Is this move uninspired? Yes. Does it have anything to do with national financial ruin? (Which we do not, in fact, have. . . turns out there are still one or two people who think we will get back on the right track eventually.) No. Hyperbole--
I suppose the positive side of this is that if people are happy spending real money on virtual objects, then they probably have enough money.
I'm afraid not. You mentioned the counterargument to this: casinos. See also: credit cards, the $10T national debt, balloon payments on houses. People are happy to buy things they don't have the money to afford.
Well, forget about having a technician. There just aren't enough of them. They are understaffed even to fix their ATMs, there's no way in hell they can install a tech all day in every polling location, even assuming you could get them all to go through the non-partisan . Even having a few floating around is out of the question.
In fact, imagine this scenario: Imagine what your technophobic grandmother (or luddite cousin, it doesn't have to be ageist) would do if the computer tech who showed up told her, "Ah, it's registering all your votes backwards. There you go, just hit the McCain button, and it's actually registering a vote for Obama." With the poll worker standing right there, nodding ignorantly along.
There isn't enough manpower to correct all these machines, there isn't enough training budget to make all the regular poll workers proficient, and there's no way to keep corruption out of the system. Electronic voting machines are a bad idea, period.
If it is, than doing this would be a just act of civil disobedience.
(Actually, I'm pretty sure it is, because you could use your video record of voting to sell your vote. I only approve of this as an emergency measure to counteract the corrupt voting machine industry.)
Check your voting laws, it might be possible to get the poll worker to agree to put the machine in a test mode, and video it then.
Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions
This is not entirely fair. Before the Internet, information was difficult to search through, and the expense to the creator of putting information out there was higher, but nowhere near as high as the expense to readers (look up the cost of some of the better-respected scientific journals these days). In such an environment, you want a filter to keep crap out.
The Internet marries nearly-free publishing to nearly-free subscribing, and slathers on extremely good searchability. It is new and game-changing. The old ideas aren't about "censorship", they were the right way to do things in the pre-Internet world.
The problem is that application dialogs often open on unexpected places. Some don't attempt to remember where you last saved something; some do, and end up in even worse places. For example, if you went out of your way to save something in an obscure directory last time, the next time you try to do a save it will also land in that obscure directory.
The latter at least is easy to discover, but most users never think of the solution: just "save as.." again, and see where it takes you.
If all applications agreed on a standard API to discover the "last used" directory, neither would be a problem. Let's say you accidentally save a file in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ or something stupid like that, well, when you open your email client to email the attachment to someone, it will ALSO open up that directory, and you'll see your file.
In other words, this is easy to solve at the application layer, we just need a tiny bit more cooperation from the applications. The "last opened" directory should be a trivial API available on every platform, and should be a basic service, not part of something high-level like Gnome VFS.
GP is clearly a troll, but you're wrong about Anonymous. Slashdot logs anonymous posts. If a TLA agency came after them, Mr. AC wouldn't be Anonymous for very long.
You're right, it is bad when you put too much weight on these numbers, and use them for something practical. Most people just laugh and ignore them. John McCain, unfortunately, spent all of his advertising budget on 38 thousand swing planets. Boy is there egg on his face now.
They'll only get criminal charges if there was intent to buy stolen goods. In other words, they would have to know it was stolen before they bought it, or not report it if they found out after they bought it.
Very hard to prove, even if they are criminal types, which they most likely are not. But yeah, they have to give that shit back.
This completely misses the point. Schneier knows that. He knows the whole thing is fucking stupid. He's just pointing out it's so completely stupid that it is obviously only for show. If it were slightly less stupid, it would still be worthless, but it would no longer be obvious. He's pointing out these trivial solutions to the problems he poses, not to fix the system, which is unfixable (and he knows it, and he has said it). He's pointing them out to show you how stupid the TSA and the DHS think you are.
I started out as a personal gmail user. I was very happy with it, even routing my work email through it, but when the question for our mid-sized business came up, "should we outsource our email to gmail?" I said no. I said let's do due diligence, there are other outsourced solutions, this is something we really ought to get right.
