The principle of capitalism ist: Privatize profits, communalize costs.
That's not a principle of capitalism, it's a principle of robbery. You've been deceived by another principle of robbery: you can get away with it longer if you call it "capitalism", or "Communism", "social security", or whatever else keeps the mob happy with you.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
You don't take the paper ballot home with you. You put it in a locked box, where unlike electronic ballots it cannot be invisibly changed later.
How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind?
By destroying the original paper ballot and printing out another; in the polling booth; while you're voting; until you've put your ballot in the box. Note that you can still have computers print out the ballots if you want - and you may want to, so they can prevent voters from accidentally choosing two candidates in the same race, help read to blind voters, warn voters who may have unintentionally missed casting a vote, and make long ballots easy to read. What is important is that the final official ballot is in an immutable human-readable form that gets checked by the voter before it is cast.
If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Because hacking into a computer that your opponents are watching requires you to be smart, but hacking into large numbers of ballot boxes that your opponents are watching requires magic.
Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
No, remember the voting machines while also focusing on absentee ballots and voter registration. Security is hard and tedious - if you want the voting system to be secure, you have to secure every weak element of the process, not just the weakest.
I was not referring to the small "pittance" that Congress gave "users" to the archiving of a computer program.
Neither was I. I'm sorry if quoting the entire section was misleading - the part you're interested in is (1), which says that if "a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner", then you have the right to make that copy regardless of what the copyright holders think. That covers copies on your hard drive, partial copies in memory and cache, whatever your computer needs to run the software.
US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, 117: Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The only thing they'll accomplish with their asinine HDCP requirement is eliminate the market for HD content on PCs.
No; they only have the power to reduce the supply of legal HD content on PCs. You're right that they'd like to eliminate the whole market, but since they have no power over demand, the best they can do is force that market to go to independent providers or copyright infringers.
Hollywood had better hope their HD formats get cracked as fast as their DVD encryption did. Thanks to DeCSS and to the Linux video players incorporating it, I've got $1000 of legally-purchased DVDs on my shelves. Perhaps I won't watch HD movies at all; perhaps I'll be able to find playable HD movies illegally - it's all the same to Hollywood, though, because they won't see my money unless they're selling me a product I can use.
well, no. because there are no derived works involved. it's just new versions of the same thing
A new version of the same thing is a derived work. The term you're looking for is "code fork" - perhaps that happens more often to BSD projects than to GPL ones, but even if it does I wouldn't call that something to brag about.
In reality, i see many more significant OSS products released under BSD-like licenses than GPL ones.
Of the top ten most active projects on SourceForge last week, all ten were released under GPL, LGPL, or MPL licenses. Of the top ten most downloaded projects on SourceForge, all ten were released under the GPL or the Bittorrent Open Source License (which has a similar "must make the Source Code of your Modifications available" clause).
I know, there's other definitions of "significant" out there (and 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2!), but the first place I looked for objective data came up 100% GPL-like, 0% BSD-like. That might have been a lucky fluke, but I don't think so.
What they don't do is waste time on stupid license discussions, or being worried about what someone else might do with their code.
Exactly. That's why anyone who does spend time worrying about licenses, or anyone who is worried about what someone else might do with their code, has been contributing to Linux instead. It's a lot easier for IBM to make a business case for spending a billion dollars on open source development when they can be sure they're not just writing Microsoft's next operating system for them.
The GPL world, otoh, spends it's efforts on discussions like this one...
You seem to have confused "The GPL world" with "Slashdot". We spend efforts on discussions far stupider than this one. As for wasted effort, are you kidding?
So much... effort... discussing... Can't... reach mouse... too weak... Code writing abilities... fading...
and I can't find a single instance of people standing on each other's shoulders.
We're in a discussion about the Linux kernel; don't those hundreds of developers standing on each other's shoulders count for anything? You say "I can't find..." but you don't seem to be looking very hard.
Imagine a system were every binary had to be digitally signed in order for the kernel to run it - you'd have a system that's immune to rootkits. Too bad that's disallowed under the GPL3. If you ever let anyone else use that system, you'd have to give out your private key to the world! Great plan.
