just once, to see a deaf person try to get a case into the Canadian court system claiming it's unfair they have to pay these fees because they're incapable of pirating music.
Even if that's totally legally baseless and it gets thrown out the instant that the paperwork goes through and it gets in front of the judge. As a publicity stunt it would be effective and funny.
(On the other hand, knowing the copyright industry, the canadian RIAA equivilent will probably just send this right back and try to get a special tax placed on deaf people, since they're hurting the profits of the recording industry by their incapability to listen to music...)
Why, just the other day I was looking at my x86 debian box and thinking, "You know, it's so great how on my mac and on the school's sparc machines, I can never get binaries for anything, it's a BITCH AND A HALF to compile anything, and half the time I can't get stuff to work. Debian doesn't offer anything like that. I sure do wish there was some way I could get that Darwin/Solaris sort of experience on my PC!"
And now here this is! My prayers answered! Yahoo!
[ DISCLAIMER: The above is humor. In reality, my x86 box is running Gentoo, which means that I can never get binaries for anything, it's a bitch and a half to install anything, and half the time I can't get stuff to work. ]
Call me paranoid, but I think that I am going to refrain from following any links in this slashdot discussion until I can get back home to my home computer (and more specifically my copy of Safari...)
triggers an automatic payment system that could be changed moment to moment by the content distributor.
I want you all to very clearly remember that quote the next time Microsoft tries to claim that Palladium is about "giving the user the control to be sure that only the programs they've authorized are running on their computer" or something along those lines...
OK, so they're naming something not-very-java-ish "Java Desktop" to capitalize on the Java name.
But look at the COMMENTS in this thread, even so far! Look at all the posts going "eww, JAVA? for a DESKTOP?". Java is NOT a name with positive connotations. Everyone "knows" that Java is slow, clunky, and jittery. Of course, the only time they've ever directly used a Java app was AWT applets running on Netscape 4 ages and ages ago, but that's still the perception I think most people have.
Java, from an end-user perspective, was blitzed out before it or the VMs were even remotely ready, was oversold in the embedded-in-web-browsers area (where it ran like crap) and undersold as a facilitator of cross-platform application development (where it ran almost acceptably), was pushed in everyone's face in the form of poorly designed pre-Swing applets, and then quietly retreated completely from the end-user space. This is the last memory most people have of Java (even if it's the woman in wal-mart going "oh, Java? I think I remember that from that email forward from my grandson? that's the thing that makes animations that blink a lot, isn't it?") and outside of the community of programmers and people who know what a "servlet" is, it probably currently has negative mindshare.
Is Sun actually thinking "Hmm, 'Java Desktop System', that's a name people can trust"?
Or is the idea that they now trying to rehabilitate Java's brandname by attatching it to a product that (one can only hope) is actually worthwhile and usable?
There are these things called "election monitors". You can sign up to be one, and when you do, you get to stand around at a polling station all day and watch. For the one location you are a monitor at, you get to stand there and watch the entire process take place. You know no one's lost a few votes because you saw the box just plain sat on the table all day and nothing happened to it.
Now, obviously, you can't watch everything. You can only be in one place at a time. But the idea is that a sufficient number of varied people sign up to be election monitors that organized vote fraud becomes very, very difficult. You can't plan ahead to commit vote fraud because you don't know whether you'll have a monitor. And if indications are that vote fraud is going to occur on a small scale at those precincts where no monitors showed up, you can easily solve this problem by just adding monitors. You may not be watching, but a significant proportion of the time, someone is.
You can't do this with electronic voting. You can't sit there and watch the electrons flow down the ethernet cable to the central server to ensure that the only electrons that go through are the ones that were cast by a voter. You can't look inside the memory of the computer and see if there's a rogue process quietly flipping bits. You can electronically audit the machines to ensure they aren't doing anything wierd, but this is far more complicated than just watching a locked box on a table, it brings up the question of how you can trust the electronic auditing process any more than you can trust the electronic voting process, and it serverely limits who can perform election monitor duties to those who can understand how the computer system works.
Well, first off, if you look, he isn't saying the Linux means no-forced-upgrades-ever. He's saying that the overall Linux-based system which Sun is selling means no-forced-upgrades-ever. And this is valid as a sales point for Sun, no? I mean, historically, Sun has shown itself to be far more willing to provide support for "obsoleted" Sun software products than many other companies (in particular MS, the obvious target of the "2-3 year cycle" barb) have for their products, no?