Our CEOs (we have two, yeah..) both tried it and liked it, so we went with it.
So I'm in the unique position of having argued to management that we shouldn't risk anything on Gmail, and us doing it anyway because management wanted it. And you know what? I was wrong. Gmail has been a great productivity booster for our business, it's saving us money on salaries, and the downtime is less than we experienced when we were half-assedly running it ourselves.
Plus, when shit does hit, I just smile, and nobody tries to blame me.:-) On the ~two occasions that we had any noticable gmail outage, our CEOs weren't the ones complaining. They have realized that email may be important, but we can still get work done while gmail is futzing around with it.
In the Western civilized society after the Renaissance era anyway.
This is the Spanish Inquisition of our times, and I don't mean Monty Python. I mean the real one, where they burned you if you didn't renounce your false god, and then burned you if you do.
Is now really a good time to quibble about regulating giant, economy-controlling companies? Yes, regulate those bitches. Small businesses need to advertise, if one company controls the only means to do so on the Internet, they can set the price and make life miserable for lots of people.
This is not insightful. Everyone can steal a voting machine just as easily. Since the voting records are stored on memory cards, you can steal a LOT MORE OF THEM... hundreds in your pockets.
As an added multiplier, if you implement your hack in the right place, you can also corrupt A LOT MORE voting machines at once, and therefore a lot more votes at once.
No system will be 100% secure, but paper voting is the easiest TO secure. I didn't RTFA, but anyway, I thought the brazilian machines just printed out a paper ballot?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this move uninspired? Yes. Does it have anything to do with national financial ruin? (Which we do not, in fact, have. . . turns out there are still one or two people who think we will get back on the right track eventually.) No. Hyperbole--
I suppose the positive side of this is that if people are happy spending real money on virtual objects, then they probably have enough money.
I'm afraid not. You mentioned the counterargument to this: casinos. See also: credit cards, the $10T national debt, balloon payments on houses. People are happy to buy things they don't have the money to afford.
Well, forget about having a technician. There just aren't enough of them. They are understaffed even to fix their ATMs, there's no way in hell they can install a tech all day in every polling location, even assuming you could get them all to go through the non-partisan . Even having a few floating around is out of the question.
In fact, imagine this scenario: Imagine what your technophobic grandmother (or luddite cousin, it doesn't have to be ageist) would do if the computer tech who showed up told her, "Ah, it's registering all your votes backwards. There you go, just hit the McCain button, and it's actually registering a vote for Obama." With the poll worker standing right there, nodding ignorantly along.
There isn't enough manpower to correct all these machines, there isn't enough training budget to make all the regular poll workers proficient, and there's no way to keep corruption out of the system. Electronic voting machines are a bad idea, period.
If it is, than doing this would be a just act of civil disobedience.
(Actually, I'm pretty sure it is, because you could use your video record of voting to sell your vote. I only approve of this as an emergency measure to counteract the corrupt voting machine industry.)
Check your voting laws, it might be possible to get the poll worker to agree to put the machine in a test mode, and video it then.
Traditional peer review is mostly a censorship mechanism that is used to suppress minority opinions
This is not entirely fair. Before the Internet, information was difficult to search through, and the expense to the creator of putting information out there was higher, but nowhere near as high as the expense to readers (look up the cost of some of the better-respected scientific journals these days). In such an environment, you want a filter to keep crap out.
The Internet marries nearly-free publishing to nearly-free subscribing, and slathers on extremely good searchability. It is new and game-changing. The old ideas aren't about "censorship", they were the right way to do things in the pre-Internet world.
Well you've got us there. Most Americans couldn't find Canada, let alone your capital.
The problem is that application dialogs often open on unexpected places. Some don't attempt to remember where you last saved something; some do, and end up in even worse places. For example, if you went out of your way to save something in an obscure directory last time, the next time you try to do a save it will also land in that obscure directory.
The latter at least is easy to discover, but most users never think of the solution: just "save as.." again, and see where it takes you.
