Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: OpenDocuments, RFID Passports, Firefox Celebration
Politics still muddying the water of the MA OpenDocument debate. The Commonwealth's Secretary of State William Galvin says he has "grave concerns" about the switch and told secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco that "we will not be participating." Galvin is considered one of the strong candidates to run as a rival candidate for next year's gubernatorial race against incumbent Mitt Romney who supports the switch.
RFID passports still the best option. The US State Department released a final ruling on the issue of RFID technology to be included in all US passports after October 2006 which also contained some of the reasoning behind their move. Other technologies were apparently looked at and discarded due to the difficulty of implementation and several security measures have apparently been taken to try and placate the opposition.
Firefox fans at Oregon State celebrate 100 million downloads. CNet has a pictorial about a local OSU LUG that had a few interesting ways to celebrate the recent big numbers on the Firefox downloads page. Happy to show their support students both painted a giant Firefox logo and launched a weather balloon, I can't think of any better way to say congratulations.
DrDOS didn't really break, it just reverted. The FreeDOS folks have an update on their webpage stating that DrDOS 8.1 no longer exists and all links on the DrDOS webpage apparently point to DrDOS 7.03. There were some negative reactions to the release or 8.1 stating that it included software that it shouldn't have so for now the "band-aid" fix appears to be in place.
Flexbeta takes a look at Flock. Noting the roots of Flock in Mozilla's Firefox browser, the folks over at Flexbeta take a quick look at the additional functionality offered by this newcomer. This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser. Looks like this Firefox offspring is fighting hard for some recognition of its own.
iTunes continues to take over the world. With the recent release of iTunes Australia and Apple's continued growth in the industry a recent announcement brings us "Standford on iTunes". This new service will give alumni and the general public access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content.
The new OpenDocument Fellowship is working with a petition to get Microsoft to implement the format. SIGN IT! http://www.opendocumentfellowship.org/petition/
Jay | http://oldos.org
For example, I've downloaded 10 myself - I'm sure many others have too.
There's no way to compare these numbers to the main competition (IE), so I'm not celebrating much myself.
ps First Post!?!
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Indeed, if there's one thing that we can learn from this whole OpenDocument debacle, it's that we should instead use LaTeX and plaintext.
Plaintext emails and memos work just fine. LaTeX is fantastic for more complex documents. And you can even output PDFs of documents, if you really want to make viewing easy and exact.
These new technologies seem to bring nothing but problems, especially when the existing formats work so well.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
The Commonwealth's Secretary of State William Galvin says he has "grave concerns" about the switch and told secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco that "we will not be participating." Galvin is considered one of the strong candidates to run as a rival candidate for next year's gubernatorial race against incumbent Mitt Romney who supports the switch
I hardly think this will be a big issue in the election for Massachusetts voters, but if it becomes one, this will be a huge way to get non-techies to identify problems with the Microsoft monopoly. If this issue somehow becomes a big (if not the biggest) factor in this election, we can expect ODF to come up in elections all over the place.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I read the text of the passport release earlier, and they claim to have addressed the privacy concerns but really haven't. The biggest problem is that a criminal could very easily grab all of your identity information without your knowledge. They assert that (I'm paraphrasing) "since the chip has no internal power source, it can't broadcast your identity". But that is a canard -- anyone who wants to read out your identity can simply use the same high-gain antenna to beam power your way as to pick up your passport's readout. Of course the protocols will be discovered -- at least by the people you don't want reading your passport.
All the more reason to stick your passport in the microwave with your new shirts from Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, bop on over to www.house.gov and send a quick note of outrage to your representative!
This may sound dumb but....
If you assume that this happens with all software, then you just have to assume total downloads is an arbitary figure and use it to compare with other downloads?
Standford engineers have discovered...
"Standford on iTunes"
It appears ScuttleMonkey didn't just make a typo, but just has no clue that it is actually Stanford not Standford...
Read the link.
1 05739574
Quote: Microsoft has stated that they will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051016
The purpose of this petition is to quantify the customer demand for OpenDocument support. EndQuote
Jay | http://oldos.org
This comes up every time such stats are mentioned.
