Virginia Tech's "System X" cluster cost a total of $6M for the asset alone (i.e., not including buildings, infrastructure, etc.), for performance of 12.25 Tflops.
By contrast, NCSA's surprise entry in November 2003's list, Tungsten, achieved 9.82 Tflops for $12M asset cost.
Double the cost, for a Top 100 supercomputer's-worth lower performance.
And it wasn't because Virginia Tech had "free student labor": it doesn't take $6M in labor to assemble a cluster. Even if we give it an extremely, horrendously liberal $1M for systems integration and installation, System X is still ridiculously cheaper.
I know there will be a dozen predictable responses to this, deriding System X, Virginia Tech, Apple, Mac OS X, linpack, Top 500, and coming up with one excuse after another. But won't anyone consider the possibility that these Mac OS X clusters are worth something?
Not surprising, but interesting as AOL already has several arrangements with Apple to allow AOL Music, AOL accounts, etc., interoperate with the iTunes Music Store:
It was never implemented under Clinton either. Bush did nothing to take the process back from any previous level, nor did anyone "pull out" of anything, regardless of what the title of your CORPWATCH!&@^%!&%# article says. It was never ratified under Clinton, never was binding over the US, and was never "pulled out" of. Clinton had THREE YEARS to implement it, and did nothing more than Bush has done.
Bush didn't "pull out of" anything. Why YOUR revisionist history, Anonymous Coward?
The US is a Kyoto signatory, but "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
The US isn't being unfairly singled out in any of the articles posted.
No, but it will be in most of the replies to this article.
What is unremarkable about that?
You just took two unrelated things I said and strung them together.
What's not remarkable is the idea that experts consider human activity related to global warming. The article insinuates that there is serious, credible opposition to this idea. There isn't. There may be disagreements on degrees of impact, but everyone agrees human activity is a contributing factor at some level.
The idea that China and India (and other major greenhouse contributors) should be brought to task is fine. As a US citizen, however, I am primarily concerned with what my country can do to help, not in deflecting blame. Surely, we would be in a better position to apply pressure to other countries in this regard, were we at the forefront of C02 emmissions reduction?
Indeed. And frankly, we can do this without ratifying Kyoto in its current state, with no timetables or hard deadlines for compliance of developing nations, that might harm our economy. We ARE a signatory to Kyoto, by the way.
Well, you know nothing "for sure". I know beyond any reasonable requirement that the 2004 election wasn't "stolen". Does that mean there was no fraud? No. What it means is that people who have devoted their LIVES to this, people who believed that getting Bush out of office was the most important task of their lives, who worked for various Democratic organizations, Kerry's campaign, in volunteer and paid capacities - thousands of lawyers, observers, and experts - as well as independent election monitors, non-partisan legal and voting experts, and scholars from the most respected voting projects at prestigious universities (like the MIT-Caltech Voting Project), don't believe the election was stolen. And they know a LOT more about this than you or me. Like I said, if it makes you feel better to think it was stolen, or that it might have been, or pretend that it's really that nebulous and that we "just don't know", be my guest. We DO know, and the people who count know - even ones who REALLY despise Bush and all that Republicans and conservatives stand for - therefore, the election was not stolen.
I know you might be partly kidding (hopefully?), but this is not about anyone in the administration's personal oil "portfolios".
This is about a complicated period of transition and economic globalization, where the US is trying to keep as many jobs inside its borders as possible, while making concessions to corporations, AND also allowing some jobs to be outsourced to help keep costs down and encourage further investment by US-based corporations. It's a tricky situation, but I assure you it's no more or less about personal greed or selfishness than it would be with any other party in office.
Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US (or Europe).[1]
So... Then what?
And uh, is this news? Does anyone credible seriously disagree that emissions from human activity are at least in part contributing factors? Or is this another jab at boogiemen that don't exist? There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.
Also, the "Earth" isn't in danger. Yes, I know this distinction is splitting hairs, but what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants. Our actions are not going to alter a several billion year old rock.
