Only allow people to scan for RFID that match a white list of your own property or property in your care with your consent. Any reading not on a white list must be discarded. Once an item is sold it is no longer their property and must be removed from the white list - with todays pos tech this would be absurdly easy to implement.
And even easier to circumvent. That's like making everyone's root password be "passw0rd", but then requiring peoplle to use ssh clients which will only connect to the "white list" of other computers they have accounts on. You might prevent accidental abuse this way, but the false sense of security will just make malicious abuse easier.
I'm up for space exploration and all, but I suppose that a trillion bucks would go a long way towards solving AIDS, cancer, hunger and poverty...
It's not "a trillion bucks", by the way. Bush's plans for human spaceflight are lousy and will be expensive, but the trillion dollars quote comes from some reporter deciding to randomly pull numbers from an older, obsolete, more expensive plan and round them up to the nearest trillion.
I'm all for sending people up to space after we can send our citizenry through school at a 12th grade math and reading level.
It's been a long time since you were in school, hasn't it? In the (public) high school I went to, anyone who graduated without a 12th grade education did so either because they were mentally handicapped (a fraction of a percent of the school) or because they didn't want to put any effort into it (more than half of the school). Higher teachers salaries wouldn't have lowered that percentage very far (I say while wincing; my father's a high school teacher now), and raising the rest of the educational budget would have done jack and squat. It's not a money problem (as you point out below) and money is basically the only tradeoff between education and space exploration.
There are other effects of space exploration on education, but they're less obvious and not necessarily negative. For example, I can't imagine how many engineers (not just aerospace engineers) are now working on R&D completely unrelated to human spaceflight, but were originally inspired by reading science fiction and watching it start to become science fact on the news.
Did you know they're revising policies so kids can't get held back for being behind in math or science anymore, and so kids are automatically promoted ahead a grade if they've already been held back in the past? Let's fix this crap back home before setting foot elsewhere.
What? How dare you waste our time with United States educational policies when poor AIDS education is killing millions of Africans! After all, if we're going to believe that society can't do two things at once for some crazy reason, we'd better make really really sure that the one lone priority we don't give up on is a good one.
These aren't the same thing, and the latter phrase is technically accurate, while the former phrase feeds the "They want to stop our P2P networking advances!" anger exhibited by some slashdot posters.
While it's theoretically possible that the RIAA just sued everyone running Kazaa, that would have meant issuing way more than 9 subpoenas per university; it's more likely that they actually queried their targets' computers for a list of the shared files first, then sued the people who offered fifty gigs of pop MP3s for download and ignored the people who just had Linux.isos, game demos, and indie music.
I'm not saying the "they want to stop all file-sharing!" anger is totally unjustified; that's basically what the RIAA did to Napster, after all. But it is probably unjustified on this occasion; this time they're trying to sue actual copyright infringers and not just people who create technology that happens to make infringement possible.
It would make sense that the IBM case would set precedent and all other cases obide by that ruling.
Take a closer look at SCO's charges. Most of the complaints aren't copyright infringement, but contract violation. SCO isn't just saying "IBM isn't supposed to do that with our code!", they're saying "IBM isn't supposed to do that with their code!"
I personally don't expect either claim to survive a trial, but it's theoretically possible for SCO to lose all of the copyright claims and win some of the contract claims, in which case they'd win some damages against IBM but they probably still wouldn't have any standing to sue third parties.
Instead of forcing me to make individual choices about every single optional CPU or GPU taxing feature, try and detect the capabilities of my computer and give me the best picture quality I can get at a smooth framerate.
That way I don't have to study the impact of every single optional feature... if my computer can handle two pixel shader passes, 100 MB of textures, and models which have been decimated to 10000-20000 triangles each, I still won't have to know what a "pixel shader" is before playing.
