We use a large XSLT file (more accurately a series of files with xsl:includes) which document the functions of the XML. You can transform any XML query or response with this XSL, and it will document the call for you. There's also an XML file which when transformed with this XSL will give you full schema documentation.
So it's your choice, you have complete documentation, or you can get documentation on any call by passing its content through the XSLT.
That by itself should keep MySQL from consuming too many resources especially during heavy transactions like during a library update. I don't know if the Amarok guys wrote in any optimize tables calls, but this can also enhance performance once in a while. Because I use mine for other development as well, I have a site script which periodically runs through OPTIMIZE TABLE on all the tables in MySQL. MySQL keeps statistics on what its data looks like, but over time, especially if the data has changed, these statistics can get out of sync. OPTIMIZE TABLE does a full table scan and rebuilds the statistics from scratch so that they are accurate. The statistics are used by the query planner to guess the likelihood of one key vs another key being the best bet, and other things. If the data is relatively static, then you don't typically need it, but if the data is frequently changing, it can be a good idea to do this once in a while.
I know most people run Amarok with the SQLight database. I haven't ever run it this way, but I'd be curious what impact that has on overall performance. Presumably transactions are slower, but probably also have lower impact on the rest of the system.
Usually servers perform large blocks of similar work instead of spreading work out super evenly across all applications. The quantums should be large because millisecond responsiveness is less important than total throughput. When moving a mouse across the screen, millisecond responsiveness is highly important for instant visual feedback.
Servers and desktops do have different needs.
By the way, I know my collection isn't gargantuan or anything, it's only 11,000 tracks and ~45 gig, but I can update my Amarok database without substantial performance loss to the rest of my system. You're using the MySQL Amarok library on a desktop? Do you have a my.cnf file set up as a desktop version? If MySQL thinks it's supposed to act like a server, it's gonna be greedy with resources (thus reinforcing the server/desktop dichotomy).
If you got up to half way through book 10, I'd recommend you try book 11, even if you never finish book 10 (I think you'll be able to pick up fine). A lot of things start to come together in this book, it's definitely not one of the slower ones.
As the series progresses, the books get progressively slower up until book 11, when he starts really wrapping things up substantially. You could probably completely skip book 10 and not even notice it; at least book 9 something happened in the plot, even if it wasn't very much. Been a while since I read them, but I think the only significant plot advancement in book 10 was the rescue of someone (saving names so I don't spoil anything) from some Aiel, whose capture had happened somewhere in book 9. Their capture itself was not a significant plot element, and so far as I can tell has no outcome on the entire series other than to have given one of the major characters something to work on for book 10, which is good, because it's the only thing that happened.
Like I said, it's been a while since I read that book, and it could be that I'm missing something, after so many books over so many years (and many re-readings of them, including most recently listening to them as audio books), what happens in which book gets blurry.
I'm not trying to knock the series, just saying he seemed like he was stretching it out. I still think of the series fondly for all of that. I was eagerly awaiting the 12th book, and I do sincerely hope that a ghost writer is able to finish it. It's fairly epic, but the series would have been even better as 9 books.
I'm sorry, I probably didn't explain my core point very well.
If the voter can't verify the hash of their vote receipt on the spot (which they can't), then the machine can easily issue them a bogus receipt that looks right as far as the human-verifiable portion of the receipt goes, and instead record a correctly hashed, correctly signed false vote. The voter later discovers their receipt doesn't match, and they have no way at all to prove that they voted the way they say they did. You have no way at all to prove that the authentic but intentionally malformed receipt you have is valid, and it becomes a matter of human vs machine's word.
Further, in order to expose problems in the system, the voter is required to expose the way they voted. If coercion is going on, this is exactly what you don't want to have as a predicate for detecting fraud. Also if there was some intention of throwing the election so that the entire results are considered invalid, because it's a hash chain, you would only have to invalidate or destroy the record of one very early vote, and the rest of the records would be un-verifiable.
This doesn't gain you anything over a machine which simply records the vote in a dual human/computer readable format onto a card that the machine is physically given by the voter, and which is fed into a locked ballot box after verification by the voter. Part of the record on the card would be machine #, vote # by that machine, and time. You can't stuff the box because the stuffed cards would be out of sequence or else at a time when the polls have closed (or else a whole lot of votes 2 minutes before they closed). You could only forge this record if people physically entered the voting booth multiple times, which in an anonymous ballot is only defensible with human precautions which are already present.
Agreed, I got a definite sense that he was feeling his mortality and working hard to tie things up.
He almost lost me around book 10 because as others have pointed out, you could skip this book entirely and not be surprised by anything you read in book 11.
I would like to know how it ends though, I still think of the entire series fondly, even if I did feel like he was milking it for a while.
