Because hand-counting produces even more errors than electronic counting.
I won't ask you to prove your assertion. We're not necessarily after an accurate count, but we must have a count we can agree on. That's not a joke: read on...
If a group of people sit down and all agree that candidate A got so many votes and candidate B got so many, that becomes the result regardless of whether we're talking about X's in boxes, holes in punch cards, or readouts from some MS database. And even if we make a 2+2=5 mistake, it doesn't matter so long as you (or the delegate representing your interests in the vote counting process) fails to catch the error along with everyone else.
The appropriate Sneakers quote is: "The world is not governed by reality, but by the perception of reality."
If one of the group disagrees with the result, the "paper trail ballot" type systems allow us to narrow the scope of the disagreement from the "I don't trust the vote count from that State, let's recount..." down through the "I don't trust the vote count from that precinct, let's recount..." all the way to "I don't think this particular punch card was read properly, let's re-examine it". Through a process of "do we all agree that this ballot represents a vote for candidate A? [Yes] or [Disputed]" questioning, we can get the number of disputed ballots down to a number less than the margin of difference. Of if we can't, the whole election get's thrown out.
To wit, the clear problem with electronic voting machines is that they allow reasonable people to disagree with the result in a way that cannot be discounted. Think about it: if you, as a reasonably well educated Slashdotter, show up for the vote count and assert that the electronic voting machine changed your vote, how can the election officials prove, to the reasonable man standard that you're wrong?
If I were in charge of selecting a voting system, I would be running scared away from any system which doesn't provide me with a way to prove Joe Slashdotter voted the way Joe Slashdotter perceives himself to have voted. As noted in the article, vote counters don't like close races, because it raises the percentage of votes where an undisputed result must be agreed upon before they get any peace. Electronic voting systems allow people to get machines, precincts, and even entire state-wide mandated voting systems thrown out. We could be headed for this first ever Presidential Election in 2004 that gets thrown out because of the number of disputed votes, no matter who is the apparent winner.
A voting system without a paper trail changes the equation from one of "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for this (blank checkbox, hanging chad, or otherwise disputed) ballot into "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for these (electronic only, no paper trail, disputed) thirty thousand some odd ballots...
If you live in a district where there isn't a paper trail, just call your local election board, tell them you want to witness the vote counting for your next election, then after they've approved, tell them you will disagree with any electronic-only result. I'll bet they add a paper trail just to avoid the headaches.
This is the wrong example to use. A more correct example would run something like this:
"Mister Anderson, our records indicate that you spent a portion of last night attending a political rally for a certain political candidate. You should realize the policies promoted by that candidate would be detrimental to the corporate objectives of this organization and could result in our having to terminate certain employees. You have a choice to make, Mister Anderson, do I make myself clear?"
However, the very fact that you are trying to convince me that your point is more 'good' than mine...
The closest thing in my post to a "point" was the statement "Only a troll would believe so." Everything else was interrogative (Is it possible..), general comment (Well, you do..., Almost no one..., Nature itself doesn't..., Now "society" is..., Yet even at this...) or deduction (Which means that..., If you continue...) I suppose there was the "I could not possibly have said it better myself." compliment.
....tells me you don't agree with that fact.
"Fact" being that my point was not as "good" as yours. Are you sure that qualifies as "fact"?;-)
Your use of terms with values attached such as troll and selfish defeat your own argument.
All words have values; that's what makes them words. Perhaps you meant "connotations". Certain words in certain contexts can have positive or negative connotations. For example, "selfish" is generally accepted to mean "seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage" but that is neither good nor bad by itself. For example, in the context of a Capitalism vs. Communism debate, the term "selfish" would more generally describe people in the Capitalist camp, for whom selfless behavior is considered bad for shareholder value.
And I stand by my statement that only a troll (small "t") would believe that having beliefs in conflict with society makes one "Evil", although I'll admit the trolls may yet win that battle.
