What does the software do when it sees Presldont --> Goorge Washlngten because of character-recognition errors in the OCR software?
It does with the OCR exactly what it would do with a scanned barcode; it checks the Huffman distance between Presldont --> Goorge Washlngten and President --> George Washington (26/31) against the other possibility (President --> John Adams at 13/31) compares it against it's internal threshold and decides if the voter intent is clear enough to make a clear call on it's own, or if it needs to punt to a human interpreter. The difference is that the Huffman difference between the Code*39 representation of any two characters is a lot shorter than the full english text representation of any two candidates names. That's by design. Barcodes optimize things we want to have optimized when we're looking to compress information into a small space. That's not the purpose of a ballot. The purpose of a ballot is to capture voter intent, and any sort of encoding takes us away from that.
That still doesn't give us a solution for the problem of finding ourselves facing a ballot where the barcode and the english text disagree, except for making it harder to find out it happens when it happens.
...the narrowest a wide bar can appear to be is still wider by a considerable margin than the widest a narrow bar can appear...
That's not how barcodes work, at least not with UPC or Code*39 or any other barcode designed to work with standard ink and paper. Instead, the key measurement is the distince between the dark-to-light transitions and vice-versa. That way the code reads the same under varying conditions of humidity, ink viscosity, paper absorpidity, etc.
It's the same with regular paper ballots.
No it isn't, which was my point. If you're deriving voter intent from the english text, you have to check the english text on every ballot. Theres no 'spot-check', unless you're calling 100% a "spot-check". It's only when you've introduced a layer of indirection that you have to 'spot-check' to be sure you're deriving voter intent correctly.
Now, we could say that any system involving machine reading of ballots is substituting "a machine's interpretation of how the voter intended to vote" for "how the voter intended to vote" and therefore we need a spot check to be sure the machine is interpreting the ballots correctly. This is a problem related to machine interpretation of ballots (in whatever form) and does not directly address the problem introduced by barcodes. The problem introduced by the barcodes is that the machine is not looking at the same thing the voter looked at when the voter verified his own voter intent. Instead the machine is looking at something which is supposed to be the same thing voter looked at.
To disenfranchise a voter under the OVC system, one only needs to find a way to make the barcode differ from the english text, keep the voter from verifying the barcode on an uncompromised decoder, and hope that the batch doesn't get selected for a spot check. A clever vote rigger could cover all those bases easily.
However, if the voter intent is being derived from the english text, one has to find a way to make the english text read differently than it does. Full control over the box which prints the ballot buys you nothing. There's no decoder, so you can't compromise one. The only point of vulnerability left is the box which interprets the ballots (if you aren't hand counting them) which is a common vulnerability to any system using machine interpreters.
Pick your ballots truly randomly....
Cryptographers always see red flags whenever someone uses the word random because the randomness generator is a vulnerability of all but the most carefully designed cryptographic systems. Where does th
Actually, it matters a great deal whether or not the election is actually rigged.
I should clarify: if your goal is to rig an election then it matters a great deal that the election get rigged, preferably the way you wanted it to be rigged.
But no one promoting digital voting as enhancing democracy would admit to that.
But if your goal is to enhance democracy, then it doesn't really matter whether what you're offering enhances democracy or allows the election to be rigged. If it does not at least appear to preclude the possibility of rigging the election, if will be viewed as a failed solution.
We're not as interested in speed as we are in accuracy, so while scanning a barcode might be faster than some other method, we don't really care, because any method of tabulation (even hand counting) will be fast enough for the application.
Reading printed letters is slower and more prone to recognition errors.
But we're not reading letters, are we? We're not trying to OCR the difference between an e and an ê with 100% accuracy, we only need to tell the difference between President --> George Washington and President --> John Adams.
...you verify a certain percentage of ballots to make sure the barcode counts match the human-readable name counts.
The smaller that certain percentage is, the greater a chance that an error could slip through unnoticed.
Even if the voting machines themselves and the counting machines are both compromised, this check catches it.
Only if the spot-checking turns up a discrepency. If we spot-check 1% of the whole, there's a 99% chance that a compromised batch will get through unnoticed. But let's say a spot check does turn-up a discrepency. We know the batch where we caught the discrepency needs to have the machine-count thrown-out as untrustable in favor of the hand count. Now, what additional coults should we conclude we can no longer trust? Any vote counted by that tabulator? Any vote cast in that precinct? And vote using that version of the software? (why would you be using any other version? How many version of this stuff am I going to have to verify each election?) In the real world, a discrepency would either be 'shrugged-off' as a one-time failure, or would have you re-counting, by hand, every vote cast in that election. If you haven't conditioned people to expect a hand re-count, you'll never see one. and if you have, why bother with a machine count in the first place?
Note that you can check barcodes easily by having a template of the barcode for each name with the bars printed right at the edge of the paper.
Go re-read the specs. In the simple case, a ballot consists of a collection of races/issues. The barcode would be different for each combination of votes; If we voted for the same mayor but a different dog catcher, our barcodes would differ. The length of the barcode on the sample ballot implies a more complex case where the barcode also contains extra information, such as the sequence number of the ballot, the machine id which produced it, timestamp, voter language preference, etc. In any of these cases you'd expect to never see two identical bar codes.
As a final check...taken down and brought back to a central location.
Any discrepancy triggers an automatic recount of the election based on the human-readable printing on the ballots, since the machines have just proven themselves unreliable.
...and, after barcodes and printers and scanning and spot checks and pulling multiple machines off-line from each precinct and the farce of a parallel ballot were back to counting human readable votes by hand again.
You know, honey, you could have just stopped and asked for directions.
The Open Voting Consortium solution is a bit skimpy
on details, so I'll have to go by published statements, with deference to your understanding
of the system, of course.
For example,the bar code to human text is validated in four ways.
This makes the assumption that the human text and barcode match. What would be the response when presented with a ballot where the barcode and text did not match? Simply presuming that it wll never happen is short-sighted. If such a system is truly open source, it would be trivial to produce something which looks like a real ballot but contains such an arbitrary flaw. We could,
as a counter, require an out-of-context check (special paper, special ink, etc) at increased complexity and cost....
Second, any voter can swipe the bar code on an independent stand-alone machine for playback before casting the vote.
We can presume most people would not carry a barcode reader to the voting booth with them, which would represent an opportunity for exploitation, but let's presume they did. Reading-back the barcode presumably only gives me the number. 5124512451245124512451245124512451245124 But the vote I cast was not for a number, it was for a person. How am I (Joe Average Voter) supposed to make the translation between the selection of candidates I voted for and the encoded representation in the number. Unless I can perform such a decoding in my head, I have to trust that the system has not been compromised.
Now, I could program my own barcode reader to also decode the number back into a ballot, but now we've introduced complexity and with it, opportunity for exploit. How would a truly honest election official handle the situation where a voter presents a ballot which reads (text) for Candidate A, and scans (on the precinct-supplied verifier) for Candidate A but scans (of the voter-provided verifier) for Candidate B? We could presume that the voter-supplied equipment is faulty, but a corrupt election official who had tampered with the precinct-supplied scanner would surely say the same thing, and probably have an accomplice with his own compromised scanner on hand for back-up.