First of all, they don't track downloads via the update feature of Firefox.
Second, while you've downloaded it ten times, there are many businesses and schools who have installed it on hundreds of workstations from a single download. So it may be one of those things that balances out in the end.
And finally, it's not so much about the exact number. It's about the general magnitude of the number. Even if they're 10 million downloads off either way, that's still an impressive number of people to reach.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It means somewhere between 1 and 99,999,991 users.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
American University's Washington College of Law has several podcasts on iTunes now including one with most of the big panels and speakers.
But also there is people(companies, school(s,districs), etc...) who download onto the network and install from there, or put it on the next ghost image, so I'd say there is still other things beside multi-copy downloads that affect the numbers... Anyways 100 million downloads period is still a amazing mark, and a lot of bandwith gone by too :P
NO~, I read Slashdot because I think it's stupid.....
-----
High Resolution Automobile Picture Gallery
For Flock to not open source their browser? By basing it on Firefox, doesn't the Mozilla Public License require that the changes to the source be distributed?
I celebrated by taking an old PC out in the driveway, putting a fox plushie on top of it and setting it in fire. That's what I call a Firefox!
So, I live in Boston and am an American citizen. Does anyone know of a site that lays out very clearly who I need to write to, what I need to tell them and who I need to keep in mind come voting time?
I'd be responsible for about 20 of those...
Any time that a friend asks for IT help of any kind, the first thing I do is d/l firefox, eradicate the links to IE, and tell them to use that instead.... even if the 'IT help' request had nothing to do with IE or the 'net.
I've even started doing it on other peoples PC's at work.
Sure IE has improved of late, but that appears to have been only due to the increased interest in the foxy lady.
And to think that ten years ago I was one of the biggest MS fanboys out there.
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. -- Leo Tolstoy
I read about the RFID passports. Seems like an unecessary use of technology. "Computers and electronics will make us safer!" Paper passports work fine; why not have a barcode and scanner if you want to scan it quickly?
"Recreational hazard: One group member shows the downside that comes with using their chosen artistic medium (temporary paint made from a mixture of corn starch, food coloring, Kool-Aid, and water)."
You COULD have just painted the firefox logo with sidewalk chalk, but nooo, you had to be fancy and now look what you've done!
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
But what the US is doing is more akin to:
USE="freedom" emerge -uDp world
This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser.
They had a choice?
WASTE - The Secure P2P
Perhaps one should find out more about his election finances, dollars to dognuts a big chunk will be coming out of some slick people from Redmond, or their cronies, with no way to really trace it. Gates and company learned alot from the Sco fiasco, in future the paper trail will not be so transparent!
Hold on....The Democrats are opposed to ODF.....supporting a big business....thought....only.....Republicans....did that....
Damn. This must be Bush's fault somehow....
-john
Slashdot: you'll not find a more wretched collection of villainy and disreputable types...
100 million downloads is a good thing, but what exactly does it mean?
Well I didnt download it the other 999,999,990 times, so I gues it means that firefox kick ass!
serenity now!
Pacheco expressed his concern that OpenDocument would not be usable by people with disabilities, and his committee is holding a hearing at the State House to discuss the format. However, it's not clear whether Pacheco's moves will have any effect.
If he thinks that the closed format of MSOffice is usable by people with disabilities he has another thought coming.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
I'm a happy Firefox camper, but I've dl'ed at least 6 versions (relatively new adopter :(), so I guess the milestone is symbolic. Symbolic or not, it's pretty impressive. Now if only they can stop it from choking on a certain crop of sportsline.com's sinister pop-unders.
Evil knows and loves evil because I.E. displays them without a glitch.
To quote Walter Neff, the evil hero in "Double Indemnity", "Do I laugh now, or wait 'til it gets funny?"
RFID tags are so cheap (or rather, will soon be, read below), I'm really seeing a flood coming, not only for passports, for anything the human mind can imagine!
Taken from http://slashgisrs.org/
MobileMag have a small article about a 100% organic matter RFID chip developed in Korea, costing only 0.5 cents. From the article: The new RFID Tag chip is able to function on the 30 kHz frequency by only using 100% organic compounds and an inkjet printer. By cutting down the price considerably it will allow for thee mass production through the printing process. The chip can also be printed on any paper, plastic and wood standard.
