The article you linked has couple more points that are in my opinion more important than the problems with the interface:
Additionally, there is risk of a breach of the anonymity of the votes, because the electronic ballot box has been archived with information on who voted and how. The e-voting project had been strongly criticised by Effi from its inception for the lack of transparency both in the process and software.
First, the system is not anonymous. Right people can see from the archives who voted for who. In fact, right after the election they were telling those who asked if their vote had been cast or not.
Secondly, the system is completely closed. There was an audit, but the auditors were forced to sign a NDA. There is also no paper trace. The voter has no guaranties that his/hers vote has been cast to the right candidate.
The EFF says the system is flawed because it requires people to verify their vote once they selected it?
No, they criticize that it was possible to stop the voting process unintentionally. This could have been solved using card readers that took whole card inside the reader, so it wouldn't have been possible pull it out without voting. Other solution would have been to display clear message that the voting process was interrupted and no vote was cast.
You also don't yank out your card until you're told to.
ATM won't give you any money if you yank out the card too early. That means that there is a clear feedback when the transaction has happened correctly. With voting machines there was no such feedback.
A 2% spoilage rate although higher than the typical rate, isn't incredibly high.
Why spend money to switch to a system that is worse?
One of the biggest issues on the Finnish system is that you can connect the vote to a voter. Basically, a vote is stored in to the main database with voter identification. The database is encrypted, but anybody with right password and key can check who voted for who. The database, keys and passwords will be stored for years.
Compared to this the user interface glitch is just a minor issue.
There is a similar discussion going on in Finland. There are few areas where uranium has been found and foreign mining companies would be very willing to extract the ore. However, most of these projects have been stopped due to strong opposition from locals and general public. Reports like this and the fact that the building process for building the fifth nuclear power plant in Finland has already started - with sixth already being discussed - are probably going to pressure the officials to allow the mining.
You need to take into account that the pictures were not taken from final orbit, where the craft will be as close as 250 km from planet surface, but from over 200 000 km away. The pictures also revealed that giant vortex over south pole, which is something no one was sure about before. I'd say that these first images were pretty good.
You're mixing Internet and WWW. Internet was deveolped by DARPA, which is an agency of the US Department of Defence. World Wide Web, which is important part of the Internet and major factor in it's succes, was developed in CERN.
Re:sing Bittorrent to download copyrighted content
on
A Bit of Bittorrent Bother
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No.
You can legally share copyrighted files if you have permission from the copyright owner. Even if you didn't, it would only be copyright infirgment not theft.
Although parent is modded funny he raises a good point.
I think that in the end DRM will cost more to the media companies than it will bring money to them. First of all there is always the cost to add DRM solutions to media. Mass production lowers these costs but they will still be there. Then there's the fact that restricting the use will irritate consumers, even those that don't have grasp for tech. For example my sister and my cousin already have refused to by anything with DRM after they had some bad experiences with copy-protected discs. As seen in the recent Sony BMG mess, irritating customers can cost millions to media companies.
What media companies expect from DRM is increased sales after people have to buy the media they normally would copy. However, it has already been shown that it won't stop piracy. Even the media companies have accepted this. Instead they claim that DRM is used to restrict home copying and other fair use rights. I am questioning this claim since even the recent copy-protections can be circumvented with such basic programs as Windows Media Player and Nero.
Even if Blue-Ray and Vista manage to restrict home copying, it will propably just lead to more piracy when people find out that they cannot properly use media they paid just for. Many will find that getting same media from p2p for free sounds a lot better solution.
It would be really interesting to see some independent studies about this.
You don't agree with GPL you can still use the software. You don't, however, have rights to disribute it without author(s) permission. If you do so, you would be breaking your country's copyright laws.
As I said, Theora is good at lower bitrates but with higher bitrates there's still some performance problems with the codec. The Doom9.net comparison focused on ripping movies and they used bitrates between 600 - 1000 kbps. At these rates the Theora codec still performs quite poorly.
