What about verifiable paper voting?
Every ballot is printed on 2-sheet carbon paper, with the candidates listed in a random order. The list of candidates is only printed on the top sheet of the carbon paper. Every ballot has a random serial number, which is printed on both sheets of the carbon paper.
The voter marks the box next to his or her chosen candidate. The top sheet of the carbon paper is placed in the ballot box, and the voter keeps the bottom sheet. The bottom sheet shows the serial number and the mark made by the voter, but it doesn't show the candidate's name, so the voter can hold onto the bottom sheet without fear of harassment.
After the election, any voter may present the bottom sheet of his or her ballot and demand to see the matching top sheet. If a significant number of top sheets are missing or do not match the corresponding bottom sheets, the election can be declared invalid.
As a safeguard against ballot stuffing, election observers may publish a list of randomly chosen serial numbers and ask for the bottom sheets to be submitted anonymously by post. If a significant number of bottom sheets are missing or do not match the corresponding top sheets, the election can be declared invalid.
Here's what I don't understand: why would a record company pay for DRM that's already been broken, when they can release their music without DRM for free? They're getting the equivalent of no DRM, but at a higher cost, and with the added risks of pissing off the customer and getting sued by Apple.
If a person lives for 1000 years and their personality continues to evolve, to what extent can the 1000-year-old individual be regarded as "the same person" as, say, the 30-year-old individual? Are you the same person you were 10 years ago, or 20? What would 1000 years of experience, combined with 1000 years of cultural, political and technological change, do to the human personality?
Do you trust the current government and all future governments to agree with your definition of not doing anything wrong? Would you have been happy to live in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany, safe in the knowledge that you were a law-abiding citizen? Would you be happy to move to present-day Cuba, Burma, Turkmentistan or Belarus?
Laws that require corporate employees to behave amorally in order to make a profit are inherently immoral and directly at odds with the purpose of the law, which is to persuade people to behave morally even when they have an incentive to do otherwise.
Laws that place fiduciary duties above social responsibilities must be struck down before we can expect corporations to act as anything better than extremely rich immortal sociopaths.
I don't approve of the US government censoring Hezbollah websites, but you can't claim moral equivalence: how many people has Falun Gong killed? If the US government censored every website discussing or promoting Islam, you might have a point.
Hash functions aren't only used for calculating the checksums of files. For example, what if you want to calculate the rolling hash of an incoming stream of data? In the cases where you know the length of the data I agree it's a good idea to include it, but you don't need to change the hash function: just calculate H(length||data) instead of H(data).
Any non-standard gravitational force that scales with baryonic mass will fail to reproduce these observations.
Here's what I don't understand: why does gravity have to scale linearly with mass? If I understand relativity correctly (which I almost certainly don't, but this is my way of asking for an explanation), an object in a gravitational field behaves like an object under acceleration, and an object under acceleration behaves as if its mass is changing. Is it possible that an object's mass depends on the strength of the gravitational field it's immersed in, leading to a synergistic effect where the mass of two objects is greater when they're close together than when they're far apart? Could this explain why large clusters of matter have higher mass than we would otherwise expect?
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
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Time within the CPU in the server stops every 1/5th of a second for a duration lasting 4/5ths of a second. A 20% quota represents the full calculating capacity of the machine.
I keep trying to explain the same principle to my boss with respect to the time I spend on Slashdot, but I guess he's no astrophysicist.
Freenet uses forward error correction, which guarantees that the original data can be reconstructed given a sufficient number of pieces. Shamir's information dispersal algorithm makes the additional guarantee that nothing can be learned about the original data unless you have enough pieces to reconstruct it.
Why can't something be both a planet and a moon? As far as I understand it, the new IAU definition of a planet is something that's in orbit around a star, is not a star, and is large enough for gravity to make it roughly spherical. A moon is something that's in orbit around a planet. So you could argue that our Moon is already a planet (it's in orbit around the Sun as well as the Earth). The same would apply to many other large moons in the solar system.
Thanks for the information - in that case I guess the only remaining hurdle is the license, and this page seems to say they're looking for an OSI-approved license.
There are already free JVMs and free Java compilers. The problem is the class libraries. Java's standard libraries are huge, and free reimplementations are having a hard time keeping up. Without the libraries, open source versions of javac and the JVM won't bring us significantly closer to the goal of a completely free Java platform.