Frankly those users have ignored all the obvious aspects of being infected (100% cable light flashing)
My cable light has been flashing intermittently ever since the latest Windows worm. It's not because my (Fedora Linux) computer is infected, it's because every other infected computer on the net is periodically scanning my entire block of IP addresses. Every time they try to infect an unused address in that block, our helpful routers send an ARP packet to every cable modem user. I've seen more than a hundred per second during bad periods.
Maybe DSL users (who don't have to share the same bandwidth with everyone in their neighborhood) or users at smarter cable modem companies (who could be caching these things a bit longer, not sending out ARP requests for the same IP address every few seconds) would see a difference if they were infected by a virus, but at least Road Runner Austin users are probably all used to constantly flickering cable modem lights by now.
Forcing some sort of email "stamp" in any way will do one thing, fragment the email standard as those who don't want to pay/can't afford to pay will adopt a new standard of sending messages.
No, they'll adopt an old standard of sending messages: SMTP.
3. SCO is to provide and identify all specific lines of code from Unix System V from which IBM's contributions from AIX and Dynix are alleged to be derived.
Note that this sentence essentially assumes that SCO's "If A and B are linked into the same binary, then B is a derived work of A" theory is wrong. For this question to be even answerable, every chunk of code that SCO claims is a "derivative work" of System V is going to have to be a modified version of code that is already included in System V.
Somehow I don't think "We don't actually have any JFS, RCU, or NUMA code in System V, but under our theory we don't have to" is going to be a very good answer to this order, but it's basically the only answer SCO can give.
Superficially this order doesn't look like a big win for IBM, but since order 3 implies that Judge Wells doesn't believe SCO's ideas about "derivative works" and order 5 implies that Judge Wells does believe IBM's ideas about the GPL... well, that's about as good as the order could get without actually throwing out any of SCO's claims.
Ok, so all this does is prove that your vote was cast, not for whom you cast it.
Right.
How does this prevent tampering again?
It prevents tampering at the first stage of the process: nobody can just "lose" your ballot the way boxes of paper ballots and bits on smartcards can be lost, because your ballot can be published instantly, anyone who is worried about the election computers crashing can make their own copy, and when the votes are finally tallied you can check the list of votes yourself to make sure your vote is on it.
If there's no physical representation used for recount purposes, then I can go into the database and change for whom your vote was cast without changing the fact that you cast it.. right ?
Not quite, because there is no single "database". The encrypted votes can be published immediately, so everyone can be sure that the list of votes which is being decrypted includes their vote. The encryption is a nested process: each candidate (or a group of election officials, but the trustable way to do this is if each candidate gets to approve their own official) gets to supply public keys that they can generate themselves, a vote is encrypted by applying all of these public keys sequentially.
The list of votes is then decrypted by each candidate decrypting sequentially, and shuffling the list after each decryption.
What prevents any of the candidates from tampering is that after all the lists are published, some of the substeps get randomly checked. The introductory text uses the analogy of releasing "videos" of the substeps, but the real text explains a protocol that lets you verify some the substeps cryptographically, and because of all the scrambling lets you verify up to 50% of the substeps without revealing which encrypted vote matched up with any particular decrypted vote.
So, if you're one of the officials, you can fake a decryption step and change who a vote is for, but if you've got a 50% chance of being caught with every change (i.e. a 99.9% chance of being caught after 10 changes), you're probably not going to risk changing enough votes to matter.
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Maybe it does, but "xfreee86" sounds the same, and returns real search results, and "xfree66" has more "six/sex" sounds in it and returns real search results. They're not filtering by sound.
Any of us who used to use SCO Unix and is migrating to Linux could be next. If you don't have a contract with SCO and aren't a distributor of Unix or Linux, i.e., if you are normal end user, there is nothing they could possibly get you for.
SCO hasn't been afraid of starting lawsuits it can't win in the past; what makes you think it will be afraid to do so in the future?
Besides, if the allegations aren't true, and no SCO libraries are being used, it should be easy to prove and this case will be dropped very quickly (at least quick for the judicial system).