If (or when) the developers manage to solve these problems Theora will become a viable codec, but if they had reviewed it now, it would have only gotten a bad publicity.
Theora is still in alpha stages and still has many problems with it. Currently it doesn't stand a chance with the codecs in the shoot-out, especially with the bitrates they were using in the tests.
That being said, remember that Theora is already pretty useful for low bitrate Internet streams.
Seismologist Cvetan Sinadinovski said it caused buildings to shake in the island state for up to 15 seconds, but did not cause a tsunami or unusual tidal activity because it was of horizontal rather than vertical displacement and struck far off the coast.
There's one great difference between GPL* and EULAs. The GPL grants you rights when EULAs takes away your rights. There's no need to accept GPL if you just want to use the software, but then you are bound by the copyright law and therefore cannot disribute the software. EULAs on the other hand take away the rights granted by the copyright law, and you have to accept it before you can use the software.
Here at/. people are pissed because they have no way of reading contract when they do the purchase but still have to accept it. Remember that most stores don't accept boxes that have been opened back.
GPL, on the other hand, you don't need to accept if you just plan to use the software. It only comes to play if you plan on using the software on ways that are restricted by copyright law.
I hate replying to myself, but the one I've got isn't the same as those just posted. I just didn't bother to check this before posting because Yahoo was so bloody slow. The title is still missleading[1] as the trailer has been online for months this is just a new one.
What about a system where it's court's job to decide how much the loser has to pay. So, if RIAA wins you won't end up paying all of their multi millon dollar legal fees. Only small part of it or maybe none at all.
That's the system we've got in Finland and it seem to be working pretty well.
There has already been major progress in the Xorg. The next release - going to be released Aug 25 - just went to feature freeze and it will have some fancy stuff like real transparency. There has also been some serious discussion about moving X on top of OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
The article you linked has couple more points that are in my opinion more important than the problems with the interface:
Additionally, there is risk of a breach of the anonymity of the votes, because the electronic ballot box has been archived with information on who voted and how. The e-voting project had been strongly criticised by Effi from its inception for the lack of transparency both in the process and software.
First, the system is not anonymous. Right people can see from the archives who voted for who. In fact, right after the election they were telling those who asked if their vote had been cast or not.
Secondly, the system is completely closed. There was an audit, but the auditors were forced to sign a NDA. There is also no paper trace. The voter has no guaranties that his/hers vote has been cast to the right candidate.
The EFF says the system is flawed because it requires people to verify their vote once they selected it?
No, they criticize that it was possible to stop the voting process unintentionally. This could have been solved using card readers that took whole card inside the reader, so it wouldn't have been possible pull it out without voting. Other solution would have been to display clear message that the voting process was interrupted and no vote was cast.
You also don't yank out your card until you're told to.
ATM won't give you any money if you yank out the card too early. That means that there is a clear feedback when the transaction has happened correctly. With voting machines there was no such feedback.
A 2% spoilage rate although higher than the typical rate, isn't incredibly high.
Why spend money to switch to a system that is worse?
One of the biggest issues on the Finnish system is that you can connect the vote to a voter. Basically, a vote is stored in to the main database with voter identification. The database is encrypted, but anybody with right password and key can check who voted for who. The database, keys and passwords will be stored for years.
Compared to this the user interface glitch is just a minor issue.
More detailed criticism can be found from Effi's e-voting report.
There is a similar discussion going on in Finland. There are few areas where uranium has been found and foreign mining companies would be very willing to extract the ore. However, most of these projects have been stopped due to strong opposition from locals and general public. Reports like this and the fact that the building process for building the fifth nuclear power plant in Finland has already started - with sixth already being discussed - are probably going to pressure the officials to allow the mining.
Exactly, here's an explanation written by Stephen Bainbridge, a law professor at UCLA:
http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/2007/01/blogger_Gentoo doesn't distribute Sun's Java? Then why do they have both sun-jdk and sun-jre in the official portage tree?
