Are you sure the worm could not take advantage of data files saved by previously running IM and also send messages using IM even though you are running Gaim?
I certainly agree. They could have mentioned what it is (something to do with making Java have data persistance). I would think to 90% of Slashdot readers "hibernate" is something laptop computers do when you close the lid.
I distinctly remember my left-wing teachers in elementary school saying that pollution will cause the planet to end up like Venus, very hot. I also remember VERY CLEARLY that when "Nuclear Winter" was announced it was attacked by saying "you've been claiming for years that pollution will raise the temperatures, now you are claiming the opposite".
Venus was a huge deal back then. It was only a few years since accurate measurements were made of the surface temperature and they were way, way higher than expected. It very much influenced popular science. I would like to see this Newsweek article, I would not be suprised if the article is more like a "scientist claims that actually the opposite of what we think will happen."
Besides if you want colder, why not just quote the Nuclear Winter people.
And I don't like how you claim that my disputing your "fact" means I think climitologists are right today. I pretty clearly stated my opinion that they were wrong then. Where did I say that means they are right now?
The waste heat output of all our machines is minor and completely swamped by solar heating. The main reason cities are heat producers is due to all the asphalt absorbing solar energy, not from the exhaust from the air conditioners.
but us grizzled oldies remember the 70s when that same 95% of climate scientists, using the same data, assured us that a new Ice Age was just about to engulf us all
Rubbish. You are confusing "nuclear winter" with the pollution predictions.
I clearly remember the hype in the 70's being that pollution was going to turn the planet into Venus. Things were not very accurate then and the claim was the actual opaque visible pollution, as well as waste heat, would do it. It was often pointed out that if all the ice melted we would be under 30 feet of water. A Nova episode from the 70's about Fusion energy clearly stated this, saying that even perfectly clean Fusion might not stop the warming because it would still generate heat.
In fact one of the biggest problems with "nuclear winter" in the popular mind was the well known "fact" that all the smoke from the fires would actually keep heat down next to the ground and thus it should be hot, not cold. Several opponents of nuclear winter scenarios used exactly this argument.
Not saying anything was very accurate at all, but the prediction from pollution was clearly toward a hot scenario. I'm not sure how accurate "nuclear winter" was, I feel that some of it was a concerted effort to look "studied" by conflicting with popular perception of how the earth would be destroyed.
No, except in two states (Vermont and Nebraska? not sure) the electoral votes are given entirely to whoever won the popular vote.
Thus if California went 51% to Gore, or it went 99% for Gore, the end result is the same, Gore got all the California electoral votes. Thus if there is no chance of Gore getting less than 50% of the vote, there is no reason whatsoever for either candidate to campaign there. In your example of NY your vote does not matter even if it is *for* the democratic candidate.
Also in 2000 just a change of a thousand or so Florida votes (way below the margin of error, unfortunately) would switch all of Florida's electoral votes, completely swamping other states. If it just changed one Florida electoral vote (or better yet changed only a fraction) then there would not have been any argument about the last election, as somebody else calculated Bush would have won by several dozen electoral votes.
I certainly agree that there are problems. What I was really trying to say was how to DRM in a technically possible way. I think it is interesting that the only way to make DRM workable is with an open-source scheme such as this. Microsoft hates this and thus will do anything in the world to stop it from being considered.
Hardware solutions will generate modchips -big enough demand means aftermarket solutions will come out, eventually.
That would be solved by having a central registry of legal encryption keys, created by the chip manufacturers. Any key submitted for encrypting the music would be checked against this database so that a fake key would not be accepted. Of course access to this database may cost money, so this could be a big problem for small publishers. I would hope that the use of the database by big guys would manage to protect small ones even if they don't pay for access.
The problem of broken keys, and invalidating prior legal purchases of the innocent.
You have identified what is by far the biggest problem with my scheme. However I am not convinced that any effective DRM scheme would not have the same problem.
