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Researchers at the Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas (GoLP) achieved the first milestone of the GoLP simulation program on Extreme Plasma Physics: the installation of the first Macintosh G4 cluster in Europe, called epp (or ep2), which is based on the AppleSeed paradigm developed at UCLA by Viktor Decyk et al. The epp cluster is capable of delivering over 50 GFlops of peak power, and it is based on 16 Dual PowerPC G4/450, 32 processors, 12 Gigabytes of RAM, 0.5 Terabyte of hard disk space, running Mac OS 9, over 100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet, switched by one Asanté Intracore 8000. This is the fastest Macintosh-based cluster in the World. The installation and set up of this cluster took less than 1 day (including moving the machines to the computer room, unpacking the machines, and making all the cables!), and it did not require previous knowledge of networking: a one-page recipe for Mac OS clusters can be found here (AppleSeed website) (Portuguese translation coming soon). This "supercomputer for the rest of us" will be used for the numerical simulation of plasmas, novel plasma particle acceleration schemes using ultra intense lasers, and relativistic shocks in astrophysics. This work supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. More info available soon (also in Portuguese), as well as science using epp. For more information also contact Luís O.Silva(+351 21 8419 336).

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Researchers at the Grupo de Lasers e Plasmas (GoLP) achieved the first milestone of the GoLP simulation program on Extreme Plasma Physics: the installation of the first Macintosh G4 cluster in Europe, called epp (or ep2), which is based on the AppleSeed paradigm developed at UCLA by Viktor Decyk et al. The epp cluster is capable of delivering over 50 GFlops of peak power, and it is based on 16 Dual PowerPC G4/450, 32 processors, 12 Gigabytes of RAM, 0.5 Terabyte of hard disk space, running Mac OS 9, over 100 Mb/s Fast Ethernet, switched by one Asanté Intracore 8000. This is the fastest Macintosh-based cluster in the World. The installation and set up of this cluster took less than 1 day (including moving the machines to the computer room, unpacking the machines, and making all the cables!), and it did not require previous knowledge of networking: a one-page recipe for Mac OS clusters can be found here (AppleSeed website) (Portuguese translation coming soon). This "supercomputer for the rest of us" will be used for the numerical simulation of plasmas, novel plasma particle acceleration schemes using ultra intense lasers, and relativistic shocks in astrophysics. This work supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. More info available soon (also in Portuguese), as well as science using epp. For more information also contact Luís O.Silva(+351 21 8419 336).

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The scientists who argue for human germline modification make some interesting points. For example, they point out that we've already been altering the gene line by simply treating diabetics with insulin--if that diabetic then goes on to have children, we have increased the number of defective genes in the population. Same with cystic fibrosis. And yet, obviously nobody would argue against life-prolonging treatment for the "genetically challenged". So what's wrong with treating the germline for the positive?

Hehe, not to diminish what you did (very cool project that I thought about writing myself last year) but just that we're heading in to major league waters here, and it's pretty exciting. Punnet squares are an important part of genetics because of inheritance, but the stuff now is all gene expression and interaction. It's pretty terrifying, because that's where the real work is all going to be, but it's also incredibly exciting, because bio is going to be the science of this century.

If you're interested in slightly higher level concepts, I just found this website at my college's webserver (it's a class I had to take, intro to Molecular Bio) and it looks like it's got some good info through the flash animations. If you want the hardcore stuff, go to the NCBI site where you can browse the genome, search for proteins and genes, and do all the stuff real biologists do :-) If you're at a University that's paying online fees, you can read journal articles that they link to from University IP's as well.

"I may not have morals, but I have standards."

8. What intellectual property policies will govern OCW materials?

The policies toward the intellectual property created for MIT OCW will be clear and consistent with other policies for scholarly material used in education. Faculty will retain ownership of most materials prepared for MIT OCW, following the MIT policy on textbook authorship

I've been thinking lately that elementary through high-school textbooks are long overdue for an open-source upgrade. Books remain a big expense at schools. More than at university level, it should be possible to determine what are the essential things which every high-school student should know about chemistry, or every 6th-grader should know about history.

I haven't noticed any such project. I have seen that there's folks aiming at open source Economics textbooks.

Actually, Yeah. In fact, Classic MacOS did as well. With OS X being SMP-enabled at the kernel, the clusters should be able to make full use of the hardware now.

A central problem is that all the efficiencies possible in a large-scale network are lost without some aggregation, some centralization. Kleinrock worked a bit on the idea of allowing groups of soldiers to cluster together to form temporary hubs close to where additional bandwidth was necessary, but the problem is extraordinarily difficult both mathematically and physically--it's taken a long time for systems to get small enough for the research to be feasible.

Moreover, ARPA/IPTO/ITO really lost steam around the 80's, when Bob Kahn stepped down (no offense, Saul). And they didn't have no Linux, neither. So maybe the time is right, now.

--

from http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/press/1996/uavproto.h tml

"A prototype for a potential fleet of solar-powered autonomous aircraft that fly at high altitude in "V" formations like geese and serve as wireless communications hubs or sensing platforms will be displayed June 5 at UCLA in Westwood. The aircraft was designed and built by UCLA and Rockwell engineers in partnership with NASA."

these people really ought to read slashdot more often... =)

My .02,

A better link is available here

All your suprachiasmatic nucleus are etc, etc.

They promote it as a cross between CS and CE.

Sort of like this? :) That's what I'm taking (5th year). See my other comment


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The homepage of the translation project for the Philodemus texts found at Herculaneum is here. No more details of the image enhancement techniques unfortunately, but some nice photos of some of the papyri.

As /.-ers have pointed out, man has been playing God from the beginnings of civilization, breeding animals and crops to our desired specifications. And as Jared Diamond has pointed out so eloquently in his book, The Third Chimpanzee, man has been changing the climate and ecology(accidentally, perhaps, but changing nonetheless) of our planet since he first deforested Lebanon. If the possibility exists to reverse damages we have inflicted on the world, we have the right, and even perhaps the duty, to do so.

God himself has given man license to 'play god', so to speak, from Adam onwards. He knew what He was setting us up for when He gave us intelligence, and hopes to see us do good with our tools.

As David Brin pointed out so eloquently in his essays in the book Otherness, what does God, if He is a loving father, want of us? Does He want blind obedience, as one would from a dog rather than a child? Or does He want to see us grow and mature, taking up His tools as we grow older, creating beautiful things with them? As an avowed Christian, I must believe in a loving God who expects the latter.

