New Mexico and Iowa may still mean something after all, although the chances of that are looking a little more slim. The news networks all called Colorado for Bush before they had even started counting ballots in one of the most heavily Democratic counties along the front range. Even now maybe a third of the votes from boulder county have been tallied. At the current rate of 70/30 Kerry, its likely that he will fall short of the votes he needs to over come Bush's 120,000 vote lead, but it's still within the realm of possibility. If Colorado comes back into play, New Mexico and Iowa may still mean something, as Ohio alone would not be enough to put Bush over 270.
At this point, I don't think it's going to happen, but I would love to see Colorado "flip-flop", regardless of whether it changes the winner of the election, just to be able to see all the newscasters have to say "Oops!"
Reminds me of the saying: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around." (sorry can't remember who originally said it) Every political party and political candidate wants some people to benefit at the expense of others. This is not a perfect world, and no one can create a system where everyone will be happy. Third parties are not immune to this.
Anyway, as someone who considers himself to be pretty conservative, I will say that I didn't like a lot of what CLinton did or tried to do, but I would pick him over Bush any day.
Playing devil's advocate, what makes you trust the machines they used to count those big paper ballots? Or are they really doing it by hand?
There are machines that read them, although they are doing some sanity checking by hand. That is part of the reason we are waiting so long to find out the results in Boulder County.(*) So I do still have to have some faith in the machine. However, if they do have to be recounted, these ballots will be much easier to count by hand. The big issue in 2000 was punch card ballots. And so there were problems with hanging chads, multiple punches, and determining "the will of the voter". With the ballots we have here, the "will of the voter" is pretty obvous if they have to go back and look at the ballots again.
I wouldn't have a problem with electronic voting machines that print out a paper receipt which is then stored somewhere for safekeeping in case the tallies need to be verified. However, as far as I am aware, none of the electronic voting machines used in this election do that.
And even with the paper ballots a lot of people still had to wait in line for quite a while. It still takes time to fill out the ballots, and ther eis a limit to how many people they can fit in the polling area at any one time. (looked like there were eight "voting tables" in my precinct)
(*) By the way, I am still taking the networks declaration of Colorado to go to Bush with a grain of salt. They made that declaration before any of the votes had been counted in a county with over 200,000 registered voters that have so far gone 70/30 to Kerry
After the last 4 years I imagine flaunting American, and especially bragging about, in most of the world is going to invite nothing but negativity and grief.
This is indeed the case. My wife went to school in France for a while, and was over there when 9/11 happened. Although there was a very brief time just after the attacks when people there were nice to Americans, for the most part they found out that they were treated much better if they hung around Canadian students or tour groups. (This was easy to do as many Canadians wore jackets or backpacks with large Canadian flags on them to avoid being mistaken for Americans.)
However, it does seem to depend quite a bit on where you go. Big cities and places that attract a lot of American tourists are worse. My wife and I went to Corsica for our honeymoon last year, and everyone there was extremely nice to us. But Corsica's economy is mostly based on tourism (French tourism at that) and we only saw one other American while we were there. (on the ferry back to the mainland) To them we were more of a novelty than anything else. (a lot of people wanted to talk about the Bears when they found out we were from Chicago. Apparently learning about American sports teams is something of a hobby over there)
But here it seems that the Deibold machines did their jobs. I stil don't trust them but I'm not going to dispute the results.
I'm not so sure about this. I've heard enough stories about people hitting kerry on one of these touchscreens only to see it say bush when it asked them to confirm their votes. And I've heard them from a variety of places and states. Of course even a paper trail wouldn't help us in this case unless the voter took the time to look over the choices made by the machine. It's possible that these stories are the exceptions rather than the rule, but they still make me wonder.
Personally I liked the ballots that we used here in Boulder, Colorado. Big printed paper ballots with a square next to each option. You fill in the square with a blue or black pen. It's about as easy as you can make it, and I know exactly how my votes got counted. On the downside, they take longer to count (as of noon today only about 5% of Boulder's precincts had reported in) but personally, I would be perfectly happy to wait until the Friday after election day to see the results if it meant I wouldn't have to worry about whether my vote counted.
While this will at least save us from hordes of lawyers swarming around constant recounts, it won't save us from any Michael Moore crapumentaries.
The part I find interesting is that the networks were ready to call Colorado for bush already fairly early last night. Bush is currently up by about 120,000 votes in Colorado (as of 12:00pm Nov 3rd) but Boulder county, one of the states largest heavily Democratic counties (over 300,000 people, not sure how many registered voters) has only reported 5% of its precincts vote so far. At the earliest they won't be done counting the regular ballots until this evening, after which there will still be early voting, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, etc. So while I'm not expecting Colorado to switch sides, (120,000 votes is a decent margin to overcome for a 300,000 person county- the Boulder precincts that have reported so far are about 2-1 for Kerry) if it does happen, Bush drops back below 270, even with Ohio, and we would be waiting on Iowa and New Mexico....
