Sure, I agree Google is very useful, but I still can't figure out where the heck they are getting this kind of valuation from. [Except for the usenet archives, and only sort of there] Google doesn't own any of the information that they help people access. They are just a kind of middleman there. At least in theory, anyone else can access the same information.
Sure can't be their hardware. Supposed to be just a big pile of PCs and mass storage devices.
Actually, Google might even wind up in a serious liability situation as regards copyright questions for the cached and HTML versions that effectively bypass the real owners of the information.
Okay, by acclamation Google is the most useful of the search engines and the one most of us do use first, but $12 billion of first? I still can't figure it.
On the other hand, if I was allowed to print up some little papers with fancy scrolls and say they were worth $12 billion, I suppose I might consider doing it. Truth be told.
So far no one has mentioned Microsoft's official excuse for terminating Windows 98--the termination was included as part of their settlement of a lawsuit with Sun. This is actually an excellent example of Microsoft's diabolical cleverness. They basically lost the lawsuit, but they used the settlement to kill off 98 so they can make more money on that XP garbage. You call that "punishment"? Hard to believe that Sun's lawyers were dumb enough to fall for that:
Brer Rabbit Microsoft: "Whatever you do, Brer Fox Sun, please don't throw me in that briar patch of dropping Windows 98 support!"
Anyway, my own timing is almost impeccable, which isn't so common. I hope it's a good sign for the new year. My last pure Windows 98 box apparently croaked last night (and all the data had been pulled off a while ago). I still have a couple of cross-booters just in case.
Well, I notice that you trashed all of my post except for the deliberately provocative introduction to the conclusion. You then ignored everything I actually said in favor of your favorite straw man arguments.
Sorry, but I have worked in the computer industry most of my life, and I think the people who design CPUs are quite intelligent and good at their jobs. They design them to run properly at certain speeds, and you are a fool to think you can buy a $25 heat sink and outdo their test equipment. It is in their interest to make them run as fast as possible within certain constraints, mostly reliability and longevity, and that's what they do.
Another item from my stint at a semiconductor maker was that I got to run some of the REAL test equipment. So long ago that I've already forgotten most of the details, but I think they were Teradyne machines that cost several million dollars each. They were designed to test chips hot and cold, though I don't even remember which liquid gas we used to chill them. Probably liquid nitrogen, actually, but I'm not even sure now. I do remember a fair bit about the results, however. When you pushed the envelope and ran chips hot or cold, they started getting flaky. Sometimes I would run the same chips through several times just to see how much variation there was on each pass, and you'd see quite a bit at the extremes. However, those testers and the tests themselves (called the test vectors) were well designed to reliably measure the performance of the chips under thermal stress.
The only thing close to a real exception--which you didn't mention--was certain cases when the marketing people interfered. In some cases they actually did take faster CPUs and sell them as slower ones because there was too much demand for the lower priced CPUs and relative overproduction of the overpriced fast ones. Never as common as the overclockers like to claim, and probably never happens now. If they wind up with too many fast CPUs, they know they have to cut the prices more quickly, because the faster model is already breathing down their necks.
The everyday reality on the product line is that the CPUs are properly tested with fancy testers and proper tests. The ones that are marginal are immediately marked for use at lower speeds--but only after those smart experts have evaluated the nature of the flakiness and have GOOD reason to believe they will operate reliably at slower speeds.
Your example of the Yugo only reminds me of the story of the idiot who fastened a solid fuel booster rocket to his car. http://www.rocketcarstory.com/ is kind of a summary site for this probable urban legend.
However, I will note the moderators are obviously pro-overclocking, since they modded your fluffy post up to the max.
Forgot one important bit of evidence from personal experience... Many years ago I worked at AMD for a while. At that time, the 286 was the standard but boring moneymaker, and one of the guys I worked with was one of the main people on the 286. He was PLENTY clever and knew a LOT about making the CPU run fast. Actually, AMD's 286 clones were already running much faster than Intel had thought possible for the design.
However, he wasn't the most clever guy there. Those guys were all working on the 386 project. I think he knew most of them, though I never met them.
This overclocking stuff is REALLY stupid to the point of insanity. My conclusion is that it's a weird fantasy about the lone DIY (do-it-yourself) tinkerer.
First, consider the economic side. For all of the special efforts and costs needed to cool down, test, and monitor an overclocked CPU, you could just buy a couple more for the same speedup effect. No special anything required. At the same time, there is no real need for all those cycles--we have a glut of cycles now. If it were really cost-effective to overclock and use special cooling systems, then the very few people who actually do need lots and lots of cycles would be using overclocking for their supercomputers--and they don't. They just buy more CPUs and run them the way they were designed.
The design question leads to the second point. Building a modern CPU is not a hobby for amateurs. It is an incredibly complicated device involving the efforts of large teams of very clever people using very fancy design tools. No one person could even know all the details of a modern CPU. Far too many details. They may know some of the higher level features, or know a lot of detail about a tiny section, but no one really understands all of it. However, they are doing the best they can to insure that it will work reliably, and that includes MANY design considerations that are related to the clock speed.
