And consider this: The structure of both the UI *AND* help documents (good ones) are based on the common and crucial TASKS that the application is meant to facilitate. So good Use Case documentation (which for some make/break functionality will drill down into detailed Use-Case scenarios with sample data) not only half-writes your documentation but your automated tests as well!
Outside the usual exceptions, I see little sign of this practice in FOSS.
It is, as you say, user-thinking vs non-user thinking. Developers must stay organized to grow into their user-thinking abilities; It doesn't just happen in an IRC channel.
Your home page observation is a real pet-peeve of mine, too. If they can't put an intro paragraph or two near the top or a clearly-marked About button, then why should even power users and developers stop to look? This indicates not just unprofessional attitudes, but immature cliqishness as well. The Internet isn't about reading minds.
And there are whole websites geared toward OSS development that encourages these 1980s practices and attitudes. Want documentation for that "stable 2.0" project you're browsing? Well clicking on that Documentation link on SauceFork.net isn't going to show you any 9 times out of 10. Its just this space to put docs... just plop it in! No collaboration tools needed for docs... just the 'sauce'.
Requirements? Use Cases? Models? Interactive Help? API documentation? (Oh, don't mention that last one... that's asking for committment! Interfaces becoming contracts... shivvver!) Not all of these are needed for each project... but c'mon these dev-o-matic sites could provide more documentation assistance and structure than "arrrr, write it by yourself and just plop it in there, matey!";-)
You kept presenting FOSS developers with what professional programmers call "Use Cases".
But FOSS projects lacking professional developers (almost all of them) do not record, maintain and abide by the Use Cases (the anticipated behaviors and desires) of their claimed target audience.
It becomes apparent that professionals are eager to please and commit to their target audience (in return for money primarily), but that hackers are mostly interested in impressing each other.
This is true even when you look at intensive GUI development. The FOSS projects that go whole-hog on GUIs tend to be candy-laden for sure, but poorly match user expectations and workflow.
I should state now that I think Mozilla and OO.org are the exceptions. Their background developer culture is professional. But I wish there were more of these exceptions.
From the article: "We want less people hacking on frameworks and more people hacking on applications that use frameworks. It's not a technical problem so much as a social one."
We've got people who like OS hacking. But because no one has committed to a minimum specification aimed at the desktop, all creative types are likely to see is shifting sand where they cannot build or distribute without dozens more headaches than in a structured environment.
'Linux' is frightening to someone, say, with a lot of interest in small business accounting or background in the arts and who just wants a consistent framework for expressing themselves. People who aren't "systems oriented" need a less chaotic environment in which to learn and build.
OTOH end-users are frequently pressured into installing software ONLY from their distro's central repository. So the power users (people who like to sample and compare many different apps) among them are likely to feel very constrained, or that "nothing works" when they download software independantly-- The result is they forget about 'Linux' and about recommending it to family and coworkers.
Take a look at Mac download sites like MacUpdate and Versiontracker: Notice anything? Little bits and pieces of the OS are NOT dominant on the menu!
I suppose the upcoming LSB Desktop spec will be a big step in the right direction. There will be quite a few distros supporting it in short order.
Until then, Mr. Bacon should be reminded that no "Linux" exists which has real meaning to an end-user. They can't bring the "Linux" moniker into a CompUSA and use it to shop. If you wanted to open a "LinuxMall.com" online, what on earth would your criteria be for Linux-compatible products?! Plain LSB perhaps, but then that doesn't cover GUIs so you are back at the servers market selling to people who know more than you.
And when watchdogs explain to the press that certain machnes have odd RF emissions, what do you think the public reaction will be? Would you like your picture to be shown on newscasts with your occupation of Engineer completely supplanted by the subtitle "Conspiracy Theorist"?
Physical evidence in punchcard form is difficult enough to present seriously. Adding esoterics like EM signatures and explanations made extremely complex due to your suggested layers of indirection would probably hurt democracy more than help.
As for its potential to help, I doubt it even more since broad conspiracies aren't necessary. You only need 2-3% offset in a couple of swing states.