Animoog.org
We've downloaded about 50 total (Do they count downloads of nightly builds?) but installed it on about 30 systems. I've heard some people say they've downloaded one and installed it on hundreds, but I'm sure most of them have really downloaded it more than a couple times.
Even their website says "Copyright 2004" and their latest news item is dated 2003. Or has their site always been like that?
You can pack 64KB into printed media but it might take several passport pages to do so. Remember the "dot strips" in the back of computer magazines in the mid-1980s? Scan them in to get your shareware.
Smudging and dirt could be a problem as could speed.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From the RFID passport link in the main article:
Based on that testing, the Department, in cooperation with the GPO,
will include an anti-skimming material in the front cover and spine of
the electronic passport that will mitigate the threat of skimming from
distances beyond the ten centimeters prescribed by the ISO 14443
technology, as long as the passport book is closed or nearly closed.
The Department will also implement Basic Access Control (BAC) to
mitigate further any potential threat of skimming or eavesdropping. BAC
recently has been adopted as a best practice by the ICAO New
Technologies Working Group and will soon be formally added to the ICAO
specifications. BAC utilizes a form of Personal Identification Number
(PIN) that must be physically read in order to unlock the data on the
chip. In this case, the PIN will be derived from the printed characters
from the second line of data on the Machine-Readable Zone that is
visibly printed on the passport data page. The BAC also results in the
communication between the chip and the reader being encrypted,
providing further protection.
There you have it - with an off-the-shelf reader you have to be within inches OR trick the user into opening the book, AND you have to type or scan in the encryption code.
This won't stop dishonest border guards from hiding a 2nd reader under their jacket and memorizing the secret codes, but it will stop the guy sitting in the row behind you on the airplane.
Now who was the wise guy who said only North Koreans needed RFID-enabled passports?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I ares knowing of the engrish. glrad irm n3t the olry on3.
all your base.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
Saving sig aborted.
Reason: Your subject looks too much like ascii art
wow...that is original. Get over it, not every stat needs explaining.
I suspect that OpenDocument adoption is more wide-spread than LaTeX adoption, mostly because OO.o groks both that and MS Word format (the de facto standard).
So the real lesson is that you need to make tools that are good enough & people won't care about the technical merits of the file format. So long as they can work with other people & use their old documents, they won't moan too much.
Not even that; the number of downloads gives you no concrete information at all about the number of users. There could be zero users or billions (most likely not more than 6 billion or so, though).
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
You realize that the vast majority of people who use Open Office (namely, all of them) will never be Microsoft customers? In fact, many of them want Microsoft dead. How are they customers? And how is their demand "customer demand?"
DATABASE WOW WOW
When I tried signing the petition, it didn't appear to accept e-mail addresses whose local part (that is, everything before the @) contains a plus sign ('+'). Even though RFC 2822 section 3.4.1 states that plus signs are valid characters in a local part, I get "Error - could not process the submission - Email is invalid." I reported this to the webmaster.
The built-in RFID leak-protection mechanism is a good start but it's not nearly enough for the Truly Paranoid [TM].
Who will be the first to try to patent a passport wallet made out of aluminum foil?
Who will trademark the name Passport Protector [TM]?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You should be careful to call the more recent, XML-based format "OpenDocument", rather than "OpenDoc".
OpenDoc was a software component system developed in the early-to-mid 1990s by Apple, in response to OLE.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
No. If you have x unknown amount of additional downloads that shouldn't be counted, and y number of installations that weren't counted, then the odds of x - y = 0 (the hypothesis that it "balances out in the end") seems extremely unlikely.
Why is there this fascination with using all kinds of contorted non-logic to try and derive statistics from data that just can't support it? If you don't have the facts, the right thing to do is hold your hands up and say "I don't know", and the wrong thing to do is say "well because we don't know how many we undercount by and how many we overcount by, we'll just sweep logic under the rug and pretend that it "balances out".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
You can specify the number of your students. Maximum number of customers is 599 via web form. 600 up you must contact the webmaster.