It's also not clear from the provided documentation if the information within the barcode represents only the information on the ballot, or if other unaccounted-for information is also included. Either possibility could be leveraged into an exploit by itself.
Third, Since the voter does not have to cast the ballot they can leave the poll with the completed but not cast ballot.
There's a minor DOS (Denial Of Service) exploit waiting to happen.
Any third party outside the poll can swipe the barcode and vaidate...
...or invalidate...
...it for the voter.
Fourth, at the end of the day the every single bar code is swiped by a human. The humans can also see the plain text of the ballot they are swiping. Thus they can validate as many ballots as they choose to.
This ignores human nature. Most people given the opportunity to use either the 'stare and compare, stack and add' count or the machine count will choose the machine count. Having the paper ballots as a backup only helps if the paper ballot is considered authoritative. And if you're planning to have the paper ballot be authoratitive, have any other count available only introduces the possibility of controversy, for the price of increased complexity.
All of your questions have been debated at length by many voting system experts. Many in fact had simmilar questions or complaints when they first examined the system. But those who stick around long enough to listen and lear, find out why those features exists. It really is very well though out.
Would you care to offer a response, or a link to the response by others? Some of us well-educated, hyper-intelligent, tech-toting slashdotters are willing to listen and learn.
Then again, some of us are not. Some people really do demand to see the empty ballot box before voting starts, and dedicate a whole day watching to be sure each person puts only one piece of paper in the box. And then they stick around to see the paper come out of the box and get sorted into piles. You might be able to convince me that the source code doesn't contain any exploits or back doors, but you won't be able to convince them. And more likely than not, the more I learn about the system, the more likely I am to think that I know how to exploit it (whether it's actually exploitable or not) and as long as I think it's exploitable, I won't trust it.
You make an excellent point here, but you don't make it strongly enough.
The elections not only have to be fool-proof, but fool-accountable too, so that the common voter can clearly understand, and verify the process of voting. That alone means no electronic voting, because 99% of the voters don't understand it, and even if they do, they can't verify the process.
The Diebolds and the Mexico's of the world are just now starting to understand this: It doesn't matter if the voting machine actually rigs the vote or not, if there's a possibility that the voting machine could have allowed the vote to be rigged, people with an axe to grind are going to grind it.
Diebold (and digital voting advovcates like them) will always hide behind the shield of "no one has ever proven that the election was rigged" while ignoring the damage that "no one has ever proven that the election wasn't rigged" does to the entire election process.
Digital voting is an assault on democracy. It really is as simple as that.
The Open Voting Consortium advocates the use of their Open Voting Solution as an answer to Black Box Voting, and I suspect many Slashdotters might sympathize with this approach. But I would advocate caution. While certainly better than any Diebold offering, the solution they advocate suffers from several problems.
Why the barcode?The voter intent is rendered in two seperate versions: the Native Language version (President ---> George Washington) and the barcode version. This raises the question: which one is authoritative? If a ballot should turn-up which lists the voter intent inconsistently, that ballot becomes invalid, as does the sanity of the machine and every vote cast upon it. Additionally, who knows what other information is contained in that barcode? We could argue that if the barcode says something different than the printed words, it would be exposed when read-back by the scanning-station, unless that machine has been compromised as well.
Why the survelliance? Does anyone else think it a bad idea to have anything reading the ballots before the election closes? We already get enough complaints about exit polls and pundits 'calling' the election before the polls close, so why do we go out of the way to allow machines to see how we're voting before we've even cast the ballot?
And the strange thing (to me) is that it's all unnecessary:
Forget the barcode. Print the voter intent in "plain english" and let the computers key-off of that for counting. Computerized OCR can be as accurate as barcode reading if the printing conditions are controlled and the computer knows what it's looking for. If we agree beforehand on standardized meanings for each possible voter intent across several languages and representations (including braille) then there's no need to 'translate it back'.
Forget the 'second box'. There should only be one way to 'cast a vote'; the 'device' accumulating the counts should be openly observable, analog (only idiots expect infallible analog behavior out of digital devices), and singular. If you create a situation where there are two (or more) places where the count is being kept, you create a situation where one of the counts is going to be ignored.
And, best of all, the solution (pen and paper, boxes and X's) has already been developed. There's no need to raise $1.5 Million to fund the development of this solution, or spend my nights in the run-up to the election going over the source code looking for vulnerabilities when I should be considering real issues.
Only under the pressure of regulators cracking down on them did they back off from this unwarranted charge.
Damned Federal Regulators! Just once I'd like to see a Liberitarian Administration in power that would once-and-for-all allow our precious Corporations the Freedom to conduct their business without the constant threat of Federal Regulators stepping in.
Then we'd see an Internet where I could watch Home Shopping Network in High Definition Video without having to worry that all the pipes will get filled-up by miscreants making free phone calls over the Internet, or posting to their silly little left wing communist hippie blogs.
How come slashdot still doesn't support the <SARCASM> tag?
I saw no such "fallacious" assertion on the part of the interviewer, and I think Stallman's dismissal of a (IMHO) reasonable, pertinent question spoke volumes of his opinion of paid developers.
Let's go back to the original interviewer question:
What kind of an economic model does an entrepreneur look at when he starts out with free software?
The interviewer is starting with the following assumptions:
That entrepreneurs working with free software make up a significant segment of the free software community.
That the economic model is a significant model when an entrepreneur becomes involved in free software.
If we wanted to keep the form of the question the same, but change topics, we could imagine an interviewer asking a famous sports star: "What kind of toothpick does a lumberjack use when he watches football on Friday night?"
Stallman's reply would fit either:
RMS: I want to ask you why that question is worth asking.
Stallman goes on to assert that most free software is not being developed by people being paid to do so. I'd agree. Stallman doesn't assert, but I will, that even those who are looking at free software for the explicit purpose of making money quickly learn that the economic model for doing so will be among the least significant models for doing so.
I don't have as much experience with free software as the Professor does, having been into it for only a decade and a half myself, but I can tell you what I do, and why I eventually came to agree with Stallman.
I'm what most people would regard as a full-time free software developer, in that I spend 40 hours (or so) a week developing free software. It's a 9 to 5 (well, more like 8 to 4:30) job for me. It has been my primary job function for more than the past ten years.
My job description, however, does not include developing free software. Rather, my job description describes me as a senior software engineer, one of a team of programmers who develop proprietary, closed-source software for an embedded, proprietaary hardware platform.
My salary is paid from the proceeds of selling that closed source software. I am not a superstar programmer, but my salary is in-line with what other senior programmers with more than a decade of experience make in this part of the country.
My job is to provide the tools the other members of the team need in order to produce innovative, high-quality products within the timeframe our customers demand.
I am under no mandate to use free software; my bosses don't care, my workmates don't care, our investors don't care, our customers don't care. What they do care about is:
that the tools be cost effective,
that they be flexible-enough to allow us to spin on a dime when the customers ask/need us to,
that they not lock our business processes into a costly, proprietary solution,
that they not force us to upgrade against our will, needs, or schedule,
that they perform exactly as we need them to,
that they be fixable by us, extensible by us, modifiable by us, etc.
The hard part of software development is not figuring out how to make the computer perform a given function. It's in figuring out that the computer needs to perform a given function. That's what our customers pay us to do for the proprietary product we produce. That's what my boss pays me to do for the tools I provide.
