You can probably actually deal with the problem of dishonest or inaccurate feedback fairly easily. The first step is making feedback appear only once both parties have left it (or after some time limit has elapsed, after which feedback can no longer be given). After that, eBay should be able to tell if, say, a buyer is leaving unjustified negative feedback. eBay really just has to look if that person has left a disproportionately large number of negatives for sellers (compared to the eBay population at large).
If they want to get a little fancier they can look at the correlation of the buyers feedback with that of others (i.e., does this person tend to leave negative feedback for people that are judged to be good by everyone else). If someone leaves negative feedback one for a seller that has otherwise excellent feedback, that could be a fluke. If a buyer consistently leaves negative feedback for otherwise good sellers that's a pattern. It quickly becomes quite improbable that the buyer just has bad luck.
This actually would weed out not just dishonest buyers but also those with unreasonably high standards. So anyway, eBay would have to crunch the data and make a rating about the honesty of the buyer (or seller) that would be listed along with feedback totals. If they just restricted themselves to comparing proportion of negatives given to the eBay average that would be a very simple calculation (and to give a score on honesty they have to compare this to the overall statistical distribution to figure out how reasonable that value is). I think that the blind feedback system I mentioned at the beginning is an important part of this, though, because in that system people would be much more likely to actually leave neutrals or negatives. In the current system where people almost always leave positives, it wouldn't work as well (because the differentiation would be smaller and more likely to be buried in statistical noise).
Anyway, that would weed out habitually dishonest or unreasonable sellers. I don't think that there's much eBay can do in individual cases, especially regarding condition of merchandise, since I don't see how they could know. However, as long as you sell a fair amount of stuff, a system like they one I'm talking about should ensure that such dishonesty is quite rare.
The worst part about all this electoral confusion is that blaming the electoral college is how you make sure the system never changes. The electoral college is based on squarely in the constitution and would be a major undertaking to change. However the constitution has nothing at all to do with how each state allocates there votes. That can be addressed on a state by state level. Currently most states are winner take all. Which means that a thousand or so voters (or the fraud perpetrated on a thousand or so voters) can decide millions of peoples worth of vote. If all the states switched to proportional voting then the margins for how much the popular vote can differ from the results would decrease. It would also severely reduce the rewards for disenfranchising voters, and candidates would have to do a better job of appealing to the majority.
While I basically agree with you, I think it's important to realize that changing to proportional allocation of electors is also often against a state's self interest. Basically, when the state votes for president as a block it has much more power and is more likely to get candidate attention (and promises). This might not be immediately clear, but you can look here for a good explanation of what influence the electoral college (under the winner-takes-all system currently used in most states) has based on the Banzhaf power index. Another point is that in any state with a clear majority for one party, it is against the interests of their party to switch to proportional allocation of electors. The issue of party power might be resolved by making a pact among many states (with different party dominance) to do it, but you'd still be faced with the fact that it would simply make some states less powerful.
Still, you're correct that changing the electoral college is even less likely.
Are we still talking about AT&T, or did the conversation move on to the Dubya administration?
They're closelyrelated. In fairness, though, AT&T is much more competent than the Bush administration itself, otherwise we might not have much to fear. "We know where the infringing packets are. They're on the internets and north, south, east, and west somewhat."
How about by user? I'm thinking of parents that will now have to settle agruements between siblings: "Moooomm! Jonny used up all the internet."
And here comes the moment I start feeling old:
This is how things used to be, back in the early days of AOL, Compuserve, etc. You got a certain number of minutes of modem access per month. Presumably disagreements like that did happen, but somehow or another people dealt with it. It was a big deal when AOL first came out with an "unlimited" plan, and the immediate result was that they couldn't handle the load. So the problem of "unlimited" access and overselling access isn't anything new either.
Hopefully now someone will come along and talk about using gopher via the BBS they used to dial in to or something, and I won't feel so bad.
This argument is often trotted out for the iPod, etc. It's specious. First, it's not expensive to install a new one -- it's free as part of your AppleCare.
