Right, now I see your point. Indeed, for us, it's a no-brainer that infrastructure leads to better business opportunities and improves the overall quality of life. However, just this is alone attitude alone does almost nothing.
So this is something you should also care about. Along with heavy government intervention and expenditures you also get the inherent government inefficiency. So you want the government to invest, but try to restrict it to what is really necessary (such as transportation infrastructure). It's almost impossible to make private-build high speed rail infrastructure to be profitable by itself. It's just too expensive. So the government needs to spend money on this and then recoup this money through the taxes paid the businesses made possible by this infrastructure.
On the other hand, healthcare is much more complicated. In Brazil we do have free universal healthcare, but it's so bad that everyone who can afford it pays a private health insurance - and even those aren't that code, because the industry profits are heavily regulated, so we don't have access to state-of-the-art treatments, even with the best health insurance available.
I actually live in Belo Horizonte. Our infrastructure is shit. We don't have a decent subway system (a single line that connect nowhere to nowhere), despite the 6 million people living in the metropolitan area. Our airport is running over capacity and there won't be any real solution implemented in the foreseeable future - they will do a slight remodelling of the airport, but a new terminal is needed and that is too expensive. No rail transport to the airport.
The same thing happens in most of Brazil. The World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016 will show the world how the "Brazilian Miracle" is such a fraud. We merely got lucky during the financial crisis, as everything worked perfectly for us. At least up to this point.
Any decent company I've ever worked with would have separate internet links for the "mission-critical" stuff and the regular internet traffic.
They would have a dedicated link to the servers but users would have access to the internet through regular consumer broadband.
Works great, you get the best of both worlds. Maybe you should leave your BOFH nest and consider this option and try to become less hated by your users (I know I would hate you).
When I was a small kid, I was left by myself in the back seat of the car (back then, no one used seatbelts around here, specially in the back seat). For unknown reasons the car lost its brakes and started moving downhill and would exit through the front gate and likely hit the other house across the street. I was able to steer the car so that it crashed the gate instead of going out of our property.
I don't have clear memories of this as I was small. When my grandmother told this story there was one remarkably funny part.
She told me when people said stuff like: "It was god who turned that wheel and avoided a tragedy!" I promptly replied: "No, it wasn't god, it was me! I did like this!" and did a swinging motion similar to turning the driving wheel.
I wish I remembered this last bit. I could then tell everyone I was an atheist even as a kid.;-)
Orkut is actually the most popular social network in Brazil (in fact, the expression "social network" is barely used around here, people just say "Orkut" instead).
Here in Brazil all speed traps must have warning sign placed 300 meters before it, otherwise any fine is illegal. The speed traps also cannot be positioned facing the traffic, ie., it can only measure your speed after you went past it. Hiding the police car is illegal and officers must keep the lights over their cars turned on while doing a speed trap operation (but this is difficult to dispute unless you actually notice and record it somehow).
Overall, you need to not be paying attention at all to get a fine here. And lots of drivers still do, specially if they're drunk.
People who leave Brazil and go live in the US end up with an utopic Brazil in their minds. Generally, around here you work less and everything flows slowly. However, after living in the US for a while, when they come back to *live* in Brazil again they get very frustrated as they realize they forgot about all the bad things that made them leave in the first place.
One thing which is true is that Brazilians tend to prefer services where most of the other persons are also Brazilians or they can easily ignore foreigners. Despite being known for being friendly, most Brazilians don't feel comfortable around foreigners. It's a sort of passive xenophobia. No one actually attacks or explicitly dislikes foreigners, people just feel odd and suspicious and prefer the company of other Brazilians. This is famous in MMO games where Brazilians are known to go around shouting "br?" or they usually put "BR" in their nicknames.
I guess culture is an odd thing. I'm a Brazilian and I can't understand nor explain this phenomena very well myself. Yet, for some reason, when I play Starcraft 2 on the Latin America region, I feel the urge to ask "br?" to see if the other player is Brazilian or from some other Latin American country. Go figure.
