Isn't this just a magicians trick? i.e. look here not over there?
In Florida they had a "I have not been found incapable..." checkbox on the registration form. Fail to check that box and your registration form is thrown away (even though you declare yourself fit to vote wit the signature).
A simple trick would be to tell your campaigners to make sure that box is ticked (or perhaps tick it yourself for likely republican voters, or pretick the forms handed to your supporters).
I guess maybe 1 in twenty voters would miss that checkbox or fail to understand its significance. Right there thats a 2.5% swing, without any other tricks. Perhaps though, it would show up if the ink was different for that checkbox.
"Patents are absolutely necessary to protect small companies from having their ideas taken without any credit or compensation to the original source."
Software needs to interoperate with other software. Sooner or later you have to sign away your patent protection to gain the closed API, or use of someone else's patents. If you look at the companies that have successfully used patents against big companies, they are almost always pure patent plays that sell no real product.
"I have seen posts on many patent articles here that read the first one or two claims and assume that a huge range of existing work is covered,"
Patents for browser plugins successfully used in court, one click patents successfully used in court, patents for video conferencing successfully used in court..... The courts seem to have the same problem!
"But the abuses do not stop the patent system from being useful for software."
Its not just abuses there are more fundamental problems:
Software implementation is already covered by copyright. The algorithm inside the software was never previously patentable, as a result most existing software is built on algorithms that haven't been disclosed. YOU CAN'T TELL THE ALGORITHMS USED FROM THE COMPILED RESULT. Hence prior-art can't be established because you can't see inside the old software.
The BSAs tricky wording removes the 'technology' requirement from software (as required by TRIPS). Other inventions have to be technological, but thanks to some backdoor work by the BSA, simply being software is enough to count as technology. So a one-tick of a paper order form isn't patentable, but the same system written in software is.
The lobbyists bypassed the EU Parliament to push this through.
"Kill the economy. I mean really kill it - we are talking 40% or higher inflation here."
Why do it in such a complicated way? No country is under any obligation to allow people to come. In Europe we only allow immigrants if they have skills needed AND THEY PLAN TO STAY. Since its pointless training them up and exporting them again. You could just simply stop allowing them!
"270 000 foreigners for a job at any one time. In a country of 300 million that is a statistically insignificant number."
"The brief discusses the requirement of the broadcast flag in digital television; something Congress implicitly allows."
*IF* congress should decide that fair use can be taken away by a technical measure mandated by Congress, *THEN* the FCC would have the implicit right to dictate the technicallities of that measure.
To put it a different way, suppose the vehicles department decided all vehicles should have speed limiters set at 10mph. Setting speed limits is not within the vehicle depts remit, but yet the effect is the same. Has congress therefore given them implicit right to set speed limits?
Lets take it further, they decide that cars must have a driver weight sensor so that only people less than 150kg can drive. Has congress implicitly given the vehicle regulator the right to stop fat people driving by setting their remit to dictate car standards?
"We knew Saddam had WMD's at one point in time. There's no question about it. We also knew that, when he kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998,... "
Bush: Lets invade Iraq because he is part of Al Qaeda.
CIA: Well actually that's not true, they don't like him he doesn't like them.
Bush: Let's invade Iraq because they are making Nuclear WMDs, just look at this memo to buy Uranium.
UN: That memo is sooo fake. Look it's signed in crayon.
Bush: OK, well lets invade Iraq because he kicked out the inspectors so he must have something to hide.
UN: He kicks them out every few years, we give you PERMISSION to threaten him, you drop a few bombs, he lets them back in, we've done this before.
Bush: Thank you for the PERMISSION to invade, now whose with me? Anyone? Tony? Pretty please Tony? Remember special relationship?
Tony Blair: Oh, alright, but only because we feel bad about 9/11.
So $120 Billion so far, going on 225 billion, no WMDs found, all to topple Sadam Hussein, a man in his late 60's who would have died soon enough anyway.
