because US laws and export restrictions never change. ever.
When it comes to Cuba, that's pretty much a given. Cuba has vowed to keep their current system in perpetuity and the US has vowed never to lift the embargoes as long as that is the case. That impasse is enforced by the Cuban expatriates and disgruntled corporations on the US side and the Castros and people with deep distrust of the US on the Cuban side. Not only is neither side budging, they aren't even discussing, or daring to suggest that they might consider, the possibility of change.
"Well, according to Netcraft, the libertarians, communists and independent parties's sites are all running Linux. The American Green party is running FreeBSD."
So... Netcraft confirms American democracy* is dead?
I highly doubt someone running for President of the US (or any country for that matter) cares, or even knows what fucking OS his web site runs, or if it's done in ASP or PHP.
And that's precisely our problem. The people running this country have no clue when it comes to technology, which puts us in a bad situation when you consider that they are charged with regulating and stimulating the growth of this technology. Then consider the fact that our enemies use technology against us and that we are competing strenuously with other countries in the tech realm. The candidates don't even know what is going on in the tech world, much less do they have any tech skills, which puts us at a competitive disadvantage and increases the likelihood that bad decisions will continue to be made with respect to technology.
I was surprised that Obama and Clinton had actually started putting videos on youtube, as this indicates that someone in their campaigns understand some of the dynamics of current online phenomena, but even so they have shown that they don't truly understand what technological events like the rise of youtube represent and what they mean to us, because they don't understand the technology in the least. Consider Obama's statement that he did not think anyone in his office was savvy enough to create the infamous 1984 ad. It turned out that someone who had worked for his campaign had done it, but it was obvious to everyone who knew anything about this sort of thing that whereas it was good work and fairly creative, it was a project that current technology makes relatively simple using commonly available desktop tools.
As long as politicians are mired in old thinking and do not understand current technology we will continue to have problems with the way technology is regulated and how it is being incentivised (or not). These basic tech problems and the problems with IP law are much larger than our government weasels seem to understand, and this has a direct impact on everything we are doing, the economy, the energy crisis, the war, the war on terror, etc. Until we get some people in office who "get it" we are headed for serious trouble.
We tried that with Micro$oft but they just turned around a bought all the politicians.
Which might have been the real goal in the first place. Before the Microsoft trial Microsoft did not hire lobbyists. Now they have lobbyists in Washington and make regular political contributions like everyone else. They basically learned to "play ball" and the politicians not only left them alone, but starting doing things for them.
Hmm, except salamanders don't have teeth or attack things quite like that...though I agree that's probably the 'obvious' correlation to be found.
The tongue in cheek correlation I see is that of an alligator. Gerrymandering...alligator...swing state...surely not;)
Not the real salamander, the mythological one which the name comes from. Salamanders were monsters that lived in hell or inside volcanoes, and might have teeth as well. In medieval times wizards and alchemists were thought to have traffic with salamanders and demons. The connotation of evil and of power granted by traffic with evil powers and giving oneself over to evil must surely have had more to do with the creation of the word Gerrymander than the real creature, which is completely harmless and has no negative connotation at all.
If I got him right he agrees with the impossibility to keep the incumbents in their seats. I.e. he thinks it's a good thing that you cannot "win" the last scenario.
I thought he meant that turnover in this particular game would be a good thing, i.e. the incumbants losing their seats would be good, especially when you consider that once this change is made to the districts the future winners of elections would have to appeal to a broader base of diverse people rather than the narrow base they can pander to now and still win.
"Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game"
Your post getting +5 is a great example of how cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence. If you remove the "+5 Cynical", your post says nothing and contributes nothing to the discussion, in fact it's silly: Politics isn't a game, it's real and affects real peoples' lives.
It depends on your definition of "game." American football is a game, but it's real and affects people's lives. It has a major effect on the economies of large cities. So your disqualification would seem not to work here. Real-world impact of a game's outcome has no bearing on the definition of a game, whether it be a game in the traditional sense like basketball, or a game like politics or the stock market, which are games according to sociological and philosophical observation.
It seems you have made the common error of associating frivolity with the idea of a game. In English, the concept of games has been linked, in some people's minds inextricably, with the concept of frivolity. But while play and games can be frivolous they do not have to be so and are not always seen that way by the players. This would especially be true in the case of games where there is a sense of extreme competition and real-world impact, which would seem to be the case here. It's probably true that some of the participants of this particular game view it somewhat frivolously, in the sense that they are simply having fun, without losing their sense of competition; this was the case with some of the more famous entrepeneurs of the late 19th and early 20th century as regards the game of wealth-building. But there are probably others in politics who view it as a game and treat it as such while also treating it very seriously. For them politics would be a game which they mean to win, which is incredibly competitive; this is no different from the first case, but the distinction in the second case lies in impact. For these players the cost of losing is very great because they would feel that failure to win the game of politics would mean failure in the larger game of the determinance of the fate of the human race, or at the very least their particular plitical unit (city, state, country).
I think it's important to analyse this particular case. If you think about it, even a sincere politician who believes fervently in their stated ends must realize that they will not have the chance of implementing their ideas without winning the game of politics. This would probably lead to even more extreme measures than would the contest of those who view the game frivolously. For them the game would be very much like the game of war, in which the result of the other team winning is horrible in itself to contemplate, and the repercussions of being the loser even more horrible because the winner is also winning the right to dominance in that particular case. In politics, as in war, the winner of the game determines the future of the loser, who is at his/her mercy, as is everyone the loser cares about. For someone who is sincere in their beliefs this would be completely unacceptable, and it is possible that such a person would then do anything to win, perhaps even thinhgs they might otherwise not do, like cheating.
Price fixing on a massive scale and the original inventors of Regional Lockout(TM)?
Not to mention stifling innovation by draconian licensing restrictions. In some cases Nintendo would approve a project, allow a company to spend money and time on it, then pull out at the last minute. The most egregious of these was when a certain company worked with Nintendo on a new color portable game system that would play NES games as well as gameboy games. After the company developed the technology and made a few million of them Nintendo decided at the last minute not to allow the devices to be sold. This left the developer in the cold, as well as the users since nothing comparable was ever made or allowed by Nintendo.
There were also assorted debacles over licensing for third party controllers and various games, which ended up with some popular games and controllers being made in defiance of Nintendo, resulting in extra-long lawsuits.
Then there were the exclusivity agreements, which got so insane that even Nintendo was locking out itself. Games like the Zelda series, for instance, only being available on a given version of the Nintendo console. To this day, unless you can emulate some of them, you would have to get a complete set of Nintendo game consoles to play all the Zeldas.
