Well, the Duma was much better than the Czar, at least for the short while that it existed. Unfortunately they got overthrown by Lenin, who was followed by Stalin, who was a reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible. Currently things seem quite confused, but it looks as if the Duma may have reappeared. (I haven't been following things closely, and anyway these patterns play themselves out over generations, so short intermittent changes aren't unexpected.)
China is a better case. When the party chairman was Mao, he was pretty clearly a Chinese Emperor. Currently it's not so clear. They may actually be changing their system of government to a bureaucracy without an Emperor. I'm not at all sure that this is an improvement. It can be, but that all depends on the Emperor. Still, I consider it quite likely that within a generation or two there will be a new Imperial Dynasty and Mandrinate. (Not all of the Emperors were powerful...it's just that under Mao the Emperor and the head of the Mandrinate were combined in one person, and not made hereditary. However I expect the prior system to resurrect itself from the ashes like a Phoenix, symbol of the Empress. (Egyptian phoenix, anyway. I'm not sure that Chinese phoenixes resurrect themselves.)
It's a program that I wrote in SmallEiffel for MSWind. I forget exactly what the re-packager called it, but it didn't need to be recompiled to work on MSWind as a compiler. Unfortunately that was discontinued. Even more unfortunately, SmallEiffel acquired new maintainers who aren't particularly interested in backwards compatibility. As a result even if I still had the code and an MSWind system I could no longer compile it.
I'm counting "Accompany with a written offer" as making the choice at the time of distribution...but I you appear to be right that one doesn't need to actually do the distribution at that time.
Also the Eiffel program was a stand alone program (rather like GhostScript in that regard) that I wrote which was called from MSAccess which passed it a few file names and said "process this!". It could have been run from the command line, but it was more convenient to do it this way.
Similarly Ghostscript is a stand alone program. Unless you modify the code drastically you can't say that it's a part of some other program. (Of course, they may have done just that. I don't know.)
Don't be too quick. Obama may not be Bush, but his voting record is enough to cause qualms. Remember he voted for FISA. He voted for the Bush bailout. And lots of other rather peculiar things.
I voted for Obama because he wasn't McCain. Not because I have any particularly nice feelings about him. I'm cautiously optimistic that he won't make things worse. He might make things better, but he's voted for extending the war every time (I think).
I don't think that Obama actually hates people the way that Bush does. That may in and of itself be the main advantage...and McCain might have had that same advantage, though I don't think that Palin did. But both McCain and Palin seemed to be suffering from reality disconnect aggravated by advanced cases of Future Shock. (So do many of their supporters.)
So don't expect too much, and certainly don't expect ANY improvement before Jan. 20.
Sorry, but the human condition is something that the laws need to be written to presume. One must presume that those controlling lots of money for a short time will be motivated to gain as much from it as the can safely do. And to not worry about the long term effects unless those directly effect them, personally. (Even then, evidence shows that long-term effects tend to be severely discounted.)
Therefore the laws must be written to control that in the known environment of humans. Greedy bastards are the ones most interested in money, so that's what you'll find where lots of money is accessible to control. These are standard environmental conditions. You don't get more conservative financial leaders unless the laws DEMAND that that's who you get. (And even then there will be exceptions...so you need to watch carefully.)
Those messages you may have found inflamatory, but I'm afraid that I have considered Bush a traitor for many years. Probably since shortly after 9/11. And I have no respect for anyone who supports him or his actions.
But my despising of Bush was based on his known actions. And the actions of Karl Rove were enough that he should be in prison at the moment, based on his known actions. (I'll admit the "village idiot" was merely inflamatory...Bush was a willing puppet, but he was aware of what he was doing...which is one of the things that makes it harder to forgive him than Regan.)
And I consider that anything that was done which made it more difficult for Bush to govern needs evidence before I will consider it less than a positive good. Direct evidence that proves that it does more harm to the country than the good which is accomplished by making it more difficult for Bush to govern.
Politicians always talk about bringing unification and peace, but one needs to understand what they're saying. They're saying "We won, so grin and bear it." Often it's not an important enough matter, so that's a rational approach. Perhaps even usually. Bush has been an exception. He's not just of different convictions, he seems evil. He seems destructive for the sake of being destructive. If there are two choices in a situation, he can be relied upon to choose the more evil (though not always the more destructive).
Did you ever read or see "The Manchurian Candidate"? I've wondered about Bush. I still do, but I now feel that there is more agreement of purpose than that model would imply.
