The Presidential election is unique. It's the only election in which multiple "office-holders" (electors) are all determined by a single vote tally - i.e. "winner-take-all." Only Maine and Nebraska have rationally addressed this anomaly so far.
It seems to me that states have a choice: (1) If they continue to promulgate the statewide "winner-take-all" paradigm, then the absence of a valid winner should result in neither candidate taking anything. Unless the margin of 'victory' achieves a statistical confidence level of 90% (or a legislated alternative), no electors should be chosen from that state. None. (2) Adopt the Maine/Nebraska apportionment of electors by Congressional District, with two elected statewide. Split the statewide pair when the vote is a statistical tie.
Both approaches preserve the "small state" advantage.
... software for an election system with standards for validation and verification that don't achieve a quarter of the reliability that MilSpec achieves. Is there a more ubiquitously 'mission critical' an application? I don't think so. Yet they don't even have requirements for end-to-end error detection, let alone correction. It's a classic one-way communications channel, and there's virtually nothing to ensure the information isn't corrupted, either deliberately or systemically.
Not necessarily. If the IRS audits, they'll ask for proof that such devices or services are actually required. That's when you'll discover the difference between coerced and required -- and the difference between common sense and tax laws.
This actually happened to me. The company, because it did federal contracts, wouldn't go on record as requiring an employee to bear such expenses because, in the "fine print," federal contracts require the contractor to bear and account for all necessary expenses. There are other reasons as well.
... memory and had to rewire it, using cheap PRC labor with suitable profits for crony middlemen. (It fills a couple of old blimp hangers near a hydroeletric dam and has the side benefit of warming a few swimming pools.)
But they forgot about the write-after-read circuits.
... would seem to be obvious. Require that they cease and desist in the obsessive collection of massive amounts of surveillance data that does not serve the public interest. They're clearly in possession of far more data than they can resonably use in the interests of Justice.
It must also be true that Hitler wasn't really Hitler until the six-millionth Jew was murdered by the state. Up until that time he wore his "Gott Mit Uns" beltbuckle with pride and proclaimed "I'm not really Hitler so stop saying that!"
Heaven forbid any "good German" should actually look at the conditions and attitudes that led inexorably to the atrocities of autocratic power (that corrupts) in order to prevent any such abuses, regardless of scale, in the future. Let's just wait until the six-millionth 'evil-doer' is murdered, huh?
Officials subject to Constitutional Advise and Consent are impeachable. However, as we know, getting a blow job and not sharing is the only impeachable offense currently recognized by the Greedy Old Perverts.
The fallacy is in assuming that the degree of fraud is both equal in potential scope and equally detectible. Paper-based systems are inherently more immune to large scale fraud at the ballot level if only because so many physical ballots would require attention. Electronic systems pose far lower hurdles for large-scale fraud, allowing for extensive pseudo-random vote switching and/or nullification. At the same time, at least the tangible paper ballot offers an opportunity for forensic analysis using a multiple-millenia-long basis in human experience. Such detection/correction/amelioration techniques have a far shallower pool of human experience upon which to draw when it comes to 'black box' electronic systems. Just try to find the perpetrator's fingerprints or eraser residue on a touchscreen system.
The greater threat posed by such systems is mostly in the very opportunity to detect the fraud at all. It's likely that exit polling, while surely arguable, would be the predominant method for even suggesting the probability of fraud and wouldn't even begin to prove the who/what/where/when/how of it.
I completely agree. Optical scan (including marksense) systems have the additional virtue of being available to absentee voters. There's not much doubt that all the virtues favor optical scanning: the ballot the voter touches is the ballot that's counted, it's a natural audit trail, there are backup counting methods, the cost is lowest, the technology is targeted at the tabulation and not speciously at the fictitious "user is wrong" voter, and they're the most tamper-resistant.
IMHO, anyone favoring weaker ballot technology is just asking for fraud in the last remaining vestige of actual democracy in our American system today.
"Free marketeers" constantly remind us that as the supply goes up the cost comes down. Constantly confusing correlation with causality, the advertising marketeers don't seem to get the message that as the supply goes up the value comes down. When advertising increases in proportion to actual content, the value of each ad is reduced, both because it's competing for the reader's attention with other ads, but because the readers lose interest.