However, for the sake of argument: if you look in general at a Linux-based system like this one versus a Microsoft-based solution, you will indeed find it is true that the Linux-based solution will be far less susceptible to forced upgrades. This is because Microsoft has two covert methods by which it forces upgrades:
Associated software. If you go with the MS OS, you're probably going to be going with other MS software as well, for example Word. If you want to do this, you're going to continuously over time upgrade Word, both because MS continuously updates Word, and because you will have to keep upgrading Word in order to work with the new-version Word documents people send you. Over time this means that you will have to eventually upgrade your OS as well in order to run the newest version of Word. That sort of thing. With a Linux solution, you have access to the code and have the ability if you need to to (in an analogous situation) alter the OpenOffice and/or Linux itself so that a newer version of OpenOffice runs on an older version of Linux, or add support for newer document formats to the older OpenOffice you were running.
Hardware upgrades. Over time, what if you want to perform partial hardware upgrades on some of your systems, or add new systems, but you wish to keep your network homogenous from a software standpoint? If MS does not choose to continue to add support to its OS for new hardware, and they often do not, then what do you do? You will be unable to work with the new hardware without performing an upgrade. With the Linux solution you have the ability to add support for new hardware yourself if the vendor chooses not to.
Both of these cases imply on the Linux side changes to the code, which is a sort of upgrade. However the open source model provides the *possibility* of doing minor upgrades to bring over crucial new features, rather than (say) having to upgrade all the way to WinXP from W2K, with all the baggage that implies, just to get one tiny little feature. Moreover they give you a large degree of flexibility in your choice of vendors. If the British health system needs changes to the system they are using, they may go to Sun and purchase the upgrade, OR they can hire an independent contractor of their choice, point them at the code, and say "add these features".
And note that with everything I have said here, you can replace "Linux" with "Open Source" and "MS" with "Closed Source" and it works just fine.
Well, that's just fantastic, isn't it
on
RSA-576 Factored
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· Score: 4, Funny
I think that composite numbers everywhere will sleep just a little bit less securely tonight, knowing that the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik is out there, somewhere, waiting for them.
Now let me tell you another story. The first time I voted when I turned 18 here in the US, I noticed that the voting place workers were putting the signature cards in precise order on top of the voting machines (the ones with the arm you pull to close/register vote/open curtain). They placed them in precise order according to the order that each person went into the booth. On those cards was your signature, that they used to compare against your voter card. So they could go back, and according to the order of the cards, and the order of the registered vote, figure out what your vote was. Of course, this is supposed to be impossible, your vote is supposed to be anonymous.
That's an implementation problem. Make it instead so that the vote paper trail is dropped into a locked box that's counted elsewhere, and the implementation problem goes away. Physical/paper voting systems are easy to change; call the local paper, complain to the city council or whatever, and you can probably get something implemented to fix that problem. If you find that no one is listening to a lone election monitor, or the town's too small for someone to "rock the boat", the ACLU will be more than happy to make some noise on an anonymous tip.. and oh, of course, you aren't trying to INSINUATE anything! You just want to ensure the process is as trustable as possible.
Yeah, watching who goes into a polling place is an effective method. But as long as there's a decent-sized number of people per polling place, you can't be *sure*. If 300 people voted in this one station, and 5 of them voted "wrong", how do you know which ones?
Absentee voting is ALWAYS problematic from the anonymity standpoint.
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
The problem here is, what if Z is the most important requirement for the project?
There are a number of different criteria that are desirous in a voting system. However, a few of them are absolutely necessary. The ones that are necessary are that it must not introduce statistically significant amounts of error, it must be anonymous, and it must be auditable and trustable. If you lack any of these qualities, you wind up with a system which is worse than nothing at all, becuase the system is not just flawed: it is potentially damaging.
Punch cards become an unworkable option because they violate the first of these. The potential margin of uncatchable error is large enough that it was larger than the margin of victory in the deciding area of the last presidential election.
The electronic voting systems currently being pushed have almost all of the desirable voting-system qualities, lack the last of the necessities: they are inauditable and untrustable. This is not just an implementation problem. It is a fundamental problem-- becuase any auditing methods for the system must themselves be electronic, and thus as susceptable to being cheated as the system itself. It is perhaps possible to create a trustable electronic voting system. However, it requires an absolutely obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, something along the lines of methods used on the Las Vegas slot machines mentioned on/. a few days ago, only even more so, becuase many of the slot machines' systems of ensuring fairness are made impossible by the voting systems' requirement of anonymity. You can argue that this is an implementation problem, and that the problem is just that the current implementors are just putting the minimal amount of effort into trust, and that's just not enough. But I would say it is fundamental because the amount of effort required to make the system trustable is so great that it is unlikely anyone will ever be bothered to reach it. People will always inherently want to cut corners..
