If you want to avoid being monitored by regulating agencies and their agents, don't do things that are regulated. You have no right to avoid such monitoring in the course of applying such regulation.
There are two basic problems to the Internet replacing the phone system.
The first is basic functionality and reliability. Right now people put up with disconnects all the time on data connections. What? That page didn't load? Click it again! To some extent, the software could make up for some failures simply with more and better error handling rather than just dumping it out on the user. But that doesn't solve the problem 100%.
The second is an economic one. Most of the telecommunications that the Internet relies on was bought and paid for because of telephone services. Much of it is still paid for because of telephone services. A lot of people here seem to think that the reason Internet connectivity is cheap is because, well, it is cheap. It isn't - most providers aren't paying for the full load of connectivity they are using and most telecommunications companies aren't charging the same for data vs. voice even over the same link.
Should voice connectivity no longer support telecommunications, we're going to be seeing more realistic costs in data connectivity, especially at the low end. When the POTS system requires copper to every house, putting DSL on that copper is trivial and cheap. When DSL service has to pay for the copper and maintenance of it, the costs are going to be a lot more realistic.
I don't believe anywhere in the world today is experiencing the real costs. This does look like it is going to be changing pretty soon. Whoever inherits the US telecommunications systems, it will be quite a shock to the customers.
The problem with cameras is that if the recording was available to only prosecution and defense, that would be fine. When it is shown publicly, you pretty much flushed the opportunity for an impartial jury down the toliet. Sure it is sensational and therefore everyone is going to watch it.
The problem with camera phones and the like is that you have now put another form of evidence outside the judicial process and in the hands of the public. For better or worse.
If the police report contradicts the recording, as it likely will because the camera isn't getting everything, what does the jury believe? Today, it will be the narrow viewpoint of the camera and what it misses didn't happen.
OK, let's for a moment assume that there is no question that humans (and only humans) are causing global warming. If nothing is done to stop this human-induced climate change, millions of people will die. If all human activity which contributes to global warming ends tomorrow, these millions of people will not die.
Does that about sum it up?
This sounds like the perfect justification for starting a war. If those pesky Americans aren't stopped, the rest of the world will die! So, how come the war has not started? If this is settled, and we know who the enemy is that will be responsible for millions of deaths, we better do something about it, right?
There are so many things wrong with this that I can only barely scratch the surface of the problem. But, just a few things to think about.
Google is an index, not an archive of anything. If the original material goes away, it will be inaccessible. It might not be cached at all, and even if it is, the cache isn't a permanent repository.
Google is a advertising service. All of their revenue comes from presenting advertising to people using their web services. Do we really want to place all of the keys to history and knowledge with an advertising company?
Google is a commercial enterprise with "permanent archival" nowhere in its charter. The moment they find a good business reason to remove information from their system, they do it. Should they at some point decide that indexing "unpopular" pages is not profitable, they will stop. The moment they decide that indexing things which are otherwise indexed by something else is not profitable or beneficial to their business, they will stop.
Doesn't sound like any sort of permanent archive that I would trust.
I see lots of comments about how this person didn't do anything. OK, the RIAA isn't so incredibly stupid as to just pull people's names out of the phone book and sue them. While file sharing and related copyright violation is common, it isn't quite that common.
So, where did they get her name? Could it be that someone was using her computer and/or Internet connection without her knowledge to do these things? Could it be that the ISP in question misidentified the customer for the RIAA, perhaps intentionally?
I seriously doubt this person had a random selection process applied to them. It could be that she is actually the account holder of an Internet connection used for file sharing. It could also be that the ISP made a mistake, intentionally or otherwise, thus leading to the lawsuit. Funny, you never hear about the results of these sorts of problems.
Have it widely read, by equally uninformed people, some of whom think there must be something to this or the Government wouldn't be hiding this important information.
Have said government or government agency spend untold hours trying to get the truth out. Usually this operation fails.
Have equally uninformed Congresscritters cut said agency's funding because obviously they do not know what they are doing.
How much has NASA spent, in PR money and man-hours on trying to debunk the "faked moon landing"? How many Congresscritters believe there must be something to this?
