Or people could disable daylight time savings and do it manually
That's great, if you're going to be there. I have a MythTV box that records TV shows for me. I'm going to be out of town during the new change over, and if it didn't automatically update properly, I'd miss all of my shows after the time shift. If I tried to do it manually, I'd have to do it before I left, which would mean I'd miss my shows between when I left and DST, unless I set up a cron job to do it for me.
Fortunately, Ubuntu seems to be on the ball, "sudo zdump -v/etc/localtime |grep 2007" tells me the DST is up to date.
iTunes is only a must if the iTMS is a must. I used iTunes for ages, but as soon as I got my music over to my Linux box and fired up Amarok, there was no going back. In fact, Amarok was the deal breaker when it came to dropping Windows all together. It doesn't eat up my CPU nearly as bad as iTunes did. It handles my iPod (or any other music device) wonderfully, allowing transfers both from the computer to the iPod and from the iPod to the computer. It has an alarm clock plugin that lets me specify different wakeup times for different days of the week, which is incredibly useful for a college student who has 4 different start times during a 5 day school week. Plus, because it uses dcop for to allow interfacing with it from the command line, I can use my remote control to control it. You can also automatically download lyrics and the wikipedia entry about each artist just by going to the context tab.
Can't choose your partition during the install? How can it do that on it's own? I know it's a difficult question for new users, but if all of your hard drives are formatted and have data on them, how do you expect it to choose one to resize or wipe out? When you install, it gives one option of installing to the largest empty space. Otherwise, choosing a partition is simply a must.
Personally, I think OpenOffice is good enough to replace MS Office for 90% of users. I find it to be faster and more stable than MS Office, though I must admit the last version of MS office I used before switching to OpenOffice was Office XP.
If MS dropped Mac Office support, Apple would likely do everything they could to maintain their ground, and rather than reinvent the wheel, it would make sense to throw their support to OpenOffice development. It could quickly become superior to MS Office across the board, and it could probably do it before the last version of Mac Office becomes antiquated.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did reinvent the wheel rather than support an office suite that would benefit Linux, their main competitor in the not-windows category.
By definition, PEOPLE alect muicipal governments. If they want wifi they can ask for it. If they're too dumb to ask for it, they're too dumb to deserve it. Same goes for sewers and drinkable water.
There is nothing about election in the definition of municipal governments, and neither muicipal nor alect even have definitions.
Drinkable water isn't generally provided by municipal governments, it's treated and provided by private water companies. I'm not sure who provides sewage services, but it's something of a necessity - without it health risks sky rocket. If someone doesn't want to pay for sewage, they don't get that option because of the health risks it imposes on those around them. If someone doesn't want to pay for drinkable water, they simply don't get it.
Wifi is another matter entirely. People can survive just fine without it, and there's no reason someone who doesn't want it should be forced to pay for everyone to have it.
Just because the government provides something doesn't make it free, it just means everyone pays for it in taxes instead of the people who use it paying for the service. In some cases this is necessary, but in the case of WiFi it most certainly isn't.
once the mac version of office starts slipping in compatibility with the windows version people would choose Mac's over windows. Isn't that illogical?
The minute that Office for the Mac starts to slip significantly behind in compatibility with the Windows version there will be few corporations that will chose Macs over PCs.
I highly doubt sales people would be in on such a conspiracy. A company like Best Buy has sales people coming and going all the time. If someone got pissed because they were fired, the first thing they'd do would be blow the whistle on this. If these price differences are even deliberate, it's done strictly by the people managing the two websites. The sales reps would be told to sell at the intranet website's price, and are probably unaware of the fact that there's a different version of bestbuy.com at work than there is at home, let alone that the prices are different in order to screw the consumer. It may be a conspiracy, but it's not involving every sales rep at every Best Buy in the country.
With Ubuntu Edgy, I haven't run into a wireless card that doesn't work from the LiveCD without downloading any additional drivers. I've used a Broadcom card, two different Intel cards, and a Linksys card with an Atheros chipset (madwifi drivers). There may be a few cards that Ubuntu doesn't recognize out of the box, but they're getting to be pretty rare.
