I have been using Photoshop for years, every since I was in high school. I've also been using 3DStudioMax, Premier, AfterEffects, Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro, you name it. All of it is pirated.
As a matter of a fact, when I was in 10th grade, some friends and I got together and formed an amateur film group. We used the software that we had pirated to further our understanding of film.
I won't mention any names, but several of the members of that group have gone on to work with major directors on major films.
Adobe Photoshop costs a couple of hundred dollars - maybe more, now. Another poster said that 3DStudioMax cost $6000! At those prices, how can anyone who isn't already an expert afford to learn or experiment?
I understand that major corporations should have to pay for their software - I can even see how a professional who's livelyhood came from the software might be able to justify the price points on these exclusive software packages - but c'mon, 15 year-old-kids?
How dare anybody call innocent and curious kids making Counterstrike Sprays with Photoshop criminals! If anybody expects them to pay hundreds or thousands - forget it. We have to find another, better system.
I tried to use Rubbing Alcohol to clean a keyboard that I had spilled coffee into once.
It still worked after the coffee, but I was adamant about having a clean keyboard, so I poured 70% Isopropanol into the keyboard, then let it dry for two weeks.
It never worked again.
I think the problem may have been that it was only 70% pure, the other 30% being water.
So get the very best quality isopropanol that you can, or ask the boys at the company to buy you a huge container of laboratory grade Ethanol or Methanol instead.
After that, put all the computers in an ozone chamber and I think you'll be fine.
With all this talk about how the government doesn't really represent the will of the people, doesn't it stand to reason that we have to clean house and change the power structure?
I think the largest reason that the US has become so corrupt is that plain old folks (read: the majority of the population) are not interested in participating in goverment. What kind of democracy only asks you to go to the polls once a year at most? What kind of a citizen is only willing to actually attend once every 4 years?
In ancient Greece, the democracy worked much better because people were required to fulfil their civic duties, and people took those duties seriously. Now, with our "representative" democracy, the power actually vested in the people is so limited as to be useless.
We need a system whereby everyone must participate in the vote very frequently - once a month, for instance, we could have a vote on important issues, the same as congress. With technology as advanced as it is, we could easily tally all those votes for each individual issue. Then, lobbyists would have the job of convincing people to vote their way, a much more difficult challenge than greasing a few career politicians with money.
For more involved issues, the community would elect a panel of randomly selected citizens to work on the budgets, specific complicated legislations, etc. It could be structured like a jury selection inquiry, with the populace opting-out certain unfit members of the panel. A side effect of structuring law this way would be to make legal documents transparent, since they wouldn't be written with obsfucation in mind.
The question now becomes how to get this system implemented. I fear there is no way except a bloody overthrow of the legislative branch of our goverment. Somehow I don't think the policitians would reneg their powers willingly.
If you're trying to make the point that Windows and Linux are equivalent, they clearly aren't.
If you're trying assert that Windows is harder to use than Linux, you're wrong.
But that isn't really the point. Let's say you go out and buy a car. You have an obligation, because it's a machine that you are going to be using, to at least understand it's principal of operation. Let me say that again - "When you are using a piece of machinery, you have an obligation to understand the basic principal of it's operation".
The GUI and Windows has been dumbing down the average user for far too long. This leads to decreased productivity, apathy, and a sense that computers can't do very much for the average person.
When computers were first made available, people wanted to harness the power to do complex mathematical calculations on them, use them to control appliances, to tune their cars, to improve their lives in any way possible, in general, to push the envelope on what they could do. These days, 2 Billion Operations a Second buys you email with attachments, a simple web browser, and an office application on which all you really do is type and use the Spell Checker.
I agree that Linux probably isn't ready for prime-time, but I disagree on the definition of Prime-Time. To me, when users are harnessing the power of their hardware, they are adequately using their computer. And frankly, they stand a better chance of doing that with tools like sh and php then they do with VBA or Windows Scripting Host.
