Don't spend hours a day counting calories, but get some exercise, avoid the junk food (just don't even bring it home unless you have an iron will), and start eating less if you start getting fat.
"What kind of sandwich doesn't have a lot of fat in it?"
But now that Linux is nearing the complexity of Windows, I find the same problematic techniques are appropriate. Which tells me someone (or many someones) are not learning from Windows' failures, but rather repeating them as they develop Linux.
No, Linux is not nearing the complexity of Windows. Certain distributions may be, but the operating system itself is modular: just plug in what you need and unplug what you don't. By wiping your OS and installing fresh to cure persistent problems, you are saying that you refuse to do any troubleshooting on your box. It's the lazy way out, and it causes you to lose work, and manually reinstall all the apps you had before. In Windows, you can't really troubleshoot THAT much, since everything is closed-source, proprietary, and people charge a bundle for service contracts. However, in Linux, everything is documented and open, and support is available from a thousand forums all over the web. Just typing the error message you get into Google as a phrase search should at least tell you what the problem is.
The basic rule of thumb for Linux is: unless the problem is with the kernel, you shouldn't even have to reboot to solve it. And on a popular distribution like Ubuntu, I'm sure someone has had the same problem as you, already solved it, and posted their journey on the forums. Don't be so quick to just blast things into oblivion to fix a bug.
Not all. Many areas have municipal water, electricity, or garbage collection, run by the city/county.
And the government is not GIVING you these things, they are merely guaranteeing access. Of course you still have to pay for it. But what about $FARMER in $RURAL_STATE, who can't get broadband because the wires are not run out that far? Basically, the Democrats want to turn broadband into a utility, just like power and water. So if the private companies are unwilling to provide access in those areas, the municipal government still has the ability to provide it.
My fear is that this will turn into another telco company love-fest, with lots of money being drained from the government and almost none of it ending up in the infrastructure. We are already years behind in broadband capabilities. We need to foster competition instead of doling out subsidies; the subsidies are obviously not working.
"The installer may not be GUI, but you only ever need to use it once, because we support ongoing upgrades via the network, from version to version. You never need to reinstall the operating system, just upgrade from each released version to the next when you want to."
At the most you should only have to reboot biannually... to use the new kernel that comes with each new Ubuntu release.
Anarchy is nice and all, but it's a bit unstable. I don't want to have an all-out war in my front yard every April 15th.
For me, this also means that while government can afford greater weapons, it shouldn't prevent us from obtaining them as well. Look at the Framers hatred of big centralized control of the masses and one would believe they, too, would not want a central army more powerful than the militias that army was supposed to be solely composed of.
This is a misreading of sorts. The Framers set up the government-controlled military with the same types of checks and balances that other areas of government were given. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Army, but only Congress can declare war. The President can exercise certain emergency powers, but only for so long: then he has to get Congress' permission. And if the President does something Congress doesn't like, they have the power to remove him from office.
The Constitution was set up in this way in order to prevent a single person from having enough power to create tyrrany. Offering up F-22s and tactical nukes to the average citizen places this power back in the hands of individual people, which is contrary to the notion of checks and balances. It's also not in the best interest of the people. Think about how many people are murdered over trivial things (the recent altercations over toilet paper come to mind) and then imagine if everyone in the country could just go out and buy a nuke. I shudder to think.
The Constitution doesn't guarantee the right, I believe it is a right all humans have from birth.
That's why it's spelled out in the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to be a list of the inalienable rights retained by people from birth. It was added to the Constitution to prevent the types of legal loophole maneuvering that go on when such things are left to vaguery; it was implied, but never stated in the original Constitution, that any rights not limited in the document are reserved for the people. Note that the Bill of Rights was written by James Madison and was based on the writings of John Locke, who wrote extensively of "natural rights," i.e., those rights all humans have from birth. Of course, philosophers would argue that all rights are artificial constructs of social structures, but that is a discussion for another thread.
However, the Second Amendment only guarantees the right to bear arms if they are used in a militia (read the whole thing--most people only quote the clause about bearing arms). The amount of money and resources required to run a modern army is so far out of reach of a militia now that the idea of militias rising up against a truly tyrranical government--one that is willing to use all necessary force on its citizens--is now laughable. If our government ever becomes truly tyrranical, we will need to use methods other than force to affect change. Handing a battery of Sidewinder missles to every American will only serve to turn the country into a wasteland.
Why does everyone in Washington seem to think that machines are needed to eliminate paper entirely?
There are two reasons to use mechanical/electronic/automatic voting machines:
1. Accessibility. Voting machines allow people with poor eyesight, who can't read, or speak a different language to vote properly. The machine will check for over- or under-votes before the vote is submitted, it can increase text size, and it could even read the directions out loud into a pair of headphones, in a variety of languages.
2. Counting speed. The vote counts can be completed the moment the polls close, keeping the media happy.
Neither of these two reasons necessitate eliminating paper entirely.
Here's how I envision an electronic voting system:
The voter walks up to a touch screen which takes them through the voting process. They get assistance if they need it (see point #1 above).