This is not to say that iron fertilization is a good idea. We don't yet have anywhere near the foresight and knowledge that our Father has, and humility demands we admit this. We should definitely make plans to curb the greenhouse effect, but we need to know our limitations. Unintended consequences have a way of popping up in the oddest ways...however, we must take drastic action to prevent global warming, and climate engineering is just another tool in our toolbox, though it is a dangerous one.

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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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When you actually speak with a user on the phone (or better yet see them face to face), you have a valuble opportunity to *educate* them so they won't repeat their mistake. Sure, you can send them an email after you remotely fixed their problem, but they probably wont read it and they almost certainly wont retain anything from it. In fact, they learn better if you simply tell them what to do and let them actually execute the steps to fix it.

Phil Agre has an excellent guide to helping people use computers that anyone working in a support or helpdesk position should read.

From http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/~howard/Papers/copyright 99.html:

In 1996 the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) told the Girl Scouts of the USA that scout camps must start paying a licensing fee to sing any of the 4 million copyrighted songs that ASCAP controlled (Walker and Fagan). This included girl scout staples such as "Happy Birthday". Many camps went songless for months, until newspaper and talk show attention generated enough outrage that ASCAP was forced to say that they had no intention of prosecuting girl scout camps for violations of singing songs around the campfire. But in backing down, ASCAP still insisted that they still might prosecute camps for playing background music without a license. Though most citizens would bristle at ASCAP's attempts to charge the girl scouts, as a copyright holder the law is on their side, and the girl scouts' only defense would be fair use (but only as long as fair use remains a defense).

I first started school as a CS major. To tell you the truth I didn't enjoy it. I enjoy coding and problem solving but I didn't enjoy all of the math, physics and EE. And my school doesn't really offer the CS classes that I wanted to take. So in turn I really wasn't enjoying my major. So I had to ask myself why am I a CS major. Well I did want to learn how to code, and I thought it would be a prestigious major, but I just wasnft enjoying it. I could endure this major and come out on top, or I could pick a major that I really enjoyed and that was more unique. And I could continue coding and learning how to program the stuff I wanted to learn on my own. Now I am a East Asian Languages And Cultures and Japanese Major. I now work in the computer industry and will have no trouble finding a good job when I graduate, I have already received a few offers. And I am much more happy now, then I was a few years ago as a CS major. If you are bitching now that you donft want to be a CS major because its ten times harder then a CIS major then you will be miserable at your work when you graduate. If you follow the dollar bill and not your heart then you will be miserable. Do something you want to do. Pick a major that will give you the most enjoyment. And likewise pick a career that will give you the most enjoyment. If you have to ask a question about what major should you chose, then you have choose the wrong major.

I always say, a properly secured linux installation will be much more secure than a half secured openbsd install. It only takes me about 5 minutes to completely secure a box, it would be worth your time to learn how to do it because it saves much time in cleaning up after a system compromise. It's so easy, that I'm going to list out all the steps that I use to secure a redhat 6.2 machine

1. nmap 127.0.0.1
2. /usr/sbin/ntsysv (turn off all un-needed services that show in the nmap scan)
3. shut down those services, ala /etc/rc.d/init.d/(service) stop
4. vi /etc/inetd.conf (remove un-needed services)
5. restart inetd, /etc/rc.d/init.d/inet restart
6. nmap 127.0.0.1 (make sure the services are shut down)
7. install all security updates from a updates.redhat.com mirror, my favorite is ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com/pub/linux/redhat/update s/

Redhat 7.0 is very similar to 6.2, except you do not need to edit /etc/inetd.conf because it does not exist, and you can use ntsysv to remove services from the new xinetd used in 7.0.

an even better solution for #7 is to use an auto update script or program. Personally I feel that most of the ones out there for the redhat distributions aren't so great, so I decided to write my own script to do it myself. Run it fron cron once a day, and forget about manual updates. I just wrote a web page for my script, and you can see it here http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~drewm/superupd/

I thought I remembered reading an article in SciAm or Discover about this but can't seem to find it. Here's some other links, though.

A part of the PBS documentery on the subject

UCLA news article

The SI prefixes (from NIST) are:

yocto (10e-24)
zepto (10e-21)
atto (10e-18)
femto (10e-15)
pico (10e-12)
nano (10e-09)
micro (10e-06)
milli (10e-03)
[unity] (10e+00)
kilo (10e+03)
mega (10e+06)
giga (10e+09)
tera (10e+12)
peta (10e+15)
exa (10e+18)
zetta (10e+21)
yotta (10e+24)

The length of a typical bond between two atoms is about one Ångstrom -- 10e-10 metre, or a tenth of a nanometer -- so the first few prefixes probably won't come up much in conversation [yet?].

(for completeness, there are binary versions of these prefixes too :-)

And on the subject of nano-things... let's not let the CAD-crazed physicists with their molecular beams and Atomic Force Microscopes push the fascination of supramolecular chemistry off the stage. Have a look at the Stoddart and Rebek groups' pages. Also see KevinMS' comment!

Macs are good for plenty of things.

Here's one of the more interesting of them:

http://exodus.physics.ucla.edu/appleseed/appleseed .html

- If you can't make use of a computer, it's due to your own lack of competency.

I found this on a post in a kuro5hin.org story which has since been killed. I reposted it in another kuro5hin story and repost it here again. References for these statements are to be found in a link at the end of the FAQ.

----------------------------

[This draft #4 was prepared by Rich Cowan (rcowan@lesley.edu) with help from Paul Rosenberg, Dan Kohn, Jonathan Prince, Marc Sobel, subscribers to the Red Rock Eater News Service and the electronic mail discussion florida-recount-discuss@egroups.com, and the Yale Law School Student Campaign for a Legal Election, 127 Wall Street New Haven, CT 06511 -- spin@pantheon.yale.edu]

1) Myth: Al Gore has a responsibility to concede the election.

Fact: A 330 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast in Florida is incredibly close! It is roughly equivalent to a 1-vote margin in a city with 40,000 people and 18,000 voters. It is extremely rare for an election this close NOT to be contested for several weeks until a manual recount can take place, with observers from both sides taking part and inspecting ballots. This kind of detailed recount has not yet taken place.