You have to remember, it isn't enough for a voting system just to produce a correct answer. It has to to the greatest extent possible eliminate doubt. If you have a system which is not trustable, but by coincidence just happens to be accurate, it's still going to be a problem because the elected candidates enemies will be able to go around for that candidate's entire political lifespan claiming that they stole the election-- and really, who can definitively say that they're wrong?
The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent recall election were disenfranchised by not having touch screen voting
No, The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent election were disenfranchised by using punch card voting. The fact that one of the alternatives to punch card voting is touchscreen voting does not mean that the ACLU was demanding the counties use touchscreen voting, just that the counties not use the punch card voting systems which had lost their legal certification anymore!
Cringely's intentions are excellent but he plays into the biggest, most disasterous, most helpful to the voting companies fallacy in the entire mess:
Recording method of votes and tabulation method of votes are entirely separate, orthogonal concepts.
The first has to do with, do you make a mark on a piece of paper, pull a lever, or touch a button on a screen? The second has to do with, are the votes recorded on paper and dropped in a box to be counted somewhere, or are they put on a hard drive to be just added together somewhere?
The first is what electronic voting salesmen are mostly selling the systems based on. The second is what electronic voting's enemies are mostly complaining about, as it alone is what makes almost all of the potential cheating possible. There's *no reason the two have to go together*! You could have a touch-screen voting machine which prints out a scantron sheet, which then is dropped in a box and counted like a hand-filled-out scantron sheet would have been.
A lot of the support for "electronic voting" has come from the fact its proponents have attempted as much as possible to prevent the false choice of "Punch cards VS electronic voting!" and hoping pieces of paper won't come to people's minds. But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this.
Maybe that would be part of the reason why it's currently intended only for the Chinese market.
Sorry.. I've been spending much too long on gaming-specific message boards, which are currently full of people going "d00d the iQue I wanna import one". I appear in a knee-jerk way to have accidentally read that kind of sentiment into the article text, and I just realized I was not clear enough in my original post that my "i don't get this" response referred only to people outside of China who would import the iQue...
I unfortunately can't comment on the articles, as one is in German and the other is currently squashed flat by the Slashdot Effect. But I've looked at the iQue and I honestly just do not see the attraction. I mean, for the specific case of the Chinese market it makes a lot of sense, it looks really cool, and it was a neat idea from Nintendo's perspective. But for the rest of the world, I can't understand why people would want one. An iQue is, what, $115-$150? Go on Ebay, you'll consistently find an N64 with something like 12 games for $80 or so and a Super Nintendo with a few games for probably less than $30.
Meanwhile the iQue will not ever be able in the end to play *all* the games for either of these systems, and at the moment it can only play a handful. And as new games are released for the iQue, as I understand how the system works, you will only be able to add them to your memory card if you can somehow get it to China. No?
The N64 controller really sucked, but just having a better controller doesn't seem worth paying lots more money for a much more limited console.
If my commentary here is made obsolete once the linked articles become readable, I apologize.
When you watch a pirate movie, everyone's a criminal, and technically everyone's a "bad" guy, but still within the logic of the movie there are distinct people you come to think of as "good guys" and "bad guys".
Napster is the crazy, "bad but cool", immoral and greedy but gallant and kind pirate. His death scene is dramatic and gets you all pissed off at whoever it was who took him down. Afterward his crew scatters and his ship is sold off to some random merchant group.
Gnutella is the romantic, moral, and heroic pirate who fails either because of incompetence but because his own lack of cruelty (or, depending on how you look at it, his softness) is in the end exploited as a weakness.
Sharman Networks is the band of pirates which is just plain EVIL. They don't care about anything, they have no positive qualities, and despite the whole pirates-are-cool mentality of the movie, I mean, come on, they're just *evil*. Their leader, Kazaa, is bloodthirsty and cruel, and he killed his gallant and kind first mate Morpheus-- who is played by Orlando Bloom and who most of the audience had fallen in love with at that point-- in cold blood, out of pure envy and greed.