When the voter is finished, the machine prints out a page from an attached printer, perhaps onto specially watermarked paper. The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information. The voter signs by the plain text vote, folds the paper to hide the plain text votes and signature, and seals the vote with an official sticker. Then a polling place volunteer scans the bar code into the computer and drops the sealed ballot into the locked ballot box.
In the event of a recount, the pages are all bar code scanned again in an official process. If further recounts are needed after that, the seals can be broken and the votes tabulated using the plain text. Obviously, calling for the breaking of vote seals ends the anonymity of the vote, and as such should be treated with great care by the election officials and only used in the most extraordinary circumstances. If the race is so close that votes need to be verified by hand, the need to break the seals should outweigh voter anonymity.
All the code should be open source, of course, to be sure that the barcodes are actually encoding the proper information, and to maintain transparency in the entire process. Any company that refuses to submit to code review or open the code to the public should not be trusted with such an important task. Would you trust a contractor who builds your house but refuses to show you the blueprints or have a structural engineer review them?
But my point is that paper is crucial to the process. It is currently the only way to ensure recountability and anonymity at the same time. Sure, there's opportunity for fraud, as there is in any process, but this limits the opportunity for *automated* fraud.
Google COULD, if they want to, have a calendaring system in which the data is encrypted the entire time it is in transit, and the entire time it is stored on their systems, and only decrypted locally by a java applet within the browser of the user accessing the data.
This is an intriguing idea, but the implimentation wouldn't be as simple as you claim.
If the purpose of this encryption is to keep the information from Google, and thus possible governmental intervention, then you would create the events with your public key (either client-side or server-side) and decrypt them with your private key client-side, via JavaScript. Google's servers would only know about the public key and the encrypted results; they would never see the decrypted version, since decryption is done client-side. If you only use this service on a single computer, then the private key can be stored locally, but there would be no difference between that and just using Exchange or some other standalone calandering app. If you want to read your events on some other device--which is, after all, the whole point of making this a web service--then you need some way of getting your private key to the other device for decryption via client-side JavaScript. Having Google store the private key for download to the other device nullifies the security of encryption: if Google has both the encrypted data and the means to decrypt it, then it's not really encrypted, is it?
There might be an inherent paradox here: encrypted data accessible anywhere. I'm not sure this is even possible without making connections that bypass Google (say, from an internet-cafe computer to your home machine for private key transfer, or even to a third-party server that stores your private key for you.)
Would anyone better versed in encryption care to clarify for me, or to suggest schemes other than key-pair systems?
Unlike what we may all think, on the whole most people are not thouroughly dissatisfied with Windows. Sure they may have to deal with patchy security and those occasional crashes but hey, who says Linux doesn't have issues? I've had Ubuntu lock up on me more than a few times. I've spent a better part of the first month trying to get streaming videos to play on Firefox. Did I quit? No...so why would a Windows user?
This is the most insightful thing I've heard all day.
The biggest problem with trying to beat Windows is that it is Good Enough(tm). The vast majority of highly obscure hardware has drivers already written for it, and it's a single, monolithic system that's fairly easy to find support information about online. Linux, on the other hand, is fragmented enough that hardware support is spotty, and finding fixes to your problems online can be a pain, unless you have a very common problem. (This fix is for kernel version 2.6.12-r1, but I'm running 2.6.11-r3, and I'm running Gnome, not XFCE... etc.) Unless Windows users become so disenchanted with Windows to risk losing everything they've ever worked on to install a new OS, they won't make the switch. You and I know they won't lose data or productivity aside from a little retraining, but it's still the impression people get.
What Linux is really good at is pushing the envelope. We need to stay several steps ahead of Microsoft in terms of usability, security, stability, efficiency, and whiz-bang features that offer true productivity, and we need to be loud enough to keep these issues in the forefront of general users' minds. Then by the very nature of upping the ante, we will force Microsoft to keep up. Make them work hard to stay Good Enough(tm). Notice that IE now includes popup blockers, and XP Service Pack 2 included a default firewall, and many other improvements have been added to windows. I would credit some of that to applications like Firefox and Opera, who showed what a web browser could be and were vocal enough about it to make people care. This same thing could be applied to open formats such as OpenDocument, Vorbis, and XML; the more vocal we are about how great it is, and develop applications that support all these new open formats, the more we are going to force Microsoft to try and keep up.
Let's face facts here: Microsoft is not going away anytime soon. However, they are first and foremost a company that sells products, and if their customers demand something, it will get built. By keeping MS on their toes, we can make the world's computing experiences that much better. Whether Grandma Mabel is using a Dell Ubuntu machine or a Dell Windows machine doesn't matter much to me. As long as her computer is secure, stable, reliable, and using open formats, she will be happy. Linux can make that happen by continually threatening to be good enough to switch to. Whether or not the switch happens is largely irrelevant.
It is a relic of kinder, gentler, optimistic times, when people really did believe that "it cannot happen here".
No, Godwin's Law is a reminder to keep the Third Reich in perspective.
The next time the United States government brutally executes six million people based on their heritage and religious beliefs alone, you may make comparisons with Nazi Germany.
The more comparisons to Nazi Germany we make with things that are not even remotely close to it in terms of evil per square inch, the more the concept of Hitler and his atrocities will become diluted, and forgotten.
