Upon further review, The Register article appears to be directly based on this article that came out the day after the article I just qouted. Headline on the later one is "Glitches Cited in Early Voting."
From what I read in this article, several users encountered a miscalibrated touchscreen so that a press on the screen registered in the wrong place. Several voters only caught the error when reviewing their votes on the final page.
It sounds like a small, correctable problem, and pretty damn far from "sheannigans."
From the article:
Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney said it's not uncommon for screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync, making votes register incorrectly. Poll workers are trained to recalibrate them on the spot -- essentially, to realign the video screen with the electronics inside. The 15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.
Here is the actual Miami Herald article that The Register article is based on.
The headline on the Miami Herald piece? Only minor glitches reported in early voting
Read the full article. You have one woman in Florida who had a problem (or made a mistake), realized the problem, and had it corrected. This is HARDLY voting "shenannigans."
Excerpting from the article:
''It has been fantastic,'' Miami-Dade Elections Supervisor Lester Sola said. ``Our ability to process voters accurately and at a faster rate really has improved.''
To help keep things running smoothly, everything is done electronically, he said.
Registered voters can swipe their Florida driver's license or have their voter registration cards scanned to verify they can vote, then sign their names on an electronic monitor similar to those used in stores, he said.
While most voters find the electronic machines easy to use, they are not foolproof, as Joan Marek discovered on Thursday at the Hollywood satellite courthouse. After casting her votes, Marek, a Democrat, was surprised to see name of Charlie Crist -- the Republican candidate for governor -- on the review screen.
She was able to go back and correct the vote, and alerted poll workers to the problem.
China hasn't threatenned to "wipe Israel off the map."
China doesn't refer to the US as the "Great Satan."
China doesn't support Hizbullah, a terrorist group which killed 241 Americans in a bombing in Beirut.
China didn't ship thousands upon thousands of rockets to terrorist group Hizbullah.
China didn't storm the US embassy and hold 66 diplomats and US citizens hostage for over a year.
China didn't use terrorists to bomb the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
China doesn't try to actively sabotage the peace process in the Middle East.
Oh.... but Iran did.
China has nuclear weapons, but not many people are worried that China would provide a terrorist group with a nuclear weapon. There is great uncertainty over what Iran would do with nuclear weapons and nuclear technology.
China is far from perfect, but the general direction they are moving is towards a more open society and a market economy.
I'm not sure if it's just because people or more likely to get caught, but at the university I attended, the computer science department had the most honor code violations. (It's a low absolute number, but it accounted for a substantial portion of overall honor code violations).
* Assuming a non-skewed distribution (eg. normal distribution).
It amazes me how people freak out when something falls below its estimate. If X is normally distributed the actual value of X should fall below its expectation 50% of the time. If instead of expectation we're talking about the median, this is simply by definition. This isn't Statistics 101, this is like Statistics 0. But people still freak out. Sales figures, employment numbers, wage growth...
I'm just waiting for the headline, "50 Percent of Home Sales Exceed Median Price!!"
Will anyone admit that DRM isn't bad?
on
DRM and Democracy
·
· Score: 0
I know this isn't popular to say on Slashdot, but DRM is not the end of the world.
Apple iTunes Store has been selling DRM music for several years now. And the world is still here. People love their iPods and their DRM music.
Basically, mainstream America is fine with DRM. Implemented properly, it's a reasonable part of a solution to a the real problem of widescale IP theft.
My viewpoint may be one standard deviation off of normal Slashdot opinion, but this IS where mainstream America is.
Concentrate more on promoting than on demoting. The real goal here is to find the juicy good stuff and let others read it. Do not promote personal agendas. Do not let your opinions factor in. Try to be impartial about this. Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles. And to keep the children who like to spam Slashdot in check.
Some moderators need to read moderation guidelines
Is it POSSIBLE to disagree with net neutrality and not get modded down?!?!?!?
My post is fair, reasonable, logical, and not hysterical. If you disagree with someone, then you post a reply; you don't mod them down or mark something as a troll when it isn't.
All kinds of people are coming out with these parade of hypothetical horribles, but WHERE IS THE CURRENT PROBLEM??!?
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
It is a free market. It is a market governed by free choices and is free from the interference of force and fraud.
1. You can buy DRM music or not buy DRM music. You have a choice and know what you are buying.
2. Artists can distribute music themselves or through a label. They have a choice.
3. If the artists distribute it themselves, they can protect it with DRM or not protect it with DRM.
4. If the artist goes with a label, the label can choose to protect the music with drm or not protect it with drm
Nowhere is there force and nowhere is there fraud.
