First, The United States of America doesn't hold a single election to determine it's President. Each state holds it's own election, independent of the others, and the results of those elections are then tallied to determine the winner. You may not like the Electoral College, but the simple fact is that the Constitution provides for separation between Federal and States Rights, and voting for our leaders is a States right. You cannot implement a national system without a constitutional amendment (and the issue of States Rights vs Federal Rights is so strong that we once had a war over it).
Second, Slashdot is a geek haven, yet even Slashdot was hacked recently. You honestly expect the Government to do a better job securing their Internet voting system than Slashdot does securing their web server and ensuring no abuse of the Moderation system? If the geeks here can't do it, why would anybody assume it can be done somewhere else, and on a much larger scale? Maybe nobody has hacked Brazilian elections, but they are hardly the target US Elections would be, are they?
Third, and this is something people often don't think about, voting isn't SUPPOSED to be easy. Without creating an Elitist slant (which is not my intent), it's important to realize that making voting at least a little inconvenient serves the purpose of eliminating those voters who have absolutely no initiative. If they can't expend the effort to get to the polls (usually a 5 minute drive), they probably also didn't expend the initiative to consider the candidates and the issues. They might have some opinion spoon-fed to them by last nights news, but they are hardly qualified voters.
Fourth, ballots are supposed to be secret. Internet voting cannot be secret. You have to be identified to the system and tracked to prevent spoofing. If you separate the logon from the actual vote, then we've still got to cover what happens if someone votes on the Internet AND votes in the polling station. You have no idea who they voted for in either place, but they've been allowed to vote twice (and trivially at that).
I'm not opposed to improving the system, I just don't think we are ready to go full-bore into hi-tech, Internet voting, without a lot more effort being spent to solve the myriad technical and human problems involved. We don't really need the most technical solution possible, we need the most reliable and effective. If simply redesigning the ballots cures the problems, we don't have to scrap the whole system, we can just redesign the ballots.
Actually, everyone over the age of 18 is legally entitled to vote. Qualified is an entirely different matter. Uninformed votes are meaningless. I would say that a large portion of the populace is not qualified to vote (qualified means capable of making a rational, informed decision, whether anybody else agrees with it or not is irrelevant). In fact, I would wager that most of us are not qualified to vote on at least some of the issues that appear on the ballot (for example, when you get to the part about whether judges should be retained, I bet the percentage of the voting population who actually has an informed opinion on each judge is fairly small).
I vote in Duval County, Florida and the ballot here was not the same as that in Broward, BUT the system is similar (and always has been). The names of the candidates occupy two lines (President, then Vice-President), so even if the opposite page is blank (as it is here in Duval), the second candidate was STILL the third hole down (and always HAS been). You have always had to look at the arrows to see which hole to punch.
If the voters in Broward were confused, they would've been confused by the ballot we used up here in Duval as well (just look at the samples printed everywhere and remove the right hand page and it's exactly what we had in Duval).
In addition, I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone could go through that ballot, being confused and picking the wrong hole, then continuing on through the other 10 pages or so, and then, upon reaching the parking spot, having just voted for many candidates and issues, suddenly have the realization that they misunderstood the very first page and voted wrong. At least not in the numbers being anecdotally reported. While they may have voted wrong, I doubt they all realized it in the parking lot.
Sun's Solaris has less nagging bugs, and an NDA, while RedHat Linux has many nagging bugs, and is open to criticism, hacking, cracking, etc. How is RedHat any better than Sun in this respect?
The particular bug Bob Young referred to was a memory problem that could cause data corruption or even a server to crash. Sun has spent a year working to fix it all while trying to keep it a secret (even from customers with support contracts). Red Hat 7.0 has been out a few weeks and has it's bugs listed openly so you can see if a problem you just ran into is a known bug. This is CLEARLY better.
I have a similar experience. In the last 2 months I've had 4 power outages long enough to cause my systems to fail ungracefully and in each and every case all I did was turn the power switch on and the computer not only booted and did it's own fsck, but didn't lose a byte. Total time to be back up? About 10 minutes.
It strikes me that one point nobody has mentioned is that the EQ client connects to Verant's Patch Server and then to Verant's Login Server. Any Server Emulator is going to have to not only emulate that process, but have a way for the client to connect to it, since the client has no method of choosing to connect somewhere else.
The easy way is, of course, to put an entry in your HOSTS file to change the IP address of patch.everquest.com, but if Verant simply makes the client go to a specific IP address instead of a fqdn, then the only way to connect to the Server Emulator is to modify the client and NOW they've got you. You may be able to get away with putting up a server, but the legalities of modifying their client (which, of course, you are licensed to use but do not own, grrr!) is much easier to convince a court to prohibit.