Do not fall into that trap. No matter how bad you think things are in the United States government, they will never approach the level of the Third Reich. Period.
If you go to USENET, where Godwin's so-called "law" originated, you will find that it is no longer held in high regard, as the real-world events became far too uncomfortably close to those of the early 20th century ones
No, I think it is a testament to the declining quality of USENET and the debates held there in the last few years.
The sad truth about post 9/11 is that you could solve the airline threat by simply keeping guns off the planes (was already done) and fortifying the cockpit door. That's it! Problem solved! No need for TSA, no need to show ID to get on the plane, none of that!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the 9/11 "airline threat" only worked because it caught us off guard. There really is no way to fight that without becoming completely paranoid about everything and everyone.
In absolutely every airplane hijacking in this country before 9/11, the objective of the hijackers was to get what they wanted, and to live through the experience. Passengers were told to "just sit quietly, and do what they ask; no one will get hurt, the authorities will handle this, it will all be over soon, etc."
When the terrorists stood up with their wimpy little 3/4" blades and announced the hijacking, the passengers did what what they thought was a very reasonable thing according to all prior knowledge: just let this play out, and we'll all survive. They didn't count on the fact that the terrorists were willing to die for their cause, and take out the whole plane with them.
You can bet money that if anyone tried the same thing now on a plane, they would be tackled from behind and beaten senseless with full cans of soda before they can even make a move. The paradigm has shifted, and we now know that not all hijackers are even interested in living through the ordeal. Therefore, it makes sense for the passengers to try and stop them before something truly awful happens. In fact, this is what happened on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania: once the passengers heard that these were suicide bombers via cell phones, they attacked the terrorists, which is probably why the plane crashed before it even made it to its (unknown) destination.
No amount of new security will make us safer; it will only serve to inconvenience the passengers and ensure that we show the terrorists just how fearful we really are. The secured cockpits, air marshalls, and a willingness to stand up and beat a terrorist senseless, are all we need. Anything else is paranoia.
...my point wasn't the newness of dissenting opinions, simply the vast worldly spread of them.
That's true, but there is also a larger amount of worldly spread information in general, true and false. In fact, I would venture to say that the percentage of false information to true information is much lower now than it has been historically, simply because the average educational level of the world has increased dramatically in the last 100 years. So even though more bad information is out there, even more good information is out there as well, and the percentage is about the same, if not a little better.
All this talk about the One True Format(tm) is nice, and I'm heartily in favor of using OpenDocument over proprietary formats, but not to prevent a Digital Dark Age.
The Digital Dark Age people talk about is not about file formats. Mostly, it's about data storage and retention. Most of what historians/archeologists know about entire civilizations and time periods comes not from the official documents, but from the personal, off-the-cuff type stuff. Historians love reading journals, diaries and personal letters, and archeologists glean the most information from household and personal items. These are the things that give you insight into the *people* who lived in that age, and how the political events of the times (which are generally well preserved) were perceived.
However, most of our personal letters are now emails, which regularly get deleted, lost, blown away in a formatting, or simply forgotten about and tossed with the computer when we upgrade. Our journals and diaries are now blogs, which are subject to the same problems. In 2500 years when some archaeologist digs up your laptop, he must first decipher the machine to find where the data is stored, then extract the data, then decode it and translate it into his own language, before he can even start working on the meaning and significance of your emails, all of which contain complicated headers and multiple encodings (text, HTML, etc.). Contrast this with his finding a paper letter... the machine deciphering and data extraction is already done. All he has to do is decode the symbols and translate the language.
Data about our society will exist, but most of it will be in a digital form, and this places lots of extra burden on the person trying to understand the data. As a result, there will be many more gaps in our history, because the data is much harder to decipher.
Keeping our data in open formats is not really the issue; they still rely on conventions such as ASCII, XML, and PNG, that may or may not be lost. The truth is that the data only exists as 1s and 0s, and whether the data is in Microsoft Word format or OpenDocument format, it will still need to be deciphered and decoded. If all knowledge of ASCII/Unicode mapping and 32-bit RGBA color encoding is lost, does it matter if the XML schema of the format is documented somewhere in some different string of 1s and 0s?
What the OpenDocument format solves is the problem of near-term data access. In relatively short time spans, say 100 years or so, the OpenDocument will still be readable long after all proprietary formats have been abandoned. For this reason, OpenDocument should be used to keep documents available long after the company that provided the creation software has gone under. This is a noble and very valid goal, but let's not confuse it with the larger issue of the "Digital Dark Age."
The events that lead up to Gulf War II will probably be important to historians. While the crazy nutcase theories concerning the events flood the internet will only confuse history. You can hardly seperate the truth from the fiction NOW, imagine trying to do so 100 years from now.
Right. Because in the 1770s, absolutely no one in the colonies wrote anything stating that Washington et. al. were just a bunch of wankers who didn't feel like paying extra for tea, the greedy bastards. And no one ever wrote home and mentioned that Jefferson was probably only writing the Decleration to get his name in the papers, since he's an attention whore.