I can't understand where all the confusion is coming from on the E-Voting issue. The machines are supposed to address a problem:
Problem: Present a list of voting choices in any number of languages, in audio for those who are blind, give them an opportunity to change their vote if they made a mistake, give them a second (and a third) chance to confirm their vote, and then make sure that their vote is counted.
It sounds like a great application for computers. After all, multi-lingual GUIs are common and practical, and computers give you the chance to change your mind before you finalize the vote.
Solution: Use the computer to format the ballot, so that you don't have to have different versions for every language, and so that the voter can confirm and reconfirm the votes before finally committing them to a paper ballot. The computer then "fills in " the ovals on the ballot, eliminating improperly filled or inadequately filled circles, at which point the voter can look at the paper and quadruple check that he voted for the right people, and put that ballot into a "dumb" optical scanner that JUST COUNTS. Nothing to tamper with, nothing to worry about - you could have 5 terminals to every counter, which would save money over the current system and would still guarantee (actually enhance) the accuracy of the vote.
It's almost like somebody DOESN'T WANT the vote to be counted properly.
What the RIAA are learning these days is that when a virutal copy of your product is just as good as the actual product, the business model is finished.
It doesn't matter what artificial contraints you put on people - (i.e, Copyright, DMCA, Broadcast Flag) in the end, the business model must change. In the music industry, for instance, I think the future of the industry will be in Live performance, one example of a product that has no digital equivalent.
The same is true for Software. We have come to the point in the history of humanity at which certain products are no longer saleable because they are so easy to copy. Software as a manufacturing industry is finished - if you are trying to make software to sell in a retail store as an off-the-shelf product, you're going to be disappointed by your sales. One person can buy it and then copy it a hundred million times without incurring any cost. (For that matter, so can you, so it really wouldn't be fair to charge a significant amount for each unit anyway)
The code is easy to reproduce - the product is easy to copy. That can't be where the money is. Instead, follow the AOL software model - the CD is free, the service is not. Let's say you write a database application to put Widgets on the Web. Give away the software, charge for each transaction. That's the only way to make money in software today.
Design your software so that students and tinkerers can use it without having to pay. Small-time websites and businesses are more likely to remember you when they make it to the Big Time if you gave away your product to them in the beginning. Uniform pricing policies presume a fixed value for the software, which isn't true - prices should be adjusted based on the business the software will leverage for the client. Obviously, Microsoft should pay a little more for a MySQL license than MountedArmadilloSkulls.com.
You know, it seems like a lot of people are under the impression that the Police are going to be using this system to solve crimes.
If the federal government is responsible for these cameras, then they aren't under any obligation to let the police use them.
Besides, the Police in most cities are underfunded and incompetent. I wouldn't worry about the Police if I were a terrorist or criminal. Rather, I would be concerned about the CIA and the HSA, who are very well funded indeed and have nothing else to do, since the threat of Terrorism is largely a ruse to frighten the public.
Along those lines, I just love the Fox News Channel. They have a ticker across the bottom of the screen that says: Terror Alert: >Elevated and has since 9/12/2001. Jesus Christ - who's fooled by this?
It took me a tremendous amount of time to get my version of FC2 working. As a former Windows user, now fully converted over to Linux, I have a lot of hardware that I bought on the cheap and that just isn't supported natively by Linux. It took me an installation (after trying dozens of other things) of ndiswrapper, new scanner libraries, special asm runtimes, Kernel 2.6.7, my own personally patched.c files in the kernel source, and close to two weeks of assuring my wife "Really, It'll be Better than Windows when it's done!"
Now, finally, it is done. However, there are still things that annoy me. For instance, since I opened Slashdot from the daily email, I'm using Mozilla right now instead of firefox. I still haven't figured out how to circumvent that!