Let's look at my exact quote, shall we?
So it may be one of those things that balances out in the end.
Notice the use of the word may. That suggests that it is possible, but not guaranteed. And of course it's not true statistics. That's obvious to anyone. When you consider that we don't have very good data, it's pointless to try to apply formal statistical methods. Either way the results will not be of a high quality.
However, we do have these two "forces" that are counteracting each other. As such, the effects of each are diminished somewhat, even if we do not know the exact magnitude of each, or exactly how much they cancel. The point is that the effect of multiple downloads from individuals is mitigated somewhat by multiple installations from a single download by businesses/schools.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
And how! Four annoying ads at the bottom of the page, a Google Ad sidebar, those green underline ad links, and three more pages left to click through. Someone's getting paid for *this* Slashdotting....
DRDOS Inc. includes FreeDOS and other software in DR-DOS 8.1 for $45!
Are these people crazy? is there someone left in the world that's hard-up enough and will pay $45 for DOS?
I can see FreeDos as a hobby. I did have a lot of fun in those days- But pay $45 for FREEDOS?
Hah! As if Microsoft would even THINK ABOUT LaTeX. Look, Microsoft is struggling against (or is it US who are struggling against Microsoft for?) OpenDocument. LaTeX isn't even in their radar screen.
Besides, you forgot the reason for OpenDocument to exist: Inter-operability. And you also forgot its power: XML.
Anyone with an XML parser can read opendocument. But to read LaTeX, you need a complicated parser.
OpenDocument can be transformed into HTML with an XSLT template automatically. Heck, you could render OpenDocument with Internet Explorer! (With the appropriate XSL stylesheet, of course)
Also, any XML can be transformed into PDF via XSL:FO.
You could put a bunch of OpenDocument files and index them from with a simple program that supports XML.
The point of OpenDocument is that it's EASY to handle. The EZPublish content management system ALREADY supports importing and exporting of OpenDocument files. Heck, there's even a C++ IDE that can export the sourcefiles (syntax-highlighted) to OpenDocument.
I don't care how much you're fond of LaTeX. Is it powerful? Yes. But is it popular? Is it easy to implement?
Sorry, but I think you're stuck a few years behind.
I think a good idea would be for them to truly find out how many people are using it. Make it so that when you download it, you have to state how many people it's for. And to make that accurate, you should have to give your SSN or whatever your country's national ID number is, and the ID number of everyone who you claim will use it. Then they can strike any duplicates. To make sure people don't give it away and distort the number, they could make the file encrypted such that it will only run if you register it. To confirm you're not using someone else's number, they could set up centers at DMV's (Department of Motor Vehicles) where you can verify that it's you before you can register it (and they'd have computers you'd use to register your copy).
To prevent people from compiling it on their own, they could close the source so that you can only run it through the official installer and only that would be counted in the tallies. To verify transparency, they should put all the names and ID numbers in a central database that everyone can access so that independent agencies can verify the names and contact people to be sure they're actually using it. This could all be funded by selling the contact information in the database to direct marketing organizations (the legitimate ones, not the ones who harass you).
This is the only way to get an accurate, scientific count of the true number of users.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
I mean in Australia, we've had magnetic strips on the passports for a while. All they do at customs is scan through a "card reader". There is no need to embed an RFID in the passport and worry about people reading it from a distance.
There it is!
Open Documents and MS version of XML are really about one thing: Data Mining. Why should you have to write a document, then a spreadsheet, then combine the two, when you can just specify a data source in the document in the first place. Then, take that data, and using the magic of XML, put it on the web. Take the data from the web, put it on your phone. Change it on your phone, and the document updates itself.
XML is really only a middleware. The magic happens behind the scenes. Think of XML as a language, like english. You might speak German, Bob from Accounting might speak Arabic, and Jonie from HR might speak Swahili. You can't get anything done, unless two of you learn the other ones language, or you all start speaking english. Except in this case, English is well documented, carefully laid out, and makes sense. Microsoft's Version would be more like Egyptian heiroglyphics, but we don't have a Rosetta stone (yet).
