> Gore offered recounts and, indeed, last Wednesday he said he'd
go along with hand recounts for the entire state if Bush wanted them.
BTW, I agree Gore had every right to ask for recounts in the four heavily-Dem counties, and Bush blew a chance by not calling for recounts in heavily-Republican counties.
But by last Wednesday, the deadline for calling for recounts had long passed, and Gore's offer was good PR, but technically illegal - in that there was no basis in law to ask for recounts of any counties other than "Gore's four" at the time the "offer" was extended.
BTW, I saw a web site that listed the counties, their machine-counts, and the type of voting technology used -- most of the heavily-Republican counties used the Optiscan system and would not have been subject to the "hanging chad" issue.
It's an accident of statistics that Gore's four preferred counties happen to be (a) heavily-populated, (b) heavily-Democratic, and (c) used the punch-card system. Only this combination of all three factors - lots of votes to recount, a high probability of any machine-unreadable vote being Democratic, and a relatively high proportion of machine-unreadable votes - could have given Gore the win.
Given the experimental errors (even in Optiscan counties), the legal errors (should overseas ballots without postmarks count? should dimpled chads count?), I'm not at all convinced I know who would have won a "fair" hand count of the entire state.
Sadly, the reality we must deal with is that there are no non-partisans left, and there's no such thing as a "fair" hand count.
Yet even the hand counts as performed and accepted by largely-Democratic canvassing boards showed a win for Bush. On the grounds that Gore had every statistical thing going for him, and won almost all the "legal breaks" that changed the vote count, and yet still managed to lose, I believe he should concede.
But the fact is that I don't know, and don't think anyone will ever "know", who "won" in Florida. The result was within the margin of error. There's no way to know.
The bottom line of this election is - and has always been - if you believe a dimpled/pregnant chad oughta be a vote (which it hasn't been in Florida for about 10 years), then you believe Gore won. If you don't, then you believe Bush won.
Gore has lost:
Gore lost the original machine count, so he asked for a recount.
He lost the machine recount, so he asked for recounts in four Democratic counties.
Miami-Dade: Gave up, costing him 157 votes. He's sued them for certifying the results. Pending.
Broward: Stopped, got sued, started again, recounted including pregnant chads. Gain of 500-odd votes.
Palm Beach: Didn't count pregnant chads. Gain of ~100-odd votes. Gore's gonna contest/sue until he can get another 500 pregnant chads outa here.
WTF's the other county that I forgot about?;-)
The Secretary of State certified the election a few days ago, and Gore sued (again), and the law which sets the date of the certification was essentially rewritten by the Florida State Supreme Court in order to give Gore another week to harvest votes. Bush is appealing, but probably won't win.
Which brings us to today.
Gore still hasn't find enough pregnant chads to steal the election, so he's gonna contest and sue everyone until he browbeats the courts into giving him yet more recounts.
Mr. Gore. Give it up. You've lost. Deal with it and come back in 2004 against a weakened Bush.
Just because your mentor Clinton was a sucker for Hollywood doesn't mean you have to be. Just because he taught you how to "always attack, never defend", or that "the purpose of a lawsuit is not to win, but to harass", or that the way to win a PR battle is by "dead-agenting" your enemies (e.g. what your boss did to smear the repuation of Kathleen Willey, among many others), doesn't mean you have to follow in his footsteps.
Stop acting like a $cientologist and be your own man, Mr. Vice-President. It really doesn't become you.
> Not that it matters for this case, but has anyone actually been able to make money because they
can track users bettter?
An advertiser is a guy who cons you into thinking that he can con your customer.
So yeah, Doublefuck and its ilk have made money selling the line about user-profiling, but the jury's still out as to whether Doublefuck's customers can make money with it.
Judging from what's happening to DCLK and TFSM and similar stocks, the market's got an opinion. IMHO it'll be amazing if these companies are still operational when the lawsuits are over with.
> They're not trying to track you so they can shop you to the FBI for visiting porn sites, they're just
making things better for you - partly because products are cheaper as it means decisions can be
made more accurately, and partly because it means you get what you want.
1) I decide what's "better for me". Not Doublefuck. When a marketer says it wants to "do you a favor", treat it like a government employee - grab your wallet and run like hell.
2) What prevents the Feds from issuing a subpoena to Doubleclick and (That other bunch of shitweasels they merged with in order to assign real-life identities to their cookie database, that got them in such trouble with the FTC), in much the same way they would with an ISP of a suspect?
