I'd think this was obvious, but why has nobody pointed it out yet?
If they let the Palm Beach county results stand, then GW Bush will have been elected by 2000 confused idiots.
If they let those votes be counted for Gore instead, then Gore will have been elected by 2000 people who had to backpedal on their inaccurate statements.
Check out the CBS page for presidential election results in Florida, by county.
Now take a look at the votes for the Socialist Workers Candidate, Harris. Scroll down the page.
6 votes..
5 votes..
0 votes.. (what a loser)
88 votes.. (ok, I take that back)
0 votes..
36 votes..
Volusia County: 9,888 votes!!! That's 5% of the county residents, and 95% of Harris' total vote.
Same thing with Philips, the Constitution guy, who got 2,927 votes in Volusia, almost 3/4 of his total count for Florida. Hell, Browne, who only got 1% in other counties by generosity of rounding, beat out Nader in Volusia to get 3,211 votes. Is there some ultraeffective "pro third party, anti Green" ad campaign that decided to spam just one city in Florida?
Perhaps, but that's not enough for those wacky Volusers; apparantly they've been having some computer trouble, too. According to a section of this ABC News article, the vote count for Gore in Volusia may have decreased by about 10,000 votes while they were sending in returns Wednesday morning. WTF?
Yeah. So, I guess my point is that Florida sucks. I guess they weren't expecting to be swarmed over by national news coverage, though; this kind of stuff probably happens everywhere, but never takes on this kind of importance.
You can see the hacked version of the website here .
Seeing as how the hacker finishes off with "As such, I must vote Gore, and I urge you to do so." and then links to Al Gore's web page, I doubt it was a Green sympathizer. Of course, it could be a Green trying to make both Democrats and Republicans look bad, but now we're in conspiracy theory territory.
They have a distribution which is not Mandrake 7.2 (check the Mandrake mailing lists for details, but I believe it's a prerelease), and they are representing it as if it was Mandrake 7.2.
I doubt that the particular marketdroid who made this decision thought of it in these terms, but "misrepresentation" and "fraud" are the first things that come to my mind. People's first experience with Linux should not be with a beta release masquerading as a fully tested distribution.
Though proprietary, it is as 'Open Source' as lots of code people here praise.
Strange, I haven't seen any praise falling on anything that didn't meet the Open Source definition. On the other hand, there's been disdain for the QPL, which did meet that definition but wasn't GPL-compatible, and there's been absolute loating for the SCSL, which isn't open source but is at least closer than "published source" from IBM.
Umm... so has everybody been rooted now?
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 2
It doesn't look like it; the news articles seem to imply that it was just some low level accounts cracked and just read-only access to anything important. (Yeah, like they could slip an extra bug into Windows source code and anyone would notice)
But that wasn't my first thought. That headline, "Microsoft cracked", is terrifying! Are all the Windows users here keeping their systems up to date? If you aren't, you're probably vulnerable to the new "Win9x doesn't always check whole SMB passwords" bug, the old "malformed IP packets confuse the hell out of Microsoft engineers" bugs, or a whole plethora of Outlook exploits (including a buffer overflow when email is downloaded, so turning off previewing and javascript won't help).
But if you are keeping your Windows box up to date, then you'll be one of the hundred million computers that get 0wn3d by the first person to crack windowsupdate.microsoft.com and stick in a trojan. This isn't just a Microsoft problem, of course; every OS vendor (even taking the broadest definition of "vendor" for Debian people) keeps their repository of updates, and all the good ones have an easy way for users to sync with those updates.
I still think that Windows Update, and the idea of autoinstalling security updates from vendors in general, is a good thing; it certainly beats having millions of exploitable computers hanging off the net. But that central download source then becomes a central point of failure for your operating system security; God help us all if Microsoft ever really gets cracked.
Or at least, that's the impression I get. The beta RPMs that bero@redhat.com was putting together were set up to install alongside KDE 1, but I gather the attitude for the release candidates and final is "why would you want to have both installed at the same time?"
That's not a horrible policy, I guess, but it seems unnecessary. One of the things I always liked about Linux was the ability to have, say, libc5 and glibc, or ncurses 3,4, and 5, all installed at the same time to support old binaries.
I don't. C'mon, who builds a house at "One Microsoft Way"? It's like living on "Ethnic Cleansing Avenue"; you have to be expecting enraged mobs with torches and pitchforks at your front door eventually anyways.
