Clearly, Diebold's actions through this debacle has been criminal, not negligent. According to previous stories and Diebold's own email they've knowingly installed uncertified software, faked demos, installed machines with thousands of negative votes for one candidate, and have repeatedly deceived election officials and investigators. One feels that this reflects Diebold's corporate culture after browsing through an archive of their email.
I can't fault them for folks already in place at Global Election Systems (GES) when they acquired the company at the beginning of 2002. Nor do I believe that folks with a criminal history should be barred from IT careers. Someone with expertise in large scale fraud could be very helpful, if not invaluable, in finding exploits in systems you're trying to secure.
However, a development and management staff comprised of numerous folks with experience in stock fraud, money laundering, smuggling, cracking and grand larceny certainly calls into question the legitimacy of the projects they've worked on. The Diebold spokesdrone said that a few of them left at the time of acquisition, but did not say if any remained working at Diebold.
My own opinion is that Diebold itself is a criminal enterprise whose thin facade of trustworthiness has been torn down to expose the company's true character.
This calls into question not only Diebold's election systems, but all of their products including their ubiquitous ATM machines. Who knows how many of those have been cracked or if there's an ongoing fraudulent scheme (beyond ATM withdrawl fees) by Diebold to defraud Joe and Jane Citizen of their hard-earned cash.
Based on Diebold's behaviour, I don't think that that sounds terribly crazy.
After reading the responses of several riders after composing and posting, putting a radar in your field of vision seems more dangerous. The "feel" thing with radar and the spoken data others suggest would probably work better.
OT, I'm curious about the appeal of riding. I understand having the sun shine on your face and the wind in your hair, but a convertible "cage" seems more enjoyable to me than a bike. I'm a careful, cool-headed driver so a motorcycle seems reckless. I've ridden a few times, but it never caught my fancy. On the other hand, I enjoyed riding horses.
Anyway, again OT, what about riding motorcycles appeals?
Neat, though I'm not much on the motorcycle thing after witnessing an acquaintance fatally crash. A HUD wouldn't have saved him, but perhaps a personal radar displayed on that HUD could give (motor and muscle) cyclists the information they need to avoid similar accidents. Combined with a wireless medical alert system, drivers - heck, regular folks - will have a much better chance of surviving an accident.
What if the life-threatening situation occurs at the theater, like a heart attack?
Then someone can holler "is there a doctor in the house"? The theatre can call 911, you can summon one of the off-duty cops doubling as theatre security, you can go outside of the theatre to dial 911 on your cell phone (reception inside sucks).
Someone expecting news about a lifethreatening situation is a moron for going to the one place that forbids cell phone use. The theatres I patron insist that all cell phones be turned off - no, they don't frisk you, they expect you to be courteous.
And for your hypothetical movie-going doctor expecting emergency news - hospitals have contigencies for this. It's called standby. It's not like the heart patient is all alone up there in the hospital - there's a staff of doctors and nurses to take care of them until their primary physician shows up.
Sheesh.
If you go somewhere that tells you up front "hey, you can't use cell phones in here" then you don't have any standing to sue for blocking communication. You agreed to abide by those terms by patronizing that place. If you don't agree? Go somewhere else or wait for your movie on DVD.
This is called fraud, not "stealth inflation" and should be prosecuted as such. The article says that "[i]n previous eras, this was known as thievery" - well, I don't know what era the author comes from but that's what I call it too.
Verizon's approach is particularly agregious - they charge for an itemized bill?!?
I smell more class action lawsuits coming on - and I don't care that the lawyers will get 50% percent of the judgement or settlement. This behaviour needs to be stomped on hard core.
They'll want to make their $ back and a handsome profit on top of it; but you're right - companies are not "fair" about it IMHO. A better system to balance that out needs to be tacked on to patent law.
And in 17 years (depending on your country) that technology will become generic and commoditized. Inventors should be compensated for their labour; however, for the next generation the fruits of it should be ubiquitous.
So look at it this way: in a generation, this technology will be patent-free.
