If you did, you still wouldn't post your credit card number on your cube wall. Right?
The wallet idea is actually very good. Granted, your wallet becomes a breakable link in the chain, but that's only for a week or two, then you have your password memorized.
Suppose your boss decides to pressure you to vote the way he wants. Suppose everybody's boss pressures them to vote the way they want. You could quite easily see a very strong bias.
Just being someone's boss doesn't necessarily mean a person has the exact same political desires as other bosses. But, yeah, it's quite probable that en masse bosses would skew a certain way. But being someone's boss also means you're in a position of additional accountability if any one of half a dozen employees reports you for vote coercion.
Even if we're not talking about a general directional skew in election results, the principle of protecting individual franchise is important. That's the fundamental issue here, not mass coercion.
Thankfully, "sticking your head in the sand" is not considered a valid engineering method. The system needs to take this kind of stuff into account. The fact that you're naive doesn't mean we should all be naive.
You're acting like a dick. Doing that is actively harmful to your cause and is harmful even to people not directly involved in this discussion, so I recommend against it.
On to your point. I did not advocate any specific action, I only speculated on the mechanics and outcome of the scenario.
However, I do contest your reasoning. "Valid engineering" should involve an understanding of the system you're trying to work with. It's not useful take into account every infinitely remote possibility. No, you design for practicality, by expectation. If you can reasonably (i.e., without excessive energy) design solutions that eliminate entire swaths of problem space, including whole classes of vanishingly remote possibilities, then great. But more brain power has to be put to understanding the nature of what the problem is instead of what it might be. Scenarios in which the problem space involves lots of humans make for challenging design. It's often impossible to know with certainty what the practical needs of the solution are. You judge as best you can, looking at the phenomena involved and weighing them for likelihood and impact on the design. I can see mass coercion by a single entity in a first world country as a (really small) factor, just not a primary concern. Go ahead and weigh it in and design for it, and if you have an easy answer, then great.
As mentioned above, I feel that protection of individual franchise is an important principle. It should be a primary concern, and the impractically small issue of mass coercion would be protected against under the same umbrella.
The local Don standing behind you with a cocked 9mm while you cast your vote is a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities.
The employer/union advising you to vote for x and favouring people who did when promotions and/or layoffs come around are the boring and far more real picture.
The local Don wouldn't have gotten to his position if he spent all his time mucking in details, failing to understand ideas like the basic concept of efficiency. The threat of a single chambered round gets him... one vote? I wouldn't call that a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities unless you were arguing that trying to influence elections by coercion by gun would be ineffectual.
As for the employer or local force of whatever nature coercing through favoritism or the threat of firing, my point is that if you try to do these things on a scale large enough to have a concerted impact in a first world country where laws exist against vote coercion and for protecting labor, your activity will be too obvious to avoid repercussions.
As above, the real concern is not mass coercion, but the principle of individual franchise. Solving that solves your bogeyman simultaneously.
If you want to make progress instead of just brow beat, focus on solutions. I know there are numerous solutions out there to protect against vote coercion, but I don't know if any work specifically in a home-voting scenario. Links?
Back when http://stats.dnsbl.com/ was operational I used their data to give me a quick leg up on figuring out which lists to look at. Then I checked out the lists for how they operate and then did a performance analysis.
Aside from policy/operation, two things that were particularly important to me were false positives and overlap. These lists get very low false positives and they combine nicely.
I agree with your idea that a list can almost always be useful if it gets weighed in (even if it receives negative weighting!), but the thing you replied to and contested was "most legitimate hosts and providers stopped using them years ago." Are you actually saying that most legitimate providers have not stopped using them?
As far as the "mercy of one or two big blacklists", that's the option I went for. I shopped around and looked at performance and looked at the methodology and infrastructure as much as I could, and I settled on two blacklists. (Though each of them is an aggregate of others, maybe something like blended vintage wines.) They've done a damn good job over the past year and I expect them to continue to work well for at least a few more years. (Probably longevity was another consideration.)