Everyone knows that in history, there were no such things as dissenting opinions, wild unfounded accusations, conspiracy theories, or nutters distributing pamphlets in the park. That's the only reason we really know what happened: everyone told exactly the same story, every time.
Whenever this subject surfaces, everyone is focused on whether or not the video games create violent people. But I think a much more plausible scenario is that people who are already predisposed to violence are drawn to play violent video games.
Think about it: someone who enjoys beating other people up will probably get a kick out of snapping necks in Splinter Cell and running over prostitutes in GTA. People who are already violent probably very much enjoy playing violent video games. Of course, they would be just as violent even without the video games, but the correlation is there.
However, there are many many more people who are NOT predisposed to violence who also enjoy playing violent video games (present company included), which is why the issue is complicated. But I think the majority of people who decry video games because they are "turning society more violent" are looking at the issue backwards. Violent video games don't create violent people; violent people are drawn to violent video games.
Violence has existed in human society since the dawn of time, without the help of video games. Hell, even Shakespeare wrote bloody plays about war, rape, and murder. He even included an all-out gang war in Romeo & Juliet. Let's blame him for our society's ills.
I thought this was known for years now...why else are you not to switch on your cell phone during flights? just for fun?
The problem is actually certification.
The FAA requires that every bit of electrical equipment on the plane be certified to fly before the plane can carry passengers. There is a very specific set of criteria for determining airworthiness, including interference levels. Thus, every piece of equipment installed in the plane is hardened against radio interference before the plane is delivered.
Since the FAA, during the course of electrical interference studies, discovered that passive electrical devices do not emit any appreciable electromagnetic radiation, they were deemed safe to use during non-critical portions of the flight (cruise altitude, basically). However, since cell phones do emit electromagnetic radiation (typically in the 1-3 GHz range), they would be required, by FAA rules, to be certified before they could be used in flight. In all likelyhood, the vast majority of cell phones would pass certification with flying colors. However, since the FAA can't possibly certify every single brand and model of cell phone (it's a rather long and arduous process involving reams of paperwork, and new brands/models appear every week), they simply issue the blanket statement that cell phones are not allowed to be used on planes.
Disclaimer: I work for Boeing Commercial Aircraft.
To make it more compatable with similar licenses, there's a whole bunch of optional terms and conditions that can be added. For example, you can say "If you sue us for patent infringement, you can't use any patents our code relies upon that we own, effectively ending your ability to use our software." The notable feature is that this is an optional condition.
Wait, what?
Didn't RMS blow a gasket a few weeks ago, talking about how Creative Commons sucks eggs because it includes optional clauses?
How is this different? Now, instead of GPLv3, we have GPLv3-with-patent-restrictions, and GPLv3-with-attribution, and GPLv3-with-different-disclaimer-of-liability, and...
Either RMS likes customizing licensing, or he doesn't. He's being a hypocritical here.
I don't think there's such a bright line delineation of copyright non-infringement as you seem to be implying.
Well, of course not. But if I wrote a book which tries to prove the existence of ghosts, does every book/movie that involves ghosts violate my copyright? What if the ghosts in those movies died the same way the "real" ghosts in my book did? What if you used my ideas about heaven/afterlife, which I claimed to be true, since I had already died, been there, and come back?
If you claim them to be facts, they are not copyrightable. If you claim them to be copyrightable, they are not facts.
The actual text written about them, on the other hand, is copyrighted. If Dan Brown had used some of that text verbatim, he would be guilty of plagiarism, and this would be much more cut-and-dried. But he didn't.
This case, if it ever goes to a court, would be an interesting precedent.
If you read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, you might understand why the authors would be so bitter after counting the high degree of similarities between the two, and Dan Brown's sales figures would be constantly rubbing salt in the wound.
Yes, I probably would be bitter. Dan Brown is clearly not clever enough to make up his own wild conspiracy theories, so he steals other peoples', works them into unbelievably bad prose, and claims he believes all his theories are true in order to drum up some press, controversy, and cash.
But here's the kicker: either the theories presented in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are fact, or they are not. If they are fact, then they are not copyrightable, which means Dan Brown is free to use them however he likes. If they are not fact, and are just wild speculation, then they are copyrightable, and the authors' claims of facthood (which are likely the basis for their success) are clearly false. They've dug themselves into a classic catch-22.
So what to do? Do they admit they've been lying about the nature of these "facts" all these years and make fools of themselves, or do they maintain their stance about the truthfulness of their claims and sit and watch Dan Brown get filthy rich off their ideas?
I love it when bottom feeders start fighting each other for rule of their little patch of mud.
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Don't spend hours a day counting calories, but get some exercise, avoid the junk food (just don't even bring it home unless you have an iron will), and start eating less if you start getting fat.
"What kind of sandwich doesn't have a lot of fat in it?"
"Half a sandwich."
But now that Linux is nearing the complexity of Windows, I find the same problematic techniques are appropriate. Which tells me someone (or many someones) are not learning from Windows' failures, but rather repeating them as they develop Linux.