Please understand that I do not mean that believing in good and evil gives one the right to crush what is considered evil by any means available.
I hope I'm understanding you correctly to mean that opposing that which our beliefs identify as "Evil" is proper, even if not every means should be availed in the process. If so, then I agree with you. (The alternate interpretation would leave us all as just inanimate observers in this world.)
With that said I do not want a level playing field: I do not want cops to be on a level playing field with criminals (I want criminals locked up and cops paid well) and I do not want to be on a level playing with theives (I will lock my doors).
So, are you saying that thieves should not be allowed to lock their own doors? Or are you saying that you choose not to break into a thief's house, regardless of wether he has availed himself of door locks? The former case describes a "selfish" tipping of the playing field, while the latter simply displays moral fortitude while leaving a level playing field for others (theif or not) to lock their own doors as they see fit. If I understand your argument correctly, perhaps you really do want a level playing field.
Just a thought; is it possible that leaving one's door unlocked could reduce crime, by forcing residents of the community to address the causes of crime rather than just forcing the criminals down the street to the house with the weakest locks? I suspect that those who take the "us vs. them" mentality of always locking their house would soon find themselves fighting not only the criminal element, but also their neighbors with weaker locks whereas those seeking a root cause would find allies among their weak-locked neighbors as well as among the criminals who'd really rather be doing something else than breaking into homes and dodging police.
My point is simply this: if we are convinced that something is right (good as opposed to evil) the only way that we will fight for our beliefs is to be better at using the tools good and evil have in common.
A point well stated and well taken. Also a point which is applicable from any point of view; wether good/evil are relative or absolute. Hmm.
Well, you do (for one), or at least you would if you thought things through.
Almost no one whom you'd consider to be "Evil" considers themselves to be evil. And they would likely tag some people as "Evil" even if you would disagree with their assessment. And almost no one would agree with you on what is good and what is evil completely. To do that, they'd have to be you.
Which means that if the world were to function by your own self-centered definition of good and evil, you'd be all alone.
Nature itself doesn't have a concept of good or evil. Which means regardless of wether we'd each want a level playing field, it's ultimately a level playing field on which we must play.
Evil for lack of a better term is always bad and society depends on those doing evil to not be on even ground with the law in order to protect the rights we all hold dear.
Now "society" is just one of the teams on this playing field; a big team, I'd admit, and one you're likely so familiar with as to believe that no others exist, but it's just a team nonetheless. As you point out, your society has created your society's laws and has it's own interest in seeing that people on any other team are placed at a disadvantage. After all, it has to protect those "rights" which your society holds so dearly.
Is it possible that members of some other society might have their own values, profess their own beliefs, and institute their own laws to protect the rights they hold so dear? Some of these might conflict with the values, beliefs, and laws of your society; does that make them "Evil"?
Only a troll would believe so.
Yet even at this point, we're making a judgment call saying that one kind of "society" can be more "good" than another in a way that a "non-society" could never approach. That's a widely held belief, but there's still a lot of time left on the clock. Maybe Douglas Adams was right and some day we'll decide that even the trees were a bad idea, and we should have all stayed in the oceans..."
If you continue to insist that the playing field be tipped selfishly in your favor, then you must admit that, over time, more and more people will become aligned against you in their own self interest. Each time you exclude someone by calling them (or their team/society) "Evil" you build a greater force which sees you the same way. And the stronger you hold your beliefs, the more motivate they are to hold theirs.
The problem is that evil is almost always better motivated because in our society no good deed goes unpunished.
there's multiple problems with anonymous, encrypted peer to peer whitout users oversights.
Those are not problems of the encryption, nor even of the system which employs it. The problems you mention result from trusting an untrustable contact.
It's not an IP address you're trying to conceal, (having an IP is not illegal) it's the activity occuring at that IP address which you're concerned with. Similarly, if you get your content only from and offer your content only to trustable people, then you don't have to worry about them linking your conduct with your identity.