> with doubleclick.net, you can easily OPT_OUT of their tracking stuff
I trust DoubleCross to respect my privacy even less than I trust Carnivore. At least the feebs don't get paid based on the number of citizens whose privacy they invade.
I didn't opt out, by the way - why the fuck should I opt out of something I never opted into?
And as for the argument that "you'll see advertising anyway, wouldn't you prefer it to be relevant to you rather than random?", please stop repeating the classic false-dichotomy tactic used by marketers.
If I'm not gonna click on their banners anyways - because (I know this is hard for the marketing mind to grasp) I read for the content, not the ads. So whether the ads are about goat sex or optimizing compilers, they're irrelevant either way.
At least by firewalling Doubleclick (at the router, with the Junkbuster proxy, or with the HOSTS file in Windoze, and maybe all three:-), the ads remain irrelevant, and they can't make money by selling my surfing habits against my will.
Nothing personal with respect to DoubleCross, you understand. The same goes for 24/7 Media, Exactis, and all the rest of the DMA shitweasels.
/me goes away, muttering something about AT&T telemarketers and wire brushes...
Like how to prevent the Feds from using it - to spec - but illegally.
Constructive suggestion: The device is placed under lock and key.
Two keys are required to open the case in which the device resides.
One of those keys is under the control of the ISP. You can think
of a "key" as either half of cryptographic key (for remote access
to Carnivore) or a physical key. Better yet, both.)
I don't mind an ISP rolling over for FBI in the face of a court
order. It's not a court request, it's a court order
after all! But I fear any system that denies my ISP the chance to
stand up to a Fed trying to use Carnivore without that
court order.
As of now, the only thing standing between my privacy and an FBI
gone berzerk is... well, the FBI.
If it ain't there, it can't be abused.
If Carnivore is there, and effective access controls (I
can't believe I'm using the term "effective access control"
with a straight face!), all we have to do is wait for them to realize
that IDE drives in removable cartridges are, gig-for-gig, the cheapest
storage solution around. In the name of "cost savings", the Jaz will
be phased out for a hard-drive-based solution. All of a sudden, the
media-size limitation on capture imposed by the use of the Jaz drive
is effectively eliminated.
(Note to self: Buy stocks in hard drive manufacturers if the Feds
decide to push for laws to legalize the move to 24/7 surveillance
and capture. And switch to end-to-end encryption if any single
hard drive manufacturer shows a doubling in revenue in a single
quarter on the grounds that they've decided to do it whether it's
been legalized or not.)
My paranoid fantasy for the day:
FBI's position:
It's OK to record SMTP headers (but not the DATA portion containing
the contents of an email) without a court order because "they're just like
the envelope of a letter".
The obvious extension:
"GET foo.html" is to HTTP as "To: foo@bar.com" is to SMTP.
It's therefore OK to record the GET portion of any HTTP transactions
without a court order as long as you don't dump the contents of the web
page being viewed.
>The first.exe checks your local settings, OS version and directories, [... ]
Cool - I'd never thought about that, figuring the installer would be "smart" enough to figure out where stuff would go, but for the plugins that may already exist on the system, it actually makes sense. Thanx for the clue.
> [if Gates = Satan, then Woz = heir-apparent to God... ] the original
Apple and Apple ][ encouraged a great deal of free software and home-brew computing.
One of my most prized "holy items" from the early days is a copy of the Apple ][ Programmer's Reference, complete with schematics and a fully-commented disassembly of its ROM.
OK, ya bunch of luzing turists, it's time to come clean.
If Silicon Valley isn't "mecca for geeks", I wanna know how many of you non-SV folks, when you came here for the first time - probably on a business trip or conference - didn't take a drive and get yer picture taken in front of the Nutscrape fountain.
C'mon. I know you're out there.
I'm not the only one who's done it, and I'm not the only one who's driven visiting friends to do it. So fess up.
/me raises hand.
(OK, I may be the only one dumb enough to admit it, but I know I'm not the only one who's done it.)
"Look. If you buy a piece of vinyl, but lose your record player, it's obvious you only paid for the vinyl, so you have to pay again if you want it on CD."
"But if you buy a series of bits from an online music site, it's obvious you only bought the right to listen to the music produced by the bits, so you have to pay again if you want to play them on another computer."
I mean, duh!
"Next thing you know, these open source types will start grumbling about this election thing in Florida, and come to some cockamamie conclusion like the current legal practice of 'fair is defined as that which scrapes up votes for our candidate and invalidates votes for our opponent' being a bad thing or something."
