Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
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eBay The Vote
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If the Fair Tax passes, there will be no tax deductions. Have kids? Too damn bad. Wave bye-bye to the mortgage interest deduction. No more retirement savings advantages.
I'm no pro-fair tax person, but why should I be punished for willfully not having kids and renting an apartment? Was it because people who owned homes and have kids complained more to get those breaks? Seems to be me that people who don't have kids and never will should get tax breaks due to the fact they'll never cause a single dollar to be used by the Department of Education.
Personally, I like the DS because of its plethora of 2d games. Mostly this is because of a hardware limitation but I think 2d games still have its place. I really miss hand drawn games like Monkey Island as well.
I haven't ever been a victim of identify theft, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day I would even though I guard all my personal information like a rabid pit pull and shred all my mail.
The simple fact that most credit companies only need a birthday and a social security number is what drives me mad, because I'm asked by everyone for both in casual situations.
I bought a new cell phone the other day and it required me giving my Social over to the sales person even though I already had an account with them. She even wrote it down on a scrap piece of paper when she was calling the order it to remember it. I had to ask her at the end of the transaction to have the piece of paper back. I don't think she was stealing but rather it was careless behavior and if someone else grabbed that paper I would have been up the creek.
The whole system needs a password system that is only known by the person themselves and no one else. With a SS number its all over the place and its not too hard to get with enough effort.
My usual reaction to identity theft laws is "Aren't existing fraud laws sufficient?"
No. But its not the identity thieves the laws should target (because its hard to track them down) but the credit companies and the companies that accept fraudulent credit.
Simply letting someone ruin another persons life with a birthday and a social security number is a horrid method for identification. It really needs to stop and there should be recourse for identity theft victims to go after credit companies who allowed such a transaction to happen.
Of course these credit companies are the ones trying to make a buck by offering "protection" services when they are the ones who let these transactions happen with little background checking.
FTFA: The plan is to release it in February, and the suggestion is that apps will need to be digitally signed (not unlike digital signing in Leopard).
Is this akin to trusted computing? This is the first I heard Leopard having such a thing. So if you are a 3rd party developer you will have to contact apple or Verisign every time you want to release your app? Or is this just poormans DRM?
It has it's place and I'm happy with that but I don't want to hear it non stop, it demeans the person talking like that.
Maybe I listed to too many explicit lyrics or watched too many R rated movies, but when someone curses (but not at me) it doesn't bother me because the words themselves have no impact on me. I might be desensitized though.
When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can't run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn't fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.... As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence. -General George Smith Patton, Jr.
I don't see a problem with a tax for internet access.
I dunno. I see a problem with all taxes until we have a balance budget again by decreasing government spending.
Of course this might involve ending a war that costs $400 billion dollars a year.
I pay a little over 1/4 of my income now for state, city, and federal taxes as it is so even though it wouldn't kill me to pay a few more dollars a month for internet taxes, it is salt in the wounds for a government that has no control over its spending habits.
It's like being robbed in your home when you're out. It doesn't matter if you have an alarm system or not, if someone wants property of yours, they will get it. You can double lock your doors, put bars on the windows, pay for a monitoring service, or whatever, it will not stop a determined person from getting whatever they want to get.
But in this instance it is like having someone in your house at all times who is allowed to go through your stuff at any given time for any particular reason. They aren't supposed to steal anything or do anything illegal to your home, but the thought of having them there and having that ability is what annoys me.
As they say... Locks are there to keep honest people honest. When you don't have any at all or have someone on the inside who you can implicitly trust is when things get hairy.
Getting people to use encryption is always a tough sell, because most people, to be perfectly frank, lead lives that are so completely boring that nobody would ever want to read their mail, and they know it
Just because you think its boring doesn't mean the powers that be don't. (Your employer, random stalker, marketing company, and of course the government)
Its usually the mundane stuff that they could use against you ambiguously. Everyone breaks the law one way or another due to the nature of our complex legal system. This could be anything from something as mundane as describing the time frame frame of picking your kids up at school and then describing the time it took you to get home or to the grocery store and if someone pulled out Google maps and took your email literally you would have have to have been speeding and therefore breaking the law even if you gave the wrong times in your email (you weren't actually looking at the clock after all).
Now I really doubt anyone would go that far to get you, but the whole point of privacy is that it prevents everyday information from being used against you if a scenario like that every happened.
Its not about "If you have something to hide you have nothing to fear" but rather "If you haven't hidden anything than you should be afraid". Imagine if your employer wanted to fire you and then subpoena Comcast for any evidence they could get rid of you and got a hold of your VoiP record of casually bitching to your wife about how bad your job sucks and how you hated them.