I've been guilty of that. I had a drive I thought was getting ready to die. It was rattling fairly consistently, so I put it in a RAID with a couple other drives, not really knowing what would happen if the drive died. One day, shortly after upgrading from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy, my raid crapped out on me, giving me a screen saying the my logical volume couldn't be assembled from the RAID components, because the RAID devices weren't found. Having never dealt with a drive failure in a RAID, I assumed this meant the drive had died, so I went to the store, bought a new drive, and started to install it. I then found that the rattle was because I had used a screw that was one size to small, and it wasn't being properly held in place. I replaced it anyway, still thinking it was bad. I booted up a live CD and repaired the raid, then booted back to my regular boot, only to find the original problem. Turns out the software raid in Edgy just sucked, so I went back to dapper, and bought an external case for the old drive. It turned out to be fine.
Long story short, I replaced a drive when I didn't need to. I happened to find out that the drive was fine, but lots of people probably never would have. I blame my own ignorance, both for causing the rattle, and not knowing what a raid failure looked like. It certainly isn't fair to blame Seagate for the drive failure, or misrepresenting the failure time - I assume they make sure their drives have legitimately failed before counting them in their drive failure statistics. You can't blame them for user ignorance.
I have three computers, all running Ubuntu linux. My most recent came with Ubuntu installed, and works more smoothly than any windows PC I ever had. The other two I did the installs myself. One is a desktop with basic hardware, no problem getting it running.
With Ubuntu Edgy Eft, both of my laptops have been able to connect to my wireless network from the Live CD, without any difficult configuration. Just start up wlassistant and go. One of my cards is intel, the other is broadcom. The Broadcom card doesn't get 802.11 g, just B. That's the only problem I've had with wireless.
Both laptops are running Beryl, which did take some config file editing, but there are guides that tell you how to open the files and exactly what lines to edit. I understand that there are scripts to do this now. One is an ATI radeon X600 card, the other is an intel GMA.
Card reader works out of the box in both laptops. I've never tried firewire, but it's identified in my hardware list.
My girlfriend's laptop has better hardware support in Linux than it does in Windows. For whatever reason, her laptop quit charging it's battery a few months ago. I chalked this up to a bad mother board, and assumed it was irreparable. Last weekend, she decided she wanted to try out this "Linux" thing I've been raving about, and we were stunned to see the battery start charging when we booted up the Live CD. Now she's a happy Linux user too.
What version of Ubuntu were you using? Wireless support on Dapper was a bit tricky, and my card reader took some work on dapper. Breezy badger before that was even less impressive. The hardware support for Ubuntu has come a long way in the year and a half since I started using it, but any more there's not much hardware that doesn't work out of the box, and Feisty looks even more promising.
If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than[sic] per the DMCA it needs a license to do that.
Quite some time ago, slashdot ran this article about a program called QTFairuse6, which uses iTunes to decrypt Fairplay music. If that argument against BackupHDDVD is valid, QTFairuse6 should be fine because iTunes is doing the decryption, and iTunes is allowed to do that. I'm sure the RIAA would disagree, and I know inconsistent arguments work better in law than my line of work (CS), but that was my immediate reaction when I read the summary.
I'm not sure they've actually won many cases. Usually one of the following happens:
They get a settlement without going to court.
The defendant doesn't show up and they get a default judgement.
Their case falls apart and they dismiss with prejudice.
Are they winning cases? Not very often (that I'm aware of).
Are they getting money out of people? Yes.
If I'm wrong, please feel free to cite cases, but I've been under the impression that very few cases have been completed in court.
I think the patent system would be significantly improved if patent cases were handled more like small claims court. Each side has one representative, evidence, and witnesses. Neither side gets a team of lawyers to drag the case out for months. Obvious patents get overturned, legitimate patents are upheld, and deep pockets don't get special treatment.
