I mean things always happen. Just getting a new browser and email client have been months of hard work and debugging for the Mozilla developers.
Personally, I'm skeptical. People are willing to kill over $10 in someone's pocket. Why wouldn't we believe that people will resort to things like election machine tampering when it affects who controls the most powerful nation on Earth?
I'm not reassured by Diebold's CEO about "doing anything" to get Bush re-elected. But really, is a paper trail going to fix that?
There is nothing preventing a system from printing one thing, and logging another. Any hand-counted discrepancies would be considered "human error" and discounted, anyway. And while a code audit may not be realistic, having the machine's code secret due to patent rights is just plain silly!
Machines could be checked by a number of ways, including a sort of ghosting/registry check done by an independent agency supervised by the various parties. And so on.
But then there's the need to hardened the machines to external manipulation. The casinos have been fighting this for years, and still people find ways to cheat.
All we can do as citizens is keep fighting. The struggle for freedom will never go away, not even in the USA... especially in the USA.
Kerry was working from information massaged by the administration to make their case for war. According to multiple sources, the CIA report being quashed by the administration currently actually names names and says why they baked up "proof" of Saddam's supposed weapons and squelched dissenting views. The Wall Street Journal months ago dug up a confidential Bush administration plan prepared way before 9/11, detailing invasion of Iraq. (Forgive me for not linking links here. They're in http://theregular.com/, WSJ, blogs, etc.)
I think you've touched on what the megacorps don't get: their whole marketing/sales paradigm is rapidly becoming outmoded.
If you own a mall and play music from the speakers in the mall, you have to pay ASCAP and/or BMI blanket fees to cover royalties for the publishers and artists. It's not a ton of money -- not so much that management is tempted to cheat. It's just not worth the hassle. The same kind of thing is going to have to happen in this digital age, or the whole media economy is going to choke on encrusted '60s-era business mindset placque in the revenue arteries.
Ultimately, if the price is right, people will pay for premium access to premium programming. And if reruns are affordable enough to access, then nobody will bother trying to copy things onto local media.
Alas, it will take a maverick success from the margins, some original thinking by the old white men in the board rooms, or a trainwreck before these monkeys will let go of the cookies in the jar.
Nobody got rich by disempowering the customer... or not as rich as they might have. The customer is always right, even if wrong.
(As for what this means for the news, well, that's another story. Jon Stewart said it best last Friday.)
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I mean things always happen. Just getting a new browser and email client have been months of hard work and debugging for the Mozilla developers.
... especially in the USA.
Personally, I'm skeptical. People are willing to kill over $10 in someone's pocket. Why wouldn't we believe that people will resort to things like election machine tampering when it affects who controls the most powerful nation on Earth?
I'm not reassured by Diebold's CEO about "doing anything" to get Bush re-elected. But really, is a paper trail going to fix that?
There is nothing preventing a system from printing one thing, and logging another. Any hand-counted discrepancies would be considered "human error" and discounted, anyway. And while a code audit may not be realistic, having the machine's code secret due to patent rights is just plain silly!
Machines could be checked by a number of ways, including a sort of ghosting/registry check done by an independent agency supervised by the various parties. And so on.
But then there's the need to hardened the machines to external manipulation. The casinos have been fighting this for years, and still people find ways to cheat.
All we can do as citizens is keep fighting. The struggle for freedom will never go away, not even in the USA
Kerry was working from information massaged by the administration to make their case for war. According to multiple sources, the CIA report being quashed by the administration currently actually names names and says why they baked up "proof" of Saddam's supposed weapons and squelched dissenting views. The Wall Street Journal months ago dug up a confidential Bush administration plan prepared way before 9/11, detailing invasion of Iraq. (Forgive me for not linking links here. They're in http://theregular.com/, WSJ, blogs, etc.)
I think you've touched on what the megacorps don't get: their whole marketing/sales paradigm is rapidly becoming outmoded.
... or not as rich as they might have. The customer is always right, even if wrong.
If you own a mall and play music from the speakers in the mall, you have to pay ASCAP and/or BMI blanket fees to cover royalties for the publishers and artists. It's not a ton of money -- not so much that management is tempted to cheat. It's just not worth the hassle. The same kind of thing is going to have to happen in this digital age, or the whole media economy is going to choke on encrusted '60s-era business mindset placque in the revenue arteries.
Ultimately, if the price is right, people will pay for premium access to premium programming. And if reruns are affordable enough to access, then nobody will bother trying to copy things onto local media.
Alas, it will take a maverick success from the margins, some original thinking by the old white men in the board rooms, or a trainwreck before these monkeys will let go of the cookies in the jar.
Nobody got rich by disempowering the customer
(As for what this means for the news, well, that's another story. Jon Stewart said it best last Friday.)