How do you convince people to buy carbonated sugar water, manufactured at 1.5 cents a can, for sixty cents? Marketing!
By the same token, Red Hat has become synonimous with Linux in the non-Linux world. People are willing to pay $80 for software that they can download for the cost of bandwidth, or get from CheapBytes for ten bucks. IT professionals are willing to pay big bucks for Red Hat certifications.
Voters who are not computer savvy will likely become confused by the unnecessary complication of the new voting machines and many are likely to cast their ballots in error, possibly voting for a candidate they had no intention of supporting.
I think you're over-estimating the complexity of the system for the user.
It's not hard: you see the candidate you want, you touch their name. Their name lights up. If you want to change your vote, you touch a different name. Once you've picked your candidate, you move on to the next page. You can change your vote later. When you want to accept the ballot, just press a last panel on the screen.
This isn't rocket science. It's as easy as the paper ballots, if not easier.
The reliability and accuracy of paper-based systems is what led to the mess in Florida in 2000.
I agree with you on the hacking and digital manipulation. There are ways around this, but only if the system is well-designed. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the system to produce a desired result, both subtle (place the candidate's name on the second page of a list of names) and gross (stuff the ballot box with 'votes' for your guy from 'voters' who are dead.) No paper system is 100% tamper proof.
John Marshall in particular has a reputation for teaching trial advocacy, and has one of the first computer-law-oriented programs in the world. They also hosted the American Bar Association's "Cybercrime" conference last May.
So you have a lot of really connected lawyers who know the field and know how to convince a judge or jury.
I'm willing to bet that Sorkin could pull a few favors, assemble a dream team, and put whomever was dumb enough to sue him into a world of blinding pain.
Actually, MS did this receantly. What they had been doing was underreporting earnings so as to be able to build up a reserve that they could then use later to prop up earnings when the market slowed down. It's not illegal, but still frowned on.
That's really odd, because if I underreport my earnings, I get in trouble for tax evasion.
I'm not trying to compare apples and oranges here; I'm really curious if MS reported the same numbers to SEC and IRS / Washington State Department of Revenue. If so then someone ought to get that money from them; Washington state needs every penny it can get right now.
Microsoft is conducting a campaign to actively reach out to the Linux-using geek crowd. This may be designed to make us take a second look at them in a more positive light.
The real test will be whether they use DMCA to clamp down on vulnerability research on their.NET and XP technologies. If they don't, then it's good evidence that they're dedicated to becoming good citizens.
The truth is you can expect to get sued if you use deadly force to defend yourself or your home or family. If you disable the bad guy, you get sued by the bad guy. If you kill the bad guy, you get sued by the bad guy's estate.
I would still kill someone who posed a deadly threat to me or my loved ones. Their lives are worth the years of hell fighting off a lawsuit.
PostgreSQL was never GPL'd. Not even copyleft, but just a plain free software license, can't remember if derived from BSD or MIT X. If one wants copyleft, SAPdb is the only choice now.
What's the advantage of using a copylefted product over a MIT/BSD licensed product? There's none that I can see unless you're going to hack it, and even then, it depends on what you want to do with the end result.
Well, the problem is that you're coming off as a white supremacist. That, and there's not much evidence of the mass mutilations that you speak of. Most of these are cattle mutilations.
We could also lay blame on certain ultra-rich white businessmen, but ultimately the blame lays on Mugabe.
Let us suppose that I am growing 'normal' corn while my neighbor grows GE corn. Let us also assume that I make a habit out of saving 5-10% of my crop for replanting three years later, after a year of soybeans and a year of alfalfa, and that my neighbor is on a similar schedule.
Let's start in 2000 with both of us planting corn. My corn has no GE genes in it; my neighbor's corn has some GE genes in it, which are covered by patents held by Frankenfood Inc.. That year some pollen from my corn invades my neighbor's field and vice-versa. Come harvest time, I harvest my corn and my neighbor harvests his. I save my 10% for replanting, and in 2003, I plant partially GE corn. My corn is now covered by patents held by Frankenfood Inc, unbeknownst to myself.
Have I invaded on Frankenfood's patent?
Do I owe Frankenfood Inc. royalties on their IP?
If so, do I owe them in 2003, when I use the seeds; or do I owe them in 2000, when I first harvested and sold those GE seeds to the general public?
Let's suppose that the cross pollenation occurs over long distances.. that the GE corn was grown in Zimbabwe and that my corn is grown in Chile, but that the cross-pollenation happens anyway due to a jet stream. Zimbabwe has a royalty-free license to use Frankenfood's GE corn. Chile does not even use Frankenfood's GE corn. Do I still owe them royalties?
Can they get an injunction ordering me not to plant my corn or to destroy a corn crop that I've already planted? Can they back it up with guns if I refuse to obey?