So, it's free in the sense that you have to buy some additional extended warranty plan. Or, actually, you had to have bought it years before that (I believe you technically have to purchase it before the end of whatever limited warranty the unit comes with).
On my mp3 player, replacing the battery is just a matter of buying a new one and removing four screws (small phillips heads).
Remember, in the US, we elect through the electoral college... So, how much is your vote worth? At the extreme ends, Wyoming, which has the least number of people for a state gets 3 electoral votes for about 500,000 people (0.0006%), whereas California has 55 for 38 million people (0.00001%).
Therefore, for every 1 vote for a Republican in Wyoming, 60 votes for a Democrat in California are needed to cancel each other out. And this mathematician wants to make it more "fair" by giving more votes to smaller states?
First of all, the TFA is addressing representation in the House of Representatives, not in the electoral college, where the disproportionate representation of small states is mainly due to the electors they get for their Senate seats. Secondly, while I too used to believe that the disproportionality you're talking about was a problem, I have since read a very interesting article that treats the problem using something called the Banzaf Power Index to assess how much power people in each state actually get through the process. This is a more rational way of comparing the power of people in different states, and it shows that effectively many people in small states do not have disproportionate power in the process. Now, this analysis doesn't show that the current system is fair, it simply shows that it's biased in a different way than you suggest and, in fact, tends to give more power to people who live in larger states, because the large voting block of electors (in states where they all cast their votes for the same candidate) is more powerful.
In any case, if you're concerned with people having disparate power in the federal government depending on what state they live in, the real problem is obviously going to be representation in the Senate. Since representation in the Senate has no proportionality built into it at all, and the Senate is at least as powerful as the House, the disproportionate power of people in less populous states over congressional legislation has to be the most serious departure from equal representation. But even if we could all agree that that's bad, it's probably unlikely to change since it would require an amendment to the constitution that must be ratified by 3/4 of the states; people are unlikely to support drastically reducing their own power. Just look at how hard it has been for the people of DC simply to get representation at all.
Must have been a good freshman class, because it sounds to me like you've got it pretty much right. Like you say, a heat engine can always extract work while moving heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder one, and the efficiency is bounded by the Carnot efficiency. The main signs of trouble, when it comes to the 2nd law, are if a device can extract work by simply absorbing heat from one reservoir or while moving heat from one reservoir to another of equal or greater temperature.
Anything worth getting can be gotten through plain old FTP or HTTP. These are tried and tested technologies. They work everywhere.
The same can be said of sneakernet (via snail mail), but I'm not about to go back to that either. Perhaps you're simply not aware, but there are many (legal) tasks for which BitTorrent is a much more effective tool than a traditional FTP or HTTP server.
Stop being a sheep. BitTorrent doesn't work behind firewalls, it doesn't work through NAT without setup, it requires an open port (thereby opening security vulnerabilities). BitTorrent wastes your bandwidth and your CPU time, and for what? To shift bandwidth costs off the producer and onto the consumer.
If you've ever done much with FTP you'll know that firewalls can be a major stumbling block there too, particularly because not all clients implement all features of FTP. What I get from BitTorrent is faster downloads and the ability to easily and temporarily donate some bandwidth to various organizations. In the case of community efforts, this is one way to help support them. In the case of commercial products, hopefully this results in lower costs of operation and cheaper products for me. Since I'm paying for the bandwidth either way and usually not using all of it, this trade makes a lot of sense.
There's plenty of FTP/HTTP mirrors for Linux distros, same for OO.o, and WoW patches.
Spoken like someone who's never tried to download a popular piece of software right after release. If you have a reasonably fast connection BitTorrent is often the fastest way to get, say, the latest version of your distro, especially during periods of high demand. My net connection isn't even that fast (only 1.5 Mbps) and I've found this. Considering the connection speeds being discussed in TFA, this point is that much more important. Additionally, for community projects this is a way for people to give back by, in effect, donating their bandwidth temporarily, so it has that advantage over FTP and HTTP as well (where you can setup a mirror, but this is a separate and more cumbersome process that must then be managed).
Sure, somewhere, once in a blue moon, someone downloads a public-domain movie/book using BT, but that doesn't make it the norm by any means.
