Right, but we run the risk of requiring the broadcast of everything IN LARGE FONTS so that a little signal can penetrate the noise.
Sometimes you need an incorruptible, sane image to focus people's notice on what really matters.
Anybody got one?
No mention of "The Worst Toilet in Scotland" from Trainspotting which must be near there somewhere, as the first bullet on the trivia reveals.
I must be squeamish--I couldn't make it past that scene. Something about watching humans debase themselves like that, even fictionally, is too disquieting. Drugs are not the God you thought they'd be, no?
The thing is, with the competition (from a legal standpoint) of DRM, trusted computing, and etc, the GPL must make changes to counter these new ideas.
Some people are afraid that the changes in gpl3 will keep people from embracing open source, but it is essential to have a licence that will be of use in the years to come.
RMS has liberal views, but at this point he's the only one addressing the problem.
True. Binary drivers are a huge problem, as well, most acutely in the wireless and video subsystems. Ultimately, software is better when it's like chess, rather than poker.
GPL3 is relatively unrevolutionary WRT GPL2. http://lwn.net/ has good coverage. GPL3 pretty much refines 2.
I don't see why one would have to be liberal to agree with the GPL itself. I've always thought of it as essentially saying that software knowledge is like academic knowledge. Then there is the point where we step off the paper and into an ideology, asserting that !GPL == unethical
Now we've crossed the political Rubicon, so to speak.
Actually, I bought my Dell C680 from EmperorLinux.com, and Dell was extremely good about the warranty service.
Then, when I had to send it back for something too wierd to get into here, and the shipping company 'lost' the laptop, Dell was quite reasonable about taking care of the customer, and now I have a D800.
Thus, I can readily offer good word-of-mouth for Dell in terms of quality and customer service.
EmperorLinux.com is teh r0x0rz, too. Go, Lincoln!
Is there a Majority Shareholder keeping Linux support at the lip service level?
Or, do Dell's executives own Massive Stacks of certain stock? Maybe Somebody would be Mighty Sore at Mr. Dell if he Mustered Sufficient courage to Make Significant choice available to people.
Ah, Monopolistic Speculation: gotta love it.
The OS is really the gateway drug.
How about when you want to expand into application software realms? Art, music, math, science...you can rpm/apt-get/emerge to your heart's content if you don't make a lousy OS choice on the front end.
Voting is a simple, infrequent process that gains nothing from computers.
"Nothing" may be a little strong.
We speak of an information system. I agree that there isn't a serious requirement to automate the system. Truly, it's an application that makes great sense in a "batch" process.
However, there is some benefit, particularly to a media-driven society, from the faster feedback of an automated system.
Thus, we need to dress up a serious Luddite attack on voting in terms of "returning to traditional values".
Properly characterizing the instant-gratification nature of electronic voting as an immature, unwise development would be good.
It might help drive political debate in the US away from its current hormone-driven frenzy into sober contemplation of the world situation.
We could enter a golden age where the US formally declares war before conducting invasions, and considers the consequences of policy for decades out, and beyond just the next erection.
<adjusts rose-colored glasses>
As you point out, in reality we can never be 100% sure about what is "real", therfore a fair election is not enough to inspire confidence, it must also must be "seen to be fair".
I'm finding your arguments persuasive. There is an undeniable arrogance in the US, where we tacitly assert that our elections are impeccable, and that there could never be a need for an external observer. Ahem.
What about the question of a denial-of-service? How do we filter out that unavoidable minority with the extreme opinion who insist that there was foul play, and exercise their free speech in ways that everyone else finds tedious?
For example, there is in the US a group who maintain that the Pearl Harbor attack of 07Dec1941 was no surprise, and that the US government knowingly permitted it. Belief is a powerful tool, and supports ideas that hang in the air the way bricks do not, to borrow a little Douglas Adams.
One can only hope that the US 2008 election is won clearly, decisively, and cleanly by one side. The outpourings of angst risk becoming a "boy who cries wolf", boring the society to the point that real fraud falls on deaf ears.
So, confidence in people is superior to confidence in equipment? Was that equipment, in fact, produced by people?
My argument is that in a finite reality you can't escape placing confidence in something external.