The hard part is finding trustable contacts. Encryption does not help in this, but it is an effective tool for ensuring that information is only being disclosed to to whom you think you are disclosing it to.
Any, yes, stoopid people can shoot themselves in the foor even with an encrypted gun. Nothing can prevent that. Onlt the advice "Don't have stupid friends." seems of any help for that.
...nothing more than some kind of perverted searching application.
Well, a bit more than that. It's a referral system, which incorporates the enthusiasm of your audience to sell your products. So, if I wind up running one of the best sites for finding the metadata files, I might find myself making some cash to offset the cost of hosting the node.
Perhaps I could even offer a search engine to make it easier to find the metadata of content you might like. That would make my site more popular.
Why, I could even choose what metadata files I recommend or refuse to offer. That would give me some power and control; make me a player in the Music Industry. You wanna get popular, you talk to me.
Which is precisely why as soon as a market for such metadata (no content, remember) got going, the RIAA would claim copyright over the metadata files themselves, and start C&D'ing anyone who didn't distribute the "correct" (read: most profitable for them) metadata.
The RIAA is a Copyright industry. They are only interested in Control. Don't think for a moment they would allow that control to be taken from them just because the content can no longer be represented in.mp3 format.
Legal or not, the name was indeed choose to be phonetically similar to Windows.
So, does that give Microsoft ownership of the Lindows name? If I build my coffee shop next to your gas station to be "locationally similar", what control does that give you over my business?
Can you prevent me from printing my car a certain color in an attempt to be "chromatically" similar to yours?
How much other phonetic territory can Microsoft claim from having claimed the word "Windows"?
You're not really in the market for a backup system; you're in the market for a restore system. It's worthless unless you can reliably get the files back.
Spend some time thinking about the circumstances under which you might need a restore service; how often, how quickly, how to verify it works, etc. This may help to clarify the issues for you.
A "ballot randomizer" implements a form of cut-and-choose. It works for paper ballots because a visual inspection pretty much ensures that the randomization is truly random, and the voter's choice of which ballot is chosen feeds entropy into the system in a verifiable way. In a digital (electronic) system there's no way to be sure that the "random" selection for the ballot was verifiably random.
And as you've pointed out, it only solves a subset of the problems which would need to be solved.
If you can check your vote after the fact, anyone willing to go to the extent of threatening you will be able to as well.
Not exactly. There's a sliver of vulnerability there which could be exploited to create a full-knowledge, zero proof system.
To satisfy the voter, you must provide them with knowledge that ties their selection to a ballot, but you needn't provide them with evidence of that. This is the idea behind systems which, for example, show the voter a completed ballot behind a piece of glass. The voter can know that his votes are being recorded correctly, but has no way to prove to anyone else what was on the ballot.
Ignoring the other possible problems of such a system, it would be possible to show the voter a unique number which he could copy down and later compare against a complete record of all votes cast, their unique ID, and the contents of the ballot. The voter could claim a unique number associated with a vote for any candidate, but only the voter would know if he copied down the unique number for his own vote or someone elses.
There's only one horrible horrible problem with that system:
Actually more than one. Such a system would allow anyone with both knowledge of the identity of the voter and knowledge of the unique identifier for the ballot to report on who voted for whom. It's not just the guy buying your vote who get's leverage, it's the guy wanting to retaliate against anyone voting a particular way.
Additionally, such a system need not be actually compromised by someone with both pieces of info; as long as the voter believes that there is hidden info betraying his "secret" ballot, the coersion can exist.
The tactic of including something which obviously isn't right just to get attention is a well proven strategy.
Here's one to watch for: watch for television advertisements where a product is pictured as reflected in a mirror, but the product name isn't mirror imaged. The eye will be drawn to the product name instinctively as the mind is saying "shouldn't that be backwards?"
Some people consider a Resume to be a sales tool; an advertisement for themselves; and in keeping with our long-standing tradition of skirting the truth when advertising, consider it more important to get noticed than to be truthful.
