Personally, I demand that that the Control key be placed where it belongs, immediately to the left of the 'A' key. Caps-lock needs to be out of the way or disabled altogether. '<' and '>' need to be shift-comma and shift-period, respectively (I've used old DEC keyboards where '<' and '>' are on a single key between 'Z' and shift).
I understand that not everyone shares my preferences, which is why keyboards need to be software-configurable. In Windows 2000, for example, you have to edit the registry to swap the control and caps-lock keys (see here for instructions). That's ridiculous. In Unix and Linux you can use xmodmap, which isn't *quite* as cumbersome.
I rarely use any keyboards other than my own, and other people rarely use my keyboards, so I don't worry about undoing my re-mappings. But that's not true for everyone. Any user-oriented OS should have a convenient way to define a set of keyboard mappings, an easy way to switch among them, and a way to specify that a mapping applies only to a specific user.
And finally, the physical design of the keyboard has to accomodate this flexibility. Modern PC keyboards actually aren't bad in this regard; Caps Lock is in the wrong place, but it doesn't physically lock when you press it the way it does on some old keyboards.
Ultimately it would be nice for the legends on the key tops to be programmable (but not at the expense of durability). That's not a big deal for me, since I'm a touch typist.
Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Solar escape velocity from Earth's vicinity (1 AU) is about 42 km/s. Perhaps 618 km/s is the escape velocity from the Sun's surface -- something that isn't likely to be of much direct concern to us for the foreseeable future.
The point where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Moon cancel each other out is somewhere inside the Earth crust.
The center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is about 1000 miles below the Earth's surface.
The point where the Earth and the Moon would exert an equal gravitational force on a third body is in space, much closer to the Moon than to the Earth. I think the actual balance point, the L1 point, is somewhat closer to Earth because of the contribution of rotation -- "centrifugal force", which of course isn't really a "force" unless you use a rotating frame of reference... blah blah physics blah blah vague handwaving blah blah.
The distance actually matters less than the delta-v (fuel requirements). In those terms, Low Earth Orbit is probably about halfway to the Moon, or to just about anywhere in the Solar System. (I don't know the exact figures; perhaps somone else can provide more details.)
Oh well, if you can suspend disbelief long enough to beleive they would send Clint Eastwood and James Gardner into space, I guess you can overlook the physics too.
Why not? They sent John Glenn, and he's older than either of them.
I might be able to guess what the correct number is, but I won't; I don't want some innocent third party getting tons of phone calls over this.
Lawrence Lockwood's name is on the patent, but it was filed in 1994, and PanIP wasn't formed until 2002. Are we sure that Lockwood is affiliated with the company? Is it possible he just sold them the patent?
*snort* Laws passed by any sovereign country are only valid inside that country.
Tell that to Manuel Noriega.
Hacking? You mean vandalism?
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I would expect Slashdot, of all places, to avoid misusing the word "hacking".
Even if we were to give up the battle over the original meaning of the word (a concession I do not make), the meaning being propagated by the media seems deliberately designed to cause confusion. When the same word is used to refer to (a) exploring and/or modifying a system you own, (b) breaking or bypassing the security features of a system someone else owns, and (c) breaking into and vandalizing a system someone owns, it gives the impression that anyone who does any of these things is a criminal -- or, conversely, that anyone who vandalizes someone else's computer system is just having a little innocent fun.
If you want to talking about someone breaking into someone else's computer system, call it what it is -- trespassing. If you want to talking about someone deliberately modifying someone else's computer system without permission, call it what it is -- vandalism.
Re:Password Rememberers/Managers etc.
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I always thought it was ironic that the dumbest users (no offence) had to use a password-managing program to keep track of all their passwords. What they don't realise is that all (closed source) password-managing programs send the user's passwords back to the programs author. Either through a direct connection to some computer, or by emailing them to a hotmail account:) lol.
Do you have some evidence of this, or is it just a joke? Since you said all closed source password-managing programs do this, I presume you have a great deal of evidence.
Part of the problem, of course, is the widespread misuse of the words "hack" and "hacker". When we use the same word for (1) creating (part of) a computer system, (2) trying to understand a computer system, (3) breaking into a computer system, and (4) breaking into and vandalizing a computer system, confusion is inevitable.
