It took me a long time to get section numbering right
Well, the main reason I now use OO exclusivly is section numbering.
I worked on a class project where three people shared a word document.
Everytime we pasted something from one document into the master document, Word rearranged the section and list numbering "for us", causing us major problems. It took ~20 minutes to fix the dam numbering and with the next paste it was all void again. Word also changed header formats and other stuff "for us". Finally we just ignored the numbering until the document was done and rearranged it at the end.
Since then, I use OO exclusivly. It never did anything similar to me.
OO does what you tell him to do.
Word does what it guesses that you want, even if this means reformatting the whole document after a simple paste. As Word's "guessing" is more often than not wrong, it's REALLY annoying.
And yes, I know that somewhere in Word is a hidden cryptic option panel "Autoformatting" where you can turn most of this stuff off, but the default is still annoying. Besides, "autoformatting" is one of the "great" features that MS claims make Word better.
Agnosticism doesnt imply that you dont believe in God.
Agnosticism means the believe that it cannot be known if God exist. It doesnt say that you cannot believe in God.
While most agnostics are also weakly atheist (non-existance of the believe in god), it's not true that, if you dont know something, you cannot believe in it. Agnosticism is about the believe in the provability of God's existance, atheism is about the believe in the existance of God.
Personnaly I'm agnostic (I believe that neither the existance nor the non-existance of god is provable), but I still believe in a god.
And yes, I dont see how somebody cannot be agnostic.
An all-powerfull being can just decide to hide and nothing will be able to find it, so the absence of evidence isnt evidence of absence. And to state that God wouldnt hide is blasphemy : how can you mortal even fantom that you could predict God's intentions.
On the other hand, if some aliens branch you into a matrix like machine and play god in the simulation, how would you be able to distingish this from reality? So the existance of God isnt provable either, unless you include "the sysadmin of a matrix i'm hooked into" into your definition of God.
As the parent pointed out, pure Extreme Programming cannot be offshored. (Unless you also offshore the client)
That's why some people think that XP (and other very customer involving methods) will be the only ones used in North America in the near future, as all projects using more classic methods (with documented requirements) will be offshored.
I guess that some classical projects will remain, but in general I agree with this thinking.
So like it or not, you may be forced to use XP, move to India or change your job.
You cannot have a to-scale model in a room. It's impossible. As long as your earth is visible, your model is NOT to scale and cant give a real impression of the dimensions.
The earth diameter is 1/400000 of the distance Sun-Pluto. So even if your room is a enormous large hall (400m - 4 soccer fields long), your model of earth would still be only 1mm in diameter. It would be invisible.
Actually, the string you attach the earth on would be larger than the "globe" of the earth.
If you use anything interesting for the earth (let's say 1,5cm ~a quarter), the sun-pluto distance becomes 6km - far longer than any room, hall or whatever building.
If you want to show moons and asteroids, your model needs to be even larger.
Even in this proposed huge-scale model, earth will still only have a 1m diameter.
Another problem is the sun. With a diameter more than 100 times larger than earth, even if you use just a quarter as a model for earth, you'll need a hula-hoop for the sun, that is, a hula-hoop 100m away.
Given that, the sun should have a 100m diameter in this model... are they really gonna build something this big?
If it was accessible to everyone, it could lead to a completly honest, telepatic society.
But we surely would have to adapt to live without even white lies. (Is this even possible?) Not to mention the problem with the lack of privacy, but perhaps such a society could be anarchic which would prevent an abuse by a governement.
And, of course, pirated devices that would let you shield your thougths (e.g. asking for a confirmation after each sentence before transmitting it) would appear and the honesty is gone.
You had to think : "two, three, one, four, two, three, three, three, four, two" or so to send "idiot" to your coworkers. (They use a grid with the letters of alphabet to reduce the number of symbols the system has to recognize.)
While you think verbally, you normally mumble to your self.
I know for sure that it's always the case when you read (except for some spead-reading technics that involve just looking at the text without formulating the words) and I'm pretty sure it's true for all verbal thougths.
Most (all?) people actually "speak" when they think in words. This is most observable while reading.
When you think (or read) "banana" your brain creates the same signals (but at lower magnitude) as if you would say it. Your tongue actually moves while your reading. Experiments with mute people have shown that they actually move their hands slightly, as if they were forming the words, they read, in sign-language.
This technology does not read your thoughts, but the signals send to your vocal system. As it catches the signals before they reach the vocal system, it reads "words not yet spoken". If you speak the words or just think them doesnt mattern the system. However, the system doesnt reads your thougths. If you just imagine a banana, but do not think the word "banana", the technology wouldnt catch it (even if improved), as imaging a banana doesnt trigger a signal to the vocal system.