I also was brought up in a religious republican environment. while i have typically voted republican in the past (including bush in 2000, more because i disagreed with gore's policies than because i liked bush) it has been a long time since i actually liked the republican candidates. i just moved to a new area recently, and haven't had a chance to really learn all of the local politics. but for the first time ever, i voted a straight democrat ticket. i may have helped elect a total jerk to some state or county office- i have no idea- but i could not in good concience support the republicans in any way in this election.
it amazes me looking back. how could the democrats fail so miserably at picking a strong candidate. i wanted to vote against bush right from the start, but it wasn't until the debates that i even barely started to feel good about voting for kerry.
here's hoping that in 2008 at least one of the parties can put up a candidate worth voting for. it would be a welcome reliefe from the last two elections. mccain seems like he would have a decent chance.
while i will concede that more people want bush to be president than kerry, i will not concede that bush would be a better leader. i also believe that many of the people who want bush to be president are not seeing the truth ( The separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters) and many more are single issue voters who voted for him because of his stance on (for example) gay rights and could care less if the rest of his policies bring the courty to its knees over the next four years.
And, for the record, I'm happy to see so many religious Americans support Bush's family values: lies, greed, and discrimination. After all, who has time to help the poor, heal the sick, or protect God's creation? We have corporations and millionaires to look after! These are the values I hope to instill in my children someday.
Well, there is no "perfect" hashing routine, there are only "more optimal" hashing routines. As to whether it is possible to design a hashing algorithm which ensures that collisions do not occur for similar data, it depends on how you define similar data. If you consider "similar data" to be, for example, any two strings of ASCII characters that are 40 characters long, than a 32 byte hash will not be able to hash all of those values without collisions, as you are trying to map 280 bits of variation in the input to 256 bits in the hash.
However, a hash can (in theory) be designed such that starting with one piece of data, say a 40 character ascii string, and changing one discrete part of that data, like changing lol to:-), will result in a significantly different hash.
The point to this goes beyond just avoiding collisions. It also protects against educated gueses. If we had a weak hashing algorithm, where the strings "hello" and "Hello" hashed to very similar values, it would be easy for a hacker to narrow down the search. Rather than having to brute force the original data (or a collision) an attacker would only have to try random data until he got a hash close to the one he was attacking and then try small variations until he arrived at the original key.
Would there be any string of data which held the same hash for both MD5 and SHA1?
yes there would. an MD5 hash is 32 hexadecimal digits, or 16 bytes. i'm not sure off the top of my head if SHA1 is the same, but for purposes of argument we will assume that it is. (regardless, it is a fixed number of characters from a finite set of possible characters, which is the main point here.)
so if we combine an MD5 hash and an SHA1 hash, we have essentially a 32 byte signature. Now if you are only using this to store passwords, and you arbitrarily define a password as a string of no more than 20 characters from a standard 104 key keyboard, then it is possible (although not guaranteed) that each of these passwords will have a different representation in your hashing scheme. however, if we are using this to store signatures of data which can be of arbitrary length, and of any character set, you are trying to map a finite (in this case (2^8)^32) number of signatures to an infinite number of possible data strings, so there will be collisions. an infinite number of collisions, actually.
no fixed length hash can map to an arbitrary data sequence without there being collisions. the point of a well designed hashing algorithm is to make sure that collisions never happen for data that is similar. (e.g. in a perfect hashing routine, no two ten character alphanumeric strings would collide, but a ten character alphanumeric may produce the same hash as a 10mb jpeg file.) this makes it much harder to brute force a hash, as it reduces the number of collisions that are actually useful. (e.g. a 10 mb jpeg file with the same hash as a 10 character password is useless to an attacker.)
We desperately need to abolish the screwed up electorial college, we desperately need to institute a rational voting system (Condorcet is the best, with Instant Runoff being a flawed second choice), and we desperately need to institute national election standards.
Maybe we need to have an instant runoff election to choose which election system is the least of N evils.
Actually, he's right, but for the wrong reasons. Once a third party gets strong enough to start siphoning off votes from one of the existing parties, that party will adjust it's platform to "stop the bleeding" so to speak. If the third party is the leftmost party, the party in the middle will move left to absorb those third party voters. The party on the right will then move just a little bit to the left to try and pick up a few disenfranchised voters in the middle away from the other party.