Training my own filter to blend multiple blacklists isn't that unappealing an option, though. It just didn't occur to me as easily configurable when I built my system.
Doing things like admitting mistake is outstanding. I commend you, sir, for that forthright behavior. That kind of discussion helps. If people see that others are interested in accuracy rather than (perceived) domination, they'll be more willing to concede their own mistakes or to concede your correctness when they're wrongly in opposition.
I can understand the motivation to switch gears from reasonable discussion to snark mode if the other party appears to be beyond reason. I find myself experiencing that urge frequently. But I recognize that even if I'm right, even if they're wrong, even if they're ridiculous and stubborn in their wrongness, it doesn't benefit them or humanity at large to create more "Internet forum fighting". It might help me to feel better, but I can and should find other ways to vent my frustration with the inanity. Making more Conflict Text and putting that out into the world for others to slog through doesn't help the signal to noise ratio and it's even actively harmful in that it raises the overall perception of conflict in the world and therefore the likelihood that people will default to antagonistic behavior. It exacerbates the problem that it's reacting to. It's a 180 from that gentlemanly, productive concession of point. It's hard, but I try to remember to control myself during those urges to lash out. I don't always do a good job.
---- ---- -----
Freetardo, note that you lose even worse if you let the fact that someone is fighting you force you into an increasingly ridiculous position. It's not about whether you can beat someone else in discussion by having as opposing a position as possible, by admitting as little fault in your arguments as you can get away with, and by admitting as little correctness in your opponent's argument as you can manage. That's not beating anyone but yourself. It's ironic, but when people fight in forums they automatically lose, because fighting is itself stupid. Just look at the statement you're quotable with now: "When a normal person uses the term ``downward pressure'' when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down". You're on record with that idiocy now, and you probably only pulled it out because you were in the "I must disagree because I'm fighting" mode.
Granted, admitting fault is hard, but it's stronger and righter to do so. It's immature to stay the course when you're wrong. Let your first reaction to contradiction be something like "Hm, how true is that?" rather than "Nuh uh!"
This kind of attitude is half the reason people aren't more reasonable in discussion.
If you make discussion about beating others, you derail us from the more valuable goal of cooperatively working towards truth.
Yeah, you were right about downward pressure, but you turned into an asshole at the end there. On behalf of humanity I would ask that you knock that off.
Whatever. Take that feel-good stuff somewhere else. Two wrongs often do make a write, and eye for an eye does make me feel better. I don't care what Gandhi says.
Ah, it makes you feel better. Hm... Basing morality on urges is kind of a bad sign, isn't it?
I might suggest we all try to find ethical wisdom from different sources, rather than some anon online forum commenters. I know, kooky.
If you appear to be driving badly (as much as such a thing can be objectively determined), I think a stop and testing is fine.
Testing shouldn't be for presence of intoxicants, but ability to perform.
And you should be charged with some degree of "driving while incapable".
Even if you're not on any illicit drugs.
Be a shitty driver for whatever reason — inattention, sleepiness, emotion, age — and there should be consequences. There should be forces to keep you off the roads: in enforcement, in licensing, in as many places as they can be employed.
Lost a partition to corruption (had extended partition to > 136G without updating W2K service pack to handle it; worked fine for months until I started to fill up the disk). My data was mincemeat, but GetDataBack helped me get what I could.
Customer service is excellent. The developer is very responsive in the forums.
If you think being afraid of terrorism is justifiable, you haven't done the numbers and you're just reacting with your gut.
That's when terrorism works — when you get terrorized, when you freak out and do stupid things that cause you much more damage than the original attacks. Saying "justifiably afraid" is another way of saying "I'm half of what makes terrorism work."
Are people really so fearful that they frantically cast about for ways to be safer? Okay, here's a good, actually effective way: Quit tailgating.
I see a burgeoning meme, "the browser wars don't matter". Can we nip this in the bud, please?
The idea can only be put forth by someone who fails to understand how important control over the computing platforms is. The idea, folks, is to even the playing field, to promote interoperability and efficient resource usage in development, to remove any dictator or single controlling force. I can't stress how important this is.