The RIAA, of course, is the stock British Navy captain, because even though he technically represents "good", and technically one supposes his job is to go around and save lives and stuff, you root against him anyway, because he's a slimeball, he's blatantly corrupt, and everyone who works for him was cruelly and forcibly conscripted into a hellish life of prison-like service to the navy during raids on passing ships which are not really (when you think about it) much different from the raids performed by the pirates.
From the standpoint of the Open Source Community, this is about the best thing that could be hoped to possibly happen. This means that within 30 days, the question of "is there SCO code in Linux?" will be definitively answered, legally. So in 30 days, either we will know for a fact no, there never was any SCO code in Linux, or we will know exactly where it is. (SCO may try to play the "trade secret!" rule and get the locations sealed, if they exist, but I can't see this succeeding-- the part that would theoretically be a trade secret, the code itself, would already be leaked no matter what. I doubt they would outright claim in court "the locations of the code are a trade secret becuase once they're known, we can no longer make vague allegations and drive up our stock price, our primary product"..) This means two things:
In 30 days plus a very short amount of time to do some cleaning in the linux codebase, there will be no SCO code in Linux at all and SCO will not be able to claim otherwise without admitting they lied to a judge in the IBM case discovery.
Once SCO has to present EXACTLY what its evidence and allegations are, not just "Linux stole some stuff", they will have a MUCH harder time obfuscating their allegations toward the Linux community by confusing them in the public mind with the rather straightforward contractual-obligation suit SCO has going on with IBM...
Re:Online mentions in IBM filing
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 5, Informative
Just tinfoil hatting a bit, but could IBM use this opportunity to badly hurt HP, their nearest competitor?...
OK, this is a misconception I keep seeing, and I would like to clarify.
IF SCO code is inside of Linux, it is NOT LEGAL for ANYONE to distribute Linux until the SCO code is removed.
If SCO code is in Linux, SCO doesn't own Linux. They just own the bits of code they own; the entire REST of the linux kernel still belongs to the individual authors.
The individual authors have only agreed to let the bits of code they own be released under the GPL. The GPL says that if you distribute GPLed code, you MUST be able to state that ANYONE will be able to redistribute the code with NO extra limitations besides those of the GPL (with the only exception being that people *may* be prohibited from distributing into countries where the code is illegal under local laws).
So: IBM *cannot* just settle out of court with SCO and continue on while HP gets whacked. If IBM gains the right to distribute the hypothetical SCO portions of the kernel, then HP automatically gains the right as well. And if HP does not gain that right, then that means *IBM does not have the right to distribute Linux at all* because they would be violating the license rights of every single kernel contributor EXCEPT SCO [and themselves].
In fact, it would mean that until that limited, GPL-incompatible SCO code is removed, *no one* would be able to distribute Linux legally. This is the problem. SCO can *never* collect license fees for any hypothetical code it has in Linux, from IBM, HP, or anyone else, because the instant that code is revealed to be real, it must immediately be removed from Linux, period.
Now, once it is removed, SCO could try to claim damages from HP for the time its code spent in Linux, but between the fact that in this hypothetical case 1) HP would be an unknowing transgressor and 2) HP was using code that IBM had in apparently good faith presented to HP as being owned by IBM, HP could brush off any lawsuits easily. When you add the 3) problem SCO failed to mitigate damages at all and 4) SCO very probably *granted* HP an unlimited GPL license to distribute SCO's "poisoned" code by distributing Caldera, HP would be able to laugh such a case out of court even more easily than IBM is going to laugh the current contract-based case out of court.
(And of course, all of this assumes SCO's "stolen" code is real. I see no more or less reason to take such an idea seriously than I see a reason to believe the works of H.P. Lovecraft are actually true.)
Don't they actually have to put up in court tomorrow?
If I remember right, tomorrow is the oral discovery arguments for their case against IBM. Doesn't this mean that tomorrow they have to actually justify their unwillingness to clarify the nature of their case and answer to a judge for it?
Can't wait to see what that does to their stock.
Am I totally mistaking the nature of Discovery, but doesn't it mean that any evidence they haven't submitted by tomorrow, they can't use in the case? Meaning if they don't clarify their violations, rather than just giving the names of a bunch of documents (some of which contain nothing but some #includes and a "not implemented" comment), the "linux community" can then go around confidently stating that no such violations exist?
When's Redhat's Lanham Act case get to hit court to ask for injunctions?
Anyway, it probably wouldn't be too far-out to assume Darl's letter is some kind of diversionary tactic. Or that they won't try to do something even bigger and noisier tomorrow to draw attention away from the court.