In the end, the third party dies off, but the people who voted for that third party get what they wanted- both of the major political parties have moved closer to their spot on the political spectrum, and hopefully one or both of them is now addressing the major issues that caused them to vote for the third party (See: Populists and Progressives of the late 1800's and early 1900's).
In extreme cases, the party in the middle will not react quickly enough. that party will die out, losing all of its voters to either the third party or the other major party. (See: birth of the Republican party/death of the Whigs)
Remember that at least one, but quite possibly 3 or 4, Chief Justices will retire in the next 4 years. Voting for green/socialist/etc instead of Kerry in this election is realistically helping put Bush in office. If Bush can appoint of 1/3 of the Supreme Court will have a lasting effect of 20-30 years.
I hear this argument every election, but really, Supreme Court justices can retire whenever they want (unless they die). The reality is, no conservative judge will retire if he knows he's likely to be replaced by a liberal, and no liberal judge will retire if he knows he's likely to be replaced by a conservative, especially in the current political climate where the party in power changes every 4-8 years. So if Bush appoints 3 conservative judges I'd give you 9:1 odds that they are replacing 3 conservative judges.
I realize that Slashdot leans more to the left than the American Public, but I find it amusing that everyone in this thread assumes that the original poster would vote for Kerry if he doesn't vote for ___________________. There are Bush supporters on Slashdot too, and the OP went out of his way to not show any bias or give any indication which way he was leaning. For all you know you (and everyone else in this thread making the same assumption) may be encouraging him to vote for Bush instead of throwing his vote away on Badnarik.
At this point it looks like Colorado's proposed legislation is almost certainly going to fail. At this point, that is probably a good thing, regardless of who wins in Colorado. Setting aside for a moment any discussion of whether we would be better off with the electoral votes split or winner-take-all, the fact that it would have taken effect this election (in effect retroactively, as voters would have no way of knowing how their votes were going to be counted when they cast them) would have caused major lawsuit potential, with 4 electoral votes on the line. I'm all for changing how we distribut the electoral votes, but making it effective this election was a bad idea. It also probably prejudiced most Republicans against the plan as it was proposed by a Democrat in a state that has for most recent elections voted just barely Republican- It made it look to a lot of people like the Bill was more of a ploy to snag 4 electoral votes away from George Bush than being any sort of meaningful electoral reform.
Many people who voted for Nader in 2000 got a hard lesson in why choosing the lesser of two evils is important. Their conscience is telling them to vote for Kerry now.
Unfortunately, if those people really want to change anything, this is the election where they should support Nader or the Greens more than ever. The Democrats aren't going to change anything if all the people who voted for Nader last time come running back to them once they realize that because of their vote, 'the greater of two evils' was able to win the election. Instead they are using legal tricks to try and marginalize those voters who didn't 'learn their lesson' last time. The only way the Democrats will change the way they are approaching their campaigning is if they realize that this is a systemic problem, and that rather than try to bully the third parties out of the race, they need to address the issues that the third party voters feel are not being addressed.
Third party candidates can make a huge difference if they can get heard. They don't even have to come close to winning the election, but by costing the major parties a few votes in key states (or creating the perception that they might) they can force the major candidates to address issues that they otherwise would ignore.
If the democrats lose this election, they have no one to blame but themselves. If they lose because too many college students in a major swing state (for example) vote for Nader instead of Kerry, well, they should have found out what the issues were that caused those students to ignore the Democratic Party in favor of a candidate they knew wouldn't win. And while the though of another four year's under Bush is frightening to a lot of Americans, including me, if that's what it takes to make the Democratic Party catch on, then so be it.
(disclaimer: While I encourage people who like third party candidates to vote for them, I will not be voting for them because I do not agree with many of their stances. I am a conservative who will be voting for Kerry because I believe he is the best choice of any of the candidates. As a side benefit, a Kerry-Edwards win would also greatly decrease the chances of there ever being a second President Clinton)
I would suggest that you should go ahead and vote for your third party candidate. Personally, I'm voting for Kerry, but I don't particularly like the Green or Reform Party platforms. Typically I would be more likely to vote for a Republican, but in this particular election I actually like Kerry as a candidate. If I were going to vote third party, I would vote libertarian, but as much as I agree with them philosophically, the idealist in me knows better.
That being said, it appalls me the way the Democrats are treating Nader's campaign. Every registered voter in this country knows how close this election is. At this point, any voter who votes for a third party knows that there is a chance that by voting for said third party instead of the "lesser of two evils" they are perhaps helping the "greater of two evils" win the election. If the Democrats lose too many votes to Nader or another third party candidate, they have only themselves to blame. They have had all the time in the world to address the issues that are attracting voters away from them to the various third parties, and they still haven't done it. You'd think they would have learned their lesson after the last election. (Actually, judging by their actions, I supppose that they have, however, it wasn't the right lesson....)
