while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job.
Their goal is to stay in business, which means their goal is to make whoever pays them happy while not making either the government or the talent pool as a whole unhappy with them.
If they are paid by the companies, then their goal includes NOT getting you a job that will make THEIR CLIENT un-happy. If you've made bone-headed mistakes in interviews this may include not getting you any job with any of their clients, unless maybe the client is looking for a job where your bone-headed mistakes are not relevant to the job in question.
there really is no shortage of any element in this world
Shortage exists when demand exceeds supply. For many truly-rare elements, the cost has always been so high that the demand never took off, avoiding a shortage situation.
I'll use gold as one example: If prices jump and stay high, many industrial users will find not-as-good-but-a-whole-lot-more-cost-effective substitutes. If prices plummet to USD$400/troy oz. and stay there, then you will see a lot more people buying gold-plated cables for their home entertainment centers and gold dental fillings may become "in" again.
This reminds me of a rerun of a 70s TV show. In this episode the King was about to be deposed by his right-hand-man but the tables turned and his former adviser wound up dying and admitting he was wrong.
The King said that nobody would be punished and that the events of that day would be erased from history.
My thought was "no, you idiot, those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
"[T]here are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation.
Translation: The employment laws in most states allow for "at-will" employment, meaning the employer can fire you for any reason EXCEPT for a relatively short list of legally-protected reasons which (in those states) do not include sexual orientation.
There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay,
If he had said "not lease/not renew leases to gay tenants" he'd be spot-on - most states give landlords wide latitude in choosing their tenants as long as they don't discriminate against certain protected classes of people which in many states don't include homosexuals. I don't know of any state that allows a legally binding housing contract to include a "no gay" clause unless it's a shared-housing arrangement (e.g. boarders in a family home, in states where such boarders have extremely wide latitude in choosing tenants) or religiously-sponsored housing (such as in a religious university's dormitories where no public funds are used). That said, some landlords do prohibit unrelated adults from cohabitation, but it applies just as much to non-gay (and gay) roommates sharing costs as it does to gay roommates sharing much more.
or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies.
The same statement can be said about any boyfriend/fiancee. This statement is practically equivalent to saying "or where we can't the rights typically afforded to married people."
Basically, he's just saying "being gay should be a protected class for employment and housing" and "either gay marriage should be legal or those in a committed relationship similar to marriage should have next-of-kin rights for medical visitation and inheritance".
IF you have a digital-cable-compatible (clear-QAM) TV you can get basic cable for under $20/month.
It's just the full-power local stations + the public access stations + I think 1 or 2 "national" stations (WGN or TBS or something similar, I think) and maybe a shopping channel or two.
You do NOT get local low-power stations, which in some ways makes it worse than rabbit ears if you are close enough to the TV antennas to get the low-power stations anyways.
This is their "teaser/entry-level rate". To get anything decent you are talking either close to $50 for the next level up or a $70/month combo plan for a several-dozen-national-channels (+ what's in basic cable) plan + your choice of basic (2 or 3 Mbps downstream, almost-zero upstream) Internet service or their least-expensive phone service.
Oh, and if you don't have a digital-cable-compatible TV, you'll need a box because the analog channels are either gone or will be soon. A converter box is about $10/mo.
Worse, or better depending on your needs, many non-basic channels are or soon will be "switched" which means your "cable compatible TV" can't get them and if you bought your own box years ago, you'll need to replace it.
Now for a bit of a disclaimer: I may seem like I'm ranting about the analog phase-out and the changeover to switched digital, but I'm actually in favor of it. Switched digital channels allows for a much larger "menu" of stations without the capacity of the neighborhood wire or fiber being the limiting factor. It allows cable to companies to offer thousands or tens of thousands of channels to their customers as long as they beef up their head-end and don't have people in a given neighborhood trying to watch more channels than the fiber or coax will carry at one time.
What the cable TV stations SHOULD do for capacity management: 1) EITHER offer everyone free digital converter boxes OR keep the non-HD versions of the OTA channels and public-access channels on analog channels until the only people who would be hurt by a cutoff are using 15-year-old TVs. 2) HD versions of OTA and (if available) public-access channels should be sent "in the clear" in a format that is compatible with digital TVs. This could be clear-QAM or with a little re-engineering it could be the same frequencies used by OTA channels that still use the VHF band (yes, a few still do), so the TV "thinks" it's seeing a VHF TV antenna for these channels (a bit of trivia: for decades, analog cable TV used the same VHF band as VHF TV stations for channels 2-13). 3) EITHER offer everyone free switched-channel-capable converter boxes or keep all channels on the most popular "several hundred channel" plan available on a non-switched plan until such time as all TVs less than 15 years old have this capability built in. 4) Put everything else on switched channels.
