repeating something that was stated in the summary and adding "Epic phail" to the end now qualifies as "interesting"? from the summary:
The internet portal's co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made this comment despite the fact Yahoo rejected a $33 a share offer from Microsoft back in May. What a huge loss for the share holders.
shouldn't there be some kind of literacy requirement for mods?
well, according to BusinessWeek, some "Washington Insiders" think Steve Ballmer might be in the running for CIO.
i would be seriously disturbed if Ballmer is really being considered for CIO. corporate interests are rarely aligned with public interest, and Microsoft in particular has a long history of disreputable policies & actions. besides, Microsoft already has enough political sway in Washington.
i'd prefer that the position was given to someone outside of the commercial/corporate sector who wouldn't pose a conflict of interest. RMS, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig would all make ideal candidates. they don't have any corporate-ties, are reputable authorities on IT, and all have demonstrated that they put public interest ahead of commercial interests. RMS and Lawrence Lessig in particular are both outspoken critics of the current establishment. if Obama really wants change, then he needs to appoint iconoclasts & idealists who are willing to challenge existing policies and attitudes.
appointing people like Ballmer or Bezos would just be replacing old corporate pupppets with new ones. unless being rich is the primary requirement for CIO, neither of them are qualified for such an important political office.
either grow up and learn how to engage in mature discourse with others or go back to playing with your GI-Joes. the metagovernment project clearly has nothing to do with anarchism or eliminating government or the rule of law. so maybe you should actually learn what it is that you're criticizing before making such specious & ill-informed arguments.
lashing out with ad hominem name-calling and complete non-sequiturs just because you've been backed into a corner in an argument just makes you look like a mental midget. if you can't use sound logic to defend your position, then perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your assumptions.
it's designed that way to serve as a protective crotch guard (against stray groin-kicks from irate female co-workers who are sick and tired of you pretending to be a sex-droid) and to conceal untimely erections--which will bound to occur since the unit is also designed to deliver a very sensual scrotal massage while you're walking.
maybe not a legal precedent in the traditional sense, but just because there's no common law doesn't mean people won't imitate these actions and file similar cases after seeing the successful prosecution of the defendants in this case. heck, other European, and even non-European, countries could see it as an affirmation of "societally acceptable" censorship.
it's just like when the U.K. starts putting up surveillance cameras everywhere it, not only sets a bad example, but also makes it more permissible for, and in fact encourages, other governments to similarly encroach on the rights of their own citizenry, and likewise when the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act was passed. in the age of modern international relations and global culture, events and policy decisions in one nation rapidly ripple outward to other nations, especially as the U.K. & the U.S. are purportedly the leaders of the "free world."
Italy isn't a global leader or superpower, but their cultural & political attitudes can still spread to their international peers. and all it takes is for one so-called democratic society to shift towards a reactionary/oppressive state unopposed to start a positive feedback loop, where each nation's own step towards fascism becomes justification for increasingly draconian policies in another nation.
well, each voter can be given a receipt with a ballot ID printed on it. that way voters can just input their ballot ID into the web form to check if their vote was correctly counted. of course, if your vote wasn't correctly counted, then you'd still have to identify yourself and lose voter anonymity somewhat. but it's better than not having a vote. and your corrected ballot will still be anonymous.
this would all be a lot easier/simpler if we had online electronic voting. you log-in, you place your vote(s), you get your confirmation #, and your virtual ballot is immediately tabulated and the election results updated in real-time. and you can also immediately check to see if your e-ballot was correctly tabulated using your confirmation number. no bureaucratic or logistical delays.
perhaps someone should develop an open source online voting system. first it can be put through some trial runs in municipal elections. and after a year or two, once the system has proven itself, it can be pushed up the governmental/administrative hierarchy and implemented at state level. and one or two years later, if there aren't any problems, it can be introduced at the federal level.
using an open source development model, and by implementing new features at the municipal level first and gradually pushing them up the chain of government, it would be possible to safely implement online electronic voting and move our nation slowly but steadily towards a direct, participatory democracy where individuals have much greater involvement in government and a real say in public policy.
this kind of risk management would allow us to safely implement (eventually) regular broad-based referendums for policy-making at the federal level. since the bi-partisan system clearly doesn't work, and the federal government no longer represents the interests of the people. things like net neutrality, gay marriage rights, stem cell research, government surveillance, etc. would be better voted on by the public than by the political aristocracy, whom have proven that they can no longer be trusted to protect in public interest.
foreign policy & international relations would still be handled by political leaders, but domestic policy issues that affect the day to day lives of ordinary people should be decided by the public. if our congressmen don't have the time to read the bills they pass into law, that's O.K. we'll read them and vote on them instead. increasing public involvement in the "democratic" process would make Americans less politically indifferent and perhaps cure the social apathy that plagues our society. if people actually have a say in government, and have real political power, then they'll be more likely to take an active interest in current issues.
thought commands definitely have a lot of potential to supersede all other input devices/technologies. i've never seen, or heard of, the OCZ NIA or Emotiv EPOC, but if there are effective neural signal monitors that aren't prohibitively expensive, i'd be interested to learn more about them.
