"This only happend because the Democrats won the house."
Actually, I'd guess it happened because the new Senate may end up with a clear Democratic majority.
By letting Rumsfeld go now and appointing a successor immediately, Bush has a very good chance to get his appointee confirmed in the current, Republican-controlled Senate. (The Democrats could stall the confirmation until the end of the current session, but they wouldn't gain from it. It would be bad press, and Bush would just make a recess appointment between sessions anyway.)
Ideally, you should get informed. This is your country. You are part owner. Assume your responsibilities and get informed.
But of course, that may seem a dauntingly large step. If it's too intimidating, then start small. Almost every election has several races and issues to be voted upon. So pick one. Get informed about that issue. Read the information provided by the candidtaes, or the initiative text or whatever. Ask your friends. Read the papers. Check out local blogs. Think about it. Form your own opinion, then vote accordingly.
Leave the rest of the ballot blank if you must. There's no penalty for undervoting, so just vote on what you know. It's not that hard.
Try again next election... but pick more than one thing to vote on.
Vote by mail does have a really big impact on turnout levels. It also speeds up final counts quite a bit, because the county elections offices can start counting a huge pile of early returns first thing in the morning instead of waiting for precinct deliveries. (In my county, about 44% of ballots were at the elections office by Monday at noon.)
VBM comes with its own problems, of course. It makes easier various sorts of retail fraud such as false registrations, voter intimidation, and bribery. Larger scale fraud includes collecting ballot envelopes from voters for delivery, and throwing out ones belonging to voters with the "wrong" registration. Plus if you want to nitpick, the price of postage could be considered a poll tax.
There's also a vulnerability at the elections office itself. The optical scan machines could be tampered with, although that would take an insider.
Another side effect, for good or ill, is that it makes last minute ad blitzes less effective. Parties' advertising dollars must be spent earlier and over a longer period. Last minute supression tactics, such as the RoboCalls in the news, wouldn't have much impact here.
On the whole, I like VBM. Just remember that it's no magic bullet. It trades one set of problems for another (hopefully lesser) set of problems.
"Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers."
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
No, what election officials evidently want is speed and ease-of-use. Hopefully they also want accuracy and precision, but the evidence suggests that many don't value those as highly.
What election-system vendors want is money. They make promises regarding speed, ease-of-use, accuracy, and precision to get that money. They may have excellent intentions, too, but its the profit that motivates them.
"Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
That's always been a problem. It's just that now, the inner workings of many election systems are no longer observable. That makes it very difficult to verify the integrity of the election process.
If the assertions in the article are true, then it's not the world that's unready for Linux. It's Linux that's unready for the world. The goal needs to be to adapt Linux to people, not to adapt people to Linux.
The backwards headline itself is an indciation of how poorly the problem is understood in some circles.
The article makes useful distinctions between retail and wholesale fraud, and between detectable and undetectable fraud. A requirement to present identification at the polling place would make one kind of retail fraud more detectable, and maybe preventable. That's a good thing, to be sure.
But it's really small potatoes compared to the undetectable wholesale fraud that the article outlines. If undetectable wholesale fraud is this easy and there's no audit trail behind the votes, it really doesn't matter if the people voting presented ID or not.
Excellent idea. For Step 1, I suggest looking at this comment.
Of course, it may be that the AP already supports QoS and it just needs to be configured. If not, running OpenBSD's PF as a bridge on a Soekris 4801 (or equivalent low-power box) with compact flash for mass storage would allow him (with the owner's permission) to place it upstream of the access point and forget about it. The whole thing is US $300-$400 plus time.
(It could be done even cheaper on a salvaged old computer, of course, but the reliability would be lower and power consumption much higher.)
"The incident raises a number of interesting questions and concerns regarding just where our rights end."
There is no interesting question about where our rights end. Our rights themselves continue to be what they were. The interesting question is where our rights begin to be oppressed.
If you fail to grasp this important distinction, you are granting others power over your inalienable rights.
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
But snooping on people not directly involved with HP? No way. I don't care who they were, journalists or customers... that's beyond the pale. That's the sort of thing we [used to] make our government get a warrant for. If HP wanted that information, they should have gone to court to get it.