My job typically involves working with the other programmers to figure out how to build, test, or deliver new functionality for our proprietary product. We typically use free software as the basis for custom built, in-house tools, which in a nutshell allows us to build things no one else can build, test our prototypes while other organizations are stil
In other words, software developers aught not be paid for their efforts; it should be something they freely contribute to some global software collective. Software developers should instead find another way to make a living.
Um. those are your words, not his. RMS is pointing out that not everyone who works on free software makes money from doing so. Some people do get paid for the specific task of writing free software (it's in their job description, so to speak) but many others do so without direct compensation. RMS is responding to the interviewers fallicious assertion (that because not everyone gets paid to develop free software, there can exist no reason to develop it by pointing out the falsity of the argument.
The licensing agreements are generally about the conditions under which you are allowed to play the music or make and distribute copies of the music, not the conditions under which you are allowed to simply listen.
But copyright owners aren't granted all the rights the DRM stack provides for them. They are granted a limited set of rights (concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc) but only for a limited time and not in conflict with fair use.
However, it doesn't change my overall argument.
Seems like your overall argument is "if we agree to X then we should X, and if we aren't willing to X, then we shouldn't agree to X." where X is a DRM-imposed restriction. If I've pharaphrased you correctly (my apologies if I haven't) I can see how some people would agree.
From the other point of view, however, I never agreed to grant to the copyright owner all the rights which a DRM solution can provide. I agreed only to those limited set of rights (concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc) for a limited time, and not in conflict with fair use.
Is it beyond bounds to ask that copyright owners also adhere to your overall philosophy: If they agree to fix their work in tangible form in exchange for a limited set of rights concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc. for a limited time, and not in conflict with fair use, then they should do so. And if they don't agree to the limited copy right, then they shouldn't fix their work in tangible form, nor expect us to abide by our side of the agreement if they won't abide by theirs.
It's the rub most people don't get. If author A sells a copy of his work to purchaser B, under whatever restrictions they privately agree, I am a party to the transaction even if I am neither author A nor purchaser B. I become a party, as a member of the public, as soon as the Work is fixed in Tangible Form. I benefit only to the extent that Copyright allows, but I can demand to benefit to the limit of those extents fully.
If we want to argue that we aren't compensating our Authors enough under the current Copyright agreements, that perhaps we owe them more than a life-plus-ninety-years of exclusivity and the ability to outlaw functionality in every technological device which might be capable of handling a copy of their work, in exchange for a chance to rent restricted, temporary access to the Tangible Form of their work, then let's make that argument up-front. If we want to suggest that there should be one class of persons who are granted access to the Work, and a second class who are denied in perpetuity, then let's say that up-front and have a discussion.
I might remind you that this discussion has been had before. Copyright was originally (British law) an exclusive Right, granted by the King, iin Perpetuity, and intended to ensure certain information (like, the actual words of the Bible) was maintained under the necessary restrictions. Dang that Gutenberg, and his Scribe Guild circumventing movable type.
If you don't want to abide by the terms of the agreement, then don't listen to the music, don't watch the video, and don't play with the software. It's not that difficult to understand.
Might I suggest you re-read what you have written, and see if it stands-up to your own scrutiny?
You seem to be suggesting that the author of a piece of music can insist that I agree to his/her terms in order to be rightly entitled to listen to his/her music. Maybe this is exactly what you meant to write. But I shudder to imagine a world like this.
In such a world, could I, as a gardener, deny you the right to look at flowers I've grown? What about flowers polinated from flowers I've grown?
Could I deny you the right to even look at my wife? What about my kids?
Clearly I could, as the author of a book, demand that you pay me before reading my book. Could I also demand you not speak about the ideas in the book? Could I demand payment from anyone who reads over your shoulder? From their childern? Or yours?
Let's be clear, with your statement wraping my right to listen in terms, we've already stepped beyond the bounds of what the law supports, so we're just talking about what would be considered morally right under the system you've suggested.
I'd suggest such a system is unworkable as a practical matter, even if it were not unimaginable as a practical matter.
How freaking self-centered does a person have to be to believe that their rights to pirate music are more relevant than the rights of the people who actually own the music?
Um...just exactly where do you think the "ownership" part of owning the music comes from? If the artist wants complete control of "their" music, they can keep it in their own head. The world is a poorer place if they do, so some of us (society in general, you and I included) have agreed to act like they do own their music, have agreed to grant them a copy right for limited times in exchange for their sharing their music.
Yes, an author/artist is damaged (and so are we) every time some "pirate" violates that agreement. That's why we have laws, and courts, and judges, etc. etc. But the author/artists actions amount to no better than piracy when they violate the agreement themselves by trying to claim more rights than we (society in general, you and I included) have agreed to grant them.
Which is what DRM does, whether intentional or not.
We might agree that I can't make a copy of a song you wrote without your permission. And we think that because DRM restricts me from making a copy of a song you own copy right to (and by extention, restricts me from making a copy of a song you own copy right to without your permission) that it's doing a good thing. But DRM manages restrictions (which it does have a model for) instead of rights (which it does not have a model for). Which means if I then negotiate an agreement with you whereby I am allowed to make a copy of a song you own copy right to, DRM will still restricts me from doing so.
Some of us don't have this fixation on the thought that software and music should be free. Regardless of what you think, its currently not, right or wrong. Piracy of software and music is still piracy and still illegal.
Well-intentioned thoughts, clearly. I doubt the comment was intended to be as closed-minded as it came across.
There aren't too many people in the camp that claims information (software, music, whatever) should be locked up forever, certainly less than there are even among the "everything free today" loonies. And the law (internationally under Berne and within the U.S. specifically) is clear on this point. Infringing a copyright is illegal, but not infringing a copyright is not.
Every DRM system in use today fails to grasp that distinction, and instead seeks to prevent copying or deter public exibition or manage rights without regard to whether the copying or public exibition actually infringe any copyright.
And while an author might assert all activities violate her copy rights to her own work, in most jurisdiction such an assertion clearly only holds for a limited time (the first hundred years or so) and for eternity thereafter the assertion is laughable to all. A DRM system, however, understands no such limits, and will continue to assert the author's right even when no such right exists under law.
In this respect at least, the form of the assertion is flawed. Saying "Piracy of software and music is still piracy and still illegal" without acknowledging the limits of copyright is about as wrong as declaring apples to be inedible simple because they have yet to ripen.
I've seen many good suggestions from people who can imagine their own favorite solution, but I haven't yet heard from anyone who has actually done this.
Edison's point, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, is fully applicable here. A rod through the middle seems like a simple, fairly intuitive solution until you actually start to build it.
You can't use a fluid support system, like ropes or chains, because if the rod swings at all the swinging motion is transferred to the disks and stresses them at the point (spindle mount) in a fashion completely foreign to their design specs. The mounting system must be rigid.
If you're planning to slide the disks along the rod to put them on or take them off, each disk is wearing it's spindle along a single point of contact. You'll need an interface to isolate the disk from the rod. An improvement would be to use this spacer to also isolate each disk from it's neighbor.
