I admit that I wouldn't pay all *that* much -- probably $300 would be about the cap -- but I wouldn't require a *huge* screen, either, and everything these days has LCD screens, so it shouldn't cost that much. It doesn't need to do arbitrary formats, either, as long as I can render any format to its format easily and Freely. It barely needs any storage capacity compared to an MP3 player -- 64MB of ebooks are going to last you a long, long time. It doesn't need a touch screen. It doesn't even need color. It just needs a good-looking screen that's bigger than a PDA, and to not cost too much.
And I agree that use of locked books is totally ridiculous. I wouldn't buy them -- a lot of what I want to read is already web pages or text. I have tons and tons of things that I'd love to read somewhere other than sitting in my computer chair.
Tablet PCs might do it, but they're pricy and have short battery life.
Advertisers finally figured out on the Web that the best way to "get someone's attention" isn't necessarily the best way to "get someone to buy your product".
I remember strobing.GIF ads.
Actually, they might still exist, but I haven't had animated GIFs on in my browser for years, and Flash ads are blocked, so I can't say for sure -- but when I use web browsers on other computers, I don't seem to see them any more.
Other than as a willy-waving metric, it seems that the error count in a tiny sampling of articles isn't useful at *all*.
I mean, it's pretty clear that both Britannica and Wikipedia are useful references. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but neither is gong to be unilaterally better.
Now, I personally use WP exclusively; It's available from anywhere with a web browser, it's free, it covers the sorts of things that I deal with frequently (tech, pop culture, people) and I'm a fan of the open source mentality. For my particular needs, WP is better suited. However, I don't see a need to claim that one is *better*. There are going to be WP articles that are *chock full* of errors on some points or link to sketchy sources, and there are going to be Britannica articles that just don't exist compared to WP or are simply outdated. It doesn't take people very long to figure out which is more appropriate to their uses, because aside from the initially surprising fact (to me, at least) that WP works and doesn't simply fall prey to vandalism, the strengths of the two aren't that hard to figure out. I'm not going to use WP as a primary source for a research paper, but it's going to be the very first reference that I turn to when I want an overview of a topic.
I think that WP still has some challenges to pass -- WP contains articles on specific *products*, which Britannica completely lacks, and at some point, marketers are going to start expressing interest in the ability to freely edit Wikipedia articles on their products. But people that claim that WP is not useful are so clearly demonstrated wrong by a short while of using WP that there isn't any point in even arguing the point. It would be like someone claiming that Google isn't useful because it can return results to pages that aren't peer-reviewed.
Right now, there's a lot of noise over the Seigenthaler incident, but that's a tiny ripple in a vast ocean -- people will find a way to solve problems like this (if not in WP, then in a competing, derived system), just because it's so useful to do so. Reputation systems, a second system that blocks admission of changes until someone reviews them, whatever. We haven't even scratched the surface of systems like this, and their value is clearly phenomenal. I have read far more history and computer science on WP than I've been motived to read about elsewhere for quite some time. I've looked up a number of things that I always wondered about (what "grunge" actually *is*, for example), because WP is so quick to access, so vast, and so readable.
The best thing about all this is that WP is something that nobody (or very few people, at least) were making noise about until recently. The Internet solves problems (communication, latency, ability to provide links to other content, ease of collaboration, access to everyone to try out new system ideas) that allow incredible new systems that have never existed before in humanity's existence, and the number of new (as of yet raw perhaps, unpolished) systems is *exploding*. Search engines are the only thing that was an immediate and obvious application to me when the Web came into being, and even the mechanisms of something like Google were certainly not obvious. In the past few years, we have seen ideas like del.icio.us, yahoo's bundle of services, free webmail, Wikipedia, and so forth come into being. What's even more incredible is that these things are *enabling* technologies. Each one is a tool that allows people to more easily communicate or deal with things, which makes us even *more* powerful and makes it even easier for us to make new tools. If I can freely collaborate without long-distance phone charges with people in Sweden, I expand the number of people that I can share knowledge with. If I can read, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the languages that I can read through use of Babelfish, I have hugely increased the number of documents available to me. If I can take advantage
Who's going to believe that a man with 4 networked computers (one recently "cleaned"), high speed internet, and a wifi setup (perhaps with security disabled for just such a defense) is a "computer novice" subjected to the attacks of a roving gang of drive-by internet pirates? I'm sure it looks good for his friends and family to hear him proclaim innocence to the claims, but he should be aware that perjury is a crime!
Well, two points:
(a) Let's say that, like many people, you live in an apartment complex or other reasonably dense residential environment. You want to run your peer-to-peer client all day. Most people are not going to be technically knowledgeable enough to configure their router to make this a background operation, and are going to have to resort to things like capping data rates. Like many people, you have a wireless laptop, and a neighbor with an Internet connection and a wireless hub. You simply use their network for your laptop, which keeps your own connection peppy.
(b) If the guy does do this, is it a good thing for society to fine him $100K? I'm not saying that it necessarily isn't, but I'm very much not sure of this. Today, the only reason that waiters/waitresses can reasonably make a living is because of tips -- I could see musicians operating the same way. We just don't know what's feasible yet, but I'm not really worried that our society will become deprived of audio or video entertainment because we don't have life-crippling fines on those who copy them.
The law works the same way as bin Laden and Paramount. This is why punitive damages exist -- because law enforcement can't catch every violation of the law.
In the US, volunteer fire and rescue members are not officially allowed to exceed the speed limit but many do because to poke along at 25mph getting to the station means that someone WILL die if they arrive too late. They take the risk of a ticket or worse every day to save people like you who probably bitch, moan and flip them the finger for passing you.
And I'm sure that they never, ever cause any accidents.
Hint: volunteer fire and rescue members are not allowed to exceed the speed limit for a *reason*. Police, who are, receive special training. I don't want some jackass (no matter how well meaning) to rear-end me into an intersection, thank you very much.
So you can bypass the filters with a little network know-how, like that is new.
It is unique in two ways: first, this is *very* easy, and second, someone else can do the work for you (e.g. I could simply mirror the.xxx hierarchy in a non-.xxx hierarchy, and the entire thing would be bypassed). It's also hard to reverse engineer and create key generators for CSS -- but once one person has done it, *anyone*, no matter the level of knowledge, benefits. That's where the problem comes in.
