Whoa there! It sounds like you're contradicting lupis42. The only (valid) reason they would require you to open ports to host a game would be to allow game traffic to bypass their servers and go directly between players. Traffic in a LAN party would reach the router, and bounce back to the hosting machine (assuming the router behaves correctly, not all of them do). Your limiting factor there is the ability of the router to process the packets. It is a bottle neck, but not nearly as big as the DSL uplink.
Of course, this then begs the question, why remove LAN? All the game traffic is being directed between clients anyways. It sounds like they have ulterior motives of some kind. (Piracy fears are overblown, but legitimate. Add "revenue"? Minute cuts to development costs? Corporate insecurity/control freak issues?)
This is a rational, reasonable position. It is worth asking the question "Does your church improve the quality of your current life?" You would find many people answer "yes", but it is still a good question.
Of course, the real question is "Does your church teach truth?" It is a seemingly unrelated question, but then, why should truth only benefit me when I'm dead?
It's a side effect of capitalism, and one that would ruin them if the public wasn't stupid (a limiting factor in the effectiveness of any government/economic system).
I didn't know you could win an argument by appending a "Period." after your thesis.
Oh, you can't. It's a declaration that one refuses to change his opinion on the matter. It can sometimes be used to end an argument (if done correctly), but will never win one.
Yes, I know you were being sarcastic. I'm being pedantic. So there.
This particular outburst of concern is FUD. Debian already has Mono in the "main" repository (as opposed to "contrib" or "non-free"). That alone is a statement that they are not worried about the "free-ness" of the package. Even if it will now be installed by default, it was already made available by default to every Debian installation. The difference is very superficial.
If MS was going to go after them, they could have already. This changes nothing. (although this spat on/. might bring it to MS attention.)
Information on the web is not replicated nor redundant across the Internet without paying (for example) Akamai. It is decentralized and distributed.
Perhaps I'm being nit-picky, but you are too. There is no central location on the web where all information is stored, nor a central authority over said information. Hence, the World Wide Web as a whole (not tiny chunks of it) are decentralized.
It is distributed across many physical locations. Any location can fail independently, without affecting the web as a whole. Sometimes, distributed can also imply redundancy, so you have a partial point here, just not when compared to email or possibly wave (see below).
Waves are made up of wavelets. Each wavelet has an authoritative server which the other servers answer to (the originating server for the wavelet). Every change to a wavelet must go through that server. What happens when that server goes down? I don't know for sure yet, but it seems that the wavelet becomes read-only until it comes back up (only partially distributed with cache redundancy). Email is worse, as each message only lives on one computer at any given time. If the computer in question fails, it may take the message with it. (distributed, yes; redundant, not on your life!)
In terms of the systems as wholes: www, SMTP, and Wave are all distributed. (note the distinction between www and HTTP; it is a very fine one.) In terms of specific information or messages, none of them are entirely redundant. (not distributed in that sense of the term)
Last I heard, you needed to pay Hotmail too. AOL might (or might not) have allowed the free accounts POP3 and SMTP access (kinda doubt it), but by the time they started allowing free accounts to non-paying customers, they were late to the game and had a bad reputation.
You had to pay for that portion of the Hotmail service. If it was free at that time, I certainly never heard about it. I think the same holds true for the yahoo service, but I'm less sure. Paying for the service also let you break the 2M/6M storage caps that were in place when Gmail launched.
I mean, it is distributed and decentralised, which is the antithesis of what the WWW is about.
What planet did you grow up on? The "World Wide Web" is comprised of a decentralized, distributed (worldwide) set of computers running web servers owned and controlled by myriad companies and individuals (more specifically, the web pages and hyperlinks). You seem to understand that there is a difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, but cannot grasp that the "www" part of the equation is thoroughly distributed and decentralized?
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter) Today, they do.
