Please - if you build one of these you need to be aware of the EXTREME DANGER involved in playing with this little toy.
If you shine the beam into your eye - on purpose, by accident - or by bouncing it off of something shiny, it will burn holes in your retina. That's not "may" that's "will". We're talking about permanent eye damage, the kind that makes people blind.
Operating one of these in your house or outdoors is dangerous not only to yourself but to others. Our world is full of shiny things; even imperfect "mirrors" can reflect enough beam energy to harm yourself or an innocent bystander; just one quick "flash" sighting of the beam's reflection is enough to cause permanent eye damage.
I know that there's too many of you who will say "it'll never happen to me" and go happily waving your new super laser pointer around. I have one helpful tip for you: if you have a "wow, that's bright!" experience followed by things getting darker - get yourself to the hospital RIGHT NOW and tell them you got a look at a class IIIb laser. They'll know what to do and can probably save your eye if you get there soon enough.
Laser safety goggles are a great idea - but only if you're playing with your laser indoors in a room with all windows covered and all shiny / reflective things removed or covered. If you take it outdoors and start waving it around, someone's going to get hurt.
Great plan from the ivory tower - tell them we're giving them health insurance, but charge the ones most likely to need insurance a big surcharge. In an ethical world, they'd cut the other workers rates to compensate. In our modern corporate controlled world, the extra money they'll be pulling in will be used to line some executive's pockets.
Disease prevention? Not really; look at the measurements they'll be using to determine who gets charged more. Lots of pseudo science, carefully written to appeal to the Oprah generation. Meanwhile, behind the smoke and mirrors a HR director pockets a nice bonus for this loss prevention idea.
What would be very informative would be to see if the selective "insurance" surcharges are applied to the upper management / executive staff. I've got a hunch that they're exempt...
Elton may see that the current scheme of things doesn't have a place in it for him. That doesn't mean that the system is broken, it just means that his day in the sun is over and it's time for new talent to take their turn in the spotlight.
Such is the way things are and the way things always have been. The old giving way for the new is the way the circle of life works.
The RIAA and their way of doing things are also part of the past, not the future. They'll thrash and scream as they're relegated to the past - but they'll go, willing or not, into memory. Much as they'd like to turn back time their fate is already upon them and the final chapter can't be rewritten or altered.
Music is and always has been a part of humanity. It's been performed and distributed in numerous ways over our history and there's strange and mysterious things yet to come. But even in that brave new world, music will still be a part of humanity and it'll resist attempts to subvert it to serve someone's corporate goals.
And 100 years from now some has-been artist will complain that the new technology has killed his golden goose. It'll never cross his mind that the market no longer finds him relevant. It won't matter then, either. The circle of life goes on...
I'm on my second Trackman marble; the first died after 5 years and I wouldn't consider anything else on my "big" computer. After a short familiarization period it's as easy to use as a mouse, doesn't put as much stress on your wrist, and doesn't require free space on the desk to operate in.
Pluses: Easy to zip from one end or corner of the screen to the other, very responsive.
Minuses: Fine movements are difficult to impossible to control. Can't position to a pixel or draw a smooth circle with this thing.
I like it for gaming - the targets in games are easy to point at and you can position the cursor much quicker than you could with a mouse. Driving with one hand on the keyboard and one on the trackball is easy; much better than a mouse. I've been accused of being a bot a few times...
But I wouldn't use a trackball for precision drawing; for AutoCAD I'd plug in a mouse.
All current passenger vehicles are equipped with a computer system that handles engine management, transmission control, body control, and more. Some of the current implementations are amazing; multiple processors communicating over a high-speed network, etc.
By law, they have to support OBD2 diagnostics; this spec provides a limited number of diagnostic indicators that (theoretically) can be accessed and interpreted the same on all vehicles. The OBD2 spec is even available - not officially, but Google is your friend.
So far so good - some standardization, albeit government enforced. But there's more; there's a lot more useful diagnostic information available from the vehicle systems than OBD2 shows. So the manufacturers extend the protocol and define other trouble codes and ways of accessing them. These extensions aren't documented, and they're often designed to be as obscure and impenetrable as possible. Every manufacturer has different proprietary extensions and they change them at whim.
The dealership service departments have the dedicated computer that talks to that manufacturer's cars; it knows all the codes. But independent service shops don't have those dedicated machines or any information about how to read the extended codes from a vehicle. The manufacturers refuse to provide any information to anyone at any price; you can't even buy the diagnostic machine from them unless you're one of their dealers.