There are lots of problems with this, especially privacy and some fair-use problems, but at least it technically is possible:
There is a sealed decoder chip in the playback device. It must not be software (though Microsoft will scream and cry and try to convince you otherwise). Ideally it is attached rather well to the digital to analog portion and cannot be seperated without destroying it. The chip has a PK decryption key burned into it at manufacture. Nobody knows this key. The chip also can report the matching PK encryption key.
Anybody can access the encryption key and encrypt music (or whatever data) to a form where only this chip can decrypt it and play it back. The resulting encrypted data does not have to be protected at all because it is useless without the matching chip.
You would buy music by sending the PK encryption key to the music distributor, who will encrypt the music and send it back. The file is useless except on the target device.
Notes:
If somebody does extract and publish a decryption key, this will probably be noticed soon and publishers can refuse to encrypt to that key.
It's not impossible to transfer your music to another device. You may be able to prove to the publisher that you bought the music by showing them your old key and checksums of the files you bought, then they will re-encrypt the music for a new key. Now of course you may have copied that music and key, but the fact that the files are useless without talking to the publisher, and they can compare the submitted keys from different sites, makes this seem like it would work.
To prevent software from pretending to be the chip and submitting encryption keys that the decryption is known for, the chip manufacturers would keep a database of all assigned encryption keys and publishers could check this for legality. If the majority of the large ones do this it will still protect small publishers that don't pay for the system by discouraging development of such software.
Advantages of this system:
1. It will work with open source. In fact it is highly recommended that the chip interface be entirely documented, as this increases insurance that there is no loophole and it cannot be broken. This is the primary reason Microsoft will fight this tooth and nail and currently throws all kinds of smokescreens up to discourage any discussion of a hardware solution without secret software.
2. Anybody can use it to copy-protect their data, since the encryption key is available. If DRM is actually a benefit this does not limit it to only rich media companies who can buy a license for it.
3. Nothing special needs to be done with the files to "protect" them, they can be stored with any other data on any backup medium.
Disadvantages:
Yes there are a lot of problems with this system! However most of them apply to any DRM system.
1. Privacy concerns because that encryption key is a system-id. Maybe the chips could have a whole lot of them, hundreds, so different ones can be used at random.
2. If your hardware fails your files are useless. However this is true of most DRM systems.
3. Serious problems with fair use. But all other DRM has this. Maybe publishers will accept the id's of a number of devices rather than just one and files designed to be decodable with several chips at once (the pk is only used for a small header, the rest of the file can be shared by all of them).
4. Still has an analog hole, but so does all other DRM.
the electoral college, which is currently necessary to avoid popular vote take-over by densely populated areas which often have a political slant
I hear this all the time, but it just does not seem believable. Under our current system the popular vote is "taken over" by a rather random subset of the states, where the vote is divided approximately 50-50 and all campaigning is done there. Inside those states, because a straight popular vote counts there, the densely-populated areas have just as much power as you claim so they are targeted exactly the same way.
Also under the electorial system the people with the most "power" (ie fewest voters per elector) are in DC, which, last time I checked, is a "densly populated area".
It may make sense to allocate votes per state somewhat disproportionatly, perhaps multiplying the fractions of the popular votes in each state by the number of electors for that state, to end up with a weighted popular vote, this should satisfy your requirements.
In case you are wondering I searched for "Cobb" on CNN. "Badnarik" gives zero hits, just like said. "Cobb" gets a dozen hits but only 3 stories that are political:
Two of the Cobb articles were about Nader (one about 30% Nader before going back to Bush/Kerry, the other had a tiny paragraph about Nader), and the otherone did not actually contain the word "Cobb".
The rest of the hits were unrelated things about agriculture and movies.
Really, even if a "crib sheet" would be helpful, why not just write a memorized list of all the points down as soon as you get to the podium, using the pens and papers that are there for that purpose, before you get confused by the debate. That would not be cheating and would serve just as good of a purpose as bringing a pre-written sheet. Memorizing the list, but then writing a backup, would work much better than a non-memorized list, since you may not have to glance at it to recall the item.
