The way I would do something like this is to put the voting system inside a fully monitored and logged virtual machine. Then I would open it up to hackers, knowing that all changes to the system state will be logged and can be scanned for malicious actions.
Personally, I don't understand why people would want another MS format on their Linux boxen
I don't want another Microsoft format on my Linux box. However, as long as Microsoft has the majority of users in the given market, I have to show at least token support for these formats in order to keep from being completely marginalized.
MPEG-4 is a valid alternative and the market seems to lean toward non-proprietary media codes.
Since when? The vast majority of music downloads are in proprietary, patent encumbered codecs, like MP3, WMA, and AAC+Fairplay. Most audio and video streams on the net are in WMA or Real. If the market favors non-proprietary codecs, then why don't we see greater adoption of OGG, or FLAC?
I've found that the most effective counterargument is to point out that the whole "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is based upon the presumption that the government is infallible and perfectly competent. Sure, I have nothing to hide. However, I do fear the government looking at bits and pieces of my personal data and then coming to an erroneous conclusion about my future behavior because they didn't get the whole picture.
Also, I don't like the thought of government being able to make arbitrary decisions restricting your freedoms without at least giving you the chance to address their concerns. Encrypting my data makes the government come to me for the decryption key (chance are, they'll do this at least see if I'm willing to cooperate). This is a chance for me to ask what's going on and why they need this data.
The problem with that scenario is that windows doesn't really send a signal to the task in question (at least not a signal that most tasks respond to). So, the choice in most cases is: 1) Wait 10 seconds for Windows to kill -9 the task or 2)Hit the button now and kill -9 the task yourself. In a situation like that, most people will hit the manual override.
Sure, Clinton could have vetoed. His veto would then have been promptly overridden by the strongly Republican congress, depleting his political capital when he had precious little of the stuff in the first place.
Not that I'm absolving the Democratic party from anything. The DMCA wouldn't have had a veto-proof majority without Democratic support. I'm just saying that Clinton's power to stop this thing is somewhat less than one would suppose.
That depends. What kind of record player are you using? How good is your amplifier? What is the quality of the record. While vinyl isn't universally high quality, you can get good sound out of vinyl if you take care of your records and play them on quality turntables.
It aggravates me to see police officers using their lights to force a green, but, on the other hand, the risk of a speeding ambulance T-boning a car because it had to speed through a red light is greatly lessened by this system. I'm willing to make the abuse vs. safety tradeoff in this case.
Besides, if you hang out behind the cop car, you can usually draft through on the green light as well:-)
In my city (Minneapolis), all of the traffic lights have sensors on them that warn other motorists when emergency vehicles are approaching. These sensors are wired to the lights and sirens of the vehicle, so that they get priority when approaching intersections. How hard is it to tie these sensors to the red-light cameras so that they're disabled while the emergency vehicle has to go through the intersection?
On the other hand, if the cop didn't have his lights and sirens on when he ran the red light, he should be held accountable just like any other citizen. There was no emergency, therefore he had no right to break the rules.
must disagree. Downloaded music is free. It is easily copyable without loss of quality between copys.
There is no way that the RIAA can or could compete with this new model. It has driven them insane and they are just thrashing away dangerously in their madness.
As another poster pointed out, the availability of free alternatives hasn't been a problem for the bottled water industry. In fact, it could be argued that the water industry has it tougher: they have to pay for the distribution of a physical good. The RIAA just has to distribute information. The distribution costs of digital data are nearly zero. At worst, they have to pay for a server farm or two.
I place the blame squarely on the heads of the record companies for failing to recognize the revolutionary nature of digital distribution and sticking to their old (physical) distribution model even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was obsolete. Right after the shutdown of Napster, the record companies could have co-opted the pirates by offering high-quality digital downloads. By refusing to do so, they allowed other music piracy sites to become an acceptable place to get music.
Right. But that's because the current grid isn't set up to efficiently route power from distributed sources. That's not an inherent difficulty of distrbuted power generation, but rather a problem in the way the grid is set up today.
"And on a cloudy day, they can't provide for their customers?"
It can't be cloudy everywhere, all of the time. Increasingly, the grid will be used to redistribute power form areas that have surplus to where areas have excess demand. The current model of having all generation centralized at power plants is going to become obsolete.