I think it's a shame the way so many people are trying to drown out the third parties. Personally, I don't care whether the eletoral system gets modified to allow a third party candidate to win. It doesn't have to be in order for the third parties to have an effect. Just by being in the race, they can force the major candidates to address issues that would otherwise be ignored (look up William Jennings Bryan and the populist party). Unfortunately the current campaign and debate system keeps most people from finding out about the issues the third parties are trying to force. The entire election ends up revolving around the handful of issues that the two major parties "agree to disagree" on. I think this is a huge problem. There are a lot of issues that I would like to have seen discussed that were never even mentioned by either of the third parties. The debates end up being a bunch of sound bites repeated by the candidates over and over while completely dodging any questions that they don't have a prepared catchphrase for.
As I said, personally, I'm voting for Kerry because I like him. However, I think that anyone who thinks that the major party candidates aren't addressing the issues that are important to them should go ahead and vote for the third party candidate that we like. And as much as I dislike the prospect of another four years under Bush's leadership, there's a part of me that would like to see the Democrats lose because of people voting for third party candidates in swing states. Maybe in the next election they'll learn that instead of trying to use lawyers and courts to shut up the third parties, they should use the issues to try and win back all of the voters that they have lost to third parties.
Why does running a statistical analysis website that gathers information on polls and aggregates them into something quasi-meaningful "support" the Democratic candidate?
He pointed out that his original goals for creating the site were to encourage overseas voters (whom he expects to be more likely to vote for Kerry) to make sure they are registered and get their absentee ballots. Most of his banners were for get out the vote efforts (probably, although i never actually looked, efforts biased towards the democrats) I would imagine that from there it took off and spread into things that interested him (e.g. statistics and writing), which had the added effect of getting more eyeballs for his banners.
Perhaps that is true (as I said, I'm not familiar with the guidelines themselves) but Gnome farked something up pretty badly. Sure it results in a very nice looking system, but it's also rather unbearable for extended use. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks so. I've talked to an awful lot of people who used to swear by Gnome but switched to KDE, Windows, or something else somewhere between 2.2 and the current version (2.8?) because they didn't like using it anymore.
There is of course a tradeoff here that most people are forgetting. KDE could have added this to Linux at the kernel level in which case it would work with any linux application, but then the rest of the KDE users (KDE is a cross-platform Desktop Environment, remember?) would have been SOL. As a FreeBSD user, I'm glad that KDE chose to implement these protocol handlers at the applicaction level, thus allowing them to work on any platform that KDE works on, rather than adding them to the Linux kernel.
Of course not everyone agrees that the Mac Classic HIG is desirable (*). While they may make the system easier to figure out for someone who has never seen it before, I stopped using Gnome about halfway through the push to implement the new HIG as I found each new release made it more difficult for me to accomplish the tasks I was trying to accomplish. Somebody needs to figure out how to make a system that is easy to learn without getting in the way of people who know what they are doing. Mac OS X sounds like it may have succeeded at this, I can't say as I have not had the chance to use it much yet, but Mac Classic and Gnome most certainly have not.
(*) at least not as implemented- i don't know the guidelines, I have only used systems that have claimed to implement them.
You sure do think there's a lot of cheap people out there. =) 5.1 surround setups are getting incredibly cheap, most can be had for far under $1000
I don't think they're cheap, I think they are practical. What percentage of this country can afford to spend $1000 on their stereo system? Sure, you and I can, (well, I'm making an assumption, since I don't really know anything about you) but right now I'm a DINK who makes about as much as a median U.S. family of four. And even I have a lot of better things to spend that money on than my stereo system. I have a plain old fashioned 27" non-HDTV, and I suspect that is the same or better than at least 80% of the country. The new DVD player I ordered yesterday for $60 will be my first stereo related purchase in over three years.
The problem is that DVD is so widespread that a lot of people won't want to buy a new player, even if it is price comparable to their current player, because most people have $250 TV's that won't be able to show the difference between the two anyway. And until manufacturers can convince the majority of consumers to switch, any new titles are still going to be made available as DVD. The only way that I see Blu-Ray/HD-DVD taking off quickly is if they can figure out a way to make disks that will work in both DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players and still support the features of the more advanced system. maybe instead of 2-sided disks that have widescreen on one side and fullscreen on the other, they'll make them with DVD on one side and HD-DVD on the other. of course that would probably raise the cost of the disks becuase then they'd be paying the licensing for both technologies.
