Probably this bounty for Windows XP on the Intel Mac is prompted in a reaction to Linux on the Intel Mac. Can't have the press paying attention to that, now can we?
But the original posters' point was that if there is any suspicion of discrepancies/errors/hacking, the "system" (meaning the whole election process) can fall back on a more traditional/reliable method (paper votes).
Then we are probably much better off going with a 100% paper model and skip the bullshit (aka "IT Solutions"). A paper trail is useless if the authenticity and origin of the electronic records cannot be known 100%. Say on the day of the election the machines tally +1.01 or +1.02 for every vote for party A and +0.99 or +0.98 for party B. The 'paper trail' won't inherently give any clue about that nor is it likely to be discovered since it will follow projected demographics very closely.
Anyway, how much of a suspicion of errors, cracking or other discrepancies would it take to get authorities to cough up the cost of a manual recount?
In the last US presidential 'election', for the first time ever exit polls diverged greatly from the tallies reported by the polling sites. Nor did the US fulfill its own (and the UN's) requirements for an open and fair election. Neither of those set off a recount.
The voter gets the paper, looks at the human readable output to verify that his vote was correctly recorded...
All that proves is that the screen and the piece of paper say the same thing. How do either of those relate to the actual value recorded as the vote?
... so that in the event of a dispute they can be hand counted
The data should be verifable without resorting to a manual recount.
It would take a fairly large discrepancy to initiate a recount: In the last 'election', not only did the US not fulfill its own (and the UN's) requirements for an open and fair election, but also for the first time ever exit polls diverged greatly from the tallies reported by the polling sites. Neither of those set off a recount.
Talk of a "paper trail" is a lot of noise and a red herring. The real issue is that validity, origin, and authenticity of the poll data. That can be done with or without paper.
It would also appear to apply to all software. Closed source can even be more difficult since it is harder to be sure of what's actually in the packages and who owns it.
So, any company that runs MS Windows is also in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley, unless they get full disclosure from Microsoft on all the technology Microsoft has licensed or otherwise taken into use.
Interesting how legitimate questions like the problem of software patents or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance get spun into anti-FOSS FUD.
I can usually tell with one sip whether it's a real drink or one with synthetic 'sweetener'. To me, saccharin did not taste sweet at all and aspartame just tastes wrong, but not as nasty as the saccharin. When I was a kid my taste buds where sharper and I could taste not just the presence of preservatives, but also which ones. Kinda took the fun out of many cereals, carbonated beverages and even a few candies.
I'd say, in the UK (where I am and where the article was saying Firefox was trailing behind) they are mainly in places were the user is forced to user a certain well-known browser (despite, maybe, preferring something better) due to slow organisations (or the slow IT departments thereof) who don't like change.
Not liking change is probaly inaccurate. I recall when many institutions started to become afflicted with MS, starting with MSIE. Those same IT depts busted their assess to inflict MS products on as many levels as they could. It's only when it comes to exorcising MS from part of the organization that they suddenly don't like change. They'll still work overtime to rollout the Next Version (tm) from Redmond and put in their own time to replace a non-MS tool or services with a less functional MS-based one.
Unfortunately managment is blind in several ways. They are often dazzled by the advertisements or by their own admiration of the personal wealth of Bill Gates. However, mostly they are blind as to who much of their IT department is working for.
All it takes is a handful of employees who are loyal to Microsoft and not the organization for which they work and those who are loyal to the organization will find themselves monkey-wrenched every step until they must leave.
Boycotting Microsoft goods would send an even stronger message than hurting American exports.
By buying Microsoft products, paying for Microsoft services and helping spread Microsoft-only protocols and formats, you are endorsing their behavior in China and elsewhere. By endorsing their behavior, you are saying "that is how I want the world to be"
We've seen from 2 decades of court cases and lobbying efforts time and again that MS doesn't give even a rat's asshole about being on the right side of the law or even on the right side of ethics. Any fines or remedies that may happen to eventually be enforced, even partially, are simply seen as the cost of doing business. Courts and legislator haven't been able to stop any of this and are more and more a part of the problem. The only thing that will make a difference is if people affect the bottom line, since that appears to be the single measure by which the company operates.