Actually, almost no one knows or cares if it's maintained in Brazil. I live in Belo Horizonte myself, know people from Google and I didn't know that myself - I only knew local developers were involved in maintaining it.
It's really just a matter of market penetration. Even people who barely know how to click a mouse, don't have a computer at home and live on slums have an Orkut profile. There's no way this people would change to another social network. They probably had a hard time "learning Orkut".
Brazilian society is a lot more "inertia-driven" than, eg., the American society.
Did you know that, for instance, in Brazil, Google's Orkut is the social network used by everyone and Facebook is barely used? Facebook can (and probably will) be replaced when a better alternative comes up.
As an example, I just paid today R$2.25/liter to fuel my car. Doing the conversion to USD and gallons, that's about US$4.95/gallon. Electricity is also more expensive and taxed here - I pay about US$0.38/kWh.
You'll notice that even though by western standards Foxconn has a terrible work environment, they're actually the best option for Chinese workers, who queue to work there.
Even though the salaries seem low by western standards, Foxconn pays the higher salaries in China. The article mentions several people who are there only to earn some money for a while and then go to work on a lower-paying less-stressful business.
The man himself started his huge empire with a $7500 loan. Hell, I live in Brazil and you can't even begin an auto repairshop with this money here, let alone a small manufacturing plant.
By Chinese standards, Foxconn is great and they actually seem to care about their employees more than the other Chinese companies do. None of the workers are afraid to complain and lose their jobs or anything like that and even strikes happen (and people continue employed).
Honestly, you should just enjoy your cheap electronics while you can because this isn't going to last forever as a newer generation of Chinese people is growing up (also mentioned in the article) and they will want better standards of living - no one needs to take care of them, there's more than a billion of them and they can take care of themselves.
I've seen 3G networks with latencies of 90-100ms to the outside world. While it's not as good as regular broadband, I was even able to decently play some online shooters with that latency with acceptable performance. That's probably the case where latency is most important.
But then, I used to play Quake on a dialup connection back in 1997, so maybe I can just cope with higher latencies better than the average gamer.
Because it's so cheap to buy a pirated copy off the streets that downloading is almost pointless for someone who just doesn't care about the source of what they're buying. You can buy pirated CDs or DVDs here for the equivalent of US$1-3.
Hell, it probably makes economical sense to buy a pirated copy if you consider the high costs of energy here (US$0.433/kWh on my state) and prices similar to the US for broadband (I pay US$75 for the land line + 10mbps ADSL). Let's say I'm able to torrent a 4.3GB DVD movie in 6 hours (if it's a healthy torrent). My PC draws about 200Wh. So:
Energy cost = 6 x 0.2kWh = 1.2kWh * US$0.433 =~ US$0.52 Broadband = 6 x ( US$75 / 30 days / 24h ) =~ US$0.63 Blank media = US$0.50
Total cost = US$1.65
And you don't have the hassle of finding a good torrent, downloading, waiting 6h then burning it yourself.
Anyway, file sharing is actually very common here. However, for each file sharer, I would say there are at least 20 other people buying pirated stuff off the streets. When I tell people I don't buy these pirated goods, *I* end up looking silly and need to explain them why I don't do it. Some people go as far as to say that they prefer buying pirated copies because then they support the local market and its "honest workers" instead of giving money to the corrupt American studios.
Almost no one sees buying this stuff as bad and I've seen police officers buying them several times on the DVD stand in front of my job. I work in the IT staff of a *Federal Court* and there's an illegal DVD stand in front of it. That's how pervasive it is here.
I'm a Brazilian and I can say this is really bad and will actually hinder the future progress of the country in several areas.
You see, the piracy issue here isn't with file-sharers. Very very few people are file-sharers around here. The main problem here is actual physical piracy - in every neighborhood you can find a dozen of people selling pirated DVDs and CDs on the streets. This merchandise is controlled by mafia-like illegal cartels and they're a real criminal issue. This R$3 fee is a crappy band-aid which does not solve the social issue, but rather, just gives some money to the media companies.
Furthermore, this fee will badly impact smaller / indie artists who actually charge reasonable prices for their CDs because people would now be entitled to download stuff for free off the internet, without any sort of remorse whatsoever.