"The browser wars don't matter -- they're over."
Just about, it's true. With 1/3+ of the market using non-IE, developers have to build to standards. But it's like balancing a wine glass on a tray, pretty easy when the tray isn't badly tilted, and then while you put some attention to it, but the balancing act is never over. This will be true for the next platform, too.
"The browser wars don't matter -- it's just about hating Microsoft."
Again, it's about control. Netscape was aiming for the same kind of position, but they lost out. If they had become the single driving and defining entity behind the web platform, thwarting interoperability whenever it profited them, they would have been the force to fight. If Java had gotten somewhere, we'd have Sun to worry about. The anti-anti-Microsoft crowd needs to pull their heads out.
I love Palin. I think she's stupendously (unintentionally) funny.
But I fucking hate misinformation, so I would have modded him up. It's like the "Al Gore says he created the Internet" misinformation meme. Can't stand it.
People seeing the world how they want to instead of how it is. Laughing at the things too ridiculous to be real. In fact, not real. This believe-what-you-want thinking needs to be crushed before humanity can truly have hope.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect the "one strike and you're out" philosophy is likely to cause you more problems than it solves.
You gotta keep up, guy. Giorgio explains in detail.
http://hackademix.net/2009/05/04/dear-adblock-plus-and-noscript-users-dear-mozilla-community/
I was sexually active at age 15: I masturbated much more than I do now.
FTFY
If you did, you still wouldn't post your credit card number on your cube wall. Right?
The wallet idea is actually very good. Granted, your wallet becomes a breakable link in the chain, but that's only for a week or two, then you have your password memorized.
Suppose your boss decides to pressure you to vote the way he wants. Suppose everybody's boss pressures them to vote the way they want. You could quite easily see a very strong bias.
Just being someone's boss doesn't necessarily mean a person has the exact same political desires as other bosses. But, yeah, it's quite probable that en masse bosses would skew a certain way. But being someone's boss also means you're in a position of additional accountability if any one of half a dozen employees reports you for vote coercion.
Even if we're not talking about a general directional skew in election results, the principle of protecting individual franchise is important. That's the fundamental issue here, not mass coercion.
Thankfully, "sticking your head in the sand" is not considered a valid engineering method. The system needs to take this kind of stuff into account. The fact that you're naive doesn't mean we should all be naive.
You're acting like a dick. Doing that is actively harmful to your cause and is harmful even to people not directly involved in this discussion, so I recommend against it.
On to your point. I did not advocate any specific action, I only speculated on the mechanics and outcome of the scenario.
However, I do contest your reasoning. "Valid engineering" should involve an understanding of the system you're trying to work with. It's not useful take into account every infinitely remote possibility. No, you design for practicality, by expectation. If you can reasonably (i.e., without excessive energy) design solutions that eliminate entire swaths of problem space, including whole classes of vanishingly remote possibilities, then great. But more brain power has to be put to understanding the nature of what the problem is instead of what it might be. Scenarios in which the problem space involves lots of humans make for challenging design. It's often impossible to know with certainty what the practical needs of the solution are. You judge as best you can, looking at the phenomena involved and weighing them for likelihood and impact on the design. I can see mass coercion by a single entity in a first world country as a (really small) factor, just not a primary concern. Go ahead and weigh it in and design for it, and if you have an easy answer, then great.
As mentioned above, I feel that protection of individual franchise is an important principle. It should be a primary concern, and the impractically small issue of mass coercion would be protected against under the same umbrella.
The local Don standing behind you with a cocked 9mm while you cast your vote is a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities.
The employer/union advising you to vote for x and favouring people who did when promotions and/or layoffs come around are the boring and far more real picture.
The local Don wouldn't have gotten to his position if he spent all his time mucking in details, failing to understand ideas like the basic concept of efficiency. The threat of a single chambered round gets him... one vote? I wouldn't call that a nice picture to illustrate the possibilities unless you were arguing that trying to influence elections by coercion by gun would be ineffectual.