I haven't heard of these content describing metatags before reading your post. Slashdot doesn't appear to have them, so please give us a link where this content tag standard is given. Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?
"Metatags" is a generic term for any type of tag containing metainformation -- I was referring to ICRA.
Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?
I'm saying that that is a superior alternative to having the same thing done, but with only domain-level granularity, and on the basis of whether or not it is in.xxx versus whether or not it is tagged.
And no website is being forced to move to.xxx. SaudiBikiniGals.com isn't forced. AnalYanks.com isn't forced. Who cares about complaints about their choise of TLD? If your government of choice happens to force you, then that sucks but they could do much worse.
The argument that nobody (or at least some people) aren't forced to take part in something is certainly not a counterargument to someone saying that it has severe problems.
As for "government of choice", that's quite a simplification. Changing citizenship is hardly an off-the-cuff decision. If the technical problems with the idea that you are promoting have, as a solution, changing your citizenship, something is quite wrong with the solution.
Cashcow or not,.xxx hurts only those who buy them. Maybe we should get rid of.net,.org and every other TLD, they are only cashcows,.com should be enough for everybody!
Actually, I don't much like the fact that Verisign and a couple of other registrars do encourage people purchasing foobar.com to also purchase foobar.net and foobar.org "with one easy click!". However, those other TLDs have quite legitimate uses -- they are hierarchical classifiers for domains..xxx is not.
I don't think that Slashdot is anti-UN. Complaints about the UN has been recent and specific to control of ICANN's job being handed over the the UN. I think that Slashdot tends to be anti-authoritarian WRT the Internet.
And, frankly, I also think that the status quo is better than trying to involve the UN. The reason the Internet has done so well is because relevant people that could have squashed by trying to poke at it and regulate it have kept their hands the hell off it.
The US government has done a pretty good job of not playing politics with ICANN's work. The last thing that I want is red tape strangling every smart engineer out there who is trying to advance technology.
Handing something to the UN nearly *guarantees* that it will become politicized. The whole *point* of the UN is to have a diplomatic forum. I don't *want* that.
If the US starts doing a poor job of handling what ICANN's been doing, *then* I can see start talking about the UN. But I don't want to break something that isn't broken for the sake of making someone politically happy. I'm rather more interested in whether things are technically okay.
Does anyone really think they won't get their rebates?
Actually, this is true for at least some people: I was reading a study on rebates, and of the (large) test group, 30% of rebates were never recieved (at least as of six months after sending the rebate in).
However, I think that the real problem is, as you pointed out, that retailers attempt to benefit based on the fact that some people will not send the rebate in.
The point is that there is huge benefit to having clear and accurate information available to everyone. It makes it much easier for people to make correct buying decisions given their needs and values. There are essentially no drawbacks to having accurate information on what you are purchasing available. As a result, we have lots of laws to ensure that this happens (food needs to have nutritional information and quantity information measured and presented in a standard format, medical products cannot make bogus medical claims -- if you look at "health drinks" in the US a hundred years ago, you'll note that this was not always the case).
Point being, anything that requires better and more accurate information about a product to be provided is pretty much unilaterally a win.
So rebates are a mechanism that attempts to take advantage of bogus information about a product. At least in the United States (not the case in all countries, as I understand it) it is legal to have a rebate and to then publish the *after rebate* price as the price of the product (I believe that some states may require "after rebate" in the fine print.) In fact, you aren't buying a widget for $N-$rebate. You're buying the choice of a widget at $N or a widget plus some additional work on your part, which you might screw up by damaging the UPC or similar, for $N-$rebate. They eye-catch with (false) low prices and hope that once someone's attention is grabbed or they are in the store or they've purchased the product, that they won't follow through.
This is simply not good.
I'd prefer consumer-level rebates to simply not be allowed -- the manufacturer can always pay the retailer if it wants to simply allow reducing price on existing inventory. That gets rid of the whole mess. If you want to compete on price, compete on price honestly.
If that isn't acceptable, I'd at least prefer that actual prices *must* be listed in the same color as and at least as large as after-rebate prices. Let people buy based on honest information.
Anyone who registers under that domain is fully aware that his web site can be easily blocked.
I'm not sure if you're completely aware how DNS works.
When I do what most people consider "registering a domain", I am paying for a single line entry in a database somewhere that aims at a DNS server that I run that can contain as many entries as I want, and aim at any IP.
So, for instance, I can sit down and register foobarbaz.xxx (or will, if the xxx TLD gets pushed past ICANN). I can then set the record www.foobarbaz.xxx on my server to aim at the IP address that www.apple.com points at.
Of course, that doesn't hurt Apple. You don't care whether people set up *additional*.xxx records aiming at an IP, right? Sure, so far, it's just a useless extra record.
The problem is that the same operation can be performed, but from another TLD into.xxx. I can register typical.name, and then aim dirtymonkeysex.myfavoritesites.typical.name at the same IP address that www.dirtymonkeysex.xxx resolves to. *Now* all my ISP sees is me trying to resolve "dirtymonkeysex.myfavoritesites.typical.name", and I get my site. Anyone in the world with the bandwidth to run a DNS server (not much; nowhere near what is required to run a proxy to access those same pages) can allow anyone else in the world to bypass the.xxx block that your ISP is running.
We can bring in vhosts too, but the simple point is that DNS was never designed to perform content filtering -- these aren't flaws in DNS, it's people trying to incorrectly use the thing and mostly not understanding why it wouldn't work.
No one is going to complain that they didn't put metatag XYZ on their pages.
So disallow pages that lack content metatags. [shrug] I don't see the problem as any more difficult than trying to force all websites to move to.xxx.
As far as I know, there won't be special laws regarding this domain. Registering is entirely voluntary. You either register and acknowledge that you are blocked in a bunch of places that probably didn't want to see your business anyway, or don't and live happily ever after. It's not the content viewer who decides if the site should be a.xxx, but the content creator.
Topless sites would not be.xxx sites in, say, the UK. Bikini sites would be.xxx sites in, say, Saudi Arabia. The variable is not the content *creator*, but the content *viewer*.
So now, you have lots of complaints from people in the world who don't like whatever standard content creators choose to use.
I'm serious --.xxx is *not* the quick, easy fix that it appears to be on the surface. What it is is an intended cash cow for domain name registrars.