Except that if the machine is programmed to alter a vote, and it knows the hash chain at the time it wants to alter the vote, it is able to record the altered vote, with a correct hash at the time the vote is recorded. This is what I meant when I said that if the machine has everything it needs to record the correct vote, it also has everything it needs to record an altered vote. The voter isn't able to manually verify the vote's hash, and even if every voter took a receipt and came back to verify it later, the vote on the receipt wouldn't agree with the machine, and you would have no way to reconcile it.
Hash chains verify that none of the data was changed after the chain was forged, but it doesn't guarantee anything about the integrity of the data as it is being chained. They assume that the author of the chain can be trusted, and the principle being protected against here is that we can't trust voting machines. That's why an inalterable record needs to be created which is verified at the time the vote is cast. The machine doesn't have access to the ballot cards, the voter gives one card to the machine per vote, so the machine is physically unable to alter, destroy, or insert votes. The cards once fed to the machine have the voting record printed on them, and the voter verifies the record is accurate. Once printed, the card gets inserted into a locked ballot box, or else returned to the voter if they indicate their vote was not as expected.
This suggests that during a recount or investigation, every voter would show up with his or her vote receipt. Lose even one receipt and you can't verify the votes.
Who's to say that the ballots they count are the ballots that were cast? Even if they are completed using indelible ink, the slips could be replaced.
I do think that electronic voting offers an additional control in the form of a completely separate system which needs to be compromised in order to alter the vote unnoticed. Coupling multiple technologies (in this case, electronic and physical) to tabulate the same data gives you greater data security and accuracy.
As well they should! Even if voters *don't* verify their vote, the point is that they CAN, and once they have verified their vote, there's no technology which can undo it. There is still physical security concerns regarding the paper ballots, but this has been an issue in the past. The idea is to put as many barriers in the way of tampering with an election as possible without compromising the necessary requirements of an election (one vote per voter, anonymous ballots, etc).
Even if most people don't properly verify their paper ballot, some small percentage will, and if that person declares loudly, "I clearly voted for one candidate, and the one recorded on paper is not the same as the one I voted for," it can spark a thorough investigation.
In order to defeat the vote in a system where a paper and electronic vote are both recorded, you have to compromise the machines, and you also have to compromise the physical security at the election location (this is a lot more detectable). If the cards are counted for each facility before they are sent, you would also have to compromise the card counting data at the central voting authority. If proper separation of duties are used, then the only way to perform voter fraud is with massive collaboration, which of course substantially increases the chance of a whistle blower giving away your whole conspiracy.
Headphones would also be a substantial health hazard. There's no way I would put an object on my head which has been on the head of hundreds of other people just today.
The biggest concern is not with people making a mistake in recording their votes (though this is a concern, but one which is easily correctable with a good user interface), but with machines which may be tampered with to alter the outcome of the vote.
Even the marbles-in-a-jug thing is easily falsifiable since anyone with two marbles gets two votes, let alone with a hundred marbles.
The idea is that you have to make the "authority" on which vote is which an immutable record. That is to say something which can't be changed after the vote has been cast. There's nothing in the computer world where this is the case. Not even cryptography would suffice since the voting machine does all the cryptography, and it could easily show you one cryptographically signed vote and record a different cryptographically signed vote. If it has everything it needs to do the original signing, it has everything it needs to forge the signing of different data.
This immutable authority is most easily done as a paper trail. The paper can be shown to users through a piece of glass, and once confirmed, be fed into a locked audit box. Unfortunately even this is still vulnerable to a malicious machine continuing on to forge votes between users and feeding those votes into the box. At least the machine couldn't delete existing votes, it would only be able to add to them, and that would show up as more votes registered than votes cast.
So I think the current approach is that each voter would be issued an audit card as they enter the voting booth. The machine doesn't have these, and the user feeds the card into the machine for their vote to be recorded.
There are two myths in TFA which I wish to debunk.
1) Tivo users are less guilty of stealing content because the cost of broadcasting is relatively fixed. False - Advertisers pay based on expected viewers of a TV show. As the number of people skipping commercials increases, advertisers will pay less and less for those commercials. Already you can see that the big money in advertising is shifting to product placement in shows. Some shows it is just too prominent in and I have already cut back or stopped watching them all together.
2) Failing to accept advertisements on a web page is theft since it costs some tiny amount of money to serve you the page False - What if I view the page and fail to click on the advertisement? Is that also theft? Very few advertisers pay millage any more, they're almost all pay per click, so whether I view the page with or without advertising, if I don't click on the link, the cost to serve me the page is the same (actually slightly less for not having to pay for bandwidth of the advertisement), and the income is exactly the same - $0. So if skipping ads on a page is stealing, then so is failing to click on ads on a page.
