nationalism and xenophobia tend to be conservative/reactionary traits. so naturally there are more racists amongst the republicans since they're the "more" conservative faction in the bipartisan system. but i agree that there are racists in both parties. but, statistically, you'll find a higher concentration of republicans in the more bigoted/racially homogeneous states.
it's probably not correct to call all republicans racists, or all racists republicans though. just as it's incorrect to equivocate 'democrat' with 'liberal'.
but, like the article says, there are fewer people whose e-mail addresses start with z or numbers. so they'd be getting fewer hits by targeting those starting characters. there's already more spam messages being targeted at "zebras" per legitimate target than there are spam messages being targeted at aardvark addresses.
so the smart thing for spammers to do is to stop wasting time with zebra addresses, since they'd have a higher chance of actually reaching a real mailbox by targeting more popular character ranges.
that's easy to say when you're not writing a thousand checks a month.
and the fact of the matter is, he didn't issue or authorize the account transfers that he's being charged for. so why should he have to pay for fraud? is there a clause in his banking contract that says "the bank is allowed to give away your money without your consent as long as we list the transactions in your monthly statement?"
IMO, language is a natural outgrowth of culture. it should be allowed to change and evolve organically however a society sees fit to use it, without regards to legal trademarks. i think it's futile and unethical for companies to demand that the public stop using their trademarked name as a generic noun or verb. no one individual or organization has the right to impede the natural course of linguistic evolution. it's something everyone contributes to. if the general population decides that "kleenex" is synonymous to "tissue," then who are you to say it's wrong?
judges and lawyers aren't the problem. the problem is the political culture of our nation. judges and lawyers aren't the ones that make the laws, they just have to work with them. i believe there are judges and lawyers on both sides of the coin, but the laws favor corporate interests over public interests. also, lawsuits cost money, and corporations also happen to have the most money. so they tend to be the ones who abuse the system.
our court system certainly has its problems, but the issue at hand here is much, much bigger. for instance, several states have long since passed industry-sponsored legislation to censor the media from criticizing the agricultural industry or even giving negative reports on industry practices--such as the use of bovine growth hormone. so what this particular article talks about is just one small part of the bigger problem, which is the disproportionate influence and political power that corporations hold in our society.
yea, but how many of those authors published books in the 1930's? unless Walter Rudin started publishing his writings in his early-teens, and Hormander before he turned 10, i don't think you can make a comparison between their works and Bourbaki's.
i don't believe the technology you're referring to yet exists. the physical fabrication of a DVD can't be accomplished by any pocket-sized device that i'm aware of. nor do we have the teleportation technology to replace one DVD with another remotely.
maybe you know something that i don't. but more likely, you just didn't bother to read the post i was replying to, specifically this part: "But ballots can't be wiped remotely. Would be vote corrupters need to get physical access."
you wouldn't need any device in your pocket to replace a DVD. but you would have to have physical access to that DVD. in which case the same security risks would exist whether the ballots were stored on a DVD or on paper.
you can't honestly believe that banking and other financial systems are secure because they're built on a foundation of implicit trust of the user/operator.
although each bank, as a member of a heavily regulated industry, has strong disincentives against cheating, every employee, as a privately self-interested individual in a competitive capitalist society, _does_ have an incentive to cheat the system wherever possible. it's certainly not moral-restraint that prevents people within the banking industry and other parts of the financial sector from defrauding the system.
and what advantages are there of purely electronic voting? certainly there is the environmental aspect, but the impact would be negligible in the grand scheme of things as you've just said. IMO the biggest benefit would be the logistical advantage. in a properly designed system, not only would there be less room for human-error, but broad-based public referendums would be much easier to carry out, and thus could be incorporated into more aspects of government.
why shouldn't the public have more say in the formation of public policy, especially when even members of congress admit that they don't usually read the actual bills that they vote on half the time? if we're to tout ourselves as the leading democracy in the world, then shouldn't we try to advance the ideals of participatory democracy? it's fairly easy buy a few corrupt politicians, but it's much harder to buy a few million votes.
if we can trust our national economic infrastructure to electronic data keeping, then there's no reason why similar levels of security couldn't be achieved with electronic voting. just because it hasn't been attempted yet (in the U.S.) doesn't mean that it's not possible.
if illiterate Venezuelan peasants can form their national constitution via mass referendum, then shouldn't an educated first-world nation like the U.S. be able to form public policy without professional legislators to decide for us what's in our own best interest?