No, Linux is not nearing the complexity of Windows. Certain distributions may be, but the operating system itself is modular: just plug in what you need and unplug what you don't. By wiping your OS and installing fresh to cure persistent problems, you are saying that you refuse to do any troubleshooting on your box. It's the lazy way out, and it causes you to lose work, and manually reinstall all the apps you had before. In Windows, you can't really troubleshoot THAT much, since everything is closed-source, proprietary, and people charge a bundle for service contracts. However, in Linux, everything is documented and open, and support is available from a thousand forums all over the web. Just typing the error message you get into Google as a phrase search should at least tell you what the problem is.
The basic rule of thumb for Linux is: unless the problem is with the kernel, you shouldn't even have to reboot to solve it. And on a popular distribution like Ubuntu, I'm sure someone has had the same problem as you, already solved it, and posted their journey on the forums. Don't be so quick to just blast things into oblivion to fix a bug.
I contest this is a very handy tool for anyone that wants to setup multi-media, web browsing, plugins and more.
I think the word you're looking for is attest.
contest
attest
All of those are run by private companies
Not all. Many areas have municipal water, electricity, or garbage collection, run by the city/county.
And the government is not GIVING you these things, they are merely guaranteeing access. Of course you still have to pay for it. But what about $FARMER in $RURAL_STATE, who can't get broadband because the wires are not run out that far? Basically, the Democrats want to turn broadband into a utility, just like power and water. So if the private companies are unwilling to provide access in those areas, the municipal government still has the ability to provide it.
My fear is that this will turn into another telco company love-fest, with lots of money being drained from the government and almost none of it ending up in the infrastructure. We are already years behind in broadband capabilities. We need to foster competition instead of doling out subsidies; the subsidies are obviously not working.
And I'm hoping that biannual OS reinstalls aren't the price of a feature-complete OS, as Microsoft would have me believe.
From the Ubuntu website:
"The installer may not be GUI, but you only ever need to use it once, because we support ongoing upgrades via the network, from version to version. You never need to reinstall the operating system, just upgrade from each released version to the next when you want to."
At the most you should only have to reboot biannually... to use the new kernel that comes with each new Ubuntu release.
Think first: who has the biggest gun?
Anarchy is nice and all, but it's a bit unstable. I don't want to have an all-out war in my front yard every April 15th.
For me, this also means that while government can afford greater weapons, it shouldn't prevent us from obtaining them as well. Look at the Framers hatred of big centralized control of the masses and one would believe they, too, would not want a central army more powerful than the militias that army was supposed to be solely composed of.
This is a misreading of sorts. The Framers set up the government-controlled military with the same types of checks and balances that other areas of government were given. The President is Commander-in-Chief of the Army, but only Congress can declare war. The President can exercise certain emergency powers, but only for so long: then he has to get Congress' permission. And if the President does something Congress doesn't like, they have the power to remove him from office.
The Constitution was set up in this way in order to prevent a single person from having enough power to create tyrrany. Offering up F-22s and tactical nukes to the average citizen places this power back in the hands of individual people, which is contrary to the notion of checks and balances. It's also not in the best interest of the people. Think about how many people are murdered over trivial things (the recent altercations over toilet paper come to mind) and then imagine if everyone in the country could just go out and buy a nuke. I shudder to think.
The Constitution doesn't guarantee the right, I believe it is a right all humans have from birth.
That's why it's spelled out in the Bill of Rights, which is supposed to be a list of the inalienable rights retained by people from birth. It was added to the Constitution to prevent the types of legal loophole maneuvering that go on when such things are left to vaguery; it was implied, but never stated in the original Constitution, that any rights not limited in the document are reserved for the people. Note that the Bill of Rights was written by James Madison and was based on the writings of John Locke, who wrote extensively of "natural rights," i.e., those rights all humans have from birth. Of course, philosophers would argue that all rights are artificial constructs of social structures, but that is a discussion for another thread.
However, the Second Amendment only guarantees the right to bear arms if they are used in a militia (read the whole thing--most people only quote the clause about bearing arms). The amount of money and resources required to run a modern army is so far out of reach of a militia now that the idea of militias rising up against a truly tyrranical government--one that is willing to use all necessary force on its citizens--is now laughable. If our government ever becomes truly tyrranical, we will need to use methods other than force to affect change. Handing a battery of Sidewinder missles to every American will only serve to turn the country into a wasteland.
Why does everyone in Washington seem to think that machines are needed to eliminate paper entirely?
There are two reasons to use mechanical/electronic/automatic voting machines:
1. Accessibility. Voting machines allow people with poor eyesight, who can't read, or speak a different language to vote properly. The machine will check for over- or under-votes before the vote is submitted, it can increase text size, and it could even read the directions out loud into a pair of headphones, in a variety of languages.
2. Counting speed. The vote counts can be completed the moment the polls close, keeping the media happy.
Neither of these two reasons necessitate eliminating paper entirely.
Here's how I envision an electronic voting system:
The voter walks up to a touch screen which takes them through the voting process. They get assistance if they need it (see point #1 above).
When the voter is finished, the machine prints out a page from an attached printer, perhaps onto specially watermarked paper. The printout includes a brief listing of who was voted for in each election in plain text so the voter can verify, and there is a bar code on the back of the page which encodes all that information. The voter signs by the plain text vote, folds the paper to hide the plain text votes and signature, and seals the vote with an official sticker. Then a polling place volunteer scans the bar code into the computer and drops the sealed ballot into the locked ballot box.