Voting is a simple, infrequent process that gains nothing from computers. One we get past the simplest of electronic aids, then we are smothering it in the trappings of technolust.
The argument that goes "You have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" is a fallacy advanced by pro-authoritarian people.
The government doesn't belong having absolute knowledge of our private lives, because then the burden to be law-abiding becomes infinite. The temptation to miscontrue "illegal" patterns becomes too great for abusers to resist: Even if the courts do get involved (and discern every case correctly) then the powerful still have a tool for limitless harassment of opposition groups and scapegoats. Ultimately, people who are disliked and disrespected will tend to go to jail for something anyway, since few people lead perfectly-legal lives.
OTOH they can bring people in for possibly assisting terrorists, and they disappear. There's an "endless war" on, ya know.
But modern voting arrangements ARE inspected by average citizens. Lookup voting and transparency.
And yes, where punchcards and marked paper ballots are concerned, all of the logical interactions (up until you get to the electoral college in the US) can be seen plainly. Particularly during a recount (which, by the way, purely computerized systems cannot even accomodate).
The only exception seems to be the optical-scan paper ballots. Even so, its a slight exception where off-the-shelf and rather simplistic ICs are used to sense light/dark in particular spots. Very many engineers can thoroughly grasp and audit these machines. And in a recount, those optical ballots are counted by hand anyway so the logic comes into plain view again.
Paperless BBV is exceptionally anti-democratic. Its medievalism with a high-tech gloss. A billion angels gathered on the head of a pin to witness a "yeah" or a "nay". So grossly overwrought, for what?
One of the requirements if that you can audit the machine, physically, down to the last bit and gate. That isn't realistic today to have people in various locales faced with splitting open ICs and putting them under electron microscopes.
Ask yourself this: If someone took the innards from a C64 emulator joystick, and used it in a voting machine based on a C64... how would you know the CPU is a real 6510 and not a fake programmed to behave like one under most circumstances? Are not older CPUs emulated today with microcode, by corporations and hobbyists alike?
Even proprietary software can be reverse-engineered. But IC internals??
The only possible saving grace for BBV that I can see is voter-verified paper ballots (and you only get to use them during a recount). But then why use computers at all? Filling a circle on a piece of paper and feeding it into an optical reader is much cheaper and less prone to tampering and equipment failure.
I see what you're saying, but I don't think this level of effort and engineering (and expense) would be sustained by your average voting precinct. Plus it puts the mechanics of voting into extremely esoteric categories that not even most engineers can follow through A-Z.
How many people can slice open ICs and perform a full logical audits? Do you get the idea that the equipment is effectively un-auditable? Since WHEN is "no physical audit" allowed in a democracy that claims transparent voting???
Because of this, it should be clear that anyone refusing to print physical ballots, at least until these problems are resolved, must be either incompetent or up to mischief.
That is IF they are resolved, and I don't think they ever will. The industry is already working hard to turn most PCs, servers, peripherals and consumer electronics into TC-DRM nervous systems that honor the interests of large conglomerates, not the rights of the people. If industry suddenly considers the public to be untrustworthy and restict our data processing options within our own homes, then we ought to consider the industry doubly untrustworthy in the voting booth.
Before the colonies, most of those societies were tribal and very collectivist.
The great preponderance of activity within African colonies has been that of traders and religious missionaries. An examination of seaport activity and settlements should tell you that. The sustained whirlwind of precious minerals, gems, crops, fuel, drugs, real estate and labor knows no equal from public sector OR military.
Colonialism didn't bring collectivism to Africa; it turned regional governments into unaccountable counterfeits. And it unleashed a lot of religious medievalists on the continent who were beoming unpopular at home; So while Europe embraced progressive humanism, the colonies were intensifying the habit of arbitrary sectarianism abroad.
Like many history books, you are yourself transfixed by officialdom. Its the only face of responsibility you'll accept for humanity's follies. In this respect, you appear to have the same instincts as corporatists (those persistently name-changing shields against responsibility); they want government to accept responsibility for all the power they wield away from the TV cameras and for the failures of the culture they promote ceaselessly on-camera. They hide behind the responsibility of the 'individual' corporation when they must to spare individuals in their elite circle, yet want individuals to take the brunt for misdeeds when they happen to be poor.