Why on earth would anyone else want to use your private key with that system? You haven't described a kernel that's immune to rootkits, you've described a kernel that won't run any program its vendor hasn't blessed. If what you want is a kernel that's immune to rootkits, you don't have to give out any keys with your system at all - the people who install it will generate their own public/private keypair.
Check out the documentary "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Really good show.
If you have enough time on your hands, please check out the book of the same name instead. It's sort of like the documentary, except that you don't have to hear the words "Guns, Germs, and STEEL" in a corny dramatic voice every 2 minutes, you get to read hundreds of pages of additional detail instead.
It was called "Dances With Wolves", but I think it must have been part of the Final Fantasy series: it ran you on rails through the story line and took 20 hours to get to the ending.
Did the creators decide that stories about 4 or 5 elite SG-1 team members were boring, but stories about 40,000 or 50,000 random grunts would be exciting?
Or did they decide that games which can be run as a standalone application sell for $50, but games which require central servers can bring in $50 + $10 per month for a year?
Re:Private networks and the business case.
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IPv6 Readiness Report
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I keep hearing about handhelds and that millions of them will need their own IP addresses. I don't see why. I'm sure most of the wireless providers want to control the content that their subscribers can send or receive - that business model does not want a wide open network with each host directly connected to the internet.
Back when it was just a proprietary BBS, Prodigy wanted to charge me $0.25 per email I sent - that business model does not want a wide open network where any host can connect to any SMTP server.
I think they became a full TCP/IP provider eventually, but I switched networks too quickly to find out. Let's hope that wireless providers understand the lesson here: if someone else can offer your customers a better business model, it doesn't matter what your business model wants.
You don't commit voter fraud with paper ballots by erasing the mark. You do it by substituting another marked piece of paper for it
Why do you act as if I'm ignoring that? I said you also need trustworthy volunteers watching the ballot boxes. Can you substitute one piece of paper for another in a locked box in front of my eyes without me noticing?
My point is quite simple: you can substitute one electronic ballot for another, in plain sight, in front of as many witnesses, volunteers, and auditors as you like, without any of them being the wiser. You cannot substitute one paper ballot for another in that way, because if you try to do so without having the collusion of every random person who might be in the same room, then they'll say "Hey, why are you switching the ballot boxes?"
So there is the communication from precinct captain to supervisor to the capital to consider.
This is again easy to solve: if candidates can allow their own volunteers to supervise the counting, then they can check the final counts and any discrepancy will cause them to say "Hey, why did that number change?". And again: paper counts are possible to supervise, electronic counts are not.
In short, I don't worry much about the naked complexity of the computer code required
Although the complexity of the computer code required should worry you (we've already seen bugs that affected thousands of votes - how much more worrisome does it have to get?), it's the complexity of the computer code *installed* that should worry you more. There is no way to verify that the code which was "certified" is the code which was installed, and in fact we know of many cases in which the opposite has occurred.
That is, which can prove that no one was able to modify the tally on the disk drive or that no once was able to replace a ballot box with another of his choosing just after the polls close.
There's an easy way to prove to you that none of the ballot boxes have been replaced: I just invite you to come stay up all night with them and watch them.
Now, prove to me that nobody was able to modify a tally on a disk drive. You simply can't do it. Are you going to verify that the source code is flawless? That's never happened even when the programmers were all trying to make it so - imagine how much more insecure software gets when the programmers all have huge incentives to insert backdoors! How are you going to trust that the binaries on the machines correspond to that source code? Remember, you can't just tell the machines to give you their own binaries - a good rootkit can just keep uninfected files around to make itself look clean. For that matter, who says the rootkits have to be on the disk at all? Why not in the BIOS? Or the hard drive firmware? Or in an altered CPU?
Paper and electronics simply don't work the same way, no matter what strained attempts you make to equate them. An audit trail is possible with paper because changing a paper ballot while an auditor watches would require a teleporter. Changing a hard drive ballot while an auditor watches just requires a hard drive.