You might be able to make the support rod arbitrarily long, but the longer it gets, the more weight the rod must support, the heavier it becomes for whoever is expected to hold one end up as a disk is taken off or put on. They'll also need enough 'dead' length on the rod for whatever they're using to support it; that's one hand width if they're doing this by hand. Plus room enough to stand. On both ends...
There is also the problem of how to get a disk off if you need one from the center.
The maximum diameter of the spindle is limited by the hole in the CD/DVD and further limited by the spindle isolator. Longer rods make for more efficient use of space, but quickly become unwieldy. Support the rod in the middle, and you have an extra support you need to keep moving.
And, once you actually build it, you (re)discover what capacitance engineers and hard disk designers have known for years; this configuration (insulating surface seperated by an air gap) is a particulate magnet whenever both motion and particles are present. Of course, we could retrofit this solution into a multimillion dollar clean room to solve the problem....
And don't even get me started on common mode failures. Did you ever buy a spindle of CDR's and find you couldn't get any of them from that spindle to burn properly? Have you ever dropped a spindle of CDR's and tried to burn them afterwords? Or looked at the mount under magnification afterwords?
And don't even get me started on what "Family Values" and "Personal Responsibility" relly mean.
Family Values:
"My family is important to me. Maybe not the most important thing in the world, but it's still very important to me. By family I mean my grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, my wife, my kids, and (if they had any) their children, etc. And by important I mean at the very least more important than spending time with my buddies drinking, or my golf swing. I make sure my family is well fed, well educated, safe, and happy, because those things are important to them, so they're important to me."
"Your family, on the other hand, is not important to me, at least not as important to me as my own family is. Your family is your own Personal Responsibility (see below) just like my family is mine. I'm not too worried if the school your kid goes to crumbles, so long as I can get my voucher to send my kid to a good school. And if that means he gets a better shot at college (Affirmative action? Come on...) then that's just the way things go, because we do live in a meritocracy and it's all just good and right that the kids who are successful get into the best colleges. We don't want to go wasting our tax dollars putting slackers through college, now do we?"
Personal Responsibility:
"I'm not a slacker. I get up and work every day. I pay my bills. And quite frankly I'm offended at anyone who thinks that this world somehow owes them a living. It's simple common sense that other people should share the same responsibility for their own lives that I assume for mine."
"If you aren't making enough to pay your bills, get a better job. If you aren't educated enough to get a better job, quit and go back to school. If you can't afford to quit, like because you're already not paying your bills, take classes on line. No broadband, eh? Well why the hell didn't your parents send you to a better school in the first place? That was their responsibility."
"Look, the Constitution (or some other famous document that you're not supposed to argue with, lest you be called unAmerican) says that all men are created equal. That means that we both had an equal shot to get into Harvard, own a football team, etc. It's a real shame that you weren't up to the challenge like the rest of us successful people, but you know where would this world be if we didn't allow the Free (not Libre') Market to sort out the misfits and the queers for us?"
Do you remember when Hillary Clinton was talking-up the "It take a village...to raise a Child" book and the Conservative Right countered with "No, it takes a Parent to raise a child." Very clear demonstration of this split. Many on the Conservative Right think that these things (education among them, but more generally everything from high speed internet access to quality health care) are things which individuals should be providing for themselves, rather than relying on some sort of government provided program paid for at taxpayer expense. It's an excellent example of the blindness the group seems to suffer. Not, I'll admit, as good an example as Bush recently gave us himself, at a press conference, on what he pointed out was an overcast day, where he couldn't imagine why anyone but a misfit (or queer) might be wearing sunglasses, and made a point as such to the legally blind reporter posing a question.
Or (to bring it back on topic) when he seems unable to understand why anyone who wasn't engaged in terrorism would possibly object to having his phone calling records tapped and in the posession of the President of the United States.
Right. And right now about the only people with "freedom isn't free" ribbon bumper stickers are people who support Bush.
It's a great line: "freedom isn't free" It's got such a great ring to it most people don't realize it's completely false.
Freedom is free. It's Liberty which is not.
Freedom is granted to every living thing. Both the bird in a tree and the bird in a cage are free to fly as far as their wings will carry them. One the one in the cage lacks is Liberty. And it lacks that Liberty because we have taken it away.
This administration has made a partcularly profitable joke out of mixing up freedom and liberty to confuse people. Orwell would have recognised it as thought control by destroying the language. If Freedom and Liberty are used interchangably, neither retains it's meaning; they both become, literally, unthinkable.
Those things piss me off royally, because this administration has done more to make me less free than any other, and it just keeps getting worse.
This is not correct. This administration has neither made you more free nor less free, because your freedom is not under their control. They're just claiming credit (and apparently in your case they've been effective) for something they didn't do. But your liberties are. And it is correct to say that your civil liberties are being impacted.
Watch the language. In other words listen. There's some very revealing words being used.
You'll hear quotes about "Coaltion Casualties" (that's our side, right?) and "Insurgent Casualties" (that's their side, right?).. But even Fox News will tell you about that "other" force in Iraq: the "Civilian Casualties" (whose side is that? Wait a second, I'm a civilian.).
They won't support any increase to the minimum wage because that would be an infringement on our Freedom to work as cheaply as we might want to, or our Freedom to hire people on the cheap.
And don't even get me started on what "Family Values" and "Personal Responsibility" relly mean.
If American voters aren't happy with his decision they can always vote him out.
I must point out the obvious: Anyone who contemplates running for office in opposition to the current administration will be doing so under the survelliance of the current administration. This has been true since the program began.
And one might suspect that part of the reason this administration doesn't want anyone from the Justice Department investigating this program is because anyone from the Justice Department who does investigate this program may discover that they, too, have been under the survelliance of this administration.
Total Information Awareness is a double-edged sword: when you gain knowledge of everything, you lose the right to claim plausible deniability.
I wonder if Mr. Bush has thought this through completely: the next time something bad (like a terrorist attack) happens, someone is bound to start asking why, even with all the privacy invasion, they couldn't spot it coming.
...would be laying down fiber optic lines that also provide internet at speeds...
Almost right, but completely wrong.
It's not internet which those fibers (or whatever) will be providing, it's IMS.
As a quick intro, IMS or IP Multimedia Subsystem encapsulates other services, like Video, Telephony, and Internet into services which the provider can offer, control, and charge for.
So while the line going into your house may change from supporting a maximum of 384Kbps to gigEther, the channel available for you to use for internet doesn't have to change at all. Unless you pay to change it.
Understand what this means. You'll never be able to claim that the carrier is "blocking" or "slowing-down" your internet access, and they can claim true-to-their-word that they aren't infringing network neutrality. It's just that if you want to do anything that requires more bandwidth than you're getting today, you'd better have a fat wallet, no matter how fat the pipe into your home is.
Kill off a couple billion, and we'll be good to go for a while.
With the current population doubling time somewhere between 20 and 50 years, an event which kills-off half the global population, say 3 Billion people, would buy us, maybe, 50 years.
Think about that, and you'll understand the scope of the problem.
I'd like to point out that while Linux users *could* buy a copy of Windows and Office, people with disabilities can't choose not to have them.
Define "disabilitiy".
Take your time. It's often very hard for people who think they aren't to put into words just exactly what one is.
Could I define someone as disabled because they do not choose to see our point-of-view?