After all, the truthful ones who don't get noticed stand less of a chance at getting the job (or making the sale) than the untruthful ones which make it to the interview.
the moderator believed SPAMMers are too dumb to figure this out themselves, and was trying to prevent them from seeing it,
the moderator figured only a SPAMMer would be smart enough to spot this weakness and I must, therefore, be a SPAMMer who deserves to be moderated a Troll
the moderator is a SPAMMer who understands how valuable it would be to have thousands of systems deployed like this, and marked this post as a Troll to prevent the spamhole authors (or potential users) from realizing how such a system makes them more vulnerable.
You're making my point much more strongly than I could make it myself, thank you.
...crank out a new OS, half a dozen hit tunes, and a best selling Novel.
How does a tune get to be a "hit" without the help of a "society"? How does a novel get to be "best selling" without a "society" to purchase it? And it's actually quite trivial to crank-out a new OS if you don't have to worry about making it run on hardware some "society" built, or figure out how to convince "society" to run it.
It's like, if you own all the corn kernels and I own all the potting soil, we'll both go hungry. It's only when we work together (as a "society of two" if you will) that either of us has anything of value.
I think you are seriously underestimating the value of the infinite trivial contributions by people who've never been granted a book contract, or received air time, or gotten a patent issued in their name.
Society is nothing more than a group of indiviuals, and it's a small minority of those indiviuals who are capable of creating anything.
If so, then consider this: If you take the work you've created and never divulge it to "society":
Your "copy right" to that work will be infinite.
Your profit from that work will be zero.
Personally, I think you'd have a hard time creating anything without using the tools "society" has provided. What language were you going to write that book in again?
If the message doesn't go through then its a 'blackhole' relay and they will find another one.
You give up too easily. If even one message gets through, you've at least found a system which is not firewalled-off from sending email. Root the system and install a custom SMTP agent and ignore the fact that it also runs a spamhole. At the very least, a system running a spamhole is a better target than your average box, because you know it can send mail.
"motive of profit is the engine that ensures progress of science" There's certainly no disputing...that the court really did write such an opinon recently.
The closest phrase from Eldred I could find was "The profit motive is the engine that ensures the progress of science." cited in a footnote supporting "The constitutional command, we have recognized, is that Congress, to the extent it enacts copyright laws at all, create a system that promote[s] the Progress of Science." and citing that phrase from American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 27 (SDNY 1992), aff d, 60 F. 3d 913 (CA2 1994).
Strangely, the word "profit" does not appear at all in Eldred outside of footnotes.
I thought that openness was against the US Constitution...
A flip comment, but also an excellent summary.
Darl seems to be arguing that copyright protection only exists when the author is claiming some financial incentive for the work. That view almost works, too, if you consider the government to belong to Big Business (TM).
I hope I'm not mis-quoting McBride when I summarize his open letter this way:
The GPL may well "...promote the advancement of Science and the Useful Arts...", but it does so outside of the profit motive. McBride interprets Eldred vs. Ashcroft as meaning that Congress has no power to offer a copyright protection except to people who are planning to get rich off it. Since people who write free software aren't planning to get (monetarily) rich from doing so, they don't get any copyright protection, and anyone who is planning to get rich (c.f. SCO) can steal their works with impunity.
What worries me is that it picks-up on a theme I've seen developing a lot lately, and is especially present in the U.S. Republican party of late: If you aren't a Major Corporation, you just Don't Matter. If you aren't funding the Party Coffers, you're part of the problem.
The same problems we've been discussing here with regards to electronic voting machines and slot machines and such are present in many facets of our lives.
Think about electronic breathalizers, for example.
At least for the State of North Carolina, all the elements of an exploit are present:
The code is proprietary, not well inspected, not well controlled.
The machine is told (through the calibration sample) just exactly what the State limit is at the time the test is performed.