those are problems which have already been addressed in the field of electronic security. how would a digital device in one's pocket wipe out a DVD? how would it wipe out a flash drive? how would it wipe out a properly shielded hard drive?
we live in a capitalist society. in a way, you can say that the foundations of our society is based on financial capital and commerce. if such essential and complex artificial systems as the credit system, banks, and stock market are all run on electronic networks, and all of which require high levels of security, then how can you say that electronic voting couldn't possibly work as well?
what worked "reasonably well for the history of the USA" isn't necessarily the only solution, or the best solution. as i've already stated, electronic voting is vital to the progress of our nation towards a true democratic society. if you're content with the current level of corruption and voter disenfranchisement, then sure let's never change. but if you have hopes of a future in which the public can participate more directly in the democratic process, then it would be foolish to dismiss electronic voting offhand based simply on a knee-jerk reaction to change.
that's dumb. each digital ballot exists physically on the data storage medium, whether it's the memory cells of a flash drive, the magnetic regions of a hard disk platter, or the pits on a DVD's aluminum surface. these records can be created, examined, or destroyed, just as paper ballots can.
the problem isn't with the concept of digital ballots. it's with the use of black box voting machines. if the hardware and software design of the voting machines aren't available for public inspection, then we can't know if they're secure or not--or if they're intentionally rigged. and paper receipts can always be printed out by the voting machine so as to have another form of records to fall back on.
e-voting can be just as secure as, or perhaps even more so than, paper ballots. but the voting machines must use open source software and hardware design. with sound security practices in place, we would be able to extend the technology to public referendums and create a system of direct-democracy in the U.S.
the political system in the U.S. has become so disconnected from the public that policy makers rarely represent their constituency. rather than voting in the interest of public good, our legislative process is completely dominated by commercial/corporate interests. but this doesn't have to continue.
with the ubiquitous nature of internet/web access today, the logistical problems which previously prevented the conducting of legislation through mass referendums can easily be overcome, thereby realizing true participatory democracy. who needs a political aristocracy to legislate public policy for us when we have the technology to allow every citizen to vote from the convenience of their own computer on policy issues?
dismissing electronic voting off the bat when it's been successfully implemented in other countries is very shortsighted. there are issues to be worked out for any new system, but if electronic record keeping is secure enough to handle online banking, credit card transactions, the stock market exchange, etc. then why couldn't it be made to work for voting?
my point was that there are unlimited services. if you don't like the water analogy, what about unlimited local/long distance phone plans, unlimited text messages, etc.?
growing up has nothing to do with it. if they advertised their service as having a 250GB cap, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. and try not to extrapolate your personal experiences as the normative standard onto everyone else. if we'd all "grown up" like you then everyone would still be on 56K dial-up and using hourly rate internet access plans. and what does your monthly bandwidth usage have to do with maturity anyway?
as do some apartment complexes and other leased properties. And regardless of the payment system, the comparison i drew was in regards to the AC's claim that there's no such thing as "unlimited services." regardless of what rates the utility companies charge, your phone lines aren't going to suddenly go dead because you've made too many calls, or your gas go out because you've grilled too many hamburgers. it has little to do with their billing method and more to do with the fact that they have more capacity than the normal user is capable of using. if your capacity exceeds the aggregate demand on your services, then you can give your customers unlimited usage in practice.
or you could simply advertise as a fixed quota service, as has been pointed out already.
yea, i also can't check my e-mail or download porn through the plumbing system (although it is a series of pipes), but that wasn't the point of the comparison.
perhaps you should read the comment that i was replying.
i have a hard time finding blank DVDs that last more than a 3-4 years. and backing up hundreds of gigabytes of files onto DVDs tends to ruin your DVD burner pretty fast. not to mention it's a lot easier to lose/damage data stored in hundreds of separate DVD's than a couple of harddrives.
it's pretty presumptuous to think that every one has the same needs/preferences as you.
that would be up to the site admin to do that, not the attacker. and i see no reason for sites like Digg or Last.fm to fuck with the e-mail address you input. if people find out that they are removing the +, then they will just lose security/privacy-conscious users.
yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...
it's not hard to calculate how much bandwidth the average user requires each month and then take that amount * the number of subscribers you have, and make sure that your capabilities can match that level of traffic. of course, this doesn't work if you oversell and _advertise your service as "unlimited"_.
well, that's basically what i did. and the system worked fine for several months. but windows update kept prompting me to install WGA. i just ignored the system tray update messages for several weeks, but some way or another it got installed (i probably accidentally installed it along with a new security update).
