Here: "Rank the candidates by preference, where one is most preferred and X is least preferred." That's how all priority voting schemes work for the voter and all that needs to be explained to them, this is just a way of counting the votes.
Like chess the rules can be explained very quickly. The consequences of those rules cannot be predicted however. Even the folk on Crooked Timber could not work out the implications of Condorcet.
The advantage of STV is that voters know that they do not hurt their prefered candidates chances by voting for a lesser preference. Under STV with the current Republican leadership I would probably vote Democrat, Libertarian, Green. Under Condorcet I would only vote Democrat.
The reason third parties like Condorcet is that they have the idea that they will get the second place votes from the major parties. This only works when the third parties are at the center of the two major parties. With the Religious Reich and free market ultra-ideologues in control of the GOP this is currently the case. They have managed to leapfrog over the Libertarian party into the world of total la-la land.
But after Bush and cronies get sent packing back to Texas the GOP will try to get back to the center. At that point it is quite likely that I would much prefer the Republican to the loonies that the third parties tend to dredge up.
Definitely *not* an example of how it should work. You have an external organisation doing the job that the patent office itself should be doing.
True, but it is working better than it was.
As for Microsoft 'losing' here. The FAT patent was a relative cheapie to license, $50K or so. Compare that to the $500 million Eolas judgement.
For Microsoft its heads they win tails Eolas is more likely to lose. This is what you might call a phyric defeat.
Microsoft might make some money out of software patents, but they will also be taken to the cleaners by patent trolls. Sure they might gain a couple of billion a year or so if they were as successful as IBM or TI. But they would also be shelling out several times that to the trolls.
had a pollster call up the other day, but before they would take my many opinions they asked me my post code to confirm I was from the right area, I wasn't. Somehow I think they were doing a survey of how many people actually know what the name of their electorate is.
They use this to determine whether you are a likely voter. The theory goes that people who know their candidate and polling station are more likely to vote than those who do not. Elections are determined mostly by turnout.
As several people have been pointing out in the blogosphere, this works a lot lot better a week before the poll than two months. So the recent polls based on a likely voter model that weighted Republicans 40% vs 33% for Democrats are probably irrelevant, particularly since many voters will not even have received their notice of poll yet to tell them where the place is.
Comming up to the vote expect the correction to cancel itself out, this will eroneously show Bush slipping comming up to election day. In 2000 Bush lost the popular vote even though the polls showed him an average of 5% ahead the day before and only two polls out of 19 showed Gore ahead.
That said, although the polls are often wrong they are very rarely so wrong as to give Keyes a chance of beating Obama. Keyes has been abandonded by many in his own party because he is a complete whack job.
. . why is there a "list of students" involved? And seriously, do they not know these tokens are lent? Either this is an insidious attempt at a pilot of some sort of "internet ID" or a completely dumb idea.
Security is risk management, not risk elimination.
The point of an experiment is to see how significant these issues actually are.
Sharing the token is a bad idea since it will also be used to authenticate to the school web site. If a kid looses the token and has it re-issued then the original is cancelled.
In most countries, credit card authentication was used to ensure one had reached the legal age...
In which situations wasn't it enough, besides the goatse ?
The point of the token is to prove that you are a minor and thus should be allowed into kids only chat rooms.
The idea of the experiment is to see if the scheme is effective in keeping pedophiles and stalkers out.
Blogs from people are also not absolute fact. You don't really know who is behind the keyboard. Don't take anything you don't see with your own eyes as fact.
Blogs can ask the right questions on occasion but they are a lousy place to find fact.
Even when the blogosphere arrives at the right conclusion it can get there by asserting facts that are demonstrably false. A week ago we had a bunch of Republicans swearing that no typewriter ever had proportional spacing then started wittering on about kerning.
If the secretary who would have typed the memos had not been dug up to provide the only reliable statement on the matter it is quite likely that we would still be listening to this 'debate'. If the documents had not had a superscript TH the 'conclusion' to the forgery claim might have been CBS putting on a show with Rather typing away at a 1960s era IBM Executive model C.
The wittering on about typography could easily have obscured the genuine issue of provenance. But nobody wanted to talk about that because it did not lend itself to blanket statements such as typewriters did not ever do proportional spacing.
What the episode also demonstrated though was that the established media is little better. Several ran with stories by bogus 'experts' on vintage typewriters who made ridiculous mistakes.
Now we have the GOP supporters crowing about the latest batch of polls that have a really bizaro set of internals that are more suggestive of them being a democrat set up job. The Gallup poll is using a likely voter model that is highly skewed towards whichever party has done a better job of mobilization relative to their mobilization at this point in the cycle last election. Both parties are much more mobilized but the GOP is more so relative to this point in the cycle.
The upshot of all this is that the likely voter model will inevitably swing back as the election nears. This will create the impression that Bush is loosing support even if he is in fact gaining.
If you know where to look you can find comment on what is really going on, but there is a lot of bogus stuff out there and even the mainstream offerings can be way off base.
My point is that this time around what had been the biggest hole in Bush's knowledge in 2000 has been filled by his experiences of the past four years. I very much doubt that he will come across as ignorant as he sometimes did against Gore.
Why on earth do you imagine he is any less clueless today than he was then? Bush does not read intellignce breifings headlined 'Bin Laden determined to attack US', he show zero understanding of any foreign policy issue, he makes blanket assertions that merely show his ignorance.
The expectations today are very different. If Bush comes across as I expect, just as ignorant as he was four years ago then it is all over for him.
Well, he didn't come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer. But I think you are overstating it. We tend to perceive people who disagree with us as dumb. After all, how smart can they be if they don't see things that are obvious to us?