Individual responsibility is fine. But who does it realistically apply to? Some want it only for relatively poor people, whether they admit this to themselves or not, and their actions show it.
People are social every bit as much as we are individuals. These are two qualities either of which can be reinforced in positive or negative ways: We can lean toward nurturing, or toward militarism. But we NEED organization to be effective, and we need a uniform background of enforced rules in order to grow. So you're stuck with collectivism forever I'm afraid.
And we all must be vigilant about this effective power. That is what democratic accountability is for; We have recourse when a less-than-perfect system takes on too many negligent or malicious characteristics.
Besides democracy, the other side of the collectivist coin is money. You can't escape that either. Money, being an abstraction, can turn into avarice and gross indifference if our whole daily experience is filtered through it. Whereas whole lives filtered through the state (or the tribe) can lead to mob mentality.
We are in trouble because so much of our national indentity and habits are tied-up in sham virtues relating to our collective and individual selves. Corporation = Individual person (lie). Washington = Public interest (lie). There is an increasing tendency to label something as its opposite in order to conceal a growing military-industrial complex that has little to do with government by the people. "Government" doesn't cause these problems; a culture fed on propaganda from 98% for-profit media does. And these industries (on behalf of shareholders) want their services (and revenue stream) to come between you and everything else in your life. The less domestic governing power an increasingly sham government has, the more control their execs and major stockholders can exercise from their bank accounts.
The GDP is supposed to be a measure of our education effort, but the GDP means jack; Chairs shuffling on the deck of the Titanic at a mile per minute does not indicate the shuffling isn't caused by a destructive force such as piloting a ship into an iceberg. To borrow another metaphor: In real terms the chocolate ration has been reduced from 40 grams to 30, but we can think of it relative to financial activity in the aftermath of Katrina and celebrate it an increase. Its an Orwellian yardstick in reverse- a concealment of how we squander vast ill-gotten resources by wallowing in myopia and self-interest, instead of focusing on empowerment through education and infrastructure.
Right. Its similar to handing blueprints to a committee and insisting they have audited the innards of a machine as a result. A real audit consists of comparing the intended design with the physical reality.
And no independant entity can audit billions of transitors, plus every algorithm down to the last bit, in a timely manner.
No one claims that analog elections with physical evidence is perfect. But black box electronics are completely IMPERFECT for the task of recording important, anonymous transactions.
Without receiving a printed ballot, the voter NEVER EVEN SEES the electronic "ballot" hidden in the computer. They only see an indirect representation on the screen. That is not voting.
Instead of "Bush sucks", can these findings be leveraged into a call for increased voting software transparency, i.e. 100% FOSS?
FOSS is not the answer in this case because, like the proprietary code, it doesn't leave a robust forensic trail. We are talking about billions of transistors per machine just to record a handful of A, B, C, D choices per person. And those choices are stored as bits, the most fleeting and maleable information construct. AND one side of the transaction is always anonymous.
These elements just do not mix.
OSS would be a nice touch. But what's more, on top of all this you have silicon components that are balooning in complexity from an industry that is intent on surruptitiously limiting and manipulating software in TC fashion. Can you open the hood of these ICs to check their "mechanical" properties? No. VERY FEW people acquire familiarity with the outward behaviors of these machines because they are seldom-used and not under the constant gaze of hackers in their basement or admins in a server room.
And its all to provide patrons of the corporatist party with a wholly unnecessary cash cow.
Of course, it would just KILL these companies to sell machines that print a voter-verified ballot. A physical entity! Oh, the expense!!!
Bottom-line is: They can call an array of bits hidden within the machine a "ballot". But that does not make it appropriate for anonymous transactions carrying such high stakes.
Also, fish uses an SSL encryption layer. Your 286 machine does?
For the record, whatever gripes people might have about the UI, KDE is the faster and more stable environment. That much is well-known. The project doesn't deal with stability issues and other bugs by saying "Ehhh... people don't NEED that feature anyway. *CHOP*".