if an advanced neural interface can be developed to accurately read thought commands, conventional input devices would become largely obsolete. paraplegics and other users with disabilities would benefit greatly from such technology. i mean, what's more intuitive than thought commands?
though i imagine we're still quite a ways away from being able to dictate a letter with our minds or draw images with our mind's eyes. there's still a lot more that needs to be uncovered about how the brain works before we can fully interface between mind and machine. and i do wonder if it'd really be easier to monitor, and accurately interpret, motor commands than using video imaging to receive motion inputs.
typing into a keyboard or sliding a mouse around all day isn't particularly exciting either. but input devices aren't meant to be exciting or interesting. they're supposed to be useful/practical.
touch screens are so popular because they're intuitive and easy to use. the more natural an input device feels, the more transparent it becomes, and the more effective it is at its job. ideally, the input device should be unnoticeable to the user. they should feel like they're directly manipulating & interacting with the virtual content on the screen.
the ball-mouse was adopted so quickly because it greatly reduces the effort needed to interact with computer software. when your hand is on the mouse, the cursor becomes just an extension of your arm. moving the pointer becomes effortless and natural. whereas, with a keyboard you have to fiddle with a bunch of clumsy arrow buttons, and this creates a virtual & psychological gap between the user and the software they're trying to interact with.
the touch screen is an evolution of the mouse cursor. with it you can directly point and touch items on the screen to interact with them. there's no need for a mouse or pointer. that eliminates another gap between the user and the virtual environment.
bugs are the result of human error, which occurs whether you're depending on programmers or 50-year-old polling station volunteers. open source e-voting machines facilitate public oversight to catch bugs/flaws in the voting machine software. closed source e-voting machines prevent people from analyzing the code that's counting their votes. that means bugs are much less likely to be caught/fixed.
backdoors, like deliberate voter suppression/election fraud, will always be a potential risk. that's why OSS is necessary. again, open source means there is a means for vigilant members of the public to scrutinize the code and ensure there are no back doors. no matter how good of a programmer the perpetrator is, you can't hide a backdoor forever in open source software. the more eyes that are on the source code, the sooner the backdoor will be found.
with something as important as e-voting software, you can bet there'll be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of programmers, security analysts, code auditors, software testers, etc. pouring over every line of that code. compare that to the broken code-auditing system that the diebold machines went through, where the flaws with the system weren't discovered until the source code was leaked, discovered by a sleuthing citizen, and finally delivered into the hands of competent programmers to be analyzed.
audits
Can't solve. Letting everyone see the code to analyze potential backdoors is such a major security risk, because once exploited, they can't be dealt with
--what the hell does that even mean? begging the question is not "analysis" no matter how confidently you repeat your non-sequiturs. unless you are advocating security through obscurity (and an honor system for the programmers), how is perpetual debugging/auditing and public oversight a "major security risk"? are Google's servers being hacked into by the hundreds because they're all running linux? is SELinux being used by the NSA & DoD because open source means backdoors and other security risks "can't be dealt with"?
maybe take some courses on information security/secure coding before spewing out this verbal diarrhea. in fact, take philosophy 101 while you're at it and learn at least basic informal fallacies. then maybe you'll be able to participate in online discussions without wasting people's time with specious arguments full of gaping holes in logic.
so then just increase the volunteer-to-voter ratio. but i still don't think that provides a guarantee against election fraud.
between the voting location and each county's ballot-tabulating location ballots can be "lost"/"misplaced." and even if a ballot arrives at the tabulation building, there's no guarantee that the machine will correctly count the ballot, or that it'll even be fed into the machine. even if they're hand counted, human error or deliberate fraud could still cause votes to be miscounted. and between the county and state bureaucracy the numbers can be manipulated once again. each time the tabulation results are reported up the government bureaucratic hierarchy, you have new people handling the election results, which introduces yet more opportunities for tampering and manipulation of the figures.
you could monitor the ballot counters with surveillance cameras and review them after the election, but that's still only a limited guarantee that a vote is correctly counted. the best thing to do is for the final tabulation results to be uploaded to an online server so that each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants. this puts the responsibility for assuring that each vote is counted into the hands of whoever cast the ballot. it also establishes more public oversight over the electorial process.
personally, i use BS.Player PRO (there's also a free version), which loads quite fast, has a very small memory footprint, and also has some nice looking skins. it plays.avi,.wmv, and.mkv, and most.mov files i've encountered.
i also have VLC player installed, which i use to open.mov files that BS.Player won't play for whatever reasons, but the interface is kinda crappy; it opens two player windows; and it crashes whenever i try to close the inactive player window or just the whole program. maybe i have an old version, but it just doesn't seem very stable or as polished as BS.Player.
i rarely ever use WMP except when i need to open a second player while BS.Player is already open (in the middle of a movie that i don't want to lose my spot in).
exactly. i think for most Americans it's probably both, faster and easier, to find a computer with internet access than to actually get to an official voting booth.