They've been doing this for years; various lawsuits have come and gone but the manufacturers still won't share the information that mechanics need to service their cars effectively. The manufacturers like it this way; it drives more business to the dealership service departments and prevents third-party parts companies from making less-expensive replacement parts. This is the status quo; even the Japanese manufacturers play the same game.
So let's consider the possibility of a standardized automotive operating system or architecture. Would the manufacturers use it? If it offered greater reliability or reduced build costs they'd go for it. But before it hit the dealers they'd "fix" it so that their parts and service divisions would continue to enjoy their competitive advantages...
The people walking on this surface will know they're doing work; to get a perceptible amount of power, the load on the walkers will be perceptible too.
The real engineering trick with this design is explaining to the people that they're not just rats on a treadmill. That's not an easy problem for MIT kids to solve on their slide rules...
Especially if they're going to put systems like this in "crowd" areas - crowds aren't only composed of healthy adults, they also contain children, disabled people, etc. How hard would it be to push a wheelchair across this thing?
There's been many instances of police officers harassing photographers in the last few years. This little bit of foolishness will provide the police with something they can use to justify that harassment.
I know I won't be visiting New York anytime in the forseeable future; sightseeing there is getting too risky...
This article would have been timely (but no more accurate) a couple of years ago. The vaccine showed great promise, but the clinical trials were a flop. The drug was written off; the company lost a bundle.
Mumble mumble making a vaccine for a polymorphic virus mumble - wish I hadn't bought that company's stock...
Let's see now; the casino places a faulty machine into service. Whose fault is that? They lost money on the games played on this machine. Whose fault is that?
There's quite a few responses here that say that the player saw a way to take advantage of the rules of play and proceeded to do so. I'd like to submit that the casinos make a regular practice of knowing the rules of play for every game in their inventory and use that knowledge to insure that the customers will consistently lose money. So if the casino fixes the game so that you lose it's just business as usual. But if the casino fixes the game so that you win then you're stealing from the casino? What kind of twisted logic is this?
Keep in mind that the players did not break the machine - they simply played the machine using the rules and conditions that the casino programmed into it. If the casino made a mistake in the programming, that's the casino's problem. If they lost money, that's just one of the risks of doing business.
What's happened is that they've created a system where the casinos are virtually guaranteed to make money. They rig the games so that the casino always comes out ahead - and as long as you lose when you play then everything is peachy. But if you win consistently you'll find that they don't consider it to be a game at all. Especially if you find and exploit a flaw in one of their games; not just things like a badly programmed slot machine, but things like counting cards at the blackjack table. They'll turn you over to the law and press for charges for your attempt to play their games by THE SAME RULES that the casino uses.
Does anyone here seriously think that observing the action on a casino game and adjusting your play style to take maximum advantage of the possibilities presented is a crime?
What started out with a highly skilled and ethical team has grown - and as they grow and hire more people, they're bringing a few people on board that came from abusive corporate environments and / or have studied at the business school of "whatever we can get away with is OK".
All the talk of "do no evil" means nothing to your typical control freak manager. And as these back-stabbing jerks find each other they team up to "protect" each other from the bad normal people. Over time, the bad drives out the good - and another corporation started by starry-eyed college graduates becomes a nest of scum-sucking criminals.
Against that background, their push for more H1B employees is no surprise. The push is on for higher profits, the greatest expense they have is payroll. Can't cut back on staffing, so they'd like to cut back on the size of the worker's paychecks. The H1B program is perfect for them; nice cheap foreign workers - and those workers are virtually slaves to the corporation due to the terms of that program. Control freaks are happy, bean counters are happy - the stock holders are happy, too.
I see some people here saying that there is really a shortage of qualified workers - that's just plain wrong. I live here in Silicon Valley and I know many, many well-qualified and very experienced IT workers who are unemployed and looking for work. If Google or any other company in the valley made a good faith effort to hire local talent they'd have no problem finding all the people they need. In other words, THE SHORTAGE OF SKILLED WORKERS DOES NOT EXIST. It's just the lie they tell so that they can enslave a few more foreign workers that'll work long hours for very little money - under conditions that would be illegal if they weren't H1B workers.
"Do no evil" sounds good - but "Make more money" is the rule they really follow.