Furthermore, artists don't HAVE to sign with a label. Especially with the Internet, they can distribute music without one. If an artist chooses to sign with a label and the label insists on DRM, that is a choice made in a free market.
YOUR argument is that the market is not free because YOU want to buy/download non-drm music. That is not the definition of a free market. A free market is a market without an artificial price mechanism, and a market that is free from force and fraud. Here's a reasonably good wiki article on the subject.
I don't see iTunes files on the sharing networks, and FairPlay has yet to be cracked in a way that allows a person to remove protection from a file that they didn't purchase. So you might dislike DRM and FairPlay, but it is working.
Maybe I'll get modded down for agreeing with Neil McAllister, but I really think the guy is right. Obviously the FSF is wrong and DRM is not the end of the world because DRM is here and the world hasn't ended. When groups like FSF start getting shrill and taking extreme, unreasonable positions, it might get the blood pumping in some of Slashdot's free software fanbois, but it does nothing to help their underlying cause. In the eyes of the general populace, it just makes them sound crazy (and therefore ignorable).
Maybe this is because I don't fully understand all the FSF does, but it seems to me what really advances the cause of free software is free software that WORKS. The Linux kernel, GNU tools etc... all do WAY more to advance the idea of free software than any amount of political advocacy.
As I understand how conference works, the justices go in order of seniority with the most senior justice first and the newest justice last. Therefore, Alito would have been the last to state his views in conference.
However, I agree that the article's statement is stupid. A justice can change his mind at any time prior to when the opinion is actually handed down. Also, I have no idea how religiously the above procedure is actually followed, and even if it were, it doesn't really imply that Alito cast the deciding vote, just potentially the last vote. Let me just add a disclaimer and say I am not a lawyer, have no special knowledge of the SOCUS, and that all my knowledge of the above procedure comes from a wiki article and a speech I heard on c-span given by Justice Thomas.
US President George W Bush has given his backing to a law prohibiting anti gay protests at military funerals.
His signature follows bills in Kentucky and Ohio regulating funeral protests in response to the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, after they said American military deaths are God's retribution for tolerance of gay people.
There's a difference between speech and active disruption of lawful activity; the first is protected and the second is not. Also, the First Amendment is able to accomodate reasonable time & place restrictions. The question will be whether these restrictions go too far. In any case, these protestors are about as despicable and hate filled as they come.
The following two points are NOT controversial:
(1) A private employee's statements to his employer are not protected by the First Amendment. (If you go on TV and call your boss an asshole, he can fire you and you are NOT protected by the first amendment.)
(2) The government CANNOT stop citizens from bringing up issues in the public interest.
Which brings us to this case...
The majority of the court simply said that in this case, the petitioner was acting in his official duties and falls in category (1) and not category (2). Federal whistleblower laws etc... might protect him, but he has no CONSITUTIONAL right of action under the First Amendment.
Before you go crazy and mod me down, take a moment to read the opinion. IMHO it's a quite reasonable outcome.
In other news, Company BlahBlah to implement search technology to automatically block offensive material from image search.... oh wait, that's already a feature of Google image search!
Automatically detecting the word !@#$ and bleeping it out doesn't seem to be like a bad feature to me, as long as its optional. Maybe it's dumb that they're trying to patent it, but the idea isn't a bad one.
Windows is continuing its transition to the Unix user/security model, but your average user (and many IT people) neither understand the user/admin distinction nor permissions.
As I understand the article, EVERYONE in Vista is a normal user. Administrators have the ability though to take administrator actions on a case by case basis after supplying credentials.
To me, this sounds exactly like "sudo" under unix/linux or the "Authenticate: blahblah requires that you type your password" under Mac OS X. This model is more secure and works great, but there are some legacy transition issues.
For you unix people, the problem the article describes is, "what if you mount an old drive, the drive has restrictive permissions, and the file owner UIDs don't match the new system?" (your user account doesn't have permission to do anything on the drive)
NTFS has file permissions, but they rarely came up in practice because everyone in Windows was doing everything as the Unix equivalent of root. In Unix, the obvious fix is to do a sudo chown -R newuser/mnt/olddrive (or an ultraghetto sudo chmod -R o+rwx/mnt/olddrive) . The user/permission concept is totally foreign to your average windows user though, and hence the problem.
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
Content based anti-spam will never be complete
on
Spam Gets Personal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The main method for detecting spam currently are blacklists and content based filters (either automatic or human). Blacklists are easily defeated by zombies and content based filters will always have problems because spam content can be very similar to valid content.
This is my own personal opinion, but I think e-mail has to go in the direction of EASY TO USE crypto based authentication. This technology already exists (pgp) and is used heavilly by the computer security industry. it would make a lot of sense IMHO if EVERY e-mail from my bank was cryptographically signed using the bank's private key. Websites are encrypted and authenticated using public/private key cryptography (SSL) why can't the same thing be done for e-mail?
