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"Whatever the reason, where the intention of the voter can be fairly and satisfactorily ascertained, that intention should be given effect."

"The trial judge concluded that a vote should be recorded for a candidate if the chad was not removed but an impression was made on or near it."

I'd wager they can't block this little tid-bit:

Warning! Don't click here if you're under 18 or local regulations prohibit you from downloading pr0n, even ASCII-art.

When looking at this pic, try setting your point size to 4 and make sure you're using a fixed-width font. Much more realistic.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.

The circuit judge to whom the contest is presented may fashion such orders as he or she deems necessary to ensure that each allegation in the complaint is investigated, examined, or checked, to prevent or correct any alleged wrong, and to provide any relief appropriate under such circumstances.

> Fact: According to the Secretary of State's office, there is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. This view has been contested by hundreds of Florida voters. The final decision on the legality of the ballot is likely to be made in court, as long as this issue could have an effect on the election.

According to the Jurist site, a paper ballot must have a spot for marking the voter's choice to the right of the candidate's name, and a machine ballot must conform to the form of a paper ballot "as nearly as practicable".

\methinks the courts are going to have to weigh in on the meaning of "practicable".

The same site also mentions that Florida officials have said that the ballot is perfectly legal, but then again Florida officials have been saying lots of things that the courts will eventually have to rule on.

Finally, even if a court does agree that the ballot was confusing, there is legal precedent at the appeals level in Florida for saying "tough luck" anyway. (But will they say the same thing in a presedential election?)

> His ruling on the 5pm deadline is basically: "Yeah, she [the Secretary of State] can ignore late results...but not arbitrarily"

I found the ruling quite surprising, since the Florida Statutes clearly give voters right up until the moment of statewide certification to register their contest or protest of the election. The implication of the judge's ruling seems to be that yes, you could register your {pro,con}test of the election right up until 4:59 this afternoon, but that the SoS could completely ignore it at her discretion, since there would not be time left to read it, let alone do anything about it.

I vote the "work of great cowardice" explanation. Notice also that five (count 'em, five!) judges have already recused themselves from the Butterfly Ballot Suit, so that that extremely hot potato(e) is now in the hands of a sixth. I don't think anyone in the judicial system wants to have his/her resume saddled with having single-handedly selected a president.

And of course, the Florida SoS must be the squirmingest person in the USA right now. I wouldn't want to have her job under the current circumstances.

As always, the most technically useful link for all this is the Jurist site. You can also find interesting articles (and opinions) at Salon, including stories that the mainstream press is virtually ignoring.

> The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballor

Not. See this note on jurist, and read the part about allegations of a confusing ballot. IANAL, but it certainly sounds like the ballot does not conform to the requirements of Floridian state law.

> Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida.

Actually, the problem was reported long before the outcome of the election was clear. By 11:24 AM Florida time, there had already been enough complaints to prompt a FAX from the DNC to contact county officials, asking them to post a clarification. A note was then distributed by the county to the actual voting sites, arriving mostly between 1:00 and 2:00 PM. (I have seen at least once source claiming that the clarification never did reach all the sites.)

See th is Salon article for a pretty good review of the situation, including a link to a scan of the memo.

Also, now that a bit of information about the disqualified ballots is finally leaking out, it turns out that there was indeed a high fraction of Gore+Buchanan punches (over 2x the number of Gore+Bush punches, IIRC).

It is at best misleading for you to portray the current dispute as a post hoc attempt by the Democrats to throw a fair election.

http://sage.che.pitt.edu/msad.jpg

john

Politicians are always ranting about the World Wide Web...problem is, they forget the first two words..."WORLD WIDE".

For some reason, they don't realize that a ton of pr0n sites (and some of the best ones, in my book :), as well as many gambling sites, radicals, "How to make a nuclear weapon", etc., are located OUTSIDE the US.

For example...

US Government: "Hey, Holland! Shut down all the porn and pro-marijuana sites that end in .nl!"
Dutch: "You're fooking kidding, right?"