"Censorship"? No. Not showing *everything* to a kid until you, the parent, determines that they are ready, yes.
If filtering out content that you consider objectionable (even if you intend to stop doing so two decades in the future) isn't censorship, I'm curious as to what your definition of the word is. Mirriam-Webster says "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable".
If you haven't noticed, there is a huge, wide range of maturity between 0 and 18. Maybe when you have children of your own, you'll realize this.
And how do you think that mental maturity is reached, if not through experience?
If Americans truly hold freedom of expression in high regard (as is often claimed by them)
We actually don't. The US is pretty religiously conservative. Religion is the largest source of objection to freedom of expression, regrettably enough. It always seems to be Southern Baptists out claiming that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft and needs to be removed from school libraries...
If you think about how Christianity works, it's not such a surprise. Back when Galileo started talking about the rest of the universe perhaps not circling around the Earth, Christianity worked very quickly to stifle him and keep him under house arrest until he died. The folks living large at the top of the religious food chain didn't try to just *defend* their ideas -- they knew that they were wrong, and that they were only going to win by suppressing competing ideas.
And then when Martin Luther translated the Bible into a language that commoners could read...he nearly was killed by good ol' Christianity. There was the risk that someone would have to actually *defend* ideas, instead of being able to just indoctrinate kids at a young age ("If you don't do what the priest says and give him money each week, you're going to BURN IN HELL FOREVER").
Christianity is steadily dying out in the United States. Christianity now claims 10% less of the population than it did a decade ago. Still a long way to go, though.
"I know you're joking, but many Europeans find it hilarious how those in the US who go on the most about bringing "freedom" to Iraq and Afghanistan are often amongst the leaders in wanting to limit freedom in America."
Being truthful is sometimes not the most effective short-term way to herd people. Playing off fears and irrationality often works a lot better.
Their take (which is apparently correct) is that if they're selling database entries, then a business needs to buy subscriptions for *all* possible related entries. If they come out with a.biz TLD, then IBM needs to buy ibm.biz to avoid concerns that someone *else* might buy it.
It's completely necessary to enforce an ever-increasing tax against businesses. It's free money for the registrars -- why *wouldn't* they push for more TLDs?
It's sad that ICANN can't tell said parasites to shove off.
So the purpose of censorship is to help adults deal with their own childhood censorship-induced fears and neuroses and inability to deal with them rationally, rather than to actually produce a benefit for children?
Paul Graham once wrote that the real point of PowerPoint is not to help present information in a memorable manner. It's to help presenters confront their fears of public speaking, since it means that the audience is looking at a projected square and the speaker is hidden in the darkness, rather than having to stand in the light in front of everyone.
I guess what I'm wondering is why you are capable of being aware of said content and dealing with it responsibly, but that you feel that hiding it from a kid somewhere will somehow help them become more responsible or a better adult. [shrug] You can lock someone in a box until they're 18 and then let them go, but they'll have the mind of an infant. When do you want to let them develop the ability to understand and deal with things? Right as you send them off to college? It *does* mean that you can pretend that they're still ignorant, but is that best for them?
(c) Many of the problems of the.xxx TLD still apply. It's still a single bit. It tries to apply a global bar for what is acceptable for a kid to view to the *entire* world, rather than flagging based on type of content. It is primarily pushed by registrars that just want to sell more domains. It has only domain-level granularity. It's a lot easier to bypass than metatagging.
if all sex sites had to have a.xxx tld, it would be *SO* easy to block it.... How can even the religious zealots be against that?
A lot of reasons. I've posted scads of problems with it, but here are my two favorite reasons:
(1).xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address..xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason..xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in.xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.
(2).xxx sucks from a policy standpoint. We sorta-kinda can get away with saying "This is adult content, and this isn't" in the United States, because we've got a *somewhat* universal standard of acceptable content. Even then, there's friction (in San Francisco, it's been ruled legal to do nude yoga on a city street -- try doing that in the Deep South). But it's not nearly as much as the differences between countries and continents. Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a.xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television. In the US, we consider that unacceptable and obscene. In some conservative Islamic countries, a woman in regular business wear (or worse, a bikini) would be considered completely unacceptable. How do you do a good job of reconciling all these various wildly-differing social values into that single bit of information? No matter what happens, an awful lot of people are going to find your classification completely unacceptable. A.xxx TLD promises *years* of culture wars and infighting.
There are two main groups pushing for a.xxx TLD. First, there are a lot of people who simply don't have the technical background to understand the drawbacks of a.xxx TLD, but know that they want to be able to filter porn. They aren't familiar with the alternatives, and a.xxx TLD is easy to explain to them. The other group is the domain name registrars, which are absolutely salivating at the possibility of having people have to pay for a new domain based on the kind of content they are providing. Heck, get past the initial big step of getting people used to paying a domain name registrar tax to serve a particular type of content, and you can do it with all *kinds* of content. There's nothing that a domain name registrar would like better than something along these lines.
And that's why I really don't think that most people actually want a.xxx TLD. They may want to be able to filter porn, but they don't want a.xxx TLD.
Wikipedia is more relevant to *my* life than Plato or the Bible. The first is mostly obsolete ideas, the second is a lot of horseshit. IMHO, of course.
Personally, I think that you just reacted like that because you've been told time over and over that the Bible is incredibly important. [shrug]
Wikipedia has potential and is "entertaining" but I'd never use it for real research.
Uh...that's, like, okay.
Because Wikipedia links directly to original sources.
The reason that it was so crucial for old-media encyclopedias to be so heavily examined is because it was a pain in the ass to check original sources.
Most things that people hear word-of-mouth or in the newspaper are less well-checked than what I read on Wikipedia. And that's what I and 99% of the people out there use Wikipedia for. We aren't trying to use it as an authoritative source for writing a doctoral thesis, where the propagation of even a single error might be significant. We're trying to get real-world usable information. And Wikipedia does a better job than anything else out there of doing this.
A lot of people bash Wikipedia because it doesn't seem like it should work. It clashes mightily with the common computer security approach of accepting absolutely no attacks against something. Wikipedia, however, takes advantage of a completely different mechanism that most people undervalue -- recoverability. *Anyone* can vandalize Wikipedia. Vandalizing Wikipedia en-masse, however, is totally useless, because the bulk of Wikipedia's content *is* useful and *does* keep improving.