To be honest, (and I've said this before on Slashdot) Linux has a lot of ground to gain before it will be truely more productive for the average user, above and beyond Windows. Right now, there is no free application that supports the whole gamut of windows drivers, and until you can assure a potential convert that everything they already have will work in Linux, and that their future purchases will ALSO work in Linux, it isn't cost effective to save the $90 on Windows. If you figure that I spend 60 hours getting this computer working, and assuming my time is worth only $5 an hour, I've still spent more money on Linux (Just to Get it Working) than windows!
A couple things are inconsistent here. If he is tired of "carrying around a binder full of CDs", why did he put a 250-lb computer in the back of his gas-guzzler?
And how did he play those CDs? Presumably on the Cassette deck?
It's not important that we "hand-count" ballots - anyone who has ever tried it knows that the margin of error for humans is huge. If people hand-count ballots, I can say with certainty that the numbers will be wrong. That's because humans are lazy and easy to fool, and they get confused when they have to do the exact same thing 20,000 times in an evening. I have worked with a handful of "democratic" societies and helped to count votes, and no two counts are EVER the same.
What IS important to this process is that the machine that does the counting is mechanical and transparent, and that a seperate, "user-friendly" machine actually prepairs the ballot for submission. Why can't we just have a computer that makes a punch card for the voter, who visually verifies that it is correct and then inserts it into a mechanical device to count the ballot? Jeez, it really isn't that difficult.
I actually have converted many people to firefox. I run a computer repair business and whenever I give someone a "tune-up" the first thing I do is rip out IE and give them Firefox instead.
For the slower, older computers, I give them K-Meleon.
I think I have a solution to all this voting nonsense. The first step is to issue every voting age american a Public and Private Key , as per PGP.
Then, when the voting is actually taking place, the votes are encrypted using the Government's widely-known public key, and is digitally signed using the private individual's Private key.
This way, even the voting machine doesn't know what votes a given data stream actually contains, since the signature of the individual changes the representation of the votes. When the gov't. recieves the vote, it decodes the message using it's own private key, and then re-decodes it using the voter's known Public Key.
In other words, don't count on a machine to do the counting at the voting machine level. Assign one public, open-source machine to decode all the votes once they have been registered. There is no reason for the voting machines to do the counting themselves.
Another possible method would be to use two seperate machines for the voting. The first has a touch-screen and all the bells and whistles, and punches you a physically verifyable ballot, which is then put into the second machine, which reads the card and asks you to confirm the votes again. When you do, then a physical counter is incremented. The first machine is all or mostly electronic, and the second entirely mechanical, so there is no funny business.
What is needed here is some kind of "pass-through" responsibility.
The ISP should be under contract with the user to ALLOW THE USER TO PUBLISH their own content. Therefore, legal complaints should be directed to the user and the ISP should be left out of it.
Sure, it's the ISP's computer, and their network, but there needs to be a special concession in the case of internet content that the Provider doesn't "own" or "control" that content. I think there is already an understanding along these lines. For instance, if I publish a book on my (hosted) website, that doesn't mean my ISP can now claim to "own" that book or demand a chuck of the revenue because they "helped" to sell it. (Or Does It?)
I worked for several years as an intern at a giant Pharmaceutical company, in research and development, where EVERY employee had a PhD (except me!). To be honest, I wasn't that impressed with their range of knowledge or their overall competence.
I think another poster hit the nail on the head when he said that PhDs are overqualified in a teeny, tiny area of study that only they actually care about. However, the "Doctor" title brings out the Ego in many of them, disabling their critical thinking skills (i.e. - "This project is a total waste of time and will never come to anything"). In essence, they're the reason many failed projects go horribly overbudget before they finally die.
What this high school needs to do is arrange their equipment such that it detects the signal from the SuperStation and broadcasts the inverse wave, effectively destroying the signal for a good distance around. Sure, it won't save them, but at this point, nothing will!
Now, I know that it's ILLEGAL, but what's to stop you from simply using a cantenna or similar device and hooking it up to a simple amplifier? It seems to me that decent gain combined with higher wattage would equal better signal strength, even with a less-than-perfect LOS.