This whole line of reasoning has always struck me as a rather disingenuous argument, because proponents of the "Well, the SSID was broadcast and there was no key required, so obviously it's free for anyone to use" theory never offer any criteria for exactly how much the owner of a wireless access point needs to do before random clients can "assume" it's not intended for public use.
I see your point and I do understand where you are coming from on this, but the problem is a bit sticky.
For instance, where I live, and probably where most people live these days, pretty much every business around from the local hamburger joint to the local bar, etc advertises free wifi. Many if not most of them simply set up an AP with a broadcast SSID and have done. The people who work there may not even know what the SSID is, but they expect you to just search and find it, which you can. In several places there is overlap between these APs from businesses and similarly configured APs from regular folk. Sometimes the SSID is obvious, like $RESTAURANT, but sometimes it's just the default Linksys SSID or whatever. There are services that help these folks set up their networks and require some kind of authentication over ssl to actually get out to the net, etc, or will just set up the system for you in some other way, but those cost money, and, like I said, many small businesses find it simpler to just fire up an AP out of the box and hook it up.
I have also noted that since encryption adds significant overhead to wifi connections, making them in many cases many times slower than without, people will open the network for that reason alone. The 11mbps connections were especially nasty that way.
Then you have your neighbour problem. Sure it's not anything like the situation with getting connected to an open wifi connection run by a business, but even so there are people who deliberately set their wifi networks as open networks that broadcast their SSID specifically because they want people to be able to use them. There are even clubs that work together to convince people to set their networks up this way, and set their own up this way, specifically so people can use them.
Given all that and the permissive nature of these networks, a culture is brewing such that people do not see connecting to open networks as wrong, and often do not care that people connect to theirs. In my experience, this is actually more the rule than the exception, even with non-technical users.
Now we come to your point. For instance the person who just got wifi and has no idea other people can connect to it, etc, who barely struggled through the instructions and has no idea how to monitor the connection. This is the guy I am sure your worry most about. It's not their fault they did not secure their network, per se, and it is not fair in any case for people to just use their stuff because the "door is open" and the "keys are in it" or whatever analogy you like today. But at the same time it's hard to draw the line between legitemately using an open network and using one that was not supposed to be open. Sometimes, in fact, it's the proverbial "clueless user" who ends up on the wrong network thinking he is on his own. It's even weirder when they are both called "Linksys." How is he supposed to know? I actually got onto my girlfriend once for getting on someone else's network, but she not only did not know she'd done that, but did not know at the time how she could have told what network she was on. (She is more expert now).
Usually people that are connecting to other's networks are not doing anything more nefarious than using someone else's bandwidth. I do know some people who deliberately set up open networks had to close them because some one did try to hack the other boxes on their home network. In any case, it is probaly is a good idea not to connect to networks not your own unless you know it is open on purpose. In the case of the neighbour you can generally ask, and I
I'm not entirely into the details, but according to this [ipurbia.com] article the patents include the briliant idea to connect a voip network with the pots network. Anyone trying to patent something that obvious is a patent troll to me.
It's not just obvious, but not even novel. First off, VOIP is not by any means a new technology. The way it is currently being marketed is somewhat new, but before the big phone companies started doing this there were a lot of little companies that were trying to innovate in this area only to be swatted by the big phone companies. Second, the connection between POTS and internet telephony is not new either; the aforementioned companies were doing this stuff back in the mid-to-late nineties. These patents are from 2001/2/3. The phone companies know all of this because they were the ones trying to stop telephony from leaking onto the internet, until they were able to move into the situation they are in now, where they are the ones setting the prices and making the money instead of free services and other low cost alternatives eating their bottom line. The result has been lesser technology for higher prices under the guise of innovation.
Even if you ignore the fact that these technologies and even their specific application to the internet are not new, nothing else described in the patents is any different than what has been done in telco systems for around a hundred years. You can't suggest that switching systems based on numbers and billing people for the calls is really an innovation in a sane world. It's not just BS, it is a many-layered onion of recursive BS, which is BS on so many levels it is astounding that anyone is seriously contemplating the idea that the situation as it stands might be justified.
he's not a US citizen, so he doesn't get the same protections and access to a legal trial that a citizen of the US does. It sucks, but nothing about war is ever great.
Actually that is not true. Not only does the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also defines what a citizen is protect all persons within the States
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
but there are several treaties which we have signed which would likewise require due process. This notion that non-citizens do not have rights has been perpetuated as fact in order to justify the mistreatment of non-citizens. In any case, some of the people who are in GITMO are citizens of the United States, and many other have been citizens of countries with which we are not at war, including the UK.
This country was founded on the principal that all men are created equal and thus have equal rights under the law. Until recently we were in a business of perpetuating that idea. Now some people are trying to change our mission and justify activities that most people would normally consider un-American with bogus legal arguments that anyone with a 7th grade education should not be making, much less the Attorney General of the United States.
This guy has actually proposed completely reinterpreting the Constitution such that anything not specifically spelled out in the Constitution is not a protected right. Not only is that backwards, he has even made that argument about things that are spelled out in the Constitution. How a lawyer gets anywhere by saying "this is the law because I say so" as a legal argument is beyond me, but this is what we have now.
Anyway, I know you have a bunch of White House officials suggesting and talk show hosts outright saying that you can do whatever you want with non-citizens because they don't have rights. I know that this message is being trumpeted loud and clear on every channel, especially some particular ones. But it is not true, has never been true, and people only believe it because it is a lie that has been repeated enough.
There are a whole lot of false messages in the media which tend to have common threads. You're supposed to think for yourself and maybe wonder "why are they telling me this, particularly this way?" Like all the time spent covering the story that Obama was substituted for Osama in a CNN news story. Or the endless repeating of the word "madrassa" without a single mainstream journalist (John Stewart was the only person on a major television series who brought it up) pointing out that this is the word for school in Arabic. Followed by tape of people saying they thught Obama was a terrorist. When you see a news story you need to realize there is always an idea for sale here. And sometimes you have to learn not to buy it.
What makes you think they didn't? If you look the case up almost anywhere other than the crappy source linked in the summary, you'll find that they did indeed have an attorney. It still took twelve days to get the charges (of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, no less) dropped, and then the state authorities tried to have him held for a psychiatric evaluation because he had refused to admit to the charges.
Your link confirmed my suspicion, which is that the IT department (or worse, lack thereof), screwed this one up. There was a funny bit about this on the local news here about the 911 call center's plans for DST. The IT department had set up central time syncronization and was busy making sure all the relevant systems were patched so that DST would be properly rendered. Yet the most often asked question, including by the reporter covering the story (which was later asked, eerily, by the knobs that read news at CNN), was "Why do you need to apply the patch? Can't we just set our clocks manually?"
