I'm a software developer with close to 20 years of experience. I was pointed to your position paper on VVPT. Please accept my comments on your position paper.
Electronic Voting Machines and Voter-Verified Paper Trails (VVPT) League of Women Voters http://www.lwv.org/join/electionshava_dre- vvpt.htm l The League of Women Voters strongly supports full and equal voting rights for all eligible Americans, including persons with disabilities. The League also supports voter verification of ballots, including the requirement in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) whereby the voter verifies the ballot before it is cast and counted. However, the League does not support proposals for a new requirement for paper-based voter verification - the voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) system that would require Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to provide an individual paper confirmation for each ballot for each voter to verify.
A VVPT requirement undermines voting access for people with disabilities or limited English proficiency, raises costs, fails to guarantee security, unnecessarily complicates the voting process, undermines federal certification standards, and slows the replacement of outdated voting machines.
To be clear, VVPT would require DRE equipment to print out a physical paper receipt that the voter could review and then stuff in the ballot box. These printed ballots would then be the official record of the election.
These printed ballots would:
- be printed out when the user has completed selecting all
of their choices via the DRE's touch screen interface
- would only print out the individuals selected, and thus
is very simple to understand and uncluttered
- would be printed in the language used by the DRM machine,
cross-language support on paper is quite easy
- be in large font for reading impaired and could be handed
to an election worker to read for those who are blind
- would have an encoded version of the votes via a bar-code to
make scanning in the votes for semi-automated recounts easy
- would be printed on card stock using your average laser
or inket printer; thermal paper does not last long enough
To be more concrete about this, and to make it absolutely clear what we are discussing, there is an open source application [1] with an on-line demo [2] that produces this sort of printed receipt [3]. Be advised that the user interface for making the selections is not important to this discussion, the only thing that is salient is the final receipt printed.
With this background, let me address your specific concerns. Before you continue with this statements, I ask you to download the referenced PDF file above and print this so that you can see exactly what is being requested by the VVPT community.
* The voter-verified paper trail requirement undermines voting access. DREs make it possible, for the first time, for persons with visual disabilities or limited manual dexterity to cast secret and independent ballots.
The VVPT does not replace DREs. People would still use touch screens to make their choices. The printed 'receipt' would be in the individual's language and printed in a large enough font so that it is absolutely clear.
Because DREs can be programmed in multiple languages, voters with limited English proficiency can participate fully and equally. The millions of Americans who face literacy challenges also can take advantage of the audio features of DREs to cast independent votes without embarrassment.
There is no reason why the printed receipt cannot print out results in the voter's choice of language. During an official manual recount, it wou
----- Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 19:41:29 -0400 To: letters@nytimes.com Subject: Secure Voting Techology
May 3rd's article "Who Hacked the Voting System?" begs the question: why must these complicated voting systems be all encompassing?
Imagine a process where selecting candidates and tallying choices is distinct. The voter enters a booth, uses a complicated touch-screen machine, and emerges with a human-readable card clearly stating their candidate. Then, the voter walks over to a brightly lit election desk, feeds this card into the tallying machine, and deposits their card into the ballot box.
Security is straight-forward. Voters will tell you when a touch-screen system make an error. This leaves the tallying machine to secure. Luckily, it is in plain sight and its operation is simple. Further, if the tally is questioned, some or all of the ballots can be reviewed by human eyes.
Candidate selecting technology is complicated. Card tallying ain't. Let's keep them separate.
----- Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 11:19:17 -0400 To: letters@nytimes.com Subject: Demand Grows to Require Paper Trails for Electronic Votes
In the article Demand Grows to Require Paper Trails for Electronic Voting, published May 23, 2004, Doug Chapin from the Pew Charitable Trust said: "You can either build a fence around a cliff or put an ambulance in the valley... The paper trail is the ambulance in the valley. Certifying the machines and testing them in the first place to make sure they are secure is the fence around the cliff."