Well, it's possible these are different groups of people within the Slashdot community. That's the interesting thing about communities, they can have dichotomous opinions, and you can't really ding them for inconsistency unless you can demonstrate individuals which have inconsistent or hypocritical opinions.
Also I think generally the complaint about anonymous cowards comes not from people exercising their right to anonymity to participate in insightful commentary, or perhaps informative but potentially personally damaging information (such as the dissemination of information which could get the person into trouble in real life, but which should be said anyway, such as the HD DVD key a few months back).
Instead it's complaining about people who post vitriolic whiny complaints but don't want to pony up to the consequences (slight though they may be) of voicing sentiments such as "I mean, really, Slashdot. I understand the need to compete with Digg, and the whole firehose thing, but, really, shit like this is ridiculous and it only works to drive people like me away," which doesn't really contribute in any meaningful way to anything but is some random guy/gal just wanting to get their whiny rocks off, make vague or perhaps specific but meaningless threats, and otherwise just exercise their right (however annoying) to act like a spoiled rich kid and think that anyone really cares whether or not they leave.
I echo the gp sentiment - if your use of AC status is to fail to advance the discussion in any way, but instead to throw yourself to the ground and slam your fists and feet, then you've abused that status (you would also have abused your account, but at least we would be able to tell you so), and any threats of leaving should be encouraged since it will better the community as a whole. Making such comments under the AC cover just takes any value you could have conveyed with your statement, and converts it into whining since we can't really challenge the statement of an AC and expect any response.
It makes sense if there's limited supply, and they want the people who paid for the car's development to reap the rewards, without those cars being bought for twice as much in other states as status symbols.
Also they don't have the authority to tax out-of-state sales of these cars. The fact that this is civil fines means that these car makers and California entered into a contract along the lines of, "We'll give you money to research the cars we want, but you need to give us first shot at owning the results of that research." Makes sense to me, especially in a political arena where without such an agreement, the next guy running for office would point out all "your tax dollars which funded research on cars which only a small fraction of are even being sold in this state!"
Well, the thing is the practice is actually meant to block a form of fraud by their employees, and has nothing to do with whether or not they suspect you of having put something into the bag that doesn't belong to you (indeed, if you've managed to conceal something past the register, you have no reason to make yourself suspect by pulling it out and putting it in the bag after, so this doesn't thwart shop lifting). There were some high profile (in a local sense, not a national sense) cases of people colluding with store employees to only have some of the goods they purchased rung up, or rung up with the wrong UPC code.
For example, I might slap the UPC from a can of compressed air onto the back of some small but expensive item. To overhead cameras the transaction looks legitimate since they can't see the dollar totals; all they can see is that every item was successfully scanned.
So the idea is to ensure that the transaction the store agreed to is actually the same as the transaction you agreed to. In this sense, if accepted as a part of the overall transaction, it makes sense, it's a check & balance for the store to ensure that their cashiers are being honest.
There is definitely some legal gray area here. If you told customers that in order to make a purchase here, they must subject the store provided bag or bags (and only that bag, not other bags or the person themselves) to verification, you could certainly do business this way. If you had some way to ensure that the customer knew in advance that they would be subject to this, it would be part of the agreement for doing business. They aren't invading privacy in any way, because if everything is legit, then the only things in that bag will be the things that they just sold you, and they already have this information. I did once have a Best Buy refuse to not give me a bag (I only bought one thing and thought it was wasteful) on the grounds that the guy checking the merchandise by the exit wanted to account for everything which would be in the bag. At least they have very small bags at Best Buy for such small purchases.
However, since they don't require people entering the store to explicitly agree to this, they probably can't force the issue. You could claim you didn't realize and that it was not part of your agreement in the purchase. I'm guessing that if you told them that you didn't agree to such search before you entered the store, they'd probably tell you they didn't agree to your terms and wish you luck at another store.
All things considered, I do think the bag is your own property once the transaction is completed. They have given it to you as a matter of convenience, a sort of value-added service. Certainly they can't show up at your house a week later and demand their bag back, nor do they expect you to leave it at the door or some such. It's clearly given to you as part of the transaction, and that makes it yours once the transaction is complete.
If you don't want to be searched, then you can choose to leave.
Except that it is specifically as you are attempting to leave that they are searching you. In the case of a club, they can refuse entrance if you refuse the search. In the case of a store, they could do the same thing as you're entering, but if you refuse a search, they can't detain you. Further the goods in that bag are now your personal property, they gave up any right to look in that bag when the transaction completed.
For the first article, good article, terrible site =) Fortunately there was a PDF of the subject matter of the article, and in much greater depth. Unfortunately I find only correlational relationship between sex ed quality and sexual behavior in children. The consequence of this is that we can only say that Europe has better sex ed and also teens have sex later (which was the only significant correlation, the article says they have just as much of it, but starting at a later age, on average one year later).
