No argument there, I just dislike the relativist position that people can't be classified as good or bad at all.
As an aside, if you were to try to compute goodness or badness mathematically, you'd have to include a time-based non-linear regression mechanic so that current actions tend to outweigh past actions (assuming that you believe that people can change).
1) Obama's team started a new site. 2) They applied to have the url myspace.com/barackobama pointed to the new official site. 3) Myspace shut down the old fan page because the owner wasn't Barrack Obama
I don't know if Obama's team intended for step 3 to take place. When you understand the events, it's hard to see this as a black and white issue instead of just an angry disagreement between people. It wasn't handled very deftly, so I guess the lesson for everyone involved is:
When you act like an ass you get burned.
That applies to both the volunteer and Obama's campaign staff.
Sorry, if I don't care that much. I read the story and when you ignore the sensationalizing, it's pretty mundane. The volunteer decided the campaign was taking advantage of him because they weren't paying him for the site, the campaign decided the volunteer was trying to take advantage of them because he was demanding to be paid.
While I think this could have been handled more deftly, I generally require more than one minor public disagreement before writing someone off.
Actually, I thought it was typical for both parties to always claim the opposing party picked a weak candidate with no good ideas and that therefore the other party had no chance of winning. Mostly, this is a pundit trick to attempt to demoralize the opposition and energize the faithful, and it occurs regardless of the quality of either candidate.
What exactly is the fiasco? He (or his campaign staff) decided he didn't want to buy a myspace channel for $50,000. On the flip side of "stealing" from the guy who registered the myspace page in his name without his permission, he's a politician who chose not to squander $50,000. If he had bought it, the same political trolls who are crying about him ripping this guy off would be crying how "Obama wasted $50,000 on a myspace page".
This appears to be a simple case of "Sorry, your price is too high", unless someone can actually give a cogent (and truthful) reason why anyone should care.
Actually, that's wrong. There are good and bad people, they are identified by the history of their actions. Good people are those who do more good than bad and bad people are those who do more bad than good.
There is a big problem with this article and others like it. It is very difficult to get reasonable results out of them. There is no single causational trigger for violence. If there were, we'd see armies of 28 days style zombies everywhere.
The evidence pretty clearly indicates that all media has a weak influences on violent behaviour whether it be comics, novels, newspapers, music, movies, television, or video games, but real life has the largest impact. The violence we witness or participate in is more important than any other factor.
For young children, parents tend to play the pivotal role in their development. The parent's reaction to violence can be more important than all of the media that the child consumes. But a parent actually has to be there. They have to talk to their children. They have to make sure that their children are understanding the context of what they see and hear.
I think the "protect the children" crowd has it terribly, terribly wrong. They want to protect children from seeing the consequences of violence. That might be worse than teaching children self-confidence instead of knowledge, which everyone should know by now was disastrously bad. Children learn from what they see and hear, when violence is portrayed as having no consequences they learn that violence has no consequences.
I'd expect an announcement regarding the 2008 expansion to WoW. They previously promised to do a yearly expansion to WoW and May's about the right time to begin hyping a december release.
Even if it were Starcraft, I don't have high hopes for it. WoW's customer service and Burning Crusade's grindfest disappointed me to the point where I no longer have any goodwill for Blizzard's name. Just as well, I suppose, it's been hollowed out and worn as a jaunty cap by Vivendi. The designers who built Starcraft don't work for Vivendi. Hell the desginers who built World of Warcraft don't work for Vivendi any more either. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blizzard division of Vivendi does not currently have the ability to produce a Starcraft 2, let alone make a worthy sequel.
I'm very sure that Vivendi had no interest in Starcraft when they bought it, they were only looking at the subscription revenues of WoW.
There's an interesting little problem there: "If you expect all politicians to be dirty, all you will see is dirty politicians"
It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't expect my politicians to be new-car clean, but if I were American I wouldn't settle for soiled and bloody underwear clean politicians. Cheney and Bush have earned impeachment with their actions.