In the event of a recount, the pages are all bar code scanned again in an official process. If further recounts are needed after that, the seals can be broken and the votes tabulated using the plain text. Obviously, calling for the breaking of vote seals ends the anonymity of the vote, and as such should be treated with great care by the election officials and only used in the most extraordinary circumstances. If the race is so close that votes need to be verified by hand, the need to break the seals should outweigh voter anonymity.
All the code should be open source, of course, to be sure that the barcodes are actually encoding the proper information, and to maintain transparency in the entire process. Any company that refuses to submit to code review or open the code to the public should not be trusted with such an important task. Would you trust a contractor who builds your house but refuses to show you the blueprints or have a structural engineer review them?
But my point is that paper is crucial to the process. It is currently the only way to ensure recountability and anonymity at the same time. Sure, there's opportunity for fraud, as there is in any process, but this limits the opportunity for *automated* fraud.
Google COULD, if they want to, have a calendaring system in which the data is encrypted the entire time it is in transit, and the entire time it is stored on their systems, and only decrypted locally by a java applet within the browser of the user accessing the data.
This is an intriguing idea, but the implimentation wouldn't be as simple as you claim.
If the purpose of this encryption is to keep the information from Google, and thus possible governmental intervention, then you would create the events with your public key (either client-side or server-side) and decrypt them with your private key client-side, via JavaScript. Google's servers would only know about the public key and the encrypted results; they would never see the decrypted version, since decryption is done client-side. If you only use this service on a single computer, then the private key can be stored locally, but there would be no difference between that and just using Exchange or some other standalone calandering app. If you want to read your events on some other device--which is, after all, the whole point of making this a web service--then you need some way of getting your private key to the other device for decryption via client-side JavaScript. Having Google store the private key for download to the other device nullifies the security of encryption: if Google has both the encrypted data and the means to decrypt it, then it's not really encrypted, is it?
There might be an inherent paradox here: encrypted data accessible anywhere. I'm not sure this is even possible without making connections that bypass Google (say, from an internet-cafe computer to your home machine for private key transfer, or even to a third-party server that stores your private key for you.)
Would anyone better versed in encryption care to clarify for me, or to suggest schemes other than key-pair systems?
ENOUGH ALREADY ! It has jumped the freaking shark or whatever.
Don't you mean it's jumped the Isur.us oxyrinch.us?
They are rather repetitio.us.
Some people might find them ingenio.us, stupendo.us and humoro.us.
I find them pretentio.us, superfluo.us, and ridiculo.us, not to mention meretricio.us.
(I had to use my thesaur.us.)
Unlike what we may all think, on the whole most people are not thouroughly dissatisfied with Windows. Sure they may have to deal with patchy security and those occasional crashes but hey, who says Linux doesn't have issues? I've had Ubuntu lock up on me more than a few times. I've spent a better part of the first month trying to get streaming videos to play on Firefox. Did I quit? No...so why would a Windows user?
This is the most insightful thing I've heard all day.
The biggest problem with trying to beat Windows is that it is Good Enough(tm). The vast majority of highly obscure hardware has drivers already written for it, and it's a single, monolithic system that's fairly easy to find support information about online. Linux, on the other hand, is fragmented enough that hardware support is spotty, and finding fixes to your problems online can be a pain, unless you have a very common problem. (This fix is for kernel version 2.6.12-r1, but I'm running 2.6.11-r3, and I'm running Gnome, not XFCE... etc.) Unless Windows users become so disenchanted with Windows to risk losing everything they've ever worked on to install a new OS, they won't make the switch. You and I know they won't lose data or productivity aside from a little retraining, but it's still the impression people get.
What Linux is really good at is pushing the envelope. We need to stay several steps ahead of Microsoft in terms of usability, security, stability, efficiency, and whiz-bang features that offer true productivity, and we need to be loud enough to keep these issues in the forefront of general users' minds. Then by the very nature of upping the ante, we will force Microsoft to keep up. Make them work hard to stay Good Enough(tm). Notice that IE now includes popup blockers, and XP Service Pack 2 included a default firewall, and many other improvements have been added to windows. I would credit some of that to applications like Firefox and Opera, who showed what a web browser could be and were vocal enough about it to make people care. This same thing could be applied to open formats such as OpenDocument, Vorbis, and XML; the more vocal we are about how great it is, and develop applications that support all these new open formats, the more we are going to force Microsoft to try and keep up.
Let's face facts here: Microsoft is not going away anytime soon. However, they are first and foremost a company that sells products, and if their customers demand something, it will get built. By keeping MS on their toes, we can make the world's computing experiences that much better. Whether Grandma Mabel is using a Dell Ubuntu machine or a Dell Windows machine doesn't matter much to me. As long as her computer is secure, stable, reliable, and using open formats, she will be happy. Linux can make that happen by continually threatening to be good enough to switch to. Whether or not the switch happens is largely irrelevant.
It is a relic of kinder, gentler, optimistic times, when people really did believe that "it cannot happen here".
No, Godwin's Law is a reminder to keep the Third Reich in perspective.