I'm as socialist and altruistic as the next guy, but I think there can be some balance with capitalism. If you defang its cannibalistic tendencies and ensure reasonable labor rights then it's not a bad way to live.
Now, IMHO anyone who uses NIH technology or other tech developed at taxpayer expense then the taxpayer should get an even split. So if Liverium, a drug to reverse cirrhosis in alcoholics, were developed and made $50 billion for Merc then the Treasury would get half in the name of the taxpayer. Just like we should be collecting for mineral rights that mining companies get for virtually nothing (e.g. billions in gold extracted for a $30,000 fee on public land).
What to do with this largesse? Well, everyone has their own opinion and I'll leave that to another debate.
They conclude that the Internet is not ready to be critical infrastructure.
Really? It already is a mission critical infrastructure for my company and most others, I suspect. When some idiot with a backhoe takes the region down for a few hours, we're in serious doo-doo (no second carrier where I am). We switch to ye ole spreadsheet as a backup, but we're crippled without Internet access.
I agree with the article - there are some serious architectural flaws that need to be addressed; however, fact of the matter is that the internet has already become a mission critical technology despite these shortcomings.
Thanks for the kudos, man. I don't believe in lying to children (aka "protecting" them) either. Children/teens are people too and deserve to be respected.
I laughed at the story you related about your mother telling a kid where babies come from and the kids mother getting ticked.
I've run into a couple of situations almost exactly like that and had parents howling for my head. My response was "so you tell your kids to tell the truth, but lie to them"?
Good news all 'round with China joining Brasil and Germany in massive deployments of an open source software infrastructure.
I hope to see something of this scale happen in the United States, though I think it's more likely for a small cash-strapped state or major metro to adopt Linux state/city-wide than more well-heeled communities.
I agree, parents should be guides and not overlords. Not necessarily a kid's "buddy", but certainly a trusted person they can turn to. Discipline as needed for violating rules, but make sure the punishment fits the crime.
I was online very early - starting with CompuServe in 1984 when we rotated back to the States. At home and a buddies house with Commodores, Tandys, and an Apple II. We hacked everything we could and yeah, ultimately got busted by the MIBs who (fortunately) just gave us a warning. ASCII pr0n wasn't exactly what the doctor ordered, so the magazine variety had to
suffice. I BBSed with a bunch of other folks, met a bunch of folks online - some I met IRL, others not.
The big bad Internet is just one of a myriad of tools that people use to communicate. It's replaced the phone for most teens I know. What you do online does not necessarily reflect who you are or what you're going to be. I remember folks spewing warnings about the evil of AD&D when I was a teen, the total overcompensation for it and raid of my personal library, the destruction (at a book burning sponsored by the Catholic Church) of 2 years of gaming notes and characters and worldbuilding and books. All in the name of "protecting me" from an evil influence. I think a lot of parents act *exactly* the same way about computing and the Internet.
My parents trusted me; every now and then I betrayed that trust and did something incredibly stupid and dangerous and was punished for it if I got caught. The majority of the time I did get caught. As a general rule, I followed my parents' guidelines. I didn't consider them unreasonable. I think I turned out okay so far: love my IT job, happy with my $, happy with my friends & family.
I smoked cigarettes, I drank alcohol. It was another time (I graduated from HS in '87) and we spent my early adolescence stationed in Spain - 3 years. Alcohol was freely available, I had a lot of money (for a junior high and high school kid) from various entrepreneurial activities. My buddies and I ate breakfast in a neighborhood bar before school and had a few beers there and played video games after school. When I got back to the States I got in trouble for both smoking and drinking, but my parents blew it off - they'd rather have me drinking at home under supervision than binging at some party. I learned moderation from my Mom.
As a parent, you certainly can shape the kind of person your kid is going to be - for good and for ill. But you are not the only influence on their life and certainly in adolescence aren't the most important one - not to them anyway.