Ah, that's the catch, isn't it? "Quick for the judicial system" seems to be translatable as "within several months" so:
If SCO needs to bump it's stock price up for a few months, then anyone who looks at them funny and has deep pockets is a possible target.
If SCO needs to make using Linux seem risky (to persuade Microsoft or Sun to "buy more licenses"), then anyone who uses Linux is a possible target.
On the other hand, this really doesn't make Linux much more risky than any other business activity: if anyone can sue you for anything, baseless or not, appeasing them all would mean caving in to threats from anyone whose brother made it through law school, not just Darl.
At least with paperless voting you need something more sofisticated and educated that a horde of gorillas that can barely read and write their names
More sophisticated and educated, but less numerous. The problem with paperless voting as currently implemented is that to tamper with the results you don't need a "horde" of anyone; you just need one or two of those sophisticated people to get the right level of access and abuse it.
How does this answer the question? You're saying everyone can read your vote, given your encrypted receipt...
No, I'm not. I'm saying everyone can read your encrypted vote (and make sure it is included in the public list of votes), given your encrypted receipt. However, your encrypted vote can't be used anyone (even yourself!) to prove whom you voted for.
Did you read the whole paper? Some of your concerns seem to be based on a misunderstanding of how their system works, but others were specifically addressed.
Who has access to scanners?
Everyone. Being a "scanner" in a vreceipt.com-like system means that you have a computer scanner to read the receipt, easily written software to decode the binary number it represents, an HTTP client to download the list of binary receipts recorded at your precinct, and a public key encryption program to check the digital signatures on everything. Basically a "trusted organization" is just your local computer geek.
How do you keep them from the vote buyers and vote intimidators (particularly when you are giving them to the groups with the most stake in the election outcome)?
By selling scanners at Best Buy and Circuit City, writing open source OCR software (which basically just has to read a grid of squares and say "black = 1, white = 0", which you could do by hand if you're paranoid) to use with them, and using existing open source software (say, gpg and wget) for the rest of the tasks. Open source software is an insufficient solution to evoting when it's specifically written for evoting and installed on someone else's computer (how do you know there isn't a very subtle trojan in the source, and how are you certain that the source you've read is equivalent to the binary actually running on the machine), but it's a perfect solution when it's general purpose software already running on your own computer.
Why should people trust any more that their vote will be counted correctly,
Because they can download the list of encrypted receipts online, and find their own vote on it.
and that poor code won't correctly interpret their intended vote,
Because 50% of the intermediate decryption steps are randomly published, so if anyone's software was accidentally or maliciously mis-decrypting votes, it couldn't make even a dozen errors without a (1-2^-12) probability of getting caught.
but then subtract one from the candidate the voted for instead of adding
There is no way of "subtracting" a vote in this system. After the decryption is done, what is left is a list of statements that basically say "I voted for X", and you get the totals by counting. If you don't trust someone else's software to do the counting correctly, you can download the list and count it yourself.
as happened in one polling station in GA in '00
The vreceipt.com system is nothing like any evoting system in use today; it's specifically designed to be immune to the problems which make current evoting systems impractical.
There are a couple problems it's not completely immune to:
It requires a trusted random number generator to choose which decryption steps to spot check in each stage. The best way I can think of to do this would be to have every candidate generate as many random numbers as needed, give encrypted copies of these random numbers to every other candidate, give out the decryption key once they've received the other candidates' numbers (to prevent a candidate from seeing anyone else's numbers before generating their own), and finally XOR everybody's number list together. This would have to be done after the election results were decrypted.
It doesn't prevent people from adding votes to the total. As far as I can tell, the only way to prevent that is to have volunteers at every precinct making sure that the number of encrypted votes they record wasn't any greater than the number of eligible voters stepping into booths. This wouldn't be too hard, since encrypted votes could safely be published instantly - they still wouldn't be decryptable until after the election was over when everyone with keys works together to decrypt them.
In summary, zero in any unit is the lowest attainable pressure.