[1] Don't feed me the per capita shit. China will be a far, far greater polluter in this realm, per capita or no. Further, the economic empowerment of the Chinese people will eventually drive them to a level of concern about the well-being of the environment, so, in a way, their accelerated economic development is a good thing, politically and environmentally. Incidentally, China has proven they can reduce greenhouse emissions, even while growing economically (1, 2)...but the point is, they're still on an upward trend. And they've got a lot more people who will begin to thirst for energy-hungry luxuries.
The last paragraph was a joke. The sad part is that the "Bush stole the election" conspiracy theorists (with the complicity of the Kerry campaign and the national media, no less), are dead serious.
Oh, you know that for sure, do you? There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I've seen very credible evidence of voter intimidation, voting machine irregularities, disparities in equipment between rich and poor counties, and many other little pieces of puzzle that seem to fit together and show that a great amount of fraud occurred. Was the election stolen? Well, I can't say for sure. Apparently you can. Thanks for that tidbit!
So, are you going to support the bills, or still fantasize about how the election was stolen?
You honestly believe that there was 3.5 MILLION votes worth of voting fraud? Or more than 150,000 votes worth of fraud in Ohio? And that the DNC, the Kerry campaign, the election monitors, the 3600 Kerry campaign lawyers, all just did nothing about it?
Of COURSE there was fraud and errors. Just like in EVERY election we've ever had! But the point is, everyone who matters, ESPECIALLY the entire DNC and the Kerry camp itself, didn't think there was any "fraud" that would even come close to being a "story", much less changing the outcome of the election. Remember 2000? Why wouldn't the same thing, multiplied by a factor of ten, have happened in 2004, in terms of media coverage, lawyers scouring through records and votes, etc?
Funnier still is your mention of "disparities" between rich and poor counties - that's the EXACT thing that HAVA is designed to FIX! You know, HAVA, that thing that is mandating *electronic voting machines*? I guess they just can't win. No matter what, you'll think that the big, bad, evil Republicans stole the election to further their goals of warmongering, lining pockets, and kicking pussy cats.
And they bloody shouldn't, either. Why the hell should anyone trust results counted by insecure machines sold by privately owned corporations who have expressed their support for the Republican Party, and two of which are led by siblings?
Because the "support", even if it was in poor taste, was done in his capacity as a GOP campaigner, not to indicate that he was going to rig elections with his 13,000-employee company's voting equipment?
Because the voting machines, once deployed, are no longer under Diebold's control?
Because we trust private corporations to manufacture proprietary systems to control our money, power, medical equipment, vehicles, financial systems, avionics, and much more?
Because corporations are a part of American society and they're not necessarily "evil"?
Because the same people who we've always entrusted our elections to, i.e., local county officials, are still running them, and no specific information about parties or candidates are even entered until the systems are completely under their control?
Because comparatively few electronic voting systems were even *used* in the 2004 election, and the entire Democratic party infrastructure, all voting monitors, Kerry's $300 million, 2-year campaign, and its 3600 lawyers, including the lead attorney on the Kerry campaign, and election and political science scholars at Universities, and the Caltech-MIT Voting Project all don't think the election was stolen?
I'm sorry, you can think that the US election was just like Ukraine's, except that the American's "didn't fight", but you're fucking wrong. You can hate Bush if you want, believe that he's evil incarnate and the most evil man on earth (if you choose to view things so black and white), if that makes you somehow happier.
Uh, fink is not a "port of Debian" to anything. It's a port of the *Debian package manager* to Mac OS X. It's also a ports library, and does a lot more than the Debian apt system.
What's wrong with having a package manager and ports for an OS? fink is a whole separate OSS project; I'm not sure I really even understand your point...
I don't have to prove it wasn't stolen. We assume that the LOCAL stewards of our election process, i.e., the same counties who have ALWAYS been the stewards of the process, are managing it properly. And I know that until you can personally inspect every line of source code in every Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold machine, you just won't believe they're not somehow rigged.
Why do people so believe that the election just MUST have been rigged, retarded comments from Diebold's CEO notwithstanding? Can't people just deal with the fact that Bush won? Why can't people envision a world where, Bush & Co. aside, Republicans legitimately win elections?