it'd be harder to perpetrate voter suppression of low-income minorities with an online voting system than with the traditional voting system. all those reports of black voters being locked out of, or turned away from, voting locations would have been moot with online voting. no one would be forced to wait 6 hours to cast their ballot just because they were in a heavily Democratic city.
so at least one form of election fraud would be eliminated by online referendums.
that's still more accessible than a document written in legalese that's only available by contacting Obama's staff. most administrations don't make any sort of effort to keep the public informed of their plans once the election is over, much less maintain a 2-way dialog.
the technical merits of the website are a different issue. maybe they need a better web team. have you tried giving them your feedback on their site's accessibility.
well, you wouldn't conduct a federal referendum using anonymous polls. as my boss puts it, "one SSN, one vote." just have people select a password when they register to vote. no one said it was a simple solution, but it's not impossible with today's technology & IT infrastructure.
and you could always start slow, like using online referendums as public opinion polls for the president and other policy-makers to use as a reference for minor policy issues. then once the system is tried and test, and judged acceptably secure, it could be employed for official legal referendums, like state ballot propositions, and then integrated into the federal legislative process.
i'm not advocating that we dissolve Congress tomorrow and jump head first into online voting without any kind of trial run. but you gotta start somewhere. when the U.S. first started holding public elections the system was pretty imperfect too--i think there was even a/. submission on this. but if this does work, it has the potential to put power into the hands of working class citizens.
i'm not a big fan of the bipartisan system--personally, i'm a Nader supporter--and i'm not too excited about having a former drug Czar as a VP. but how is this not news for nerds?
the president-elect has launched a website to lay out his plans for government reform (letting us know what we should expect in the coming term) in an accessible online format, and also to solicit thoughts and opinions about policy issues from ordinary citizens. AFAIK, this is the first time any U.S. president has embraced IT and the world wide web to such an extent as a means of engaging the citizenry in public discourse.
i honestly believe that the web is the key to realizing a true participatory democracy on a federal level in a country as big as the U.S., so this is certainly something to take notice of. this may be just the first small step, but at least it's a step in the right direction. along with the THOMAS system, which gives the public easy access to bills, legislation, and congressional voting records, the web is gradually increasing the level of transparency in government. perhaps in the near future online referendums can be conducted, if not for deferring policy making to the public, then at least to poll public opinion on key issues.
this kind of interactive digital democracy eliminates any ambiguity as to what the general mood of the public is, how the public feels about key issues, and what the will of the people is. it's vital for an online dialog to be opened between political officials and their constituency, especially with the growing gap/disconnect between the political elite and the daily realities of the common man. at least then politicians and can't plead ignorance.
If you find a project similar to your needs on freshmeat, sourceforge, etc. you can always contact the developer and ask them to modify/extend, etc.
that's actually a very good idea. i'm surprised nobody thought to mention this earlier. there are already tons and tons of open source projects out there. there's no need starting a fresh new project when there's already an open source application that fits your needs and is much more mature and already has a development community around it.
if you're willing to pay the developer(s), there are tons of open source projects out there that could use the funding. who knows, maybe one of them is exactly what you're looking for. it's hard for open source projects to reach critical mass when everyone wants to create their own application rather than contribute to an existing project that might fulfill the same objectives.
one of the great advantages of open source is that there is room for both cooperation and competition. even if you don't find a project that fits your needs perfectly, you might be able to fork an existing implementation that you can use as a starting-off point. that reduces the amount of redundancy in the code space. and if you can revived a dead project, then even better.
i think part of what kills off open source applications is a perceived lack of interest, which is partially due to the dispersal of resources over too many redundant projects. luckily, FOSS being what it is, anyone can pick up a dead or inactive project and resume development on it. so before you go off and contract a developer for a brand new open source program, see what's already out there that might fit your needs.
a subscription for user-generated content? so Activision wants users to pay them money to share their self-created content?
why are mainstream game publishers run by such douche bags? it's not enough that users are adding value to their product by donating their time/creativity to create new content for the game, but now the game publisher wants to "monetize" this content by charging users for sharing their own songs with each other.
jesus christ, do you have to repeat the same specious arguments every single time the white-space spectrum is brought up? what do hacked iPods have to do with FCC approval of wi-fi over the white-space spectrum? a hacker can modify their wireless devices to broadcast over any frequency they want regardless of federal regulations. the FCC regulates commercial equipment manufacturers, not renegade iPod hackers.
besides, the white-space spectrum that is being opened up to wi-fi applications is what's being freed up by the switchover to digital television. whether wi-fi uses this spectrum or not, you're not going to receive any TV signals over it. that's why it's being classified as white-space. and you keep whining about some perceived threat all of this is based purely on blind speculation. the FCC tests have found that such use of the white-space spectrum won't interfere with any existing applications, so unless you can have evidence of the contrary, you're just talking out of your ass.
opening up white-space frequencies for wireless broadband applications serves public interest much more than reserving this band for terrestrial TV broadcasts would. the usable radio spectrum is a limited public resource that is currently being monopolized by TV/radio/cellular networks. right now only a handful of media & communications corporations are allowed to make us of this data transmission medium. opening up the spectrum, even partially, to wireless broadband would allow everyone to benefit from this shared resource instead of it just being hoarded by a rich & powerful minority.