To anyone who knows anything about clocks or computers, the answer is obvious and the fact someone could be clueless enough to ask that question, especially when it comes to 911 center computers or those o fa major news organization, just boggles the mind. But when at a loss for an answer, this story provides a ready one. We do it that way to prevent this very shit from happening. Thank God the cell phone company had the right timestamps in their computers. I guess that means their IT people weren't nimrods and weren't prevented from doing their job by nimrods.
BTW, even with the lack of an IT department someone has to be responsible for maintaining the system just like someone is responsible for cleaning the floor. These things don't run themselves. And they should have remembered that they manually set the clocks forward over a day late when they were accusing this guy. Especially since they did this manually, and the Principal herself knew all about it.
From the newly linked article:
High school Principal Kathy Charlton confirmed that some of the district's clocks were wrong because of the changeover to daylight-saving time, which was three weeks earlier this year.
"All the time stamps were screwed up. Some did (change over), some didn't," Charlton said. "Everyone's system had to be set manually. There were a lot of clocks involved."
Man it would be a disaster. He would either get his ass kicked by someone, or lose the deal because he thought he could hold the con call from the airplane.
You know all these people talking about ass kicking in this story amuse me. First off, I doubt most of them have ever kicked an ass in their life. Second, there is only one guy who is allowed to kick ass on an airplane and that is an air marshal. Anyone else trying to step in his territory is going to get their ass kicked and then they are going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for committing multiple felonies. Third, if someone really is being an ass on the plane the authorities will be taking care of that themselves; after all we are talking about a new world of air travel where failure to obey a flight attendant is a felony in itself. Even before that it was a serious crime to cause a major disturbance on an airplane; now there is more than zero tolerance. The guy running up and down the aisle screaming will be ordered to go back to his seat and be quiet; if he fails to comply he will be put in his place by the people whose job it is to do so.
How about the fact that Cellular phones don't work in the air? That should be enough reason to not use them on a plane.
If that were true, then none of the calls made on 9/11 would have worked. But the fact is that hundreds of people were using their cell phones on planes that day. Not only did the calls go through, but the use of these phones did not cause the planes to crash and did not result in any kind of cell phone interferance.
As far as the "scientific evidence" is concerned, cell phone companies and air travel regulatory agecies have resisted all attempts at gathering such evidence. You don't have to test this by flying in a plane, either. The one study which was allowed to be conducted was in the UK, reported on slashdot, and at the very least showed that normal usage of a cell phone in the passenger compartment of an airplane could not possibly interfere with the plane's controls and communications. Likewise, testing of the effect of such usage on the cellular network could be performed without endagering anyone's lives, using UAVs, computer simulations, and other techniques. It simply does not serve the purpose of the telcos to do this, and in the end it's research that will not result in new products that make people money, so why should they fund it? The only part of the cellular phone system that is not designed to handle this kind of thing is the billing system and the deals cellular phone companies make regarding roaming charges, etc.
How can e-mail be that valuable? If anything important is received, it should be copied to a file. After all, e-mail is not a filing system. There a major gaps between correspondence even between project members. The advent of large hard drives just makes it easy to not delete anything from the mailbox.
An email is a file. That's how it works. It's just that some email clients store those files within databases or something instead, which just opens up a bunch of unnecessary problems. I'm sure there are some arguments for search efficiency in binary database files, but IMHO they are immediately outweighed by vendor lockin, the results of corruption, and a host of other problems that go away when we go back to treating email as it is. That's another reason I prefer sylpheed. All my email is stored as text files that can easily be manipulated, transferred, and read by any program. One file getting corrupted is not going to render my whole inbox unreadable.
Or you could just use Opera or any other email client to download the webmail to your machine like any sane person would do. Why would you want to keep your messages on a remote server?
So that you can access it from anywhere without setting up a server yourself. Or access it if your desktop machine dies. I use sylpheed to get my gmail, but I leave it on google's servers also. I have so far found this was a better idea than deleting it because of those very cases. The main reason to delete mail from the server is to save space and meet the requirements. Even then it sucks becuse your desktop/laptop system is less reliable and uses a much less reliable drive. You can back your mail up, but this ignores the fact of the increased risk to which you are placing your data. Yes, I know that it is better to set up your own server with redundancy, etc than to rely on an external entity to keep your mail safe, and you'd be insane to rely on such things for your business. However for the individual this solution makes more sense, and even in a business environment it is best to leave as much on the mail server as you reasonably can in order to increase the likelihood that you can access your mail.
The question is whether the GPL (any version) is harder to understand than any other licence. If not, then you don't need a lawyer just for the GPL v3.No, you are wrong. All of us who agree to those contracts (EULAs) are crossing our fingers and hoping it all works out or are ignorant of the law. As individual users we do not, so far(we'll see), have much to worry about when we blindly agree to those EULAs.
But as a developer or corporate user, I have much to worry about.
No sir, I like to have my ducks in a row as much as I can and I don't like gambling too much as you suggested.
And to add, considering your comment, I can tell that you're not a lawyer and you're assertions that there isn't a problem should be ignored.
If you are serious about this sort of thing then you should consult an attorney as you suggested. I would not think you necessarily have to retain one, though it's always a good idea to have one on hand for other complexities of running a business. I've never done this myself, but I understand there are attorneys who will go over a contract for you for a few hundred dollars. It's not like there's a shortage of competition.
You could always use the BSD license instead; after all, it has been described as giving complete freedom even if you want to make a baby-mulching machine with the software. Or there's the Bugroff License, which was clearly created to answer this very problem. There used to be a "Penis Bird Troll" on slashdot who created the "Penis Bird License," which was simply "no restrictions on use." The problem with the Bugroff and Penis Bird licenses is that they seem a bit frivolous and their humour might backfire in that on the one hand, especially in the latter case, it might be difficult to market your software to some companies under such a license just because of the name, and on the other hand, it probably would agitate lawyers.
If you're distributing your own original work, you can use whatever license you want. You can even hire someone to write it for you. If you are going to use other people's work you have to learn what the license means, and a lawyer is always a good idea when it comes to these kinds of questions. You do have one additional recourse in that the FSF does employ lawyers and are more than happy to discuss and explain the GPL to you including any implications from the specific application you intend. If getting advice from the people who wrote both the software and the license, the latter with the help of their lawyers, is not enough then you are definitely right about needing a lawyer.
Personally, I would think that before I got too far in running a business I would make sure I either had money to hire one, or, failing that, that I knew one I could get hold of and pay for these sorts of things. I think most people fall into the latter category (individuals and small businesses) and as I said lawyers can be had for piecemeal jobs like that for reasonable prices specifically because they know this is a market where they can thrive. Believe me as scary as the GPL may seem to you in terms of complexity there are far more dangerous hazards to be faced in business, what with liability, contracts, etc. I'd be willing to bet that you're more likely to be sued by an angry customer than you are by the FSF.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), this might give the MPAA ideas about courtesy in theaters...