Further, there has been fraud and errors in EVERY election since the beginning of time. Granted, electronic systems make it easier, but we trust proprietary electronic systems with so much, why was it just so outrageous to assume that electronic systems could be made accountable for voting? When HAVA passed and mandated consistent electronic systems, there weren't any secret ulterior motives.
Also, see this post for a very small sampling from people who have more at stake and vested in this process, including on Kerry's "side", who agree that the election simply wasn't stolen (and no, they're not conceding because they were "forced", or for "the good of the country" - they conceded because they lost).
Jaeson, my problem is that every time slashdot or a blog posts yet another sensationalistic story whose implication is clear, NO ONE mentions the only things that can actually SOLVE this problem, i.e., the proposed legislation I referenced. It is always focused on the past, rather than on the future. What purpose does it serve to think that the 2004 election was stolen, when the Kerry campaign, and its 3600 lawyers, or the European election monitors, or the DNC, or voting experts in Universities (not sociology students with an agenda at Berkeley), don't think it was?
Why don't we just concentrate on something we can all agree on, which is making the process accountable? Do you really believe local election officials are secretly and surreptitiously rigging the elections? Hell, there weren't even that many electronic systems used in 2004. But there sure as fuck will be in 2008, so let's fix it, eh? The election was not stolen, and it was not rigged. There may have been localized instances of fraud (on BOTH sides, in some cases, and not necessarily all electronic), but it was NOT enough, still, to alter the outcome of the election.
Doug Chapin, a nonpartisan election analyst, finds the claims to be baseless. "There were no problems that would lead me to believe that there were stolen elections or widespread fraud," he said.
"There was no overwhelming reason to cast doubt on the outcome of this election," seconded Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "George Bush got more votes this time."
Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result.
Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.
''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities.
''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."
''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."
All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.
"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."
As for exit polls, often brought up in the context of electronic voting, here is one expert's view:
I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.
The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.
If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit poll
Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).
A frequent charge levied after the 2000 election was voter disenfranchisement and ballot spoilage due, in large part, to antiquated, malfunctioning, or broken mechanical voting equipment. Legislation was introduced guaranteeing a minimum standard for the equipment and processes associated with voting in all jurisdictions. Since we are living in the 21st century, electronic systems were specified. $3.9 billion was set aside under HAVA to replace all mechanical punch card systems with electronic systems by 1 January, 2006. The goal is to ensure a consistency and fairness in the appearance and operation of the voting systems, both for voters and local election officials.
To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections...
The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.
A bill has been introduced to amend HAVA. H.R.2239 and its twin Senate counterpart S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter, and that "any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen".
Additionally, the three electronic voting manufacturers already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products. Some e-voting critics make it seem like vendors are resisting. However, it is the local election boards that are resisting (as well as the slow march of bureaucracy). The e-voting vendors will build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
Disclaimer: this comes from a previous post of mine on the subject
LOL! Oh man, this is great. Now Apple's *lying* about numbers of deployed systems running Mac OS X?
And better still, even *if* Apple's telling the truth (which you of course won't grant them, even based on clear sales numbers which are publicly available in all financial reports), then either a.) they're still "far behind" UNIX or Linux (nope, sorry, they're not, and numerous publications you can find at my original Google link clearly confirm that, and this has been known for quite some time), or b.) it's still bad, because it comes from one vendor and/or has proprietary components.
Even though Apple is widely recognized as being the only remaining innovator is general computing, you manage to indict them on every front!
Your response makes you look *really* stupid, because the "solution" you just read has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE MYSTERY PICTURE IN QUESTION. Worse, every single other response to the parent - most of which were BEFORE you - recognizes that (though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there, since it took you some time to write your response). The "solution" is talking about a completely different and unrelated picture!
The entire non-GUI part of Mac OS X is completely open, and uses open standards for communication, networking, and everything else.
Apparently you've never actually seen or used Mac OS X.
And since the entire IT press (and no, not just the ones you'd consider morons) routinely refers to Mac OS X as a UNIX-based OS, because it is. The "UNIX" userland is a full BSD and X11 environment, that does everything you'd expect a UNIX environment to do, and runs everything you'd expect a UNIX environment to run (yes, there are quirk and unique aspects in the UNIX environment, just as there are between various other flavors of Linux, UNIX, and BSD).