since i'd just gotten settled into my new install i wasn't looking forward to having to reformat and starting all over again, so i've just been putting up with it. but i'll probably follow the tips that have been posted and try to remove WGA or do a fresh install from one of those disks you referred to.
and unfortunate i do graphic design, so i use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, etc. on a daily basis, and I also need to make sure that the client's site renders properly in IE (which is arguably the most frustrating part of my job). but i probably should give Ubuntu a try as a secondary OS.
also, running a division renowned for state-of-the-art research attracts top talent to your company, which in turn attracts more talent and creates a fertile research atmosphere. then all you need is to actually take advantage of this pool of talent you have at your disposal. don't be like Xerox and spend all this money on research and then let another company steal the results and bring it to market first.
i'm using a Dell my dad gave me as a gift when i went off to college, and it was supposed to come with a copy of XP (pre-installed). naturally, after a few years of use, i had to upgrade the computer/reformat the HDD/etc. during this process i found that Dell didn't actually give me a Windows XP setup disc. they had instead given me some Dell "system recovery" disc that would have re-installed all of their Dell-branded crap and bloatware from their software partners which i'd spent years removing and replacing.
i found it much more convenient to just borrow a friend's XP disc. however, i realized to my dismay that the XP serial number which came with the Dell didn't actually work with anything except for the Dell OS Recovery disc. and i wasn't going to use that disc (by now i'd lost it anyway) and have to spend a week uninstall everything and manually re-install all the new service packs and updates. so i just ended up using a "pirated" XP setup disc image i found on the web which included all the latest service packs and updates (minus WGA) and no other useless crap.
unfortunately, i accidentally installed the WGA update one day. and so every time the system starts, and seemingly every 15 minutes after that, i get told that my copy of windows isn't "genuine" which causes whatever program was in the foreground to lose-focus and is particularly annoying when you're typing.
Slashdot Mirror
nationalism and xenophobia tend to be conservative/reactionary traits. so naturally there are more racists amongst the republicans since they're the "more" conservative faction in the bipartisan system. but i agree that there are racists in both parties. but, statistically, you'll find a higher concentration of republicans in the more bigoted/racially homogeneous states.
it's probably not correct to call all republicans racists, or all racists republicans though. just as it's incorrect to equivocate 'democrat' with 'liberal'.
but, like the article says, there are fewer people whose e-mail addresses start with z or numbers. so they'd be getting fewer hits by targeting those starting characters. there's already more spam messages being targeted at "zebras" per legitimate target than there are spam messages being targeted at aardvark addresses.
so the smart thing for spammers to do is to stop wasting time with zebra addresses, since they'd have a higher chance of actually reaching a real mailbox by targeting more popular character ranges.
that's easy to say when you're not writing a thousand checks a month.
and the fact of the matter is, he didn't issue or authorize the account transfers that he's being charged for. so why should he have to pay for fraud? is there a clause in his banking contract that says "the bank is allowed to give away your money without your consent as long as we list the transactions in your monthly statement?"
general case -> specific case
the Federal Reserve insures the bank. -> the bank insures the individual.
i'd say that banking fraud is a pretty big potential contributor to financial trouble for any banking institution.
IMO, language is a natural outgrowth of culture. it should be allowed to change and evolve organically however a society sees fit to use it, without regards to legal trademarks. i think it's futile and unethical for companies to demand that the public stop using their trademarked name as a generic noun or verb. no one individual or organization has the right to impede the natural course of linguistic evolution. it's something everyone contributes to. if the general population decides that "kleenex" is synonymous to "tissue," then who are you to say it's wrong?
judges and lawyers aren't the problem. the problem is the political culture of our nation. judges and lawyers aren't the ones that make the laws, they just have to work with them. i believe there are judges and lawyers on both sides of the coin, but the laws favor corporate interests over public interests. also, lawsuits cost money, and corporations also happen to have the most money. so they tend to be the ones who abuse the system.
our court system certainly has its problems, but the issue at hand here is much, much bigger. for instance, several states have long since passed industry-sponsored legislation to censor the media from criticizing the agricultural industry or even giving negative reports on industry practices--such as the use of bovine growth hormone. so what this particular article talks about is just one small part of the bigger problem, which is the disproportionate influence and political power that corporations hold in our society.
so do you also ask for adhesive bandages instead of band-aids? acetylsalicylic acid tablets instead of asprin? and acetaminophen instead of tylenol?