The best thing you can do is spend time with your kids; I'm not talking hours and hours of mutually boring 'hanging out' or Interrogation 101. But spend some quality time with them, even if it's just a few minutes a day, to ask how they are, how stuff is going. Not a quiz on what they're learning, but ask them about stuff they're interested in - things important to them, how they fit in at school, gauge how happy or bummed they are, etc. Don't be all judgemental or you'll lose a fragile rapport.
In other words, treat them like a human fucking being and SHOW them you respect them by listening to them. You don't have to agree with them, just *listen*. Mete out discipline as needed.
Faith in the system is based on its security, accuracy, and anonymity of votes cast.
If it's a black box, has no paper trail, and is manufactured by a company whose president has close ties to a sitting administration AND is a major contributor to the administration AND has promised to deliver votes to that administration AND a company that has an abysmal security record then how in the hell can you trust any election run on their voting platform?
Shooting the messenger isn't going to fix the problems, nor is it going to restore faith in the system. Researchers must loudly and publicly criticize flaws; doing otherwise undermines democracy.
I don't trust any electronic voting system that is not open source and has not gone through an exhaustive (and public) security review with each release.
Too much Star Wars - this isn't going to work like some giant magnifying glass and an ant colony. You need a huge area to convert the beamed energy into power significant enough to fry your neighbor. Long term environmental effects (over centuries) are likely to be the biggest (and overblown) concern. This is waaaaay the hell less harmful than virtually any energy we're producing now (arguably better than capturing wind power) aside from geothermal.
Okay, so you're surfing around after a fragfest of Battlefield 1942 Desert Combat, chillin' and listening to some tunes when...
A marching band at 10000% volume liquefies your internal organs in surround sound. Yes, another Flash ad leaps up to cover the article you're trying to read.
Gott in Himmel, time to install Mozilla on the Win32 fragging partition.
I can't tell you how much Belkin stuff I have at work. Cables of every type, USB hubs, KVM switches, and whatnot. This escapade earns them a spot on my blacklist. This behaviour is inexcusable and they are deservedly being lambasted for cramming spam down folks throats - it calls into question how many other "features" are buried in other Belkin hardware.
I doubt we'll see much more hijacking from hardware vendors.
Just because they're dropping PBXs doesn't mean they're dropping redundancy or failover. If one of the call centers goes down (very rare if you have redundant providers, power), switcheroo to the other one - send staff over to the other location.
We're exploring VoIP options, but for the time being I'm happy to let my telco provider take care of our voice and bandwidth needs.
Normally, I don't feed the trolls, but okay, I'll bite.
You exaggerate a lot; obviously you have never worked in industry.
No, I exaggerate a little and have worked in the industry for 10 years as a code monkey. I've been up the totem pole from the bottom to the top - programmer, lead programmer, project manager, and IT director.
When I was a peon, I watched marketing take over development and make a lot of numbskull decisions not unlike the ones I described in my last post. I've worked with companies where company policy forbid them from making simple no-brainer decisions just like the example we're discussing.
If you haven't seen crazy stuff like this, then I doubt you've worked in the industry very long.
Disappearing would only raise suspicion, not abate it. And it doesn't change the fact that this code gets reviewed a lot by a lot of different people. It would get noticed pretty quickly, methinks.
Think about how often your own code gets reviewed, debugged, optimised - not necessarily by you, but by Joe Coder on the same project or Wilma Coder some time down the road.
I doubt that someone sociopathic enough to work on something for years under a legitimate guise, then "one day" would be able to keep it together long enough to pull off the kind of coup you're proposing.
No, I tend to think that folks of this bent are found mostly among the crowd of virus authors.
> Setting current->uid to zero when options __WCLONE and __WALL are set? The
> retval is dead code because of the next line, but it looks like an attempt
> to backdoor the kernel, does it not?
It sure does. Note "current->uid = 0", not "current->uid == 0".
Good eyes, I missed that. This function is sys_wait4() so by passing in
__WCLONE|__WALL you are root. How nice.
And this is exactly why folks should insist on open source code.