The data seams to be on commercial flash cards, so:
- Make the format public - Publish a public/private-key signing algo (with up to 1 MBit keys) - Everyone that is interested can show up at the end of the election and sign the results on the flash card. (With a flash card reader/writer) On the flash card will be his public key and the sign. - The card is put back in the voting booth who verifies that the results are unaltered and that all signs are valid. If all signatures are ok, the booth gives a signed report to all signing parties about the signatures used on the results. - Then the card is on the way to the central point.
If anybody has a problem with the result from his precinct, he can come with the list of signers and ask to see the result and it's signatures. If a signature is missing, we have a problem.
This should garantuee that it's impossible that: 1) Someone tempers with a result. They would have to break the public key and even the CIA is (hopefully) unable to break a 1 Mb key. 2) Someone just claims without merrit that result is tempered for "fun" or profit. As their signature is on the result, you can easily point out that they signed these result on the voting day. In case someone shows up with a broken device to halt the election, one could just ignore him after 3 (or 10) unsuccesfull signings. His fault for using a broken device and not bringing a backup device.
While this doesnt prevent tempering inside the voting booth (to prevent this we still need a paper trail and a paper trail the voter can see), I'm very confident that this makes it impossible to temper with the data on the transfer. That is, if the signers keep their private keys private. Suggestion for paranoids : keep the private keys only on the signing device, destroy any storage (including RAM) they were on during their generation, do not connect to any network during generation, and destroy the signing device's storage right after succesfully signing.
I would argue that this is even more secure than traditional ballots. Of course, the candidates would need to have someone computer savy they trust to use this protection, but in this computer dependand world, a candidate should have these.
Of course, if someone has a (quantum) computer that can break 1 Mb keys, we're out of luck, but if somebody has such a thing and can keep it secret, he has ways to temper traditional elections too.
And to come back from to the first point : "PUBLIC FORMAT". I completly agree with you about black box magic. Anything in a voting machine must be complety open (open as in "can be freely inspected by everyone without a NDA", not as in "copyleft"), or else it cannot be trusted. Including formats and sourcecode. And we still need paper trails, just in case we overlooked an obscure (intentional or not) bug.
Today, suing someone costs you nothing. If you loose, you pay nothing. If you win, you pay, but you get more.
However, getting sued is expensive. If you loose, you pay your lawyer + the plaintiff. If you win, you still pay your lawyer.
A solution would be to make suing expensive. If you loose, you'd have to pay all legal expenses of the defendant.
So the system would be: If plaintiff wins, he pays his lawyer, but gets more. If plaintiff looses, he pays the defendant's lawyer. If defendant wins, he pays nothing. If defendant looses, he pays his lawyer + the plaintiff.
As suing can suddenly become very pricy, the whole attitude to lawsuits should change and people would actually evaluate the situation before suing. It would still allow people to sue "for free" if they win their lawsuit. But it should stop these "snowball-chance-in-hell, but suing anyway, just in case I got lucky with the jury"-lawsuits.
I've read the official rapport of the german military on gender. This rapport was published in 1999 to prepare the officers for the arrival of women into the combat units after an European Supreme Court decision.
This rapport was mainly based on studies made by the american military. Their conclusions:
The best amount of woman in a group is between 20% and 50%. Too few women actually DO distract men which will somewhat dispute over them. More women make the situation "normal" enough to stop this behavior. Too much women somewhat seams to lower the efficiency of the group though.
While a little weaker, women have more stamina than man which makes up for the lack of strength.
I think there were some more stats on the differences, but I have forgotten them since. Particulary, there was a section on menstruation and related problems that I dont remember in detail.
The rapport goes on on practical problems like:
There is generally only one shower room in german barracks, so some timeshift policy has to be applied.
When doing a surprise inspection of the dorms, a male officier has to knock first and wait a bit before entering a women's dorm. (What's the point of a surprise inspection if you have the time to hide the booze first? (j/k))
The personal should be instructed to drop their dirty jokes (Ha, I'd like to know if this ever worked, it IS the military, after all).
And so on. There was also an section on relationships between soldiers. While relations with subordinates where forbidden, I do no longer remember the rules for relationships on the same level.
It also cited some common fears, beside distraction, there was also:
The fear that women act hysterical in critical combat situations. Empirical evidence however, does not support that.
Another fear would be that men act overly protective of women, trying to keep them out of harm and engage in foolish rescue missions that they would never have done for a male comrade. This seams to be more of a problem, but can be fixed with proper training. Sidenote : I would take it with a grain of salt, as this is based on american studies and the american army is known to engage in foolish rescue missions anyway, as is it a political succes and a moral boost for the troup if you rescue any soldier (male or female) from the ennemy, even if half of the rescue team dies.
And that's what I remember from this rapport.
Disclaimer : As I wrote this from memory and read it five years ago, there might be some factual errors in my post.
I clearly reject the fact that just because something is legal it is "ok" and "not immoral".
And to become PM, you should have a higher moral than the common CEO.
Granted, Martin acted according to the law. The system permits people to be extremly selfish, even against the interest of their country.