It's pretty sad to see what the great Internet and blogs have done to actual discussion and debate about the issues.
Neither Kerry or Bush (or their people) are stupid enough to cheat at the debate because getting caught would far outweigh any plausable gains from reducing the chances that their candidate might screw up. Just show a little common sense everybody. This is an implausable as any pseudo-science or elaborate conspiracy theory, and only people of those intelligence levels should believe or even talk about these things.
It would be nice if we could argue about whether Bush or Kerry as President would be better for the future of America. But no, the morons who can run a web browser and post to a blog would rather read and write this nonsense and retreat into fantasyland of crap unrealistic nonsense. And rather than ignore this extremism like we used to, it becomes the most visible part of the debate. This is a pretty sad result of what should have been a great breakthrough in free speech.
Oddly enough I thought the first one was somewhat left-leaning, and I'm left-leaning as well! Perhaps the thing is more balanced than anybody thinks, considering how confused everybody is!
(I have not seen this new one so I can't say anything about it)
I agree. This is ridiculous, they would not attempt to cheat in this way, because it would look very bad if they were caught.
Before this silly thing came up everybody was laughing about how badly Bush stumbled. Wouldn't he do a better job if he was cheating? Or is the joke now that he still screwed up despite cheating? That "bulge" if it is not photoshopped in (and there is precedence for such lies on the internet, from people of all political persuasions) is probably a bullet-proof vest, as has been mentioned before. Certainly if you wanted a secret transimitter you could hide it better.
The other side is also running bogus charges about Kerry bringing something to the podium. He brought a pen, and in case you are too stupid to have ever written something down, you know that you pull the cap off a pen, YOU REVERSE IT, and you put it on the other end. "unfold" my ass.
Both sides are way to smart to cheat. This is all a lot of bullshit from people with no IQ, and it is shameful that the Internet allows such crap to flood the real issues.
Although I do remember Audi's being mentioned, I thought it started being reported for *lots* of cars, from all different manufacturers. This was the true proof that it was driver error and not some defect in a certain manufacturer (you could make a claim that it was a defect in the basic design of a car shared by all manufacturers, though).
The most common case was "put the automatic in gear and it takes off". People were pushing down the gas instead of the brake and then shifting from park to drive, and the car took off. Thinking they were pushing the brake, they would just push harder. This did not happen in manual transmissions because even if the driver was pushing the gas by accident, they were also pushing in the clutch, and if they panicked they would propbably push the clutch back in and it would cost to a stop. Not sure why people were unaware of the engine racing, but it was often reported in gas stations, which were noisy locations, and often with large luxury cars where the engine noise is purposely muffled.
This is why all modern automatic transmission cars require you to hold down the brake to shift out of park. There was a design change made because of this. But really the cause was the driver.
Microsoft actively encourages use of backslashes in URL's in their Web publishing software. This is done so that it is more difficult to move a web site to a non-Windows server, and also to break older non-IE browsers by making them fail to correctly parse relative URL names.
If they had written this correctly, IIS would, at a very low level, have checked any URL and translated it to a legal Windows filename. This would mean turning any backslash into some other escape sequence before using it to identify the file in the file system (forward slashes could be left alone). This would have been trivial and in fact most original 3rd-party software for serving web pages from Windows did this. This would have immediately stopped the exploit of putting '\' or %5c into the URL.
IIS certainly checks and cooks the URL in many other ways before producing the filename, so lazyness is not an excuse. It is pretty obvious that they wanted to intentionally allow URL's on the web that were non standard and would not work correctly on Unix servers.
Though saying "we made a mistake in Iraq" would be very bad for the Repblicans and it is extremely unlikely they would do it, I feel that if it came down to exactly two choices of saying they were wrong or starting the draft, they would say they are wrong.