Yes, this would be a bit expensive but it is cheaper than the cost of dissatisfied customers.
Don't Austrailians have practically-untrackable prepaid, non-refillable debit cards for Father Christmas give out?
In the USA mass purchases of such cards are traceable or require extra paperwork, as are refillable cards, but you can buy cards for small amounts like $50 at most grocery stores with cash and use them like a debit card. USD$50 should be more than enough for a few months of light-duty VPN use and probably more than enough for a single month of "everything I do goes through the VPN" use for a moderate-level home user.
The only gotcha I can see is that some of these gift cards aren't good internationally, and even if they are today, I can see governments mandating that as of FUTURE_DATE, cards sold without a record of who bought it must be domestic-use-only.
Yes VPN providers will just exit that encrypted Australian usage in another random country. All that will be collected is hours of usage to one ip range for years
That works for a time, until your VPN provider gets hit by the local-to-them equivalent of the USA's "national security letter."
Note to Aussies: Don't use a USA-based VPN, at least not as your final "exit node."
Instead of running a background application to help find astronomical objects or help society in other ways, I could run a background application that pretended to be a popular web browser going to a mix of "normal" web sites and web sites that I know my government hates.
Repeat this over 0.1% of the population and it would muddy the waters for investigators trying to see who is really visiting those web sites and who is just having their computer to it for the sake of doing it.
While I agree that the cost of embarrassment is not a legitimate cost, the cost associated with having someone available to screen records and the cost of tracking where records are kept is just as legitimate as the cost of disk/tape/paper-file storage for keeping them in the first place.
I for one don't want my bank keeping records about me and either saying "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, nobody can access them" or the polar opposite, "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, everyone can access them your privacy be ****'ed."
It is only records which are 100% public that don't need screeners. Even many records on deposit at America's courthouses don't meet this requirement: In some states it used to be routine for military service people to deposit some military records with the courthouse for safe-keeping. These included Social Security Numbers. In the modern age of identity theft, court clerks now routinely redact Social Security Numbers when someone requests a copy of these records.
retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless
There's more to retaining records than retaining records.
There's the cost of remembering where they are, the cost of going through the human process of vetting access requests to make sure they are legit then extracting and possibly redacting data and giving it to the person requesting the data, and the big cost:
The cost of embarrassment when someone finds something in the records that you *as a manager or institution) either know is there and prefer that it never be found or that they find something there that even you didn't know was there but which you definitely wish had never been found.
The Boy Scouts of America learned that the hard way. I'm betting more than a few Scout Executives over the last few years secretly wish that, starting in the 1920s, the Scouts had simply turned over the information on allegedly-abusive Scout leaders to the local police (who, given the desires to not embarrass the Scouts at the time, would've probably handled most cases quietly) and put purged all "ineligible volunteer" files after 20 or 30 years, on the assumption that if, 20 or 30 years later, that person applied to be a volunteer and he had no criminal record then he was no more a danger than someone who had never volunteered with the Scouts before who also had no criminal record.
Fortunately for everyone, the Scouts did retain records, purging them only when the person turned 75, which (back in the 1920s) was a reasonable age as very few 75-year-olds who hadn't been Scouters in recent years would apply to be Scouters.
Back in the 70s, most urban areas and many rural areas had "unlimited local calling" and "unlimited incoming calls." This was fine until the rise of home-based BBSs which tended to use more of the limited telephone-switch resources 24x7 than the telephone company's planners envisioned. The "Baby Bells" (the descendants of the breakup of the original AT&T/"Ma Bell") tried to get these systems billed at business rates. Eventually, I think there was a compromise either nationally or in the state I lived in at the time: If you ran less than X number of phone lines you could publicly advertise your non-business BBS and still be billed at residential rates. Anything more than X number of phone lines and you would be charged at business rates.
Sure, the phone-enabled buying stuff is nice, but you know the main reason I shop with plastic? So I don't have to deal with change.