In theory, you pay taxes for the infrastructure the governement provides. By profitting from the canadian infrastructure, but hiding his profits from the canadian governement, he morally stole something from the canadian people.
As the owner of his company he had to choose if he wanted to maximise his personal fortune, or give his country a just part of his profits.
I dont say he should be punished for what he did. But I say he shouldnt become PM either.
There is the huge conflict of interest : the best for Canada would be to pass laws that stop or at least restrain this tax avoidance. The best for his company would be to pass laws who make it even easier. He has choosen the benefit of his company over the benefit of his country in the past. I dont think that suddenly, by being nominated PM, he turns into a selfless, highly moral human that put's Canada's interests over his own.
Oh, and it's not capitalism either. Capitalism is all about free market. Subventions disturb the market and are therefor bad. But allowing big companies to escape taxes while providing them with the same infrastructure is a form of hidden subventions and therefor a Bad Thing even in liberal theory.
The system that we have currently isnt capitalism. The corporated world demands (and gets:( ) lower taxes, less social system, but as soon as you touch their subventions, they cry foul! For example, while cutting social expenses, Bush increased the subvention of the agriculture.
The current system is being transformed into a system where people are taxed and the money is given through subventions to corporations. I dont call this capitalism, I'd call it corporalism and it cannot work as it is deflationists in nature, but we will learn this soon enough the hard way.
Oh, and about changing the system : The best position to change the system is PM. So when we put someone on this post that has used every possibility the system offers him for his personal gain, do you expect the system to change for the better?
And about Stronach's : I have the similar problems with her that I have with Martin. Except that she isnt PM yet.
You can't be serious?! Copps as PM? That wouldn't be a good thing.
I never said it would be good. I said it would be better than Martin.
Martin stole, through tax avoidance, billions of dollars that belong morally to Canada, even before he became PM. Can you trust or even only expect him to respect the interest of the country now, while he always put his personal interest first in the past?
Finally, if Copps is that unpopular, the liberals might loose the election and this might be good. It's never healthy if a party holds the power for too long.
Except the problem that the whole world doesnt speak english / may be analphabet, there is a fundamental flaw.
As I said in another message, as the computer can not take the word apple and generate the image of an apple, you need a database of images classified by humans.
Nothing prevents the spammer from ripping all (or almost all) examples and then engaging some indians to classify them.
To prevent this, you would need the help of volunteers on the net that would at pictures at infinitum, so that your number of pictures isn't finite.
But then, nothing prevents spammers from filling the database with crap, rendering it unusable.
And if, instead of volunteers, you engage a lot of indians to add new images, the spammers just have to engage as many indians. Or, they really do the porn trick cited in the ancestor post : every time a new image is encountered by the bot, they put in on a porn page, requesting the visitor to solve the problem to get his free access pass.
But as the cost of taking the pictures, and then putting them into the computer, then classifying them is higher as the cost for the spammers to just classify them, I guess the big spammers would win this battle. (It might kill the basement spammers, but they aren't the mass of the problem.)
You just have to get your computer program better than the average typo occurance.
Oh... and remember the Slashdot story a few weaks ago where a computer spam filter was MORE accurate than the human testers. (Yeah, it probably was spam filter reads whole message vs. human reads only subject, but still...)
I think there are many tasks where a well trained computer program will perform even better than the average human.
Neural networks offer a good solution to fuzzy problems. An interesting point of neural networks is that you can train them and once they are stabilized you can burn them into a chip. Making the chip isnt cheap, but once you have one, you can run it at MHz speed and decode one image every cycle! So a challenge that takes a long time on a normal PC will just take one cycle on dedicated hardware. And as spammers will be likely to get such dedicated hardware, every time advantage is void.
And about your problems that are currently hard for computers : The problem with these is that you either:
- have to classify a limited number of examples by humans. Than spammers could just get all examples and classify them by hand too.
- or have the computer generate an exemple following some rules. In this case you have rules + random noise. But noise reduction has become quite good and I dont know any example of a rule that can easily be reversed by a human but not by a computer (an "one-AI-way" function?)
And on facial recognition : there have been huge advances in facial recognition lately, to a point where there are the first prototypes that use facial recognition as a password. There is still work to do to recognize a face from any angle, but even there is progress.
Since AI has stopped doing nothing other than trying to pass the turing test, there has been a huge advance on practical applications of it.
Thinking in concepts (needed for natural language) is really hard. But just recognizing things is much easier and AI is getting better and better at it.
Yeah, a industry giant that puts his money into the caymans, so that he dont pay taxes to his own country is so much better than Bush.
It seams now that he got into office by similar ways as Bush (preventing supporters of his rival from voting). I surely hope that Copps wins her appeal and becomes PM. While she isnt perfect, at least she does pay taxes.
Oh, and because even Paul saw that a PM that is not paying taxes is a bit off, he decide to fix the problem. But instead of transferring his money back to Canada and pay taxes (making an example for other companies), he decided to give the company to his sons.