Dark Wizard was great. I didn't own it, but I would rent it for a lot of weekends when I was a kid. That game and Warlords II for the PC are probably the best turn-based strategy games I remember playing.
There were a few gems on the Sega CD. It's a real pity it flopped.
Sonic CD is really awesome. I still have the original CD and a working Sega CD + Mega Drive (Genesis for you Americans). I wish it was realeased for a more popular platform as it's relatively unknown thanks to the failure of Sega CD.
Well, smokers are still smelling very bad even after smoking outside and coming it. The smell sticks to clothes, hair, hands and even the computers start smelling bad after a while. So they're not "punitive policies", they're more "protective policies" for the non-smoking majority. You could try to quit smoking.
You can buy the North American version and use it to play in Africa or elsewhere *with your North American brothers*. But if you buy the African version (if there is such a thing) you will only be able to play against Africans.
You can also buy multiple versions. For instance, I bought the Latin America version and I'm considering also buying the North America version as several people I know bought that instead.
It's more like creating multiple realms instead of DVD-like region locking. It still sucks, though.
Large scale manipulation will be clearly detected in any sort of remotely democratic society - even in the US, you still have two parties (and several parties in the case of Brazil). If all parties agree that e-voting is a secure alternative, it's very likely it is indeed secure (they may hold stupid views and opinions but they're usually well-versed in political trickery).
Also, the biggest problem really is the small scale tampering and election fraud. In small cities, with maybe as few as a thousand voters, every vote counts. It's unlikely they would have the resources to break an e-voting system, while they can easily manipulate "manual" elections. A dozen votes are commonly the difference between being elected or not in these places.
Actually, they're even considering eliminating or restricting access to the end-of-day paper trail here for the sake of anonimity. Each voter here goes to a predetermined voting location (so you can't go to any voting location as you please).
In city elections in small towns, some minor roles will require maybe a couple hundred votes to be elected. Let's say a politician has "bought" the votes of 50 people from one given voting location but he only gets 10 votes in that location. Or worse, let's say it's a smaller voting location and he paid maybe 5 voters but got 0 votes in a given location. He will know those people didn't vote for him and thus the anonimity of the vote (which is a constitutional right) has been partly violated.
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
The only risk we have is if the central voting authority itself is corrupt. But, in that case, some of the political parties would probably be aware (we have several political parties).
The voting machines produce an end-of-day paper-trail, aggregating the results. Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
I'm not sure how it works everywhere else, but in Brazil voting is anonymous.
This means that on each paper-ballot there wasn't any sort of identifiable information associating the vote with the voter. So, a recount is moot, as you could just replace the original paper-ballots with whatever votes you want. The paper-ballot method is much more vulnerable to this kind of voting fraud, which used to happen in Brazil.
Now, what we have here is that each one of the voting machines produces a paper-trail at the end of the election with the total vote count for that individual machine. So, by aggregating all of the results anyone could do a manual vote count in parallel to the official one (which is only done electronically).
So, basically, the only way an electronic system can be compromised is if the central authority is corrupt itself. But if that were the case, the parties would also complain about it (we have several parties here, not just two).
Brazil has been using electronic voting country-wide for more than a decade and no party complains about its security - everyone considers them much more secure than the old and easy-to-tamper-with paper ballots.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
And this is why I believe there should be more people supporting the Parrot VM.
It is already usable and could support a lot more languages decently with better community support.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, now I see your point. Indeed, for us, it's a no-brainer that infrastructure leads to better business opportunities and improves the overall quality of life. However, just this is alone attitude alone does almost nothing.
So this is something you should also care about. Along with heavy government intervention and expenditures you also get the inherent government inefficiency. So you want the government to invest, but try to restrict it to what is really necessary (such as transportation infrastructure). It's almost impossible to make private-build high speed rail infrastructure to be profitable by itself. It's just too expensive. So the government needs to spend money on this and then recoup this money through the taxes paid the businesses made possible by this infrastructure.