frankly, terrestrial broadcasting, of both TV and radio, is soon to become a technological anachronism anyway. the internet is an open public communications network. what's more, it's a generalized digital communications network, meaning it can transfer video, audio, text, or any other data. so why waste radio bands on specialized closed communications networks? it won't be long before ubiquitous open wireless access subsumes all cellular/radio/tv networks.
i'm sorry to say this, but your Luddite paranoia is really just a knee-jerk reaction to societal progress. it's like complaining that wireless routers are going to interfere with your teletype machine.
well, if that's the attitude you take regarding your clientèle then maybe people should be warned about your business.
generally, every business will have a few dissatisfied customers since it's hard to make everyone happy. but if there are dozens of customer complaints regarding the same company, then that's a pretty good indicator that they're either unscrupulous or just incompetent. so it doesn't have to be by a "disgruntled employee" for a complaint to have any merit.
besides, another poster who met his wife through that agency already said that he had to pay $3600 for the minimum of 36 introductions (of which he only used 5) to use the service.
i don't know much about sound cards, but wouldn't something like Dolby Digital be handled in the firmware or on a dedicated chip? otherwise you might as well have the application (music player, DVD/video player, etc.) decode the Dolby Digital data to the raw uncompressed audio channels that are sent to the speakers.
i'd believe that. i've taken high doses of benzodiazepines that completely blacked out my memory of the night before.
it was really strange waking up the next morning and finding a pack of cigarettes that i couldn't remember buying (or who gave them to me) and also finding blog entries that i didn't remember writing. i basically had to talk to all of my friends to piece together what happened the night before, since i had no recollection of talking to anyone, people coming over to my apartment, or going out to dinner with a friend, etc.
but pharmacologically-triggered anterograde amnesia has limited applications compared to being able to wipe specific memories at will--and after the fact. i mean, you could potentially have all soldiers involved in black ops take large doses of benzodiazepines before every mission. but that could greatly compromise their ability to function, and it wouldn't allow you to cover up unanticipated incidents.
i don't think a "group" of 7 people would be that susceptible to groupthink. generally, when it comes to group behaviors, the larger the group, the more pronounced the effects of group psychology are.
groupthink/group mentality isn't a blanket argument against synergetic bodies or group collaboration, nor is it a very good argument for autocratic decision-making. deliberative assemblies, or committees, are so popular because when you invite more than one perspective on a particular issue you encourage discussion and debate, which facilitates better decision-making. you're more likely to make the wrong decision when you don't have to argue your position to opposing committee members. discussion forces people to give more careful thought to their actions/choices.
the issue of accountability also isn't much of a problem with a committee of this size. it's not like the military chain of command where the ones giving the orders are distanced from the resultant consequences, and "following orders" introduces ambiguity of responsibility.
as long as records are kept of each committee member's votes & statements, they can be held directly accountable for their actions. that is, assuming there's some sort of government or public oversight. but the same problem would arise with an autocratic system.
no, because then you're behind/inside the cloak and your visibility in the cloaked direction is zero. you're not unbending the light with a complementary image. if the light source is behind you, you'd just look like a jackass holding up a bed sheet.
the method proposed in the article is to hide objects outside (hence, "How to Cloak Objects At a Distance") of a cloak using a complementary material. no materials have yet been developed to do this.
it doesn't even necessarily have to be a physical material. if you can use lasers or an EM field to bend(or unbend) light back to its original state, then you can simulate a virtual complementary material. you'd still need to determine the optical properties of the object that you want to cloak to create the complementary image, but you could theoretically create a mobile/non-stationary cloaking device this way.
CF: Sure, some of my own research that I've done, I've found that controlling for family violence exposure pretty much wipes out any relationship between violent games and aggression, so the correlation is essentially zero once you control for family violence. They didn't do that in this study, which is a significant concern for me.
all he plainly states is that this study found a correlation in their data. that is an indisputable mathematical observation. he's simply being an objective and open-minded researcher here. but he's arguing that even if you accept their premise (the correlation found in the data), their logic is unsound. so he is skeptical about their conclusion, which he is clearly refuting.
i think you should re-read the portion of interview in which he says that even an undergrad should understand correlation != causation. heck, re-read the entire thing, since you clearly missed his point:
Even if you took it at face value, which I don't, video game violence overlaps somewhere between, based on their own statistics, a half a percent to two percent, with a variance in aggression. If you woke up tomorrow and you were half a percent more aggressive than you were today, would you notice that? It's just not much of an effect.
i mean, you seriously need to work on your reading comprehension skills if what you took from the interview is that Christopher Ferguson thinks video games cause aggression.
so do DMV scheduling systems. when you schedule a DMV appointment does the DMV website discriminate against you based on your race/age/sex/religion? an expert system doesn't have to be written by impartial programmers to be impartial.
how would a programmer make an expert system discriminate based on someone's race when that isn't in the problem domain of the system? you think the developer is going to spend an extra 50 years programming their cultural prejudices into a system that's only designed to apply a list of legal codes to court cases? do bug testers and code review processes not exist in your imaginary world?
theoretically a commercial jet's autopilot system could be programmed to kill everyone on board. it's written by fallible and imperfect human programmers, right? so do you avoid all air travel?