It isn't that criticism is wrong, it is that an important part of criticism called "critical thinking" is absent. At least the thinking part is. While this has existed since the beginning of time with people complaining about the pyramids going to fall over the first time it rained, this sort of nonsense has been made far, far more accessible to the average Joe now. Is the answer censorship? I doubt it. But what if someone wrote a long Wikipedia article about this sort of thing and a devoted group of followers kept any attempt at introducing reason, logic and common sense from being added?
There is this charming piece there, written a long, long time ago, concerning a "researcher" that spent all of his time reading and re-interpreting the writings of other "researchers". There was a statement to the effect that going and looking at original sources was too much trouble and way too difficult. Besides, all the real work had already beend one once, why simply repeat that?
Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.
And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.
Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.
Why is there such a thing as HTML email? We lasted from the 70's until about 1994 with just text.
The whole concept of web plug-ins is based on installing software on demand. If you don't have the Flash player on your computer and you go to a flash web site you can get the Flash player just by clicking on something.
Believe it or not, businesses do use "active content" (macros and such) to do stuff, even in Outlook. This was probably a mistake, but it is unlikely that they are going to go backwards.
The problem isn't "Windows is insecure", the problem is that people are given a general-purpose computing instrument and they want a web & email appliance.
If you change their computer into a web & email appliance and prevent programs from being run that are not specifically installed by someone that knows what they are doing, the problem goes away. But that isn't where we are today. Everyone has general purpose computing instruments and nobody has a web TV box.
Most of this stuff is not installed because of security exposures in that allow stealh installations because of exposures in email readers and web browsers. It is installed the same way the user would install any other "desired" program. They user just doesn't know they don't want it. They have been manipulated into believing they need whatever this is and without more knowledge and understanding they are going to install the bot.
Solution? Give people appliances not general-purpose computers. Programmers need computers, people need entertainment appliances.
For an ISP of any size mail filtering is a significant problem. You don't just add something onto the mail server farm without taking a pretty severe performance hit. I do not believe there is anything free that can handle a substantial load.
Another factor is that most of the very cautious folks I deal with have a real simple solution - no attachments, period. ISP's cannot implement something like that. They can block executable attachments, but that isn't really effective any longer. From what I understand most of this doesn't really fall into the "virus" or "worm" category but is instead human-installed. Dumb person clicked on the link or attachment. Blocking all instances of this would be pretty tough without having major impact.
Why would the SEC care? There is no fraud here. Nobody is getting hurt, except those people buying stock and expecting to make a quick profit. They don't make their quick profit and maybe lose money. If you play with the stock market like that you are going to lose money. Period. It isn't the government's job to keep you from doing stupid things with your money.
The problems with this are regulation, taxation, and operation. You would not believe the hurdles that have to be gone through to set up a casino in the US. Any jurisdiction. Tribal casinos have the same issues as do those on "riverboats" and in Nevada.
An online casino has none of these. You can operate out of a basement somewhere. No rules, no oversight, no regulation. And, perhaps most importantly, no taxation. The rules the casinos have to follow in Las Vegas ensures two things: fair play and reporting every dime of "take" by the casino as well as every dime won by players. An offshore online casino is not going to be subject to these requirements.
Of course the "fair play" regulation is going to be waved about. As well it should. How the heck do you know anything about an online casino, anyway? Through their advertising? Player testamonials? Somehow I don't think that comes anywhere near reality.
And I doubt very much if you open the door to Internet gaming in general if you are going to be able to regulate it in any manner whatsoever. How would any government prevent some Ponzi-style operation from having a casino where everyone wins for the first couple of weeks? How long would you really need to keep it going? A month? Two? I guess it would depend on how greedy you were. I can't imagine any way of regulating such operations. And believe me, I would want to set up my very own online casino tomorrow if I could. Can't imagine a better way to bring in a lot of cash fast. Even a quasi-legitimate operation that returns 99.99% of all money bet would have incredible payoff to the operator.
It is proper to call the act of removing money from the content owner's pocket theft.
If you put your hand in my pocket, take money out and walk away you have committed theft. Period. Why you thought you should do this is immaterial. You can say "I just made a copy" but that does not change the fact that you accessed something I should have been paid for to enable your access.