This could be the result of better sex ed, but it could also be the result of cultural differences. Are kids given fewer opportunities to sneak off together? Are they culturally less inclined to experiment because they see more unglorified sexuality in the media, etc? Are American kids given more opportunities to sneak off together (American parents work more hours on average by a fair margin)? Are American kids more enticed into experimenting with sex because it's so much more glorified in the media?
Perhaps it is environmental. Does the meat American kids eat have higher hormone levels in it? American girls are experiencing an earlier average puberty than anywhere else in the world (http://edrv.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/24/ 5/668), so it is very likely that this has an adverse effect on preventing earlier sexual activity. The exact reason American girls are experiencing earlier puberty is not known, though hormones in the food and drinking water are likely culprits. (Note, the drinking water thing is a measurable value, and is possibly the side-effect of higher per capita consumption of oral contraceptives since this causes hormone overflow in urine, and these hormones take a long time to break down, and survive water treatment processses).
I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know for sure that you are or aren't, but there are enough variables unaccounted for to make a correlational study unable to establish causation. Honestly I don't have an opinion one way or the other, my jury is still out.
For the second article, as you observe, this is a causational study between abstinence campaigns and a side-effect of having sex. This is much easier to establish a causal relationship for since there are fewer intervening factors. However there is still *some* in the sense that 1) HIV and poverty are correlated (higher incidence of HIV amongst the impoverished) and 2) poverty and sex ed are inversely correlated (the impoverished get less education about sex ed in general). (see here, warning, pdf) Note that number 2 is most likely a contributing factor to number 1. The consequence of this on the study you quoted is that it may have a negating effect on our ability to measure this.
However the only way it could be said to have no effect whatsoever on sex rates is if no child was influenced by such a campaign. This I find hard to believe. My wife and I agreed to abstain, and I find it unlikely that we are the only ones.
Anyway, thanks for the articles, both were very interesting.
There is a direct relationship between the quality of sexual education in school and the number of teens who make it through puberty without causing pregnancy or getting pregnant.
If this were Wikipedia, [Citation Needed] would appear here. So in that light, please provide a link to the study or data that backs up this claim. While you're at it, I'd appreciate one for your "Preaching 'True love waits' has a proven effect of NIL" statement too (if the effect is proven, let's see the proof).
Houses are build by teams, should I pay a license fee for every person who visits my house ? No, you pay the guys who build your house according to their hourly rate, doesn't really matter if it's one guy or tens or hundreds.
And if you want to pay a development team to recreate the game from the ground up, then you *will* own it and will be entitled to do whatever you want with it.
Except in the course of typical games, you're paying for a tiny fraction of the overall cost to produce the game. It's like buying a ticket to an amusement park. The fact that you bought a ticket doesn't entitle your friends admittance also. Your ticket pays for a tiny fraction of the cost and upkeep of the amusement park, and you get to use that park when and how the owners of the park say you do.
Actually I believe many companies purposely accept the message then send an NDR if the recipient is invalid in order to protect themselves against brute force account guessing from zombie hordes. If you immediately confirm the validity of an email address, then you can try a lot in rapid succession. If you send an NDR then you can't unless you provide a valid return address (does not mesh well with zombie hordes).
The whole email system is horribly broken, fixes to specific problems create new problems or break existing and relied-upon functionality.
Sorry, the ban is not on disseminating information, engineers are permitted to speak off the record, so if they feel something needs to be brought to public light, they can inform the press, and a direct challenge can be issued.
Engineers are only not permitted to speak on the record, which means that unless you're specifically authorized to speak in an official capacity, you cannot. This sounds pretty standard to me, and in fact has been the standing policy at the last several places I did work for. If you're an employee of an organization, and you speak on the record as an employee of that organization, your words are given a certain amount of weight which they may not merit since you may not have the full picture, or you may be speaking about an in-progress investigation.
This is basically the same for every company or public works organization with a PR department.
In addition, being in the tightly enclosed space with recirculated air that is the aircraft, there's a good chance it won't be only yourself who is the vector on the other side. Hit the restroom early in the flight and increase those chances! This is probably even more effective than trying to cough on random people on the other side.
I felt like the guy made some really bad decisions in that movie actually, but the point is that he thought they were the right ones. Not everyone has the wherewithal to know. There are a lot of poverty stricken people who make bad decisions because they don't know better. This could have a lot to do with why that person is in that situation, or it could be the result of being in that situation.