I have to say I am one of those people who disagrees with the rules against cell phones. I think stopping people from using them in stores/bars, in planes/trains, and in their cars is just silly, though in the case of cars I do think people should use handsfree. It's just that most handsfree solutions seem to suck. I certainly haven't found a decent solution for that despite many attempts.
However, when it comes to theatres I have to say there is no reason to allow people to use cell phones in theatres. If you think you're going to have to take a call you need to put the phone on vibrate and go outside to talk.
As a matter of fact, my favorite theatre has a rule about that. At the beginning of each movie they display a warning: "If you talk or use your cell phone during this movie we will take your ass out." It usually is in bold colours, like all in red, accompanied by an incredibly violent graphic of semirandom choice. There are a lot of things I like about that theatre, but this has to be the best feature. They also have a rule against bringing in children under a certain age, or children making noise. The only problem with this rule is that they do have a "whining baby night" or something like that, on tuesdays. I thought it was funny when someone who was new in town had the unfortunate experience of going on that night without knowing the rule. I was glad to find that it is definitely a good idea to avoid that night like the plague, which is an indication of why it is also good they have that rule in place on other nights.
I think they do sometimes waive the baby rule for the daytime showings of kid's films, but not for the showings at night. This way Linux gurus over 30 can slake their shameful, secret, Harry Potter habit without having to deal with a bunch of young children being loud during the movie.
Humans have been scrutinizing Mars to the best of their ability given available technology for centuries. We have sent probes to map the surface multiple times and robots to probe in various ways. And all this time we missed seven caves whose openings were larger than football fields (and in some cases larger than two football fields) which just happen to be near one of the most prominent features we know about. Whether these features are caves or not, the facts of their size and location should be a wakeup call to us as far as the limitations of our efforts thus far. Who knows what else we are missing; one must also wonder at the difficulty of finding microbes on a planet where we were unable to detect features of this size.
I hope one day we can place colonies on Mars, as inhospitable as it is. Once we have done that we will be in a better position to explore the planet as we have ours. Every time we think we have found everything worth finding on Mars and further exploration will not yield any results that change our impression that it is a dull, lifeless planet whose only saving grace is that it is nearby we find something that surprises us. We can only hope this trend continues.
For recourse, they have the letter of the law as it pertains to the language in their contract. Unfortunately, the contract probably has a clause that makes an exemption for damages that result from compliance with lawful orders of law enforcement authorities.
But these would not seem to be lawful orders. In any case this would not be legal in the US, because a warrant for one company's equipment would not cover other companies that are unrelated, and even if a judge issued a warrant broad enough to cover an entire data center it does not meet the standard for a warrant and would likely be invalidated in a higher court.
In the case of Sweden, no Swedish laws were being violated. In fact, no US laws were being violated. It is absurd that any action was taken at all, and it is just another example of Corporations ruling the US without regard to rule of law or the Constitution, then using the clout of the US military and economy to assist in their control of other countries as well.
Come now. If you aren't a gay male and think having a Mac is sexy then I am going to predict you have lots of females who view you as 'just as friend'.
Dude, chicks dig Macs. They look cool and they are more versatile when it comes to things like video editing, etc out of the box. Male slashdotters may be fine with an ancient beige box they built from dumpster dived or bargain basement parts, but some people like powerul, easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing computers. Many of those people happen to be female and to a certain degree the Mac laptop is supplanting the cute dog as a chick magnet / ice breaker. The bonus is that you can take it into more places and it won't shit in your shoes.:D
I have never gotten these little statements... "bias"... "bias" - BOTH THE SAME FREAKING WORD!
It's a difference of degree. For instance the degree of bias in BBC News reporting (where at least an attempt at objective reporting is made) and the degree of bias in Fox News, which is advertised as a far right idealogue agency (to bring balance to the news). It's like if you were to compare one room in which you find dust on the wainscotting when subjected to a white-glove test and another one that is filled with garbage, feces and dead bodies. "Well there's dirty and there's dirty." When spoken the second case is emphasized because it is greater in degree.
Business today seems to run on the notion that if it's not specifically prohibited, we should try and do it, no matter how bad it looks. I get better ethics and learning curves from my third graders.
Government seems to be going the same way. Alberto Gonzales actually made that argument before Congress when he claimed that the right to habeas corpus was not specifically granted in the Constitution. He then went on to explain other violations of our rights by saying that those exercises of power were not specifically disallowed by the Constitution. He just breezed through the incongruity of those two points of view and totally ignored the fact that all of this flies in the face of centuries of law. The system did not matter, the justification did not matter, logic did not matter. All that mattered was that they get away with doing whatever they want at any given time. The reality is that they will. No one will ever be punished for the abuses of power in our recent history, and corporations will not be punished for their abuses, either.
You, me, and any other private-sector entity do not have to explain our whims and caprices when (not) buying something (which may, actually, be unfortunate) to any one other than, perhaps, family members or stock-holders. The government, however, is legally obliged to pick the best -- all of us are the stock-holders...
Knowing the policies and the corruption levels of Taxachusetts, Diebold may well be right suspecting something foul...
Way to counter bias. It's clear you did not even read the article, which says:
Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection.
Diebold is alleging that they are clearly the best and therefore must always be picked. They are saying that the judge should award them the contract since the government made a mistake and picked a company other than theirs, which is the best. The government explained that the device they picked was reported as easier to use by disabled people and had some features which the Diebold machine lacks.
This suit was deliberately filed on the day of an election in which the machines would be used. Its very premise is frightening; according to Diebold they must be the only electronic voting machine manufacturer and whenever any other manufacturer is picked by a government entity that entity must be ordered by a judge to go with Diebold instead. It represents an attempt by a corporation to subvert the democratic process, which makes the fact they are a voting machine manufacturer even more frightening. In any case, this kind of thing cannot be allowed. Companies should not be able to sue the government every time they lose a bid for a contract. That will just create chaos and we will get even less accomplished through the government than we already do.
Slashdot Mirror
because US laws and export restrictions never change. ever.
When it comes to Cuba, that's pretty much a given. Cuba has vowed to keep their current system in perpetuity and the US has vowed never to lift the embargoes as long as that is the case. That impasse is enforced by the Cuban expatriates and disgruntled corporations on the US side and the Castros and people with deep distrust of the US on the Cuban side. Not only is neither side budging, they aren't even discussing, or daring to suggest that they might consider, the possibility of change.
