My definition would be roughly: "Any candidate can request a recount of the paper trail from any voting machines", which (assuming the candidates weren't forced to pay for the recount cost unless they requested a large fraction of machines to be recounted and didn't find any major discrepancies) would make it extremely hard to cheat the system.
Their definition appears to be "Nevada's system... requires county registrars to randomly select a small percentage of machines -- from 1 percent to 3 percent of a county's total -- and compare printed records with the vote totals taken from computers' memory cartridges after polls close." That's just as good, as long as that "random selection" is made either by a provably tamperproof random number generator (hard to do right) or by each the candidates submitting random numbers to be XORed (easy to do right).
The first permutation I tried was: "Any optical marks indicating choice, two or more observers agree, chads detached at two corners". That came out for Gore by 105 votes.
The second permutation I tried was "Filled ovals or completed arrows, all observers agree, full punches, statewide recount". That came out for Gore by 134 votes.
The last thing I tried was (on the "What if..." tab) "Statewide recount using the standards of each county's election officials", which came out for Gore by 171 votes.
Ironically, the most important alternate standards by which Bush would have still won (you're right, and the person you replied to is wrong: Gore didn't win every recount) are "Gore's request" (an apparant attempt to increase Gore votes by only recounting some heavy Democrat-voting counties) and "Florida Supreme Court recount", the one interrupted by a partisan US Supreme Court vote.
Personally, I'm not too bothered by the Florida debacle: even if more precise counting would have led to a Gore victory, the results are clearly within the margin of error in either case. The only electoral votes that Bush/Cheney clearly should have lost are the ones coming from Texas, whose electors should have been prohibited by the 12th Amendment from voting for a President and Vice President who were both inhabitants of Texas. Granted, the 12th isn't very high on my list of "parts of the Constitution I wish the US government wasn't violating", but I still hate seeing that list get longer.
What's keeping the fragile space progam in Florida anyway? Politics?
The space center got there in the first place because of latitude. Not the metaphorical kind, either, but the "28 degrees north of the equator" kind. The closer you are to the equator, the more of a boost you get from the Earth's 1000 mph rotation and the more orbits you can reach without fuel-prohibitive plane change maneuvers. Of course, that's no longer a great reason - the space station is at an incredibly inclined orbit anyway so that it can be reached from Russian launch sites, and most of the space shuttle's non-ISS work wasn't dependent on putting it in any particular orbit, just as long as it was in free fall.
The reason that still applies to the Space Shuttle is: East coast. Even when everything goes right, the solid rocket boosters end up falling over 200 kilometers downrange of the launch site, and it's a lot safer (and possibly cheaper - they get picked up and refurbished) if there's ocean there to catch them. When something goes wrong, it's nice to have the whole boost trajectory over water - Challenger was only 7 miles downrange when it turned into flying shrapnel, and there's no telling when (either how many years from now or how long into its boost) there might be another launch accident.
Another problem I have is that since about version 1.3 (or earlier?), Mozilla, and later Firefox, have been unstable and crashing a lot (e.g. once or twice a week under heavy load). I don't know is this is a Linux-only issue (I only use Red Hat 9 and Fedora core 2), but they seem to have a memory leak and that's not good if it creeps into the 1.0 release.
It's not just a Linux issue; a friend of mine sees it on Windows XP, too. He sent these instructions which made it fairly consistently reproduceable on both our systems:
Go to http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/newuser.pl
Next start filling out the form as if you were getting a new account, using the tab button to maneuver around the boxes using the tab button. Then once you get to the box where it says password again, type out a few letters, then shift tab back to the password box and delete a few characters from the end of it using the keyboard only.
I intended to file this in bugzilla at one point, but got interrupted while trying to make sure it wasn't a dupe of an existing bug entry and never got back around to it. Now (assuming it still crashes the current release) I ought to write this up and submit it; you've made me feel guilty.;-)
I have no problem with those who require payment for their work, be it money or development effort, but you better state that before "giving away" your software, and you better not be calling it "free" (that last one for you, GPL!).