You left out the actions of Pelosi and Feinstein. Feinstein, at least, is nearly as guilty as Bush, and Pelosi was as guilty as she was capable of. And she just got re-elected.
Insane, yes. But probably no more so than your repeated insistence that "he fact that until now, the majority of the electorate was on the side of those people".
I don't know anyone who was on the side of that. Even most Bush supporters didn't ever support torture. Most of them are still in denial about it happening. (Well, I don't know a large enough number of Bush supporters to make a valid sample, even if it weren't non-random, but such is my experience.)
OTOH, I agree that most people don't weigh human rights violations seriously enough. (And I'm not *just* referring to torture, but to the multitudinous human rights violations that have become the practice during the last 8 years...and also to the ones I was occasionally aware of earlier.)
A more cogent point would be the insanity of the way the US supports dictatorships. This is something we *should* find abhorrent, but which we have done since our start as a country. It's as if our government has no morals at all, and as if our people don't expect it to display any morals. Merely obedience to rules. (That's insanely foolish, I'll admit, but it's not the insanity that you were talking about.) If you don't expect the government to display morality, then why would you expect it to obey the rules?
And there are no viable 3rd etc. party candidates because of the either imbecilic or corrupt voting practice summed up as "winner take all". Practically every other voting method produces better results, but no other method as reliably produces "most powerful wins". Instant Runoff is pretty good. I prefer Condorcet, but Instant Runoff is easier to explain to people, and lets people vote for their true choice without sacrificing their vote to "the lesser of two evils" because their candidate probably doesn't have a chance. (As does Condorcet, of course.)
Most decent systems allow voters to rank their preference for candidates, and then proceed from there. Almost all ways of proceeding from their produce results that more voters find satisfactory. But they don't as strongly support the entrenched power structure, and they make it easier for new parties to arise and accumulate influence. (And even allow for occasional candidates to win without ANY party support.)
Blaming Bush isn't a solution, but he has been aggressively attempting to destroy the country. There may have been some actions that he took that weren't intended as destructive to the country, but I would need to have them pointed out, and I'm afraid that with his track record I can't give him any benefit of the doubt. I expect him to relocate to a country with no extradition treaty some time before January 20th. (Well, that's a slight exaggeration. Expect is to strong a term. But he has been making preparations.)
Blaming Bush is no solution, but getting rid of him is the first step towards a solution. Blaming Chaney might be more reasonable, but that's not a solution either. Getting rid of every law and administrative decision made by either of them would be a reasonable first step towards a solution. I'm not aware of ANY that should be kept (though I acknowledge that such may exist). As a first cut, though, get rid of all of them. That can be done reasonably quickly. Then if any are desirable, they can be re-instituted on an "as justified" basis. But each one would need lots of justification and examination for booby-traps.
<RANT> Now clearly I don't expect this to happen, even though I'm of the opinion that that's the proper action. And I remember that Obama voted for FISA. So my expectations are rather low. But at least he hasn't yet given evidence that his main goal is to destroy the country. (Were it possible, I think that Bush & Cheney should both be charged with and convicted of treason. I think that they WERE the primary enemies of the country during the last 8 years...and that they gave themselves lots of aid and comfort and armed assistance.) And there are a lot of both Democrats and Republicans that deserve similar handling. Unfortunately, many of them are currently in office, so I can't imagine the Justice Department handling the case...and I'm not certain that it should. (Separation of Powers.) I personally consider both Feinstein and Pelosi to be traitors, but evidence for intentional treason is a bit lacking. Possibly they could argue that they didn't intend to betray the country. </Rant>
I also remember that Clinton was kept pretty busy towards the end, and really couldn't get very much done against rather intense opposition. Ostensibly over something very trivial.
Sorry, Clinton isn't really on the hook for this one, though I admit that there's no proof that he would have fixed things if he'd had the time.
To me the attacks on Clinton seemed orchestrated specifically to prevent him from cleaning up certain areas of government. Whether this is true or not, they certainly had that effect. Whether this is an area that he would have addressed isn't clear. Whitewater makes it clear that he was informed about this kind of problem, but doesn't demonstrate whether he would have cleaned the problem up if he had been able. (After all, Chester A. Arthur cleaned up the "spoils system", and removed a lot of corruption from the federal government.)