There is intelligence and there is knowledge. The problem with Bush is that he is not interested in making any effort to learn any piece of information whatsoever. This is a real problem when you have to make decisions on the basis of complex information.
in the debates Bush reacted to a series of questions with the non-existent 'call a friend option'. He made plain that he would be the creature of his advisors, a follower not a leader.
On 9/11 he showed that he was not a leader by reading 'My Pet Goat' and waiting for his advisers to tell him how to act.
In New York in particular, where any civil claim against CBS News would have to be heard, it's essentially impossible to demonstrate reckless disregard.
Bush could actually sue in any state where the program was broadcast. But the problem goes further. Even if the documents were proven to be fraudulent under US libel jurisprudence Bush would have to prove that the AWOL claims themselves were untrue, it would not be sufficient to show that one of the pieces of evidence produced was fraudulent.
The latest piece of jujitsu in this saga is that the DNC has demanded that the RNC explain their part in the forgery of the memos. I don't think that this particular conspiracy theory is going to turn out to have much to it, the chances of either national party being involved are negligible.
The polls are clearly swinging towards Kerry, the indisputable proof of this fact is that there was another security scare issued by the RNC to the moonie controlled Washington Times this morning. Al Qaeda to attack before the inauguration unless people vote for Bush etc.
Bush can't lose because everybody thinks he's stupid. That's why he wins, he wanders around stuttering and mispronouncing everything for 6 months, until the expectation is that he'll debate like a rotting fish. Then Bush just does enough coke pre-debate to create the illusion of competence, and victory is his.
Bush is living in a bubble world of his own fantasies. He does not have the slightest idea what is going on in iraq and will fire anyone who dares tell him it is different to what he believes.
Bush has been repeatedly telling lies about Kerry and misrepresenting key parts of his platform. It is anyone's guess which justification Bush will give for his invasion of iraq in the debates, he has given 25 already. But Bush is almost certain to attack Kerry for having changed his position when he has not changed at all.
In bubble-boy's world everything comes down to black and white distinctions and there are no consequences of making choices. In the real world if you want to cut taxes for any length of time you had better also be serious about reducing spending.In the real world you have to worry about whether the replacement for Saddam will be any better before spending $200 billion and 1000 lives replacing him.
I also think that Kerry goes into these debates at a little bit of an "expectations" disadvantage. The meme is still strong out there that Bush is a blithering idiot.
In 2000 we were told repeatedly that this did not matter at all.
Bush proved himself to be a complete idiot in the debates, his performance was dreadful, but the media pretended the opposite, gave him the slide and called him the victor.
I don't think that the expectations gap helps Bush this time round. It is now very clear that we need a very competent person to get us out of the Iraq quagmire. Bush has to demonstrate that he is that person. I don't think he can.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that someone who reportedly didn't type memos would know how to do this or was even inclined to do so. We could ask Mr. Killian, but he's dead. Very convenient.
We could ask his secretary who was the first person to give any reliable data on the authenticity of the memos. She knows what sort of typewriter she had after all, it was not a proportional font machine, they are something of a pain to use if you have to correct.
The point here is that you and the other members of the 111th keyboard squadron have been confusing good points (provenance) with really really bad points like saying that Killian did not type. I don't think you would find a single Lt. Col. in the US army who typed their own office memos at the time, even today a Lt. Col. qualifies for a secretary, it is a very senior position.
Killian probably did not wax and polish his own staff car or clean his own office. But that does not mean that they were not done.
We really do need a better form of argument for Web politics discussions than blanket assertions of absolute certitude made on the basis of absolutely no knowledge of the situation.
Now we have the left wing blogosphere going off chasing the idea that the whole scheme was a set up by Rove. I don't see why Rove would do this, it sounds like a very risky scheme to me. The most likely explanation is that either Bartlet typed up the memos himself or someone duped Bartlet into beleiving that they had discovered the memos. But instead we are off chasing a wife swapping GOP strategist as the probable source.
Like when do we discuss the 1000+ US soldiers that have died because Bush lied?
The Executive could do proportional spacing, but it had a fixed set of characters, of which the superscripted "th" isn't one of them. So I think the real issue is that you need to find a typewriter that can do BOTH, not point out the obvious fact that there were typewriters at the time that could do one but not the other.
At the time typewriters with non-standard keys were very common. All it took was to simply switch out one type bar and the corresponding key. It was considerably easier to do this type of mod on a standard machine where you only needed to change one character than on a selectric where you had to machine a completely custom golf ball. Think about it for just a few moments. There have been several IBM repairmen from the time who report doing this on a regular basis.
The other more pressing issue is the fact that typing up the same memo with MS Word's defaults gives a memo with unbelievably similar spacing and font...
Again, the claim made was false, the similarities disappear when you do a comparison at a decent resolution. Didn't you get just a bit suspicious when you see someone choosing to shrink both documents that way? The pagination only breaks that way after you spend a long time playing with the margins and you still don't come up with the uneven baseline that is very clear on the CBS copy.
Whoever took the trouble to create the documents definitely used a typewriter to do so.
The real problem with the memos was provenance. If Bartlet had kept copies of the memos he would have produced them much earlier. He has been claiming that Bush's records were sanitized for several years now.
The wittering on with a progression of categorical statements about typewriters that kept being disproved came close to causing the provenance point to be missed.
The obvious way to check the authenticity of the memos was to compare them with others from Killian's office (not the typing pool which probably typed the other stuff). I wonder why so many Bush appologists preferred to make demonstratively untrue statements such as 'typewriters cannot do proportional fonts' rather than perform the simple test that would be decisive.