If I wanted to be legalistic about it, I'd have to point out that in the eyes of the law he did not perjure himself. The perjury charges were all either dropped or dismissed. The may one that Republicans always mention, is in fact false. Clinton asked the lawyers deposing him "What do you mean sexual relations", they said "You know what we mean. Intercourse" and then he said "No, I did not have sexual relations with her". You should be complaining about conduct unbecoming of a lawyer, I think, because that's the only thing that really had repercussions on him, causing him to lose his licence to practice law as a result of his shenanigans.
The reason Clinton was impeached was because the Republicans hated his guts and after almost 4 years of trying, they finally had found something they could use against him. It was simple partisan politics, except even some of the Republicans felt it was too partisan and voted against it.
1) Social programs do not really help people avoid the consequences of their actions, they help them deal with the consequences and they do so to avoid having those consequences redistributed back to everyone else. They arrose as a reaction to the clarity of failure of libertarianism in the 30s. It became glaringly obvious to the majority of people that there was one little truth: "Sometimes things happen that no matter how hard you try to cope with, you just can't."
2) Personal responsibility is a tough value to prioritize. The world is interconnected. All too often we fail to attribute consequences to the actions that actually spawned them. This failure may lead to us forcing people to take "personal responsibility" for the consequences of other peoples actions.
The sad and scary thing is that the current U.S. government IS a reflection of it's citizens. Not all of it's citizens, maybe not even a majority. But at least significant minority of U.S. citzens are scared out of their wits that "them foreigners" are gonna come and kill them or their babies.
American media has been extremely complicit in supporting the government because a large subsection of the public believes in the Bush administration. They've forged unbreakable links of loyalty and will defend that government from any perceived slight. This puts the media in a difficult position, if they're not nice to the government then they will be inundated with complaints and harrassment from organizations that actively support the government and it's war policies, if they are nice, then they get the same treatment from those who don't support the government.
Too many U.S. citizens are willing to make any excuse necessary for the government because they think Bush will protect them as long as he's allowed to do whatever he wants. They refuse to recognize the misbehaviour of the Bush whitehouse because they have invested too much of their hope for safety and security in the government. Asking hard questions about the government means dealing with fear and betrayal, and there's no way they want to do that again.
That make a whole lot of sense until you take of your "I-see-prejudice-everywhere" glasses. Why do there need to be more women in computer science is a legitimate question with a legitimate answer: Women bring alternative views and solutions to computer science. Furthermore, this drop off seems to be specific to North American Computer Science programs, and the level of enrollment is dropping from past levels.
This indicates that there is a North American problem, reforming the computer science is possible solution, but one I, personally, do not like much. Removing the requirment to learn programming at all, essential guts the heart of the education. I wonder what graduates of that program are actually qualified to do.
However, I think they are correct when they mention that students preconceptions of what kind of work they'll do is interfering with enrollment. That's not just high school computer courses taught by teachers who know little or nothing about computers, it's also popular media which rarely shows anyone who works with computers professionally, and even more rarely shows them in a positive light.
Think about it for a moment. In TV shows if you have a broken computer who fixes it? Either it's one of the regular cast who "just happens" to know how to fix computers or it's Brian Posehn. The media has built a very negative social stereotype of computer science and it should be no surprise that it turns people off the field entirely.
The only show I can think of that had such characters, was Level 9, a 2000 UPN show that cancelled after 9 episodes. It kind of deserved that, though. Words fail me when I try to describe the rampant ignorance of the writers in what was and was not reasonable in computer related crime. Lyle from the Italian Job is pretty much the only other character I can think of who fits the bill as an at least somewhat positive role model.
It's not about reducing the need to learn a particular programming language, it's eliminating the need to learn any programming language that's a problem. I remember my third year Operating Systems class, I worked with one student who couldn't write any code at all, and one who couldn't understand the fundamentals of function calls and code reuse. These are people who should have already flunked out of the program. The fact that they were still in the program was a testament to their ability to copy work from other students and pass it off as their own.
