Except there's a big difference between forging paper ballots, or having people vote multiple times under different identities, and using a computer-based system which could be altered easily enough to not record votes at all, record the incorrect votes, or have its count altered by an outside agent. Even the idea of a paper trail is somewhat laughable, as you're expecting people to hang on to this piece of paper for a significant time, on the off chance it might be needed to verify how they voted.
Computer-based voting is a long way from being a reliable enough method to be used exclusively. I think for now there should be a concentration on creating ballots that are easily machine-readible, making the counting easier. Purely computer-driven systems will have to be phased in in small numbers, so they can be monitored and bugs ironed out. Perhaps give people a choice of what type of machine they wish to use. You're going to have to do a lot of work to convince me that this technology is robust enough and secure enough to be used exclusively.
It may be modded funny, but the Jacquard Loom was the precursor of the modern punch-card computer. I remember from James Burke's original "Connections" series that the idea of registering patterns on a card led to the invention of a rudimentary computing system used to track the US Census (I think it was the 1890 Census, but my memory is flaky).
You're obviously intelligent and skilled, and yet you're probably not doing anything to help cure cancer, are you? So when can we expect to see you give up your job, quit posting to Slashdot in your leisure time, and join a cancer-cure R&D team at minimum wage? Anything less, and we'll find you guilty of exercising your freedom for your own benefit at the expense of your fellow man, and we'll force you to be a more productive and helpful member of society.
I'll gladly work for anyone who can put my computer and psychology skills to good use curing cancer, AIDS, poverty, etc. I'll even do it for free, in what little spare time I have. I don't pretend to be trying to cure anything, nor do I pretend to have the answers for all of society's ills. What I do know is that your typical CEO makes about 50,000 times more than most of the people who work for them, and if any of them were truly committed to the welfare of others, they'd put the money to work rather than spending it on luxury.
BTW, whenever this country has put its mind to something, it has accomplished it. What we need is a Manhattan Project to cure cancer, and one to fight AIDS, and one to end poverty world-wide. I'll gladly pony up my spare cash to fund these initiatives.
Yeah, it really sucked when the patent expired on Aspirin. Now nobody can buy one because businesses can't make money off it.
Au contrair -- the development of Aspirin (trademarked) by Bayer marked a breakthrough in the treatment of acute pain and was a boon to Bayer, until that is, their competitors found a way to copy the formula and create other versions of "Aspirin." So they were able to wring their profits after it was initially developed; now, it is a generic drug, one that anyone can produce, making it relatively cheap and easy to obtain, though for any major pharmaceutical company producing it, it provides only an insignificant fraction of their profit. Not to mention, aspirin has since been eclipsed by other painkillers, and only in the last two decades has had any major resurgence, due to its blood thinning qualities, helping heart patients avoid future heart attacks.
This just in: developing medecines takes work, and work costs resources. Anybody who can think of a better way to provide resources to the people interested in developing medecines, besides patent royalties and the like, please come forward.
How about taking the money Big Pharma uses to line the pockets of its CEOs and the egregiously large profits these companies make and putting the bulk of it into research and production? How about diverting resources and money from male impotence drugs, since I suspect far more people have cancer than there are men who can't spank the monkey.
The Fairness Doctrine was a lovely idea in its day -- that day is now over. Why? You're on it -- the Internet. So, a media outlet provides a biased look at some subject... and within hours, bloggers hither and yon are adding their two cents, bringing up counter arguments, and providing new information to support/refute the story. Some of the information is spurious, moronic, or downright prevarication, but much of it is relevant. People who were part of the story and feel cut out or that their words were taken out of context get to set the record straight. Depending on the societal relevance, it might make it to Wikipedia and be high on Google in a short period of time. In this age, the Internet provides the fairness, though at the price of limited transparency, given that much of the information provided is repetitive.
It has long been known that the Greenhouse Effect exists, causing temperatures to rise by trapping heat. The more gases that trap infrared radiation that exist in the atmosphere, the more heat is retained and the faster the atmospheric temperature rises. This is mitigated by other factors, but the basic mechanism is pretty simple. I think the why question has a pretty decent answer, making the real question: Is this part of a natural warming trend, part of the natural fluctuation that happens after an ice age, or has the current warming trend been triggered, or is it being accelerated, by the rate of Greenhouse emissions?