The machine is told (through the data entry) just exactly who you are before the reading is made.
There's no evidence of what the Blood Alcohol Level actually was, only the machine's testimony.
It would be trivial for an insider to rig the machine such that if the name of the person to be tested matched some internal structure, the readout would always be two tenths below whatever the calibration sample read.
And with that kind of exculpatory evidence on your side, one could drink and drive to one's heart's content and never have to worry about a drunk-driving conviction: just demand a breathalizer test to "prove" your innocence and the case would never make it to court for a closer examination.
The answer to this is to make a simple, purpose built program, which is INCAPABLE of running externally introduced code.
You are mistaken if you believe a machine can be made secure by making the disk read-only.
Any machine where the code space is shared with the data space can be compromised, if the system can be induced to execute arbitrary (possibly memory-resident-only) data.
Even a system where the behavior (code) is hard-wired can be compromised if all the possible permutations of the behavior are not completely understood. There are always unforseen circumstances under which perfectly correct behavior can produce unintended consequences.
Why in Gods name would anyone use a proven insecure operating system as the base for a series of teller machines?
Then again, there's a difference between not provably perfect and downright incompetent.
I don't know, I imagine it could cause problems convicting people who are not innocent as well. The law seems to make a crime of performing an action (possessing/using equipment capable of making an infringing copy in circumstances where such would be possible) even without any illegal/infringing action taking place. That looks overly broad to me. I'm sure glad it won't be my taxes being spent to enforce this. Then again, I'm sure Ohio can afford it with the massive budget surplusses they corrently have, and the kickbacks from the Corporate Publishing Empire have got to be worth something...
Slashdot Mirror
I won't ask you to prove your assertion. We're not necessarily after an accurate count, but we must have a count we can agree on. That's not a joke: read on...
If a group of people sit down and all agree that candidate A got so many votes and candidate B got so many, that becomes the result regardless of whether we're talking about X's in boxes, holes in punch cards, or readouts from some MS database. And even if we make a 2+2=5 mistake, it doesn't matter so long as you (or the delegate representing your interests in the vote counting process) fails to catch the error along with everyone else.
The appropriate Sneakers quote is: "The world is not governed by reality, but by the perception of reality."
If one of the group disagrees with the result, the "paper trail ballot" type systems allow us to narrow the scope of the disagreement from the "I don't trust the vote count from that State, let's recount..." down through the "I don't trust the vote count from that precinct, let's recount..." all the way to "I don't think this particular punch card was read properly, let's re-examine it". Through a process of "do we all agree that this ballot represents a vote for candidate A? [Yes] or [Disputed]" questioning, we can get the number of disputed ballots down to a number less than the margin of difference. Of if we can't, the whole election get's thrown out.
To wit, the clear problem with electronic voting machines is that they allow reasonable people to disagree with the result in a way that cannot be discounted. Think about it: if you, as a reasonably well educated Slashdotter, show up for the vote count and assert that the electronic voting machine changed your vote, how can the election officials prove, to the reasonable man standard that you're wrong?
If I were in charge of selecting a voting system, I would be running scared away from any system which doesn't provide me with a way to prove Joe Slashdotter voted the way Joe Slashdotter perceives himself to have voted. As noted in the article, vote counters don't like close races, because it raises the percentage of votes where an undisputed result must be agreed upon before they get any peace. Electronic voting systems allow people to get machines, precincts, and even entire state-wide mandated voting systems thrown out. We could be headed for this first ever Presidential Election in 2004 that gets thrown out because of the number of disputed votes, no matter who is the apparent winner.
A voting system without a paper trail changes the equation from one of "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for this (blank checkbox, hanging chad, or otherwise disputed) ballot into "we need to agree what the intent of the voter was for these (electronic only, no paper trail, disputed) thirty thousand some odd ballots...
