If you remember the Netscape memos that came out in the DOJ prosecution of Microsoft, Microsoft certainly considers it to be a "war" against any competition, and they're who we're up against. More than that, Microsoft sems to consider their wars the 'take no prisoners' type.
The dad of one of my ex girlfriends runs a company that recently decided to move from Linux to Windows -- and he says that a good part of the reason why is that MS is reall hot to kill off Linux.
First off, "war" is a stupid metaphor for OS marketshare.
This doesn't mean the war is over, but it's definitely a good bit of momentum on an important front. I'd say that the next place where we're most likely to get some motion is the business desktop market. In that arena, I'd say that things like OpenOffice (and it's various alternatives) are rather important pieces to support.
The war is far from over, but there's nothing wrong with celebrating a major victory.
There are lots of cases of cops going overboard and charging someone with something that won't stick in court.
This is, however Britain where things like Canada's constitutional right to association aren't necessarily written in stone (or in Canada's case, a
really strong piece of blotting paper).
Now, that having been said, I've gone through periods where I've been rather politically active, and some of the people that I've been associated with through various groups have histories that I don't know about. For example, I once had a girlfriend who told me that she once had a boyfriend who was 'wanted for questioning' about some bomb that was set off somewhere. Does that mean that it's suddenly illegal for me to read various controversial texts? Worse yet, would it be illegal for me even if I hadn't known about my ex's ex's history?
If it really is based on simple possession of manuals, I'd say that this arrest is totally bogus. -- but I'm still waiting for the full evidence to come out in a trial.
My understanding is that private use of software isn't considered a cause of action for a patent suit.
Even if it was legally possible, how is MS going to find out about me violating their retroactive patent on sudo (oops, loose lips!) in order to sue me, if I'm not allowed to distribute the result?
For somebody who claims that it is possible to sue someone for private use, can you point me to a case where such a case was successfully prosecuted?
For interesting trips, I'll take along both an SLR and a POS. In my case, I carry the SLR around everywhere, except for places where I figured that it would be a pain (or where I figured that I'd be too worried about it). For high-risk or low-space situations (e.g. going out dancing), I'll take the Point and Shoot. If the PaS gets toasted, I'll only mourn the loss of the pictures.
There are now, however some pretty nice intermediate cases... I've had a chance to play with an Nikon CoolPix-950. It gives reasonable control (not as nice as the D70S, but far better than nothing). It's good enough for a lot of situations.
A D70 on the other hand allows me to add an external flash, and zoom lenses far beyond what the CoolPix is capable of. It does image buffering which allows me to shoot in bursts, and I have one image that got blown up to 36x48", and it still looked nice from a less than a foot away. That's about as big as I've done with any of my film images.
There are still that 3% of pictures that the D70 can do that the CoopPix can't but that's far better than the 10-20% problems that I'd have with a normal PAS.
You don't follow politics because you're not going to vote, then you don't vote because you haven't followed the politics.
If you force yourself to vote, then next year you'll probably be paying more attention -- simply because you'll know that you'll be voting. I consider voting to be the minimal requirement in a democracy.
One last point: You may regret the consequences whether or not you vote. If you don't vote and find out that a creep that you didn't really like got in by one vote, you'll be just as disappointed as you would if his/her opponent got in by your one vote and turned out to be a creep.
That's why I consider voting to be the minimal political activity. The next step (should you accept this mission....) is to get into more direct lobbying and volunteer work etc. over an issue that you actually care about.
That was pretty much the point of the article -- A properly designed system with a voter-verified paper trail has the redundancy and internal checks and balances needed to endure voter confidence -- Unfortunately, a very large number of voting systems do not have the kinds of proper design processes that you encountered.
Things like smart cards are nothing more than bling-bling. There's no way for the average voter (or even the average voting official) to recognize if one of those things has been compromised. Trusting a closed, proprietary system with no independently verifiable audit trail is essentially outsourcing the counting process to a company that may or may not have an ulterior motive.