People who break into other people's computer systems should be called what they are: computer trespassers. People who deliberately damage other people's computer systems (say, by altering web pages) should be called what they are: computer vandals.
Using the correct terminology would make it clear that messing around with your own computer system and messing around with someone else's computer system are two entirely different things.
> I would argue that the usage of the term "God" in U.S. currency and within the pledge refers to > a system of morals and fairness more than it does the religious aspect.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. The word "God", especially capitalized, refers to the personal supreme being of the Jewish, Christian, and perhaps Muslim religions. Or it can refer to a less specific supreme being, but it's absurd to suggest that it doesn't refer to some supreme being.
Take a look at what President Eisenhower said when he signed the act in 1954:
From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our Nation and our people to the Almighty.
Nobody is saying that "God is now unconstitutional"; perhaps you'd care to explain where you got that idea. What's unconstitutional is government advocacy of religion.
And yes, printing "In God We Trust" on our currency is equally unconstitutional, in my opinion. Courts have ruled otherwise, but -- well, they're wrong. Courts have made mistakes before.
Unfortunately, I expect the Supreme Court to overturn this ruling. The only question is whether they'll bother to read it first.
> This is terrible news. The Constitution gives us freedom of God, not freedom from God.
It gives us both. Take a look at the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...
The wording of the establishment clause is perhaps a bit obscure to modern readers. It means that there can be no legally established religion as some other countries have (the Church of England in the UK, the Roman Catholic Church in some other countries, Islam in others). The strictest interpretation is that it forbids an official Church of United States. However, it's been interpreted (correctly, IMHO) to ban government endorsement of religion.
(BTW, it's true that some states had official churches in the early 19th century. The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to extend the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights to cover the states as well as the Federal government.
For example, a daily recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools, led by the teacher or another school official, would clearly violate the First Amendment's establishment clause -- even if it weren't mandatory. There's nothing preventing individual students from praying if they want to, but it is not the government's place to lead them in prayer.
It seems equally obvious to me that the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment, as long as recitation of the Pledge is imposed by a state-run school.
If you want to recite Pledge, including the "under God", nobody is stopping you.
This is not a Christian nation, even if the majority of the population happens to be Christian.
If you think that the "under God" doesn't violate the First Amendment, how would you feel if it said "under Allah", or "under Zeus", or "under Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and all the others"?
The Establishment Clause is there to protect religion as much as it is to protect people from having religion imposed on them. If I choose to pray, I'll pray. It is not the government's place to tell me how to pray.
According to the press release, the system has 640 nodes with 8 vector processors each, for a total of 5120 CPUs. Each node has 16GB of shared memory and has a peak performance of 8 GFLOPS.
The system runs NEC's SUPER-UX Unix-based operating system, and supports Fortran90, C, C++, HPF (High Performance Fortran), and MPI2 (Message Passing Interface).
You're confusing steganography (data hiding) with cryptography (data obfuscation).
Steganography and cryptography are two different things, but they can easily be used together.
Suppose the government banned all forms of cryptography except for some kind of key escrow system, so the government can (theoretically) decrypt any message it intercepts. The currently existing forms of cryptography would still exist.
If I want to send a secure message, I can encrypt it with, say, PGP, and then encrypt the PGP-encrypted message with the "approved" algorithm. The PGP encryption won't even be recognized unless someone gets a court order and removes the top-level encryption. Even then, I can scatter the bits of my PGP-encrypted message into, say, the low-order color bits of a large image file (making sure that the original unmodified image file no longer exists for comparison). The recipient of the message knows to (1) apply the "approved" decryption algorithm, (2) extract the message bits from the image file using a previously agreed method, and (3) decrypt using PGP.
This is just one example off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to accomplish the same thing.
Any attempt to ban strong encryption would *only* catch those criminals who are smart enough to use encryption at all (many of them aren't) but stupid enough to use a government-approved encryption program without modification.
The history of encryption is a battle between encryption and decryption. At this time, I think encryption is so far ahead of decryption that any attempts at regulation will hurt legitimate users (of whom there are many) without impeding criminals.
When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
I am hardly an expert on this subject. If there are flaws in my reasoning, I'd be glad to have them pointed out.
The FSC was even more clearly political than the USSC and tossed out the existing statutes in Florida governing elections. They essentially rewrote the FL election law and overruled local elections boards in a somewhat aribitrary and one sided manner.