Reasonable. I've pretty definitely traced the patent mess back to Reagan's attempt to turn the PTO into a profit center. Not to claim that it wasn't already pretty bad, but it was once reasonable to accept a PTO patent as evidence that an invention was novel, and that at least nobody had filed for a patent on it before in the US. (They were always quite peculiar as to what they would accept as evidence. I don't think that's actually gotten any worse despite the Neem tree patent...you can find equivalent abuse all the way back to the founding. It may have been designed in intentionally.)
Pointing out statistics isn't racist. The interpretation that you put on them may well be. But without an interpretation they don't mean anything.
J.C. once said (as translated) "The poor you will always have with you". This could be read as a statistical statement about the distribution of incomes, but usually people put some interpretation on those words that isn't, strictly speaking, found within the text.
An old saying went "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.", and it was largely based on the fact that statistics don't tell you why something happened, but they sure make it easy for your prejudices to convince you that you know.
I rather like the Scantron(tm?)(sp?) system we used this time. You black out a section (i.e., fill in an arrow) on a piece of paper for each vote. You can see what you've done. The votes are fed into an optical scanner, which immediately counts them. Then the paper copies are saved as an audit trail. Simple, fast, elegant, cheap, and easy. And verifiable.
And it was debugged by IBM on high school exams, SATs, PSATs, etc. Years ago.
Case 1: You are engaged in non-commercial distribution, so you only need to be willing to tell me how to get a copy.
Case 2: This is commercial distribution. If requested you must provide the source...so you'd better keep a copy for 3 years.
Case 3: Home. Non-Commercial. Not sure about distribution. If so see Case 1. Work. Probably commercial. Not sure about distribution, but if so see Case 2...either that or already technically illegal under misuse of company property.
Note that in all cases you have no obligation to distribute the software unless requested to do so. Also the courts are reputed to occasionally use common sense, so when there's no obvious intent to flout the license they will often avoid hair-splitting details, and just allow approximate remediation. (If you can't provide the exact patch set that was running on your computer on that day, it's probably still ok if you aren't engaged in large scale commercial activity.)
An oversight, yes. Honest? We're talking about Diebold here. I'm about as willing to presume honesty on their part as on the part of SCOx or MS. I can, in certain cases, accept the possibility, and the lack of proof of intent to deceive. If they want to claim honesty, though, they've got to prove it.
There's no obligation to put it on a web site, but I believe that unless they distribute the source code at the same time that they distribute the application, they need to make the source code available to anyone who asks.
OTOH, that's just the source code to the GPL code. There's nothing that says their Visual Basic code has to be made available for all to ruin their eyes on. (Well, they were reported many years ago as using MSAccess as their database.)
Anyway, snideness aside, their code is their code, and licensed however they choose. Other people's code, however, is licensed as the other people choose. The part that's under GPL has a requirement that you make the source code available...either at the time of distribution to the recipient or on request by anyone, your choice. But after you've distributed it, you've already chosen. (But, of course, this requirement only applies to the GPL code. I once called an Eiffel program that I write from MSAccess. The Eiffel program was GPL [not that it mattered, I was just being purist], but that certainly didn't mean that I had to distribute MSAccess.)
If the code is under the GPL, and they distribute the code, then they are required to provide the source either at the time of distribution, or on request for the next 3? 7? (I should look this up, but I'm lazy) years.
If they provide the source at the time of distribution, then they have no further obligations, and only the purchasers are entitled to the source. If they don't, then I believe that anyone is entitled to request the source. (I'd have to check the license again to be certain of that part.)
Anyway, the easy way to handle it is to distribute the source with the application, and that's what I do. If, however, you sell lots, then it becomes cheaper to set up an ftp site...but you can also insist that anyone who wants to get the code from you mail in a request, and you can bill for "reasonable shipping and handling". (I read that as "you aren't supposed to make money on the shipping and handling, but it shouldn't cost you either".)
(I'm pretty clear about what applies if you ship the code with the application...but I'm less clear about the options I don't use.)
N.B.: This only applies to the GPL licensed code. Ghostscript is a separate chunk of code, so if they didn't embed it into their program, all they would need to do is ship the Ghostscript code as they had shipped it with the binary. This is likely to be a nothing suit. (OTOH, anything that gets in the way of the corrupt Diebold voting machines is good, and if it *should* result in their sale being prevented, even better. And they MAY have altered the code to print results other than what were calculated, who knows.)