The system that you describe seems to be simple, reliable and independently verifiable. If all the voting systems currently in use were like that, we wouldn't be having the debate that we're having.
I could probably design a simple, secure and verifiable system with 1980's technology and a few man-months of work. The fact that many systems don't pass muster isn't an indictment of computer-supported voting -- It's an indictment of the people who built the ill-designed the systems and the people who paid more attention to bling-bling than design principles.
I'mn scratching that system off of my list of possible destinations if we manage to run our current ecosystem into the ground and need to send refugees off to a replacement.
The whole point of a democratic system with free speech is that challenges to a solution (either proposed or implemented) are a good thing. If the system survives a well formed (or even an ill-formed) challenge, that only makes it stronger. The 'survival' may require modifications to address the issues raised -- which is also a good thing.
The presumption that challenging the leadership (including the proprietary of that leadership) is somehow a bad thing is a holdover from the days of kings and dictatorships not true democracy.
Our leadership and voting systems systems are both human and falible. To presume that either has some sort of holy and inhuman infalability is to take the path to societal delerium.
Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections.
To which the answer should be "yep" -- rise to the challenge or accept it's validity. That's the way of a true democracy.
When I was in high-school, global warming was an interesting but as-yet unproved theory. Over the years the evidence for global waming has gotten stronger, and the evidence against it has gotten weaker and more hand-wavey. That's the way that realscience is supposed to work.
This guy (like many other anti-global warming mongers) is using a lot of hand waving, and nit-picking of mostly older studies that have since been improved upon. Rather than producing proper proof of his own, he's mostly saying "there are these minor (and sometimes manufactured) issues with this study, so the whole idea must be wrong -- you therefore must accept our view of things". That's the approach of bogus pop-science. Plausable deniablility is not the same as proper scientific research.
The problem is that the reverse isn't happening to those that claim global warming is happening. Why? A generation of scientists have grown up being taught global warming from junior high and high school.
The reason why global warming is no longer getting ripped apart is that there is very little credible points left to counter the theory. The question has mostly gone from 'if' to details like "how, and how fast".
To take lack of a credible opposition as proof of a problem is a most un-scientific approach. -- especially since an evaporating opposition is a predictable side-effect if the theory is solid.
No problem with paper ballots... I think the point is that having paid millions of dollars for those stupid paperless machines, we still end up needing to go to paper (( and they needed to print paper ballots as a backup). Very little has been gained by going to paperless systems -- other than having a system that's far easier to invisibly game.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using computers to tabulate votes, per se... In Vancouver we use an optical scoring system to count the ballots.. They work fine -- and if the computers blow up and melt into a puddle, we've still got the paper ballots as the canonical vote record.
Computer assisted vote counting is a fine idea, but electrons are too delicate a system to do the entire vote process on.
Ono of my ex girlfriends worked as a customer service supervisor at a bank.. She always gets a paper receipt when she goes to an ATM... I expect that she'd have the same interest in having a physical record of her vote in case the computers mess up there as well.
If you don't like the way that things are, then get out and vote... Drag your friends out, let politicians know what you're doing, and make sure you're in a position to have them listen to you next time you want them to do something..
If a group arguing for a position sounds like a bunch of idiots, I tend to take the opposite view.
I wouldn't take the opposite view, I'd just discount the statements of the idiots... The fact that you have a wingnut taking an extreme view of something doesn't mean that (especially more moderate members of) the entire group is out to lunch. Remember that enemies of a point of view will sometimes place agent provocateurs within that group to make them look silly.
If, however, after discounting the wingnuts you find that there is nobody left advocating that point of view (which seems to be the case for the anti-global-warming group), then you can just walk away from them until you find some serious evidence to support their theory (and also to show how their opponents were misled).
Only if everybody gets to print their own ballot (from a take-home copy of the ODF file).