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New Mexico and Iowa may still mean something after all, although the chances of that are looking a little more slim. The news networks all called Colorado for Bush before they had even started counting ballots in one of the most heavily Democratic counties along the front range. Even now maybe a third of the votes from boulder county have been tallied. At the current rate of 70/30 Kerry, its likely that he will fall short of the votes he needs to over come Bush's 120,000 vote lead, but it's still within the realm of possibility. If Colorado comes back into play, New Mexico and Iowa may still mean something, as Ohio alone would not be enough to put Bush over 270.
At this point, I don't think it's going to happen, but I would love to see Colorado "flip-flop", regardless of whether it changes the winner of the election, just to be able to see all the newscasters have to say "Oops!"
Reminds me of the saying: "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around." (sorry can't remember who originally said it) Every political party and political candidate wants some people to benefit at the expense of others. This is not a perfect world, and no one can create a system where everyone will be happy. Third parties are not immune to this.
Anyway, as someone who considers himself to be pretty conservative, I will say that I didn't like a lot of what CLinton did or tried to do, but I would pick him over Bush any day.
Playing devil's advocate, what makes you trust the machines they used to count those big paper ballots? Or are they really doing it by hand?
There are machines that read them, although they are doing some sanity checking by hand. That is part of the reason we are waiting so long to find out the results in Boulder County.(*) So I do still have to have some faith in the machine. However, if they do have to be recounted, these ballots will be much easier to count by hand. The big issue in 2000 was punch card ballots. And so there were problems with hanging chads, multiple punches, and determining "the will of the voter". With the ballots we have here, the "will of the voter" is pretty obvous if they have to go back and look at the ballots again.
I wouldn't have a problem with electronic voting machines that print out a paper receipt which is then stored somewhere for safekeeping in case the tallies need to be verified. However, as far as I am aware, none of the electronic voting machines used in this election do that.
And even with the paper ballots a lot of people still had to wait in line for quite a while. It still takes time to fill out the ballots, and ther eis a limit to how many people they can fit in the polling area at any one time. (looked like there were eight "voting tables" in my precinct)
(*) By the way, I am still taking the networks declaration of Colorado to go to Bush with a grain of salt. They made that declaration before any of the votes had been counted in a county with over 200,000 registered voters that have so far gone 70/30 to Kerry
After the last 4 years I imagine flaunting American, and especially bragging about, in most of the world is going to invite nothing but negativity and grief.
This is indeed the case. My wife went to school in France for a while, and was over there when 9/11 happened. Although there was a very brief time just after the attacks when people there were nice to Americans, for the most part they found out that they were treated much better if they hung around Canadian students or tour groups. (This was easy to do as many Canadians wore jackets or backpacks with large Canadian flags on them to avoid being mistaken for Americans.)
However, it does seem to depend quite a bit on where you go. Big cities and places that attract a lot of American tourists are worse. My wife and I went to Corsica for our honeymoon last year, and everyone there was extremely nice to us. But Corsica's economy is mostly based on tourism (French tourism at that) and we only saw one other American while we were there. (on the ferry back to the mainland) To them we were more of a novelty than anything else. (a lot of people wanted to talk about the Bears when they found out we were from Chicago. Apparently learning about American sports teams is something of a hobby over there)
actually, the vast majority of ohio used punch card ballots.
but that's ok, we don't want facts to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory.
But here it seems that the Deibold machines did their jobs. I stil don't trust them but I'm not going to dispute the results.
I'm not so sure about this. I've heard enough stories about people hitting kerry on one of these touchscreens only to see it say bush when it asked them to confirm their votes. And I've heard them from a variety of places and states. Of course even a paper trail wouldn't help us in this case unless the voter took the time to look over the choices made by the machine. It's possible that these stories are the exceptions rather than the rule, but they still make me wonder.
Personally I liked the ballots that we used here in Boulder, Colorado. Big printed paper ballots with a square next to each option. You fill in the square with a blue or black pen. It's about as easy as you can make it, and I know exactly how my votes got counted. On the downside, they take longer to count (as of noon today only about 5% of Boulder's precincts had reported in) but personally, I would be perfectly happy to wait until the Friday after election day to see the results if it meant I wouldn't have to worry about whether my vote counted.
While this will at least save us from hordes of lawyers swarming around constant recounts, it won't save us from any Michael Moore crapumentaries.
The part I find interesting is that the networks were ready to call Colorado for bush already fairly early last night. Bush is currently up by about 120,000 votes in Colorado (as of 12:00pm Nov 3rd) but Boulder county, one of the states largest heavily Democratic counties (over 300,000 people, not sure how many registered voters) has only reported 5% of its precincts vote so far. At the earliest they won't be done counting the regular ballots until this evening, after which there will still be early voting, provisional ballots, absentee ballots, etc. So while I'm not expecting Colorado to switch sides, (120,000 votes is a decent margin to overcome for a 300,000 person county- the Boulder precincts that have reported so far are about 2-1 for Kerry) if it does happen, Bush drops back below 270, even with Ohio, and we would be waiting on Iowa and New Mexico....