On the other hand, healthcare is much more complicated. In Brazil we do have free universal healthcare, but it's so bad that everyone who can afford it pays a private health insurance - and even those aren't that code, because the industry profits are heavily regulated, so we don't have access to state-of-the-art treatments, even with the best health insurance available.
I actually live in Belo Horizonte. Our infrastructure is shit. We don't have a decent subway system (a single line that connect nowhere to nowhere), despite the 6 million people living in the metropolitan area. Our airport is running over capacity and there won't be any real solution implemented in the foreseeable future - they will do a slight remodelling of the airport, but a new terminal is needed and that is too expensive. No rail transport to the airport.
The same thing happens in most of Brazil. The World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016 will show the world how the "Brazilian Miracle" is such a fraud. We merely got lucky during the financial crisis, as everything worked perfectly for us. At least up to this point.
Any decent company I've ever worked with would have separate internet links for the "mission-critical" stuff and the regular internet traffic. They would have a dedicated link to the servers but users would have access to the internet through regular consumer broadband. Works great, you get the best of both worlds. Maybe you should leave your BOFH nest and consider this option and try to become less hated by your users (I know I would hate you).
When I was a small kid, I was left by myself in the back seat of the car (back then, no one used seatbelts around here, specially in the back seat). For unknown reasons the car lost its brakes and started moving downhill and would exit through the front gate and likely hit the other house across the street. I was able to steer the car so that it crashed the gate instead of going out of our property.
;-)
I don't have clear memories of this as I was small. When my grandmother told this story there was one remarkably funny part.
She told me when people said stuff like: "It was god who turned that wheel and avoided a tragedy!" I promptly replied: "No, it wasn't god, it was me! I did like this!" and did a swinging motion similar to turning the driving wheel.
I wish I remembered this last bit. I could then tell everyone I was an atheist even as a kid.
Orkut is actually the most popular social network in Brazil (in fact, the expression "social network" is barely used around here, people just say "Orkut" instead).
Here in Brazil all speed traps must have warning sign placed 300 meters before it, otherwise any fine is illegal. The speed traps also cannot be positioned facing the traffic, ie., it can only measure your speed after you went past it. Hiding the police car is illegal and officers must keep the lights over their cars turned on while doing a speed trap operation (but this is difficult to dispute unless you actually notice and record it somehow).
Overall, you need to not be paying attention at all to get a fine here. And lots of drivers still do, specially if they're drunk.
People who leave Brazil and go live in the US end up with an utopic Brazil in their minds. Generally, around here you work less and everything flows slowly.
However, after living in the US for a while, when they come back to *live* in Brazil again they get very frustrated as they realize they forgot about all the bad things that made them leave in the first place.
One thing which is true is that Brazilians tend to prefer services where most of the other persons are also Brazilians or they can easily ignore foreigners. Despite being known for being friendly, most Brazilians don't feel comfortable around foreigners. It's a sort of passive xenophobia. No one actually attacks or explicitly dislikes foreigners, people just feel odd and suspicious and prefer the company of other Brazilians. This is famous in MMO games where Brazilians are known to go around shouting "br?" or they usually put "BR" in their nicknames.
I guess culture is an odd thing. I'm a Brazilian and I can't understand nor explain this phenomena very well myself. Yet, for some reason, when I play Starcraft 2 on the Latin America region, I feel the urge to ask "br?" to see if the other player is Brazilian or from some other Latin American country. Go figure.
Actually, almost no one knows or cares if it's maintained in Brazil. I live in Belo Horizonte myself, know people from Google and I didn't know that myself - I only knew local developers were involved in maintaining it.
It's really just a matter of market penetration. Even people who barely know how to click a mouse, don't have a computer at home and live on slums have an Orkut profile. There's no way this people would change to another social network. They probably had a hard time "learning Orkut".
Brazilian society is a lot more "inertia-driven" than, eg., the American society.
Did you know that, for instance, in Brazil, Google's Orkut is the social network used by everyone and Facebook is barely used?
Facebook can (and probably will) be replaced when a better alternative comes up.
In Brazil there are heavy taxes on fuels.