If you are, I hope you know that the U.S. spends more per capita and percentage of GDP each year on disaster preparedness, and the government is spending billions to rebuild after Katrina.
Sounds like poor value for our dollar then. I think they probably outsource too much.;-)
Seriously, I've heard all the extremist libertarian gospel before, and the lame excuses for Republican mismanagement which to any outsider looks like corporatists (actual former corporate execs almost to a person) starving and sabotaging the government. These opinions are a dime a dozen on all the American whiteboy sites. Government = socialism. Imperialism = socialism. Whatever.
You could perhaps do us a favor and move to a relatively lawless region like the Congo for five years, then report back with your experiences. I'll wait!
It was the massive expansion of government powers and resources which facilited westward expansion and the inevitable genocide.
Except when genocide goes relatively unnoticed, as it did with the slave trade and its gross negligence toward human life.
I also do not agree that any diverse movement like socialism or capitalism must be equivalent to its most extreme element. That's just a double standard usually employed by extremists from the "other side". In your case, you even go as far as implying that the sins of all states are the sins of socialism, even when those are fostering capitalism.
Mass murder, racism, genocide, and war are simply the most ugly extreme of collectivism and anti-individualism.
Yet a right-wing collectivism like racism is not interchangeable with a form that is based on universal human rights.
It all comes down to whether someone is trying to sell you extremism in terms of either ideas or deeds. That's where today's individualists need to take a good long look in the mirror while they reflect on the third-world tradgedy that transpired on the Gulf Coast last year. Maybe they could ask how much money they saved through extreme indifference; It would be a start.
That's like saying democracy is racist and genocidal, because Americans slayed the native population and enslaved people for their own personal benefit under democracy's banner. What about THOSE millions of people? Or the ones in Southeast Asia for that matter?
Communism did not stop genocidal tendencies that existed in the East during the first few decades. But that does not indicate the ideology provides particular justification for genocide.
If anything, this only proves that violent revolution opens the door to murderous scoundrels.
An OS should enforce a standard image overlay (like a red circle or arrow) on all executables. Its astounding to me that no OS in wide use will consistently show code and data as distinct.
Sometimes an application's associated types have the SAME icon as the app itself! We can blame users for laxity, but developers have done their part in confusing code/data in their minds.
Where Mac OS, Windows and all the rest fail is that they don't enforce strong visual cues for executables.
I have said this before: Superimpose all representations of executables with a red circle or red border, and these trojans will become an endangered species!
Stop confusing data and code in the minds of users!
I just loaded FF 1.5.0.1 and Opera 8.5 on Mac OSX 10.3.9 (iBook G4 1.2GHz 768M) each with identical nine tabs:
Firefox: 54.15M (Real) 190.07M (VM) ; 2.1% idle
Opera : 59.36M (Real) 239.66M (VM) ; 0.4% idle
Assessment: This Firefox outperforms both Opera and Safari in memory usage, and is faster than Opera on challenging pages. However it has the least favorable idling habits, starting at 2% here and would climb to 4% after several days of intensive use. FF 1.5.0.1 memory use would climb to about 100M for the same pages over the same period, indicating the cache grows somewhat but not wildly the way FF 1.5 did.
The test of also rather unfair, as I have 7 FF extensions running.
On OS X 10.3, Firefox 1.5 was the CPU & memory hog. But I have been using 1.5.0.1 extensively and it is MUCH better. It even seems to use les memory than Safari.
I still would like to see better idling behavior (I'm not entirely comfortable with 4% usage) but 1.5 was 3x as bad.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
;-)
And consider this: The structure of both the UI *AND* help documents (good ones) are based on the common and crucial TASKS that the application is meant to facilitate. So good Use Case documentation (which for some make/break functionality will drill down into detailed Use-Case scenarios with sample data) not only half-writes your documentation but your automated tests as well!
Outside the usual exceptions, I see little sign of this practice in FOSS.
It is, as you say, user-thinking vs non-user thinking. Developers must stay organized to grow into their user-thinking abilities; It doesn't just happen in an IRC channel.