My last fluid mechanics professor disagreed - zero is the lowest attainable pressure in a gas, but the molecules in a liquid can pull on each other as well as push. This is apparantly not a very natural condition (it's sort of like a superheated liquid, in that any imperfections in your container give the fluid a place to start vaporizing), but it can be done experimentally. Try Google, in which a search for '"negative pressure" liquid' produces thousands of results, with some peer reviewed journal articles and college classroom materials on the first page.
Sorting by score first put your post at the top, and I was just starting to appreciate your cutting expression of the extent to which even the worst of today's television programming is a reflection of the sort of industry which creates it and the sort of society which demands it...
And then I realized you just meant the screen would have a lot of glare. Man, that's disappointing.
What exactly is so hard to believe? Does my Red Hat box refuse to let a script edit ifcfg-ppp0 until it sees a GPG signature? Does OS X prevent you from installing a modem unless you're dialing an Apple-approved phone number? Could any company sell a product which refused to let users make arbitrary changes to their own settings, and not be rightfully reviled for it on Slashdot?
Are you just hunting for the (+1, anti-Microsoft) mod points?
Thank you! Everyone else on this is just posting "it's not terrorism" or "it was just a joke". I agree, this guy should be thrown in the slammer or put adrift at sea or something.
Why are those beliefs incompatible? You don't have to be a "terrorists" to be a dangerous, worthless criminal. Someone reprogramming a thousand computers to make 911 inaccessible might be a terrorist. Someone reprogramming 18 computers to call 911 occasionally is a criminal.
The column you're looking at is labeled "Altitude (feet) / Distance (miles)". The highest altitude reached is under 100,000 feet, which is under 31 kilometers.
The second link (which says you've got 35,756 kilometers to go) you read correctly.
You cant use CSS on your product without a license and more then I can use the contents of your videos in mine.
The contents of his videos are protected by copyright law, so although you can use a legally acquired copy however you want, you're right that you can't make more copies without a license.
CSS is an algorithm (and thus uncopyrightable), it isn't patented (if it had been nobody would have had to crack a DVD player's keys or reverse engineer the algorithm to begin with), and now it isn't a trade secret anymore. What exactly do you think he needs a license for?
You raise an interesting point: the only way an entrenched technology can fight innovation is if its supporters can get a government to intervene on its behalf.
The easiest way for an entrenched company to fight innovation is to do nothing: if your products require a large investment in capital then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies, and if your products also require a large R&D budget then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies in your field.
The second easiest way is to discourage competing innovations by demonstrating them to be a losing proposition for your competitors. If a significant competing project comes out of a smaller company, you sell your version at a loss, thus forcing your competitor to sell theirs at a loss, until they leave the market or are forced out of business. This will cause you to lose money in the short term on one product at a time, but will save you money in the long term as other companies realize they can't make money competing with you and decide to stay out of "your" markets in the first place.
Note that the second method is nearly impossible if you aren't already a monopoly in some markets and is technically illegal if you are; fortunately any legal costs and fines that result are unlikely to be substantial, and just act to slightly increase the cost of "dumping".
XP's implementation doesn't actually show the desktop previews in the pager - it's more like Mac OS X's expose, with the desktop preview grid taking over the whole screen when you click a preview button or hit a key combination.
Thanks for the correction, but I don't think it makes a big difference. IIRC Enlightenment also popped up larger versions of the desktop previews while you were "Alt-Tabbing" (no, that wasn't the default key combo, but you get the idea) between desktops. They didn't fill the screen, but I can't imagine a reasonable patent being granted for "desktop previews which fill 100% instead of 60% of the screen".
Except I'm using a Lexmark printer; everything else isn't the same model you described but close enough to use the exact same driver. The only problem I had with 2.6 is that the ivtv driver (for a Hauppauge PVR-250 TV tuner) needed to be patched built by hand; everything else seems to be caught by Red Hat's autoconfiguration tools now.
Slashdot Mirror
Only allow people to scan for RFID that match a white list of your own property or property in your care with your consent. Any reading not on a white list must be discarded. Once an item is sold it is no longer their property and must be removed from the white list - with todays pos tech this would be absurdly easy to implement.