So back to my main conclusion: Overclocking is a fantasy of the DIY tinkerer "beating" the experts. Actually, it's nice when it happens, but overclocking is NOT one of those cases. The overclockers fantacize about some form of "delivering more bang for the buck", but they are competing directly against professionals with the same goal. The pros win, especially in Intel's case where their development costs per CPU are almost negligible. As the joke goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." The overclockers already lost. (By the way, I think this is also an expecially American fantasy, a kind of "independence" thing, and that there are very few non-American overclockers.)
One more technical aspect as a fairly concrete example. Overclocked computers can become unreliable. Many overclockers limit their testing to "Does it boot and seem to run the OS properly?" However, the OS is not using the floating point resources the same way that true numeric applications do. The machine may seem okay as far as the OS is concerned, but actually be producing gibberish results. (There was actually a probable example of this published by seti@home. I'm tempted to diverge into the psychological relationships there...)
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
Bev Harris is one of the leading activists on this issue, and has written extensively on it in various forums. I don't think she's technically that strong, and I was quite surprised to see her name here on SlashDot, but she knows a lot on this issue. Didn't know to include a link to her well-known Web site. I think this is the correct URL: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
The poll has apparently been closed already. Not sure what to make of that, but perhaps yet another political slant. At least CNN isn't as imbalanced as Faux News.
Anyway, on the substantive issue of reliable voting, computer security is NOT a done deal. This networking stuff is great in many ways, but there's a big problem when everything is connected together. You hack into one part of the system, and you've exposed various other parts to attack. The old idea was to make a secure perimeter with firewalls and DMZs and so forth, and you could keep something safe inside, but that's called the "eggshell model" now--turns out to be relatively easy to breech and you still need strong security for EVERY machine with ANY sensitive information on it. Someone in the office took his notebook computer home for the weekend, and you can never tell what Trojan backdoor is inside your network now.
Of course, the BIG threat here is abuse of power. No one needs to be protected from weakness, but powerful people often want MORE. Not an independent event--that greed is usually part of how they got there in the first place. Consider the recent example of Arnold in California and the selection in Florida in 2000...
If our votes are to have ANY meaning, they must be protected, and it is very clear that some people will play ANY game that will win more power. Voting machines as secret slot machines? Would you trust Las Vegas THAT much?
Simple. Print the ballots. Let the voters LOOK at what the ballot says, and save it. It's convenient that the machine can also report the results quickly--but NOT convenient that any computer can be hacked.
Well, none of the comments I saw made the obvious comment, which is that people tend to believe exactly what they want to believe. The fancy name is "cognitive dissonance" and reduction is the goal. In his case, he desperately wanted to believe that his financial problems were about to be solved by this manna from heaven. Actually, the article mentions his strong religious streak, which I take as symptomatic of the gullibility the 419 scammers are looking for. And now he still can't admit he was wrong.
Actually, what it most reminds me of is many of Dubya's supporters. The bigger the shaft, the more firmly they want to support him. Just won't admit they were wrong. Sad truth is that I don't feel any particular pity for either category of sucker, but the BushCo supporters are doing more secondary harm to me and the country.
The article also mentions the kidnappings and killings. At least some of the few we know about. That reminds me of the/. article a few weeks ago about playing games with these criminals, which prompts me to repeat my warning: These 419 scammers are nasty bastards. Just because their scams are so stupidly hilarious, doesn't mean anyone should try to play any kind of game with them. The "funny picture of 419 scammer" Web sites are doing a public disservice by portraying them as stupid clowns and harmless. They are not. If they pretend to play along with any game, they are just looking for a way to nail someone. It's just more convenient for them if they can find and victimize the stupidest people available.
Naw, all they need to do is switch to pre-paid email. If they couldn't divide their costs by the imaginary zero, the whole spam business would collapse in a day. And it IS an IMAGINARY zero. Email is NOT really free, but uses resources and incurs costs. Pretending it is free is the root of the problem.
You know that they're going to have to waive every form of liability under the sun before they get anywhere near the thing. Not only them, but every relative unto the fourth cousin twice removed will have to sign, too. Probably current employeers, past employeers for the past 10 years, and any company the "astroballast" might potentially work for in the future will have to agree.
However, all things considered, it's probably safe enough. Sad to say, the Russians have the better safety record. They've already launched a tourist successfully, while America lost one of the two we launched. (Or was it three?)
Doesn't really matter how you slice it. Either SCO is staging another media event, or they are just too technically incompetent to be selling technical services. Remember, technical services or technical something-or-other is still supposed to be the real reason for the existence of the company.
However, I'll go ahead and note that I thought I might have been targeted for a DoS attack yesterday. (I have one of the best collections of political commentary online, and dittoheads are notoriously lacking in senses of humor.) Still not sure what the real cause was, but rebooting my ADSL modem took care of it. I've never seen it in such a strange state, however. The upload speed was normal, 512K, but my download is normally over a meg, and it was running at 64K.