Now in reality it's a lot more complex and it will never get to just those two choices, they will always have something more preferrable to choose (ie. they could claim they won in Iraq and then pull out, probably better than saying they were wrong and the same result). I don't think there is any way to prove which of these two choices they consider worse, as they won't do either one of them. I just feel that they are VERY much against starting the draft, and that Democrats would be more realistic saying "Republicans will announce they are wrong next year" than saying "Republicans will start the draft next year".
I doubt it is running X. But from the article, the screen interface is OpenGL. This would imply that it should be relatively trivial to modify the game so it runs on Linux and displays in an X window.
This is the display only. The interface to the sound and to the input peripherials is another problem, and may be very difficult. It would be best to write some kind of emulation library so that the arcade machine calls can be used unchanged.
The idea is, no matter what you do, there is a 50% chance of lethal injection, 45% chance of electric chair, and 5% chance of escape.
The question is, you are given a chance to vote on your "favorite". This will have no effect on what happens, it is not a vote on what will be done. He is claiming that people in the current election will vote for lethal injection since it is the most likely outcome and people like to vote for the "winner". The idea is that you really should vote for your favorite, escape, even though there is very little chance of you escaping.
I actually thought it was pretty clever. Whatever you think of his platform, the guy does speak out and makes you think. So do all these other 3rd-party candidates. It would be nice if more people could see them.
I'm talking about long before X11 existed. Back when Unix was an alternative to VMS. I can state absolutely that EVERYBODY liked Unix much much better. And this was at DEC!
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure the worm could not take advantage of data files saved by previously running IM and also send messages using IM even though you are running Gaim?
I certainly agree. They could have mentioned what it is (something to do with making Java have data persistance). I would think to 90% of Slashdot readers "hibernate" is something laptop computers do when you close the lid.
I distinctly remember my left-wing teachers in elementary school saying that pollution will cause the planet to end up like Venus, very hot. I also remember VERY CLEARLY that when "Nuclear Winter" was announced it was attacked by saying "you've been claiming for years that pollution will raise the temperatures, now you are claiming the opposite".
Venus was a huge deal back then. It was only a few years since accurate measurements were made of the surface temperature and they were way, way higher than expected. It very much influenced popular science. I would like to see this Newsweek article, I would not be suprised if the article is more like a "scientist claims that actually the opposite of what we think will happen."
Besides if you want colder, why not just quote the Nuclear Winter people.
And I don't like how you claim that my disputing your "fact" means I think climitologists are right today. I pretty clearly stated my opinion that they were wrong then. Where did I say that means they are right now?
There have been many, many ice ages since the Dinosaurs were killed.
The waste heat output of all our machines is minor and completely swamped by solar heating. The main reason cities are heat producers is due to all the asphalt absorbing solar energy, not from the exhaust from the air conditioners.
but us grizzled oldies remember the 70s when that same 95% of climate scientists, using the same data, assured us that a new Ice Age was just about to engulf us all
Rubbish. You are confusing "nuclear winter" with the pollution predictions.
I clearly remember the hype in the 70's being that pollution was going to turn the planet into Venus. Things were not very accurate then and the claim was the actual opaque visible pollution, as well as waste heat, would do it. It was often pointed out that if all the ice melted we would be under 30 feet of water. A Nova episode from the 70's about Fusion energy clearly stated this, saying that even perfectly clean Fusion might not stop the warming because it would still generate heat.
In fact one of the biggest problems with "nuclear winter" in the popular mind was the well known "fact" that all the smoke from the fires would actually keep heat down next to the ground and thus it should be hot, not cold. Several opponents of nuclear winter scenarios used exactly this argument.
Not saying anything was very accurate at all, but the prediction from pollution was clearly toward a hot scenario. I'm not sure how accurate "nuclear winter" was, I feel that some of it was a concerted effort to look "studied" by conflicting with popular perception of how the earth would be destroyed.