With Microsoft working in so many ways to "compete" with Linux, it complicates their plans when they've got so many different "companies" to "compete" with. Toss in a little GPL V3 and I'll bet the ivory tower crowd at MS are drinking Maalox and ducking chairs these days...
When I think of hard drive failure, it's almost always due to a drive hardware failure. Bad motors, bad chips on the controller board. Another popular failure is due to flaky firmware on the drive controller causing the tracking information on the platter to become overwritten.
Magnetic wobbles? Let me see a show of hands - how many have had their data spontaneously change due to this phenomenon. Yeah, I thought so...
I think I see where Linus is coming from - but he doesn't give Mr. Stallman credit for derailing Microsoft's plans to marginalize Linux.
Maintaining the purity of open source is a noble goal, but when immoral operations like MS are in the picture sometimes idealism has to bow to the necessities of the real world.
I'm not too sure about the FSF myself - but I've got to admit that GPL V3 has thrown a monkey wrench in Microsoft's plans. That's a pretty neat trick; not too many people / companies have made them blink before...
A shared secret is no secret at all. It doesn't matter how carefully you wrap your secret in an enigma - at the end of the day, no matter how secure your lock, you also supply the end user with the key that opens the lock.
So you'll print off thousands and millions of these discs that contain both the lock and the key - and distribute them to anyone who has the price of purchase - and you think it's going to take how long for just one person to open your lock?
Once that one person has compromised your protection then it's done. From that one compromise, copies will flood the internet. Will BD+ prevent your movies from being shared? Nope, no chance of that. But it might slow things down a little - just a little, mind you.
We hope you've spent as much time working up a plausible excuse for the failure of this system as you did in promoting it to unsuspecting media companies. They're not going to be happy when they discover you've sold them a bill of goods...
Billing errors? After months of dealing with almost monthly "billing errors" it started to become apparent that there just might be something more than an error.
Errors, by their nature, are random. If they were making mistakes then you'd see some mistakes in your favor and some in theirs. But after so many "errors" that were ALWAYS in Sprint's favor I formed the opinion that this was something they were doing on purpose to cheat those customers that didn't check their bill carefully.
Did any of these banks actually do any analysis of the security of cell phone data?
It hasn't been that long since Paris Hilton's cell got hacked and everyone got to see what she kept on her phone; maybe AT&T has better security on this stuff - but I'd bet not.
They describe the same old massively parallel computing idea but gloss over the problems involved. This old chestnut keeps coming to the surface every few years but nobody ever seems to show any working hardware...
To successfully rig an election takes more than just a tweaked voting machine - it also requires that the people managing the election not look closely enough to detect the fraud. Vote fraud coming from a political party would probably have the necessary connections, desire, and funding to pull it off successfully in isolated areas.
Microsoft isn't in a position to make subtle changes that would slip by in specific elections. Their lobbying arm isn't sufficiently "connected" in any local election to allow the technical fraud to slide by undetected. If they were to move their activities into areas where they could support this kind of activity it'd attract attention; there's a lot of media pundits that focus on nothing but Microsoft. I suspect the best they could do if they tried would be to subtly alter election results in Washington; this wouldn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things.
The reason for PROM based voting machines is so the code can't be changed after the machine is in place. Did you know that many of the current crop of voting machines accept software updates through the same interface the voter plugs his authorization card into? Just one person in that district could step into the booth, insert a programming card, and that machine is compromised. One machine per polling place would be more than enough to control the election outcome.
And my proposal for a simple machine running bespoke code from PROM isn't to obscure the code - the code could be published for the world to see. Counting votes isn't complicated - even Microsoft could write this code and leave no bugs or exploitable holes. If there were holes, the "many eyes" looking at the source would find them - and since the physical machine runs from PROM, it can't be altered (easily) while in operation.
By keeping it simple, it's simple to validate the code. It also reduces the possibilities for vote fraud. Heck, you're a smart guy - what do you thing of Diebold building a voting machine that stores its counts in an Access database? Can they really guarantee that the counts will be correct?
I don't think that Microsoft would take the chance of attempting to rig an election; the chance of getting caught is non-zero and the penalty would be astronomical. Besides, if all they supply is the OS and maybe a runtime library - they'd have a hard time affecting the operation of a vote counting program in a useful way.
The real problem with using a Microsoft OS under a voting platform is the swiss cheese security model they seem to use. There's an awful lot of black hat coders that specialize in compromising Windows for a price; a political party could easily meet that price, and the resulting exploit could manipulate votes. A specialized exploit like this could be very stealthy and not be noticed until well after the election is certified - if ever.