yea, but how many of those authors published books in the 1930's? unless Walter Rudin started publishing his writings in his early-teens, and Hormander before he turned 10, i don't think you can make a comparison between their works and Bourbaki's.
oops, that should read "more urban vibe." i'm not a racist, i swear.
they need to adopt a moron urban vibe, maybe do a commercial with kanye west.
yo, where you at, dawg?
you killed my father. prepare to die?
what?
i don't believe the technology you're referring to yet exists. the physical fabrication of a DVD can't be accomplished by any pocket-sized device that i'm aware of. nor do we have the teleportation technology to replace one DVD with another remotely.
maybe you know something that i don't. but more likely, you just didn't bother to read the post i was replying to, specifically this part:
"But ballots can't be wiped remotely. Would be vote corrupters need to get physical access."
you wouldn't need any device in your pocket to replace a DVD. but you would have to have physical access to that DVD. in which case the same security risks would exist whether the ballots were stored on a DVD or on paper.
you can't honestly believe that banking and other financial systems are secure because they're built on a foundation of implicit trust of the user/operator.
although each bank, as a member of a heavily regulated industry, has strong disincentives against cheating, every employee, as a privately self-interested individual in a competitive capitalist society, _does_ have an incentive to cheat the system wherever possible. it's certainly not moral-restraint that prevents people within the banking industry and other parts of the financial sector from defrauding the system.
and what advantages are there of purely electronic voting? certainly there is the environmental aspect, but the impact would be negligible in the grand scheme of things as you've just said. IMO the biggest benefit would be the logistical advantage. in a properly designed system, not only would there be less room for human-error, but broad-based public referendums would be much easier to carry out, and thus could be incorporated into more aspects of government.
why shouldn't the public have more say in the formation of public policy, especially when even members of congress admit that they don't usually read the actual bills that they vote on half the time? if we're to tout ourselves as the leading democracy in the world, then shouldn't we try to advance the ideals of participatory democracy? it's fairly easy buy a few corrupt politicians, but it's much harder to buy a few million votes.
if we can trust our national economic infrastructure to electronic data keeping, then there's no reason why similar levels of security couldn't be achieved with electronic voting. just because it hasn't been attempted yet (in the U.S.) doesn't mean that it's not possible.
if illiterate Venezuelan peasants can form their national constitution via mass referendum, then shouldn't an educated first-world nation like the U.S. be able to form public policy without professional legislators to decide for us what's in our own best interest?
those are problems which have already been addressed in the field of electronic security. how would a digital device in one's pocket wipe out a DVD? how would it wipe out a flash drive? how would it wipe out a properly shielded hard drive?
we live in a capitalist society. in a way, you can say that the foundations of our society is based on financial capital and commerce. if such essential and complex artificial systems as the credit system, banks, and stock market are all run on electronic networks, and all of which require high levels of security, then how can you say that electronic voting couldn't possibly work as well?
what worked "reasonably well for the history of the USA" isn't necessarily the only solution, or the best solution. as i've already stated, electronic voting is vital to the progress of our nation towards a true democratic society. if you're content with the current level of corruption and voter disenfranchisement, then sure let's never change. but if you have hopes of a future in which the public can participate more directly in the democratic process, then it would be foolish to dismiss electronic voting offhand based simply on a knee-jerk reaction to change.
that's dumb. each digital ballot exists physically on the data storage medium, whether it's the memory cells of a flash drive, the magnetic regions of a hard disk platter, or the pits on a DVD's aluminum surface. these records can be created, examined, or destroyed, just as paper ballots can.
the problem isn't with the concept of digital ballots. it's with the use of black box voting machines. if the hardware and software design of the voting machines aren't available for public inspection, then we can't know if they're secure or not--or if they're intentionally rigged. and paper receipts can always be printed out by the voting machine so as to have another form of records to fall back on.
e-voting can be just as secure as, or perhaps even more so than, paper ballots. but the voting machines must use open source software and hardware design. with sound security practices in place, we would be able to extend the technology to public referendums and create a system of direct-democracy in the U.S.
the political system in the U.S. has become so disconnected from the public that policy makers rarely represent their constituency. rather than voting in the interest of public good, our legislative process is completely dominated by commercial/corporate interests. but this doesn't have to continue.
with the ubiquitous nature of internet/web access today, the logistical problems which previously prevented the conducting of legislation through mass referendums can easily be overcome, thereby realizing true participatory democracy. who needs a political aristocracy to legislate public policy for us when we have the technology to allow every citizen to vote from the convenience of their own computer on policy issues?
