Unfortunatly I threw it away but I got a chain email about some site showing that Bush and Kerry are releated by a few generations. That seems quite likely, so this really isn't too suprising. Bush could start his *own* web site and call it "Kerry relatives against Kerry".
What is interesting is that the company will waste so much money and time "authorizing" software, but won't do simpler money-saving things like checking if their employees are wasting time reading web sites instead of working!
With the current system it has been proven (with Florida) that changing about 1000 votes can completely alter the election.
If it was a straight popular vote, Gore would have won by 300,000 votes, so that many would have to be changed in order to alter the outcome.
If each state's electors were divided proportionally, Bush would have won by 12(?) electoral votes. This would require at least 12 different states to change some votes. The 12 nearest n+.5 would have to be located, and I would expect the average margin to be near the 1000 of Florida, so 12,000 votes would have to be changed.
If electors were divided fractionally and proportionally, then Bush would again win by approximately 12 electoral votes but in this case the 12 states with lowest population to elector would have to change by an average of.5 vote, that is 6/540 of the us population or many millions.
It seems pretty obvious that the current scheme is 12-1000 times easier to cheat than alternatives.
Fractional electoral votes would make it nearly impossible to have a Florida-like situation.
Your system helps a lot, but there is a tiny chance that the winner is ahead by 1 vote, and they can find a state that is really close to N+.5 popular vote and argue that there were mistakes there of a few dozen and try to switch the vote.
I think fractional electoral votes would reduce the chances of this by so much that we don't need to worry about it ever again.
Though I agree there are better things than IRV (approval voting is my favorite), IRV is better than what we have now. It allows 3rd parties to be get almost 1/3 of the vote before it screws up and reverts to the equivalent of popular vote, so at least there is a measure of what support those 3rd parties have.
In fact it seems to have shown some bug in Safari or in Cocoa. I used ctrl+click to pop up the menu and choose open in a new window, and what happened is that the menu stayed up, and the dialog box appeared above the secunia site, and let my type it in. I could not raise the dialog box above the menu, or pick items from the menu. When I dismissed the dialog box the Citibank window opened.
Trying a second time sort of worked better, perhaps because Citibank was cached. But in this case it stopped updating the window after only drawing a few items and paused waiting for me to fill in the dialog box.
I thought the hearing aid looked remarkably modern
on
Transistor Radio Turns 50
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My first impression seeing that picture was that the thing in the front was some recent MP3 player, put there to contrast it with the old radios.. Only reading the text below revealed it was a 1952 design. Case is quite rounded and silver and very small.
Though that was unusually well worded, he really should be looking at what many, many people are saying on all sides of the political spectrum. There is not going to be a draft. It would be political suicide for the congress (even if a lame-duck is president). More importantly, there are very believable claims by military experts (including doves) that it is unnecessary or may even be counter-productive.
I'm voting for Kerry, but I agree their tactics are pretty questionable.
No, the cause was that a few hundred votes could change things. This enabled the decision to be made by the courts.
Even if you assumme Bush cheated, their ability to cheat was *because* the vote was so close. If Gore got 55% of the votes in Florida then to cheat and reverse it would require somehow discounting or miscounting hundreds of thousands of votes, which would be extremely difficult or impossible. But if Gore got 50.001% of the votes like he did then you can cheat by changing or ignoring only *hundreds* of votes.
Yes I agree that public domain code is very much the same as the prisoner delimma.
The GPL is an attempt to make it *not* the prisoner delimma by forcing the other side to cooperate if you do. This eliminates the losing part of the cooperation choice and thus it is no longer a delimma.
Both Bush and Kerry completely ignored the election methods question. They did not say anything about changing the system, instead talking about cheating in elections.
All of them completely punted on the "made a mistake" question. I guess they were all told by their advistors to never, ever admit making a mistake, no matter what.
The best answer was the actually short and meaningful one Kerry did for sex education. In this case he was well aware that he agrees with the majority of Americans so for the first time ever one of the candidates gave a short a non-hedging answer.
I also thought Bush's answer to the health plan question was very good and very specific. It sounds like he has people really working on a method to make a system that is not national health care. Because some people disagree with this it sounds like he has real, non-partisan experts working on how to make this as appealing to everybody as possible, and thus can come up with real concise and non-hedging answers.
Other than that I can't say I was too impressed with anybody...
No, Kerry did not make any mistakes, read his answer. And Nader only made a mistake about eating a hot dog.