The next time the United States government brutally executes six million people based on their heritage and religious beliefs alone, you may make comparisons with Nazi Germany.
The more comparisons to Nazi Germany we make with things that are not even remotely close to it in terms of evil per square inch, the more the concept of Hitler and his atrocities will become diluted, and forgotten.
Do not fall into that trap. No matter how bad you think things are in the United States government, they will never approach the level of the Third Reich. Period.
If you go to USENET, where Godwin's so-called "law" originated, you will find that it is no longer held in high regard, as the real-world events became far too uncomfortably close to those of the early 20th century ones
No, I think it is a testament to the declining quality of USENET and the debates held there in the last few years.
In short, as long as you can prove that you're innocent, you've got nothing to worry about.
So you're saying that until I prove I'm innocent, I must be guilty?
Anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
I call Godwin.
Thanks for playing, though.
The sad truth about post 9/11 is that you could solve the airline threat by simply keeping guns off the planes (was already done) and fortifying the cockpit door. That's it! Problem solved! No need for TSA, no need to show ID to get on the plane, none of that!
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the 9/11 "airline threat" only worked because it caught us off guard. There really is no way to fight that without becoming completely paranoid about everything and everyone.
In absolutely every airplane hijacking in this country before 9/11, the objective of the hijackers was to get what they wanted, and to live through the experience. Passengers were told to "just sit quietly, and do what they ask; no one will get hurt, the authorities will handle this, it will all be over soon, etc."
When the terrorists stood up with their wimpy little 3/4" blades and announced the hijacking, the passengers did what what they thought was a very reasonable thing according to all prior knowledge: just let this play out, and we'll all survive. They didn't count on the fact that the terrorists were willing to die for their cause, and take out the whole plane with them.
You can bet money that if anyone tried the same thing now on a plane, they would be tackled from behind and beaten senseless with full cans of soda before they can even make a move. The paradigm has shifted, and we now know that not all hijackers are even interested in living through the ordeal. Therefore, it makes sense for the passengers to try and stop them before something truly awful happens. In fact, this is what happened on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania: once the passengers heard that these were suicide bombers via cell phones, they attacked the terrorists, which is probably why the plane crashed before it even made it to its (unknown) destination.
No amount of new security will make us safer; it will only serve to inconvenience the passengers and ensure that we show the terrorists just how fearful we really are. The secured cockpits, air marshalls, and a willingness to stand up and beat a terrorist senseless, are all we need. Anything else is paranoia.
Text posted on the internet might not be completely legitimate or factual.
Film at 11.
...my point wasn't the newness of dissenting opinions, simply the vast worldly spread of them.
That's true, but there is also a larger amount of worldly spread information in general, true and false. In fact, I would venture to say that the percentage of false information to true information is much lower now than it has been historically, simply because the average educational level of the world has increased dramatically in the last 100 years. So even though more bad information is out there, even more good information is out there as well, and the percentage is about the same, if not a little better.
All this talk about the One True Format(tm) is nice, and I'm heartily in favor of using OpenDocument over proprietary formats, but not to prevent a Digital Dark Age.
The Digital Dark Age people talk about is not about file formats. Mostly, it's about data storage and retention. Most of what historians/archeologists know about entire civilizations and time periods comes not from the official documents, but from the personal, off-the-cuff type stuff. Historians love reading journals, diaries and personal letters, and archeologists glean the most information from household and personal items. These are the things that give you insight into the *people* who lived in that age, and how the political events of the times (which are generally well preserved) were perceived.
However, most of our personal letters are now emails, which regularly get deleted, lost, blown away in a formatting, or simply forgotten about and tossed with the computer when we upgrade. Our journals and diaries are now blogs, which are subject to the same problems. In 2500 years when some archaeologist digs up your laptop, he must first decipher the machine to find where the data is stored, then extract the data, then decode it and translate it into his own language, before he can even start working on the meaning and significance of your emails, all of which contain complicated headers and multiple encodings (text, HTML, etc.). Contrast this with his finding a paper letter... the machine deciphering and data extraction is already done. All he has to do is decode the symbols and translate the language.
Data about our society will exist, but most of it will be in a digital form, and this places lots of extra burden on the person trying to understand the data. As a result, there will be many more gaps in our history, because the data is much harder to decipher.
Keeping our data in open formats is not really the issue; they still rely on conventions such as ASCII, XML, and PNG, that may or may not be lost. The truth is that the data only exists as 1s and 0s, and whether the data is in Microsoft Word format or OpenDocument format, it will still need to be deciphered and decoded. If all knowledge of ASCII/Unicode mapping and 32-bit RGBA color encoding is lost, does it matter if the XML schema of the format is documented somewhere in some different string of 1s and 0s?
What the OpenDocument format solves is the problem of near-term data access. In relatively short time spans, say 100 years or so, the OpenDocument will still be readable long after all proprietary formats have been abandoned. For this reason, OpenDocument should be used to keep documents available long after the company that provided the creation software has gone under. This is a noble and very valid goal, but let's not confuse it with the larger issue of the "Digital Dark Age."