If you want to troll about things like the Mac OS X GUI, iTunes, QuickTime, etc., sure, those are all proprietary. Ironically, when you say "est at implementing standards, having the nicest support, easy upgrades, speed", those are all the PRIMARY reasons many people are choosing Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server SPECIFICALLY over things like Linux and Solaris!
Just because you personally don't like Macs or Apple, or don't like anything that has any proprietary element doesn't make you correct.
I know you're trolling, and sorry to disappoint you, but I work in the central IT organization here, and I haven't exaggerated anything. This are tremendously, ridiculously more Mac OS X installations than Linux or any other *nix here, and this is the same at other US-based large academic research institutions I regularly deal with (and I'm NOT just talking about public student computing labs). And the vast, vast majority of these people don't use them for graphic design.
Yes. There are more PCs running Windows than anything else.
I'm talking about Mac OS X vs Linux. And I'm not talking about public computing labs. I'm talking about what faculty and researchers actually use in their work. There is FAR more Mac OS X here than any Linux, Solaris, or any other *nix use on the desktop. We estimate we have something on the order of 8000 Macs in use on campus, and probably around 3 times as many PCs.
Wow. Why do people think the only place Macs are used are in "design"?
My world is also a University. One of the largest public research Universities in the country, the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I don't know where you are, but there are ridiculously far more Mac OS X users here than Linux users. Linux is probably used for server applications more than Mac OS X Server, but on the desktop, it's so laughably not even close. Walk up and down the halls of our life and biomedical sciences buildings, physics and astronomy, engineering, medical, and other research areas, and you'll see Mac OS X, Mac OS X, Mac OS X. You'll see the same thing at DoE National Laboratories. (Incidentally, our CS department just bought 33 5.6TB Xserve RAIDS for a grid computing project, for a total of 185TB. No Mac OS X in that order, but still...)
Wow. I'm still kind of floored at what you said, considering Mac OS X is *everywhere* at every large academic research institution I've been to lately (Caltech, Stanford, Umich, MIT...)
No, but the article is talking about OS competitors. It just ignores something that's bigger than both of the *nixes mentioned. Unless they're making a judgment to ignore anything but x86, ignoring one of the fastest growing OSes, especially in the server market, is a little contrary to their own aims by making such blanket statements.
Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Tech's "System X" cluster cost a total of $6M for the asset alone (i.e., not including buildings, infrastructure, etc.), for performance of 12.25 Tflops.
By contrast, NCSA's surprise entry in November 2003's list, Tungsten, achieved 9.82 Tflops for $12M asset cost.
Double the cost, for a Top 100 supercomputer's-worth lower performance.
And it wasn't because Virginia Tech had "free student labor": it doesn't take $6M in labor to assemble a cluster. Even if we give it an extremely, horrendously liberal $1M for systems integration and installation, System X is still ridiculously cheaper.
I know there will be a dozen predictable responses to this, deriding System X, Virginia Tech, Apple, Mac OS X, linpack, Top 500, and coming up with one excuse after another. But won't anyone consider the possibility that these Mac OS X clusters are worth something?
Not surprising, but interesting as AOL already has several arrangements with Apple to allow AOL Music, AOL accounts, etc., interoperate with the iTunes Music Store:
Apple and America Online Announce Online Music Alliance
AOL Members Now Have Instant Access to Apple's iTunes Music Store
iTunes Music Store AOL account signin
It was never implemented under Clinton either. Bush did nothing to take the process back from any previous level, nor did anyone "pull out" of anything, regardless of what the title of your CORPWATCH!&@^%!&%# article says. It was never ratified under Clinton, never was binding over the US, and was never "pulled out" of. Clinton had THREE YEARS to implement it, and did nothing more than Bush has done.
So fuck off, and nice try.
Bush didn't "pull out of" anything. Why YOUR revisionist history, Anonymous Coward?
The US is a Kyoto signatory, but "On June 25, 1997, before the Kyoto Protocol was to be negotiated, the U.S. Senate passed by a 95-0 vote the Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98), which stated the sense of the Senate was that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Disregarding the Senate Resolution, on November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. Aware of the Senate's view of the protocol, the Clinton Administration never submitted the protocol for ratification."