We NEED the moon. We need it for the children. This is a war - a war on terror. A war against whoever took the moon.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the War On Terror came into direct conflict with the nefarious international crime syndicate of Carmen Sandiego.
This is a repost of my comment from earlier today on K5. It would have been nice if the AC had credited me, but I don't mind, because hey, this way it's at Score:5, and it's much higher up chronologically in the discussion than it would have been if I'd posted it.
Anyway, I'm just posting this here now because I want to link to the slashdot story on H.R. 3057, which I would like to suggest you check out.
Slashdot Mirror
just once, to see a deaf person try to get a case into the Canadian court system claiming it's unfair they have to pay these fees because they're incapable of pirating music.
Even if that's totally legally baseless and it gets thrown out the instant that the paperwork goes through and it gets in front of the judge. As a publicity stunt it would be effective and funny.
(On the other hand, knowing the copyright industry, the canadian RIAA equivilent will probably just send this right back and try to get a special tax placed on deaf people, since they're hurting the profits of the recording industry by their incapability to listen to music...)
Why, just the other day I was looking at my x86 debian box and thinking, "You know, it's so great how on my mac and on the school's sparc machines, I can never get binaries for anything, it's a BITCH AND A HALF to compile anything, and half the time I can't get stuff to work. Debian doesn't offer anything like that. I sure do wish there was some way I could get that Darwin/Solaris sort of experience on my PC!"
And now here this is! My prayers answered! Yahoo!
[ DISCLAIMER: The above is humor. In reality, my x86 box is running Gentoo, which means that I can never get binaries for anything, it's a bitch and a half to install anything, and half the time I can't get stuff to work. ]
Whoa!
Yeah, it is... oops
Call me paranoid, but I think that I am going to refrain from following any links in this slashdot discussion until I can get back home to my home computer (and more specifically my copy of Safari...)
triggers an automatic payment system that could be changed moment to moment by the content distributor.
I want you all to very clearly remember that quote the next time Microsoft tries to claim that Palladium is about "giving the user the control to be sure that only the programs they've authorized are running on their computer" or something along those lines...
I heard a saying: The 20th century was the century of physics. The 21st century will be the biology and medicine.
What will be the 21st century's analogue of the atom bomb?
OK, so they're naming something not-very-java-ish "Java Desktop" to capitalize on the Java name.
But look at the COMMENTS in this thread, even so far! Look at all the posts going "eww, JAVA? for a DESKTOP?". Java is NOT a name with positive connotations. Everyone "knows" that Java is slow, clunky, and jittery. Of course, the only time they've ever directly used a Java app was AWT applets running on Netscape 4 ages and ages ago, but that's still the perception I think most people have.
Java, from an end-user perspective, was blitzed out before it or the VMs were even remotely ready, was oversold in the embedded-in-web-browsers area (where it ran like crap) and undersold as a facilitator of cross-platform application development (where it ran almost acceptably), was pushed in everyone's face in the form of poorly designed pre-Swing applets, and then quietly retreated completely from the end-user space. This is the last memory most people have of Java (even if it's the woman in wal-mart going "oh, Java? I think I remember that from that email forward from my grandson? that's the thing that makes animations that blink a lot, isn't it?") and outside of the community of programmers and people who know what a "servlet" is, it probably currently has negative mindshare.
Is Sun actually thinking "Hmm, 'Java Desktop System', that's a name people can trust"?
Or is the idea that they now trying to rehabilitate Java's brandname by attatching it to a product that (one can only hope) is actually worthwhile and usable?
...than RSA.
There are these things called "election monitors". You can sign up to be one, and when you do, you get to stand around at a polling station all day and watch. For the one location you are a monitor at, you get to stand there and watch the entire process take place. You know no one's lost a few votes because you saw the box just plain sat on the table all day and nothing happened to it.
Now, obviously, you can't watch everything. You can only be in one place at a time. But the idea is that a sufficient number of varied people sign up to be election monitors that organized vote fraud becomes very, very difficult. You can't plan ahead to commit vote fraud because you don't know whether you'll have a monitor. And if indications are that vote fraud is going to occur on a small scale at those precincts where no monitors showed up, you can easily solve this problem by just adding monitors. You may not be watching, but a significant proportion of the time, someone is.