Kind of reminds a quote from DeBruler: "Computer science is the discipline that believes all problems can be solved with one more layer of indirection." Seams that it applies to political moral to.
If Bill were so arrogant as to think he could send email to someone not on his whitelist, then he deserves not to have his email go through.
While I agree with this statement, somebody will introduce the following bug into his system : the C/R message will not come FROM: Charlie, but FROM: the C/R system.
Of course it's a bug, but it will not manifest itself loudly, so I predict it wont be fixed for a rather long time, with a lot of messages being dropped.
But I agree that this argument is rather weak.
The REAL problem is that spammers will start collection email-pairs instead of simple emails and simply circumvent any whitelist. They already do collect addresses out of chain-emails and mailing lists, they just need to collect the FROM address as a second field to the TO address and go on happily.
The clever ones might already do this and wait to use it till whitelists become widespread enough.
You need the same font that is used on their page. Then you loop through every possible starting position and every possible letter. When the pixels occupied from the letter have all the same color and the pixels surrounding them havent, you have a match. Afterwards, you just need to order the letters according to the starting pixel.
Heck, if you put some money behind your challenge, I might write one, that breaks your example, over the weekend. If you send me the code you use to generate the image, I'll break it overnight.
For a real challenge, use at least something as the yahoo challenge from the article and add some random noise. This will make it harder, but I bet it would still be possible with a good (and perhaps adapted CR).
Remember, if you can reverse engineer their algo that produces the challenge images (and that is not difficult as you dont have to get exactly the results as long as they are similar), you can generate an infinity of training instances for your CR that can run automaticly. And a CR trained with billions of instances will become VERY good (possibly even better than humans).
While ALDI has some ads today, it has extremly few. And they hadnt at all in the beginning. They just advertise their special sales every week in a normal newspaper ad. That's it.
No TV ads, no billboards, no radio spots, no sponsoring.
They aim to have good quality and low prices. EVERTHING else is secondary.
Shop decoration? Shop mobilar? Product choice? More than two cash registers? Electronic scanners? Credit cards accepted? Air miles? Consumer counseling? Forget it all. An ALDI store is two manual cash registers and ~600 different products (40000 is normal in the industry) to choose from that are mostly still in the boxes the fabricant packed them into.
They therefor break almost all rules of marketing.
Now look at the Forbes list of the worlds richest people for the two owners, Karl & Theo Albrecht. You dont have to look far... Karl is number 3, Theo number 14.
So refusing to advertise in order to get lower prices CAN work, it can even work EXTREMLY well. At least for stores that have a local consumer base and can use mouth-to-mouth propaganda.
Besides, more generally, restaurant dont advertise either. And I'm hell sure NOT to go to the few that do, as I know I will pay for the ads. A good restaurant doesnt need ads, they already get them for free from guides, so a restaurant that does advertise is most likely mediocre or worse.
GUI's are fine for things you're new too or use rarely. It's much easier and faster to see and click a button, than to search the man-page for the keybinding you need.
However, if you use things often, you manage to learn these keybinding and then it becomes MUCH faster to just hit 3 keys with your fingers than to move your hand to your mouse, move the pointer to a button and click it, move your pointer back to the main frame and click into it to give it focus back, then move your hand back to your keyboard.
And what application do normal people uses everyday? Right, their desktop. So WHY, why, why do you have icons & menus on a thing that you use daily? It's a productivity killer.
Ok, the Start Menu has some merrit for finding programs that you use so rarely that you forgot their name, but desktop icons and the slowlaunch bar are just too inefficient compared to keyboard shortcuts and if you remember the name of a program, firing up a shell and typing the name is faster than searching in the menu.
And no, a GUI is not better because people "just wont learn keybindings". Make it gradually, add an agent that automates adding keybindings (but less annoying then Blinky) and everybody will end up using keybindings over icons.
My desktop is pekwm, and it is blank. My.pekwm/keys file is rather large.
First MS Academic licenses cost close to nothing (something like 500 bucks for ALL MS products for an ENTIRE departement).
Second, they like programming contests too. I still have this unopened, sealed box of Windows XP Pro that MS gave to me for winning a local (just my university) programming contest in 2002. Somewhat funny as the contest was hold on machines running Linux:-)
And at a conference for students last year, they were giving away Visual Studio.NET Professional.
Just like drug dealers : the first is always free.
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a long time to get section numbering right
Well, the main reason I now use OO exclusivly is section numbering.
I worked on a class project where three people shared a word document.
Everytime we pasted something from one document into the master document, Word rearranged the section and list numbering "for us", causing us major problems. It took ~20 minutes to fix the dam numbering and with the next paste it was all void again. Word also changed header formats and other stuff "for us". Finally we just ignored the numbering until the document was done and rearranged it at the end.
Since then, I use OO exclusivly. It never did anything similar to me.