As for the employer or local force of whatever nature coercing through favoritism or the threat of firing, my point is that if you try to do these things on a scale large enough to have a concerted impact in a first world country where laws exist against vote coercion and for protecting labor, your activity will be too obvious to avoid repercussions.
As above, the real concern is not mass coercion, but the principle of individual franchise. Solving that solves your bogeyman simultaneously.
If you want to make progress instead of just brow beat, focus on solutions. I know there are numerous solutions out there to protect against vote coercion, but I don't know if any work specifically in a home-voting scenario. Links?
I suspect the reality in a first world country is that you can't do this to the tune of enough votes without being far too obvious.
This is why it's important to look at list methodology before subscription.
I think if you are having problems with the methods behind "the" Spamhaus list, maybe you haven't looked closely enough.
I recommend Spamhaus XBL and Spamcop Blocking List .
Spamcop used to have problems, but I think they resolved them a couple years ago.
Back when http://stats.dnsbl.com/ was operational I used their data to give me a quick leg up on figuring out which lists to look at. Then I checked out the lists for how they operate and then did a performance analysis.
Aside from policy/operation, two things that were particularly important to me were false positives and overlap. These lists get very low false positives and they combine nicely.
Old stats:
http://stats.dnsbl.com/zen.html
http://stats.dnsbl.com/spamcop.html
More samples means better signal to noise.
Does it also mean more DNS activity?
I agree with your idea that a list can almost always be useful if it gets weighed in (even if it receives negative weighting!), but the thing you replied to and contested was "most legitimate hosts and providers stopped using them years ago." Are you actually saying that most legitimate providers have not stopped using them?
As far as the "mercy of one or two big blacklists", that's the option I went for. I shopped around and looked at performance and looked at the methodology and infrastructure as much as I could, and I settled on two blacklists. (Though each of them is an aggregate of others, maybe something like blended vintage wines.) They've done a damn good job over the past year and I expect them to continue to work well for at least a few more years. (Probably longevity was another consideration.)
Training my own filter to blend multiple blacklists isn't that unappealing an option, though. It just didn't occur to me as easily configurable when I built my system.
Doing things like admitting mistake is outstanding. I commend you, sir, for that forthright behavior. That kind of discussion helps. If people see that others are interested in accuracy rather than (perceived) domination, they'll be more willing to concede their own mistakes or to concede your correctness when they're wrongly in opposition.
I can understand the motivation to switch gears from reasonable discussion to snark mode if the other party appears to be beyond reason. I find myself experiencing that urge frequently. But I recognize that even if I'm right, even if they're wrong, even if they're ridiculous and stubborn in their wrongness, it doesn't benefit them or humanity at large to create more "Internet forum fighting". It might help me to feel better, but I can and should find other ways to vent my frustration with the inanity. Making more Conflict Text and putting that out into the world for others to slog through doesn't help the signal to noise ratio and it's even actively harmful in that it raises the overall perception of conflict in the world and therefore the likelihood that people will default to antagonistic behavior. It exacerbates the problem that it's reacting to. It's a 180 from that gentlemanly, productive concession of point. It's hard, but I try to remember to control myself during those urges to lash out. I don't always do a good job.
---- ---- -----
Freetardo, note that you lose even worse if you let the fact that someone is fighting you force you into an increasingly ridiculous position. It's not about whether you can beat someone else in discussion by having as opposing a position as possible, by admitting as little fault in your arguments as you can get away with, and by admitting as little correctness in your opponent's argument as you can manage. That's not beating anyone but yourself. It's ironic, but when people fight in forums they automatically lose, because fighting is itself stupid. Just look at the statement you're quotable with now: "When a normal person uses the term ``downward pressure'' when referring to the cost of something it does mean that the price goes down". You're on record with that idiocy now, and you probably only pulled it out because you were in the "I must disagree because I'm fighting" mode.
Granted, admitting fault is hard, but it's stronger and righter to do so. It's immature to stay the course when you're wrong. Let your first reaction to contradiction be something like "Hm, how true is that?" rather than "Nuh uh!"
You have lost, admit it and have a nice day.