Slashdot Mirror
repeating something that was stated in the summary and adding "Epic phail" to the end now qualifies as "interesting"?
from the summary:
shouldn't there be some kind of literacy requirement for mods?
well, according to BusinessWeek, some "Washington Insiders" think Steve Ballmer might be in the running for CIO.
i would be seriously disturbed if Ballmer is really being considered for CIO. corporate interests are rarely aligned with public interest, and Microsoft in particular has a long history of disreputable policies & actions. besides, Microsoft already has enough political sway in Washington.
i'd prefer that the position was given to someone outside of the commercial/corporate sector who wouldn't pose a conflict of interest. RMS, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig would all make ideal candidates. they don't have any corporate-ties, are reputable authorities on IT, and all have demonstrated that they put public interest ahead of commercial interests. RMS and Lawrence Lessig in particular are both outspoken critics of the current establishment. if Obama really wants change, then he needs to appoint iconoclasts & idealists who are willing to challenge existing policies and attitudes.
appointing people like Ballmer or Bezos would just be replacing old corporate pupppets with new ones. unless being rich is the primary requirement for CIO, neither of them are qualified for such an important political office.
either grow up and learn how to engage in mature discourse with others or go back to playing with your GI-Joes. the metagovernment project clearly has nothing to do with anarchism or eliminating government or the rule of law. so maybe you should actually learn what it is that you're criticizing before making such specious & ill-informed arguments.
lashing out with ad hominem name-calling and complete non-sequiturs just because you've been backed into a corner in an argument just makes you look like a mental midget. if you can't use sound logic to defend your position, then perhaps it's time to re-evaluate your assumptions.
you've got it all wrong. that's a feature.
it's designed that way to serve as a protective crotch guard (against stray groin-kicks from irate female co-workers who are sick and tired of you pretending to be a sex-droid) and to conceal untimely erections--which will bound to occur since the unit is also designed to deliver a very sensual scrotal massage while you're walking.
maybe not a legal precedent in the traditional sense, but just because there's no common law doesn't mean people won't imitate these actions and file similar cases after seeing the successful prosecution of the defendants in this case. heck, other European, and even non-European, countries could see it as an affirmation of "societally acceptable" censorship.
it's just like when the U.K. starts putting up surveillance cameras everywhere it, not only sets a bad example, but also makes it more permissible for, and in fact encourages, other governments to similarly encroach on the rights of their own citizenry, and likewise when the U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act was passed. in the age of modern international relations and global culture, events and policy decisions in one nation rapidly ripple outward to other nations, especially as the U.K. & the U.S. are purportedly the leaders of the "free world."
Italy isn't a global leader or superpower, but their cultural & political attitudes can still spread to their international peers. and all it takes is for one so-called democratic society to shift towards a reactionary/oppressive state unopposed to start a positive feedback loop, where each nation's own step towards fascism becomes justification for increasingly draconian policies in another nation.
well, each voter can be given a receipt with a ballot ID printed on it. that way voters can just input their ballot ID into the web form to check if their vote was correctly counted. of course, if your vote wasn't correctly counted, then you'd still have to identify yourself and lose voter anonymity somewhat. but it's better than not having a vote. and your corrected ballot will still be anonymous.
this would all be a lot easier/simpler if we had online electronic voting. you log-in, you place your vote(s), you get your confirmation #, and your virtual ballot is immediately tabulated and the election results updated in real-time. and you can also immediately check to see if your e-ballot was correctly tabulated using your confirmation number. no bureaucratic or logistical delays.
perhaps someone should develop an open source online voting system. first it can be put through some trial runs in municipal elections. and after a year or two, once the system has proven itself, it can be pushed up the governmental/administrative hierarchy and implemented at state level. and one or two years later, if there aren't any problems, it can be introduced at the federal level.
using an open source development model, and by implementing new features at the municipal level first and gradually pushing them up the chain of government, it would be possible to safely implement online electronic voting and move our nation slowly but steadily towards a direct, participatory democracy where individuals have much greater involvement in government and a real say in public policy.
this kind of risk management would allow us to safely implement (eventually) regular broad-based referendums for policy-making at the federal level. since the bi-partisan system clearly doesn't work, and the federal government no longer represents the interests of the people. things like net neutrality, gay marriage rights, stem cell research, government surveillance, etc. would be better voted on by the public than by the political aristocracy, whom have proven that they can no longer be trusted to protect in public interest.
foreign policy & international relations would still be handled by political leaders, but domestic policy issues that affect the day to day lives of ordinary people should be decided by the public. if our congressmen don't have the time to read the bills they pass into law, that's O.K. we'll read them and vote on them instead. increasing public involvement in the "democratic" process would make Americans less politically indifferent and perhaps cure the social apathy that plagues our society. if people actually have a say in government, and have real political power, then they'll be more likely to take an active interest in current issues.