Well, he's repeatedly denied saying it, and reporters aren't notorious for accuracy. Still, at one time he was reported to have said it, and it was a long time before he started denying it.
To be fair, at the time he said it, and for several years following, it WAS true...especially in the sense that nobody could afford to have that much RAM. Unfortunately it lead to architectural design issues in MS-DOS software that took a long time to work around...so the quote became both notorious and denied.
As to whether it was an accurate quote... just about anyone who claims to know is fooling himself. And this may include the person to whom the quote is attributed. Memories are fallible.
As to whether I believe Gates said it... Yes. It's right in line with other things he was saying at the time. But that sure isn't proof.
Really? I don't believe so. And as I recall the actual evidence that could be used to resolve the question was sealed by the US Supreme Court.
OTOH, he probably did come close to winning actual elections under the official rules. Probably. But Diebold counted many of those votes, so I'm not certain at all. And equivalent problems have been found with the other voting machines being sold. It's as if a voting machine won't be bought unless it's easy to corrupt the result... (I live in a Democrat county of a Democrat state, and it bought Diebold voting machines. I'm not making about claims of the honesty of one party over the other. They are BOTH highly suspect.)
That's what they say as a joke. Actually, however, it's only around 5% or fewer that give lawyers a bad name. But over 90% deserve the bad name that they get, because they act to protect those 5% from punishment.
And this *isn't* a joke.
(OTOH, the whole context is based on the presumption that the legal system is capable of being salvaged. That a system where gaming the system to defend clients that you know are guilty is salvageable. I'm not convinced that this is true. My suspicion is that the legal system was tolerable in the 17-1800's was because it was weakly enforced, and was clearly better than anarchy. It's clearly not really interested in truth or justice, and makes no real effort to determine those. In fact there are many places in the rules for acceptable evidence, what information can be made available to the jury, etc. where it is quite clear that gaming the system is valued more highly than either truth or justice.)
Historically tort reform has been wealthy people with lots of power shifting the basis on which suits can be filed or won.
Now I'll grant that this isn't what it's sold as, but historically that's been what's happened. Strangely enough they've never shifted the basis in such a manner as to disadvantage themselves.
You have made a good argument that our legal system is inherently corrupt.
I do not believe that there is ANY ethical action that is possible once a lawyer decides that his client is guilty of a heinous crime beyond the possibility of his doubting it. The only quasi-ethical stance is that I can see is that he should resign his position, but remain silent. And I'm not comfortable with that. And clearly lawyers don't frequently act in this quasi-ethical fashion.
Why do you presume that a person who is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt is deserving any defense? The only reason that I can see is that you believe that the particular law he is guilty of breaking is, itself, so unethical that breaking it is the lesser ethical violation. I'll grant that there are many such laws, but that doesn't seem to be what we are discussing.
Now if you are talking about following customary practices that have by tradition in the legal profession become called ethical, then you have a sort of a point. But accepting it requires accepting those traditions, which are commonly rejected by those who aren't themselves lawyers. And rejected on the grounds that they are unethical, despite the fact that lawyers label them as ethics.
Note that even many lawyers who are in and of themselves ethical accept these principles. They just operate in areas of the field where they don't apply. But by accepting and defending these principles as ethical they are themselves acting unethically...though probably not consciously so.
To my mind the purpose of a justice system is to determine truth and to render ethical judgments based on that truth. When gaming the system becomes the end, then justice is gone. And contesting to shield a person known to you to be guilty is gaming the system, unless you consider that the law under which he is guilty is itself unethical.
If the machine is so designed that any measurable fraction of the qualified voters can't use it, then it's broken.
I realize that this puts stringent requirements on the machine, but they are necessary requirements. The end user must be able to use the system, or the system is broken.
That said, I agree that any intelligent system for defrauding the vote wouldn't reveal itself so openly. As a result no secret voting machine should ever be trusted. This, however, doesn't imply that there aren't stupid ways of defrauding the machinery, and some of the reported hacks would allow extremely stupid people to hack the machines so as to defraud the vote. So that's not proof that the vote isn't fraudulent. Only measuring against a known good paper backtrail could show that.
Personally, I have no difficulty believing that some stupid hack has been applied to the voting machine, though I agree that it isn't proven. All that's proven is that people aren't being allowed to vote the way that they intend. That's enough, in my opinion, to invalidate the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the Duma was much better than the Czar, at least for the short while that it existed. Unfortunately they got overthrown by Lenin, who was followed by Stalin, who was a reincarnation of Ivan the Terrible. Currently things seem quite confused, but it looks as if the Duma may have reappeared. (I haven't been following things closely, and anyway these patterns play themselves out over generations, so short intermittent changes aren't unexpected.)