Today, the right to make a copy for personal use has been extended to making a copy to share with friends. And, because we're friendly on this planet, "friends" means everyone on the planet. Make no mistake, the more militant folks out there want to enforce "buy one copy, share with the planet."
Electronics manufacturers have somewhat less to lose than content producers, but both are going to lose in the long run as long as fair use is translated to "free music and movies."
Just exactly how do we put the cork back in the bottle? Well, unbreakable DRM probably isn't the answer although it seems like a pretty attractive goal. And a 99% solution (assuming 100% is impossible) is fine with the folks implementing it. Heck, a 75% solution is fine with them. Strict enforcement isn't going to happen, neither through civil or criminal means. Patronage might be the only answer, but it would mean pretty much the end of music as a business.
Yes, and for centuries we haven't cared if the error margin of the little old ladies was 1% or even 2%. If one precinct's results got flipped around because of errors, it didn't matter because of the sheer number of precincts and their small size - usually much less than 100 people per precinct for most of the last 200+ years.
Unfortunately, we are now caring a lot more about accuracy. The current manual processes can't handle the requirements for 100% accuracy or at least accuracy way beyond 0.9%. Could it be done with manual processes? Sure, banks used to do this completely manually all the time. It just takes time and more people. And duplication of efforts to ensure quality.
Not going to fly here, for a couple of reasons. One is there aren't enough workers. Another is that we can either count the votes fast or listen to the news reports because they will report results based on exit polls, surveys and guesswork.
One problem: every time you count the paper ballots (assuming they exist), you get a different answer. This is because many of the elections are close enough that the real difference is less than the margin of error.
So, the problem is having the paper ballots. Providing the ability to "recount" them endlessly with less and less accuracy each time doesn't make elections any better.
Spamming is not illegal. Maybe it should be, but today it is not. There has been an extremely weak attmempt to regulate it, but even that does not attach criminal penalties to spamming. Law enforcement isn't going to get anywhere near this problem for a long time.
ISP's do not release the real-world identities of their customers from having an IP address and an time. They just don't. Nor will they even forward an email to their customer. So, you can forget about contacting the originator of the spam.
Lastly, the sender of the spam is probably not the originator. It is someone that either got paid to send it or had their machine compromised and sent it without their knowledge.
The problem with fingerprint readers is there has been a lot of junk put out there. Anything that uses an optical sensor is a joke. Most of the capacitive ones are useless as well.
We recently deployed an application using an RF-based fingerprint reader. It uses the Authentec chip which is in many readers. It is extremely difficult to fool because it scans below the skin level. Some jello mold finger isn't going to work with this.
The software is very simple and very fast. You can either use their database (encrypted) or your own for storing templates.
We decided that this was the only way to avoid compromising existing user/password security for systems already in place. If we had even the possibility of the same passwords being used, our system would have to be provably at least as secure as whatever they were currently using. A very difficult and wide-open standard to be measured against. Therefore, no passwords at all.
Plenty of people could write long letters about how they have struggled with heroin most of their adult lives.
Would you not consider use of heroin a choice?
Just because you fall into some kind of behavior and have difficulty escaping from it, no matter how destructive it is to you, your life, everyone around you, whatever, you still do it. Gambling is this way. Drugs and alcohol are this way.
Homosexuality? Right now, nobody knows. I've seen plenty of "choice" in my life. Some of it pretty darn self-destructive and these people can be full of regrets.
OK, so your boss has heard the phase "Open Source" and wants to get in on the new movement. This sounds like a really bad way to run a business - on the latest fad.
Actually, what you are describing, as others have pointed out, doesn't sound like a very good fit. Probably the best way to make a profit from Open Source is to have the software be so incredibly arcane and poorly written that it is utterly unreadable to anyone that hasn't spent months tracing through it. Then it will be obvious to even an experienced programmer that they do not have the time to understand the code and have to pay someone else to fix even minor bugs. If the software is something that is critical to a business and is missing features or has obvious bugs this is even better, because the need for outside support will be obvious to anyone.
If you are instead starting with a well-written, well-documented software package that requires very little in the way of support you aren't going to make any money at all selling support to your customers - they already know the software works and doesn't have the kind of problems they would need to spend lots of money on support to have someone on tap to resolve.
First casualty of a MS breakup will be the Win32 API. It is junk and nobody would their right mind would continue to invest in it besides Microsoft.