The problem isn't so much that Microsoft won't open their code for inspection - the real problem is that the bad guys have been poking and prodding at Microsoft's products for years and they have a fine knowledge of the exploitable flaws standing by and ready to use. Combine that with an inability to verify the code - this just isn't acceptable. Windows is too darned easy to compromise; it's not suitable as a platform for a vote counting system.
What's really needed is a custom made vote machine. This isn't a complex function; a simple CPU and about 1K of code would do the trick. As a unique hardware based design (code in PROM) it'd be very difficult to compromise - and the code would be simple enough that reviewing it and verifying its integrity would be fairly simple.
You can bet that there'd be a lot of lobbying from Diebold and Sequoia to keep this from happening. Are those companies honorable? I don't know - but something that I've noticed is that Diebold ATM machines seem to be very, very secure and accurate. I've also seen some of the Diebold voting machine code that got published a while back. Not impressed with that at all; almost looked like it was designed to be easy to compromise. Hard to believe that a company with so much experience in secure computing would do such a thing.
Even if the vendors allow their source code to be viewed, you can be sure that only a few special people will get to look at it. We the people won't get that opportunity. That just creates another "soft spot" in the system; a stack of cash in the right hands would get most anything approved (assuming a sufficient quantity of cash).
As far as I'm concerned, we should be sticking with paper ballots until the security problems in electronic voting are completely identified and workable solutions are found and tested. The current crop of electronic voting machines are far too easy to compromise. Not just the machine itself, but also due to the small number of people who maintain / prepare / operate these systems. Compromise one of these individuals and you can control the vote...
There's still no substitute for the CD - as far as I'm concerned. It's the one physical format that easily translates to all the various digital formats our little devices want.
I suppose I should explain that I'm a bit "more mature" than many here. The music that I enjoy comes from a time when there wasn't anything other than Major Labels. I appreciate that there's a lot of current artists that are bypassing the Major Label system, but their music isn't what I'm happiest listening to.
So although there's a few things that I'd love to have a copy of - like the Amboy Dukes album I was just thinking of - I'm not going to buy it. Not today and probably not tomorrow either.
What about the artists? They're getting screwed by the record companies; you'd be surprised to find out how many not only don't make anything from their recordings but are deeply in debt to the labels. My buying habits make no difference at all to them; if a sale to me means anything to a Major Label artist it's a matter of a few cents. They're bound by their contracts so you don't hear much from them about the way they're treated. If they could talk without reprisal they'd tell you about how bad things really are. That limo that they arrive at the concert in? The label insists that they do this - and adds the cost onto their debt.
Things are very, very rotten in the music industry these days - and when all the hand-wringing is done the only way to break the RIAA members grip on the industry is to remove the money from it. That means not buying their products - if enough people stop buying, they'll notice - like they are now. Let's keep the pressure up until they give it up as a lost cause and artists can once again make a living from their tunes.
My CD purchasing is zero these days - until the music industry quits harassing their customers and treating the performers as slaves they're not getting a dime from me.
What enforcement powers do these clowns really have? I would presume none and this is just saber rattling.
But if they do have some enforcement power to go along with their ratings - that makes them censors. If that enforcement power exists, it'd be worth taking a good close look at where they got it from.
Wanting to keep tabs on every employee every minute is the mark of someone who does not trust his employees at all. The reason he doesn't trust them is because he's not trustworthy himself, knows it, and insecure in his position.
Providing these misfits with technology that fulfills their wishes will lead to a long line of labor abuses. Not just now, but for years to come. Once the technology is in place, the maladjusted "boss" types will find it irresistable.
Slashdot Mirror
If you shine the beam into your eye - on purpose, by accident - or by bouncing it off of something shiny, it will burn holes in your retina. That's not "may" that's "will". We're talking about permanent eye damage, the kind that makes people blind.
Operating one of these in your house or outdoors is dangerous not only to yourself but to others. Our world is full of shiny things; even imperfect "mirrors" can reflect enough beam energy to harm yourself or an innocent bystander; just one quick "flash" sighting of the beam's reflection is enough to cause permanent eye damage.
I know that there's too many of you who will say "it'll never happen to me" and go happily waving your new super laser pointer around. I have one helpful tip for you: if you have a "wow, that's bright!" experience followed by things getting darker - get yourself to the hospital RIGHT NOW and tell them you got a look at a class IIIb laser. They'll know what to do and can probably save your eye if you get there soon enough.