Yeah... It was mundane to your, but not your employer.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -Cardinal Richelieu
Why? Is defending a MS operating system for honest reasons impossible to believe anymore?
Why should someone defend any operating system for that matter?
I mean, no one at Microsoft has your personal well being in mind when the made the software. They made it to turn a profit. Same goes for Apple and I suppose Red Hat too. I don't see whey anyone should defend any corporation when the corporation shouldn't be deserving free positive publicity.
Unless you start slipping in dollars bills in my mail box I don't really see the need to defend a product other than, well this is why I use it or don't use it.
Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with Vista other than the fact that there is no need for it in my life. You are free to buy it, but I don't think it will do you any better than WinXP other than games that require Vista (and that is rather dubious).
Otherwise to defend a corporation's product who doesn't give a damn about you is silly which is why I could see that some people could automatically see anyone defending a product as astroturfers or shills.
A chess grandmaster would easily beat the whole of/. if we were voting for our moves. In fact the only way to make "we" smart enough to win such a game would be to have another grandmaster vetoing the choices.
Chess is an example of linear application. You can only make one choice at a time. Its easy to scale to one person or computer.
This is why a computer can beat Gary and a group of humans can't. Now if the task is parallel then many persons can help.
Take your old animation houses for Disney. It doesn't help them that they have the next Leonardo Da Vinci on staff if he can only draw 100 frames of animation per hour. They need a team of 100 persons working independently to create their feature film in a reasonable amount of time.
I suppose the same could apply to writing novels or any task that can have multiple tasks completed at the same time.
have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them
I've still had HDDs fail with adequate cooling, but you're right. On average its usually the laptops that go belly up. In the best scenario a product should be designed with the worst case scenario in mind which is why SSD sounds so promising since it is less volatile especially in laptops.
You've got to be kidding, that's going to end the energy crisis? Scale it up about 10,000x, maybe.
Of course not. It was never intended for consumer use. It was a way for the military to beam power to any remote location on the earth so their its units in the field could get electricity without hauling around gas and generators.
Unofficially, I suppose it could be used to beam down 10MW of microwaves on someone they don't like. I don't know if that would kill someone but might make the area rather uncomfortable to be in.
When it can sync with exchange servers without having to use webdav I think it will be a contender
Like Microsoft Entourage? Oh wait...
(Yeah, to be fair, Entourage 2008 will have supposedly native MAPI exchange support and not webdav, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm just point out that "offical" Microsft "Exchange" application Engourage 2004 on the Mac only has webdav support unlike its brother Outlook 2003)
Put another way, anonymity and secrecy can be used for good - anyone living in an oppressive country can attest to that.
Yeah. Anonymity sucks when it comes to spam and trolls. But when you are being beat and/or shot for things you said by the powers that be, you're going to be missing it badly. All one has to do is turn on the TV and see why we must have the ability to publish anonymously at all times.
Remember, then they have come for everyone who has already spoken out publicly, the only people left to speak out will be those who can speak autonomously.
I think I could almost here someone say "If you believe in your cause strong enough, why aren't you brave enough to speak out with your name attached to it?".
Well, its going to be a moot point if you are dead and can no longer keep speaking.
If you don't like something vote with your wallet.
They are voting with their wallet. They are using it to vote via their lawyer.
But seriously... So you are saying that your worth and rights as a human being are determined by how much money you have?
I mean... I could vote with my wallet but it won't change anything other than I'll be sitting at home a lot without electricity, books, electronics, food, gas in the car, or even clothes that aren't falling apart.
I suppose in the end, if I really wanted to vote with my wallet I could become a Buddhist monk and reject all worldly possessions (hey its not a bad idea) because the majority of economics is slowly becoming monopolistic. I can't choose my electric company, my local phone company, my local ISP, my only 5 cell phone providers who are all priced the same and give the same customer service. Wal Mart and Target are basically the same and they are driving all the mom and pops out of business who even if I voted with my wallet still would go out of bussiness.
Hell... When buying video games and comics, I go to the local stores. I don't know if it really helps, but its more of a "take that corporate America!" rather than doing any real difference. So no... Voting with your wallet doesn't work (unless you have a wallet that has millions in it), but paying lawyers and creating large fuss on the internet does.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but its just the way things are.
You can chastise people for using lawyers to get their way, but thats not going to do any good. You'd have to pay your own lawyer to fight the system in order for them to stop doing such things. Again... That's still technically voting with your wallet.
Would you have sex with a robot if it were nearly lifelike?