After all, that's what "looking around here" tells you, and people wouldn't be repeating such things if they weren't solid truth, right?
Look around here - Almost nobody is running a 2.3/"2.4Test" kernel. Because it's too damn far from being ready,
First of all, there's about ten times as many people here as there were when 2.1/2.2 came out. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more cautious Linux users, and even more Windows users, than there used to be.
Second, exactly how scientific a poll are you taking? I'd like to hear how how many people contributed to the conclusion of "almost nobody".
I've been running them since 2.4.0-test7 (which I dropped into Red Hat 7 with no problems), with no crashes. NVidia's binary drivers leak memory like a sieve, but with closed source software whatcha gonna do? The open nv driver in XFree86 4.0.1 still works great, so I'm not too concerned.
I still think there's plently of people who would love to beta test a new kernel. They just don't want to alpha test one.
Excellent. Then they can download a 2.4.0 test kernel any time, as they've been beta quality for longer than I've been using them. "Too damn far from being ready" is a subjective term, and I'd like to hear just what objective problems it's supposed to be insinuating. I'm sure there's still serious bugs that need fixing (knowing that is one of the nice things about a public TODO list), but nothing I've personally encountered.
Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.?
My most exciting driving experience had to be getting off 287 in San Francisco. Normally, when you take a highway exit, and you see the sign saying "Exit 35 m.p.h.", that should be mentally translated to "Keep it below 60, and start decelerating". There's an exit in San Francisco, however, where "Exit 25 m.p.h." means "If you are driving 26 m.p.h., you are about to die". Tight little loop that nearly threw my friend's car off the road, and nearly made me rear-end him trying to brake as fast as he had to.
Yeah, yeah, my fault. I'm normally a safe driver, though, I swear...
According to the exit polls, anyway, the second choices of Perot supporters were split pretty evenly between Bush and Clinton. Even approval voting would have gone to Clinton in that election, although Perot's numbers would have shot way up.
This situation is different. There may be a number of Nader supporters whose second choice is "not going to the poll", but you can be sure the rest of them would be 99% Gore over Bush.
Borda count wouldn't fix the problem.
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 2
In fact, I could easily imagine a Borda count voting system making the problem worse.
The problem, of course, is that people don't vote their real feelings, they vote to maximize the chance of their vote "making a difference", to try and influence the outcome of the election. When everybody does this, the total outcome can be something completely undesired.
You still have that problem with Borda voting. If there are five candidates running, and you prefer A to B to C to D to E, but C and D are leading in the polls immediately before the election. Under our current system, you'd avoid "throwing away your vote" by voting for C instead of A. If we used Borda voting, then do you want to vote your conscience, A-B-C-D-E? No! You want to vote C-A-B-E-D, and put as large a spread between C and D as your vote will allow you.
Under approval voting, you would vote approval for A, B, and C, and disapproval for D and E. There aren't any funny game theory tricks that would let you increase your vote's effectiveness at the expense of the accuracy of it's ordering. Of course, the total accuracy of the vote is questionable; you might "approve" of D as president, just not as much as A, B, or C. But at least the rankings would be more accurate than today.
And of course, this is all based on the idea that people try to maximise the effectiveness of their vote, which isn't true. If that were the case, then we'd all be lying to the pollsters right up until the exit polls, so that third party candidates had a greater chance. The 10% of the population who might prefer Nader to Gore, but absolutely hate Bush, for instance, would tell pollsters they were voting for Nader, then vote for Gore anyway unless Nader had a higher poll standing on election day (in which case all the people who prefer Gore to Nader, but don't want Bush to be elected, would tell pollsters they were voting for Gore, but vote for Bush anyway).
What is the basis for the concern about information travelling faster than light?
Because one of the things that Relativity claims is relative is the idea of simultaneity. "Travels faster than light" in one reference frame always equates to "travels backwards in time" in another reference frame.
If you can send information faster than light in any reference frame (and remember, they're supposed to be indistinguishable), then you can send information back to its starting point at an earlier time than it is sent, and then causality goes right out the window.
This isn't a question for the candidates, or even a suggestion for the people posting and moderating questions.
It's a plea to Roblimo and/or whoever chooses the final 10 questions.
With the Carnivore interview recently, I wasn't the only one to complain that a lot of redundant "why should we trust you" type questions were moderated up to a 5 (and then asked in the interview), to the detriment of questions moderated to 4 or even 3, and generally to the detriment of us all when we had to read the Carnivore reviewer repeatedly defending his character rather than answering more interesting questions about the review.
