No offense to the people who took the time out of their lives to write slashcode, but IMHO it's a pretty bad example of a big application written in perl.
Exhibit A: when a perl file starts out with "use strict; # ha ha ha, not really" or a similar comment
Exhibit B: global hash vars used for configuration information that have names like %I (real descriptive, guys), and that are never centrally declared (ie. the components are assigned piecewise throughout a ton of different files, not one central declaration of "%I = (stuff)" in an obviously named file.) (note also that %I is not the sole conveyer of conf info, further muddying the waters)
This is not to say that slashcode is bad in terms of utility, on the contrary, the slash engine itself works quite well (as/. and any number of other slashcode sites (like the 3 I've set up) demonstrate). Heaven help you if you want look at the code though...
Like any language, a large part of it's suitability for a given task depends on the coder as well as the language's unique attributes. I've seen just as bad C and Python as I have perl.
(In the unlikely event a central slashcode maintainer reads this post: dude, try enforcing (recommending, whatever) a minimum 4 or 5 character variable name convention! It'll increase the readability (and thus ease of contribution) a good bit.:-) )
As I said in another post, this is meant solely for business use. There are two reasons that spring to mind that a business would get this installed:
1) they have branch offices in the connected cities and they want to save on leased-line costs
2) they are a "serving" company (.com, ISP, co-lo provider, et al.) and need cheap bandwidth by the bucketfull, but not all to one big source (instead to a lot of little (modem) to medium (xdsl, cable,isdn) sources).
(or maybe some combination of the two).
The network as described fits both of those needs very well. Now if for some reason you were the sole utilizer of the line and you wanted to just act like a surfer (wishing to get 100Mbps to, say, some pr0n site), yeah, you'd be screwed.
Yeah, here in Austin I have connectivity through Time-Warner (same network as @Home? not sure). Reading their terms of service ("no servers, you naughty little linux hacker") and looking at their bandwidth profile (15Kbps up, capped) leaves one with the distinct impression that they really aren't interested in being a 2-way IP(internet protocol)-carrier but rather a 1-way content provider.
I expect that this is common to other ISPs operated by cable companies, becuase their entire business mindset (up until recently) has been focused on being the sole source of information to passively absorbing masses of people (TV). Not too suprising that they'd approach the new medium of the Internet (new to them) with the same thought patterns of the old.
On an Austin-TW side-minirant, the main reason they give against home serving and for the bandwidth cap is that "they don't have enough bandwidth". Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace?:-/ The other rational they give is that people only want to use servers for piracy (mp3, warez). How like a content company to assume all their customers are IP (int. prop.) criminals...:-(
(Side note: I'm not trying to be condescending by defining IP twice, I just didn't want their to be confusion about which expansion of IP I was refering to.:-))
That's 100x (roughly) the bandwidth of a T-1 for 1/2 the price (again, roughly). Apparently you don't need some funkoid router interface either, according to the website it terminates in an rj45. To sweeten the deal, it looks like they'll even cover the cost of bringing it to your building.
On the downside of course, is that it looks like this is Businesses Only. This really only makes sense, given the cost structure they have in place (where they cover pretty much all of the "last mile" installation costs (leaving you the building owner to cover the comparatively minor in-building ehternet instaaltion cost (minor unless you have an old building anyway)) and derive their all their income from the monthly payment). Looking at their "Property Owner..." section, it looks like the $1000/mo. is on a per tenant basis (still a good deal for the tenants compared to each getting a T-1), and by running one wire to a house you'd only get $1K/mo as opposed to (n tenants)*$1k/mo for one wire to an office complex.
This would potentially be a very good deal for local ISPs in cities they offer service in. Anything that helps the "little guys" blossom is good, because I fear the day that AOL-TW and the Baby Bells are the only ISPs left.
One last tangental point is that it seems their illustrator doesn't know Texas that well (Dallas is practically in Tyler's lap on the network map,:-) ). (Thinking of texas, why did they hit Houston and Dallas but miss Austin? Austin has a POP from pretty much every other big and medium size bandwidth provider, and given the large tech market here and whatnot I still doubt we've reached any saturation point in connectivity.)
A good friend of mine works for a company here in Austin called ibooks.com (their concept is pretty cool btw, so I don't feel too bad about the blatant plug;-) ). Their entire backend is Java, from what I've heard. They're running everything on big AIX boxes from IBM (well, could they come from any other place?;-)).