And I care fuck all about what the norm is. BitTorrent is just a tool for shuffling bits around. I use it for perfectly legal purposes. If other people use it for illegal purposes, by all means go after them, but don't punish me for what other people are doing. And don't think that by targeting this one way of shuffling bits you'll stop whatever the activity is, because it will just shift to some other method. As far as I can see, the existence of trackers in BitTorrent probably makes it poorly suited for legal activity when compared to other p2p technologies.
I just hate the 'people download Linux' argument.
Well some of us actually use it for downloading Linux and such, and we hate it when people act as if we don't exist and back the totally idiocy of targeting a very useful communication protocol because some people happen to use it for illegal purposes.
Yeah, but will this ultra-fast connection come with port blocking, traffic shaping, unspecified caps on data transferred, and TOS that make you agree not to run a server of any kind?
Sort of off topic here, but are wizards carrying swords really counter to "pre-approved fantasy archetypes"? I mean, I'd think Gandalf would be a pretty archetypal wizard and he carried a sword.
Well sure, if it's on your lap or desk it fill up a pretty big solid angle. Watching things that close for extended periods of time my contribute to eye strain, though.
That is one of the things that's amusing about all the HD TV fuss: On the computer you've had the capacity for an HD picture for years.
See with DVD, there was a reason for everyone to upgrade. Even if you had a small, crappy, TV, DVD was still better. The picture was generally better even on poor sets, but picture quality aside the other features were more important... Not so for HD formats. The only benefit is image quality... Well, this means that the only people who are going to notice a difference are those who own HD TVs, which aren't all that many people at this point.
Moreover, it's really only people with HD TVs who usually watch them from a position where the screen fills up a large enough solid angle of their field of view that they can resolve the difference in image quality. Meaning, you have to have the right combination of having a big enough TV, sitting close enough to it, and having good enough eyesight.
...IIRC, the original Archos' were basically saved by the homebrew community, who came up with new, better, firmware for their products. It was a win-win... so why is the new stuff so anti-modder?
Yeah, I can certainly say that years ago when I bought an Archos Ondio mp3 player I quickly got fed up with the crappy interface. I'd largely stopped using the thing until I downloaded the open source Rockbox firmware. I was really shocked by how incredibly superior the functionality of Rockbox was to the factory installed firmware. I could finally use the player like I should be able to. I probably won't buy another Archos product anyway, due to the problems I experienced with that player, but I certainly wouldn't buy one I couldn't put Rockbox on.
Already someone could watch porn, movies or games with extreme violence, or other adult (and possibly offensive) material on their laptop. For that matter, someone could just bring a Playboy magazine on the plane to pass the time. With the possible exception of people trying to use VOIP (I wonder if the latency would be low and consistent enough), I really don't see how this brings up many etiquette questions that aren't already present on a plane. This just sounds like a lame excuse for filtering to me.
While the anonymization may be useful for other reasons, if your problem is filtering by your ISP then a better solution is, if possible, to get a different ISP. If you keep giving them your money, then not only do you seem to be implicitly consenting to their behavior, you're actually financially supporting it.
Now I realize that in some places people may really have no reasonable choice, but it's been my experience that many people who live in an area where there is a choice still go with providers (e.g. Comcast) who do this sort of stuff because they have the best nominal price to bandwidth ratio. When those people complain about filtering, unstated caps, etc., I have very little sympathy. Don't like it? Vote with your wallet. I hate the behavior of these ISPs and pay extra for an ISP that is much better behaved. I really burns me that others who have a choice and should know better keep giving money to these jerks.
This has absolutely nothing to do with open or closed source. A completely open source random number generator would have precisely the same vulnerability, because the problem isn't potential skulduggery by the vendor, it's potential skulduggery by the people who designed the standard.
I agree that the vulnerability of this particular PRNG has nothing to do with closed vs. open source, but I think there is some relevance to the larger issue. Namely, in a closed source OS it seems (at least naively) that there are lots of ways to insert various sorts of back doors. If one is so worried about the government twisting MS's arm to put in a back door, it seems like a publicly known PRNG algorithm with known vulnerabilities is really the least of your worries.