I think it's safe to say that claiming our activities have no impact is facetious at best; adding Greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is altering a natural process by overloading the atmospheric system and causing the other systems that provide re-uptake and moderation of these gases to be stretched to their limits more quickly. In the end, the question becomes: is the natural system capable of absorbing the extra gases we create, or are we pushing the global systems toward catastrophic failure?
The problem in this whole argument is perspective -- what works on the micro-scale is not necessarily what works best on the macro-scale. While I enjoy my freedom more than anyone, I realize that my freedom and my beliefs do not necessarily match up with the majority of the population. I am a belief system of one. I am accountable only to myself and those I interact with. A corporation is a large entity, with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of shareholders, and perhaps millions of customers. A corporation has to on the one hand, cater to the population that uses its service/buys its products, and on the other hand turn a profit.
So while I, as a person, see DRM as a threat, a corporation sees DRM as a tool to help it maintain its ability to make money off the products/services it supplies. I believe that I should have the right to see content in an unfettered fashion, whenever and wherever I want. The corporation believes that it should be compensated for the effort required to provide the product/service I am demanding. It's not so much a question of right and wrong, but to what extent a company is going to protect its interests at the expense of its customers./p.
Some expert is always trumpeting the fact that "Johnny can't program," to which many of us roll our eyes and go back to coding. But could this be a sign that the quality of the help NASA is hiring is such that these kinds of mistakes are now rampant? I mean, this could have been avoided if the code had been tested out on a full-scale mock-up of the machine, to verify that it did what it was supposed to do, before ever sending the commands to the actual machine. If anything, it's a QA failure.
Face it, your ISP is even watching you, noting your bandwidth usage, logging where you go, reading your email to make sure it's not spam, etc. The fact is, any transaction that occurs on the Internet is being logged on a server somewhere, and someone has access to that information. If you're lucky, it's just a sysadmin making sure you don't go over some quota, but you have no way of truly knowing. A true paranoic wouldn't use the Internet at all.
I think there is more to life than cheap goods and cheap goods is certainly not the sole and overiding goal of any society I'd like to be a part of.
And as they say: you get what you pay for. Cheap goods are only desirable in a culture that views resources as disposable. Cheap labor only serves to create pseudo-slavery. I personally don't mind paying more for something if I know I'm getting quality for my money. That, however, is becoming rarer by the day.
C'mon congress, learn from history. The second internet companies are allowed to make tiered internet is the day internet and porn dies. Do you want to be on the receiving end of THAT backlash?
Congress, counting its kickback and PAC money: "Huh... did someone say something? I thought I heard something... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 1... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 2...
Otherwise known as marketing... Because ultimately that's all Web 2.0 is: a marketing gimmick. Somehow, you're still using Web 1.0, when here stands the bright new, shiny, multi-functional Web 2.0. It's still all servers running software, just with different software. There's nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering here, like the first vestiges of a global AI consciousness springing full-blown. This smacks of all those "Upgrade to AOL *.0" campaigns of yesteryear.
The potential scenerio quoted in the post is so far fetched, it's doubtful anyone will ever pull it off. It involves hacking their voip system, home computer (and address book), a mass-mailing spam which happens to also include the email address of the hacked computer, user intervention (they must read the spam and respond), and the hacker must also have a good enough radio voice to fool the homeowner into thinking he's actually calling his real bank.Don't know about you, but we're not to afraid of this possible Voice over IP threat.
Far fetched? Hey, the author thought it up, didn't he? Everything is far fetched (sailing around the world, explaining gravity, travelling into space) until someone actually does it. This technique requires thought and some actual work. So? If there's money in it, someone or some group out there with the wherewithal and time on their hands will try and exploit it, because basically they know your average computer users are sheep, and they have these nifty shears. It's this kind of complicated and non-obvious avenue that will succeed, precisely because it's so hard to fathom.
If you're rolling your eyes already, wait til you get to "geodetic markers in memespace"...
AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!! It burns! It burns!!