If you live in a district where there isn't a paper trail, just call your local election board, tell them you want to witness the vote counting for your next election, then after they've approved, tell them you will disagree with any electronic-only result. I'll bet they add a paper trail just to avoid the headaches.
Why not? We cast those votes by hand, didn't we? And there were time and secrecy constraints on the casting which don't apply to the counting.
You seem to imply that vote counting does not scale as well as vote casting. Can you expand on this argument?
This is the wrong example to use. A more correct example would run something like this:
"Mister Anderson, our records indicate that you spent a portion of last night attending a political rally for a certain political candidate. You should realize the policies promoted by that candidate would be detrimental to the corporate objectives of this organization and could result in our having to terminate certain employees. You have a choice to make, Mister Anderson, do I make myself clear?"
The closest thing in my post to a "point" was the statement "Only a troll would believe so." Everything else was interrogative (Is it possible..), general comment (Well, you do..., Almost no one..., Nature itself doesn't..., Now "society" is..., Yet even at this...) or deduction (Which means that..., If you continue...) I suppose there was the "I could not possibly have said it better myself." compliment.
"Fact" being that my point was not as "good" as yours. Are you sure that qualifies as "fact"? ;-)
All words have values; that's what makes them words. Perhaps you meant "connotations". Certain words in certain contexts can have positive or negative connotations. For example, "selfish" is generally accepted to mean "seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage" but that is neither good nor bad by itself. For example, in the context of a Capitalism vs. Communism debate, the term "selfish" would more generally describe people in the Capitalist camp, for whom selfless behavior is considered bad for shareholder value.
And I stand by my statement that only a troll (small "t") would believe that having beliefs in conflict with society makes one "Evil", although I'll admit the trolls may yet win that battle.
I hope I'm understanding you correctly to mean that opposing that which our beliefs identify as "Evil" is proper, even if not every means should be availed in the process. If so, then I agree with you. (The alternate interpretation would leave us all as just inanimate observers in this world.)
So, are you saying that thieves should not be allowed to lock their own doors? Or are you saying that you choose not to break into a thief's house, regardless of wether he has availed himself of door locks? The former case describes a "selfish" tipping of the playing field, while the latter simply displays moral fortitude while leaving a level playing field for others (theif or not) to lock their own doors as they see fit. If I understand your argument correctly, perhaps you really do want a level playing field.
Just a thought; is it possible that leaving one's door unlocked could reduce crime, by forcing residents of the community to address the causes of crime rather than just forcing the criminals down the street to the house with the weakest locks? I suspect that those who take the "us vs. them" mentality of always locking their house would soon find themselves fighting not only the criminal element, but also their neighbors with weaker locks whereas those seeking a root cause would find allies among their weak-locked neighbors as well as among the criminals who'd really rather be doing something else than breaking into homes and dodging police.
A point well stated and well taken. Also a point which is applicable from any point of view; wether good/evil are relative or absolute. Hmm.
Well, you do (for one), or at least you would if you thought things through.
Almost no one whom you'd consider to be "Evil" considers themselves to be evil. And they would likely tag some people as "Evil" even if you would disagree with their assessment. And almost no one would agree with you on what is good and what is evil completely. To do that, they'd have to be you.
Which means that if the world were to function by your own self-centered definition of good and evil, you'd be all alone.
Nature itself doesn't have a concept of good or evil. Which means regardless of wether we'd each want a level playing field, it's ultimately a level playing field on which we must play.
Now "society" is just one of the teams on this playing field; a big team, I'd admit, and one you're likely so familiar with as to believe that no others exist, but it's just a team nonetheless. As you point out, your society has created your society's laws and has it's own interest in seeing that people on any other team are placed at a disadvantage. After all, it has to protect those "rights" which your society holds so dearly.
Is it possible that members of some other society might have their own values, profess their own beliefs, and institute their own laws to protect the rights they hold so dear? Some of these might conflict with the values, beliefs, and laws of your society; does that make them "Evil"?
Only a troll would believe so.