Or are you doing it with a small program running on the client machine that intercepts and reroutes packets (a man-in-the-middle attack)?
Re:but that's not the way it is
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 1
There's a tremendous number of cars in New York City without radios. Indeed, they often have signs on the outside informing you of this fact. Does this mean they aren't cars any more? Do we need a new word for "4-wheeled self-propelled vehicles capable of carrying passengers"? Of course not. Just because a feature is provided by your computer manufacturer (or car manufacturer) as standard does NOT make it part of the OS. It makes it part of the standard distribution, included applications. Tires are not optional on a car. Hardware support is not optional in an OS. CD-players ARE optional on a car. Modern memory management and Web Browsers ARE optional on an OS Distribution. See how that works? Just because you won't use a car without a radio doesn't mean one without a radio isn't a car, and because I won't use an Operating System without modern memory management doesn't mean MacOS isn't an OS. It's just an OS I won't use. It's still an OS. And UNIX is and always will be an OS, whether the feature set matches what you want to purchase or not.
Last I checked, Linux ran on multiple CPU's in multiple architectures. "Linux-only" does not eliminate the need for portable software. In any case, the GPL will mean you can still get the source and make it portable yourself if you'd like. And I seriously doubt the BSD's are going away. BSD supporters are BSD supporters because they like the quality of their OS. The success or failure of other OSes shouldn't make any difference to them. (And to be honest, it shouldn't make any difference to Linux folks, either).
Having said that, our PPC-based Linux brethren have often pointed out that binary only software distributions are the bane of their existence since they almost always run only on Intel, so we need to ensure we watch the commercial entities in that regard.
i guess the same could be said about compaq vs sun.
Don't forget that Digital Equipment Corp was once the 2nd largest computer company in the world and Compaq was a tiny little startup that built PC's that nobody would seriously consider in a corporate environment. Compaq was the very first of the PC vendors to become a Tier 1 provider. Whether they know how to beat Sun is debatable, but they have proven they can beat giants before. Digital's mistakes are legendary (mostly the continuous waffling other whether to support Vax or UNIX and not enough resources to do both), but it appears that Sun may be headed down that same road (Free Solaris for $99, use Linux at the low end, migrate to Solaris at the high end). If IBM migrates high end AIX features to Linux, AIX will probably disappear (this announcement hints at that already). Then Linux WILL be able to compete with Solaris on the big boxes and what does Sun do with competing OSes? Sure, it's a big if, but every indication is that IBM is firmly on that trail, hoping Linux is the key to their return to market dominance.
I've only had it for 7 as well, but for at least 4 of those years it left my apartment and travelled underground to my friends apartments, so we had 3 apartments on a 10-base-2 backbone. LAN gaming is much better when you don't have to take your machine anywhere!
Yes. Microsoft has even stated that one of their goals was to get the computer to boot up faster and easier (much like turning on a light switch or your TV, you turn it on, it works, you don't have to understand anything). The elimination of parsing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS serves this purpose. The removal of "pure DOS" is a side-effect (no doubt one Microsoft is happy about, but a side-effect, nonetheless) of their attempts to make computers more appliance-like.
It would be far simpler (and cheaper) to put it in Antartica, another remote area not controlled by any government (though the environment is nearly as hostile).
Slashdot Mirror
Second, Slashdot is a geek haven, yet even Slashdot was hacked recently. You honestly expect the Government to do a better job securing their Internet voting system than Slashdot does securing their web server and ensuring no abuse of the Moderation system? If the geeks here can't do it, why would anybody assume it can be done somewhere else, and on a much larger scale? Maybe nobody has hacked Brazilian elections, but they are hardly the target US Elections would be, are they?
Third, and this is something people often don't think about, voting isn't SUPPOSED to be easy. Without creating an Elitist slant (which is not my intent), it's important to realize that making voting at least a little inconvenient serves the purpose of eliminating those voters who have absolutely no initiative. If they can't expend the effort to get to the polls (usually a 5 minute drive), they probably also didn't expend the initiative to consider the candidates and the issues. They might have some opinion spoon-fed to them by last nights news, but they are hardly qualified voters.
Fourth, ballots are supposed to be secret. Internet voting cannot be secret. You have to be identified to the system and tracked to prevent spoofing. If you separate the logon from the actual vote, then we've still got to cover what happens if someone votes on the Internet AND votes in the polling station. You have no idea who they voted for in either place, but they've been allowed to vote twice (and trivially at that).