Seriously the answers to this questions were all totally evasive. I don't like Bush but his "decline to answer" may have been the most honest of any of them here!
Oddly I saw this once before, and Democrat and Republican were reversed! It made no difference to how incredibly lame the joke is.
The original joke was much simpler. The person in the balloon asked the person on the ground where they were, and the person on the ground said "in a balloon". The balloonist then deduced the person on the gound was in tech support because they said perfectly accurate but totally useless information.
Obviously somebody added a retort, and then somebody changed it to political, and then realized it was insulting their favorite party so they made the person on the ground a genius instead of an idiot. So that is how the original rather funny joke got perverted to this mess.
Whether or not this is true, couldn't it be avoided by not identifying the party on the registration forms.
Without that, I recommend that Democrats who believe this is happening claim they are Republicans. Republicans who believe the opposite should claim they are Democrats. That will also completely mess up all the predictions and polls and maybe make the election more interesting, too!
Because Cobb was involved in the previous protest I tried searching for him on CNN after seeing these claims for Badnarik. Cobb is a common word so I got some agricultural stuff and movie reviews, but the actual political articles were 2 about Nader and 1 that did not actually seem to mention Cobb.
The wikipedia entry also found by Google is interesting. It indicates that the Newsweek article was the main proponent of this. Not sure who wrote the wikipedia article but whoever it was claims the Newsweek article explicitly avoiding an environmentalist cause, however the writer may be biased.
I admit it is possible that my elementary school teachers (Massachusetts) were in the minority and it is quite possible that the perceptions and biases across the country varied. I certainly heard a million times that pollution would turn the planet into Venus. I also distinctly remember a Nova episode from that period claiming the same thing (Nova was a PBS science program). Nuclear Winter scenarios were the first time I heard that pollution would cool the planet.
I didn't think it was that bad. I'm pretty much anti-Bush but did not see too many problems with the questions. I guess you could say there was no "tax the rich more and the poor less" checkmark, just "raise taxes" and "lower taxes", that could be taken as eliminating a large number of popular viewpoints. But most of the rest seemed ok.
Of course I only got SQL errors as my results. Guess I'll vote for that SQL guy.
Interesting. Maybe we should reserve a top-level domain for anti-sites. Not sure if.org is a good idea for it though, maybe a new one called.anti. Anybody buying a.anti site must conclusively prove they are a organization opposed to the named entity, and perhaps this can be challenged in court, to prevent pretend organizations from posting garbage to make their opponents look bad. With this name reserved you could then reserve the.com name (.org would make more sense but too many people automatically put.com on the end) for the positive site, which must be owned by that person or organization or they must sign some legal document indicating that they support the owner of the site. Then maybe teach the stupid public that other endings such as.org could mean anything and such sites are not to be trusted to actually represent even who they claim to be, so that everybody does not have to buy all endings possible.
I think a lot of the hostility here is that this guy grabbed all three of.com.net.org.
It's a Trojan in that the (stupid) user thinks the program's purpose is to do something "funny" when in fact it is contains something the user does not expect and that they don't actually want.
First of all, a "user friendly" program for getting a file off the net would certainly turn on the execute bit if it thought the resulting file should have it. So I don't think it's going to offer any protection as long as doofuses are writing the software.
Second, this "feature" is not there for any high-brow security reason. Back when Unix was first written reading disks was *very* slow. And the path tended to contain "." and people tended to pile many files into the current directory. When you typed "blah" at the shell it had to quickly locate the executable called "blah" that was first in the path. The only efficient way to do this was to read all the directories in the path and store the results in memory so you could jump straight to the file rather than read every directory before it in the path (the "rehash" command would re-read the directories if you changed them). Memory was also very expensive, so it was best to get that list as small as possible by eliminating all the files that were not executable. The only fast way to do this was to add a bit to the inode (which had to be checked for access permissions anyway), reading the first block of the file was out of the question. So that is why the execute bit is there, not for any security reason. If it was for a security reason you would need some special permission to turn it on that was different than creation permission.
Actually the Unix-style permissions would stop such programs from modifying the system itself or starting up unkillable services.
However I agree that it's not going to stop much. I certainly believe it would not stop a virus from reading your email address list and sending itself to everybody you know. Also it can probably clobber the startup files that are run when you log in so that can get malware programs to run then, and can mess up your browser settings, and in general do almost all the nasty things that Windows viruses do.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunatly I threw it away but I got a chain email about some site showing that Bush and Kerry are releated by a few generations. That seems quite likely, so this really isn't too suprising. Bush could start his *own* web site and call it "Kerry relatives against Kerry".