Of course the answer is obvious, they know Bush is a fraud, they know he used connections to get into the guard, hung arroung with crooks like Kenny Boy Lay of Enron, lied about the economy, tax cuts and Iraq. They wanted to believe the memos forgeries but they knew deep down that they just might be genuine and that they were exactly the sort of thing you would expect of Bush in his DUI Alcholic period. Best not put the issue to the test then and release the actual documents, they are clearly being supressed for a reason.
Well I don't believe that most people outside of the US are in a good position to understand US politics.
That is why the BBC and others have foreign correspondents to report back from the US.
During Rove's 'mission accomplished' farce on the US Liberty the US media duly reported back the images with the approved Rove spin. The BBC reporters correctly saw the pantomime as more likely to be the embarassing liability it has become rather than the masterstroke the US media reported it as. As I and others predicted at the time the only use made of the pictures of Bush-in-flight-suit has been in anti-Bush attack ads.
The coverage the rest of the world get of the presidential candiates (to take an example) is slim.
It is considerably more comprehensive than the coverage you get from the US media. I have yet to see anything from the US media to compare with the coverage of the policy issues by the UK Economist.
The US media spends its time on memogate and the Smearboat Liars for Bush, if you want to find out about the issues you have no choiuce but the non-US media.
All the world sees of Bush is his speeches on Iraq or from F/911. They rarely get to see him as a human being while he's compaigning or mingling.
Why on earth is this relevant coverage? The BBC does not spend very much time showing Tony Blair 'compaigning' or 'mingling'. They do cover campaign speeches by both the candidates. Orchestrated campaign fluff like Bush's loyalty pledge rallys where the secret service forbids the press from interviewing protesters are better ignored by the media altogether.
The middle-east coverage is a bit different because the US military is actually *IN* the middle east at this very moment. The coverage is syndicated between various international networks.
The middle east coverage by the US media is always careful to avoid criticism from constituencies such as CAMERA, a pro-Likud outfit that basically insists on biased reporting and organizes letter writing campaigns against any media outlet that criticizes Israel. You get a far less biased account from Israel's own press which is heavily censored by the military.
Uh, yeah...that's the idea. The Republicans manufacture some patently obvious forgeries and let them "slip" into CBS's hands. Once they're proven to be fake, the Democrats get smeared. Nice tactic, eh?
What are folk on here?
One of the curious facts about the activities of the 111th keyboarders discussion of antique typewriters is that almost none of the points raised by 'experts' were valid. As I said at the time the series of claims about the capabilities of 1970s era typewriters fell apart, there was a typewriter that could have produced the memo and denying that fact only obscured the genuine question of whether it was Killian's office typewriter. Its like arguing that Hitler and Stalin never met because they were not contemporaries. The conclusion is correct but the argument is based on a claim that is clearly false, same thing with the claims that the documents were not produced on a typwriter, take a look at the uneven baseline and then explain how to produce the same effect using a laser printer.
Regardless of how the document was produced the issue of provenance was always going to be there. There is no real reason to doubt that the documents were given to CBS by Burkett, a critic of Bush who does not appear to be sponsored by either the Democratic party and certainly not by Karl Rove.
I guess that we could hypothesize that Rove planted the documents on Burkett, but this seems highly unlikely. The simplest explanation is that Burkett forged the documents himself.
I don't see why this should affect the Democrats. It is very clear that the 'Smearboat Liars for Bush' are peddling outright lies, their story has changed repeatedly, is denied by contemporary documents, including the citations for decorations awarded to the smearboat liars. It is very obvious that the Smearboat Liars are a Rove creation but this does not seem to have damaged Bush.
As for libel, I can't see how Bush would want to empower CBS with discovery powers. Killian's secretary has stated that the documents produced were forgeries but that she remembers typing similar documents. The documents were only a small part of the evidence against Bush. The fact remains that Bush lied about the reason for not taking his medical.
It is a pity that the Republican party did not exercise the same degree of skepticism with respect to the documents provided by Ahmed Chalabai that were used to justify the entry to the Iraq quagmire. Chalabai was a far more suspicious source than Burkett, he is after all a convicted embezzler and the CIA had concluded he was an Iranian agent back in the 1990s.
Bush's lies about his guard service are irrelevant compared to his lies about the cause for war in Iraq.
I think we are better off with Bush atleast if he fucks things up enought people will start looking for an alternative that will begin to "fix" things.
That is the kind of naive crap that is the reason why nobody will ever take the Naderites or Libertarians seriously.
If 50% of the country cannot understand that Bush is an incompetent empty suit there is simply no way that they are going to look at, let alone vote for a third party.
What you really want is to be able to indulge in the infantile politics of pristine principles and perpetual opposition. You don't want your party to ever see power, you know that if that happened you would be forced to make compromises, worse you might even see your precious ideology tested in practice and start comming apart at the seams.
What do you want to do here, make a choice between two real alternatives or throw away your vote on a fantasy alternative that will make absolutely no difference whatsoever?
Don't look at it as throwing away your vote, but rather as placing your vote with the person that you agree with. It's not a horse race; you don't have to bet on the winner, but rather choose who you would like to see in office the most and let the counts fall where they may.
The downside to this plan is that the result may be another four years of Bush. Another four years of increased government, decreased civil liberties and how many more wars?
If you want to build a third party then look at the way that third parties have been successful in other countries. You have to make an impact at the local level before you deserve still less can expect a hearing at the national level.
The best hope for the libertarian party is to eject Bush from office. The GOP is split between the religious fundies who support Buah and the libertarian small govt. types. This made sense when the two sides wanted the same thing, but has become an unholy alliance under W. Once the GOP loses power the fight between the GOP factions will make the Bush vs Kerry 'smearboat veterans for Bush' tactics look tame.