The OS course was their downfall. They couldn't pass it because they couldn't (or wouldn't) do the work and the other students wouldn't let someone copy all the code from a 20-workhour project. What made it worse was that for both students, this was not their first time taking the course.
Of course none of this is the real problem. The problem is that female high school students (and a fair share of male ones too) don't want to end up like in office space. Mostly the popular media usually shows two types of computer people: fat, greasy and essentially honest cubicle dwellers who can't even dress themselves or hip handsome rich hackers who usually end up in pound-me-the-ass federal prison.
So in the end, I blame Jurassic Park for making the computer nerd's greed the villain, instead of the corporate codger's hubris. The real problem is that the challenges of computer science are mostly intellectual, and nothing intellectual translates well to either the big or small screen.
It's amusing how the hipester defeats his own arguments, because it should be obvious to anyone that cell phones didn't become widespread last year and that they're not "spreading" from the U.S. to Europe. There's an obvious pattern there that needs to be analyzed for the real cause.
One thing that occured to me, is that it could be cell or GSM technology if a company started selling a bee monitor that you attached to the hive that remotely monitored them and all the hives that had these monitors attached were abandoned, but I would like to think that the bee keepers are smarter than that.
The report that the usual vermin and pests that infest abandoned hives aren't moving in either, suggests something is driving more than just the bees away.
"The contracts have to be renegotiated on a new platform"
That's not an answer, it's an excuse.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they cost a lot more has something to do with pressure from Microsoft to set the price higher to "make the DL content valuable". The same reason why they were trying to force other companies with D/L content to charge for it. I expect Microsoft intends to make a lot of money off of their cut of D/L items.
It's also possible that because the songs are now downloadable on demand, the new contract might charge Harmonix per download. Once you've built in a little profit for Harmonix and Microsoft in addition to the RIAA base fee per song and Microsoft's overhead charge for the service that could conceivably force the price that high. That's what Major Nelson wanted to imply, the question is whether he didn't say it outright is because it's true and he didn't want to offend the RIAA or because it's not true and he only wants to think that he said that to dodge the question.
While I agree with you about the tedious grinds (Kill 20,000 Furbolgs to get the useless Furbolg Trinket). Botting pisses off people who have a life as well. People who bot make it harder for everyone who don't bot because the botting is there all the time killing the same mobs over and over again. While your bot is killing those furbolgs, or elementals, or undead the other players who are trying to earn their rep, gold, or materials the honest way get screwed over by your bot.
The problem is an intractable one in WoW. Most players are prevented from effectively griefing bots by the normal game rules, but there's nothing that prevents bots from griefing other players by scouring an area clean of mobs. I've seen situations where there were 4 separate bots killing the mobs in the same field.
The solution? Don't play WoW. The game is mostly an endless grind fest. It's the timesinks that make botting popular even though it can and does get your account banned. Of course, on the flip side Blizzard is extremely slow to ban botters. I've seen bots still operating more than a month after I first reported them.
Didn't you learn anything from "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes"?
I suppose it's a tricky ethical question. If you can make a menial servant smarter, should you? Is it more acceptable to force an intelligent being to do menial work, or to engineer (mechanically or biologically) a minimally or non-intelligent creature to do it instead? The work has to be done, so I suspect the latter viewpoint will eventually win out simply because of expediency.
That's not such a good idea, PETA is run by insane clowns.
They think their ends justify deception and trickery to promote their cause. A cause which I don't think too many peole can really support. Their stated goal is to turn the entire world vegan to the point where we don't use animals at all for food, clothing, research or entertainment.
Frankly that would pretty much cause the extinction of all domesticated farm animals. Who's going to raise chickens when no one will eat them? Who will raise cows when milk, meat and leather are useless? Who will herd sheep when no one wants wool or mutton?
If might put an end to all domesticated animals period, if they decide that cats and dogs are kept for "entertainment". No thanks, PETA is just a group of zealots who place animals above humans.