A couple of years ago I read an article (and I now wish I remember where I read it) that talked about how some self-made wealthy people who lost everything on the stock market were never able to climb back on top again. It talked about how being despondent makes otherwise intelligent people start acting foolishly. It supposed that it came down to someone feeling like they are working really really hard and not achieving their goals, so sometimes the brain just blips, and they decide to acquire a goal earlier than is financially responsible. It takes one moment of weakness to purchase something you can't afford, and years of strength to climb back out of that. This of course puts all the rest of their goals that much farther off and makes it all the harder to get out of the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
We use a large XSLT file (more accurately a series of files with xsl:includes) which document the functions of the XML. You can transform any XML query or response with this XSL, and it will document the call for you. There's also an XML file which when transformed with this XSL will give you full schema documentation.
So it's your choice, you have complete documentation, or you can get documentation on any call by passing its content through the XSLT.
That by itself should keep MySQL from consuming too many resources especially during heavy transactions like during a library update. I don't know if the Amarok guys wrote in any optimize tables calls, but this can also enhance performance once in a while. Because I use mine for other development as well, I have a site script which periodically runs through OPTIMIZE TABLE on all the tables in MySQL. MySQL keeps statistics on what its data looks like, but over time, especially if the data has changed, these statistics can get out of sync. OPTIMIZE TABLE does a full table scan and rebuilds the statistics from scratch so that they are accurate. The statistics are used by the query planner to guess the likelihood of one key vs another key being the best bet, and other things. If the data is relatively static, then you don't typically need it, but if the data is frequently changing, it can be a good idea to do this once in a while.
I know most people run Amarok with the SQLight database. I haven't ever run it this way, but I'd be curious what impact that has on overall performance. Presumably transactions are slower, but probably also have lower impact on the rest of the system.
Usually servers perform large blocks of similar work instead of spreading work out super evenly across all applications. The quantums should be large because millisecond responsiveness is less important than total throughput. When moving a mouse across the screen, millisecond responsiveness is highly important for instant visual feedback.
Servers and desktops do have different needs.
By the way, I know my collection isn't gargantuan or anything, it's only 11,000 tracks and ~45 gig, but I can update my Amarok database without substantial performance loss to the rest of my system. You're using the MySQL Amarok library on a desktop? Do you have a my.cnf file set up as a desktop version? If MySQL thinks it's supposed to act like a server, it's gonna be greedy with resources (thus reinforcing the server/desktop dichotomy).
If you got up to half way through book 10, I'd recommend you try book 11, even if you never finish book 10 (I think you'll be able to pick up fine). A lot of things start to come together in this book, it's definitely not one of the slower ones.
As the series progresses, the books get progressively slower up until book 11, when he starts really wrapping things up substantially. You could probably completely skip book 10 and not even notice it; at least book 9 something happened in the plot, even if it wasn't very much. Been a while since I read them, but I think the only significant plot advancement in book 10 was the rescue of someone (saving names so I don't spoil anything) from some Aiel, whose capture had happened somewhere in book 9. Their capture itself was not a significant plot element, and so far as I can tell has no outcome on the entire series other than to have given one of the major characters something to work on for book 10, which is good, because it's the only thing that happened.
Like I said, it's been a while since I read that book, and it could be that I'm missing something, after so many books over so many years (and many re-readings of them, including most recently listening to them as audio books), what happens in which book gets blurry.
I'm not trying to knock the series, just saying he seemed like he was stretching it out. I still think of the series fondly for all of that. I was eagerly awaiting the 12th book, and I do sincerely hope that a ghost writer is able to finish it. It's fairly epic, but the series would have been even better as 9 books.
I'm sorry, I probably didn't explain my core point very well.
If the voter can't verify the hash of their vote receipt on the spot (which they can't), then the machine can easily issue them a bogus receipt that looks right as far as the human-verifiable portion of the receipt goes, and instead record a correctly hashed, correctly signed false vote. The voter later discovers their receipt doesn't match, and they have no way at all to prove that they voted the way they say they did. You have no way at all to prove that the authentic but intentionally malformed receipt you have is valid, and it becomes a matter of human vs machine's word.
Further, in order to expose problems in the system, the voter is required to expose the way they voted. If coercion is going on, this is exactly what you don't want to have as a predicate for detecting fraud. Also if there was some intention of throwing the election so that the entire results are considered invalid, because it's a hash chain, you would only have to invalidate or destroy the record of one very early vote, and the rest of the records would be un-verifiable.
This doesn't gain you anything over a machine which simply records the vote in a dual human/computer readable format onto a card that the machine is physically given by the voter, and which is fed into a locked ballot box after verification by the voter. Part of the record on the card would be machine #, vote # by that machine, and time. You can't stuff the box because the stuffed cards would be out of sequence or else at a time when the polls have closed (or else a whole lot of votes 2 minutes before they closed). You could only forge this record if people physically entered the voting booth multiple times, which in an anonymous ballot is only defensible with human precautions which are already present.