Anecdotally, the two largest obstacles to Vista have been driver issues and the jump in hardware requirements. The jump in the minimum hardware requirements between XP and Vista has been the largest since we switched from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. Therefore, when faced with the prospect of upgrading multiple components to meet Vista's requirements most people opt to stick with their existing machines and get Vista pre-installed on their next computer.
The other thing is the well publicized driver issues in Vista. When faced with the prospect of their hardware not working, people are ready to forgo the enhancements of Vista until their hardawre *is* supported.
Huh, that's interesting. Could you point me to a reputable site that can get me started with correspondence chess?
I used to play a lot of chess in school, but now that I'm in college I'm having trouble finding people at my level to play against. Everyone I meet seems to be a newbie or (more commonly) way too advanced.
Another thing that's more difficult to address is the inordinate amount of setup time that some games take. Witness Axis & Allies. Its a great game, but every time I want to play it, I realize that its going to take at least 30 to 45 minutes to set up, and the thought of that is enough to get me motivated to do something else.
That said, I don't see a way to address the issue without ruining the game. Part of the attraction of the game is the varied unit types, and its the very presence of varied units that makes setup so difficult.
I don't know about drugs, but I still don't see why gambling is outlawed in the vast majority of the USA. If I, as a rational adult, want to put some money on a game of chance, I should be able to. You cannot make a comparison between gambling and alcohol/drugs, because losing some money isn't going to physically impair me in any way.
As for the argument that gambling is used as a front for organized crime, well we already have racketeering and money laundering legislation to address that.
Because otherwise good (but risky) ideas would never get funded. For example, take airplanes. Lets say that I've got a revolutionary new airplane design. Unfortunately, producing airplanes takes a lot of money. You need to buy factory space, materials, labor, and all of the specialized equipment needed to start manufacturing. Finding enough investors to allow you to pay for all of this upfront is often an impossible task. So you end up taking a loan. The purpose of forming a limited liability corporation is so that the million dollars you take out to finance your startup costs don't place you and your investors deep in debt should your corporation go bust.
Its true that the corporation has an advantage over a sole proprietorship. That advantage is (supposedly) balanced by more stringent reporting requirements placed on corporations.
When did I ever say that a corporation shielded its shareholders from criminal liability? If that was the case, all criminal organizations, like gangs or the mafia would form corporations.
The reason behind this legal construct called the corporation is to shield its shareholders from *financial* risk. When you invest in a limited-liability corporation, you are only liable upto the amount that you invest (hence the term limited liability). The purpose of this limitation is to prevent the corporation's debts from becoming your debts should the corporation declare bankruptcy. The construct does not provide any shielding against criminal prosecution.
All I said was that the corporation concept was necessary because otherwise good (but risky) business ventures would never get funding.
I agree with your general principles, but not with the extent to which you are pursuing them. Nonpersonal entities are useful for some things, like pooling resources and sharing risk. For example, take the corporation. Originally, the limited-liability corporation was created as a separate legal entity so that individual investors would not be responsible for a corporation's debts after the corporation went out of business. This creation dramatically lowered the risks of investment, and allowed people to start new business ventures without risking ending up deep in debt if things didn't go as planned.
Corporations (now) do have way too many rights, given the fact that they're immortal. However, the solution to this is to curb the rights of corporations, not to abolish them entirely.
>>In fact, it would suck so much that competing ISPs would take notice at Comcast's irate customer base, and would offer Internet service at fixed, flat rates.<<
That would only apply in places where Comcast didn't have a monopoly for geographic reasons. I am currently forced to use Comcast because I am too far from Qwest's switching station to get DSL service. So, in my case there would have to be a sufficiently high number of irate people for Qwest to build out its infrastructure to accommodate additional users, a proposition that isn't a certainty by any means.
Didn't Cox communications start blocking Vonage in one of the Southern states (Tennessee, I think) a little while ago? As I recall consumer outrage forced Cox to relent on the ban, but there was no regulation forcing Cox to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Two words: honeypot system.