Meh. That's a topic for a different study. Quake 2 is reasonable since the "murder simulator" stuff that Thompson has been spewing dates back to those days. It shows that just running around shooting other players doesn't have an effect. They can do a follow up study to determine if longer exposure or more human looking opponents changes the results.
The Open Source software is just one step of many. If you don't know what the machine is supposed to be doing, then you can't tell if it's doing that.
Verifying the compiler should be a little easier, since the source is open and it should be using a standard compiler it should be possible to create a checksum using the same compiler and verify the compiled binaries match. This is dependent on the source code being open. Without the open code, no external agency would be able to create a checksum. They don't have the source code, and likely wouldn't know which compiler was used either.
Frankly, I think it would be much harder to create a hardware based tamper system, most of these vote terminals seem to run on fairly standard computer hardware. All of the hardware is supposed to be tested before it is used. Of course, nailing that down so that all hardware is tested and securely stored is an education and procedures problem that may need to be addressed in the future. But certification of hardware is already required by existing laws, it's just not done very well.
Also as the Republicans have amply demonstrated it's not just about changing vote totals directly. Imagine if you will, a voting program that includes an additional 10 second wait every time someone votes for a Democratic candidate instead of a Republican candidate (but only on Nov 2nd). This is enough to feel slow but not enough for the voter to go seek help. The effect would be longer lines in Democratic strongholds and shorter line in Republican strongholds. If the longer lines deter 1 in every 100 Democratic voters, that could be enough to swing a close election. Throw in a few more tricks, like fake voter registration drives (so people have to register at the polling place eating up the time of the volunteers) and undersupplying voting terminals so the lines are even longer, and you could theoretically switch a 50-50 dead heat into a 44-50 victory without actually changing one vote result.
The discussion makes me wonder if anyone reas the SFX post "Firefly was the resounding winner in our recent online poll". It would be trivial for a Firefly fan group to stuff the ballots in your typical online poll.
Slashdot Mirror
The volunteer ran the page for 2 years before he decided it was too big for him to run without a stipend from the Obama campaign.
No argument there, I just dislike the relativist position that people can't be classified as good or bad at all.
As an aside, if you were to try to compute goodness or badness mathematically, you'd have to include a time-based non-linear regression mechanic so that current actions tend to outweigh past actions (assuming that you believe that people can change).
Actually, I think he's more or less correct:
1) Obama's team started a new site.
2) They applied to have the url myspace.com/barackobama pointed to the new official site.
3) Myspace shut down the old fan page because the owner wasn't Barrack Obama
I don't know if Obama's team intended for step 3 to take place. When you understand the events, it's hard to see this as a black and white issue instead of just an angry disagreement between people. It wasn't handled very deftly, so I guess the lesson for everyone involved is:
When you act like an ass you get burned.
That applies to both the volunteer and Obama's campaign staff.
Sorry, if I don't care that much. I read the story and when you ignore the sensationalizing, it's pretty mundane. The volunteer decided the campaign was taking advantage of him because they weren't paying him for the site, the campaign decided the volunteer was trying to take advantage of them because he was demanding to be paid.
While I think this could have been handled more deftly, I generally require more than one minor public disagreement before writing someone off.
Actually, I thought it was typical for both parties to always claim the opposing party picked a weak candidate with no good ideas and that therefore the other party had no chance of winning. Mostly, this is a pundit trick to attempt to demoralize the opposition and energize the faithful, and it occurs regardless of the quality of either candidate.
What exactly is the fiasco? He (or his campaign staff) decided he didn't want to buy a myspace channel for $50,000. On the flip side of "stealing" from the guy who registered the myspace page in his name without his permission, he's a politician who chose not to squander $50,000. If he had bought it, the same political trolls who are crying about him ripping this guy off would be crying how "Obama wasted $50,000 on a myspace page".
This appears to be a simple case of "Sorry, your price is too high", unless someone can actually give a cogent (and truthful) reason why anyone should care.
Actually, that's wrong. There are good and bad people, they are identified by the history of their actions. Good people are those who do more good than bad and bad people are those who do more bad than good.