Can they sue my country under NAFTA or GATT and bankrupt the treasury?
These are the kind of issues that I think people are worried about.
Re:Sounds like fun - shame about the name
on
Economy of Errors
·
· Score: 2
However, somebody that enters a monothiestic culture and (wrongly) believes himself to be the One True God, and insists to everybody that he be recognized as such, that guy is a complete basket-case. For Jesus to think he's Jehovah, and not be, would be as far removed from reality as I would be if I thought I was Jesus.
This is a good point. However, Jesus was not born in raised in, and did not live in, a monotheistic culture. He lived in Hellenized Judea, under the control of the Roman Empire, and would have been exposed to persons from dozens if not hundreds of religious traditions. Judea at the time was a lot more cosmopolitan than, say, Kokomo, Indiana is today.
To put it another way, "the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic", if you are talking about the single, almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent, personal creator of all the world, is one-to-one (1:1) if he is wrong.
This concept of God did not exist in Jesus's time, even in Judea; it is a Christian concept of God, evolved after the fact, which was adopted later by the Jews and the Muslims, but still a Christian concept nonetheless.
This isn't to say that Jesus wasn't divine; it is just to say that we can't prove he was divine using Lewis's argument.
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut. Charles Manson, for example, is one such complete nut. When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
The problem here is that neither Lewis nor anyone else knows the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic. I happen to know several people like this (they all accept the premise that Man is God, and they appear, at least to me, to be sane and honest). Implicit in Lewis's argument is the fourth case where Jesus claims to be God, is wrong, and is not a lunatic -- either because he's actually mistaken, or because he's speaking metaphorically. If I had to weigh these four options against each other, then the mostly-sane-but-wrong option strikes me as the most likely.
Lewis does some impressive hand-waving to try to make us believe the false dillema that he's created, but it's still a false dillema.
Narnia has been banned from my local school district do to 'religious' content. Pisses me off...
That's just plain idiotic. Narnia's a far cry from, say, the Screwtape Letters. What are they going to do next, ban Shakespere for Christian overtones?
Liberals/can/ go to far at times.
Heh, so can conservatives. Harry Potter comes most immediately to mind.
I think we should teach kids about all the different major religions, including the holy books of each, so that we can give both evangelicals and atheists a massive coronary.
I do think that some of C. S. Lewis's works should be mandatory reading though if just to show students that things do NOT have to be the way that they are. My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that schools used to not have as much fighting or sex in them!.... Ugh! People must be reminded that it IS possible to get through schooling without punching and fucking your way from one class to the next.:(
OK, so help me out here. Exactly how is C S Lewis, in particular, supposed to accomplish this?
We can strap this 100kW laser onto a plane to blind the bad guy, or..
We can strap a smart bomb onto a plane to kill a bad guy.
Am I the only one who thinks that the military's job should be killing people, not blinding them? Or am I missing out on the hip new expanding role of the military that everyone's talking about?
I used to work at a company that builds parental controls. They had banks of people looking at porn every day, 8 hours a day, or about 200-400 pages a day. I worked closely with these guys since part of my job was ensuring that our data sets were clean. Trust me, after a couple of weeks of doing this, you really start to hurt.
I give money to ACLU, Planned Parenthood, EFF and NRA. Of those, the only one *not* to hound me for more and more money was EFF. I get bombarded by appeals for money, not just from these guys, but from other groups that think I might be interested in their causes.
You know what I do with all that crap? I recycle it.
Side note: sometimes the appeals for money get interesting, and I can only assume that the people who send me such solicitations haven't done their homework. Once I got a solicitation from Handgun Control Inc. I was tempted to send them a photograph of my NRA member card and an extended middle finger, but my maturity got the better of me.
IIRC, they gave Hillary Rosen (of RIAA fame) an award for protecting free speech rights. Given the ACLU's long history of fighting for free speech rights, I assume they collect quite a bit of money from the media.
This is true, and it's because the media want the ability to say as much as they possibly can. As soon as it comes to other people saying things that threaten the media's business model, the media becomes a bunch of jackboot thugs ripping out people's vocal chords.
During the 2002 Cybercrime Conference I had the opportunity to talk to one of the RIAA's lawyers. We got to talking about free speech.
"You'll probably find that we're on the same side there. We're huge defenders of free speech."
"I'll believe that when you guys file an amicus brief stating that source code is protected speech."
He had a genuinely hard time grasping what I was talking about.