Honestly, I pride myself on having a pretty voluminous vocabulary, but when I see stuff like that, I want to beat the author with a dictionary, preferably one covered in jagged spikes. It's bad enough the Internet is becoming polluted with mindless catchphrases, which the unenlightened throw around like candy at Halloween, but when tripe like that phrase starts being assembled, I'm thinking the invention of spoken language is going to turn out to be an evolutionary dead end.
Possibly. And once they perfect a way to use this technology to deliver painful shocks unless you buy their crappy goods, they're going to change their name to "You Better Buy!".
They could kill the whole problem by centralizing their data stores, and developing some secure web interfaces across enhanced encryption. That way, instead of trying to encrypt every machine, you could encrypt 50 data centers and control access locally...Hell, if I were the government I'd push all my software needs toward think clients and terminal services anyway...The average user doesn't need more, and that makes all your security problems more managable.
Why would government people need to be dragging this stuff home on their laptops anyway? In this era of high bandwidth connections and VPN, why can't the data be accessed from home or via laptop without it existing physically on the hard drive? I mean, when you think about it, they could just print the data out on paper and lose that as easily, but it seems that the idea is to create centralized, secure data stores, not to allow multiple copies of the same data to go floating around. If nothing else, data dropped on a HD may get out of synch with the original data, leading to errors.
But that's precisely the wrong way to do it. I studied experimental psych design in college. The biggest problem in experiments requiring human subjects is ascertaining their level of knowledge of the procedures to be used beforehand. By introducing people into an experiment who through experience or knowledge have some idea of the procedure to be followed, you introduce bias. Their reactions are tainted and it makes it harder to determine if they were the result of the experiment or any preconditioning. That would tend to invalidate the results. Of course, by asking the questions beforehand, you have another tendency to bias the experiment, so you have to be careful how you phrase things. The easiest way to control for such factors is an increase in sample size, especially of your control population. It does not eliminate potential bias, but it can minimize it.
"For those 12 in the VC who wanted to stop before the end, 5 claimed to be well-acquainted with the original Milgram study."
A lot of people "claim" a lot of knowledge they do not in fact have. I suspect if you'd mentioned the experimental design without mentioning the author, very few would have remembered Milgram's name; conversely, if you mentioned Milgram's name, I doubt many would know the great and gory details of the experiment.
If in fact these claims are true, that invalidates the results to some degree, evidenced by the rest of the sentence our anonymous friend didn't bother showing:
...and therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that this influenced their behaviour.
In order for the study to have been tightly-controlled and more importantly, valid, they would have had to control for that. They may have asked if the participants knew who Milgram was, but they would probably have not asked to if they had heard of the experiment, as it would have introduced a slight bias. Mind you, Milgram's experiment was ground-breaking in that it showed that even ordinary people can perform actions contrary to societal norms, which was the thesis based on the "I was only following orders" cant of concentration camp operators during WWII. It is of course not an excuse, but merely an artifact of societal control -- which gets expressed most strongly in a totalitarian regime.
Slashdot Mirror
Except there's a big difference between forging paper ballots, or having people vote multiple times under different identities, and using a computer-based system which could be altered easily enough to not record votes at all, record the incorrect votes, or have its count altered by an outside agent. Even the idea of a paper trail is somewhat laughable, as you're expecting people to hang on to this piece of paper for a significant time, on the off chance it might be needed to verify how they voted.
Computer-based voting is a long way from being a reliable enough method to be used exclusively. I think for now there should be a concentration on creating ballots that are easily machine-readible, making the counting easier. Purely computer-driven systems will have to be phased in in small numbers, so they can be monitored and bugs ironed out. Perhaps give people a choice of what type of machine they wish to use. You're going to have to do a lot of work to convince me that this technology is robust enough and secure enough to be used exclusively.
It may be modded funny, but the Jacquard Loom was the precursor of the modern punch-card computer. I remember from James Burke's original "Connections" series that the idea of registering patterns on a card led to the invention of a rudimentary computing system used to track the US Census (I think it was the 1890 Census, but my memory is flaky).
I'll gladly work for anyone who can put my computer and psychology skills to good use curing cancer, AIDS, poverty, etc. I'll even do it for free, in what little spare time I have. I don't pretend to be trying to cure anything, nor do I pretend to have the answers for all of society's ills. What I do know is that your typical CEO makes about 50,000 times more than most of the people who work for them, and if any of them were truly committed to the welfare of others, they'd put the money to work rather than spending it on luxury.