There is a big problem with this article and others like it. It is very difficult to get reasonable results out of them. There is no single causational trigger for violence. If there were, we'd see armies of 28 days style zombies everywhere.
The evidence pretty clearly indicates that all media has a weak influences on violent behaviour whether it be comics, novels, newspapers, music, movies, television, or video games, but real life has the largest impact. The violence we witness or participate in is more important than any other factor.
For young children, parents tend to play the pivotal role in their development. The parent's reaction to violence can be more important than all of the media that the child consumes. But a parent actually has to be there. They have to talk to their children. They have to make sure that their children are understanding the context of what they see and hear.
I think the "protect the children" crowd has it terribly, terribly wrong. They want to protect children from seeing the consequences of violence. That might be worse than teaching children self-confidence instead of knowledge, which everyone should know by now was disastrously bad. Children learn from what they see and hear, when violence is portrayed as having no consequences they learn that violence has no consequences.
You misspelled "easy to ignore".
World events in WoW are designed to be entirely missable.
I'd expect an announcement regarding the 2008 expansion to WoW. They previously promised to do a yearly expansion to WoW and May's about the right time to begin hyping a december release.
Even if it were Starcraft, I don't have high hopes for it. WoW's customer service and Burning Crusade's grindfest disappointed me to the point where I no longer have any goodwill for Blizzard's name. Just as well, I suppose, it's been hollowed out and worn as a jaunty cap by Vivendi. The designers who built Starcraft don't work for Vivendi. Hell the desginers who built World of Warcraft don't work for Vivendi any more either. I wouldn't be surprised if the Blizzard division of Vivendi does not currently have the ability to produce a Starcraft 2, let alone make a worthy sequel.
I'm very sure that Vivendi had no interest in Starcraft when they bought it, they were only looking at the subscription revenues of WoW.
There's an interesting little problem there:
"If you expect all politicians to be dirty, all you will see is dirty politicians"
It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't expect my politicians to be new-car clean, but if I were American I wouldn't settle for soiled and bloody underwear clean politicians. Cheney and Bush have earned impeachment with their actions.
If I wanted to be legalistic about it, I'd have to point out that in the eyes of the law he did not perjure himself. The perjury charges were all either dropped or dismissed. The may one that Republicans always mention, is in fact false. Clinton asked the lawyers deposing him "What do you mean sexual relations", they said "You know what we mean. Intercourse" and then he said "No, I did not have sexual relations with her". You should be complaining about conduct unbecoming of a lawyer, I think, because that's the only thing that really had repercussions on him, causing him to lose his licence to practice law as a result of his shenanigans.
The reason Clinton was impeached was because the Republicans hated his guts and after almost 4 years of trying, they finally had found something they could use against him. It was simple partisan politics, except even some of the Republicans felt it was too partisan and voted against it.
There are two major issues with your statement:
1) Social programs do not really help people avoid the consequences of their actions, they help them deal with the consequences and they do so to avoid having those consequences redistributed back to everyone else. They arrose as a reaction to the clarity of failure of libertarianism in the 30s. It became glaringly obvious to the majority of people that there was one little truth: "Sometimes things happen that no matter how hard you try to cope with, you just can't."
2) Personal responsibility is a tough value to prioritize. The world is interconnected. All too often we fail to attribute consequences to the actions that actually spawned them. This failure may lead to us forcing people to take "personal responsibility" for the consequences of other peoples actions.
The sad and scary thing is that the current U.S. government IS a reflection of it's citizens. Not all of it's citizens, maybe not even a majority. But at least significant minority of U.S. citzens are scared out of their wits that "them foreigners" are gonna come and kill them or their babies.
American media has been extremely complicit in supporting the government because a large subsection of the public believes in the Bush administration. They've forged unbreakable links of loyalty and will defend that government from any perceived slight. This puts the media in a difficult position, if they're not nice to the government then they will be inundated with complaints and harrassment from organizations that actively support the government and it's war policies, if they are nice, then they get the same treatment from those who don't support the government.