If someone thinks that Wikipedia is bad, fine. Let them *branch* Wikipedia into a "stable branch", and they can only allow fully reviewed changes to be added, or whatever. That's absolutely legal. There's at least some argument that maybe Wikipedia only needed to be wild and loose in its early days. I don't really think that it's likely, but instead of bitching about how Wikipedians are doing their volunteer work that they're giving to the world, sit down and fix it, you know?
Personally, I think that the rate of update and the value of more articles outweighs ideological arguments about review, but whatever.
Maybe at some point, there will be some concept of a gradient of article stability, and it will require more work to change an older article. [shrug] I dunno. But I hate all the nay-saying about WP.
Second, firewalls really don't do that much for you. They stop things like blaster which attack an open port on the operating system, but let's fix the damn oeprating system to patch those holes, not just cover them up with a rug.
Firewalls provide perhaps a single security benefit -- they might buy you a small amount of time after an exploit is released before your network is hit (e.g. if someone releases a simple worm). They are not long-term solutions at all. "Personal firewalls" are a complete waste of time -- there are too many clever ways to subvert the things.
For a long time, I've been arguing that the kinds of people who deploy incredibly restrictive firewalls left and right (and then proceed to ram things like SOAP through the firewall because they just blew away the usefulness of their network and need a hack to try to get things working again) aren't doing anything but hurting network performance and increasing complexity -- they *still* have the same servers and clients going through their firewall, but now they spent a lot of money to essentially slow everything down.
A web browser is one of the most complex applications on your system, and has to deal with some of the most complex data, and some of this data is already intended to be executed. It also changes at a very rapid rate compared to most applications (compare, say, the evolution of Navigator-Mozilla-Firefox to Photoshop). It is, quite simply, *the* most attackable thing on your system.
What's the second most attackable thing on your system? Data files. Sure, programmers go to a lot of work to ensure that they have robust handling of malicious network input. But what about in their data file formats? Plus, these often change every time a new feature is added to an application. A virus that sits in a data file can spread even on an incredibly-locked down network, where the only common access that the machines on the network use is a file server. Common, well-examined file formats like MP3 (see Nullsoft's ID3 tag problems), JPEG (libjpeg's had security problems in the past that have hit Slashdot), and so forth have had their share of blemishes. How much more likely do you think it is that the case of a more complex format (Illustrator or Word, for example) that many, many holes still exist? Plus, while server admins may patch their servers, the number of people that use old versions of WinAmp is *immense* -- lots of these holes won't be closed for a long, long time.
But what do we get? Firewalls. Granted, Microsoft had an attitude for a while that computers didn't *have* to be secure against remote attacks, and the complex filesharing/IPC/etc systems were by default exposed to the remote world, and that if their software had holes that got attacked, then the network admin was at fault. Some use of firewalls were a response to that. A hell of a lot, though, isn't. Most firewalls are Band-Aids -- they may not do much, but it's easy to point at them as progress, and everyone feels a lot better.
but I'm sure a lot of adults would be pissed if the next installment was watered down ("sweat" replacing blood a la Mortal Kombat, for example) because the standards became more strict.
The entire concept of the color of a liquid changing the rating of a game is just stupid.
Gah, the whole concept of censorship drives me up a wall.
I really, really, really loathe conservative pro-censorship organizations.
There are only three reasons someone should censor something:
1) The content is so incredibly potentially damaging that the possibility of someone seeing it at all is unacceptable. Finding out that dialing "000-0001" on any telephone causes US nuclear missiles to be launched at Russia would be a good example. There aren't many of these. People can't learn to avoid this content themselves because even a single exposure is unacceptable.
2) The content is actually addictive and will override the rational mind, so there's a feedback loop going on that causes peeople to seek out the content more and more. Thus, people can't learn to avoid this content themselves because any exposure might cause them to potentially lose the ability to choose not to seek out the content. I can't really think of any informational version of this off the top of my head, but it's the rationale used for banning addictive drugs.
3) The assumption is made that people are not capable of functioning on their own and need to be herded and controlled by some group that is somehow more enlightened. I don't really buy into this.
#3 is the rationale that conservative Christian groups seem to buy into. ("Surely, if those poor sad sops were just as intelligent/morally strong as us, they'd understand the right thing to do. Heck, they wouldn't argue with us, because they'd join us in advocating censorship! Instead, we need to expose them only to certain memes and keep any other memes that might outcompete those memes away from them!")
My take is that the more competing ideas and debate going on, the better, and that the pro-censorship folks out there aren't somehow more enlightened than the rest of us. Personally, I think that if an idea is bad, people will tend to shrug it off in favor of new, better ideas.
Care to tell me what exactly is wrong with the lever based voting machines that New York has used for the last 40 years?
I can't speak as to the specific policy details you gave, but as for lever-based voting versus e-voting, that's easy: there are few people who are aware of the issues and risks involved in e-voting.
The reason there was so much outrage on Slashdot over the entire move to e-voting (and Diebold's work in particular) was the large number of technically informed folks on here who actually understand the rather limited benefits of e-voting and the significant risks.
In the general public, there are relatively few people who could mount an informed argument for why e-voting is a bad idea. So there isn't much opposition to e-voting or Diebold's work. An official that has approved spending on something probably isn't going to want to criticize it (unless he can pass the buck to Diebold, which is why there is so much criticism of relatively minor issues in Diebold's actual implementation, rather than of e-voting in general). Diebold, of course, has every incentive in the world to get their fingers on the piles of tax dollars available for funding e-voting. The general public tends to get a vague warm and fuzzy feeling associated with anything with "technology" in its name.
I can't think of a good fix. Maybe a couple of high-profile example scenarios run by information theory or security researchers with some press attending demonstrating various flaws in Diebold's approach, focussing on points that will play out well in the news.
Those rarely include every person that's committed even a minor patch; they would probably include every person that has written a significant chunk of code and every person with commit access.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's all you care about, why not just stick the display on the shelf in front of the product, and avoid the whole problem?
Maybe, but I'd buy a good e-book reader.