One would certainly hope that SCO has greater technical sophistication than that...
Well, I know the Japanese are strong in robotics and Tsukuba is a very well known university, but this story sure doesn't seem to have gotten any mention in the local (to me) press. I read Japanese well enough, but nothing in the Japanese Google, and nothing showing up in the Yomiuri or Asahi newspapers. Nothing obvious in the university's Web site, either. Makes me wonder if they're just fishing for some foreign venture capital?
Apart from the hummingbirds, have you ever seen any bird that appears to flap its wings anywhere near that quickly? Do your observations of any birds seem to mesh with that claim?
No, I'm just calling attention to the risks of amateurs playing games with professionals. It is NOT a fair contest. The motivations are different, and so are the results. The pros are NOT playing fun and games. They are in it for the money, and they are going to persist and try to find out new ways to get the money. That also gives them the edge on experience--they'll keep wrinking the scams until they find new fits.
Bear in mind that the 419 scammers are NOT looking for wise people. Wise people would never fall for the original 419 scams, and they won't fall for any new variations (like the "you pretend to be a relative" scam). They are looking for certain categories of fools. They have shown quite a bit of flexibility in their methods of suckering those fools. For example, all sorts of imaginary transfer fees have appeared. In some cases, there have been reports of ransom and some mysterious disappearances. The amount of money involved is reportedly quite substantial--at one time 419 scams were reported as the third largest "industry" in Nigeria. (By the way, the scam has expanded well beyond Nigeria. Moving to nicer neighborhoods? A recent 419 arrest was in Australia.)
Some people might think it is clever and amusing to play games with dangerous people, especially if encouraged to "play the game". I say otherwise. If you play it carefully, you might well safely get some "clever" pictures the first time. Then that motivates a second attempt for greater cleverness. Goes well, let's play again. At some point you slip up, give them a hint how to find you. Or maybe you use a trick they've already seen. Or maybe they just get lucky and catch you unawares as you wait for your "victim". Your game could end quite badly.
Another closely related example right now is the spam wars. The anti-spammers are mostly just dedicated amateurs pitted against professional scammers, and the results have been rather predictable.Heard about the DDoS attacks? The amateurs have been getting burned.
You (theLOUDroom) actually started by saying your spam filter worked quite well, though you didn't relate it to the actual topic. If you are "wise" enough to ignore them before they ever reach you, that's perfectly fine with them--you aren't the kind of fool they're looking for. But if you decide to go looking for trouble... Well, now they may be able to offer you a deal. One of those deals you can't refuse.
The idea of poisoning the spam return channels is fundamentally a good one, but I think it would require serious professional commitment to make it work. Remember this is a divide-by-zero war--at least in the spammers imagination. Sending out another 10 million spams means nothing to them, since they fantacize they are dividing by zero.
For example, imagine you set up an spam auto-reply system to send poison replies to the spammers. All you have done is escalate one more level. The spammers would have at least two obvious counterattacks. They would try to identify the poisoned email addresses and actually remove them from their spam databases, and they would try to add a level of detect-real-human software for their spam replies. And remember that these guys are already experts at trying to beat those systems.
By extension, and for the same reason, playing games with the Nigerian 419 spammers is NOT a fun game, and they are NOT fooled. It is possible that they do have a front man who is stupid enough to be fooled, but in reality, their are some clever masterminds behind this stuff, they instantly detect any game playing, and if they invest 10 cents of their time in playing along with the game, they have some reason for it. You might think it is a game to try to photograph their front man doing a chicken dance, but meanwhile a whole team of them might be searching for your hiding place. You might not like the results if they catch you.
Not exactly the same kind of gangster, but similar thinking patterns. They recently pulled a reporter out of Tokyo Bay. He had been killed quite nastily after doing a story on the Chinese gangsters in Kabukicho. My recommendation is don't play with fire unless you know you don't care about getting burned.
If you ask me, these Web sites that play these games are doing a public disservice and should be shut down. Heck, the Web sites might be created by the 419 scammers themselves, to help fool more suckers into thinking it is safe to play games with them. Quite possibly their newest wrinkle is kidnapping the game players for ransom money.
This is definitely in "the cure is worse than the disease" category, but in these Bushie days the big company boys like Microsoft can do this sort of thing without any problem. Justice for sale in today's America: How much justice can you afford today?
Can't announce this detail publicly, but Microsoft is also hiring a hit man to "finish taking care of" the culprit when he finally gets out of jail. Consider it insurance--after all and as has already been suggested several times, this is enough money to motivate a bit of fraud. It's quite possible that the convicted "culprit" might be scamming them, particpating in a frame job with a friend and planning to split the loot after a short jail hitch. Those shrewd analysts at Microsoft! Just covering their bases. If he really is guilty, then he deserves to die for his unspeakable viral crimes against millions, and if he isn't guilty, then he deserves to die for scamming Microsoft. Nobody gets away with that!