I'm not opposed to improving the system, I just don't think we are ready to go full-bore into hi-tech, Internet voting, without a lot more effort being spent to solve the myriad technical and human problems involved. We don't really need the most technical solution possible, we need the most reliable and effective. If simply redesigning the ballots cures the problems, we don't have to scrap the whole system, we can just redesign the ballots.
Actually, everyone over the age of 18 is legally entitled to vote. Qualified is an entirely different matter. Uninformed votes are meaningless. I would say that a large portion of the populace is not qualified to vote (qualified means capable of making a rational, informed decision, whether anybody else agrees with it or not is irrelevant). In fact, I would wager that most of us are not qualified to vote on at least some of the issues that appear on the ballot (for example, when you get to the part about whether judges should be retained, I bet the percentage of the voting population who actually has an informed opinion on each judge is fairly small).
If the voters in Broward were confused, they would've been confused by the ballot we used up here in Duval as well (just look at the samples printed everywhere and remove the right hand page and it's exactly what we had in Duval).
In addition, I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone could go through that ballot, being confused and picking the wrong hole, then continuing on through the other 10 pages or so, and then, upon reaching the parking spot, having just voted for many candidates and issues, suddenly have the realization that they misunderstood the very first page and voted wrong. At least not in the numbers being anecdotally reported. While they may have voted wrong, I doubt they all realized it in the parking lot.
This is on Red Hat 6.2
The easy way is, of course, to put an entry in your HOSTS file to change the IP address of patch.everquest.com, but if Verant simply makes the client go to a specific IP address instead of a fqdn, then the only way to connect to the Server Emulator is to modify the client and NOW they've got you. You may be able to get away with putting up a server, but the legalities of modifying their client (which, of course, you are licensed to use but do not own, grrr!) is much easier to convince a court to prohibit.
Or are you doing it with a small program running on the client machine that intercepts and reroutes packets (a man-in-the-middle attack)?
There's a tremendous number of cars in New York City without radios. Indeed, they often have signs on the outside informing you of this fact. Does this mean they aren't cars any more? Do we need a new word for "4-wheeled self-propelled vehicles capable of carrying passengers"? Of course not. Just because a feature is provided by your computer manufacturer (or car manufacturer) as standard does NOT make it part of the OS. It makes it part of the standard distribution, included applications. Tires are not optional on a car. Hardware support is not optional in an OS. CD-players ARE optional on a car. Modern memory management and Web Browsers ARE optional on an OS Distribution. See how that works? Just because you won't use a car without a radio doesn't mean one without a radio isn't a car, and because I won't use an Operating System without modern memory management doesn't mean MacOS isn't an OS. It's just an OS I won't use. It's still an OS. And UNIX is and always will be an OS, whether the feature set matches what you want to purchase or not.
Having said that, our PPC-based Linux brethren have often pointed out that binary only software distributions are the bane of their existence since they almost always run only on Intel, so we need to ensure we watch the commercial entities in that regard.
Don't forget that Digital Equipment Corp was once the 2nd largest computer company in the world and Compaq was a tiny little startup that built PC's that nobody would seriously consider in a corporate environment. Compaq was the very first of the PC vendors to become a Tier 1 provider. Whether they know how to beat Sun is debatable, but they have proven they can beat giants before. Digital's mistakes are legendary (mostly the continuous waffling other whether to support Vax or UNIX and not enough resources to do both), but it appears that Sun may be headed down that same road (Free Solaris for $99, use Linux at the low end, migrate to Solaris at the high end). If IBM migrates high end AIX features to Linux, AIX will probably disappear (this announcement hints at that already). Then Linux WILL be able to compete with Solaris on the big boxes and what does Sun do with competing OSes? Sure, it's a big if, but every indication is that IBM is firmly on that trail, hoping Linux is the key to their return to market dominance.
I've only had it for 7 as well, but for at least 4 of those years it left my apartment and travelled underground to my friends apartments, so we had 3 apartments on a 10-base-2 backbone. LAN gaming is much better when you don't have to take your machine anywhere!
Yes. Microsoft has even stated that one of their goals was to get the computer to boot up faster and easier (much like turning on a light switch or your TV, you turn it on, it works, you don't have to understand anything). The elimination of parsing AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS serves this purpose. The removal of "pure DOS" is a side-effect (no doubt one Microsoft is happy about, but a side-effect, nonetheless) of their attempts to make computers more appliance-like.
It would be far simpler (and cheaper) to put it in Antartica, another remote area not controlled by any government (though the environment is nearly as hostile).