- smuggled tape of pillow talk between Hilary Rosen and Judge Kaplan, as taped by Jack Valenti
> > Does Joe Luzer want a standards-compliant browser
>
> Yes he does. He just don't know it. Mozilla is the chance to make real web apps, to turn the
web into a platform.
The market is littered with the corpses of companies that said "yes, Joe Luzer wants what we're building, he just doesn't know it yet."
> Rendering cnn.com correctly may be of some use today, but the fight is not for a browser, but
for a web platform.
Honestly, I hope you're right. But I think you're wrong.
Until it does what Joe Luzer wants, not what you think he should want, it'll continue to lose marketshare to IE:-(
> I would agree that IE is currently on top, but why must we agree that the browser war has ended?
Because the only people in this thread claiming that Mozilla is "faster" are people running it on non-Micros~1 platforms.
Every person I've seen, whether they like IE or not, has said it's a helluvalot faster than anything Netscape's released in living memory.
Galeon kicks ass - compared to NS4. But don't expect web designers to write standards-compliant HTML until Joe Luzer on a Windoze box has a reason to use anything other than IE.
And the pro-Mozilla comments I've seen in this thread don't exactly lead me to believe that "beating IE on Windoze" is a priority for any of them.
> If you don't want certain buttons, open the appropriate JAR file and change the XUL (e.g.
communicatorOverlay.xul). The button goes away.
I parse this as "We spent all this time doing the skinning and XML-fu so that you could turn off the chrome"
I got a idea. The user base never wanted a "development platform", they wanted a web browser.
How 'bout just writin' a web browser and not puttin' the chrome in there in the first place.
The only advantage I see to NS6 over NS4 is that it's easier to turn off the extra crap in NS6. Maybe if they'd spent more time writing a web browser and less time writing an extensible chrome display platform, they'd have ended up with a better browser.
The reason people are "bashing Mozilla" isn't because they're ungrateful, it's been three years and it still sucks harder than NS3.
(Or to put it another way - for those of us who just want a friggin' web browser that sucked less than NS3, what do we have to be thankful for?)
When was the last time an end user cared about standards-compliance, especially when standards-compliance means that many of the web pages they use on a daily basis will no longer render correctly?
> > [NS6 is bloatware]
> Users expect a certain minimum set of features.
That set is larger now than it was 2 years ago.
I guess what I was really getting at is best addressed by another response I have to the orignal post.
> > > Why can't we get people on Slashdot to talk about the REAL developer issues surrounding Mozilla instead
Why can't we get developers of Mozilla to talk about the real user issues surrounding Mozilla?
Or is Mozilla supposed to end up like Amaya - a useful testbed for standards compliance, but something which is never used by anyone?
(Yes, that's a gross overstatement, but there's a kernel of truth to it.)
You're right that users expect a certain minimum feature set. What I'm arguing is that the features the Netscape developers haven't considered their user base.
Who's served by Mozilla and NS6?
Advertisers in NS6.
Developers through the debugging code.
Developers through all the discussions on standards-compliance.
People who think XML is cool, not because of what it can do, but because it's XML.
Who's not served by Mozilla or NS6?
Users on Linux boxen who want something that renders their most commonly-referenced web pages anywhere near as fast as Konqueror, etc.
Users on Windoze boxen who want something that renders their most commonly-referenced web pages anywhere near as fast as IE.
Basically, anyone without an Athlon at 1.2 GHz and 256M of RAM.
Two years ago, it was possible for Netscape to say "We've written a better browser, and you web developers better code your web sites so our browser can render it".
Today, the balance of power has swung - rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly) - back to the web developers. Web developers don't care that NS6 is standards-compliant. And end users don't care either - the typical end user cares only that www.cnn.com renders. If it renders in IE and not NS, NS's market share will continue to diminish.
Ask yourself this: Does Joe Luzer want a standards-compliant browser (whatever that may mean:), or does he want something that they can use - today, not after the Glorious People's Revolution and All Web Pages are rewritten to conform with the spec - in place of IE?
> Or they think
Mozilla should run just fine on their 486/50's, and yelp "IT'S SLOW!" when it doesn't. In otherwords,
people who are completely uninformed, and wish to stay that way.:P
And just why shouldn't it run fine on a 486/50? NS3 did.
OK, so we're both exaggerating with that 486/50 crack, but isn't part of the point of open source that we can develop better software instead of bloatware?