thought commands definitely have a lot of potential to supersede all other input devices/technologies. i've never seen, or heard of, the OCZ NIA or Emotiv EPOC, but if there are effective neural signal monitors that aren't prohibitively expensive, i'd be interested to learn more about them.
if an advanced neural interface can be developed to accurately read thought commands, conventional input devices would become largely obsolete. paraplegics and other users with disabilities would benefit greatly from such technology. i mean, what's more intuitive than thought commands?
though i imagine we're still quite a ways away from being able to dictate a letter with our minds or draw images with our mind's eyes. there's still a lot more that needs to be uncovered about how the brain works before we can fully interface between mind and machine. and i do wonder if it'd really be easier to monitor, and accurately interpret, motor commands than using video imaging to receive motion inputs.
typing into a keyboard or sliding a mouse around all day isn't particularly exciting either. but input devices aren't meant to be exciting or interesting. they're supposed to be useful/practical.
touch screens are so popular because they're intuitive and easy to use. the more natural an input device feels, the more transparent it becomes, and the more effective it is at its job. ideally, the input device should be unnoticeable to the user. they should feel like they're directly manipulating & interacting with the virtual content on the screen.
the ball-mouse was adopted so quickly because it greatly reduces the effort needed to interact with computer software. when your hand is on the mouse, the cursor becomes just an extension of your arm. moving the pointer becomes effortless and natural. whereas, with a keyboard you have to fiddle with a bunch of clumsy arrow buttons, and this creates a virtual & psychological gap between the user and the software they're trying to interact with.
the touch screen is an evolution of the mouse cursor. with it you can directly point and touch items on the screen to interact with them. there's no need for a mouse or pointer. that eliminates another gap between the user and the virtual environment.
um, what?
bugs are the result of human error, which occurs whether you're depending on programmers or 50-year-old polling station volunteers. open source e-voting machines facilitate public oversight to catch bugs/flaws in the voting machine software. closed source e-voting machines prevent people from analyzing the code that's counting their votes. that means bugs are much less likely to be caught/fixed.
backdoors, like deliberate voter suppression/election fraud, will always be a potential risk. that's why OSS is necessary. again, open source means there is a means for vigilant members of the public to scrutinize the code and ensure there are no back doors. no matter how good of a programmer the perpetrator is, you can't hide a backdoor forever in open source software. the more eyes that are on the source code, the sooner the backdoor will be found.
with something as important as e-voting software, you can bet there'll be tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of programmers, security analysts, code auditors, software testers, etc. pouring over every line of that code. compare that to the broken code-auditing system that the diebold machines went through, where the flaws with the system weren't discovered until the source code was leaked, discovered by a sleuthing citizen, and finally delivered into the hands of competent programmers to be analyzed.
--what the hell does that even mean? begging the question is not "analysis" no matter how confidently you repeat your non-sequiturs. unless you are advocating security through obscurity (and an honor system for the programmers), how is perpetual debugging/auditing and public oversight a "major security risk"? are Google's servers being hacked into by the hundreds because they're all running linux? is SELinux being used by the NSA & DoD because open source means backdoors and other security risks "can't be dealt with"?
maybe take some courses on information security/secure coding before spewing out this verbal diarrhea. in fact, take philosophy 101 while you're at it and learn at least basic informal fallacies. then maybe you'll be able to participate in online discussions without wasting people's time with specious arguments full of gaping holes in logic.
so then just increase the volunteer-to-voter ratio. but i still don't think that provides a guarantee against election fraud.
between the voting location and each county's ballot-tabulating location ballots can be "lost"/"misplaced." and even if a ballot arrives at the tabulation building, there's no guarantee that the machine will correctly count the ballot, or that it'll even be fed into the machine. even if they're hand counted, human error or deliberate fraud could still cause votes to be miscounted. and between the county and state bureaucracy the numbers can be manipulated once again. each time the tabulation results are reported up the government bureaucratic hierarchy, you have new people handling the election results, which introduces yet more opportunities for tampering and manipulation of the figures.
you could monitor the ballot counters with surveillance cameras and review them after the election, but that's still only a limited guarantee that a vote is correctly counted. the best thing to do is for the final tabulation results to be uploaded to an online server so that each voter can check to make sure that their own ballot was counted correctly by the volunteers/civil servants. this puts the responsibility for assuring that each vote is counted into the hands of whoever cast the ballot. it also establishes more public oversight over the electorial process.
personally, i use BS.Player PRO (there's also a free version), which loads quite fast, has a very small memory footprint, and also has some nice looking skins. it plays .avi, .wmv, and .mkv, and most .mov files i've encountered.
i also have VLC player installed, which i use to open .mov files that BS.Player won't play for whatever reasons, but the interface is kinda crappy; it opens two player windows; and it crashes whenever i try to close the inactive player window or just the whole program. maybe i have an old version, but it just doesn't seem very stable or as polished as BS.Player.
i rarely ever use WMP except when i need to open a second player while BS.Player is already open (in the middle of a movie that i don't want to lose my spot in).