I'm worried that the same thing is happening here: among the thousand-odd posts, of course many people are repeating the same questions. Could we eliminate duplicates before sending them to the candidates, please? In particular, as I write this there are 4 DMCA comments modded +5, and more at +4. We only need one question on the DMCA.
Secondly, a request: Since you're obviously going to have to throw out three redundant copies of every question you ask, could you pick the least leading of the bunch for the question that gets sent? And could everybody just stop trying to seize the opportunity to tell the next president what to think, and take the opportunity to ask him what he thinks? I'm sorry, but a post that begins with "Little by little the rights of Americans are being taken away to protect the interests of corporations." or "Many tech people think that strong encryption is one of the best ways we have to protect freedom both now and for future generations." is not a question, it's the poster getting up on a soapbox, and inadvertently telling the politicians we're interviewing exactly how to best pander to him.
I don't want to be pandered to. I don't see any way to avoid it, since any smart candidate will have his advisors reading the last week or two of Slashdot stories and telling him what we want to hear. But do we have to do their research for them? Can we at least try and ask some unbiased questions instead, and maybe see what the candidates actually think?
The most important question I saw only got moderated to a 4, in favor of repetitious "Can we really trust you? Really, really?" BS.
To paraphrase, the question was something like "How do you know the software you are reviewing will be the (only) software installed on the FBI's black boxes?"
Perritt did admit in question 9 that Carnivore would need to physically tap all traffic on a subnet, then apply software to reject packets not related to a particular investigation.
So how does he know that the software actually going into use will be the same as the software he is being asked to review? Since the FBI will need encrypted remote access to operate the Carnivore boxes, what is to stop them from uploading whatever software they want, without any judicial review or ISP knowledge, after the fact?
Of course, the answers have to be "he doesn't know", and "nothing", but I would have liked to hear it from Perritt himself.
In Marshall v. Barlow's, US Supreme Court 1978, the court found that businesses are subject to the same Fourth Amendment protection as individuals are, in regard to Administrative agencies. How will the FBI install these boxes in ISPs when there is no ongoing investigation, and no warrant?
Really, what happens when an ISP says, "No, we aren't going to violate our customers' privacy." Do they get hit with a "sure, we're investigating someone, and it's going to take an awful long time so we'll have to leave this box here indefinitely" warrant? Do they get pressured into accepting Carnivore installations in spite of the 4th amendment?
The triple point for carbon dioxide occurs at 5.11 atmospheres. Maybe there are underground CO2 "aquifers" on Mars, but these aren't underground channels we're talking about, they're surface features. For liquid CO2 to exist on the Martian surface, it would have to be sitting under over 50 meters of frozen CO2 crust, even if there were an atmosphere as dense as Earth's on top of that.
Yeah, wish I could give you a better estimate. It all depends on whether energy usage keeps growing in developed countries, what percentage of remaining fossil fuel reserves have been discovered, and how fast the majority of the world becomes fully industrial.
The "damage" done by then may be a few degrees global warming; it may not. That's another hazy area, and one I'm even less capable of answering.
It seems to me that the greatest damage done by fossil fuel burning may be the addiction it gives society to high energy consumption. Don't get me wrong; I'm uber-addicted, having sucked up 1800 kW-hr last month between myself and two roommates. Yes, that bill hurts. But I don't know if society as a whole can support that kind of power consumption with renewable resources. Nuclear power (with fuel from breeder reactors) is probably our best bet, but that's only going to buy us another century or two, and at greater expense.
Basically, we've got around half a milennium in which to invent fusion, ring the planet with solar power satellites, or learn the true meaning of "conservation".
Anyone want to estimate the cost, per immigrant, of putting someone on Earth in a viable orbital (or Mars) colony? Anyone reading my posts here might recognize me as a space nut^H^H^Henthusiast, and I'd say a million dollars per person is a good figure to shoot for. Even Robert Zubrin wouldn't put a one-way ticket to Mars lower than $300,000 without dipping into the "well, it's theoretically possible" technology pool. In any case, the travel expenses are going to be overshadowed by the cost of having the people already there (in the case of Mars) digging you out someplace to live, mining ice for you to drink and grow things with, and generally making a home on the other side.