Your home page observation is a real pet-peeve of mine, too. If they can't put an intro paragraph or two near the top or a clearly-marked About button, then why should even power users and developers stop to look? This indicates not just unprofessional attitudes, but immature cliqishness as well. The Internet isn't about reading minds.
And there are whole websites geared toward OSS development that encourages these 1980s practices and attitudes. Want documentation for that "stable 2.0" project you're browsing? Well clicking on that Documentation link on SauceFork.net isn't going to show you any 9 times out of 10. Its just this space to put docs... just plop it in! No collaboration tools needed for docs... just the 'sauce'.
Requirements? Use Cases? Models? Interactive Help? API documentation? (Oh, don't mention that last one... that's asking for committment! Interfaces becoming contracts... shivvver!) Not all of these are needed for each project... but c'mon these dev-o-matic sites could provide more documentation assistance and structure than "arrrr, write it by yourself and just plop it in there, matey!"
You kept presenting FOSS developers with what professional programmers call "Use Cases".
But FOSS projects lacking professional developers (almost all of them) do not record, maintain and abide by the Use Cases (the anticipated behaviors and desires) of their claimed target audience.
It becomes apparent that professionals are eager to please and commit to their target audience (in return for money primarily), but that hackers are mostly interested in impressing each other.
This is true even when you look at intensive GUI development. The FOSS projects that go whole-hog on GUIs tend to be candy-laden for sure, but poorly match user expectations and workflow.
I should state now that I think Mozilla and OO.org are the exceptions. Their background developer culture is professional. But I wish there were more of these exceptions.
From the article: "We want less people hacking on frameworks and more people hacking on applications that use frameworks. It's not a technical problem so much as a social one."
We've got people who like OS hacking. But because no one has committed to a minimum specification aimed at the desktop, all creative types are likely to see is shifting sand where they cannot build or distribute without dozens more headaches than in a structured environment.
'Linux' is frightening to someone, say, with a lot of interest in small business accounting or background in the arts and who just wants a consistent framework for expressing themselves. People who aren't "systems oriented" need a less chaotic environment in which to learn and build.
OTOH end-users are frequently pressured into installing software ONLY from their distro's central repository. So the power users (people who like to sample and compare many different apps) among them are likely to feel very constrained, or that "nothing works" when they download software independantly-- The result is they forget about 'Linux' and about recommending it to family and coworkers.
Take a look at Mac download sites like MacUpdate and Versiontracker: Notice anything? Little bits and pieces of the OS are NOT dominant on the menu!
I suppose the upcoming LSB Desktop spec will be a big step in the right direction. There will be quite a few distros supporting it in short order.
Until then, Mr. Bacon should be reminded that no "Linux" exists which has real meaning to an end-user. They can't bring the "Linux" moniker into a CompUSA and use it to shop. If you wanted to open a "LinuxMall.com" online, what on earth would your criteria be for Linux-compatible products?! Plain LSB perhaps, but then that doesn't cover GUIs so you are back at the servers market selling to people who know more than you.
Now, what about those drivers...
And when watchdogs explain to the press that certain machnes have odd RF emissions, what do you think the public reaction will be? Would you like your picture to be shown on newscasts with your occupation of Engineer completely supplanted by the subtitle "Conspiracy Theorist"?
Physical evidence in punchcard form is difficult enough to present seriously. Adding esoterics like EM signatures and explanations made extremely complex due to your suggested layers of indirection would probably hurt democracy more than help.
As for its potential to help, I doubt it even more since broad conspiracies aren't necessary. You only need 2-3% offset in a couple of swing states.
Voting is a simple, infrequent process that gains nothing from computers. One we get past the simplest of electronic aids, then we are smothering it in the trappings of technolust.
The argument that goes "You have nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong" is a fallacy advanced by pro-authoritarian people.
The government doesn't belong having absolute knowledge of our private lives, because then the burden to be law-abiding becomes infinite. The temptation to miscontrue "illegal" patterns becomes too great for abusers to resist: Even if the courts do get involved (and discern every case correctly) then the powerful still have a tool for limitless harassment of opposition groups and scapegoats. Ultimately, people who are disliked and disrespected will tend to go to jail for something anyway, since few people lead perfectly-legal lives.