The way I would do something like this is to put the voting system inside a fully monitored and logged virtual machine. Then I would open it up to hackers, knowing that all changes to the system state will be logged and can be scanned for malicious actions.
This warning sponsored by Admiral Ackbar:
Its a trap!!
I don't want another Microsoft format on my Linux box. However, as long as Microsoft has the majority of users in the given market, I have to show at least token support for these formats in order to keep from being completely marginalized.
Since when? The vast majority of music downloads are in proprietary, patent encumbered codecs, like MP3, WMA, and AAC+Fairplay. Most audio and video streams on the net are in WMA or Real. If the market favors non-proprietary codecs, then why don't we see greater adoption of OGG, or FLAC?
I've found that the most effective counterargument is to point out that the whole "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" argument is based upon the presumption that the government is infallible and perfectly competent. Sure, I have nothing to hide. However, I do fear the government looking at bits and pieces of my personal data and then coming to an erroneous conclusion about my future behavior because they didn't get the whole picture.
Also, I don't like the thought of government being able to make arbitrary decisions restricting your freedoms without at least giving you the chance to address their concerns. Encrypting my data makes the government come to me for the decryption key (chance are, they'll do this at least see if I'm willing to cooperate). This is a chance for me to ask what's going on and why they need this data.
The problem with that scenario is that windows doesn't really send a signal to the task in question (at least not a signal that most tasks respond to). So, the choice in most cases is: 1) Wait 10 seconds for Windows to kill -9 the task or 2)Hit the button now and kill -9 the task yourself. In a situation like that, most people will hit the manual override.
Sure, Clinton could have vetoed. His veto would then have been promptly overridden by the strongly Republican congress, depleting his political capital when he had precious little of the stuff in the first place.
Not that I'm absolving the Democratic party from anything. The DMCA wouldn't have had a veto-proof majority without Democratic support. I'm just saying that Clinton's power to stop this thing is somewhat less than one would suppose.
That depends. What kind of record player are you using? How good is your amplifier? What is the quality of the record. While vinyl isn't universally high quality, you can get good sound out of vinyl if you take care of your records and play them on quality turntables.
It aggravates me to see police officers using their lights to force a green, but, on the other hand, the risk of a speeding ambulance T-boning a car because it had to speed through a red light is greatly lessened by this system. I'm willing to make the abuse vs. safety tradeoff in this case.
:-)
Besides, if you hang out behind the cop car, you can usually draft through on the green light as well
In my city (Minneapolis), all of the traffic lights have sensors on them that warn other motorists when emergency vehicles are approaching. These sensors are wired to the lights and sirens of the vehicle, so that they get priority when approaching intersections. How hard is it to tie these sensors to the red-light cameras so that they're disabled while the emergency vehicle has to go through the intersection?
On the other hand, if the cop didn't have his lights and sirens on when he ran the red light, he should be held accountable just like any other citizen. There was no emergency, therefore he had no right to break the rules.
>>I know in the US there are laws prohibiting companies from gimping their products like this.<<
No, there really aren't. The entire net neutrality debate is over whether there should be prohibiting these practices here.
As another poster pointed out, the availability of free alternatives hasn't been a problem for the bottled water industry. In fact, it could be argued that the water industry has it tougher: they have to pay for the distribution of a physical good. The RIAA just has to distribute information. The distribution costs of digital data are nearly zero. At worst, they have to pay for a server farm or two.
I place the blame squarely on the heads of the record companies for failing to recognize the revolutionary nature of digital distribution and sticking to their old (physical) distribution model even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it was obsolete. Right after the shutdown of Napster, the record companies could have co-opted the pirates by offering high-quality digital downloads. By refusing to do so, they allowed other music piracy sites to become an acceptable place to get music.
Right. But that's because the current grid isn't set up to efficiently route power from distributed sources. That's not an inherent difficulty of distrbuted power generation, but rather a problem in the way the grid is set up today.
"And on a cloudy day, they can't provide for their customers?"
It can't be cloudy everywhere, all of the time. Increasingly, the grid will be used to redistribute power form areas that have surplus to where areas have excess demand. The current model of having all generation centralized at power plants is going to become obsolete.
Thanks a lot!
I'm signed up now and my user name is the same as my slashdot user name.