I'm sure that if they could, merchants would start charging extra for the expensive "credit card"-style transactions to encourage people to use "debit card"-style transactions instead, but as far as I know, Visa and Mastercard won't let them discriminate.
So why not create a debit-only "shopping card" backed by the same ACH system that CurrentC uses? Not only would this save money, but it would also allow for (or force on consumers, sigh) similar customer-tracking/loyalty programs that CurrentC allows for (or forces on consumers:( ).
some kid takes a PBJ sandwich and eats part of it so that a shape of a gun is made; and he's sent home or expelled.
Or: Some kid takes a PBJ sandwich to school and the kig gets expelled and the cafeteria undergoes an expensive ebola-style decon just because his mom was out of town and she forgot to tell his grandma that someone in the school was highly allergic to peanuts and peanut dust and as a result the whole school is a peanut-free zone, nevermind that the kid with the allergy would only suffer if he got close enough to smell it.'
Okay, I'm exaggerating only slightly here. More realistically, the sandwich is confiscated, put in an airtight bag, and thrown away and the parents are sent a reminder to never let that happen again.
On the news a few elections back I saw that Texas (home of NASA and at one time the voting-residence of at least one astronaut) allows astronauts to vote electronically from space. It was news because Texas passed a special law to make it possible for astronauts to vote without having to send paper ballots to the ISS and get them back in time to be counted.
It may or may not use TCP/IP, but it is remote voting. I'm not sure if it's encrypted or not and if it is, I'm not sure if the voting authority has enough information to determine who cast which ballot.
If your state has e-voting, your elections are a farce.
Better to say "if your state has ONLY e-voting...".
Some states give you the option of how to vote. Others require e-voting only if you are voting out-of-precinct (vs. most states that don't allow out-of-precinct voting at all) or if you are voting in "early voting."
I know of one state in which "early voting" is done countywide and printing off paper ballots for each and every possible ballot in the county at every early-voting location would be a logistical nightmare in urban areas. In that state most urban areas require you to vote electronically if you vote early. If you insist on a paper ballot and realize you are not going to be in town on election day too late to get a mail-in ballot, too bad for you - either vote electronically or don't vote at all.
Here's something that can be used to replace traditional mail-in absentee ballots, which are themselves not-exactly-secure:
The election authority publishes its public key widely, such as in local newspapers and on the back of voter-registration cards.
For each voter wishing to vote absentee:
The election authority generates a one-time pad for the voter as well as a public and private key for that voter good for just the election. The election authority encrypts the voter's private key with the one-time pad, signs it with the election authority's private key, then prints out the result. It sends this information to the voter. It then destroys all copies of the voter's private key including those that are encrypted. Separately, the election authority signs the one-time pad, prints out the results, and delivers it to the voter. It then destroys all remaining copies of the one-time pad. Finally, the election authority mails out paper ballots in the traditional way, along with the "precinct/ballot style number" which has been encrypted with the voter's public key so only the voter can decrypt it. This "precinct/ballot style number" is printed on all ballots that have the identical list of candidates. This is so the voter can check that he got the right ballot.
The channels used to send the information to the voter should not have overlapping security vulnerabilities if possible. For example, mail can be intercepted, so at least one of these items should be delivered by a non-mail courier who delivers the item directly to the voter or delivered electronically.
For very-remote voters such as soldiers deployed overseas, astronauts, etc. the voting materials will probably, out of necessity, be sent to the voter in electronic form, with all documents electronically signed by the voting authority. This can be an option for other voters as well.
The voter can choose to mail in the paper ballot "as usual" if he wants to, making all of the work above pointless with respect to that voter.
Or, if he wants to use technology, the voter can scan in all of the voting materials into a computer along with a copy of the widely-published public key of the voting authority. His computer will authenticate and/or decrypt the one-time pad, the encrypted "precinct/ballot style number" that came with the ballot, and the voter's private key. It will also verify the "precinct/ballot style number" printed on the ballot matches the encrypted version. The computer will then assist the voter in filling out the ballot. For this part of the voting task, no Internet access is required. The voter could even boot his computer using a "voting boot CD" provided by any number of "competing" voter-integrity-oriented public-interest groups.
Finally, the computer will offer to print out the ballot for the person to mail in. The voter can of course inspect the ballot prior to mailing it in.