Considering the mild success of the Real Doll company, I'd say the potential is there. Besides it wouldn't take much. Most humans have fondness for inanimate objects as it is (their car, boat, power tools, computer) and it wouldn't take much for them to have a sort of fondness for their android love doll.
Using an exhaustive method is silly in a realm of 10^60 possibilities.
If it can be done at a reasonable time, exhaustive methods are actually hard to beat if they are done completely.
Keep in mind even though no human nor average computer today could come up with all the possible plays of Go in a reasonable amount of time, doesn't mean that it will be possible or isn't already possible given the appropriate hardware.
The thing is... If you know all possible moves in the game, you will know "the next best move" and play that. It doesn't matter if the opponent plays the next best move or an irrational move, the AI already knows the highest probability of which move will net a win.
The burden is left on the human to come up with a move that does not cause him to loose via a mistake. As I've said in other posts, playing irrationally in a limited set game in which you do not know for sure (playing with your gut) that if its a 50/50 next best move than that will eventually put you at a disadvantage when your gut is wrong. You might win, but over the long haul you will eventually loose. Seeing that an AI cannot be goaded, taunted, or pressured emotionally, the usefulness of playing an irrational move to throw it off its strategy won't work.
That said, playing against a brute force opponent is rather dull. It already knows knows all the moves, and you know over the course of time it will beat you most of the time.
However, in real world situations a brute force logical opponent is impossible with current processing power and infinite real world situations outside the realm of board games. And personally... I'd rather have an AI that seems like it has a personality to make things interesting. I mean that is the whole point of playing a game like poker, chess, or go would be the ability to have some level of empathy rather than brute force methods that always win.
I mean... If you lost all the time to computers, what would be the fun of playing the game? And if it felt like the computer was just letting you win, then it wouldn't be truly fun either.
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If the Fair Tax passes, there will be no tax deductions. Have kids? Too damn bad. Wave bye-bye to the mortgage interest deduction. No more retirement savings advantages.
I'm no pro-fair tax person, but why should I be punished for willfully not having kids and renting an apartment? Was it because people who owned homes and have kids complained more to get those breaks? Seems to be me that people who don't have kids and never will should get tax breaks due to the fact they'll never cause a single dollar to be used by the Department of Education.
Didn't see that one coming.
I'm sure the computer did.
Personally, I like the DS because of its plethora of 2d games. Mostly this is because of a hardware limitation but I think 2d games still have its place. I really miss hand drawn games like Monkey Island as well.
Whose fault was it that my identity was stolen?
I haven't ever been a victim of identify theft, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day I would even though I guard all my personal information like a rabid pit pull and shred all my mail.
The simple fact that most credit companies only need a birthday and a social security number is what drives me mad, because I'm asked by everyone for both in casual situations.
I bought a new cell phone the other day and it required me giving my Social over to the sales person even though I already had an account with them. She even wrote it down on a scrap piece of paper when she was calling the order it to remember it. I had to ask her at the end of the transaction to have the piece of paper back. I don't think she was stealing but rather it was careless behavior and if someone else grabbed that paper I would have been up the creek.
The whole system needs a password system that is only known by the person themselves and no one else. With a SS number its all over the place and its not too hard to get with enough effort.
My usual reaction to identity theft laws is "Aren't existing fraud laws sufficient?"
No. But its not the identity thieves the laws should target (because its hard to track them down) but the credit companies and the companies that accept fraudulent credit.
Simply letting someone ruin another persons life with a birthday and a social security number is a horrid method for identification. It really needs to stop and there should be recourse for identity theft victims to go after credit companies who allowed such a transaction to happen.
Of course these credit companies are the ones trying to make a buck by offering "protection" services when they are the ones who let these transactions happen with little background checking.
FTFA: The plan is to release it in February, and the suggestion is that apps will need to be digitally signed (not unlike digital signing in Leopard).
Is this akin to trusted computing? This is the first I heard Leopard having such a thing. So if you are a 3rd party developer you will have to contact apple or Verisign every time you want to release your app? Or is this just poormans DRM?
It has it's place and I'm happy with that but I don't want to hear it non stop, it demeans the person talking like that.
Maybe I listed to too many explicit lyrics or watched too many R rated movies, but when someone curses (but not at me) it doesn't bother me because the words themselves have no impact on me. I might be desensitized though.
I don't see a problem with a tax for internet access.
I dunno. I see a problem with all taxes until we have a balance budget again by decreasing government spending.
Of course this might involve ending a war that costs $400 billion dollars a year.
I pay a little over 1/4 of my income now for state, city, and federal taxes as it is so even though it wouldn't kill me to pay a few more dollars a month for internet taxes, it is salt in the wounds for a government that has no control over its spending habits.