Being blind, for example, only affects those people who choose to engage in activities for which good eyesight is needed. Since life does not guarantee participation in those activities to anyone, one could hardly list a desire to participate as a 'disability'. Some would define it this way.
Life dealt each of us a hand. Others may label us as 'disabled', but that generally means they wouldn't want to have been dealt the hand we were dealt. Most people understand and accept the hand they were dealt and strive to make the best of it. (Some don't, but I sense they'd complain no matter what hand they were dealt.) For the rest of us, "disabled" is a lable we apply to others for our own purposes. We might label a person as "disabled" as a reminder to ourselves that "there, but for the grace of God, go I".
If we're going to make any use of that "disabled" label at all, we have to start by accepting that to the extent that life has made us differently-abled, we are all "disabled". If we're going to use "disabled" as anything more than a derogatory, or worse, a marketing statement, then "disabled" cannot be about what someone else can or cannot do; it must be about the choices we make and the choices we are willing to let others make in pursuit of their own abilities.
I made the choice to not buy/not use Windows. Does that make me weak, or strong? Microsoft made the choice to not support the OpenDoc format, and through their choice, chose to disown everyone who made the choice I made. Does that make them weak, or strong?
I made the choice to pursue a solution which was right for me. They made the choice to enslave those who do not accept the choices made for them.
A statement like "they could always just choose to buy our product" is no better than saying "You know, you wouldn't have to suffer with being blind if you just give up and die today.".
[D]oes OpenOffice or whatever apps are currently available that use the OpenDoc format has the same level of help for people with disabilities as Office?
Does Microsoft Office (the only application which fully supports the Microsoft Office format) offer the same level of help for people without Microsoft Office on their machine as OpenDoc apps do?? Do you really think this world (or Mass. even) has more "people with disabilities" than it has "people without Microsoft Office"?
Most people who are not completely blinded by their own addiction to Microsoft will honestly say "no".
You're living in the here and now. In ten years or so, even you will be disabled when it comes to reading Microsoft Office documents produced in the current version of Microsoft Office unless those documents have been converted to whatever new format Microsoft will be pushing then.
Ten years ago, your computer was (likely) running Win95 (because Win98 won't be available for another two years yet). Documents produced in 1996 by whatever version of Word Microsoft was pushing back then might still be mostly readable in the current version. But if they aren't, good luck finding a copy of the OS and a copy of the application which created them to use.
Now think about 20 years ago. 50 years? We're not talking about some school-kid's homework, we're talking about Public Records which belong to the residents of Mass. in 2106 as much as the Mass. Constitution belongs to the residents of the Commonwealth today.
Seriously, though, doesn't Microsoft realize that significant number of users aren't going to go out and suddenly buy Windows? Sure, most (half?) will, but the rest will go hunting for a truly free (read: no-cost) alternative until a hack comes out.
In a contest between you and they, I'd suspect Microsoft is in the better position to understand the nature of the addiction they have created. And I'd feel safe saying that even if you yourself had succeeded in completely breaking your addiction to Windows, which I suspect you haven't.
Most people, most businesses are so hopelessly addicted to Windows that they literally can't even conceptualize their own survival without it. I'm always amused when I read the latest rant about a Windows vulnerability on an IE-only site, or read about some program manager publishing their "Linux Strategy" document as a PowerPoint chart.
Think of all the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Office documents the average business has, or the potential millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and business intelligence those documents represent.
Now, even if they have the skill and determination to propose leaving Windows behind, think of the complexity of dealing with a customer base which might not be as skilled, or determined.
I suspect we may see a lot of people get pissed-off at Microsoft over this, temporarily. Then, as soon as they realize just how screwed they've allowed themselves to be, it's "how do I get a legitimate license again?"
Slashdot Mirror
It does with the OCR exactly what it would do with a scanned barcode; it checks the Huffman distance between Presldont --> Goorge Washlngten and President --> George Washington (26/31) against the other possibility (President --> John Adams at 13/31) compares it against it's internal threshold and decides if the voter intent is clear enough to make a clear call on it's own, or if it needs to punt to a human interpreter. The difference is that the Huffman difference between the Code*39 representation of any two characters is a lot shorter than the full english text representation of any two candidates names. That's by design. Barcodes optimize things we want to have optimized when we're looking to compress information into a small space. That's not the purpose of a ballot. The purpose of a ballot is to capture voter intent, and any sort of encoding takes us away from that.
That still doesn't give us a solution for the problem of finding ourselves facing a ballot where the barcode and the english text disagree, except for making it harder to find out it happens when it happens.
That's not how barcodes work, at least not with UPC or Code*39 or any other barcode designed to work with standard ink and paper. Instead, the key measurement is the distince between the dark-to-light transitions and vice-versa. That way the code reads the same under varying conditions of humidity, ink viscosity, paper absorpidity, etc.
No it isn't, which was my point. If you're deriving voter intent from the english text, you have to check the english text on every ballot. Theres no 'spot-check', unless you're calling 100% a "spot-check". It's only when you've introduced a layer of indirection that you have to 'spot-check' to be sure you're deriving voter intent correctly.
Now, we could say that any system involving machine reading of ballots is substituting "a machine's interpretation of how the voter intended to vote" for "how the voter intended to vote" and therefore we need a spot check to be sure the machine is interpreting the ballots correctly. This is a problem related to machine interpretation of ballots (in whatever form) and does not directly address the problem introduced by barcodes. The problem introduced by the barcodes is that the machine is not looking at the same thing the voter looked at when the voter verified his own voter intent. Instead the machine is looking at something which is supposed to be the same thing voter looked at.
To disenfranchise a voter under the OVC system, one only needs to find a way to make the barcode differ from the english text, keep the voter from verifying the barcode on an uncompromised decoder, and hope that the batch doesn't get selected for a spot check. A clever vote rigger could cover all those bases easily.
However, if the voter intent is being derived from the english text, one has to find a way to make the english text read differently than it does. Full control over the box which prints the ballot buys you nothing. There's no decoder, so you can't compromise one. The only point of vulnerability left is the box which interprets the ballots (if you aren't hand counting them) which is a common vulnerability to any system using machine interpreters.
Cryptographers always see red flags whenever someone uses the word random because the randomness generator is a vulnerability of all but the most carefully designed cryptographic systems. Where does th
I should clarify: if your goal is to rig an election then it matters a great deal that the election get rigged, preferably the way you wanted it to be rigged.
But no one promoting digital voting as enhancing democracy would admit to that.
But if your goal is to enhance democracy, then it doesn't really matter whether what you're offering enhances democracy or allows the election to be rigged. If it does not at least appear to preclude the possibility of rigging the election, if will be viewed as a failed solution.
We're not as interested in speed as we are in accuracy, so while scanning a barcode might be faster than some other method, we don't really care, because any method of tabulation (even hand counting) will be fast enough for the application.
But we're not reading letters, are we? We're not trying to OCR the difference between an e and an ê with 100% accuracy, we only need to tell the difference between President --> George Washington and President --> John Adams.
The smaller that certain percentage is, the greater a chance that an error could slip through unnoticed.