It will also offer two choices for electronic voting: The voter can scan either the computer-printed ballot or a hand-filled-out ballot or ask the computer to generate a much-shorter "e-ballot" which contains the vote but not the graphic-image of the ballot. This e-ballot will be a summary, something like "precinct/ballot style 5341, race 1: choice 1 of 3, race 2: choice 3 of 4, race 3: abstain of 2,..." only in a much more compact form like "P5341,1,3,3,4,0,2,...". Whatever the result, the computer will encrypt it with the voting authority's public key, append a random "salt", then sign the whole thing with the voter's private key.
The voter can "cast his ballot" by returning a printout of the signed, encrypted ballot, faxing it in, emailing it in, having it delivered by courier, or submitting it over the Internet. Note that a "printout" of a "scanned-in" ballot will be quite lengthy, assuming it is printed out in an ascii-type format similar to those used for email attachments.
The voting authority will use a dedicated computer to authenticate the signatures of r
Seriously though, you do have a good question. Every environment is different. A stable environment with very little fluctuation can be a few hundred MB (plus whatever the OS needs for temporary files) away from capacity for years on end - set the alarm at that level plus 1. A drive that's used for archiving everything-ever-created in a video-editing shop will grow to infinity quite fast - set the alarm so you catch it in time to add more space and consider a second alarm that monitors for increases in the rate of growth. A "temp drive" that fluctuates wildly but has only hit 75% once and probably never will again can probably have the alarm set at 76%.
I was speaking in general terms. Yes, machines with proprietary, out-of-production components will be difficult or impossible to re-create without cooperation with the company who owns the IP rights.
There's probably a business in making retro computers as DIY kits. Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home and with small runs the parts wouldn't be cheap, but there is a hobbyist market out there.
Slashdot Mirror
while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job.
Their goal is to stay in business, which means their goal is to make whoever pays them happy while not making either the government or the talent pool as a whole unhappy with them.
If they are paid by the companies, then their goal includes NOT getting you a job that will make THEIR CLIENT un-happy. If you've made bone-headed mistakes in interviews this may include not getting you any job with any of their clients, unless maybe the client is looking for a job where your bone-headed mistakes are not relevant to the job in question.
there really is no shortage of any element in this world
Shortage exists when demand exceeds supply. For many truly-rare elements, the cost has always been so high that the demand never took off, avoiding a shortage situation.
I'll use gold as one example: If prices jump and stay high, many industrial users will find not-as-good-but-a-whole-lot-more-cost-effective substitutes. If prices plummet to USD$400/troy oz. and stay there, then you will see a lot more people buying gold-plated cables for their home entertainment centers and gold dental fillings may become "in" again.
If oil had remained the same price as it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, do you think we would have the "Franking Boom" that we have now?
Probably not - even with modern technology much of America's horizontal-drilling/fracking oil extraction isn't cost-effective at $30/barrel.
This reminds me of a rerun of a 70s TV show. In this episode the King was about to be deposed by his right-hand-man but the tables turned and his former adviser wound up dying and admitting he was wrong.
The King said that nobody would be punished and that the events of that day would be erased from history.
My thought was "no, you idiot, those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it."
"[T]here are laws on the books in a majority of states that allow employers to fire people based solely on their sexual orientation.
Translation: The employment laws in most states allow for "at-will" employment, meaning the employer can fire you for any reason EXCEPT for a relatively short list of legally-protected reasons which (in those states) do not include sexual orientation.
There are many places where landlords can evict tenants for being gay,
If he had said "not lease/not renew leases to gay tenants" he'd be spot-on - most states give landlords wide latitude in choosing their tenants as long as they don't discriminate against certain protected classes of people which in many states don't include homosexuals. I don't know of any state that allows a legally binding housing contract to include a "no gay" clause unless it's a shared-housing arrangement (e.g. boarders in a family home, in states where such boarders have extremely wide latitude in choosing tenants) or religiously-sponsored housing (such as in a religious university's dormitories where no public funds are used). That said, some landlords do prohibit unrelated adults from cohabitation, but it applies just as much to non-gay (and gay) roommates sharing costs as it does to gay roommates sharing much more.
or where we can be barred from visiting sick partners and sharing in their legacies.
The same statement can be said about any boyfriend/fiancee. This statement is practically equivalent to saying "or where we can't the rights typically afforded to married people."
Basically, he's just saying "being gay should be a protected class for employment and housing" and "either gay marriage should be legal or those in a committed relationship similar to marriage should have next-of-kin rights for medical visitation and inheritance".