All of this happened under Clinton.
So, sorry, but your bullshit post is just that.
The US isn't being unfairly singled out in any of the articles posted.
No, but it will be in most of the replies to this article.
What is unremarkable about that?
You just took two unrelated things I said and strung them together.
What's not remarkable is the idea that experts consider human activity related to global warming. The article insinuates that there is serious, credible opposition to this idea. There isn't. There may be disagreements on degrees of impact, but everyone agrees human activity is a contributing factor at some level.
The idea that China and India (and other major greenhouse contributors) should be brought to task is fine. As a US citizen, however, I am primarily concerned with what my country can do to help, not in deflecting blame. Surely, we would be in a better position to apply pressure to other countries in this regard, were we at the forefront of C02 emmissions reduction?
Indeed. And frankly, we can do this without ratifying Kyoto in its current state, with no timetables or hard deadlines for compliance of developing nations, that might harm our economy. We ARE a signatory to Kyoto, by the way.
Well, you know nothing "for sure". I know beyond any reasonable requirement that the 2004 election wasn't "stolen". Does that mean there was no fraud? No. What it means is that people who have devoted their LIVES to this, people who believed that getting Bush out of office was the most important task of their lives, who worked for various Democratic organizations, Kerry's campaign, in volunteer and paid capacities - thousands of lawyers, observers, and experts - as well as independent election monitors, non-partisan legal and voting experts, and scholars from the most respected voting projects at prestigious universities (like the MIT-Caltech Voting Project), don't believe the election was stolen. And they know a LOT more about this than you or me. Like I said, if it makes you feel better to think it was stolen, or that it might have been, or pretend that it's really that nebulous and that we "just don't know", be my guest. We DO know, and the people who count know - even ones who REALLY despise Bush and all that Republicans and conservatives stand for - therefore, the election was not stolen.
I know you might be partly kidding (hopefully?), but this is not about anyone in the administration's personal oil "portfolios".
This is about a complicated period of transition and economic globalization, where the US is trying to keep as many jobs inside its borders as possible, while making concessions to corporations, AND also allowing some jobs to be outsourced to help keep costs down and encourage further investment by US-based corporations. It's a tricky situation, but I assure you it's no more or less about personal greed or selfishness than it would be with any other party in office.
And the US supports the principles of Kyoto, but does NOT support the exemption of countries termed "developing", like China.
Soon, it will be China and India that you're pointing fingers at, and not the US (or Europe).[1]
So... Then what?
And uh, is this news? Does anyone credible seriously disagree that emissions from human activity are at least in part contributing factors? Or is this another jab at boogiemen that don't exist? There's nothing "remarkable" about these so-called findings.
Also, the "Earth" isn't in danger. Yes, I know this distinction is splitting hairs, but what's in danger is Earth's inhabitants. Our actions are not going to alter a several billion year old rock.
[1] Don't feed me the per capita shit. China will be a far, far greater polluter in this realm, per capita or no. Further, the economic empowerment of the Chinese people will eventually drive them to a level of concern about the well-being of the environment, so, in a way, their accelerated economic development is a good thing, politically and environmentally. Incidentally, China has proven they can reduce greenhouse emissions, even while growing economically (1, 2)...but the point is, they're still on an upward trend. And they've got a lot more people who will begin to thirst for energy-hungry luxuries.
The last paragraph was a joke. The sad part is that the "Bush stole the election" conspiracy theorists (with the complicity of the Kerry campaign and the national media, no less), are dead serious.
Oh, you know that for sure, do you? There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I've seen very credible evidence of voter intimidation, voting machine irregularities, disparities in equipment between rich and poor counties, and many other little pieces of puzzle that seem to fit together and show that a great amount of fraud occurred. Was the election stolen? Well, I can't say for sure. Apparently you can. Thanks for that tidbit!
So, are you going to support the bills, or still fantasize about how the election was stolen?
You honestly believe that there was 3.5 MILLION votes worth of voting fraud? Or more than 150,000 votes worth of fraud in Ohio? And that the DNC, the Kerry campaign, the election monitors, the 3600 Kerry campaign lawyers, all just did nothing about it?