The *IAA has too much money and political power for the government to pass a law allowing the circumvention of DRM. If DRM could legally be broken, there would quickly be commercial efforts to break it, and new methods wouldn't last a week. Clearly the media industry wouldn't like that, and for whatever reason, the government supports them more than the consumer.
financial benefits provided by patents are the only way to promote innovation.
Except that patents only provide financial benefits to big corporations. If a small company or individual has a patent that a big company wants, the big company will simply use the patent without paying licensing, and if the patent owner challenges them in court, they'll be bankrupted before the case is over.
On the flipside, big companies claim patents on obvious things like double clicks on hand held devices, one click purchases, digitally timeshifting recordings, etc. and can defend these obvious patents in court because they have deep pockets.
If the patent system is going to help spur innovation it needs to prevent deep pockets from being able to abuse the patent system, and right now it's failing at that.
Most of my friends are the technically inclined who have avoided DRM from the beginning. The few friends I have who ever used iTunes for music use it now as much as ever. Their iPods are generally a fairly low percent iTunes music, because they had lots of CDs before they got their iPods, and some of them like indie music - and indication of musical taste, not necessarily of opposition to DRM. The low percentage of DRMed music on iPods doesn't necessarily mean people are actively avoiding DRM or moving away from it, it simply means they have additional ways of getting their music that don't entail DRM.
These friends of mine may not be representative of the general population, but I think they are a better example of the average user than those who frequent slashdot.
The post you initially trolled was saying that the record companies always had a secure position selling music, initially because reproduction caused rapid quality loss, then because CDs were almost as expensive to copy as to buy legitimately, then bandwidth was expensive, but now there is nothing to keep people from creating high quality (admittedly with some loss) copies and redistribute them without any additional loss per copy. The point you claim does not exist was that after decades of being able to provide the highest quality versions of their music, pirates can produce a comparable product and spread it to thousands of people at virtually no cost. Take that for what you will, but you've got to be incredibly ignorant and stubborn to claim that there was no point.
Thats what we in the know call a factual error. MP3 is lossy. FLAC is not. I dont see much FLACs being traded, other than torrent sites.
You're missing the point. An MP3 loses quality from the original source, but you can spread thousands of copies of it without each of those copies becoming progressively lower quality.
Do you have any sources on this? There are certainly some more technically minded people who have avoided DRM from the beginning, but I'm not aware of too many average consumers who have much opposition at all to DRM, generally because they aren't aware. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen the masses flocking towards DRM-free alternatives.
#1. The "support" has to include ALL the hardware on the box.
#2. The boxes have to be the most popular boxes Dell sells already.
#3. The price cannot be higher than the equivalent Windows box.
Point one and point two have the potential of being mutually exclusive. Sure, we don't want Dell to say "Look, we have a box over here that has Linux on it. We support Linux. If you want Linux, this is the only box for you." But at the same time, building a Linux supported box is largely about choosing hardware, which means if the boxes aren't already Linux compatible, they'll have to make some changes to the hardware configuration to make them compatible. I'd say they have to be comparable to the most popular boxes dell already sells, but saying they have to be the same boxes defeats the purpose.
Point #3 is also problematic, because the cost of a (windows) computer is subsidized by crapware - free trials of three different ISPs, a 60 day trial of MS Office, a 60 day trial of Norton Antivirus, a bunch of games that you can only play 10 times before you have to buy them, etc. and Dell gets a cut of each of these items. The only way to make a fair comparison is if Dell also sells Windows boxes sans the crapware.
You might be interested in James P. Hogan's Kicking The Sacred Cow, if you can find a copy. Hogan discusses scientific dogma in areas such as global climate change, evolution, HIV, the theory of relativity, the origin of the universe, and a few others. The idea behind most of them is that modern science has ignored some significant data because it either doesn't fit with the current "scientific" understanding, or bureaucrats have threatened their funding. I'm not saying I believe Cremo is correct, I think it sounds a bit absurd, but I haven't read much on the issue, and I'll certainly admit that their is some bad science that gets accepted as fact. This doesn't mean, however, that bad science is factual simply because effort is expended getting the supporters of an idea to quit wasting oxygen.
