Great. So now a local mob can impose "private" home-based voting on a city block... or upon an entire village. "Private" with a mob member checking that it is going "well" at each "private" home.
And bosses and CEO and other people in charge can organize "voting places" at specific locations, to "help" all those people that need no longer go to actual booths with actual representatives of the candidates to check on the privacy of the voting.
Electronic voting? Big yes, as long as there is a paper trail to produce the final, official result (and the printed paper is presented to the voter behind a glass, and approved by pressing a button).
Non-presencial voting? Big yes, for methods such as postal voting, that are hard to defraud in significant numbers, and would cause suspicion if they were to happen on a grand scale. Big no, for Internet-based, "everyone should do it" voting.
Seriously, wouldn't it benefit everyone if an official "stock exchange" or rather, commodities exchange was created by the games themselves?
Take Magic The Gathering Online: I only play it occasionally, and I don't have the time available to be chatting for ages to find out how much a gold/silver card is worth and try to barter it... But I might put it up for "sale" on an official exchange, and bid on other cards that might be available. The same could be done for items in most online games.
If you are considering digital storage for an emergency situation, encrypt it while there is no emergency, but if you have at least 5 minutes warning (which is often the case), copy it un-encrypted. Honestly, if you need to access it, you may find yourself looking hard for a computer where to do it, and discover that you can't install the encryption sw you included in the pen, or have no permission to do it, or that you need to salvage the contents of the pen... really, using encryption for emergency situations is a bad idea. You need to get over it ALIVE, and that should be the main concern. Not getting yourself "a year's worth of food inside a safe but without its key".
The proposal you set (ripping off 1' 3") is flawed from the start. There is no point in recording it, because it is NOT SILENCE.
John Cage simply requested no musical instrument to be played, except by accident. He did not specify "silence".
So, one listens. For 1'3" of time, one listens. And since silence is never absolute (at the very minimum, you'd hear your own heart and muscles), you always listen to something.
Cage's proposal was a way of proposing that we all remember to listen to everyday sounds, to environment sounds, not as noise but as content. It is an idea readily used nowadays, whenever a musician includes both outright noise or pre-recorded effects amidst more tradicional musical content.
Try it now: for 1'3" listen to as much things as you can, open up and try to discover as many facets to sound as there are.
That's Cage's work, not listening to a recording of that duration and ignoring all the sounds that surround you - that's a perversion of his ideia.
If Joe sixpack had bought the "just enough" machine in 1997, it would have been thrown in the bin counter long ago. Unlike 1980's and 1990's machines, which would last only 3 years before serious upgrading was due, a common user can now reasonably expect to buy a top-grade machine and have it last for 6-7 years, until upgrading or a new one becomes necessary.
And don't forget operating systems: would Joe sixpack still enjoy having only Windows 95, crashing more often than win98, 2K or XP, and finding out that everyone now has a pen drive and he doesn't even has a USB port? Or that all new hardware for Joe sixpack available in supermarkets and appliance stores only has win98 and later drivers?
The sensible advice is: buy the best machine you can WITHIN the range of small price-hikes. (I.e., ignore that all-the-rage that costs 100% more than the model just below it.) And try not to forget to spend 300 or 350 every 3 years to upgrade. If you do, well, cross your fingers, you may get lucky (memory interfaces may not change -if you're lucky, typical motherboard fitting may not change - if you're lucky), and manage to spend those 300 only in 4 or 5 years. But you are taking your chances...
In fact, Raul Rojas demonstrated in 1998 that the Z3 was a Turing Machine, which downright proves it was a Universal Computer (well, at least as all physical computers can be, with limited memory).
He's proof is in German, but is mentioned here, by Zuse's son:
http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part4c.htm
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Great. So now a local mob can impose "private" home-based voting on a city block... or upon an entire village. "Private" with a mob member checking that it is going "well" at each "private" home. And bosses and CEO and other people in charge can organize "voting places" at specific locations, to "help" all those people that need no longer go to actual booths with actual representatives of the candidates to check on the privacy of the voting. Electronic voting? Big yes, as long as there is a paper trail to produce the final, official result (and the printed paper is presented to the voter behind a glass, and approved by pressing a button). Non-presencial voting? Big yes, for methods such as postal voting, that are hard to defraud in significant numbers, and would cause suspicion if they were to happen on a grand scale. Big no, for Internet-based, "everyone should do it" voting.
Seriously, wouldn't it benefit everyone if an official "stock exchange" or rather, commodities exchange was created by the games themselves? Take Magic The Gathering Online: I only play it occasionally, and I don't have the time available to be chatting for ages to find out how much a gold/silver card is worth and try to barter it... But I might put it up for "sale" on an official exchange, and bid on other cards that might be available. The same could be done for items in most online games.
If you are considering digital storage for an emergency situation, encrypt it while there is no emergency, but if you have at least 5 minutes warning (which is often the case), copy it un-encrypted. Honestly, if you need to access it, you may find yourself looking hard for a computer where to do it, and discover that you can't install the encryption sw you included in the pen, or have no permission to do it, or that you need to salvage the contents of the pen... really, using encryption for emergency situations is a bad idea. You need to get over it ALIVE, and that should be the main concern. Not getting yourself "a year's worth of food inside a safe but without its key".
All the other posts have provided help already, but I haven't seen this yet: - read Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert.
The real reason they're dropping the "My" prefixes is that too many people realized that it was BillG that was saying "My".
The proposal you set (ripping off 1' 3") is flawed from the start. There is no point in recording it, because it is NOT SILENCE. John Cage simply requested no musical instrument to be played, except by accident. He did not specify "silence". So, one listens. For 1'3" of time, one listens. And since silence is never absolute (at the very minimum, you'd hear your own heart and muscles), you always listen to something. Cage's proposal was a way of proposing that we all remember to listen to everyday sounds, to environment sounds, not as noise but as content. It is an idea readily used nowadays, whenever a musician includes both outright noise or pre-recorded effects amidst more tradicional musical content. Try it now: for 1'3" listen to as much things as you can, open up and try to discover as many facets to sound as there are. That's Cage's work, not listening to a recording of that duration and ignoring all the sounds that surround you - that's a perversion of his ideia.
If Joe sixpack had bought the "just enough" machine in 1997, it would have been thrown in the bin counter long ago. Unlike 1980's and 1990's machines, which would last only 3 years before serious upgrading was due, a common user can now reasonably expect to buy a top-grade machine and have it last for 6-7 years, until upgrading or a new one becomes necessary. And don't forget operating systems: would Joe sixpack still enjoy having only Windows 95, crashing more often than win98, 2K or XP, and finding out that everyone now has a pen drive and he doesn't even has a USB port? Or that all new hardware for Joe sixpack available in supermarkets and appliance stores only has win98 and later drivers? The sensible advice is: buy the best machine you can WITHIN the range of small price-hikes. (I.e., ignore that all-the-rage that costs 100% more than the model just below it.) And try not to forget to spend 300 or 350 every 3 years to upgrade. If you do, well, cross your fingers, you may get lucky (memory interfaces may not change -if you're lucky, typical motherboard fitting may not change - if you're lucky), and manage to spend those 300 only in 4 or 5 years. But you are taking your chances...
In fact, Raul Rojas demonstrated in 1998 that the Z3 was a Turing Machine, which downright proves it was a Universal Computer (well, at least as all physical computers can be, with limited memory). He's proof is in German, but is mentioned here, by Zuse's son: http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part4c.htm