Of COURSE there was fraud and errors. Just like in EVERY election we've ever had! But the point is, everyone who matters, ESPECIALLY the entire DNC and the Kerry camp itself, didn't think there was any "fraud" that would even come close to being a "story", much less changing the outcome of the election. Remember 2000? Why wouldn't the same thing, multiplied by a factor of ten, have happened in 2004, in terms of media coverage, lawyers scouring through records and votes, etc?
Funnier still is your mention of "disparities" between rich and poor counties - that's the EXACT thing that HAVA is designed to FIX! You know, HAVA, that thing that is mandating *electronic voting machines*? I guess they just can't win. No matter what, you'll think that the big, bad, evil Republicans stole the election to further their goals of warmongering, lining pockets, and kicking pussy cats.
And they bloody shouldn't, either. Why the hell should anyone trust results counted by insecure machines sold by privately owned corporations who have expressed their support for the Republican Party, and two of which are led by siblings?
Because the "support", even if it was in poor taste, was done in his capacity as a GOP campaigner, not to indicate that he was going to rig elections with his 13,000-employee company's voting equipment?
Because the voting machines, once deployed, are no longer under Diebold's control?
Because we trust private corporations to manufacture proprietary systems to control our money, power, medical equipment, vehicles, financial systems, avionics, and much more?
Because corporations are a part of American society and they're not necessarily "evil"?
Because the same people who we've always entrusted our elections to, i.e., local county officials, are still running them, and no specific information about parties or candidates are even entered until the systems are completely under their control?
Because comparatively few electronic voting systems were even *used* in the 2004 election, and the entire Democratic party infrastructure, all voting monitors, Kerry's $300 million, 2-year campaign, and its 3600 lawyers, including the lead attorney on the Kerry campaign, and election and political science scholars at Universities, and the Caltech-MIT Voting Project all don't think the election was stolen?
I'm sorry, you can think that the US election was just like Ukraine's, except that the American's "didn't fight", but you're fucking wrong. You can hate Bush if you want, believe that he's evil incarnate and the most evil man on earth (if you choose to view things so black and white), if that makes you somehow happier.
Uh, fink is not a "port of Debian" to anything. It's a port of the *Debian package manager* to Mac OS X. It's also a ports library, and does a lot more than the Debian apt system.
What's wrong with having a package manager and ports for an OS? fink is a whole separate OSS project; I'm not sure I really even understand your point...
I don't have to prove it wasn't stolen. We assume that the LOCAL stewards of our election process, i.e., the same counties who have ALWAYS been the stewards of the process, are managing it properly. And I know that until you can personally inspect every line of source code in every Sequoia, ES&S, and Diebold machine, you just won't believe they're not somehow rigged.
Why do people so believe that the election just MUST have been rigged, retarded comments from Diebold's CEO notwithstanding? Can't people just deal with the fact that Bush won? Why can't people envision a world where, Bush & Co. aside, Republicans legitimately win elections?
Further, there has been fraud and errors in EVERY election since the beginning of time. Granted, electronic systems make it easier, but we trust proprietary electronic systems with so much, why was it just so outrageous to assume that electronic systems could be made accountable for voting? When HAVA passed and mandated consistent electronic systems, there weren't any secret ulterior motives.
Also, see this post for a very small sampling from people who have more at stake and vested in this process, including on Kerry's "side", who agree that the election simply wasn't stolen (and no, they're not conceding because they were "forced", or for "the good of the country" - they conceded because they lost).
Jaeson, my problem is that every time slashdot or a blog posts yet another sensationalistic story whose implication is clear, NO ONE mentions the only things that can actually SOLVE this problem, i.e., the proposed legislation I referenced. It is always focused on the past, rather than on the future. What purpose does it serve to think that the 2004 election was stolen, when the Kerry campaign, and its 3600 lawyers, or the European election monitors, or the DNC, or voting experts in Universities (not sociology students with an agenda at Berkeley), don't think it was?