The US has no jurisdiction over overseas sites, and better not try to pull any stunts to usurp power to do so ("Pull thehun.net or no more automobiles for you!")

And one more point...let's see the filters extract this link (WARNING! LINK CONTAINS EXPLICIT ASCII-ART! NOT SUITABLE FOR 90% OF /. READERS! Link may not be available after a few days. You've been warned.)

The fact that what I tell you is the accepted standard wisdom within the nuclear power industry doesn't make it false. If you want accurate information about how nuclear power works, eventually you'll have to listen to people who know something about it rather than just listening to people who are terrified by it.

Sorry. I not only don't buy that nuclear power is as safe or safer than other forms, but you haven't addressed the primary point I've made, which is that nuclear power as it exists today cannot possibly supply the world's energy needs... it can only delay the inevitable by a few years.

That's a reasonable question. How long will nuclear power last us? You seem to think it will only last "a few" years. What assumptions are you making to get that figure? And by "few" do you mean a thousand years, a hundred years, a dozen years?

Another nuclear advocate, John McCarthy, has an FAQ on nuclear energy as part of his sustainability website; I recommend it to you. His sources calculate that with breeder reactors we could make known supplies of nuclear fuel last for a fair bit more than "a few" years using known technology. Here are some details from this page:

-=-=-
How long will nuclear energy last? These facts come from an article& lt;/A> by Bernard Cohen.

Nuclear energy, assuming breeder reactors, will last for several billion years, i.e. as long as the sun is in a state to support life on earth.

Here are the basic facts.

1. In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)

2. Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.

3. How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?

   There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.

   In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)

4. How much uranium is there in seawater?

   Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.

5. However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

6. Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
7. He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.

Comments:

• Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.
• He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium.
• He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.

The main point to be derived from Cohen's article is that energy is not a problem even in the very long run. In particular, energy intensive solutions to other human problems are entirely acceptable.

-=-=-

Not saying this is right, of course, but it's how court cases are won, and I'm sure it's second nature to someone like Velenti. Do you really think that when William Jefferson Clinton said that he didn't know whether "the insertion of an object in the genitalia of another person" counted as "sexual relations," that he really just honestly didn't have any idea? I'm sure if you find a transcript of the OJ trial, you'll find that magic phrase all over The Juice's testimony, as well. I also bet that The Unabomber doesn't say it very much - quite simply, "I don't know" is something successful litigants do whenever anyone asks them a question about anything that could even conceivably help the other side. Defendents that don't say "I don't know" tend to end up in jail, and lawyers that don't say "I don't know" don't become high ranking lawyers for the MPAA.

Mr. Valenti probably is relatively clueless on technology, but probably not as woefully clueless in general as you might suspect from transcripts of his talks. It's all just an artful dodge to fulfil the wishes of his corporate masters.

Reid v. Covert (1957) Supreme Court

• When the United States acts against its citizens abroad, it can do so only in accordance with all the limitations imposed by the Constitution, including Art. III, 2, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. Pp. 5-14. [354 U.S. 2]

• http://www.thebates.com/sincity/menue.htm
• http://www.pitt.edu/~wichter/books.html
• http://hem.passagen.se/fm4/sincity.html

I just downloaded the preview release, and Nautilus seems to be pretty slick. Eazel and the other contributors have done a lot of work in a pretty short amount of time. It even seems to be fairly stable for such an early release, though it did crash after about fifteen minutes. That said, I can't really see this replacing either emelFM or the console, which are my primary file managers.

Sure, Nautilus looks really professional, and has plenty of eye- and ear-candy, but when considering functionality, how does Nautilus really benefit the user? For example, how is being able to play an mp3 right in the file manager using a bonobo component any better than just having xmms pop-up to play it? Other than just being a cool technological feat, I can't see how a component architecture is really advantageous in a file manager.