As an example, I just paid today R$2.25/liter to fuel my car. Doing the conversion to USD and gallons, that's about US$4.95/gallon. Electricity is also more expensive and taxed here - I pay about US$0.38/kWh.
You'll notice that even though by western standards Foxconn has a terrible work environment, they're actually the best option for Chinese workers, who queue to work there.
Even though the salaries seem low by western standards, Foxconn pays the higher salaries in China. The article mentions several people who are there only to earn some money for a while and then go to work on a lower-paying less-stressful business.
The man himself started his huge empire with a $7500 loan. Hell, I live in Brazil and you can't even begin an auto repairshop with this money here, let alone a small manufacturing plant.
By Chinese standards, Foxconn is great and they actually seem to care about their employees more than the other Chinese companies do. None of the workers are afraid to complain and lose their jobs or anything like that and even strikes happen (and people continue employed).
Honestly, you should just enjoy your cheap electronics while you can because this isn't going to last forever as a newer generation of Chinese people is growing up (also mentioned in the article) and they will want better standards of living - no one needs to take care of them, there's more than a billion of them and they can take care of themselves.
I've seen 3G networks with latencies of 90-100ms to the outside world. While it's not as good as regular broadband, I was even able to decently play some online shooters with that latency with acceptable performance. That's probably the case where latency is most important.
But then, I used to play Quake on a dialup connection back in 1997, so maybe I can just cope with higher latencies better than the average gamer.
This post should be modded Insightful, not Funny.
Brilliant, sir.
Because it's so cheap to buy a pirated copy off the streets that downloading is almost pointless for someone who just doesn't care about the source of what they're buying.
You can buy pirated CDs or DVDs here for the equivalent of US$1-3.
Hell, it probably makes economical sense to buy a pirated copy if you consider the high costs of energy here (US$0.433/kWh on my state) and prices similar to the US for broadband (I pay US$75 for the land line + 10mbps ADSL). Let's say I'm able to torrent a 4.3GB DVD movie in 6 hours (if it's a healthy torrent). My PC draws about 200Wh. So:
Energy cost = 6 x 0.2kWh = 1.2kWh * US$0.433 =~ US$0.52
Broadband = 6 x ( US$75 / 30 days / 24h ) =~ US$0.63
Blank media = US$0.50
Total cost = US$1.65
And you don't have the hassle of finding a good torrent, downloading, waiting 6h then burning it yourself.
Anyway, file sharing is actually very common here. However, for each file sharer, I would say there are at least 20 other people buying pirated stuff off the streets. When I tell people I don't buy these pirated goods, *I* end up looking silly and need to explain them why I don't do it. Some people go as far as to say that they prefer buying pirated copies because then they support the local market and its "honest workers" instead of giving money to the corrupt American studios.
Almost no one sees buying this stuff as bad and I've seen police officers buying them several times on the DVD stand in front of my job. I work in the IT staff of a *Federal Court* and there's an illegal DVD stand in front of it. That's how pervasive it is here.
I'm a Brazilian and I can say this is really bad and will actually hinder the future progress of the country in several areas.
You see, the piracy issue here isn't with file-sharers. Very very few people are file-sharers around here. The main problem here is actual physical piracy - in every neighborhood you can find a dozen of people selling pirated DVDs and CDs on the streets. This merchandise is controlled by mafia-like illegal cartels and they're a real criminal issue. This R$3 fee is a crappy band-aid which does not solve the social issue, but rather, just gives some money to the media companies.
Furthermore, this fee will badly impact smaller / indie artists who actually charge reasonable prices for their CDs because people would now be entitled to download stuff for free off the internet, without any sort of remorse whatsoever.
Dark Wizard was great. I didn't own it, but I would rent it for a lot of weekends when I was a kid. That game and Warlords II for the PC are probably the best turn-based strategy games I remember playing.
There were a few gems on the Sega CD. It's a real pity it flopped.
Sonic CD is really awesome.
I still have the original CD and a working Sega CD + Mega Drive (Genesis for you Americans).
I wish it was realeased for a more popular platform as it's relatively unknown thanks to the failure of Sega CD.
