They can also do stuff like: RETURN PERSON ID where party != party in control of government AND buys anti-Administration magazines AND owns a gun AND actively participates in political protests.
Why do pro-government apologists always sound like they're about to piss their pants in fear of terrorists? Who is more likely to destroy your life, a terrorist or the government?
IMHO, the number of patents that are valid at any given moment should be limited to a fairly small number (rather than the free-for-all we've got today). New patent "slots" would open up as existing patents either expired or were overturned due to prior art or obviousness.
Not only would it be much easier to search the patent database to find out if you were infringing, but if you made the granting of the patents occur through some kind of process where the merits of the patent applications were made to compete against each other (like an auction), then you'd have a way of weeding out bad patents upfront without having to depend on having a large # of competent patent examiners.
It's only a "legitimate" concern because people are panicking, which makes it easier for them to manipulate. From a what-are-the-real-odds? viewpoint, people aren't in very much danger from terrorists at all (unless you're living in Iraq).
I'm not sure what you mean about science keeping its proper place. Scientists essentially try and create models (usually mathematical) that can explain the observed behavior of reality. What kind of place are you thinking of where this is not the proper behavior of "science"?
Just another example of "managers" believing form-over-function then.
Most of the people I've worked with in the past didn't give a damn whether you had signed up with some hoity-toity service company: if you couldn't fulfill your contractual obligations, they were going to come after YOU, not the service company.
In a situation like that, blaming the service company isn't going to fly.
Too bad your are conveniently forgetting that REAL corporate customers want someone to sue when things go wrong.
That always makes me laugh. I've heard it repeated so many times, yet I don't think I've heard of a single high-profile case where a software-provider has been sued successfully for providing a defective product.
You are extrapolating wildly from a generalized concept (we shouldn't mess with stuff we don't know much about because we'll screw ourselves over?) to a specific problem (how will mass removed from the Moon's surface affect its orbit?).
As far as the first problem is concerned, the obvious answer for any given subject is that we need to study the subject enough so that we DO know enough about it. There has to be a point where you say, "Okay, I understand this subject enough" and go ahead and start using the fruits of that knowledge, otherwise you'll end up doing nothing but a neverending series of ineffectual studies, wasting resources and with absolutely no benefit for anyone else.
As far as the second problem is concerned, calculating the orbital mechanics of celestial bodies _is_ one of those things that science does quite well, especially for a neighbor as close, as observable, and as massive as the Moon. Even using simplified high school physics does a pretty good job of estimating how much mass removal it would take to affect the Moon's orbit to any observable degree (WAY beyond the technological abilities of humans for the foreseeable future), which leads me back to my snark about the state of your knowledge of high school physics.
I believe Ron Paul would leave the funding of (or lack thereof) public services like police protection up to the states. He's more of an uber-strict Constitutional Constructionist rather than a batshiat-crazy libertarian.
To be more precise, corn is one not-very-efficient choice of many possible biosources for ethanol. It's just a highly subsidized one.
Bio-diesel makes good sense if you already generate bio waste that you're paying to dispose of, but simply doesn't scale.
I don't think that's exactly true (especially if you're talking about something like algae farming), but even if it were - have you looked up exactly how much biowaste our society generates?
Cars will move off of oil when someone figures out a better energy storage device than anyone has yet.
Again, to be precise, cars will move off oil when the cost of oil has become so high that the alternatives are cost-effective by comparison (and the pain of transition is less than the pain of paying for the remaining oil).
A really good energy storage device would just be one of the catalysts to convince people to make the transition.
The University doesn't "need" to do anything that the law doesn't require them to do. It's not their problem if there's no way for the RIAA to enforce its business model.
I did actually mention counting machines in my post, with the assumption that they were using OCR to read the same ballot results that the human used to verify that their ballot was correct, plus the ballot design & fonts were designed to be easily OCRed with high accuracy.
As I mentioned, however, the only reason for using a machine to do the counting is speed. As long as you're using a "black box" for counting, it becomes very, very difficult to be sure that the votes are being counted the way you intended them to be counted.
There are time-tested & well-understand procedures for handcounting paper ballots, which have many safeguards against the corruption of individual counters & officials. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the voting machine-makers either studied or cared about the motivation behind these procedures.) We should keep using those procedures unless we have an absolutely compelling reason otherwise, and speed is NOT one of those compelling reasons.