Bush failed to catch Osama Bin laden, failed to run the economy, failed to create jobs, failed to plan for the future pensions crunch, has considerably increased terrorism worldwide and reduced his own peoples freedom in the process.
If the bank stole your money, they would lose you as a customer, so their interests and yours are aligned.
Plus listen to the ATM when you take the money out and you'll hear it print a note on the internal printer, even when you don't request a receipt it still prints a paper trail.
"The bottom line is that these electronic voting machines can be, and probably already are, many times more accurate than paper ballots."
"and probably already are", they're unverifable, its not enough to say "and probably already are" you have to be able to say "and verifably are".
"I haven't used a paper ballot in nearly 20 years. But seems to me that they didn't have serial numbers that were cross-indexed with the voter rolls then, so switching ballots out wouldn't have been all that hard if someone had wanted to."
My understanding of US paper voting is this (based on how it works in Europe):
You vote on a specially printed ballot with security features. Your vote goes into a locked ballot box which the local polling workers can't open. The ballot box is taken to be opened and counted. All of these steps are done in front of representatives of opposing candidates.
So its difficult to see where the swap would occur without the candidates representative seeing it. Ballot stuffing use to be possible, until they started counting the voters through the door, ballot box distruction was possible, but now they're metal boxes individually numbered and tracked with a signature trail.
So paper trail elections seem pretty damn good to me.
Electronic voting could be made to work, but it could use an audit trail. Otherwise a tap on the screen is all thats needed to change the votes recorded.
PRA is a side issue, it derives from the message header and so cannot be trusted since it could be faked.
Can I suggest this approach to handle relayed mail:
It doesn't matter if a message from A to B goes via C.
When you accept messages from 'C' and the header says its relayed mail, it is either:
1. A known blacklisted spammer relay. 2. An unknown relay in which case content filtering is used. 3. A relay that implements SPF itself and so messages from it can be treated as already having passed the SPF check.
Determining 3 isn't as difficult as you might guess. You can promote a relay server from 2 to 3 if you never receive spam with a faked origin, from it.
Since the whole point of SPF is to reduce the number of content checks, reducing the filtering load and improving the reliability, this is a reasonable strategy.
All fine words, but MIT licensed it and paid for exactly that: Analogue streams played from CDs to their students, so its not a copyright issue.
No-one, other than you, is claiming that their contract requires "Adverts", "Incomplete songs" & "Unscheduled recordings", "degraded analogue" or any other such condition.
"Which I why I keep javascript turned off. Blocks another subset of ads. "
Better turn off JPEG and HTML too then, the most annoying ads are just JPEGS linked via affliate links. If you want to block Google adverts, you don't have to suffer. Just map "googlesyndication.com" to localhost in your hosts file.
I tried Javascript (Active Scripting) switched off when I was using Internet Explorer. Nothing worked. The biggest problems, news sites that use pull down menus, popup pages from links, none of my banking sites worked, no stock investing, parts of zdnet failed, what a pain!
" That you're letting anyone execute code on your system, and even though it's severely limited "
But thats the whole point, you can't do interactions server side because of the network lag between client and server would make it unworkable. Without code running client side you have no interaction beyond clicking links and waiting for new pages to download. So you will always have to run something client side to get interaction and it may aswell be a well rounded piece of code like Javascript.
"Not to mention the fact that the main use for Javascript as far as I can tell is"
Shopping carts, teaching aids, google adverts.... basically all client side interactions that aren't written in Java or Flash.
Just switch to Firefox, someday Microsoft will get their act sorted out, but for the moment switch the Firefox.
You wouldn't disable images on the page to fix the JPEG exploit, there's no reason to disable Javascript.
HTML's nice, but it simply can't handle even basic tasks and its the only workable solution for client side interaction unless you start using Flash (eek).
I don't get it, I tried the Firefox exploits in 1.0PR, but neither exploit work.