Laser safety goggles are a great idea - but only if you're playing with your laser indoors in a room with all windows covered and all shiny / reflective things removed or covered. If you take it outdoors and start waving it around, someone's going to get hurt.
Disease prevention? Not really; look at the measurements they'll be using to determine who gets charged more. Lots of pseudo science, carefully written to appeal to the Oprah generation. Meanwhile, behind the smoke and mirrors a HR director pockets a nice bonus for this loss prevention idea.
What would be very informative would be to see if the selective "insurance" surcharges are applied to the upper management / executive staff. I've got a hunch that they're exempt...
Such is the way things are and the way things always have been. The old giving way for the new is the way the circle of life works.
The RIAA and their way of doing things are also part of the past, not the future. They'll thrash and scream as they're relegated to the past - but they'll go, willing or not, into memory. Much as they'd like to turn back time their fate is already upon them and the final chapter can't be rewritten or altered.
Music is and always has been a part of humanity. It's been performed and distributed in numerous ways over our history and there's strange and mysterious things yet to come. But even in that brave new world, music will still be a part of humanity and it'll resist attempts to subvert it to serve someone's corporate goals.
And 100 years from now some has-been artist will complain that the new technology has killed his golden goose. It'll never cross his mind that the market no longer finds him relevant. It won't matter then, either. The circle of life goes on...
Pluses: Easy to zip from one end or corner of the screen to the other, very responsive.
Minuses: Fine movements are difficult to impossible to control. Can't position to a pixel or draw a smooth circle with this thing.
I like it for gaming - the targets in games are easy to point at and you can position the cursor much quicker than you could with a mouse. Driving with one hand on the keyboard and one on the trackball is easy; much better than a mouse. I've been accused of being a bot a few times...
But I wouldn't use a trackball for precision drawing; for AutoCAD I'd plug in a mouse.
By law, they have to support OBD2 diagnostics; this spec provides a limited number of diagnostic indicators that (theoretically) can be accessed and interpreted the same on all vehicles. The OBD2 spec is even available - not officially, but Google is your friend.
So far so good - some standardization, albeit government enforced. But there's more; there's a lot more useful diagnostic information available from the vehicle systems than OBD2 shows. So the manufacturers extend the protocol and define other trouble codes and ways of accessing them. These extensions aren't documented, and they're often designed to be as obscure and impenetrable as possible. Every manufacturer has different proprietary extensions and they change them at whim.
The dealership service departments have the dedicated computer that talks to that manufacturer's cars; it knows all the codes. But independent service shops don't have those dedicated machines or any information about how to read the extended codes from a vehicle. The manufacturers refuse to provide any information to anyone at any price; you can't even buy the diagnostic machine from them unless you're one of their dealers.
They've been doing this for years; various lawsuits have come and gone but the manufacturers still won't share the information that mechanics need to service their cars effectively. The manufacturers like it this way; it drives more business to the dealership service departments and prevents third-party parts companies from making less-expensive replacement parts. This is the status quo; even the Japanese manufacturers play the same game.
So let's consider the possibility of a standardized automotive operating system or architecture. Would the manufacturers use it? If it offered greater reliability or reduced build costs they'd go for it. But before it hit the dealers they'd "fix" it so that their parts and service divisions would continue to enjoy their competitive advantages...
The real engineering trick with this design is explaining to the people that they're not just rats on a treadmill. That's not an easy problem for MIT kids to solve on their slide rules...
Especially if they're going to put systems like this in "crowd" areas - crowds aren't only composed of healthy adults, they also contain children, disabled people, etc. How hard would it be to push a wheelchair across this thing?
I know I won't be visiting New York anytime in the forseeable future; sightseeing there is getting too risky...
"Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?" How about those of us who want ridiculously fast laptops?
Mumble mumble making a vaccine for a polymorphic virus mumble - wish I hadn't bought that company's stock...
There's quite a few responses here that say that the player saw a way to take advantage of the rules of play and proceeded to do so. I'd like to submit that the casinos make a regular practice of knowing the rules of play for every game in their inventory and use that knowledge to insure that the customers will consistently lose money. So if the casino fixes the game so that you lose it's just business as usual. But if the casino fixes the game so that you win then you're stealing from the casino? What kind of twisted logic is this?