BTW, whenever this country has put its mind to something, it has accomplished it. What we need is a Manhattan Project to cure cancer, and one to fight AIDS, and one to end poverty world-wide. I'll gladly pony up my spare cash to fund these initiatives.
Au contrair -- the development of Aspirin (trademarked) by Bayer marked a breakthrough in the treatment of acute pain and was a boon to Bayer, until that is, their competitors found a way to copy the formula and create other versions of "Aspirin." So they were able to wring their profits after it was initially developed; now, it is a generic drug, one that anyone can produce, making it relatively cheap and easy to obtain, though for any major pharmaceutical company producing it, it provides only an insignificant fraction of their profit. Not to mention, aspirin has since been eclipsed by other painkillers, and only in the last two decades has had any major resurgence, due to its blood thinning qualities, helping heart patients avoid future heart attacks.
How about taking the money Big Pharma uses to line the pockets of its CEOs and the egregiously large profits these companies make and putting the bulk of it into research and production? How about diverting resources and money from male impotence drugs, since I suspect far more people have cancer than there are men who can't spank the monkey.
...Big Pharma would do it for the betterment of all mankind -- no profit in that!
Interesting note: CNN is reporting that Cancer deaths have dropped for the second straight year.
If they wait for it in a dark alleyway with a lead pipe and stay very, very quiet...
The Fairness Doctrine was a lovely idea in its day -- that day is now over. Why? You're on it -- the Internet. So, a media outlet provides a biased look at some subject... and within hours, bloggers hither and yon are adding their two cents, bringing up counter arguments, and providing new information to support/refute the story. Some of the information is spurious, moronic, or downright prevarication, but much of it is relevant. People who were part of the story and feel cut out or that their words were taken out of context get to set the record straight. Depending on the societal relevance, it might make it to Wikipedia and be high on Google in a short period of time. In this age, the Internet provides the fairness, though at the price of limited transparency, given that much of the information provided is repetitive.
It has long been known that the Greenhouse Effect exists, causing temperatures to rise by trapping heat. The more gases that trap infrared radiation that exist in the atmosphere, the more heat is retained and the faster the atmospheric temperature rises. This is mitigated by other factors, but the basic mechanism is pretty simple. I think the why question has a pretty decent answer, making the real question: Is this part of a natural warming trend, part of the natural fluctuation that happens after an ice age, or has the current warming trend been triggered, or is it being accelerated, by the rate of Greenhouse emissions?
I think it's safe to say that claiming our activities have no impact is facetious at best; adding Greenhouse gases to the atmosphere is altering a natural process by overloading the atmospheric system and causing the other systems that provide re-uptake and moderation of these gases to be stretched to their limits more quickly. In the end, the question becomes: is the natural system capable of absorbing the extra gases we create, or are we pushing the global systems toward catastrophic failure?
The problem in this whole argument is perspective -- what works on the micro-scale is not necessarily what works best on the macro-scale. While I enjoy my freedom more than anyone, I realize that my freedom and my beliefs do not necessarily match up with the majority of the population. I am a belief system of one. I am accountable only to myself and those I interact with. A corporation is a large entity, with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of shareholders, and perhaps millions of customers. A corporation has to on the one hand, cater to the population that uses its service/buys its products, and on the other hand turn a profit.
So while I, as a person, see DRM as a threat, a corporation sees DRM as a tool to help it maintain its ability to make money off the products/services it supplies. I believe that I should have the right to see content in an unfettered fashion, whenever and wherever I want. The corporation believes that it should be compensated for the effort required to provide the product/service I am demanding. It's not so much a question of right and wrong, but to what extent a company is going to protect its interests at the expense of its customers./p.
Change the country's name to 'France'... oh wait... prior art...
Apple could be trying to market the ZunePhone.
Some expert is always trumpeting the fact that "Johnny can't program," to which many of us roll our eyes and go back to coding. But could this be a sign that the quality of the help NASA is hiring is such that these kinds of mistakes are now rampant? I mean, this could have been avoided if the code had been tested out on a full-scale mock-up of the machine, to verify that it did what it was supposed to do, before ever sending the commands to the actual machine. If anything, it's a QA failure.