The USSC decision wasn't based on Florida law, it was based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Their previous ruling had criticized the FSC for making new law, then they shot them down for not doing so.
And there were several counties that counted military absentee ballots that arrived on time but without a postmark, but a few counties did not. I think I remember several hundred remaining uncounted, of which I assume Bush would have received the lion's share.
Florida state law requires absentee ballots to have postmarks. The Bush campaign managed to make it look like the evil Democrats were trying to disenfranchise Our Brave Men And Women In Uniform, but in fact they were merely trying to follow the law.
I don't think even RMS would be that extreme. Rather, what he is saying is that you should 'vote with your feet' and ensure that the next (currently unelected) president who you vote for is fully aware of the issues regarding freedom vs. terrorism.
I really think he meant exactly what he wrote -- that George W. Bush is an unelected president.
Such a viewpoint may be in the minority (unfortunately), but it's hardly extreme. I don't always agree with RMS, but on this point, I and a lot of people I know think he's right. (And, of course, a lot think he's wrong.)
Like many of the articles written about the Miami Herald / USA Today recount, the headline and the first few paragraphs say that Bush would have won. It's only in the 5th paragraph that they mention that Gore would have won under the standard advocated by many Republicans.
Perhaps Bush would have won in a fair recount of the votes actually cast. But even that doesn't account for the hundreds of voters who were illegally disenfranchised because their names appeared on sloppily compiled lists of felons. Nor does it account for the hundreds of votes that were mis-cast because of poor ballot design. (It's been argued that disenfranchising voters who can't follow directions is a good thing. I might acknowledge that as a valid argument if it weren't for the fact that the poor designs systematically favored Bush, either deliberately or accidentally.)
In any case, recounting until you get the result you want is not the way to run an election. The way to run it is to follow the law of the state.
Do you mean the law that says ballots are to be judged by "the intent of the voter"? Or the one that calls for a mandatory recount in close races? Several Florida counties never recounted their ballots; they just re-checked the totals. This must be some new meaning of the word "recount" that I hadn't previously encountered.
Then the US Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the counting on based on an "equal protection" argument that would invalidate every election in the country -- but they had their fingers crossed, so you can't use it as a precedent.
good point. The margin Gore "won" the popular vote is smaller than the margin Bush "won" Florida
Huh?
According to the National Archives and Records Administration, at <http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/2000popres.html>, Bush's official margin over Gore in the Florida vote total was 2,912,790 to 2,912,253, a margin of 537 votes or about 0.009% of the total votes cast. Gore's margin in the nationwide popular vote was 50,996,582 to 50,456,062, a margin of 540,520 votes, or 0.5% of the total cast.
First of all, the difference in the national popular vote was ~50,000 (not ~500,000) which is less than the total number of uncounted absentee ballots and well within the margin of error.
Second, the US Supreme court voted 7-2 to reverse the Florida court's decision, and only 5-4 to get on with certifying the election results.
It was the 5-4 vote that stopped the recount. The US Supreme Court could have reversed the decision and allowed the recount to continue under what it considered proper conditions; the claimed deadline was not supported by law.
Third, you might want to reconsider saying "even if Bush really did get the majority of the votes in Florida, that wouldn't excuse the theft." because it was the Florida Supreme Court who first attempted to steal the election for Gore. It was the Gore campaign who first sought to change the rules and timeline of the process through legal action - and it was the Florida Supreme Court who first acted rewrite the election rules after the official results were turned in.
I haven't looked at the Florida Supreme Court's decision recently. As I recall, though, it required the recount to follow the "intent of the voter" standard specified in Florida state law -- which, under the US Constitution, is the controlling law for presidential elections.
Even if the FSC's decision was incorrect, that doesn't make the USSC's blatantly political decision correct. It's not their job to fight political bias with political bias. It's their job to make a decision based on the law and the Constitution. a job they failed to perform.
Fourth, the post-election counts done by the Miami papers prove that even if the US Supreme Court had not acted, Bush still would have won. In fact, they found that Bush would have even picked up more votes.
That's what the headlines said when the reports came out. If you read more than the first few paragraphs, you'd find that the reports included alternative numbers based on several different assumptions. Under some assumptions, Bush won; under others, Gore won.