OO does what you tell him to do.
Word does what it guesses that you want, even if this means reformatting the whole document after a simple paste. As Word's "guessing" is more often than not wrong, it's REALLY annoying.
And yes, I know that somewhere in Word is a hidden cryptic option panel "Autoformatting" where you can turn most of this stuff off, but the default is still annoying. Besides, "autoformatting" is one of the "great" features that MS claims make Word better.
Agnosticism doesnt imply that you dont believe in God.
Agnosticism means the believe that it cannot be known if God exist. It doesnt say that you cannot believe in God.
While most agnostics are also weakly atheist (non-existance of the believe in god), it's not true that, if you dont know something, you cannot believe in it. Agnosticism is about the believe in the provability of God's existance, atheism is about the believe in the existance of God.
Personnaly I'm agnostic (I believe that neither the existance nor the non-existance of god is provable), but I still believe in a god.
And yes, I dont see how somebody cannot be agnostic.
An all-powerfull being can just decide to hide and nothing will be able to find it, so the absence of evidence isnt evidence of absence. And to state that God wouldnt hide is blasphemy : how can you mortal even fantom that you could predict God's intentions.
On the other hand, if some aliens branch you into a matrix like machine and play god in the simulation, how would you be able to distingish this from reality? So the existance of God isnt provable either, unless you include "the sysadmin of a matrix i'm hooked into" into your definition of God.
As the parent pointed out, pure Extreme Programming cannot be offshored. (Unless you also offshore the client)
That's why some people think that XP (and other very customer involving methods) will be the only ones used in North America in the near future, as all projects using more classic methods (with documented requirements) will be offshored.
I guess that some classical projects will remain, but in general I agree with this thinking.
So like it or not, you may be forced to use XP, move to India or change your job.
the scale is 1 mile : 15 millions km but they left the units out ;-p
You cannot have a to-scale model in a room.
... are they really gonna build something this big?
It's impossible.
As long as your earth is visible, your model is NOT to scale and cant give a real impression of the dimensions.
The earth diameter is 1/400000 of the distance Sun-Pluto.
So even if your room is a enormous large hall (400m - 4 soccer fields long), your model of earth would still be only 1mm in diameter. It would be invisible.
Actually, the string you attach the earth on would be larger than the "globe" of the earth.
If you use anything interesting for the earth (let's say 1,5cm ~a quarter), the sun-pluto distance becomes 6km - far longer than any room, hall or whatever building.
If you want to show moons and asteroids, your model needs to be even larger.
Even in this proposed huge-scale model, earth will still only have a 1m diameter.
Another problem is the sun.
With a diameter more than 100 times larger than earth, even if you use just a quarter as a model for earth, you'll need a hula-hoop for the sun, that is, a hula-hoop 100m away.
Given that, the sun should have a 100m diameter in this model
Nana, this is because they also use this NASA thougth-reading thing that was covered yesterday.
While they hit the button, they think the name and the connection is established.
They still speak loudly though, because marketing studies suggested that people dont like computer generated thougth-to-speach.
8-}
Scary? Depends who has access to it.
If it was accessible to everyone, it could lead to a completly honest, telepatic society.
But we surely would have to adapt to live without even white lies. (Is this even possible?) Not to mention the problem with the lack of privacy, but perhaps such a society could be anarchic which would prevent an abuse by a governement.
And, of course, pirated devices that would let you shield your thougths (e.g. asking for a confirmation after each sentence before transmitting it) would appear and the honesty is gone.
Ah well, this was a very short dream of utopia.
No danger with the current version.
...
You had to think : "two, three, one, four, two, three, three, three, four, two" or so to send "idiot" to your coworkers. (They use a grid with the letters of alphabet to reduce the number of symbols the system has to recognize.)
But once they implement full word recognition
And I was ready to learn sign language in order to communicate in noisy bars. Now I think I better get one of these :)
While you think verbally, you normally mumble to your self.
I know for sure that it's always the case when you read (except for some spead-reading technics that involve just looking at the text without formulating the words) and I'm pretty sure it's true for all verbal thougths.
Most (all?) people actually "speak" when they think in words. This is most observable while reading.
When you think (or read) "banana" your brain creates the same signals (but at lower magnitude) as if you would say it. Your tongue actually moves while your reading. Experiments with mute people have shown that they actually move their hands slightly, as if they were forming the words, they read, in sign-language.
This technology does not read your thoughts, but the signals send to your vocal system. As it catches the signals before they reach the vocal system, it reads "words not yet spoken". If you speak the words or just think them doesnt mattern the system. However, the system doesnt reads your thougths. If you just imagine a banana, but do not think the word "banana", the technology wouldnt catch it (even if improved), as imaging a banana doesnt trigger a signal to the vocal system.