The software is free to use. The respect of the community (which for open source companies is still probably a prerequisite for profit) is not.
Kind of a race to see which bottoms out first, their market cap or their credibility. I rather suspect they'll be forced into bankruptcy if the stock drops much more.
Market cap and net worth are two different numbers. Having a small market cap can only hurt your future net worth if you were relying on being able to issue more stock, and since SCOX is planning to do the opposite (they want to launder their Baystar money by using it to buy back the stock they've been printing for their executives) then as a company they don't care even if their stock gets so cheap Nasdaq delists them.
The SCOX executives are undoubtedly pissed about the plummeting stock price, but not because it limits how long their company can stay afloat, just because it limits how fast they'll be able to take stock speculators' cash for themselves in the meantime.
you manage to pull this self-proclaimed "show stopper" out of your ass
Actually, I just thought it was funny. I didn't proclaim it a "show stopper" despite your misleading quotes, and even used language ("I'm sure their audience won't be too confused") that indicates my belief that it wasn't a serious problem.
Speaking of funny, isn't it ironic that you're carping about my identification of someone else's illiteracy while simultaneously demonstrating your own problems with reading comprehension?
The number of ports that the process uses may affect how this issue is resolved:
* If the process uses more than 1024 ports, the number of ports probably will not change.
* If the process uses less than 1024 ports, the program may be using a range of ports. Therefore, opening individual ports may not reliably resolve the issue.
It just fills you with confidence in their network security qualifications, doesn't it? I'm sure their audience won't be too confused (even most online gamers know the difference between "port number" and "number of ports"), but that just makes it even stranger that they hired a technical writer who can't make that distinction clearly.
I'm using Linux too, but my cable modem is constantly flooded with ARP requests generated by the incoming packets from the hordes of worm-ridden XP boxes that now own the internet and are repeatedly scanning our entire subnet. Perhaps your ISP is smarter than mine - Road Runner appears to be firewalling off incoming traffic to all the most dangerous ports now, but apparantly not in a way that prevents their routers from generating repeated ARP requests to the thousands of unused IP addresses which I must share a cable with.
Furious blinking became normal behavior for many cable modems years ago, and I don't think there's anything I can do (except maybe convincing my more network-savvy friends to go get jobs at Time Warner) to stop it.
And the first link tells me that W32.Welchia attacks the RPC DCOM vulnerability found in Windows {NT,2K,XP,2K3} and the WebDAV vulnerability found in IIS 5.0, but specifically lists Windows 98 among the "Systems Not Affected". Is there a different version which also attacks stock 9x installations?
BS. I dare you to put a stock 98se install on an unprotected line. Time how long it takes for it to be owned. Probably under 30 minutes or so.
Wouldn't it be even faster for you to just provide him with a URL describing a Win98SE remote exploit? When I tried to find one, the only hit I found (besides IE/Outlook flaws) was for the UPNP service, which isn't on the stock install.
In the Marybeth Peters statement (an eye-opening read that cuts through the paranoia/lies that Slashdot is spoonfeeding you) she says several interesting things. She is not in favor of scrapping the Betamax decision, and makes no mention of it not be strong enough, despite what our editors want you to believe.
Scrolling down to page 20 of Marybeth's statement:
While you have carefully crafted this bill to preserve the 20-year-old decision in the Sony case, it may become necessary to consider whether that decision is overly protective of manufacturers and marketers of infringement tools, especially in today's digital environment. If the Sony precedent continues to be an impediment to obtaining effective relief against those who profit by providing the means to engage in mass infringement, it should be replaced by a more flexible rule that is more meaningful in the technological age, but that still vindicates the Court's goal to balance effective "and not merely symbolic" protection of copyright with the rights of others to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce.
she gives facts making it riduculously clear that Kazaa and others like it are designed to contribute and profit from copyright infringement
Unfortunately, Marybeth's understanding of peer-to-peer networking is just as superficial as your understanding of her statement. Her "ridiculously clear" facts include:
Kazaa gets more advertising revenue from having more users. Duh. Her same argument would make Microsoft liable for people who send copyrighted attachments with Hotmail, except that unlike Kazaa, Microsoft has finally figured out that large companies can buy their way out of federal prosecution with enough political contributions.
