Yes, but nothing is stopping Sequoia from being hung in the court of public opinion. And I hereby find the defendant guilty. Lets go hang them off the same tree we dumped Diebold on. Failure to present for inspection is an automatic failure on voter confidence, and a major red flag for corruption.
I for one say we need to amend the patent and copyright acts to make devices used to voting unpatentable, and exempt from copyright, or barring that, that the certification process requires all rights to be signed over to the government. These machines by their very nature should be open to the most detailed scrutiny imaginable by anyone who feels so inclined. If the companies want to make money on them sell maintenance and manufacturing contracts, but there should be no way to claim trade secrets on anything used for voting.
Did anyone read TFA and realize that of the programs that were known to be vulnerable, the majority were various brands of Linux? Actually Linux isn't vulnerable, but some of the common utilities are. Upgrading bzip2 and tar to the latest versions should fix any vulnerabilities. Also hit hard it seems was Symantec with the common library all their utilities use for handling compressed files being compromised, and hence virtually all of their products across the board.
The IDS software I run blocks access to any file that it can't scan unless you specifically allow access to that file. It scared me a bit the first time I ran it because it reported a couple possible infections, but after looking at the details I realized it had flagged them because an open for read had failed (they were locked by another application).
Click here to install our crack for xyz software ( test material from OUSPG )
If that did not work click here for our other version ( install virus of choice )
Small chance you will need this version;) since we are great coders. Huh, my AV software just crashed, my IDS is throwing a fit, and my registry monitor is blocking a bunch of changes to the startup keys. Something tells me I don't want to run this installer. Guess I need to reset this VM instance back to baseline.
Banning certain words is by definition a blacklist. Apparently you missed that bit of logic. Blacklists also inherently don't work within a flexible medium such as language.
I consider much that's on the "public airwaves" to be offensive, but that's why I don't watch television mutch. Likewise a great deal I find to be at the very least entertaining, if not informative would be considered by many to be offensive. I don't condone censorship, whether it's in a book, on tv, on the radio, or at a public gathering. If you have a problem with what someone says, take it up with them, but leave language out of it. There is no blanket rule for what's proper to say or what's not, and any attempt to define such a rule is futile at best. For an example of the ludicrous things this leads to, look at the show Farscape as someone else pointed out, they created a whole new set of profanities just to get around network censorship that existed for no reason. Everyone knows what they're trying to express, but they get a free pass from the idiotic censorship because they don't use anything from the "bad" box of words they defined. It's the same reason blacklists don't work to keep people from visiting sites you don't like, there's always ways around them. A more effective approach is to go after the people, and convince them not to visit the sites, or in the origional case, to use more refined language if possible.
I have no problem with the "n-word" itself, rather the manner in which it's used is what makes it objectionable. Merely saying it, devoid of context means nothing, much the same as simply saying "orange" by itself has no meaning. When used in a sentence where the intent is obviously to denigrate another based on their race, then that sentence becomes objectionable, not for any particular word in it, but for the meaning implied by it. It's not the words that need attacking, it's the people uttering them. Banning words merely leads to the creation of new words with the same implied meaning. We do that sort of thing all the time, it's a simple time saving device, but in respect to sub-domains of our language it's known a jargon.
Which just goes to show that expletives are really nothing but a load of dren. The creation of expletives and censorship of them is really thought crime lite. There are no 'real' curse words, but those we choose to define for ourselves. It's a shame with how shallow most peoples vocabularies are to begin with that we feel the need to prune them even further by declaring certain words off-limits in public speech.
Poorly structured sentences and those devoid of meaning can be uttered just fine without having to resort to profanity, and likewise very well structured and appropriate sentences can contain profanity. Your objection makes no sense, as it's the person doing the talking, and the meaning they put behind it that determines the worth of the communication, not the specific words chosen. Although some words can more effectively communicate the nuance of what the person is trying to impart, no words are inherently worth more or less than another, and anything considered an expletive is merely a cultural oddity. People offended by a word, rather than being offended (or not) by the meaning of the sentence the word is used in, are so shallow as to be worthless. There are no bad words, and there are no good words, all words are equal.