The data seams to be on commercial flash cards, so :
:
- Make the format public
- Publish a public/private-key signing algo (with up to 1 MBit keys)
- Everyone that is interested can show up at the end of the election and sign the results on the flash card. (With a flash card reader/writer) On the flash card will be his public key and the sign.
- The card is put back in the voting booth who verifies that the results are unaltered and that all signs are valid. If all signatures are ok, the booth gives a signed report to all signing parties about the signatures used on the results.
- Then the card is on the way to the central point.
If anybody has a problem with the result from his precinct, he can come with the list of signers and ask to see the result and it's signatures. If a signature is missing, we have a problem.
This should garantuee that it's impossible that
1) Someone tempers with a result. They would have to break the public key and even the CIA is (hopefully) unable to break a 1 Mb key.
2) Someone just claims without merrit that result is tempered for "fun" or profit. As their signature is on the result, you can easily point out that they signed these result on the voting day.
In case someone shows up with a broken device to halt the election, one could just ignore him after 3 (or 10) unsuccesfull signings. His fault for using a broken device and not bringing a backup device.
While this doesnt prevent tempering inside the voting booth (to prevent this we still need a paper trail and a paper trail the voter can see), I'm very confident that this makes it impossible to temper with the data on the transfer.
That is, if the signers keep their private keys private.
Suggestion for paranoids : keep the private keys only on the signing device, destroy any storage (including RAM) they were on during their generation, do not connect to any network during generation, and destroy the signing device's storage right after succesfully signing.
I would argue that this is even more secure than traditional ballots. Of course, the candidates would need to have someone computer savy they trust to use this protection, but in this computer dependand world, a candidate should have these.
Of course, if someone has a (quantum) computer that can break 1 Mb keys, we're out of luck, but if somebody has such a thing and can keep it secret, he has ways to temper traditional elections too.
And to come back from to the first point : "PUBLIC FORMAT". I completly agree with you about black box magic. Anything in a voting machine must be complety open (open as in "can be freely inspected by everyone without a NDA", not as in "copyleft"), or else it cannot be trusted. Including formats and sourcecode. And we still need paper trails, just in case we overlooked an obscure (intentional or not) bug.
Today, suing someone costs you nothing.
:
If you loose, you pay nothing.
If you win, you pay, but you get more.
However, getting sued is expensive.
If you loose, you pay your lawyer + the plaintiff.
If you win, you still pay your lawyer.
A solution would be to make suing expensive.
If you loose, you'd have to pay all legal expenses of the defendant.
So the system would be
If plaintiff wins, he pays his lawyer, but gets more.
If plaintiff looses, he pays the defendant's lawyer.
If defendant wins, he pays nothing.
If defendant looses, he pays his lawyer + the plaintiff.
As suing can suddenly become very pricy, the whole attitude to lawsuits should change and people would actually evaluate the situation before suing.
It would still allow people to sue "for free" if they win their lawsuit. But it should stop these "snowball-chance-in-hell, but suing anyway, just in case I got lucky with the jury"-lawsuits.
I've read the official rapport of the german military on gender. This rapport was published in 1999 to prepare the officers for the arrival of women into the combat units after an European Supreme Court decision.
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This rapport was mainly based on studies made by the american military. Their conclusions
The best amount of woman in a group is between 20% and 50%. Too few women actually DO distract men which will somewhat dispute over them. More women make the situation "normal" enough to stop this behavior. Too much women somewhat seams to lower the efficiency of the group though.
While a little weaker, women have more stamina than man which makes up for the lack of strength.
I think there were some more stats on the differences, but I have forgotten them since. Particulary, there was a section on menstruation and related problems that I dont remember in detail.
The rapport goes on on practical problems like
There is generally only one shower room in german barracks, so some timeshift policy has to be applied.
When doing a surprise inspection of the dorms, a male officier has to knock first and wait a bit before entering a women's dorm. (What's the point of a surprise inspection if you have the time to hide the booze first? (j/k))
The personal should be instructed to drop their dirty jokes (Ha, I'd like to know if this ever worked, it IS the military, after all).
And so on. There was also an section on relationships between soldiers. While relations with subordinates where forbidden, I do no longer remember the rules for relationships on the same level.
It also cited some common fears, beside distraction, there was also
The fear that women act hysterical in critical combat situations. Empirical evidence however, does not support that.
Another fear would be that men act overly protective of women, trying to keep them out of harm and engage in foolish rescue missions that they would never have done for a male comrade.
This seams to be more of a problem, but can be fixed with proper training.
Sidenote : I would take it with a grain of salt, as this is based on american studies and the american army is known to engage in foolish rescue missions anyway, as is it a political succes and a moral boost for the troup if you rescue any soldier (male or female) from the ennemy, even if half of the rescue team dies.
And that's what I remember from this rapport.
Disclaimer : As I wrote this from memory and read it five years ago, there might be some factual errors in my post.
I clearly reject the fact that just because something is legal it is "ok" and "not immoral".