Because this will be an open protocol (GWFP on XMPP), somebody will eventually develop a client protocol, or (preferably) extend the federated protocol to the client level. If it's any good, Google will eventually implement it. Right now, Google is stuck on Web 2.0 and HTML 5. (and cloud computing?) I think they can be broken free from that, it just takes some presure on a case-by-case basis.
I think it's a cultural taboo throughout the US... now. There was a time when coercion was a major problem (I think it was New York, not sure). We want to avoid the ability for that kind of political climate to build again.
That's a good point, and worth considering. Absentee ballots are harder to use for fraud for several reasons, but there seems to be some evidence of abuse/fraud.
If I understand where you're going with that, you need to remember that you cannot prove how you voted. The system cannot be permitted to allow you to verify your vote. We've been there before, and it isn't pretty.
I've renewed a number of systems that attempt to surmount this problem and remain end-to-end verifiable, but they each have severe flaws. It's like watching a magician: the trick only works if you don't look hard enough. If you have any specific systems that you suggest I look at, I will. It is a cowardly (AC) cop-out to say that one exists without referencing it.
You had a really good point about the negative correlation, but you lost it. Hacking the pentagon is not trivial. It's telling that it is possible. Regular voting machines are more secure than WEP, but that's not saying much. (Home PCs used for Internet voting would have less security than WEP on average, but that's another topic.)
We have to assume that if the Internet is secure enough for us to buy stuff, then it is secure enough for voting.
Not true, for several reasons. There are several additional security constraints on voting. For example, you cannot be allowed to prove how you voted. Therefore, you cannot receive feedback on how you voted. You can't "balance your checkbook", so to speak. They know this and can set the online balance to whatever they choose. That's without hacker involvement. Online purchases are actually much riskier than most people are willing to consider. "Identity theft" has skyrocketed, and compromising online purchases is one way that's done. Sure the transmission may be secure, but either the client or server may be compromised (and are, regularly). Banks have simply decided to live with a particular level of fraud. HTTPS is only a small part in the equation.
From a practical standpoint, only close elections can be stolen anyway.
Again, not true. The public only needs to belive that it was close. That's not too hard, really.
If a close election is stolen, then approximately the same number of persons disagree with the result as if the election were not stolen, so what difference does it really make from the standpoint of quality of outcome?
I see your point from a pragmatic point of view, but I disagree. I don't want to see people with power getting away with abusing us and grabing more power. It's the principle of the thing. Besides, we don't want to encourage corruption. Period.
I agree that the two-party false-dichotomy is a bigger problem, but we can't deal with that in a vacuum. Electronic fraud is much easier to perpetrate (particularly when mixed with corruption). Paper fraud without corruption: much harder to do. (It does happen, and needs to be addressed, but it's not nearly as big a worry.)
And how do you know that the code running on the server is the same as the code that was opened for public review? How can you ever be sure that an "administrator" (or hacker) hasn't updated values in the database? There are too many possible problems, even running open source. There would need to be a bullet proof algorithm in place, and nobody has proposed one yet (that I've read, and I've looked). I'm willing to admit the possibility, but I think it is impossible.
As others have already pointed out, it becomes impossible to verify that our elections officials are acting honestly. Some do; some don't; most have an unfounded trust in their employees/volunteers (to not assist in fraud). This is the big problem.
There are myriad other problems too. What happens if the polls are closed early by to a DDoS attack? How can you guarantee the server won't be hacked? (It happens to banks sometimes.) What about the machines people are voting from? If they're voting from home (and not a kiosk), you can tell your computer to vote for candidate A, your computer can tell you that you voted for candidate A, but the botnet virus on your machine may have voted on your behalf for candidate B.
We're miles away from free and fair elections, but Internet voting is the wrong direction to travel to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoa there! It sounds like you're contradicting lupis42. The only (valid) reason they would require you to open ports to host a game would be to allow game traffic to bypass their servers and go directly between players. Traffic in a LAN party would reach the router, and bounce back to the hosting machine (assuming the router behaves correctly, not all of them do). Your limiting factor there is the ability of the router to process the packets. It is a bottle neck, but not nearly as big as the DSL uplink.