I admit that I wouldn't pay all *that* much -- probably $300 would be about the cap -- but I wouldn't require a *huge* screen, either, and everything these days has LCD screens, so it shouldn't cost that much. It doesn't need to do arbitrary formats, either, as long as I can render any format to its format easily and Freely. It barely needs any storage capacity compared to an MP3 player -- 64MB of ebooks are going to last you a long, long time. It doesn't need a touch screen. It doesn't even need color. It just needs a good-looking screen that's bigger than a PDA, and to not cost too much.
And I agree that use of locked books is totally ridiculous. I wouldn't buy them -- a lot of what I want to read is already web pages or text. I have tons and tons of things that I'd love to read somewhere other than sitting in my computer chair.
Tablet PCs might do it, but they're pricy and have short battery life.
Advertisers finally figured out on the Web that the best way to "get someone's attention" isn't necessarily the best way to "get someone to buy your product".
.GIF ads.
I remember strobing
Actually, they might still exist, but I haven't had animated GIFs on in my browser for years, and Flash ads are blocked, so I can't say for sure -- but when I use web browsers on other computers, I don't seem to see them any more.
Other than as a willy-waving metric, it seems that the error count in a tiny sampling of articles isn't useful at *all*.
I mean, it's pretty clear that both Britannica and Wikipedia are useful references. They have different strengths and weaknesses, but neither is gong to be unilaterally better.
Now, I personally use WP exclusively; It's available from anywhere with a web browser, it's free, it covers the sorts of things that I deal with frequently (tech, pop culture, people) and I'm a fan of the open source mentality. For my particular needs, WP is better suited. However, I don't see a need to claim that one is *better*. There are going to be WP articles that are *chock full* of errors on some points or link to sketchy sources, and there are going to be Britannica articles that just don't exist compared to WP or are simply outdated. It doesn't take people very long to figure out which is more appropriate to their uses, because aside from the initially surprising fact (to me, at least) that WP works and doesn't simply fall prey to vandalism, the strengths of the two aren't that hard to figure out. I'm not going to use WP as a primary source for a research paper, but it's going to be the very first reference that I turn to when I want an overview of a topic.
I think that WP still has some challenges to pass -- WP contains articles on specific *products*, which Britannica completely lacks, and at some point, marketers are going to start expressing interest in the ability to freely edit Wikipedia articles on their products. But people that claim that WP is not useful are so clearly demonstrated wrong by a short while of using WP that there isn't any point in even arguing the point. It would be like someone claiming that Google isn't useful because it can return results to pages that aren't peer-reviewed.
Right now, there's a lot of noise over the Seigenthaler incident, but that's a tiny ripple in a vast ocean -- people will find a way to solve problems like this (if not in WP, then in a competing, derived system), just because it's so useful to do so. Reputation systems, a second system that blocks admission of changes until someone reviews them, whatever. We haven't even scratched the surface of systems like this, and their value is clearly phenomenal. I have read far more history and computer science on WP than I've been motived to read about elsewhere for quite some time. I've looked up a number of things that I always wondered about (what "grunge" actually *is*, for example), because WP is so quick to access, so vast, and so readable.
The best thing about all this is that WP is something that nobody (or very few people, at least) were making noise about until recently. The Internet solves problems (communication, latency, ability to provide links to other content, ease of collaboration, access to everyone to try out new system ideas) that allow incredible new systems that have never existed before in humanity's existence, and the number of new (as of yet raw perhaps, unpolished) systems is *exploding*. Search engines are the only thing that was an immediate and obvious application to me when the Web came into being, and even the mechanisms of something like Google were certainly not obvious. In the past few years, we have seen ideas like del.icio.us, yahoo's bundle of services, free webmail, Wikipedia, and so forth come into being. What's even more incredible is that these things are *enabling* technologies. Each one is a tool that allows people to more easily communicate or deal with things, which makes us even *more* powerful and makes it even easier for us to make new tools. If I can freely collaborate without long-distance phone charges with people in Sweden, I expand the number of people that I can share knowledge with. If I can read, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the languages that I can read through use of Babelfish, I have hugely increased the number of documents available to me. If I can take advantage
Who's going to believe that a man with 4 networked computers (one recently "cleaned"), high speed internet, and a wifi setup (perhaps with security disabled for just such a defense) is a "computer novice" subjected to the attacks of a roving gang of drive-by internet pirates? I'm sure it looks good for his friends and family to hear him proclaim innocence to the claims, but he should be aware that perjury is a crime!
Well, two points:
(a) Let's say that, like many people, you live in an apartment complex or other reasonably dense residential environment. You want to run your peer-to-peer client all day. Most people are not going to be technically knowledgeable enough to configure their router to make this a background operation, and are going to have to resort to things like capping data rates. Like many people, you have a wireless laptop, and a neighbor with an Internet connection and a wireless hub. You simply use their network for your laptop, which keeps your own connection peppy.
(b) If the guy does do this, is it a good thing for society to fine him $100K? I'm not saying that it necessarily isn't, but I'm very much not sure of this. Today, the only reason that waiters/waitresses can reasonably make a living is because of tips -- I could see musicians operating the same way. We just don't know what's feasible yet, but I'm not really worried that our society will become deprived of audio or video entertainment because we don't have life-crippling fines on those who copy them.
The law works the same way as bin Laden and Paramount. This is why punitive damages exist -- because law enforcement can't catch every violation of the law.
In the US, volunteer fire and rescue members are not officially allowed to exceed the speed limit but many do because to poke along at 25mph getting to the station means that someone WILL die if they arrive too late. They take the risk of a ticket or worse every day to save people like you who probably bitch, moan and flip them the finger for passing you.
And I'm sure that they never, ever cause any accidents.
Hint: volunteer fire and rescue members are not allowed to exceed the speed limit for a *reason*. Police, who are, receive special training. I don't want some jackass (no matter how well meaning) to rear-end me into an intersection, thank you very much.
So you can bypass the filters with a little network know-how, like that is new.
.xxx hierarchy in a non-.xxx hierarchy, and the entire thing would be bypassed). It's also hard to reverse engineer and create key generators for CSS -- but once one person has done it, *anyone*, no matter the level of knowledge, benefits. That's where the problem comes in.
.xxx versus whether or not it is tagged.
.xxx. SaudiBikiniGals.com isn't forced. AnalYanks.com isn't forced. Who cares about complaints about their choise of TLD? If your government of choice happens to force you, then that sucks but they could do much worse.