Worst case outcome in this situation is the religious right 'win', split the party down the middle and the rump join the Libertarian party. Best case outcome is that the religious right lose and the GOP drops the attacks on civil liberties.
Go back to the declaration and examine the man's credentials. IBM didn't just get an authority on comparing code they got *the* authority. Prof Davis understands the technologies used, he understands the methodologies to follow, he has previous experience in doing code comparisons for trials.
Before you start into panexorisms of praise for Randy perhaps you could explain what he has done that makes him such an exalted expert on the subject.
I don't doubt the conclusion he has come to, but lets try to keep some proportion here.
Last week we had two bunches of idiots discussing vintage typewriters. One group was attesting to the eminence and expertise of a bunch of 'experts' denouncing the documents as fake because no typewriter could have produced them. Another group that the documents were genuine beyond all doubt. And a third group pointing out that it would be easy enough to find out the truth by examining the microfiches that the Whitehouse refuses to allow released.
As it turns out the typewriter experts were completely wrong, the documents were typewritten and contained features no computer system would ever produce (like the alignment of the characters on the baseline being off). The somewhat fewer number of folk claiming the documents definitely genuine on the basis that Dan Rather makes no mistakes ever also seem to be wrong since the typist concerned says that she never used a proportional spacing typewriter while working for Killian.
On the other hand the secretary does say that she typed up memos that said exactly the same damn thing and that Bush's antics at the base were notorious at the time.
So lets not get too invested in experts and such. It may well turn out that there are lines of code that turn out to be the same, but that does not prove very much since it is entirely possible that common chunks of code come from a third source - like the Berkley TCP stack and such.
The key thing to remember here is that we know where the vast majority of Linux code was written, by whom and when. Even if SCO proves to be right about small chunks that are similar it will be easy enough to replace them.
Has SCO met the burden of proof required to continue with the burdensome discovery that they are demanding? I don't think so, they have aledged much and proved nothing
There was no "infiltration" involved. The memos were happily served up from the DJC's servers sicne they were available to the public with no protection. Furthermore, they were not classified.
That is not accurate. The documents were actually on a machine that should have been secure but the system operator had incorrectly applied the ACLs so that the files were visible to Miranda when they should not have been. This 'mistake' did not happen to the GOP files.
What Miranda did was exactly the same as if he had noticed that the office door of a democrat had not been locked properly and had gone inside to copy the files. That is why he is facing criminal charges.
Miranda has two options. He can either serve his time in jail or if the facts he claims in his lawsuit are true he can tell the FBI who ordered him to collect the information.
This happened last week. Since then Florida's AG has launched an appeal which automatically gets Narer back on the ballot for the mailins due to be sent out by Saturday.
Last week was a preliminary injunction, this is the hearing. Nader is off and the Florida supreme court has issued an injunction preventing any more ballots being sent out without their permission.
The Bushies did try to do an end run by ignoring the first injunction and sending out as many ballots as they could, but only a few were actually mailed and those are likely to end up being cancelled. The net effect is likely to be damage to Bush since the four counties that sent out the invalid postal ballots are ones where the GOP controls the returning officer - i.e. republican areas.
This whole Nader issue is a GOP shell game. Nader does not have the support of 100,000 floridians that it takes to get on the ballot through petition. He is unlikely to poll that number nationwide. In fact he is unlikely to even qualify for the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning.
The 'reform' party does not have a significant national membership, Nader has had four years to form a 'leftwing cretins who want to hand the election to Bush' party and has not done so.
How are there "guts of UNIX" inside NT for POSIX? NT only does POSIX.1 compliance (not POSIX.2 like a real operating system) which from what I understand (but of course I can't download the spec) is pretty small.
Download Windows Services for Unix and take a look. The code fills up something like 250 Mb on my hard drive. I'll bet that there is plenty that could infringe there.
Likewise, you aren't offering any suggestions about what to do when Social Security collapses under its own weight in the near future...
The budget deficit is currently $500 billion per year or so and growing. The financial crisis is going to come long before social security becomes an issue.
Even if you exclude the effects of the Iraq invasion, Bush has cut taxes and sharply increased spending. There has been no fiscal discipline whatsoever, none. Take a look at the farm bill, or the highways bill.
A war would normally be an excuse for the pentagon to close bases and cancel weapons programs that it does not need. Nope, none of that has happened. Remember that Congress can authorize appropriations, they cannot force the money to be spent, the administration can always refuse to place the orders.
The Bush tax cuts are responsible for approx $300 million of the deficit. 80-90% of the effects go to the richest and the idlest of the rich, reversing the tax cuts out would have little effect on the economy.
If you look a little further along the line you can see that the same method will be used to close the social security shortfall. Taxes will rise slightly for most people and more significantly for the richest of the rich. Dividends and capital gains will be taxed as income again and so on. Corporate tax loopholes will be closed.
Something like $200 billion a year is lost through tax exemptions that are written for corporate donors. Bob Dole wrote hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts for Archer Daniels Midland alone. A flat tax for corporate america would eliminate those corrupt perks. Same with all the niche personal tax exemptions for mining, drilling etc that you find out about when you use Turbo Tax.
The basis of authority for Social Security is not morality. It's a recognition that we are not willing to let old people simply starve and die in the streets.
Its a recognition that they have voting rights. The folk hoping to bankrupt Social Security are smoking some serious dope. The seniors are not going to stand for their benefits being cut, they are simply going to vote for whatever increases in taxes on the working population that it takes.
The Bush tax cuts were always going to be temporary, even if they are made 'permanent' they are going to be temporary.