OTOH they can bring people in for possibly assisting terrorists, and they disappear. There's an "endless war" on, ya know.
But modern voting arrangements ARE inspected by average citizens. Lookup voting and transparency.
And yes, where punchcards and marked paper ballots are concerned, all of the logical interactions (up until you get to the electoral college in the US) can be seen plainly. Particularly during a recount (which, by the way, purely computerized systems cannot even accomodate).
The only exception seems to be the optical-scan paper ballots. Even so, its a slight exception where off-the-shelf and rather simplistic ICs are used to sense light/dark in particular spots. Very many engineers can thoroughly grasp and audit these machines. And in a recount, those optical ballots are counted by hand anyway so the logic comes into plain view again.
Paperless BBV is exceptionally anti-democratic. Its medievalism with a high-tech gloss. A billion angels gathered on the head of a pin to witness a "yeah" or a "nay". So grossly overwrought, for what?
One of the requirements if that you can audit the machine, physically, down to the last bit and gate. That isn't realistic today to have people in various locales faced with splitting open ICs and putting them under electron microscopes.
Ask yourself this: If someone took the innards from a C64 emulator joystick, and used it in a voting machine based on a C64... how would you know the CPU is a real 6510 and not a fake programmed to behave like one under most circumstances? Are not older CPUs emulated today with microcode, by corporations and hobbyists alike?
Even proprietary software can be reverse-engineered. But IC internals??
The only possible saving grace for BBV that I can see is voter-verified paper ballots (and you only get to use them during a recount). But then why use computers at all? Filling a circle on a piece of paper and feeding it into an optical reader is much cheaper and less prone to tampering and equipment failure.
There can be no hidden or inaccessible logic in the voting booth.
It is incompatible with anonymous voting by definition.
I see what you're saying, but I don't think this level of effort and engineering (and expense) would be sustained by your average voting precinct. Plus it puts the mechanics of voting into extremely esoteric categories that not even most engineers can follow through A-Z.
How many people can slice open ICs and perform a full logical audits? Do you get the idea that the equipment is effectively un-auditable? Since WHEN is "no physical audit" allowed in a democracy that claims transparent voting???
Because of this, it should be clear that anyone refusing to print physical ballots, at least until these problems are resolved, must be either incompetent or up to mischief.
That is IF they are resolved, and I don't think they ever will. The industry is already working hard to turn most PCs, servers, peripherals and consumer electronics into TC-DRM nervous systems that honor the interests of large conglomerates, not the rights of the people. If industry suddenly considers the public to be untrustworthy and restict our data processing options within our own homes, then we ought to consider the industry doubly untrustworthy in the voting booth.
Before the colonies, most of those societies were tribal and very collectivist.
The great preponderance of activity within African colonies has been that of traders and religious missionaries. An examination of seaport activity and settlements should tell you that. The sustained whirlwind of precious minerals, gems, crops, fuel, drugs, real estate and labor knows no equal from public sector OR military.
Colonialism didn't bring collectivism to Africa; it turned regional governments into unaccountable counterfeits. And it unleashed a lot of religious medievalists on the continent who were beoming unpopular at home; So while Europe embraced progressive humanism, the colonies were intensifying the habit of arbitrary sectarianism abroad.
Like many history books, you are yourself transfixed by officialdom. Its the only face of responsibility you'll accept for humanity's follies. In this respect, you appear to have the same instincts as corporatists (those persistently name-changing shields against responsibility); they want government to accept responsibility for all the power they wield away from the TV cameras and for the failures of the culture they promote ceaselessly on-camera. They hide behind the responsibility of the 'individual' corporation when they must to spare individuals in their elite circle, yet want individuals to take the brunt for misdeeds when they happen to be poor.
Individual responsibility is fine. But who does it realistically apply to? Some want it only for relatively poor people, whether they admit this to themselves or not, and their actions show it.