:( ) lower taxes, less social system, but as soon as you touch their subventions, they cry foul!
And to become PM, you should have a higher moral than the common CEO.
Granted, Martin acted according to the law.
The system permits people to be extremly selfish, even against the interest of their country.
In theory, you pay taxes for the infrastructure the governement provides. By profitting from the canadian infrastructure, but hiding his profits from the canadian governement, he morally stole something from the canadian people.
As the owner of his company he had to choose if he wanted to maximise his personal fortune, or give his country a just part of his profits.
I dont say he should be punished for what he did.
But I say he shouldnt become PM either.
There is the huge conflict of interest : the best for Canada would be to pass laws that stop or at least restrain this tax avoidance. The best for his company would be to pass laws who make it even easier.
He has choosen the benefit of his company over the benefit of his country in the past.
I dont think that suddenly, by being nominated PM, he turns into a selfless, highly moral human that put's Canada's interests over his own.
Oh, and it's not capitalism either. Capitalism is all about free market. Subventions disturb the market and are therefor bad.
But allowing big companies to escape taxes while providing them with the same infrastructure is a form of hidden subventions and therefor a Bad Thing even in liberal theory.
The system that we have currently isnt capitalism. The corporated world demands (and gets
For example, while cutting social expenses, Bush increased the subvention of the agriculture.
The current system is being transformed into a system where people are taxed and the money is given through subventions to corporations.
I dont call this capitalism, I'd call it corporalism and it cannot work as it is deflationists in nature, but we will learn this soon enough the hard way.
Oh, and about changing the system : The best position to change the system is PM. So when we put someone on this post that has used every possibility the system offers him for his personal gain, do you expect the system to change for the better?
And about Stronach's : I have the similar problems with her that I have with Martin. Except that she isnt PM yet.
You can't be serious?! Copps as PM? That wouldn't be a good thing.
I never said it would be good. I said it would be better than Martin.
Martin stole, through tax avoidance, billions of dollars that belong morally to Canada, even before he became PM. Can you trust or even only expect him to respect the interest of the country now, while he always put his personal interest first in the past?
Finally, if Copps is that unpopular, the liberals might loose the election and this might be good. It's never healthy if a party holds the power for too long.
like, showing a picture of an apple
Doesnt work either.
Except the problem that the whole world doesnt speak english / may be analphabet, there is a fundamental flaw.
As I said in another message, as the computer can not take the word apple and generate the image of an apple, you need a database of images classified by humans.
Nothing prevents the spammer from ripping all (or almost all) examples and then engaging some indians to classify them.
To prevent this, you would need the help of volunteers on the net that would at pictures at infinitum, so that your number of pictures isn't finite.
But then, nothing prevents spammers from filling the database with crap, rendering it unusable.
And if, instead of volunteers, you engage a lot of indians to add new images, the spammers just have to engage as many indians. Or, they really do the porn trick cited in the ancestor post : every time a new image is encountered by the bot, they put in on a porn page, requesting the visitor to solve the problem to get his free access pass.
But as the cost of taking the pictures, and then putting them into the computer, then classifying them is higher as the cost for the spammers to just classify them, I guess the big spammers would win this battle. (It might kill the basement spammers, but they aren't the mass of the problem.)
Humans do them lal teh tiem.
... and remember the Slashdot story a few weaks ago where a computer spam filter was MORE accurate than the human testers. (Yeah, it probably was spam filter reads whole message vs. human reads only subject, but still ...)
So you cant just block someone after one mistake.
You just have to get your computer program better than the average typo occurance.
Oh
I think there are many tasks where a well trained computer program will perform even better than the average human.
Always depends on the amount of money involved.
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Neural networks offer a good solution to fuzzy problems. An interesting point of neural networks is that you can train them and once they are stabilized you can burn them into a chip.
Making the chip isnt cheap, but once you have one, you can run it at MHz speed and decode one image every cycle! So a challenge that takes a long time on a normal PC will just take one cycle on dedicated hardware. And as spammers will be likely to get such dedicated hardware, every time advantage is void.
And about your problems that are currently hard for computers : The problem with these is that you either
- have to classify a limited number of examples by humans. Than spammers could just get all examples and classify them by hand too.
- or have the computer generate an exemple following some rules. In this case you have rules + random noise. But noise reduction has become quite good and I dont know any example of a rule that can easily be reversed by a human but not by a computer (an "one-AI-way" function?)
And on facial recognition : there have been huge advances in facial recognition lately, to a point where there are the first prototypes that use facial recognition as a password.
There is still work to do to recognize a face from any angle, but even there is progress.
Since AI has stopped doing nothing other than trying to pass the turing test, there has been a huge advance on practical applications of it.
Thinking in concepts (needed for natural language) is really hard.
But just recognizing things is much easier and AI is getting better and better at it.
Yeah, a industry giant that puts his money into the caymans, so that he dont pay taxes to his own country is so much better than Bush.