I don't think this is correct. There's nothing inherently tamper-resistant about paper.
Data stored on paper is visible to the naked eye and is write-only. Those two features aren't sufficient to make ballot fraud impossible (you also need trustworthy volunteers watching every ballot box!), but they are necessary, and no other form of computer-written storage really qualifies. If you put 5 paper ballots in a box, you can be very sure that you'll later pull those same 5 paper ballots out of the box and the writing on them will be unchanged. If I don't trust you, I can volunteer to go sit next to you and keep my own eyes on the box. If you put 5 electronic ballots on a hard drive, then you're one buffer overflow or back door away from pulling 31337 ballots out.
With computer voting machines nearly any of the hardware and software designers involved has an opportunity to insert subtle trojan code into the system, and there's no way for a concerned volunteer to verify the system's integrity unless they have an electron microscope, permission to dismantle voting machines, and a better eye for software security than every OS vendor in existence. You're right that what's important is guaranteeing the chain of custody from the voter to the count; I'm saying that when the chain of custody includes a black box that can rewrite its own innards, such guarantees are impossible.
That's not to say computers can't be a part of the process. You could make ballot tampering much harder by printing out ballot copies for each of three separately stored ballot boxes. Unofficial electronic counts can give fast unofficial results while acting as an error indicator against tampering with the official paper ballots. You can use automatic optical counting for higher precision but combine it with hand counts for fraud prevention. All that's important is that the ballot get verified by the voter casting it, after which verification it is impossible to change. The easiest way to ensure that is to make sure computers are just the start of the process and a more transparent technology like paper is the end.
Obviously, computerized voting is a stupid, stupid idea.
That's not obvious at all. Greater accessibility for the handicapped, more legible interfaces for long complicated ballots, the early detection and correction of "misvotes" and unintentional "undervotes", and the elimination of "hanging chads", stray marks and half-filled scan bubbles, etc. all make computerized voting a great idea.
What's a bad idea is storing the votes in computer memory. Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper. Touchscreen voting machines need to finish up your vote by printing it out on a paper ballot, prompting you to confirm or (with the help of a poll worker) destroy that paper, and finally directing you to the ballot box where the paper should be inserted to become part of the official count. If that was how electronic voting worked, I think even the computer-literate population would be thrilled.
and we have to provide for public funding of campaigns, so politicians don't have to beg for money and become beholden.
This public funding - will it be wasted on every "Natural Law Party" candidate who wants to run, will it be restricted to major parties and further entrench the corrupt two party system, or will there be a complicated series of rules (written by the incumbents, of course) to try and walk the tightrope between those two hazards?
The location of Qt matters to me because, if I write a program that depends on Qt, I can provide/usr/local/qt as the default location and it will Just Work for my users.
Well, by definition it will Just Work for your users, because if people who download your program are running Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, or any other distribution that puts Qt where it's supposed to go, then your program won't work at all and they won't become your users!
I suggest using the QTDIR variable to find your default location, and the linker to find your libraries, and it will Just Work for all users. If you can't figure out how to write correct Qt programs, that's your problem, not Debian's. Demanding that my system become less functional because you don't know better than to use hard-coded pathnames is ridiculous.
Follow the instructions for installing from source, and you will have everything accessible under/usr/local/qt; install the Debian packages, and you will see they changed the name to/usr/share/qt3.
So they don't clutter up my/usr/local/ tree, a directory for things I've installed by hand, with automatically installed packages? Good for them. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard says "The/usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated," and I'd hate to use a distribution that violated that safety.
Why does the directory location of qt matter that much to you anyway? Fedora has it in/usr/lib/qt-3.3 and everything's working fine. In fact, I could put qt in/home/roystgnr/qt/ if I want, define QTDIR and my linker path accordingly, and unless your qt-using software is broken it should work. We bitch enough about broken software that unnecessarily requires Administrator access on Windows; there's no reason to go any easier on software that unnecessarily requires root access on Linux.