Does anyone remember whether the Miami newspaper reports account for overvotes as well as undervotes?
Finally, there were "irregularities" in the counting process that took votes away from Bush as well as Gore, such as the military absentee ballots that should have counted but were thrown out.
I don't remember those. I thought that a lot of military absentee ballots were counted despite the lack of a postmark.
By "a real president right now", do you mean a perjuring aldulterer who debates the definition of "is"?
Clinton was legitimately elected, but no, I'm not specifically talking about him.
(I will note a few things. He has not been convicted of perjury, though of course that doesn't mean you don't have the right to call him a perjurer. His wife appears to have forgiven him for his adultery; as far as I'm concerned, that makes it none of anyone else's business. And if you look at the full context of the "definition of is" sound bite, which they hardly ever bothered to show us, he was responding to a poorly worded and ambiguous question. It really did depend on what the definition of "is" is.)
I'd settle for someone who took office by legitimate means. (I don't even insist on election; Ford was never elected, but his succession was legitimate and Constitutional.) I'd settle for someone who speaks coherently, who gives straight answers to straight questions. Just for starters, I'd like someone who's smart enough not to use the word "crusade" while trying to persuade Islamic countries to join our side in a war. (Look at history to see how Moslems feel about the Crusades; they haven't forgotten.)
I voted Libertarian, yet that 'unelected' bit annoyed me, because he was elected, regardless of how many popular votes he got, because popular votes don't matter.
It's not about the nationwide popular vote. It's about the theft of the election. It's about the partisan interference in the Florida recount, and the illegitimate intervention by the US Supreme Court.
Gore led the nationwide popular vote by more than 500,000, well beyond the margin of error.
However, presidents are not selected by the popular vote, they're selected by votes in the Electoral College. Many people would prefer a direct popular vote, but to my knowledge nobody, including Gore himself, advocated retroactively changing the rules in the 2000 election. Doing so would have turned the election into a politically motivated charade.
Instead, the US Supreme Court decided, by a 5-4 vote, to turn the election into a politically motivated charade.
In the Bush v. Gore decision, the court issued an unsigned per curiam decision, which is unprecedented in a case of this importance. They based their decision on an equal protection argument that they had previously rejected. They stated that their decision would not establish a precedent for future cases, which is also unprecedented in a case of this importance. Could it be that on some level they knew what they were doing, and were ashamed of it?
Can anyone seriously suggest that, if the facts of the case had been reversed, we would have gotten the same 5-4 decision in Gore's favor? I didn't think so.
Bush's alleged margin of victory in Florida is well within the margin of error, and much of that error was systematically in his favor. To take just one example, there were a number of "overvotes" in which voters marked a candidate and voted for him again as a write-in candidate. Florida law clearly states that these votes should have been counted. Many of them weren't. Absentee ballots that arrived without postmarks after election day were counted, also in violation of Florida law. All this was done under the direction of Florida's Secretary of State, who had also been one of Bush's state campaign managers.
Even if Bush really did get the majority of the votes in Florida, that wouldn't excuse the theft. The true count wasn't known at the time, and the Supreme Court did its best to ensure that it wouldn't be.
There is no statute of limitations on the crime of stealing the presidency, so before you ask, no, I will not "get over it".
I can't presume to speak for RMS, but I'm sure this is exactly what he meant when he referred to Bush as an "unelected president". I am saddened that so many people seem to think that this is an extremist viewpoint.
I truly hope that Bush handles the current crisis well, though what I've seen so far doesn't fill me with optimism. I truly wish that we had a real president right now.
And, in case anyone was wondering, the horrible events of last week in no way impair my right, and my duty, to express these opinions, or the appropriateness of doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I demand that that the Control key be placed where it belongs, immediately to the left of the 'A' key. Caps-lock needs to be out of the way or disabled altogether. '<' and '>' need to be shift-comma and shift-period, respectively (I've used old DEC keyboards where '<' and '>' are on a single key between 'Z' and shift).
I understand that not everyone shares my preferences, which is why keyboards need to be software-configurable. In Windows 2000, for example, you have to edit the registry to swap the control and caps-lock keys (see
here for instructions). That's ridiculous. In Unix and Linux you can use xmodmap, which isn't *quite* as cumbersome.