I might have picked up cable for IP service, but Comcast would only sell IP service as an extra along with TV service, so I got DSL instead. My broadcast reception totally sucks, and I might have gotten cable to remedy that... but my local TV news is a travesty and I can't bear to watch it anyway. I might have picked up cable to get just the SciFi channel and a maybe a couple others, but the cable company didn't want to sell me only the channels I'm interested in and the packages were too expensive.
The only shows I want to watch are available on iTunes or - eventually - on DVD. I don't need my channels a la carte any more, because now I can get my shows a la carte. Each full season of the shows I want to watch costs me the about the same, if not less than, a month's cable bill.
So screw you, Comcast. You missed your chance. If you'd given me channels a la carte a few years ago, I might have bought and been a loyal customer. Now, it's too late. I doubt I'll ever get cable.
Well, technically he was on the right track since the Templars are just one expression of the larger Masonic movement. (Of which Jeff Bezos is, of course, a high-ranking member.)
Well... if they're really scanning all calls passing through some point, then they have actually listened somewhat to every conversation. Which means that they would have to get a warrant covering (at least) each distinct conversation that they monitored. Which, if the reports are to be believed, could amount to every phone call into, out of, or within the US.
That's probably an impractical amount of warrants to get even later, so I guess they have a point.
(Personally, though, I think the search is just overbroad.)
I haven't looked at a lot of the photos from this conflict (I have less depressing things to do with my time) but from what I have seen, news photography is generally not to be trusted. I have seen examples of images manipulated by both sides. Not necessarily digitally, but often in framing and captioning. Both sides are spinning the media hard, and both sides are pretty good at it.
Be skeptical. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but all thousand could be lies.
"I wonder how long it will be before the record labels successfully lobby Congress for legislation that effectively prohibits artists from doing an end run around the labels."
I think they're unlikely to succeed at that, and even that they are unlikely to try. Since the labels aren't actually the content creators, they'll have a heck of a time working around the constitution's copyright clause to do such a thing.
Plus, they still have revenue and will for a long time to come. They're not about to go bankrupt, so they have lots of time to live in denial. If every artist dropped their label today (or as soon as their contracts run out, anyway) the labels still control huge portions of the back catalogs of most big artists. That gives them enormous clout. While I think that clout has peaked and will diminish from here on out, it'll still be a long slow fall.
"The irony is that it was the media companies who gave Apple this power, by mandating DRM."
Exactly. Apple is neither demon nor saint here... they're just riding the wave of the moment.
Their success comes because they put together a vertical integration: a playback device, a content distribution platform, a music store, and most critically an agreement with enough major record labels to support the rest. (It's probable that other tech powers could have managed this, but Apple is the one which did it.)
DRM doesn't do Apple any good in itself. (Or didn't at the iPod/iTunes launch, anyway.) I'm sure DRM was a big headache to design and implement, and they could just as well have done without it. But a plausible DRM implementation was the only way for Apple to get the record companies to play ball, so (in order to reap the profits from the other stages) Apple had to include it.
Now, the iPod/iTunes/iTMS/FairPlay stack is a raging success. It's so successful that it has given Apple the whip hand over the record companies. (Which is more than a bit amusing.)
If at some point the record companies want to break Apple's grip on power, they can do so easily... just drop their DRM demand, thereby cutting their own throats. Or they can stop selling through iTMS, and watch that revenue stream dry up, their artists leave, and listen to their customers howl. Or they can go to an Apple competitor and negotiate a better DRM deal... which consumers will ignore, because a better deal for the record companies is necessarily a worse deal for the end user.
So I think the record industry is done as a power broker. This is undoubtedly bad for them and for Apple's competitors, and it's less than ideal for consumers, but it's too soon to say that it's really bad overall. With the record companies' power broken, more artists are going to retain the rights to their works, and publish via TuneCore.com or iTMS or whatever. In time, that's going to change the face of the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd make one heck of an updraft.
"This only happend because the Democrats won the house."
Actually, I'd guess it happened because the new Senate may end up with a clear Democratic majority.
By letting Rumsfeld go now and appointing a successor immediately, Bush has a very good chance to get his appointee confirmed in the current, Republican-controlled Senate. (The Democrats could stall the confirmation until the end of the current session, but they wouldn't gain from it. It would be bad press, and Bush would just make a recess appointment between sessions anyway.)
Yep and Nope, respectively.
Ideally, you should get informed. This is your country. You are part owner. Assume your responsibilities and get informed.