I also was brought up in a religious republican environment. while i have typically voted republican in the past (including bush in 2000, more because i disagreed with gore's policies than because i liked bush) it has been a long time since i actually liked the republican candidates. i just moved to a new area recently, and haven't had a chance to really learn all of the local politics. but for the first time ever, i voted a straight democrat ticket. i may have helped elect a total jerk to some state or county office- i have no idea- but i could not in good concience support the republicans in any way in this election.
it amazes me looking back. how could the democrats fail so miserably at picking a strong candidate. i wanted to vote against bush right from the start, but it wasn't until the debates that i even barely started to feel good about voting for kerry.
here's hoping that in 2008 at least one of the parties can put up a candidate worth voting for. it would be a welcome reliefe from the last two elections. mccain seems like he would have a decent chance.
while i will concede that more people want bush to be president than kerry, i will not concede that bush would be a better leader. i also believe that many of the people who want bush to be president are not seeing the truth ( The separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters) and many more are single issue voters who voted for him because of his stance on (for example) gay rights and could care less if the rest of his policies bring the courty to its knees over the next four years.
And, for the record, I'm happy to see so many religious Americans support Bush's family values: lies, greed, and discrimination. After all, who has time to help the poor, heal the sick, or protect God's creation? We have corporations and millionaires to look after! These are the values I hope to instill in my children someday.
That's a silver lining? One of the reasons I voted for Kerry was that I was hoping a win by Kerry would prevent her from ever becoming president....
Well, there is no "perfect" hashing routine, there are only "more optimal" hashing routines. As to whether it is possible to design a hashing algorithm which ensures that collisions do not occur for similar data, it depends on how you define similar data. If you consider "similar data" to be, for example, any two strings of ASCII characters that are 40 characters long, than a 32 byte hash will not be able to hash all of those values without collisions, as you are trying to map 280 bits of variation in the input to 256 bits in the hash.
:-), will result in a significantly different hash.
However, a hash can (in theory) be designed such that starting with one piece of data, say a 40 character ascii string, and changing one discrete part of that data, like changing lol to
The point to this goes beyond just avoiding collisions. It also protects against educated gueses. If we had a weak hashing algorithm, where the strings "hello" and "Hello" hashed to very similar values, it would be easy for a hacker to narrow down the search. Rather than having to brute force the original data (or a collision) an attacker would only have to try random data until he got a hash close to the one he was attacking and then try small variations until he arrived at the original key.
Would there be any string of data which held the same hash for both MD5 and SHA1?
yes there would. an MD5 hash is 32 hexadecimal digits, or 16 bytes. i'm not sure off the top of my head if SHA1 is the same, but for purposes of argument we will assume that it is. (regardless, it is a fixed number of characters from a finite set of possible characters, which is the main point here.)
so if we combine an MD5 hash and an SHA1 hash, we have essentially a 32 byte signature. Now if you are only using this to store passwords, and you arbitrarily define a password as a string of no more than 20 characters from a standard 104 key keyboard, then it is possible (although not guaranteed) that each of these passwords will have a different representation in your hashing scheme. however, if we are using this to store signatures of data which can be of arbitrary length, and of any character set, you are trying to map a finite (in this case (2^8)^32) number of signatures to an infinite number of possible data strings, so there will be collisions. an infinite number of collisions, actually.
no fixed length hash can map to an arbitrary data sequence without there being collisions. the point of a well designed hashing algorithm is to make sure that collisions never happen for data that is similar. (e.g. in a perfect hashing routine, no two ten character alphanumeric strings would collide, but a ten character alphanumeric may produce the same hash as a 10mb jpeg file.) this makes it much harder to brute force a hash, as it reduces the number of collisions that are actually useful. (e.g. a 10 mb jpeg file with the same hash as a 10 character password is useless to an attacker.)
We desperately need to abolish the screwed up electorial college, we desperately need to institute a rational voting system (Condorcet is the best, with Instant Runoff being a flawed second choice), and we desperately need to institute national election standards.
Maybe we need to have an instant runoff election to choose which election system is the least of N evils.
Actually, he's right, but for the wrong reasons. Once a third party gets strong enough to start siphoning off votes from one of the existing parties, that party will adjust it's platform to "stop the bleeding" so to speak. If the third party is the leftmost party, the party in the middle will move left to absorb those third party voters. The party on the right will then move just a little bit to the left to try and pick up a few disenfranchised voters in the middle away from the other party.