With paper ballots and a transparent counting process, you can end up with a fair and trusted process, but it's not really open source. You're looking at a rather different paradigm.
no. Watts per square metre per second would be the variability of energy from the sun. one watt/m^2/s would mean that the energy imparted to a square metre of land is increased by 3600watts in the space of an hour or 1.5Megawatts in a week week -- You'd be pretty much looking at a nova (or a supernova) situation to get that scale of change.
People are willing to pay for music, but they're not willing to pay more for formats that allow them to do less. That's why DRM is dead -- It's self-cannibalizing. The rise and fall of CD sales in conjunction with the rise and sudden death of napster points to that people are willing to pay for something that they like -- whether it's free or not. Yes, there are some people that have (and will continue to) make and distribute free copies of music
The big difference that the digital age has made is that it's now far easier to track that bootlegging. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that the people that you can now see will suddenly stop buying music. The real threat of P2P music sharing to record companies is that it breaks their deathgrip on the distribution channels -- Musicians may no longer have to bend over just to get their music distributed, and that's what scares the wits out of the record compainis.
there's a fundamental problem that everybody seems to understand: as long as lossless copies of music (or movies or photos for that matter) can be made, paying for music is dead.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia -- Don't follow spurious 'urgent' links in email -- whether it's to your termination notice, or a wikipedia article. Email back to someone you trust asking if it's real -- then you can decide if it's trustable.
Perhaps they're looking at pulling out because China is working to move to Linux. It would look a lot nicer, from the PR side if they could say that China became a strong Linux bastion because MS had pulled out than because they got tossed out.
Personally I hope it backfires and China ends up with 100,000,000 computers running Linux.
"I kicked the bitch out"
"Ah! That explains why I saw your stuff on the sidewalk."
From what he's saying, this guy found the bug through unrelated research and realized that it could affect these big companies. Offering to fix the problem for money is OK, but threatening to release the bug if they don't pay him is what could fetch a criminal charge... This leaves him in the difficult position where releasing details of the bug for free could place him in jeopardy.
I'd second the motion for a lawyer... He's in a legal minefield. doing anything (and possibly even doing nothing) could fetch him legal trouble. If ever there was a time for <strike>super...</strike> a lawyer, it's here.
According to this CNN article less than 3 people per year die from rabies (39 in 15 years). Fast food probably kills more than that every day -- possibly every hour!
...
more people in the U.S. die each year from eating fast food than die from rabies.
Fast food helps obesity and obesity makes heart attacks more likely.... Heart attacks kill almost a million people a year in North america. That's about 114/hour -- so if fast food obesity accounts for 3% of heart attack deaths, then we'll have more people dying from fast food per hour than rabies (and bats) kill per hour. Freak. I'm more likely to die tripping over my cat than from getting rabies.
Well, 300W seems to be the rated power. Last time I checked (although, this was for a 500MZ P3), my machine was eating about 50W... or about $5/month.
More recently, me and my roommate figured out last year that we could get away with turning off the thermostat completely (we Live in Vancouver, BC). The only things we had heating the house were residual heat from the duct going past us to the floor upstairs, and two computers turned on 24/7, and the house stayed comfortably warm for almost the entire winter,except for the two coldest days, where I turned on the thermostat -- at a cost of aboug $5/day.
This actually leaves me wondering if a "A small beowulf cluster of these" (if you'll excuse the cliche) might actually be one of the most cost-effective methods of heating a space -- with the free cycles for BOINC being but a pleasant side-effect.
I had this idea for an ad, but my animation skills suck, and my attempt at doing one, anyways, died with the loss of two disk drives....
Scene: A screen with the question: "
Do you trust computers to count your vote?
Yes
No
As the first 9 voters vote, a text over (or even voice over) appears:
"8 out of 10 hackers surveyed don't trust computer companies to count their vote"
As each voter casts their vote, the on-screen tally counts.... It ends up with 8 "No"s and 1 "Yes"
The 10th voter comes in and executes an 'easter-egg' a three-finger touch at the top and bottom edges of the right hand side of the screen, and the middle of the left side.......
a happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and this 'voter' touches just to the right of it... The happy face turns green.