I think Mr. Chapin's analogy is poor, it is not an either/or, one would properly do both. However, if he insists with this analogy, I suggest Verified Voting is more analogous with the ability to ensure that the fence around the cliff is actually working. The only way to detect that a voting technology reflects voter intent is to complement touch screens with a simple print-out listing the canidates the voter has chosen. Then the voter can review their choices and stuff this print-out into the ballot box so random or challenge recounts can happen. Lacking this ability to verify voter intent, we are left with only one way to ensure that our democracy is working -- trust a for-profit corporation.
------- Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 10:09:04 -0400 To: letters@nytimes.com Subject: The Disability Lobby and Voting
I am so happy to see the NY Times call-out the League of Weoman Voters for their counter-productive stand; also, I can't believe that despite my calls, Senator Dodd has joined this nonsense.
An optical scan solution can offer the best of both worlds. A disabled-persons friendly touch screen or audio-system can be used to generate the ballot; while the actual counting of the optical ballots can be done with a much simpler optical reader.
By breaking the problem of filling-out and counting ballots, we get the best of both worlds; the intermediate ballot provides the paper trail. It is also easier to test optical scanners for compliance -- there is less code to review, and deterministic inputs/outputs allow testing to be automated. Further, since only one optical scanner is needed per district, and can be closely monitored. Let user-friendly voting machines thrive, but make sure they don't do the counting.
I've written the League several times over the last few months. Their stance is not only wrong-headed, but they refuse to listen to their constituency. The NY Times article refers to a group of disabled people, ones who happen to have a great deal of influence with the LWV, who were given foundation monies from Diabold. You cannot pretend that politics is not involved here.
Confirmed. This patent seems to be concerned with physical buttons, not mouse clicks or taps. The patent specifically covers using how long the user holds down the button, and subsequent actions to indicate different software behavior.
There is prior art of using datbases of all sorts to hold scripts. Heck, we even use tarballs... I'm not sure it is "unobvious" that one could use an "XML Datbabase" to hold scripts.
Has it made its way to FreeBSD ports yet?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 1
The people who make RTEMS, Online Applications Research Corporation are a very cool bunch who were early adopters in the real time operating system space. They have worked very closely with RMS on licensing in the mid 90's and were one of the first groups using GCC as a cross compiler. Their business model is support oriented plus government contracts.
(I have no financial stake in OAR or RTEMS, other than having good feelings about their involvement in OSS)
I find him refreshing. I think it is a new sort of politics, a revival of Democracy. The Internet allows the free-flow of information, and internet commerse has finally matured so that supporting someone who you believe in is just a few clicks away. If Dean continues in this way the end of big-business backers may just be around the corner.
If you havn't looked at Dean, I encourage you do to so. He is a very nice blend of Liberatarian, small-business Republican, and even some Democrat notions. I encourage Dean to continue doing exactly what he is. Even if I disagree with him on some points, I agree with his overall direction -- giving professionals and small business people a voice rather than letting big "absentee owner" corporations run the show. Amen.
Hello. I don't trade music. However, I have a question. I do use a wireless network in my house and beacuse the drivers don't work well with FreeBSD I don't use WEP (besides when my friends visit I'd rather not do configuration work). Now... I think the next door neighbor may be using my wireless connection... so if he/she is downloading music, it'll have my IP. Further, what is to stop someone from parking their car outside my house to "surf" with my IP address? Yes, I could shut down my wireless... but I'm curious -- what is my liability here?