On the first one: The citibank site opens in a new tab, I click on the field that says "enter a zip code" but the typing cursor never appears. The pull downs down pull down and nothing works. Wasn't it supposed to work as normal?
On the second one, the dialog pops up when I'm on the Secunia page, just when I try to click the tab to switch to the citibank one. How am I supposed to think its from Citibank when the Secunia tab is the top tab!?
(Copy of my anon posting, now that Slashdot login is working again).
"This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered"
It surely takes only a single coder to code such an easter egg. To get it past code review *may* take another. So we're talking about a tiny conspiracy required to do it.
The reward is control of the most powerful nation in the world, so the reward for doing it is huge. Once you control the executive branch + Congress who is there to arrest you?
"I'm personally distrustful of paper records as they rely on humans to read and interpet them"
I'm distrustful of paper ballots too, everyone is. That's why they're sealed in boxes and monitored and the count is monitored by all parties. Nobody trusts paper ballots, they don't have to, because they're easy to monitor and hard to fake.
In the same way, nobody should be forced to blindly trust that electronic ballots don't have easter eggs. Nobody should have to trust Diebold et al. haven't put an easter egg into their machines.
Playing devils advocate: I could write an easter egg into the software, so that when I come along to the voting booth, I tap my finger on the screen in a few special unmarked places, and that machine then favours my chosen candidate.
Tell a few of my friends and we could easily do that with all the machines in a swing state.
The pre-checks wouldn't pick it up, the random machines taken out for testing wouldn't show the problem (because I wouldn't be activating my easter egg on those machines).
Whoever writes the voting software controls the election without the paper trail.
Its fine to make unauditable voting machines, just as long as I'm writing the software.:)
I wonder if they realise that they're devaluing the 'virgin' brand with this stuff.
Here they're talking about 'open standards' when talking about Microsoft's proprietary DRM infested WMA format. Do they think the CNET crowd are stupid? If they can't keep it real when talking about their music player, how can I trust Virgin holidays description of a resort! The crap they talk in one market affects their other markets too.
Also what happens in the future? When Microsoft finally tries to make this DRM crap work, they will have to disable writing to unprotected CDs.
It's one thing for Microsoft to screw over their customers (its almost expected of them), but Virgin?
Perhaps the closing strategy is for enough people to do the 'letter' trick to Blizzard that they can no longer afford the cost of collecting the software from the customers and simply fail to accept your terms.
At that point, use one of the copies they've failed to collect to write BNetd2 and render this stupid idiotic judgement moot.
Alternatively, try upping the ante. You had a reasonable expectation of buying a product. As a result of Blizzards actions not yours (you've bought thousands of things in shops without having your purchase rights taken away) you incurred extra costs.
A journey to the shop, the time+cost of writing a letter, storage costs for their worthless CD. So ask for *more* than the cost of the product.
"(they partially base this on the fact that the party to this dispute was smart enough to reverse engineer the product, and thus should have known well enough to read and understand the terms of the EULA, unlike a normal user )."
Counter argument: Legal smarts aren't programming smarts. Can the Judge write code? No? Then is it reasonable to assume the EULA was understood, let alone read?
Slashdot Mirror
Buy DVDs, lots of cartoon DVDs and lend them out to the students.
DVDs because the multiple languages and subtitles are a great way to learn a new language. Cartoons because animation has simpler phrases.
Isn't this just a magicians trick? i.e. look here not over there?
In Florida they had a "I have not been found incapable..." checkbox on the registration form. Fail to check that box and your registration form is thrown away (even though you declare yourself fit to vote wit the signature).
A simple trick would be to tell your campaigners to make sure that box is ticked (or perhaps tick it yourself for likely republican voters, or pretick the forms handed to your supporters).
I guess maybe 1 in twenty voters would miss that checkbox or fail to understand its significance.
Right there thats a 2.5% swing, without any other tricks. Perhaps though, it would show up if the ink was different for that checkbox.
"I could just keep running the debt forever and then print more money as I go"
Whatever happened to the USSR?