This kind of attitude is half the reason people aren't more reasonable in discussion.
If you make discussion about beating others, you derail us from the more valuable goal of cooperatively working towards truth.
Yeah, you were right about downward pressure, but you turned into an asshole at the end there. On behalf of humanity I would ask that you knock that off.
I'm no "anon forum commenter". I'm onymous.
Some folks see irony where there isn't any.
Don't you think?
Whatever. Take that feel-good stuff somewhere else. Two wrongs often do make a write, and eye for an eye does make me feel better. I don't care what Gandhi says.
Ah, it makes you feel better. Hm... Basing morality on urges is kind of a bad sign, isn't it?
I might suggest we all try to find ethical wisdom from different sources, rather than some anon online forum commenters. I know, kooky.
If you appear to be driving badly (as much as such a thing can be objectively determined), I think a stop and testing is fine.
Testing shouldn't be for presence of intoxicants, but ability to perform.
And you should be charged with some degree of "driving while incapable".
Even if you're not on any illicit drugs.
Be a shitty driver for whatever reason — inattention, sleepiness, emotion, age — and there should be consequences. There should be forces to keep you off the roads: in enforcement, in licensing, in as many places as they can be employed.
Get off my lawn before I mow you down with my edlin!
Another "me too" here.
Lost a partition to corruption (had extended partition to > 136G without updating W2K service pack to handle it; worked fine for months until I started to fill up the disk). My data was mincemeat, but GetDataBack helped me get what I could.
Customer service is excellent. The developer is very responsive in the forums.
And this is why we should discourage IE8 use.
Can we please avoid getting ourselves into the exact same mess all over again?
Hear, hear.
If you think being afraid of terrorism is justifiable, you haven't done the numbers and you're just reacting with your gut.
That's when terrorism works — when you get terrorized, when you freak out and do stupid things that cause you much more damage than the original attacks. Saying "justifiably afraid" is another way of saying "I'm half of what makes terrorism work."
Are people really so fearful that they frantically cast about for ways to be safer? Okay, here's a good, actually effective way: Quit tailgating.
Take off every 'Information Aggressor Squadron'!!
I see a burgeoning meme, "the browser wars don't matter". Can we nip this in the bud, please?
The idea can only be put forth by someone who fails to understand how important control over the computing platforms is. The idea, folks, is to even the playing field, to promote interoperability and efficient resource usage in development, to remove any dictator or single controlling force. I can't stress how important this is.
"The browser wars don't matter -- they're over."
Just about, it's true. With 1/3+ of the market using non-IE, developers have to build to standards. But it's like balancing a wine glass on a tray, pretty easy when the tray isn't badly tilted, and then while you put some attention to it, but the balancing act is never over. This will be true for the next platform, too.
"The browser wars don't matter -- it's just about hating Microsoft."
Again, it's about control. Netscape was aiming for the same kind of position, but they lost out. If they had become the single driving and defining entity behind the web platform, thwarting interoperability whenever it profited them, they would have been the force to fight. If Java had gotten somewhere, we'd have Sun to worry about. The anti-anti-Microsoft crowd needs to pull their heads out.
Isn't that about where it's at now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet-explorer-usage-data.svg
I don't think the asymptote is as high as 66%. We're there now and look at how fast IE usage is dropping.
Anyway, having other browsers make up 1/3 or more of the audience is enough to force websites to be built towards standards, which is the real issue.
Ah, but I must not be a Trek nerd. Because I only just found out that this was your point -- the scenario is in this movie.
Kind of like a Kobayashi-
Oh, shit, I didn't even see myself as a Trek nerd...
I love Palin. I think she's stupendously (unintentionally) funny.
But I fucking hate misinformation, so I would have modded him up. It's like the "Al Gore says he created the Internet" misinformation meme. Can't stand it.
People seeing the world how they want to instead of how it is. Laughing at the things too ridiculous to be real. In fact, not real. This believe-what-you-want thinking needs to be crushed before humanity can truly have hope.
At least... that's what I believe.
Idiotic moderation is also a bit of a killjoy.