Welcome back to the Fuedal ages everyone! CEO's and boards are the land owners, lawyers are the knights. Get back to work you serfs.
Hey now! Don't dis medieval fuedalism. Those serfs got more time off for religious holidays and farming downtime than we do today at our jobs.
Oh wait... That just means the wage-slave is less free than the serf.
It's like being robbed in your home when you're out. It doesn't matter if you have an alarm system or not, if someone wants property of yours, they will get it.
You can double lock your doors, put bars on the windows, pay for a monitoring service, or whatever, it will not stop a determined person from getting whatever they want to get.
But in this instance it is like having someone in your house at all times who is allowed to go through your stuff at any given time for any particular reason. They aren't supposed to steal anything or do anything illegal to your home, but the thought of having them there and having that ability is what annoys me.
As they say... Locks are there to keep honest people honest. When you don't have any at all or have someone on the inside who you can implicitly trust is when things get hairy.
Getting people to use encryption is always a tough sell, because most people, to be perfectly frank, lead lives that are so completely boring that nobody would ever want to read their mail, and they know it
Just because you think its boring doesn't mean the powers that be don't. (Your employer, random stalker, marketing company, and of course the government)
Its usually the mundane stuff that they could use against you ambiguously. Everyone breaks the law one way or another due to the nature of our complex legal system. This could be anything from something as mundane as describing the time frame frame of picking your kids up at school and then describing the time it took you to get home or to the grocery store and if someone pulled out Google maps and took your email literally you would have have to have been speeding and therefore breaking the law even if you gave the wrong times in your email (you weren't actually looking at the clock after all).
Now I really doubt anyone would go that far to get you, but the whole point of privacy is that it prevents everyday information from being used against you if a scenario like that every happened.
Its not about "If you have something to hide you have nothing to fear" but rather "If you haven't hidden anything than you should be afraid". Imagine if your employer wanted to fire you and then subpoena Comcast for any evidence they could get rid of you and got a hold of your VoiP record of casually bitching to your wife about how bad your job sucks and how you hated them.
Yeah... It was mundane to your, but not your employer.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." -Cardinal Richelieu
Why? Is defending a MS operating system for honest reasons impossible to believe anymore?
Why should someone defend any operating system for that matter?
I mean, no one at Microsoft has your personal well being in mind when the made the software. They made it to turn a profit. Same goes for Apple and I suppose Red Hat too. I don't see whey anyone should defend any corporation when the corporation shouldn't be deserving free positive publicity.
Unless you start slipping in dollars bills in my mail box I don't really see the need to defend a product other than, well this is why I use it or don't use it.
Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with Vista other than the fact that there is no need for it in my life. You are free to buy it, but I don't think it will do you any better than WinXP other than games that require Vista (and that is rather dubious).
Otherwise to defend a corporation's product who doesn't give a damn about you is silly which is why I could see that some people could automatically see anyone defending a product as astroturfers or shills.
A chess grandmaster would easily beat the whole of /. if we were voting for our moves. In fact the only way to make "we" smart enough to win such a game would be to have another grandmaster vetoing the choices.
Chess is an example of linear application. You can only make one choice at a time. Its easy to scale to one person or computer.
This is why a computer can beat Gary and a group of humans can't. Now if the task is parallel then many persons can help.
Take your old animation houses for Disney. It doesn't help them that they have the next Leonardo Da Vinci on staff if he can only draw 100 frames of animation per hour. They need a team of 100 persons working independently to create their feature film in a reasonable amount of time.
I suppose the same could apply to writing novels or any task that can have multiple tasks completed at the same time.
Even if there was liquid water, how do we know that it is rich enough in oxygen to support life?
Last, I checked plants don't need oxygen but CO2 and they are mostly interested in the Carbon and release the oxygen part as a by product.
However, I wouldn't think photosynthesis would work too well out that far, but as biological history goes... Plants came first and then animals.
have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them
I've still had HDDs fail with adequate cooling, but you're right. On average its usually the laptops that go belly up. In the best scenario a product should be designed with the worst case scenario in mind which is why SSD sounds so promising since it is less volatile especially in laptops.
You've got to be kidding, that's going to end the energy crisis? Scale it up about 10,000x, maybe.
Of course not. It was never intended for consumer use. It was a way for the military to beam power to any remote location on the earth so their its units in the field could get electricity without hauling around gas and generators.
Unofficially, I suppose it could be used to beam down 10MW of microwaves on someone they don't like. I don't know if that would kill someone but might make the area rather uncomfortable to be in.