I'm not one of the people who thinks all software must be open source, but it seems like there are strong arguments in favor of open source as far as avoiding back doors from powerful interests.
Sorry to indulge the off-topic troll of the parent, but I'd like to state a common sense point lest other get sucked into this fallacious line of reasoning.
Those who want to paint all these issues as black and white, or say that some official or another "lied" about complex issues related to WMD in Iraq, OIF, etc., are the ones who are effectively the liars -- by ignoring everything that doesn't neatly support their own political positions.
I agree that people have a tendency to accept things that confirm what they'd like (or have already chosen) to believe and ignore or doubt those that do not. This is a ubiquitous natural psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias, and it is not limited to any particular political group (though you might like to believe so). I further agree that like almost any matter of intelligence, the question of whether or not Iraq had WMDs was murky, and I believe many people with knowledge of intelligence believed in good faith that they did. The people selling the Iraq war didn't not lie about the existence of WMDs, but they did make false statements.
There were basically two sorts of falsehoods that were told in the run-up to the war. The first were specific pieces of evidence that were repeated to the public after it was widely known within the government that those pieces had been discredited (or cast into very serious doubt). These include statements about aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, and others. The second set of falsehoods were statements not about the evidence but about the level of certainty. When Bush administration officials said they believed Iraq had WMDs or that they had evidence of an Iraqi WMD program they were likely telling the truth. However, when, for example, Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," or President Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," or when Donald Rumsfeld said, "We know where the weapons are..." those were false statements. There remained doubt. There remained a lack of direct, verifiable, incontravertible evidence of the WMDs (e.g. pictures of the weapons, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis). As a result, those statements were simply and manifestly false.
Now, you can get into a whole semantic argument over whether they were lies or just false statements, based on whether they just misunderstood what they got from the intelligence community and so on. I think it's hard to make that argument given that in some instances (on the specific pieces of intel) people like Cheney were corrected by intelligence officials but continued to make the statements. In any case, from my perspective it's a moot point. Whether they made the false statements due to duplicity or just incompetence, the effect is the same, and it still marks them as unfit for their respective positions. There is no sufficient excuse for making false statements, that are either patently false or easily can be verified to be false, to the nation on a subject so dire as whether to go to war.
If the Bush administration had simply said, "we have intelligence that makes of believe Iraq has WMDs" and put forward what was, as far as they knew at the time, fairly reliable intelligence, then I would say they did not lie. They made a mistake, but, when it comes to intelligence, mistakes happen. But they did not do merely that; they included highly dubious or discredited evidence and stated that there was "no doubt". They made false statements to the nation, and I would say they lied.
I recall one case in California, where they got a warrant based on an anonymous tip (claiming marijuana was being grown), entered the property, killed the owner, didn't find any drugs but took the property anyway.
Is the case of Donald Scott the one you're talking about? I've never heard of this and would be interested to know. I bet others would as well.
Concerned about the the broad effect of federal forfeiture laws, Henry Hyde (R-Ill., House Judiciary Committee Chairman) and John Conyers (D-Mich., the senior Democrat on the Committee) teamed up to introduce the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act in a rare display of bipartisan unity.... Disturbed by this and other similar stories of excess, the House members voted to approve H.R. 1658 to curb this abuse.
This bears an eerie resemblance to the movie Final Cut. From the IMDB plot summary:
The story is set in a world where implanted microchips can record all moments of an individual's life. The chips are removed upon death so the images can be edited into something of a highlight reel for loved ones who want to remember the deceased.
Not nearly the same, admittedly, but I couldn't help but be reminded.
Slashdot Mirror
You can probably actually deal with the problem of dishonest or inaccurate feedback fairly easily. The first step is making feedback appear only once both parties have left it (or after some time limit has elapsed, after which feedback can no longer be given). After that, eBay should be able to tell if, say, a buyer is leaving unjustified negative feedback. eBay really just has to look if that person has left a disproportionately large number of negatives for sellers (compared to the eBay population at large).