Debian using/usr/share/qt3 is a little worrisome, though. */share/ directories are supposed to be for architecture-independent files, and qt library binaries by definition include compiled code. I hope Debian's got that under/usr/lib where it belongs.
Again, please stop speaking from a position of ignorance, you just make yourself look foolish.
This, coming from someone who thinks that a resolution against those who [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 is a declaration of war in Iraq.
... you talk about "wartime authorities under the Constitution" without mentioning that the Constitution only gives the power to declare war to Congress, who have not done so.
... you think that wiretaps which would be a felony when done by private citizens aren't even "unreasonable" when done by the government.
... you haven't questioned the premise that the unwarranted wiretaps are listening to known al-Qaeda members, even though such wiretaps surely would not have been among the ~0.1% of warrants that FISA has denied.
... you think that the way to solve inadequate attention to the intelligence we can obtain legally is to bury future intelligence in every phone call we can get away with intercepting illegally, fixing an "inability to put the dots together" by splilling a bottle of ink on the page.
... you think that civil libertarians don't realize that terrorism is a threat, or you falsely pretend to think so to score rhetorical points.
... you do think that terrorism is a threat worth suspending the Bill of Rights for, but you don't realize just how much more the USA was threatened when the Bill of Rights was written.
... you think the Bill of Rights is something to be suspended by executive fiat rather than the democratic amendment process in the Constitution.
I'm sure there's more, of course, but I'll limit the list to your one post for now. If you'd like an extended version, I suggest starting with your thoughts on torture, secret prisons, and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
While I don't think it would have an immediate impact (a la the moon exploding like in Time Machine remake) but it could certainly have an impact on tidal flows. I don't know what other environmental impact the moon has, and I have no clue how much a change in mass it would take to affect earth noticably,
Yes, this would be an example of that "too much ignorance" I mentioned. Looking up the (literally astronomical) ratio between the Moon's mass and human mining needs as another poster suggested would be one way to start correcting that. A little a priori knowledge would help, too: the ellipticity of the Moon's orbit, the receding of the Moon's orbit, and the interactions between solar and lunar tides all mean that tide strengths are already variable. A quick Google search should tell you roughly how much they vary, which should give you an idea how much of a change human activity might have to make to be noticeable.
Hopefully seeing some of those numbers will make you realize how flawed the premise of the problem is to begin with, in fact. If we ever get to the point where we can remove a noticable percentage of the Moon's mass, contracting the Moon's orbital radius to keep tidal amplitudes balanced would be relatively simple.
it should at least be done carefully.
The fact that some people suffer from technophobia doesn't mean people should be afraid of removing mass from the Moon, not any more than the existance of agoraphobia means we should be afraid to leave the house.
Re:Future of our civilization?
on
Return to the Moon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Ok, so we're already screwing up the ecological system of one planet, so all the more reason to start mining the moon too!
Oh, no! You mean those evil miners might one day turn the moon into a ball of irradiated lifeless rock!?! The horror!
I'm sorry, but isn't it this "let's just mine the blasted thing!" line of thinking that's stifled the advancement of newer energy resources for so long?
When newer energy resources are developed, it will be done using materials that came out of mines. Scientific advancement is rarely hindered by too many mines; usually the limiting factor is too much ignorance.
What exactly is this quality of "blimpiness" you want to improve? The important characteristic of blimps is their buoyancy without cargo, and blimps become more buoyant if they carry a higher volume of gas or if they have less structural mass. Blimps are designed to look "puffed up" only because that shape reduces the structural mass necessary to support a given volume of gas, and a shape-changing structure would be more massive still.
Kill three people at the neighborhood Quikie Mart and you get local coverage. Kill three people in a suborbital or orbital flight, and instant worldwide coverage.
Kill three people at the neighborhood Quikie Mart and leave behind a note proclaiming yourself a terrorist, and you'll get instant worldwide coverage. Better yet, from the terrorists' point of view, you'll be terrifying everyone who goes to convenience stores, not just everyone rich enough to afford a suborbital rocket flight.