As recently noted, if Microsoft had been divided into pieces, the non-OS company would probably be producing Linux versions of Microsoft Office now. At least they would have a legitimate profit-maximizing motivation to do so. That in itself would be enough to make Linux viable in almost all corporations and for most home users. Incidentally, it would break up the Windows monopoly and increase everyone's security by solving the "Windows as one big target" problem. Good for almost everyone but Bill Gates.
Forgot to note that if Microsoft had been divided into an OS company and a non-0S (applications) company, then this Linux-inclusive approach would have been natural profit-maximizing behavior for the applications company. Of course, being Micro$oftians, then would have cheated and conspired to "justify" not producing Linux versions anyway, but that's a different problem.
Belaboring the obvious, but there is ONLY one thing that would be needed to make Linux ready for the home and corporate desktop NOW. However, I bet you won't like it:
If Microsoft provided Linux-compatible versions of their application programs, almost all corporate and most home users would be able to switch to Linux immediately, and most of them would be completely satisfied.
That fundamentally means versions that would be strongly guaranteed by Microsoft to provide compatible functionality and compatible files. The customers would still have to pay for the applications, but even splitting the difference with the non-Microsoft OS and charging slightly more, the customers would still come out ahead, though Microsoft would lose the direct Windows revenue. For example, half the cost of the OS could be added to the bundle cost of the applications, with no extra cost for Linux. Microsoft would actually make more for that non-Windows copy of Office, but would get no OS revenue. And the customer would still pay less than for the Windows/Office bundle.
Of course, Microsoft would never do it voluntarily, and no one could force them to. File it under nice dreams?
Well, there's no such thing as a perfect system, but it sure makes sense to me that the voter should be allowed to read the ballot as the machine is going to count it, and that those ballots should be stored for verification, if needed. Just printing a receipt is not adequate--it doesn't really matter so much *WHO* voted. What matters is that ALL of the votes are properly counted. Remember Florida?
Some of the Diebold people arguing against printing copies are mumbling about the expense of printing, but that's a load of marlarky. They don't need to print much information, only the candidates that the voter actually selected, and the others can be ignored. In addition, the machines already have printers, because certain reports have to be produced in any case. Ink and paper are really trivial expenses--the big cost is support to make sure the machines keep running properly during the election, and that expense is going to be there no matter what.
Of course, in the case of contested elections, there are some extra costs for checking, but it's crazy to argue that any system is so perfect that there will never be any reason to check it carefully. Especially with something like elections, where the stakes are so high.
The solution is to use the enemy's strength against him. Kind of a problem here since SCO doesn't have any *REAL* strengths, but at least they claim to have strong lawyers.
Lawyers as assets [asses?] should make the RIAA leap to mind. As already noted, the RIAA is eager to sue copyright infringers, even if the IP addresses can be faked. So setting up a number of P2P servers using IP addresses that belong to SCO should be sufficient to get that side moving.
The other side is more of a challenge. SCO claims they want to defend IP, but RIAA doesn't have any and doesn't pretend to. They haven't actually created anything except money for themselves and a lot of mumbles about "defending artistes" somewhere. Somehow the DMCA has to be linked to IP so SCO will attack via that route... Judging by their existing lawsuits, it doesn't have to be a sensible or realistic link.
Actually, I looked into this matter. Kind of awkward because my source apparently doesn't want publicity, or maybe the information is doubtful. Count it as a third-hand report? Anyway, the report was that McDonald's was using SCO's software for one of their minor inventory control systems in a backroom somewhere. Just enough to allow McBride to claim them as a customer, but nothing mission critical.
Would you trust SCO software to flip a burger correctly? However, I rather hope that's where McBride is working after he's paroled. I'd be glad to stop by that McDonald's and order McBride's special virtual $3 billion burger. Not what they meant with the billions and billions...
Obvious when you think about it. First, you use the recently discussed security problems of the P2P networking software to fudge the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the illegal file sharers. Of course you use the IP addresses of SCO. This gets the RIAA to start suing SCO. At the same time, you need to fudge the hack so it looks like the real source is running under SCO's distribution of Linux. This gets SCO to sue the RIAA for the license fees and IP (Intellectual Property) violations.
Both snakes are eating each other's tails, and they implode into a black hole. Uglier than the end of the Borg!
Or maybe the real solution is better drugs. For example, they could have a drug that raises your blood pressure when you lie. One good dose and McBride's head would pop like a balloon. (And imagine using it in Washington when asking about "Governator Arnold"...)
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Sure, I agree Google is very useful, but I still can't figure out where the heck they are getting this kind of valuation from. [Except for the usenet archives, and only sort of there] Google doesn't own any of the information that they help people access. They are just a kind of middleman there. At least in theory, anyone else can access the same information.