China is a better case. When the party chairman was Mao, he was pretty clearly a Chinese Emperor. Currently it's not so clear. They may actually be changing their system of government to a bureaucracy without an Emperor. I'm not at all sure that this is an improvement. It can be, but that all depends on the Emperor. Still, I consider it quite likely that within a generation or two there will be a new Imperial Dynasty and Mandrinate. (Not all of the Emperors were powerful...it's just that under Mao the Emperor and the head of the Mandrinate were combined in one person, and not made hereditary. However I expect the prior system to resurrect itself from the ashes like a Phoenix, symbol of the Empress. (Egyptian phoenix, anyway. I'm not sure that Chinese phoenixes resurrect themselves.)
It's a program that I wrote in SmallEiffel for MSWind. I forget exactly what the re-packager called it, but it didn't need to be recompiled to work on MSWind as a compiler. Unfortunately that was discontinued. Even more unfortunately, SmallEiffel acquired new maintainers who aren't particularly interested in backwards compatibility. As a result even if I still had the code and an MSWind system I could no longer compile it.
I'm counting "Accompany with a written offer" as making the choice at the time of distribution...but I you appear to be right that one doesn't need to actually do the distribution at that time.
Also the Eiffel program was a stand alone program (rather like GhostScript in that regard) that I wrote which was called from MSAccess which passed it a few file names and said "process this!". It could have been run from the command line, but it was more convenient to do it this way.
Similarly Ghostscript is a stand alone program. Unless you modify the code drastically you can't say that it's a part of some other program. (Of course, they may have done just that. I don't know.)
Don't be too quick. Obama may not be Bush, but his voting record is enough to cause qualms. Remember he voted for FISA. He voted for the Bush bailout. And lots of other rather peculiar things.
I voted for Obama because he wasn't McCain. Not because I have any particularly nice feelings about him. I'm cautiously optimistic that he won't make things worse. He might make things better, but he's voted for extending the war every time (I think).
I don't think that Obama actually hates people the way that Bush does. That may in and of itself be the main advantage...and McCain might have had that same advantage, though I don't think that Palin did. But both McCain and Palin seemed to be suffering from reality disconnect aggravated by advanced cases of Future Shock. (So do many of their supporters.)
So don't expect too much, and certainly don't expect ANY improvement before Jan. 20.
Sorry, but the human condition is something that the laws need to be written to presume. One must presume that those controlling lots of money for a short time will be motivated to gain as much from it as the can safely do. And to not worry about the long term effects unless those directly effect them, personally. (Even then, evidence shows that long-term effects tend to be severely discounted.)
Therefore the laws must be written to control that in the known environment of humans. Greedy bastards are the ones most interested in money, so that's what you'll find where lots of money is accessible to control. These are standard environmental conditions. You don't get more conservative financial leaders unless the laws DEMAND that that's who you get. (And even then there will be exceptions...so you need to watch carefully.)
Those messages you may have found inflamatory, but I'm afraid that I have considered Bush a traitor for many years. Probably since shortly after 9/11. And I have no respect for anyone who supports him or his actions.
But my despising of Bush was based on his known actions. And the actions of Karl Rove were enough that he should be in prison at the moment, based on his known actions. (I'll admit the "village idiot" was merely inflamatory...Bush was a willing puppet, but he was aware of what he was doing...which is one of the things that makes it harder to forgive him than Regan.)
And I consider that anything that was done which made it more difficult for Bush to govern needs evidence before I will consider it less than a positive good. Direct evidence that proves that it does more harm to the country than the good which is accomplished by making it more difficult for Bush to govern.
Politicians always talk about bringing unification and peace, but one needs to understand what they're saying. They're saying "We won, so grin and bear it." Often it's not an important enough matter, so that's a rational approach. Perhaps even usually. Bush has been an exception. He's not just of different convictions, he seems evil. He seems destructive for the sake of being destructive. If there are two choices in a situation, he can be relied upon to choose the more evil (though not always the more destructive).
Did you ever read or see "The Manchurian Candidate"? I've wondered about Bush. I still do, but I now feel that there is more agreement of purpose than that model would imply.