The ``site engine'' has evoked some interest in other companies that would like to use it for things besides selling books (e.g. Dell and tech documents, so says the grapevine). If their code had been written in really AIX-specific C or C++, it would take far longer to port to say, WinNT/2K running on a horde of Dell x86 machines, than Java will. Now, I'm sure that some stuff will have to be tweaked for the slightly different environment, but if I had to guess it would be a 2 week process instead of a 2 month one.
So that's one reason why portability is always good: you don't know where your code may end up having to run.
Yeah, sure, it starts out all innocent. He's just flying planes, right?
Hmm, next thing you know he's taking lessons at SpaceCamp. Just a retirement hobby...
Then first thing you know he's launched himself into space (who wouldn't want to curry favor with the phone company?), and is paradropping Plan 9 media kits into Linux/*BSD strongholds.
Yes, it could be pretty successful, dropping Plan 9 from Outer Space...
And maybe Linux developers would like to get paid for coding boring shit like office twaddle. Games are more fun, and text processing is a solved problem (i.e. vim || emacs && (La)TeX).
In Texas, you are perfectly free to shoot the living shit out of anyone who is tresspassing on your property. Tresspassing is defined as any person being on your property that you don't want there, unless they are performing an official government duty (police, fire, paramedics, serving of subpeona, etc). This is a fairly technical interpretation of the law, i.e. don't expect to off the gas meter lady and waltz free. But still hopefully it'll give those M$ bastards pause, being mindful that something like 65% of texas households have 2 or more firearms...;-)
A slightly more realistic reading of the law would be that if they asked to come in, and you said no, but they tried to force their way in, then it becomes Open Season On Microsofties Day, and let the fireworks begin...:-) I've often wondered if my.300 Winchester Magnum would work on a Microsoftie with normal bullets or if I'd need to lay in some silver...
(Note for the humor-impaired, I'm not actually advocating the shooting of M$ employees. Unless they're assholes, in which case the Asshole season in texas is Jan 1 -> Dec 31, with no bag limit.)
I live in texas, and I know a lot of spanish speakers (I speak a very tiny amount myself). Spanish is a myth, there is no "Spanish" language anymore.
The "problem', if you wish to define it as such, is that it has mutated heavily in the Americas away from "Castilian" (ie. european or "high" spanish), and within the Americas the differences between, say, the hispanoamerican speech in Guanajuanto (sp? northern mexico university town) and in Rio are larger than you would expect (I seem to recall that "sanitares" (sp?) was fruit in Guatemala and bathroom in Mexico, or some such, as an example). This has been occuring long before tech jargon. The differences have grown to the point that the european and american versions of the tongue are almost mutually unitelligible (according to my sources anyway).
It must be emphasized that this "blurring" was I think due more to migration than contact with other languages. (Not to say that that didn't play an important role as well, within 100 miles in either direction of the texas-spanish border, pretty much everyone is in linguistic euilibrium between the two tongues, "spanglish" as it's referred to.
So to sum up, this guy is just a hyper-purist, much like hyper-purists in pretty much every culture. As is typical of most purity fanatics, he's focused on one thing as the root cause of all the changes he doesn't like (like a Southern Baptist focusing on Disney as the corruptor of Family Values).
One of the Unix grognards at a previous job (you know the type: bearded, glasses, suspenders, covered in moss and cat5) said that the "Slowlaris" thing arose from the switch-over from SunOS to Solaris in that Solaris 2.0->2.(3?4?) had a lot of legacy stuff from SunOS (i.e. BSD utils running against compatibility libs) lurking within the sysV exterior. I have no idea if he's right (I was, what, 12 when that happened?), but on the face of it it sounds logical.
I was involved in the BSA from an early age. I made it to Life (the rank immeadiately below Eagle, which most people are more familiar with;-) ) by the time I was 16. (Then I went to college and got too busy to do anything BSA related, but that's a different story.)
I can't say today that I would support them. I do think that they can teach a young boy/man good things, but I can not forgive them for the reactionary tack they've taken in recent years (``We can discriminate against anyone we don't like.'' which while legally correct (they're a private club) is morally wrong).
In an ideal world the BSA would be a forum for a young boy of any background to feel welcomed and nurtured so that they can grow into the best man they can be; sadly at this time I don't think the BSA has attained that ideal.