Solution? Raise the price for ad copy and reduce the supply of space available. When advertisers actually have to pay more for space, they might actually start trying to make an offer that's worth the reader's attention.
The only 'evidence' excluded because it was obtained illicitly is 'evidence' obtained by the government or an agent thereof. This "exclusionary principle" does not apply when the obtainer is a private entity (person or company). Thus, even though a crime or misdemeanor may have been committed by such a private entity in obtaining information or property used as evidence, it is NOT excluded for this reason.
(Indeed, if it were, then stolen property itself would be excluded as evidence of theft. D'oh!)
From what I can tell, most of those with learning ability and integrity quickly leave the various Customer Support positions associated with @Home. The chances of reaching a Tier 1 CSR who can actually distinguish between a technically savvy customer and a helpless newbie are less than 1 in five.
The larger cable operators (especially AT&T) who remarket @Home services are running their own Tier 1 CS operations, either internally or subcontracted to about three major body shops that run telephone boiler rooms. The IRS is better at "customer care" than the vast majority of these folks.
Not only aren't these folks able to obtain any information about known network or server outages that may be causing calls, they're not even apparently aware of or concerned that they aren't. About 1 time in three, their own support systems are out, so they can't even log the call or access what little information that may be available. They usually aren't even able to access the service themselves, since they're on segregated WANs.
On top of all this, they often lie and invent "policy" merely to close out the call... where the customer has had to wait often more than an hour on hold just to get through. Newbie customers have had their systems hosed because they slavishly followed the CSRs misguided or malicious instructions, often up to and including reinstalling their OS and all software... when the issues actually do lie in the malfunctioning services themselves.
Among the things customers have been told... no credits for prolonged and repeated email service failures because email is "free"... the don't accept complaints about web server outages because user webspaces are "free"... no credit or accommodation for news server outages because Usenet is "free"... they can only get a credit for one day at a time, and must call every day (taking an hour or two) to get another day's credit ($1.33), even if they're completely dead in the water.
In my 30 years in this industry, I have *never* heard of a support function that was so abysmal. They make AOL look like saints and rocket scientists. They make the CSRs in the old days of CompuServe look like gods. It's truly beyond belief.
Yet... every once in awhile (1 time in 5), a diligent and honest CSR actually takes the call. 1-3 months later, that CSR is no longer there and their email bounces.
One of the @Home subscribers has apparently been tracking email losses for over three months. I've never heard of an ISP that lost this much email!
http://members.home.net/mblackford/eGroup-chart.ht m
Intellectual Property laws (arguably including DMCA), covering copyright and trade secret material, are enacted to encourage and support the development and publication of true intellectual property, or innovative and improved product development and commercial offerings to the public. Such protections are established in order that those who work to improve commercial products and services, increase knowledge, and create art are able to benefit from their service to the public. It's an incentive to such creative folks to do so.... because the public benefits.
It is the public benefit that is sought by such legislation, not a cover under which deceitful and illicit activities can be hidden.
While you could label anything with a claim of copyright it does NOT mean that you can legitimately employ the IP legal system to prevent the publication of something that's merely embarassing. The interests of the public are preeminent. It would not be in the public interest to allow the use of copyright to keep something hidden... it's intended to facilitate publication and distribution, with fair compensation for such publication.
Likewise, trade secret protections can only be affirmed where innovation and improved products or services are reasonably the basis for the materials in question. Thus, while it could be validly claimed that publishing proprietary business plans and market analyses would be a violation, the publication and reporting of materials portraying gross ineptitude and deceitful business practices cannot validly be so interpreted.
There can be no tort if the published materials are factually accurate and not demonstrably valuable. Embarassment isn't a sufficient basis for claiming value, particularly when the embarassment is due to the company's own materials which demonstrate their malicious, inept, and predatory behavior.
IMHO, Excite@Home has abused its privelege as a publicly licensed business. They have malignantly and arrogantly interfered with the commercial relationships of a citizen with other businesses, under the thin cover of DMCA, merely to keep their own sleazy behavior hidden from the disinfectant effect of public view and informed consumers. They should be made to answer for this outrageous behavior in either a court of law, or the court of public opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
The Presidential election is unique. It's the only election in which multiple "office-holders" (electors) are all determined by a single vote tally - i.e. "winner-take-all." Only Maine and Nebraska have rationally addressed this anomaly so far.