I can understand "haha, u luzer, gotta upgr8d!" coming from Micros~1, who has a vested interest in making sure we all get on the upgrade treadmill with each revision of the OS and office suite - the corporate purchaser then purchases more Dells and Compaqs, and MSFT gets to sell more OS licenses.
But from the open source camp, I find that attitide to be disgusting.
Actually, on the tactics, we pretty much agree - the Republicans have done very poorly in terms of knowing when to request recounts, or in which counties.
About the only area on which we differ is "who squandered whose lead" during the campaign - this election was IMHO the Dems' to lose the day Bush got the nomination, and I'm amazed it wasn't a Dem landslide.
(And thanks for correcting me on whether the Dems actually sued Broward or not.)
On the subject of who's more likely to benefit from manual recounts, that's likely a function of whether the Optiscan or the punch-card system was used, and that varies on a county-by-county basis.
It appears from this report that it may be a moot point - my initial reading is that most of the punch-card counties are heavily-Democratic, and that Gore could therefore reasonably have been expected to win a statewide manual recount. (Background: My hunch is that the optiscan system is less subject to "valid, but uncounted vote" error, whereas the chad problem with punch cards has been rehashed time and again).
So that may be the real reason for the Republicans' initial and current reluctance (which we've both interpreted as a tactical error on their part) to call for hand recounts in heavily-Republican counties.
As for the guns and the fact that most of the world's population is scrounging for food instead of worrying about politics, true enough - though if you really wanna split hairs, India has a history of electoral violence, China probably would have civil unrest, except that their elections are pretty much open-and-shut cases, and most of the countries in Africa, where people arguably ought to be most concerned with eking out a living (and least about politics) has a long and bloody history of political unrest.
> When mozilla appears in a fully materialized and non-beta state, I am sure someone will kindly remove every reference
to Netscape's annoying web-services and their paid-for bookmarks.
s/When/Until/g
The problem with "Until" is that we're still waiting. For three fscking years.
And every one of those years has given IE more market share and marginalized Nutscrape.
I'll believe it when I see it.
And I'm someone who also prefers NS3 over NS4. It renders stuff twice as fast as NS4. And what I've seen out of Mozilla hasn't been encouraging in that regard either.
P.S. I preferred NS3 to NS4 because
NS3's its toolbar is narrower - no "My Netscape", no "Search" button - and why did "Security" have to be a menu button? My NS4 session has to take up over half the screen just to let me click "Stop"
Turning image-autoload on/off, enabling/disabling Java and Javashit are several mouse-clicks and moseovers faster in NS3 than NS4.
Until I see an offering from Nutscrape/Mozilla that makes it easier for me to turn off the spam than NS3, I'll remain skeptical.
>If Harris were a lawyer, she'd probably take this as a rebuke to her overstepping the bounds of her authority as
Secretary of State. Because she's a Republican partisan with limited experience, it probably went over her
head. I'll bet good money that the Republican legal team understood, though, and is hard at work coming up
for possible reasons to close the door on Palm Beach Co.'s manual recount.
(Emphasis mine, not the poster's, and the bulk of the poster's post is non-partisan; I emphasize this bit for a reason, which I'll get to in the second part of this post.)
Funny, I'll bet good money that the Democratic legal team understood too, and is hard at work coming up for excuses to sue the Secretary for "being arbitrary" should the (third!!!) recount go Gore's way and not be certified. They changed the definition of what constitutes a "voted" chad at least twice during the manual sample recount, and they've even sued Democratic Broward county officials for deciding that its vote was accurate enough and didn't need a manual recount.
Make no mistake - I firmly believe the Gore team intends to continue calling for recounts until it gets the result it wants, and if it hasn't won, it'll sue to get more recounts if the recounts it gets don't pan out.
> Like most lay observers, it seems that the person to whom we are replying ascribes motives to
the process of law. The best thing that judges can do is rule for legal consistency, not justice, not
cowardice, and certainly a pox on both your houses.
In a perfect world, I'd agree. It is not a perfect world. Which is why I (unfairly and out of context) highlighted the partisan chunk of your post.
The problem is that there are no non-partisans left - and if there are non-partisans, anyone who independently comes to any set of conclusions resembling either the Gore or Bush positions is indistinguishable from a partisan, so it doesn't matter.
(Tackhead's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently-advanced political thought in this debate is indistinguishable from partisan sniping";-)
There are no [detectable] non-partisans on the bench, on the street, or on Slashdot. You and I are part of the problem.
But as others have pointed out, it's a testament to the strength of our democracy that the protests on both sides have been lawful and peaceful. Damn near anywhere else in the world, people would be picking up guns.