The other option is a reduction in spending. Given that this issue is still ten years out there is actually a lot of scope for cutting non-defense related military spending. All those bases that are not needed, the weapons programs that are boondogles for Congressional districts, etc. etc.
The US spends as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. Sure some of it is important, but the stuff that costs money is not the same as the stuff that is useful. For example there is nobody who seriously believes that the star wars system that has been deployed has the slightest chance of working if needed. There has never been anything close to a test under realistic conditions. Cancelling that program saves something like $10 billion alone.
Bin Laden and cronies do not have access to the hyper sophisticated weapons that we were told the soviet union had pointed at us (neither did they as it turned out but that is a different matter).
What we need for the war on terror is very different from what was needed to fight the Soviet Union. If the opposition has anti-tank missiles then you have to develop heavy tanks with reactive armor. If they do not then you are probably better off with an armoured version of a Humvee and have the advantage of higher speed.
When Rumsfeld started at the Pentagon he began the process of killing boondogle projects like the crusader heavy artillery under the transformation process. That was delayed by 9-11 and the subsequent willingness of congress to simply write a blank check for any project. But fiscal discipline will return soon. Either there will be a democrat in the WH and real budget discipline returns or Dufus will drive the country into a massive balance of payments crisis in 2006-7.
What a crock. The judge should simply dismiss the case at this point, with prejudice. I can think of at least 15 different reasons to do so.
I agree, and I think that this is why the IBM lawyers held off making the usually routine motions for dismissal earlier, they knew they would get to a point where they would file one for real.
As for this upsetting Microsoft, don't be too sure. Microsoft has some very similar exposures to IBM, they also sell software that has a complex and often difficult to track history. They also distribute the guts of UNIX with Windows so they can meet requirements for POSIX compliance.
SCO is about to go glug glug glug down the toilet bowl of dotcom vile.
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Like chess the rules can be explained very quickly. The consequences of those rules cannot be predicted however. Even the folk on Crooked Timber could not work out the implications of Condorcet.
The advantage of STV is that voters know that they do not hurt their prefered candidates chances by voting for a lesser preference. Under STV with the current Republican leadership I would probably vote Democrat, Libertarian, Green. Under Condorcet I would only vote Democrat.
The reason third parties like Condorcet is that they have the idea that they will get the second place votes from the major parties. This only works when the third parties are at the center of the two major parties. With the Religious Reich and free market ultra-ideologues in control of the GOP this is currently the case. They have managed to leapfrog over the Libertarian party into the world of total la-la land.
But after Bush and cronies get sent packing back to Texas the GOP will try to get back to the center. At that point it is quite likely that I would much prefer the Republican to the loonies that the third parties tend to dredge up.
True, but it is working better than it was.
As for Microsoft 'losing' here. The FAT patent was a relative cheapie to license, $50K or so. Compare that to the $500 million Eolas judgement.
For Microsoft its heads they win tails Eolas is more likely to lose. This is what you might call a phyric defeat.
Microsoft might make some money out of software patents, but they will also be taken to the cleaners by patent trolls. Sure they might gain a couple of billion a year or so if they were as successful as IBM or TI. But they would also be shelling out several times that to the trolls.
They use this to determine whether you are a likely voter. The theory goes that people who know their candidate and polling station are more likely to vote than those who do not. Elections are determined mostly by turnout.
As several people have been pointing out in the blogosphere, this works a lot lot better a week before the poll than two months. So the recent polls based on a likely voter model that weighted Republicans 40% vs 33% for Democrats are probably irrelevant, particularly since many voters will not even have received their notice of poll yet to tell them where the place is.
Comming up to the vote expect the correction to cancel itself out, this will eroneously show Bush slipping comming up to election day. In 2000 Bush lost the popular vote even though the polls showed him an average of 5% ahead the day before and only two polls out of 19 showed Gore ahead.
That said, although the polls are often wrong they are very rarely so wrong as to give Keyes a chance of beating Obama. Keyes has been abandonded by many in his own party because he is a complete whack job.
As Josh Micah Marshall pointed out, Bush enjoys 100% support amongst heads of government he appointed himself.
Security is risk management, not risk elimination.
The point of an experiment is to see how significant these issues actually are.
Sharing the token is a bad idea since it will also be used to authenticate to the school web site. If a kid looses the token and has it re-issued then the original is cancelled.
The point of the token is to prove that you are a minor and thus should be allowed into kids only chat rooms.
The idea of the experiment is to see if the scheme is effective in keeping pedophiles and stalkers out.
Blogs can ask the right questions on occasion but they are a lousy place to find fact.
Even when the blogosphere arrives at the right conclusion it can get there by asserting facts that are demonstrably false. A week ago we had a bunch of Republicans swearing that no typewriter ever had proportional spacing then started wittering on about kerning.
If the secretary who would have typed the memos had not been dug up to provide the only reliable statement on the matter it is quite likely that we would still be listening to this 'debate'. If the documents had not had a superscript TH the 'conclusion' to the forgery claim might have been CBS putting on a show with Rather typing away at a 1960s era IBM Executive model C.
The wittering on about typography could easily have obscured the genuine issue of provenance. But nobody wanted to talk about that because it did not lend itself to blanket statements such as typewriters did not ever do proportional spacing.
What the episode also demonstrated though was that the established media is little better. Several ran with stories by bogus 'experts' on vintage typewriters who made ridiculous mistakes.
Now we have the GOP supporters crowing about the latest batch of polls that have a really bizaro set of internals that are more suggestive of them being a democrat set up job. The Gallup poll is using a likely voter model that is highly skewed towards whichever party has done a better job of mobilization relative to their mobilization at this point in the cycle last election. Both parties are much more mobilized but the GOP is more so relative to this point in the cycle.