Another concern I have is speed. This release is dog-slow on my Athlon system with 160 MB of RAM. I know its not fair to reach conclusions about the finished product based on such an early release, but can we realistically expect this app to ever be blazingly fast? I'm curious about how long I will have to sit and wait while Nautilus draws the contents of a directory with a few hundred or even a few thousand files, especially with all of the content preview functionality enabled.

I guess what I want is something where I can turn off all of the extraneous stuff made to help newbies and still have a file manager with ground-breaking (dare I say innovative) features for helping me do what file managers are meant to do: manage files. With the pervasive networking, high bandwidth and gigantic hard drives that are becoming commonplace today, it's getting progressively harder to sort through the data that is available on my computer. The file manager paradigms we have now were designed for a much smaller amount of data (on both the local system and over the network). Even my $HOME directory is starting to become a tangled maze of information that is taking more and more time for me to try and keep organized. And this is on a system with a relatively sane *nix style file system structure. I shudder even to think about some large windows drives that I've seen.

Anyway, a while back on Gnotices , in another discussion on Nautilus, I brought up my thoughts on this subject, and mentioned that I thought having a filtering and querying mechanism somewhat like SQL (of course with a good GUI) would be great to help sort through large amounts of files. Someone said that there were at least tentative plans to include something like this in Nautilus eventually. I hope this comes to pass. Also, someone else said that the Linux file system was not well suited to doing this sort of database-like operation. Perhaps there are some gurus out there who can elaborate on this.

I've rambled enough here, so I'd like to end by pointing out that I don't mean this to sound too harsh towards Nautilus. I've been using GNOME off and on since the .30 days, and I sincerely hope that Nautilus will be a worthwhile addition to the desktop. I feel, though, that without some serious consideration of the issues I wrote about above, Nautilus will just be a fancy version of Windows Explorer, when it could be something much better. Perhaps other /. readers have better ideas than my own, and we can discuss them here...

---------------------------
"The people. Could you patent the sun?"

Actually it appears you are trolling, but I'll bite anyway (its late :) ).

1) I have heard of Cassini, it is an intersting exploration probe of the Saturn system. As an aside where do you get your Pu toxicity data? Here's a link to a paper on the subject by Bernard Cohen. Do you have information from a radiation health researcher to back your claims?

2) In order to expolore the outer solar system there are good reasons to use plutonium as a power source (in an RTG, Radioisotope Thermal Generator). It is compact (low mass/energy), long lived, and reliable. Other possible power sources have inherently serious problems.

3) Also they do contain the Pu in many layers of protection in case of an accidental reentry to prevnt the release of the Pu in the atmosphere. Perhaps the press has been "nonchalant" because the danger is miniscule and only the extremists are upset by a non-existant danger.

Several American cities have filed suit against gun manufacturers for marketing an unsafe product. Some of the manufacturers have settled by making concessions on things like trigger locks.

-

According to their website... "PSC operates five supercomputing-class machines: a 512 processor Cray T3E, two eight-processor Cray J90s, a four-processor Alphaserver 8400 5/300 system, and an Intel cluster with 10 4-processor compute nodes."

This page provides a description of the work researchers plan to do with the new supercomputer.

The center is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon, The University of Pittsurgh, and the old Westinghouse Electric company.

It's also intersting to note that the PSC & CMU formed the NCNE Gigapop that provides the internet to CMU, PITT, WVU, and Penn State.

I just graduated from high school...

Thankfully, my school didn't do AP CS, insted we used the University of Pittsburgh's College in High School program (CHS).

We got PITT credit for the class, based on multiple tests and projects completed throughout the year, not just one stupid AP test. I took AP chem, and I thought it was the biggest waste because the teacher tried to teach to the test, and we ended up learning nothing productive.

I also had a very good CS teacher, who also taught me Calc.

While some schools laugh at AP credit, Pitt credit seems to work. Carnegie Mellon usually takes Pitt credit (I'll be a freshmen there this year).