Kazaa automatically reshares downloaded files. Again, duh. Bittorrent (which you erroneously think she would support) works the same way. In any case it's irrelevant. If a file could have been legally downloaded once, then it's almost certainly free to upload afterward. In fact, the fact that peers do most of the uploading to relieve central servers of network congestion is practically the definition of how P2P software works!
The X button minimizes instead of closes Kazaa. This doesn't "hide the program from the screen" as she says, it leaves the program in the taskbar, just like countless other programs from Mozilla to Winamp. Again, this is how P2P is supposed to work: because the software is always running, there is always a wide selection of uploaders available, and so uploads can be fast without swamping a central server.
Kazaa lets you download more if you upload more. Again, Bittorrent works this way too. And yes, this is how P2P is supposed to work: fast download speeds for everyone are made possible by ensuring that the first people in line to download a file are the ones most likely to help others download it as well.
Atlas Shrugged has a quote describing this exact pattern of behavior: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."
And it's a popular enough quote that I found it in five seconds searching for "atlas shrugged laws"
Ayn Rand wasn't the first one to make that observation.
Probably not. Did the person you're replying to say she was? Can you name the person who was first?
Perhaps we should all head back to Africa and the Middle East, and not migrate any further until we've turned our species' homelands into heaven. I'm sure if we focus all our efforts on them, we'll accomplish that Real Soon Now too...
This whole "voting 3rd party is a wasted vote" thing is a just self-fulfilling prophecy.
No, it's a mathematical consequence of plurality voting. If the pre-election polls are 49%, 49%, and 2%, then voting for the 2% candidate (let's call him "Ralph N") who has no chance of winning wastes your chance to express your preference between the two 49% candidates. If enough people do this in a swing state (let's label it "FL"), they can end up handing electoral victory to the candidate they least wanted to win.
there are no cameras at any intersection where I live.
How do you know? Were you expecting a big public announcement when any cameras were put up? Where I live, "homeland security" is now legally an acceptable excuse for not telling the public exactly where they're being watched. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also become an acceptable excuse for not even mentioning the existance of smaller cameras at all.
Rice University started creating new course material for their Electrical Engineering department five or six years ago. Their Connexions Project now seems to be used for a few courses from half a dozen other colleges as well. If you start flipping through the content, keep in mind you'll need the MathML fonts for Mozilla or a MathML plugin for IE; otherwise many of the pages are going to render hideously or incompletely.
I keep most of my Matlab code Octave-compatible with little trouble, but that just works for the core Matlab features. Matlab has much better (and friendlier) plotting than Octave's gnuplot interface, a nice IDE, and nice (although separately sold) "toolbox" packages for dozens of different application categories. Even the parts of Matlab I don't like are still a step above Octave; Matlab's sparse matrix support is pretty weak, for instance, but (without some unpopular patches) Octave hasn't got them at all.
If you want to outlaw copyright infringement without outlawing communication, all you have to do is make copyright infringement illegal, but with enough exceptions (called, say, "fair use") to allow people to talk freely about copyrighted works without allowing them to just repeat those works verbatim.
This bill won't outlaw copyright infringement - that's already been done. What it will outlaw is "acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement", which is just as vague as it sounds - by my interpretation (which is obviously narrower than Hatch's) there isn't a single P2P network in existance which would be criminalized, whereas by a broader interpretation (at least, I hope it's broader than Hatch's and any judge's) the iPod will become illegal.
If they can't trust electronic voting, how will they trust thier online poll?
Easily: they're the ones running it.
If you let me personally set up every computer counting votes, I would trust electronic voting too. Unfortunately this probably isn't a solution to our election problems, since other people don't seem to trust me as much as I do.