Slashdot Mirror
The principle of capitalism ist: Privatize profits, communalize costs.
That's not a principle of capitalism, it's a principle of robbery. You've been deceived by another principle of robbery: you can get away with it longer if you call it "capitalism", or "Communism", "social security", or whatever else keeps the mob happy with you.
The concept of a paper trail or voter receipt or whatever you want to call it is stupid. Just imagine a paid thug taking people to the polling place and then asking to see their paper receipt to make sure they voted "the right way".
You don't take the paper ballot home with you. You put it in a locked box, where unlike electronic ballots it cannot be invisibly changed later.
How will you handle "wrong" votes? Where will you change them? When will you change them? How long will people have to change their mind?
By destroying the original paper ballot and printing out another; in the polling booth; while you're voting; until you've put your ballot in the box. Note that you can still have computers print out the ballots if you want - and you may want to, so they can prevent voters from accidentally choosing two candidates in the same race, help read to blind voters, warn voters who may have unintentionally missed casting a vote, and make long ballots easy to read. What is important is that the final official ballot is in an immutable human-readable form that gets checked by the voter before it is cast.
If I'm smart enough to hack votes inside a machine, why would you assume that I'm not smart enough to spoof the paper trail?
Because hacking into a computer that your opponents are watching requires you to be smart, but hacking into large numbers of ballot boxes that your opponents are watching requires magic.
Want to make elections more accurate and secure? Forget the voting machines and focus on the weakest elements of the election process, absentee ballots and voter registration.
No, remember the voting machines while also focusing on absentee ballots and voter registration. Security is hard and tedious - if you want the voting system to be secure, you have to secure every weak element of the process, not just the weakest.
I was not referring to the small "pittance" that Congress gave "users" to the archiving of a computer program.
Neither was I. I'm sorry if quoting the entire section was misleading - the part you're interested in is (1), which says that if "a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner", then you have the right to make that copy regardless of what the copyright holders think. That covers copies on your hard drive, partial copies in memory and cache, whatever your computer needs to run the software.
US Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, 117:
Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs
(a) Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy. -- Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided:
(1) that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner, or
(2) that such new copy or adaptation is for archival purposes only and that all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
The only thing they'll accomplish with their asinine HDCP requirement is eliminate the market for HD content on PCs.
No; they only have the power to reduce the supply of legal HD content on PCs. You're right that they'd like to eliminate the whole market, but since they have no power over demand, the best they can do is force that market to go to independent providers or copyright infringers.
Hollywood had better hope their HD formats get cracked as fast as their DVD encryption did. Thanks to DeCSS and to the Linux video players incorporating it, I've got $1000 of legally-purchased DVDs on my shelves. Perhaps I won't watch HD movies at all; perhaps I'll be able to find playable HD movies illegally - it's all the same to Hollywood, though, because they won't see my money unless they're selling me a product I can use.
well, no. because there are no derived works involved. it's just new versions of the same thing
A new version of the same thing is a derived work. The term you're looking for is "code fork" - perhaps that happens more often to BSD projects than to GPL ones, but even if it does I wouldn't call that something to brag about.
In reality, i see many more significant OSS products released under BSD-like licenses than GPL ones.
Of the top ten most active projects on SourceForge last week, all ten were released under GPL, LGPL, or MPL licenses. Of the top ten most downloaded projects on SourceForge, all ten were released under the GPL or the Bittorrent Open Source License (which has a similar "must make the Source Code of your Modifications available" clause).
I know, there's other definitions of "significant" out there (and 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2!), but the first place I looked for objective data came up 100% GPL-like, 0% BSD-like. That might have been a lucky fluke, but I don't think so.
What they don't do is waste time on stupid license discussions, or being worried about what someone else might do with their code.
Exactly. That's why anyone who does spend time worrying about licenses, or anyone who is worried about what someone else might do with their code, has been contributing to Linux instead. It's a lot easier for IBM to make a business case for spending a billion dollars on open source development when they can be sure they're not just writing Microsoft's next operating system for them.