Yet even at this point, we're making a judgment call saying that one kind of "society" can be more "good" than another in a way that a "non-society" could never approach. That's a widely held belief, but there's still a lot of time left on the clock. Maybe Douglas Adams was right and some day we'll decide that even the trees were a bad idea, and we should have all stayed in the oceans..."
If you continue to insist that the playing field be tipped selfishly in your favor, then you must admit that, over time, more and more people will become aligned against you in their own self interest. Each time you exclude someone by calling them (or their team/society) "Evil" you build a greater force which sees you the same way. And the stronger you hold your beliefs, the more motivate they are to hold theirs.
I could not possibly have said it better myself.
Those are not problems of the encryption, nor even of the system which employs it. The problems you mention result from trusting an untrustable contact.
It's not an IP address you're trying to conceal, (having an IP is not illegal) it's the activity occuring at that IP address which you're concerned with. Similarly, if you get your content only from and offer your content only to trustable people, then you don't have to worry about them linking your conduct with your identity.
The hard part is finding trustable contacts. Encryption does not help in this, but it is an effective tool for ensuring that information is only being disclosed to to whom you think you are disclosing it to.
Any, yes, stoopid people can shoot themselves in the foor even with an encrypted gun. Nothing can prevent that. Onlt the advice "Don't have stupid friends." seems of any help for that.
Well, a bit more than that. It's a referral system, which incorporates the enthusiasm of your audience to sell your products. So, if I wind up running one of the best sites for finding the metadata files, I might find myself making some cash to offset the cost of hosting the node.
Perhaps I could even offer a search engine to make it easier to find the metadata of content you might like. That would make my site more popular.
Why, I could even choose what metadata files I recommend or refuse to offer. That would give me some power and control; make me a player in the Music Industry. You wanna get popular, you talk to me.
Which is precisely why as soon as a market for such metadata (no content, remember) got going, the RIAA would claim copyright over the metadata files themselves, and start C&D'ing anyone who didn't distribute the "correct" (read: most profitable for them) metadata.
The RIAA is a Copyright industry. They are only interested in Control. Don't think for a moment they would allow that control to be taken from them just because the content can no longer be represented in .mp3 format.
So, does that give Microsoft ownership of the Lindows name? If I build my coffee shop next to your gas station to be "locationally similar", what control does that give you over my business?
Can you prevent me from printing my car a certain color in an attempt to be "chromatically" similar to yours?
How much other phonetic territory can Microsoft claim from having claimed the word "Windows"?
Spend some time thinking about the circumstances under which you might need a restore service; how often, how quickly, how to verify it works, etc. This may help to clarify the issues for you.
And as you've pointed out, it only solves a subset of the problems which would need to be solved.
Not exactly. There's a sliver of vulnerability there which could be exploited to create a full-knowledge, zero proof system.
To satisfy the voter, you must provide them with knowledge that ties their selection to a ballot, but you needn't provide them with evidence of that. This is the idea behind systems which, for example, show the voter a completed ballot behind a piece of glass. The voter can know that his votes are being recorded correctly, but has no way to prove to anyone else what was on the ballot.
Ignoring the other possible problems of such a system, it would be possible to show the voter a unique number which he could copy down and later compare against a complete record of all votes cast, their unique ID, and the contents of the ballot. The voter could claim a unique number associated with a vote for any candidate, but only the voter would know if he copied down the unique number for his own vote or someone elses.
Actually more than one. Such a system would allow anyone with both knowledge of the identity of the voter and knowledge of the unique identifier for the ballot to report on who voted for whom. It's not just the guy buying your vote who get's leverage, it's the guy wanting to retaliate against anyone voting a particular way.
Additionally, such a system need not be actually compromised by someone with both pieces of info; as long as the voter believes that there is hidden info betraying his "secret" ballot, the coersion can exist.
When you go long, your potential loss is limited, your potential profit is unlimited.
When you go short, your potential profit is limited, your potential loss is unlimited.
