'Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google]'
In what way are Yahoo or MSN easier to use? All a search engine needs is an input field where you enter your search phrase, and a button "search", which then presents a list of results. Everything else is just fancy bullshit. Anybody remembers how Altavista went from search engine to portal? Hardly anybody used it anymore shortly after they did that switch, because it starting sucking.
...for developing a filesystem so unstable it destroyed the porn collections of tens of thousands young, horny men. I mean, destroying other people's porn collections! That's even worse than murder!!1!
I once saw a report in a TV show about an experiment they made in a shop: They put up a big sign "3 tins for 0.99" and a small sign "1 tin for 0.30". The shop sold more packs of three tins for 0.99:-(
And that's exactly the reason why European consumer protection laws require the price marking in supermarket to contain the price per a comparable unit, e.g. 100 grams or 1 kg.
Can you bring a concrete example? In my C++ programming, I never had to cast a pointer, except for maybe a dynamic_cast or two. In my experience, the shitty and ugly code comes from programmers who learned C++ in the early 1990s and didn't have a closer look at modern C++, with features such as RTTI, exceptions, and a usable standard library including (most importantly!) a string class (I have seen so many inferior own implementations of this, it's unbelievable).
You could certainly make XML vastly more compact if you had some table of tags mapped to 2-byte codes. You're not the first to have such an idea, and I and others will be happy to use it... as soon as you've got it standardized, implemented, and as widely accepted as ASCII.
Not as widely accepted as ASCII, but standardized and implemented: WBXML
Well, religion started the conflict. Religions like Christianity were there before science was. And when science started to emerge, it was fought extremely hard and brutal by Christian religions (especially the Roman-Catholic church). And in these days, the evangelical movement and their think-tanks try to take over the science with pseudo-scientic junk like ID and try to make it into the schools' curricula, so the "hateful bigotry" you mention is only the healthy self-defense from the science community.
The new Prime Minister, Surayud Chulanont, is a born-and-raised military man. He seeks to strengthen Thailand. I suspect that spending large sums on outside technology which will tend to increase the influence of outside media (such as the US and China) leads him to take a dim view of the OLPC project, along with the other cancelled and soon-to-be-cancelled educational initiatives.
(Metaphorically) killing off great opportunities for better education, and trying to reach some stage of technological autarchy, all from a man with a military background... sounds like a mix of the Khmer Rouge agenda with the North Korean Juche system, without all the suppression and genocide, of course...
No, I don't think that his goals will do his country any good.
That's why lock your computer when you leave. On Windows, Windows-Key-L does this, and on Linux, most of the widely-used desktop environments have an equivalent functionality built-in.
Please learn about the concept of teleological interpretations of laws. Simply put, if the law says, "sex offense against minors in emails", you can come to the conclusion that the spirit and purpose of the law is to protect minors from sex offense via personal electronic communication, which makes it not only apply to email, but to instant messaging as well. Unfortunately, there is no good Wikipedia on this topic in English, so I can only refer to the German article, which describes the different forms of interpretation in a nice fashion: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslegung_(Recht)
How can this save costs? Do you know how expensive those machines are? Compared to simple pen and paper, they amortize after about 20 years of operation. And that's the _maximum_ operation period (for XP-based machines like the SDU voting computers probably even shorter). Faster counting? How relevant is that whether the election officials can go home one or two hours earlier? You shouldn't sacrifice something as crucial as _voting_ to getting home earlier. And regarding your "changing your vote" argument: how is that supposed to work? That would only work if the vote was associated with some kind of unique user ID, and that would be totally against the provision of secrecy. So I see no advantages for voting computers, but a lot of bugs in so far _all_ existing implementations, versus a well-known system that just works.
Tempest for Eliza is a very interesting demonstration of the whole problem. You feed it with an audio file, and by showing the right graphics on your screen, it transmits that audio file on a configurable frequency.
Actually, banning _is_ the solution. Voting computers make voting less verifiable, less auditable, more expensive (although the Voting machine producers claim otherwise), so why use them? What reason justifies switching from a proven, working, easy-to-use, easy-to-audit system (pen and paper) to a new technology of questionable quality?
OK, that's something completely different then. What I was referring to was HiFinder, a music recommendation system, implemented by a company of the same name. Sony (Sony NetServices that is, which is owned by Sony Music Europe and Sony DADC) actually wanted to buy an exclusive license, but they ran into some legal hassles (some code ownership issues *cough*GPLed*cough*source*cough*), and instead of negotation a rewrite of the problematic parts, they simply bought the whole company and did the partial rewrite by themselves. And in the next version, they threw away HiFinder completely and replaced it by yet another system, developed from scratch. This was all part of a gigantic effort (and mess, when you look at the work of the managers) to create a web and mobile music download and streaming platform for Europe's biggest mobile phone provider.