People are social every bit as much as we are individuals. These are two qualities either of which can be reinforced in positive or negative ways: We can lean toward nurturing, or toward militarism. But we NEED organization to be effective, and we need a uniform background of enforced rules in order to grow. So you're stuck with collectivism forever I'm afraid.
And we all must be vigilant about this effective power. That is what democratic accountability is for; We have recourse when a less-than-perfect system takes on too many negligent or malicious characteristics.
Besides democracy, the other side of the collectivist coin is money. You can't escape that either. Money, being an abstraction, can turn into avarice and gross indifference if our whole daily experience is filtered through it. Whereas whole lives filtered through the state (or the tribe) can lead to mob mentality.
We are in trouble because so much of our national indentity and habits are tied-up in sham virtues relating to our collective and individual selves. Corporation = Individual person (lie). Washington = Public interest (lie). There is an increasing tendency to label something as its opposite in order to conceal a growing military-industrial complex that has little to do with government by the people. "Government" doesn't cause these problems; a culture fed on propaganda from 98% for-profit media does. And these industries (on behalf of shareholders) want their services (and revenue stream) to come between you and everything else in your life. The less domestic governing power an increasingly sham government has, the more control their execs and major stockholders can exercise from their bank accounts.
The GDP is supposed to be a measure of our education effort, but the GDP means jack; Chairs shuffling on the deck of the Titanic at a mile per minute does not indicate the shuffling isn't caused by a destructive force such as piloting a ship into an iceberg. To borrow another metaphor: In real terms the chocolate ration has been reduced from 40 grams to 30, but we can think of it relative to financial activity in the aftermath of Katrina and celebrate it an increase. Its an Orwellian yardstick in reverse- a concealment of how we squander vast ill-gotten resources by wallowing in myopia and self-interest, instead of focusing on empowerment through education and infrastructure.
Mass empowerment is too uncomfortable.
Right. Its similar to handing blueprints to a committee and insisting they have audited the innards of a machine as a result. A real audit consists of comparing the intended design with the physical reality.
And no independant entity can audit billions of transitors, plus every algorithm down to the last bit, in a timely manner.
It only takes one bit to throw an election.
No one claims that analog elections with physical evidence is perfect. But black box electronics are completely IMPERFECT for the task of recording important, anonymous transactions.
Without receiving a printed ballot, the voter NEVER EVEN SEES the electronic "ballot" hidden in the computer. They only see an indirect representation on the screen. That is not voting.
Instead of "Bush sucks", can these findings be leveraged into a call for increased voting software transparency, i.e. 100% FOSS?
FOSS is not the answer in this case because, like the proprietary code, it doesn't leave a robust forensic trail. We are talking about billions of transistors per machine just to record a handful of A, B, C, D choices per person. And those choices are stored as bits, the most fleeting and maleable information construct. AND one side of the transaction is always anonymous.
These elements just do not mix.
OSS would be a nice touch. But what's more, on top of all this you have silicon components that are balooning in complexity from an industry that is intent on surruptitiously limiting and manipulating software in TC fashion. Can you open the hood of these ICs to check their "mechanical" properties? No. VERY FEW people acquire familiarity with the outward behaviors of these machines because they are seldom-used and not under the constant gaze of hackers in their basement or admins in a server room.
And its all to provide patrons of the corporatist party with a wholly unnecessary cash cow.
Of course, it would just KILL these companies to sell machines that print a voter-verified ballot. A physical entity! Oh, the expense!!!
Bottom-line is: They can call an array of bits hidden within the machine a "ballot". But that does not make it appropriate for anonymous transactions carrying such high stakes.
Gound Fault Circuit Interrupters? The outlets in my house don't have grounds!!!
But your coffeemaker has plenty, so don't worry.
Sounds like system problems or a slow link.
:-)
Also, fish uses an SSL encryption layer. Your 286 machine does?
For the record, whatever gripes people might have about the UI, KDE is the faster and more stable environment. That much is well-known. The project doesn't deal with stability issues and other bugs by saying "Ehhh... people don't NEED that feature anyway. *CHOP*".
IMHO people don't need Gnome.