You can't do this with electronic voting. You can't sit there and watch the electrons flow down the ethernet cable to the central server to ensure that the only electrons that go through are the ones that were cast by a voter. You can't look inside the memory of the computer and see if there's a rogue process quietly flipping bits. You can electronically audit the machines to ensure they aren't doing anything wierd, but this is far more complicated than just watching a locked box on a table, it brings up the question of how you can trust the electronic auditing process any more than you can trust the electronic voting process, and it serverely limits who can perform election monitor duties to those who can understand how the computer system works.
However, for the sake of argument: if you look in general at a Linux-based system like this one versus a Microsoft-based solution, you will indeed find it is true that the Linux-based solution will be far less susceptible to forced upgrades. This is because Microsoft has two covert methods by which it forces upgrades:
- Associated software. If you go with the MS OS, you're probably going to be going with other MS software as well, for example Word. If you want to do this, you're going to continuously over time upgrade Word, both because MS continuously updates Word, and because you will have to keep upgrading Word in order to work with the new-version Word documents people send you. Over time this means that you will have to eventually upgrade your OS as well in order to run the newest version of Word. That sort of thing. With a Linux solution, you have access to the code and have the ability if you need to to (in an analogous situation) alter the OpenOffice and/or Linux itself so that a newer version of OpenOffice runs on an older version of Linux, or add support for newer document formats to the older OpenOffice you were running.
- Hardware upgrades. Over time, what if you want to perform partial hardware upgrades on some of your systems, or add new systems, but you wish to keep your network homogenous from a software standpoint? If MS does not choose to continue to add support to its OS for new hardware, and they often do not, then what do you do? You will be unable to work with the new hardware without performing an upgrade. With the Linux solution you have the ability to add support for new hardware yourself if the vendor chooses not to.
Both of these cases imply on the Linux side changes to the code, which is a sort of upgrade. However the open source model provides the *possibility* of doing minor upgrades to bring over crucial new features, rather than (say) having to upgrade all the way to WinXP from W2K, with all the baggage that implies, just to get one tiny little feature. Moreover they give you a large degree of flexibility in your choice of vendors. If the British health system needs changes to the system they are using, they may go to Sun and purchase the upgrade, OR they can hire an independent contractor of their choice, point them at the code, and say "add these features".And note that with everything I have said here, you can replace "Linux" with "Open Source" and "MS" with "Closed Source" and it works just fine.
I think that composite numbers everywhere will sleep just a little bit less securely tonight, knowing that the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik is out there, somewhere, waiting for them.
Yup.
Just remember: The inescapable progress of science is not only ultimately beneficial to mankind. It's also delicious!
Let's just hope that they remembered to set aside an appropriate amount of funding in the grant for plum sauce.
Now let me tell you another story. The first time I voted when I turned 18 here in the US, I noticed that the voting place workers were putting the signature cards in precise order on top of the voting machines (the ones with the arm you pull to close/register vote/open curtain). They placed them in precise order according to the order that each person went into the booth. On those cards was your signature, that they used to compare against your voter card. So they could go back, and according to the order of the cards, and the order of the registered vote, figure out what your vote was. Of course, this is supposed to be impossible, your vote is supposed to be anonymous.
That's an implementation problem. Make it instead so that the vote paper trail is dropped into a locked box that's counted elsewhere, and the implementation problem goes away. Physical/paper voting systems are easy to change; call the local paper, complain to the city council or whatever, and you can probably get something implemented to fix that problem. If you find that no one is listening to a lone election monitor, or the town's too small for someone to "rock the boat", the ACLU will be more than happy to make some noise on an anonymous tip.. and oh, of course, you aren't trying to INSINUATE anything! You just want to ensure the process is as trustable as possible.
Yeah, watching who goes into a polling place is an effective method. But as long as there's a decent-sized number of people per polling place, you can't be *sure*. If 300 people voted in this one station, and 5 of them voted "wrong", how do you know which ones?
Absentee voting is ALWAYS problematic from the anonymity standpoint.
What does this mean? If you want a program that does X, Y and Z, and you get one that does X and Y, it could still be useful and worth the money you spend.
/. a few days ago, only even more so, becuase many of the slot machines' systems of ensuring fairness are made impossible by the voting systems' requirement of anonymity. You can argue that this is an implementation problem, and that the problem is just that the current implementors are just putting the minimal amount of effort into trust, and that's just not enough. But I would say it is fundamental because the amount of effort required to make the system trustable is so great that it is unlikely anyone will ever be bothered to reach it. People will always inherently want to cut corners..
The problem here is, what if Z is the most important requirement for the project?