Sure can't be their hardware. Supposed to be just a big pile of PCs and mass storage devices.
Actually, Google might even wind up in a serious liability situation as regards copyright questions for the cached and HTML versions that effectively bypass the real owners of the information.
Okay, by acclamation Google is the most useful of the search engines and the one most of us do use first, but $12 billion of first? I still can't figure it.
On the other hand, if I was allowed to print up some little papers with fancy scrolls and say they were worth $12 billion, I suppose I might consider doing it. Truth be told.
So far no one has mentioned Microsoft's official excuse for terminating Windows 98--the termination was included as part of their settlement of a lawsuit with Sun. This is actually an excellent example of Microsoft's diabolical cleverness. They basically lost the lawsuit, but they used the settlement to kill off 98 so they can make more money on that XP garbage. You call that "punishment"? Hard to believe that Sun's lawyers were dumb enough to fall for that:
Brer Rabbit Microsoft: "Whatever you do, Brer Fox Sun, please don't throw me in that briar patch of dropping Windows 98 support!"
Anyway, my own timing is almost impeccable, which isn't so common. I hope it's a good sign for the new year. My last pure Windows 98 box apparently croaked last night (and all the data had been pulled off a while ago). I still have a couple of cross-booters just in case.
Well, I notice that you trashed all of my post except for the deliberately provocative introduction to the conclusion. You then ignored everything I actually said in favor of your favorite straw man arguments.
Sorry, but I have worked in the computer industry most of my life, and I think the people who design CPUs are quite intelligent and good at their jobs. They design them to run properly at certain speeds, and you are a fool to think you can buy a $25 heat sink and outdo their test equipment. It is in their interest to make them run as fast as possible within certain constraints, mostly reliability and longevity, and that's what they do.
Another item from my stint at a semiconductor maker was that I got to run some of the REAL test equipment. So long ago that I've already forgotten most of the details, but I think they were Teradyne machines that cost several million dollars each. They were designed to test chips hot and cold, though I don't even remember which liquid gas we used to chill them. Probably liquid nitrogen, actually, but I'm not even sure now. I do remember a fair bit about the results, however. When you pushed the envelope and ran chips hot or cold, they started getting flaky. Sometimes I would run the same chips through several times just to see how much variation there was on each pass, and you'd see quite a bit at the extremes. However, those testers and the tests themselves (called the test vectors) were well designed to reliably measure the performance of the chips under thermal stress.
The only thing close to a real exception--which you didn't mention--was certain cases when the marketing people interfered. In some cases they actually did take faster CPUs and sell them as slower ones because there was too much demand for the lower priced CPUs and relative overproduction of the overpriced fast ones. Never as common as the overclockers like to claim, and probably never happens now. If they wind up with too many fast CPUs, they know they have to cut the prices more quickly, because the faster model is already breathing down their necks.
The everyday reality on the product line is that the CPUs are properly tested with fancy testers and proper tests. The ones that are marginal are immediately marked for use at lower speeds--but only after those smart experts have evaluated the nature of the flakiness and have GOOD reason to believe they will operate reliably at slower speeds.
Your example of the Yugo only reminds me of the story of the idiot who fastened a solid fuel booster rocket to his car. http://www.rocketcarstory.com/ is kind of a summary site for this probable urban legend.
However, I will note the moderators are obviously pro-overclocking, since they modded your fluffy post up to the max.
Forgot one important bit of evidence from personal experience... Many years ago I worked at AMD for a while. At that time, the 286 was the standard but boring moneymaker, and one of the guys I worked with was one of the main people on the 286. He was PLENTY clever and knew a LOT about making the CPU run fast. Actually, AMD's 286 clones were already running much faster than Intel had thought possible for the design.
However, he wasn't the most clever guy there. Those guys were all working on the 386 project. I think he knew most of them, though I never met them.
This overclocking stuff is REALLY stupid to the point of insanity. My conclusion is that it's a weird fantasy about the lone DIY (do-it-yourself) tinkerer.
First, consider the economic side. For all of the special efforts and costs needed to cool down, test, and monitor an overclocked CPU, you could just buy a couple more for the same speedup effect. No special anything required. At the same time, there is no real need for all those cycles--we have a glut of cycles now. If it were really cost-effective to overclock and use special cooling systems, then the very few people who actually do need lots and lots of cycles would be using overclocking for their supercomputers--and they don't. They just buy more CPUs and run them the way they were designed.
The design question leads to the second point. Building a modern CPU is not a hobby for amateurs. It is an incredibly complicated device involving the efforts of large teams of very clever people using very fancy design tools. No one person could even know all the details of a modern CPU. Far too many details. They may know some of the higher level features, or know a lot of detail about a tiny section, but no one really understands all of it. However, they are doing the best they can to insure that it will work reliably, and that includes MANY design considerations that are related to the clock speed.