"Patents are absolutely necessary to protect small companies from having their ideas taken without any credit or compensation to the original source."
Software needs to interoperate with other software. Sooner or later you have to sign away your patent protection to gain the closed API, or use of someone else's patents. If you look at the companies that have successfully used patents against big companies, they are almost always pure patent plays that sell no real product.
"I have seen posts on many patent articles here that read the first one or two claims and assume that a huge range of existing work is covered,"
Patents for browser plugins successfully used in court, one click patents successfully used in court, patents for video conferencing successfully used in court..... The courts seem to have the same problem!
"But the abuses do not stop the patent system from being useful for software."
Its not just abuses there are more fundamental problems:
Software implementation is already covered by copyright. The algorithm inside the software was never previously patentable, as a result most existing software is built on algorithms that haven't been disclosed.
YOU CAN'T TELL THE ALGORITHMS USED FROM THE COMPILED RESULT.
Hence prior-art can't be established because you can't see inside the old software.
The BSAs tricky wording removes the 'technology' requirement from software (as required by TRIPS). Other inventions have to be technological, but thanks to some backdoor work by the BSA, simply being software is enough to count as technology.
So a one-tick of a paper order form isn't patentable, but the same system written in software is.
The lobbyists bypassed the EU Parliament to push this through.
"The UK has countless coloured immigrants who have absolutely no skills, "
They got in other ways than the facilitated visa (the UK equivalent of H1B), e.g. marriage into asian families living in UK.
For the facilitated visa you need to demonstrate a willingness to stay and the sponsor has to show how they have skills not available in the UK.
H1B format is just dumb, you import people, train them up, get them experienced, then export them to India to compete with your own workforce. Why?
"Kill the economy. I mean really kill it - we are talking 40% or higher inflation here."
Why do it in such a complicated way?
No country is under any obligation to allow people to come. In Europe we only allow immigrants if they have skills needed AND THEY PLAN TO STAY. Since its pointless training them up and exporting them again. You could just simply stop allowing them!
"270 000 foreigners for a job at any one time. In a country of 300 million that is a statistically insignificant number."
Only true if you were 300 million IT SPECIALISTS.
"The brief discusses the requirement of the broadcast flag in digital television; something Congress implicitly allows."
*IF* congress should decide that fair use can be taken away by a technical measure mandated by Congress, *THEN* the FCC would have the implicit right to dictate the technicallities of that measure.
To put it a different way, suppose the vehicles department decided all vehicles should have speed limiters set at 10mph. Setting speed limits is not within the vehicle depts remit, but yet the effect is the same. Has congress therefore given them implicit right to set speed limits?
Lets take it further, they decide that cars must have a driver weight sensor so that only people less than 150kg can drive. Has congress implicitly given the vehicle regulator the right to stop fat people driving by setting their remit to dictate car standards?
Search "lyndie england", 11,100 results
Search "lynndie england", 97,200 results.
"We knew Saddam had WMD's at one point in time. There's no question about it. We also knew that, when he kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998,... "
Bush: Lets invade Iraq because he is part of Al Qaeda.
CIA: Well actually that's not true, they don't like him he doesn't like them.
Bush: Let's invade Iraq because they are making Nuclear WMDs, just look at this memo to buy Uranium.
UN: That memo is sooo fake. Look it's signed in crayon.
Bush: OK, well lets invade Iraq because he kicked out the inspectors so he must have something to hide.
UN: He kicks them out every few years, we give you PERMISSION to threaten him, you drop a few bombs, he lets them back in, we've done this before.
Bush: Thank you for the PERMISSION to invade, now whose with me? Anyone? Tony? Pretty please Tony? Remember special relationship?
Tony Blair: Oh, alright, but only because we feel bad about 9/11.
So $120 Billion so far, going on 225 billion, no WMDs found, all to topple Sadam Hussein, a man in his late 60's who would have died soon enough anyway.