Why don't we just concentrate on something we can all agree on, which is making the process accountable? Do you really believe local election officials are secretly and surreptitiously rigging the elections? Hell, there weren't even that many electronic systems used in 2004. But there sure as fuck will be in 2008, so let's fix it, eh? The election was not stolen, and it was not rigged. There may have been localized instances of fraud (on BOTH sides, in some cases, and not necessarily all electronic), but it was NOT enough, still, to alter the outcome of the election.
Why is that so hard to accept?
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=239735 (video)
/10/internet_buzz_on_vote_fraud_is_dismissed/
Doug Chapin, a nonpartisan election analyst, finds the claims to be baseless. "There were no problems that would lead me to believe that there were stolen elections or widespread fraud," he said.
"There was no overwhelming reason to cast doubt on the outcome of this election," seconded Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "George Bush got more votes this time."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/11
Much of the traffic is little more than Internet-fueled conspiracy theories, and none of the vote-counting problems and anomalies that have emerged are sufficiently widespread to have affected the election's ultimate result.
Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush.
''No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," said Jack Corrigan, a veteran Kerry adviser who led the Democrats' team of 3,600 attorneys who fanned out across the country on Election Day to address voting irregularities.
''I get why people are frustrated, but they did not steal this election," Corrigan said. ''There were a few problems here and there in the election. But unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."
''I think it's safe to say that on the votes that were cast in Ohio, Bush won," said Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University who is working with the ACLU to challenge Ohio's use of punch-card ballots. ''If the margin had been 36,000 rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown."
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/11436220p-1 2350492c.html
All three said their networks had set up investigative units to review any claims of voter fraud or problems with electronic voting technology this year, but that nothing significant had appeared anywhere to affect the election's outcome.
"A lot of the allegations we've looked into, they're just not true," Shapiro said. "Believe me, I'd love a juicy story about the election as much as anybody. Florida was a great story, but it's just not there this time."
As for exit polls, often brought up in the context of electronic voting, here is one expert's view:
I think the important thing about exit polls is they show us why people won and the dynamics of the race. The mistake most people make is they see polls as a horse-race, but they are actually the explanation of what happened.
The polls may have been wrong about who won, but they were right about explaining why people voted the way they did. If you don't have polls, you allow the elites and candidates to interpret the elections in their own interest. Polls, in many ways, are crucial to democracy.
If you look at previous elections, you can see that exit polls are always different the day after the election. Exit polls ultimately are always right, though they are never right originally. This is because polls have to be weighted with the actual vote to be completely accurate. The vote, of course, can't be factored in until the election is completed. If the exit polls are not "corrected" in this way, then the analysis of the election will always be flawed. So after the polls have closed, exit poll
Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).
A frequent charge levied after the 2000 election was voter disenfranchisement and ballot spoilage due, in large part, to antiquated, malfunctioning, or broken mechanical voting equipment. Legislation was introduced guaranteeing a minimum standard for the equipment and processes associated with voting in all jurisdictions. Since we are living in the 21st century, electronic systems were specified. $3.9 billion was set aside under HAVA to replace all mechanical punch card systems with electronic systems by 1 January, 2006. The goal is to ensure a consistency and fairness in the appearance and operation of the voting systems, both for voters and local election officials.
After the 2000 presidential election, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA):
To establish a program to provide funds to States to replace punch card voting systems, to establish the Election Assistance Commission to assist in the administration of Federal elections and to otherwise provide assistance with the administration of certain Federal election laws and programs, to establish minimum election administration standards for States and units of local government with responsibility for the administration of Federal elections...
The putative reasoning for going with electronic systems was likely that since we have managed to design accountable and reliable electronic and computing equipment for the management of our power, medical care, money, etc., it likely was more or less assumed by the legislature that such accountable systems could also be applied to voting.
A bill has been introduced to amend HAVA. H.R.2239 and its twin Senate counterpart S.1980, discussed further here, will amend the Help America Vote Act such that there is "a voter-verified permanent record or hardcopy" attached with each and every ballot cast by every voter, and that "any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code available for inspection upon request to any citizen".
Additionally, the three electronic voting manufacturers already have the ability to add permanent, individual voter-verified paper audit trails to their products. Some e-voting critics make it seem like vendors are resisting. However, it is the local election boards that are resisting (as well as the slow march of bureaucracy). The e-voting vendors will build - and sell - whatever municipalities will buy.