Sure a boycott may be harder for some people than others, but then it is a choice people have made over time, often unawares. But most people do have a clue and just choose to ignore it thus ending up in a difficult spot. A lot of honest Christians/Buddhists/Muslims/$FAV_REL would balk at having anything to do with a neighbor, dealership, or local business that even hinted at a similar lack of ethics and disregard for the law that MS has time and again demonstrated.
Said same people put up a few hours of volunteer work or a few dollars for a charity once or twice a year to make people's lives better and then turn around and plunk down hundreds of dollars for a company that works with oppressive regimes to make people's lives worse. I guess it has to cancel out.
Most religions have regular periods of atonement or penance. For many, Lent is coming up. These are just some options, some harder some easier to do for 40 days. If some are too hard, well just recall that bad karma (or however you want to call it) is hard to work off:
Stop buying MS products and services - e.g. MS games, packages or systems
Stop using MS products and services - e.g. No MSN or Hotmail or MSNBC.
Give up MSIE - e.g. use Opera, Firefox, Mozilla, etc.
Stop using MS formats - e.g. No WMA/WMV use MPEG/AAC/Ogg, no MS Word or Excel docs use OpenDocument or something else
Stop using sites that use MS formats - e.g. those sites with the WMV format videos
Stop using applications that use MS formats - e.g. drop WMP for Winamp
Try out a non-MS operating system for a while - e.g. OS X or a live CD from Ubuntu or Knoppix.
Try out a non-MS video / audio player
Try out a non-MS web browser
Try out a non-MS productivity suite - e.g. OpenOffice.org comes to mind, but there are others
you get the idea...
Wake up. Vote with your wallet. By buying into MS you are endorsing its business methods and ethics. Software is simply another tool and in no way exempt from the standards of behavior that we expect from other tool makers.
People need to understand that computers are magical boxes that run on white smoke and fairy dust. Never, ever open your computer, or even risk hooking new devices up to it; you might cause the spell to fail. Understanding how it works is of course beyond any normal mortal;
It's blue smoke not white. Harware runs on blue smoke because they clearly stop working if you ever let the blue smoke out. What's so complex about that?
Taiwan doesn't have to single out MS by name. It's simple enough to exclude them by mandating the country not use any proprietary, undocumented APIs, protocols or formats. Yes, technically MS could still meet those requirements. But in practice MS will never deal with anything but their own undocumented, propietary formats, protocols and APIs -- unless you include the undocumented, propietary extensions (think embrace, extend, extinguish) made to existing non-MS specifications whether open or closed.
Just to illustrate this look at how MS breaks Java, HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, NTP, Kerberos and LDAP, to name a few. All that's needed to chuck MS out on the street is to require adherence to open standards.
It's not just climatology. Fish stocks are headed for the basement, and we aren't doing anything to stop it. (Basically, this would require closing several still profitable fisheries.)
At this late stage, it probably will come to that in most areas. However, the choice was made years ago when it was decided that factory trawlers could be used in place of sustainable fishing methods. The latter ensure a renewable supply of fish. The former simple mine the fish until they are all gone. Depending on the reproductive cycle of the species and the mining method, there may not be much warning.
It's not a new problem. Blue pike disappeared from the Great Lakes quite suddenly, though they had been a major portion of the commercial catch for decades.
1. Software development in the US will be more expensive,...
How does that one keep popping up again and again? Software patents have little or nothing to do with software development and everything to do with software usage.
Patents : Usage:: Copyright : Distribution
It's people using software that will feel the cost of software patents not so much developers. In principle it could also be used to crush smaller or independent developers, but the real money is in getting the end-users to pay to use their XML-serialization, shopping carts, blogs, etc.