Well, that trashes the existing application base. Good news for Linux I suppose, but it does put us back at the level of CP/M as far as applications are concerned. Look forward to every application having to individually support printers and other devices again.
You know exactly who is sending you email - look at the headers. The IP address is right there.
Of course, with ISP's protecting their users they will not even acknowledge that the IP address is theirs, much less forward an email to the user. If someone's computer sends me 1,000 emails I want their phone number and address. Privacy be damned!
Why isn't some country like Saudi Arabia or China leading the effort in human experimentation? China has way, way more babies than they need, so using a few every now and then would eliminate the need for cloning completely.
Saudi Arabia beheads people for minor crimes and stones people to death for things that aren't crimes in most places. It can't be that they sit around and have long arguments about life being somehow valuable.
Every day in Sudan more Christers are killed by the Mohammedians - you would think they could just be used for medical experiments and breeding stem-cell sources instead. Think of Hitler's doctors doing it right with 60+ years of increased knowledge today.
The one thing that I think it facinating is how this argument never seems to come around to full-blown human cloning or where one might get genotype-specific stem cells for Michael Fox. You know, you would need an embryo with his DNA to get started, right? Where does that come from? And how do you get a perfect DNA match? Probably about the same technique they used with Dolly the sheep, with a few important refinements.
Some things to keep in mind here:
Stem cells to treat people will almost certainly be genotype-specific, meaning the DNA has to match.
If you can grow an embryo with the same DNA as an existing person, you can clone people for fun and profit.
There are two basic problems with paper ballots in the US and one that is held up as the reason by most people.
The margin of error in the manual processes with paper ballots is too high for recent elections.
The speed at which news organizations are reporting election outcome exceeds the speed at which votes can actually be counted. If you want your elections controlled by the news media, sticking with paper ballots will achieve this.
The third item is complexity. Most election precints in the US have 30-40 separate items that are being voted on. In some areas there may be over 100. There is no good way to represent this in a compact form such that some type of automation can be used to process the paper.
We have seen what the margin of error does to an election. You get a count and someone doesn't like it, so there is a recount. The results are different but still within the margin of error for the manual processes involved. There is another recount and the results change again. You can keep recounting but the results are random - the difference is within the margin of error for the processes being used. There is no choice but to change the process.
Elections are closely monitored to reduce or eliminate fraud, not to ensure an accurate count. Sure, everyone wants an accurate count, but manual processes that are assured to be 100% accurate (no margin of error) are extremely tedious and involved. Looking at elections in the past in the US, very few were close enough where the difference between candidates was less than 1%. And when this happened, mistakes were made and they have become quite famous. We have just had three rounds of elections where many, many local, state and federal elections had less than 1% difference between the candidates.
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Liquor is regulated.
Cigarettes are regulated.
Driving is regulated.
Being in a school library at night is regulated.
If you want to avoid being monitored by regulating agencies and their agents, don't do things that are regulated. You have no right to avoid such monitoring in the course of applying such regulation.
There are two basic problems to the Internet replacing the phone system.
The first is basic functionality and reliability. Right now people put up with disconnects all the time on data connections. What? That page didn't load? Click it again! To some extent, the software could make up for some failures simply with more and better error handling rather than just dumping it out on the user. But that doesn't solve the problem 100%.
The second is an economic one. Most of the telecommunications that the Internet relies on was bought and paid for because of telephone services. Much of it is still paid for because of telephone services. A lot of people here seem to think that the reason Internet connectivity is cheap is because, well, it is cheap. It isn't - most providers aren't paying for the full load of connectivity they are using and most telecommunications companies aren't charging the same for data vs. voice even over the same link.
Should voice connectivity no longer support telecommunications, we're going to be seeing more realistic costs in data connectivity, especially at the low end. When the POTS system requires copper to every house, putting DSL on that copper is trivial and cheap. When DSL service has to pay for the copper and maintenance of it, the costs are going to be a lot more realistic.
I don't believe anywhere in the world today is experiencing the real costs. This does look like it is going to be changing pretty soon. Whoever inherits the US telecommunications systems, it will be quite a shock to the customers.