But of course, that may seem a dauntingly large step. If it's too intimidating, then start small. Almost every election has several races and issues to be voted upon. So pick one. Get informed about that issue. Read the information provided by the candidtaes, or the initiative text or whatever. Ask your friends. Read the papers. Check out local blogs. Think about it. Form your own opinion, then vote accordingly.
Leave the rest of the ballot blank if you must. There's no penalty for undervoting, so just vote on what you know. It's not that hard.
Try again next election... but pick more than one thing to vote on.
Don't wait, just get started.
As it happens, I live in Oregon.
Vote by mail does have a really big impact on turnout levels. It also speeds up final counts quite a bit, because the county elections offices can start counting a huge pile of early returns first thing in the morning instead of waiting for precinct deliveries. (In my county, about 44% of ballots were at the elections office by Monday at noon.)
VBM comes with its own problems, of course. It makes easier various sorts of retail fraud such as false registrations, voter intimidation, and bribery. Larger scale fraud includes collecting ballot envelopes from voters for delivery, and throwing out ones belonging to voters with the "wrong" registration. Plus if you want to nitpick, the price of postage could be considered a poll tax.
There's also a vulnerability at the elections office itself. The optical scan machines could be tampered with, although that would take an insider.
Another side effect, for good or ill, is that it makes last minute ad blitzes less effective. Parties' advertising dollars must be spent earlier and over a longer period. Last minute supression tactics, such as the RoboCalls in the news, wouldn't have much impact here.
On the whole, I like VBM. Just remember that it's no magic bullet. It trades one set of problems for another (hopefully lesser) set of problems.
Ars Technica detailed a plausible transmission path for a viral hack on a single machine to spread to the precinct, county, or even state level.
"Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers."
Absolutely untrue. What could be more hacker-proof than a paper ballot system?
No, what election officials evidently want is speed and ease-of-use. Hopefully they also want accuracy and precision, but the evidence suggests that many don't value those as highly.
What election-system vendors want is money. They make promises regarding speed, ease-of-use, accuracy, and precision to get that money. They may have excellent intentions, too, but its the profit that motivates them.
"Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."
That's always been a problem. It's just that now, the inner workings of many election systems are no longer observable. That makes it very difficult to verify the integrity of the election process.
If the assertions in the article are true, then it's not the world that's unready for Linux. It's Linux that's unready for the world. The goal needs to be to adapt Linux to people, not to adapt people to Linux.
The backwards headline itself is an indciation of how poorly the problem is understood in some circles.
The article makes useful distinctions between retail and wholesale fraud, and between detectable and undetectable fraud. A requirement to present identification at the polling place would make one kind of retail fraud more detectable, and maybe preventable. That's a good thing, to be sure.
But it's really small potatoes compared to the undetectable wholesale fraud that the article outlines. If undetectable wholesale fraud is this easy and there's no audit trail behind the votes, it really doesn't matter if the people voting presented ID or not.
I was going to say What a load of horseshit!, but I guess your title is close enough.
Carry on.
Excellent idea. For Step 1, I suggest looking at this comment.
Of course, it may be that the AP already supports QoS and it just needs to be configured. If not, running OpenBSD's PF as a bridge on a Soekris 4801 (or equivalent low-power box) with compact flash for mass storage would allow him (with the owner's permission) to place it upstream of the access point and forget about it. The whole thing is US $300-$400 plus time.
(It could be done even cheaper on a salvaged old computer, of course, but the reliability would be lower and power consumption much higher.)
"We say they are something that everyone has, but it's like money - only worth something if people believe that it is worth something."
If true, it's all the more reason to encourage people to believe in them.
"The incident raises a number of interesting questions and concerns regarding just where our rights end."
There is no interesting question about where our rights end. Our rights themselves continue to be what they were. The interesting question is where our rights begin to be oppressed.
If you fail to grasp this important distinction, you are granting others power over your inalienable rights.
"Behold the future."
Ah. A perfect upgrade for the Big Dig!
Note that I said "concievable" instead of "likely".
:-)
A snowball's chance in hell is still theoretically nonzero.
I'll allow that it's conceivable that HP might have had some contractual or moral right to snoop on their board members.
But snooping on people not directly involved with HP? No way. I don't care who they were, journalists or customers... that's beyond the pale. That's the sort of thing we [used to] make our government get a warrant for. If HP wanted that information, they should have gone to court to get it.