If someone took the innards from a C64 emulator joystick, and used it in a voting machine based on a C64... how would you know the CPU is a real 6510 and not a fake programmed to behave like one under most circumstances?
Aw, c'mon. If we're after implementing a system that's really hard to subvert, one good way is to have an old IC, with a known pin-out, mounted to a board. You have a test kit that can touch the pins and feed all manner of inputs and outputs to it. You also sample the RF emitted by the chip (every conductor is an antenna, you know) and ensure that all the gazintas and gazoutas line up for all of your hardware. You also implement tight handling controls, and buy really simple hardware with life-expectancies of decades. As I said earlier in the thread, you make all of the specs open, and allow people time to run test suites of their own devising against the hardware. Then you randomly deploy the hardware at election time.
Foolproof? Of course not. Full thought-through? No. My thesis is that, with sufficient transparency and randomization, you can ensure that any fraud will require a very broad conspiracy. And it doesn't have to be cost-prohibitive, either.
I am confident he will be found guilty after a trial, as the obvious facts in this TIA case indicate. He has already been convicted after due process once before, though pardoned. The facts in this case are just as clear, and another trial will surely establish them
Poindexter is obviously a dangerous traitor to the Constitution, which he has sworn to uphold in several offices he's held, to say nothing of his basic duty as a citizen. We hang traitors.
I am not a court, I do not have the power to try or sentence Poindexter, I do not propose to hang him myself. I am just an American citizen defending myself and my country from a very real traitor.
I'm not sure if I'm a) confused as to the basis of the discussion, b) being trolled, or c) [ad hominem attack goes here]
I think I'll choose a), declare you right, and punt, sir.
Why do you defend him?
Not sure I recall uttering word #1 in the fellow's defense.
But I'll venture that he, himself, might just have undertaken his actions with a certainty akin to that you've demonstrated here.
Best,
Chris
Yes, it's still running.
There is a federal program, budget dollars authorized against the project, and it would be a black eye for all of the contracting and management people, not to mention a severe hardship on the actual project staff, if they didn't strive to meet 100% of the goals of the project.
Whether or not this is a variation of the Nuremberg defense is left up to the Court of/. Opinion.
What are the actual requirements of a voting machine? I daresay that an 8088 chip could get the job done, with a published, verifiable codebase.
A hardware base of cheap, durable units could be purchased, tested, and dispersed randomly, with dirt cheap printers.
As with the bulk of IT discussions, the issues are have more to do with social considerations than technical ones.
Who is griping and Why is often more interesting than What they are whining about.
Not that I am accusing you personally of being a whiner, Burz; that was a general observation. (Got myself in trouble that way the other day)
Carried to conclusion, would you not be required to do all voting by punchcard?
What good is that, though, if you haven't actually counted all the votes yourself?
My question is, how can you implement any kind of system, voting or otherwise, and escape placing confidence in things which you cannot see?
Re:Summary - more data means more data
on
Inescapable Data
·
· Score: 1
Shame it's such a triumph of quantity over quality.
Your point is captured in this real-world anecdote: http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/23611
Simultaneously, this suggests a mitigation:
Designate the hardware, and a rigorous test schedule, and allow concerned parties to execute test suites against it before the election.
You can't eliminate "acts of nature", but you can set up a system wherein conspiracy becomes Really Hard.
How many immaculate software projects have ever come down the chute?
Instead of "Bush sucks", can these findings be leveraged into a call for increased voting software transparency, i.e. 100% FOSS?
Then, can we expand the victory to include all taxation software, such that, with due regard to privacy, you can figure out WTF is going on with your tax dollars?
Or is that kind of transparency impossible in a democracy?
Ruby on Rails sets off like a Cimmerian for conquest.
Struts and Hibernate get consumed by an error trace of Cthulhuian proportions, if the supply of live sacrifices runs out, which it eventually shall, doomed one.
It seems that video and wireless network interface drivers are two of the stickiest wickets for the desktop, irrespective of OS.
Under my WindowsXP boot, my Netgear card died, after configuring WPA-PSK against the Linksys router, with a wpa_supplicant error.
Can't run CivIV at an interesting resolution with any amount of eye-candy, or the nVidia driver craps out.
Clearly, these are multi-vendor problems.