Maybe use the data from the DNS records to correlate blocks of IPs that all belong to the same organization? Apply a weight first to IPs coming from the same organization you're a member of, and then a second weight to those that are geographically close (using one of the many services out there that correlate IP to physical location [poor granularity though]). Might even be able to apply some logic that says something like "if getting high latency from IP in block X, weight other IPs from block X lower". Might help eliminate slow connections that are all traveling over the same wonky backbone.
Anyone know what he means by this being a "limited" version of the Turing test? The AI does ok until you ask it what the airspeed of an unladen swallow is. It also only gets the favorite color question right about 50% of the time.
I wonder how many more ridiculous lawsuits like this need to be brought before the government finally wakes up and realizes software patents are a bad idea.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing: "my mind is made up regardless of facts, so don't confuse me with facts, or confront me with information that doesn't agree with my biases and blinders as I'll just make stuff that does so agree anyhow" is so much shorter than what you wrote. First, your post had no facts in it whatsoever. Look up the definition of fact if you're confused on this point. What it did have was your opinion and your theories about the things you've observed. Secondly you obviously didn't understand what I wrote, so I'll see if I can dumb it down for you. Refusing to answer direct questions with direct answers, but instead replying with indirect quasi-answers does not count as a new language, and being annoyed with someone for dodging questions is not the same as refusing to speak someones language. Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, these are all languages, bullshit, and buzzwords are not.
Many of the questions asked can't be answered simply. However, as I said, the answers are quite clear if you speak the language. No they weren't. Their were at least partial answers to almost everything, particularly if you read between the lines and extrapolated from what little was said, but that's not the same as actual saying it. It's not some "new" language being spoken here, it's just that a great deal of the questions weren't actually answered, rather answers to questions that were very similar to those asked where given instead. Had he simply said, "well, that's complex and difficult to answer succinctly, but what I can say is x" that would be one thing, but he simply ignored quite a few questions. For instance, the one that caught my attention the most was when asked if they would be prepared to offer commercially competitive pay for the services of the best in the field, and he answered by saying that he "understand[s] you can't buy loyalty", which wasn't exactly the question asked. Now, if you extrapolate a little from that, then the answer is probably no, but anytime you are forced to extrapolate from incomplete information there's a margin of error. I refuse to classify PR doubletalk, and bullshit as "new languages", and anyone that believe otherwise is an idiot.
That way, we can say "it's unusual for a General to answer questions from 1 'big wig,' 3 professionals, 5 blue collar workers, and 1 Goatse troll." I wasn't aware Goatse trolls asked questions. Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough. Then again, I don't think I want to be looking at all.
Geeks tend to favor blunt straight answers. Part of the reason we usually hate management. Would have been nice to see some simple (to understand, not necessarily simple in thought) answers to the questions.
No, I never assumed anyone had the right to anything. What I said, was that if you ban guns (or restrict them to various degrees), the only ones that would be armed would be the criminals. Laws are like that, they only work on people who are obeying them in the first place, and to provide punishment for the ones that violate them after the fact. Sure banning them would cut down on some of the robbers and petty criminals with guns, but not all of them, and it would eliminate almost all of the non-criminals with guns. Put it this way, explosives are illegal (most anyway, not talking about firecrackers here), but that doesn't seem to stop people from getting them anyway. Guns are already controlled, and there are various licensing and checks required, but that doesn't have much impact either, and we still see murderers coming out of the prisons and getting their hands on weapons with ease, including weapons that are illegal to poses already, so how will removing the weapons of defenders help in any way?
As to your last question there, the way you know who the "bad guy" is, is he's the one shooting at you. It's illegal to "shoot first and ask questions later", it is not however illegal to shoot someone who is threatening you, or who you feel (reasonably) is threatening you. If someone points a "gun" at you and says they're going to shoot you, and you in turn shoot them, even if it turns out that the "gun" was fake or not loaded, it's still self defense because you reasonably were lead to believe he was going to shoot you. If however someone breaks into your house and when you turn on the lights they try to run but you shoot them, that's not legal because there was no threat to your personal safety. It's really a rather simple system, and it works well.