I rarely use any keyboards other than my own, and other people rarely use my keyboards, so I don't worry about undoing my re-mappings. But that's not true for everyone. Any user-oriented OS should have a convenient way to define a set of keyboard mappings, an easy way to switch among them, and a way to specify that a mapping applies only to a specific user.
And finally, the physical design of the keyboard has to accomodate this flexibility. Modern PC keyboards actually aren't bad in this regard; Caps Lock is in the wrong place, but it doesn't physically lock when you press it the way it does on some old keyboards.
Ultimately it would be nice for the legends on the key tops to be programmable (but not at the expense of durability). That's not a big deal for me, since I'm a touch typist.
Escape is simply a push beyond about 7 miles per second, in order to escape the Earth and reach all other points beyond (although to escape Sol requires about 618 km/s).
Solar escape velocity from Earth's vicinity (1 AU) is about 42 km/s. Perhaps 618 km/s is the escape velocity from the Sun's surface -- something that isn't likely to be of much direct concern to us for the foreseeable future.
The point where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and the Moon cancel each other out is somewhere inside the Earth crust.
... blah blah physics blah blah vague handwaving blah blah.
The center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system is about 1000 miles below the Earth's surface.
The point where the Earth and the Moon would exert an equal gravitational force on a third body is in space, much closer to the Moon than to the Earth. I think the actual balance point, the L1 point, is somewhat closer to Earth because of the contribution of rotation -- "centrifugal force", which of course isn't really a "force" unless you use a rotating frame of reference
The distance actually matters less than the delta-v (fuel requirements). In those terms, Low Earth Orbit is probably about halfway to the Moon, or to just about anywhere in the Solar System. (I don't know the exact figures; perhaps somone else can provide more details.)
Oh well, if you can suspend disbelief long enough to beleive they would send Clint Eastwood and James Gardner into space, I guess you can overlook the physics too.
Why not? They sent John Glenn, and he's older than either of them.
The phone number is incorrect.
I might be able to guess what the correct number is, but I won't; I don't want some innocent third party getting tons of phone calls over this.
Lawrence Lockwood's name is on the patent, but it was filed in 1994, and PanIP wasn't formed until 2002. Are we sure that Lockwood is affiliated with the company? Is it possible he just sold them the patent?
*snort* Laws passed by any sovereign country are only valid inside that country.
Tell that to Manuel Noriega.
I would expect Slashdot, of all places, to avoid misusing the word "hacking".
Even if we were to give up the battle over the original meaning of the word (a concession I do not make), the meaning being propagated by the media seems deliberately designed to cause confusion. When the same word is used to refer to (a) exploring and/or modifying a system you own, (b) breaking or bypassing the security features of a system someone else owns, and (c) breaking into and vandalizing a system someone owns, it gives the impression that anyone who does any of these things is a criminal -- or, conversely, that anyone who vandalizes someone else's computer system is just having a little innocent fun.
If you want to talking about someone breaking into someone else's computer system, call it what it is -- trespassing. If you want to talking about someone deliberately modifying someone else's computer system without permission, call it what it is -- vandalism.
I always thought it was ironic that the dumbest users (no offence) had to use a password-managing program to keep track of all their passwords. What they don't realise is that all (closed source) password-managing programs send the user's passwords back to the programs author. Either through a direct connection to some computer, or by emailing them to a hotmail account :) lol.
Do you have some evidence of this, or is it just a joke? Since you said all closed source password-managing programs do this, I presume you have a great deal of evidence.
Part of the problem, of course, is the widespread misuse of the words "hack" and "hacker". When we use the same word for (1) creating (part of) a computer system, (2) trying to understand a computer system, (3) breaking into a computer system, and (4) breaking into and vandalizing a computer system, confusion is inevitable.
People who break into other people's computer systems should be called what they are: computer trespassers. People who deliberately damage other people's computer systems (say, by altering web pages) should be called what they are: computer vandals.
Using the correct terminology would make it clear that messing around with your own computer system and messing around with someone else's computer system are two entirely different things.
> a system of morals and fairness more than it does the religious aspect.
I'm sorry, but that's nonsense. The word "God", especially capitalized, refers to the personal supreme being of the Jewish, Christian, and perhaps Muslim religions. Or it can refer to a less specific supreme being, but it's absurd to suggest that it doesn't refer to some supreme being.