Hardly. There are plenty of legitimate ways to use media that are prohibited by DRM. I'd like to have all of my movies and music on my media PC so I could just pull everything up with a remote. This is legal with my music, but DRM (supported by the DMCA) prevents me from doing the same with my movies. My media center also happens to be a Linux computer, which has no (legal) support for DVDs, HD-DVDs or BluRays. I am not a hacker, trying to prove that it can be done, nor am I a pirate - I simply want to be able to use my media without being told what uses are allowed.
There's a great one already: dyndns.com. It's intended as a means for people with dynamic IP addresses to be able to host websites, but it's a good way to simply register a computer's IP address with a remote server. I have one computer that runs a web-server that actually uses the dyndns address, but every computer I have has it's own dynamic address and updates when the IP changes. If anyone ever steals one of my computers and plugs it into the internet, I can find the IP address and hopefully recover the laptop with the assistance of law enforcement.
Of course, I'm not to keen on testing this plan, so I also keep locks on my laptops when they're home, or never let them out of my site when I'm out and about, but I think it's a good start.
The first and third are fixed by TLS. The second is only an issue if Internet voting is the only way of casting your vote.
The second could be an issue even if there are other means of casting your vote. If the plan is for 50% of the (voting) population to vote online, the polling centers would likely be ill prepared for a rush of voters when the site goes down. This could be resolved by having online-voting available during the same period absentee voters receive their ballots - if there is a problem with the web site, the polling center could be more prepared.
The third could also be an issue. It's quite feasible that your ISP could know political affiliation from the sites you routinely visit - when election day comes around, the people who regularly visit leftist websites find that their internet connection is moving at a snail's pace, and the election site seems to be down. They may not be able to submit a false vote, but they could still prevent targeted people from voting. Presumably, people could then go to the polling center, but if they had planned on voting online they may not have left room on their schedule to go to a polling center, and they may miss the election.
I don't necessarily think these are going to be big issues, but they are things that need to be considered before such an election is implemented.
If the use was fraudulent, as the merchant I have absolutely no way to know that
I beg to differ. On the back of my credit card, the words "Not Valid Unless Signed" are quite clear. Just below that is my signature and the words (See ID). I worked retail all through high school and over extended breaks during college, and I always checked signatures against the back of the card. If someone had written something to the extent of "check ID," I did. But 90% of the places I use my credit card, the clerk doesn't bother to check the signature - some places they never even touch my card. On the rare occasion that someone asks to see my ID, I thank them for asking, and if it is a tipping establishment, they get a little extra. The merchant is the only link in the chain that can check identification, and they almost never do.
As far as online merchants, they also have a line of defense. I recently purchased a laptop and asked that it be shipped to my dorm - the address on the card being my home address. Within minutes I received an e-mail saying that the order could not be processed until I added my dorm as an alternative shipping address with the credit card company. The credit card company then required a piece of personal information that would have been hard for a third party to come by.
In short, merchants who meet the customer in person can check signatures or ID. Merchants who are shipping items have the opportunity to confirm the shipping address, and merchants who are providing online services can generally terminate the service if the credit card comes back as fraudulent. I would agree that a chargeback fee is inappropriate, but I think it's quite reasonable to hold merchants responsible for accepting a card without taking precautions to insure that the person using the card is the person whose name appears on the front of the card.
Slashdot Mirror
That's great, if you're going to be there. I have a MythTV box that records TV shows for me. I'm going to be out of town during the new change over, and if it didn't automatically update properly, I'd miss all of my shows after the time shift. If I tried to do it manually, I'd have to do it before I left, which would mean I'd miss my shows between when I left and DST, unless I set up a cron job to do it for me.