What SSC has is a *application* for a trademark, and no doubt this will be a disputed application. I suggest that the linuxgazette.NET people write the PTO and explain their side of the story before the trademark publishes... although, they probably have several months to do so. Trademarks take quite a bit of time. SSC's attempt to do a last-minute trademark file and then sue is not only mean spirited, but stupid. http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=do c&state=h prn5r.2.1
Word Mark LINUX GAZETTE Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Publication of Journal. FIRST USE: 19950701. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19960801 Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING Serial Number 78319880 Filing Date October 28, 2003 Current Filing Basis 1A Original Filing Basis 1A Owner (APPLICANT) Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. CORPORATION 2208 NW Market St Suite 407 Seattle WASHINGTON 98107 Type of Mark SERVICE MARK Register PRINCIPAL Live/Dead Indicator LIVE
While this law is weak -- it is nice that it isn't going to prevent Business 2 Business Unsolicited Commercial Email. We should start slow, and get more strong. I'm not talking *bulk* UCE here. Many startup tech companies spend _alot_ of time finding potential business customers and making them aware of services that are being offered. A carefully researched electronic mailing usually can return a high response rate if the people being addressed are the appropriate contacts in the companies in question, if the message is clear and targeted well, etc. I'm glad that the current law will not prevent this sort of necessary communication. In short, if you put your email address on a company website as a contact or listing you in your position with an email; or you are listed in the directory of a non-profit or similar organization... you should be willing to receive UCE.
What this law does, and I'm glad to see it, is ban fradulent UCE. And many bulk UCE techniques, such as harvested lists or guessing names. In general, I think the problem is with bulk email, not in general commercial email. If you're email address is listed on your company's web page you *are* in my humble opinion soliciting commercial responses and I'm glad this legislation does not ban this sort of communication as the god awful, anti-business, California law did.
There are very legitimate reasons for unsolicited mail from one corporation to another. While I completely agree that emailing a personal email address is bad showing, emailing a corporate address that is posted on the company's webpage with a commercial solicitation should be explicitly "ok". Yes? Perhaps "bulk" emailing ( > 100 per day, let us say) is bad pratice, however, there are reasons for targeted solicitation, no? Does this bill cover this eventuality?
Use 'paper ballot', or 'printed ballot' or 'printed selections to be deposited into the ballot box'. When people here the word 'receipt' they get the idea that the voter can take home a copy of how they voted... and this is *dangerous*. You don't want to confuse people. It is _not_ a receipt.
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party. Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).
It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.
This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.
Annoted Pratical Guide for Solving Rubik's Cube
on
Rubik's Cube Comeback
·
· Score: 1
I was talking with one of the representative's legislative assistance the other day and said that the decision was made so that they always had a "real" record of what happened. As if to imply that digital records are not, in fact, real.
I encourage you to read the statments by Copps and Adelstein. While both of these individuals voted for the measure, the spent a considerable amount of time framing three general areas of dissent:
public domain: the flag should be limited to use only for materials which are copyrightable. For instance, government meetings should not be locked behind the flag
fair use: the flag does not provide a mechanism for educational use of the material where fair use of copyright would be permitted
privacy: improper use of this technology could be used in such a way that people lose privacy; the comments don't say it, but in the hearings it was voiced, "what good is first amendment protection if the government and/or political groups know who is listening to you"
You suffer from black and white thinking; the world, my friend, is mostly grey.
You can always find an excuse to not do something and you can never have enough knowledge or data to prove that nothing bad will ever happen.
Let's get concrete then. Is spending 1/20th (or less) studying what could go wrong adequate? This is not about studying something to death, it is about looking to see if you can see the bottom of the pool... or finding a stick to measure where the pool bottom is. According to the article nanotechology will be a trillion dollar marketplace; what is resonable caution? 4 million? I don't think so.
You seem to think that because companies are willing to invest in a technology that they are irresponsible.
Companies are amoral. It maximizes *its* bottom line without regard to its environment. In a society, just beacuse a company is successful at maximizing its bottom line does not mean that it is helpful to society as a whole.
do you really believe that these companies would release anything that they believed would get them sued?
Have you not a sense of history? To a corporation it is a cost vs reward calculation. If a company can pollute a river and not have to pay for it, it will. If it can save a ten million dollars from its bottom line by creating a hundred-million dollar cleanup cost (superfund) at a 30% chance of getting caught... it will. Now, if we could hold directors and executives more accountable for their actions, perhaps you would be more correct. But really, as long as the exec can cash out with his one million dollar bonus... by all means, pollute that river.
The essential problem with companies that impact the environment is that their risk is artificially limited (the whole purpose of companies is to shielf investors from risk), while the potential for gain great. However, with environmental damage, who pays if things go bad? The public -- either with health complications or will billion dollar superfund costs.