The problem with cameras is that if the recording was available to only prosecution and defense, that would be fine. When it is shown publicly, you pretty much flushed the opportunity for an impartial jury down the toliet. Sure it is sensational and therefore everyone is going to watch it.
The problem with camera phones and the like is that you have now put another form of evidence outside the judicial process and in the hands of the public. For better or worse.
If the police report contradicts the recording, as it likely will because the camera isn't getting everything, what does the jury believe? Today, it will be the narrow viewpoint of the camera and what it misses didn't happen.
OK, let's for a moment assume that there is no question that humans (and only humans) are causing global warming. If nothing is done to stop this human-induced climate change, millions of people will die. If all human activity which contributes to global warming ends tomorrow, these millions of people will not die.
Does that about sum it up?
This sounds like the perfect justification for starting a war. If those pesky Americans aren't stopped, the rest of the world will die! So, how come the war has not started? If this is settled, and we know who the enemy is that will be responsible for millions of deaths, we better do something about it, right?
Oh wait. I guess it isn't THAT settled.
There are so many things wrong with this that I can only barely scratch the surface of the problem. But, just a few things to think about.
Doesn't sound like any sort of permanent archive that I would trust.
I see lots of comments about how this person didn't do anything. OK, the RIAA isn't so incredibly stupid as to just pull people's names out of the phone book and sue them. While file sharing and related copyright violation is common, it isn't quite that common.
So, where did they get her name? Could it be that someone was using her computer and/or Internet connection without her knowledge to do these things? Could it be that the ISP in question misidentified the customer for the RIAA, perhaps intentionally?
I seriously doubt this person had a random selection process applied to them. It could be that she is actually the account holder of an Internet connection used for file sharing. It could also be that the ISP made a mistake, intentionally or otherwise, thus leading to the lawsuit. Funny, you never hear about the results of these sorts of problems.
How much has NASA spent, in PR money and man-hours on trying to debunk the "faked moon landing"? How many Congresscritters believe there must be something to this?
It isn't that criticism is wrong, it is that an important part of criticism called "critical thinking" is absent. At least the thinking part is. While this has existed since the beginning of time with people complaining about the pyramids going to fall over the first time it rained, this sort of nonsense has been made far, far more accessible to the average Joe now. Is the answer censorship? I doubt it. But what if someone wrote a long Wikipedia article about this sort of thing and a devoted group of followers kept any attempt at introducing reason, logic and common sense from being added?
There is this charming piece there, written a long, long time ago, concerning a "researcher" that spent all of his time reading and re-interpreting the writings of other "researchers". There was a statement to the effect that going and looking at original sources was too much trouble and way too difficult. Besides, all the real work had already beend one once, why simply repeat that?
Well folks, we are pretty much there. Journalists now spend probably equal amounts of time covering each other, gossipping and relying in innuendo and hearsay rather than facts. Little wonder we have the sort of news media we have today with this.
And the "internet journalists" are probably the worst. We have "aggregator sites" on the web which simply dish out stories rehashed from other web sites. We have bloggers writing stuff about aggregated news sites and other bloggers.
Read the bit about the "Old Empire" in Foundation and see if you think it is happening here now.
Why is there such a thing as HTML email? We lasted from the 70's until about 1994 with just text.
The whole concept of web plug-ins is based on installing software on demand. If you don't have the Flash player on your computer and you go to a flash web site you can get the Flash player just by clicking on something.
Believe it or not, businesses do use "active content" (macros and such) to do stuff, even in Outlook. This was probably a mistake, but it is unlikely that they are going to go backwards.
The problem isn't "Windows is insecure", the problem is that people are given a general-purpose computing instrument and they want a web & email appliance.
If you change their computer into a web & email appliance and prevent programs from being run that are not specifically installed by someone that knows what they are doing, the problem goes away. But that isn't where we are today. Everyone has general purpose computing instruments and nobody has a web TV box.
Most of this stuff is not installed because of security exposures in that allow stealh installations because of exposures in email readers and web browsers. It is installed the same way the user would install any other "desired" program. They user just doesn't know they don't want it. They have been manipulated into believing they need whatever this is and without more knowledge and understanding they are going to install the bot.
Solution? Give people appliances not general-purpose computers. Programmers need computers, people need entertainment appliances.