According to the US Constitution and the Laws of Florida, it is the responsibility of officials in Florida to certify the election results. November 17 is the deadline for absentee ballots sent from overseas to arrive. Since the election is close enough in Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico to be affected by absentee ballots, the results in those states cannot be certified before that date.

2) Myth: the number of "spoiled ballots" in Palm Beach County was typical. In a press briefing televised live on all networks on 11/9/00, Karl Rove of the Bush campaign compared the 14,872 invalidated ballots in the 1996 Presidential race to 19,120 ballots for President that were spoiled in this election.

Fact: the Bush campaign was comparing apples and oranges. There were actually 29,702 invalidated ballots this year in Palm Beach County. This is almost twice the number in 1996. "19,120" refers to only those 2000 ballots which were thrown out for voting for two Presidential candidates. The remaining 10,582 ballots had no choice recorded for President.

According to the Palm Beach County elections office (http://www.pbcelections.org), voters this year were not confused at all by the rest of the ballot. For example, less than 1% of U.S. Senate votes were invalidated because of multiple punches, compared with over 4% in the Presidential contest.

3) Myth: The Palm Beach ballot is definitely illegal due to the presence of punch holes to the left of some of the candidates.

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.

It is possible that the ballot could be ruled illegal on other grounds, such as the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act.

4) Myth: "The more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting tomachine counting." -- Former Sec. of State James Baker, speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign at a press briefing televised by all networks on 11/10/00.

Fact: In 1997, George W. Bush signed into law a bill stating that hand recounts were the preferred method in a close election in Texas. The bill, "HB 330", mandated that representatives of all parties be present to prevent fraud. Laws establishing rights and procedures for handrecounts also exist in Florida (see Title IX, Chapter 102). In fact, the Orlando Sentinel, (orlandosentinel.com) reported that a partial hand count of Presidential ballots this year was ordered by Republicans in Seminole County, where Bush led Gore. This count took place on 11/9 and 11/10, widening Bush's lead by 98 votes. The Bush campaign did not complain about this hand count; nor did it complain about the hand count on 11/11/00 which put Bush slightly ahead of Gore in New Mexico.

There do exist machine voting systems which are fairly accurate, but antiquated punch card systems are notoriously inaccurate. They were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1997 by Secretary of State William Galvin after a Congressional primary that was also "too close to call". The problem is that if the punched-out pieces of cardboard are not completely removed from the punch card, they can obstruct the card reader and the votes will not be counted. A manual recount of such cards can clearly reveal the voter's intentions.

5) Myth: The process is unfair because hand recounts were held only in liberal areas of Florida, where Gore stands to pick up the most votes.

Fact: It is true that a statewide recount would be more fair, and the Bush campaign has every right to request one. According to Florida law, hand recount requests must come from the campaigns, not from the state. To fail to request what is commonly referred to as a "defensive recount" in conservative areas of Florida, they may be making a tactical blunder that will cost them the election.

It is also true that there were voting irregularities in the counties where the Gore campaign requested recounts.

6) Myth: "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3407 votes there. According to the Florida Department of State, 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County are registered to the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, an increase of 110% since the 1996 presidential election" -- Ari Fleischer of the Bush Campaign, 11/9/00. The 2,000 votes received by the Reformparty candidate for Congress indicate that party's strength in Palm Beach County (James Baker on Meet the Press, 11/12/00).

Fact: Of those 16,695 voters, only 337 (2 percent) are in the Reform Party according to Florida state records. The Reform party candidate for Congress, John McGuire, is connected to a more centrist wing of the Reform Party, predating Buchanan's involvement. An analysis of his support indicates that it came largely from reform-minded Ralph Nader voters.

Regarding Buchanan's vote total, the Washington Post reported that his vote percentage in Palm Beach county was four times as high at the polls as in absentee voting. Even Buchanan himself admitted on 11/8/00 on the Today Show that many of his votes actually "belonged to Al Gore". So did his campaign manager, Bay Buchanan.

7) Myth: If Gore (or Bush) ends up winning the popular vote, he really should win the election even if he loses Florida and other states.

Fact: This is not the way the U.S. Constitution is written. The Electoral College decision, imperfect as it may be, is the only one that matters. It may be possible to reform or eliminate the electoral college in the future, so that small states would no longer receive extra electoralvotes out of proportion to their population. But until this change is made by Constitutional amendment, the Electoral College is still the law of the land.

8) Myth: The Cook County, Illinois ballot from the home district of Gore campaign chair Richard Daleyis similar to the "butterfly" ballot used in Palm Beach County (reported by Don Evans, 11/8/00)

Fact: According to the Chicago Daily Herald on11/10/00, the ballots in Chicago which had"facing pages" were referendum questions which only had two punch holes, Yes and No.

9) Myth: The election process in Florida outside of Palm Beach County was fair.

Fact: Actually, thousands of irregularities in over a half-dozen categories have already been reported:

-Ballots ran out in certain precincts according tothe LA Times on 11/10/00.

-Carpools of African-American voters were stopped by police, according to the Los Angeles Times (11/10/00). In some cases, officers demanded to see a "taxi license".

-Polls closed with people still in line in Tampa, according to the Associated Press.

-In Osceola County, ballots did not line up properly, possibly causing Gore voters to have their ballots cast for Harry Browne. Also, Hispanic voters were required to produce two forms of ID when only one is required. (source: Associated Press)

-Dozens, and possibly hundreds, of voters in Broward County were unable to vote because the Supervisor of Elections did not have enough staff to verify changes of address.

-Voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-cons, according to Mother Jones magazine.

-According to Reuters news service (11/8/00), many voters received pencils rather than pens when they voted, in violation of state law.

-According to the Miami Herald, many Haitian-American voters were turned away from precincts where they were voting for the first time (11/10/00)

-According to Feed Magazine, the mayoral candidate whose election in Miami was overturned due to voter fraud, Xavier Suarez, said he was involved in preparing absentee ballots for George W. Bush. (11/9/00)

-According to tompaine.com, CBS's Dan Rather reported a possible computer error in Volusia County, Florida, where James Harris, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, won 9,888 votes. He won 583 in the rest of the state. [11/9/00] County-level results for Florida are available at cnn.com.

-Many African-American first-time voters who registered at motor vehicles offices or in campus voter registration drives did not appear on the voting rolls, according to a hearing conducted by the NAACP and televised on C-SPAN on 11/12/00.