Your argument that because this is new, it needs to be regulated before it can be developed has more than a whiff of Luddite-ism.
No, the argument is that as much money should be spent exploring the impacts of introducing new materials into our environment as we study commercializing said materials. And that recognizing that companies will not do this on their own (unless we make their owners more accountable for their actions).
When has regulation ever advanced anything?
Every entity works within a regulatory environment that spells out what is "fair" and what is "not fair" -- that is, how each entity should play the competitive game. Without a proper regulatory environment, entities would be so busy screwing each other that no forward progress would be made. You have the right to do as you please... as long as you don't hurt my interests. Regulation takes care of the second part of the sentance.
Lastly, environmental regulation is by far the most troublesome beacuse real costs to society can be extremely high and hard to verify. Clean air, water, soil is a shared "public good". The problem with the 'environment' is that its ownership is distributed over a great many people, and thus it is hard to find a single stakeholder. Once bad things happen it is *easy* to find a stakeholder, but before then, it is a role that a regulatory branch must take on. The penalty for waiting till damage is done is just too high not to have at least some measure of caution.
How can you regulate something that doesn't exist, other than to say 'Thou Shalt Not'?
You can set guidlines for deployment of technology contingent upon a resonable amount of research done by companies. We can help companies which would not normally do this by providing a good amount of public money to do this sort of research. Or, alternatively, we can strip companies of their artifically-low limited liability and hold shareholders and directors more accountable for their investment and corporate direction.
The key is to find the right ballence of public vs private interest to maximise *both* saftey and innovation.
Don't dismiss peer-reviewed research so stupidly
on
The Issues of Nano-Safety
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I wonder what the mortality rate is for mice with common dirt released directly into their lungs?
Did you even bother to look for the actual research. I did a very quick search on google, and found this report. I'd love an actual link to the study, but I don't have time to do more searching.
This report talked about a study which compared particles of 20 nanometers (deadly) with ones of 130 nanometers (not deadly) in the same concentrations. Certainly these results are not perfect, a better study would make these nanoparticles into an areosol, as this would be the most likely form of real-life delivery.. that is, a light dust cloud breathed by a human after some object was moved containing nanotubes. In any case, I'm sure the same concentration of plain-old dirt would not even be noticed.
If you want to argue the results... do you own study. Oh wait, that was the point of the NY Times article wasn't it... that not enough studies were being done. Amazing.
But the $4 million it expects to award next year for risk studies is barely measurable against the $847 million in federal money that President Bush has proposed for nanotechnology research and development for the 2004 fiscal year.
Couple this with the fact that companies will be more than willing to invest their own dollars in nanotechnology (but not studying risks), it is clear that we are not doing enough to study the environmental impacts of such stuff. This is brand new territory, with new rules and new concequences. It is stupid to think that the old rules to protect people and the environment will be adequate. Environmental messes are *horribly* expensive to clean up by comparison.
To call this FUD is really irresponsible. You don't jump in head first to a pool of water unless you know how deep the pool is, no?
If parts of the GPL are found to be invalid or problematic, the FSF can publish a GPL2 and then license all code it has been assigned under this modified license.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a software developer with close to 20
years of experience. I was pointed to your position paper on VVPT.
Please accept my comments on your position paper.
Electronic Voting Machines and Voter-Verified Paper Trails (VVPT)
League of Women Voters
http://www.lwv.org/join/electionshava_dre- vvpt.htm l
The League of Women Voters strongly supports full and equal
voting rights for all eligible Americans, including persons with disabilities. The League also supports voter verification of ballots, including the requirement in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) whereby the voter verifies the ballot before it is cast and counted. However, the League does not support proposals for a new requirement for paper-based voter verification - the voter-verified paper trail (VVPT) system that would require Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines to provide an individual paper confirmation for each ballot for each voter to verify.
A VVPT requirement undermines voting access for people with disabilities or limited English proficiency, raises costs, fails to guarantee security, unnecessarily complicates the voting process, undermines federal certification standards, and slows the replacement of outdated voting machines.