Face it, your ISP is even watching you, noting your bandwidth usage, logging where you go, reading your email to make sure it's not spam, etc. The fact is, any transaction that occurs on the Internet is being logged on a server somewhere, and someone has access to that information. If you're lucky, it's just a sysadmin making sure you don't go over some quota, but you have no way of truly knowing. A true paranoic wouldn't use the Internet at all.
And as they say: you get what you pay for. Cheap goods are only desirable in a culture that views resources as disposable. Cheap labor only serves to create pseudo-slavery. I personally don't mind paying more for something if I know I'm getting quality for my money. That, however, is becoming rarer by the day.
Congress, counting its kickback and PAC money: "Huh... did someone say something? I thought I heard something... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 1... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 2...
Otherwise known as marketing... Because ultimately that's all Web 2.0 is: a marketing gimmick. Somehow, you're still using Web 1.0, when here stands the bright new, shiny, multi-functional Web 2.0. It's still all servers running software, just with different software. There's nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering here, like the first vestiges of a global AI consciousness springing full-blown. This smacks of all those "Upgrade to AOL *.0" campaigns of yesteryear.
Far fetched? Hey, the author thought it up, didn't he? Everything is far fetched (sailing around the world, explaining gravity, travelling into space) until someone actually does it. This technique requires thought and some actual work. So? If there's money in it, someone or some group out there with the wherewithal and time on their hands will try and exploit it, because basically they know your average computer users are sheep, and they have these nifty shears. It's this kind of complicated and non-obvious avenue that will succeed, precisely because it's so hard to fathom.
AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGHHHH!!!!! It burns! It burns!!
Honestly, I pride myself on having a pretty voluminous vocabulary, but when I see stuff like that, I want to beat the author with a dictionary, preferably one covered in jagged spikes. It's bad enough the Internet is becoming polluted with mindless catchphrases, which the unenlightened throw around like candy at Halloween, but when tripe like that phrase starts being assembled, I'm thinking the invention of spoken language is going to turn out to be an evolutionary dead end.
Possibly. And once they perfect a way to use this technology to deliver painful shocks unless you buy their crappy goods, they're going to change their name to "You Better Buy!".
...Joanna Rutkowska is the best looking of the five.
Why would government people need to be dragging this stuff home on their laptops anyway? In this era of high bandwidth connections and VPN, why can't the data be accessed from home or via laptop without it existing physically on the hard drive? I mean, when you think about it, they could just print the data out on paper and lose that as easily, but it seems that the idea is to create centralized, secure data stores, not to allow multiple copies of the same data to go floating around. If nothing else, data dropped on a HD may get out of synch with the original data, leading to errors.
But that's precisely the wrong way to do it. I studied experimental psych design in college. The biggest problem in experiments requiring human subjects is ascertaining their level of knowledge of the procedures to be used beforehand. By introducing people into an experiment who through experience or knowledge have some idea of the procedure to be followed, you introduce bias. Their reactions are tainted and it makes it harder to determine if they were the result of the experiment or any preconditioning. That would tend to invalidate the results. Of course, by asking the questions beforehand, you have another tendency to bias the experiment, so you have to be careful how you phrase things. The easiest way to control for such factors is an increase in sample size, especially of your control population. It does not eliminate potential bias, but it can minimize it.
A lot of people "claim" a lot of knowledge they do not in fact have. I suspect if you'd mentioned the experimental design without mentioning the author, very few would have remembered Milgram's name; conversely, if you mentioned Milgram's name, I doubt many would know the great and gory details of the experiment.
If in fact these claims are true, that invalidates the results to some degree, evidenced by the rest of the sentence our anonymous friend didn't bother showing:
...and therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that this influenced their behaviour.In order for the study to have been tightly-controlled and more importantly, valid, they would have had to control for that. They may have asked if the participants knew who Milgram was, but they would probably have not asked to if they had heard of the experiment, as it would have introduced a slight bias. Mind you, Milgram's experiment was ground-breaking in that it showed that even ordinary people can perform actions contrary to societal norms, which was the thesis based on the "I was only following orders" cant of concentration camp operators during WWII. It is of course not an excuse, but merely an artifact of societal control -- which gets expressed most strongly in a totalitarian regime.