Then look at some of these peer-reviewed scientific pulications: aspartame breaks down into formaldehyde and methanol, among other things. Both are banned in most countries.
I think the patent expiring is why you're hearing more about it because there isn't anyone to "stifle" the truth anymore.
He's half right. The truth is called "bashing" these days if it's unpleasant for some people or contrary to their wishes. Business these days being based mostly on wishful thinking these days, that's a big deal for their bottom line.
More seriously, the problems with aspartame have been known for a long time. It's rather toxic stuff in the long term and for people with fast growing nervous systems (ie. kids). I don't suppose the new stuff is any healthier, it's just got more years before the patent expires so it's "worth" defending -- if viewed from the limited scope of the companies. As public health issue, it's probably still a problem.
I don't use gmail, but I've also been getting around 30 a day, it's been gradually going up again taking a few leaps last year. I think we have another quote to make fun of:
Geeze, dude. You should have thought about that before you got locked into MS. MS is and will keep on fighting to prevent just what you are talking about doing: leaving MS Outlook. When MS starts shaking people down over patents, interoperability will be that much harder. You probably won't lose your data, but it is a race now.
Since you're thinking about FireFox 1.5 as well, I'd recommend it. The improvements are nothing to shout about, but they are noticeable in a good way.
People just don't seem to expect robust code in the way they did.
One of the more harmful byproducts of the Microsoft Effect is that people generalize the acceptance and expectation of poor performance and poor quality beyond just MS. This gets projected onto not just other vendor's products or even ICT, but onto technology in general. People quickly get used to a lower quality of service and it spreads. Since everything these days relies on software, the Microsoft Effect generates a very expensive and dangerous situation.
I'm considering getting the PS3, not for gaming at all, but to use as a linux desktop system running on 8 64-bit PPC cores, each of which runs at more than 2GHz. Go find that at $500.
I guess that may answer my question about where to look for hardware after the Mac Mini goes over to (W)Intel...
There's a lot of misdirection going on here. The day an exploit is made public is not the same as when the bug it uses is reported. Nor is that the same as when the bug is found, not is that the same as when MS acknowledges the bug.
We're dealing with a number of different dates, some of which are often months or years apart:
Date bug found by black hat
Date bug found by white hat
Date bug is reported
Date bug is made public
Date exploit is published
Date exploit is found 'in the wild'
Date MS acknowledges the bug
Date MS announces a patch
Date MS releases a patch
Date MS releases a patch that fixes the bug / repairs damage from first patch
Somehow, being a political movement / cult, MS becomes exempt from the rules of a normal business and from what customers expect. No other device or appliance has had even a fraction of the defects as MS' without going through a major product recall. Our dear Chairman Bill will go down in history as the man that made bad engineering acceptible aka the Microsoft Effect
There's more where that came from. That was only one patent.
Ok. So it's 25c per unit? But then realize that's only one patent. In the US and regions weak enough to be forced into "Free Trade" agreements mandating US sw patents, there are tens of thousands of other sw patents which can potentially get royalties. Many of these patents have been lifted from comp sci text books, RFCs, existing programs and even established best practice. But the USPTO says they're good, so you gotta pay. Closed source, open source, developer or user - you gotta pay.
If any device or is affected by even 1% of these many tens of thousand of outrageous patents @ 25 c per patent per unit, the added cost passed on will be significant. Say 30000 sw patents, 0.5% are relevant with royalties of 10c per unit per patent, that's an added cost of $38 per unit, not counting the 'administrative' costs and gouging which will get tacked on. Cool, everything just got more expensive without changing a thing.
Software patents: the sugar in your gas tank on the "information superhighway"
That was some time in 2003. I remember it because of the metaphor. Most of these problems are the result of design flaws and would take more
work to fix than Microsoft has time or resources. Thus Bill Gate's
allusions to the U.S. Apollo program - $25 billion over 10 years, just to catch MS up with 1998.