What is interesting is that the company will waste so much money and time "authorizing" software, but won't do simpler money-saving things like checking if their employees are wasting time reading web sites instead of working!
With the current system it has been proven (with Florida) that changing about 1000 votes can completely alter the election.
.5 vote, that is 6/540 of the us population or many millions.
If it was a straight popular vote, Gore would have won by 300,000 votes, so that many would have to be changed in order to alter the outcome.
If each state's electors were divided proportionally, Bush would have won by 12(?) electoral votes. This would require at least 12 different states to change some votes. The 12 nearest n+.5 would have to be located, and I would expect the average margin to be near the 1000 of Florida, so 12,000 votes would have to be changed.
If electors were divided fractionally and proportionally, then Bush would again win by approximately 12 electoral votes but in this case the 12 states with lowest population to elector would have to change by an average of
It seems pretty obvious that the current scheme is 12-1000 times easier to cheat than alternatives.
Fractional electoral votes would make it nearly impossible to have a Florida-like situation.
Your system helps a lot, but there is a tiny chance that the winner is ahead by 1 vote, and they can find a state that is really close to N+.5 popular vote and argue that there were mistakes there of a few dozen and try to switch the vote.
I think fractional electoral votes would reduce the chances of this by so much that we don't need to worry about it ever again.
Though I agree there are better things than IRV (approval voting is my favorite), IRV is better than what we have now. It allows 3rd parties to be get almost 1/3 of the vote before it screws up and reverts to the equivalent of popular vote, so at least there is a measure of what support those 3rd parties have.
In fact it seems to have shown some bug in Safari or in Cocoa. I used ctrl+click to pop up the menu and choose open in a new window, and what happened is that the menu stayed up, and the dialog box appeared above the secunia site, and let my type it in. I could not raise the dialog box above the menu, or pick items from the menu. When I dismissed the dialog box the Citibank window opened.
Trying a second time sort of worked better, perhaps because Citibank was cached. But in this case it stopped updating the window after only drawing a few items and paused waiting for me to fill in the dialog box.
My first impression seeing that picture was that the thing in the front was some recent MP3 player, put there to contrast it with the old radios.. Only reading the text below revealed it was a 1952 design. Case is quite rounded and silver and very small.
Though that was unusually well worded, he really should be looking at what many, many people are saying on all sides of the political spectrum. There is not going to be a draft. It would be political suicide for the congress (even if a lame-duck is president). More importantly, there are very believable claims by military experts (including doves) that it is unnecessary or may even be counter-productive.
I'm voting for Kerry, but I agree their tactics are pretty questionable.
I think it would be possible to ship a kitchen table with a mars landing mission, so they really don't have to look for one!
Thanks. I thought the spelling was wrong, but could not figure out how to fix it. I was copying the spelling from the earlier post.
No, the cause was that a few hundred votes could change things. This enabled the decision to be made by the courts.
Even if you assumme Bush cheated, their ability to cheat was *because* the vote was so close. If Gore got 55% of the votes in Florida then to cheat and reverse it would require somehow discounting or miscounting hundreds of thousands of votes, which would be extremely difficult or impossible. But if Gore got 50.001% of the votes like he did then you can cheat by changing or ignoring only *hundreds* of votes.
Yes I agree that public domain code is very much the same as the prisoner delimma.
The GPL is an attempt to make it *not* the prisoner delimma by forcing the other side to cooperate if you do. This eliminates the losing part of the cooperation choice and thus it is no longer a delimma.
Both Bush and Kerry completely ignored the election methods question. They did not say anything about changing the system, instead talking about cheating in elections.
All of them completely punted on the "made a mistake" question. I guess they were all told by their advistors to never, ever admit making a mistake, no matter what.
The best answer was the actually short and meaningful one Kerry did for sex education. In this case he was well aware that he agrees with the majority of Americans so for the first time ever one of the candidates gave a short a non-hedging answer.
I also thought Bush's answer to the health plan question was very good and very specific. It sounds like he has people really working on a method to make a system that is not national health care. Because some people disagree with this it sounds like he has real, non-partisan experts working on how to make this as appealing to everybody as possible, and thus can come up with real concise and non-hedging answers.
Other than that I can't say I was too impressed with anybody...
No, Kerry did not make any mistakes, read his answer. And Nader only made a mistake about eating a hot dog.
Seriously the answers to this questions were all totally evasive. I don't like Bush but his "decline to answer" may have been the most honest of any of them here!