If they want to get a little fancier they can look at the correlation of the buyers feedback with that of others (i.e., does this person tend to leave negative feedback for people that are judged to be good by everyone else). If someone leaves negative feedback one for a seller that has otherwise excellent feedback, that could be a fluke. If a buyer consistently leaves negative feedback for otherwise good sellers that's a pattern. It quickly becomes quite improbable that the buyer just has bad luck.
This actually would weed out not just dishonest buyers but also those with unreasonably high standards. So anyway, eBay would have to crunch the data and make a rating about the honesty of the buyer (or seller) that would be listed along with feedback totals. If they just restricted themselves to comparing proportion of negatives given to the eBay average that would be a very simple calculation (and to give a score on honesty they have to compare this to the overall statistical distribution to figure out how reasonable that value is). I think that the blind feedback system I mentioned at the beginning is an important part of this, though, because in that system people would be much more likely to actually leave neutrals or negatives. In the current system where people almost always leave positives, it wouldn't work as well (because the differentiation would be smaller and more likely to be buried in statistical noise).
Anyway, that would weed out habitually dishonest or unreasonable sellers. I don't think that there's much eBay can do in individual cases, especially regarding condition of merchandise, since I don't see how they could know. However, as long as you sell a fair amount of stuff, a system like they one I'm talking about should ensure that such dishonesty is quite rare.
While I basically agree with you, I think it's important to realize that changing to proportional allocation of electors is also often against a state's self interest. Basically, when the state votes for president as a block it has much more power and is more likely to get candidate attention (and promises). This might not be immediately clear, but you can look here for a good explanation of what influence the electoral college (under the winner-takes-all system currently used in most states) has based on the Banzhaf power index. Another point is that in any state with a clear majority for one party, it is against the interests of their party to switch to proportional allocation of electors. The issue of party power might be resolved by making a pact among many states (with different party dominance) to do it, but you'd still be faced with the fact that it would simply make some states less powerful.
Still, you're correct that changing the electoral college is even less likely.
Oh yeah, aren't they the ones that secretly came from the same planet as the Randroids?
They're closely related. In fairness, though, AT&T is much more competent than the Bush administration itself, otherwise we might not have much to fear. "We know where the infringing packets are. They're on the internets and north, south, east, and west somewhat."
And here comes the moment I start feeling old:
This is how things used to be, back in the early days of AOL, Compuserve, etc. You got a certain number of minutes of modem access per month. Presumably disagreements like that did happen, but somehow or another people dealt with it. It was a big deal when AOL first came out with an "unlimited" plan, and the immediate result was that they couldn't handle the load. So the problem of "unlimited" access and overselling access isn't anything new either.
Hopefully now someone will come along and talk about using gopher via the BBS they used to dial in to or something, and I won't feel so bad.
So, it's free in the sense that you have to buy some additional extended warranty plan. Or, actually, you had to have bought it years before that (I believe you technically have to purchase it before the end of whatever limited warranty the unit comes with).
On my mp3 player, replacing the battery is just a matter of buying a new one and removing four screws (small phillips heads).
First of all, the TFA is addressing representation in the House of Representatives, not in the electoral college, where the disproportionate representation of small states is mainly due to the electors they get for their Senate seats. Secondly, while I too used to believe that the disproportionality you're talking about was a problem, I have since read a very interesting article that treats the problem using something called the Banzaf Power Index to assess how much power people in each state actually get through the process. This is a more rational way of comparing the power of people in different states, and it shows that effectively many people in small states do not have disproportionate power in the process. Now, this analysis doesn't show that the current system is fair, it simply shows that it's biased in a different way than you suggest and, in fact, tends to give more power to people who live in larger states, because the large voting block of electors (in states where they all cast their votes for the same candidate) is more powerful.
In any case, if you're concerned with people having disparate power in the federal government depending on what state they live in, the real problem is obviously going to be representation in the Senate. Since representation in the Senate has no proportionality built into it at all, and the Senate is at least as powerful as the House, the disproportionate power of people in less populous states over congressional legislation has to be the most serious departure from equal representation. But even if we could all agree that that's bad, it's probably unlikely to change since it would require an amendment to the constitution that must be ratified by 3/4 of the states; people are unlikely to support drastically reducing their own power. Just look at how hard it has been for the people of DC simply to get representation at all.