The GPL world, otoh, spends it's efforts on discussions like this one...
You seem to have confused "The GPL world" with "Slashdot". We spend efforts on discussions far stupider than this one. As for wasted effort, are you kidding?
So much... effort... discussing... Can't... reach mouse... too weak... Code writing abilities... fading...
and I can't find a single instance of people standing on each other's shoulders.
We're in a discussion about the Linux kernel; don't those hundreds of developers standing on each other's shoulders count for anything? You say "I can't find..." but you don't seem to be looking very hard.
Imagine a system were every binary had to be digitally signed in order for the kernel to run it - you'd have a system that's immune to rootkits. Too bad that's disallowed under the GPL3. If you ever let anyone else use that system, you'd have to give out your private key to the world! Great plan.
Why on earth would anyone else want to use your private key with that system? You haven't described a kernel that's immune to rootkits, you've described a kernel that won't run any program its vendor hasn't blessed. If what you want is a kernel that's immune to rootkits, you don't have to give out any keys with your system at all - the people who install it will generate their own public/private keypair.
Check out the documentary "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Really good show.
If you have enough time on your hands, please check out the book of the same name instead. It's sort of like the documentary, except that you don't have to hear the words "Guns, Germs, and STEEL" in a corny dramatic voice every 2 minutes, you get to read hundreds of pages of additional detail instead.
It was called "Dances With Wolves", but I think it must have been part of the Final Fantasy series: it ran you on rails through the story line and took 20 hours to get to the ending.
Software licenses are agreements that should have the full weight of contract law.
You're right. End user licenses should be considered as valid as any other contract with no consideration and no signature.
Did the creators decide that stories about 4 or 5 elite SG-1 team members were boring, but stories about 40,000 or 50,000 random grunts would be exciting?
Or did they decide that games which can be run as a standalone application sell for $50, but games which require central servers can bring in $50 + $10 per month for a year?
I keep hearing about handhelds and that millions of them will need their own IP addresses. I don't see why. I'm sure most of the wireless providers want to control the content that their subscribers can send or receive - that business model does not want a wide open network with each host directly connected to the internet.
Back when it was just a proprietary BBS, Prodigy wanted to charge me $0.25 per email I sent - that business model does not want a wide open network where any host can connect to any SMTP server.
I think they became a full TCP/IP provider eventually, but I switched networks too quickly to find out. Let's hope that wireless providers understand the lesson here: if someone else can offer your customers a better business model, it doesn't matter what your business model wants.
You don't commit voter fraud with paper ballots by erasing the mark. You do it by substituting another marked piece of paper for it
Why do you act as if I'm ignoring that? I said you also need trustworthy volunteers watching the ballot boxes. Can you substitute one piece of paper for another in a locked box in front of my eyes without me noticing?
My point is quite simple: you can substitute one electronic ballot for another, in plain sight, in front of as many witnesses, volunteers, and auditors as you like, without any of them being the wiser. You cannot substitute one paper ballot for another in that way, because if you try to do so without having the collusion of every random person who might be in the same room, then they'll say "Hey, why are you switching the ballot boxes?"
So there is the communication from precinct captain to supervisor to the capital to consider.
This is again easy to solve: if candidates can allow their own volunteers to supervise the counting, then they can check the final counts and any discrepancy will cause them to say "Hey, why did that number change?". And again: paper counts are possible to supervise, electronic counts are not.
In short, I don't worry much about the naked complexity of the computer code required
Although the complexity of the computer code required should worry you (we've already seen bugs that affected thousands of votes - how much more worrisome does it have to get?), it's the complexity of the computer code *installed* that should worry you more. There is no way to verify that the code which was "certified" is the code which was installed, and in fact we know of many cases in which the opposite has occurred.
That is, which can prove that no one was able to modify the tally on the disk drive or that no once was able to replace a ballot box with another of his choosing just after the polls close.
There's an easy way to prove to you that none of the ballot boxes have been replaced: I just invite you to come stay up all night with them and watch them.