"Well, according to Netcraft, the libertarians, communists and independent parties's sites are all running Linux. The American Green party is running FreeBSD."
So... Netcraft confirms American democracy* is dead?
*of the people, for the people, yada yada.
Well it doesn't take a Kreskin...
I highly doubt someone running for President of the US (or any country for that matter) cares, or even knows what fucking OS his web site runs, or if it's done in ASP or PHP.
And that's precisely our problem. The people running this country have no clue when it comes to technology, which puts us in a bad situation when you consider that they are charged with regulating and stimulating the growth of this technology. Then consider the fact that our enemies use technology against us and that we are competing strenuously with other countries in the tech realm. The candidates don't even know what is going on in the tech world, much less do they have any tech skills, which puts us at a competitive disadvantage and increases the likelihood that bad decisions will continue to be made with respect to technology.
I was surprised that Obama and Clinton had actually started putting videos on youtube, as this indicates that someone in their campaigns understand some of the dynamics of current online phenomena, but even so they have shown that they don't truly understand what technological events like the rise of youtube represent and what they mean to us, because they don't understand the technology in the least. Consider Obama's statement that he did not think anyone in his office was savvy enough to create the infamous 1984 ad. It turned out that someone who had worked for his campaign had done it, but it was obvious to everyone who knew anything about this sort of thing that whereas it was good work and fairly creative, it was a project that current technology makes relatively simple using commonly available desktop tools.
As long as politicians are mired in old thinking and do not understand current technology we will continue to have problems with the way technology is regulated and how it is being incentivised (or not). These basic tech problems and the problems with IP law are much larger than our government weasels seem to understand, and this has a direct impact on everything we are doing, the economy, the energy crisis, the war, the war on terror, etc. Until we get some people in office who "get it" we are headed for serious trouble.
We tried that with Micro$oft but they just turned around a bought all the politicians.
Which might have been the real goal in the first place. Before the Microsoft trial Microsoft did not hire lobbyists. Now they have lobbyists in Washington and make regular political contributions like everyone else. They basically learned to "play ball" and the politicians not only left them alone, but starting doing things for them.
Hmm, except salamanders don't have teeth or attack things quite like that...though I agree that's probably the 'obvious' correlation to be found.
The tongue in cheek correlation I see is that of an alligator. Gerrymandering...alligator...swing state...surely not ;)
Not the real salamander, the mythological one which the name comes from. Salamanders were monsters that lived in hell or inside volcanoes, and might have teeth as well. In medieval times wizards and alchemists were thought to have traffic with salamanders and demons. The connotation of evil and of power granted by traffic with evil powers and giving oneself over to evil must surely have had more to do with the creation of the word Gerrymander than the real creature, which is completely harmless and has no negative connotation at all.
If I got him right he agrees with the impossibility to keep the incumbents in their seats. I.e. he thinks it's a good thing that you cannot "win" the last scenario.
I thought he meant that turnover in this particular game would be a good thing, i.e. the incumbants losing their seats would be good, especially when you consider that once this change is made to the districts the future winners of elections would have to appeal to a broader base of diverse people rather than the narrow base they can pander to now and still win.
"Why is that crazy? Gerrymandering, and indeed, much of politics, is a game"
Your post getting +5 is a great example of how cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence. If you remove the "+5 Cynical", your post says nothing and contributes nothing to the discussion, in fact it's silly: Politics isn't a game, it's real and affects real peoples' lives.
It depends on your definition of "game." American football is a game, but it's real and affects people's lives. It has a major effect on the economies of large cities. So your disqualification would seem not to work here. Real-world impact of a game's outcome has no bearing on the definition of a game, whether it be a game in the traditional sense like basketball, or a game like politics or the stock market, which are games according to sociological and philosophical observation.
As far as politics goes, at least some of the participants would seem certainly to have understood it as a game in the traditional sense of the word. That is, there are winners and losers, a defined set of rules, etc. In any event, sociological analysis and game theory would, in even the most rudimentary analysis, seem to reinforce this belief. One of the more famous books that analysed sociological and psychological games was Games People Play, which among other things discussed the aspects of common social interactions which fit basic requirements for the definition of the word "game."
It seems you have made the common error of associating frivolity with the idea of a game. In English, the concept of games has been linked, in some people's minds inextricably, with the concept of frivolity. But while play and games can be frivolous they do not have to be so and are not always seen that way by the players. This would especially be true in the case of games where there is a sense of extreme competition and real-world impact, which would seem to be the case here. It's probably true that some of the participants of this particular game view it somewhat frivolously, in the sense that they are simply having fun, without losing their sense of competition; this was the case with some of the more famous entrepeneurs of the late 19th and early 20th century as regards the game of wealth-building. But there are probably others in politics who view it as a game and treat it as such while also treating it very seriously. For them politics would be a game which they mean to win, which is incredibly competitive; this is no different from the first case, but the distinction in the second case lies in impact. For these players the cost of losing is very great because they would feel that failure to win the game of politics would mean failure in the larger game of the determinance of the fate of the human race, or at the very least their particular plitical unit (city, state, country).
I think it's important to analyse this particular case. If you think about it, even a sincere politician who believes fervently in their stated ends must realize that they will not have the chance of implementing their ideas without winning the game of politics. This would probably lead to even more extreme measures than would the contest of those who view the game frivolously. For them the game would be very much like the game of war, in which the result of the other team winning is horrible in itself to contemplate, and the repercussions of being the loser even more horrible because the winner is also winning the right to dominance in that particular case. In politics, as in war, the winner of the game determines the future of the loser, who is at his/her mercy, as is everyone the loser cares about. For someone who is sincere in their beliefs this would be completely unacceptable, and it is possible that such a person would then do anything to win, perhaps even thinhgs they might otherwise not do, like cheating.
In the case
The political process in the US filters out the more altruistic politicians at the lower levels.
So what you're saying is the power gamers and gold farmers have taken over the game and ruined it for everyone else :D.
Price fixing on a massive scale and the original inventors of Regional Lockout(TM)?
Not to mention stifling innovation by draconian licensing restrictions. In some cases Nintendo would approve a project, allow a company to spend money and time on it, then pull out at the last minute. The most egregious of these was when a certain company worked with Nintendo on a new color portable game system that would play NES games as well as gameboy games. After the company developed the technology and made a few million of them Nintendo decided at the last minute not to allow the devices to be sold. This left the developer in the cold, as well as the users since nothing comparable was ever made or allowed by Nintendo.
There were also assorted debacles over licensing for third party controllers and various games, which ended up with some popular games and controllers being made in defiance of Nintendo, resulting in extra-long lawsuits.