Well, smokers are still smelling very bad even after smoking outside and coming it. The smell sticks to clothes, hair, hands and even the computers start smelling bad after a while. So they're not "punitive policies", they're more "protective policies" for the non-smoking majority. You could try to quit smoking.
You can buy the North American version and use it to play in Africa or elsewhere *with your North American brothers*.
But if you buy the African version (if there is such a thing) you will only be able to play against Africans.
You can also buy multiple versions. For instance, I bought the Latin America version and I'm considering also buying the North America version as several people I know bought that instead.
It's more like creating multiple realms instead of DVD-like region locking. It still sucks, though.
Large scale manipulation will be clearly detected in any sort of remotely democratic society - even in the US, you still have two parties (and several parties in the case of Brazil). If all parties agree that e-voting is a secure alternative, it's very likely it is indeed secure (they may hold stupid views and opinions but they're usually well-versed in political trickery).
Also, the biggest problem really is the small scale tampering and election fraud. In small cities, with maybe as few as a thousand voters, every vote counts. It's unlikely they would have the resources to break an e-voting system, while they can easily manipulate "manual" elections. A dozen votes are commonly the difference between being elected or not in these places.
Actually, they're even considering eliminating or restricting access to the end-of-day paper trail here for the sake of anonimity. Each voter here goes to a predetermined voting location (so you can't go to any voting location as you please).
In city elections in small towns, some minor roles will require maybe a couple hundred votes to be elected. Let's say a politician has "bought" the votes of 50 people from one given voting location but he only gets 10 votes in that location. Or worse, let's say it's a smaller voting location and he paid maybe 5 voters but got 0 votes in a given location. He will know those people didn't vote for him and thus the anonimity of the vote (which is a constitutional right) has been partly violated.
It's a difficult issue to solve.
These methods you mention surely work for Belgium. When you've got a small country, with a relatively small population size, where vote coercion probably is a very minor issue (if a problem at all), it's much easier. The overhead of e-voting is probably not worth it.
However, consider a different situation, in which you have voting locations in extreme places such as the middle of the Amazon rainforest (and dropping the containers in the river is a real possibility), in a country of 5500+ cities spread throughout a hufe territory and in a lot of those cities some local authorities are more powerful than the police itself.
Suddenly, all these methods don't work. In the developed areas and large cities, these methods you described would work. In the most remote areas, however, e-voting was able to stop a lot of the election fraud which was going on.
The only risk we have is if the central voting authority itself is corrupt. But, in that case, some of the political parties would probably be aware (we have several political parties).
The voting machines produce an end-of-day paper-trail, aggregating the results. Individual paper-trails are actually forbidden by law, as that would make voting non-anonymous.
I'm not sure how it works everywhere else, but in Brazil voting is anonymous.
This means that on each paper-ballot there wasn't any sort of identifiable information associating the vote with the voter. So, a recount is moot, as you could just replace the original paper-ballots with whatever votes you want. The paper-ballot method is much more vulnerable to this kind of voting fraud, which used to happen in Brazil.
Now, what we have here is that each one of the voting machines produces a paper-trail at the end of the election with the total vote count for that individual machine. So, by aggregating all of the results anyone could do a manual vote count in parallel to the official one (which is only done electronically).
So, basically, the only way an electronic system can be compromised is if the central authority is corrupt itself. But if that were the case, the parties would also complain about it (we have several parties here, not just two).
This is terribly biased.
Brazil has been using electronic voting country-wide for more than a decade and no party complains about its security - everyone considers them much more secure than the old and easy-to-tamper-with paper ballots.
I honestly don't understand why there is such bias against electronic voting on Slashdot since, in theory, it's a "nerd community".
Yes, e-voting, after a lot of effort can be compromised. Regular paper-ballot voting can be compromised by anyone, skilled or not, with not a lot of effort at all. Any voting system can be compromised. I don't honestly understand why the Slashdot community dislike e-voting that much.
And this is why I believe there should be more people supporting the Parrot VM.
It is already usable and could support a lot more languages decently with better community support.