Assuming it was noticed, and I have little reason to think that modification of a project's cvs tree would go unnoticed, a closed source product would have to go up and down the development chain of command. Then likely up and down the marketing chain of command while a decision was made whether to say anything about it (yeah, right) was made. Meetings would be held, blame would be assigned, and - oh yeah - a discussion about a fix would ensue.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but only a little.
I remember when a beta of a game [unnamed software publisher] was working on got ripped off our company ftp site and passed around. There was so much hype about our game that the leaked late beta was a serious disappointment and effectively killed the good buzz the marketing folks had whipped up. [It blew anyway, got shredded by the gaming rags, had a lot of potential but an inexperienced crew and very little financial support.]
Of course, this situation is nothing like that.
There's always going to be someone trying to backdoor the linux kernel, windows, osx, apps galore. Having the source on-hand to look at gives you that added level of confidence that "hey, worst case we can fix it - deal with it ourselves" rather than go through the denial, silence, lame excuse, patch cycle you go through with closed source products.
As one of my history professors liked to put things "then they grabbed guns and ran around and the government [granted them civil rights, repealed the tax, etc.". I think we're a far cry from that. Vote the bastards out; however, when your vote has no potency or legitimacy then how exactly do you effect change?
I prefer ye ole fashioned civil disobedience - at least until the concentration camps arrive.
The Bush Administration is taking a big fat nosedive just before the election. Fool me once, can't get fooled again may be the rallying cry of the 2004 Presidential Election. Clearly, there where shenannigans going on in the 2000 Election, which has only emboldened spreading this around for 2004.
For those convicted of felonies:(
Hopefully a first offender's pardon will let you cast a ballot next fall. At least until such laws can be repealed as the anti-democratic tools they are.
All I can say is thank God, praise Allah, thumbs-up Yahweh and pass the mashed taters. Confidence in elections is what separates free citizens in a democracy from sheep in a dictatorship. I'm glad the EFF has stepped up to the plate to fight the good fight and will contribute what dollars I can to lend a hand.
But this is a fight we have to take on locally. Find out what's used in your district. If they use black-box machines with no paper trail (virtually everyone does) then hit 'em with a big ole ream of this. Send it your city councilmember, call your Congresscritter and your Senators, bitch to your local paper, blog. Do something.
My favourite excerpts:
"I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb"." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/support.w3archive/200101/msg00068.html ]
Or how about:
In response to a question about a presentation in El Paso County, Colorado: "For a demonstration I suggest you fake it. Progam them both so they look the same, and then just do the upload fro [sic] the AV. That is what we did in the last AT/AV demo." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/support.w3archive/199903/msg00098.html ]
Or even:
"Elections are not rocket science. Why is it so hard to get things right! I have never been at any other company that has been so miss [sic] managed." [source: http://chroot.net/s/lists/announce.w3archive/20011 0/msg00002.html ]
Makes me feel all warm and gooey inside, but not in that comfortable, sated, internally glowing way. In that queasy, rumbling, internally bleeding, hosting-an-Alien-baby kind of way.
Okay, call me a conspiracy theorist with this one.
Essentially the XBox runs a win2k derivative kernel with DirectX slapped on top of it. Right? Everyone's making the transition to 64 bit, and Intel's hobbled a bit in that department (dot)
Since Redmond had decided to go with the PPC for XBox2 (dot) Maybe they're gonna pull something interesting. Mayhap the big spaz over that guy's G5 snaps, mebbe? (dot)
Who knows whether the dots connect?
I dunno if Redmond would really bother to get Apple folks to run Windows. But maybe this goes hand in hand with their fight in the server market. Big time Windows clustering.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't fault them for folks already in place at Global Election Systems (GES) when they acquired the company at the beginning of 2002. Nor do I believe that folks with a criminal history should be barred from IT careers. Someone with expertise in large scale fraud could be very helpful, if not invaluable, in finding exploits in systems you're trying to secure.