The upshot of all this is that the likely voter model will inevitably swing back as the election nears. This will create the impression that Bush is loosing support even if he is in fact gaining.
If you know where to look you can find comment on what is really going on, but there is a lot of bogus stuff out there and even the mainstream offerings can be way off base.
Why on earth do you imagine he is any less clueless today than he was then? Bush does not read intellignce breifings headlined 'Bin Laden determined to attack US', he show zero understanding of any foreign policy issue, he makes blanket assertions that merely show his ignorance.
The expectations today are very different. If Bush comes across as I expect, just as ignorant as he was four years ago then it is all over for him.
There is intelligence and there is knowledge. The problem with Bush is that he is not interested in making any effort to learn any piece of information whatsoever. This is a real problem when you have to make decisions on the basis of complex information.
in the debates Bush reacted to a series of questions with the non-existent 'call a friend option'. He made plain that he would be the creature of his advisors, a follower not a leader.
On 9/11 he showed that he was not a leader by reading 'My Pet Goat' and waiting for his advisers to tell him how to act.
Bush could actually sue in any state where the program was broadcast. But the problem goes further. Even if the documents were proven to be fraudulent under US libel jurisprudence Bush would have to prove that the AWOL claims themselves were untrue, it would not be sufficient to show that one of the pieces of evidence produced was fraudulent.
The latest piece of jujitsu in this saga is that the DNC has demanded that the RNC explain their part in the forgery of the memos. I don't think that this particular conspiracy theory is going to turn out to have much to it, the chances of either national party being involved are negligible.
The polls are clearly swinging towards Kerry, the indisputable proof of this fact is that there was another security scare issued by the RNC to the moonie controlled Washington Times this morning. Al Qaeda to attack before the inauguration unless people vote for Bush etc.
Bush is living in a bubble world of his own fantasies. He does not have the slightest idea what is going on in iraq and will fire anyone who dares tell him it is different to what he believes.
Bush has been repeatedly telling lies about Kerry and misrepresenting key parts of his platform. It is anyone's guess which justification Bush will give for his invasion of iraq in the debates, he has given 25 already. But Bush is almost certain to attack Kerry for having changed his position when he has not changed at all.
In bubble-boy's world everything comes down to black and white distinctions and there are no consequences of making choices. In the real world if you want to cut taxes for any length of time you had better also be serious about reducing spending.In the real world you have to worry about whether the replacement for Saddam will be any better before spending $200 billion and 1000 lives replacing him.
In 2000 we were told repeatedly that this did not matter at all.
Bush proved himself to be a complete idiot in the debates, his performance was dreadful, but the media pretended the opposite, gave him the slide and called him the victor.
I don't think that the expectations gap helps Bush this time round. It is now very clear that we need a very competent person to get us out of the Iraq quagmire. Bush has to demonstrate that he is that person. I don't think he can.
We could ask his secretary who was the first person to give any reliable data on the authenticity of the memos. She knows what sort of typewriter she had after all, it was not a proportional font machine, they are something of a pain to use if you have to correct.
The point here is that you and the other members of the 111th keyboard squadron have been confusing good points (provenance) with really really bad points like saying that Killian did not type. I don't think you would find a single Lt. Col. in the US army who typed their own office memos at the time, even today a Lt. Col. qualifies for a secretary, it is a very senior position.
Killian probably did not wax and polish his own staff car or clean his own office. But that does not mean that they were not done.
We really do need a better form of argument for Web politics discussions than blanket assertions of absolute certitude made on the basis of absolutely no knowledge of the situation.
Now we have the left wing blogosphere going off chasing the idea that the whole scheme was a set up by Rove. I don't see why Rove would do this, it sounds like a very risky scheme to me. The most likely explanation is that either Bartlet typed up the memos himself or someone duped Bartlet into beleiving that they had discovered the memos. But instead we are off chasing a wife swapping GOP strategist as the probable source.
Like when do we discuss the 1000+ US soldiers that have died because Bush lied?
At the time typewriters with non-standard keys were very common. All it took was to simply switch out one type bar and the corresponding key. It was considerably easier to do this type of mod on a standard machine where you only needed to change one character than on a selectric where you had to machine a completely custom golf ball. Think about it for just a few moments. There have been several IBM repairmen from the time who report doing this on a regular basis.
The other more pressing issue is the fact that typing up the same memo with MS Word's defaults gives a memo with unbelievably similar spacing and font...
Again, the claim made was false, the similarities disappear when you do a comparison at a decent resolution. Didn't you get just a bit suspicious when you see someone choosing to shrink both documents that way? The pagination only breaks that way after you spend a long time playing with the margins and you still don't come up with the uneven baseline that is very clear on the CBS copy.
Whoever took the trouble to create the documents definitely used a typewriter to do so.
The real problem with the memos was provenance. If Bartlet had kept copies of the memos he would have produced them much earlier. He has been claiming that Bush's records were sanitized for several years now.
The wittering on with a progression of categorical statements about typewriters that kept being disproved came close to causing the provenance point to be missed.
The obvious way to check the authenticity of the memos was to compare them with others from Killian's office (not the typing pool which probably typed the other stuff). I wonder why so many Bush appologists preferred to make demonstratively untrue statements such as 'typewriters cannot do proportional fonts' rather than perform the simple test that would be decisive.
Of course the answer is obvious, they know Bush is a fraud, they know he used connections to get into the guard, hung arroung with crooks like Kenny Boy Lay of Enron, lied about the economy, tax cuts and Iraq. They wanted to believe the memos forgeries but they knew deep down that they just might be genuine and that they were exactly the sort of thing you would expect of Bush in his DUI Alcholic period. Best not put the issue to the test then and release the actual documents, they are clearly being supressed for a reason.