You don't want a ballot that has a separated human and machine-readable codes. The counting machines (if you use them) should be capable of reading the same part of the ballot that the human reads, and vice versa, so there's as little ambiguity as possible between what the machines are looking at, and what the humans are looking at.
Of course, if the essential information is human readable, then you don't need machines to do any counting either - all of the old, time-tested procedures for vote-counting paper ballots can be used, except you'll have nice clean machine-generated ballots to read from.
The main advantages of using voting machines is that they can be used to print out a nice, clean ballot which can be easily counted (no misaligned filling-out of ovals or odd marks, don't worry about #2 pencils or color of pens, no hanging chads, the ballot contains only the selected choices so no "they really meant this choice!" type of counting, etc).
They're also good at providing alternative interfaces for the disabled (sound or braille) while still printing out a nice, clean ballot.
The only reason for COUNTING machines is for speed though, and since there's no easy way to make sure the counting machines haven't been compromised, we shouldn't depend on them at ALL except maybe for "preliminary results". For the final official result, we should still stick to the hand counting votes (especially if we have nice, clean, easily-readable ballots).
Why do you need to print a voting receipt then? If the voter isn't going to take anything with them (not a good idea anyway), and they're going to leave something behind, then the ballot is the voting "receipt".
The only valid reason for checking peoples' IDs at the voting place is try and make sure that each person is eligible to vote, and gets one and only one ballot. Beyond that, there is no reason to keep track of any voter's ID.
Well, that would probably be the bits in the early Constitution where only white male landowners (assumed to be better decision-makers than the general public) were allowed to be voting citizens. It took quite a long time, and quite a bit of blood and tears, before people outside of that "elite" were allowed to vote.
Even now we don't allow children to vote, since we assume that they aren't mature enough to make good decisions about the fate of the country, and we don't allow recent immigrants to vote, since we assume that they don't have a deep enough commitment to the country to make decisions based on the country's longterm health.
You know, there's nothing magical about democracy as far as good decision-making is concerned.
If a majority of decision makers in ANY government system (e.g., the dictator in a dictatorship, or the voters in a democracy) are either unwilling or incapable of making their decisions based on the overall good of the society, then there's a high probability that society is going to get screwed.
To make good decisions, a decision maker needs to:
#1 have good information,
#2 possess the ability to analyze that information in a rational manner, and
#3 discuss their conclusions with other good decision makers to be able to double-check their analysis.
Voters who don't think rationally can't do #2.
Those who are ignorant don't have #1.
Those who are dogmatic deny #1, don't bother doing #2, and refuse to do #3.
If there were a "perfect" way of deciding voter eligibility, none of these types of people would be allowed to vote, since they do not add any value to the decision-making process.
Since there is no way to trust a voter-eligibility process, we allow EVERYONE to vote and hope that either the rational, informed voters either outnumber the ignorant fools, or the ignorant fools are following a rational, informed decision-maker.
Once your society reaches a critical mass of stupidity/ignorance in its voting population, however, you're going to get increasingly irrational and/or based-on-demagoguery results, which will inevitably degrade the health of the society.
Of course, in this case they aren't merely throttling connections - they're spoofing RST packets to cause both parties to think the connection has been dropped.
According to Reg tipster Rob, Window Server Update Services forced Windows Desktop Services 3.01 on the fleet of machines even though admins had configured their system to install updates only for existing programs and the search program wasn't installed on any machines (well, until then, anyway).
It's already that way: business class, or residential.
The main difference right now, of course, is that business tends to get a little better service because the ISP wants to keep their business, rather than the scenario where the ISP will deliberately degrade the residential service to try and force people to go to business class.
These kinds of tactics work only because there is not enough competition in the markets to give people another choice if their providers are pulling this kind of crap on them.
P2P clients have implemented non-standard (and random) service ports for a LONG time, plus the type of encryption that can be used is independent of the type of connection that is being used.
ISPs will have to do traffic analysis (watching the pattern of encrypted data being sent) to figure out whether an encrypted connection fits the profile for a P2P link, and if they screw up & put the brakes on the legit traffic (like VoIP or videoconferencing), they're going to piss off their customers even more than they already are.
Ideally, they could just limit a customer's overall bandwidth to what that customer was willing to pay for, but since they're being greedy & want to sell more bandwidth than they've built their infrastructure for, I don't have much empathy for them.