Fortunately, Ubuntu seems to be on the ball, "sudo zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2007" tells me the DST is up to date.
iTunes is only a must if the iTMS is a must. I used iTunes for ages, but as soon as I got my music over to my Linux box and fired up Amarok, there was no going back. In fact, Amarok was the deal breaker when it came to dropping Windows all together. It doesn't eat up my CPU nearly as bad as iTunes did. It handles my iPod (or any other music device) wonderfully, allowing transfers both from the computer to the iPod and from the iPod to the computer. It has an alarm clock plugin that lets me specify different wakeup times for different days of the week, which is incredibly useful for a college student who has 4 different start times during a 5 day school week. Plus, because it uses dcop for to allow interfacing with it from the command line, I can use my remote control to control it. You can also automatically download lyrics and the wikipedia entry about each artist just by going to the context tab.
Can't choose your partition during the install? How can it do that on it's own? I know it's a difficult question for new users, but if all of your hard drives are formatted and have data on them, how do you expect it to choose one to resize or wipe out? When you install, it gives one option of installing to the largest empty space. Otherwise, choosing a partition is simply a must.
If MS dropped Mac Office support, Apple would likely do everything they could to maintain their ground, and rather than reinvent the wheel, it would make sense to throw their support to OpenOffice development. It could quickly become superior to MS Office across the board, and it could probably do it before the last version of Mac Office becomes antiquated.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did reinvent the wheel rather than support an office suite that would benefit Linux, their main competitor in the not-windows category.
There is nothing about election in the definition of municipal governments, and neither muicipal nor alect even have definitions.
Drinkable water isn't generally provided by municipal governments, it's treated and provided by private water companies. I'm not sure who provides sewage services, but it's something of a necessity - without it health risks sky rocket. If someone doesn't want to pay for sewage, they don't get that option because of the health risks it imposes on those around them. If someone doesn't want to pay for drinkable water, they simply don't get it.
Wifi is another matter entirely. People can survive just fine without it, and there's no reason someone who doesn't want it should be forced to pay for everyone to have it.
Just because the government provides something doesn't make it free, it just means everyone pays for it in taxes instead of the people who use it paying for the service. In some cases this is necessary, but in the case of WiFi it most certainly isn't.
I highly doubt sales people would be in on such a conspiracy. A company like Best Buy has sales people coming and going all the time. If someone got pissed because they were fired, the first thing they'd do would be blow the whistle on this. If these price differences are even deliberate, it's done strictly by the people managing the two websites. The sales reps would be told to sell at the intranet website's price, and are probably unaware of the fact that there's a different version of bestbuy.com at work than there is at home, let alone that the prices are different in order to screw the consumer. It may be a conspiracy, but it's not involving every sales rep at every Best Buy in the country.
With Ubuntu Edgy, I haven't run into a wireless card that doesn't work from the LiveCD without downloading any additional drivers. I've used a Broadcom card, two different Intel cards, and a Linksys card with an Atheros chipset (madwifi drivers). There may be a few cards that Ubuntu doesn't recognize out of the box, but they're getting to be pretty rare.
Long story short, I replaced a drive when I didn't need to. I happened to find out that the drive was fine, but lots of people probably never would have. I blame my own ignorance, both for causing the rattle, and not knowing what a raid failure looked like. It certainly isn't fair to blame Seagate for the drive failure, or misrepresenting the failure time - I assume they make sure their drives have legitimately failed before counting them in their drive failure statistics. You can't blame them for user ignorance.
With Ubuntu Edgy Eft, both of my laptops have been able to connect to my wireless network from the Live CD, without any difficult configuration. Just start up wlassistant and go. One of my cards is intel, the other is broadcom. The Broadcom card doesn't get 802.11 g, just B. That's the only problem I've had with wireless.
Both laptops are running Beryl, which did take some config file editing, but there are guides that tell you how to open the files and exactly what lines to edit. I understand that there are scripts to do this now. One is an ATI radeon X600 card, the other is an intel GMA.
Card reader works out of the box in both laptops. I've never tried firewire, but it's identified in my hardware list.