10) Myth: "No evidence of vote fraud, either in the original vote or in the recount, has been presented." -- James Baker, representing the Bush campaign on 11/10/00, in a Florida briefing.

Fact: The election was held just last week, so of course many instances of fraud have not yet been substantiated. Even so, authorities have already uncovered clear evidence of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.

In Pensacola, Florida, Bush supporter Todd Vinson never received the absentee ballot he requested. According to the Associated Press on 11/9/00, it was determined after an investigation that this ballot was received by a third party, filled out with a forged signature, and then sent in. Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, when asked if other absentee ballots might had been intercepted, said, "I agree there may well be many more than just this one".

Much media attention on the issue of voter fraud has been focused on Wisconsin where cigarettes were offered to homeless people who were casting absentee ballots, presumably for Gore. The Gore campaign claims the cigarettes were not used to "buy" votes. On Monday 10/13, the London Times reported a suspected pro-Bush vote fraud operation in Miami involving over 10,000 ballots.

11) Myth: It is highly unusual for judges to intervene after an election. Since the designer of a disputed ballot in Florida is a member of the party contesting the election, a legal challenge is impossible.

Fact: The most fundamental right of a democratic society is the the right to vote, and to have one's vote correctly counted. The legal system exists to ensure that people's rights are not violated. Whether the person committing a violation is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect how that violation should be treated.

Elections are ultimately struggles for political power so it should not be surprising that disputes are often resolved in court. Of course judges can be biased. That is why they must explain their decisions and why bad arguments can be overturned on appeal.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998, in connection with a disputed Volusia County election, that if there is "substantial noncompliance" with election laws and a "reasonable doubt" about whether election results "expressed the will of the voters" then a judge must "void the contested election, even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing." (source: Wall St. Journal, 10/10/00). The Journal indicated that there was little legal precedent for a revote in just one area where an election occurred. It would be more likely for a court to order a new election or to overturn the result.

These issues have arisen in other states as well. In a Massachusetts Democratic primary in 1996 for the US House, the election was so close after recounts that a judge had to make the final decision after examining some of the ballots that were incompletely punched, to determine the intention of the voter. The law clearly dictated that it was the will of the voter that mattered, and the candidate who was behind, William Delahunt, went on to win the final election. Call the Capitol Switchboard if you have any doubts at 202-225-3121.

12) Myth: Richard Nixon's party in 1960 did the honorable thing in not contesting the results of the election.

Fact: According to a column in the Los Angeles Times, 11/10/00, "on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thurston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party's national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, NewJersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called "field checks" in eight of those 11 battlegrounds. In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of aChicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois." Recounts continued into December, but did not succeed in overturning the result of the election.

13) Myth: "Governor Bush is still the winner, subject only to counting the overseas ballots, which traditionally have favored the Republican candidates" -- James Baker, Press Briefing, 11/10/00

Fact: The number of yet-to-be-counted overseas military ballots is likely to be in the range of 500 to 2000, based on the 1996 election in which there were 2,300 oversees absentee ballots overall, with roughly 60% of them coming from people enlisted in the military. According to CNN [11/10/00], the military overseas ballots that arrived before the election were already counted.

The biggest difference from 1996 is that Clinton -- who avoided the draft -- was running against Dole, a decorated military veteran.

In 2000 George W. Bush -- who avoided service in Vietnam and actually lost flying privileges in the Texas Air National Guard -- is running against Al Gore, a veteran who served in Vietnam.

It is just as possible that Gore will gain a few hundred votes from veterans as the other way around. It is also possible that the Gore ticket will pick up votes from Democratic diplomatic appointees, or temporary residents and dual citizens of Israel.

PLEASE HELP DISTRIBUTE THIS FLYER! We plan to make it easy for you to obtain a paper copy for distribution at your workplace, church or campus. If you post this on the web, please let us know! HTML and printable (Word, PDF) versions will be available at: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu /pe ople/pagre/13-myths.html

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To participate in a student discussion, please send a blank email to: can-rw-subscribe@topica.com

Tips on E-Organizing: www.organizenow.net

-------------
Jacob Everist
jeverist@fairtunes.com
http://tropus.sourceforge.net

-------------------------

I found this on a post in a kuro5hin.org story which has since been killed. I reposted it in another kuro5hin story and repost it here again. References for these statements are to be found in a link at the end of the FAQ.

----------------------------

[This draft #4 was prepared by Rich Cowan (rcowan@lesley.edu) with help from Paul Rosenberg, Dan Kohn, Jonathan Prince, Marc Sobel, subscribers to the Red Rock Eater News Service and the electronic mail discussion florida-recount-discuss@egroups.com, and the Yale Law School Student Campaign for a Legal Election, 127 Wall Street New Haven, CT 06511 -- spin@pantheon.yale.edu]

1) Myth: Al Gore has a responsibility to concede the election.

Fact: A 330 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast in Florida is incredibly close! It is roughly equivalent to a 1-vote margin in a city with 40,000 people and 18,000 voters. It is extremely rare for an election this close NOT to be contested for several weeks until a manual recount can take place, with observers from both sides taking part and inspecting ballots. This kind of detailed recount has not yet taken place.

According to the US Constitution and the Laws of Florida, it is the responsibility of officials in Florida to certify the election results. November 17 is the deadline for absentee ballots sent from overseas to arrive. Since the election is close enough in Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico to be affected by absentee ballots, the results in those states cannot be certified before that date.

2) Myth: the number of "spoiled ballots" in Palm Beach County was typical. In a press briefing televised live on all networks on 11/9/00, Karl Rove of the Bush campaign compared the 14,872 invalidated ballots in the 1996 Presidential race to 19,120 ballots for President that were spoiled in this election.

Fact: the Bush campaign was comparing apples and oranges. There were actually 29,702 invalidated ballots this year in Palm Beach County. This is almost twice the number in 1996. "19,120" refers to only those 2000 ballots which were thrown out for voting for two Presidential candidates. The remaining 10,582 ballots had no choice recorded for President.

According to the Palm Beach County elections office (http://www.pbcelections.org), voters this year were not confused at all by the rest of the ballot. For example, less than 1% of U.S. Senate votes were invalidated because of multiple punches, compared with over 4% in the Presidential contest.

3) Myth: The Palm Beach ballot is definitely illegal due to the presence of punch holes to the left of some of the candidates.

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.