Now, prove to me that nobody was able to modify a tally on a disk drive. You simply can't do it. Are you going to verify that the source code is flawless? That's never happened even when the programmers were all trying to make it so - imagine how much more insecure software gets when the programmers all have huge incentives to insert backdoors! How are you going to trust that the binaries on the machines correspond to that source code? Remember, you can't just tell the machines to give you their own binaries - a good rootkit can just keep uninfected files around to make itself look clean. For that matter, who says the rootkits have to be on the disk at all? Why not in the BIOS? Or the hard drive firmware? Or in an altered CPU?
Paper and electronics simply don't work the same way, no matter what strained attempts you make to equate them. An audit trail is possible with paper because changing a paper ballot while an auditor watches would require a teleporter. Changing a hard drive ballot while an auditor watches just requires a hard drive.
I don't think this is correct. There's nothing inherently tamper-resistant about paper.
Data stored on paper is visible to the naked eye and is write-only. Those two features aren't sufficient to make ballot fraud impossible (you also need trustworthy volunteers watching every ballot box!), but they are necessary, and no other form of computer-written storage really qualifies. If you put 5 paper ballots in a box, you can be very sure that you'll later pull those same 5 paper ballots out of the box and the writing on them will be unchanged. If I don't trust you, I can volunteer to go sit next to you and keep my own eyes on the box. If you put 5 electronic ballots on a hard drive, then you're one buffer overflow or back door away from pulling 31337 ballots out.
With computer voting machines nearly any of the hardware and software designers involved has an opportunity to insert subtle trojan code into the system, and there's no way for a concerned volunteer to verify the system's integrity unless they have an electron microscope, permission to dismantle voting machines, and a better eye for software security than every OS vendor in existence. You're right that what's important is guaranteeing the chain of custody from the voter to the count; I'm saying that when the chain of custody includes a black box that can rewrite its own innards, such guarantees are impossible.
That's not to say computers can't be a part of the process. You could make ballot tampering much harder by printing out ballot copies for each of three separately stored ballot boxes. Unofficial electronic counts can give fast unofficial results while acting as an error indicator against tampering with the official paper ballots. You can use automatic optical counting for higher precision but combine it with hand counts for fraud prevention. All that's important is that the ballot get verified by the voter casting it, after which verification it is impossible to change. The easiest way to ensure that is to make sure computers are just the start of the process and a more transparent technology like paper is the end.
Obviously, computerized voting is a stupid, stupid idea.
That's not obvious at all. Greater accessibility for the handicapped, more legible interfaces for long complicated ballots, the early detection and correction of "misvotes" and unintentional "undervotes", and the elimination of "hanging chads", stray marks and half-filled scan bubbles, etc. all make computerized voting a great idea.
What's a bad idea is storing the votes in computer memory. Computers have only one good mechanism for storing ballots in a failure-resistant, tamper-resistant fashion, and that's printer ink on paper. Touchscreen voting machines need to finish up your vote by printing it out on a paper ballot, prompting you to confirm or (with the help of a poll worker) destroy that paper, and finally directing you to the ballot box where the paper should be inserted to become part of the official count. If that was how electronic voting worked, I think even the computer-literate population would be thrilled.
and we have to provide for public funding of campaigns, so politicians don't have to beg for money and become beholden.
This public funding - will it be wasted on every "Natural Law Party" candidate who wants to run, will it be restricted to major parties and further entrench the corrupt two party system, or will there be a complicated series of rules (written by the incumbents, of course) to try and walk the tightrope between those two hazards?
The location of Qt matters to me because, if I write a program that depends on Qt, I can provide /usr/local/qt as the default location and it will Just Work for my users.
Well, by definition it will Just Work for your users, because if people who download your program are running Fedora, Red Hat, Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, or any other distribution that puts Qt where it's supposed to go, then your program won't work at all and they won't become your users!
I suggest using the QTDIR variable to find your default location, and the linker to find your libraries, and it will Just Work for all users. If you can't figure out how to write correct Qt programs, that's your problem, not Debian's. Demanding that my system become less functional because you don't know better than to use hard-coded pathnames is ridiculous.