exactly. i think for most Americans it's probably both, faster and easier, to find a computer with internet access than to actually get to an official voting booth.
it'd be harder to perpetrate voter suppression of low-income minorities with an online voting system than with the traditional voting system. all those reports of black voters being locked out of, or turned away from, voting locations would have been moot with online voting. no one would be forced to wait 6 hours to cast their ballot just because they were in a heavily Democratic city.
so at least one form of election fraud would be eliminated by online referendums.
that's still more accessible than a document written in legalese that's only available by contacting Obama's staff. most administrations don't make any sort of effort to keep the public informed of their plans once the election is over, much less maintain a 2-way dialog.
the technical merits of the website are a different issue. maybe they need a better web team. have you tried giving them your feedback on their site's accessibility.
well, you wouldn't conduct a federal referendum using anonymous polls. as my boss puts it, "one SSN, one vote." just have people select a password when they register to vote. no one said it was a simple solution, but it's not impossible with today's technology & IT infrastructure.
and you could always start slow, like using online referendums as public opinion polls for the president and other policy-makers to use as a reference for minor policy issues. then once the system is tried and test, and judged acceptably secure, it could be employed for official legal referendums, like state ballot propositions, and then integrated into the federal legislative process.
i'm not advocating that we dissolve Congress tomorrow and jump head first into online voting without any kind of trial run. but you gotta start somewhere. when the U.S. first started holding public elections the system was pretty imperfect too--i think there was even a /. submission on this. but if this does work, it has the potential to put power into the hands of working class citizens.
i'm not a big fan of the bipartisan system--personally, i'm a Nader supporter--and i'm not too excited about having a former drug Czar as a VP. but how is this not news for nerds?
the president-elect has launched a website to lay out his plans for government reform (letting us know what we should expect in the coming term) in an accessible online format, and also to solicit thoughts and opinions about policy issues from ordinary citizens. AFAIK, this is the first time any U.S. president has embraced IT and the world wide web to such an extent as a means of engaging the citizenry in public discourse.
i honestly believe that the web is the key to realizing a true participatory democracy on a federal level in a country as big as the U.S., so this is certainly something to take notice of. this may be just the first small step, but at least it's a step in the right direction. along with the THOMAS system, which gives the public easy access to bills, legislation, and congressional voting records, the web is gradually increasing the level of transparency in government. perhaps in the near future online referendums can be conducted, if not for deferring policy making to the public, then at least to poll public opinion on key issues.
this kind of interactive digital democracy eliminates any ambiguity as to what the general mood of the public is, how the public feels about key issues, and what the will of the people is. it's vital for an online dialog to be opened between political officials and their constituency, especially with the growing gap/disconnect between the political elite and the daily realities of the common man. at least then politicians and can't plead ignorance.
that's actually a very good idea. i'm surprised nobody thought to mention this earlier. there are already tons and tons of open source projects out there. there's no need starting a fresh new project when there's already an open source application that fits your needs and is much more mature and already has a development community around it.
if you're willing to pay the developer(s), there are tons of open source projects out there that could use the funding. who knows, maybe one of them is exactly what you're looking for. it's hard for open source projects to reach critical mass when everyone wants to create their own application rather than contribute to an existing project that might fulfill the same objectives.
one of the great advantages of open source is that there is room for both cooperation and competition. even if you don't find a project that fits your needs perfectly, you might be able to fork an existing implementation that you can use as a starting-off point. that reduces the amount of redundancy in the code space. and if you can revived a dead project, then even better.
i think part of what kills off open source applications is a perceived lack of interest, which is partially due to the dispersal of resources over too many redundant projects. luckily, FOSS being what it is, anyone can pick up a dead or inactive project and resume development on it. so before you go off and contract a developer for a brand new open source program, see what's already out there that might fit your needs.
a subscription for user-generated content? so Activision wants users to pay them money to share their self-created content?
why are mainstream game publishers run by such douche bags? it's not enough that users are adding value to their product by donating their time/creativity to create new content for the game, but now the game publisher wants to "monetize" this content by charging users for sharing their own songs with each other.
jesus christ, do you have to repeat the same specious arguments every single time the white-space spectrum is brought up? what do hacked iPods have to do with FCC approval of wi-fi over the white-space spectrum? a hacker can modify their wireless devices to broadcast over any frequency they want regardless of federal regulations. the FCC regulates commercial equipment manufacturers, not renegade iPod hackers.
besides, the white-space spectrum that is being opened up to wi-fi applications is what's being freed up by the switchover to digital television. whether wi-fi uses this spectrum or not, you're not going to receive any TV signals over it. that's why it's being classified as white-space. and you keep whining about some perceived threat all of this is based purely on blind speculation. the FCC tests have found that such use of the white-space spectrum won't interfere with any existing applications, so unless you can have evidence of the contrary, you're just talking out of your ass.