I got that book for my web designer girlfriend who had expressed an interest in learning what goes on ``behind the scenes'', and to be honest, after reading it I was way south of impressed. As a resource for the absolute novice to learn the language perl, I guess it's OK (although I still think the Llama book is better). As a reference for the absolute novice to learn CGI programming with perl, it blows monkey ass.
I feel this way becuase it mentions CGI.pm exactly once, in the context of ``it's too hard, just ignore it.'' Uhhhhh.... Yeah. Riiiiight. Programming CGIs in perl without using CGI.pm is about two incrememnts easier than just doing it in C. Using CGI.pm, it's about 100 increments easier. A tiny example is parsing form variables: it's a pain in the ass to get right by hand, it is one very short line of code with CGI.pm (see the param() function). I guess maybe she was trying to avoid mentioning what modules were, but how hard is it to understand that ``use CGI; $r = new CGI;'' makes $r hold a whole bunch of functions and stuff to make CGI easy? You don't have to be an OOP expert to use objects...
Now, I think Ms. Castro's HTML book by peachpit is pretty good. So evidently she just got in over her head or something with the perl book.
Woah. Must of missed that one! What was it, the lemonade stand he ran as a kid? In Texas he is legendarily bad as a biddnis (<--local pronounciation, doncha know?;-) ) man...
Look around America today and tell me that having the occasional chlorine in the gene pool via natural or unnatural causes up through time until relatively recently was a bad idea. Better yet, watch any random five minute segment of Jerry Springer's show...:-)
Yeah, that sounds great! Think of all the money I'd save on sleeping pills for those long, bumpy flights over the Atlantic...
Honestly though, does anyone read man pages for fun? I consider myself a hardcore computer enthusiast and like nothing better than an afternoon spent on my computer, but reading man pages is about as fun as reading 12-year-old Newsweeks in a dentist's office waiting to get a root canal...
Not to seem loutish, but of course it's an American-centric viewpoint. We did, after all, sort of invent and propagate this ``Internet'' thing and still have the highest number of 'net users globally. I'd equally expect to here Brit-centric viewpoints in a debate about scones, tea, or cricket.
> It all boils down to ICANN asking most of the ccTLDs to pay a third of it's operating costs without allowing them representation in
ICANN itself. Now that doesn't sound very fair, does it?
Yeah, taxation without equal representation. You'd think people would have learned their lesson about trying to pull that, what with the British getting their asses handed to them on a plate in the late 1700s over the exact same issue...;-)
Well, no, not really.:-) The balance of power between the States and the Federal government is a dynamic one, the result of ~200 years of subtle and non-subtle pushing by both sides. The Federal government can exert strong control over some things which it has been given direct control of (and this is a suprisingly small list of things to people living in other countries), every thing else it basicaly has to persuade the States into doing.
A prime example of this is the 55 MPH speed limit on the nations roads. For (what, 15? 20? 30? know it was in effect when I was a little kid 15+ years ago), this was pretty much universal across the country. The Federal government did not put this into place by fiat (even though they did build the interstate highway system), but rather by saying ``if you (a State) wish to gain the benefit of Federal highway and transportation funds, here is what you must do...", a list that included a raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21 and a lowering of the speed limit to 55 if applicable(which really, really sucked by the way in a state like Texas where I live, becuase the place is so goddamn big (bigger than France) that at 55 it takes quite a while to drive from one major city to any other).
It's not like the States are trying to make an issue out of this, it's something they genuinely have the right to determine at the state level (furthermore, the State can't say anything about how some things are done ``on the ground'' by the local election boards, or else you know that Ms. Harris would kick the Palm Beach board straight in the ass...). The only way the Feds could try to influence this would be to try something similar to the highway funds thing (i.e. indirectly through money, like by offering a carrot of grants to pay for the upgrade(s) or by offering a stick in terms of taking away funding if they are not done).
Slashdot Mirror
But then, I did just wake up. :-)
I can just see it now:
enigma1>sho ver
(they would, after all, be pretty enigmatic).None of your business.
enigma1>sho interfaces
None of your business. (etc.)
--
No offense to the people who took the time out of their lives to write slashcode, but IMHO it's a pretty bad example of a big application written in perl.