Keep in mind that the players did not break the machine - they simply played the machine using the rules and conditions that the casino programmed into it. If the casino made a mistake in the programming, that's the casino's problem. If they lost money, that's just one of the risks of doing business.
What's happened is that they've created a system where the casinos are virtually guaranteed to make money. They rig the games so that the casino always comes out ahead - and as long as you lose when you play then everything is peachy. But if you win consistently you'll find that they don't consider it to be a game at all. Especially if you find and exploit a flaw in one of their games; not just things like a badly programmed slot machine, but things like counting cards at the blackjack table. They'll turn you over to the law and press for charges for your attempt to play their games by THE SAME RULES that the casino uses.
Does anyone here seriously think that observing the action on a casino game and adjusting your play style to take maximum advantage of the possibilities presented is a crime?
All the talk of "do no evil" means nothing to your typical control freak manager. And as these back-stabbing jerks find each other they team up to "protect" each other from the bad normal people. Over time, the bad drives out the good - and another corporation started by starry-eyed college graduates becomes a nest of scum-sucking criminals.
Against that background, their push for more H1B employees is no surprise. The push is on for higher profits, the greatest expense they have is payroll. Can't cut back on staffing, so they'd like to cut back on the size of the worker's paychecks. The H1B program is perfect for them; nice cheap foreign workers - and those workers are virtually slaves to the corporation due to the terms of that program. Control freaks are happy, bean counters are happy - the stock holders are happy, too.
I see some people here saying that there is really a shortage of qualified workers - that's just plain wrong. I live here in Silicon Valley and I know many, many well-qualified and very experienced IT workers who are unemployed and looking for work. If Google or any other company in the valley made a good faith effort to hire local talent they'd have no problem finding all the people they need. In other words, THE SHORTAGE OF SKILLED WORKERS DOES NOT EXIST. It's just the lie they tell so that they can enslave a few more foreign workers that'll work long hours for very little money - under conditions that would be illegal if they weren't H1B workers.
"Do no evil" sounds good - but "Make more money" is the rule they really follow.
With Microsoft working in so many ways to "compete" with Linux, it complicates their plans when they've got so many different "companies" to "compete" with. Toss in a little GPL V3 and I'll bet the ivory tower crowd at MS are drinking Maalox and ducking chairs these days...
Magnetic wobbles? Let me see a show of hands - how many have had their data spontaneously change due to this phenomenon. Yeah, I thought so...
Maintaining the purity of open source is a noble goal, but when immoral operations like MS are in the picture sometimes idealism has to bow to the necessities of the real world.
I'm not too sure about the FSF myself - but I've got to admit that GPL V3 has thrown a monkey wrench in Microsoft's plans. That's a pretty neat trick; not too many people / companies have made them blink before...
So you'll print off thousands and millions of these discs that contain both the lock and the key - and distribute them to anyone who has the price of purchase - and you think it's going to take how long for just one person to open your lock?
Once that one person has compromised your protection then it's done. From that one compromise, copies will flood the internet. Will BD+ prevent your movies from being shared? Nope, no chance of that. But it might slow things down a little - just a little, mind you.
We hope you've spent as much time working up a plausible excuse for the failure of this system as you did in promoting it to unsuspecting media companies. They're not going to be happy when they discover you've sold them a bill of goods...
They've been making their money through fraud for years now; why expect them to suddenly grow a sense of ethics now?
Errors, by their nature, are random. If they were making mistakes then you'd see some mistakes in your favor and some in theirs. But after so many "errors" that were ALWAYS in Sprint's favor I formed the opinion that this was something they were doing on purpose to cheat those customers that didn't check their bill carefully.
No more Sprint here; never again.
It hasn't been that long since Paris Hilton's cell got hacked and everyone got to see what she kept on her phone; maybe AT&T has better security on this stuff - but I'd bet not.
I don't think this is going to turn out well...
They describe the same old massively parallel computing idea but gloss over the problems involved. This old chestnut keeps coming to the surface every few years but nobody ever seems to show any working hardware...
Microsoft isn't in a position to make subtle changes that would slip by in specific elections. Their lobbying arm isn't sufficiently "connected" in any local election to allow the technical fraud to slide by undetected. If they were to move their activities into areas where they could support this kind of activity it'd attract attention; there's a lot of media pundits that focus on nothing but Microsoft. I suspect the best they could do if they tried would be to subtly alter election results in Washington; this wouldn't make a lot of difference in the grand scheme of things.