So let's play one of my favorite games, "Fun with Almanac Numbers":
250,000 more people on the Earth every year, plus
6,000,000 one thousandth of the current population, equals
6,250,000 people we need to evacuate each year.
times 1,000,000 dollars per emigrant, equals
6.25 trillion dollars per year.
I can't find any good figures for World GDP, but this is somewhere around a fourth of it. Feel the burn. Of course, the proper figure to compare to is not World GDP, but the cost of our best alternative, the "not fucking up the Earth" plan. Opinions vary, but 6.25 trillion a year is an order of magnitude above most of them.
Besides, if we all went to Mars we'd just end up terraforming it eventually anyway; we might as well practice terraforming Earth first.
I've gone from Red Hat 6.2 to 6.9.5 to 7.0. I submitted four or five bug reports in 6.9.5; one was a "already fixed in Rawhide" situation, two others got fixes a few days later, one has a fix coming when they put together a glibc-devel errata. XFree86 4.0.1 still consumes an ungodly amount of memory on my machine, but compared to the bugs in the first releases of Red Hat 5.0 and 6.0 (which I avoided until a few weeks of errata issues had gone by), I've been quite impressed. So far I've seen Red Hat 7.0 on 2 computers, and it's been good, 2 for 2. Your particular system may vary, of course. I'd advise waiting a month before upgrading all your corporate workstations, and waiting for 7.1 before touching any important servers... but if you're not in that kind of situation, come on in, the water's fine.
By contrast, I've seen significantly more problems with Mandrake 7.1, which was frighteningly down towards the Windows end of the quality-o-meter. That was a big let down, since Mandrake 7.0 had given our LUG such a smooth installfest last year. At least with Red Hat 5 and 6, the progression from "buggy" to "rock-solid" was steadily upward.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd think this was obvious, but why has nobody pointed it out yet?
If they let the Palm Beach county results stand, then GW Bush will have been elected by 2000 confused idiots.
If they let those votes be counted for Gore instead, then Gore will have been elected by 2000 people who had to backpedal on their inaccurate statements.
Either way, it sounds like a fair election...
Check out the CBS page for presidential election results in Florida, by county.
Now take a look at the votes for the Socialist Workers Candidate, Harris. Scroll down the page.
6 votes..
5 votes..
0 votes.. (what a loser)
88 votes.. (ok, I take that back)
0 votes..
36 votes..
Volusia County: 9,888 votes!!! That's 5% of the county residents, and 95% of Harris' total vote.
Same thing with Philips, the Constitution guy, who got 2,927 votes in Volusia, almost 3/4 of his total count for Florida. Hell, Browne, who only got 1% in other counties by generosity of rounding, beat out Nader in Volusia to get 3,211 votes. Is there some ultraeffective "pro third party, anti Green" ad campaign that decided to spam just one city in Florida?
Perhaps, but that's not enough for those wacky Volusers; apparantly they've been having some computer trouble, too. According to a section of this ABC News article, the vote count for Gore in Volusia may have decreased by about 10,000 votes while they were sending in returns Wednesday morning. WTF?
Yeah. So, I guess my point is that Florida sucks. I guess they weren't expecting to be swarmed over by national news coverage, though; this kind of stuff probably happens everywhere, but never takes on this kind of importance.
You can see the hacked version of the website here .
Seeing as how the hacker finishes off with "As such, I must vote Gore, and I urge you to do so." and then links to Al Gore's web page, I doubt it was a Green sympathizer. Of course, it could be a Green trying to make both Democrats and Republicans look bad, but now we're in conspiracy theory territory.
And every time someone emailed him about it, Cmdr Taco delayed the Slash code release 24 hours!
They have a distribution which is not Mandrake 7.2 (check the Mandrake mailing lists for details, but I believe it's a prerelease), and they are representing it as if it was Mandrake 7.2.
I doubt that the particular marketdroid who made this decision thought of it in these terms, but "misrepresentation" and "fraud" are the first things that come to my mind. People's first experience with Linux should not be with a beta release masquerading as a fully tested distribution.
Look! They've got a Halloween story, a full 364 days before halloween!
Would Bush be a better man if he'd spent 10 years in prison for snorting cocaine when he was young?
Well, he wouldn't be running for President today, which I see as an improvement...
Frozen CO2, that is. What do you think the Martian ice caps are made of? (Well, mostly made of, anyway; there may be water ice at the poles too).
Though proprietary, it is as 'Open Source' as lots of code people here praise.