The big question is who is going to provide the common language. Microsoft wants it to be them, so everyone speaks Microsoft, or more to the point, only Microsoftians can be in on the conversation. Open Document Format means that everyone can learn, and that's all it takes.
That is one of the issues there, not only an open document standard that could be read far into the future,by any citizen, using any OS, but weaning the state off of the regular large sums checks (i.e; tax money) they continually ship to MS for absolutely no other reasons other than inertia and intellectual apathy.
For every person like you, there is a person like me. I've downloaded it 8 times (for each version since...Phoenix?). I've installed it 80+ times though. Every computer on my network has it.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
I always use the latest nightly build so I don't know how they count that.
I notice that the Flexbeta review is not comparing Flock to the latest nightly builds of Firefox because some features the latest nightly builds have that are similar to Flock's are missing from the screenshots. They are giving Flock credit for features Flock may have inherited from the Firefox codebase.
RFID's in passports are one of the dumbest anti-terrorism ideas to make it past the drawing board. It has already been demonstrated that so-called "short-range" RFID tags can be read up to 70 feet away with easily attainable current technology, the tools will only get more sensitive as time passes.
The "anti-skimming material" that the Dept of State references will make it harder to get exact bits off the RFID, but it sure won't stop someone from being able to at least tell if you have one of these RFID passports in your pocket.
Carrying your passport around with you (as you are required to do in most foreign countries) will be the equivalent of wearing a big sign on your back that says, "Get Your Grudge On! Kidnap Me! I'm an American!"
Short of sending hundreds of legit blank passports directly to Osama, I can't think of a passport plan likely to enable more terrorism than this cockamamie scheme.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
One of my friends has neglected to download several copies of Firefox, I'm sure that many others do the same. This might make things add up in the end ?
Check out my PHP Url Validator
I think you guys are all missing the point. The e-Passports are being introduced to stop fraud not terrorism. The chips have the data on the front of the passport and a copy of your facial image. This is then digitally signed. The customs operator can then check the signature is still valid and that the face etc. still match.
As trite as this may sound, making a lot of polite noise explaining the issues to both the senator mentioned in the article and the secretary of state would be a good thing. Also email any Democratic action committee or PAC or the MA party itself detailing how this affects you and how this may cause you to switch party affiliations / question the core democratic values. I just sent out multiple letters and urge you to do the same Senator MARC R. PACHECO Marc.Pacheco@state.ma.us Secretary of State William Francis Galvin cis@sec.state.ma.us
So what, ...) that don't get counted. Sneakernet and copying the installer over LANs doesn't get counted either, and there are countless mirrors too.
there's lots of people that download it through P2P (bittorrent, G2, ed2k,
I think it's undercounted, not inflated.
Anyway, download numbers don't really matter, it's usage share that matters. As there's probably a sizeable fraction of those downloads that get uninstalled right away.
It means that it's likely that some people somewhere use Firefox.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Good point.
Of course this counter should only display INDETERMINATE.
In fact all counters can produce errors of this sort, so they should all display INDETERMINATE.
As a matter of fact, every counter in the entire world could have the same sort of errors, even clocks are not 100% correct, so every counter of any sort should simply display INDETERMINATE.
I mean if you can't guarantee 100% accuracy, then there is not point in even attempting to measure anything.
You should feel happy, you have made the world a better place.
(accidently posted this to someone who wasn't a moron)
The people at flex beta neglected to realize that most of the differences in the Flock options panel have to do with Flock being based on the Firefox 1.5b2 release, not the 1.0.7 version. Obviously someone is not as diehard a fox fan as they would like us to think.
This probably isn't very relevant -- I presume what you mean is that he sent it as a Microsoft Word document. Back in 1994 I remember that the .DOC format was more well known for being plain ASCII text --- it was a common extension for electronic software user manuals everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, Microsoft decided to make it the default extension for Microsoft Word. I'm not sure if it was used in Word for DOS, but Word for Windows certainly became much more popular than the DOS one had ever been for all sorts of reasons. One of them was perhaps that shortly after Word for Windows was released, wherever it was installed, people who double-clicked on a .doc file in Windows would then be opening it on Word... never mind that it was plain ASCII text.