What I hope to see from OSDL, and I think the Linux kernel community is driving towards, is more advocacy for open drivers. I don't know whether it's all intellectual property crap or what, but the peripheral vendors, as a whole (and without stooping to finger-pointing) come really close to cartel-like behavior that achieves little besides disadvantaging the end-user.
Is there a way to promote a hardware compatibility database on http://www.osdl.org/ that focuses strictly on chipsets, standards, specs, and test suites so vendors are positively encouraged to sell gear that doesn't suck?
A job site offering something completely different might allow/.-style moderation of companies.
Dimensions may include, but are not limited to:
Culture
Benenfits
Comptencies
Obvious challenges include data maintenance and privacy. How to let an individual give comment without devolving into http://www.fuckedcompany.com/, and without fear of reprisal, and yet avoid a stuffed ballot-box syndrome, or overly self-selective responses, is an exercise left to a Wharton whiz-kid. Probably need a low subscription fee.
Having solved all of those challenges, though, it would be genuinely interesting to see which soul-sucking Dilbert-bins would implode due to inability to vacuum up fresh talent...
Slashdot Mirror
Not there yet. The GOP example just copped 8 1/3 years:
c le/2006/03/03/AR2006030300290.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Right, but we run the risk of requiring the broadcast of everything IN LARGE FONTS so that a little signal can penetrate the noise.
Sometimes you need an incorruptible, sane image to focus people's notice on what really matters.
Anybody got one?
No mention of "The Worst Toilet in Scotland" from Trainspotting which must be near there somewhere, as the first bullet on the trivia reveals.
I must be squeamish--I couldn't make it past that scene. Something about watching humans debase themselves like that, even fictionally, is too disquieting. Drugs are not the God you thought they'd be, no?
Vista
GPL3 is relatively unrevolutionary WRT GPL2. http://lwn.net/ has good coverage. GPL3 pretty much refines 2.
I don't see why one would have to be liberal to agree with the GPL itself. I've always thought of it as essentially saying that software knowledge is like academic knowledge. Then there is the point where we step off the paper and into an ideology, asserting that
!GPL == unethical
Now we've crossed the political Rubicon, so to speak.
about the Middle East that you've seen in Western Media that you wish could be cleared up?
Actually, I bought my Dell C680 from EmperorLinux.com, and Dell was extremely good about the warranty service.
Then, when I had to send it back for something too wierd to get into here, and the shipping company 'lost' the laptop, Dell was quite reasonable about taking care of the customer, and now I have a D800.
Thus, I can readily offer good word-of-mouth for Dell in terms of quality and customer service.
EmperorLinux.com is teh r0x0rz, too. Go, Lincoln!
Is there a Majority Shareholder keeping Linux support at the lip service level?
Or, do Dell's executives own Massive Stacks of certain stock?
Maybe Somebody would be Mighty Sore at Mr. Dell if he Mustered Sufficient courage to Make Significant choice available to people.
Ah, Monopolistic Speculation: gotta love it.
The OS is really the gateway drug.
How about when you want to expand into application software realms? Art, music, math, science...you can rpm/apt-get/emerge to your heart's content if you don't make a lousy OS choice on the front end.
We speak of an information system. I agree that there isn't a serious requirement to automate the system. Truly, it's an application that makes great sense in a "batch" process.
However, there is some benefit, particularly to a media-driven society, from the faster feedback of an automated system.
Thus, we need to dress up a serious Luddite attack on voting in terms of "returning to traditional values".
Properly characterizing the instant-gratification nature of electronic voting as an immature, unwise development would be good. It might help drive political debate in the US away from its current hormone-driven frenzy into sober contemplation of the world situation.
We could enter a golden age where the US formally declares war before conducting invasions, and considers the consequences of policy for decades out, and beyond just the next erection.
<adjusts rose-colored glasses>
What about the question of a denial-of-service? How do we filter out that unavoidable minority with the extreme opinion who insist that there was foul play, and exercise their free speech in ways that everyone else finds tedious?
For example, there is in the US a group who maintain that the Pearl Harbor attack of 07Dec1941 was no surprise, and that the US government knowingly permitted it. Belief is a powerful tool, and supports ideas that hang in the air the way bricks do not, to borrow a little Douglas Adams.