But in America, we have enough faith in the process - even if it ends up being a bunch of lawyers in a steel cage death match - that we'll abide by its results, whether they're in favor of our preferred candidate or not. In that sense, we may be part of the problem, but we're all of the solution.
Dem-heavy Broward County's Dem-controlled commission decides their results aren't in error and decides not to do a full manual recount. Gore sues 'em to force it anyways. That's low, even for Gore.
Repubs:
For suing yesterday in a federal court regarding what's ostensibly a state matter.
The smartest character today is, IMHO, the judge in his ruling on today's 5pm deadline:
His ruling on the 5pm deadline is basically: "Yeah, she [the Secretary of State] can ignore late results" (Repubs happy because that's the law), "but not arbitrarily" (Dems happy because the judge has introduced ambiguity).
That's either the work of great cowardice ("Fuck, I don't wanna touch this!")...
... or wisdom of Solomonic proportions ("You two idjitz can't agree on who's [baby|election] this is? Fine, gimme a sword, we'll carve the [sprog|decision] in half and you can each have custody of your half. Now get the fsck out and don't talk to me until one of you does something that shows me who the real [mother|statesman] is.")
I'm not sure which of the two it is, but I have a hunch it's the latter.
> Interesting family outing. [... ] I know the Swiss army is largely composed of reservists, but what I don't get is how you can get to
drive an SPH out of the base, get civilians on it, and play funky games with it. If you're a Swiss reservist,
can you keep a tank or SPH in your garage? How does it work? Don't you get reprimanded for allowing
civilians near or in a military vehicle?
Great chocolate, great knives, and howitzers, oh my!
I don't know how it works either, but the day I find out, I'm on the next flight to Switzerland...
(Hey gang, next time, can ya show us what happens when you a 155mm shell meets a Packard-Bell at point-blank range?:-)
> Gore only called for hand counts in certain Democratic counties. That introduces
additional inaccuracies in the margin, which is what matters, since hand counting is biased towards
finding additional votes. The ONLY fair hand-recount is a statewide hand recount with uniform
standards (e.g. standards for dealing with chad), and where each ballot is handled a minimum number
of times (because this can loosen chad).
Agreed -- but with the caveat that each county should have used the same method when voting, so that the errors introduced by the voting/counting methodology were evenly distributed across the population.
Unfortunately, that was not the case in this election. Some counties used the Optiscan system (not subject to "chad" error), and others used punch cards (which, as we're painfully aware, are).
So any inaccuracies introduced by the hand-count (or rather, by the original vote, and possibly corrected by the hand count) are not evenly distributed among counties.
Depending on how you vote, this either unfairly skewed the election to Bush on November 7th, or it will skew the election to Gore in the days ahead as the hand recounts progress.
The time to have decided this was before the vote, when one's political leanings wouldn't have entered into the equation. Sadly, it's too late for that, which is why we're in this mess.
Quoted from a Canadian commentary (albeit a highly partisan
one in favor of Bush) on the subject:
But a hand count is all about the arcane art of chad divining.
The chad is the little bit of paper that gets punched out. It's held on in
four places, and who voted for whom depends on how many of those threads
need to be severed to constitute a vote. Maybe none needs to be severed,
as proponents of the "dimpled chad" (a slight indentation) argue. All we
know is that the count began by using a three-point severance as
the standard for an official vote. When it came to two-point severances,
officials were allowed to use their discretion as to which of these were
valid. But even that leeway wasn't enough. So, a quarter of the way
through, Ms. LePore switched to the "sunlight" test. In other words,
if you hold the ballot up and see light coming through at any point,
you are entitled to interpret that as a vote for whomsoever you perceive
the sun shineth. Alas, over in the Bush pile, it's a total eclipse. On
Saturday night, after a sample count of 1%, the Incredible Chad Diviners
had given the Vice-President a net gain of 19 votes. That's when Ms. LePore
chose to demand a full hand count. We are not in Florida or Kansas anymore:
We are in... Chad.
If (if!) this report (I see no substantiation here, and the article is extremely partisan, so I'm still classifying it as "rumor" - I'm sure if there's evidence for it, a Bush partisan will substantiate it:-) about the changing
of the standard between three-point severance to "sunlight" or the
"dimpled chad" partway through the recount turns out to be
true, it raises questions about the impartiality of the hand recount.