The events that lead up to Gulf War II will probably be important to historians. While the crazy nutcase theories concerning the events flood the internet will only confuse history. You can hardly seperate the truth from the fiction NOW, imagine trying to do so 100 years from now.
Right. Because in the 1770s, absolutely no one in the colonies wrote anything stating that Washington et. al. were just a bunch of wankers who didn't feel like paying extra for tea, the greedy bastards. And no one ever wrote home and mentioned that Jefferson was probably only writing the Decleration to get his name in the papers, since he's an attention whore.
Everyone knows that in history, there were no such things as dissenting opinions, wild unfounded accusations, conspiracy theories, or nutters distributing pamphlets in the park. That's the only reason we really know what happened: everyone told exactly the same story, every time.
</sarcasm>
Whenever this subject surfaces, everyone is focused on whether or not the video games create violent people. But I think a much more plausible scenario is that people who are already predisposed to violence are drawn to play violent video games.
Think about it: someone who enjoys beating other people up will probably get a kick out of snapping necks in Splinter Cell and running over prostitutes in GTA. People who are already violent probably very much enjoy playing violent video games. Of course, they would be just as violent even without the video games, but the correlation is there.
However, there are many many more people who are NOT predisposed to violence who also enjoy playing violent video games (present company included), which is why the issue is complicated. But I think the majority of people who decry video games because they are "turning society more violent" are looking at the issue backwards. Violent video games don't create violent people; violent people are drawn to violent video games.
Violence has existed in human society since the dawn of time, without the help of video games. Hell, even Shakespeare wrote bloody plays about war, rape, and murder. He even included an all-out gang war in Romeo & Juliet. Let's blame him for our society's ills.
I thought this was known for years now...why else are you not to switch on your cell phone during flights? just for fun?
The problem is actually certification.
The FAA requires that every bit of electrical equipment on the plane be certified to fly before the plane can carry passengers. There is a very specific set of criteria for determining airworthiness, including interference levels. Thus, every piece of equipment installed in the plane is hardened against radio interference before the plane is delivered.
Since the FAA, during the course of electrical interference studies, discovered that passive electrical devices do not emit any appreciable electromagnetic radiation, they were deemed safe to use during non-critical portions of the flight (cruise altitude, basically). However, since cell phones do emit electromagnetic radiation (typically in the 1-3 GHz range), they would be required, by FAA rules, to be certified before they could be used in flight. In all likelyhood, the vast majority of cell phones would pass certification with flying colors. However, since the FAA can't possibly certify every single brand and model of cell phone (it's a rather long and arduous process involving reams of paperwork, and new brands/models appear every week), they simply issue the blanket statement that cell phones are not allowed to be used on planes.
Disclaimer: I work for Boeing Commercial Aircraft.
To make it more compatable with similar licenses, there's a whole bunch of optional terms and conditions that can be added. For example, you can say "If you sue us for patent infringement, you can't use any patents our code relies upon that we own, effectively ending your ability to use our software." The notable feature is that this is an optional condition.
Wait, what?
Didn't RMS blow a gasket a few weeks ago, talking about how Creative Commons sucks eggs because it includes optional clauses?
How is this different? Now, instead of GPLv3, we have GPLv3-with-patent-restrictions, and GPLv3-with-attribution, and GPLv3-with-different-disclaimer-of-liability, and...
Either RMS likes customizing licensing, or he doesn't. He's being a hypocritical here.
His address, you say?
I think it might be time to pull another Alan Ralsky.
Who's with me?
I don't think there's such a bright line delineation of copyright non-infringement as you seem to be implying.
Well, of course not. But if I wrote a book which tries to prove the existence of ghosts, does every book/movie that involves ghosts violate my copyright? What if the ghosts in those movies died the same way the "real" ghosts in my book did? What if you used my ideas about heaven/afterlife, which I claimed to be true, since I had already died, been there, and come back?
If you claim them to be facts, they are not copyrightable. If you claim them to be copyrightable, they are not facts.
The actual text written about them, on the other hand, is copyrighted. If Dan Brown had used some of that text verbatim, he would be guilty of plagiarism, and this would be much more cut-and-dried. But he didn't.
This case, if it ever goes to a court, would be an interesting precedent.
If you read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, you might understand why the authors would be so bitter after counting the high degree of similarities between the two, and Dan Brown's sales figures would be constantly rubbing salt in the wound.
Yes, I probably would be bitter. Dan Brown is clearly not clever enough to make up his own wild conspiracy theories, so he steals other peoples', works them into unbelievably bad prose, and claims he believes all his theories are true in order to drum up some press, controversy, and cash.
But here's the kicker: either the theories presented in "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" are fact, or they are not. If they are fact, then they are not copyrightable, which means Dan Brown is free to use them however he likes. If they are not fact, and are just wild speculation, then they are copyrightable, and the authors' claims of facthood (which are likely the basis for their success) are clearly false. They've dug themselves into a classic catch-22.
So what to do? Do they admit they've been lying about the nature of these "facts" all these years and make fools of themselves, or do they maintain their stance about the truthfulness of their claims and sit and watch Dan Brown get filthy rich off their ideas?
I love it when bottom feeders start fighting each other for rule of their little patch of mud.