To be clear, VVPT would require DRE equipment to print out a physical paper receipt that the voter could review and then stuff in the ballot box. These printed ballots would then be the official record of the election.
These printed ballots would:
- be printed out when the user has completed selecting all
of their choices via the DRE's touch screen interface
- would only print out the individuals selected, and thus
is very simple to understand and uncluttered
- would be printed in the language used by the DRM machine,
cross-language support on paper is quite easy
- be in large font for reading impaired and could be handed
to an election worker to read for those who are blind
- would have an encoded version of the votes via a bar-code to
make scanning in the votes for semi-automated recounts easy
- would be printed on card stock using your average laser
or inket printer; thermal paper does not last long enough
To be more concrete about this, and to make it absolutely clear what
we are discussing, there is an open source application [1] with an
on-line demo [2] that produces this sort of printed receipt [3]. Be
advised that the user interface for making the selections is not
important to this discussion, the only thing that is salient is the
final receipt printed.
[1] http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
[2] http://gyaku.pair.com/~vote/ballot2.html
[3] http://clarkevans.com/tmp/ballot-receipt.pdf
With this background, let me address your specific concerns. Before
you continue with this statements, I ask you to download the
referenced PDF file above and print this so that you can see exactly
what is being requested by the VVPT community.
* The voter-verified paper trail requirement undermines voting access. DREs make it possible, for the first time, for persons with visual disabilities or limited manual dexterity to cast secret and independent ballots.
The VVPT does not replace DREs. People would still use touch screens
to make their choices. The printed 'receipt' would be in the
individual's language and printed in a large enough font so that it is
absolutely clear.
Because DREs can be programmed in multiple languages, voters with limited English proficiency can participate fully and equally. The millions of Americans who face literacy challenges also can take advantage of the audio features of DREs to cast independent votes without embarrassment.
There is no reason why the printed receipt cannot print out results in
the voter's choice of language. During an official manual recount, it
wou
-----
... The paper trail is the ambulance in the
Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 19:41:29 -0400
To: letters@nytimes.com
Subject: Secure Voting Techology
May 3rd's article "Who Hacked the Voting System?" begs the question:
why must these complicated voting systems be all encompassing?
Imagine a process where selecting candidates and tallying choices is
distinct. The voter enters a booth, uses a complicated touch-screen
machine, and emerges with a human-readable card clearly stating
their candidate. Then, the voter walks over to a brightly lit
election desk, feeds this card into the tallying machine, and
deposits their card into the ballot box.
Security is straight-forward. Voters will tell you when a
touch-screen system make an error. This leaves the tallying machine
to secure. Luckily, it is in plain sight and its operation is
simple. Further, if the tally is questioned, some or all of the
ballots can be reviewed by human eyes.
Candidate selecting technology is complicated. Card tallying ain't.
Let's keep them separate.
-----
Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 11:19:17 -0400
To: letters@nytimes.com
Subject: Demand Grows to Require Paper Trails for Electronic Votes
In the article Demand Grows to Require Paper Trails for Electronic
Voting, published May 23, 2004, Doug Chapin from the Pew Charitable
Trust said: "You can either build a fence around a cliff or put an
ambulance in the valley
valley. Certifying the machines and testing them in the first place to
make sure they are secure is the fence around the cliff."
I think Mr. Chapin's analogy is poor, it is not an either/or, one would
properly do both. However, if he insists with this analogy, I suggest
Verified Voting is more analogous with the ability to ensure that the
fence around the cliff is actually working. The only way to detect that
a voting technology reflects voter intent is to complement touch screens
with a simple print-out listing the canidates the voter has chosen. Then
the voter can review their choices and stuff this print-out into the
ballot box so random or challenge recounts can happen. Lacking this
ability to verify voter intent, we are left with only one way to ensure
that our democracy is working -- trust a for-profit corporation.