Then he touches the "yes" button, and the on screen count quickly rolls back to 6 "Yes" and 4 "No".
The text-over gets' appended to.
Two do.
Now, while I'm at this, can somebody point me to the article (I think it was a slashdot article) where they ran the poll that I'm referring to?? I do remember a poll being done that found that about 80% of the "hackers" at a convention said that they didn't trust computerized voting, but there is so much noise about diebold et al, that I haven't been able to find it again.
Back in the late '80s a friend of mine mentioned that he and coleagues felt that HP had managed to make itself reliably second best at just about everything that they did... Not often the bleeding-edge best, but you could always count on them to provide a good solid product -- no matter what they did.
In other words, you could do the crap shoot trying to choose the company that had the absolutely best "x", or you could just blindly buy HP and know that you're gonna get a really strong contender.
Not an entirely bad business plan, if you ask me.
A revoked biometric still means that the spoofed person is f*cked -- and someone with a spoofed biometric can do massive mischief until the spoof is discovered.
"No, I'm sorry sir, you did it all yesterday -- I have it right here with a proper biometric scan.... Well -- I'm not trying to accuse you of anything -- but, if you were in Hawaii until this morning, then how did you provide an iris scan here yesterday?"
A key and irreplaceable component of any authentication instrument is a revocation feature.
-- and it should change into a 3-layer system.. Something you know (pw), something you have (card), something you are (biometrics). At least with such a 3 layer system, the biometrics are only one part of three. That still doesn't change the fact that someone who can read your biometric has at least an opportunity to spoof that same reading --- Yes, you can add features to the biometric read, but the technology to spoof those features will likely along with the ability to test for them.
Another big problem is that too many C?Os are going to be told that biometrics are the be-all and end-all of security and you're gonna end up with soooo many biometric-only solutions that use (of course) the cheaper image-only systems and end up gettin spoofed at the most disasterous times possible.
I've always been told that the best security check involves two things: something you have, and something you know.
if you're serving off of your mac, then get your own domain, and allow your mac to serve that domain.
You can then cname..
www.mydomain.com -> my-Imac.myDepartment.u-of-something.edu
When you leave the university then you can then just copy the files off of my-Imac, and install them on a proper shared hosting server or set up your own colo'ed machine, or whatever suits your fancy.
I have some workarounds via my department, but unfortunately my only option for a full website seems to be serving it on my office iMac, with an ungodly long URL.
Slashdot Mirror
The dad of one of my ex girlfriends runs a company that recently decided to move from Linux to Windows -- and he says that a good part of the reason why is that MS is reall hot to kill off Linux.
This doesn't mean the war is over, but it's definitely a good bit of momentum on an important front. I'd say that the next place where we're most likely to get some motion is the business desktop market. In that arena, I'd say that things like OpenOffice (and it's various alternatives) are rather important pieces to support.The war is far from over, but there's nothing wrong with celebrating a major victory.
This is, however Britain where things like Canada's constitutional right to association aren't necessarily written in stone (or in Canada's case, a really strong piece of blotting paper).
Now, that having been said, I've gone through periods where I've been rather politically active, and some of the people that I've been associated with through various groups have histories that I don't know about. For example, I once had a girlfriend who told me that she once had a boyfriend who was 'wanted for questioning' about some bomb that was set off somewhere. Does that mean that it's suddenly illegal for me to read various controversial texts? Worse yet, would it be illegal for me even if I hadn't known about my ex's ex's history?
If it really is based on simple possession of manuals, I'd say that this arrest is totally bogus. -- but I'm still waiting for the full evidence to come out in a trial.
Even if it was legally possible, how is MS going to find out about me violating their retroactive patent on sudo (oops, loose lips!) in order to sue me, if I'm not allowed to distribute the result?
For somebody who claims that it is possible to sue someone for private use, can you point me to a case where such a case was successfully prosecuted?