Agreed, I got a definite sense that he was feeling his mortality and working hard to tie things up.
He almost lost me around book 10 because as others have pointed out, you could skip this book entirely and not be surprised by anything you read in book 11.
I would like to know how it ends though, I still think of the entire series fondly, even if I did feel like he was milking it for a while.
Except that if the machine is programmed to alter a vote, and it knows the hash chain at the time it wants to alter the vote, it is able to record the altered vote, with a correct hash at the time the vote is recorded. This is what I meant when I said that if the machine has everything it needs to record the correct vote, it also has everything it needs to record an altered vote. The voter isn't able to manually verify the vote's hash, and even if every voter took a receipt and came back to verify it later, the vote on the receipt wouldn't agree with the machine, and you would have no way to reconcile it.
Hash chains verify that none of the data was changed after the chain was forged, but it doesn't guarantee anything about the integrity of the data as it is being chained. They assume that the author of the chain can be trusted, and the principle being protected against here is that we can't trust voting machines. That's why an inalterable record needs to be created which is verified at the time the vote is cast. The machine doesn't have access to the ballot cards, the voter gives one card to the machine per vote, so the machine is physically unable to alter, destroy, or insert votes. The cards once fed to the machine have the voting record printed on them, and the voter verifies the record is accurate. Once printed, the card gets inserted into a locked ballot box, or else returned to the voter if they indicate their vote was not as expected.
This suggests that during a recount or investigation, every voter would show up with his or her vote receipt. Lose even one receipt and you can't verify the votes.
And a trusty #2 pencil, complete with eraser!
Who's to say that the ballots they count are the ballots that were cast? Even if they are completed using indelible ink, the slips could be replaced.
I do think that electronic voting offers an additional control in the form of a completely separate system which needs to be compromised in order to alter the vote unnoticed. Coupling multiple technologies (in this case, electronic and physical) to tabulate the same data gives you greater data security and accuracy.
As well they should! Even if voters *don't* verify their vote, the point is that they CAN, and once they have verified their vote, there's no technology which can undo it. There is still physical security concerns regarding the paper ballots, but this has been an issue in the past. The idea is to put as many barriers in the way of tampering with an election as possible without compromising the necessary requirements of an election (one vote per voter, anonymous ballots, etc).
Even if most people don't properly verify their paper ballot, some small percentage will, and if that person declares loudly, "I clearly voted for one candidate, and the one recorded on paper is not the same as the one I voted for," it can spark a thorough investigation.
In order to defeat the vote in a system where a paper and electronic vote are both recorded, you have to compromise the machines, and you also have to compromise the physical security at the election location (this is a lot more detectable). If the cards are counted for each facility before they are sent, you would also have to compromise the card counting data at the central voting authority. If proper separation of duties are used, then the only way to perform voter fraud is with massive collaboration, which of course substantially increases the chance of a whistle blower giving away your whole conspiracy.
Headphones would also be a substantial health hazard. There's no way I would put an object on my head which has been on the head of hundreds of other people just today.
The biggest concern is not with people making a mistake in recording their votes (though this is a concern, but one which is easily correctable with a good user interface), but with machines which may be tampered with to alter the outcome of the vote.
Even the marbles-in-a-jug thing is easily falsifiable since anyone with two marbles gets two votes, let alone with a hundred marbles.
The idea is that you have to make the "authority" on which vote is which an immutable record. That is to say something which can't be changed after the vote has been cast. There's nothing in the computer world where this is the case. Not even cryptography would suffice since the voting machine does all the cryptography, and it could easily show you one cryptographically signed vote and record a different cryptographically signed vote. If it has everything it needs to do the original signing, it has everything it needs to forge the signing of different data.
This immutable authority is most easily done as a paper trail. The paper can be shown to users through a piece of glass, and once confirmed, be fed into a locked audit box. Unfortunately even this is still vulnerable to a malicious machine continuing on to forge votes between users and feeding those votes into the box. At least the machine couldn't delete existing votes, it would only be able to add to them, and that would show up as more votes registered than votes cast.
So I think the current approach is that each voter would be issued an audit card as they enter the voting booth. The machine doesn't have these, and the user feeds the card into the machine for their vote to be recorded.
System -> Administration -> Software Sources, Internet Updates tab, check "Install security updates without confirmation."
There are two myths in TFA which I wish to debunk.
1) Tivo users are less guilty of stealing content because the cost of broadcasting is relatively fixed.
False - Advertisers pay based on expected viewers of a TV show. As the number of people skipping commercials increases, advertisers will pay less and less for those commercials. Already you can see that the big money in advertising is shifting to product placement in shows. Some shows it is just too prominent in and I have already cut back or stopped watching them all together.