Anecdotally, the two largest obstacles to Vista have been driver issues and the jump in hardware requirements. The jump in the minimum hardware requirements between XP and Vista has been the largest since we switched from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. Therefore, when faced with the prospect of upgrading multiple components to meet Vista's requirements most people opt to stick with their existing machines and get Vista pre-installed on their next computer.
The other thing is the well publicized driver issues in Vista. When faced with the prospect of their hardware not working, people are ready to forgo the enhancements of Vista until their hardawre *is* supported.
Huh, that's interesting. Could you point me to a reputable site that can get me started with correspondence chess?
I used to play a lot of chess in school, but now that I'm in college I'm having trouble finding people at my level to play against. Everyone I meet seems to be a newbie or (more commonly) way too advanced.
Another thing that's more difficult to address is the inordinate amount of setup time that some games take. Witness Axis & Allies. Its a great game, but every time I want to play it, I realize that its going to take at least 30 to 45 minutes to set up, and the thought of that is enough to get me motivated to do something else.
That said, I don't see a way to address the issue without ruining the game. Part of the attraction of the game is the varied unit types, and its the very presence of varied units that makes setup so difficult.
I don't know about drugs, but I still don't see why gambling is outlawed in the vast majority of the USA. If I, as a rational adult, want to put some money on a game of chance, I should be able to. You cannot make a comparison between gambling and alcohol/drugs, because losing some money isn't going to physically impair me in any way.
As for the argument that gambling is used as a front for organized crime, well we already have racketeering and money laundering legislation to address that.
Because otherwise good (but risky) ideas would never get funded. For example, take airplanes. Lets say that I've got a revolutionary new airplane design. Unfortunately, producing airplanes takes a lot of money. You need to buy factory space, materials, labor, and all of the specialized equipment needed to start manufacturing. Finding enough investors to allow you to pay for all of this upfront is often an impossible task. So you end up taking a loan. The purpose of forming a limited liability corporation is so that the million dollars you take out to finance your startup costs don't place you and your investors deep in debt should your corporation go bust.
Its true that the corporation has an advantage over a sole proprietorship. That advantage is (supposedly) balanced by more stringent reporting requirements placed on corporations.
When did I ever say that a corporation shielded its shareholders from criminal liability? If that was the case, all criminal organizations, like gangs or the mafia would form corporations.
The reason behind this legal construct called the corporation is to shield its shareholders from *financial* risk. When you invest in a limited-liability corporation, you are only liable upto the amount that you invest (hence the term limited liability). The purpose of this limitation is to prevent the corporation's debts from becoming your debts should the corporation declare bankruptcy. The construct does not provide any shielding against criminal prosecution.
All I said was that the corporation concept was necessary because otherwise good (but risky) business ventures would never get funding.
I agree with your general principles, but not with the extent to which you are pursuing them. Nonpersonal entities are useful for some things, like pooling resources and sharing risk. For example, take the corporation. Originally, the limited-liability corporation was created as a separate legal entity so that individual investors would not be responsible for a corporation's debts after the corporation went out of business. This creation dramatically lowered the risks of investment, and allowed people to start new business ventures without risking ending up deep in debt if things didn't go as planned.
Corporations (now) do have way too many rights, given the fact that they're immortal. However, the solution to this is to curb the rights of corporations, not to abolish them entirely.
>>The two best examples i can think of right now are the upcoming Crysis and Star Wars: Force Unleashed.<<
Also, don't forget Portal. The entire point of that game is to modify your environment by opening portals (think wormholes) from point to point.
>>In fact, it would suck so much that competing ISPs would take notice at Comcast's irate customer base, and would offer Internet service at fixed, flat rates.<<
That would only apply in places where Comcast didn't have a monopoly for geographic reasons. I am currently forced to use Comcast because I am too far from Qwest's switching station to get DSL service. So, in my case there would have to be a sufficiently high number of irate people for Qwest to build out its infrastructure to accommodate additional users, a proposition that isn't a certainty by any means.
Didn't Cox communications start blocking Vonage in one of the Southern states (Tennessee, I think) a little while ago? As I recall consumer outrage forced Cox to relent on the ban, but there was no regulation forcing Cox to do so.