.xxx hurts only those who buy them. Maybe we should get rid of .net, .org and every other TLD, they are only cashcows, .com should be enough for everybody!
.xxx is not.
It is unique in two ways: first, this is *very* easy, and second, someone else can do the work for you (e.g. I could simply mirror the
I haven't heard of these content describing metatags before reading your post. Slashdot doesn't appear to have them, so please give us a link where this content tag standard is given. Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?
"Metatags" is a generic term for any type of tag containing metainformation -- I was referring to ICRA.
Are you saying that every page on the net should have tags inserted or be blocked?
I'm saying that that is a superior alternative to having the same thing done, but with only domain-level granularity, and on the basis of whether or not it is in
And no website is being forced to move to
The argument that nobody (or at least some people) aren't forced to take part in something is certainly not a counterargument to someone saying that it has severe problems.
As for "government of choice", that's quite a simplification. Changing citizenship is hardly an off-the-cuff decision. If the technical problems with the idea that you are promoting have, as a solution, changing your citizenship, something is quite wrong with the solution.
Cashcow or not,
Actually, I don't much like the fact that Verisign and a couple of other registrars do encourage people purchasing foobar.com to also purchase foobar.net and foobar.org "with one easy click!". However, those other TLDs have quite legitimate uses -- they are hierarchical classifiers for domains.
I don't think that Slashdot is anti-UN. Complaints about the UN has been recent and specific to control of ICANN's job being handed over the the UN. I think that Slashdot tends to be anti-authoritarian WRT the Internet.
And, frankly, I also think that the status quo is better than trying to involve the UN. The reason the Internet has done so well is because relevant people that could have squashed by trying to poke at it and regulate it have kept their hands the hell off it.
The US government has done a pretty good job of not playing politics with ICANN's work. The last thing that I want is red tape strangling every smart engineer out there who is trying to advance technology.
Handing something to the UN nearly *guarantees* that it will become politicized. The whole *point* of the UN is to have a diplomatic forum. I don't *want* that.
If the US starts doing a poor job of handling what ICANN's been doing, *then* I can see start talking about the UN. But I don't want to break something that isn't broken for the sake of making someone politically happy. I'm rather more interested in whether things are technically okay.
Does anyone really think they won't get their rebates?
Actually, this is true for at least some people: I was reading a study on rebates, and of the (large) test group, 30% of rebates were never recieved (at least as of six months after sending the rebate in).
However, I think that the real problem is, as you pointed out, that retailers attempt to benefit based on the fact that some people will not send the rebate in.
The point is that there is huge benefit to having clear and accurate information available to everyone. It makes it much easier for people to make correct buying decisions given their needs and values. There are essentially no drawbacks to having accurate information on what you are purchasing available. As a result, we have lots of laws to ensure that this happens (food needs to have nutritional information and quantity information measured and presented in a standard format, medical products cannot make bogus medical claims -- if you look at "health drinks" in the US a hundred years ago, you'll note that this was not always the case).
Point being, anything that requires better and more accurate information about a product to be provided is pretty much unilaterally a win.
So rebates are a mechanism that attempts to take advantage of bogus information about a product. At least in the United States (not the case in all countries, as I understand it) it is legal to have a rebate and to then publish the *after rebate* price as the price of the product (I believe that some states may require "after rebate" in the fine print.) In fact, you aren't buying a widget for $N-$rebate. You're buying the choice of a widget at $N or a widget plus some additional work on your part, which you might screw up by damaging the UPC or similar, for $N-$rebate. They eye-catch with (false) low prices and hope that once someone's attention is grabbed or they are in the store or they've purchased the product, that they won't follow through.
This is simply not good.
I'd prefer consumer-level rebates to simply not be allowed -- the manufacturer can always pay the retailer if it wants to simply allow reducing price on existing inventory. That gets rid of the whole mess. If you want to compete on price, compete on price honestly.
If that isn't acceptable, I'd at least prefer that actual prices *must* be listed in the same color as and at least as large as after-rebate prices. Let people buy based on honest information.
Your favorite reasons suck.
.xxx records aiming at an IP, right? Sure, so far, it's just a useless extra record.
.xxx. I can register typical.name, and then aim dirtymonkeysex.myfavoritesites.typical.name at the same IP address that www.dirtymonkeysex.xxx resolves to. *Now* all my ISP sees is me trying to resolve "dirtymonkeysex.myfavoritesites.typical.name", and I get my site. Anyone in the world with the bandwidth to run a DNS server (not much; nowhere near what is required to run a proxy to access those same pages) can allow anyone else in the world to bypass the .xxx block that your ISP is running.
.xxx.
.xxx, but the content creator.
.xxx sites in, say, the UK. Bikini sites would be .xxx sites in, say, Saudi Arabia. The variable is not the content *creator*, but the content *viewer*.
.xxx is *not* the quick, easy fix that it appears to be on the surface. What it is is an intended cash cow for domain name registrars.
Okay, let's take a look:
Anyone who registers under that domain is fully aware that his web site can be easily blocked.
I'm not sure if you're completely aware how DNS works.
When I do what most people consider "registering a domain", I am paying for a single line entry in a database somewhere that aims at a DNS server that I run that can contain as many entries as I want, and aim at any IP.
So, for instance, I can sit down and register foobarbaz.xxx (or will, if the xxx TLD gets pushed past ICANN). I can then set the record www.foobarbaz.xxx on my server to aim at the IP address that www.apple.com points at.
Of course, that doesn't hurt Apple. You don't care whether people set up *additional*
The problem is that the same operation can be performed, but from another TLD into
We can bring in vhosts too, but the simple point is that DNS was never designed to perform content filtering -- these aren't flaws in DNS, it's people trying to incorrectly use the thing and mostly not understanding why it wouldn't work.
No one is going to complain that they didn't put metatag XYZ on their pages.
So disallow pages that lack content metatags. [shrug] I don't see the problem as any more difficult than trying to force all websites to move to
As far as I know, there won't be special laws regarding this domain. Registering is entirely voluntary. You either register and acknowledge that you are blocked in a bunch of places that probably didn't want to see your business anyway, or don't and live happily ever after. It's not the content viewer who decides if the site should be a
Topless sites would not be
So now, you have lots of complaints from people in the world who don't like whatever standard content creators choose to use.
I'm serious --
"Censorship"? No. Not showing *everything* to a kid until you, the parent, determines that they are ready, yes.