It seems to me that states have a choice:
(1) If they continue to promulgate the statewide "winner-take-all" paradigm, then the absence of a valid winner should result in neither candidate taking anything. Unless the margin of 'victory' achieves a statistical confidence level of 90% (or a legislated alternative), no electors should be chosen from that state. None.
(2) Adopt the Maine/Nebraska apportionment of electors by Congressional District, with two elected statewide. Split the statewide pair when the vote is a statistical tie.
Both approaches preserve the "small state" advantage.
... software for an election system with standards for validation and verification that don't achieve a quarter of the reliability that MilSpec achieves. Is there a more ubiquitously 'mission critical' an application? I don't think so. Yet they don't even have requirements for end-to-end error detection, let alone correction. It's a classic one-way communications channel, and there's virtually nothing to ensure the information isn't corrupted, either deliberately or systemically.
Not necessarily. If the IRS audits, they'll ask for proof that such devices or services are actually required. That's when you'll discover the difference between coerced and required -- and the difference between common sense and tax laws.
This actually happened to me. The company, because it did federal contracts, wouldn't go on record as requiring an employee to bear such expenses because, in the "fine print," federal contracts require the contractor to bear and account for all necessary expenses. There are other reasons as well.
It's called "getting screwed."
... memory and had to rewire it, using cheap PRC labor with suitable profits for crony middlemen. (It fills a couple of old blimp hangers near a hydroeletric dam and has the side benefit of warming a few swimming pools.)
But they forgot about the write-after-read circuits.
Ooops!
... would seem to be obvious. Require that they cease and desist in the obsessive collection of massive amounts of surveillance data that does not serve the public interest. They're clearly in possession of far more data than they can resonably use in the interests of Justice.
Better sooner than later.
Yes, it's true that not all fascists are Nazis.
It must also be true that Hitler wasn't really Hitler until the six-millionth Jew was murdered by the state. Up until that time he wore his "Gott Mit Uns" beltbuckle with pride and proclaimed "I'm not really Hitler so stop saying that!"
Heaven forbid any "good German" should actually look at the conditions and attitudes that led inexorably to the atrocities of autocratic power (that corrupts) in order to prevent any such abuses, regardless of scale, in the future. Let's just wait until the six-millionth 'evil-doer' is murdered, huh?
Yeah. That's rational. (Sheesh!)
FOIA requestors are required to bear the reasonable additional costs of information rerieval and transcription. Try it sometime.
Officials subject to Constitutional Advise and Consent are impeachable. However, as we know, getting a blow job and not sharing is the only impeachable offense currently recognized by the Greedy Old Perverts.
... and get rid of my old Craftsman router, of course.
The fallacy is in assuming that the degree of fraud is both equal in potential scope and equally detectible. Paper-based systems are inherently more immune to large scale fraud at the ballot level if only because so many physical ballots would require attention. Electronic systems pose far lower hurdles for large-scale fraud, allowing for extensive pseudo-random vote switching and/or nullification. At the same time, at least the tangible paper ballot offers an opportunity for forensic analysis using a multiple-millenia-long basis in human experience. Such detection/correction/amelioration techniques have a far shallower pool of human experience upon which to draw when it comes to 'black box' electronic systems. Just try to find the perpetrator's fingerprints or eraser residue on a touchscreen system.
The greater threat posed by such systems is mostly in the very opportunity to detect the fraud at all. It's likely that exit polling, while surely arguable, would be the predominant method for even suggesting the probability of fraud and wouldn't even begin to prove the who/what/where/when/how of it.
I completely agree. Optical scan (including marksense) systems have the additional virtue of being available to absentee voters. There's not much doubt that all the virtues favor optical scanning: the ballot the voter touches is the ballot that's counted, it's a natural audit trail, there are backup counting methods, the cost is lowest, the technology is targeted at the tabulation and not speciously at the fictitious "user is wrong" voter, and they're the most tamper-resistant.
IMHO, anyone favoring weaker ballot technology is just asking for fraud in the last remaining vestige of actual democracy in our American system today.
"Free marketeers" constantly remind us that as the supply goes up the cost comes down. Constantly confusing correlation with causality, the advertising marketeers don't seem to get the message that as the supply goes up the value comes down. When advertising increases in proportion to actual content, the value of each ad is reduced, both because it's competing for the reader's attention with other ads, but because the readers lose interest.