It is possible that the ballot could be ruled illegal on other grounds, such as the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act.

4) Myth: "The more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting tomachine counting." -- Former Sec. of State James Baker, speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign at a press briefing televised by all networks on 11/10/00.

Fact: In 1997, George W. Bush signed into law a bill stating that hand recounts were the preferred method in a close election in Texas. The bill, "HB 330", mandated that representatives of all parties be present to prevent fraud. Laws establishing rights and procedures for handrecounts also exist in Florida (see Title IX, Chapter 102). In fact, the Orlando Sentinel, (orlandosentinel.com) reported that a partial hand count of Presidential ballots this year was ordered by Republicans in Seminole County, where Bush led Gore. This count took place on 11/9 and 11/10, widening Bush's lead by 98 votes. The Bush campaign did not complain about this hand count; nor did it complain about the hand count on 11/11/00 which put Bush slightly ahead of Gore in New Mexico.

There do exist machine voting systems which are fairly accurate, but antiquated punch card systems are notoriously inaccurate. They were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1997 by Secretary of State William Galvin after a Congressional primary that was also "too close to call". The problem is that if the punched-out pieces of cardboard are not completely removed from the punch card, they can obstruct the card reader and the votes will not be counted. A manual recount of such cards can clearly reveal the voter's intentions.

5) Myth: The process is unfair because hand recounts were held only in liberal areas of Florida, where Gore stands to pick up the most votes.

Fact: It is true that a statewide recount would be more fair, and the Bush campaign has every right to request one. According to Florida law, hand recount requests must come from the campaigns, not from the state. To fail to request what is commonly referred to as a "defensive recount" in conservative areas of Florida, they may be making a tactical blunder that will cost them the election.

It is also true that there were voting irregularities in the counties where the Gore campaign requested recounts.

6) Myth: "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3407 votes there. According to the Florida Department of State, 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County are registered to the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, an increase of 110% since the 1996 presidential election" -- Ari Fleischer of the Bush Campaign, 11/9/00. The 2,000 votes received by the Reformparty candidate for Congress indicate that party's strength in Palm Beach County (James Baker on Meet the Press, 11/12/00).

Fact: Of those 16,695 voters, only 337 (2 percent) are in the Reform Party according to Florida state records. The Reform party candidate for Congress, John McGuire, is connected to a more centrist wing of the Reform Party, predating Buchanan's involvement. An analysis of his support indicates that it came largely from reform-minded Ralph Nader voters.

Regarding Buchanan's vote total, the Washington Post reported that his vote percentage in Palm Beach county was four times as high at the polls as in absentee voting. Even Buchanan himself admitted on 11/8/00 on the Today Show that many of his votes actually "belonged to Al Gore". So did his campaign manager, Bay Buchanan.

7) Myth: If Gore (or Bush) ends up winning the popular vote, he really should win the election even if he loses Florida and other states.

Fact: This is not the way the U.S. Constitution is written. The Electoral College decision, imperfect as it may be, is the only one that matters. It may be possible to reform or eliminate the electoral college in the future, so that small states would no longer receive extra electoralvotes out of proportion to their population. But until this change is made by Constitutional amendment, the Electoral College is still the law of the land.

8) Myth: The Cook County, Illinois ballot from the home district of Gore campaign chair Richard Daleyis similar to the "butterfly" ballot used in Palm Beach County (reported by Don Evans, 11/8/00)

Fact: According to the Chicago Daily Herald on11/10/00, the ballots in Chicago which had"facing pages" were referendum questions which only had two punch holes, Yes and No.

9) Myth: The election process in Florida outside of Palm Beach County was fair.

Fact: Actually, thousands of irregularities in over a half-dozen categories have already been reported:

-Ballots ran out in certain precincts according tothe LA Times on 11/10/00.

-Carpools of African-American voters were stopped by police, according to the Los Angeles Times (11/10/00). In some cases, officers demanded to see a "taxi license".

-Polls closed with people still in line in Tampa, according to the Associated Press.

-In Osceola County, ballots did not line up properly, possibly causing Gore voters to have their ballots cast for Harry Browne. Also, Hispanic voters were required to produce two forms of ID when only one is required. (source: Associated Press)

-Dozens, and possibly hundreds, of voters in Broward County were unable to vote because the Supervisor of Elections did not have enough staff to verify changes of address.

-Voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-cons, according to Mother Jones magazine.

-According to Reuters news service (11/8/00), many voters received pencils rather than pens when they voted, in violation of state law.

-According to the Miami Herald, many Haitian-American voters were turned away from precincts where they were voting for the first time (11/10/00)

-According to Feed Magazine, the mayoral candidate whose election in Miami was overturned due to voter fraud, Xavier Suarez, said he was involved in preparing absentee ballots for George W. Bush. (11/9/00)

-According to tompaine.com, CBS's Dan Rather reported a possible computer error in Volusia County, Florida, where James Harris, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, won 9,888 votes. He won 583 in the rest of the state. [11/9/00] County-level results for Florida are available at cnn.com.

-Many African-American first-time voters who registered at motor vehicles offices or in campus voter registration drives did not appear on the voting rolls, according to a hearing conducted by the NAACP and televised on C-SPAN on 11/12/00.

10) Myth: "No evidence of vote fraud, either in the original vote or in the recount, has been presented." -- James Baker, representing the Bush campaign on 11/10/00, in a Florida briefing.

Fact: The election was held just last week, so of course many instances of fraud have not yet been substantiated. Even so, authorities have already uncovered clear evidence of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.

In Pensacola, Florida, Bush supporter Todd Vinson never received the absentee ballot he requested. According to the Associated Press on 11/9/00, it was determined after an investigation that this ballot was received by a third party, filled out with a forged signature, and then sent in. Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, when asked if other absentee ballots might had been intercepted, said, "I agree there may well be many more than just this one".

Much media attention on the issue of voter fraud has been focused on Wisconsin where cigarettes were offered to homeless people who were casting absentee ballots, presumably for Gore. The Gore campaign claims the cigarettes were not used to "buy" votes. On Monday 10/13, the London Times reported a suspected pro-Bush vote fraud operation in Miami involving over 10,000 ballots.

11) Myth: It is highly unusual for judges to intervene after an election. Since the designer of a disputed ballot in Florida is a member of the party contesting the election, a legal challenge is impossible.