Strange, I haven't seen any praise falling on anything that didn't meet the Open Source definition. On the other hand, there's been disdain for the QPL, which did meet that definition but wasn't GPL-compatible, and there's been absolute loating for the SCSL, which isn't open source but is at least closer than "published source" from IBM.
It doesn't look like it; the news articles seem to imply that it was just some low level accounts cracked and just read-only access to anything important. (Yeah, like they could slip an extra bug into Windows source code and anyone would notice)
But that wasn't my first thought. That headline, "Microsoft cracked", is terrifying! Are all the Windows users here keeping their systems up to date? If you aren't, you're probably vulnerable to the new "Win9x doesn't always check whole SMB passwords" bug, the old "malformed IP packets confuse the hell out of Microsoft engineers" bugs, or a whole plethora of Outlook exploits (including a buffer overflow when email is downloaded, so turning off previewing and javascript won't help).
But if you are keeping your Windows box up to date, then you'll be one of the hundred million computers that get 0wn3d by the first person to crack windowsupdate.microsoft.com and stick in a trojan. This isn't just a Microsoft problem, of course; every OS vendor (even taking the broadest definition of "vendor" for Debian people) keeps their repository of updates, and all the good ones have an easy way for users to sync with those updates.
I still think that Windows Update, and the idea of autoinstalling security updates from vendors in general, is a good thing; it certainly beats having millions of exploitable computers hanging off the net. But that central download source then becomes a central point of failure for your operating system security; God help us all if Microsoft ever really gets cracked.
I would no more go and vote for a fictional entity like a government than I would go to the North Pole to hang out with Santa Claus.
"Fictional entity"? Who do you think is taking all your money, then?
Or at least, that's the impression I get. The beta RPMs that bero@redhat.com was putting together were set up to install alongside KDE 1, but I gather the attitude for the release candidates and final is "why would you want to have both installed at the same time?"
That's not a horrible policy, I guess, but it seems unnecessary. One of the things I always liked about Linux was the ability to have, say, libc5 and glibc, or ncurses 3,4, and 5, all installed at the same time to support old binaries.
One Microsoft Way - Redmond VA
...
I pity whoever in Virginia has this address
I don't. C'mon, who builds a house at "One Microsoft Way"? It's like living on "Ethnic Cleansing Avenue"; you have to be expecting enraged mobs with torches and pitchforks at your front door eventually anyways.
After all, that's what "looking around here" tells you, and people wouldn't be repeating such things if they weren't solid truth, right?
Look around here - Almost nobody is running a 2.3/"2.4Test" kernel. Because it's too damn far from being ready,
First of all, there's about ten times as many people here as there were when 2.1/2.2 came out. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more cautious Linux users, and even more Windows users, than there used to be.
Second, exactly how scientific a poll are you taking? I'd like to hear how how many people contributed to the conclusion of "almost nobody".
I've been running them since 2.4.0-test7 (which I dropped into Red Hat 7 with no problems), with no crashes. NVidia's binary drivers leak memory like a sieve, but with closed source software whatcha gonna do? The open nv driver in XFree86 4.0.1 still works great, so I'm not too concerned.
I still think there's plently of people who would love to beta test a new kernel. They just don't want to alpha test one.
Excellent. Then they can download a 2.4.0 test kernel any time, as they've been beta quality for longer than I've been using them. "Too damn far from being ready" is a subjective term, and I'd like to hear just what objective problems it's supposed to be insinuating. I'm sure there's still serious bugs that need fixing (knowing that is one of the nice things about a public TODO list), but nothing I've personally encountered.
Are American highways really that bad, that you feel you need to practise the drive between San Francisco and L.A.?
My most exciting driving experience had to be getting off 287 in San Francisco. Normally, when you take a highway exit, and you see the sign saying "Exit 35 m.p.h.", that should be mentally translated to "Keep it below 60, and start decelerating". There's an exit in San Francisco, however, where "Exit 25 m.p.h." means "If you are driving 26 m.p.h., you are about to die". Tight little loop that nearly threw my friend's car off the road, and nearly made me rear-end him trying to brake as fast as he had to.
Yeah, yeah, my fault. I'm normally a safe driver, though, I swear...
According to the exit polls, anyway, the second choices of Perot supporters were split pretty evenly between Bush and Clinton. Even approval voting would have gone to Clinton in that election, although Perot's numbers would have shot way up.