You need to take into account that the pictures were not taken from final orbit, where the craft will be as close as 250 km from planet surface, but from over 200 000 km away. The pictures also revealed that giant vortex over south pole, which is something no one was sure about before. I'd say that these first images were pretty good.
You're mixing Internet and WWW. Internet was deveolped by DARPA, which is an agency of the US Department of Defence. World Wide Web, which is important part of the Internet and major factor in it's succes, was developed in CERN.
So, you're actually some kind of lord?
No. You can legally share copyrighted files if you have permission from the copyright owner. Even if you didn't, it would only be copyright infirgment not theft.
<nitpick>
Single particles can. For real life example see Cherekov radiation.
</nitpick>
Something with a kick?
Perhaps you should listen the latest stuff from King Crimson. Hell, go and check out Red and keep in mind that it was done in the 70's.
Now, I must go back to listening Strapping Young Lad and Opeth....
Although parent is modded funny he raises a good point.
I think that in the end DRM will cost more to the media companies than it will bring money to them. First of all there is always the cost to add DRM solutions to media. Mass production lowers these costs but they will still be there. Then there's the fact that restricting the use will irritate consumers, even those that don't have grasp for tech. For example my sister and my cousin already have refused to by anything with DRM after they had some bad experiences with copy-protected discs. As seen in the recent Sony BMG mess, irritating customers can cost millions to media companies.
What media companies expect from DRM is increased sales after people have to buy the media they normally would copy. However, it has already been shown that it won't stop piracy. Even the media companies have accepted this. Instead they claim that DRM is used to restrict home copying and other fair use rights. I am questioning this claim since even the recent copy-protections can be circumvented with such basic programs as Windows Media Player and Nero.
Even if Blue-Ray and Vista manage to restrict home copying, it will propably just lead to more piracy when people find out that they cannot properly use media they paid just for. Many will find that getting same media from p2p for free sounds a lot better solution.
It would be really interesting to see some independent studies about this.
You don't agree with GPL you can still use the software. You don't, however, have rights to disribute it without author(s) permission. If you do so, you would be breaking your country's copyright laws.
Are you trying to say that there are workplaces where people don't read Slashdot all day?
If (or when) the developers manage to solve these problems Theora will become a viable codec, but if they had reviewed it now, it would have only gotten a bad publicity.
Theora is still in alpha stages and still has many problems with it. Currently it doesn't stand a chance with the codecs in the shoot-out, especially with the bitrates they were using in the tests.
That being said, remember that Theora is already pretty useful for low bitrate Internet streams.
Quote from the article:
Contrary to what MPAA says they had nothing to do with Finreactor raid. Here's a link to the story.(in finnish)
No, you've got it all wrong.
There's one great difference between GPL* and EULAs. The GPL grants you rights when EULAs takes away your rights. There's no need to accept GPL if you just want to use the software, but then you are bound by the copyright law and therefore cannot disribute the software. EULAs on the other hand take away the rights granted by the copyright law, and you have to accept it before you can use the software.
Here at /. people are pissed because they have no way of reading contract when they do the purchase but still have to accept it. Remember that most stores don't accept boxes that have been opened back.
GPL, on the other hand, you don't need to accept if you just plan to use the software. It only comes to play if you plan on using the software on ways that are restricted by copyright law.
[*] and other similar licenses
I hate replying to myself, but the one I've got isn't the same as those just posted. I just didn't bother to check this before posting because Yahoo was so bloody slow. The title is still missleading[1] as the trailer has been online for months this is just a new one.
[1] Surprise, surprise. This is /. after all.
That's the system we've got in Finland and it seem to be working pretty well.
Don't bother. We already have software patents and our goverment is also planning sticter copyright laws.
There has already been major progress in the Xorg. The next release - going to be released Aug 25 - just went to feature freeze and it will have some fancy stuff like real transparency. There has also been some serious discussion about moving X on top of OpenGL.