However, it is more likely that none of the staff in any position to improve things gives even a rat's asshole about security. They can make money still without it.
So, what were the allusions to the U.S. Apollo program about? Beats me. Maybe a diplomatic way of informing the current administration of a desire to get on the dole. Corporate welfare to the tune of $25 bn of taxpayer's money.
Do you realize that the US is trying to forcefeed recognition of software patents, specifically USPTO ones, into every recent and ongoing "Free Trade" agreement? Each one that falls makes life harder for users, not just developers (though the press likes to misdirect people towards the development issues sw patents will bring, further distorting the issue by making it looks like it only affects open source developers).
In first aid, you stabilize the patient then go on to other priorities. So, while working on correcting US patent legislation, we need to stabilize the situation internationally. That means stopping the spread of infection by going after the transmission vectors: trade agreements.
The MS help desk mantra, "re-install the OS", effectively gets rid of all non-MS packages, drivers, and customization while distracting the luser with other problems. It's not like MS systems have the equivalent of apt-get or kickstart where all the 3rd party packages and customizations can be put back with a script.
The courts should be looking at that and seeking to force a solution to such anti-competitive tactics, if they weren't already on MS' leash.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably this bounty for Windows XP on the Intel Mac is prompted in a reaction to Linux on the Intel Mac. Can't have the press paying attention to that, now can we?
That's what black tape is for.
Anyway, how much of a suspicion of errors, cracking or other discrepancies would it take to get authorities to cough up the cost of a manual recount? In the last US presidential 'election', for the first time ever exit polls diverged greatly from the tallies reported by the polling sites. Nor did the US fulfill its own (and the UN's) requirements for an open and fair election. Neither of those set off a recount.
Talk of a "paper trail" is a lot of noise and a red herring. The real issue is that validity, origin, and authenticity of the poll data. That can be done with or without paper.
Connect the dots there. Encryption of e-mail has not come into use, but other measures are being adopted.
So, any company that runs MS Windows is also in violation of Sarbanes-Oxley, unless they get full disclosure from Microsoft on all the technology Microsoft has licensed or otherwise taken into use.
Interesting how legitimate questions like the problem of software patents or Sarbanes-Oxley compliance get spun into anti-FOSS FUD.
I can usually tell with one sip whether it's a real drink or one with synthetic 'sweetener'. To me, saccharin did not taste sweet at all and aspartame just tastes wrong, but not as nasty as the saccharin. When I was a kid my taste buds where sharper and I could taste not just the presence of preservatives, but also which ones. Kinda took the fun out of many cereals, carbonated beverages and even a few candies.
Unfortunately managment is blind in several ways. They are often dazzled by the advertisements or by their own admiration of the personal wealth of Bill Gates. However, mostly they are blind as to who much of their IT department is working for. All it takes is a handful of employees who are loyal to Microsoft and not the organization for which they work and those who are loyal to the organization will find themselves monkey-wrenched every step until they must leave.
By buying Microsoft products, paying for Microsoft services and helping spread Microsoft-only protocols and formats, you are endorsing their behavior in China and elsewhere. By endorsing their behavior, you are saying "that is how I want the world to be"
We've seen from 2 decades of court cases and lobbying efforts time and again that MS doesn't give even a rat's asshole about being on the right side of the law or even on the right side of ethics. Any fines or remedies that may happen to eventually be enforced, even partially, are simply seen as the cost of doing business. Courts and legislator haven't been able to stop any of this and are more and more a part of the problem. The only thing that will make a difference is if people affect the bottom line, since that appears to be the single measure by which the company operates.
Sure a boycott may be harder for some people than others, but then it is a choice people have made over time, often unawares. But most people do have a clue and just choose to ignore it thus ending up in a difficult spot. A lot of honest Christians/Buddhists/Muslims/$FAV_REL would balk at having anything to do with a neighbor, dealership, or local business that even hinted at a similar lack of ethics and disregard for the law that MS has time and again demonstrated. Said same people put up a few hours of volunteer work or a few dollars for a charity once or twice a year to make people's lives better and then turn around and plunk down hundreds of dollars for a company that works with oppressive regimes to make people's lives worse. I guess it has to cancel out.