Back to my "standards" thread - this
Salon article points out that heavily-Republican counties use the
Optiscan system, which isn't subject to the "chad" issue. If true,
it appears that votes in Republican counties already "count" about
0.001% more than those in Democrat counties, and there's a legitimate
argument that Gore's calling for a hand-recount evens the score.
IMHO both the National Post and Salon articles (and the post to which I'm replying) constitute evidence that we need both a standard ballot
and a standard counting system.
(And that, Constitutionally, these standards should be set on a per-state basis, not the Federal level.)
> Another feature of the election system is that
it cannot be manipulated from a central point.
Again, a feature, not a bug. If all the voting
systems were the same [ bad juju if the Feds go rogue ]
Absolutely!
By calling for "standard ballots and recount processes", I was not counting for a single, Federally-mandated ballot/process.
Like I said in my first post - it's 51 state elections - each state should standardize its own process. My only concern is that 51 standards selected be uniform across each state.
I was certainly not calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. I guess I didn't make it clear that not only is "it's 51 elections" required by the Constitution, but that I believed the "51-ness" of the system is a feature, and not a bug.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I agree Gore had every right to ask for recounts in the four heavily-Dem counties, and Bush blew a chance by not calling for recounts in heavily-Republican counties.
But by last Wednesday, the deadline for calling for recounts had long passed, and Gore's offer was good PR, but technically illegal - in that there was no basis in law to ask for recounts of any counties other than "Gore's four" at the time the "offer" was extended.
BTW, I saw a web site that listed the counties, their machine-counts, and the type of voting technology used -- most of the heavily-Republican counties used the Optiscan system and would not have been subject to the "hanging chad" issue.
It's an accident of statistics that Gore's four preferred counties happen to be (a) heavily-populated, (b) heavily-Democratic, and (c) used the punch-card system. Only this combination of all three factors - lots of votes to recount, a high probability of any machine-unreadable vote being Democratic, and a relatively high proportion of machine-unreadable votes - could have given Gore the win.
Given the experimental errors (even in Optiscan counties), the legal errors (should overseas ballots without postmarks count? should dimpled chads count?), I'm not at all convinced I know who would have won a "fair" hand count of the entire state.
Sadly, the reality we must deal with is that there are no non-partisans left, and there's no such thing as a "fair" hand count.
Yet even the hand counts as performed and accepted by largely-Democratic canvassing boards showed a win for Bush. On the grounds that Gore had every statistical thing going for him, and won almost all the "legal breaks" that changed the vote count, and yet still managed to lose, I believe he should concede.
But the fact is that I don't know, and don't think anyone will ever "know", who "won" in Florida. The result was within the margin of error. There's no way to know.
The bottom line of this election is - and has always been - if you believe a dimpled/pregnant chad oughta be a vote (which it hasn't been in Florida for about 10 years), then you believe Gore won. If you don't, then you believe Bush won.
Gore has lost:
- Gore lost the original machine count, so he asked for a recount.
- He lost the machine recount, so he asked for recounts in four Democratic counties.
- Miami-Dade: Gave up, costing him 157 votes. He's sued them for certifying the results. Pending.
- Broward: Stopped, got sued, started again, recounted including pregnant chads. Gain of 500-odd votes.
- Palm Beach: Didn't count pregnant chads. Gain of ~100-odd votes. Gore's gonna contest/sue until he can get another 500 pregnant chads outa here.
- WTF's the other county that I forgot about?
;-)
- The Secretary of State certified the election a few days ago, and Gore sued (again), and the law which sets the date of the certification was essentially rewritten by the Florida State Supreme Court in order to give Gore another week to harvest votes. Bush is appealing, but probably won't win.
Which brings us to today.Mr. Gore. Give it up. You've lost. Deal with it and come back in 2004 against a weakened Bush.
Just because your mentor Clinton was a sucker for Hollywood doesn't mean you have to be. Just because he taught you how to "always attack, never defend", or that "the purpose of a lawsuit is not to win, but to harass", or that the way to win a PR battle is by "dead-agenting" your enemies (e.g. what your boss did to smear the repuation of Kathleen Willey, among many others), doesn't mean you have to follow in his footsteps.
Stop acting like a $cientologist and be your own man, Mr. Vice-President. It really doesn't become you.
An advertiser is a guy who cons you into thinking that he can con your customer.
So yeah, Doublefuck and its ilk have made money selling the line about user-profiling, but the jury's still out as to whether Doublefuck's customers can make money with it.
Judging from what's happening to DCLK and TFSM and similar stocks, the market's got an opinion. IMHO it'll be amazing if these companies are still operational when the lawsuits are over with.