Of course, this then begs the question, why remove LAN? All the game traffic is being directed between clients anyways. It sounds like they have ulterior motives of some kind. (Piracy fears are overblown, but legitimate. Add "revenue"? Minute cuts to development costs? Corporate insecurity/control freak issues?)
This is a rational, reasonable position. It is worth asking the question "Does your church improve the quality of your current life?" You would find many people answer "yes", but it is still a good question.
Of course, the real question is "Does your church teach truth?" It is a seemingly unrelated question, but then, why should truth only benefit me when I'm dead?
(Yes, I am religious.)
You're absolutely right. Besides, it's now illegal to do that in many places. Yet, I'm sure it's still prevalent all over the place.
It's a side effect of capitalism, and one that would ruin them if the public wasn't stupid (a limiting factor in the effectiveness of any government/economic system).
Here you go. You seem to have missed this:
"I blame Adobe and their crappy plugin" --Baseclass
I didn't know you could win an argument by appending a "Period." after your thesis.
Oh, you can't. It's a declaration that one refuses to change his opinion on the matter. It can sometimes be used to end an argument (if done correctly), but will never win one.
Yes, I know you were being sarcastic. I'm being pedantic. So there.
It changes who has which sticks. I say: worse.
They might mean "Desktop environment" in tasksel (a standard step during installation).
This particular outburst of concern is FUD. Debian already has Mono in the "main" repository (as opposed to "contrib" or "non-free"). That alone is a statement that they are not worried about the "free-ness" of the package. Even if it will now be installed by default, it was already made available by default to every Debian installation. The difference is very superficial.
If MS was going to go after them, they could have already. This changes nothing. (although this spat on /. might bring it to MS attention.)
IANAL
Someone on slashdot once wrote "99% of all lawyers make the rest of us look bad".
Information on the web is not replicated nor redundant across the Internet without paying (for example) Akamai. It is decentralized and distributed.
Perhaps I'm being nit-picky, but you are too. There is no central location on the web where all information is stored, nor a central authority over said information. Hence, the World Wide Web as a whole (not tiny chunks of it) are decentralized.
It is distributed across many physical locations. Any location can fail independently, without affecting the web as a whole. Sometimes, distributed can also imply redundancy, so you have a partial point here, just not when compared to email or possibly wave (see below).
Waves are made up of wavelets. Each wavelet has an authoritative server which the other servers answer to (the originating server for the wavelet). Every change to a wavelet must go through that server. What happens when that server goes down? I don't know for sure yet, but it seems that the wavelet becomes read-only until it comes back up (only partially distributed with cache redundancy). Email is worse, as each message only lives on one computer at any given time. If the computer in question fails, it may take the message with it. (distributed, yes; redundant, not on your life!)
In terms of the systems as wholes: www, SMTP, and Wave are all distributed. (note the distinction between www and HTTP; it is a very fine one.) In terms of specific information or messages, none of them are entirely redundant. (not distributed in that sense of the term)
Last I heard, you needed to pay Hotmail too. AOL might (or might not) have allowed the free accounts POP3 and SMTP access (kinda doubt it), but by the time they started allowing free accounts to non-paying customers, they were late to the game and had a bad reputation.
You had to pay for that portion of the Hotmail service. If it was free at that time, I certainly never heard about it. I think the same holds true for the yahoo service, but I'm less sure. Paying for the service also let you break the 2M/6M storage caps that were in place when Gmail launched.
I mean, it is distributed and decentralised, which is the antithesis of what the WWW is about.
What planet did you grow up on? The "World Wide Web" is comprised of a decentralized, distributed (worldwide) set of computers running web servers owned and controlled by myriad companies and individuals (more specifically, the web pages and hyperlinks). You seem to understand that there is a difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, but cannot grasp that the "www" part of the equation is thoroughly distributed and decentralized?
When Gmail first launched, they did not support POP3 or IMAP. (no other web provider did either, for that matter) Today, they do.