I might have picked up cable for IP service, but Comcast would only sell IP service as an extra along with TV service, so I got DSL instead. My broadcast reception totally sucks, and I might have gotten cable to remedy that... but my local TV news is a travesty and I can't bear to watch it anyway. I might have picked up cable to get just the SciFi channel and a maybe a couple others, but the cable company didn't want to sell me only the channels I'm interested in and the packages were too expensive.
The only shows I want to watch are available on iTunes or - eventually - on DVD. I don't need my channels a la carte any more, because now I can get my shows a la carte. Each full season of the shows I want to watch costs me the about the same, if not less than, a month's cable bill.
So screw you, Comcast. You missed your chance. If you'd given me channels a la carte a few years ago, I might have bought and been a loyal customer. Now, it's too late. I doubt I'll ever get cable.
Well, technically he was on the right track since the Templars are just one expression of the larger Masonic movement. (Of which Jeff Bezos is, of course, a high-ranking member.)
" [...] if the MPAA and RIAA got their filthy hands on it they could track p2p downloads."
That's what it's ultimately for, of course. (Go ahead, call me a cynic.)
But I gotta admit, it's dead clever of them to come up with a tracking system that actually adds value.
Well... if they're really scanning all calls passing through some point, then they have actually listened somewhat to every conversation. Which means that they would have to get a warrant covering (at least) each distinct conversation that they monitored. Which, if the reports are to be believed, could amount to every phone call into, out of, or within the US.
That's probably an impractical amount of warrants to get even later, so I guess they have a point.
(Personally, though, I think the search is just overbroad.)
I haven't looked at a lot of the photos from this conflict (I have less depressing things to do with my time) but from what I have seen, news photography is generally not to be trusted. I have seen examples of images manipulated by both sides. Not necessarily digitally, but often in framing and captioning. Both sides are spinning the media hard, and both sides are pretty good at it.
Be skeptical. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but all thousand could be lies.
Yeah, I guess I'm just an old-skool conservative. :-)
"I wonder how long it will be before the record labels successfully lobby Congress for legislation that effectively prohibits artists from doing an end run around the labels."
I think they're unlikely to succeed at that, and even that they are unlikely to try. Since the labels aren't actually the content creators, they'll have a heck of a time working around the constitution's copyright clause to do such a thing.
Plus, they still have revenue and will for a long time to come. They're not about to go bankrupt, so they have lots of time to live in denial. If every artist dropped their label today (or as soon as their contracts run out, anyway) the labels still control huge portions of the back catalogs of most big artists. That gives them enormous clout. While I think that clout has peaked and will diminish from here on out, it'll still be a long slow fall.
"The irony is that it was the media companies who gave Apple this power, by mandating DRM."
Exactly. Apple is neither demon nor saint here... they're just riding the wave of the moment.
Their success comes because they put together a vertical integration: a playback device, a content distribution platform, a music store, and most critically an agreement with enough major record labels to support the rest. (It's probable that other tech powers could have managed this, but Apple is the one which did it.)
DRM doesn't do Apple any good in itself. (Or didn't at the iPod/iTunes launch, anyway.) I'm sure DRM was a big headache to design and implement, and they could just as well have done without it. But a plausible DRM implementation was the only way for Apple to get the record companies to play ball, so (in order to reap the profits from the other stages) Apple had to include it.
Now, the iPod/iTunes/iTMS/FairPlay stack is a raging success. It's so successful that it has given Apple the whip hand over the record companies. (Which is more than a bit amusing.)
If at some point the record companies want to break Apple's grip on power, they can do so easily... just drop their DRM demand, thereby cutting their own throats. Or they can stop selling through iTMS, and watch that revenue stream dry up, their artists leave, and listen to their customers howl. Or they can go to an Apple competitor and negotiate a better DRM deal... which consumers will ignore, because a better deal for the record companies is necessarily a worse deal for the end user.
So I think the record industry is done as a power broker. This is undoubtedly bad for them and for Apple's competitors, and it's less than ideal for consumers, but it's too soon to say that it's really bad overall. With the record companies' power broken, more artists are going to retain the rights to their works, and publish via TuneCore.com or iTMS or whatever. In time, that's going to change the face of the industry.
A completely obvious application:
Whack the monitor with your right hand to produce a carriage return and a ding.
Would that not be totally retro-cool?