There are a number of different criteria that are desirous in a voting system. However, a few of them are absolutely necessary. The ones that are necessary are that it must not introduce statistically significant amounts of error, it must be anonymous, and it must be auditable and trustable. If you lack any of these qualities, you wind up with a system which is worse than nothing at all, becuase the system is not just flawed: it is potentially damaging.
Punch cards become an unworkable option because they violate the first of these. The potential margin of uncatchable error is large enough that it was larger than the margin of victory in the deciding area of the last presidential election.
The electronic voting systems currently being pushed have almost all of the desirable voting-system qualities, lack the last of the necessities: they are inauditable and untrustable. This is not just an implementation problem. It is a fundamental problem-- becuase any auditing methods for the system must themselves be electronic, and thus as susceptable to being cheated as the system itself. It is perhaps possible to create a trustable electronic voting system. However, it requires an absolutely obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, something along the lines of methods used on the Las Vegas slot machines mentioned on
You have to remember, it isn't enough for a voting system just to produce a correct answer. It has to to the greatest extent possible eliminate doubt. If you have a system which is not trustable, but by coincidence just happens to be accurate, it's still going to be a problem because the elected candidates enemies will be able to go around for that candidate's entire political lifespan claiming that they stole the election-- and really, who can definitively say that they're wrong?
The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent recall election were disenfranchised by not having touch screen voting
No, The American Civil Liberties Union said in California that certain counties in the recent election were disenfranchised by using punch card voting. The fact that one of the alternatives to punch card voting is touchscreen voting does not mean that the ACLU was demanding the counties use touchscreen voting, just that the counties not use the punch card voting systems which had lost their legal certification anymore!
Cringely's intentions are excellent but he plays into the biggest, most disasterous, most helpful to the voting companies fallacy in the entire mess:
Recording method of votes and tabulation method of votes are entirely separate, orthogonal concepts.
The first has to do with, do you make a mark on a piece of paper, pull a lever, or touch a button on a screen? The second has to do with, are the votes recorded on paper and dropped in a box to be counted somewhere, or are they put on a hard drive to be just added together somewhere?
The first is what electronic voting salesmen are mostly selling the systems based on. The second is what electronic voting's enemies are mostly complaining about, as it alone is what makes almost all of the potential cheating possible. There's *no reason the two have to go together*! You could have a touch-screen voting machine which prints out a scantron sheet, which then is dropped in a box and counted like a hand-filled-out scantron sheet would have been.
A lot of the support for "electronic voting" has come from the fact its proponents have attempted as much as possible to prevent the false choice of "Punch cards VS electronic voting!" and hoping pieces of paper won't come to people's minds. But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this.
Maybe that would be part of the reason why it's currently intended only for the Chinese market.
Sorry.. I've been spending much too long on gaming-specific message boards, which are currently full of people going "d00d the iQue I wanna import one". I appear in a knee-jerk way to have accidentally read that kind of sentiment into the article text, and I just realized I was not clear enough in my original post that my "i don't get this" response referred only to people outside of China who would import the iQue...
I unfortunately can't comment on the articles, as one is in German and the other is currently squashed flat by the Slashdot Effect. But I've looked at the iQue and I honestly just do not see the attraction. I mean, for the specific case of the Chinese market it makes a lot of sense, it looks really cool, and it was a neat idea from Nintendo's perspective. But for the rest of the world, I can't understand why people would want one. An iQue is, what, $115-$150? Go on Ebay, you'll consistently find an N64 with something like 12 games for $80 or so and a Super Nintendo with a few games for probably less than $30.
Meanwhile the iQue will not ever be able in the end to play *all* the games for either of these systems, and at the moment it can only play a handful. And as new games are released for the iQue, as I understand how the system works, you will only be able to add them to your memory card if you can somehow get it to China. No?
The N64 controller really sucked, but just having a better controller doesn't seem worth paying lots more money for a much more limited console.
If my commentary here is made obsolete once the linked articles become readable, I apologize.
When you watch a pirate movie, everyone's a criminal, and technically everyone's a "bad" guy, but still within the logic of the movie there are distinct people you come to think of as "good guys" and "bad guys".
Napster is the crazy, "bad but cool", immoral and greedy but gallant and kind pirate. His death scene is dramatic and gets you all pissed off at whoever it was who took him down. Afterward his crew scatters and his ship is sold off to some random merchant group.
Gnutella is the romantic, moral, and heroic pirate who fails either because of incompetence but because his own lack of cruelty (or, depending on how you look at it, his softness) is in the end exploited as a weakness.