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It seams now that he got into office by similar ways as Bush (preventing supporters of his rival from voting).
I surely hope that Copps wins her appeal and becomes PM. While she isnt perfect, at least she does pay taxes.
Oh, and because even Paul saw that a PM that is not paying taxes is a bit off, he decide to fix the problem.
But instead of transferring his money back to Canada and pay taxes (making an example for other companies), he decided to give the company to his sons.
Kind of reminds a quote from DeBruler
"Computer science is the discipline that believes all problems can be solved with one more layer of indirection."
Seams that it applies to political moral to.
If Bill were so arrogant as to think he could send email to someone not on his whitelist, then he deserves not to have his email go through.
While I agree with this statement, somebody will introduce the following bug into his system : the C/R message will not come FROM: Charlie, but FROM: the C/R system.
Of course it's a bug, but it will not manifest itself loudly, so I predict it wont be fixed for a rather long time, with a lot of messages being dropped.
But I agree that this argument is rather weak.
The REAL problem is that spammers will start collection email-pairs instead of simple emails and simply circumvent any whitelist. They already do collect addresses out of chain-emails and mailing lists, they just need to collect the FROM address as a second field to the TO address and go on happily.
The clever ones might already do this and wait to use it till whitelists become widespread enough.
Your example is EXTREMLY easy to break.
You need the same font that is used on their page.
Then you loop through every possible starting position and every possible letter. When the pixels occupied from the letter have all the same color and the pixels surrounding them havent, you have a match.
Afterwards, you just need to order the letters according to the starting pixel.
Heck, if you put some money behind your challenge, I might write one, that breaks your example, over the weekend. If you send me the code you use to generate the image, I'll break it overnight.
For a real challenge, use at least something as the yahoo challenge from the article and add some random noise. This will make it harder, but I bet it would still be possible with a good (and perhaps adapted CR).
Remember, if you can reverse engineer their algo that produces the challenge images (and that is not difficult as you dont have to get exactly the results as long as they are similar), you can generate an infinity of training instances for your CR that can run automaticly.
And a CR trained with billions of instances will become VERY good (possibly even better than humans).
ALDI is a german based grocery discounter.
... Karl is number 3, Theo number 14.
While ALDI has some ads today, it has extremly few. And they hadnt at all in the beginning.
They just advertise their special sales every week in a normal newspaper ad.
That's it.
No TV ads, no billboards, no radio spots, no sponsoring.
They aim to have good quality and low prices.
EVERTHING else is secondary.
Shop decoration? Shop mobilar? Product choice? More than two cash registers? Electronic scanners? Credit cards accepted? Air miles? Consumer counseling?
Forget it all.
An ALDI store is two manual cash registers and ~600 different products (40000 is normal in the industry) to choose from that are mostly still in the boxes the fabricant packed them into.
They therefor break almost all rules of marketing.
Now look at the Forbes list of the worlds richest people for the two owners, Karl & Theo Albrecht.
You dont have to look far
So refusing to advertise in order to get lower prices CAN work, it can even work EXTREMLY well. At least for stores that have a local consumer base and can use mouth-to-mouth propaganda.
Besides, more generally, restaurant dont advertise either. And I'm hell sure NOT to go to the few that do, as I know I will pay for the ads. A good restaurant doesnt need ads, they already get them for free from guides, so a restaurant that does advertise is most likely mediocre or worse.
GUI's are fine for things you're new too or use rarely.
.pekwm/keys file is rather large.
It's much easier and faster to see and click a button, than to search the man-page for the keybinding you need.
However, if you use things often, you manage to learn these keybinding and then it becomes MUCH faster to just hit 3 keys with your fingers than to move your hand to your mouse, move the pointer to a button and click it, move your pointer back to the main frame and click into it to give it focus back, then move your hand back to your keyboard.
And what application do normal people uses everyday? Right, their desktop. So WHY, why, why do you have icons & menus on a thing that you use daily? It's a productivity killer.
Ok, the Start Menu has some merrit for finding programs that you use so rarely that you forgot their name, but desktop icons and the slowlaunch bar are just too inefficient compared to keyboard shortcuts and if you remember the name of a program, firing up a shell and typing the name is faster than searching in the menu.
And no, a GUI is not better because people "just wont learn keybindings". Make it gradually, add an agent that automates adding keybindings (but less annoying then Blinky) and everybody will end up using keybindings over icons.
My desktop is pekwm, and it is blank.
My
Yep universities are their main target.
:-)
.NET Professional.
First MS Academic licenses cost close to nothing (something like 500 bucks for ALL MS products for an ENTIRE departement).
Second, they like programming contests too.
I still have this unopened, sealed box of Windows XP Pro that MS gave to me for winning a local (just my university) programming contest in 2002.
Somewhat funny as the contest was hold on machines running Linux
And at a conference for students last year, they were giving away Visual Studio
Just like drug dealers : the first is always free.