-------
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2004 10:09:04 -0400
To: letters@nytimes.com
Subject: The Disability Lobby and Voting
I am so happy to see the NY Times call-out the League of Weoman Voters
for their counter-productive stand; also, I can't believe that despite
my calls, Senator Dodd has joined this nonsense.
An optical scan solution can offer the best of both worlds. A
disabled-persons friendly touch screen or audio-system can be used to
generate the ballot; while the actual counting of the optical ballots
can be done with a much simpler optical reader.
By breaking the problem of filling-out and counting ballots, we get the
best of both worlds; the intermediate ballot provides the paper trail.
It is also easier to test optical scanners for compliance -- there is
less code to review, and deterministic inputs/outputs allow testing to
be automated. Further, since only one optical scanner is needed per
district, and can be closely monitored. Let user-friendly voting
machines thrive, but make sure they don't do the counting.
I've written the League several times over the last few months. Their stance is not only wrong-headed, but they refuse to listen to their constituency. The NY Times article refers to a group of disabled people, ones who happen to have a great deal of influence with the LWV, who were given foundation monies from Diabold. You cannot pretend that politics is not involved here.
In particular, on an PowerBook?
especially useful in VIM.
Confirmed. This patent seems to be concerned with physical buttons, not mouse clicks or taps. The patent specifically covers using how long the user holds down the button, and subsequent actions to indicate different software behavior.
There is prior art of using datbases of all sorts to hold scripts. Heck, we even use tarballs... I'm not sure it is "unobvious" that one could use an "XML Datbabase" to hold scripts.
Just curious... I'd like to upgrade.
The people who make RTEMS, Online Applications Research Corporation are a very cool bunch who were early adopters in the real time operating system space. They have worked very closely with RMS on licensing in the mid 90's and were one of the first groups using GCC as a cross compiler. Their business model is support oriented plus government contracts.
(I have no financial stake in OAR or RTEMS, other than having good feelings about their involvement in OSS)
I find him refreshing. I think it is a new sort of politics, a revival of Democracy. The Internet allows the free-flow of information, and internet commerse has finally matured so that supporting someone who you believe in is just a few clicks away. If Dean continues in this way the end of big-business backers may just be around the corner.
If you havn't looked at Dean, I encourage you do to so. He is a very nice blend of Liberatarian, small-business Republican, and even some Democrat notions. I encourage Dean to continue doing exactly what he is. Even if I disagree with him on some points, I agree with his overall direction -- giving professionals and small business people a voice rather than letting big "absentee owner" corporations run the show. Amen.
Hello. I don't trade music. However, I have a question. I do use a wireless network in my house and beacuse the drivers don't work well with FreeBSD I don't use WEP (besides when my friends visit I'd rather not do configuration work). Now... I think the next door neighbor may be using my wireless connection... so if he/she is downloading music, it'll have my IP. Further, what is to stop someone from parking their car outside my house to "surf" with my IP address? Yes, I could shut down my wireless... but I'm curious -- what is my liability here?
What SSC has is a *application* for a trademark, and no doubt this will be a disputed application. I suggest that the linuxgazette.NET people write the PTO and explain their side of the story before the trademark publishes... although, they probably have several months to do so. Trademarks take quite a bit of time. SSC's attempt to do a last-minute trademark file and then sue is not only mean spirited, but stupid.o c&state=h prn5r.2.1
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=d
Word Mark LINUX GAZETTE
Goods and Services IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Publication of Journal. FIRST USE: 19950701. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19960801
Mark Drawing Code (1) TYPED DRAWING
Serial Number 78319880
Filing Date October 28, 2003
Current Filing Basis 1A
Original Filing Basis 1A
Owner (APPLICANT) Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. CORPORATION 2208 NW Market St Suite 407 Seattle WASHINGTON 98107
Type of Mark SERVICE MARK
Register PRINCIPAL
Live/Dead Indicator LIVE
While this law is weak -- it is nice that it isn't going to prevent Business 2 Business Unsolicited Commercial Email. We should start slow, and get more strong. I'm not talking *bulk* UCE here. Many startup tech companies spend _alot_ of time finding potential business customers and making them aware of services that are being offered. A carefully researched electronic mailing usually can return a high response rate if the people being addressed are the appropriate contacts in the companies in question, if the message is clear and targeted well, etc. I'm glad that the current law will not prevent this sort of necessary communication. In short, if you put your email address on a company website as a contact or listing you in your position with an email; or you are listed in the directory of a non-profit or similar organization... you should be willing to receive UCE.