1) I decide what's "better for me". Not Doublefuck. When a marketer says it wants to "do you a favor", treat it like a government employee - grab your wallet and run like hell.
2) What prevents the Feds from issuing a subpoena to Doubleclick and (That other bunch of shitweasels they merged with in order to assign real-life identities to their cookie database, that got them in such trouble with the FTC), in much the same way they would with an ISP of a suspect?
I trust DoubleCross to respect my privacy even less than I trust Carnivore. At least the feebs don't get paid based on the number of citizens whose privacy they invade.
I didn't opt out, by the way - why the fuck should I opt out of something I never opted into?
And as for the argument that "you'll see advertising anyway, wouldn't you prefer it to be relevant to you rather than random?", please stop repeating the classic false-dichotomy tactic used by marketers.
If I'm not gonna click on their banners anyways - because (I know this is hard for the marketing mind to grasp) I read for the content, not the ads. So whether the ads are about goat sex or optimizing compilers, they're irrelevant either way.
At least by firewalling Doubleclick (at the router, with the Junkbuster proxy, or with the HOSTS file in Windoze, and maybe all three :-), the ads remain irrelevant, and they can't make money by selling my surfing habits against my will.
Nothing personal with respect to DoubleCross, you understand. The same goes for 24/7 Media, Exactis, and all the rest of the DMA shitweasels.
Now tell us something we didn't know.
Like how to prevent the Feds from using it - to spec - but illegally.
Constructive suggestion: The device is placed under lock and key. Two keys are required to open the case in which the device resides. One of those keys is under the control of the ISP. You can think of a "key" as either half of cryptographic key (for remote access to Carnivore) or a physical key. Better yet, both.)
I don't mind an ISP rolling over for FBI in the face of a court order. It's not a court request, it's a court order after all! But I fear any system that denies my ISP the chance to stand up to a Fed trying to use Carnivore without that court order.
As of now, the only thing standing between my privacy and an FBI gone berzerk is... well, the FBI.
If it ain't there, it can't be abused.
If Carnivore is there, and effective access controls (I can't believe I'm using the term "effective access control" with a straight face!), all we have to do is wait for them to realize that IDE drives in removable cartridges are, gig-for-gig, the cheapest storage solution around. In the name of "cost savings", the Jaz will be phased out for a hard-drive-based solution. All of a sudden, the media-size limitation on capture imposed by the use of the Jaz drive is effectively eliminated.
(Note to self: Buy stocks in hard drive manufacturers if the Feds decide to push for laws to legalize the move to 24/7 surveillance and capture. And switch to end-to-end encryption if any single hard drive manufacturer shows a doubling in revenue in a single quarter on the grounds that they've decided to do it whether it's been legalized or not.)
My paranoid fantasy for the day:
FBI's position:
- It's OK to record SMTP headers (but not the DATA portion containing
the contents of an email) without a court order because "they're just like
the envelope of a letter".
The obvious extension:- "GET foo.html" is to HTTP as "To: foo@bar.com" is to SMTP.
- It's therefore OK to record the GET portion of any HTTP transactions
without a court order as long as you don't dump the contents of the web
page being viewed.
Watch where you click. If you don't, they will.Cool - I'd never thought about that, figuring the installer would be "smart" enough to figure out where stuff would go, but for the plugins that may already exist on the system, it actually makes sense. Thanx for the clue.
One of my most prized "holy items" from the early days is a copy of the Apple ][ Programmer's Reference, complete with schematics and a fully-commented disassembly of its ROM.
If you're reading this, thanks, Woz. You rule.
If Silicon Valley isn't "mecca for geeks", I wanna know how many of you non-SV folks, when you came here for the first time - probably on a business trip or conference - didn't take a drive and get yer picture taken in front of the Nutscrape fountain.
C'mon. I know you're out there. I'm not the only one who's done it, and I'm not the only one who's driven visiting friends to do it. So fess up.
(OK, I may be the only one dumb enough to admit it, but I know I'm not the only one who's done it.)
(Hey, you say that like it's a bad thing! :-)
"But if you buy a series of bits from an online music site, it's obvious you only bought the right to listen to the music produced by the bits, so you have to pay again if you want to play them on another computer."
I mean, duh!
"Next thing you know, these open source types will start grumbling about this election thing in Florida, and come to some cockamamie conclusion like the current legal practice of 'fair is defined as that which scrapes up votes for our candidate and invalidates votes for our opponent' being a bad thing or something."