Only if the spot-checking turns up a discrepency. If we spot-check 1% of the whole, there's a 99% chance that a compromised batch will get through unnoticed. But let's say a spot check does turn-up a discrepency. We know the batch where we caught the discrepency needs to have the machine-count thrown-out as untrustable in favor of the hand count. Now, what additional coults should we conclude we can no longer trust? Any vote counted by that tabulator? Any vote cast in that precinct? And vote using that version of the software? (why would you be using any other version? How many version of this stuff am I going to have to verify each election?) In the real world, a discrepency would either be 'shrugged-off' as a one-time failure, or would have you re-counting, by hand, every vote cast in that election. If you haven't conditioned people to expect a hand re-count, you'll never see one. and if you have, why bother with a machine count in the first place?
Go re-read the specs. In the simple case, a ballot consists of a collection of races/issues. The barcode would be different for each combination of votes; If we voted for the same mayor but a different dog catcher, our barcodes would differ. The length of the barcode on the sample ballot implies a more complex case where the barcode also contains extra information, such as the sequence number of the ballot, the machine id which produced it, timestamp, voter language preference, etc. In any of these cases you'd expect to never see two identical bar codes.
if((time_of_day > "7:00am") && (uptime < "60min") ;& (ballot_count < 1000) {
rig_vote=false;
}else{
rig_vote=true;
}
You know, honey, you could have just stopped and asked for directions.
I'll also be referencing the sample ballot at http://user.it.uu.se/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jan/ballot.py in this response.
This makes the assumption that the human text and barcode match. What would be the response when presented with a ballot where the barcode and text did not match? Simply presuming that it wll never happen is short-sighted. If such a system is truly open source, it would be trivial to produce something which looks like a real ballot but contains such an arbitrary flaw. We could, as a counter, require an out-of-context check (special paper, special ink, etc) at increased complexity and cost....
We can presume most people would not carry a barcode reader to the voting booth with them, which would represent an opportunity for exploitation, but let's presume they did. Reading-back the barcode presumably only gives me the number. 5124512451245124512451245124512451245124 But the vote I cast was not for a number, it was for a person. How am I (Joe Average Voter) supposed to make the translation between the selection of candidates I voted for and the encoded representation in the number. Unless I can perform such a decoding in my head, I have to trust that the system has not been compromised.
Now, I could program my own barcode reader to also decode the number back into a ballot, but now we've introduced complexity and with it, opportunity for exploit. How would a truly honest election official handle the situation where a voter presents a ballot which reads (text) for Candidate A, and scans (on the precinct-supplied verifier) for Candidate A but scans (of the voter-provided verifier) for Candidate B? We could presume that the voter-supplied equipment is faulty, but a corrupt election official who had tampered with the precinct-supplied scanner would surely say the same thing, and probably have an accomplice with his own compromised scanner on hand for back-up.
It's also not clear from the provided documentation if the information within the barcode represents only the information on the ballot, or if other unaccounted-for information is also included. Either possibility could be leveraged into an exploit by itself.
There's a minor DOS (Denial Of Service) exploit waiting to happen.
This ignores human nature. Most people given the opportunity to use either the 'stare and compare, stack and add' count or the machine count will choose the machine count. Having the paper ballots as a backup only helps if the paper ballot is considered authoritative. And if you're planning to have the paper ballot be authoratitive, have any other count available only introduces the possibility of controversy, for the price of increased complexity.
But they were all won by Democrats, it's just that the rigged machines said they were won by Republicans... :|
We can both maintain a poker-face, and neither of us will win.
Would you care to offer a response, or a link to the response by others? Some of us well-educated, hyper-intelligent, tech-toting slashdotters are willing to listen and learn.
Then again, some of us are not. Some people really do demand to see the empty ballot box before voting starts, and dedicate a whole day watching to be sure each person puts only one piece of paper in the box. And then they stick around to see the paper come out of the box and get sorted into piles. You might be able to convince me that the source code doesn't contain any exploits or back doors, but you won't be able to convince them. And more likely than not, the more I learn about the system, the more likely I am to think that I know how to exploit it (whether it's actually exploitable or not) and as long as I think it's exploitable, I won't trust it.
The Diebolds and the Mexico's of the world are just now starting to understand this: It doesn't matter if the voting machine actually rigs the vote or not, if there's a possibility that the voting machine could have allowed the vote to be rigged, people with an axe to grind are going to grind it.
Diebold (and digital voting advovcates like them) will always hide behind the shield of "no one has ever proven that the election was rigged" while ignoring the damage that "no one has ever proven that the election wasn't rigged" does to the entire election process.
Digital voting is an assault on democracy. It really is as simple as that.
Visit their mock-up at http://user.it.uu.se/%7ejan/voting-project/ballot2 .html and the result of your balloting as I walk you through the vulnerabilities.
And the strange thing (to me) is that it's all unnecessary:
And, best of all, the solution (pen and paper, boxes and X's) has already been developed. There's no need to raise $1.5 Million to fund the development of this solution, or spend my nights in the run-up to the election going over the source code looking for vulnerabilities when I should be considering real issues.
Damned Federal Regulators! Just once I'd like to see a Liberitarian Administration in power that would once-and-for-all allow our precious Corporations the Freedom to conduct their business without the constant threat of Federal Regulators stepping in.
Then we'd see an Internet where I could watch Home Shopping Network in High Definition Video without having to worry that all the pipes will get filled-up by miscreants making free phone calls over the Internet, or posting to their silly little left wing communist hippie blogs.
How come slashdot still doesn't support the <SARCASM> tag?
Let's go back to the original interviewer question:
The interviewer is starting with the following assumptions:
If we wanted to keep the form of the question the same, but change topics, we could imagine an interviewer asking a famous sports star: "What kind of toothpick does a lumberjack use when he watches football on Friday night?"
Stallman's reply would fit either:
Stallman goes on to assert that most free software is not being developed by people being paid to do so. I'd agree. Stallman doesn't assert, but I will, that even those who are looking at free software for the explicit purpose of making money quickly learn that the economic model for doing so will be among the least significant models for doing so.
I don't have as much experience with free software as the Professor does, having been into it for only a decade and a half myself, but I can tell you what I do, and why I eventually came to agree with Stallman.
I am under no mandate to use free software; my bosses don't care, my workmates don't care, our investors don't care, our customers don't care. What they do care about is:
The hard part of software development is not figuring out how to make the computer perform a given function. It's in figuring out that the computer needs to perform a given function. That's what our customers pay us to do for the proprietary product we produce. That's what my boss pays me to do for the tools I provide.
My job typically involves working with the other programmers to figure out how to build, test, or deliver new functionality for our proprietary product. We typically use free software as the basis for custom built, in-house tools, which in a nutshell allows us to build things no one else can build, test our prototypes while other organizations are stil
Um. those are your words, not his. RMS is pointing out that not everyone who works on free software makes money from doing so. Some people do get paid for the specific task of writing free software (it's in their job description, so to speak) but many others do so without direct compensation. RMS is responding to the interviewers fallicious assertion (that because not everyone gets paid to develop free software, there can exist no reason to develop it by pointing out the falsity of the argument.
But copyright owners aren't granted all the rights the DRM stack provides for them. They are granted a limited set of rights (concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc) but only for a limited time and not in conflict with fair use.