2) Failing to accept advertisements on a web page is theft since it costs some tiny amount of money to serve you the page
False - What if I view the page and fail to click on the advertisement? Is that also theft? Very few advertisers pay millage any more, they're almost all pay per click, so whether I view the page with or without advertising, if I don't click on the link, the cost to serve me the page is the same (actually slightly less for not having to pay for bandwidth of the advertisement), and the income is exactly the same - $0. So if skipping ads on a page is stealing, then so is failing to click on ads on a page.
Well, it's possible these are different groups of people within the Slashdot community. That's the interesting thing about communities, they can have dichotomous opinions, and you can't really ding them for inconsistency unless you can demonstrate individuals which have inconsistent or hypocritical opinions.
Also I think generally the complaint about anonymous cowards comes not from people exercising their right to anonymity to participate in insightful commentary, or perhaps informative but potentially personally damaging information (such as the dissemination of information which could get the person into trouble in real life, but which should be said anyway, such as the HD DVD key a few months back).
Instead it's complaining about people who post vitriolic whiny complaints but don't want to pony up to the consequences (slight though they may be) of voicing sentiments such as "I mean, really, Slashdot. I understand the need to compete with Digg, and the whole firehose thing, but, really, shit like this is ridiculous and it only works to drive people like me away," which doesn't really contribute in any meaningful way to anything but is some random guy/gal just wanting to get their whiny rocks off, make vague or perhaps specific but meaningless threats, and otherwise just exercise their right (however annoying) to act like a spoiled rich kid and think that anyone really cares whether or not they leave.
I echo the gp sentiment - if your use of AC status is to fail to advance the discussion in any way, but instead to throw yourself to the ground and slam your fists and feet, then you've abused that status (you would also have abused your account, but at least we would be able to tell you so), and any threats of leaving should be encouraged since it will better the community as a whole. Making such comments under the AC cover just takes any value you could have conveyed with your statement, and converts it into whining since we can't really challenge the statement of an AC and expect any response.
It makes sense if there's limited supply, and they want the people who paid for the car's development to reap the rewards, without those cars being bought for twice as much in other states as status symbols.
Also they don't have the authority to tax out-of-state sales of these cars. The fact that this is civil fines means that these car makers and California entered into a contract along the lines of, "We'll give you money to research the cars we want, but you need to give us first shot at owning the results of that research." Makes sense to me, especially in a political arena where without such an agreement, the next guy running for office would point out all "your tax dollars which funded research on cars which only a small fraction of are even being sold in this state!"
Well, the thing is the practice is actually meant to block a form of fraud by their employees, and has nothing to do with whether or not they suspect you of having put something into the bag that doesn't belong to you (indeed, if you've managed to conceal something past the register, you have no reason to make yourself suspect by pulling it out and putting it in the bag after, so this doesn't thwart shop lifting). There were some high profile (in a local sense, not a national sense) cases of people colluding with store employees to only have some of the goods they purchased rung up, or rung up with the wrong UPC code.
For example, I might slap the UPC from a can of compressed air onto the back of some small but expensive item. To overhead cameras the transaction looks legitimate since they can't see the dollar totals; all they can see is that every item was successfully scanned.
So the idea is to ensure that the transaction the store agreed to is actually the same as the transaction you agreed to. In this sense, if accepted as a part of the overall transaction, it makes sense, it's a check & balance for the store to ensure that their cashiers are being honest.
There is definitely some legal gray area here. If you told customers that in order to make a purchase here, they must subject the store provided bag or bags (and only that bag, not other bags or the person themselves) to verification, you could certainly do business this way. If you had some way to ensure that the customer knew in advance that they would be subject to this, it would be part of the agreement for doing business. They aren't invading privacy in any way, because if everything is legit, then the only things in that bag will be the things that they just sold you, and they already have this information. I did once have a Best Buy refuse to not give me a bag (I only bought one thing and thought it was wasteful) on the grounds that the guy checking the merchandise by the exit wanted to account for everything which would be in the bag. At least they have very small bags at Best Buy for such small purchases.
However, since they don't require people entering the store to explicitly agree to this, they probably can't force the issue. You could claim you didn't realize and that it was not part of your agreement in the purchase. I'm guessing that if you told them that you didn't agree to such search before you entered the store, they'd probably tell you they didn't agree to your terms and wish you luck at another store.
All things considered, I do think the bag is your own property once the transaction is completed. They have given it to you as a matter of convenience, a sort of value-added service. Certainly they can't show up at your house a week later and demand their bag back, nor do they expect you to leave it at the door or some such. It's clearly given to you as part of the transaction, and that makes it yours once the transaction is complete.