Take a look at what President Eisenhower said when he signed the act in 1954:
Nobody is saying that "God is now unconstitutional"; perhaps you'd care to explain where you got that idea. What's unconstitutional is government advocacy of religion.
And yes, printing "In God We Trust" on our currency is equally unconstitutional, in my opinion. Courts have ruled otherwise, but -- well, they're wrong. Courts have made mistakes before.
Unfortunately, I expect the Supreme Court to overturn this ruling. The only question is whether they'll bother to read it first.
> This is terrible news. The Constitution gives us freedom of God, not freedom from God.
...
It gives us both. Take a look at the First Amendment:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
The wording of the establishment clause is perhaps a bit obscure to modern readers. It means that there can be no legally established religion as some other countries have (the Church of England in the UK, the Roman Catholic Church in some other countries, Islam in others). The strictest interpretation is that it forbids an official Church of United States. However, it's been interpreted (correctly, IMHO) to ban government endorsement of religion.
(BTW, it's true that some states had official churches in the early 19th century. The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to extend the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights to cover the states as well as the Federal government.
For example, a daily recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools, led by the teacher or another school official, would clearly violate the First Amendment's establishment clause -- even if it weren't mandatory. There's nothing preventing individual students from praying if they want to, but it is not the government's place to lead them in prayer.
It seems equally obvious to me that the "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the First Amendment, as long as recitation of the Pledge is imposed by a state-run school.
If you want to recite Pledge, including the "under God", nobody is stopping you.
This is not a Christian nation, even if the majority of the population happens to be Christian.
If you think that the "under God" doesn't violate the First Amendment, how would you feel if it said "under Allah", or "under Zeus", or "under Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and all the others"?
The Establishment Clause is there to protect religion as much as it is to protect people from having religion imposed on them. If I choose to pray, I'll pray. It is not the government's place to tell me how to pray.
> President Bush called the ruling ridiculous.. They wont be removing "under god" any time soon.
President Bush has no say in the matter.
I think they're using NEC vector processors.
A press release from NEC, dated May 30, 2000, is at <http://www.nec.co.jp/english/today/newsrel/000 5/3001.html>. There are also links to more current information, in both Japanese and English.
According to the press release, the system has 640 nodes with 8 vector processors each, for a total of 5120 CPUs. Each node has 16GB of shared memory and has a peak performance of 8 GFLOPS.
The system runs NEC's SUPER-UX Unix-based operating system, and supports Fortran90, C, C++, HPF (High Performance Fortran), and MPI2 (Message Passing Interface).
You're confusing steganography (data hiding) with cryptography (data obfuscation).
Steganography and cryptography are two different things, but they can easily be used together.
Suppose the government banned all forms of cryptography except for some kind of key escrow system, so the government can (theoretically) decrypt any message it intercepts. The currently existing forms of cryptography would still exist.
If I want to send a secure message, I can encrypt it with, say, PGP, and then encrypt the PGP-encrypted message with the "approved" algorithm. The PGP encryption won't even be recognized unless someone gets a court order and removes the top-level encryption. Even then, I can scatter the bits of my PGP-encrypted message into, say, the low-order color bits of a large image file (making sure that the original unmodified image file no longer exists for comparison). The recipient of the message knows to (1) apply the "approved" decryption algorithm, (2) extract the message bits from the image file using a previously agreed method, and (3) decrypt using PGP.
This is just one example off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to accomplish the same thing.
Any attempt to ban strong encryption would *only* catch those criminals who are smart enough to use encryption at all (many of them aren't) but stupid enough to use a government-approved encryption program without modification.
The history of encryption is a battle between encryption and decryption. At this time, I think encryption is so far ahead of decryption that any attempts at regulation will hurt legitimate users (of whom there are many) without impeding criminals.
When encryption is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir rapelcgvba.
I am hardly an expert on this subject. If there are flaws in my reasoning, I'd be glad to have them pointed out.
Are you aware that the ballot was designed by a Democrat?
Are you aware that this Democrat is a former Republican, and later Independent, who switched parties so she could run for office?
Also, the ballot was approved by both major parties and the election officials.
So both major parties and the election officials made a mistake that effectively disenfranchised hundreds of voters. Your point?