Here's one to watch for: watch for television advertisements where a product is pictured as reflected in a mirror, but the product name isn't mirror imaged. The eye will be drawn to the product name instinctively as the mind is saying "shouldn't that be backwards?"
Some people consider a Resume to be a sales tool; an advertisement for themselves; and in keeping with our long-standing tradition of skirting the truth when advertising, consider it more important to get noticed than to be truthful.
After all, the truthful ones who don't get noticed stand less of a chance at getting the job (or making the sale) than the untruthful ones which make it to the interview.
How does a tune get to be a "hit" without the help of a "society"? How does a novel get to be "best selling" without a "society" to purchase it? And it's actually quite trivial to crank-out a new OS if you don't have to worry about making it run on hardware some "society" built, or figure out how to convince "society" to run it.
It's like, if you own all the corn kernels and I own all the potting soil, we'll both go hungry. It's only when we work together (as a "society of two" if you will) that either of us has anything of value.
I think you are seriously underestimating the value of the infinite trivial contributions by people who've never been granted a book contract, or received air time, or gotten a patent issued in their name.
If so, then consider this: If you take the work you've created and never divulge it to "society":
Personally, I think you'd have a hard time creating anything without using the tools "society" has provided. What language were you going to write that book in again?
You give up too easily. If even one message gets through, you've at least found a system which is not firewalled-off from sending email. Root the system and install a custom SMTP agent and ignore the fact that it also runs a spamhole. At the very least, a system running a spamhole is a better target than your average box, because you know it can send mail.
The closest phrase from Eldred I could find was "The profit motive is the engine that ensures the progress of science." cited in a footnote supporting "The constitutional command, we have recognized, is that Congress, to the extent it enacts copyright laws at all, create a system that promote[s] the Progress of Science." and citing that phrase from American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 27 (SDNY 1992), aff d, 60 F. 3d 913 (CA2 1994).
Strangely, the word "profit" does not appear at all in Eldred outside of footnotes.
All in all, though, your summary is correct.
A flip comment, but also an excellent summary.
Darl seems to be arguing that copyright protection only exists when the author is claiming some financial incentive for the work. That view almost works, too, if you consider the government to belong to Big Business (TM).
I hope I'm not mis-quoting McBride when I summarize his open letter this way:
The GPL may well "...promote the advancement of Science and the Useful Arts...", but it does so outside of the profit motive. McBride interprets Eldred vs. Ashcroft as meaning that Congress has no power to offer a copyright protection except to people who are planning to get rich off it. Since people who write free software aren't planning to get (monetarily) rich from doing so, they don't get any copyright protection, and anyone who is planning to get rich (c.f. SCO) can steal their works with impunity.
What worries me is that it picks-up on a theme I've seen developing a lot lately, and is especially present in the U.S. Republican party of late: If you aren't a Major Corporation, you just Don't Matter. If you aren't funding the Party Coffers, you're part of the problem.
Think about electronic breathalizers, for example.
At least for the State of North Carolina, all the elements of an exploit are present:
It would be trivial for an insider to rig the machine such that if the name of the person to be tested matched some internal structure, the readout would always be two tenths below whatever the calibration sample read.
And with that kind of exculpatory evidence on your side, one could drink and drive to one's heart's content and never have to worry about a drunk-driving conviction: just demand a breathalizer test to "prove" your innocence and the case would never make it to court for a closer examination.
For the record, I would never use a gun to kill SCO.
You are mistaken if you believe a machine can be made secure by making the disk read-only.
Any machine where the code space is shared with the data space can be compromised, if the system can be induced to execute arbitrary (possibly memory-resident-only) data.
Even a system where the behavior (code) is hard-wired can be compromised if all the possible permutations of the behavior are not completely understood. There are always unforseen circumstances under which perfectly correct behavior can produce unintended consequences.
Then again, there's a difference between not provably perfect and downright incompetent.