I never claimed shooting an attacker wasn't a violent act, just that it's a protected act, and a reasonable action. I also never claimed hunting wasn't a violent act, in fact I specifically said it was a "violent" act, but a legal one. What I did claim however, is that competition shooting isn't a violent act, as destruction of inanimate objects even under a somewhat loose definition of violence doesn't qualify, and a paper target most certainly doesn't. Also, your assumption here (and to a certain extent mine as well in the original post) was that neither attacker nor victim would have a gun, however history shows that when you can anything, it merely acts as a deterrent to the non-criminal, that is, the victims would be armed with knives, but the attackers would still have guns. You cannot un-invent something, there will never be a time when guns are not available to those inclined to posses them, the question is, do you want only the criminals to have guns, or is it better for everyone to have that right (please don't bring up things like rocket launchers or tanks as counter examples either, guns are simple machines that are trivial to construct, a tank or RPG is not).
I predict nothing will come of this but a bunch of kids getting in trouble for flicking off the cameras. Or maybe someone will get creative and steal some of the cameras, now that would be awesome.
Using a gun is always a violent act. Competition shooting comes to mind. There are also "violent" acts one can commit with a gun that are perfectly legal, such as hunting. Furthermore, guns can be used defensively, in which case shooting an attacker is a protected right, and perfectly reasonable thing to do. The alternative is for everyone to carry around knives in which case we'll probably have a lot more instances of both attacker and victim bleeding to death after stabbing each other.
Better be safe and just ban computers. For that matter, most electronics these days pose a security risk, so we should probably ban electronics as well. Remember, the Amish don't worry about identity theft.
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I for one say we need to amend the patent and copyright acts to make devices used to voting unpatentable, and exempt from copyright, or barring that, that the certification process requires all rights to be signed over to the government. These machines by their very nature should be open to the most detailed scrutiny imaginable by anyone who feels so inclined. If the companies want to make money on them sell maintenance and manufacturing contracts, but there should be no way to claim trade secrets on anything used for voting.
The IDS software I run blocks access to any file that it can't scan unless you specifically allow access to that file. It scared me a bit the first time I ran it because it reported a couple possible infections, but after looking at the details I realized it had flagged them because an open for read had failed (they were locked by another application).
If that did not work click here for our other version ( install virus of choice )
Small chance you will need this version
Banning certain words is by definition a blacklist. Apparently you missed that bit of logic. Blacklists also inherently don't work within a flexible medium such as language.
I consider much that's on the "public airwaves" to be offensive, but that's why I don't watch television mutch. Likewise a great deal I find to be at the very least entertaining, if not informative would be considered by many to be offensive. I don't condone censorship, whether it's in a book, on tv, on the radio, or at a public gathering. If you have a problem with what someone says, take it up with them, but leave language out of it. There is no blanket rule for what's proper to say or what's not, and any attempt to define such a rule is futile at best. For an example of the ludicrous things this leads to, look at the show Farscape as someone else pointed out, they created a whole new set of profanities just to get around network censorship that existed for no reason. Everyone knows what they're trying to express, but they get a free pass from the idiotic censorship because they don't use anything from the "bad" box of words they defined. It's the same reason blacklists don't work to keep people from visiting sites you don't like, there's always ways around them. A more effective approach is to go after the people, and convince them not to visit the sites, or in the origional case, to use more refined language if possible.
I have no problem with the "n-word" itself, rather the manner in which it's used is what makes it objectionable. Merely saying it, devoid of context means nothing, much the same as simply saying "orange" by itself has no meaning. When used in a sentence where the intent is obviously to denigrate another based on their race, then that sentence becomes objectionable, not for any particular word in it, but for the meaning implied by it. It's not the words that need attacking, it's the people uttering them. Banning words merely leads to the creation of new words with the same implied meaning. We do that sort of thing all the time, it's a simple time saving device, but in respect to sub-domains of our language it's known a jargon.
Which just goes to show that expletives are really nothing but a load of dren. The creation of expletives and censorship of them is really thought crime lite. There are no 'real' curse words, but those we choose to define for ourselves. It's a shame with how shallow most peoples vocabularies are to begin with that we feel the need to prune them even further by declaring certain words off-limits in public speech.