Oddly I saw this once before, and Democrat and Republican were reversed! It made no difference to how incredibly lame the joke is.
The original joke was much simpler. The person in the balloon asked the person on the ground where they were, and the person on the ground said "in a balloon". The balloonist then deduced the person on the gound was in tech support because they said perfectly accurate but totally useless information.
Obviously somebody added a retort, and then somebody changed it to political, and then realized it was insulting their favorite party so they made the person on the ground a genius instead of an idiot. So that is how the original rather funny joke got perverted to this mess.
You don't have to submit *all* your source code. Just a piece that demonstrates how to code the patented method.
Whether or not this is true, couldn't it be avoided by not identifying the party on the registration forms.
Without that, I recommend that Democrats who believe this is happening claim they are Republicans. Republicans who believe the opposite should claim they are Democrats. That will also completely mess up all the predictions and polls and maybe make the election more interesting, too!
Because Cobb was involved in the previous protest I tried searching for him on CNN after seeing these claims for Badnarik. Cobb is a common word so I got some agricultural stuff and movie reviews, but the actual political articles were 2 about Nader and 1 that did not actually seem to mention Cobb.
The wikipedia entry also found by Google is interesting. It indicates that the Newsweek article was the main proponent of this. Not sure who wrote the wikipedia article but whoever it was claims the Newsweek article explicitly avoiding an environmentalist cause, however the writer may be biased.
I admit it is possible that my elementary school teachers (Massachusetts) were in the minority and it is quite possible that the perceptions and biases across the country varied. I certainly heard a million times that pollution would turn the planet into Venus. I also distinctly remember a Nova episode from that period claiming the same thing (Nova was a PBS science program). Nuclear Winter scenarios were the first time I heard that pollution would cool the planet.
Any chance the fact that Gaim is running makes it think it is "logged in"?
I didn't think it was that bad. I'm pretty much anti-Bush but did not see too many problems with the questions. I guess you could say there was no "tax the rich more and the poor less" checkmark, just "raise taxes" and "lower taxes", that could be taken as eliminating a large number of popular viewpoints. But most of the rest seemed ok.
Of course I only got SQL errors as my results. Guess I'll vote for that SQL guy.
Interesting. Maybe we should reserve a top-level domain for anti-sites. Not sure if .org is a good idea for it though, maybe a new one called .anti. Anybody buying a .anti site must conclusively prove they are a organization opposed to the named entity, and perhaps this can be challenged in court, to prevent pretend organizations from posting garbage to make their opponents look bad. With this name reserved you could then reserve the .com name (.org would make more sense but too many people automatically put .com on the end) for the positive site, which must be owned by that person or organization or they must sign some legal document indicating that they support the owner of the site. Then maybe teach the stupid public that other endings such as .org could mean anything and such sites are not to be trusted to actually represent even who they claim to be, so that everybody does not have to buy all endings possible.
.com .net .org.
I think a lot of the hostility here is that this guy grabbed all three of
It's a Trojan in that the (stupid) user thinks the program's purpose is to do something "funny" when in fact it is contains something the user does not expect and that they don't actually want.
First of all, a "user friendly" program for getting a file off the net would certainly turn on the execute bit if it thought the resulting file should have it. So I don't think it's going to offer any protection as long as doofuses are writing the software.
Second, this "feature" is not there for any high-brow security reason. Back when Unix was first written reading disks was *very* slow. And the path tended to contain "." and people tended to pile many files into the current directory. When you typed "blah" at the shell it had to quickly locate the executable called "blah" that was first in the path. The only efficient way to do this was to read all the directories in the path and store the results in memory so you could jump straight to the file rather than read every directory before it in the path (the "rehash" command would re-read the directories if you changed them). Memory was also very expensive, so it was best to get that list as small as possible by eliminating all the files that were not executable. The only fast way to do this was to add a bit to the inode (which had to be checked for access permissions anyway), reading the first block of the file was out of the question. So that is why the execute bit is there, not for any security reason. If it was for a security reason you would need some special permission to turn it on that was different than creation permission.
Actually the Unix-style permissions would stop such programs from modifying the system itself or starting up unkillable services.
However I agree that it's not going to stop much. I certainly believe it would not stop a virus from reading your email address list and sending itself to everybody you know. Also it can probably clobber the startup files that are run when you log in so that can get malware programs to run then, and can mess up your browser settings, and in general do almost all the nasty things that Windows viruses do.