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They can also do stuff like: RETURN PERSON ID where party != party in control of government AND buys anti-Administration magazines AND owns a gun AND actively participates in political protests.
Why do pro-government apologists always sound like they're about to piss their pants in fear of terrorists? Who is more likely to destroy your life, a terrorist or the government?
IMHO, the number of patents that are valid at any given moment should be limited to a fairly small number (rather than the free-for-all we've got today). New patent "slots" would open up as existing patents either expired or were overturned due to prior art or obviousness.
Not only would it be much easier to search the patent database to find out if you were infringing, but if you made the granting of the patents occur through some kind of process where the merits of the patent applications were made to compete against each other (like an auction), then you'd have a way of weeding out bad patents upfront without having to depend on having a large # of competent patent examiners.
Which is a good reason for physical penetration testing: to throw management's assumptions in their face.
It's only a "legitimate" concern because people are panicking, which makes it easier for them to manipulate. From a what-are-the-real-odds? viewpoint, people aren't in very much danger from terrorists at all (unless you're living in Iraq).
No he's not.
I'm not sure what you mean about science keeping its proper place. Scientists essentially try and create models (usually mathematical) that can explain the observed behavior of reality. What kind of place are you thinking of where this is not the proper behavior of "science"?
Just another example of "managers" believing form-over-function then.
Most of the people I've worked with in the past didn't give a damn whether you had signed up with some hoity-toity service company: if you couldn't fulfill your contractual obligations, they were going to come after YOU, not the service company.
In a situation like that, blaming the service company isn't going to fly.
That always makes me laugh. I've heard it repeated so many times, yet I don't think I've heard of a single high-profile case where a software-provider has been sued successfully for providing a defective product.
whitehouse.gov ought to have the disclaimer:
This site is neither affiliated nor endorsed by the US Public
You are extrapolating wildly from a generalized concept (we shouldn't mess with stuff we don't know much about because we'll screw ourselves over?) to a specific problem (how will mass removed from the Moon's surface affect its orbit?).
As far as the first problem is concerned, the obvious answer for any given subject is that we need to study the subject enough so that we DO know enough about it. There has to be a point where you say, "Okay, I understand this subject enough" and go ahead and start using the fruits of that knowledge, otherwise you'll end up doing nothing but a neverending series of ineffectual studies, wasting resources and with absolutely no benefit for anyone else.
As far as the second problem is concerned, calculating the orbital mechanics of celestial bodies _is_ one of those things that science does quite well, especially for a neighbor as close, as observable, and as massive as the Moon. Even using simplified high school physics does a pretty good job of estimating how much mass removal it would take to affect the Moon's orbit to any observable degree (WAY beyond the technological abilities of humans for the foreseeable future), which leads me back to my snark about the state of your knowledge of high school physics.
You have revealed a great deal of information about the state of your knowledge of basic high school physics in your post.
I believe Ron Paul would leave the funding of (or lack thereof) public services like police protection up to the states. He's more of an uber-strict Constitutional Constructionist rather than a batshiat-crazy libertarian.
To be more precise, corn is one not-very-efficient choice of many possible biosources for ethanol. It's just a highly subsidized one.
I don't think that's exactly true (especially if you're talking about something like algae farming), but even if it were - have you looked up exactly how much biowaste our society generates?
Again, to be precise, cars will move off oil when the cost of oil has become so high that the alternatives are cost-effective by comparison (and the pain of transition is less than the pain of paying for the remaining oil).
A really good energy storage device would just be one of the catalysts to convince people to make the transition.
The University doesn't "need" to do anything that the law doesn't require them to do. It's not their problem if there's no way for the RIAA to enforce its business model.
I did actually mention counting machines in my post, with the assumption that they were using OCR to read the same ballot results that the human used to verify that their ballot was correct, plus the ballot design & fonts were designed to be easily OCRed with high accuracy.
As I mentioned, however, the only reason for using a machine to do the counting is speed. As long as you're using a "black box" for counting, it becomes very, very difficult to be sure that the votes are being counted the way you intended them to be counted.
There are time-tested & well-understand procedures for handcounting paper ballots, which have many safeguards against the corruption of individual counters & officials. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the voting machine-makers either studied or cared about the motivation behind these procedures.) We should keep using those procedures unless we have an absolutely compelling reason otherwise, and speed is NOT one of those compelling reasons.