If Microsoft, Apple, Ebay/Paypal, Verisign, a few banks etc... got together, agreed to a SINGLE existing standard, and implemented it in a transparent and easy to use way, it might go a long way to reducing spam. Citibank could say, "all e-mail we send is cryptographically signed by Citibank. If you get an e-mail that is not signed by Citibank, then it isn't from us." Obviously there are still USARS out there who wouldn't get it, but i think this would be a big step in the right direction.
(P.S. Yes I know a variety of e-mail programs implement various crypto stuff already, but as far as I can tell, almost no one uses it or knows how to use it.)
The main point of the article isn't about open source, but about websites that bring people together to work on technology that can be used for nefarious purposes.
From the article: "The predominant reason for the growth in use of stealthy code is because of sites like Rootkit.com," says Stuart McClure, senior vice president of global threats at McAfee.
Again, to me, this isn't an "open source" problem as much as an "Internet/can we stop bad guys from getting together and working on bad things" problem.
I somehow doubt rootkit.com is that dangerous (or I have no idea if it's even malicious), but I think we're likely to see this general issue come up again with websites on bomb making techniques, biological weapons etc... What should the government/society do if there is a public website that researches technology that can be used to make mass casualty weapons?
Slashdot Mirror
It's just an idea!
From what I read in this article, several users encountered a miscalibrated touchscreen so that a press on the screen registered in the wrong place. Several voters only caught the error when reviewing their votes on the final page.
It sounds like a small, correctable problem, and pretty damn far from "sheannigans."
From the article:
The headline on the Miami Herald piece? Only minor glitches reported in early voting
Read the full article. You have one woman in Florida who had a problem (or made a mistake), realized the problem, and had it corrected. This is HARDLY voting "shenannigans."
Excerpting from the article:
Is the FBI going to jump out of my cable modem and polygraph me?
- China hasn't threatenned to "wipe Israel off the map."
- China doesn't refer to the US as the "Great Satan."
- China doesn't support Hizbullah, a terrorist group which killed 241 Americans in a bombing in Beirut.
- China didn't ship thousands upon thousands of rockets to terrorist group Hizbullah.
- China didn't storm the US embassy and hold 66 diplomats and US citizens hostage for over a year.
- China didn't use terrorists to bomb the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
- China doesn't try to actively sabotage the peace process in the Middle East.
Oh.... but Iran did.China has nuclear weapons, but not many people are worried that China would provide a terrorist group with a nuclear weapon. There is great uncertainty over what Iran would do with nuclear weapons and nuclear technology.
China is far from perfect, but the general direction they are moving is towards a more open society and a market economy.
... not only are they trying to develop nuclear weapons and "wipe Israel off the map," but they're capping bandwidth at 128kbps!
This article doesn't distinguish between grad and undergrad (and is a bit dated), but it I think it is interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/march1
It amazes me how people freak out when something falls below its estimate. If X is normally distributed the actual value of X should fall below its expectation 50% of the time. If instead of expectation we're talking about the median, this is simply by definition. This isn't Statistics 101, this is like Statistics 0. But people still freak out. Sales figures, employment numbers, wage growth...
I'm just waiting for the headline, "50 Percent of Home Sales Exceed Median Price!!"
Apple iTunes Store has been selling DRM music for several years now. And the world is still here. People love their iPods and their DRM music.
Linux Tvorvalds has said, "I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!" http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2003042401126O SKNLL>
Basically, mainstream America is fine with DRM. Implemented properly, it's a reasonable part of a solution to a the real problem of widescale IP theft.
My viewpoint may be one standard deviation off of normal Slashdot opinion, but this IS where mainstream America is.
Some moderators need to read moderation guidelines
Is it POSSIBLE to disagree with net neutrality and not get modded down?!?!?!?
My post is fair, reasonable, logical, and not hysterical. If you disagree with someone, then you post a reply; you don't mod them down or mark something as a troll when it isn't.
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
1. You can buy DRM music or not buy DRM music. You have a choice and know what you are buying.
2. Artists can distribute music themselves or through a label. They have a choice.
3. If the artists distribute it themselves, they can protect it with DRM or not protect it with DRM.
4. If the artist goes with a label, the label can choose to protect the music with drm or not protect it with drm
Nowhere is there force and nowhere is there fraud.
Furthermore, artists don't HAVE to sign with a label. Especially with the Internet, they can distribute music without one. If an artist chooses to sign with a label and the label insists on DRM, that is a choice made in a free market.