Then there were the exclusivity agreements, which got so insane that even Nintendo was locking out itself. Games like the Zelda series, for instance, only being available on a given version of the Nintendo console. To this day, unless you can emulate some of them, you would have to get a complete set of Nintendo game consoles to play all the Zeldas.
This whole line of reasoning has always struck me as a rather disingenuous argument, because proponents of the "Well, the SSID was broadcast and there was no key required, so obviously it's free for anyone to use" theory never offer any criteria for exactly how much the owner of a wireless access point needs to do before random clients can "assume" it's not intended for public use.
I see your point and I do understand where you are coming from on this, but the problem is a bit sticky.
For instance, where I live, and probably where most people live these days, pretty much every business around from the local hamburger joint to the local bar, etc advertises free wifi. Many if not most of them simply set up an AP with a broadcast SSID and have done. The people who work there may not even know what the SSID is, but they expect you to just search and find it, which you can. In several places there is overlap between these APs from businesses and similarly configured APs from regular folk. Sometimes the SSID is obvious, like $RESTAURANT, but sometimes it's just the default Linksys SSID or whatever. There are services that help these folks set up their networks and require some kind of authentication over ssl to actually get out to the net, etc, or will just set up the system for you in some other way, but those cost money, and, like I said, many small businesses find it simpler to just fire up an AP out of the box and hook it up.
I have also noted that since encryption adds significant overhead to wifi connections, making them in many cases many times slower than without, people will open the network for that reason alone. The 11mbps connections were especially nasty that way.
Then you have your neighbour problem. Sure it's not anything like the situation with getting connected to an open wifi connection run by a business, but even so there are people who deliberately set their wifi networks as open networks that broadcast their SSID specifically because they want people to be able to use them. There are even clubs that work together to convince people to set their networks up this way, and set their own up this way, specifically so people can use them.
Given all that and the permissive nature of these networks, a culture is brewing such that people do not see connecting to open networks as wrong, and often do not care that people connect to theirs. In my experience, this is actually more the rule than the exception, even with non-technical users.
Now we come to your point. For instance the person who just got wifi and has no idea other people can connect to it, etc, who barely struggled through the instructions and has no idea how to monitor the connection. This is the guy I am sure your worry most about. It's not their fault they did not secure their network, per se, and it is not fair in any case for people to just use their stuff because the "door is open" and the "keys are in it" or whatever analogy you like today. But at the same time it's hard to draw the line between legitemately using an open network and using one that was not supposed to be open. Sometimes, in fact, it's the proverbial "clueless user" who ends up on the wrong network thinking he is on his own. It's even weirder when they are both called "Linksys." How is he supposed to know? I actually got onto my girlfriend once for getting on someone else's network, but she not only did not know she'd done that, but did not know at the time how she could have told what network she was on. (She is more expert now).
Usually people that are connecting to other's networks are not doing anything more nefarious than using someone else's bandwidth. I do know some people who deliberately set up open networks had to close them because some one did try to hack the other boxes on their home network. In any case, it is probaly is a good idea not to connect to networks not your own unless you know it is open on purpose. In the case of the neighbour you can generally ask, and I
I'm not entirely into the details, but according to this [ipurbia.com] article the patents include the briliant idea to connect a voip network with the pots network. Anyone trying to patent something that obvious is a patent troll to me.
It's not just obvious, but not even novel. First off, VOIP is not by any means a new technology. The way it is currently being marketed is somewhat new, but before the big phone companies started doing this there were a lot of little companies that were trying to innovate in this area only to be swatted by the big phone companies. Second, the connection between POTS and internet telephony is not new either; the aforementioned companies were doing this stuff back in the mid-to-late nineties. These patents are from 2001/2/3. The phone companies know all of this because they were the ones trying to stop telephony from leaking onto the internet, until they were able to move into the situation they are in now, where they are the ones setting the prices and making the money instead of free services and other low cost alternatives eating their bottom line. The result has been lesser technology for higher prices under the guise of innovation.
Even if you ignore the fact that these technologies and even their specific application to the internet are not new, nothing else described in the patents is any different than what has been done in telco systems for around a hundred years. You can't suggest that switching systems based on numbers and billing people for the calls is really an innovation in a sane world. It's not just BS, it is a many-layered onion of recursive BS, which is BS on so many levels it is astounding that anyone is seriously contemplating the idea that the situation as it stands might be justified.
he's not a US citizen, so he doesn't get the same protections and access to a legal trial that a citizen of the US does. It sucks, but nothing about war is ever great.
Actually that is not true. Not only does the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which also defines what a citizen is protect all persons within the States
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
but there are several treaties which we have signed which would likewise require due process. This notion that non-citizens do not have rights has been perpetuated as fact in order to justify the mistreatment of non-citizens. In any case, some of the people who are in GITMO are citizens of the United States, and many other have been citizens of countries with which we are not at war, including the UK.
This country was founded on the principal that all men are created equal and thus have equal rights under the law. Until recently we were in a business of perpetuating that idea. Now some people are trying to change our mission and justify activities that most people would normally consider un-American with bogus legal arguments that anyone with a 7th grade education should not be making, much less the Attorney General of the United States.
This guy has actually proposed completely reinterpreting the Constitution such that anything not specifically spelled out in the Constitution is not a protected right. Not only is that backwards, he has even made that argument about things that are spelled out in the Constitution. How a lawyer gets anywhere by saying "this is the law because I say so" as a legal argument is beyond me, but this is what we have now.
Anyway, I know you have a bunch of White House officials suggesting and talk show hosts outright saying that you can do whatever you want with non-citizens because they don't have rights. I know that this message is being trumpeted loud and clear on every channel, especially some particular ones. But it is not true, has never been true, and people only believe it because it is a lie that has been repeated enough.
There are a whole lot of false messages in the media which tend to have common threads. You're supposed to think for yourself and maybe wonder "why are they telling me this, particularly this way?" Like all the time spent covering the story that Obama was substituted for Osama in a CNN news story. Or the endless repeating of the word "madrassa" without a single mainstream journalist (John Stewart was the only person on a major television series who brought it up) pointing out that this is the word for school in Arabic. Followed by tape of people saying they thught Obama was a terrorist. When you see a news story you need to realize there is always an idea for sale here. And sometimes you have to learn not to buy it.
What makes you think they didn't? If you look the case up almost anywhere other than the crappy source linked in the summary, you'll find that they did indeed have an attorney. It still took twelve days to get the charges (of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, no less) dropped, and then the state authorities tried to have him held for a psychiatric evaluation because he had refused to admit to the charges.