Leave it to a bunch of computer geeks to exploit an overflow error in the legal system: when you've got nothing left to lose, you can try to piss off the judge with forged evidence, then use the judge's indignation as an excuse to throw out the verdict. It's as if once your guiltiness value exceeds 2^15, the courts wrap it around into the negative numbers again!
If a law comes from the left, it's usually stupid. If it comes from the right, it's usually evil. "Bipartisan" just means it's stupid and evil.
But hey, it's a two party system, and you don't want to throw your vote away. Are there even any local government elections in the US which use Condorcet voting yet?
Slashdot Mirror
My definition would be roughly: "Any candidate can request a recount of the paper trail from any voting machines", which (assuming the candidates weren't forced to pay for the recount cost unless they requested a large fraction of machines to be recounted and didn't find any major discrepancies) would make it extremely hard to cheat the system.
... requires county registrars to randomly select a small percentage of machines -- from 1 percent to 3 percent of a county's total -- and compare printed records with the vote totals taken from computers' memory cartridges after polls close." That's just as good, as long as that "random selection" is made either by a provably tamperproof random number generator (hard to do right) or by each the candidates submitting random numbers to be XORed (easy to do right).
Their definition appears to be "Nevada's system
Is the point "Nader doesn't understand game theory or plurality voting"? Because if so, message received!
The first permutation I tried was: "Any optical marks indicating choice, two or more observers agree, chads detached at two corners". That came out for Gore by 105 votes.
The second permutation I tried was "Filled ovals or completed arrows, all observers agree, full punches, statewide recount". That came out for Gore by 134 votes.
The last thing I tried was (on the "What if..." tab) "Statewide recount using the standards of each county's election officials", which came out for Gore by 171 votes.
Ironically, the most important alternate standards by which Bush would have still won (you're right, and the person you replied to is wrong: Gore didn't win every recount) are "Gore's request" (an apparant attempt to increase Gore votes by only recounting some heavy Democrat-voting counties) and "Florida Supreme Court recount", the one interrupted by a partisan US Supreme Court vote.
Personally, I'm not too bothered by the Florida debacle: even if more precise counting would have led to a Gore victory, the results are clearly within the margin of error in either case. The only electoral votes that Bush/Cheney clearly should have lost are the ones coming from Texas, whose electors should have been prohibited by the 12th Amendment from voting for a President and Vice President who were both inhabitants of Texas. Granted, the 12th isn't very high on my list of "parts of the Constitution I wish the US government wasn't violating", but I still hate seeing that list get longer.
What's keeping the fragile space progam in Florida anyway? Politics?
The space center got there in the first place because of latitude. Not the metaphorical kind, either, but the "28 degrees north of the equator" kind. The closer you are to the equator, the more of a boost you get from the Earth's 1000 mph rotation and the more orbits you can reach without fuel-prohibitive plane change maneuvers. Of course, that's no longer a great reason - the space station is at an incredibly inclined orbit anyway so that it can be reached from Russian launch sites, and most of the space shuttle's non-ISS work wasn't dependent on putting it in any particular orbit, just as long as it was in free fall.
The reason that still applies to the Space Shuttle is: East coast. Even when everything goes right, the solid rocket boosters end up falling over 200 kilometers downrange of the launch site, and it's a lot safer (and possibly cheaper - they get picked up and refurbished) if there's ocean there to catch them. When something goes wrong, it's nice to have the whole boost trajectory over water - Challenger was only 7 miles downrange when it turned into flying shrapnel, and there's no telling when (either how many years from now or how long into its boost) there might be another launch accident.
It's not just a Linux issue; a friend of mine sees it on Windows XP, too. He sent these instructions which made it fairly consistently reproduceable on both our systems:
I intended to file this in bugzilla at one point, but got interrupted while trying to make sure it wasn't a dupe of an existing bug entry and never got back around to it. Now (assuming it still crashes the current release) I ought to write this up and submit it; you've made me feel guilty.
I have no problem with those who require payment for their work, be it money or development effort, but you better state that before "giving away" your software, and you better not be calling it "free" (that last one for you, GPL!).