In the end, the third party dies off, but the people who voted for that third party get what they wanted- both of the major political parties have moved closer to their spot on the political spectrum, and hopefully one or both of them is now addressing the major issues that caused them to vote for the third party (See: Populists and Progressives of the late 1800's and early 1900's).
In extreme cases, the party in the middle will not react quickly enough. that party will die out, losing all of its voters to either the third party or the other major party. (See: birth of the Republican party/death of the Whigs)
Remember that at least one, but quite possibly 3 or 4, Chief Justices will retire in the next 4 years. Voting for green/socialist/etc instead of Kerry in this election is realistically helping put Bush in office. If Bush can appoint of 1/3 of the Supreme Court will have a lasting effect of 20-30 years.
I hear this argument every election, but really, Supreme Court justices can retire whenever they want (unless they die). The reality is, no conservative judge will retire if he knows he's likely to be replaced by a liberal, and no liberal judge will retire if he knows he's likely to be replaced by a conservative, especially in the current political climate where the party in power changes every 4-8 years. So if Bush appoints 3 conservative judges I'd give you 9:1 odds that they are replacing 3 conservative judges.
I realize that Slashdot leans more to the left than the American Public, but I find it amusing that everyone in this thread assumes that the original poster would vote for Kerry if he doesn't vote for ___________________. There are Bush supporters on Slashdot too, and the OP went out of his way to not show any bias or give any indication which way he was leaning. For all you know you (and everyone else in this thread making the same assumption) may be encouraging him to vote for Bush instead of throwing his vote away on Badnarik.
At this point it looks like Colorado's proposed legislation is almost certainly going to fail. At this point, that is probably a good thing, regardless of who wins in Colorado. Setting aside for a moment any discussion of whether we would be better off with the electoral votes split or winner-take-all, the fact that it would have taken effect this election (in effect retroactively, as voters would have no way of knowing how their votes were going to be counted when they cast them) would have caused major lawsuit potential, with 4 electoral votes on the line. I'm all for changing how we distribut the electoral votes, but making it effective this election was a bad idea. It also probably prejudiced most Republicans against the plan as it was proposed by a Democrat in a state that has for most recent elections voted just barely Republican- It made it look to a lot of people like the Bill was more of a ploy to snag 4 electoral votes away from George Bush than being any sort of meaningful electoral reform.
Many people who voted for Nader in 2000 got a hard lesson in why choosing the lesser of two evils is important. Their conscience is telling them to vote for Kerry now.
Unfortunately, if those people really want to change anything, this is the election where they should support Nader or the Greens more than ever. The Democrats aren't going to change anything if all the people who voted for Nader last time come running back to them once they realize that because of their vote, 'the greater of two evils' was able to win the election. Instead they are using legal tricks to try and marginalize those voters who didn't 'learn their lesson' last time. The only way the Democrats will change the way they are approaching their campaigning is if they realize that this is a systemic problem, and that rather than try to bully the third parties out of the race, they need to address the issues that the third party voters feel are not being addressed.
Third party candidates can make a huge difference if they can get heard. They don't even have to come close to winning the election, but by costing the major parties a few votes in key states (or creating the perception that they might) they can force the major candidates to address issues that they otherwise would ignore.
If the democrats lose this election, they have no one to blame but themselves. If they lose because too many college students in a major swing state (for example) vote for Nader instead of Kerry, well, they should have found out what the issues were that caused those students to ignore the Democratic Party in favor of a candidate they knew wouldn't win. And while the though of another four year's under Bush is frightening to a lot of Americans, including me, if that's what it takes to make the Democratic Party catch on, then so be it.
(disclaimer: While I encourage people who like third party candidates to vote for them, I will not be voting for them because I do not agree with many of their stances. I am a conservative who will be voting for Kerry because I believe he is the best choice of any of the candidates. As a side benefit, a Kerry-Edwards win would also greatly decrease the chances of there ever being a second President Clinton)
I would suggest that you should go ahead and vote for your third party candidate. Personally, I'm voting for Kerry, but I don't particularly like the Green or Reform Party platforms. Typically I would be more likely to vote for a Republican, but in this particular election I actually like Kerry as a candidate. If I were going to vote third party, I would vote libertarian, but as much as I agree with them philosophically, the idealist in me knows better.
That being said, it appalls me the way the Democrats are treating Nader's campaign. Every registered voter in this country knows how close this election is. At this point, any voter who votes for a third party knows that there is a chance that by voting for said third party instead of the "lesser of two evils" they are perhaps helping the "greater of two evils" win the election. If the Democrats lose too many votes to Nader or another third party candidate, they have only themselves to blame. They have had all the time in the world to address the issues that are attracting voters away from them to the various third parties, and they still haven't done it. You'd think they would have learned their lesson after the last election. (Actually, judging by their actions, I supppose that they have, however, it wasn't the right lesson....)