No, except in two states (Vermont and Nebraska? not sure) the electoral votes are given entirely to whoever won the popular vote.
Thus if California went 51% to Gore, or it went 99% for Gore, the end result is the same, Gore got all the California electoral votes. Thus if there is no chance of Gore getting less than 50% of the vote, there is no reason whatsoever for either candidate to campaign there. In your example of NY your vote does not matter even if it is *for* the democratic candidate.
Also in 2000 just a change of a thousand or so Florida votes (way below the margin of error, unfortunately) would switch all of Florida's electoral votes, completely swamping other states. If it just changed one Florida electoral vote (or better yet changed only a fraction) then there would not have been any argument about the last election, as somebody else calculated Bush would have won by several dozen electoral votes.
I certainly agree that there are problems. What I was really trying to say was how to DRM in a technically possible way. I think it is interesting that the only way to make DRM workable is with an open-source scheme such as this. Microsoft hates this and thus will do anything in the world to stop it from being considered.
Hardware solutions will generate modchips -big enough demand means aftermarket solutions will come out, eventually.
That would be solved by having a central registry of legal encryption keys, created by the chip manufacturers. Any key submitted for encrypting the music would be checked against this database so that a fake key would not be accepted. Of course access to this database may cost money, so this could be a big problem for small publishers. I would hope that the use of the database by big guys would manage to protect small ones even if they don't pay for access.
The problem of broken keys, and invalidating prior legal purchases of the innocent.
You have identified what is by far the biggest problem with my scheme. However I am not convinced that any effective DRM scheme would not have the same problem.
Oh my god, what's wrong with the "biased" media, somehow this got into the article:
"There is little sympathy for him (Frost) either.
"Prior to last year's map redistricting, the most significant gerrymander in Texas was carried out by the Democrats in 1991.
"They carved up the state to favour their side, and the figure at the helm that year was a certain... Martin Frost.
Of course you didn't read the article. No, facts might be inconvienent for your world-view.
There are lots of problems with this, especially privacy and some fair-use problems, but at least it technically is possible:
There is a sealed decoder chip in the playback device. It must not be software (though Microsoft will scream and cry and try to convince you otherwise). Ideally it is attached rather well to the digital to analog portion and cannot be seperated without destroying it. The chip has a PK decryption key burned into it at manufacture. Nobody knows this key. The chip also can report the matching PK encryption key.
Anybody can access the encryption key and encrypt music (or whatever data) to a form where only this chip can decrypt it and play it back. The resulting encrypted data does not have to be protected at all because it is useless without the matching chip.
You would buy music by sending the PK encryption key to the music distributor, who will encrypt the music and send it back. The file is useless except on the target device.
Notes:
If somebody does extract and publish a decryption key, this will probably be noticed soon and publishers can refuse to encrypt to that key.
It's not impossible to transfer your music to another device. You may be able to prove to the publisher that you bought the music by showing them your old key and checksums of the files you bought, then they will re-encrypt the music for a new key. Now of course you may have copied that music and key, but the fact that the files are useless without talking to the publisher, and they can compare the submitted keys from different sites, makes this seem like it would work.
To prevent software from pretending to be the chip and submitting encryption keys that the decryption is known for, the chip manufacturers would keep a database of all assigned encryption keys and publishers could check this for legality. If the majority of the large ones do this it will still protect small publishers that don't pay for the system by discouraging development of such software.
Advantages of this system:
1. It will work with open source. In fact it is highly recommended that the chip interface be entirely documented, as this increases insurance that there is no loophole and it cannot be broken. This is the primary reason Microsoft will fight this tooth and nail and currently throws all kinds of smokescreens up to discourage any discussion of a hardware solution without secret software.
2. Anybody can use it to copy-protect their data, since the encryption key is available. If DRM is actually a benefit this does not limit it to only rich media companies who can buy a license for it.
3. Nothing special needs to be done with the files to "protect" them, they can be stored with any other data on any backup medium.