Why would the brokerage firm care if someone threw their money away?
Call it a tax on the financially irresponsible.
For an ISP of any size mail filtering is a significant problem. You don't just add something onto the mail server farm without taking a pretty severe performance hit. I do not believe there is anything free that can handle a substantial load.
Another factor is that most of the very cautious folks I deal with have a real simple solution - no attachments, period. ISP's cannot implement something like that. They can block executable attachments, but that isn't really effective any longer. From what I understand most of this doesn't really fall into the "virus" or "worm" category but is instead human-installed. Dumb person clicked on the link or attachment. Blocking all instances of this would be pretty tough without having major impact.
Why would the SEC care? There is no fraud here. Nobody is getting hurt, except those people buying stock and expecting to make a quick profit. They don't make their quick profit and maybe lose money. If you play with the stock market like that you are going to lose money. Period. It isn't the government's job to keep you from doing stupid things with your money.
The problems with this are regulation, taxation, and operation. You would not believe the hurdles that have to be gone through to set up a casino in the US. Any jurisdiction. Tribal casinos have the same issues as do those on "riverboats" and in Nevada.
An online casino has none of these. You can operate out of a basement somewhere. No rules, no oversight, no regulation. And, perhaps most importantly, no taxation. The rules the casinos have to follow in Las Vegas ensures two things: fair play and reporting every dime of "take" by the casino as well as every dime won by players. An offshore online casino is not going to be subject to these requirements.
Of course the "fair play" regulation is going to be waved about. As well it should. How the heck do you know anything about an online casino, anyway? Through their advertising? Player testamonials? Somehow I don't think that comes anywhere near reality.
And I doubt very much if you open the door to Internet gaming in general if you are going to be able to regulate it in any manner whatsoever. How would any government prevent some Ponzi-style operation from having a casino where everyone wins for the first couple of weeks? How long would you really need to keep it going? A month? Two? I guess it would depend on how greedy you were. I can't imagine any way of regulating such operations. And believe me, I would want to set up my very own online casino tomorrow if I could. Can't imagine a better way to bring in a lot of cash fast. Even a quasi-legitimate operation that returns 99.99% of all money bet would have incredible payoff to the operator.
It is proper to call the act of removing money from the content owner's pocket theft.
If you put your hand in my pocket, take money out and walk away you have committed theft. Period. Why you thought you should do this is immaterial. You can say "I just made a copy" but that does not change the fact that you accessed something I should have been paid for to enable your access.
Yes, but ...
Today, the right to make a copy for personal use has been extended to making a copy to share with friends. And, because we're friendly on this planet, "friends" means everyone on the planet. Make no mistake, the more militant folks out there want to enforce "buy one copy, share with the planet."
Electronics manufacturers have somewhat less to lose than content producers, but both are going to lose in the long run as long as fair use is translated to "free music and movies."
Just exactly how do we put the cork back in the bottle? Well, unbreakable DRM probably isn't the answer although it seems like a pretty attractive goal. And a 99% solution (assuming 100% is impossible) is fine with the folks implementing it. Heck, a 75% solution is fine with them. Strict enforcement isn't going to happen, neither through civil or criminal means. Patronage might be the only answer, but it would mean pretty much the end of music as a business.
Yes, and for centuries we haven't cared if the error margin of the little old ladies was 1% or even 2%. If one precinct's results got flipped around because of errors, it didn't matter because of the sheer number of precincts and their small size - usually much less than 100 people per precinct for most of the last 200+ years.
Unfortunately, we are now caring a lot more about accuracy. The current manual processes can't handle the requirements for 100% accuracy or at least accuracy way beyond 0.9%. Could it be done with manual processes? Sure, banks used to do this completely manually all the time. It just takes time and more people. And duplication of efforts to ensure quality.
Not going to fly here, for a couple of reasons. One is there aren't enough workers. Another is that we can either count the votes fast or listen to the news reports because they will report results based on exit polls, surveys and guesswork.
One problem: every time you count the paper ballots (assuming they exist), you get a different answer. This is because many of the elections are close enough that the real difference is less than the margin of error.
So, the problem is having the paper ballots. Providing the ability to "recount" them endlessly with less and less accuracy each time doesn't make elections any better.