What this law does, and I'm glad to see it, is ban fradulent UCE. And many bulk UCE techniques, such as harvested lists or guessing names. In general, I think the problem is with bulk email, not in general commercial email. If you're email address is listed on your company's web page you *are* in my humble opinion soliciting commercial responses and I'm glad this legislation does not ban this sort of communication as the god awful, anti-business, California law did.
There are very legitimate reasons for unsolicited mail from one corporation to another. While I completely agree that emailing a personal email address is bad showing, emailing a corporate address that is posted on the company's webpage with a commercial solicitation should be explicitly "ok". Yes? Perhaps "bulk" emailing ( > 100 per day, let us say) is bad pratice, however, there are reasons for targeted solicitation, no? Does this bill cover this eventuality?
They have funded the continued development of Python with continuations, called Stackless, by hiring the original author part-time.
http://osb.sra.co.jp/PowerGres/introduction-en.php
Use 'paper ballot', or 'printed ballot' or 'printed selections to be deposited into the ballot box'. When people here the word 'receipt' they get the idea that the voter can take home a copy of how they voted... and this is *dangerous*. You don't want to confuse people. It is _not_ a receipt.
Liberals are the ones who pushed for Motor-Voter legislation and now want to give driver's licenses to illegals. Who's up to their eyeballs in corruption?
This is mixing two issues. Motor Voter is about allowing you to submit for voter registration *at* the DMV. It is not about giving the right to vote to people with drivers licenses. They are two entirely different processes. Motor Voter was a _huge_ success in increasing voter registration by making it convient for the average person.
Right. And I'm sure they were donors to the Clinton Administration as well.
From what I've been reading. O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, has been reliably quoted as saying that he will deliver states to the Republican party.
Chuck Hagel, a republican senator, was at one time (and probably still is) a part owner of Election Systems and Software (ES&S).
It does not matter if they *are* being evil, what matters is that they should not even be _close_ to voting companies. It is a clear conflict of interest and smells bad no matter how you put it. I'd go further and say that all voting machines should not be done by companies at all -- too much at risk.
This has nothing to do with conspiricy theory, it has everything to do with common sense. You lock doors of your house, not to keep bad people out, but to "keep honest people honest". Power corrupts. And these people should not be putting themselves in to places where they could be corrupted, or even give the appearance of being corrupt. Its just wrong.
Annoted Pratical Guide for Solving Rubik's Cube
I was talking with one of the representative's legislative assistance the other day and said that the decision was made so that they always had a "real" record of what happened. As if to imply that digital records are not, in fact, real.
I encourage you to read the statments by Copps and Adelstein. While both of these individuals voted for the measure, the spent a considerable amount of time framing three general areas of dissent:
public domain: the flag should be limited to use only for materials which are copyrightable. For instance, government meetings should not be locked behind the flag
fair use: the flag does not provide a mechanism for educational use of the material where fair use of copyright would be permitted
privacy: improper use of this technology could be used in such a way that people lose privacy; the comments don't say it, but in the hearings it was voiced, "what good is first amendment protection if the government and/or political groups know who is listening to you"
You suffer from black and white thinking; the world, my friend, is mostly grey.
You can always find an excuse to not do something and you can never have enough knowledge or data to prove that nothing bad will ever happen.
Let's get concrete then. Is spending 1/20th (or less) studying what could go wrong adequate? This is not about studying something to death, it is about looking to see if you can see the bottom of the pool... or finding a stick to measure where the pool bottom is. According to the article nanotechology will be a trillion dollar marketplace; what is resonable caution?
4 million? I don't think so.