Fact: The most fundamental right of a democratic society is the the right to vote, and to have one's vote correctly counted. The legal system exists to ensure that people's rights are not violated. Whether the person committing a violation is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect how that violation should be treated.

Elections are ultimately struggles for political power so it should not be surprising that disputes are often resolved in court. Of course judges can be biased. That is why they must explain their decisions and why bad arguments can be overturned on appeal.

The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998, in connection with a disputed Volusia County election, that if there is "substantial noncompliance" with election laws and a "reasonable doubt" about whether election results "expressed the will of the voters" then a judge must "void the contested election, even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing." (source: Wall St. Journal, 10/10/00). The Journal indicated that there was little legal precedent for a revote in just one area where an election occurred. It would be more likely for a court to order a new election or to overturn the result.

These issues have arisen in other states as well. In a Massachusetts Democratic primary in 1996 for the US House, the election was so close after recounts that a judge had to make the final decision after examining some of the ballots that were incompletely punched, to determine the intention of the voter. The law clearly dictated that it was the will of the voter that mattered, and the candidate who was behind, William Delahunt, went on to win the final election. Call the Capitol Switchboard if you have any doubts at 202-225-3121.

12) Myth: Richard Nixon's party in 1960 did the honorable thing in not contesting the results of the election.

Fact: According to a column in the Los Angeles Times, 11/10/00, "on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thurston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party's national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, NewJersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called "field checks" in eight of those 11 battlegrounds. In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of aChicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois." Recounts continued into December, but did not succeed in overturning the result of the election.

13) Myth: "Governor Bush is still the winner, subject only to counting the overseas ballots, which traditionally have favored the Republican candidates" -- James Baker, Press Briefing, 11/10/00

Fact: The number of yet-to-be-counted overseas military ballots is likely to be in the range of 500 to 2000, based on the 1996 election in which there were 2,300 oversees absentee ballots overall, with roughly 60% of them coming from people enlisted in the military. According to CNN [11/10/00], the military overseas ballots that arrived before the election were already counted.

The biggest difference from 1996 is that Clinton -- who avoided the draft -- was running against Dole, a decorated military veteran.

In 2000 George W. Bush -- who avoided service in Vietnam and actually lost flying privileges in the Texas Air National Guard -- is running against Al Gore, a veteran who served in Vietnam.

It is just as possible that Gore will gain a few hundred votes from veterans as the other way around. It is also possible that the Gore ticket will pick up votes from Democratic diplomatic appointees, or temporary residents and dual citizens of Israel.

PLEASE HELP DISTRIBUTE THIS FLYER! We plan to make it easy for you to obtain a paper copy for distribution at your workplace, church or campus. If you post this on the web, please let us know! HTML and printable (Word, PDF) versions will be available at: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu /pe ople/pagre/13-myths.html

Internet references sometimes change, so they will be updated at:
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To participate in a student discussion, please send a blank email to: can-rw-subscribe@topica.com

Tips on E-Organizing: www.organizenow.net

-------------
Jacob Everist
jeverist@fairtunes.com
http://tropus.sourceforge.net

-------------------------

this document contains more information on the subject.

I too was very saddened that slashdot columnists and nearly all the readers didn't ever talk about the actual study. They mostly talked about an opinionated posting based on a newspaper's version of a wire story, none of which had the courage to point readers to the real study.

I urge journalists, and especially slashdot, to always point to the original source.

Sigh.

--Neal

Phil Agre, a professor at UCLA sent out a message on the Red Rock Eater mailing list debunking the "Gore invented the Internet" myth. He doesn't seem to have it up on his web site yet, so I've put up a temporary copy

Second, I hardly think I'm quibbling about semicolons. The thesis of the article is that the media keep repeating provably false assertions about Al Gore, as a result of right-wing bias or coercion or something. I agree with the first half of that, but disagree with the second and cite Quayle and Hoover as counterexamples that support a different interpretation.

---------

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

For UCLA's Arthur Anderson Buisness school, you are also required to have a labtop. Integration is the same. If you go there expect to shell out at least $3,000 for your required laptop. Did I mention you shouldbuy them through the UCLA store.

Most people dream about sex and drugs in college

Well, the sex can be replaced with Tetris (imagine the 4-stick is a penis). Now you're left with Tetanus On Drugs.

I also found this and this. Apperently Venus is losing some of its atmosphere into space because of the solar wind. (Venus doesnt have much of a magnetic field either).

This is a repost, the first was stuffed up for some reason.

I also found this and this/a&g t;. Apperently Venus is losing some of its atmosphere into space because of the solar wind. (Venus doesnt have much of a magnetic field either)

Here's some information about "formerly great cosmologists", for those of you who don't want to use a search engine. I wish UCLA could be less strident about it, but it was fun to think big thoughts for a while.

Please help billioniares to better rule us by voting for one of their paid candidates, if you live in the U.S. See BillionairesforBushorGore.com Or for a compact synopsis go here

These last few weeks have been really scary. It seems like the government and big corps are out to completly change the face of America and the world. They seem to want to totally take away freedoms that we, as Americans, take for granted.

For example, here's a headline from acbnews.com, today:

Request for More Inspection Powers

Here's a witch hunt by the government to ban violent games

here's Gove rnment Sites Get An F On Privacy

And then I find out from Wired.com that back in 1997, Clinton signed a law that makes it a federal felony to share software with friends or family. A FEDERAL FELONY to give my sister a copy of some software. Jeeze.

These are just from today!!!!

The last thing I want to hear from my kids (when I have them) is "Daddy, where where you when they took our freedom away?"

This report summarizes the experiences of the AppleSeed Project in performing real-world parallel supercomputer calculations on G3 and G4 Macs. They acknowledge that communication latency is a killer, but for embarassingly parallel codes, a G4 AppleSeed cluster does quite well and is much easier to use than a Beowulf cluster.

This report summarizes the experiences of the AppleSeed Project in performing real-world parallel supercomputer calculations on G3 and G4 Macs. They acknowledge that communication latency is a killer, but for embarassingly parallel codes, a G4 AppleSeed cluster does quite well and is much easier to use than a Beowulf cluster.