The reason for PROM based voting machines is so the code can't be changed after the machine is in place. Did you know that many of the current crop of voting machines accept software updates through the same interface the voter plugs his authorization card into? Just one person in that district could step into the booth, insert a programming card, and that machine is compromised. One machine per polling place would be more than enough to control the election outcome.
And my proposal for a simple machine running bespoke code from PROM isn't to obscure the code - the code could be published for the world to see. Counting votes isn't complicated - even Microsoft could write this code and leave no bugs or exploitable holes. If there were holes, the "many eyes" looking at the source would find them - and since the physical machine runs from PROM, it can't be altered (easily) while in operation.
By keeping it simple, it's simple to validate the code. It also reduces the possibilities for vote fraud. Heck, you're a smart guy - what do you thing of Diebold building a voting machine that stores its counts in an Access database? Can they really guarantee that the counts will be correct?
The real problem with using a Microsoft OS under a voting platform is the swiss cheese security model they seem to use. There's an awful lot of black hat coders that specialize in compromising Windows for a price; a political party could easily meet that price, and the resulting exploit could manipulate votes. A specialized exploit like this could be very stealthy and not be noticed until well after the election is certified - if ever.
The problem isn't so much that Microsoft won't open their code for inspection - the real problem is that the bad guys have been poking and prodding at Microsoft's products for years and they have a fine knowledge of the exploitable flaws standing by and ready to use. Combine that with an inability to verify the code - this just isn't acceptable. Windows is too darned easy to compromise; it's not suitable as a platform for a vote counting system.
What's really needed is a custom made vote machine. This isn't a complex function; a simple CPU and about 1K of code would do the trick. As a unique hardware based design (code in PROM) it'd be very difficult to compromise - and the code would be simple enough that reviewing it and verifying its integrity would be fairly simple.
You can bet that there'd be a lot of lobbying from Diebold and Sequoia to keep this from happening. Are those companies honorable? I don't know - but something that I've noticed is that Diebold ATM machines seem to be very, very secure and accurate. I've also seen some of the Diebold voting machine code that got published a while back. Not impressed with that at all; almost looked like it was designed to be easy to compromise. Hard to believe that a company with so much experience in secure computing would do such a thing.
Even if the vendors allow their source code to be viewed, you can be sure that only a few special people will get to look at it. We the people won't get that opportunity. That just creates another "soft spot" in the system; a stack of cash in the right hands would get most anything approved (assuming a sufficient quantity of cash).
As far as I'm concerned, we should be sticking with paper ballots until the security problems in electronic voting are completely identified and workable solutions are found and tested. The current crop of electronic voting machines are far too easy to compromise. Not just the machine itself, but also due to the small number of people who maintain / prepare / operate these systems. Compromise one of these individuals and you can control the vote...
I suppose I should explain that I'm a bit "more mature" than many here. The music that I enjoy comes from a time when there wasn't anything other than Major Labels. I appreciate that there's a lot of current artists that are bypassing the Major Label system, but their music isn't what I'm happiest listening to.
So although there's a few things that I'd love to have a copy of - like the Amboy Dukes album I was just thinking of - I'm not going to buy it. Not today and probably not tomorrow either.
What about the artists? They're getting screwed by the record companies; you'd be surprised to find out how many not only don't make anything from their recordings but are deeply in debt to the labels. My buying habits make no difference at all to them; if a sale to me means anything to a Major Label artist it's a matter of a few cents. They're bound by their contracts so you don't hear much from them about the way they're treated. If they could talk without reprisal they'd tell you about how bad things really are. That limo that they arrive at the concert in? The label insists that they do this - and adds the cost onto their debt.
Things are very, very rotten in the music industry these days - and when all the hand-wringing is done the only way to break the RIAA members grip on the industry is to remove the money from it. That means not buying their products - if enough people stop buying, they'll notice - like they are now. Let's keep the pressure up until they give it up as a lost cause and artists can once again make a living from their tunes.
Maybe others feel the same way?
But if they do have some enforcement power to go along with their ratings - that makes them censors. If that enforcement power exists, it'd be worth taking a good close look at where they got it from.
Providing these misfits with technology that fulfills their wishes will lead to a long line of labor abuses. Not just now, but for years to come. Once the technology is in place, the maladjusted "boss" types will find it irresistable.
What a horrible idea.