There's a difference between a) knowing that you are wrong, and not even having the slightest idea how much you are wrong by, and not even having the slightest idea in which direction you are wrong - and b) measuring something to some degree of accuracy and having a good idea of how close you are to the real number. Most measurements fall into the latter category. I am not arguing against them. I am arguing against measurements of the former type.
You misrepresent my argument and can't even hit reply properly, and you are calling me a moron?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I've read the Betanews & Boston Globe articles, and really can't make any sense of them. My understanding was that the Massachusetts state government was planning to switch to the OpenDocument format, yet here's this William F. Galvin saying "we will not be participating". Is Galvin not part of the Massachusetts state government? Could someone clarify for the benefit of someone not familiar with the US political system.
Of the editors you've listed, let me use the one I've used before as an example:
.lyx editor which renders its output by exporting to .tex and which has a limited (of three files I'm currently working on, it completely failed to load two, and failed to load the images of the third) ability to import .tex files. Why is this ability limited? Not because TeX "isn't powerful enough" - ASCII isn't powerful, and I'm sure LyX imports .txt files just fine. It's not limited because LyX writers are lazy or don't care, surely - they obviously think that feature is important enough to include, and if it worked with any .tex file they wouldn't have needed to invent their own .lyx file format in the first place.
.tex file or colloquial human speech would practically be artificial intelligence. I'm not saying the OpenDocument or MS Office file formats are simple, of course, but at least their Turing-complete syntax is limited to separate macros rather than being scatterable throughout the document.
LyX is not a TeX editor. LyX is a
I suspect TeX import is limited for the same reason that other programs' abilities to converse with the user are limited: because despite attempts like LyX and Clippy, dealing perfectly with input as widely variable as a complex
I've never downloaded it and yet it's installed on every computer I own. I know several other people this is true of as well. Essentially everyone who uses a modern linux distro uses firefox and I bet a vast majority never download it.
The OpenCD and similar projects probably do the same for many windows users.
And lastly corporate users usually have a central location for getting software. I highly doubt a company that requires firefox would have all their users download it.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
The Faraday cage is also a good idea.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
A few things to consider:
Online "petitions" like this are meaningless - anyone could sit down and throw together a long list of names and no one would know whether they were accurate or not. Sending a list of names to someone you are trying to influence is irrelevant - any individual who makes policy based upon an online and un-verifiable list of names should not be in a decision-making role.
If you want to effect change, do the following:
Actually, there is a Rosetta stone for Microsoft XML - unfortunately, you have to make a blood oath to the dark powers in order to make use of it. Or something like that. . .
Using the number of downloads to measure popularity of a product is like using software lines of code (SLOC) to measure productivity of a developer. Looking closely at these numbers and the individual cases will reveal that these numbers are not accurate measures. On the other hand, when taken over a long term and with appropriate statistical analysis, the SLOC has been used to predict costs and time involved in implementing new software features, products, and enhancements.
Call it a paradox of the universe, but using low-quality metrics as a predictor for the future is better than making a wild guess with no metrics. This works because while x-y=0 may be false, if x-y=b within a given margin, you can still use this information as a good predictor.
Thanks, Einstein, but 96.94% do require explainin'.
Hey, just wanted to make a point: This isn't for political, or "you have to do X because Y people signed" deal. This is meant to get a rough estimate of people who use/would use MS if they supported OpenDoucment. We are keeping a list of all people with >500 computers, and manually confirming all large submissions. It's going to be more reliable than your average.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I would say you are acting more like a lobby, which is probably going to prove more valuable than the average online petition - I still have my doubts about whether anyone will take a list, unsigned either digitally (via PGP or its ilk) or manually, seriously but I commend you for your effort and wish you good luck.
And doing neither by admitting that you don't know is best of all. Bad information is worse than no information at all, because at least when you don't have any information, you know you don't have any information, and you don't mislead others into thinking that you have good information.
That's just it, this data has a completely unknown and unknowable error margin. While the point you make is valid, it simply doesn't apply to this data.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha