You're assuming that whoever spec'd out the priority routing system would slap a "priority" field onto every packet... and you go on to say that those who knew how to switch the state of their packets' "priorities" would have free run of the net.
I think the initial recommendation was, if bandwidth is being limited by node outages or what have you, to cut out certain types of traffic, such as killing off all the port 80 HTTP or the port 8080 Realserver streams to conserve bandwidth.
If you put a properly designed system into userspace you'll be fine, as long as you remember that users are inherently evil and greedy and account for that in your system spec.
Also, there's no reason to turn on your priority system if there's no crisis so you won't take a network performance hit... in fact many systems which function as a type of prioritization method are used every day... firewalls. Block out all the porn sites so the CEO can still send his email? Thats prioritization and it seems to work fine.
If 99% of the nodes are down, only 1% (probably less) of the world will be left with any sort of internet access anyways... so who cares if the internet survives.
After the bombs drop, I don't care if the one person left on the internet can get to the one server that still up.
To give any weight to the statement "if 99% of the node go down", you'd have to assume that internet traffic is evenly spread across all nodes at all times. Of course this isn't the case... the node for an ISP which provides access to about 200 ppl in a rural Texas town isn't going to carry the same traffic as one of Qwest's core routers
An anogolgy: You could probably destroy lots of surface streets in a large city without affecting the entire city much, but if you knock out a freeway you're fucked. Same with the internet.
Besides, if 99% of the nodes go down, surfing out to read slashdot probably isn't going to be at the top of my priority list... I'll most likely have my hands full fighting off alien invaders or trying to find shelter from the massive meteor storms that are destroying the world...
If machine recounts are more accurate than hand recounts, why was there a difference of 1400 votes after the second machine recount?
The votes weren't cast in MP3 format genious... you can't play the digitally stored vote millions of times with no loss in quality. The punch cards are made of paper. If you run it through a machine (or human hands for that matter) a number of times you'll wear it down, the count will change as chad falls out, cards get bent, etc. I suppose theoretically we could recount votes until all the ballots were destroyed and no one received a single vote.
If hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts, why are hand recounts ordered by law in case in dispute in both Florida and Texas, as well as most of the other states?
People make laws. People also make mistakes. The laws might be right or wrong, but in the middle of an election is NOT the time to change or reinterpret them to favor a particular candidate. end of story.
How easy is it to stuff the ballot box when you're in a roomful of extremely partisan observers from the other side?
Guess you didn't watch the CSpan coverage of the recount... saying a ballot which has an ever so slight indention (no puncture) in the vicinty of the Gore chad is a definite vote for Gore and overrulling the GOP rep who challenges this is about the same as stuffing the box.
How can Gore have "clearly lost" the hand recount when the recount wasn't allowed to finish?
Hrmm, the manual recount was partially done in a small number of Democratic stronghold counties, and not surprisingly Gore gained votes... You want a complete recount? Recount them all, in every county, not just the ones handpicked by Democrats to gain votes for Gore.
The rest of your points aren't even worth rebutting...
Exactly. Given the normal statistical model and the assumption that vote counting machines are most likely not partisan... we'd normally expect to see recount results as in Dade country (Gore +100, Bush +77, small change, both cadidates gained/lost about equally)
A statistically correct prediction of the recount would probably show that neither candidate would gain or lose any substantial amount of votes... but look at the recounted totals in some counties...
Gadsen county, only 15,000 total votes Gore + 170 Bush +17
Martin county 60k total Bush +106 Gore +0
Palm Beach County 325k total, Gore + 787 Bush +105
Pinellas County 400k total, Gore +417 Bush -67
Its amazing... the recount is defying statistical probability! It seems that seemingly bipartisan machines have a tendency to count too many votes for one candidate, and undercount for the other. It takes good ole infallible humans to come to the rescue and recount them by hand, correcting these tricky machines that obviously favor one candidate over another.
You obviously missed a major point here. Just because the D.A.R.E. spokesperson had one little slip and didn't convey their feelings to the full extent, you say the program is bad?
>>"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing."
The idea she was probably trying to get across was most likely this:
If all the entire D.A.R.E program ever did was save this one little girl Amber from getting abducted, molested, and maybe killed, was it worth it?
Hell yah.
We'll never know how many little girls/boys got saved by something they learned at D.A.R.E because they don't all make the news like this. D.A.R.E teaches more than just drug education, so don't throw it all out as a bunk program.
Does no one see the potential for recording music?
Picture this: You're driving down the road in your ride, you hear a new (to you perhpaps) song come on this digital radio, and you dig it.
Theres no hoping the announcer says the title and artist at the end of it, or straining to remember it until you can get home to download it.. you hit the button on your car receiver, it pulls the song, title, artist and whatever out of its buffer and saves it. You get home, you take the receiver out and dock it with your box, and voila... a digital copy of whatever song you want.
I wouldn't even mind paying for each saved song, its convenience in its most ludichous form...
Everyone's ranting about "The kids will just lie and still get in." Has anyone seen that it mentions in the COPPA that you can validate a parent by collecting a credit card number and date, and a name and address to match it, and then validating that through visanet or another company. Then you know if its a parent or just little Timmy lying about his age... its very unlikely that the timster will be able to get all mommy's info to carry out the lie. A pain in the wahzoo for us site admins but what if they start forcing me to do that? Extra expense, extra hassle, driving away customers who are queasy about giving out credit card info....
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that whoever spec'd out the priority routing system would slap a "priority" field onto every packet... and you go on to say that those who knew how to switch the state of their packets' "priorities" would have free run of the net.
I think the initial recommendation was, if bandwidth is being limited by node outages or what have you, to cut out certain types of traffic, such as killing off all the port 80 HTTP or the port 8080 Realserver streams to conserve bandwidth.
If you put a properly designed system into userspace you'll be fine, as long as you remember that users are inherently evil and greedy and account for that in your system spec.
Also, there's no reason to turn on your priority system if there's no crisis so you won't take a network performance hit... in fact many systems which function as a type of prioritization method are used every day... firewalls. Block out all the porn sites so the CEO can still send his email? Thats prioritization and it seems to work fine.
After the bombs drop, I don't care if the one person left on the internet can get to the one server that still up.
An anogolgy: You could probably destroy lots of surface streets in a large city without affecting the entire city much, but if you knock out a freeway you're fucked. Same with the internet.
Besides, if 99% of the nodes go down, surfing out to read slashdot probably isn't going to be at the top of my priority list... I'll most likely have my hands full fighting off alien invaders or trying to find shelter from the massive meteor storms that are destroying the world...
If machine recounts are more accurate than hand recounts, why was there a difference of 1400 votes after the second machine recount?
The votes weren't cast in MP3 format genious... you can't play the digitally stored vote millions of times with no loss in quality. The punch cards are made of paper. If you run it through a machine (or human hands for that matter) a number of times you'll wear it down, the count will change as chad falls out, cards get bent, etc. I suppose theoretically we could recount votes until all the ballots were destroyed and no one received a single vote.
If hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts, why are hand recounts ordered by law in case in dispute in both Florida and Texas, as well as most of the other states?
People make laws. People also make mistakes. The laws might be right or wrong, but in the middle of an election is NOT the time to change or reinterpret them to favor a particular candidate. end of story.
How easy is it to stuff the ballot box when you're in a roomful of extremely partisan observers from the other side?
Guess you didn't watch the CSpan coverage of the recount... saying a ballot which has an ever so slight indention (no puncture) in the vicinty of the Gore chad is a definite vote for Gore and overrulling the GOP rep who challenges this is about the same as stuffing the box.
How can Gore have "clearly lost" the hand recount when the recount wasn't allowed to finish?
Hrmm, the manual recount was partially done in a small number of Democratic stronghold counties, and not surprisingly Gore gained votes... You want a complete recount? Recount them all, in every county, not just the ones handpicked by Democrats to gain votes for Gore.
The rest of your points aren't even worth rebutting...
A statistically correct prediction of the recount would probably show that neither candidate would gain or lose any substantial amount of votes... but look at the recounted totals in some counties...
Gadsen county, only 15,000 total votes Gore + 170 Bush +17
Martin county 60k total Bush +106 Gore +0
Palm Beach County 325k total, Gore + 787 Bush +105
Pinellas County 400k total, Gore +417 Bush -67
Its amazing... the recount is defying statistical probability! It seems that seemingly bipartisan machines have a tendency to count too many votes for one candidate, and undercount for the other. It takes good ole infallible humans to come to the rescue and recount them by hand, correcting these tricky machines that obviously favor one candidate over another.
You obviously missed a major point here. Just because the D.A.R.E. spokesperson had one little slip and didn't convey their feelings to the full extent, you say the program is bad? >>"...we can never say for sure. But I'm wholeheartedly convinced it's worth doing." The idea she was probably trying to get across was most likely this: If all the entire D.A.R.E program ever did was save this one little girl Amber from getting abducted, molested, and maybe killed, was it worth it? Hell yah. We'll never know how many little girls/boys got saved by something they learned at D.A.R.E because they don't all make the news like this. D.A.R.E teaches more than just drug education, so don't throw it all out as a bunk program.
Does no one see the potential for recording music?
Picture this: You're driving down the road in your ride, you hear a new (to you perhpaps) song come on this digital radio, and you dig it.
Theres no hoping the announcer says the title and artist at the end of it, or straining to remember it until you can get home to download it.. you hit the button on your car receiver, it pulls the song, title, artist and whatever out of its buffer and saves it. You get home, you take the receiver out and dock it with your box, and voila... a digital copy of whatever song you want.
I wouldn't even mind paying for each saved song, its convenience in its most ludichous form...
Shush! Never mention that, or else someone will start going after google and having them delete their cached sites when stuff like this happens...
Everyone's ranting about "The kids will just lie and still get in." Has anyone seen that it mentions in the COPPA that you can validate a parent by collecting a credit card number and date, and a name and address to match it, and then validating that through visanet or another company. Then you know if its a parent or just little Timmy lying about his age... its very unlikely that the timster will be able to get all mommy's info to carry out the lie. A pain in the wahzoo for us site admins but what if they start forcing me to do that? Extra expense, extra hassle, driving away customers who are queasy about giving out credit card info....