There are now, however some pretty nice intermediate cases... I've had a chance to play with an Nikon CoolPix-950. It gives reasonable control (not as nice as the D70S, but far better than nothing). It's good enough for a lot of situations.
A D70 on the other hand allows me to add an external flash, and zoom lenses far beyond what the CoolPix is capable of. It does image buffering which allows me to shoot in bursts, and I have one image that got blown up to 36x48", and it still looked nice from a less than a foot away. That's about as big as I've done with any of my film images.
There are still that 3% of pictures that the D70 can do that the CoopPix can't but that's far better than the 10-20% problems that I'd have with a normal PAS.
If you force yourself to vote, then next year you'll probably be paying more attention -- simply because you'll know that you'll be voting. I consider voting to be the minimal requirement in a democracy.
One last point: You may regret the consequences whether or not you vote. If you don't vote and find out that a creep that you didn't really like got in by one vote, you'll be just as disappointed as you would if his/her opponent got in by your one vote and turned out to be a creep.
That's why I consider voting to be the minimal political activity. The next step (should you accept this mission....) is to get into more direct lobbying and volunteer work etc. over an issue that you actually care about.
Things like smart cards are nothing more than bling-bling. There's no way for the average voter (or even the average voting official) to recognize if one of those things has been compromised. Trusting a closed, proprietary system with no independently verifiable audit trail is essentially outsourcing the counting process to a company that may or may not have an ulterior motive.
The system that you describe seems to be simple, reliable and independently verifiable. If all the voting systems currently in use were like that, we wouldn't be having the debate that we're having.
I could probably design a simple, secure and verifiable system with 1980's technology and a few man-months of work. The fact that many systems don't pass muster isn't an indictment of computer-supported voting -- It's an indictment of the people who built the ill-designed the systems and the people who paid more attention to bling-bling than design principles.
I'mn scratching that system off of my list of possible destinations if we manage to run our current ecosystem into the ground and need to send refugees off to a replacement.
The presumption that challenging the leadership (including the proprietary of that leadership) is somehow a bad thing is a holdover from the days of kings and dictatorships not true democracy.
Our leadership and voting systems systems are both human and falible. To presume that either has some sort of holy and inhuman infalability is to take the path to societal delerium. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections. To which the answer should be "yep" -- rise to the challenge or accept it's validity. That's the way of a true democracy.
This guy (like many other anti-global warming mongers) is using a lot of hand waving, and nit-picking of mostly older studies that have since been improved upon. Rather than producing proper proof of his own, he's mostly saying "there are these minor (and sometimes manufactured) issues with this study, so the whole idea must be wrong -- you therefore must accept our view of things". That's the approach of bogus pop-science. Plausable deniablility is not the same as proper scientific research.
The reason why global warming is no longer getting ripped apart is that there is very little credible points left to counter the theory. The question has mostly gone from 'if' to details like "how, and how fast".To take lack of a credible opposition as proof of a problem is a most un-scientific approach. -- especially since an evaporating opposition is a predictable side-effect if the theory is solid.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using computers to tabulate votes, per se... In Vancouver we use an optical scoring system to count the ballots.. They work fine -- and if the computers blow up and melt into a puddle, we've still got the paper ballots as the canonical vote record.
Computer assisted vote counting is a fine idea, but electrons are too delicate a system to do the entire vote process on.
Ono of my ex girlfriends worked as a customer service supervisor at a bank.. She always gets a paper receipt when she goes to an ATM... I expect that she'd have the same interest in having a physical record of her vote in case the computers mess up there as well.
If you don't like the way that things are, then get out and vote ... Drag your friends out, let politicians know what you're doing, and make sure you're in a position to have them listen to you next time you want them to do something..
If, however, after discounting the wingnuts you find that there is nobody left advocating that point of view (which seems to be the case for the anti-global-warming group), then you can just walk away from them until you find some serious evidence to support their theory (and also to show how their opponents were misled).