Your link confirmed my suspicion, which is that the IT department (or worse, lack thereof), screwed this one up. There was a funny bit about this on the local news here about the 911 call center's plans for DST. The IT department had set up central time syncronization and was busy making sure all the relevant systems were patched so that DST would be properly rendered. Yet the most often asked question, including by the reporter covering the story (which was later asked, eerily, by the knobs that read news at CNN), was "Why do you need to apply the patch? Can't we just set our clocks manually?"
To anyone who knows anything about clocks or computers, the answer is obvious and the fact someone could be clueless enough to ask that question, especially when it comes to 911 center computers or those o fa major news organization, just boggles the mind. But when at a loss for an answer, this story provides a ready one. We do it that way to prevent this very shit from happening. Thank God the cell phone company had the right timestamps in their computers. I guess that means their IT people weren't nimrods and weren't prevented from doing their job by nimrods.
BTW, even with the lack of an IT department someone has to be responsible for maintaining the system just like someone is responsible for cleaning the floor. These things don't run themselves. And they should have remembered that they manually set the clocks forward over a day late when they were accusing this guy. Especially since they did this manually, and the Principal herself knew all about it.
From the newly linked article:
High school Principal Kathy Charlton confirmed that some of the district's clocks were wrong because of the changeover to daylight-saving time, which was three weeks earlier this year.
"All the time stamps were screwed up. Some did (change over), some didn't," Charlton said. "Everyone's system had to be set manually. There were a lot of clocks involved."
Man it would be a disaster. He would either get his ass kicked by someone, or lose the deal because he thought he could hold the con call from the airplane.
You know all these people talking about ass kicking in this story amuse me. First off, I doubt most of them have ever kicked an ass in their life. Second, there is only one guy who is allowed to kick ass on an airplane and that is an air marshal. Anyone else trying to step in his territory is going to get their ass kicked and then they are going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for committing multiple felonies. Third, if someone really is being an ass on the plane the authorities will be taking care of that themselves; after all we are talking about a new world of air travel where failure to obey a flight attendant is a felony in itself. Even before that it was a serious crime to cause a major disturbance on an airplane; now there is more than zero tolerance. The guy running up and down the aisle screaming will be ordered to go back to his seat and be quiet; if he fails to comply he will be put in his place by the people whose job it is to do so.
How about the fact that Cellular phones don't work in the air? That should be enough reason to not use them on a plane.
If that were true, then none of the calls made on 9/11 would have worked. But the fact is that hundreds of people were using their cell phones on planes that day. Not only did the calls go through, but the use of these phones did not cause the planes to crash and did not result in any kind of cell phone interferance.
As far as the "scientific evidence" is concerned, cell phone companies and air travel regulatory agecies have resisted all attempts at gathering such evidence. You don't have to test this by flying in a plane, either. The one study which was allowed to be conducted was in the UK, reported on slashdot, and at the very least showed that normal usage of a cell phone in the passenger compartment of an airplane could not possibly interfere with the plane's controls and communications. Likewise, testing of the effect of such usage on the cellular network could be performed without endagering anyone's lives, using UAVs, computer simulations, and other techniques. It simply does not serve the purpose of the telcos to do this, and in the end it's research that will not result in new products that make people money, so why should they fund it? The only part of the cellular phone system that is not designed to handle this kind of thing is the billing system and the deals cellular phone companies make regarding roaming charges, etc.
How can e-mail be that valuable? If anything important is received, it should be copied to a file. After all, e-mail is not a filing system. There a major gaps between correspondence even between project members. The advent of large hard drives just makes it easy to not delete anything from the mailbox.
An email is a file. That's how it works. It's just that some email clients store those files within databases or something instead, which just opens up a bunch of unnecessary problems. I'm sure there are some arguments for search efficiency in binary database files, but IMHO they are immediately outweighed by vendor lockin, the results of corruption, and a host of other problems that go away when we go back to treating email as it is. That's another reason I prefer sylpheed. All my email is stored as text files that can easily be manipulated, transferred, and read by any program. One file getting corrupted is not going to render my whole inbox unreadable.
Or you could just use Opera or any other email client to download the webmail to your machine like any sane person would do. Why would you want to keep your messages on a remote server?
So that you can access it from anywhere without setting up a server yourself. Or access it if your desktop machine dies. I use sylpheed to get my gmail, but I leave it on google's servers also. I have so far found this was a better idea than deleting it because of those very cases. The main reason to delete mail from the server is to save space and meet the requirements. Even then it sucks becuse your desktop/laptop system is less reliable and uses a much less reliable drive. You can back your mail up, but this ignores the fact of the increased risk to which you are placing your data. Yes, I know that it is better to set up your own server with redundancy, etc than to rely on an external entity to keep your mail safe, and you'd be insane to rely on such things for your business. However for the individual this solution makes more sense, and even in a business environment it is best to leave as much on the mail server as you reasonably can in order to increase the likelihood that you can access your mail.
The question is whether the GPL (any version) is harder to understand than any other licence. If not, then you don't need a lawyer just for the GPL v3.No, you are wrong. All of us who agree to those contracts (EULAs) are crossing our fingers and hoping it all works out or are ignorant of the law. As individual users we do not, so far(we'll see), have much to worry about when we blindly agree to those EULAs.
But as a developer or corporate user, I have much to worry about.
No sir, I like to have my ducks in a row as much as I can and I don't like gambling too much as you suggested.
And to add, considering your comment, I can tell that you're not a lawyer and you're assertions that there isn't a problem should be ignored.
If you are serious about this sort of thing then you should consult an attorney as you suggested. I would not think you necessarily have to retain one, though it's always a good idea to have one on hand for other complexities of running a business. I've never done this myself, but I understand there are attorneys who will go over a contract for you for a few hundred dollars. It's not like there's a shortage of competition.
You could always use the BSD license instead; after all, it has been described as giving complete freedom even if you want to make a baby-mulching machine with the software. Or there's the Bugroff License, which was clearly created to answer this very problem. There used to be a "Penis Bird Troll" on slashdot who created the "Penis Bird License," which was simply "no restrictions on use." The problem with the Bugroff and Penis Bird licenses is that they seem a bit frivolous and their humour might backfire in that on the one hand, especially in the latter case, it might be difficult to market your software to some companies under such a license just because of the name, and on the other hand, it probably would agitate lawyers.
If you're distributing your own original work, you can use whatever license you want. You can even hire someone to write it for you. If you are going to use other people's work you have to learn what the license means, and a lawyer is always a good idea when it comes to these kinds of questions. You do have one additional recourse in that the FSF does employ lawyers and are more than happy to discuss and explain the GPL to you including any implications from the specific application you intend. If getting advice from the people who wrote both the software and the license, the latter with the help of their lawyers, is not enough then you are definitely right about needing a lawyer.