Or - use a fast pulse-forming network to blast the signal out of an old primestar dish at 1 kW!
The Wikipedia definition mentions the release of Magnetic energy as a possible environmental side effect in the case of a reactor destablization.
Anyone know what might happen if a field of this magnitude were to stray from the torus and effect the world outside the reactor?
This parent is spot-on. I run 3 WindowsXP machines and a linux PDC and fileserver in my house. I would switch to Linux for the other computers, too - but there just isn't the support for applications and hardware. I would have to spend thousands to "upgrade" to a free os that supports my hardware.
Linux asks you to learn a tremendous amount in order to use it. Fine - but you can't expect to sell a product with such a steep learning curve to people who barely made it out of High School.
Oh, and a reality check: millions of people in America alone are functionally illiterate. They are NOT going to rewrite their.confs.
Microsoft, at this point, is damn near unstoppable because it plays to the crowd - the REAL crowd. The Slashdot Community is a tiny niche in a tiny minority. Let's all work together to write linux apps that are actually easier to use than their microsoft equivalents?
I think this parent made the point crystal clear. The reason that DRM is irrelevant is simply that Media is irrelevant.
If there is one thing that I have come to understand through monitoring Slashdot posts about DRM, it's that these protection schemes are a last-ditch attempt to save a business model that is doomed to failure. Where a digital facsimile is AS GOOD as the real thing, piracy will always be rampant, and there is nothing that can be done to curb it. Years ago, a CD or a tape contained many times more data than any computer could hold. That is what they were selling us - the tape, the CD, the technology that enables us peons to use their treasure troves of information. Now the playing field is more level and the profits will dry up inevitably. What I think we are going to see now is a revival of non-piratable performance; i.e. live shows, concerts, actual theater, real people interacting with one another in realtime. So instead of bemoaning all these DRM stop-gaps, jump ahead of the bandwagon and support local theatre, music, and art!
As an added bonus, this will cut down on no-talent hacks like Britney Spears, since they won't be able to hide behind backup vocalists and clever reverb effects.
I don't think that the increased broadband speeds will really effect the Internet in the long run.
Anytime you make a large change in the culture, like when the Internet first emerged from the underground, you are going to have a massive die-off, followed by a flowering of new growth that would have been thought impossible before.
Remember when the.com's crashed? Internet commerce exploded, then collapsed. But then - then it recovered in ways that weren't anticipated. And just think - now we can get pictures of a man dropping a deuce on his wife's forehead for pennies a day!
But seriously, what is needed in the computer world these days is an understanding, especially on the part of Microsoft, that uneducated people are a threat to themselves and to those who are educated. How hard would it be for Microsoft to put together a tutorial that teaches new computer users HOW their computer works?
Currently, Windows Help (I tried it, once) is basically a collection of self-aggrandizing propaganda pages talking about how Windows can do this, can do that, is all-powerful and ever-living. It doesn't say a word about why crashes happen, what can be done about them, how Windows uses it's drivers to communicate with hardware, etc.
Not that everyone would be interested in such a tutorial, but if more people understood what their computer is actually doing, behind the scenes, how an email message is put together, addressed, sent; then they wouldn't be falling for these "social engineering" viruses. (ie. "Naked Pics of Britney Spears, attached!", or more realistically, "You file request here is put on attach sexy!")
The other day I got an spoof email directed towards my paypal account. These folks thought I would type in my username and password, give out ALL my personal information, just because they had done a nice job spoofing paypal's layout. I didn't fall for it, but I can imagine thousands of people who would. I found myself frantically emailing clients who are inept, my family and friends, warning them that it isn't real, because I could see how an ignorant person would fall for it.
If those people knew that you can look at the message headers to figure out where the mail "really" came from, these viruses wouldn't infect very many people.