That is why the BBC and others have foreign correspondents to report back from the US.
During Rove's 'mission accomplished' farce on the US Liberty the US media duly reported back the images with the approved Rove spin. The BBC reporters correctly saw the pantomime as more likely to be the embarassing liability it has become rather than the masterstroke the US media reported it as. As I and others predicted at the time the only use made of the pictures of Bush-in-flight-suit has been in anti-Bush attack ads.
The coverage the rest of the world get of the presidential candiates (to take an example) is slim.
It is considerably more comprehensive than the coverage you get from the US media. I have yet to see anything from the US media to compare with the coverage of the policy issues by the UK Economist.
The US media spends its time on memogate and the Smearboat Liars for Bush, if you want to find out about the issues you have no choiuce but the non-US media.
All the world sees of Bush is his speeches on Iraq or from F/911. They rarely get to see him as a human being while he's compaigning or mingling.
Why on earth is this relevant coverage? The BBC does not spend very much time showing Tony Blair 'compaigning' or 'mingling'. They do cover campaign speeches by both the candidates. Orchestrated campaign fluff like Bush's loyalty pledge rallys where the secret service forbids the press from interviewing protesters are better ignored by the media altogether.
The middle-east coverage is a bit different because the US military is actually *IN* the middle east at this very moment. The coverage is syndicated between various international networks.
The middle east coverage by the US media is always careful to avoid criticism from constituencies such as CAMERA, a pro-Likud outfit that basically insists on biased reporting and organizes letter writing campaigns against any media outlet that criticizes Israel. You get a far less biased account from Israel's own press which is heavily censored by the military.
What are folk on here?
One of the curious facts about the activities of the 111th keyboarders discussion of antique typewriters is that almost none of the points raised by 'experts' were valid. As I said at the time the series of claims about the capabilities of 1970s era typewriters fell apart, there was a typewriter that could have produced the memo and denying that fact only obscured the genuine question of whether it was Killian's office typewriter. Its like arguing that Hitler and Stalin never met because they were not contemporaries. The conclusion is correct but the argument is based on a claim that is clearly false, same thing with the claims that the documents were not produced on a typwriter, take a look at the uneven baseline and then explain how to produce the same effect using a laser printer.
Regardless of how the document was produced the issue of provenance was always going to be there. There is no real reason to doubt that the documents were given to CBS by Burkett, a critic of Bush who does not appear to be sponsored by either the Democratic party and certainly not by Karl Rove.
I guess that we could hypothesize that Rove planted the documents on Burkett, but this seems highly unlikely. The simplest explanation is that Burkett forged the documents himself.
I don't see why this should affect the Democrats. It is very clear that the 'Smearboat Liars for Bush' are peddling outright lies, their story has changed repeatedly, is denied by contemporary documents, including the citations for decorations awarded to the smearboat liars. It is very obvious that the Smearboat Liars are a Rove creation but this does not seem to have damaged Bush.
As for libel, I can't see how Bush would want to empower CBS with discovery powers. Killian's secretary has stated that the documents produced were forgeries but that she remembers typing similar documents. The documents were only a small part of the evidence against Bush. The fact remains that Bush lied about the reason for not taking his medical.
It is a pity that the Republican party did not exercise the same degree of skepticism with respect to the documents provided by Ahmed Chalabai that were used to justify the entry to the Iraq quagmire. Chalabai was a far more suspicious source than Burkett, he is after all a convicted embezzler and the CIA had concluded he was an Iranian agent back in the 1990s.
Bush's lies about his guard service are irrelevant compared to his lies about the cause for war in Iraq.
That is the kind of naive crap that is the reason why nobody will ever take the Naderites or Libertarians seriously.
If 50% of the country cannot understand that Bush is an incompetent empty suit there is simply no way that they are going to look at, let alone vote for a third party.
What you really want is to be able to indulge in the infantile politics of pristine principles and perpetual opposition. You don't want your party to ever see power, you know that if that happened you would be forced to make compromises, worse you might even see your precious ideology tested in practice and start comming apart at the seams.
What do you want to do here, make a choice between two real alternatives or throw away your vote on a fantasy alternative that will make absolutely no difference whatsoever?
The downside to this plan is that the result may be another four years of Bush. Another four years of increased government, decreased civil liberties and how many more wars?
If you want to build a third party then look at the way that third parties have been successful in other countries. You have to make an impact at the local level before you deserve still less can expect a hearing at the national level.
The best hope for the libertarian party is to eject Bush from office. The GOP is split between the religious fundies who support Buah and the libertarian small govt. types. This made sense when the two sides wanted the same thing, but has become an unholy alliance under W. Once the GOP loses power the fight between the GOP factions will make the Bush vs Kerry 'smearboat veterans for Bush' tactics look tame.
Worst case outcome in this situation is the religious right 'win', split the party down the middle and the rump join the Libertarian party. Best case outcome is that the religious right lose and the GOP drops the attacks on civil liberties.
Before you start into panexorisms of praise for Randy perhaps you could explain what he has done that makes him such an exalted expert on the subject.
I don't doubt the conclusion he has come to, but lets try to keep some proportion here.
Last week we had two bunches of idiots discussing vintage typewriters. One group was attesting to the eminence and expertise of a bunch of 'experts' denouncing the documents as fake because no typewriter could have produced them. Another group that the documents were genuine beyond all doubt. And a third group pointing out that it would be easy enough to find out the truth by examining the microfiches that the Whitehouse refuses to allow released.