But anyway, Pitt CHS requires Pascal before C++ to teach basic CS concepts. You have to remember that most of the kids in the class have no idea what variables or functions are.

An appropriately conceived relational calculus is more powerful than a similarly conceived functional calculus because functions are special cases of relations.

When I was manager of interactive architectures at the precursor to Prodigy I spent about a year pursuing functional programming languages as a possible public standard for the network programming language. By network programming language, I mean a language used to make programming distributed applications as transparent as possible with dynamic redistribution of functions based on load leveling and security requirements.

I chose functional programming because the dataflow graphs provided a natural network map, the nodes of which could be redistributed on the physical network without altering any of the logical analysis that went into the writing of the program. The inspiration for this work was my prior experience with the Plato network where I had pushed the creation of a mass market version of that product. (Worthy of digression is the fact that middle management killed the release of that product and may have, thereby, killed Seymour Cray's first company, Control Data Corporation along with the Midwest's chances to be the locus of the network revolution -- 20 years earlier than it finally happened.) I realized that a widely distributed mass market Plato network needed parallel distributed authoring tools for novice programmers. Combined with the Turing Award Lecture by John Backus of BNF and FORTRAN fame I was inspired to pursue functional programming when I left Plato to join with AT&T and Knight Ridder in their joint venture mass market information service experiment.

While authorized to pursue this vision by AT&T and Knight RIdder, I initiated working groups involving computer telecommunications departments from Bell Labs, Atari, Apple, Xerox PARC, MIT, Software Arts and Knight-Ridder News to explore a staged evolution from tokenized FORTH-based programmable graphics communications protocol that would fit in the earliest Videotex terminals being produced by Western Electric (which became PostScript) through distributed Smalltalk based on a FORTH VM, and on to either functional programming with data abstraction or possibly a more radical revision of Codd's work in relational programming. During this time of intense activity, I was fortunate to actually meet Alonzo Church and Haskell Curry at the 1982 ACM conference on functional programming at Carnegie Mellon shortly before Haskell's death and at least get them to sign my conference proceedings and personally thank them for their contributions.

The closest I came to finding a working foundation for distributed functional programming (with object semantics) was a synthesis between David P. Reed's distributed file system transaction protocols and Arvind and Gostellow's U-Interpreter for dataflow computations (see the special "Dataflow" issue of IEEE "Computer", I believe it was December 1980). It turns out that Reed, Arvind and Gostellow had come, from two distinct directions, on virtual machines to describe their programming systems that were isomorphic to one another. Reed's distributed transaction file system was based on the object oriented CLU programming language developed for OO research at MIT, and Arvind and Gostellow had come at theirs from the work on dataflow computers arising from the excitement inspired by Backus's previously mentioned Turing Award Lecture. Reed's system was particularly important for funcitional programming enthusiasts because he was directly addressing the concept of network state, transaction mechanisms and the practicalities of network timeouts, faults and other real-world difficulties. Unfortunately, although Reed would go on to become chief scientist at Lotus Corporation, where some collegues of mine from the Plato project were developing a distributed programming system called Lotus Notes, Reed never actually pursued his conception of network state within the context of functional programming, nor even within the context of Lotus Notes! Perhaps this was my fault for not attempting to beat Ray Ozzie over the head with Reed's thesis, but Ray was pretty cagey about what he was up to at Iris Associates back in 1984. By the time I found out Reed was Ray's chief scientist, I assumed he and Reed were working on something related to Reed's thesis. Imagine my surprise to discover Notes was not only a distributed file system of sorts, but that Reed's primary theoretic expertiese was never actually discussed as a foundation for Notes! But it gets better: the most ironic twist is that Reed and Arvind were both at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science when I discovered their respective works. When I went to visit them at MIT's LCS, I walked up the stairs from Arvind's office to Reed's office to discover that they had no idea that their respective VM's were nearly identical despite being based on entirely different approaches -- and that neither of them were particularly interested in talking to the other about a synthesis between their works!