Or how about this - many years ago the mail was so corrupt that the government had to step in and establish the Postal Service. It might not be a bad idea to require individuals to identify themselves reliably before being able to send an email from a given address. A centralized system would be easy for the government to abuse, but perhaps there is a way around that.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been using Photoshop for years, every since I was in high school. I've also been using 3DStudioMax, Premier, AfterEffects, Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro, you name it. All of it is pirated.
As a matter of a fact, when I was in 10th grade, some friends and I got together and formed an amateur film group. We used the software that we had pirated to further our understanding of film.
I won't mention any names, but several of the members of that group have gone on to work with major directors on major films.
Adobe Photoshop costs a couple of hundred dollars - maybe more, now. Another poster said that 3DStudioMax cost $6000! At those prices, how can anyone who isn't already an expert afford to learn or experiment?
I understand that major corporations should have to pay for their software - I can even see how a professional who's livelyhood came from the software might be able to justify the price points on these exclusive software packages - but c'mon, 15 year-old-kids?
How dare anybody call innocent and curious kids making Counterstrike Sprays with Photoshop criminals! If anybody expects them to pay hundreds or thousands - forget it. We have to find another, better system.
I tried to use Rubbing Alcohol to clean a keyboard that I had spilled coffee into once.
It still worked after the coffee, but I was adamant about having a clean keyboard, so I poured 70% Isopropanol into the keyboard, then let it dry for two weeks.
It never worked again.
I think the problem may have been that it was only 70% pure, the other 30% being water.
So get the very best quality isopropanol that you can, or ask the boys at the company to buy you a huge container of laboratory grade Ethanol or Methanol instead.
After that, put all the computers in an ozone chamber and I think you'll be fine.
I think everyone can see where this is going -
Let's must build huge cities underground, where the temperature is constant and we don't have to worry about skin cancer, rain, or locusts.
With all this talk about how the government doesn't really represent the will of the people, doesn't it stand to reason that we have to clean house and change the power structure?
I think the largest reason that the US has become so corrupt is that plain old folks (read: the majority of the population) are not interested in participating in goverment. What kind of democracy only asks you to go to the polls once a year at most? What kind of a citizen is only willing to actually attend once every 4 years?
In ancient Greece, the democracy worked much better because people were required to fulfil their civic duties, and people took those duties seriously. Now, with our "representative" democracy, the power actually vested in the people is so limited as to be useless.
We need a system whereby everyone must participate in the vote very frequently - once a month, for instance, we could have a vote on important issues, the same as congress. With technology as advanced as it is, we could easily tally all those votes for each individual issue. Then, lobbyists would have the job of convincing people to vote their way, a much more difficult challenge than greasing a few career politicians with money.
For more involved issues, the community would elect a panel of randomly selected citizens to work on the budgets, specific complicated legislations, etc. It could be structured like a jury selection inquiry, with the populace opting-out certain unfit members of the panel. A side effect of structuring law this way would be to make legal documents transparent, since they wouldn't be written with obsfucation in mind.
The question now becomes how to get this system implemented. I fear there is no way except a bloody overthrow of the legislative branch of our goverment. Somehow I don't think the policitians would reneg their powers willingly.
C'mon , guys.
If you're trying to make the point that Windows and Linux are equivalent, they clearly aren't.
If you're trying assert that Windows is harder to use than Linux, you're wrong.
But that isn't really the point. Let's say you go out and buy a car. You have an obligation, because it's a machine that you are going to be using, to at least understand it's principal of operation. Let me say that again - "When you are using a piece of machinery, you have an obligation to understand the basic principal of it's operation".
The GUI and Windows has been dumbing down the average user for far too long. This leads to decreased productivity, apathy, and a sense that computers can't do very much for the average person.
When computers were first made available, people wanted to harness the power to do complex mathematical calculations on them, use them to control appliances, to tune their cars, to improve their lives in any way possible, in general, to push the envelope on what they could do. These days, 2 Billion Operations a Second buys you email with attachments, a simple web browser, and an office application on which all you really do is type and use the Spell Checker.