And even easier to circumvent. That's like making everyone's root password be "passw0rd", but then requiring peoplle to use ssh clients which will only connect to the "white list" of other computers they have accounts on. You might prevent accidental abuse this way, but the false sense of security will just make malicious abuse easier.
I'm all for sending people up to space after we can send our citizenry through school at a 12th grade math and reading level.
It's been a long time since you were in school, hasn't it? In the (public) high school I went to, anyone who graduated without a 12th grade education did so either because they were mentally handicapped (a fraction of a percent of the school) or because they didn't want to put any effort into it (more than half of the school). Higher teachers salaries wouldn't have lowered that percentage very far (I say while wincing; my father's a high school teacher now), and raising the rest of the educational budget would have done jack and squat. It's not a money problem (as you point out below) and money is basically the only tradeoff between education and space exploration.
There are other effects of space exploration on education, but they're less obvious and not necessarily negative. For example, I can't imagine how many engineers (not just aerospace engineers) are now working on R&D completely unrelated to human spaceflight, but were originally inspired by reading science fiction and watching it start to become science fact on the news.
Did you know they're revising policies so kids can't get held back for being behind in math or science anymore, and so kids are automatically promoted ahead a grade if they've already been held back in the past? Let's fix this crap back home before setting foot elsewhere.
What? How dare you waste our time with United States educational policies when poor AIDS education is killing millions of Africans! After all, if we're going to believe that society can't do two things at once for some crazy reason, we'd better make really really sure that the one lone priority we don't give up on is a good one.
file-sharing.
.isos, game demos, and indie music.
sharing music illegally.
These aren't the same thing, and the latter phrase is technically accurate, while the former phrase feeds the "They want to stop our P2P networking advances!" anger exhibited by some slashdot posters.
While it's theoretically possible that the RIAA just sued everyone running Kazaa, that would have meant issuing way more than 9 subpoenas per university; it's more likely that they actually queried their targets' computers for a list of the shared files first, then sued the people who offered fifty gigs of pop MP3s for download and ignored the people who just had Linux
I'm not saying the "they want to stop all file-sharing!" anger is totally unjustified; that's basically what the RIAA did to Napster, after all. But it is probably unjustified on this occasion; this time they're trying to sue actual copyright infringers and not just people who create technology that happens to make infringement possible.
- 99% -- Record Industry Execs
- 0.05% -- Band manager
- 0.03% -- Hookers and blow
- 0.01% -- Flowers for the receptionist
- 0.005% -- A couple of beers for the record execs' buds
- 0.004% -- The Anti-Slashdot lobby
- 0.001% -- The band, Counting Crows. They can divvy it up however they want between themselves.
Is it clear now?It's clear once you do the math: their accountant is skimming 0.9% off the top!
It would make sense that the IBM case would set precedent and all other cases obide by that ruling.
Take a closer look at SCO's charges. Most of the complaints aren't copyright infringement, but contract violation. SCO isn't just saying "IBM isn't supposed to do that with our code!", they're saying "IBM isn't supposed to do that with their code!"
I personally don't expect either claim to survive a trial, but it's theoretically possible for SCO to lose all of the copyright claims and win some of the contract claims, in which case they'd win some damages against IBM but they probably still wouldn't have any standing to sue third parties.
Instead of forcing me to make individual choices about every single optional CPU or GPU taxing feature, try and detect the capabilities of my computer and give me the best picture quality I can get at a smooth framerate.
That way I don't have to study the impact of every single optional feature... if my computer can handle two pixel shader passes, 100 MB of textures, and models which have been decimated to 10000-20000 triangles each, I still won't have to know what a "pixel shader" is before playing.