Personally, I would think that before I got too far in running a business I would make sure I either had money to hire one, or, failing that, that I knew one I could get hold of and pay for these sorts of things. I think most people fall into the latter category (individuals and small businesses) and as I said lawyers can be had for piecemeal jobs like that for reasonable prices specifically because they know this is a market where they can thrive. Believe me as scary as the GPL may seem to you in terms of complexity there are far more dangerous hazards to be faced in business, what with liability, contracts, etc. I'd be willing to bet that you're more likely to be sued by an angry customer than you are by the FSF.
Unfortunately (or fortunately), this might give the MPAA ideas about courtesy in theaters...
I have to say I am one of those people who disagrees with the rules against cell phones. I think stopping people from using them in stores/bars, in planes/trains, and in their cars is just silly, though in the case of cars I do think people should use handsfree. It's just that most handsfree solutions seem to suck. I certainly haven't found a decent solution for that despite many attempts.
However, when it comes to theatres I have to say there is no reason to allow people to use cell phones in theatres. If you think you're going to have to take a call you need to put the phone on vibrate and go outside to talk.
As a matter of fact, my favorite theatre has a rule about that. At the beginning of each movie they display a warning: "If you talk or use your cell phone during this movie we will take your ass out." It usually is in bold colours, like all in red, accompanied by an incredibly violent graphic of semirandom choice. There are a lot of things I like about that theatre, but this has to be the best feature. They also have a rule against bringing in children under a certain age, or children making noise. The only problem with this rule is that they do have a "whining baby night" or something like that, on tuesdays. I thought it was funny when someone who was new in town had the unfortunate experience of going on that night without knowing the rule. I was glad to find that it is definitely a good idea to avoid that night like the plague, which is an indication of why it is also good they have that rule in place on other nights.
I think they do sometimes waive the baby rule for the daytime showings of kid's films, but not for the showings at night. This way Linux gurus over 30 can slake their shameful, secret, Harry Potter habit without having to deal with a bunch of young children being loud during the movie.
Humans have been scrutinizing Mars to the best of their ability given available technology for centuries. We have sent probes to map the surface multiple times and robots to probe in various ways. And all this time we missed seven caves whose openings were larger than football fields (and in some cases larger than two football fields) which just happen to be near one of the most prominent features we know about. Whether these features are caves or not, the facts of their size and location should be a wakeup call to us as far as the limitations of our efforts thus far. Who knows what else we are missing; one must also wonder at the difficulty of finding microbes on a planet where we were unable to detect features of this size.
I hope one day we can place colonies on Mars, as inhospitable as it is. Once we have done that we will be in a better position to explore the planet as we have ours. Every time we think we have found everything worth finding on Mars and further exploration will not yield any results that change our impression that it is a dull, lifeless planet whose only saving grace is that it is nearby we find something that surprises us. We can only hope this trend continues.
For recourse, they have the letter of the law as it pertains to the language in their contract. Unfortunately, the contract probably has a clause that makes an exemption for damages that result from compliance with lawful orders of law enforcement authorities.
But these would not seem to be lawful orders. In any case this would not be legal in the US, because a warrant for one company's equipment would not cover other companies that are unrelated, and even if a judge issued a warrant broad enough to cover an entire data center it does not meet the standard for a warrant and would likely be invalidated in a higher court.
In the case of Sweden, no Swedish laws were being violated. In fact, no US laws were being violated. It is absurd that any action was taken at all, and it is just another example of Corporations ruling the US without regard to rule of law or the Constitution, then using the clout of the US military and economy to assist in their control of other countries as well.
'or a Mac for ... looking sexy?'
Come now. If you aren't a gay male and think having a Mac is sexy then I am going to predict you have lots of females who view you as 'just as friend'.
Dude, chicks dig Macs. They look cool and they are more versatile when it comes to things like video editing, etc out of the box. Male slashdotters may be fine with an ancient beige box they built from dumpster dived or bargain basement parts, but some people like powerul, easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing computers. Many of those people happen to be female and to a certain degree the Mac laptop is supplanting the cute dog as a chick magnet / ice breaker. The bonus is that you can take it into more places and it won't shit in your shoes. :D
"but there's bias and there's bias"
I have never gotten these little statements... "bias" ... "bias" - BOTH THE SAME FREAKING WORD!
It's a difference of degree. For instance the degree of bias in BBC News reporting (where at least an attempt at objective reporting is made) and the degree of bias in Fox News, which is advertised as a far right idealogue agency (to bring balance to the news). It's like if you were to compare one room in which you find dust on the wainscotting when subjected to a white-glove test and another one that is filled with garbage, feces and dead bodies. "Well there's dirty and there's dirty." When spoken the second case is emphasized because it is greater in degree.
Business today seems to run on the notion that if it's not specifically prohibited, we should try and do it, no matter how bad it looks. I get better ethics and learning curves from my third graders.
Government seems to be going the same way. Alberto Gonzales actually made that argument before Congress when he claimed that the right to habeas corpus was not specifically granted in the Constitution. He then went on to explain other violations of our rights by saying that those exercises of power were not specifically disallowed by the Constitution. He just breezed through the incongruity of those two points of view and totally ignored the fact that all of this flies in the face of centuries of law. The system did not matter, the justification did not matter, logic did not matter. All that mattered was that they get away with doing whatever they want at any given time. The reality is that they will. No one will ever be punished for the abuses of power in our recent history, and corporations will not be punished for their abuses, either.
You, me, and any other private-sector entity do not have to explain our whims and caprices when (not) buying something (which may, actually, be unfortunate) to any one other than, perhaps, family members or stock-holders. The government, however, is legally obliged to pick the best -- all of us are the stock-holders...
Knowing the policies and the corruption levels of Taxachusetts, Diebold may well be right suspecting something foul...
Way to counter bias. It's clear you did not even read the article, which says:
Weisberg said the company is not alleging any improprieties by the secretary of state's office. Instead, it is saying the office acted in good faith but made a mistake in the selection.
Diebold is alleging that they are clearly the best and therefore must always be picked. They are saying that the judge should award them the contract since the government made a mistake and picked a company other than theirs, which is the best. The government explained that the device they picked was reported as easier to use by disabled people and had some features which the Diebold machine lacks.
This suit was deliberately filed on the day of an election in which the machines would be used. Its very premise is frightening; according to Diebold they must be the only electronic voting machine manufacturer and whenever any other manufacturer is picked by a government entity that entity must be ordered by a judge to go with Diebold instead. It represents an attempt by a corporation to subvert the democratic process, which makes the fact they are a voting machine manufacturer even more frightening. In any case, this kind of thing cannot be allowed. Companies should not be able to sue the government every time they lose a bid for a contract. That will just create chaos and we will get even less accomplished through the government than we already do.