Bush failed to catch Osama Bin laden, failed to run the economy, failed to create jobs, failed to plan for the future pensions crunch, has considerably increased terrorism worldwide and reduced his own peoples freedom in the process.
If the bank stole your money, they would lose you as a customer, so their interests and yours are aligned.
Plus listen to the ATM when you take the money out and you'll hear it print a note on the internal printer, even when you don't request a receipt it still prints a paper trail.
"The bottom line is that these electronic voting machines can be, and probably already are, many times more accurate than paper ballots."
"and probably already are", they're unverifable, its not enough to say "and probably already are" you have to be able to say "and verifably are".
"I haven't used a paper ballot in nearly 20 years. But seems to me that they didn't have serial numbers that were cross-indexed with the voter rolls then, so switching ballots out wouldn't have been all that hard if someone had wanted to."
My understanding of US paper voting is this (based on how it works in Europe):
You vote on a specially printed ballot with security features.
Your vote goes into a locked ballot box which the local polling workers can't open.
The ballot box is taken to be opened and counted.
All of these steps are done in front of representatives of opposing candidates.
So its difficult to see where the swap would occur without the candidates representative seeing it. Ballot stuffing use to be possible, until they started counting the voters through the door, ballot box distruction was possible, but now they're metal boxes individually numbered and tracked with a signature trail.
So paper trail elections seem pretty damn good to me.
Electronic voting could be made to work, but it could use an audit trail. Otherwise a tap on the screen is all thats needed to change the votes recorded.
PRA is a side issue, it derives from the message header and so cannot be trusted since it could be faked.
Can I suggest this approach to handle relayed mail:
It doesn't matter if a message from A to B goes via C.
When you accept messages from 'C' and the header says its relayed mail, it is either:
1. A known blacklisted spammer relay.
2. An unknown relay in which case content filtering is used.
3. A relay that implements SPF itself and so messages from it can be treated as already having passed the SPF check.
Determining 3 isn't as difficult as you might guess. You can promote a relay server from 2 to 3 if you never receive spam with a faked origin, from it.
Since the whole point of SPF is to reduce the number of content checks, reducing the filtering load and improving the reliability, this is a reasonable strategy.
"Is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family? "
MIT bought and paid for its license, is fully within its license and is not doing anything outside the scope of what its paid for.
Is it OK for my family to eat the bread I bought?
All fine words, but MIT licensed it and paid for exactly that: Analogue streams played from CDs to their students, so its not a copyright issue.
No-one, other than you, is claiming that their contract requires "Adverts", "Incomplete songs" & "Unscheduled recordings", "degraded analogue" or any other such condition.
"Which I why I keep javascript turned off. Blocks another subset of ads. "
Better turn off JPEG and HTML too then, the most annoying ads are just JPEGS linked via affliate links. If you want to block Google adverts, you don't have to suffer. Just map "googlesyndication.com" to localhost in your hosts file.
I tried Javascript (Active Scripting) switched off when I was using Internet Explorer. Nothing worked. The biggest problems, news sites that use pull down menus, popup pages from links, none of my banking sites worked, no stock investing, parts of zdnet failed, what a pain!
" That you're letting anyone execute code on your system, and even though it's severely limited "
But thats the whole point, you can't do interactions server side because of the network lag between client and server would make it unworkable. Without code running client side you have no interaction beyond clicking links and waiting for new pages to download.
So you will always have to run something client side to get interaction and it may aswell be a well rounded piece of code like Javascript.
"Not to mention the fact that the main use for Javascript as far as I can tell is"
Shopping carts, teaching aids, google adverts.... basically all client side interactions that aren't written in Java or Flash.
Thats weak, a spoofing bug that I have to use my imagination?
Just switch to Firefox, someday Microsoft will get their act sorted out, but for the moment switch the Firefox.
You wouldn't disable images on the page to fix the JPEG exploit, there's no reason to disable Javascript.
HTML's nice, but it simply can't handle even basic tasks and its the only workable solution for client side interaction unless you start using Flash (eek).