So back to my main conclusion: Overclocking is a fantasy of the DIY tinkerer "beating" the experts. Actually, it's nice when it happens, but overclocking is NOT one of those cases. The overclockers fantacize about some form of "delivering more bang for the buck", but they are competing directly against professionals with the same goal. The pros win, especially in Intel's case where their development costs per CPU are almost negligible. As the joke goes, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." The overclockers already lost. (By the way, I think this is also an expecially American fantasy, a kind of "independence" thing, and that there are very few non-American overclockers.)
One more technical aspect as a fairly concrete example. Overclocked computers can become unreliable. Many overclockers limit their testing to "Does it boot and seem to run the OS properly?" However, the OS is not using the floating point resources the same way that true numeric applications do. The machine may seem okay as far as the OS is concerned, but actually be producing gibberish results. (There was actually a probable example of this published by seti@home. I'm tempted to diverge into the psychological relationships there...)
Ergo, I've never heard of Intel hiring someone for their expertise in overclocking, and I don't expect to.
Bev Harris is one of the leading activists on this issue, and has written extensively on it in various forums. I don't think she's technically that strong, and I was quite surprised to see her name here on SlashDot, but she knows a lot on this issue. Didn't know to include a link to her well-known Web site. I think this is the correct URL: http://www.blackboxvoting.com/
Someone should mod her comments up even higher.
The poll has apparently been closed already. Not sure what to make of that, but perhaps yet another political slant. At least CNN isn't as imbalanced as Faux News.
Anyway, on the substantive issue of reliable voting, computer security is NOT a done deal. This networking stuff is great in many ways, but there's a big problem when everything is connected together. You hack into one part of the system, and you've exposed various other parts to attack. The old idea was to make a secure perimeter with firewalls and DMZs and so forth, and you could keep something safe inside, but that's called the "eggshell model" now--turns out to be relatively easy to breech and you still need strong security for EVERY machine with ANY sensitive information on it. Someone in the office took his notebook computer home for the weekend, and you can never tell what Trojan backdoor is inside your network now.
Of course, the BIG threat here is abuse of power. No one needs to be protected from weakness, but powerful people often want MORE. Not an independent event--that greed is usually part of how they got there in the first place. Consider the recent example of Arnold in California and the selection in Florida in 2000...
If our votes are to have ANY meaning, they must be protected, and it is very clear that some people will play ANY game that will win more power. Voting machines as secret slot machines? Would you trust Las Vegas THAT much?
Simple. Print the ballots. Let the voters LOOK at what the ballot says, and save it. It's convenient that the machine can also report the results quickly--but NOT convenient that any computer can be hacked.
Well, none of the comments I saw made the obvious comment, which is that people tend to believe exactly what they want to believe. The fancy name is "cognitive dissonance" and reduction is the goal. In his case, he desperately wanted to believe that his financial problems were about to be solved by this manna from heaven. Actually, the article mentions his strong religious streak, which I take as symptomatic of the gullibility the 419 scammers are looking for. And now he still can't admit he was wrong.
/. article a few weeks ago about playing games with these criminals, which prompts me to repeat my warning: These 419 scammers are nasty bastards. Just because their scams are so stupidly hilarious, doesn't mean anyone should try to play any kind of game with them. The "funny picture of 419 scammer" Web sites are doing a public disservice by portraying them as stupid clowns and harmless. They are not. If they pretend to play along with any game, they are just looking for a way to nail someone. It's just more convenient for them if they can find and victimize the stupidest people available.
Actually, what it most reminds me of is many of Dubya's supporters. The bigger the shaft, the more firmly they want to support him. Just won't admit they were wrong. Sad truth is that I don't feel any particular pity for either category of sucker, but the BushCo supporters are doing more secondary harm to me and the country.
The article also mentions the kidnappings and killings. At least some of the few we know about. That reminds me of the
Naw, all they need to do is switch to pre-paid email. If they couldn't divide their costs by the imaginary zero, the whole spam business would collapse in a day. And it IS an IMAGINARY zero. Email is NOT really free, but uses resources and incurs costs. Pretending it is free is the root of the problem.
The White House no longer accepts email. As Dubya said so famously: "Who cares what you think?"
You know that they're going to have to waive every form of liability under the sun before they get anywhere near the thing. Not only them, but every relative unto the fourth cousin twice removed will have to sign, too. Probably current employeers, past employeers for the past 10 years, and any company the "astroballast" might potentially work for in the future will have to agree.
However, all things considered, it's probably safe enough. Sad to say, the Russians have the better safety record. They've already launched a tourist successfully, while America lost one of the two we launched. (Or was it three?)
Doesn't really matter how you slice it. Either SCO is staging another media event, or they are just too technically incompetent to be selling technical services. Remember, technical services or technical something-or-other is still supposed to be the real reason for the existence of the company.
However, I'll go ahead and note that I thought I might have been targeted for a DoS attack yesterday. (I have one of the best collections of political commentary online, and dittoheads are notoriously lacking in senses of humor.) Still not sure what the real cause was, but rebooting my ADSL modem took care of it. I've never seen it in such a strange state, however. The upload speed was normal, 512K, but my download is normally over a meg, and it was running at 64K.