You left out the actions of Pelosi and Feinstein. Feinstein, at least, is nearly as guilty as Bush, and Pelosi was as guilty as she was capable of. And she just got re-elected.
Insane, yes. But probably no more so than your repeated insistence that "he fact that until now, the majority of the electorate was on the side of those people".
I don't know anyone who was on the side of that. Even most Bush supporters didn't ever support torture. Most of them are still in denial about it happening. (Well, I don't know a large enough number of Bush supporters to make a valid sample, even if it weren't non-random, but such is my experience.)
OTOH, I agree that most people don't weigh human rights violations seriously enough. (And I'm not *just* referring to torture, but to the multitudinous human rights violations that have become the practice during the last 8 years...and also to the ones I was occasionally aware of earlier.)
A more cogent point would be the insanity of the way the US supports dictatorships. This is something we *should* find abhorrent, but which we have done since our start as a country. It's as if our government has no morals at all, and as if our people don't expect it to display any morals. Merely obedience to rules. (That's insanely foolish, I'll admit, but it's not the insanity that you were talking about.) If you don't expect the government to display morality, then why would you expect it to obey the rules?
And there are no viable 3rd etc. party candidates because of the either imbecilic or corrupt voting practice summed up as "winner take all". Practically every other voting method produces better results, but no other method as reliably produces "most powerful wins". Instant Runoff is pretty good. I prefer Condorcet, but Instant Runoff is easier to explain to people, and lets people vote for their true choice without sacrificing their vote to "the lesser of two evils" because their candidate probably doesn't have a chance. (As does Condorcet, of course.)
Most decent systems allow voters to rank their preference for candidates, and then proceed from there. Almost all ways of proceeding from their produce results that more voters find satisfactory. But they don't as strongly support the entrenched power structure, and they make it easier for new parties to arise and accumulate influence. (And even allow for occasional candidates to win without ANY party support.)
Blaming Bush isn't a solution, but he has been aggressively attempting to destroy the country. There may have been some actions that he took that weren't intended as destructive to the country, but I would need to have them pointed out, and I'm afraid that with his track record I can't give him any benefit of the doubt. I expect him to relocate to a country with no extradition treaty some time before January 20th. (Well, that's a slight exaggeration. Expect is to strong a term. But he has been making preparations.)
Blaming Bush is no solution, but getting rid of him is the first step towards a solution. Blaming Chaney might be more reasonable, but that's not a solution either. Getting rid of every law and administrative decision made by either of them would be a reasonable first step towards a solution. I'm not aware of ANY that should be kept (though I acknowledge that such may exist). As a first cut, though, get rid of all of them. That can be done reasonably quickly. Then if any are desirable, they can be re-instituted on an "as justified" basis. But each one would need lots of justification and examination for booby-traps.
<RANT>
Now clearly I don't expect this to happen, even though I'm of the opinion that that's the proper action. And I remember that Obama voted for FISA. So my expectations are rather low. But at least he hasn't yet given evidence that his main goal is to destroy the country. (Were it possible, I think that Bush & Cheney should both be charged with and convicted of treason. I think that they WERE the primary enemies of the country during the last 8 years...and that they gave themselves lots of aid and comfort and armed assistance.) And there are a lot of both Democrats and Republicans that deserve similar handling. Unfortunately, many of them are currently in office, so I can't imagine the Justice Department handling the case...and I'm not certain that it should. (Separation of Powers.) I personally consider both Feinstein and Pelosi to be traitors, but evidence for intentional treason is a bit lacking. Possibly they could argue that they didn't intend to betray the country.
</Rant>
I also remember that Clinton was kept pretty busy towards the end, and really couldn't get very much done against rather intense opposition. Ostensibly over something very trivial.
Sorry, Clinton isn't really on the hook for this one, though I admit that there's no proof that he would have fixed things if he'd had the time.
To me the attacks on Clinton seemed orchestrated specifically to prevent him from cleaning up certain areas of government. Whether this is true or not, they certainly had that effect. Whether this is an area that he would have addressed isn't clear. Whitewater makes it clear that he was informed about this kind of problem, but doesn't demonstrate whether he would have cleaned the problem up if he had been able. (After all, Chester A. Arthur cleaned up the "spoils system", and removed a lot of corruption from the federal government.)