However, a development and management staff comprised of numerous folks with experience in stock fraud, money laundering, smuggling, cracking and grand larceny certainly calls into question the legitimacy of the projects they've worked on. The Diebold spokesdrone said that a few of them left at the time of acquisition, but did not say if any remained working at Diebold.
My own opinion is that Diebold itself is a criminal enterprise whose thin facade of trustworthiness has been torn down to expose the company's true character.
This calls into question not only Diebold's election systems, but all of their products including their ubiquitous ATM machines. Who knows how many of those have been cracked or if there's an ongoing fraudulent scheme (beyond ATM withdrawl fees) by Diebold to defraud Joe and Jane Citizen of their hard-earned cash.
Based on Diebold's behaviour, I don't think that that sounds terribly crazy.
OT, I'm curious about the appeal of riding. I understand having the sun shine on your face and the wind in your hair, but a convertible "cage" seems more enjoyable to me than a bike. I'm a careful, cool-headed driver so a motorcycle seems reckless. I've ridden a few times, but it never caught my fancy. On the other hand, I enjoyed riding horses.
Anyway, again OT, what about riding motorcycles appeals?
Neat, though I'm not much on the motorcycle thing after witnessing an acquaintance fatally crash. A HUD wouldn't have saved him, but perhaps a personal radar displayed on that HUD could give (motor and muscle) cyclists the information they need to avoid similar accidents. Combined with a wireless medical alert system, drivers - heck, regular folks - will have a much better chance of surviving an accident.
Then someone can holler "is there a doctor in the house"? The theatre can call 911, you can summon one of the off-duty cops doubling as theatre security, you can go outside of the theatre to dial 911 on your cell phone (reception inside sucks).
Someone expecting news about a lifethreatening situation is a moron for going to the one place that forbids cell phone use. The theatres I patron insist that all cell phones be turned off - no, they don't frisk you, they expect you to be courteous.
And for your hypothetical movie-going doctor expecting emergency news - hospitals have contigencies for this. It's called standby. It's not like the heart patient is all alone up there in the hospital - there's a staff of doctors and nurses to take care of them until their primary physician shows up.
Sheesh.
If you go somewhere that tells you up front "hey, you can't use cell phones in here" then you don't have any standing to sue for blocking communication. You agreed to abide by those terms by patronizing that place. If you don't agree? Go somewhere else or wait for your movie on DVD.
Favorite incorrect assumption: Nobody can beat Microsoft.
Verizon's approach is particularly agregious - they charge for an itemized bill?!?
I smell more class action lawsuits coming on - and I don't care that the lawyers will get 50% percent of the judgement or settlement. This behaviour needs to be stomped on hard core.
That would solve the whole RIAA thing, but only as a side effect.
They'll want to make their $ back and a handsome profit on top of it; but you're right - companies are not "fair" about it IMHO. A better system to balance that out needs to be tacked on to patent law.
And in 17 years (depending on your country) that technology will become generic and commoditized. Inventors should be compensated for their labour; however, for the next generation the fruits of it should be ubiquitous.
So look at it this way: in a generation, this technology will be patent-free.
I'm as socialist and altruistic as the next guy, but I think there can be some balance with capitalism. If you defang its cannibalistic tendencies and ensure reasonable labor rights then it's not a bad way to live.
Now, IMHO anyone who uses NIH technology or other tech developed at taxpayer expense then the taxpayer should get an even split. So if Liverium, a drug to reverse cirrhosis in alcoholics, were developed and made $50 billion for Merc then the Treasury would get half in the name of the taxpayer. Just like we should be collecting for mineral rights that mining companies get for virtually nothing (e.g. billions in gold extracted for a $30,000 fee on public land).
What to do with this largesse? Well, everyone has their own opinion and I'll leave that to another debate.
Really? It already is a mission critical infrastructure for my company and most others, I suspect. When some idiot with a backhoe takes the region down for a few hours, we're in serious doo-doo (no second carrier where I am). We switch to ye ole spreadsheet as a backup, but we're crippled without Internet access.