opening up white-space frequencies for wireless broadband applications serves public interest much more than reserving this band for terrestrial TV broadcasts would. the usable radio spectrum is a limited public resource that is currently being monopolized by TV/radio/cellular networks. right now only a handful of media & communications corporations are allowed to make us of this data transmission medium. opening up the spectrum, even partially, to wireless broadband would allow everyone to benefit from this shared resource instead of it just being hoarded by a rich & powerful minority.
frankly, terrestrial broadcasting, of both TV and radio, is soon to become a technological anachronism anyway. the internet is an open public communications network. what's more, it's a generalized digital communications network, meaning it can transfer video, audio, text, or any other data. so why waste radio bands on specialized closed communications networks? it won't be long before ubiquitous open wireless access subsumes all cellular/radio/tv networks.
i'm sorry to say this, but your Luddite paranoia is really just a knee-jerk reaction to societal progress. it's like complaining that wireless routers are going to interfere with your teletype machine.
well, if that's the attitude you take regarding your clientèle then maybe people should be warned about your business.
generally, every business will have a few dissatisfied customers since it's hard to make everyone happy. but if there are dozens of customer complaints regarding the same company, then that's a pretty good indicator that they're either unscrupulous or just incompetent. so it doesn't have to be by a "disgruntled employee" for a complaint to have any merit.
besides, another poster who met his wife through that agency already said that he had to pay $3600 for the minimum of 36 introductions (of which he only used 5) to use the service.
i don't know much about sound cards, but wouldn't something like Dolby Digital be handled in the firmware or on a dedicated chip? otherwise you might as well have the application (music player, DVD/video player, etc.) decode the Dolby Digital data to the raw uncompressed audio channels that are sent to the speakers.
i'd believe that. i've taken high doses of benzodiazepines that completely blacked out my memory of the night before.
it was really strange waking up the next morning and finding a pack of cigarettes that i couldn't remember buying (or who gave them to me) and also finding blog entries that i didn't remember writing. i basically had to talk to all of my friends to piece together what happened the night before, since i had no recollection of talking to anyone, people coming over to my apartment, or going out to dinner with a friend, etc.
but pharmacologically-triggered anterograde amnesia has limited applications compared to being able to wipe specific memories at will--and after the fact. i mean, you could potentially have all soldiers involved in black ops take large doses of benzodiazepines before every mission. but that could greatly compromise their ability to function, and it wouldn't allow you to cover up unanticipated incidents.
i don't think a "group" of 7 people would be that susceptible to groupthink. generally, when it comes to group behaviors, the larger the group, the more pronounced the effects of group psychology are.
groupthink/group mentality isn't a blanket argument against synergetic bodies or group collaboration, nor is it a very good argument for autocratic decision-making. deliberative assemblies, or committees, are so popular because when you invite more than one perspective on a particular issue you encourage discussion and debate, which facilitates better decision-making. you're more likely to make the wrong decision when you don't have to argue your position to opposing committee members. discussion forces people to give more careful thought to their actions/choices.
the issue of accountability also isn't much of a problem with a committee of this size. it's not like the military chain of command where the ones giving the orders are distanced from the resultant consequences, and "following orders" introduces ambiguity of responsibility.
as long as records are kept of each committee member's votes & statements, they can be held directly accountable for their actions. that is, assuming there's some sort of government or public oversight. but the same problem would arise with an autocratic system.
no, because then you're behind/inside the cloak and your visibility in the cloaked direction is zero. you're not unbending the light with a complementary image. if the light source is behind you, you'd just look like a jackass holding up a bed sheet.
the method proposed in the article is to hide objects outside (hence, "How to Cloak Objects At a Distance") of a cloak using a complementary material. no materials have yet been developed to do this.
it doesn't even necessarily have to be a physical material. if you can use lasers or an EM field to bend(or unbend) light back to its original state, then you can simulate a virtual complementary material. you'd still need to determine the optical properties of the object that you want to cloak to create the complementary image, but you could theoretically create a mobile/non-stationary cloaking device this way.
have you read what it says?
from Part 1 of the interview:
all he plainly states is that this study found a correlation in their data. that is an indisputable mathematical observation. he's simply being an objective and open-minded researcher here. but he's arguing that even if you accept their premise (the correlation found in the data), their logic is unsound. so he is skeptical about their conclusion, which he is clearly refuting.
i think you should re-read the portion of interview in which he says that even an undergrad should understand correlation != causation. heck, re-read the entire thing, since you clearly missed his point:
i mean, you seriously need to work on your reading comprehension skills if what you took from the interview is that Christopher Ferguson thinks video games cause aggression.
so do DMV scheduling systems. when you schedule a DMV appointment does the DMV website discriminate against you based on your race/age/sex/religion? an expert system doesn't have to be written by impartial programmers to be impartial.
how would a programmer make an expert system discriminate based on someone's race when that isn't in the problem domain of the system? you think the developer is going to spend an extra 50 years programming their cultural prejudices into a system that's only designed to apply a list of legal codes to court cases? do bug testers and code review processes not exist in your imaginary world?
theoretically a commercial jet's autopilot system could be programmed to kill everyone on board. it's written by fallible and imperfect human programmers, right? so do you avoid all air travel?