The software is free to use. The respect of the community (which for open source companies is still probably a prerequisite for profit) is not.
Kind of a race to see which bottoms out first, their market cap or their credibility. I rather suspect they'll be forced into bankruptcy if the stock drops much more.
Market cap and net worth are two different numbers. Having a small market cap can only hurt your future net worth if you were relying on being able to issue more stock, and since SCOX is planning to do the opposite (they want to launder their Baystar money by using it to buy back the stock they've been printing for their executives) then as a company they don't care even if their stock gets so cheap Nasdaq delists them.
The SCOX executives are undoubtedly pissed about the plummeting stock price, but not because it limits how long their company can stay afloat, just because it limits how fast they'll be able to take stock speculators' cash for themselves in the meantime.
you manage to pull this self-proclaimed "show stopper" out of your ass
Actually, I just thought it was funny. I didn't proclaim it a "show stopper" despite your misleading quotes, and even used language ("I'm sure their audience won't be too confused") that indicates my belief that it wasn't a serious problem.
Speaking of funny, isn't it ironic that you're carping about my identification of someone else's illiteracy while simultaneously demonstrating your own problems with reading comprehension?
It just fills you with confidence in their network security qualifications, doesn't it? I'm sure their audience won't be too confused (even most online gamers know the difference between "port number" and "number of ports"), but that just makes it even stranger that they hired a technical writer who can't make that distinction clearly.
I'm using Linux too, but my cable modem is constantly flooded with ARP requests generated by the incoming packets from the hordes of worm-ridden XP boxes that now own the internet and are repeatedly scanning our entire subnet. Perhaps your ISP is smarter than mine - Road Runner appears to be firewalling off incoming traffic to all the most dangerous ports now, but apparantly not in a way that prevents their routers from generating repeated ARP requests to the thousands of unused IP addresses which I must share a cable with.
Furious blinking became normal behavior for many cable modems years ago, and I don't think there's anything I can do (except maybe convincing my more network-savvy friends to go get jobs at Time Warner) to stop it.
And the first link tells me that W32.Welchia attacks the RPC DCOM vulnerability found in Windows {NT,2K,XP,2K3} and the WebDAV vulnerability found in IIS 5.0, but specifically lists Windows 98 among the "Systems Not Affected". Is there a different version which also attacks stock 9x installations?
BS. I dare you to put a stock 98se install on an unprotected line. Time how long it takes for it to be owned. Probably under 30 minutes or so.
Wouldn't it be even faster for you to just provide him with a URL describing a Win98SE remote exploit? When I tried to find one, the only hit I found (besides IE/Outlook flaws) was for the UPNP service, which isn't on the stock install.
Scrolling down to page 20 of Marybeth's statement:
she gives facts making it riduculously clear that Kazaa and others like it are designed to contribute and profit from copyright infringement
Unfortunately, Marybeth's understanding of peer-to-peer networking is just as superficial as your understanding of her statement. Her "ridiculously clear" facts include:
Kazaa gets more advertising revenue from having more users. Duh. Her same argument would make Microsoft liable for people who send copyrighted attachments with Hotmail, except that unlike Kazaa, Microsoft has finally figured out that large companies can buy their way out of federal prosecution with enough political contributions.
Kazaa automatically reshares downloaded files. Again, duh. Bittorrent (which you erroneously think she would support) works the same way. In any case it's irrelevant. If a file could have been legally downloaded once, then it's almost certainly free to upload afterward. In fact, the fact that peers do most of the uploading to relieve central servers of network congestion is practically the definition of how P2P software works!
The X button minimizes instead of closes Kazaa. This doesn't "hide the program from the screen" as she says, it leaves the program in the taskbar, just like countless other programs from Mozilla to Winamp. Again, this is how P2P is supposed to work: because the software is always running, there is always a wide selection of uploaders available, and so uploads can be fast without swamping a central server.
Kazaa lets you download more if you upload more. Again, Bittorrent works this way too. And yes, this is how P2P is supposed to work: fast download speeds for everyone are made possible by ensuring that the first people in line to download a file are the ones most likely to help others download it as well.