Disadvantages:
Yes there are a lot of problems with this system! However most of them apply to any DRM system.
1. Privacy concerns because that encryption key is a system-id. Maybe the chips could have a whole lot of them, hundreds, so different ones can be used at random.
2. If your hardware fails your files are useless. However this is true of most DRM systems.
3. Serious problems with fair use. But all other DRM has this. Maybe publishers will accept the id's of a number of devices rather than just one and files designed to be decodable with several chips at once (the pk is only used for a small header, the rest of the file can be shared by all of them).
4. Still has an analog hole, but so does all other DRM.
the electoral college, which is currently necessary to avoid popular vote take-over by densely populated areas which often have a political slant
I hear this all the time, but it just does not seem believable. Under our current system the popular vote is "taken over" by a rather random subset of the states, where the vote is divided approximately 50-50 and all campaigning is done there. Inside those states, because a straight popular vote counts there, the densely-populated areas have just as much power as you claim so they are targeted exactly the same way.
Also under the electorial system the people with the most "power" (ie fewest voters per elector) are in DC, which, last time I checked, is a "densly populated area".
It may make sense to allocate votes per state somewhat disproportionatly, perhaps multiplying the fractions of the popular votes in each state by the number of electors for that state, to end up with a weighted popular vote, this should satisfy your requirements.
In case you are wondering I searched for "Cobb" on CNN. "Badnarik" gives zero hits, just like said. "Cobb" gets a dozen hits but only 3 stories that are political:
Two of the Cobb articles were about Nader (one about 30% Nader before going back to Bush/Kerry, the other had a tiny paragraph about Nader), and the otherone did not actually contain the word "Cobb".
The rest of the hits were unrelated things about agriculture and movies.
The Chinese also make almost everything in my local 99-cent store, but nobody seems worried about them putting missiles there!
Really, even if a "crib sheet" would be helpful, why not just write a memorized list of all the points down as soon as you get to the podium, using the pens and papers that are there for that purpose, before you get confused by the debate. That would not be cheating and would serve just as good of a purpose as bringing a pre-written sheet. Memorizing the list, but then writing a backup, would work much better than a non-memorized list, since you may not have to glance at it to recall the item.
Further proof that the whole idea is ludricous.
It's pretty sad to see what the great Internet and blogs have done to actual discussion and debate about the issues.
Neither Kerry or Bush (or their people) are stupid enough to cheat at the debate because getting caught would far outweigh any plausable gains from reducing the chances that their candidate might screw up. Just show a little common sense everybody. This is an implausable as any pseudo-science or elaborate conspiracy theory, and only people of those intelligence levels should believe or even talk about these things.
It would be nice if we could argue about whether Bush or Kerry as President would be better for the future of America. But no, the morons who can run a web browser and post to a blog would rather read and write this nonsense and retreat into fantasyland of crap unrealistic nonsense. And rather than ignore this extremism like we used to, it becomes the most visible part of the debate. This is a pretty sad result of what should have been a great breakthrough in free speech.
Oddly enough I thought the first one was somewhat left-leaning, and I'm left-leaning as well! Perhaps the thing is more balanced than anybody thinks, considering how confused everybody is!
(I have not seen this new one so I can't say anything about it)
Even if Bush uses an earpiece in many situations, they are not allowed in the debate, so if he did he broke the rules, that is what is wrong.
However I think the whole thing is a bunch of crap. I don't like Bush either but they are not going to blatently cheat at the debate.
I agree. This is ridiculous, they would not attempt to cheat in this way, because it would look very bad if they were caught.
Before this silly thing came up everybody was laughing about how badly Bush stumbled. Wouldn't he do a better job if he was cheating? Or is the joke now that he still screwed up despite cheating? That "bulge" if it is not photoshopped in (and there is precedence for such lies on the internet, from people of all political persuasions) is probably a bullet-proof vest, as has been mentioned before. Certainly if you wanted a secret transimitter you could hide it better.