Frankly those users have ignored all the obvious aspects of being infected (100% cable light flashing)
My cable light has been flashing intermittently ever since the latest Windows worm. It's not because my (Fedora Linux) computer is infected, it's because every other infected computer on the net is periodically scanning my entire block of IP addresses. Every time they try to infect an unused address in that block, our helpful routers send an ARP packet to every cable modem user. I've seen more than a hundred per second during bad periods.
Maybe DSL users (who don't have to share the same bandwidth with everyone in their neighborhood) or users at smarter cable modem companies (who could be caching these things a bit longer, not sending out ARP requests for the same IP address every few seconds) would see a difference if they were infected by a virus, but at least Road Runner Austin users are probably all used to constantly flickering cable modem lights by now.
Forcing some sort of email "stamp" in any way will do one thing, fragment the email standard as those who don't want to pay/can't afford to pay will adopt a new standard of sending messages.
No, they'll adopt an old standard of sending messages: SMTP.
There is NEVER an appropriate time for that goat something link.
Note that this sentence essentially assumes that SCO's "If A and B are linked into the same binary, then B is a derived work of A" theory is wrong. For this question to be even answerable, every chunk of code that SCO claims is a "derivative work" of System V is going to have to be a modified version of code that is already included in System V.
Somehow I don't think "We don't actually have any JFS, RCU, or NUMA code in System V, but under our theory we don't have to" is going to be a very good answer to this order, but it's basically the only answer SCO can give.
Superficially this order doesn't look like a big win for IBM, but since order 3 implies that Judge Wells doesn't believe SCO's ideas about "derivative works" and order 5 implies that Judge Wells does believe IBM's ideas about the GPL... well, that's about as good as the order could get without actually throwing out any of SCO's claims.
Ok, so all this does is prove that your vote was cast, not for whom you cast it.
Right.
How does this prevent tampering again?
It prevents tampering at the first stage of the process: nobody can just "lose" your ballot the way boxes of paper ballots and bits on smartcards can be lost, because your ballot can be published instantly, anyone who is worried about the election computers crashing can make their own copy, and when the votes are finally tallied you can check the list of votes yourself to make sure your vote is on it.
If there's no physical representation used for recount purposes, then I can go into the database and change for whom your vote was cast without changing the fact that you cast it.. right ?
Not quite, because there is no single "database". The encrypted votes can be published immediately, so everyone can be sure that the list of votes which is being decrypted includes their vote. The encryption is a nested process: each candidate (or a group of election officials, but the trustable way to do this is if each candidate gets to approve their own official) gets to supply public keys that they can generate themselves, a vote is encrypted by applying all of these public keys sequentially.
The list of votes is then decrypted by each candidate decrypting sequentially, and shuffling the list after each decryption.
What prevents any of the candidates from tampering is that after all the lists are published, some of the substeps get randomly checked. The introductory text uses the analogy of releasing "videos" of the substeps, but the real text explains a protocol that lets you verify some the substeps cryptographically, and because of all the scrambling lets you verify up to 50% of the substeps without revealing which encrypted vote matched up with any particular decrypted vote.
So, if you're one of the officials, you can fake a decryption step and change who a vote is for, but if you've got a 50% chance of being caught with every change (i.e. a 99.9% chance of being caught after 10 changes), you're probably not going to risk changing enough votes to matter.
Perhaps they are doing soundex/metaphone type matching on the words to see if they are sex-related. Perhaps "xfree86" sounds like something you might find on a porn site.
Maybe it does, but "xfreee86" sounds the same, and returns real search results, and "xfree66" has more "six/sex" sounds in it and returns real search results. They're not filtering by sound.
Any of us who used to use SCO Unix and is migrating to Linux could be next. If you don't have a contract with SCO and aren't a distributor of Unix or Linux, i.e., if you are normal end user, there is nothing they could possibly get you for.
SCO hasn't been afraid of starting lawsuits it can't win in the past; what makes you think it will be afraid to do so in the future?
Besides, if the allegations aren't true, and no SCO libraries are being used, it should be easy to prove and this case will be dropped very quickly (at least quick for the judicial system).