Disclaimer: this comes from a previous post of mine on the subject
LOL! Oh man, this is great. Now Apple's *lying* about numbers of deployed systems running Mac OS X?
And better still, even *if* Apple's telling the truth (which you of course won't grant them, even based on clear sales numbers which are publicly available in all financial reports), then either a.) they're still "far behind" UNIX or Linux (nope, sorry, they're not, and numerous publications you can find at my original Google link clearly confirm that, and this has been known for quite some time), or b.) it's still bad, because it comes from one vendor and/or has proprietary components.
Even though Apple is widely recognized as being the only remaining innovator is general computing, you manage to indict them on every front!
Bravo!
It's a solution to a *completely different and unrelated APOD*!
Your response makes you look *really* stupid, because the "solution" you just read has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE MYSTERY PICTURE IN QUESTION. Worse, every single other response to the parent - most of which were BEFORE you - recognizes that (though I'll give you the benefit of the doubt there, since it took you some time to write your response). The "solution" is talking about a completely different and unrelated picture!
*Wow*.
Thanks for a good laugh though.
What the hell are you talking about?
The entire non-GUI part of Mac OS X is completely open, and uses open standards for communication, networking, and everything else.
Apparently you've never actually seen or used Mac OS X.
And since the entire IT press (and no, not just the ones you'd consider morons) routinely refers to Mac OS X as a UNIX-based OS, because it is. The "UNIX" userland is a full BSD and X11 environment, that does everything you'd expect a UNIX environment to do, and runs everything you'd expect a UNIX environment to run (yes, there are quirk and unique aspects in the UNIX environment, just as there are between various other flavors of Linux, UNIX, and BSD).
If you want to troll about things like the Mac OS X GUI, iTunes, QuickTime, etc., sure, those are all proprietary. Ironically, when you say "est at implementing standards, having the nicest support, easy upgrades, speed", those are all the PRIMARY reasons many people are choosing Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server SPECIFICALLY over things like Linux and Solaris!
Just because you personally don't like Macs or Apple, or don't like anything that has any proprietary element doesn't make you correct.
I know you're trolling, and sorry to disappoint you, but I work in the central IT organization here, and I haven't exaggerated anything. This are tremendously, ridiculously more Mac OS X installations than Linux or any other *nix here, and this is the same at other US-based large academic research institutions I regularly deal with (and I'm NOT just talking about public student computing labs). And the vast, vast majority of these people don't use them for graphic design.
Yes. There are more PCs running Windows than anything else.
I'm talking about Mac OS X vs Linux. And I'm not talking about public computing labs. I'm talking about what faculty and researchers actually use in their work. There is FAR more Mac OS X here than any Linux, Solaris, or any other *nix use on the desktop. We estimate we have something on the order of 8000 Macs in use on campus, and probably around 3 times as many PCs.
Don't you mean Poland? :-)
You forgot Poland!
Wow. Why do people think the only place Macs are used are in "design"?
My world is also a University. One of the largest public research Universities in the country, the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I don't know where you are, but there are ridiculously far more Mac OS X users here than Linux users. Linux is probably used for server applications more than Mac OS X Server, but on the desktop, it's so laughably not even close. Walk up and down the halls of our life and biomedical sciences buildings, physics and astronomy, engineering, medical, and other research areas, and you'll see Mac OS X, Mac OS X, Mac OS X. You'll see the same thing at DoE National Laboratories. (Incidentally, our CS department just bought 33 5.6TB Xserve RAIDS for a grid computing project, for a total of 185TB. No Mac OS X in that order, but still...)
Wow. I'm still kind of floored at what you said, considering Mac OS X is *everywhere* at every large academic research institution I've been to lately (Caltech, Stanford, Umich, MIT...)
No, but the article is talking about OS competitors. It just ignores something that's bigger than both of the *nixes mentioned. Unless they're making a judgment to ignore anything but x86, ignoring one of the fastest growing OSes, especially in the server market, is a little contrary to their own aims by making such blanket statements.