It will make a hell of a diffrence when those 2000 geeks don't turn up for work tomorrow
Indeed it will: 2000 formerly unemployed geeks will have jobs the next day, at half the wages that the 2000 detained, formerly employed geeks, were paid. Gotta love this economy.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you convince people to buy carbonated sugar water, manufactured at 1.5 cents a can, for sixty cents? Marketing! By the same token, Red Hat has become synonimous with Linux in the non-Linux world. People are willing to pay $80 for software that they can download for the cost of bandwidth, or get from CheapBytes for ten bucks. IT professionals are willing to pay big bucks for Red Hat certifications.
I would love to see this implemented nation wide. I don't think it will happen. Too many people in power have too much to lose from an IRV system.
Voters who are not computer savvy will likely become confused by the unnecessary complication of the new voting machines and many are likely to cast their ballots in error, possibly voting for a candidate they had no intention of supporting.
I think you're over-estimating the complexity of the system for the user.
It's not hard: you see the candidate you want, you touch their name. Their name lights up. If you want to change your vote, you touch a different name. Once you've picked your candidate, you move on to the next page. You can change your vote later. When you want to accept the ballot, just press a last panel on the screen.
This isn't rocket science. It's as easy as the paper ballots, if not easier.
The reliability and accuracy of paper-based systems is what led to the mess in Florida in 2000.
I agree with you on the hacking and digital manipulation. There are ways around this, but only if the system is well-designed. Of course, there are all sorts of ways to manipulate the system to produce a desired result, both subtle (place the candidate's name on the second page of a list of names) and gross (stuff the ballot box with 'votes' for your guy from 'voters' who are dead.) No paper system is 100% tamper proof.
Can 21st century women expect to hear:
?John Marshall in particular has a reputation for teaching trial advocacy, and has one of the first computer-law-oriented programs in the world. They also hosted the American Bar Association's "Cybercrime" conference last May.
So you have a lot of really connected lawyers who know the field and know how to convince a judge or jury.
I'm willing to bet that Sorkin could pull a few favors, assemble a dream team, and put whomever was dumb enough to sue him into a world of blinding pain.
Just wait for five years until the Slashdot generation starts having kids. You'll be seeing stories about baby formulae and disposable diapers.
Actually, MS did this receantly. What they had been doing was underreporting earnings so as to be able to build up a reserve that they could then use later to prop up earnings when the market slowed down. It's not illegal, but still frowned on.
That's really odd, because if I underreport my earnings, I get in trouble for tax evasion.
I'm not trying to compare apples and oranges here; I'm really curious if MS reported the same numbers to SEC and IRS / Washington State Department of Revenue. If so then someone ought to get that money from them; Washington state needs every penny it can get right now.
The real test will be whether they use DMCA to clamp down on vulnerability research on their .NET and XP technologies. If they don't, then it's good evidence that they're dedicated to becoming good citizens.
That's 9800 Newtons per kilogram. I'd love to see your car do that.
I would still kill someone who posed a deadly threat to me or my loved ones. Their lives are worth the years of hell fighting off a lawsuit.
What's the advantage of using a copylefted product over a MIT/BSD licensed product? There's none that I can see unless you're going to hack it, and even then, it depends on what you want to do with the end result.
We could also lay blame on certain ultra-rich white businessmen, but ultimately the blame lays on Mugabe.
The difference being, of course, that Coca growers usually don't care about the law; whereas regular farmers do.
Let us suppose that I am growing 'normal' corn while my neighbor grows GE corn. Let us also assume that I make a habit out of saving 5-10% of my crop for replanting three years later, after a year of soybeans and a year of alfalfa, and that my neighbor is on a similar schedule.
Let's start in 2000 with both of us planting corn. My corn has no GE genes in it; my neighbor's corn has some GE genes in it, which are covered by patents held by Frankenfood Inc.. That year some pollen from my corn invades my neighbor's field and vice-versa. Come harvest time, I harvest my corn and my neighbor harvests his. I save my 10% for replanting, and in 2003, I plant partially GE corn. My corn is now covered by patents held by Frankenfood Inc, unbeknownst to myself.
Have I invaded on Frankenfood's patent?
Do I owe Frankenfood Inc. royalties on their IP?
If so, do I owe them in 2003, when I use the seeds; or do I owe them in 2000, when I first harvested and sold those GE seeds to the general public?
Let's suppose that the cross pollenation occurs over long distances .. that the GE corn was grown in Zimbabwe and that my corn is grown in Chile, but that the cross-pollenation happens anyway due to a jet stream. Zimbabwe has a royalty-free license to use Frankenfood's GE corn. Chile does not even use Frankenfood's GE corn. Do I still owe them royalties?
Can they get an injunction ordering me not to plant my corn or to destroy a corn crop that I've already planted? Can they back it up with guns if I refuse to obey?
Can they sue my country under NAFTA or GATT and bankrupt the treasury?
These are the kind of issues that I think people are worried about.