This situation is different. There may be a number of Nader supporters whose second choice is "not going to the poll", but you can be sure the rest of them would be 99% Gore over Bush.
In fact, I could easily imagine a Borda count voting system making the problem worse.
The problem, of course, is that people don't vote their real feelings, they vote to maximize the chance of their vote "making a difference", to try and influence the outcome of the election. When everybody does this, the total outcome can be something completely undesired.
You still have that problem with Borda voting. If there are five candidates running, and you prefer A to B to C to D to E, but C and D are leading in the polls immediately before the election. Under our current system, you'd avoid "throwing away your vote" by voting for C instead of A. If we used Borda voting, then do you want to vote your conscience, A-B-C-D-E? No! You want to vote C-A-B-E-D, and put as large a spread between C and D as your vote will allow you.
Under approval voting, you would vote approval for A, B, and C, and disapproval for D and E. There aren't any funny game theory tricks that would let you increase your vote's effectiveness at the expense of the accuracy of it's ordering. Of course, the total accuracy of the vote is questionable; you might "approve" of D as president, just not as much as A, B, or C. But at least the rankings would be more accurate than today.
And of course, this is all based on the idea that people try to maximise the effectiveness of their vote, which isn't true. If that were the case, then we'd all be lying to the pollsters right up until the exit polls, so that third party candidates had a greater chance. The 10% of the population who might prefer Nader to Gore, but absolutely hate Bush, for instance, would tell pollsters they were voting for Nader, then vote for Gore anyway unless Nader had a higher poll standing on election day (in which case all the people who prefer Gore to Nader, but don't want Bush to be elected, would tell pollsters they were voting for Gore, but vote for Bush anyway).
What is the basis for the concern about information travelling faster than light?
Because one of the things that Relativity claims is relative is the idea of simultaneity. "Travels faster than light" in one reference frame always equates to "travels backwards in time" in another reference frame.
If you can send information faster than light in any reference frame (and remember, they're supposed to be indistinguishable), then you can send information back to its starting point at an earlier time than it is sent, and then causality goes right out the window.
This isn't a question for the candidates, or even a suggestion for the people posting and moderating questions.
It's a plea to Roblimo and/or whoever chooses the final 10 questions.
With the Carnivore interview recently, I wasn't the only one to complain that a lot of redundant "why should we trust you" type questions were moderated up to a 5 (and then asked in the interview), to the detriment of questions moderated to 4 or even 3, and generally to the detriment of us all when we had to read the Carnivore reviewer repeatedly defending his character rather than answering more interesting questions about the review.
I'm worried that the same thing is happening here: among the thousand-odd posts, of course many people are repeating the same questions. Could we eliminate duplicates before sending them to the candidates, please? In particular, as I write this there are 4 DMCA comments modded +5, and more at +4. We only need one question on the DMCA.
Secondly, a request: Since you're obviously going to have to throw out three redundant copies of every question you ask, could you pick the least leading of the bunch for the question that gets sent? And could everybody just stop trying to seize the opportunity to tell the next president what to think, and take the opportunity to ask him what he thinks? I'm sorry, but a post that begins with "Little by little the rights of Americans are being taken away to protect the interests of corporations." or "Many tech people think that strong encryption is one of the best ways we have to protect freedom both now and for future generations." is not a question, it's the poster getting up on a soapbox, and inadvertently telling the politicians we're interviewing exactly how to best pander to him.
I don't want to be pandered to. I don't see any way to avoid it, since any smart candidate will have his advisors reading the last week or two of Slashdot stories and telling him what we want to hear. But do we have to do their research for them? Can we at least try and ask some unbiased questions instead, and maybe see what the candidates actually think?
The most important question I saw only got moderated to a 4, in favor of repetitious "Can we really trust you? Really, really?" BS.
To paraphrase, the question was something like "How do you know the software you are reviewing will be the (only) software installed on the FBI's black boxes?"
Perritt did admit in question 9 that Carnivore would need to physically tap all traffic on a subnet, then apply software to reject packets not related to a particular investigation.
So how does he know that the software actually going into use will be the same as the software he is being asked to review? Since the FBI will need encrypted remote access to operate the Carnivore boxes, what is to stop them from uploading whatever software they want, without any judicial review or ISP knowledge, after the fact?
Of course, the answers have to be "he doesn't know", and "nothing", but I would have liked to hear it from Perritt himself.