The ability to flash a cell phone is downright frightening when I think about the sheer number of users I support who aren't capable of selecting the correct printer 30% of the time.
"WARNING: reflashing your phone will make it incompatible with the Crazy Frog ringtone. Are you sure you want to proceed?"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait...
On the contrary, the best time to persuade people to care about this issue is shortly before an election.
What about verifiable paper voting? Every ballot is printed on 2-sheet carbon paper, with the candidates listed in a random order. The list of candidates is only printed on the top sheet of the carbon paper. Every ballot has a random serial number, which is printed on both sheets of the carbon paper. The voter marks the box next to his or her chosen candidate. The top sheet of the carbon paper is placed in the ballot box, and the voter keeps the bottom sheet. The bottom sheet shows the serial number and the mark made by the voter, but it doesn't show the candidate's name, so the voter can hold onto the bottom sheet without fear of harassment. After the election, any voter may present the bottom sheet of his or her ballot and demand to see the matching top sheet. If a significant number of top sheets are missing or do not match the corresponding bottom sheets, the election can be declared invalid. As a safeguard against ballot stuffing, election observers may publish a list of randomly chosen serial numbers and ask for the bottom sheets to be submitted anonymously by post. If a significant number of bottom sheets are missing or do not match the corresponding top sheets, the election can be declared invalid.
Here's what I don't understand: why would a record company pay for DRM that's already been broken, when they can release their music without DRM for free? They're getting the equivalent of no DRM, but at a higher cost, and with the added risks of pissing off the customer and getting sued by Apple.
Actually it's only one line - but it's a line of Perl.
In the UK, interfering with any electronic system for political purposes is defined as terrorism. The same definition of terrorism is used in a more recent law that criminalises speech that glorifies terrorism.
Of course, that says more about the abuse of the word "terrorism" than it does about the morality of withholding exploits.
Toxteth O'Grady?
I haven't, thanks for the pointer.
If a person lives for 1000 years and their personality continues to evolve, to what extent can the 1000-year-old individual be regarded as "the same person" as, say, the 30-year-old individual? Are you the same person you were 10 years ago, or 20? What would 1000 years of experience, combined with 1000 years of cultural, political and technological change, do to the human personality?
Er, I have a CD burner sitting on my desk. Where's your nearest vinyl press?
((((((((comment this) below) jokes) programming) functional) all) place) please)
Laws that require corporate employees to behave amorally in order to make a profit are inherently immoral and directly at odds with the purpose of the law, which is to persuade people to behave morally even when they have an incentive to do otherwise. Laws that place fiduciary duties above social responsibilities must be struck down before we can expect corporations to act as anything better than extremely rich immortal sociopaths.
I don't approve of the US government censoring Hezbollah websites, but you can't claim moral equivalence: how many people has Falun Gong killed? If the US government censored every website discussing or promoting Islam, you might have a point.
Hash functions aren't only used for calculating the checksums of files. For example, what if you want to calculate the rolling hash of an incoming stream of data? In the cases where you know the length of the data I agree it's a good idea to include it, but you don't need to change the hash function: just calculate H(length||data) instead of H(data).
Oops, need to update my literature review in that case. Thanks!
Freenet uses forward error correction, which guarantees that the original data can be reconstructed given a sufficient number of pieces. Shamir's information dispersal algorithm makes the additional guarantee that nothing can be learned about the original data unless you have enough pieces to reconstruct it.
It's 3am - do you know where your finger is?
Why can't something be both a planet and a moon? As far as I understand it, the new IAU definition of a planet is something that's in orbit around a star, is not a star, and is large enough for gravity to make it roughly spherical. A moon is something that's in orbit around a planet. So you could argue that our Moon is already a planet (it's in orbit around the Sun as well as the Earth). The same would apply to many other large moons in the solar system.
Thanks for the information - in that case I guess the only remaining hurdle is the license, and this page seems to say they're looking for an OSI-approved license.
There are already free JVMs and free Java compilers. The problem is the class libraries. Java's standard libraries are huge, and free reimplementations are having a hard time keeping up. Without the libraries, open source versions of javac and the JVM won't bring us significantly closer to the goal of a completely free Java platform.
"WARNING: reflashing your phone will make it incompatible with the Crazy Frog ringtone. Are you sure you want to proceed?"
Problem solved.