My girlfriend's laptop has better hardware support in Linux than it does in Windows. For whatever reason, her laptop quit charging it's battery a few months ago. I chalked this up to a bad mother board, and assumed it was irreparable. Last weekend, she decided she wanted to try out this "Linux" thing I've been raving about, and we were stunned to see the battery start charging when we booted up the Live CD. Now she's a happy Linux user too.
What version of Ubuntu were you using? Wireless support on Dapper was a bit tricky, and my card reader took some work on dapper. Breezy badger before that was even less impressive. The hardware support for Ubuntu has come a long way in the year and a half since I started using it, but any more there's not much hardware that doesn't work out of the box, and Feisty looks even more promising.
Quite some time ago, slashdot ran this article about a program called QTFairuse6, which uses iTunes to decrypt Fairplay music. If that argument against BackupHDDVD is valid, QTFairuse6 should be fine because iTunes is doing the decryption, and iTunes is allowed to do that. I'm sure the RIAA would disagree, and I know inconsistent arguments work better in law than my line of work (CS), but that was my immediate reaction when I read the summary.
They get a settlement without going to court.
The defendant doesn't show up and they get a default judgement.
Their case falls apart and they dismiss with prejudice.
Are they winning cases? Not very often (that I'm aware of).
Are they getting money out of people? Yes.
If I'm wrong, please feel free to cite cases, but I've been under the impression that very few cases have been completed in court.
I think the patent system would be significantly improved if patent cases were handled more like small claims court. Each side has one representative, evidence, and witnesses. Neither side gets a team of lawyers to drag the case out for months. Obvious patents get overturned, legitimate patents are upheld, and deep pockets don't get special treatment.
The *IAA has too much money and political power for the government to pass a law allowing the circumvention of DRM. If DRM could legally be broken, there would quickly be commercial efforts to break it, and new methods wouldn't last a week. Clearly the media industry wouldn't like that, and for whatever reason, the government supports them more than the consumer.
Except that patents only provide financial benefits to big corporations. If a small company or individual has a patent that a big company wants, the big company will simply use the patent without paying licensing, and if the patent owner challenges them in court, they'll be bankrupted before the case is over.
On the flipside, big companies claim patents on obvious things like double clicks on hand held devices, one click purchases, digitally timeshifting recordings, etc. and can defend these obvious patents in court because they have deep pockets.
If the patent system is going to help spur innovation it needs to prevent deep pockets from being able to abuse the patent system, and right now it's failing at that.
Most of my friends are the technically inclined who have avoided DRM from the beginning. The few friends I have who ever used iTunes for music use it now as much as ever. Their iPods are generally a fairly low percent iTunes music, because they had lots of CDs before they got their iPods, and some of them like indie music - and indication of musical taste, not necessarily of opposition to DRM. The low percentage of DRMed music on iPods doesn't necessarily mean people are actively avoiding DRM or moving away from it, it simply means they have additional ways of getting their music that don't entail DRM.
These friends of mine may not be representative of the general population, but I think they are a better example of the average user than those who frequent slashdot.
The post you initially trolled was saying that the record companies always had a secure position selling music, initially because reproduction caused rapid quality loss, then because CDs were almost as expensive to copy as to buy legitimately, then bandwidth was expensive, but now there is nothing to keep people from creating high quality (admittedly with some loss) copies and redistribute them without any additional loss per copy. The point you claim does not exist was that after decades of being able to provide the highest quality versions of their music, pirates can produce a comparable product and spread it to thousands of people at virtually no cost. Take that for what you will, but you've got to be incredibly ignorant and stubborn to claim that there was no point.
Do you have any sources on this? There are certainly some more technically minded people who have avoided DRM from the beginning, but I'm not aware of too many average consumers who have much opposition at all to DRM, generally because they aren't aware. I may be wrong, but I haven't seen the masses flocking towards DRM-free alternatives.