Because this will be an open protocol (GWFP on XMPP), somebody will eventually develop a client protocol, or (preferably) extend the federated protocol to the client level. If it's any good, Google will eventually implement it. Right now, Google is stuck on Web 2.0 and HTML 5. (and cloud computing?) I think they can be broken free from that, it just takes some presure on a case-by-case basis.
That's probably true. Still, we can seek a system that makes it harder for them, instead of easier.
I can't tell if you're arguing for or against my point.
I think it's a cultural taboo throughout the US... now. There was a time when coercion was a major problem (I think it was New York, not sure). We want to avoid the ability for that kind of political climate to build again.
That's a good point, and worth considering. Absentee ballots are harder to use for fraud for several reasons, but there seems to be some evidence of abuse/fraud.
If I understand where you're going with that, you need to remember that you cannot prove how you voted. The system cannot be permitted to allow you to verify your vote. We've been there before, and it isn't pretty.
I've renewed a number of systems that attempt to surmount this problem and remain end-to-end verifiable, but they each have severe flaws. It's like watching a magician: the trick only works if you don't look hard enough. If you have any specific systems that you suggest I look at, I will. It is a cowardly (AC) cop-out to say that one exists without referencing it.
You had a really good point about the negative correlation, but you lost it. Hacking the pentagon is not trivial. It's telling that it is possible. Regular voting machines are more secure than WEP, but that's not saying much. (Home PCs used for Internet voting would have less security than WEP on average, but that's another topic.)
We have to assume that if the Internet is secure enough for us to buy stuff, then it is secure enough for voting.
Not true, for several reasons. There are several additional security constraints on voting. For example, you cannot be allowed to prove how you voted. Therefore, you cannot receive feedback on how you voted. You can't "balance your checkbook", so to speak. They know this and can set the online balance to whatever they choose. That's without hacker involvement. Online purchases are actually much riskier than most people are willing to consider. "Identity theft" has skyrocketed, and compromising online purchases is one way that's done. Sure the transmission may be secure, but either the client or server may be compromised (and are, regularly). Banks have simply decided to live with a particular level of fraud. HTTPS is only a small part in the equation.
From a practical standpoint, only close elections can be stolen anyway.
Again, not true. The public only needs to belive that it was close. That's not too hard, really.
If a close election is stolen, then approximately the same number of persons disagree with the result as if the election were not stolen, so what difference does it really make from the standpoint of quality of outcome?
I see your point from a pragmatic point of view, but I disagree. I don't want to see people with power getting away with abusing us and grabing more power. It's the principle of the thing. Besides, we don't want to encourage corruption. Period.
paper vote fraud (usually) - O(n)
electronic vote fraud - O(1)
I agree that the two-party false-dichotomy is a bigger problem, but we can't deal with that in a vacuum. Electronic fraud is much easier to perpetrate (particularly when mixed with corruption). Paper fraud without corruption: much harder to do. (It does happen, and needs to be addressed, but it's not nearly as big a worry.)
And how do you know that the code running on the server is the same as the code that was opened for public review? How can you ever be sure that an "administrator" (or hacker) hasn't updated values in the database? There are too many possible problems, even running open source. There would need to be a bullet proof algorithm in place, and nobody has proposed one yet (that I've read, and I've looked). I'm willing to admit the possibility, but I think it is impossible.
As others have already pointed out, it becomes impossible to verify that our elections officials are acting honestly. Some do; some don't; most have an unfounded trust in their employees/volunteers (to not assist in fraud). This is the big problem.
There are myriad other problems too. What happens if the polls are closed early by to a DDoS attack? How can you guarantee the server won't be hacked? (It happens to banks sometimes.) What about the machines people are voting from? If they're voting from home (and not a kiosk), you can tell your computer to vote for candidate A, your computer can tell you that you voted for candidate A, but the botnet virus on your machine may have voted on your behalf for candidate B.
We're miles away from free and fair elections, but Internet voting is the wrong direction to travel to get there.