You seem to think that because companies are willing to invest in a technology that they are irresponsible.
Companies are amoral. It maximizes *its* bottom line without regard to its environment. In a society, just beacuse a company is successful at maximizing its bottom line does not mean that it is helpful to society as a whole.
do you really believe that these companies would release anything that they believed would get them sued?
Have you not a sense of history? To a corporation it is a cost vs reward calculation. If a company can pollute a river and not have to pay for it, it will. If it can save a ten million dollars from its bottom line by creating a hundred-million dollar cleanup cost (superfund) at a 30% chance of getting caught... it will. Now, if we could hold directors and executives more accountable for their actions, perhaps you would be more correct. But really, as long as the exec can cash out with his one million dollar bonus... by all means, pollute that river.
The essential problem with companies that impact the environment is that their risk is artificially limited (the whole purpose of companies is to shielf investors from risk), while the potential for gain great. However, with environmental damage, who pays if things go bad? The public -- either with health complications or will billion dollar superfund costs.
Your argument that because this is new, it needs to be regulated before it can be developed
has more than a whiff of Luddite-ism.
No, the argument is that as much money should be spent exploring the impacts of introducing new materials into our environment as we study commercializing said materials. And that recognizing that companies will not do this on their own (unless we make their owners more accountable for their actions).
When has regulation ever advanced anything?
Every entity works within a regulatory environment that spells out what is "fair" and what is "not fair" -- that is, how each entity should play the competitive game. Without a proper regulatory environment, entities would be so busy screwing each other that no forward progress would be made. You have the right to do as you please... as long as you don't hurt my interests. Regulation takes care of the second part of the sentance.
Lastly, environmental regulation is by far the most troublesome beacuse real costs to society can be extremely high and hard to verify. Clean air, water, soil is a shared "public good". The problem with the 'environment' is that its ownership is distributed over a great many people, and thus it is hard to find a single stakeholder. Once bad things happen it is *easy* to find a stakeholder, but before then, it is a role that a regulatory branch must take on. The penalty for waiting till damage is done is just too high not to have at least some measure of caution.
How can you regulate something that doesn't exist, other than to say 'Thou Shalt Not'?
You can set guidlines for deployment of technology contingent upon a resonable amount of research done by companies. We can help companies which would not normally do this by providing a good amount of public money to do this sort of research. Or, alternatively, we can strip companies of their artifically-low limited liability and hold shareholders and directors more accountable for their investment and corporate direction.
The key is to find the right ballence of public vs private interest to maximise *both* saftey and innovation.
I wonder what the mortality rate is for mice with common dirt released directly into their lungs?
Did you even bother to look for the actual research. I did a very quick search on google, and found this report. I'd love an actual link to the study, but I don't have time to do more searching.
This report talked about a study which compared particles of 20 nanometers (deadly) with ones of 130 nanometers (not deadly) in the same concentrations. Certainly these results are not perfect, a better study would make these nanoparticles into an areosol, as this would be the most likely form of real-life delivery.. that is, a light dust cloud breathed by a human after some object was moved containing nanotubes. In any case, I'm sure the same concentration of plain-old dirt would not even be noticed.
If you want to argue the results... do you own study. Oh wait, that was the point of the NY Times article wasn't it... that not enough studies were being done. Amazing.
But the $4 million it expects to award next year for risk studies is barely measurable against the $847 million in federal money that President Bush has proposed for nanotechnology research and development for the 2004 fiscal year.
Couple this with the fact that companies will be more than willing to invest their own dollars in nanotechnology (but not studying risks), it is clear that we are not doing enough to study the environmental impacts of such stuff. This is brand new territory, with new rules and new concequences. It is stupid to think that the old rules to protect people and the environment will be adequate. Environmental messes are *horribly* expensive to clean up by comparison.
To call this FUD is really irresponsible. You don't jump in head first to a pool of water unless you know how deep the pool is, no?
If parts of the GPL are found to be invalid or problematic, the FSF can publish a GPL2 and then license all code it has been assigned under this modified license.