Sharman Networks is the band of pirates which is just plain EVIL. They don't care about anything, they have no positive qualities, and despite the whole pirates-are-cool mentality of the movie, I mean, come on, they're just *evil*. Their leader, Kazaa, is bloodthirsty and cruel, and he killed his gallant and kind first mate Morpheus-- who is played by Orlando Bloom and who most of the audience had fallen in love with at that point-- in cold blood, out of pure envy and greed.
The RIAA, of course, is the stock British Navy captain, because even though he technically represents "good", and technically one supposes his job is to go around and save lives and stuff, you root against him anyway, because he's a slimeball, he's blatantly corrupt, and everyone who works for him was cruelly and forcibly conscripted into a hellish life of prison-like service to the navy during raids on passing ships which are not really (when you think about it) much different from the raids performed by the pirates.
Just tinfoil hatting a bit, but could IBM use this opportunity to badly hurt HP, their nearest competitor? ...
OK, this is a misconception I keep seeing, and I would like to clarify.
IF SCO code is inside of Linux, it is NOT LEGAL for ANYONE to distribute Linux until the SCO code is removed.
If SCO code is in Linux, SCO doesn't own Linux. They just own the bits of code they own; the entire REST of the linux kernel still belongs to the individual authors.
The individual authors have only agreed to let the bits of code they own be released under the GPL. The GPL says that if you distribute GPLed code, you MUST be able to state that ANYONE will be able to redistribute the code with NO extra limitations besides those of the GPL (with the only exception being that people *may* be prohibited from distributing into countries where the code is illegal under local laws).
So: IBM *cannot* just settle out of court with SCO and continue on while HP gets whacked. If IBM gains the right to distribute the hypothetical SCO portions of the kernel, then HP automatically gains the right as well. And if HP does not gain that right, then that means *IBM does not have the right to distribute Linux at all* because they would be violating the license rights of every single kernel contributor EXCEPT SCO [and themselves].
In fact, it would mean that until that limited, GPL-incompatible SCO code is removed, *no one* would be able to distribute Linux legally. This is the problem. SCO can *never* collect license fees for any hypothetical code it has in Linux, from IBM, HP, or anyone else, because the instant that code is revealed to be real, it must immediately be removed from Linux, period.
Now, once it is removed, SCO could try to claim damages from HP for the time its code spent in Linux, but between the fact that in this hypothetical case 1) HP would be an unknowing transgressor and 2) HP was using code that IBM had in apparently good faith presented to HP as being owned by IBM, HP could brush off any lawsuits easily. When you add the 3) problem SCO failed to mitigate damages at all and 4) SCO very probably *granted* HP an unlimited GPL license to distribute SCO's "poisoned" code by distributing Caldera, HP would be able to laugh such a case out of court even more easily than IBM is going to laugh the current contract-based case out of court.
(And of course, all of this assumes SCO's "stolen" code is real. I see no more or less reason to take such an idea seriously than I see a reason to believe the works of H.P. Lovecraft are actually true.)
Don't they actually have to put up in court tomorrow?
If I remember right, tomorrow is the oral discovery arguments for their case against IBM. Doesn't this mean that tomorrow they have to actually justify their unwillingness to clarify the nature of their case and answer to a judge for it?
Can't wait to see what that does to their stock.
Am I totally mistaking the nature of Discovery, but doesn't it mean that any evidence they haven't submitted by tomorrow, they can't use in the case? Meaning if they don't clarify their violations, rather than just giving the names of a bunch of documents (some of which contain nothing but some #includes and a "not implemented" comment), the "linux community" can then go around confidently stating that no such violations exist?
When's Redhat's Lanham Act case get to hit court to ask for injunctions?
Anyway, it probably wouldn't be too far-out to assume Darl's letter is some kind of diversionary tactic. Or that they won't try to do something even bigger and noisier tomorrow to draw attention away from the court.
Funny, that's much the way I feel about the upcoming democrat presidential primaries.
We NEED the moon. We need it for the children. This is a war - a war on terror. A war against whoever took the moon.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the War On Terror came into direct conflict with the nefarious international crime syndicate of Carmen Sandiego.
This is a repost of my comment from earlier today on K5. It would have been nice if the AC had credited me, but I don't mind, because hey, this way it's at Score:5, and it's much higher up chronologically in the discussion than it would have been if I'd posted it.
Anyway, I'm just posting this here now because I want to link to the slashdot story on H.R. 3057, which I would like to suggest you check out.
Ah, oops :) I misunderstood.