What happens if it gets demagnetized?
Must have been a good freshman class, because it sounds to me like you've got it pretty much right. Like you say, a heat engine can always extract work while moving heat from a hotter reservoir to a colder one, and the efficiency is bounded by the Carnot efficiency. The main signs of trouble, when it comes to the 2nd law, are if a device can extract work by simply absorbing heat from one reservoir or while moving heat from one reservoir to another of equal or greater temperature.
The same can be said of sneakernet (via snail mail), but I'm not about to go back to that either. Perhaps you're simply not aware, but there are many (legal) tasks for which BitTorrent is a much more effective tool than a traditional FTP or HTTP server.
If you've ever done much with FTP you'll know that firewalls can be a major stumbling block there too, particularly because not all clients implement all features of FTP. What I get from BitTorrent is faster downloads and the ability to easily and temporarily donate some bandwidth to various organizations. In the case of community efforts, this is one way to help support them. In the case of commercial products, hopefully this results in lower costs of operation and cheaper products for me. Since I'm paying for the bandwidth either way and usually not using all of it, this trade makes a lot of sense.
Spoken like someone who's never tried to download a popular piece of software right after release. If you have a reasonably fast connection BitTorrent is often the fastest way to get, say, the latest version of your distro, especially during periods of high demand. My net connection isn't even that fast (only 1.5 Mbps) and I've found this. Considering the connection speeds being discussed in TFA, this point is that much more important. Additionally, for community projects this is a way for people to give back by, in effect, donating their bandwidth temporarily, so it has that advantage over FTP and HTTP as well (where you can setup a mirror, but this is a separate and more cumbersome process that must then be managed).
And I care fuck all about what the norm is. BitTorrent is just a tool for shuffling bits around. I use it for perfectly legal purposes. If other people use it for illegal purposes, by all means go after them, but don't punish me for what other people are doing. And don't think that by targeting this one way of shuffling bits you'll stop whatever the activity is, because it will just shift to some other method. As far as I can see, the existence of trackers in BitTorrent probably makes it poorly suited for legal activity when compared to other p2p technologies.
Well some of us actually use it for downloading Linux and such, and we hate it when people act as if we don't exist and back the totally idiocy of targeting a very useful communication protocol because some people happen to use it for illegal purposes.
Yeah, but will this ultra-fast connection come with port blocking, traffic shaping, unspecified caps on data transferred, and TOS that make you agree not to run a server of any kind?
Sort of off topic here, but are wizards carrying swords really counter to "pre-approved fantasy archetypes"? I mean, I'd think Gandalf would be a pretty archetypal wizard and he carried a sword.
Well sure, if it's on your lap or desk it fill up a pretty big solid angle. Watching things that close for extended periods of time my contribute to eye strain, though.
That is one of the things that's amusing about all the HD TV fuss: On the computer you've had the capacity for an HD picture for years.
Moreover, it's really only people with HD TVs who usually watch them from a position where the screen fills up a large enough solid angle of their field of view that they can resolve the difference in image quality. Meaning, you have to have the right combination of having a big enough TV, sitting close enough to it, and having good enough eyesight.
Yeah, I can certainly say that years ago when I bought an Archos Ondio mp3 player I quickly got fed up with the crappy interface. I'd largely stopped using the thing until I downloaded the open source Rockbox firmware. I was really shocked by how incredibly superior the functionality of Rockbox was to the factory installed firmware. I could finally use the player like I should be able to. I probably won't buy another Archos product anyway, due to the problems I experienced with that player, but I certainly wouldn't buy one I couldn't put Rockbox on.
Already someone could watch porn, movies or games with extreme violence, or other adult (and possibly offensive) material on their laptop. For that matter, someone could just bring a Playboy magazine on the plane to pass the time. With the possible exception of people trying to use VOIP (I wonder if the latency would be low and consistent enough), I really don't see how this brings up many etiquette questions that aren't already present on a plane. This just sounds like a lame excuse for filtering to me.