Ah, that's the catch, isn't it? "Quick for the judicial system" seems to be translatable as "within several months" so:
If SCO needs to bump it's stock price up for a few months, then anyone who looks at them funny and has deep pockets is a possible target.
If SCO needs to make using Linux seem risky (to persuade Microsoft or Sun to "buy more licenses"), then anyone who uses Linux is a possible target.
On the other hand, this really doesn't make Linux much more risky than any other business activity: if anyone can sue you for anything, baseless or not, appeasing them all would mean caving in to threats from anyone whose brother made it through law school, not just Darl.
At least with paperless voting you need something more sofisticated and educated that a horde of gorillas that can barely read and write their names
More sophisticated and educated, but less numerous. The problem with paperless voting as currently implemented is that to tamper with the results you don't need a "horde" of anyone; you just need one or two of those sophisticated people to get the right level of access and abuse it.
How does this answer the question? You're saying everyone can read your vote, given your encrypted receipt...
No, I'm not. I'm saying everyone can read your encrypted vote (and make sure it is included in the public list of votes), given your encrypted receipt. However, your encrypted vote can't be used anyone (even yourself!) to prove whom you voted for.
Really, read the paper.
Did you read the whole paper? Some of your concerns seem to be based on a misunderstanding of how their system works, but others were specifically addressed.
Who has access to scanners?
Everyone. Being a "scanner" in a vreceipt.com-like system means that you have a computer scanner to read the receipt, easily written software to decode the binary number it represents, an HTTP client to download the list of binary receipts recorded at your precinct, and a public key encryption program to check the digital signatures on everything. Basically a "trusted organization" is just your local computer geek.
How do you keep them from the vote buyers and vote intimidators (particularly when you are giving them to the groups with the most stake in the election outcome)?
By selling scanners at Best Buy and Circuit City, writing open source OCR software (which basically just has to read a grid of squares and say "black = 1, white = 0", which you could do by hand if you're paranoid) to use with them, and using existing open source software (say, gpg and wget) for the rest of the tasks. Open source software is an insufficient solution to evoting when it's specifically written for evoting and installed on someone else's computer (how do you know there isn't a very subtle trojan in the source, and how are you certain that the source you've read is equivalent to the binary actually running on the machine), but it's a perfect solution when it's general purpose software already running on your own computer.
Why should people trust any more that their vote will be counted correctly,
Because they can download the list of encrypted receipts online, and find their own vote on it.
and that poor code won't correctly interpret their intended vote,
Because 50% of the intermediate decryption steps are randomly published, so if anyone's software was accidentally or maliciously mis-decrypting votes, it couldn't make even a dozen errors without a (1-2^-12) probability of getting caught.
but then subtract one from the candidate the voted for instead of adding
There is no way of "subtracting" a vote in this system. After the decryption is done, what is left is a list of statements that basically say "I voted for X", and you get the totals by counting. If you don't trust someone else's software to do the counting correctly, you can download the list and count it yourself.
as happened in one polling station in GA in '00
The vreceipt.com system is nothing like any evoting system in use today; it's specifically designed to be immune to the problems which make current evoting systems impractical.
There are a couple problems it's not completely immune to:
It requires a trusted random number generator to choose which decryption steps to spot check in each stage. The best way I can think of to do this would be to have every candidate generate as many random numbers as needed, give encrypted copies of these random numbers to every other candidate, give out the decryption key once they've received the other candidates' numbers (to prevent a candidate from seeing anyone else's numbers before generating their own), and finally XOR everybody's number list together. This would have to be done after the election results were decrypted.
It doesn't prevent people from adding votes to the total. As far as I can tell, the only way to prevent that is to have volunteers at every precinct making sure that the number of encrypted votes they record wasn't any greater than the number of eligible voters stepping into booths. This wouldn't be too hard, since encrypted votes could safely be published instantly - they still wouldn't be decryptable until after the election was over when everyone with keys works together to decrypt them.
In summary, zero in any unit is the lowest attainable pressure.
