Re:Modest proposal: Run it on Diebold's hardware?
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Open Voting at OSCON
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· Score: 1
Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased?
We could, but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers. Running the code for paper ballots and then not printing the ballots would leave us up the creek, and a few cards short of a deck besides. *%-{]}}}
You can find the spammers, because there has to be a money trail all the way from you to them. If they don't provide a way for you to pay, it doesn't work.
Following that money trail can cost money. What we need is a law that gives the recipients of spam the right to sue the sender for enough money to cover that cost. For junk fax, the penalty is US$500 per message, with a multiplier for willful violations. California passed such a law, which "forced" Congress to pass the Can Spam Act--pardon me, the "Yes, You Can Spam" Act, to pre-empt it.
A good law won't make all spam go away, just as junk fax continues today at a very low level, to those who don't know their legal rights or are too lazy to assert them. But that's not you, right?
It doesn't suprise me that somebody who is aware of the potential of the Simputer (Linux handheld for poor people) would encourage development for it.
GNU-India is working on Free Unicode fonts for all writing systems of India, something you don't see Microsoft, Apple, or the commercial Unix vendors doing. Simputers are in field trials in agriculture, banking, the Post Office, health, and education in India. There are more than 50 for-profit companies developing for the Simputer, too.
You say "the allocation of characters is handled by a single, and not in any way open, organization," but this is not in any way the case. Apart from the fact that Unicode, Inc. and ISO have published their plans for encoding every known writing system, and invited anyone to propose any needed characters, they have set aside a Private Use Area of more than 130,000 code points where anyone at all can encode their own characters. No character encoding in history has so liberally supported so many user communities.
The PUA is presently used for such things as corporate logos, which are not accepted into Unicode, and for many writing systems which have not been worked out in sufficient detail for formal encoding. This includes real, historical languages, and also Tolkien's Cirth and Tengwar. I hear Klingon is out there too.
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Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased? We could, but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers. Running the code for paper ballots and then not printing the ballots would leave us up the creek, and a few cards short of a deck besides. *%-{]}}}
You can find the spammers, because there has to be a money trail all the way from you to them. If they don't provide a way for you to pay, it doesn't work.
Following that money trail can cost money. What we need is a law that gives the recipients of spam the right to sue the sender for enough money to cover that cost. For junk fax, the penalty is US$500 per message, with a multiplier for willful violations. California passed such a law, which "forced" Congress to pass the Can Spam Act--pardon me, the "Yes, You Can Spam" Act, to pre-empt it.
A good law won't make all spam go away, just as junk fax continues today at a very low level, to those who don't know their legal rights or are too lazy to assert them. But that's not you, right?
Nuke 'em with Open Source. It's the only way.
It doesn't suprise me that somebody who is aware of the potential of the Simputer (Linux handheld for poor people) would encourage development for it.
GNU-India is working on Free Unicode fonts for all writing systems of India, something you don't see Microsoft, Apple, or the commercial Unix vendors doing. Simputers are in field trials in agriculture, banking, the Post Office, health, and education in India. There are more than 50 for-profit companies developing for the Simputer, too.
The PUA is presently used for such things as corporate logos, which are not accepted into Unicode, and for many writing systems which have not been worked out in sufficient detail for formal encoding. This includes real, historical languages, and also Tolkien's Cirth and Tengwar. I hear Klingon is out there too.
So what do you claim that you can't do?