I don't get it, I tried the Firefox exploits in 1.0PR, but neither exploit work.
On the first one:
The citibank site opens in a new tab, I click on the field that says "enter a zip code" but the typing cursor never appears. The pull downs down pull down and nothing works. Wasn't it supposed to work as normal?
On the second one, the dialog pops up when I'm on the Secunia page, just when I try to click the tab to switch to the citibank one. How am I supposed to think its from Citibank when the Secunia tab is the top tab!?
Whats the trick to getting these to work?
(Copy of my anon posting, now that Slashdot login is working again).
"This makes the IMO unreasonable assumption that a single individual writes code for the machines without any checks or oversight by at least one other person, and that the malicious coder is willing to become a fugitive or go to jail when (not if) the easter egg is discovered"
It surely takes only a single coder to code such an easter egg. To get it past code review *may* take another. So we're talking about a tiny conspiracy required to do it.
The reward is control of the most powerful nation in the world, so the reward for doing it is huge. Once you control the executive branch + Congress who is there to arrest you?
"I'm personally distrustful of paper records as they rely on humans to read and interpet them"
I'm distrustful of paper ballots too, everyone is. That's why they're sealed in boxes and monitored and the count is monitored by all parties. Nobody trusts paper ballots, they don't have to, because they're easy to monitor and hard to fake.
In the same way, nobody should be forced to blindly trust that electronic ballots don't have easter eggs. Nobody should have to trust Diebold et al. haven't put an easter egg into their machines.
"I've voted touchscreen twice and it was great, "
:)
Playing devils advocate: I could write an easter egg into the software, so that when I come along to the voting booth, I tap my finger on the screen in a few special unmarked places, and that machine then favours my chosen candidate.
Tell a few of my friends and we could easily do that with all the machines in a swing state.
The pre-checks wouldn't pick it up, the random machines taken out for testing wouldn't show the problem (because I wouldn't be activating my easter egg on those machines).
Whoever writes the voting software controls the election without the paper trail.
Its fine to make unauditable voting machines, just as long as I'm writing the software.
I wonder if they realise that they're devaluing the 'virgin' brand with this stuff.
Here they're talking about 'open standards' when talking about Microsoft's proprietary DRM infested WMA format. Do they think the CNET crowd are stupid? If they can't keep it real when talking about their music player, how can I trust Virgin holidays description of a resort! The crap they talk in one market affects their other markets too.
Also what happens in the future? When Microsoft finally tries to make this DRM crap work, they will have to disable writing to unprotected CDs.
It's one thing for Microsoft to screw over their customers (its almost expected of them), but Virgin?
"I find it ironic that a bunch of anti-violence, anti-gun, peacemongers, like Democrats would behave this way. "
The man reporting it that gun shot was Phil Parlock (Republican campaigner).
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091804X.shtml
The same guy who was attacked (when he was with his daughter) by democrats and had his Bush poster tore up.
Trouble is he does the every election, so it seems about as fake as can be, this is the 3rd election in which he's done this stunt.
Perhaps the closing strategy is for enough people to do the 'letter' trick to Blizzard that they can no longer afford the cost of collecting the software from the customers and simply fail to accept your terms.
At that point, use one of the copies they've failed to collect to write BNetd2 and render this stupid idiotic judgement moot.
Alternatively, try upping the ante. You had a reasonable expectation of buying a product. As a result of Blizzards actions not yours (you've bought thousands of things in shops without having your purchase rights taken away) you incurred extra costs.
A journey to the shop, the time+cost of writing a letter, storage costs for their worthless CD. So ask for *more* than the cost of the product.
"(they partially base this on the fact that the party to this dispute was smart enough to reverse engineer the product, and thus should have known well enough to read and understand the terms of the EULA, unlike a normal user )."
Counter argument: Legal smarts aren't programming smarts. Can the Judge write code? No? Then is it reasonable to assume the EULA was understood, let alone read?