My last fluid mechanics professor disagreed - zero is the lowest attainable pressure in a gas, but the molecules in a liquid can pull on each other as well as push. This is apparantly not a very natural condition (it's sort of like a superheated liquid, in that any imperfections in your container give the fluid a place to start vaporizing), but it can be done experimentally. Try Google, in which a search for '"negative pressure" liquid' produces thousands of results, with some peer reviewed journal articles and college classroom materials on the first page.
Sorting by score first put your post at the top, and I was just starting to appreciate your cutting expression of the extent to which even the worst of today's television programming is a reflection of the sort of industry which creates it and the sort of society which demands it...
And then I realized you just meant the screen would have a lot of glare. Man, that's disappointing.
What exactly is so hard to believe? Does my Red Hat box refuse to let a script edit ifcfg-ppp0 until it sees a GPG signature? Does OS X prevent you from installing a modem unless you're dialing an Apple-approved phone number? Could any company sell a product which refused to let users make arbitrary changes to their own settings, and not be rightfully reviled for it on Slashdot?
Are you just hunting for the (+1, anti-Microsoft) mod points?
Thank you! Everyone else on this is just posting "it's not terrorism" or "it was just a joke". I agree, this guy should be thrown in the slammer or put adrift at sea or something.
Why are those beliefs incompatible? You don't have to be a "terrorists" to be a dangerous, worthless criminal. Someone reprogramming a thousand computers to make 911 inaccessible might be a terrorist. Someone reprogramming 18 computers to call 911 occasionally is a criminal.
The column you're looking at is labeled "Altitude (feet) / Distance (miles)". The highest altitude reached is under 100,000 feet, which is under 31 kilometers.
The second link (which says you've got 35,756 kilometers to go) you read correctly.
You cant use CSS on your product without a license and more then I can use the contents of your videos in mine.
The contents of his videos are protected by copyright law, so although you can use a legally acquired copy however you want, you're right that you can't make more copies without a license.
CSS is an algorithm (and thus uncopyrightable), it isn't patented (if it had been nobody would have had to crack a DVD player's keys or reverse engineer the algorithm to begin with), and now it isn't a trade secret anymore. What exactly do you think he needs a license for?
You raise an interesting point: the only way an entrenched technology can fight innovation is if its supporters can get a government to intervene on its behalf.
The easiest way for an entrenched company to fight innovation is to do nothing: if your products require a large investment in capital then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies, and if your products also require a large R&D budget then you probably won't have to fight innovation from anyone but other large companies in your field.
The second easiest way is to discourage competing innovations by demonstrating them to be a losing proposition for your competitors. If a significant competing project comes out of a smaller company, you sell your version at a loss, thus forcing your competitor to sell theirs at a loss, until they leave the market or are forced out of business. This will cause you to lose money in the short term on one product at a time, but will save you money in the long term as other companies realize they can't make money competing with you and decide to stay out of "your" markets in the first place.
Note that the second method is nearly impossible if you aren't already a monopoly in some markets and is technically illegal if you are; fortunately any legal costs and fines that result are unlikely to be substantial, and just act to slightly increase the cost of "dumping".
XP's implementation doesn't actually show the desktop previews in the pager - it's more like Mac OS X's expose, with the desktop preview grid taking over the whole screen when you click a preview button or hit a key combination.
Thanks for the correction, but I don't think it makes a big difference. IIRC Enlightenment also popped up larger versions of the desktop previews while you were "Alt-Tabbing" (no, that wasn't the default key combo, but you get the idea) between desktops. They didn't fill the screen, but I can't imagine a reasonable patent being granted for "desktop previews which fill 100% instead of 60% of the screen".
Except I'm using a Lexmark printer; everything else isn't the same model you described but close enough to use the exact same driver. The only problem I had with 2.6 is that the ivtv driver (for a Hauppauge PVR-250 TV tuner) needed to be patched built by hand; everything else seems to be caught by Red Hat's autoconfiguration tools now.
What trouble did you have installing?