The only justification (at least in the Netherlands and Germany) for voting computers is cost reduction - adding a voter-verifiable paper trail would completely totally destroy this "advantage" (which is very questionable, anyway).
But, in fact, there is no reason to reduce cost in this process. Cost shouldn't matter here, since secret, equal, free elections are a crucial process within democratic systems. Besides that, the pen and paper method is the most simple method you have, everybody understands it. In fact it's so simple, everyone can audit the whole process. Contrary to that, audits of computer-based systems can only be done by a few experts (and a complete audit goes from a security audit of the software down to as far as checking the hardware for possible modifications).
Plus, voting machines are everyday proved insecure.
Even more so in this special case. I was told by well-informed sources that these machines are actually Windows-XP-based and have GPRS connection. Rumors say that the Dutch secret service had security-audited this type of machine, and seems to have found some potential security holes, which seems to be the unofficial reason for the ban.
You can object to transactions because you usually do get a receipt, but it's much more difficult to object to election results because an inherent property of secret elections is that you get no receipt, meaning that it's _very_ difficult to find any proof if an election fraud was done by modifying the voting computers.
Actually, Fox News is the only news station that gets "The Truth, The Absolute Truth and nothing but The Truth Seal of Quality" certification by the Pentagon News Correction Unit.
How is democracy "even more flawed that communism"?
I think you don't have even the slightest understanding of parliamentary democracy, which you only characterize as a "facade" as opposed to direct democracy. It works like this (at least here in Europe): people elect people and/or parties. Those people and/or parties with the most approval then form some kind of parliament, being the legislative power in the country. These people/parties are elected by the people (usually) because of what agenda, politics, opinions, or programmes they represent. This means that the people in the parliament represent the people who elected them, in the right proportion. And they're also the ones who vote for/against laws/bills that were made by the executive power (i.e. the government). This system has only one big weakness: it does not allow differentiation, i.e. with your vote you can only elect a general political direction but not e.g. opinion A of representative X regarding topic I and opinion B of representative Y regarding topic J. I don't really say what's undemocratic about it.
Slashdot Mirror
'Why are Yahoo! and MSN such complex-looking places? Because their systems are easier to use [than Google]'
In what way are Yahoo or MSN easier to use? All a search engine needs is an input field where you enter your search phrase, and a button "search", which then presents a list of results. Everything else is just fancy bullshit. Anybody remembers how Altavista went from search engine to portal? Hardly anybody used it anymore shortly after they did that switch, because it starting sucking.
...for developing a filesystem so unstable it destroyed the porn collections of tens of thousands young, horny men. I mean, destroying other people's porn collections! That's even worse than murder!!1!
I see a new slashdot mem coming...
I once saw a report in a TV show about an experiment they made in a shop: They put up a big sign "3 tins for 0.99" and a small sign "1 tin for 0.30". The shop sold more packs of three tins for 0.99 :-(
And that's exactly the reason why European consumer protection laws require the price marking in supermarket to contain the price per a comparable unit, e.g. 100 grams or 1 kg.
Can you bring a concrete example? In my C++ programming, I never had to cast a pointer, except for maybe a dynamic_cast or two. In my experience, the shitty and ugly code comes from programmers who learned C++ in the early 1990s and didn't have a closer look at modern C++, with features such as RTTI, exceptions, and a usable standard library including (most importantly!) a string class (I have seen so many inferior own implementations of this, it's unbelievable).
You could certainly make XML vastly more compact if you had some table of tags mapped to 2-byte codes. You're not the first to have such an idea, and I and others will be happy to use it... as soon as you've got it standardized, implemented, and as widely accepted as ASCII.
Not as widely accepted as ASCII, but standardized and implemented: WBXML
That's right. Both take about 9 months to complete.
Well, religion started the conflict. Religions like Christianity were there before science was. And when science started to emerge, it was fought extremely hard and brutal by Christian religions (especially the Roman-Catholic church). And in these days, the evangelical movement and their think-tanks try to take over the science with pseudo-scientic junk like ID and try to make it into the schools' curricula, so the "hateful bigotry" you mention is only the healthy self-defense from the science community.
The new Prime Minister, Surayud Chulanont, is a born-and-raised military man. He seeks to strengthen Thailand. I suspect that spending large sums on outside technology which will tend to increase the influence of outside media (such as the US and China) leads him to take a dim view of the OLPC project, along with the other cancelled and soon-to-be-cancelled educational initiatives.
(Metaphorically) killing off great opportunities for better education, and trying to reach some stage of technological autarchy, all from a man with a military background... sounds like a mix of the Khmer Rouge agenda with the North Korean Juche system, without all the suppression and genocide, of course...
No, I don't think that his goals will do his country any good.