I agree with the article - there are some serious architectural flaws that need to be addressed; however, fact of the matter is that the internet has already become a mission critical technology despite these shortcomings.
I laughed at the story you related about your mother telling a kid where babies come from and the kids mother getting ticked.
I've run into a couple of situations almost exactly like that and had parents howling for my head. My response was "so you tell your kids to tell the truth, but lie to them"?
I hope to see something of this scale happen in the United States, though I think it's more likely for a small cash-strapped state or major metro to adopt Linux state/city-wide than more well-heeled communities.
I was online very early - starting with CompuServe in 1984 when we rotated back to the States. At home and a buddies house with Commodores, Tandys, and an Apple II. We hacked everything we could and yeah, ultimately got busted by the MIBs who (fortunately) just gave us a warning. ASCII pr0n wasn't exactly what the doctor ordered, so the magazine variety had to suffice. I BBSed with a bunch of other folks, met a bunch of folks online - some I met IRL, others not.
The big bad Internet is just one of a myriad of tools that people use to communicate. It's replaced the phone for most teens I know. What you do online does not necessarily reflect who you are or what you're going to be. I remember folks spewing warnings about the evil of AD&D when I was a teen, the total overcompensation for it and raid of my personal library, the destruction (at a book burning sponsored by the Catholic Church) of 2 years of gaming notes and characters and worldbuilding and books. All in the name of "protecting me" from an evil influence. I think a lot of parents act *exactly* the same way about computing and the Internet.
My parents trusted me; every now and then I betrayed that trust and did something incredibly stupid and dangerous and was punished for it if I got caught. The majority of the time I did get caught. As a general rule, I followed my parents' guidelines. I didn't consider them unreasonable. I think I turned out okay so far: love my IT job, happy with my $, happy with my friends & family.
I smoked cigarettes, I drank alcohol. It was another time (I graduated from HS in '87) and we spent my early adolescence stationed in Spain - 3 years. Alcohol was freely available, I had a lot of money (for a junior high and high school kid) from various entrepreneurial activities. My buddies and I ate breakfast in a neighborhood bar before school and had a few beers there and played video games after school. When I got back to the States I got in trouble for both smoking and drinking, but my parents blew it off - they'd rather have me drinking at home under supervision than binging at some party. I learned moderation from my Mom.
As a parent, you certainly can shape the kind of person your kid is going to be - for good and for ill. But you are not the only influence on their life and certainly in adolescence aren't the most important one - not to them anyway.
The best thing you can do is spend time with your kids; I'm not talking hours and hours of mutually boring 'hanging out' or Interrogation 101. But spend some quality time with them, even if it's just a few minutes a day, to ask how they are, how stuff is going. Not a quiz on what they're learning, but ask them about stuff they're interested in - things important to them, how they fit in at school, gauge how happy or bummed they are, etc. Don't be all judgemental or you'll lose a fragile rapport.
In other words, treat them like a human fucking being and SHOW them you respect them by listening to them. You don't have to agree with them, just *listen*. Mete out discipline as needed.
Of course, the shoe is on the other foot too.
If it's a black box, has no paper trail, and is manufactured by a company whose president has close ties to a sitting administration AND is a major contributor to the administration AND has promised to deliver votes to that administration AND a company that has an abysmal security record then how in the hell can you trust any election run on their voting platform?
Shooting the messenger isn't going to fix the problems, nor is it going to restore faith in the system. Researchers must loudly and publicly criticize flaws; doing otherwise undermines democracy.
I don't trust any electronic voting system that is not open source and has not gone through an exhaustive (and public) security review with each release.
Too much Star Wars - this isn't going to work like some giant magnifying glass and an ant colony. You need a huge area to convert the beamed energy into power significant enough to fry your neighbor. Long term environmental effects (over centuries) are likely to be the biggest (and overblown) concern. This is waaaaay the hell less harmful than virtually any energy we're producing now (arguably better than capturing wind power) aside from geothermal.