This is 2014. "Being gay" being headline-worthy even for the CEO of a company the size of Apple is soooooo last century.
Now if he were dating George P. Bush, that would be fodder for the gossip columns. But not for Slashdot. We are beyond that, I hope.
IF you have a digital-cable-compatible (clear-QAM) TV you can get basic cable for under $20/month.
It's just the full-power local stations + the public access stations + I think 1 or 2 "national" stations (WGN or TBS or something similar, I think) and maybe a shopping channel or two.
You do NOT get local low-power stations, which in some ways makes it worse than rabbit ears if you are close enough to the TV antennas to get the low-power stations anyways.
This is their "teaser/entry-level rate". To get anything decent you are talking either close to $50 for the next level up or a $70/month combo plan for a several-dozen-national-channels (+ what's in basic cable) plan + your choice of basic (2 or 3 Mbps downstream, almost-zero upstream) Internet service or their least-expensive phone service.
Oh, and if you don't have a digital-cable-compatible TV, you'll need a box because the analog channels are either gone or will be soon. A converter box is about $10/mo.
Worse, or better depending on your needs, many non-basic channels are or soon will be "switched" which means your "cable compatible TV" can't get them and if you bought your own box years ago, you'll need to replace it.
Now for a bit of a disclaimer: I may seem like I'm ranting about the analog phase-out and the changeover to switched digital, but I'm actually in favor of it. Switched digital channels allows for a much larger "menu" of stations without the capacity of the neighborhood wire or fiber being the limiting factor. It allows cable to companies to offer thousands or tens of thousands of channels to their customers as long as they beef up their head-end and don't have people in a given neighborhood trying to watch more channels than the fiber or coax will carry at one time.
What the cable TV stations SHOULD do for capacity management:
1) EITHER offer everyone free digital converter boxes OR keep the non-HD versions of the OTA channels and public-access channels on analog channels until the only people who would be hurt by a cutoff are using 15-year-old TVs.
2) HD versions of OTA and (if available) public-access channels should be sent "in the clear" in a format that is compatible with digital TVs. This could be clear-QAM or with a little re-engineering it could be the same frequencies used by OTA channels that still use the VHF band (yes, a few still do), so the TV "thinks" it's seeing a VHF TV antenna for these channels (a bit of trivia: for decades, analog cable TV used the same VHF band as VHF TV stations for channels 2-13).
3) EITHER offer everyone free switched-channel-capable converter boxes or keep all channels on the most popular "several hundred channel" plan available on a non-switched plan until such time as all TVs less than 15 years old have this capability built in.
4) Put everything else on switched channels.
Yes, this would be a bit expensive but it is cheaper than the cost of dissatisfied customers.
Don't Austrailians have practically-untrackable prepaid, non-refillable debit cards for Father Christmas give out?
In the USA mass purchases of such cards are traceable or require extra paperwork, as are refillable cards, but you can buy cards for small amounts like $50 at most grocery stores with cash and use them like a debit card. USD$50 should be more than enough for a few months of light-duty VPN use and probably more than enough for a single month of "everything I do goes through the VPN" use for a moderate-level home user.
The only gotcha I can see is that some of these gift cards aren't good internationally, and even if they are today, I can see governments mandating that as of FUTURE_DATE, cards sold without a record of who bought it must be domestic-use-only.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is timeless.
Yes VPN providers will just exit that encrypted Australian usage in another random country. All that will be collected is hours of usage to one ip range for years
That works for a time, until your VPN provider gets hit by the local-to-them equivalent of the USA's "national security letter."
Note to Aussies: Don't use a USA-based VPN, at least not as your final "exit node."
Instead of running a background application to help find astronomical objects or help society in other ways, I could run a background application that pretended to be a popular web browser going to a mix of "normal" web sites and web sites that I know my government hates.
Repeat this over 0.1% of the population and it would muddy the waters for investigators trying to see who is really visiting those web sites and who is just having their computer to it for the sake of doing it.
An anonymous government official once said he never metadata he didn't like.
While I agree that the cost of embarrassment is not a legitimate cost, the cost associated with having someone available to screen records and the cost of tracking where records are kept is just as legitimate as the cost of disk/tape/paper-file storage for keeping them in the first place.