How ironic.
However, somebody that enters a monothiestic culture and (wrongly) believes himself to be the One True God, and insists to everybody that he be recognized as such, that guy is a complete basket-case. For Jesus to think he's Jehovah, and not be, would be as far removed from reality as I would be if I thought I was Jesus.
This is a good point. However, Jesus was not born in raised in, and did not live in, a monotheistic culture. He lived in Hellenized Judea, under the control of the Roman Empire, and would have been exposed to persons from dozens if not hundreds of religious traditions. Judea at the time was a lot more cosmopolitan than, say, Kokomo, Indiana is today.
To put it another way, "the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic", if you are talking about the single, almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent, personal creator of all the world, is one-to-one (1:1) if he is wrong.
This concept of God did not exist in Jesus's time, even in Judea; it is a Christian concept of God, evolved after the fact, which was adopted later by the Jews and the Muslims, but still a Christian concept nonetheless.
This isn't to say that Jesus wasn't divine; it is just to say that we can't prove he was divine using Lewis's argument.
Lewis pointed out that anybody who actually believes himself to be God, and isn't, is a complete nut. Charles Manson, for example, is one such complete nut. When we examine the record of Christ's words, deeds, and how people and society reacted to him, it looks like the chance of him being a nut can probably be ruled out.
The problem here is that neither Lewis nor anyone else knows the odds that someone who claims to be God is a complete lunatic. I happen to know several people like this (they all accept the premise that Man is God, and they appear, at least to me, to be sane and honest). Implicit in Lewis's argument is the fourth case where Jesus claims to be God, is wrong, and is not a lunatic -- either because he's actually mistaken, or because he's speaking metaphorically. If I had to weigh these four options against each other, then the mostly-sane-but-wrong option strikes me as the most likely.
Lewis does some impressive hand-waving to try to make us believe the false dillema that he's created, but it's still a false dillema.
Narnia has been banned from my local school district do to 'religious' content. Pisses me off...
That's just plain idiotic. Narnia's a far cry from, say, the Screwtape Letters. What are they going to do next, ban Shakespere for Christian overtones?
Liberals /can/ go to far at times.
Heh, so can conservatives. Harry Potter comes most immediately to mind.
I think we should teach kids about all the different major religions, including the holy books of each, so that we can give both evangelicals and atheists a massive coronary.
I do think that some of C. S. Lewis's works should be mandatory reading though if just to show students that things do NOT have to be the way that they are. My word, people cannot even IMAGINE that schools used to not have as much fighting or sex in them! .... Ugh! People must be reminded that it IS possible to get through schooling without punching and fucking your way from one class to the next. :(
OK, so help me out here. Exactly how is C S Lewis, in particular, supposed to accomplish this?
Are you going retro Tony? Nothing's more frightening than a German with nostalgia.
(NB: I'm Irish-American, naturlich)
If I could give you an extra point to raise the score to +6, I would. Good show.
We can strap this 100kW laser onto a plane to blind the bad guy, or..
We can strap a smart bomb onto a plane to kill a bad guy.
Am I the only one who thinks that the military's job should be killing people, not blinding them? Or am I missing out on the hip new expanding role of the military that everyone's talking about?
I used to work at a company that builds parental controls. They had banks of people looking at porn every day, 8 hours a day, or about 200-400 pages a day. I worked closely with these guys since part of my job was ensuring that our data sets were clean. Trust me, after a couple of weeks of doing this, you really start to hurt.
You know what I do with all that crap? I recycle it.
Side note: sometimes the appeals for money get interesting, and I can only assume that the people who send me such solicitations haven't done their homework. Once I got a solicitation from Handgun Control Inc. I was tempted to send them a photograph of my NRA member card and an extended middle finger, but my maturity got the better of me.
IIRC, they gave Hillary Rosen (of RIAA fame) an award for protecting free speech rights. Given the ACLU's long history of fighting for free speech rights, I assume they collect quite a bit of money from the media.
This is true, and it's because the media want the ability to say as much as they possibly can. As soon as it comes to other people saying things that threaten the media's business model, the media becomes a bunch of jackboot thugs ripping out people's vocal chords.
During the 2002 Cybercrime Conference I had the opportunity to talk to one of the RIAA's lawyers. We got to talking about free speech.
"You'll probably find that we're on the same side there. We're huge defenders of free speech."
"I'll believe that when you guys file an amicus brief stating that source code is protected speech."
He had a genuinely hard time grasping what I was talking about.
It will make a hell of a diffrence when those 2000 geeks don't turn up for work tomorrow
Indeed it will: 2000 formerly unemployed geeks will have jobs the next day, at half the wages that the 2000 detained, formerly employed geeks, were paid. Gotta love this economy.