Follow the instructions for installing from source, and you will have everything accessible under /usr/local/qt; install the Debian packages, and you will see they changed the name to /usr/share/qt3.
/usr/local/ tree, a directory for things I've installed by hand, with automatically installed packages? Good for them. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard says "The /usr/local hierarchy is for use by the system administrator when installing software locally. It needs to be safe from being overwritten when the system software is updated," and I'd hate to use a distribution that violated that safety.
/usr/lib/qt-3.3 and everything's working fine. In fact, I could put qt in /home/roystgnr/qt/ if I want, define QTDIR and my linker path accordingly, and unless your qt-using software is broken it should work. We bitch enough about broken software that unnecessarily requires Administrator access on Windows; there's no reason to go any easier on software that unnecessarily requires root access on Linux.
/usr/share/qt3 is a little worrisome, though. */share/ directories are supposed to be for architecture-independent files, and qt library binaries by definition include compiled code. I hope Debian's got that under /usr/lib where it belongs.
So they don't clutter up my
Why does the directory location of qt matter that much to you anyway? Fedora has it in
Debian using
Again, please stop speaking from a position of ignorance, you just make yourself look foolish.
This, coming from someone who thinks that a resolution against those who [the President] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001 is a declaration of war in Iraq.
Even Bush claimed that "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks" - has he changed his mind since?
I'm sure there's more, of course, but I'll limit the list to your one post for now. If you'd like an extended version, I suggest starting with your thoughts on torture, secret prisons, and indefinite imprisonment without trial.
While I don't think it would have an immediate impact (a la the moon exploding like in Time Machine remake) but it could certainly have an impact on tidal flows. I don't know what other environmental impact the moon has, and I have no clue how much a change in mass it would take to affect earth noticably,
Yes, this would be an example of that "too much ignorance" I mentioned. Looking up the (literally astronomical) ratio between the Moon's mass and human mining needs as another poster suggested would be one way to start correcting that. A little a priori knowledge would help, too: the ellipticity of the Moon's orbit, the receding of the Moon's orbit, and the interactions between solar and lunar tides all mean that tide strengths are already variable. A quick Google search should tell you roughly how much they vary, which should give you an idea how much of a change human activity might have to make to be noticeable.
Hopefully seeing some of those numbers will make you realize how flawed the premise of the problem is to begin with, in fact. If we ever get to the point where we can remove a noticable percentage of the Moon's mass, contracting the Moon's orbital radius to keep tidal amplitudes balanced would be relatively simple.
it should at least be done carefully.
The fact that some people suffer from technophobia doesn't mean people should be afraid of removing mass from the Moon, not any more than the existance of agoraphobia means we should be afraid to leave the house.
Ok, so we're already screwing up the ecological system of one planet, so all the more reason to start mining the moon too!
Oh, no! You mean those evil miners might one day turn the moon into a ball of irradiated lifeless rock!?! The horror!
I'm sorry, but isn't it this "let's just mine the blasted thing!" line of thinking that's stifled the advancement of newer energy resources for so long?
When newer energy resources are developed, it will be done using materials that came out of mines. Scientific advancement is rarely hindered by too many mines; usually the limiting factor is too much ignorance.
What exactly is this quality of "blimpiness" you want to improve? The important characteristic of blimps is their buoyancy without cargo, and blimps become more buoyant if they carry a higher volume of gas or if they have less structural mass. Blimps are designed to look "puffed up" only because that shape reduces the structural mass necessary to support a given volume of gas, and a shape-changing structure would be more massive still.
Kill three people at the neighborhood Quikie Mart and you get local coverage. Kill three people in a suborbital or orbital flight, and instant worldwide coverage.
Kill three people at the neighborhood Quikie Mart and leave behind a note proclaiming yourself a terrorist, and you'll get instant worldwide coverage. Better yet, from the terrorists' point of view, you'll be terrifying everyone who goes to convenience stores, not just everyone rich enough to afford a suborbital rocket flight.