Exhibit A: when a perl file starts out with "use strict; # ha ha ha, not really" or a similar comment
Exhibit B: global hash vars used for configuration information that have names like %I (real descriptive, guys), and that are never centrally declared (ie. the components are assigned piecewise throughout a ton of different files, not one central declaration of "%I = (stuff)" in an obviously named file.) (note also that %I is not the sole conveyer of conf info, further muddying the waters)
This is not to say that slashcode is bad in terms of utility, on the contrary, the slash engine itself works quite well (as /. and any number of other slashcode sites (like the 3 I've set up) demonstrate). Heaven help you if you want look at the code though...
Like any language, a large part of it's suitability for a given task depends on the coder as well as the language's unique attributes. I've seen just as bad C and Python as I have perl.
(In the unlikely event a central slashcode maintainer reads this post: dude, try enforcing (recommending, whatever) a minimum 4 or 5 character variable name convention! It'll increase the readability (and thus ease of contribution) a good bit. :-) )
--
As I said in another post, this is meant solely for business use. There are two reasons that spring to mind that a business would get this installed:
- 1) they have branch offices in the connected cities and they want to save on leased-line costs
- 2) they are a "serving" company (.com, ISP, co-lo provider, et al.) and need cheap bandwidth by the bucketfull, but not all to one big source (instead to a lot of little (modem) to medium (xdsl, cable,isdn) sources).
(or maybe some combination of the two).The network as described fits both of those needs very well. Now if for some reason you were the sole utilizer of the line and you wanted to just act like a surfer (wishing to get 100Mbps to, say, some pr0n site), yeah, you'd be screwed.
--
Yeah, here in Austin I have connectivity through Time-Warner (same network as @Home? not sure). Reading their terms of service ("no servers, you naughty little linux hacker") and looking at their bandwidth profile (15Kbps up, capped) leaves one with the distinct impression that they really aren't interested in being a 2-way IP(internet protocol)-carrier but rather a 1-way content provider.
I expect that this is common to other ISPs operated by cable companies, becuase their entire business mindset (up until recently) has been focused on being the sole source of information to passively absorbing masses of people (TV). Not too suprising that they'd approach the new medium of the Internet (new to them) with the same thought patterns of the old.
On an Austin-TW side-minirant, the main reason they give against home serving and for the bandwidth cap is that "they don't have enough bandwidth". Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace? :-/ The other rational they give is that people only want to use servers for piracy (mp3, warez). How like a content company to assume all their customers are IP (int. prop.) criminals... :-(
(Side note: I'm not trying to be condescending by defining IP twice, I just didn't want their to be confusion about which expansion of IP I was refering to.--
That's 100x (roughly) the bandwidth of a T-1 for 1/2 the price (again, roughly). Apparently you don't need some funkoid router interface either, according to the website it terminates in an rj45. To sweeten the deal, it looks like they'll even cover the cost of bringing it to your building.
On the downside of course, is that it looks like this is Businesses Only. This really only makes sense, given the cost structure they have in place (where they cover pretty much all of the "last mile" installation costs (leaving you the building owner to cover the comparatively minor in-building ehternet instaaltion cost (minor unless you have an old building anyway)) and derive their all their income from the monthly payment). Looking at their "Property Owner..." section, it looks like the $1000/mo. is on a per tenant basis (still a good deal for the tenants compared to each getting a T-1), and by running one wire to a house you'd only get $1K/mo as opposed to (n tenants)*$1k/mo for one wire to an office complex.
This would potentially be a very good deal for local ISPs in cities they offer service in. Anything that helps the "little guys" blossom is good, because I fear the day that AOL-TW and the Baby Bells are the only ISPs left.
One last tangental point is that it seems their illustrator doesn't know Texas that well (Dallas is practically in Tyler's lap on the network map, :-) ). (Thinking of texas, why did they hit Houston and Dallas but miss Austin? Austin has a POP from pretty much every other big and medium size bandwidth provider, and given the large tech market here and whatnot I still doubt we've reached any saturation point in connectivity.)
--
they'd make really great frisbees.
Lends a whole new meaning to sneakernet ("Hey Joe-Bob, can you toss me that thar backup?").
--
So someday people might actually be more bone-headed than they are now!?! What are they thinking? ;-)
--
A good friend of mine works for a company here in Austin called ibooks.com (their concept is pretty cool btw, so I don't feel too bad about the blatant plug ;-) ). Their entire backend is Java, from what I've heard. They're running everything on big AIX boxes from IBM (well, could they come from any other place? ;-)).