dismissing electronic voting off the bat when it's been successfully implemented in other countries is very shortsighted. there are issues to be worked out for any new system, but if electronic record keeping is secure enough to handle online banking, credit card transactions, the stock market exchange, etc. then why couldn't it be made to work for voting?
my point was that there are unlimited services. if you don't like the water analogy, what about unlimited local/long distance phone plans, unlimited text messages, etc.?
growing up has nothing to do with it. if they advertised their service as having a 250GB cap, then we wouldn't be having this discussion. and try not to extrapolate your personal experiences as the normative standard onto everyone else. if we'd all "grown up" like you then everyone would still be on 56K dial-up and using hourly rate internet access plans. and what does your monthly bandwidth usage have to do with maturity anyway?
as do some apartment complexes and other leased properties. And regardless of the payment system, the comparison i drew was in regards to the AC's claim that there's no such thing as "unlimited services." regardless of what rates the utility companies charge, your phone lines aren't going to suddenly go dead because you've made too many calls, or your gas go out because you've grilled too many hamburgers. it has little to do with their billing method and more to do with the fact that they have more capacity than the normal user is capable of using. if your capacity exceeds the aggregate demand on your services, then you can give your customers unlimited usage in practice.
or you could simply advertise as a fixed quota service, as has been pointed out already.
yea, i also can't check my e-mail or download porn through the plumbing system (although it is a series of pipes), but that wasn't the point of the comparison.
perhaps you should read the comment that i was replying.
i have a hard time finding blank DVDs that last more than a 3-4 years. and backing up hundreds of gigabytes of files onto DVDs tends to ruin your DVD burner pretty fast. not to mention it's a lot easier to lose/damage data stored in hundreds of separate DVD's than a couple of harddrives.
it's pretty presumptuous to think that every one has the same needs/preferences as you.
that would be up to the site admin to do that, not the attacker. and i see no reason for sites like Digg or Last.fm to fuck with the e-mail address you input. if people find out that they are removing the +, then they will just lose security/privacy-conscious users.
yea, that's why my kitchen and bathroom faucets stop working if i use more than 250 gallons of water a month...
it's not hard to calculate how much bandwidth the average user requires each month and then take that amount * the number of subscribers you have, and make sure that your capabilities can match that level of traffic. of course, this doesn't work if you oversell and _advertise your service as "unlimited"_.
well, that's basically what i did. and the system worked fine for several months. but windows update kept prompting me to install WGA. i just ignored the system tray update messages for several weeks, but some way or another it got installed (i probably accidentally installed it along with a new security update).
since i'd just gotten settled into my new install i wasn't looking forward to having to reformat and starting all over again, so i've just been putting up with it. but i'll probably follow the tips that have been posted and try to remove WGA or do a fresh install from one of those disks you referred to.
and unfortunate i do graphic design, so i use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, etc. on a daily basis, and I also need to make sure that the client's site renders properly in IE (which is arguably the most frustrating part of my job). but i probably should give Ubuntu a try as a secondary OS.
also, running a division renowned for state-of-the-art research attracts top talent to your company, which in turn attracts more talent and creates a fertile research atmosphere. then all you need is to actually take advantage of this pool of talent you have at your disposal. don't be like Xerox and spend all this money on research and then let another company steal the results and bring it to market first.
i hope that's meant to be sarcastic.
i'm using a Dell my dad gave me as a gift when i went off to college, and it was supposed to come with a copy of XP (pre-installed). naturally, after a few years of use, i had to upgrade the computer/reformat the HDD/etc. during this process i found that Dell didn't actually give me a Windows XP setup disc. they had instead given me some Dell "system recovery" disc that would have re-installed all of their Dell-branded crap and bloatware from their software partners which i'd spent years removing and replacing.
i found it much more convenient to just borrow a friend's XP disc. however, i realized to my dismay that the XP serial number which came with the Dell didn't actually work with anything except for the Dell OS Recovery disc. and i wasn't going to use that disc (by now i'd lost it anyway) and have to spend a week uninstall everything and manually re-install all the new service packs and updates. so i just ended up using a "pirated" XP setup disc image i found on the web which included all the latest service packs and updates (minus WGA) and no other useless crap.
unfortunately, i accidentally installed the WGA update one day. and so every time the system starts, and seemingly every 15 minutes after that, i get told that my copy of windows isn't "genuine" which causes whatever program was in the foreground to lose-focus and is particularly annoying when you're typing.