Well you could check out Xandros Linux (Debian/KDE based). They've had a disk encryption panel in Kcontrol for quite some time now.
Not to mention that these 'free' services actually PAY for their bandwidth.
Hello???
Perhaps the article should be re-headlined: "ISPs And Backbones Not Keeping-Up With Demand?"
The author is probably dense, or a suck-up.
If you are, I hope you know that the U.S. spends more per capita and percentage of GDP each year on disaster preparedness, and the government is spending billions to rebuild after Katrina.
;-)
Sounds like poor value for our dollar then. I think they probably outsource too much.
Seriously, I've heard all the extremist libertarian gospel before, and the lame excuses for Republican mismanagement which to any outsider looks like corporatists (actual former corporate execs almost to a person) starving and sabotaging the government. These opinions are a dime a dozen on all the American whiteboy sites. Government = socialism. Imperialism = socialism. Whatever.
You could perhaps do us a favor and move to a relatively lawless region like the Congo for five years, then report back with your experiences. I'll wait!
Bye.
It was the massive expansion of government powers and resources which facilited westward expansion and the inevitable genocide.
Except when genocide goes relatively unnoticed, as it did with the slave trade and its gross negligence toward human life.
I also do not agree that any diverse movement like socialism or capitalism must be equivalent to its most extreme element. That's just a double standard usually employed by extremists from the "other side". In your case, you even go as far as implying that the sins of all states are the sins of socialism, even when those are fostering capitalism.
Mass murder, racism, genocide, and war are simply the most ugly extreme of collectivism and anti-individualism.
Yet a right-wing collectivism like racism is not interchangeable with a form that is based on universal human rights.
It all comes down to whether someone is trying to sell you extremism in terms of either ideas or deeds. That's where today's individualists need to take a good long look in the mirror while they reflect on the third-world tradgedy that transpired on the Gulf Coast last year. Maybe they could ask how much money they saved through extreme indifference; It would be a start.
That's like saying democracy is racist and genocidal, because Americans slayed the native population and enslaved people for their own personal benefit under democracy's banner. What about THOSE millions of people? Or the ones in Southeast Asia for that matter?
Communism did not stop genocidal tendencies that existed in the East during the first few decades. But that does not indicate the ideology provides particular justification for genocide.
If anything, this only proves that violent revolution opens the door to murderous scoundrels.
A user should not have to go that far.
An OS should enforce a standard image overlay (like a red circle or arrow) on all executables. Its astounding to me that no OS in wide use will consistently show code and data as distinct.
Sometimes an application's associated types have the SAME icon as the app itself! We can blame users for laxity, but developers have done their part in confusing code/data in their minds.
Where Mac OS, Windows and all the rest fail is that they don't enforce strong visual cues for executables.
I have said this before: Superimpose all representations of executables with a red circle or red border, and these trojans will become an endangered species!
Stop confusing data and code in the minds of users!
I just loaded FF 1.5.0.1 and Opera 8.5 on Mac OSX 10.3.9 (iBook G4 1.2GHz 768M) each with identical nine tabs:
Firefox: 54.15M (Real) 190.07M (VM) ; 2.1% idle
Opera : 59.36M (Real) 239.66M (VM) ; 0.4% idle
Assessment: This Firefox outperforms both Opera and Safari in memory usage, and is faster than Opera on challenging pages. However it has the least favorable idling habits, starting at 2% here and would climb to 4% after several days of intensive use. FF 1.5.0.1 memory use would climb to about 100M for the same pages over the same period, indicating the cache grows somewhat but not wildly the way FF 1.5 did.
The test of also rather unfair, as I have 7 FF extensions running.
On OS X 10.3, Firefox 1.5 was the CPU & memory hog. But I have been using 1.5.0.1 extensively and it is MUCH better. It even seems to use les memory than Safari.
I still would like to see better idling behavior (I'm not entirely comfortable with 4% usage) but 1.5 was 3x as bad.
I'm not sure, but everyone has to pay bills.
Would you rather consumer goods become more expensive to pay for the channels through advertising, and turn them into garbage to boot?