Atlas Shrugged has nothing to do with it.
Atlas Shrugged has a quote describing this exact pattern of behavior: "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."
And it's a popular enough quote that I found it in five seconds searching for "atlas shrugged laws"
Ayn Rand wasn't the first one to make that observation.
Probably not. Did the person you're replying to say she was? Can you name the person who was first?
Perhaps we should all head back to Africa and the Middle East, and not migrate any further until we've turned our species' homelands into heaven. I'm sure if we focus all our efforts on them, we'll accomplish that Real Soon Now too...
looks like my wife's going into labor now; and, I'm gonna miss the premiers for both Stargate Atlantis and I, Robot.
At least with "I, Robot" you can always read the book instead of going to see the movie.
In fact, judging by the trailers that might be a good idea even if you're not going to be busy opening night...
This whole "voting 3rd party is a wasted vote" thing is a just self-fulfilling prophecy.
No, it's a mathematical consequence of plurality voting. If the pre-election polls are 49%, 49%, and 2%, then voting for the 2% candidate (let's call him "Ralph N") who has no chance of winning wastes your chance to express your preference between the two 49% candidates. If enough people do this in a swing state (let's label it "FL"), they can end up handing electoral victory to the candidate they least wanted to win.
there are no cameras at any intersection where I live.
How do you know? Were you expecting a big public announcement when any cameras were put up? Where I live, "homeland security" is now legally an acceptable excuse for not telling the public exactly where they're being watched. I wouldn't be surprised if it's also become an acceptable excuse for not even mentioning the existance of smaller cameras at all.
Rice University started creating new course material for their Electrical Engineering department five or six years ago. Their Connexions Project now seems to be used for a few courses from half a dozen other colleges as well. If you start flipping through the content, keep in mind you'll need the MathML fonts for Mozilla or a MathML plugin for IE; otherwise many of the pages are going to render hideously or incompletely.
how has the patriot act directly affected you?
By making it impossible for me to answer this question, since it is now illegal for my librarian to tell me if the PATRIOT Act is affecting me.
does Octave compare well to Matlab?
I keep most of my Matlab code Octave-compatible with little trouble, but that just works for the core Matlab features. Matlab has much better (and friendlier) plotting than Octave's gnuplot interface, a nice IDE, and nice (although separately sold) "toolbox" packages for dozens of different application categories. Even the parts of Matlab I don't like are still a step above Octave; Matlab's sparse matrix support is pretty weak, for instance, but (without some unpopular patches) Octave hasn't got them at all.
If you want to outlaw copyright infringement without outlawing communication, all you have to do is make copyright infringement illegal, but with enough exceptions (called, say, "fair use") to allow people to talk freely about copyrighted works without allowing them to just repeat those works verbatim.
This bill won't outlaw copyright infringement - that's already been done. What it will outlaw is "acts from which a reasonable person would find intent to induce infringement", which is just as vague as it sounds - by my interpretation (which is obviously narrower than Hatch's) there isn't a single P2P network in existance which would be criminalized, whereas by a broader interpretation (at least, I hope it's broader than Hatch's and any judge's) the iPod will become illegal.
If they can't trust electronic voting, how will they trust thier online poll?
Easily: they're the ones running it.
If you let me personally set up every computer counting votes, I would trust electronic voting too. Unfortunately this probably isn't a solution to our election problems, since other people don't seem to trust me as much as I do.
Leave it to a bunch of computer geeks to exploit an overflow error in the legal system: when you've got nothing left to lose, you can try to piss off the judge with forged evidence, then use the judge's indignation as an excuse to throw out the verdict. It's as if once your guiltiness value exceeds 2^15, the courts wrap it around into the negative numbers again!
If a law comes from the left, it's usually stupid. If it comes from the right, it's usually evil. "Bipartisan" just means it's stupid and evil.
But hey, it's a two party system, and you don't want to throw your vote away. Are there even any local government elections in the US which use Condorcet voting yet?