-Dave

Actually, the U.S. Olympic committee, the national branch of the International Olympic Committee, which will be enforcing this on U.S. athletes, is not a govermental actor. (See San Francisco Arts & Athletics v. U.S.O.C., 483 U.S. 522 (1987)) Thus, the First Amendment does not apply to the U.S.O.C. (See an excellent article by Prof. Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School. So, unfortunately we're stuck with the clap-trap the Olympic committee wants to feed us. Personally, I'll boycott the "official everything" of the Olympics, and watch for write-ups after the fact from either observers (because the audience are not restricted from writing) or the athletes after the fact. Thalia

Actually, the U.S. Olympic committee, the national branch of the International Olympic Committee, which will be enforcing this on U.S. athletes, is not a govermental actor. (See San Francisco Arts & Athletics v. U.S.O.C., 483 U.S. 522 (1987)) Thus, the First Amendment does not apply to the U.S.O.C. (See an excellent article by Prof. Eugene Volokh of UCLA Law School. So, unfortunately we're stuck with the clap-trap the Olympic committee wants to feed us. Personally, I'll boycott the "official everything" of the Olympics, and watch for write-ups after the fact from either observers (because the audience are not restricted from writing) or the athletes after the fact. Thalia

I'd laugh at your ignorance, but you're not the only one who's gone off about carbon dating in this thread. Carbon dating is only good for measuring ages of organic materials, on earth, and only for a few tens of thousands of years of age.

Go look up Hubble's constant. Here, I'll even do some of your work for you.

The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law.

It is not the judge's job to uphold the law if he or she decides that the law is in error. That's why the judicial system is an effective check against the other branches of government. Civil disobedience of the type practiced by 2600 and the authors of DeCSS has been shown historically (read: Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Thoreau) to be one of the best ways for individuals to make a difference in law.

The constitution is subject to interpretation by individuals and judicial officials, not just large corporations and the policymakers under their employ.

Many of us believe the DMCA should not be the law, and one of the best ways to challenge that is to show that upholding the DMCA violates the Constitution.

-ubermuffin

I've observed that some geeks tend to lose perspective with the outside world after spending too long in computerland. As I was reading this tirade, I was struck with the fact that Emmanuel is suffering drastically from this problem. Then I found that it wasn't limited to just him; almost all the posts on Slashdot went to the effect of "the judge is clearly biased, poor Emmanuel got shafted. Just another case of the Man trying to keep us down." PLEASE people, try to withdraw from your life on the net for a minute and think like normal people. Here, I'll work off his statements.

See, in my mind, this case has always been about common sense. Someone cracked someone else's badly protected encryption scheme. Game over. It's shot to hell. You don't continue to use bad encryption or pretend it didn't happen.

That's not at all what it's about. This isn't a crypto war. It's like someone robbed a bank, and told all his friends how to get past security, then got caught and tried to convince everyone that he's the good guy for revealing that the bank had bad security. The point is that it was illegal to crack the encryption, and illegal to distribute the tool for doing so. If anyone doubts that it was really illegal, check out the DMCA. And it was the judge's job to uphold the law. So when he saw some kids arguing "Sure, we broke the law, but it was really their fault because their crypto sucked ass." of course he treated them with contempt. Their few defenses were bullshit. Development of a Linux player? Well besides the fact that developing an Open Source Linux player would be drastically violating DVD-CCA's intellectual property, (they spend money developing CSS, and they get that money back through licensing) the code was developed in Windows. But wait, he has another defense:

So now we have this law that basically says we are not allowed to show people the failings of technology if the people controlling that technology decide they don't want us to.

No, not true. DMCA "Does permit the cracking of copyright protection devices, however, to conduct encryption research, assess product interoperability, and test computer security systems." They didn't just "show people the failings of the technology," they took a program to exploit those failings and distributed it. It's one thing to tell Xing "Hey, we found a crack in your security and reverse engineered your program." and quite another to build a tool to use that crack and distribute it to the public. 2600 wasn't aiding crypto research, they were distributing a tool that not only had no legal use, but its very existence was a violation of copyright laws and the DMCA. They were fighting a war with an opponent that wasn't even aware they were being attacked. It's not the corp's responsibility to have good crypto anymore than its your responsibility to wear Kevlar. If you crack their crypto, just like if you shoot somebody, you're breaking the law. The crypto is only there to assure them some protection from lawbreakers. So what's their next point?

Oh, and let's also point out that no matter how hard they try, nobody can wipe the paint off the wall.

The fact that they can't stop all the criminals doesn't mean you shouldn't stop any. It's pretty much impossible to completely prevent all murders, but that's no reason to legalize murder.

He goes on to complain about how he was treated unfairly due to 2600's reputation. They earned the reputation. They're subversives, plain and simple. They teach people how to break the law. He says that if 2600 wasn't able to post their tutorials on things like stealing domain names and intercepting cell phone calls, that those security holes would still be there. Maybe so, but I don't believe for a second that 2600 published that info in the hopes of aiding the industry. If they really wanted the holes closed, they would discreetly explain the problems to the companies responsible, not publish them to a huge public audience of hackers.

Another thing that bothers me is that it doesn't seem to matter in the least WHY DeCSS was written. The fact is that DeCSS was written to circumvent CSS and, even if that was done specifically to cure world hunger, in the eyes of the court, it was a violation of the DMCA.

Actually it does matter. As I've already quoted, the DMCA makes it perfectly acceptable to crack encryption for research purposes. But the judge looked at the situation and determined that that was not why DeCSS was written.

And ironic that none of us even HAS a DVD player.

I find that pretty ironic, but probably not the same way he does. I think that for people who cry out so much about their "right" to view a DVD on whatever they want, they haven't actually purchased even one legitimate player. No wonder they want the illegal Linux player.

Now I don't agree with the MPAA, (though I end up defending them a lot around here, since the average Slashdotter doesn't even stop to think for a minute before crying out that MPAA is some giant conspiracy headed by evil warlords seeking to oppress all of us poor netizens.) I think CSS is pretty stupid and I think that the DMCA goes too far. Hatch even admits that DMCA goes too far. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. But in the meantime, it's the law, and the judge isn't biased and stupid by upholding the law. That's his job.

In fact, I believe you are actually allowed to develop some type of CSS-DVD-player, but it's the actual distribution of such tools that is illegal.

Nope, fraid not. The DMCA "Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software."

That means you're not allowed to crack it, even on your own.
Ironically though, the No Electronic Theft Act, of 1997 amends copyright law to "Exempt from criminal prosecution reproduction or distribution that is not done "willfully" or that constitutes small-scale non-commercial copying (copyrighted works with a total retail value of less than $1,000)"

So as I read it, you're actually allowed to pirate copyrighted material, as long as it's cheap and you don't redistribute it. But you aren't allowed to crack any "anti-piracy measures" in the process.