Point one and point two have the potential of being mutually exclusive. Sure, we don't want Dell to say "Look, we have a box over here that has Linux on it. We support Linux. If you want Linux, this is the only box for you." But at the same time, building a Linux supported box is largely about choosing hardware, which means if the boxes aren't already Linux compatible, they'll have to make some changes to the hardware configuration to make them compatible. I'd say they have to be comparable to the most popular boxes dell already sells, but saying they have to be the same boxes defeats the purpose.
Point #3 is also problematic, because the cost of a (windows) computer is subsidized by crapware - free trials of three different ISPs, a 60 day trial of MS Office, a 60 day trial of Norton Antivirus, a bunch of games that you can only play 10 times before you have to buy them, etc. and Dell gets a cut of each of these items. The only way to make a fair comparison is if Dell also sells Windows boxes sans the crapware.
You might be interested in James P. Hogan's Kicking The Sacred Cow, if you can find a copy. Hogan discusses scientific dogma in areas such as global climate change, evolution, HIV, the theory of relativity, the origin of the universe, and a few others. The idea behind most of them is that modern science has ignored some significant data because it either doesn't fit with the current "scientific" understanding, or bureaucrats have threatened their funding. I'm not saying I believe Cremo is correct, I think it sounds a bit absurd, but I haven't read much on the issue, and I'll certainly admit that their is some bad science that gets accepted as fact. This doesn't mean, however, that bad science is factual simply because effort is expended getting the supporters of an idea to quit wasting oxygen.
Hardly. There are plenty of legitimate ways to use media that are prohibited by DRM. I'd like to have all of my movies and music on my media PC so I could just pull everything up with a remote. This is legal with my music, but DRM (supported by the DMCA) prevents me from doing the same with my movies. My media center also happens to be a Linux computer, which has no (legal) support for DVDs, HD-DVDs or BluRays. I am not a hacker, trying to prove that it can be done, nor am I a pirate - I simply want to be able to use my media without being told what uses are allowed.
Of course, I'm not to keen on testing this plan, so I also keep locks on my laptops when they're home, or never let them out of my site when I'm out and about, but I think it's a good start.
The second could be an issue even if there are other means of casting your vote. If the plan is for 50% of the (voting) population to vote online, the polling centers would likely be ill prepared for a rush of voters when the site goes down. This could be resolved by having online-voting available during the same period absentee voters receive their ballots - if there is a problem with the web site, the polling center could be more prepared.
The third could also be an issue. It's quite feasible that your ISP could know political affiliation from the sites you routinely visit - when election day comes around, the people who regularly visit leftist websites find that their internet connection is moving at a snail's pace, and the election site seems to be down. They may not be able to submit a false vote, but they could still prevent targeted people from voting. Presumably, people could then go to the polling center, but if they had planned on voting online they may not have left room on their schedule to go to a polling center, and they may miss the election.
I don't necessarily think these are going to be big issues, but they are things that need to be considered before such an election is implemented.
I beg to differ. On the back of my credit card, the words "Not Valid Unless Signed" are quite clear. Just below that is my signature and the words (See ID). I worked retail all through high school and over extended breaks during college, and I always checked signatures against the back of the card. If someone had written something to the extent of "check ID," I did. But 90% of the places I use my credit card, the clerk doesn't bother to check the signature - some places they never even touch my card. On the rare occasion that someone asks to see my ID, I thank them for asking, and if it is a tipping establishment, they get a little extra. The merchant is the only link in the chain that can check identification, and they almost never do.
As far as online merchants, they also have a line of defense. I recently purchased a laptop and asked that it be shipped to my dorm - the address on the card being my home address. Within minutes I received an e-mail saying that the order could not be processed until I added my dorm as an alternative shipping address with the credit card company. The credit card company then required a piece of personal information that would have been hard for a third party to come by.
In short, merchants who meet the customer in person can check signatures or ID. Merchants who are shipping items have the opportunity to confirm the shipping address, and merchants who are providing online services can generally terminate the service if the credit card comes back as fraudulent. I would agree that a chargeback fee is inappropriate, but I think it's quite reasonable to hold merchants responsible for accepting a card without taking precautions to insure that the person using the card is the person whose name appears on the front of the card.