Also, the Democrats tried to disqualify the military votes since they knew they were not popular with the military.
And because they knew the law was on their side.
The FSC was even more clearly political than the USSC and tossed out the existing statutes in Florida governing elections. They essentially rewrote the FL election law and overruled local elections boards in a somewhat aribitrary and one sided manner.
The USSC decision wasn't based on Florida law, it was based on the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Their previous ruling had criticized the FSC for making new law, then they shot them down for not doing so.
And there were several counties that counted military absentee ballots that arrived on time but without a postmark, but a few counties did not. I think I remember several hundred remaining uncounted, of which I assume Bush would have received the lion's share.
Florida state law requires absentee ballots to have postmarks. The Bush campaign managed to make it look like the evil Democrats were trying to disenfranchise Our Brave Men And Women In Uniform, but in fact they were merely trying to follow the law.
I don't think even RMS would be that extreme. Rather, what he is saying is that you should 'vote with your feet' and ensure that the next (currently unelected) president who you vote for is fully aware of the issues regarding freedom vs. terrorism.
I really think he meant exactly what he wrote -- that George W. Bush is an unelected president.
Such a viewpoint may be in the minority (unfortunately), but it's hardly extreme. I don't always agree with RMS, but on this point, I and a lot of people I know think he's right. (And, of course, a lot think he's wrong.)
Reference, please. Every article I've seen about the recount shows Bush would have won.
Here's one: <http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/04/04/flor ida.recount.01/>
Like many of the articles written about the Miami Herald / USA Today recount, the headline and the first few paragraphs say that Bush would have won. It's only in the 5th paragraph that they mention that Gore would have won under the standard advocated by many Republicans.
Perhaps Bush would have won in a fair recount of the votes actually cast. But even that doesn't account for the hundreds of voters who were illegally disenfranchised because their names appeared on sloppily compiled lists of felons. Nor does it account for the hundreds of votes that were mis-cast because of poor ballot design. (It's been argued that disenfranchising voters who can't follow directions is a good thing. I might acknowledge that as a valid argument if it weren't for the fact that the poor designs systematically favored Bush, either deliberately or accidentally.)
In any case, recounting until you get the result you want is not the way to run an election. The way to run it is to follow the law of the state.
Do you mean the law that says ballots are to be judged by "the intent of the voter"? Or the one that calls for a mandatory recount in close races? Several Florida counties never recounted their ballots; they just re-checked the totals. This must be some new meaning of the word "recount" that I hadn't previously encountered.
Then the US Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the counting on based on an "equal protection" argument that would invalidate every election in the country -- but they had their fingers crossed, so you can't use it as a precedent.
good point. The margin Gore "won" the popular vote is smaller than the margin Bush "won" Florida
.html>, Bush's official margin over Gore in the Florida vote total was 2,912,790 to 2,912,253, a margin of 537 votes or about 0.009% of the total votes cast. Gore's margin in the nationwide popular vote was 50,996,582 to 50,456,062, a margin of 540,520 votes, or 0.5% of the total cast.
Huh?
According to the National Archives and Records Administration, at <http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/2000popres
May I ask where you got your numbers?
First of all, the difference in the national popular vote was ~50,000 (not ~500,000) which is less than the total number of uncounted absentee ballots and well within the margin of error.
.html> shows a difference of 540,520 votes. Do you have a better source?
The National Archives and Records Administration, at <http://www.nara.gov/fedreg/elctcoll/2000popres
Second, the US Supreme court voted 7-2 to reverse the Florida court's decision, and only 5-4 to get on with certifying the election results.
It was the 5-4 vote that stopped the recount. The US Supreme Court could have reversed the decision and allowed the recount to continue under what it considered proper conditions; the claimed deadline was not supported by law.
Third, you might want to reconsider saying "even if Bush really did get the majority of the votes in Florida, that wouldn't excuse the theft." because it was the Florida Supreme Court who first attempted to steal the election for Gore. It was the Gore campaign who first sought to change the rules and timeline of the process through legal action - and it was the Florida Supreme Court who first acted rewrite the election rules after the official results were turned in.
I haven't looked at the Florida Supreme Court's decision recently. As I recall, though, it required the recount to follow the "intent of the voter" standard specified in Florida state law -- which, under the US Constitution, is the controlling law for presidential elections.