The ``site engine'' has evoked some interest in other companies that would like to use it for things besides selling books (e.g. Dell and tech documents, so says the grapevine). If their code had been written in really AIX-specific C or C++, it would take far longer to port to say, WinNT/2K running on a horde of Dell x86 machines, than Java will. Now, I'm sure that some stuff will have to be tweaked for the slightly different environment, but if I had to guess it would be a 2 week process instead of a 2 month one.
So that's one reason why portability is always good: you don't know where your code may end up having to run.
--
that we'll have to wait() to find out what he'll do next?
Fuggit. Too tired to be funny for you slashdot fools. Time to sleep().
--
Yeah, sure, it starts out all innocent. He's just flying planes, right?
Hmm, next thing you know he's taking lessons at SpaceCamp. Just a retirement hobby...
Then first thing you know he's launched himself into space (who wouldn't want to curry favor with the phone company?), and is paradropping Plan 9 media kits into Linux/*BSD strongholds.
Yes, it could be pretty successful, dropping Plan 9 from Outer Space...
--
And maybe Linux developers would like to get paid for coding boring shit like office twaddle. Games are more fun, and text processing is a solved problem (i.e. vim || emacs && (La)TeX).
:-)
--
In Texas, you are perfectly free to shoot the living shit out of anyone who is tresspassing on your property. Tresspassing is defined as any person being on your property that you don't want there, unless they are performing an official government duty (police, fire, paramedics, serving of subpeona, etc). This is a fairly technical interpretation of the law, i.e. don't expect to off the gas meter lady and waltz free. But still hopefully it'll give those M$ bastards pause, being mindful that something like 65% of texas households have 2 or more firearms... ;-)
A slightly more realistic reading of the law would be that if they asked to come in, and you said no, but they tried to force their way in, then it becomes Open Season On Microsofties Day, and let the fireworks begin... :-) I've often wondered if my .300 Winchester Magnum would work on a Microsoftie with normal bullets or if I'd need to lay in some silver...
(Note for the humor-impaired, I'm not actually advocating the shooting of M$ employees. Unless they're assholes, in which case the Asshole season in texas is Jan 1 -> Dec 31, with no bag limit.)
--
I live in texas, and I know a lot of spanish speakers (I speak a very tiny amount myself). Spanish is a myth, there is no "Spanish" language anymore.
The "problem', if you wish to define it as such, is that it has mutated heavily in the Americas away from "Castilian" (ie. european or "high" spanish), and within the Americas the differences between, say, the hispanoamerican speech in Guanajuanto (sp? northern mexico university town) and in Rio are larger than you would expect (I seem to recall that "sanitares" (sp?) was fruit in Guatemala and bathroom in Mexico, or some such, as an example). This has been occuring long before tech jargon. The differences have grown to the point that the european and american versions of the tongue are almost mutually unitelligible (according to my sources anyway).
It must be emphasized that this "blurring" was I think due more to migration than contact with other languages. (Not to say that that didn't play an important role as well, within 100 miles in either direction of the texas-spanish border, pretty much everyone is in linguistic euilibrium between the two tongues, "spanglish" as it's referred to.
So to sum up, this guy is just a hyper-purist, much like hyper-purists in pretty much every culture. As is typical of most purity fanatics, he's focused on one thing as the root cause of all the changes he doesn't like (like a Southern Baptist focusing on Disney as the corruptor of Family Values).
--
One of the Unix grognards at a previous job (you know the type: bearded, glasses, suspenders, covered in moss and cat5) said that the "Slowlaris" thing arose from the switch-over from SunOS to Solaris in that Solaris 2.0->2.(3?4?) had a lot of legacy stuff from SunOS (i.e. BSD utils running against compatibility libs) lurking within the sysV exterior. I have no idea if he's right (I was, what, 12 when that happened?), but on the face of it it sounds logical.
--
I was involved in the BSA from an early age. I made it to Life (the rank immeadiately below Eagle, which most people are more familiar with ;-) ) by the time I was 16. (Then I went to college and got too busy to do anything BSA related, but that's a different story.)
I can't say today that I would support them. I do think that they can teach a young boy/man good things, but I can not forgive them for the reactionary tack they've taken in recent years (``We can discriminate against anyone we don't like.'' which while legally correct (they're a private club) is morally wrong).
In an ideal world the BSA would be a forum for a young boy of any background to feel welcomed and nurtured so that they can grow into the best man they can be; sadly at this time I don't think the BSA has attained that ideal.