Too many U.S. citizens are willing to make any excuse necessary for the government because they think Bush will protect them as long as he's allowed to do whatever he wants. They refuse to recognize the misbehaviour of the Bush whitehouse because they have invested too much of their hope for safety and security in the government. Asking hard questions about the government means dealing with fear and betrayal, and there's no way they want to do that again.
That make a whole lot of sense until you take of your "I-see-prejudice-everywhere" glasses. Why do there need to be more women in computer science is a legitimate question with a legitimate answer: Women bring alternative views and solutions to computer science. Furthermore, this drop off seems to be specific to North American Computer Science programs, and the level of enrollment is dropping from past levels.
This indicates that there is a North American problem, reforming the computer science is possible solution, but one I, personally, do not like much. Removing the requirment to learn programming at all, essential guts the heart of the education. I wonder what graduates of that program are actually qualified to do.
However, I think they are correct when they mention that students preconceptions of what kind of work they'll do is interfering with enrollment. That's not just high school computer courses taught by teachers who know little or nothing about computers, it's also popular media which rarely shows anyone who works with computers professionally, and even more rarely shows them in a positive light.
Think about it for a moment. In TV shows if you have a broken computer who fixes it? Either it's one of the regular cast who "just happens" to know how to fix computers or it's Brian Posehn. The media has built a very negative social stereotype of computer science and it should be no surprise that it turns people off the field entirely.
The only show I can think of that had such characters, was Level 9, a 2000 UPN show that cancelled after 9 episodes. It kind of deserved that, though. Words fail me when I try to describe the rampant ignorance of the writers in what was and was not reasonable in computer related crime. Lyle from the Italian Job is pretty much the only other character I can think of who fits the bill as an at least somewhat positive role model.
It's not about reducing the need to learn a particular programming language, it's eliminating the need to learn any programming language that's a problem. I remember my third year Operating Systems class, I worked with one student who couldn't write any code at all, and one who couldn't understand the fundamentals of function calls and code reuse. These are people who should have already flunked out of the program. The fact that they were still in the program was a testament to their ability to copy work from other students and pass it off as their own.
The OS course was their downfall. They couldn't pass it because they couldn't (or wouldn't) do the work and the other students wouldn't let someone copy all the code from a 20-workhour project. What made it worse was that for both students, this was not their first time taking the course.
Of course none of this is the real problem. The problem is that female high school students (and a fair share of male ones too) don't want to end up like in office space. Mostly the popular media usually shows two types of computer people: fat, greasy and essentially honest cubicle dwellers who can't even dress themselves or hip handsome rich hackers who usually end up in pound-me-the-ass federal prison.
So in the end, I blame Jurassic Park for making the computer nerd's greed the villain, instead of the corporate codger's hubris. The real problem is that the challenges of computer science are mostly intellectual, and nothing intellectual translates well to either the big or small screen.
It's amusing how the hipester defeats his own arguments, because it should be obvious to anyone that cell phones didn't become widespread last year and that they're not "spreading" from the U.S. to Europe. There's an obvious pattern there that needs to be analyzed for the real cause.
One thing that occured to me, is that it could be cell or GSM technology if a company started selling a bee monitor that you attached to the hive that remotely monitored them and all the hives that had these monitors attached were abandoned, but I would like to think that the bee keepers are smarter than that.
The report that the usual vermin and pests that infest abandoned hives aren't moving in either, suggests something is driving more than just the bees away.
"The contracts have to be renegotiated on a new platform"
That's not an answer, it's an excuse.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they cost a lot more has something to do with pressure from Microsoft to set the price higher to "make the DL content valuable". The same reason why they were trying to force other companies with D/L content to charge for it. I expect Microsoft intends to make a lot of money off of their cut of D/L items.
It's also possible that because the songs are now downloadable on demand, the new contract might charge Harmonix per download. Once you've built in a little profit for Harmonix and Microsoft in addition to the RIAA base fee per song and Microsoft's overhead charge for the service that could conceivably force the price that high. That's what Major Nelson wanted to imply, the question is whether he didn't say it outright is because it's true and he didn't want to offend the RIAA or because it's not true and he only wants to think that he said that to dodge the question.