If all applications agreed on a standard API to discover the "last used" directory, neither would be a problem. Let's say you accidentally save a file in %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ or something stupid like that, well, when you open your email client to email the attachment to someone, it will ALSO open up that directory, and you'll see your file.
In other words, this is easy to solve at the application layer, we just need a tiny bit more cooperation from the applications. The "last opened" directory should be a trivial API available on every platform, and should be a basic service, not part of something high-level like Gnome VFS.
I'm rolling Womp Rat. At 3 meters, they'll be one of the better damage races, and Luke Skywalker is the only person who can kill one.
Dude, I know. What a bunch of illiterate hicks.
Most of the Canadian population is also within 100 miles of the US border. Apparently we get to search you guys, too.
Perhaps what you really want to know is how Wiktionary defines truth.
What irony? This person is clearly a poster child for Office 2007 being easy to use.
GP is clearly a troll, but you're wrong about Anonymous. Slashdot logs anonymous posts. If a TLA agency came after them, Mr. AC wouldn't be Anonymous for very long.
Generally Available (i.e. released)
You're right, it is bad when you put too much weight on these numbers, and use them for something practical. Most people just laugh and ignore them. John McCain, unfortunately, spent all of his advertising budget on 38 thousand swing planets. Boy is there egg on his face now.
They'll only get criminal charges if there was intent to buy stolen goods. In other words, they would have to know it was stolen before they bought it, or not report it if they found out after they bought it.
Very hard to prove, even if they are criminal types, which they most likely are not. But yeah, they have to give that shit back.
This completely misses the point. Schneier knows that. He knows the whole thing is fucking stupid. He's just pointing out it's so completely stupid that it is obviously only for show. If it were slightly less stupid, it would still be worthless, but it would no longer be obvious. He's pointing out these trivial solutions to the problems he poses, not to fix the system, which is unfixable (and he knows it, and he has said it). He's pointing them out to show you how stupid the TSA and the DHS think you are.
I started out as a personal gmail user. I was very happy with it, even routing my work email through it, but when the question for our mid-sized business came up, "should we outsource our email to gmail?" I said no. I said let's do due diligence, there are other outsourced solutions, this is something we really ought to get right.
Our CEOs (we have two, yeah..) both tried it and liked it, so we went with it.
So I'm in the unique position of having argued to management that we shouldn't risk anything on Gmail, and us doing it anyway because management wanted it. And you know what? I was wrong. Gmail has been a great productivity booster for our business, it's saving us money on salaries, and the downtime is less than we experienced when we were half-assedly running it ourselves.
Plus, when shit does hit, I just smile, and nobody tries to blame me. :-) On the ~two occasions that we had any noticable gmail outage, our CEOs weren't the ones complaining. They have realized that email may be important, but we can still get work done while gmail is futzing around with it.
In the Western civilized society after the Renaissance era anyway.
This is the Spanish Inquisition of our times, and I don't mean Monty Python. I mean the real one, where they burned you if you didn't renounce your false god, and then burned you if you do.
If I had a superpower in real life, it would be to make the Wyld Stallyns air guitar noise.
DJI
Is now really a good time to quibble about regulating giant, economy-controlling companies? Yes, regulate those bitches. Small businesses need to advertise, if one company controls the only means to do so on the Internet, they can set the price and make life miserable for lots of people.
This is not insightful. Everyone can steal a voting machine just as easily. Since the voting records are stored on memory cards, you can steal a LOT MORE OF THEM... hundreds in your pockets.
As an added multiplier, if you implement your hack in the right place, you can also corrupt A LOT MORE voting machines at once, and therefore a lot more votes at once.
No system will be 100% secure, but paper voting is the easiest TO secure. I didn't RTFA, but anyway, I thought the brazilian machines just printed out a paper ballot?
you're pitting a machine generating questions and answers against a machine designed to answer questions.
You make it sound like that's hard. Here's a question that a machine could generate that another machine could not answer:
"What number am I thinking of?"
Lua is also uniquely capable in the area of being sandboxable. I'm looking forward to trying it out some day.
Fundies believe homosexuality is learned. If you see any running around holding flashlights in their fists, it's not eugenics, it's closeted gayness.