Really? What part? I don't see anything in the DMCA that makes it illegal to have copyrighted works that you do not own.

--
The real Slim Shady does not have a Slashdot id. But I don't know of any imposters.

There was a pretty good description of what happened in Seattle, as opposed to what was presented in mainstream media, in Paul Hawken's essay and more at the Red Rock Eater.

Check it out.

Load balancing? Easy to write, hard to make work well. You need to compare the cost of migration to the benefits of balancing, and you need to make decisions based on partial and outdated information. Many early systems thrashed because everybody would migrate to the idle processor, which then became overloaded, so everybody migrated somewhere else, etc.

Speaking of migration, it's a mess. The only system I know of that implemented migration fully was Locus, out of UCLA. The trouble is that whenever a process has a dependency on or a hook into its environment, that connection must be migrated too. Open files, working directory, sockets, controlling tty, signals, process parent/child relationships, and many more details must be handled. Not fun, and the benefits turned out to be mostly minor (though I do recall writing a cool version of "find" that migrated itself to the machine that stored the current subtree as it ran).

The issue of supporting distributed applications is generally considered to be separate from writing a truly distributed OS. Most of what a distributed application needs can be provided by a good communications library. To some extent, we're still learning exactly what such a library should have. What about SETI@home is specialized to it, and what's universal? I don't think we've completely figured it out.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of major concerns and design issues that must be addressed in a distributed OS. We have fairly good solutions to some, but most have not yet been solved:

• Process control. How much process migration is a Good Thing? How do you decide what machine to use to start a process, and when do you decide to migrate it to another?
• Communication and synchronization. What facilities does a distributed application need? How do we make those easy to use?
• Reliability. How do we deal with the inevitable machine failures?
• Replication. What processes and data should be duplicated on different systems? Are you doing the replication for performance, for reliability, or both? How do you manage updates to replicated data? How do you keep replicated process synchronized?
• Lack of global knowledge. How do you make decisions based on partial information?
• Naming. What names to things have. Do you have a shared global namespace, or a private one? How do you resolve names? What do you do when people and objects move?
• Scalability. How does the system behave when the number of computers/users/programs jumps by a factor of 10 or 100? (This is a place where Napster doesn't do real well.)
• Compatibility. How do you support existing software? Do you run on only one kind of hardware, or many?
• Security. Who gets to run on what machine?

Finally, I should note that the list of projects at U of Arizona might appear to be complete, but it omits a lot of important projects. Four that jump to my mind are Locus and Ficus from UCLA (though the latter is more of a distributed filesystem than an OS), Coda from CMU (again a DFS, rather well-known to Linux folks), and of course the extremely important Network of Workstations work out of UC Berkeley, which led to Inktomi and Hotbot.

Load balancing? Easy to write, hard to make work well. You need to compare the cost of migration to the benefits of balancing, and you need to make decisions based on partial and outdated information. Many early systems thrashed because everybody would migrate to the idle processor, which then became overloaded, so everybody migrated somewhere else, etc.

Speaking of migration, it's a mess. The only system I know of that implemented migration fully was Locus, out of UCLA. The trouble is that whenever a process has a dependency on or a hook into its environment, that connection must be migrated too. Open files, working directory, sockets, controlling tty, signals, process parent/child relationships, and many more details must be handled. Not fun, and the benefits turned out to be mostly minor (though I do recall writing a cool version of "find" that migrated itself to the machine that stored the current subtree as it ran).

The issue of supporting distributed applications is generally considered to be separate from writing a truly distributed OS. Most of what a distributed application needs can be provided by a good communications library. To some extent, we're still learning exactly what such a library should have. What about SETI@home is specialized to it, and what's universal? I don't think we've completely figured it out.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of major concerns and design issues that must be addressed in a distributed OS. We have fairly good solutions to some, but most have not yet been solved:

• Process control. How much process migration is a Good Thing? How do you decide what machine to use to start a process, and when do you decide to migrate it to another?
• Communication and synchronization. What facilities does a distributed application need? How do we make those easy to use?
• Reliability. How do we deal with the inevitable machine failures?
• Replication. What processes and data should be duplicated on different systems? Are you doing the replication for performance, for reliability, or both? How do you manage updates to replicated data? How do you keep replicated process synchronized?
• Lack of global knowledge. How do you make decisions based on partial information?
• Naming. What names to things have. Do you have a shared global namespace, or a private one? How do you resolve names? What do you do when people and objects move?
• Scalability. How does the system behave when the number of computers/users/programs jumps by a factor of 10 or 100? (This is a place where Napster doesn't do real well.)
• Compatibility. How do you support existing software? Do you run on only one kind of hardware, or many?
• Security. Who gets to run on what machine?

Finally, I should note that the list of projects at U of Arizona might appear to be complete, but it omits a lot of important projects. Four that jump to my mind are Locus and Ficus from UCLA (though the latter is more of a distributed filesystem than an OS), Coda from CMU (again a DFS, rather well-known to Linux folks), and of course the extremely important Network of Workstations work out of UC Berkeley, which led to Inktomi and Hotbot.

Or is British Columbia the only place in North America being overrun by retarded reality-based Japanese videogames?

You mean like Project Appleseed? By jove, I'd love one!

The Happy Blues Man

I recently heard a great interview on Larry Mantel's Air Talk of Jeremy Rifkin. He has just written a new book, titled The Age of Access, which delves into this very topic.

The point which strikes a cord with me is that the ultimate model that corporations strive for is to remove any material ownership from the consumer so the consumer always has to pay over and over again for the 'experience'. This model effectively strips the consumer from creating or fostering their own culture. The internet like any other medium or tool can be used by the corporations to continue this erosion, ala ASP, UCITA, etc. or it can be used to combat this erosion, ala slashdot, usenet, wiki wiki web, rre, etc.

It is probably no coincidence that this ask slashdot comes on the same day as the Scott Reents interview. They are in the same vein both prompting you to think about your freedom outside in the big blue room and how the internet effects it.

There is no doubt in my mind that we as a people should actively work to ingrain our culture into the internet and constantly strive to make life as tangible as possible. The internet should serve as our glue to keep our culture together not be the solvent that rips it apart.