--
I got that book for my web designer girlfriend who had expressed an interest in learning what goes on ``behind the scenes'', and to be honest, after reading it I was way south of impressed. As a resource for the absolute novice to learn the language perl, I guess it's OK (although I still think the Llama book is better). As a reference for the absolute novice to learn CGI programming with perl, it blows monkey ass.
I feel this way becuase it mentions CGI.pm exactly once, in the context of ``it's too hard, just ignore it.'' Uhhhhh.... Yeah. Riiiiight. Programming CGIs in perl without using CGI.pm is about two incrememnts easier than just doing it in C. Using CGI.pm, it's about 100 increments easier. A tiny example is parsing form variables: it's a pain in the ass to get right by hand, it is one very short line of code with CGI.pm (see the param() function). I guess maybe she was trying to avoid mentioning what modules were, but how hard is it to understand that ``use CGI; $r = new CGI;'' makes $r hold a whole bunch of functions and stuff to make CGI easy? You don't have to be an OOP expert to use objects...
Now, I think Ms. Castro's HTML book by peachpit is pretty good. So evidently she just got in over her head or something with the perl book.
--
... too gawddamn stupid to get a joke. ;-)
--
Woah. Must of missed that one! What was it, the lemonade stand he ran as a kid? In Texas he is legendarily bad as a biddnis (<--local pronounciation, doncha know? ;-) ) man...
--
Nah. I live in Austin, and I've watched him as the Head Yahoo in this wacky state for while now.
The Shrub could only be Baseball Commissioner if he could figure out which end of the bat to hold. Fat chance, that... ;-)
--
How did we get here? Easy, stupidity.
Look around America today and tell me that having the occasional chlorine in the gene pool via natural or unnatural causes up through time until relatively recently was a bad idea. Better yet, watch any random five minute segment of Jerry Springer's show... :-)
--
Probably best not to discuss memory errors when defending the Shrub (little Bush, as he is known in Texas)...
Still, even though I'm a Democrat, I laughed. Definitely +5 Funny. :-)
--
Yeah, that sounds great! Think of all the money I'd save on sleeping pills for those long, bumpy flights over the Atlantic...
Honestly though, does anyone read man pages for fun? I consider myself a hardcore computer enthusiast and like nothing better than an afternoon spent on my computer, but reading man pages is about as fun as reading 12-year-old Newsweeks in a dentist's office waiting to get a root canal...
--
Not to seem loutish, but of course it's an American-centric viewpoint. We did, after all, sort of invent and propagate this ``Internet'' thing and still have the highest number of 'net users globally. I'd equally expect to here Brit-centric viewpoints in a debate about scones, tea, or cricket.
--
> It all boils down to ICANN asking most of the ccTLDs to pay a third of it's operating costs without allowing them representation in ICANN itself. Now that doesn't sound very fair, does it?
Yeah, taxation without equal representation. You'd think people would have learned their lesson about trying to pull that, what with the British getting their asses handed to them on a plate in the late 1700s over the exact same issue... ;-)
--
Well, no, not really. :-) The balance of power between the States and the Federal government is a dynamic one, the result of ~200 years of subtle and non-subtle pushing by both sides. The Federal government can exert strong control over some things which it has been given direct control of (and this is a suprisingly small list of things to people living in other countries), every thing else it basicaly has to persuade the States into doing.
A prime example of this is the 55 MPH speed limit on the nations roads. For (what, 15? 20? 30? know it was in effect when I was a little kid 15+ years ago), this was pretty much universal across the country. The Federal government did not put this into place by fiat (even though they did build the interstate highway system), but rather by saying ``if you (a State) wish to gain the benefit of Federal highway and transportation funds, here is what you must do...", a list that included a raising of the drinking age from 18 to 21 and a lowering of the speed limit to 55 if applicable(which really, really sucked by the way in a state like Texas where I live, becuase the place is so goddamn big (bigger than France) that at 55 it takes quite a while to drive from one major city to any other).
It's not like the States are trying to make an issue out of this, it's something they genuinely have the right to determine at the state level (furthermore, the State can't say anything about how some things are done ``on the ground'' by the local election boards, or else you know that Ms. Harris would kick the Palm Beach board straight in the ass...). The only way the Feds could try to influence this would be to try something similar to the highway funds thing (i.e. indirectly through money, like by offering a carrot of grants to pay for the upgrade(s) or by offering a stick in terms of taking away funding if they are not done).
--