I agree that Linux probably isn't ready for prime-time, but I disagree on the definition of Prime-Time. To me, when users are harnessing the power of their hardware, they are adequately using their computer. And frankly, they stand a better chance of doing that with tools like sh and php then they do with VBA or Windows Scripting Host.
I can't understand where all the confusion is coming from on the E-Voting issue. The machines are supposed to address a problem:
Problem:
Present a list of voting choices in any number of languages, in audio for those who are blind, give them an opportunity to change their vote if they made a mistake, give them a second (and a third) chance to confirm their vote, and then make sure that their vote is counted.
It sounds like a great application for computers. After all, multi-lingual GUIs are common and practical, and computers give you the chance to change your mind before you finalize the vote.
Solution:
Use the computer to format the ballot, so that you don't have to have different versions for every language, and so that the voter can confirm and reconfirm the votes before finally committing them to a paper ballot. The computer then "fills in " the ovals on the ballot, eliminating improperly filled or inadequately filled circles, at which point the voter can look at the paper and quadruple check that he voted for the right people, and put that ballot into a "dumb" optical scanner that JUST COUNTS. Nothing to tamper with, nothing to worry about - you could have 5 terminals to every counter, which would save money over the current system and would still guarantee (actually enhance) the accuracy of the vote.
It's almost like somebody DOESN'T WANT the vote to be counted properly.
I think I've said this before on /., but well -
What the RIAA are learning these days is that when a virutal copy of your product is just as good as the actual product, the business model is finished.
It doesn't matter what artificial contraints you put on people - (i.e, Copyright, DMCA, Broadcast Flag) in the end, the business model must change. In the music industry, for instance, I think the future of the industry will be in Live performance, one example of a product that has no digital equivalent.
The same is true for Software. We have come to the point in the history of humanity at which certain products are no longer saleable because they are so easy to copy. Software as a manufacturing industry is finished - if you are trying to make software to sell in a retail store as an off-the-shelf product, you're going to be disappointed by your sales. One person can buy it and then copy it a hundred million times without incurring any cost. (For that matter, so can you, so it really wouldn't be fair to charge a significant amount for each unit anyway)
The code is easy to reproduce - the product is easy to copy. That can't be where the money is. Instead, follow the AOL software model - the CD is free, the service is not. Let's say you write a database application to put Widgets on the Web. Give away the software, charge for each transaction. That's the only way to make money in software today.
Design your software so that students and tinkerers can use it without having to pay. Small-time websites and businesses are more likely to remember you when they make it to the Big Time if you gave away your product to them in the beginning. Uniform pricing policies presume a fixed value for the software, which isn't true - prices should be adjusted based on the business the software will leverage for the client. Obviously, Microsoft should pay a little more for a MySQL license than MountedArmadilloSkulls.com.
You know, it seems like a lot of people are under the impression that the Police are going to be using this system to solve crimes.
If the federal government is responsible for these cameras, then they aren't under any obligation to let the police use them.
Besides, the Police in most cities are underfunded and incompetent. I wouldn't worry about the Police if I were a terrorist or criminal. Rather, I would be concerned about the CIA and the HSA, who are very well funded indeed and have nothing else to do, since the threat of Terrorism is largely a ruse to frighten the public.
Along those lines, I just love the Fox News Channel. They have a ticker across the bottom of the screen that says: Terror Alert: >Elevated and has since 9/12/2001. Jesus Christ - who's fooled by this?
It took me a tremendous amount of time to get my version of FC2 working. As a former Windows user, now fully converted over to Linux, I have a lot of hardware that I bought on the cheap and that just isn't supported natively by Linux. It took me an installation (after trying dozens of other things) of ndiswrapper, new scanner libraries, special asm runtimes, Kernel 2.6.7, my own personally patched .c files in the kernel source, and close to two weeks of assuring my wife "Really, It'll be Better than Windows when it's done!"