I think it's a shame the way so many people are trying to drown out the third parties. Personally, I don't care whether the eletoral system gets modified to allow a third party candidate to win. It doesn't have to be in order for the third parties to have an effect. Just by being in the race, they can force the major candidates to address issues that would otherwise be ignored (look up William Jennings Bryan and the populist party). Unfortunately the current campaign and debate system keeps most people from finding out about the issues the third parties are trying to force. The entire election ends up revolving around the handful of issues that the two major parties "agree to disagree" on. I think this is a huge problem. There are a lot of issues that I would like to have seen discussed that were never even mentioned by either of the third parties. The debates end up being a bunch of sound bites repeated by the candidates over and over while completely dodging any questions that they don't have a prepared catchphrase for.
As I said, personally, I'm voting for Kerry because I like him. However, I think that anyone who thinks that the major party candidates aren't addressing the issues that are important to them should go ahead and vote for the third party candidate that we like. And as much as I dislike the prospect of another four years under Bush's leadership, there's a part of me that would like to see the Democrats lose because of people voting for third party candidates in swing states. Maybe in the next election they'll learn that instead of trying to use lawyers and courts to shut up the third parties, they should use the issues to try and win back all of the voters that they have lost to third parties.
Why does running a statistical analysis website that gathers information on polls and aggregates them into something quasi-meaningful "support" the Democratic candidate?
He pointed out that his original goals for creating the site were to encourage overseas voters (whom he expects to be more likely to vote for Kerry) to make sure they are registered and get their absentee ballots. Most of his banners were for get out the vote efforts (probably, although i never actually looked, efforts biased towards the democrats) I would imagine that from there it took off and spread into things that interested him (e.g. statistics and writing), which had the added effect of getting more eyeballs for his banners.
Perhaps that is true (as I said, I'm not familiar with the guidelines themselves) but Gnome farked something up pretty badly. Sure it results in a very nice looking system, but it's also rather unbearable for extended use. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks so. I've talked to an awful lot of people who used to swear by Gnome but switched to KDE, Windows, or something else somewhere between 2.2 and the current version (2.8?) because they didn't like using it anymore.
There is of course a tradeoff here that most people are forgetting. KDE could have added this to Linux at the kernel level in which case it would work with any linux application, but then the rest of the KDE users (KDE is a cross-platform Desktop Environment, remember?) would have been SOL. As a FreeBSD user, I'm glad that KDE chose to implement these protocol handlers at the applicaction level, thus allowing them to work on any platform that KDE works on, rather than adding them to the Linux kernel.
Of course not everyone agrees that the Mac Classic HIG is desirable (*). While they may make the system easier to figure out for someone who has never seen it before, I stopped using Gnome about halfway through the push to implement the new HIG as I found each new release made it more difficult for me to accomplish the tasks I was trying to accomplish. Somebody needs to figure out how to make a system that is easy to learn without getting in the way of people who know what they are doing. Mac OS X sounds like it may have succeeded at this, I can't say as I have not had the chance to use it much yet, but Mac Classic and Gnome most certainly have not.
(*) at least not as implemented- i don't know the guidelines, I have only used systems that have claimed to implement them.
You sure do think there's a lot of cheap people out there. =) 5.1 surround setups are getting incredibly cheap, most can be had for far under $1000
I don't think they're cheap, I think they are practical. What percentage of this country can afford to spend $1000 on their stereo system? Sure, you and I can, (well, I'm making an assumption, since I don't really know anything about you) but right now I'm a DINK who makes about as much as a median U.S. family of four. And even I have a lot of better things to spend that money on than my stereo system. I have a plain old fashioned 27" non-HDTV, and I suspect that is the same or better than at least 80% of the country. The new DVD player I ordered yesterday for $60 will be my first stereo related purchase in over three years.
The problem is that DVD is so widespread that a lot of people won't want to buy a new player, even if it is price comparable to their current player, because most people have $250 TV's that won't be able to show the difference between the two anyway. And until manufacturers can convince the majority of consumers to switch, any new titles are still going to be made available as DVD. The only way that I see Blu-Ray/HD-DVD taking off quickly is if they can figure out a way to make disks that will work in both DVD and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD players and still support the features of the more advanced system. maybe instead of 2-sided disks that have widescreen on one side and fullscreen on the other, they'll make them with DVD on one side and HD-DVD on the other. of course that would probably raise the cost of the disks becuase then they'd be paying the licensing for both technologies.
yeah, but what if the mirror mechanism locks up for some reason? how long will it take for this to damage your eye's if it stops moving?