Let's not forget the second most important question, which only got moderated to a 3:
In Marshall v. Barlow's, US Supreme Court 1978, the court found that businesses are subject to the same Fourth Amendment protection as individuals are, in regard to Administrative agencies. How will the FBI install these boxes in ISPs when there is no ongoing investigation, and no warrant?
Really, what happens when an ISP says, "No, we aren't going to violate our customers' privacy." Do they get hit with a "sure, we're investigating someone, and it's going to take an awful long time so we'll have to leave this box here indefinitely" warrant? Do they get pressured into accepting Carnivore installations in spite of the 4th amendment?
The triple point for carbon dioxide occurs at 5.11 atmospheres. Maybe there are underground CO2 "aquifers" on Mars, but these aren't underground channels we're talking about, they're surface features. For liquid CO2 to exist on the Martian surface, it would have to be sitting under over 50 meters of frozen CO2 crust, even if there were an atmosphere as dense as Earth's on top of that.
On XFree86 4.0.1, with a Hauppage "WinTV Go" card.
Watching the 2nd US Presidential debate start now, in fact.
Email me for a copy of my conf.modules (which may not be helpful if you're using a non bttv card) or XF86Config files.
Yeah, wish I could give you a better estimate. It all depends on whether energy usage keeps growing in developed countries, what percentage of remaining fossil fuel reserves have been discovered, and how fast the majority of the world becomes fully industrial. The "damage" done by then may be a few degrees global warming; it may not. That's another hazy area, and one I'm even less capable of answering. It seems to me that the greatest damage done by fossil fuel burning may be the addiction it gives society to high energy consumption. Don't get me wrong; I'm uber-addicted, having sucked up 1800 kW-hr last month between myself and two roommates. Yes, that bill hurts. But I don't know if society as a whole can support that kind of power consumption with renewable resources. Nuclear power (with fuel from breeder reactors) is probably our best bet, but that's only going to buy us another century or two, and at greater expense. Basically, we've got around half a milennium in which to invent fusion, ring the planet with solar power satellites, or learn the true meaning of "conservation".
Anyone want to estimate the cost, per immigrant, of putting someone on Earth in a viable orbital (or Mars) colony? Anyone reading my posts here might recognize me as a space nut^H^H^Henthusiast, and I'd say a million dollars per person is a good figure to shoot for. Even Robert Zubrin wouldn't put a one-way ticket to Mars lower than $300,000 without dipping into the "well, it's theoretically possible" technology pool. In any case, the travel expenses are going to be overshadowed by the cost of having the people already there (in the case of Mars) digging you out someplace to live, mining ice for you to drink and grow things with, and generally making a home on the other side.
So let's play one of my favorite games, "Fun with Almanac Numbers":
250,000 more people on the Earth every year, plus
6,000,000 one thousandth of the current population, equals
6,250,000 people we need to evacuate each year.
times 1,000,000 dollars per emigrant, equals
6.25 trillion dollars per year.
I can't find any good figures for World GDP, but this is somewhere around a fourth of it. Feel the burn. Of course, the proper figure to compare to is not World GDP, but the cost of our best alternative, the "not fucking up the Earth" plan. Opinions vary, but 6.25 trillion a year is an order of magnitude above most of them.
Besides, if we all went to Mars we'd just end up terraforming it eventually anyway; we might as well practice terraforming Earth first.
I've gone from Red Hat 6.2 to 6.9.5 to 7.0. I submitted four or five bug reports in 6.9.5; one was a "already fixed in Rawhide" situation, two others got fixes a few days later, one has a fix coming when they put together a glibc-devel errata. XFree86 4.0.1 still consumes an ungodly amount of memory on my machine, but compared to the bugs in the first releases of Red Hat 5.0 and 6.0 (which I avoided until a few weeks of errata issues had gone by), I've been quite impressed. So far I've seen Red Hat 7.0 on 2 computers, and it's been good, 2 for 2. Your particular system may vary, of course. I'd advise waiting a month before upgrading all your corporate workstations, and waiting for 7.1 before touching any important servers... but if you're not in that kind of situation, come on in, the water's fine.
By contrast, I've seen significantly more problems with Mandrake 7.1, which was frighteningly down towards the Windows end of the quality-o-meter. That was a big let down, since Mandrake 7.0 had given our LUG such a smooth installfest last year. At least with Red Hat 5 and 6, the progression from "buggy" to "rock-solid" was steadily upward.