For the first article, good article, terrible site =) Fortunately there was a PDF of the subject matter of the article, and in much greater depth. Unfortunately I find only correlational relationship between sex ed quality and sexual behavior in children. The consequence of this is that we can only say that Europe has better sex ed and also teens have sex later (which was the only significant correlation, the article says they have just as much of it, but starting at a later age, on average one year later).
/ 5/668), so it is very likely that this has an adverse effect on preventing earlier sexual activity. The exact reason American girls are experiencing earlier puberty is not known, though hormones in the food and drinking water are likely culprits. (Note, the drinking water thing is a measurable value, and is possibly the side-effect of higher per capita consumption of oral contraceptives since this causes hormone overflow in urine, and these hormones take a long time to break down, and survive water treatment processses).
This could be the result of better sex ed, but it could also be the result of cultural differences. Are kids given fewer opportunities to sneak off together? Are they culturally less inclined to experiment because they see more unglorified sexuality in the media, etc? Are American kids given more opportunities to sneak off together (American parents work more hours on average by a fair margin)? Are American kids more enticed into experimenting with sex because it's so much more glorified in the media?
Perhaps it is environmental. Does the meat American kids eat have higher hormone levels in it? American girls are experiencing an earlier average puberty than anywhere else in the world (http://edrv.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/24
I'm not saying you're wrong. I don't know for sure that you are or aren't, but there are enough variables unaccounted for to make a correlational study unable to establish causation. Honestly I don't have an opinion one way or the other, my jury is still out.
For the second article, as you observe, this is a causational study between abstinence campaigns and a side-effect of having sex. This is much easier to establish a causal relationship for since there are fewer intervening factors. However there is still *some* in the sense that 1) HIV and poverty are correlated (higher incidence of HIV amongst the impoverished) and 2) poverty and sex ed are inversely correlated (the impoverished get less education about sex ed in general). (see here, warning, pdf) Note that number 2 is most likely a contributing factor to number 1. The consequence of this on the study you quoted is that it may have a negating effect on our ability to measure this.
However the only way it could be said to have no effect whatsoever on sex rates is if no child was influenced by such a campaign. This I find hard to believe. My wife and I agreed to abstain, and I find it unlikely that we are the only ones.
Anyway, thanks for the articles, both were very interesting.
Except in the course of typical games, you're paying for a tiny fraction of the overall cost to produce the game. It's like buying a ticket to an amusement park. The fact that you bought a ticket doesn't entitle your friends admittance also. Your ticket pays for a tiny fraction of the cost and upkeep of the amusement park, and you get to use that park when and how the owners of the park say you do.
Actually I believe many companies purposely accept the message then send an NDR if the recipient is invalid in order to protect themselves against brute force account guessing from zombie hordes. If you immediately confirm the validity of an email address, then you can try a lot in rapid succession. If you send an NDR then you can't unless you provide a valid return address (does not mesh well with zombie hordes).
The whole email system is horribly broken, fixes to specific problems create new problems or break existing and relied-upon functionality.
Sorry, the ban is not on disseminating information, engineers are permitted to speak off the record, so if they feel something needs to be brought to public light, they can inform the press, and a direct challenge can be issued.
Engineers are only not permitted to speak on the record, which means that unless you're specifically authorized to speak in an official capacity, you cannot. This sounds pretty standard to me, and in fact has been the standing policy at the last several places I did work for. If you're an employee of an organization, and you speak on the record as an employee of that organization, your words are given a certain amount of weight which they may not merit since you may not have the full picture, or you may be speaking about an in-progress investigation.
This is basically the same for every company or public works organization with a PR department.
In addition, being in the tightly enclosed space with recirculated air that is the aircraft, there's a good chance it won't be only yourself who is the vector on the other side. Hit the restroom early in the flight and increase those chances! This is probably even more effective than trying to cough on random people on the other side.
I felt like the guy made some really bad decisions in that movie actually, but the point is that he thought they were the right ones. Not everyone has the wherewithal to know. There are a lot of poverty stricken people who make bad decisions because they don't know better. This could have a lot to do with why that person is in that situation, or it could be the result of being in that situation.
A couple of years ago I read an article (and I now wish I remember where I read it) that talked about how some self-made wealthy people who lost everything on the stock market were never able to climb back on top again. It talked about how being despondent makes otherwise intelligent people start acting foolishly. It supposed that it came down to someone feeling like they are working really really hard and not achieving their goals, so sometimes the brain just blips, and they decide to acquire a goal earlier than is financially responsible. It takes one moment of weakness to purchase something you can't afford, and years of strength to climb back out of that. This of course puts all the rest of their goals that much farther off and makes it all the harder to get out of the situation.