The other side is also running bogus charges about Kerry bringing something to the podium. He brought a pen, and in case you are too stupid to have ever written something down, you know that you pull the cap off a pen, YOU REVERSE IT, and you put it on the other end. "unfold" my ass.
Both sides are way to smart to cheat. This is all a lot of bullshit from people with no IQ, and it is shameful that the Internet allows such crap to flood the real issues.
Although I do remember Audi's being mentioned, I thought it started being reported for *lots* of cars, from all different manufacturers. This was the true proof that it was driver error and not some defect in a certain manufacturer (you could make a claim that it was a defect in the basic design of a car shared by all manufacturers, though).
The most common case was "put the automatic in gear and it takes off". People were pushing down the gas instead of the brake and then shifting from park to drive, and the car took off. Thinking they were pushing the brake, they would just push harder. This did not happen in manual transmissions because even if the driver was pushing the gas by accident, they were also pushing in the clutch, and if they panicked they would propbably push the clutch back in and it would cost to a stop. Not sure why people were unaware of the engine racing, but it was often reported in gas stations, which were noisy locations, and often with large luxury cars where the engine noise is purposely muffled.
This is why all modern automatic transmission cars require you to hold down the brake to shift out of park. There was a design change made because of this. But really the cause was the driver.
Microsoft actively encourages use of backslashes in URL's in their Web publishing software. This is done so that it is more difficult to move a web site to a non-Windows server, and also to break older non-IE browsers by making them fail to correctly parse relative URL names.
If they had written this correctly, IIS would, at a very low level, have checked any URL and translated it to a legal Windows filename. This would mean turning any backslash into some other escape sequence before using it to identify the file in the file system (forward slashes could be left alone). This would have been trivial and in fact most original 3rd-party software for serving web pages from Windows did this. This would have immediately stopped the exploit of putting '\' or %5c into the URL.
IIS certainly checks and cooks the URL in many other ways before producing the filename, so lazyness is not an excuse. It is pretty obvious that they wanted to intentionally allow URL's on the web that were non standard and would not work correctly on Unix servers.
Though saying "we made a mistake in Iraq" would be very bad for the Repblicans and it is extremely unlikely they would do it, I feel that if it came down to exactly two choices of saying they were wrong or starting the draft, they would say they are wrong.
Now in reality it's a lot more complex and it will never get to just those two choices, they will always have something more preferrable to choose (ie. they could claim they won in Iraq and then pull out, probably better than saying they were wrong and the same result). I don't think there is any way to prove which of these two choices they consider worse, as they won't do either one of them. I just feel that they are VERY much against starting the draft, and that Democrats would be more realistic saying "Republicans will announce they are wrong next year" than saying "Republicans will start the draft next year".
There is no link to any CBS story in that article. It is simply repeating what you said.
I doubt it is running X. But from the article, the screen interface is OpenGL. This would imply that it should be relatively trivial to modify the game so it runs on Linux and displays in an X window.
This is the display only. The interface to the sound and to the input peripherials is another problem, and may be very difficult. It would be best to write some kind of emulation library so that the arcade machine calls can be used unchanged.
I think you misunderstood the quote.
The idea is, no matter what you do, there is a 50% chance of lethal injection, 45% chance of electric chair, and 5% chance of escape.
The question is, you are given a chance to vote on your "favorite". This will have no effect on what happens, it is not a vote on what will be done. He is claiming that people in the current election will vote for lethal injection since it is the most likely outcome and people like to vote for the "winner". The idea is that you really should vote for your favorite, escape, even though there is very little chance of you escaping.
I actually thought it was pretty clever. Whatever you think of his platform, the guy does speak out and makes you think. So do all these other 3rd-party candidates. It would be nice if more people could see them.
I'm talking about long before X11 existed. Back when Unix was an alternative to VMS. I can state absolutely that EVERYBODY liked Unix much much better. And this was at DEC!