Yarrr! As long as ye follow the laws of ye Admiralty any salvage by ye shall be yours by right of cutlass!
When it can sync with exchange servers without having to use webdav I think it will be a contender
Like Microsoft Entourage? Oh wait...
(Yeah, to be fair, Entourage 2008 will have supposedly native MAPI exchange support and not webdav, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm just point out that "offical" Microsft "Exchange" application Engourage 2004 on the Mac only has webdav support unlike its brother Outlook 2003)
I'm sorry, but civil disobedience usually involves getting intentionally caught and punished for doing something that should not be wrong
The Boston Tea Party was done anonymously.
Secondly, the The Federalist Papers were released under pseudonyms by the US constitution writers.
Put another way, anonymity and secrecy can be used for good - anyone living in an oppressive country can attest to that.
Yeah. Anonymity sucks when it comes to spam and trolls.
But when you are being beat and/or shot for things you said by the powers that be, you're going to be missing it badly.
All one has to do is turn on the TV and see why we must have the ability to publish anonymously at all times.
Remember, then they have come for everyone who has already spoken out publicly, the only people left to speak out will be those who can speak autonomously.
I think I could almost here someone say "If you believe in your cause strong enough, why aren't you brave enough to speak out with your name attached to it?".
Well, its going to be a moot point if you are dead and can no longer keep speaking.
If you don't like something vote with your wallet.
They are voting with their wallet. They are using it to vote via their lawyer.
But seriously... So you are saying that your worth and rights as a human being are determined by how much money you have?
I mean... I could vote with my wallet but it won't change anything other than I'll be sitting at home a lot without electricity, books, electronics, food, gas in the car, or even clothes that aren't falling apart.
I suppose in the end, if I really wanted to vote with my wallet I could become a Buddhist monk and reject all worldly possessions (hey its not a bad idea) because the majority of economics is slowly becoming monopolistic. I can't choose my electric company, my local phone company, my local ISP, my only 5 cell phone providers who are all priced the same and give the same customer service. Wal Mart and Target are basically the same and they are driving all the mom and pops out of business who even if I voted with my wallet still would go out of bussiness.
Hell... When buying video games and comics, I go to the local stores. I don't know if it really helps, but its more of a "take that corporate America!" rather than doing any real difference. So no... Voting with your wallet doesn't work (unless you have a wallet that has millions in it), but paying lawyers and creating large fuss on the internet does.
I don't like it anymore than you do, but its just the way things are.
You can chastise people for using lawyers to get their way, but thats not going to do any good. You'd have to pay your own lawyer to fight the system in order for them to stop doing such things. Again... That's still technically voting with your wallet.
Would you have sex with a robot if it were nearly lifelike?
Considering the mild success of the Real Doll company, I'd say the potential is there. Besides it wouldn't take much. Most humans have fondness for inanimate objects as it is (their car, boat, power tools, computer) and it wouldn't take much for them to have a sort of fondness for their android love doll.
More likely your program is not popular enough to be worth pirating.
Or its so popular among its niche that no one bothers to seed it since they've all bought it.
Using an exhaustive method is silly in a realm of 10^60 possibilities.
If it can be done at a reasonable time, exhaustive methods are actually hard to beat if they are done completely.
Keep in mind even though no human nor average computer today could come up with all the possible plays of Go in a reasonable amount of time, doesn't mean that it will be possible or isn't already possible given the appropriate hardware.
The thing is... If you know all possible moves in the game, you will know "the next best move" and play that. It doesn't matter if the opponent plays the next best move or an irrational move, the AI already knows the highest probability of which move will net a win.
The burden is left on the human to come up with a move that does not cause him to loose via a mistake. As I've said in other posts, playing irrationally in a limited set game in which you do not know for sure (playing with your gut) that if its a 50/50 next best move than that will eventually put you at a disadvantage when your gut is wrong. You might win, but over the long haul you will eventually loose. Seeing that an AI cannot be goaded, taunted, or pressured emotionally, the usefulness of playing an irrational move to throw it off its strategy won't work.
That said, playing against a brute force opponent is rather dull. It already knows knows all the moves, and you know over the course of time it will beat you most of the time.
However, in real world situations a brute force logical opponent is impossible with current processing power and infinite real world situations outside the realm of board games. And personally... I'd rather have an AI that seems like it has a personality to make things interesting. I mean that is the whole point of playing a game like poker, chess, or go would be the ability to have some level of empathy rather than brute force methods that always win.
I mean... If you lost all the time to computers, what would be the fun of playing the game? And if it felt like the computer was just letting you win, then it wouldn't be truly fun either.