A marching band at 10000% volume liquefies your internal organs in surround sound. Yes, another Flash ad leaps up to cover the article you're trying to read.
Gott in Himmel, time to install Mozilla on the Win32 fragging partition.
I doubt we'll see much more hijacking from hardware vendors.
Homer: What's the number to 911?
Of course this is easier for us because our call centers are about 2 miles apart.
We're exploring VoIP options, but for the time being I'm happy to let my telco provider take care of our voice and bandwidth needs.
You exaggerate a lot; obviously you have never worked in industry.
No, I exaggerate a little and have worked in the industry for 10 years as a code monkey. I've been up the totem pole from the bottom to the top - programmer, lead programmer, project manager, and IT director.
When I was a peon, I watched marketing take over development and make a lot of numbskull decisions not unlike the ones I described in my last post. I've worked with companies where company policy forbid them from making simple no-brainer decisions just like the example we're discussing.
If you haven't seen crazy stuff like this, then I doubt you've worked in the industry very long.
Think about how often your own code gets reviewed, debugged, optimised - not necessarily by you, but by Joe Coder on the same project or Wilma Coder some time down the road.
I doubt that someone sociopathic enough to work on something for years under a legitimate guise, then "one day" would be able to keep it together long enough to pull off the kind of coup you're proposing.
No, I tend to think that folks of this bent are found mostly among the crowd of virus authors.
And this is exactly why folks should insist on open source code.
Assuming it was noticed, and I have little reason to think that modification of a project's cvs tree would go unnoticed, a closed source product would have to go up and down the development chain of command. Then likely up and down the marketing chain of command while a decision was made whether to say anything about it (yeah, right) was made. Meetings would be held, blame would be assigned, and - oh yeah - a discussion about a fix would ensue.
Perhaps I exaggerate, but only a little.
I remember when a beta of a game [unnamed software publisher] was working on got ripped off our company ftp site and passed around. There was so much hype about our game that the leaked late beta was a serious disappointment and effectively killed the good buzz the marketing folks had whipped up. [It blew anyway, got shredded by the gaming rags, had a lot of potential but an inexperienced crew and very little financial support.]
Of course, this situation is nothing like that.
There's always going to be someone trying to backdoor the linux kernel, windows, osx, apps galore. Having the source on-hand to look at gives you that added level of confidence that "hey, worst case we can fix it - deal with it ourselves" rather than go through the denial, silence, lame excuse, patch cycle you go through with closed source products.
I prefer ye ole fashioned civil disobedience - at least until the concentration camps arrive.
The Bush Administration is taking a big fat nosedive just before the election. Fool me once, can't get fooled again may be the rallying cry of the 2004 Presidential Election. Clearly, there where shenannigans going on in the 2000 Election, which has only emboldened spreading this around for 2004.
For those convicted of felonies :(
Hopefully a first offender's pardon will let you cast a ballot next fall. At least until such laws can be repealed as the anti-democratic tools they are.
But this is a fight we have to take on locally. Find out what's used in your district. If they use black-box machines with no paper trail (virtually everyone does) then hit 'em with a big ole ream of this. Send it your city councilmember, call your Congresscritter and your Senators, bitch to your local paper, blog. Do something.
My favourite excerpts:
Or how about:
Or even:
Makes me feel all warm and gooey inside, but not in that comfortable, sated, internally glowing way. In that queasy, rumbling, internally bleeding, hosting-an-Alien-baby kind of way.
Essentially the XBox runs a win2k derivative kernel with DirectX slapped on top of it. Right? Everyone's making the transition to 64 bit, and Intel's hobbled a bit in that department (dot)
Since Redmond had decided to go with the PPC for XBox2 (dot) Maybe they're gonna pull something interesting. Mayhap the big spaz over that guy's G5 snaps, mebbe? (dot)
Who knows whether the dots connect?
I dunno if Redmond would really bother to get Apple folks to run Windows. But maybe this goes hand in hand with their fight in the server market. Big time Windows clustering.