While the anonymization may be useful for other reasons, if your problem is filtering by your ISP then a better solution is, if possible, to get a different ISP. If you keep giving them your money, then not only do you seem to be implicitly consenting to their behavior, you're actually financially supporting it.
Now I realize that in some places people may really have no reasonable choice, but it's been my experience that many people who live in an area where there is a choice still go with providers (e.g. Comcast) who do this sort of stuff because they have the best nominal price to bandwidth ratio. When those people complain about filtering, unstated caps, etc., I have very little sympathy. Don't like it? Vote with your wallet. I hate the behavior of these ISPs and pay extra for an ISP that is much better behaved. I really burns me that others who have a choice and should know better keep giving money to these jerks.
Ok, I don't get how the parent is only modded +1 while the GP is +5. The parent is actually clever.
I agree that the vulnerability of this particular PRNG has nothing to do with closed vs. open source, but I think there is some relevance to the larger issue. Namely, in a closed source OS it seems (at least naively) that there are lots of ways to insert various sorts of back doors. If one is so worried about the government twisting MS's arm to put in a back door, it seems like a publicly known PRNG algorithm with known vulnerabilities is really the least of your worries.
I'm not one of the people who thinks all software must be open source, but it seems like there are strong arguments in favor of open source as far as avoiding back doors from powerful interests.
Or to put it succinctly we can just quote Sir Issac Newton:
Sorry to indulge the off-topic troll of the parent, but I'd like to state a common sense point lest other get sucked into this fallacious line of reasoning.
I agree that people have a tendency to accept things that confirm what they'd like (or have already chosen) to believe and ignore or doubt those that do not. This is a ubiquitous natural psychological phenomenon called confirmation bias, and it is not limited to any particular political group (though you might like to believe so). I further agree that like almost any matter of intelligence, the question of whether or not Iraq had WMDs was murky, and I believe many people with knowledge of intelligence believed in good faith that they did. The people selling the Iraq war didn't not lie about the existence of WMDs, but they did make false statements.
There were basically two sorts of falsehoods that were told in the run-up to the war. The first were specific pieces of evidence that were repeated to the public after it was widely known within the government that those pieces had been discredited (or cast into very serious doubt). These include statements about aluminum tubes, yellowcake uranium, and others. The second set of falsehoods were statements not about the evidence but about the level of certainty. When Bush administration officials said they believed Iraq had WMDs or that they had evidence of an Iraqi WMD program they were likely telling the truth. However, when, for example, Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," or President Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," or when Donald Rumsfeld said, "We know where the weapons are..." those were false statements. There remained doubt. There remained a lack of direct, verifiable, incontravertible evidence of the WMDs (e.g. pictures of the weapons, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis). As a result, those statements were simply and manifestly false.
Now, you can get into a whole semantic argument over whether they were lies or just false statements, based on whether they just misunderstood what they got from the intelligence community and so on. I think it's hard to make that argument given that in some instances (on the specific pieces of intel) people like Cheney were corrected by intelligence officials but continued to make the statements. In any case, from my perspective it's a moot point. Whether they made the false statements due to duplicity or just incompetence, the effect is the same, and it still marks them as unfit for their respective positions. There is no sufficient excuse for making false statements, that are either patently false or easily can be verified to be false, to the nation on a subject so dire as whether to go to war.
If the Bush administration had simply said, "we have intelligence that makes of believe Iraq has WMDs" and put forward what was, as far as they knew at the time, fairly reliable intelligence, then I would say they did not lie. They made a mistake, but, when it comes to intelligence, mistakes happen. But they did not do merely that; they included highly dubious or discredited evidence and stated that there was "no doubt". They made false statements to the nation, and I would say they lied.
Is the case of Donald Scott the one you're talking about? I've never heard of this and would be interested to know. I bet others would as well.
An interesting note from your link:
Note that Conyers is the current chairman.
This bears an eerie resemblance to the movie Final Cut. From the IMDB plot summary:
Not nearly the same, admittedly, but I couldn't help but be reminded.