One can only hope that the US 2008 election is won clearly, decisively, and cleanly by one side. The outpourings of angst risk becoming a "boy who cries wolf", boring the society to the point that real fraud falls on deaf ears.
So, confidence in people is superior to confidence in equipment? Was that equipment, in fact, produced by people?
My argument is that in a finite reality you can't escape placing confidence in something external.
Foolproof? Of course not. Full thought-through? No. My thesis is that, with sufficient transparency and randomization, you can ensure that any fraud will require a very broad conspiracy. And it doesn't have to be cost-prohibitive, either.
I think I'll choose a), declare you right, and punt, sir.
Not sure I recall uttering word #1 in the fellow's defense.
But I'll venture that he, himself, might just have undertaken his actions with a certainty akin to that you've demonstrated here.
Best,
Chris
Yes, it's still running. /. Opinion.
There is a federal program, budget dollars authorized against the project, and it would be a black eye for all of the contracting and management people, not to mention a severe hardship on the actual project staff, if they didn't strive to meet 100% of the goals of the project.
Whether or not this is a variation of the Nuremberg defense is left up to the Court of
What are the actual requirements of a voting machine? I daresay that an 8088 chip could get the job done, with a published, verifiable codebase.
A hardware base of cheap, durable units could be purchased, tested, and dispersed randomly, with dirt cheap printers.
As with the bulk of IT discussions, the issues are have more to do with social considerations than technical ones.
Who is griping and Why is often more interesting than What they are whining about.
Not that I am accusing you personally of being a whiner, Burz; that was a general observation. (Got myself in trouble that way the other day)
Carried to conclusion, would you not be required to do all voting by punchcard?
What good is that, though, if you haven't actually counted all the votes yourself?
My question is, how can you implement any kind of system, voting or otherwise, and escape placing confidence in things which you cannot see?
Shame it's such a triumph of quantity over quality.
Your point is captured in this real-world anecdote:
http://use.perl.org/~Matts/journal/23611
Simultaneously, this suggests a mitigation:
Designate the hardware, and a rigorous test schedule, and allow concerned parties to execute test suites against it before the election.
You can't eliminate "acts of nature", but you can set up a system wherein conspiracy becomes Really Hard.
How many immaculate software projects have ever come down the chute?
Instead of "Bush sucks", can these findings be leveraged into a call for increased voting software transparency, i.e. 100% FOSS?
Then, can we expand the victory to include all taxation software, such that, with due regard to privacy, you can figure out WTF is going on with your tax dollars?
Or is that kind of transparency impossible in a democracy?
Ruby on Rails sets off like a Cimmerian for conquest.
Struts and Hibernate get consumed by an error trace of Cthulhuian proportions, if the supply of live sacrifices runs out, which it eventually shall, doomed one.
It seems that video and wireless network interface drivers are two of the stickiest wickets for the desktop, irrespective of OS.
Under my WindowsXP boot, my Netgear card died, after configuring WPA-PSK against the Linksys router, with a wpa_supplicant error.
Can't run CivIV at an interesting resolution with any amount of eye-candy, or the nVidia driver craps out.
Clearly, these are multi-vendor problems.
What I hope to see from OSDL, and I think the Linux kernel community is driving towards, is more advocacy for open drivers. I don't know whether it's all intellectual property crap or what, but the peripheral vendors, as a whole (and without stooping to finger-pointing) come really close to cartel-like behavior that achieves little besides disadvantaging the end-user.
Is there a way to promote a hardware compatibility database on http://www.osdl.org/ that focuses strictly on chipsets, standards, specs, and test suites so vendors are positively encouraged to sell gear that doesn't suck?
Dimensions may include, but are not limited to:
Culture
Benenfits
Comptencies
Obvious challenges include data maintenance and privacy. How to let an individual give comment without devolving into http://www.fuckedcompany.com/, and without fear of reprisal, and yet avoid a stuffed ballot-box syndrome, or overly self-selective responses, is an exercise left to a Wharton whiz-kid. Probably need a low subscription fee.
Having solved all of those challenges, though, it would be genuinely interesting to see which soul-sucking Dilbert-bins would implode due to inability to vacuum up fresh talent...