One would certainly hope that SCO has greater technical sophistication than that...
Well, I know the Japanese are strong in robotics and Tsukuba is a very well known university, but this story sure doesn't seem to have gotten any mention in the local (to me) press. I read Japanese well enough, but nothing in the Japanese Google, and nothing showing up in the Yomiuri or Asahi newspapers. Nothing obvious in the university's Web site, either. Makes me wonder if they're just fishing for some foreign venture capital?
So a few thousand /.ers should apply for the position? How long would it take SCO to figure out their leg was being pulled?
Okay, my mistake. I shouldn't have posted before reading the rest of the article. He backs off that claim, but now the whole thing is quite doubtful.
Plus, he completely punted on the African Swallow part of it.
Apart from the hummingbirds, have you ever seen any bird that appears to flap its wings anywhere near that quickly? Do your observations of any birds seem to mesh with that claim?
No, I'm just calling attention to the risks of amateurs playing games with professionals. It is NOT a fair contest. The motivations are different, and so are the results. The pros are NOT playing fun and games. They are in it for the money, and they are going to persist and try to find out new ways to get the money. That also gives them the edge on experience--they'll keep wrinking the scams until they find new fits.
Bear in mind that the 419 scammers are NOT looking for wise people. Wise people would never fall for the original 419 scams, and they won't fall for any new variations (like the "you pretend to be a relative" scam). They are looking for certain categories of fools. They have shown quite a bit of flexibility in their methods of suckering those fools. For example, all sorts of imaginary transfer fees have appeared. In some cases, there have been reports of ransom and some mysterious disappearances. The amount of money involved is reportedly quite substantial--at one time 419 scams were reported as the third largest "industry" in Nigeria. (By the way, the scam has expanded well beyond Nigeria. Moving to nicer neighborhoods? A recent 419 arrest was in Australia.)
Some people might think it is clever and amusing to play games with dangerous people, especially if encouraged to "play the game". I say otherwise. If you play it carefully, you might well safely get some "clever" pictures the first time. Then that motivates a second attempt for greater cleverness. Goes well, let's play again. At some point you slip up, give them a hint how to find you. Or maybe you use a trick they've already seen. Or maybe they just get lucky and catch you unawares as you wait for your "victim". Your game could end quite badly.
Another closely related example right now is the spam wars. The anti-spammers are mostly just dedicated amateurs pitted against professional scammers, and the results have been rather predictable.Heard about the DDoS attacks? The amateurs have been getting burned.
You (theLOUDroom) actually started by saying your spam filter worked quite well, though you didn't relate it to the actual topic. If you are "wise" enough to ignore them before they ever reach you, that's perfectly fine with them--you aren't the kind of fool they're looking for. But if you decide to go looking for trouble... Well, now they may be able to offer you a deal. One of those deals you can't refuse.
The idea of poisoning the spam return channels is fundamentally a good one, but I think it would require serious professional commitment to make it work. Remember this is a divide-by-zero war--at least in the spammers imagination. Sending out another 10 million spams means nothing to them, since they fantacize they are dividing by zero.
For example, imagine you set up an spam auto-reply system to send poison replies to the spammers. All you have done is escalate one more level. The spammers would have at least two obvious counterattacks. They would try to identify the poisoned email addresses and actually remove them from their spam databases, and they would try to add a level of detect-real-human software for their spam replies. And remember that these guys are already experts at trying to beat those systems.
By extension, and for the same reason, playing games with the Nigerian 419 spammers is NOT a fun game, and they are NOT fooled. It is possible that they do have a front man who is stupid enough to be fooled, but in reality, their are some clever masterminds behind this stuff, they instantly detect any game playing, and if they invest 10 cents of their time in playing along with the game, they have some reason for it. You might think it is a game to try to photograph their front man doing a chicken dance, but meanwhile a whole team of them might be searching for your hiding place. You might not like the results if they catch you.
Not exactly the same kind of gangster, but similar thinking patterns. They recently pulled a reporter out of Tokyo Bay. He had been killed quite nastily after doing a story on the Chinese gangsters in Kabukicho. My recommendation is don't play with fire unless you know you don't care about getting burned.
If you ask me, these Web sites that play these games are doing a public disservice and should be shut down. Heck, the Web sites might be created by the 419 scammers themselves, to help fool more suckers into thinking it is safe to play games with them. Quite possibly their newest wrinkle is kidnapping the game players for ransom money.
This is definitely in "the cure is worse than the disease" category, but in these Bushie days the big company boys like Microsoft can do this sort of thing without any problem. Justice for sale in today's America: How much justice can you afford today?