Reasonable. I've pretty definitely traced the patent mess back to Reagan's attempt to turn the PTO into a profit center. Not to claim that it wasn't already pretty bad, but it was once reasonable to accept a PTO patent as evidence that an invention was novel, and that at least nobody had filed for a patent on it before in the US. (They were always quite peculiar as to what they would accept as evidence. I don't think that's actually gotten any worse despite the Neem tree patent...you can find equivalent abuse all the way back to the founding. It may have been designed in intentionally.)
Pointing out statistics isn't racist. The interpretation that you put on them may well be. But without an interpretation they don't mean anything.
J.C. once said (as translated) "The poor you will always have with you". This could be read as a statistical statement about the distribution of incomes, but usually people put some interpretation on those words that isn't, strictly speaking, found within the text.
An old saying went "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.", and it was largely based on the fact that statistics don't tell you why something happened, but they sure make it easy for your prejudices to convince you that you know.
I rather like the Scantron(tm?)(sp?) system we used this time. You black out a section (i.e., fill in an arrow) on a piece of paper for each vote. You can see what you've done. The votes are fed into an optical scanner, which immediately counts them. Then the paper copies are saved as an audit trail. Simple, fast, elegant, cheap, and easy. And verifiable.
And it was debugged by IBM on high school exams, SATs, PSATs, etc. Years ago.
Case 1: You are engaged in non-commercial distribution, so you only need to be willing to tell me how to get a copy.
Case 2: This is commercial distribution. If requested you must provide the source...so you'd better keep a copy for 3 years.
Case 3: Home. Non-Commercial. Not sure about distribution. If so see Case 1. Work. Probably commercial. Not sure about distribution, but if so see Case 2...either that or already technically illegal under misuse of company property.
Note that in all cases you have no obligation to distribute the software unless requested to do so. Also the courts are reputed to occasionally use common sense, so when there's no obvious intent to flout the license they will often avoid hair-splitting details, and just allow approximate remediation. (If you can't provide the exact patch set that was running on your computer on that day, it's probably still ok if you aren't engaged in large scale commercial activity.)
An oversight, yes. Honest? We're talking about Diebold here. I'm about as willing to presume honesty on their part as on the part of SCOx or MS. I can, in certain cases, accept the possibility, and the lack of proof of intent to deceive. If they want to claim honesty, though, they've got to prove it.
There's no obligation to put it on a web site, but I believe that unless they distribute the source code at the same time that they distribute the application, they need to make the source code available to anyone who asks.
OTOH, that's just the source code to the GPL code. There's nothing that says their Visual Basic code has to be made available for all to ruin their eyes on. (Well, they were reported many years ago as using MSAccess as their database.)
Anyway, snideness aside, their code is their code, and licensed however they choose. Other people's code, however, is licensed as the other people choose. The part that's under GPL has a requirement that you make the source code available...either at the time of distribution to the recipient or on request by anyone, your choice. But after you've distributed it, you've already chosen. (But, of course, this requirement only applies to the GPL code. I once called an Eiffel program that I write from MSAccess. The Eiffel program was GPL [not that it mattered, I was just being purist], but that certainly didn't mean that I had to distribute MSAccess.)
If the code is under the GPL, and they distribute the code, then they are required to provide the source either at the time of distribution, or on request for the next 3? 7? (I should look this up, but I'm lazy) years.
If they provide the source at the time of distribution, then they have no further obligations, and only the purchasers are entitled to the source. If they don't, then I believe that anyone is entitled to request the source. (I'd have to check the license again to be certain of that part.)
Anyway, the easy way to handle it is to distribute the source with the application, and that's what I do. If, however, you sell lots, then it becomes cheaper to set up an ftp site...but you can also insist that anyone who wants to get the code from you mail in a request, and you can bill for "reasonable shipping and handling". (I read that as "you aren't supposed to make money on the shipping and handling, but it shouldn't cost you either".)
(I'm pretty clear about what applies if you ship the code with the application...but I'm less clear about the options I don't use.)
N.B.: This only applies to the GPL licensed code. Ghostscript is a separate chunk of code, so if they didn't embed it into their program, all they would need to do is ship the Ghostscript code as they had shipped it with the binary. This is likely to be a nothing suit. (OTOH, anything that gets in the way of the corrupt Diebold voting machines is good, and if it *should* result in their sale being prevented, even better. And they MAY have altered the code to print results other than what were calculated, who knows.)
Well, he's repeatedly denied saying it, and reporters aren't notorious for accuracy. Still, at one time he was reported to have said it, and it was a long time before he started denying it.