Solution? Raise the price for ad copy and reduce the supply of space available. When advertisers actually have to pay more for space, they might actually start trying to make an offer that's worth the reader's attention.
The only 'evidence' excluded because it was obtained illicitly is 'evidence' obtained by the government or an agent thereof. This "exclusionary principle" does not apply when the obtainer is a private entity (person or company). Thus, even though a crime or misdemeanor may have been committed by such a private entity in obtaining information or property used as evidence, it is NOT excluded for this reason. (Indeed, if it were, then stolen property itself would be excluded as evidence of theft. D'oh!)
From what I can tell, most of those with learning ability and integrity quickly leave the various Customer Support positions associated with @Home. The chances of reaching a Tier 1 CSR who can actually distinguish between a technically savvy customer and a helpless newbie are less than 1 in five. The larger cable operators (especially AT&T) who remarket @Home services are running their own Tier 1 CS operations, either internally or subcontracted to about three major body shops that run telephone boiler rooms. The IRS is better at "customer care" than the vast majority of these folks. Not only aren't these folks able to obtain any information about known network or server outages that may be causing calls, they're not even apparently aware of or concerned that they aren't. About 1 time in three, their own support systems are out, so they can't even log the call or access what little information that may be available. They usually aren't even able to access the service themselves, since they're on segregated WANs. On top of all this, they often lie and invent "policy" merely to close out the call ... where the customer has had to wait often more than an hour on hold just to get through. Newbie customers have had their systems hosed because they slavishly followed the CSRs misguided or malicious instructions, often up to and including reinstalling their OS and all software ... when the issues actually do lie in the malfunctioning services themselves.
Among the things customers have been told ... no credits for prolonged and repeated email service failures because email is "free" ... the don't accept complaints about web server outages because user webspaces are "free" ... no credit or accommodation for news server outages because Usenet is "free" ... they can only get a credit for one day at a time, and must call every day (taking an hour or two) to get another day's credit ($1.33), even if they're completely dead in the water.
In my 30 years in this industry, I have *never* heard of a support function that was so abysmal. They make AOL look like saints and rocket scientists. They make the CSRs in the old days of CompuServe look like gods. It's truly beyond belief.
Yet ... every once in awhile (1 time in 5), a diligent and honest CSR actually takes the call. 1-3 months later, that CSR is no longer there and their email bounces.
One of the @Home subscribers has apparently been tracking email losses for over three months. I've never heard of an ISP that lost this much email! http://members.home.net/mblackford/eGroup-chart.ht m
Intellectual Property laws (arguably including DMCA), covering copyright and trade secret material, are enacted to encourage and support the development and publication of true intellectual property, or innovative and improved product development and commercial offerings to the public. Such protections are established in order that those who work to improve commercial products and services, increase knowledge, and create art are able to benefit from their service to the public. It's an incentive to such creative folks to do so .... because the public benefits.
... it's intended to facilitate publication and distribution, with fair compensation for such publication.
It is the public benefit that is sought by such legislation, not a cover under which deceitful and illicit activities can be hidden.
While you could label anything with a claim of copyright it does NOT mean that you can legitimately employ the IP legal system to prevent the publication of something that's merely embarassing. The interests of the public are preeminent. It would not be in the public interest to allow the use of copyright to keep something hidden
Likewise, trade secret protections can only be affirmed where innovation and improved products or services are reasonably the basis for the materials in question.
Thus, while it could be validly claimed that publishing proprietary business plans and market analyses would be a violation, the publication and reporting of materials portraying gross ineptitude and deceitful business practices cannot validly be so interpreted.
There can be no tort if the published materials are factually accurate and not demonstrably valuable. Embarassment isn't a sufficient basis for claiming value, particularly when the embarassment is due to the company's own materials which demonstrate their malicious, inept, and predatory behavior.
IMHO, Excite@Home has abused its privelege as a publicly licensed business. They have malignantly and arrogantly interfered with the commercial relationships of a citizen with other businesses, under the thin cover of DMCA, merely to keep their own sleazy behavior hidden from the disinfectant effect of public view and informed consumers.
They should be made to answer for this outrageous behavior in either a court of law, or the court of public opinion.