You don't want a ballot that has a separated human and machine-readable codes. The counting machines (if you use them) should be capable of reading the same part of the ballot that the human reads, and vice versa, so there's as little ambiguity as possible between what the machines are looking at, and what the humans are looking at.
Of course, if the essential information is human readable, then you don't need machines to do any counting either - all of the old, time-tested procedures for vote-counting paper ballots can be used, except you'll have nice clean machine-generated ballots to read from.
The main advantages of using voting machines is that they can be used to print out a nice, clean ballot which can be easily counted (no misaligned filling-out of ovals or odd marks, don't worry about #2 pencils or color of pens, no hanging chads, the ballot contains only the selected choices so no "they really meant this choice!" type of counting, etc).
They're also good at providing alternative interfaces for the disabled (sound or braille) while still printing out a nice, clean ballot.
The only reason for COUNTING machines is for speed though, and since there's no easy way to make sure the counting machines haven't been compromised, we shouldn't depend on them at ALL except maybe for "preliminary results". For the final official result, we should still stick to the hand counting votes (especially if we have nice, clean, easily-readable ballots).
Why do you need to print a voting receipt then? If the voter isn't going to take anything with them (not a good idea anyway), and they're going to leave something behind, then the ballot is the voting "receipt".
The only valid reason for checking peoples' IDs at the voting place is try and make sure that each person is eligible to vote, and gets one and only one ballot. Beyond that, there is no reason to keep track of any voter's ID.
So you agree that there is at least one criteria where we (as a society) have decided that a certain group of citizens are not fit to vote?
Well, that would probably be the bits in the early Constitution where only white male landowners (assumed to be better decision-makers than the general public) were allowed to be voting citizens. It took quite a long time, and quite a bit of blood and tears, before people outside of that "elite" were allowed to vote.
Even now we don't allow children to vote, since we assume that they aren't mature enough to make good decisions about the fate of the country, and we don't allow recent immigrants to vote, since we assume that they don't have a deep enough commitment to the country to make decisions based on the country's longterm health.
You know, there's nothing magical about democracy as far as good decision-making is concerned.
If a majority of decision makers in ANY government system (e.g., the dictator in a dictatorship, or the voters in a democracy) are either unwilling or incapable of making their decisions based on the overall good of the society, then there's a high probability that society is going to get screwed.
To make good decisions, a decision maker needs to:
#1 have good information,
#2 possess the ability to analyze that information in a rational manner, and
#3 discuss their conclusions with other good decision makers to be able to double-check their analysis.
Voters who don't think rationally can't do #2.
Those who are ignorant don't have #1.
Those who are dogmatic deny #1, don't bother doing #2, and refuse to do #3.
If there were a "perfect" way of deciding voter eligibility, none of these types of people would be allowed to vote, since they do not add any value to the decision-making process.
Since there is no way to trust a voter-eligibility process, we allow EVERYONE to vote and hope that either the rational, informed voters either outnumber the ignorant fools, or the ignorant fools are following a rational, informed decision-maker.
Once your society reaches a critical mass of stupidity/ignorance in its voting population, however, you're going to get increasingly irrational and/or based-on-demagoguery results, which will inevitably degrade the health of the society.
Of course, in this case they aren't merely throttling connections - they're spoofing RST packets to cause both parties to think the connection has been dropped.
Apparently you didn't RTFA.
It's already that way: business class, or residential.
The main difference right now, of course, is that business tends to get a little better service because the ISP wants to keep their business, rather than the scenario where the ISP will deliberately degrade the residential service to try and force people to go to business class.
These kinds of tactics work only because there is not enough competition in the markets to give people another choice if their providers are pulling this kind of crap on them.
P2P clients have implemented non-standard (and random) service ports for a LONG time, plus the type of encryption that can be used is independent of the type of connection that is being used.
ISPs will have to do traffic analysis (watching the pattern of encrypted data being sent) to figure out whether an encrypted connection fits the profile for a P2P link, and if they screw up & put the brakes on the legit traffic (like VoIP or videoconferencing), they're going to piss off their customers even more than they already are.
Ideally, they could just limit a customer's overall bandwidth to what that customer was willing to pay for, but since they're being greedy & want to sell more bandwidth than they've built their infrastructure for, I don't have much empathy for them.