Even if the FSC's decision was incorrect, that doesn't make the USSC's blatantly political decision correct. It's not their job to fight political bias with political bias. It's their job to make a decision based on the law and the Constitution. a job they failed to perform.
Fourth, the post-election counts done by the Miami papers prove that even if the US Supreme Court had not acted, Bush still would have won. In fact, they found that Bush would have even picked up more votes.
That's what the headlines said when the reports came out. If you read more than the first few paragraphs, you'd find that the reports included alternative numbers based on several different assumptions. Under some assumptions, Bush won; under others, Gore won.
Does anyone remember whether the Miami newspaper reports account for overvotes as well as undervotes?
Finally, there were "irregularities" in the counting process that took votes away from Bush as well as Gore, such as the military absentee ballots that should have counted but were thrown out.
I don't remember those. I thought that a lot of military absentee ballots were counted despite the lack of a postmark.
By "a real president right now", do you mean a perjuring aldulterer who debates the definition of "is"?
Clinton was legitimately elected, but no, I'm not specifically talking about him.
(I will note a few things. He has not been convicted of perjury, though of course that doesn't mean you don't have the right to call him a perjurer. His wife appears to have forgiven him for his adultery; as far as I'm concerned, that makes it none of anyone else's business. And if you look at the full context of the "definition of is" sound bite, which they hardly ever bothered to show us, he was responding to a poorly worded and ambiguous question. It really did depend on what the definition of "is" is.)
I'd settle for someone who took office by legitimate means. (I don't even insist on election; Ford was never elected, but his succession was legitimate and Constitutional.) I'd settle for someone who speaks coherently, who gives straight answers to straight questions. Just for starters, I'd like someone who's smart enough not to use the word "crusade" while trying to persuade Islamic countries to join our side in a war. (Look at history to see how Moslems feel about the Crusades; they haven't forgotten.)
I voted Libertarian, yet that 'unelected' bit annoyed me, because he was elected, regardless of how many popular votes he got, because popular votes don't matter.
It's not about the nationwide popular vote. It's about the theft of the election. It's about the partisan interference in the Florida recount, and the illegitimate intervention by the US Supreme Court.
That turns out not to be the case.
Gore led the nationwide popular vote by more than 500,000, well beyond the margin of error.
However, presidents are not selected by the popular vote, they're selected by votes in the Electoral College. Many people would prefer a direct popular vote, but to my knowledge nobody, including Gore himself, advocated retroactively changing the rules in the 2000 election. Doing so would have turned the election into a politically motivated charade.
Instead, the US Supreme Court decided, by a 5-4 vote, to turn the election into a politically motivated charade.
In the Bush v. Gore decision, the court issued an unsigned per curiam decision, which is unprecedented in a case of this importance. They based their decision on an equal protection argument that they had previously rejected. They stated that their decision would not establish a precedent for future cases, which is also unprecedented in a case of this importance. Could it be that on some level they knew what they were doing, and were ashamed of it?
Can anyone seriously suggest that, if the facts of the case had been reversed, we would have gotten the same 5-4 decision in Gore's favor? I didn't think so.
Bush's alleged margin of victory in Florida is well within the margin of error, and much of that error was systematically in his favor. To take just one example, there were a number of "overvotes" in which voters marked a candidate and voted for him again as a write-in candidate. Florida law clearly states that these votes should have been counted. Many of them weren't. Absentee ballots that arrived without postmarks after election day were counted, also in violation of Florida law. All this was done under the direction of Florida's Secretary of State, who had also been one of Bush's state campaign managers.
Even if Bush really did get the majority of the votes in Florida, that wouldn't excuse the theft. The true count wasn't known at the time, and the Supreme Court did its best to ensure that it wouldn't be.
There is no statute of limitations on the crime of stealing the presidency, so before you ask, no, I will not "get over it".
I can't presume to speak for RMS, but I'm sure this is exactly what he meant when he referred to Bush as an "unelected president". I am saddened that so many people seem to think that this is an extremist viewpoint.
I truly hope that Bush handles the current crisis well, though what I've seen so far doesn't fill me with optimism. I truly wish that we had a real president right now.
And, in case anyone was wondering, the horrible events of last week in no way impair my right, and my duty, to express these opinions, or the appropriateness of doing so.