With paper ballots and a transparent counting process, you can end up with a fair and trusted process, but it's not really open source. You're looking at a rather different paradigm.
no. Watts per square metre per second would be the variability of energy from the sun. one watt/m^2/s would mean that the energy imparted to a square metre of land is increased by 3600watts in the space of an hour or 1.5Megawatts in a week week -- You'd be pretty much looking at a nova (or a supernova) situation to get that scale of change.
The big difference that the digital age has made is that it's now far easier to track that bootlegging. Just because you can see it doesn't mean that the people that you can now see will suddenly stop buying music. The real threat of P2P music sharing to record companies is that it breaks their deathgrip on the distribution channels -- Musicians may no longer have to bend over just to get their music distributed, and that's what scares the wits out of the record compainis.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia -- Don't follow spurious 'urgent' links in email -- whether it's to your termination notice, or a wikipedia article. Email back to someone you trust asking if it's real -- then you can decide if it's trustable.
"Ah! That explains why I saw your stuff on the sidewalk."
I'd second the motion for a lawyer... He's in a legal minefield. doing anything (and possibly even doing nothing) could fetch him legal trouble. If ever there was a time for <strike>super...</strike> a lawyer, it's here.
Well, 3/year is the average over 15 years, so I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that it goes as high as 6 and as low as 0 or 1 in any given year.
More recently, me and my roommate figured out last year that we could get away with turning off the thermostat completely (we Live in Vancouver, BC). The only things we had heating the house were residual heat from the duct going past us to the floor upstairs, and two computers turned on 24/7, and the house stayed comfortably warm for almost the entire winter,except for the two coldest days, where I turned on the thermostat -- at a cost of aboug $5/day.
This actually leaves me wondering if a "A small beowulf cluster of these" (if you'll excuse the cliche) might actually be one of the most cost-effective methods of heating a space -- with the free cycles for BOINC being but a pleasant side-effect.
Scene: A screen with the question: "
- Do you trust computers to count your vote?
- Yes
- No
As the first 9 voters vote, a text over (or even voice over) appears:"8 out of 10 hackers surveyed don't trust computer companies to count their vote"
As each voter casts their vote, the on-screen tally counts.... It ends up with 8 "No"s and 1 "Yes"
The 10th voter comes in and executes an 'easter-egg' a three-finger touch at the top and bottom edges of the right hand side of the screen, and the middle of the left side.......
a happy face appears in the middle of the screen, and this 'voter' touches just to the right of it... The happy face turns green.
Then he touches the "yes" button, and the on screen count quickly rolls back to 6 "Yes" and 4 "No".
The text-over gets' appended to.
Two do.
Now, while I'm at this, can somebody point me to the article (I think it was a slashdot article) where they ran the poll that I'm referring to?? I do remember a poll being done that found that about 80% of the "hackers" at a convention said that they didn't trust computerized voting, but there is so much noise about diebold et al, that I haven't been able to find it again.
Can anybody give me a pointer?
In other words, you could do the crap shoot trying to choose the company that had the absolutely best "x", or you could just blindly buy HP and know that you're gonna get a really strong contender.
Not an entirely bad business plan, if you ask me.
"No, I'm sorry sir, you did it all yesterday -- I have it right here with a proper biometric scan.... Well -- I'm not trying to accuse you of anything -- but, if you were in Hawaii until this morning, then how did you provide an iris scan here yesterday?"
-- and it should change into a 3-layer systemAnother big problem is that too many C?Os are going to be told that biometrics are the be-all and end-all of security and you're gonna end up with soooo many biometric-only solutions that use (of course) the cheaper image-only systems and end up gettin spoofed at the most disasterous times possible.
You can then cname ..
www.mydomain.com -> my-Imac.myDepartment.u-of-something.edu
When you leave the university then you can then just copy the files off of my-Imac, and install them on a proper shared hosting server or set up your own colo'ed machine, or whatever suits your fancy.