Can't announce this detail publicly, but Microsoft is also hiring a hit man to "finish taking care of" the culprit when he finally gets out of jail. Consider it insurance--after all and as has already been suggested several times, this is enough money to motivate a bit of fraud. It's quite possible that the convicted "culprit" might be scamming them, particpating in a frame job with a friend and planning to split the loot after a short jail hitch. Those shrewd analysts at Microsoft! Just covering their bases. If he really is guilty, then he deserves to die for his unspeakable viral crimes against millions, and if he isn't guilty, then he deserves to die for scamming Microsoft. Nobody gets away with that!
As recently noted, if Microsoft had been divided into pieces, the non-OS company would probably be producing Linux versions of Microsoft Office now. At least they would have a legitimate profit-maximizing motivation to do so. That in itself would be enough to make Linux viable in almost all corporations and for most home users. Incidentally, it would break up the Windows monopoly and increase everyone's security by solving the "Windows as one big target" problem. Good for almost everyone but Bill Gates.
Remember: How much justice can you affort today?
Forgot to note that if Microsoft had been divided into an OS company and a non-0S (applications) company, then this Linux-inclusive approach would have been natural profit-maximizing behavior for the applications company. Of course, being Micro$oftians, then would have cheated and conspired to "justify" not producing Linux versions anyway, but that's a different problem.
Belaboring the obvious, but there is ONLY one thing that would be needed to make Linux ready for the home and corporate desktop NOW. However, I bet you won't like it:
If Microsoft provided Linux-compatible versions of their application programs, almost all corporate and most home users would be able to switch to Linux immediately, and most of them would be completely satisfied.
That fundamentally means versions that would be strongly guaranteed by Microsoft to provide compatible functionality and compatible files. The customers would still have to pay for the applications, but even splitting the difference with the non-Microsoft OS and charging slightly more, the customers would still come out ahead, though Microsoft would lose the direct Windows revenue. For example, half the cost of the OS could be added to the bundle cost of the applications, with no extra cost for Linux. Microsoft would actually make more for that non-Windows copy of Office, but would get no OS revenue. And the customer would still pay less than for the Windows/Office bundle.
Of course, Microsoft would never do it voluntarily, and no one could force them to. File it under nice dreams?
Well, there's no such thing as a perfect system, but it sure makes sense to me that the voter should be allowed to read the ballot as the machine is going to count it, and that those ballots should be stored for verification, if needed. Just printing a receipt is not adequate--it doesn't really matter so much *WHO* voted. What matters is that ALL of the votes are properly counted. Remember Florida?
Some of the Diebold people arguing against printing copies are mumbling about the expense of printing, but that's a load of marlarky. They don't need to print much information, only the candidates that the voter actually selected, and the others can be ignored. In addition, the machines already have printers, because certain reports have to be produced in any case. Ink and paper are really trivial expenses--the big cost is support to make sure the machines keep running properly during the election, and that expense is going to be there no matter what.
Of course, in the case of contested elections, there are some extra costs for checking, but it's crazy to argue that any system is so perfect that there will never be any reason to check it carefully. Especially with something like elections, where the stakes are so high.
The solution is to use the enemy's strength against him. Kind of a problem here since SCO doesn't have any *REAL* strengths, but at least they claim to have strong lawyers.
Lawyers as assets [asses?] should make the RIAA leap to mind. As already noted, the RIAA is eager to sue copyright infringers, even if the IP addresses can be faked. So setting up a number of P2P servers using IP addresses that belong to SCO should be sufficient to get that side moving.
The other side is more of a challenge. SCO claims they want to defend IP, but RIAA doesn't have any and doesn't pretend to. They haven't actually created anything except money for themselves and a lot of mumbles about "defending artistes" somewhere. Somehow the DMCA has to be linked to IP so SCO will attack via that route... Judging by their existing lawsuits, it doesn't have to be a sensible or realistic link.
Actually, I looked into this matter. Kind of awkward because my source apparently doesn't want publicity, or maybe the information is doubtful. Count it as a third-hand report? Anyway, the report was that McDonald's was using SCO's software for one of their minor inventory control systems in a backroom somewhere. Just enough to allow McBride to claim them as a customer, but nothing mission critical.
Would you trust SCO software to flip a burger correctly? However, I rather hope that's where McBride is working after he's paroled. I'd be glad to stop by that McDonald's and order McBride's special virtual $3 billion burger. Not what they meant with the billions and billions...
Obvious when you think about it. First, you use the recently discussed security problems of the P2P networking software to fudge the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of the illegal file sharers. Of course you use the IP addresses of SCO. This gets the RIAA to start suing SCO. At the same time, you need to fudge the hack so it looks like the real source is running under SCO's distribution of Linux. This gets SCO to sue the RIAA for the license fees and IP (Intellectual Property) violations.
Both snakes are eating each other's tails, and they implode into a black hole. Uglier than the end of the Borg!
Or maybe the real solution is better drugs. For example, they could have a drug that raises your blood pressure when you lie. One good dose and McBride's head would pop like a balloon. (And imagine using it in Washington when asking about "Governator Arnold"...)