To be fair, at the time he said it, and for several years following, it WAS true...especially in the sense that nobody could afford to have that much RAM. Unfortunately it lead to architectural design issues in MS-DOS software that took a long time to work around...so the quote became both notorious and denied.
As to whether it was an accurate quote ... just about anyone who claims to know is fooling himself. And this may include the person to whom the quote is attributed. Memories are fallible.
As to whether I believe Gates said it... Yes. It's right in line with other things he was saying at the time. But that sure isn't proof.
Really? I don't believe so. And as I recall the actual evidence that could be used to resolve the question was sealed by the US Supreme Court.
OTOH, he probably did come close to winning actual elections under the official rules. Probably. But Diebold counted many of those votes, so I'm not certain at all. And equivalent problems have been found with the other voting machines being sold. It's as if a voting machine won't be bought unless it's easy to corrupt the result... (I live in a Democrat county of a Democrat state, and it bought Diebold voting machines. I'm not making about claims of the honesty of one party over the other. They are BOTH highly suspect.)
That's what they say as a joke. Actually, however, it's only around 5% or fewer that give lawyers a bad name. But over 90% deserve the bad name that they get, because they act to protect those 5% from punishment.
And this *isn't* a joke.
(OTOH, the whole context is based on the presumption that the legal system is capable of being salvaged. That a system where gaming the system to defend clients that you know are guilty is salvageable. I'm not convinced that this is true. My suspicion is that the legal system was tolerable in the 17-1800's was because it was weakly enforced, and was clearly better than anarchy. It's clearly not really interested in truth or justice, and makes no real effort to determine those. In fact there are many places in the rules for acceptable evidence, what information can be made available to the jury, etc. where it is quite clear that gaming the system is valued more highly than either truth or justice.)
Historically tort reform has been wealthy people with lots of power shifting the basis on which suits can be filed or won.
Now I'll grant that this isn't what it's sold as, but historically that's been what's happened. Strangely enough they've never shifted the basis in such a manner as to disadvantage themselves.
You have made a good argument that our legal system is inherently corrupt.
I do not believe that there is ANY ethical action that is possible once a lawyer decides that his client is guilty of a heinous crime beyond the possibility of his doubting it. The only quasi-ethical stance is that I can see is that he should resign his position, but remain silent. And I'm not comfortable with that. And clearly lawyers don't frequently act in this quasi-ethical fashion.
Why do you presume that a person who is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt is deserving any defense? The only reason that I can see is that you believe that the particular law he is guilty of breaking is, itself, so unethical that breaking it is the lesser ethical violation. I'll grant that there are many such laws, but that doesn't seem to be what we are discussing.
Now if you are talking about following customary practices that have by tradition in the legal profession become called ethical, then you have a sort of a point. But accepting it requires accepting those traditions, which are commonly rejected by those who aren't themselves lawyers. And rejected on the grounds that they are unethical, despite the fact that lawyers label them as ethics.
Note that even many lawyers who are in and of themselves ethical accept these principles. They just operate in areas of the field where they don't apply. But by accepting and defending these principles as ethical they are themselves acting unethically...though probably not consciously so.
To my mind the purpose of a justice system is to determine truth and to render ethical judgments based on that truth. When gaming the system becomes the end, then justice is gone. And contesting to shield a person known to you to be guilty is gaming the system, unless you consider that the law under which he is guilty is itself unethical.
Possibly, for certain definitions of "everyone". They lost me years ago.
You mean like "Jealous Jabberwock"?
Personally my preference would be for something like "Jumpy Jackalope", but that's not the tenor that I think he was reaching for.
If the machine is so designed that any measurable fraction of the qualified voters can't use it, then it's broken.
I realize that this puts stringent requirements on the machine, but they are necessary requirements. The end user must be able to use the system, or the system is broken.
That said, I agree that any intelligent system for defrauding the vote wouldn't reveal itself so openly. As a result no secret voting machine should ever be trusted. This, however, doesn't imply that there aren't stupid ways of defrauding the machinery, and some of the reported hacks would allow extremely stupid people to hack the machines so as to defraud the vote. So that's not proof that the vote isn't fraudulent. Only measuring against a known good paper backtrail could show that.
Personally, I have no difficulty believing that some stupid hack has been applied to the voting machine, though I agree that it isn't proven. All that's proven is that people aren't being allowed to vote the way that they intend. That's enough, in my opinion, to invalidate the results.