Seems like your overall argument is "if we agree to X then we should X, and if we aren't willing to X, then we shouldn't agree to X." where X is a DRM-imposed restriction. If I've pharaphrased you correctly (my apologies if I haven't) I can see how some people would agree.
From the other point of view, however, I never agreed to grant to the copyright owner all the rights which a DRM solution can provide. I agreed only to those limited set of rights (concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc) for a limited time, and not in conflict with fair use.
Is it beyond bounds to ask that copyright owners also adhere to your overall philosophy: If they agree to fix their work in tangible form in exchange for a limited set of rights concerning publication, distribution, public performance, derivation, etc. for a limited time, and not in conflict with fair use, then they should do so. And if they don't agree to the limited copy right, then they shouldn't fix their work in tangible form, nor expect us to abide by our side of the agreement if they won't abide by theirs.
It's the rub most people don't get. If author A sells a copy of his work to purchaser B, under whatever restrictions they privately agree, I am a party to the transaction even if I am neither author A nor purchaser B. I become a party, as a member of the public, as soon as the Work is fixed in Tangible Form. I benefit only to the extent that Copyright allows, but I can demand to benefit to the limit of those extents fully.
If we want to argue that we aren't compensating our Authors enough under the current Copyright agreements, that perhaps we owe them more than a life-plus-ninety-years of exclusivity and the ability to outlaw functionality in every technological device which might be capable of handling a copy of their work, in exchange for a chance to rent restricted, temporary access to the Tangible Form of their work, then let's make that argument up-front. If we want to suggest that there should be one class of persons who are granted access to the Work, and a second class who are denied in perpetuity, then let's say that up-front and have a discussion.
I might remind you that this discussion has been had before. Copyright was originally (British law) an exclusive Right, granted by the King, iin Perpetuity, and intended to ensure certain information (like, the actual words of the Bible) was maintained under the necessary restrictions. Dang that Gutenberg, and his Scribe Guild circumventing movable type.
Might I suggest you re-read what you have written, and see if it stands-up to your own scrutiny?
You seem to be suggesting that the author of a piece of music can insist that I agree to his/her terms in order to be rightly entitled to listen to his/her music. Maybe this is exactly what you meant to write. But I shudder to imagine a world like this.
In such a world, could I, as a gardener, deny you the right to look at flowers I've grown? What about flowers polinated from flowers I've grown?
Could I deny you the right to even look at my wife? What about my kids?
Clearly I could, as the author of a book, demand that you pay me before reading my book. Could I also demand you not speak about the ideas in the book? Could I demand payment from anyone who reads over your shoulder? From their childern? Or yours?
Let's be clear, with your statement wraping my right to listen in terms, we've already stepped beyond the bounds of what the law supports, so we're just talking about what would be considered morally right under the system you've suggested.
I'd suggest such a system is unworkable as a practical matter, even if it were not unimaginable as a practical matter.
Um...just exactly where do you think the "ownership" part of owning the music comes from? If the artist wants complete control of "their" music, they can keep it in their own head. The world is a poorer place if they do, so some of us (society in general, you and I included) have agreed to act like they do own their music, have agreed to grant them a copy right for limited times in exchange for their sharing their music.
Yes, an author/artist is damaged (and so are we) every time some "pirate" violates that agreement. That's why we have laws, and courts, and judges, etc. etc. But the author/artists actions amount to no better than piracy when they violate the agreement themselves by trying to claim more rights than we (society in general, you and I included) have agreed to grant them.
Which is what DRM does, whether intentional or not.
We might agree that I can't make a copy of a song you wrote without your permission. And we think that because DRM restricts me from making a copy of a song you own copy right to (and by extention, restricts me from making a copy of a song you own copy right to without your permission) that it's doing a good thing. But DRM manages restrictions (which it does have a model for) instead of rights (which it does not have a model for). Which means if I then negotiate an agreement with you whereby I am allowed to make a copy of a song you own copy right to, DRM will still restricts me from doing so.
Well-intentioned thoughts, clearly. I doubt the comment was intended to be as closed-minded as it came across.
There aren't too many people in the camp that claims information (software, music, whatever) should be locked up forever, certainly less than there are even among the "everything free today" loonies. And the law (internationally under Berne and within the U.S. specifically) is clear on this point. Infringing a copyright is illegal, but not infringing a copyright is not.
Every DRM system in use today fails to grasp that distinction, and instead seeks to prevent copying or deter public exibition or manage rights without regard to whether the copying or public exibition actually infringe any copyright.
And while an author might assert all activities violate her copy rights to her own work, in most jurisdiction such an assertion clearly only holds for a limited time (the first hundred years or so) and for eternity thereafter the assertion is laughable to all. A DRM system, however, understands no such limits, and will continue to assert the author's right even when no such right exists under law.
In this respect at least, the form of the assertion is flawed. Saying "Piracy of software and music is still piracy and still illegal" without acknowledging the limits of copyright is about as wrong as declaring apples to be inedible simple because they have yet to ripen.
Good. Now, part two: Build it.
I've seen many good suggestions from people who can imagine their own favorite solution, but I haven't yet heard from anyone who has actually done this.
Edison's point, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, is fully applicable here. A rod through the middle seems like a simple, fairly intuitive solution until you actually start to build it.
And don't even get me started on common mode failures. Did you ever buy a spindle of CDR's and find you couldn't get any of them from that spindle to burn properly? Have you ever dropped a spindle of CDR's and tried to burn them afterwords? Or looked at the mount under magnification afterwords?
Let me know when you get your first one built.
Perhaps you would explain how this bar is supported?
Family Values:
"My family is important to me. Maybe not the most important thing in the world, but it's still very important to me. By family I mean my grandparents, parents, brothers and sisters, my wife, my kids, and (if they had any) their children, etc. And by important I mean at the very least more important than spending time with my buddies drinking, or my golf swing. I make sure my family is well fed, well educated, safe, and happy, because those things are important to them, so they're important to me."
"Your family, on the other hand, is not important to me, at least not as important to me as my own family is. Your family is your own Personal Responsibility (see below) just like my family is mine. I'm not too worried if the school your kid goes to crumbles, so long as I can get my voucher to send my kid to a good school. And if that means he gets a better shot at college (Affirmative action? Come on...) then that's just the way things go, because we do live in a meritocracy and it's all just good and right that the kids who are successful get into the best colleges. We don't want to go wasting our tax dollars putting slackers through college, now do we?"
Personal Responsibility: "I'm not a slacker. I get up and work every day. I pay my bills. And quite frankly I'm offended at anyone who thinks that this world somehow owes them a living. It's simple common sense that other people should share the same responsibility for their own lives that I assume for mine."
"If you aren't making enough to pay your bills, get a better job. If you aren't educated enough to get a better job, quit and go back to school. If you can't afford to quit, like because you're already not paying your bills, take classes on line. No broadband, eh? Well why the hell didn't your parents send you to a better school in the first place? That was their responsibility."
"Look, the Constitution (or some other famous document that you're not supposed to argue with, lest you be called unAmerican) says that all men are created equal. That means that we both had an equal shot to get into Harvard, own a football team, etc. It's a real shame that you weren't up to the challenge like the rest of us successful people, but you know where would this world be if we didn't allow the Free (not Libre') Market to sort out the misfits and the queers for us?"