YOUR argument is that the market is not free because YOU want to buy/download non-drm music. That is not the definition of a free market. A free market is a market without an artificial price mechanism, and a market that is free from force and fraud. Here's a reasonably good wiki article on the subject.
I don't see iTunes files on the sharing networks, and FairPlay has yet to be cracked in a way that allows a person to remove protection from a file that they didn't purchase. So you might dislike DRM and FairPlay, but it is working.
Maybe this is because I don't fully understand all the FSF does, but it seems to me what really advances the cause of free software is free software that WORKS. The Linux kernel, GNU tools etc... all do WAY more to advance the idea of free software than any amount of political advocacy.
However, I agree that the article's statement is stupid. A justice can change his mind at any time prior to when the opinion is actually handed down. Also, I have no idea how religiously the above procedure is actually followed, and even if it were, it doesn't really imply that Alito cast the deciding vote, just potentially the last vote. Let me just add a disclaimer and say I am not a lawyer, have no special knowledge of the SOCUS, and that all my knowledge of the above procedure comes from a wiki article and a speech I heard on c-span given by Justice Thomas.
His signature follows bills in Kentucky and Ohio regulating funeral protests in response to the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, after they said American military deaths are God's retribution for tolerance of gay people.
Search google news or read the article here
There's a difference between speech and active disruption of lawful activity; the first is protected and the second is not. Also, the First Amendment is able to accomodate reasonable time & place restrictions. The question will be whether these restrictions go too far. In any case, these protestors are about as despicable and hate filled as they come.
(1) A private employee's statements to his employer are not protected by the First Amendment. (If you go on TV and call your boss an asshole, he can fire you and you are NOT protected by the first amendment.)
(2) The government CANNOT stop citizens from bringing up issues in the public interest.
Which brings us to this case...
The majority of the court simply said that in this case, the petitioner was acting in his official duties and falls in category (1) and not category (2). Federal whistleblower laws etc... might protect him, but he has no CONSITUTIONAL right of action under the First Amendment.
Before you go crazy and mod me down, take a moment to read the opinion. IMHO it's a quite reasonable outcome.
Or maybe any news that you read on Slashdot
Automatically detecting the word !@#$ and bleeping it out doesn't seem to be like a bad feature to me, as long as its optional. Maybe it's dumb that they're trying to patent it, but the idea isn't a bad one.
My favorite clip is the restart one
As I understand the article, EVERYONE in Vista is a normal user. Administrators have the ability though to take administrator actions on a case by case basis after supplying credentials.
To me, this sounds exactly like "sudo" under unix/linux or the "Authenticate: blahblah requires that you type your password" under Mac OS X. This model is more secure and works great, but there are some legacy transition issues.
For you unix people, the problem the article describes is, "what if you mount an old drive, the drive has restrictive permissions, and the file owner UIDs don't match the new system?" (your user account doesn't have permission to do anything on the drive)
NTFS has file permissions, but they rarely came up in practice because everyone in Windows was doing everything as the Unix equivalent of root. In Unix, the obvious fix is to do a sudo chown -R newuser /mnt/olddrive (or an ultraghetto sudo chmod -R o+rwx /mnt/olddrive) . The user/permission concept is totally foreign to your average windows user though, and hence the problem.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
This is my own personal opinion, but I think e-mail has to go in the direction of EASY TO USE crypto based authentication. This technology already exists (pgp) and is used heavilly by the computer security industry. it would make a lot of sense IMHO if EVERY e-mail from my bank was cryptographically signed using the bank's private key. Websites are encrypted and authenticated using public/private key cryptography (SSL) why can't the same thing be done for e-mail?
If Microsoft, Apple, Ebay/Paypal, Verisign, a few banks etc... got together, agreed to a SINGLE existing standard, and implemented it in a transparent and easy to use way, it might go a long way to reducing spam. Citibank could say, "all e-mail we send is cryptographically signed by Citibank. If you get an e-mail that is not signed by Citibank, then it isn't from us." Obviously there are still USARS out there who wouldn't get it, but i think this would be a big step in the right direction.
(P.S. Yes I know a variety of e-mail programs implement various crypto stuff already, but as far as I can tell, almost no one uses it or knows how to use it.)
From the article: "The predominant reason for the growth in use of stealthy code is because of sites like Rootkit.com," says Stuart McClure, senior vice president of global threats at McAfee.
Again, to me, this isn't an "open source" problem as much as an "Internet/can we stop bad guys from getting together and working on bad things" problem.
I somehow doubt rootkit.com is that dangerous (or I have no idea if it's even malicious), but I think we're likely to see this general issue come up again with websites on bomb making techniques, biological weapons etc... What should the government/society do if there is a public website that researches technology that can be used to make mass casualty weapons?