While I agree with you about the tedious grinds (Kill 20,000 Furbolgs to get the useless Furbolg Trinket). Botting
pisses off people who have a life as well. People who bot make it harder for everyone who don't bot because the botting is there all the time killing the same mobs over and over again. While your bot is killing those furbolgs, or elementals, or undead the other players who are trying to earn their rep, gold, or materials the honest way get screwed over by your bot.
The problem is an intractable one in WoW. Most players are prevented from effectively griefing bots by the normal game rules, but there's nothing that prevents bots from griefing other players by scouring an area clean of mobs. I've seen situations where there were 4 separate bots killing the mobs in the same field.
The solution? Don't play WoW. The game is mostly an endless grind fest. It's the timesinks that make botting popular even though it can and does get your account banned. Of course, on the flip side Blizzard is extremely slow to ban botters. I've seen bots still operating more than a month after I first reported them.
I've been much happier since I quit.
Didn't you learn anything from "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes"?
I suppose it's a tricky ethical question. If you can make a menial servant smarter, should you? Is it more acceptable to force an intelligent being to do menial work, or to engineer (mechanically or biologically) a minimally or non-intelligent creature to do it instead? The work has to be done, so I suspect the latter viewpoint will eventually win out simply because of expediency.
So, you're saying if you trim the tail off a monkey, it becomes a human?
That's not such a good idea, PETA is run by insane clowns.
They think their ends justify deception and trickery to promote their cause. A cause which I don't think too many peole can really support. Their stated goal is to turn the entire world vegan to the point where we don't use animals at all for food, clothing, research or entertainment.
Frankly that would pretty much cause the extinction of all domesticated farm animals. Who's going to raise chickens when no one will eat them? Who will raise cows when milk, meat and leather are useless? Who will herd sheep when no one wants wool or mutton?
If might put an end to all domesticated animals period, if they decide that cats and dogs are kept for "entertainment". No thanks, PETA is just a group of zealots who place animals above humans.
Meh. That's a topic for a different study. Quake 2 is reasonable since the "murder simulator" stuff that Thompson has been spewing dates back to those days. It shows that just running around shooting other players doesn't have an effect. They can do a follow up study to determine if longer exposure or more human looking opponents changes the results.
The Open Source software is just one step of many. If you don't know what the machine is supposed to be doing, then you can't tell if it's doing that.
Verifying the compiler should be a little easier, since the source is open and it should be using a standard compiler it should be possible to create a checksum using the same compiler and verify the compiled binaries match. This is dependent on the source code being open. Without the open code, no external agency would be able to create a checksum. They don't have the source code, and likely wouldn't know which compiler was used either.
Frankly, I think it would be much harder to create a hardware based tamper system, most of these vote terminals seem to run on fairly standard computer hardware. All of the hardware is supposed to be tested before it is used. Of course, nailing that down so that all hardware is tested and securely stored is an education and procedures problem that may need to be addressed in the future. But certification of hardware is already required by existing laws, it's just not done very well.
Also as the Republicans have amply demonstrated it's not just about changing vote totals directly. Imagine if you will, a voting program that includes an additional 10 second wait every time someone votes for a Democratic candidate instead of a Republican candidate (but only on Nov 2nd). This is enough to feel slow but not enough for the voter to go seek help. The effect would be longer lines in Democratic strongholds and shorter line in Republican strongholds. If the longer lines deter 1 in every 100 Democratic voters, that could be enough to swing a close election. Throw in a few more tricks, like fake voter registration drives (so people have to register at the polling place eating up the time of the volunteers) and undersupplying voting terminals so the lines are even longer, and you could theoretically switch a 50-50 dead heat into a 44-50 victory without actually changing one vote result.
The discussion makes me wonder if anyone reas the SFX post "Firefly was the resounding winner in our recent online poll". It would be trivial for a Firefly fan group to stuff the ballots in your typical online poll.