I for one don't want my bank keeping records about me and either saying "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, nobody can access them" or the polar opposite, "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, everyone can access them your privacy be ****'ed."
It is only records which are 100% public that don't need screeners. Even many records on deposit at America's courthouses don't meet this requirement: In some states it used to be routine for military service people to deposit some military records with the courthouse for safe-keeping. These included Social Security Numbers. In the modern age of identity theft, court clerks now routinely redact Social Security Numbers when someone requests a copy of these records.
retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless
There's more to retaining records than retaining records.
There's the cost of remembering where they are, the cost of going through the human process of vetting access requests to make sure they are legit then extracting and possibly redacting data and giving it to the person requesting the data, and the big cost:
The cost of embarrassment when someone finds something in the records that you *as a manager or institution) either know is there and prefer that it never be found or that they find something there that even you didn't know was there but which you definitely wish had never been found.
The Boy Scouts of America learned that the hard way. I'm betting more than a few Scout Executives over the last few years secretly wish that, starting in the 1920s, the Scouts had simply turned over the information on allegedly-abusive Scout leaders to the local police (who, given the desires to not embarrass the Scouts at the time, would've probably handled most cases quietly) and put purged all "ineligible volunteer" files after 20 or 30 years, on the assumption that if, 20 or 30 years later, that person applied to be a volunteer and he had no criminal record then he was no more a danger than someone who had never volunteered with the Scouts before who also had no criminal record.
Fortunately for everyone, the Scouts did retain records, purging them only when the person turned 75, which (back in the 1920s) was a reasonable age as very few 75-year-olds who hadn't been Scouters in recent years would apply to be Scouters.
Back in the 70s, most urban areas and many rural areas had "unlimited local calling" and "unlimited incoming calls." This was fine until the rise of home-based BBSs which tended to use more of the limited telephone-switch resources 24x7 than the telephone company's planners envisioned. The "Baby Bells" (the descendants of the breakup of the original AT&T/"Ma Bell") tried to get these systems billed at business rates. Eventually, I think there was a compromise either nationally or in the state I lived in at the time: If you ran less than X number of phone lines you could publicly advertise your non-business BBS and still be billed at residential rates. Anything more than X number of phone lines and you would be charged at business rates.
""It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is^H^Hunlimited' is."
Sure, the phone-enabled buying stuff is nice, but you know the main reason I shop with plastic? So I don't have to deal with change.
I'm sure that if they could, merchants would start charging extra for the expensive "credit card"-style transactions to encourage people to use "debit card"-style transactions instead, but as far as I know, Visa and Mastercard won't let them discriminate.
So why not create a debit-only "shopping card" backed by the same ACH system that CurrentC uses? Not only would this save money, but it would also allow for (or force on consumers, sigh) similar customer-tracking/loyalty programs that CurrentC allows for (or forces on consumers :( ).
Hola Jack?
No, then the right-wing-nuts will think we are illegals from South of the Border and insist that we be deported immediately.
*sarcasm*
I can't wait for someone to pull a gun on a city bus and say "Everyone freeze, this we are hellojacking this bus."
*/sarcasm*
some kid takes a PBJ sandwich and eats part of it so that a shape of a gun is made; and he's sent home or expelled.
Or: Some kid takes a PBJ sandwich to school and the kig gets expelled and the cafeteria undergoes an expensive ebola-style decon just because his mom was out of town and she forgot to tell his grandma that someone in the school was highly allergic to peanuts and peanut dust and as a result the whole school is a peanut-free zone, nevermind that the kid with the allergy would only suffer if he got close enough to smell it.'
Okay, I'm exaggerating only slightly here. More realistically, the sandwich is confiscated, put in an airtight bag, and thrown away and the parents are sent a reminder to never let that happen again.
On the news a few elections back I saw that Texas (home of NASA and at one time the voting-residence of at least one astronaut) allows astronauts to vote electronically from space. It was news because Texas passed a special law to make it possible for astronauts to vote without having to send paper ballots to the ISS and get them back in time to be counted.
It may or may not use TCP/IP, but it is remote voting. I'm not sure if it's encrypted or not and if it is, I'm not sure if the voting authority has enough information to determine who cast which ballot.
If your state has e-voting, your elections are a farce.
Better to say "if your state has ONLY e-voting...".
Some states give you the option of how to vote. Others require e-voting only if you are voting out-of-precinct (vs. most states that don't allow out-of-precinct voting at all) or if you are voting in "early voting."