Do you remember when Hillary Clinton was talking-up the "It take a village...to raise a Child" book and the Conservative Right countered with "No, it takes a Parent to raise a child." Very clear demonstration of this split. Many on the Conservative Right think that these things (education among them, but more generally everything from high speed internet access to quality health care) are things which individuals should be providing for themselves, rather than relying on some sort of government provided program paid for at taxpayer expense. It's an excellent example of the blindness the group seems to suffer. Not, I'll admit, as good an example as Bush recently gave us himself, at a press conference, on what he pointed out was an overcast day, where he couldn't imagine why anyone but a misfit (or queer) might be wearing sunglasses, and made a point as such to the legally blind reporter posing a question.
Or (to bring it back on topic) when he seems unable to understand why anyone who wasn't engaged in terrorism would possibly object to having his phone calling records tapped and in the posession of the President of the United States.
It's a great line: "freedom isn't free" It's got such a great ring to it most people don't realize it's completely false.
Freedom is free. It's Liberty which is not.
Freedom is granted to every living thing. Both the bird in a tree and the bird in a cage are free to fly as far as their wings will carry them. One the one in the cage lacks is Liberty. And it lacks that Liberty because we have taken it away.
This administration has made a partcularly profitable joke out of mixing up freedom and liberty to confuse people. Orwell would have recognised it as thought control by destroying the language. If Freedom and Liberty are used interchangably, neither retains it's meaning; they both become, literally, unthinkable.
This is not correct. This administration has neither made you more free nor less free, because your freedom is not under their control. They're just claiming credit (and apparently in your case they've been effective) for something they didn't do. But your liberties are. And it is correct to say that your civil liberties are being impacted.
Watch the language. In other words listen. There's some very revealing words being used.
You'll hear quotes about "Coaltion Casualties" (that's our side, right?) and "Insurgent Casualties" (that's their side, right?).. But even Fox News will tell you about that "other" force in Iraq: the "Civilian Casualties" (whose side is that? Wait a second, I'm a civilian.).
They won't support any increase to the minimum wage because that would be an infringement on our Freedom to work as cheaply as we might want to, or our Freedom to hire people on the cheap.
And don't even get me started on what "Family Values" and "Personal Responsibility" relly mean.
I must point out the obvious: Anyone who contemplates running for office in opposition to the current administration will be doing so under the survelliance of the current administration. This has been true since the program began.
And one might suspect that part of the reason this administration doesn't want anyone from the Justice Department investigating this program is because anyone from the Justice Department who does investigate this program may discover that they, too, have been under the survelliance of this administration.
Total Information Awareness is a double-edged sword: when you gain knowledge of everything, you lose the right to claim plausible deniability.
I wonder if Mr. Bush has thought this through completely: the next time something bad (like a terrorist attack) happens, someone is bound to start asking why, even with all the privacy invasion, they couldn't spot it coming.
Almost right, but completely wrong.
It's not internet which those fibers (or whatever) will be providing, it's IMS .
As a quick intro, IMS or IP Multimedia Subsystem encapsulates other services, like Video, Telephony, and Internet into services which the provider can offer, control, and charge for.
So while the line going into your house may change from supporting a maximum of 384Kbps to gigEther, the channel available for you to use for internet doesn't have to change at all. Unless you pay to change it.
Understand what this means. You'll never be able to claim that the carrier is "blocking" or "slowing-down" your internet access, and they can claim true-to-their-word that they aren't infringing network neutrality. It's just that if you want to do anything that requires more bandwidth than you're getting today, you'd better have a fat wallet, no matter how fat the pipe into your home is.
With the current population doubling time somewhere between 20 and 50 years, an event which kills-off half the global population, say 3 Billion people, would buy us, maybe, 50 years.
Think about that, and you'll understand the scope of the problem.
Define "disabilitiy".
Take your time. It's often very hard for people who think they aren't to put into words just exactly what one is.
Could I define someone as disabled because they do not choose to see our point-of-view?
Being blind, for example, only affects those people who choose to engage in activities for which good eyesight is needed. Since life does not guarantee participation in those activities to anyone, one could hardly list a desire to participate as a 'disability'. Some would define it this way.
Life dealt each of us a hand. Others may label us as 'disabled', but that generally means they wouldn't want to have been dealt the hand we were dealt. Most people understand and accept the hand they were dealt and strive to make the best of it. (Some don't, but I sense they'd complain no matter what hand they were dealt.) For the rest of us, "disabled" is a lable we apply to others for our own purposes. We might label a person as "disabled" as a reminder to ourselves that "there, but for the grace of God, go I".
If we're going to make any use of that "disabled" label at all, we have to start by accepting that to the extent that life has made us differently-abled, we are all "disabled". If we're going to use "disabled" as anything more than a derogatory, or worse, a marketing statement, then "disabled" cannot be about what someone else can or cannot do; it must be about the choices we make and the choices we are willing to let others make in pursuit of their own abilities.
I made the choice to not buy/not use Windows. Does that make me weak, or strong? Microsoft made the choice to not support the OpenDoc format, and through their choice, chose to disown everyone who made the choice I made. Does that make them weak, or strong?
I made the choice to pursue a solution which was right for me. They made the choice to enslave those who do not accept the choices made for them.
A statement like "they could always just choose to buy our product" is no better than saying "You know, you wouldn't have to suffer with being blind if you just give up and die today.".
Does Microsoft Office (the only application which fully supports the Microsoft Office format) offer the same level of help for people without Microsoft Office on their machine as OpenDoc apps do?? Do you really think this world (or Mass. even) has more "people with disabilities" than it has "people without Microsoft Office"?
Most people who are not completely blinded by their own addiction to Microsoft will honestly say "no".
You're living in the here and now. In ten years or so, even you will be disabled when it comes to reading Microsoft Office documents produced in the current version of Microsoft Office unless those documents have been converted to whatever new format Microsoft will be pushing then.
Ten years ago, your computer was (likely) running Win95 (because Win98 won't be available for another two years yet). Documents produced in 1996 by whatever version of Word Microsoft was pushing back then might still be mostly readable in the current version. But if they aren't, good luck finding a copy of the OS and a copy of the application which created them to use.
Now think about 20 years ago. 50 years? We're not talking about some school-kid's homework, we're talking about Public Records which belong to the residents of Mass. in 2106 as much as the Mass. Constitution belongs to the residents of the Commonwealth today.
In a contest between you and they, I'd suspect Microsoft is in the better position to understand the nature of the addiction they have created. And I'd feel safe saying that even if you yourself had succeeded in completely breaking your addiction to Windows, which I suspect you haven't.
Most people, most businesses are so hopelessly addicted to Windows that they literally can't even conceptualize their own survival without it. I'm always amused when I read the latest rant about a Windows vulnerability on an IE-only site, or read about some program manager publishing their "Linux Strategy" document as a PowerPoint chart.
Think of all the hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Office documents the average business has, or the potential millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and business intelligence those documents represent.
Now, even if they have the skill and determination to propose leaving Windows behind, think of the complexity of dealing with a customer base which might not be as skilled, or determined.
I suspect we may see a lot of people get pissed-off at Microsoft over this, temporarily. Then, as soon as they realize just how screwed they've allowed themselves to be, it's "how do I get a legitimate license again?"
Kudos.