As it turns out the typewriter experts were completely wrong, the documents were typewritten and contained features no computer system would ever produce (like the alignment of the characters on the baseline being off). The somewhat fewer number of folk claiming the documents definitely genuine on the basis that Dan Rather makes no mistakes ever also seem to be wrong since the typist concerned says that she never used a proportional spacing typewriter while working for Killian.
On the other hand the secretary does say that she typed up memos that said exactly the same damn thing and that Bush's antics at the base were notorious at the time.
So lets not get too invested in experts and such. It may well turn out that there are lines of code that turn out to be the same, but that does not prove very much since it is entirely possible that common chunks of code come from a third source - like the Berkley TCP stack and such.
The key thing to remember here is that we know where the vast majority of Linux code was written, by whom and when. Even if SCO proves to be right about small chunks that are similar it will be easy enough to replace them.
Has SCO met the burden of proof required to continue with the burdensome discovery that they are demanding? I don't think so, they have aledged much and proved nothing
That is not accurate. The documents were actually on a machine that should have been secure but the system operator had incorrectly applied the ACLs so that the files were visible to Miranda when they should not have been. This 'mistake' did not happen to the GOP files.
What Miranda did was exactly the same as if he had noticed that the office door of a democrat had not been locked properly and had gone inside to copy the files. That is why he is facing criminal charges.
Miranda has two options. He can either serve his time in jail or if the facts he claims in his lawsuit are true he can tell the FBI who ordered him to collect the information.
Last week was a preliminary injunction, this is the hearing. Nader is off and the Florida supreme court has issued an injunction preventing any more ballots being sent out without their permission.
The Bushies did try to do an end run by ignoring the first injunction and sending out as many ballots as they could, but only a few were actually mailed and those are likely to end up being cancelled. The net effect is likely to be damage to Bush since the four counties that sent out the invalid postal ballots are ones where the GOP controls the returning officer - i.e. republican areas.
This whole Nader issue is a GOP shell game. Nader does not have the support of 100,000 floridians that it takes to get on the ballot through petition. He is unlikely to poll that number nationwide. In fact he is unlikely to even qualify for the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning.
The 'reform' party does not have a significant national membership, Nader has had four years to form a 'leftwing cretins who want to hand the election to Bush' party and has not done so.
Download Windows Services for Unix and take a look. The code fills up something like 250 Mb on my hard drive. I'll bet that there is plenty that could infringe there.
The budget deficit is currently $500 billion per year or so and growing. The financial crisis is going to come long before social security becomes an issue.
Even if you exclude the effects of the Iraq invasion, Bush has cut taxes and sharply increased spending. There has been no fiscal discipline whatsoever, none. Take a look at the farm bill, or the highways bill.
A war would normally be an excuse for the pentagon to close bases and cancel weapons programs that it does not need. Nope, none of that has happened. Remember that Congress can authorize appropriations, they cannot force the money to be spent, the administration can always refuse to place the orders.
The Bush tax cuts are responsible for approx $300 million of the deficit. 80-90% of the effects go to the richest and the idlest of the rich, reversing the tax cuts out would have little effect on the economy.
If you look a little further along the line you can see that the same method will be used to close the social security shortfall. Taxes will rise slightly for most people and more significantly for the richest of the rich. Dividends and capital gains will be taxed as income again and so on. Corporate tax loopholes will be closed.
Something like $200 billion a year is lost through tax exemptions that are written for corporate donors. Bob Dole wrote hundreds of millions of dollars in tax cuts for Archer Daniels Midland alone. A flat tax for corporate america would eliminate those corrupt perks. Same with all the niche personal tax exemptions for mining, drilling etc that you find out about when you use Turbo Tax.
Its a recognition that they have voting rights. The folk hoping to bankrupt Social Security are smoking some serious dope. The seniors are not going to stand for their benefits being cut, they are simply going to vote for whatever increases in taxes on the working population that it takes.
The Bush tax cuts were always going to be temporary, even if they are made 'permanent' they are going to be temporary.
The other option is a reduction in spending. Given that this issue is still ten years out there is actually a lot of scope for cutting non-defense related military spending. All those bases that are not needed, the weapons programs that are boondogles for Congressional districts, etc. etc.
The US spends as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. Sure some of it is important, but the stuff that costs money is not the same as the stuff that is useful. For example there is nobody who seriously believes that the star wars system that has been deployed has the slightest chance of working if needed. There has never been anything close to a test under realistic conditions. Cancelling that program saves something like $10 billion alone.
Bin Laden and cronies do not have access to the hyper sophisticated weapons that we were told the soviet union had pointed at us (neither did they as it turned out but that is a different matter).
What we need for the war on terror is very different from what was needed to fight the Soviet Union. If the opposition has anti-tank missiles then you have to develop heavy tanks with reactive armor. If they do not then you are probably better off with an armoured version of a Humvee and have the advantage of higher speed.
When Rumsfeld started at the Pentagon he began the process of killing boondogle projects like the crusader heavy artillery under the transformation process. That was delayed by 9-11 and the subsequent willingness of congress to simply write a blank check for any project. But fiscal discipline will return soon. Either there will be a democrat in the WH and real budget discipline returns or Dufus will drive the country into a massive balance of payments crisis in 2006-7.
I agree, and I think that this is why the IBM lawyers held off making the usually routine motions for dismissal earlier, they knew they would get to a point where they would file one for real.
As for this upsetting Microsoft, don't be too sure. Microsoft has some very similar exposures to IBM, they also sell software that has a complex and often difficult to track history. They also distribute the guts of UNIX with Windows so they can meet requirements for POSIX compliance.
SCO is about to go glug glug glug down the toilet bowl of dotcom vile.