I know of one state in which "early voting" is done countywide and printing off paper ballots for each and every possible ballot in the county at every early-voting location would be a logistical nightmare in urban areas. In that state most urban areas require you to vote electronically if you vote early. If you insist on a paper ballot and realize you are not going to be in town on election day too late to get a mail-in ballot, too bad for you - either vote electronically or don't vote at all.
Here's something that can be used to replace traditional mail-in absentee ballots, which are themselves not-exactly-secure:
The election authority publishes its public key widely, such as in local newspapers and on the back of voter-registration cards.
For each voter wishing to vote absentee:
The election authority generates a one-time pad for the voter as well as a public and private key for that voter good for just the election.
The election authority encrypts the voter's private key with the one-time pad, signs it with the election authority's private key, then prints out the result. It sends this information to the voter. It then destroys all copies of the voter's private key including those that are encrypted.
Separately, the election authority signs the one-time pad, prints out the results, and delivers it to the voter. It then destroys all remaining copies of the one-time pad.
Finally, the election authority mails out paper ballots in the traditional way, along with the "precinct/ballot style number" which has been encrypted with the voter's public key so only the voter can decrypt it. This "precinct/ballot style number" is printed on all ballots that have the identical list of candidates. This is so the voter can check that he got the right ballot.
The channels used to send the information to the voter should not have overlapping security vulnerabilities if possible. For example, mail can be intercepted, so at least one of these items should be delivered by a non-mail courier who delivers the item directly to the voter or delivered electronically.
For very-remote voters such as soldiers deployed overseas, astronauts, etc. the voting materials will probably, out of necessity, be sent to the voter in electronic form, with all documents electronically signed by the voting authority. This can be an option for other voters as well.
The voter can choose to mail in the paper ballot "as usual" if he wants to, making all of the work above pointless with respect to that voter.
Or, if he wants to use technology, the voter can scan in all of the voting materials into a computer along with a copy of the widely-published public key of the voting authority. His computer will authenticate and/or decrypt the one-time pad, the encrypted "precinct/ballot style number" that came with the ballot, and the voter's private key. It will also verify the "precinct/ballot style number" printed on the ballot matches the encrypted version.
The computer will then assist the voter in filling out the ballot. For this part of the voting task, no Internet access is required. The voter could even boot his computer using a "voting boot CD" provided by any number of "competing" voter-integrity-oriented public-interest groups.
Finally, the computer will offer to print out the ballot for the person to mail in. The voter can of course inspect the ballot prior to mailing it in.
It will also offer two choices for electronic voting: ..." only in a much more compact form like "P5341,1,3,3,4,0,2,...". Whatever the result, the computer will encrypt it with the voting authority's public key, append a random "salt", then sign the whole thing with the voter's private key.
The voter can scan either the computer-printed ballot or a hand-filled-out ballot or ask the computer to generate a much-shorter "e-ballot" which contains the vote but not the graphic-image of the ballot. This e-ballot will be a summary, something like "precinct/ballot style 5341, race 1: choice 1 of 3, race 2: choice 3 of 4, race 3: abstain of 2,
The voter can "cast his ballot" by returning a printout of the signed, encrypted ballot, faxing it in, emailing it in, having it delivered by courier, or submitting it over the Internet. Note that a "printout" of a "scanned-in" ballot will be quite lengthy, assuming it is printed out in an ascii-type format similar to those used for email attachments.
The voting authority will use a dedicated computer to authenticate the signatures of r
Windows 7. :P.
Seriously though, you do have a good question. Every environment is different. A stable environment with very little fluctuation can be a few hundred MB (plus whatever the OS needs for temporary files) away from capacity for years on end - set the alarm at that level plus 1. A drive that's used for archiving everything-ever-created in a video-editing shop will grow to infinity quite fast - set the alarm so you catch it in time to add more space and consider a second alarm that monitors for increases in the rate of growth. A "temp drive" that fluctuates wildly but has only hit 75% once and probably never will again can probably have the alarm set at 76%.
I was speaking in general terms. Yes, machines with proprietary, out-of-production components will be difficult or impossible to re-create without cooperation with the company who owns the IP rights.
There's probably a business in making retro computers as DIY kits. Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home and with small runs the parts wouldn't be cheap, but there is a hobbyist market out there.