The problem with fingerprint readers is there has been a lot of junk put out there. Anything that uses an optical sensor is a joke. Most of the capacitive ones are useless as well.
We recently deployed an application using an RF-based fingerprint reader. It uses the Authentec chip which is in many readers. It is extremely difficult to fool because it scans below the skin level. Some jello mold finger isn't going to work with this.
The software is very simple and very fast. You can either use their database (encrypted) or your own for storing templates.
We decided that this was the only way to avoid compromising existing user/password security for systems already in place. If we had even the possibility of the same passwords being used, our system would have to be provably at least as secure as whatever they were currently using. A very difficult and wide-open standard to be measured against. Therefore, no passwords at all.
Plenty of people could write long letters about how they have struggled with heroin most of their adult lives.
Would you not consider use of heroin a choice?
Just because you fall into some kind of behavior and have difficulty escaping from it, no matter how destructive it is to you, your life, everyone around you, whatever, you still do it. Gambling is this way. Drugs and alcohol are this way.
Homosexuality? Right now, nobody knows. I've seen plenty of "choice" in my life. Some of it pretty darn self-destructive and these people can be full of regrets.
OK, so your boss has heard the phase "Open Source" and wants to get in on the new movement. This sounds like a really bad way to run a business - on the latest fad.
Actually, what you are describing, as others have pointed out, doesn't sound like a very good fit. Probably the best way to make a profit from Open Source is to have the software be so incredibly arcane and poorly written that it is utterly unreadable to anyone that hasn't spent months tracing through it. Then it will be obvious to even an experienced programmer that they do not have the time to understand the code and have to pay someone else to fix even minor bugs. If the software is something that is critical to a business and is missing features or has obvious bugs this is even better, because the need for outside support will be obvious to anyone.
If you are instead starting with a well-written, well-documented software package that requires very little in the way of support you aren't going to make any money at all selling support to your customers - they already know the software works and doesn't have the kind of problems they would need to spend lots of money on support to have someone on tap to resolve.
First casualty of a MS breakup will be the Win32 API. It is junk and nobody would their right mind would continue to invest in it besides Microsoft.
Well, that trashes the existing application base. Good news for Linux I suppose, but it does put us back at the level of CP/M as far as applications are concerned. Look forward to every application having to individually support printers and other devices again.
You know exactly who is sending you email - look at the headers. The IP address is right there.
Of course, with ISP's protecting their users they will not even acknowledge that the IP address is theirs, much less forward an email to the user. If someone's computer sends me 1,000 emails I want their phone number and address. Privacy be damned!
Saudi Arabia beheads people for minor crimes and stones people to death for things that aren't crimes in most places. It can't be that they sit around and have long arguments about life being somehow valuable.
Every day in Sudan more Christers are killed by the Mohammedians - you would think they could just be used for medical experiments and breeding stem-cell sources instead. Think of Hitler's doctors doing it right with 60+ years of increased knowledge today.
The one thing that I think it facinating is how this argument never seems to come around to full-blown human cloning or where one might get genotype-specific stem cells for Michael Fox. You know, you would need an embryo with his DNA to get started, right? Where does that come from? And how do you get a perfect DNA match? Probably about the same technique they used with Dolly the sheep, with a few important refinements.
Some things to keep in mind here:
The third item is complexity. Most election precints in the US have 30-40 separate items that are being voted on. In some areas there may be over 100. There is no good way to represent this in a compact form such that some type of automation can be used to process the paper.
We have seen what the margin of error does to an election. You get a count and someone doesn't like it, so there is a recount. The results are different but still within the margin of error for the manual processes involved. There is another recount and the results change again. You can keep recounting but the results are random - the difference is within the margin of error for the processes being used. There is no choice but to change the process.
Elections are closely monitored to reduce or eliminate fraud, not to ensure an accurate count. Sure, everyone wants an accurate count, but manual processes that are assured to be 100% accurate (no margin of error) are extremely tedious and involved. Looking at elections in the past in the US, very few were close enough where the difference between candidates was less than 1%. And when this happened, mistakes were made and they have become quite famous. We have just had three rounds of elections where many, many local, state and federal elections had less than 1% difference between the candidates.
The manual processes have to go.