If filtering out content that you consider objectionable (even if you intend to stop doing so two decades in the future) isn't censorship, I'm curious as to what your definition of the word is. Mirriam-Webster says "to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable".
If you haven't noticed, there is a huge, wide range of maturity between 0 and 18. Maybe when you have children of your own, you'll realize this.
And how do you think that mental maturity is reached, if not through experience?
If Americans truly hold freedom of expression in high regard (as is often claimed by them)
We actually don't. The US is pretty religiously conservative. Religion is the largest source of objection to freedom of expression, regrettably enough. It always seems to be Southern Baptists out claiming that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft and needs to be removed from school libraries...
If you think about how Christianity works, it's not such a surprise. Back when Galileo started talking about the rest of the universe perhaps not circling around the Earth, Christianity worked very quickly to stifle him and keep him under house arrest until he died. The folks living large at the top of the religious food chain didn't try to just *defend* their ideas -- they knew that they were wrong, and that they were only going to win by suppressing competing ideas.
And then when Martin Luther translated the Bible into a language that commoners could read...he nearly was killed by good ol' Christianity. There was the risk that someone would have to actually *defend* ideas, instead of being able to just indoctrinate kids at a young age ("If you don't do what the priest says and give him money each week, you're going to BURN IN HELL FOREVER").
Christianity is steadily dying out in the United States. Christianity now claims 10% less of the population than it did a decade ago. Still a long way to go, though.
"I know you're joking, but many Europeans find it hilarious how those in the US who go on the most about bringing "freedom" to Iraq and Afghanistan are often amongst the leaders in wanting to limit freedom in America."
Being truthful is sometimes not the most effective short-term way to herd people. Playing off fears and irrationality often works a lot better.
Yes, if other memes get to them before their indoctrination is complete, they might come up with different ideas than others.
My take: if your ideas are good enough, you don't need to try to silence others to ensure that your ideas take root.
Totally unnecessary.
.biz TLD, then IBM needs to buy ibm.biz to avoid concerns that someone *else* might buy it.
Not from a registrar's point of view.
Their take (which is apparently correct) is that if they're selling database entries, then a business needs to buy subscriptions for *all* possible related entries. If they come out with a
It's completely necessary to enforce an ever-increasing tax against businesses. It's free money for the registrars -- why *wouldn't* they push for more TLDs?
It's sad that ICANN can't tell said parasites to shove off.
Are you ready to explain that to a 6 year old?
So the purpose of censorship is to help adults deal with their own childhood censorship-induced fears and neuroses and inability to deal with them rationally, rather than to actually produce a benefit for children?
Paul Graham once wrote that the real point of PowerPoint is not to help present information in a memorable manner. It's to help presenters confront their fears of public speaking, since it means that the audience is looking at a projected square and the speaker is hidden in the darkness, rather than having to stand in the light in front of everyone.
I guess what I'm wondering is why you are capable of being aware of said content and dealing with it responsibly, but that you feel that hiding it from a kid somewhere will somehow help them become more responsible or a better adult. [shrug] You can lock someone in a box until they're 18 and then let them go, but they'll have the mind of an infant. When do you want to let them develop the ability to understand and deal with things? Right as you send them off to college? It *does* mean that you can pretend that they're still ignorant, but is that best for them?
(a) Why does it have to be a TLD? This is a US issue. Why not *.kids.us?
.xxx TLD still apply. It's still a single bit. It tries to apply a global bar for what is acceptable for a kid to view to the *entire* world, rather than flagging based on type of content. It is primarily pushed by registrars that just want to sell more domains. It has only domain-level granularity. It's a lot easier to bypass than metatagging.
(b) This has already been proposed
(c) Many of the problems of the
if all sex sites had to have a .xxx tld, it would be *SO* easy to block it.... How can even the religious zealots be against that?
.xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address. .xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason. .xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in .xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.
.xxx sucks from a policy standpoint. We sorta-kinda can get away with saying "This is adult content, and this isn't" in the United States, because we've got a *somewhat* universal standard of acceptable content. Even then, there's friction (in San Francisco, it's been ruled legal to do nude yoga on a city street -- try doing that in the Deep South). But it's not nearly as much as the differences between countries and continents. Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a .xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television. In the US, we consider that unacceptable and obscene. In some conservative Islamic countries, a woman in regular business wear (or worse, a bikini) would be considered completely unacceptable. How do you do a good job of reconciling all these various wildly-differing social values into that single bit of information? No matter what happens, an awful lot of people are going to find your classification completely unacceptable. A .xxx TLD promises *years* of culture wars and infighting.
.xxx TLD. First, there are a lot of people who simply don't have the technical background to understand the drawbacks of a .xxx TLD, but know that they want to be able to filter porn. They aren't familiar with the alternatives, and a .xxx TLD is easy to explain to them. The other group is the domain name registrars, which are absolutely salivating at the possibility of having people have to pay for a new domain based on the kind of content they are providing. Heck, get past the initial big step of getting people used to paying a domain name registrar tax to serve a particular type of content, and you can do it with all *kinds* of content. There's nothing that a domain name registrar would like better than something along these lines.
.xxx TLD. They may want to be able to filter porn, but they don't want a .xxx TLD.
A lot of reasons. I've posted scads of problems with it, but here are my two favorite reasons:
(1)
(2)
There are two main groups pushing for a
And that's why I really don't think that most people actually want a
Wikipedia is more relevant to *my* life than Plato or the Bible. The first is mostly obsolete ideas, the second is a lot of horseshit. IMHO, of course.
Personally, I think that you just reacted like that because you've been told time over and over that the Bible is incredibly important. [shrug]
Wikipedia has potential and is "entertaining" but I'd never use it for real research.
Uh...that's, like, okay.
Because Wikipedia links directly to original sources.
The reason that it was so crucial for old-media encyclopedias to be so heavily examined is because it was a pain in the ass to check original sources.
Most things that people hear word-of-mouth or in the newspaper are less well-checked than what I read on Wikipedia. And that's what I and 99% of the people out there use Wikipedia for. We aren't trying to use it as an authoritative source for writing a doctoral thesis, where the propagation of even a single error might be significant. We're trying to get real-world usable information. And Wikipedia does a better job than anything else out there of doing this.