That's why lock your computer when you leave. On Windows, Windows-Key-L does this, and on Linux, most of the widely-used desktop environments have an equivalent functionality built-in.
Please learn about the concept of teleological interpretations of laws. Simply put, if the law says, "sex offense against minors in emails", you can come to the conclusion that the spirit and purpose of the law is to protect minors from sex offense via personal electronic communication, which makes it not only apply to email, but to instant messaging as well. Unfortunately, there is no good Wikipedia on this topic in English, so I can only refer to the German article, which describes the different forms of interpretation in a nice fashion: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslegung_(Recht)
Bullshit. The source package provides a mechanism to build trademarked-asset-free versions of Firefox. That's what projects like OpenBSD do.
A license agreement is nat a law, it's more like a contract. And contracts may contain things that are against ordre public or are unconscionable.
Would it have been that hard to identify the correct product being reviewed?
:-)
You must be new here.
The SDU machines run Windows XP. That's why.
How can this save costs? Do you know how expensive those machines are? Compared to simple pen and paper, they amortize after about 20 years of operation. And that's the _maximum_ operation period (for XP-based machines like the SDU voting computers probably even shorter). Faster counting? How relevant is that whether the election officials can go home one or two hours earlier? You shouldn't sacrifice something as crucial as _voting_ to getting home earlier. And regarding your "changing your vote" argument: how is that supposed to work? That would only work if the vote was associated with some kind of unique user ID, and that would be totally against the provision of secrecy. So I see no advantages for voting computers, but a lot of bugs in so far _all_ existing implementations, versus a well-known system that just works.
Tempest for Eliza is a very interesting demonstration of the whole problem. You feed it with an audio file, and by showing the right graphics on your screen, it transmits that audio file on a configurable frequency.
Actually, banning _is_ the solution. Voting computers make voting less verifiable, less auditable, more expensive (although the Voting machine producers claim otherwise), so why use them? What reason justifies switching from a proven, working, easy-to-use, easy-to-audit system (pen and paper) to a new technology of questionable quality?
OK, then at least parts of the rumor were true.
OK, that's something completely different then. What I was referring to was HiFinder, a music recommendation system, implemented by a company of the same name. Sony (Sony NetServices that is, which is owned by Sony Music Europe and Sony DADC) actually wanted to buy an exclusive license, but they ran into some legal hassles (some code ownership issues *cough*GPLed*cough*source*cough*), and instead of negotation a rewrite of the problematic parts, they simply bought the whole company and did the partial rewrite by themselves. And in the next version, they threw away HiFinder completely and replaced it by yet another system, developed from scratch. This was all part of a gigantic effort (and mess, when you look at the work of the managers) to create a web and mobile music download and streaming platform for Europe's biggest mobile phone provider.
The only justification (at least in the Netherlands and Germany) for voting computers is cost reduction - adding a voter-verifiable paper trail would completely totally destroy this "advantage" (which is very questionable, anyway).
But, in fact, there is no reason to reduce cost in this process. Cost shouldn't matter here, since secret, equal, free elections are a crucial process within democratic systems. Besides that, the pen and paper method is the most simple method you have, everybody understands it. In fact it's so simple, everyone can audit the whole process. Contrary to that, audits of computer-based systems can only be done by a few experts (and a complete audit goes from a security audit of the software down to as far as checking the hardware for possible modifications).
Plus, voting machines are everyday proved insecure.
Even more so in this special case. I was told by well-informed sources that these machines are actually Windows-XP-based and have GPRS connection. Rumors say that the Dutch secret service had security-audited this type of machine, and seems to have found some potential security holes, which seems to be the unofficial reason for the ban.
You can object to transactions because you usually do get a receipt, but it's much more difficult to object to election results because an inherent property of secret elections is that you get no receipt, meaning that it's _very_ difficult to find any proof if an election fraud was done by modifying the voting computers.
Actually, Fox News is the only news station that gets "The Truth, The Absolute Truth and nothing but The Truth Seal of Quality" certification by the Pentagon News Correction Unit.
How is democracy "even more flawed that communism"?
I think you don't have even the slightest understanding of parliamentary democracy, which you only characterize as a "facade" as opposed to direct democracy. It works like this (at least here in Europe): people elect people and/or parties. Those people and/or parties with the most approval then form some kind of parliament, being the legislative power in the country. These people/parties are elected by the people (usually) because of what agenda, politics, opinions, or programmes they represent. This means that the people in the parliament represent the people who elected them, in the right proportion. And they're also the ones who vote for/against laws/bills that were made by the executive power (i.e. the government). This system has only one big weakness: it does not allow differentiation, i.e. with your vote you can only elect a general political direction but not e.g. opinion A of representative X regarding topic I and opinion B of representative Y regarding topic J. I don't really say what's undemocratic about it.