I had never heard of this before. Wasn't there some old science fiction series where the king was selected at random, then beheaded at the end of his term?
It doesn't mention it in the Wikipedia article but the book A Far Sunset by Edmund Cooper features this, in that the last survivor of a starship crew becomes ultimate ruler of a remote civilisation and although he does work towards modernisation he is still killed at the end of his reign.
full disclosure: my username came from an Edmund Cooper short story.
In reality though, it opens the possibility of vote buying and intimidation
You might have a good point. If you don't explain it, though, it's indistinguishable from FUD.
Do you really need it spelled out? If you can verify your vote online, somebody else can look over your shoulder while you do that, or require that you give them the means to do that themselves.
"You will vote the way I tell you or else I will kill your dog"
What are you going to do? Its only a dog, right? What about your grandpa.. niece?
"I will pay $100 for a vote for me", or "Anybody who votes for XXX gets a pay rise"
Now you can prove that you voted a particular way, how does that help democracy? As soon as being able to sell your vote becomes possible, you can be guaranteed that pressure will be applied to vulnerable people to do exactly that.
It is open methods that need to be used, not open source because you can't be guaranteed that the machine itself is running the software you think it is.
Alas, in order to guarantee that a black box machine has counted your vote correctly means that you must be able to verify your vote. If you allow this then it becomes possible to intimidate voters into revealing their votes, which allows vote selling (for money or safety). This is the conundrum that open methods must work their way out of before black box voting will be safe to use
Doesn't matter, it WILL NOT let you hang up on them, no matter how many seconds you leave the phone on the hook.
I've not had a land line for many years but here in the UK it has always (so far as I know) been that the callee can hang up and the call will not be disconnected for at least 30 seconds. You can use that feature to transfer to a different extension - just hang up, walk downstairs, and pick up the other handset.
If the caller hangs up though, the call will be disconnected right away.
Overseas spammers can only profit from spamming Americans if Americans buy their products.
Sorry but thats wrong. Spammers from anywhere profit from spamming anybody because dumbasses buy their services.
That there is a continual stream of dumbasses who think they can sell something on the internet is the real problem. They pay the spammers to send out spam and it matters not a whit that they make nothing at the end of it. The spammers made their profit and still have a queue of dumbass customers who because they receive email advertising crap think that sending email advertising crap is the route to success.
Er, I would argue that the biggest difference is that "latex" is a compound that many things besides fetish clothes are made out of, whereas every meaning of "gimp" is negative.
GNU Image Manipulation Program
don't see any negative meanings there.. if you do, perhaps its you that is the problem?
What social problems do you forsee occurring if your research is moderately successful but the cost is too high for the vast majority of the population, and how do you personally plan to avoid being ripped apart by the mob?
The problem, if there is one, isn't that corporate executives MUST seek profits, it's that shareholders prefer to buy into corporations that are structured to seek profits.
and that the majority of the money that comes from shareholders to buy shares is not from people, but corporations whose charter includes only profit aims.
> 1) 1.5 hour trip to the nearest "major" airport.
When I was in Philadelphia area I was less than 1/2 an hour away. YMMV. Literally.
> 2) 1-2 hour long wait at the security line.
Never been more than 1/2 hour for me.
just out of interest, based on the above - if you were aiming for a flight that departed the runway at 12 noon, what time would you leave your house.. 11am?
how about "conspiring to commit crime XYZ" in general? I wouldn't like to say where the limits are..
personally, I could care less for the illegality (sorry if that wasn't clear:) but the karma hit is significant. don't let them take it, just give it to them and move on. don't forget, that these guys are content creators and as such will always be at the front of the queue
I should say, that the comments that the lawyers were objecting to was a thread regarding setting up the real shareaza program to query the www.shareaza.com site in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack on it and put it under.
Of course, suggesting any such thing must be illegal, and organising such an attack even in retaliation is not going to be good for your karma.
IMHO they should just have changed the name of the program and got a new domain name
First of all the announced throughput is a best case figure. You'll never see it in actual use.
Another thing to consider is that I have found that my supplier (T-Mobile in UK, using GPRS) has an intercepting proxy server; they strip out 'unnecessary' parts of HTML pages, and re-compress any JPEG images at the highest most lossy (eg 50k->10k) setting in order to make it seem faster which also loses EXIF data.
I don't know if this is only for GPRS or if it affects their 'broadband' services also but it seems to be limited to port 80 so its not too difficult to get around with a proxy but it can be annoying..
Of course, this begs the question, "Do you really need a publisher?"
in effect this happens anyway. I used to work in a (UK) bookshop and the number of publishers is in the thousands, many of which only publish a single book and I think the vast majority who have less than 10 (random number picked out of my head). I think that many many authors almost self-publish.
Books are not interchangeable. The publisher IS free to say "Sorry, we're giving you the same deal we give everyone else."
Where this breaks down is when the big businesses have beaten the market down so that 'everyone else' includes nobody.
sorry. when I wrote megastores I did not mean large book stores, but places like tesco/asda in the UK and I guess wal-mart in the USA (they own asda). Tesco takes approximately 30% (?) of the UK pounds spent and they are only interested in the high profit segment of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
thats serious old! (posting on ~9yr old 800Mhz PIII with 128Mb RAM here, doesn't do that :)
There are scripts on slashdot pages?