Now, finally, it is done. However, there are still things that annoy me. For instance, since I opened Slashdot from the daily email, I'm using Mozilla right now instead of firefox. I still haven't figured out how to circumvent that!
To be honest, (and I've said this before on Slashdot) Linux has a lot of ground to gain before it will be truely more productive for the average user, above and beyond Windows. Right now, there is no free application that supports the whole gamut of windows drivers, and until you can assure a potential convert that everything they already have will work in Linux, and that their future purchases will ALSO work in Linux, it isn't cost effective to save the $90 on Windows. If you figure that I spend 60 hours getting this computer working, and assuming my time is worth only $5 an hour, I've still spent more money on Linux (Just to Get it Working) than windows!
A couple things are inconsistent here. If he is tired of "carrying around a binder full of CDs", why did he put a 250-lb computer in the back of his gas-guzzler?
And how did he play those CDs? Presumably on the Cassette deck?
What a loser.
It's not important that we "hand-count" ballots - anyone who has ever tried it knows that the margin of error for humans is huge. If people hand-count ballots, I can say with certainty that the numbers will be wrong. That's because humans are lazy and easy to fool, and they get confused when they have to do the exact same thing 20,000 times in an evening. I have worked with a handful of "democratic" societies and helped to count votes, and no two counts are EVER the same.
What IS important to this process is that the machine that does the counting is mechanical and transparent, and that a seperate, "user-friendly" machine actually prepairs the ballot for submission. Why can't we just have a computer that makes a punch card for the voter, who visually verifies that it is correct and then inserts it into a mechanical device to count the ballot? Jeez, it really isn't that difficult.
I actually have converted many people to firefox. I run a computer repair business and whenever I give someone a "tune-up" the first thing I do is rip out IE and give them Firefox instead. For the slower, older computers, I give them K-Meleon.
I think I have a solution to all this voting nonsense. The first step is to issue every voting age american a Public and Private Key , as per PGP.
Then, when the voting is actually taking place, the votes are encrypted using the Government's widely-known public key, and is digitally signed using the private individual's Private key.
This way, even the voting machine doesn't know what votes a given data stream actually contains, since the signature of the individual changes the representation of the votes. When the gov't. recieves the vote, it decodes the message using it's own private key, and then re-decodes it using the voter's known Public Key.
In other words, don't count on a machine to do the counting at the voting machine level. Assign one public, open-source machine to decode all the votes once they have been registered. There is no reason for the voting machines to do the counting themselves.
Another possible method would be to use two seperate machines for the voting. The first has a touch-screen and all the bells and whistles, and punches you a physically verifyable ballot, which is then put into the second machine, which reads the card and asks you to confirm the votes again. When you do, then a physical counter is incremented. The first machine is all or mostly electronic, and the second entirely mechanical, so there is no funny business.
What is needed here is some kind of "pass-through" responsibility.
The ISP should be under contract with the user to ALLOW THE USER TO PUBLISH their own content. Therefore, legal complaints should be directed to the user and the ISP should be left out of it.
Sure, it's the ISP's computer, and their network, but there needs to be a special concession in the case of internet content that the Provider doesn't "own" or "control" that content. I think there is already an understanding along these lines. For instance, if I publish a book on my (hosted) website, that doesn't mean my ISP can now claim to "own" that book or demand a chuck of the revenue because they "helped" to sell it. (Or Does It?)
I think another poster hit the nail on the head when he said that PhDs are overqualified in a teeny, tiny area of study that only they actually care about. However, the "Doctor" title brings out the Ego in many of them, disabling their critical thinking skills (i.e. - "This project is a total waste of time and will never come to anything"). In essence, they're the reason many failed projects go horribly overbudget before they finally die.
I wonder if this technique ever came to anything?
Here's the article.
What this high school needs to do is arrange their equipment such that it detects the signal from the SuperStation and broadcasts the inverse wave, effectively destroying the signal for a good distance around. Sure, it won't save them, but at this point, nothing will!
Or - use a fast pulse-forming network to blast the signal out of an old primestar dish at 1 kW!