Academics...

In any case without a good foundation for handling network state in distributed functional programming, I was left facing the same sort of problems faced by John McCarthy when Marvin Minsky et al took off and started to kludge in all kinds of arbitrary state handling "formalisms" into McCarthy's mathematically pure implementation of Church's lambda calculus: LISP. I saw where that road led...

While a degeneration of Reed's approach was actually tried on the Intel 432 project under the iMAX operating system's distributed OO file system, to the best of my knowledge, the only other attempt to implement his system was a distributed archive object base that I prototyped a few years back at Filoli Information Systems (formerly Memex -- the company that bought out Xanadu Operating Company and attempted to resurrect hypertext after Autodesk dropped support when John Walker was displaced as CEO from that company and ultimately from the entire country).

However, I've never really been happy with the functional approach because functions are a degeneration of relations. That's why I've always been more interested in advancing the state of relational programming than that of functional programming. The problem is, functional thinking is embedded in our mechanistic views of time and causality -- sort of the way up and down are embedded in our physical structures due to having evolved on the surface of a planet. If we're going to deal with distributed persistence and transaction problems, we may as well handle the more general case -- especially since relational programming is at the root of the relational database industry, and it appears a relational formulation of time based on a revision of Russell and Whitehead's Relation Arithmetic, may end up dominating the future of physics.

You can't compare DOS to Unix well, as Unix influenced DOS... When MS added subdirectories to DOS they boasted they were going to add more Unix features to DOS (anyone have that announcement in your files?).

Includes a link to the Nikolia Tesla Museum, also check out AK Press, stockists of many wonderful and not so mainstream books. Do a search on their web site for Tesla, a friend of mine bought me "The Fantastic Inventions of Nikola Tesla" (ISBN 0 932813 19 4 Price: $16.95). It's great- lots of images and reproductions as well as texts on everything from the immensly practical (why we should have been taught about this man at school in science lessons) to the out there flying saucer stuff (probably the reason they prefer not to teach us about this man at school!). Definitely check out about the Wardenclyffe Tower.

From http://www.neuronet.pitt.edu/~bogdan/tesla/index.h tm:

The Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, and scientist.

Born on July 9/10, 1856 in Smiljan, Lika (Austria-Hungary)
Died on January 7, 1943 in New York City, New York (USA)

Inventions: a telephone repeater, rotating magnetic field principle, polyphase alternating-current system, induction motor, alternating-current power transmission, Tesla coil transformer, wireless communication, radio, fluorescent lights, and more than 700 other patents.

How many of us have our jobs, hobbies and/or avocations without the inventions of this man? He should also go on the all-time hackers list as well. I just wish he could have gotten that transmission-of-electricity-through-the-air thing working. :)

Russ

• Built a motor out of bugs and sticks
• Hold's the world's record for manmade lightning generation
• Invented the radio
• Invented AC
• Invented a form of X10 for telephony and remote device control
• Was terrified of the number "3" and human hair

I found this file by search, and it seems to be interesting; it addresses some of the issues with respect to telephones numbers.

Tesla (not the band, the inventor)
another
Remember the story about the new york police station shaking so bad stuff was walking off the tables, and they eventually figured out it was a machine Nikola was testing in his lab, blocks away?

Um.. no it doesn't. There is no Quicktime 3/4/Sorenson support for Linux. Xanim sure as heck doesn't have it, neither does mtv.

-= NJV =-

"A better burden can no man bear
on the way than his mother wit:
and no worse provision can he carry with him
than too deep a draught of ale."
The Havamal

Whos the Leader of the pack thats made for you and me
M-I-C-K-E-Y A-p-p-l-e
Mickey MAC!!! with g3
Mickey MAC!!! with g3

maybe now apple can make some cash CASH CASH

All you little mousekateers and little linux hacks

Run around, scream real loud. "we want our MouseMac's Fast!!!

-Stan Shivell