It doesn't mention it in the Wikipedia article but the book A Far Sunset by Edmund Cooper features this, in that the last survivor of a starship crew becomes ultimate ruler of a remote civilisation and although he does work towards modernisation he is still killed at the end of his reign.
full disclosure: my username came from an Edmund Cooper short story.
try Piazza Fontana bombing
Well, until you open the box, it does and it does not .. at the same time!
Do you really need it spelled out? If you can verify your vote online, somebody else can look over your shoulder while you do that, or require that you give them the means to do that themselves.
"You will vote the way I tell you or else I will kill your dog"
What are you going to do? Its only a dog, right? What about your grandpa.. niece?
"I will pay $100 for a vote for me", or "Anybody who votes for XXX gets a pay rise"
Now you can prove that you voted a particular way, how does that help democracy? As soon as being able to sell your vote becomes possible, you can be guaranteed that pressure will be applied to vulnerable people to do exactly that.
It is open methods that need to be used, not open source because you can't be guaranteed that the machine itself is running the software you think it is.
Alas, in order to guarantee that a black box machine has counted your vote correctly means that you must be able to verify your vote. If you allow this then it becomes possible to intimidate voters into revealing their votes, which allows vote selling (for money or safety). This is the conundrum that open methods must work their way out of before black box voting will be safe to use
On the surface, this seems a good idea and really, its the only way that an electronic system can be trusted
In reality though, it opens the possibility of vote buying and intimidation
This is why people keep saying that paper ballots with manual counts and human supervision are the only way to proceed
I've not had a land line for many years but here in the UK it has always (so far as I know) been that the callee can hang up and the call will not be disconnected for at least 30 seconds. You can use that feature to transfer to a different extension - just hang up, walk downstairs, and pick up the other handset.
If the caller hangs up though, the call will be disconnected right away.
Sorry but thats wrong. Spammers from anywhere profit from spamming anybody because dumbasses buy their services.
That there is a continual stream of dumbasses who think they can sell something on the internet is the real problem. They pay the spammers to send out spam and it matters not a whit that they make nothing at the end of it. The spammers made their profit and still have a queue of dumbass customers who because they receive email advertising crap think that sending email advertising crap is the route to success.
GNU Image Manipulation Program
don't see any negative meanings there.. if you do, perhaps its you that is the problem?
Dude, English is my first language and "shall have the power to" does not mean "shall do"
What social problems do you forsee occurring if your research is moderately successful but the cost is too high for the vast majority of the population, and how do you personally plan to avoid being ripped apart by the mob?
and that the majority of the money that comes from shareholders to buy shares is not from people, but corporations whose charter includes only profit aims.
Such as banks.
just out of interest, based on the above - if you were aiming for a flight that departed the runway at 12 noon, what time would you leave your house.. 11am?
No, but millions of people want to turn off the one thing that annoys them, and for each of those people its a different thing..
is "conspiring to murder" not illegal?
how about "conspiring to commit crime XYZ" in general? I wouldn't like to say where the limits are..
personally, I could care less for the illegality (sorry if that wasn't clear :) but the karma hit is significant. don't let them take it, just give it to them and move on. don't forget, that these guys are content creators and as such will always be at the front of the queue
I should say, that the comments that the lawyers were objecting to was a thread regarding setting up the real shareaza program to query the www.shareaza.com site in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack on it and put it under.
Of course, suggesting any such thing must be illegal, and organising such an attack even in retaliation is not going to be good for your karma.
IMHO they should just have changed the name of the program and got a new domain name
though I didn't find it very interesting..
Another thing to consider is that I have found that my supplier (T-Mobile in UK, using GPRS) has an intercepting proxy server; they strip out 'unnecessary' parts of HTML pages, and re-compress any JPEG images at the highest most lossy (eg 50k->10k) setting in order to make it seem faster which also loses EXIF data.
I don't know if this is only for GPRS or if it affects their 'broadband' services also but it seems to be limited to port 80 so its not too difficult to get around with a proxy but it can be annoying..
www.plentyoffish.com (also a free site) does work like this, you can choose to prevent 'users who have messaged others about sex' from contacting you.
Sorry, I mixed up my buyer and seller in the first line. I say the timeline should be naturally:
and that eBay should just enforce this by not enabling the buyer to leave feedback until the seller has done so.
seems that plenty of sellers attempt to hold the buyer over a barrel regarding feedback, this removes the barrel.
IMHO the seller ought to leave feedback as soon as they have received payment. I always do when I'm selling something, it seems fair.
History is full of people who didn't know how to do something but did it anyway. Knowing the broad principles is a good starting point.
I am one of those people, so I know.
sorry. when I wrote megastores I did not mean large book stores, but places like tesco/asda in the UK and I guess wal-mart in the USA (they own asda). Tesco takes approximately 30% (?) of the UK pounds spent and they are only interested in the high profit segment of the market.