A lot of people bash Wikipedia because it doesn't seem like it should work. It clashes mightily with the common computer security approach of accepting absolutely no attacks against something. Wikipedia, however, takes advantage of a completely different mechanism that most people undervalue -- recoverability. *Anyone* can vandalize Wikipedia. Vandalizing Wikipedia en-masse, however, is totally useless, because the bulk of Wikipedia's content *is* useful and *does* keep improving.
If someone thinks that Wikipedia is bad, fine. Let them *branch* Wikipedia into a "stable branch", and they can only allow fully reviewed changes to be added, or whatever. That's absolutely legal. There's at least some argument that maybe Wikipedia only needed to be wild and loose in its early days. I don't really think that it's likely, but instead of bitching about how Wikipedians are doing their volunteer work that they're giving to the world, sit down and fix it, you know?
Personally, I think that the rate of update and the value of more articles outweighs ideological arguments about review, but whatever.
Maybe at some point, there will be some concept of a gradient of article stability, and it will require more work to change an older article. [shrug] I dunno. But I hate all the nay-saying about WP.
Second, firewalls really don't do that much for you. They stop things like blaster which attack an open port on the operating system, but let's fix the damn oeprating system to patch those holes, not just cover them up with a rug.
Firewalls provide perhaps a single security benefit -- they might buy you a small amount of time after an exploit is released before your network is hit (e.g. if someone releases a simple worm). They are not long-term solutions at all. "Personal firewalls" are a complete waste of time -- there are too many clever ways to subvert the things.
For a long time, I've been arguing that the kinds of people who deploy incredibly restrictive firewalls left and right (and then proceed to ram things like SOAP through the firewall because they just blew away the usefulness of their network and need a hack to try to get things working again) aren't doing anything but hurting network performance and increasing complexity -- they *still* have the same servers and clients going through their firewall, but now they spent a lot of money to essentially slow everything down.
A web browser is one of the most complex applications on your system, and has to deal with some of the most complex data, and some of this data is already intended to be executed. It also changes at a very rapid rate compared to most applications (compare, say, the evolution of Navigator-Mozilla-Firefox to Photoshop). It is, quite simply, *the* most attackable thing on your system.
What's the second most attackable thing on your system? Data files. Sure, programmers go to a lot of work to ensure that they have robust handling of malicious network input. But what about in their data file formats? Plus, these often change every time a new feature is added to an application. A virus that sits in a data file can spread even on an incredibly-locked down network, where the only common access that the machines on the network use is a file server. Common, well-examined file formats like MP3 (see Nullsoft's ID3 tag problems), JPEG (libjpeg's had security problems in the past that have hit Slashdot), and so forth have had their share of blemishes. How much more likely do you think it is that the case of a more complex format (Illustrator or Word, for example) that many, many holes still exist? Plus, while server admins may patch their servers, the number of people that use old versions of WinAmp is *immense* -- lots of these holes won't be closed for a long, long time.
But what do we get? Firewalls. Granted, Microsoft had an attitude for a while that computers didn't *have* to be secure against remote attacks, and the complex filesharing/IPC/etc systems were by default exposed to the remote world, and that if their software had holes that got attacked, then the network admin was at fault. Some use of firewalls were a response to that. A hell of a lot, though, isn't. Most firewalls are Band-Aids -- they may not do much, but it's easy to point at them as progress, and everyone feels a lot better.
but I'm sure a lot of adults would be pissed if the next installment was watered down ("sweat" replacing blood a la Mortal Kombat, for example) because the standards became more strict.
The entire concept of the color of a liquid changing the rating of a game is just stupid.
Gah, the whole concept of censorship drives me up a wall.
I really, really, really loathe conservative pro-censorship organizations.
There are only three reasons someone should censor something:
1) The content is so incredibly potentially damaging that the possibility of someone seeing it at all is unacceptable. Finding out that dialing "000-0001" on any telephone causes US nuclear missiles to be launched at Russia would be a good example. There aren't many of these. People can't learn to avoid this content themselves because even a single exposure is unacceptable.
2) The content is actually addictive and will override the rational mind, so there's a feedback loop going on that causes peeople to seek out the content more and more. Thus, people can't learn to avoid this content themselves because any exposure might cause them to potentially lose the ability to choose not to seek out the content. I can't really think of any informational version of this off the top of my head, but it's the rationale used for banning addictive drugs.
3) The assumption is made that people are not capable of functioning on their own and need to be herded and controlled by some group that is somehow more enlightened. I don't really buy into this.
#3 is the rationale that conservative Christian groups seem to buy into. ("Surely, if those poor sad sops were just as intelligent/morally strong as us, they'd understand the right thing to do. Heck, they wouldn't argue with us, because they'd join us in advocating censorship! Instead, we need to expose them only to certain memes and keep any other memes that might outcompete those memes away from them!")
My take is that the more competing ideas and debate going on, the better, and that the pro-censorship folks out there aren't somehow more enlightened than the rest of us. Personally, I think that if an idea is bad, people will tend to shrug it off in favor of new, better ideas.
Care to tell me what exactly is wrong with the lever based voting machines that New York has used for the last 40 years?
I can't speak as to the specific policy details you gave, but as for lever-based voting versus e-voting, that's easy: there are few people who are aware of the issues and risks involved in e-voting.
The reason there was so much outrage on Slashdot over the entire move to e-voting (and Diebold's work in particular) was the large number of technically informed folks on here who actually understand the rather limited benefits of e-voting and the significant risks.
In the general public, there are relatively few people who could mount an informed argument for why e-voting is a bad idea. So there isn't much opposition to e-voting or Diebold's work. An official that has approved spending on something probably isn't going to want to criticize it (unless he can pass the buck to Diebold, which is why there is so much criticism of relatively minor issues in Diebold's actual implementation, rather than of e-voting in general). Diebold, of course, has every incentive in the world to get their fingers on the piles of tax dollars available for funding e-voting. The general public tends to get a vague warm and fuzzy feeling associated with anything with "technology" in its name.
I can't think of a good fix. Maybe a couple of high-profile example scenarios run by information theory or security researchers with some press attending demonstrating various flaws in Diebold's approach, focussing on points that will play out well in the news.
Those rarely include every person that's committed even a minor patch; they would probably include every person that has written a significant chunk of code and every person with commit access.