Poorly structured sentences and those devoid of meaning can be uttered just fine without having to resort to profanity, and likewise very well structured and appropriate sentences can contain profanity. Your objection makes no sense, as it's the person doing the talking, and the meaning they put behind it that determines the worth of the communication, not the specific words chosen. Although some words can more effectively communicate the nuance of what the person is trying to impart, no words are inherently worth more or less than another, and anything considered an expletive is merely a cultural oddity. People offended by a word, rather than being offended (or not) by the meaning of the sentence the word is used in, are so shallow as to be worthless. There are no bad words, and there are no good words, all words are equal.
Maybe use the data from the DNS records to correlate blocks of IPs that all belong to the same organization? Apply a weight first to IPs coming from the same organization you're a member of, and then a second weight to those that are geographically close (using one of the many services out there that correlate IP to physical location [poor granularity though]). Might even be able to apply some logic that says something like "if getting high latency from IP in block X, weight other IPs from block X lower". Might help eliminate slow connections that are all traveling over the same wonky backbone.
Fixed that for you. With money you can buy sex, so it's still all about the money.
I wonder how many more ridiculous lawsuits like this need to be brought before the government finally wakes up and realizes software patents are a bad idea.
Slashvertisement, now with government investors!
Geeks tend to favor blunt straight answers. Part of the reason we usually hate management. Would have been nice to see some simple (to understand, not necessarily simple in thought) answers to the questions.
No, I never assumed anyone had the right to anything. What I said, was that if you ban guns (or restrict them to various degrees), the only ones that would be armed would be the criminals. Laws are like that, they only work on people who are obeying them in the first place, and to provide punishment for the ones that violate them after the fact. Sure banning them would cut down on some of the robbers and petty criminals with guns, but not all of them, and it would eliminate almost all of the non-criminals with guns. Put it this way, explosives are illegal (most anyway, not talking about firecrackers here), but that doesn't seem to stop people from getting them anyway. Guns are already controlled, and there are various licensing and checks required, but that doesn't have much impact either, and we still see murderers coming out of the prisons and getting their hands on weapons with ease, including weapons that are illegal to poses already, so how will removing the weapons of defenders help in any way?
As to your last question there, the way you know who the "bad guy" is, is he's the one shooting at you. It's illegal to "shoot first and ask questions later", it is not however illegal to shoot someone who is threatening you, or who you feel (reasonably) is threatening you. If someone points a "gun" at you and says they're going to shoot you, and you in turn shoot them, even if it turns out that the "gun" was fake or not loaded, it's still self defense because you reasonably were lead to believe he was going to shoot you. If however someone breaks into your house and when you turn on the lights they try to run but you shoot them, that's not legal because there was no threat to your personal safety. It's really a rather simple system, and it works well.
I never claimed shooting an attacker wasn't a violent act, just that it's a protected act, and a reasonable action. I also never claimed hunting wasn't a violent act, in fact I specifically said it was a "violent" act, but a legal one. What I did claim however, is that competition shooting isn't a violent act, as destruction of inanimate objects even under a somewhat loose definition of violence doesn't qualify, and a paper target most certainly doesn't. Also, your assumption here (and to a certain extent mine as well in the original post) was that neither attacker nor victim would have a gun, however history shows that when you can anything, it merely acts as a deterrent to the non-criminal, that is, the victims would be armed with knives, but the attackers would still have guns. You cannot un-invent something, there will never be a time when guns are not available to those inclined to posses them, the question is, do you want only the criminals to have guns, or is it better for everyone to have that right (please don't bring up things like rocket launchers or tanks as counter examples either, guns are simple machines that are trivial to construct, a tank or RPG is not).
Or they could wear one of these, thanks for reminding me of it.
Remember, Big Brother is watching.
I predict nothing will come of this but a bunch of kids getting in trouble for flicking off the cameras. Or maybe someone will get creative and steal some of the cameras, now that would be awesome.
Paper weight?
Using a gun is always a violent act.
Competition shooting comes to mind. There are also "violent" acts one can commit with a gun that are perfectly legal, such as hunting. Furthermore, guns can be used defensively, in which case shooting an attacker is a protected right, and perfectly reasonable thing to do. The alternative is for everyone to carry around knives in which case we'll probably have a lot more instances of both attacker and victim bleeding to death after stabbing each other.
Better be safe and just ban computers. For that matter, most electronics these days pose a security risk, so we should probably ban electronics as well. Remember, the Amish don't worry about identity theft.