Most religions have regular periods of atonement or penance. For many, Lent is coming up. These are just some options, some harder some easier to do for 40 days. If some are too hard, well just recall that bad karma (or however you want to call it) is hard to work off:
Wake up. Vote with your wallet. By buying into MS you are endorsing its business methods and ethics. Software is simply another tool and in no way exempt from the standards of behavior that we expect from other tool makers.
Just to illustrate this look at how MS breaks Java, HTTP, HTML, TCP/IP, NTP, Kerberos and LDAP, to name a few. All that's needed to chuck MS out on the street is to require adherence to open standards.
It's not a new problem. Blue pike disappeared from the Great Lakes quite suddenly, though they had been a major portion of the commercial catch for decades.
Patents : Usage :: Copyright : Distribution
It's people using software that will feel the cost of software patents not so much developers. In principle it could also be used to crush smaller or independent developers, but the real money is in getting the end-users to pay to use their XML-serialization, shopping carts, blogs, etc.
More seriously, the problems with aspartame have been known for a long time. It's rather toxic stuff in the long term and for people with fast growing nervous systems (ie. kids). I don't suppose the new stuff is any healthier, it's just got more years before the patent expires so it's "worth" defending -- if viewed from the limited scope of the companies. As public health issue, it's probably still a problem.
I don't use gmail, but I've also been getting around 30 a day, it's been gradually going up again taking a few leaps last year. I think we have another quote to make fun of:
Since you're thinking about FireFox 1.5 as well, I'd recommend it. The improvements are nothing to shout about, but they are noticeable in a good way.
We're dealing with a number of different dates, some of which are often months or years apart:
Somehow, being a political movement / cult, MS becomes exempt from the rules of a normal business and from what customers expect. No other device or appliance has had even a fraction of the defects as MS' without going through a major product recall. Our dear Chairman Bill will go down in history as the man that made bad engineering acceptible aka the Microsoft Effect
Ok. So it's 25c per unit? But then realize that's only one patent. In the US and regions weak enough to be forced into "Free Trade" agreements mandating US sw patents, there are tens of thousands of other sw patents which can potentially get royalties. Many of these patents have been lifted from comp sci text books, RFCs, existing programs and even established best practice. But the USPTO says they're good, so you gotta pay. Closed source, open source, developer or user - you gotta pay.
If any device or is affected by even 1% of these many tens of thousand of outrageous patents @ 25 c per patent per unit, the added cost passed on will be significant. Say 30000 sw patents, 0.5% are relevant with royalties of 10c per unit per patent, that's an added cost of $38 per unit, not counting the 'administrative' costs and gouging which will get tacked on. Cool, everything just got more expensive without changing a thing.
Software patents: the sugar in your gas tank on the "information superhighway"
However, it is more likely that none of the staff in any position to improve things gives even a rat's asshole about security. They can make money still without it.
So, what were the allusions to the U.S. Apollo program about? Beats me. Maybe a diplomatic way of informing the current administration of a desire to get on the dole. Corporate welfare to the tune of $25 bn of taxpayer's money.
Do you realize that the US is trying to forcefeed recognition of software patents, specifically USPTO ones, into every recent and ongoing "Free Trade" agreement? Each one that falls makes life harder for users, not just developers (though the press likes to misdirect people towards the development issues sw patents will bring, further distorting the issue by making it looks like it only affects open source developers).
In first aid, you stabilize the patient then go on to other priorities. So, while working on correcting US patent legislation, we need to stabilize the situation internationally. That means stopping the spread of infection by going after the transmission vectors: trade agreements.
The courts should be looking at that and seeking to force a solution to such anti-competitive tactics, if they weren't already on MS' leash.