(Like the folks at Voltage Labs)
The Wikipedia definition mentions the release of Magnetic energy as a possible environmental side effect in the case of a reactor destablization. Anyone know what might happen if a field of this magnitude were to stray from the torus and effect the world outside the reactor?
This parent is spot-on. I run 3 WindowsXP machines and a linux PDC and fileserver in my house. I would switch to Linux for the other computers, too - but there just isn't the support for applications and hardware. I would have to spend thousands to "upgrade" to a free os that supports my hardware.
.confs.
Linux asks you to learn a tremendous amount in order to use it. Fine - but you can't expect to sell a product with such a steep learning curve to people who barely made it out of High School.
Oh, and a reality check: millions of people in America alone are functionally illiterate. They are NOT going to rewrite their
Microsoft, at this point, is damn near unstoppable because it plays to the crowd - the REAL crowd. The Slashdot Community is a tiny niche in a tiny minority. Let's all work together to write linux apps that are actually easier to use than their microsoft equivalents?
I think this parent made the point crystal clear. The reason that DRM is irrelevant is simply that Media is irrelevant.
If there is one thing that I have come to understand through monitoring Slashdot posts about DRM, it's that these protection schemes are a last-ditch attempt to save a business model that is doomed to failure. Where a digital facsimile is AS GOOD as the real thing, piracy will always be rampant, and there is nothing that can be done to curb it. Years ago, a CD or a tape contained many times more data than any computer could hold. That is what they were selling us - the tape, the CD, the technology that enables us peons to use their treasure troves of information. Now the playing field is more level and the profits will dry up inevitably. What I think we are going to see now is a revival of non-piratable performance; i.e. live shows, concerts, actual theater, real people interacting with one another in realtime. So instead of bemoaning all these DRM stop-gaps, jump ahead of the bandwagon and support local theatre, music, and art!
As an added bonus, this will cut down on no-talent hacks like Britney Spears, since they won't be able to hide behind backup vocalists and clever reverb effects.
Anytime you make a large change in the culture, like when the Internet first emerged from the underground, you are going to have a massive die-off, followed by a flowering of new growth that would have been thought impossible before.
Remember when the .com's crashed? Internet commerce exploded, then collapsed. But then - then it recovered in ways that weren't anticipated. And just think - now we can get pictures of a man dropping a deuce on his wife's forehead for pennies a day!
But seriously, what is needed in the computer world these days is an understanding, especially on the part of Microsoft, that uneducated people are a threat to themselves and to those who are educated. How hard would it be for Microsoft to put together a tutorial that teaches new computer users HOW their computer works?
Currently, Windows Help (I tried it, once) is basically a collection of self-aggrandizing propaganda pages talking about how Windows can do this, can do that, is all-powerful and ever-living. It doesn't say a word about why crashes happen, what can be done about them, how Windows uses it's drivers to communicate with hardware, etc.
Not that everyone would be interested in such a tutorial, but if more people understood what their computer is actually doing, behind the scenes, how an email message is put together, addressed, sent; then they wouldn't be falling for these "social engineering" viruses. (ie. "Naked Pics of Britney Spears, attached!", or more realistically, "You file request here is put on attach sexy!")
The other day I got an spoof email directed towards my paypal account. These folks thought I would type in my username and password, give out ALL my personal information, just because they had done a nice job spoofing paypal's layout. I didn't fall for it, but I can imagine thousands of people who would. I found myself frantically emailing clients who are inept, my family and friends, warning them that it isn't real, because I could see how an ignorant person would fall for it.
If those people knew that you can look at the message headers to figure out where the mail "really" came from, these viruses wouldn't infect very many people.
Or how about this - many years ago the mail was so corrupt that the government had to step in and establish the Postal Service. It might not be a bad idea to require individuals to identify themselves reliably before being able to send an email from a given address. A centralized system would be easy for the government to abuse, but perhaps there is a way around that.