- smuggled tape of pillow talk between Hilary Rosen and Judge Kaplan, as taped by Jack Valenti
That'd be ISPs using IP addresses in the ranges 1.0.0.0/8 through 255.0.0.0/8 inclusive ;-)
>
> Yes he does. He just don't know it. Mozilla is the chance to make real web apps, to turn the web into a platform.
The market is littered with the corpses of companies that said "yes, Joe Luzer wants what we're building, he just doesn't know it yet."
> Rendering cnn.com correctly may be of some use today, but the fight is not for a browser, but for a web platform.
Honestly, I hope you're right. But I think you're wrong.
Until it does what Joe Luzer wants, not what you think he should want, it'll continue to lose marketshare to IE :-(
Because the only people in this thread claiming that Mozilla is "faster" are people running it on non-Micros~1 platforms.
Every person I've seen, whether they like IE or not, has said it's a helluvalot faster than anything Netscape's released in living memory.
Galeon kicks ass - compared to NS4. But don't expect web designers to write standards-compliant HTML until Joe Luzer on a Windoze box has a reason to use anything other than IE.
And the pro-Mozilla comments I've seen in this thread don't exactly lead me to believe that "beating IE on Windoze" is a priority for any of them.
I parse this as "We spent all this time doing the skinning and XML-fu so that you could turn off the chrome"
I got a idea. The user base never wanted a "development platform", they wanted a web browser.
How 'bout just writin' a web browser and not puttin' the chrome in there in the first place.
The only advantage I see to NS6 over NS4 is that it's easier to turn off the extra crap in NS6. Maybe if they'd spent more time writing a web browser and less time writing an extensible chrome display platform, they'd have ended up with a better browser.
The reason people are "bashing Mozilla" isn't because they're ungrateful, it's been three years and it still sucks harder than NS3.
(Or to put it another way - for those of us who just want a friggin' web browser that sucked less than NS3, what do we have to be thankful for?)
When was the last time an end user cared about standards-compliance, especially when standards-compliance means that many of the web pages they use on a daily basis will no longer render correctly?
> Users expect a certain minimum set of features. That set is larger now than it was 2 years ago.
I guess what I was really getting at is best addressed by another response I have to the orignal post.
> > > Why can't we get people on Slashdot to talk about the REAL developer issues surrounding Mozilla instead
Why can't we get developers of Mozilla to talk about the real user issues surrounding Mozilla?
Or is Mozilla supposed to end up like Amaya - a useful testbed for standards compliance, but something which is never used by anyone?
(Yes, that's a gross overstatement, but there's a kernel of truth to it.)
You're right that users expect a certain minimum feature set. What I'm arguing is that the features the Netscape developers haven't considered their user base.
Who's served by Mozilla and NS6?
- Advertisers in NS6.
- Developers through the debugging code.
- Developers through all the discussions on standards-compliance.
- People who think XML is cool, not because of what it can do, but because it's XML.
Who's not served by Mozilla or NS6?Two years ago, it was possible for Netscape to say "We've written a better browser, and you web developers better code your web sites so our browser can render it".
Today, the balance of power has swung - rightly or wrongly (and I think wrongly) - back to the web developers. Web developers don't care that NS6 is standards-compliant. And end users don't care either - the typical end user cares only that www.cnn.com renders. If it renders in IE and not NS, NS's market share will continue to diminish.
Ask yourself this: Does Joe Luzer want a standards-compliant browser (whatever that may mean :), or does he want something that they can use - today, not after the Glorious People's Revolution and All Web Pages are rewritten to conform with the spec - in place of IE?
And just why shouldn't it run fine on a 486/50? NS3 did.
OK, so we're both exaggerating with that 486/50 crack, but isn't part of the point of open source that we can develop better software instead of bloatware?
I can understand "haha, u luzer, gotta upgr8d!" coming from Micros~1, who has a vested interest in making sure we all get on the upgrade treadmill with each revision of the OS and office suite - the corporate purchaser then purchases more Dells and Compaqs, and MSFT gets to sell more OS licenses.
But from the open source camp, I find that attitide to be disgusting.
About the only area on which we differ is "who squandered whose lead" during the campaign - this election was IMHO the Dems' to lose the day Bush got the nomination, and I'm amazed it wasn't a Dem landslide.
(And thanks for correcting me on whether the Dems actually sued Broward or not.)
On the subject of who's more likely to benefit from manual recounts, that's likely a function of whether the Optiscan or the punch-card system was used, and that varies on a county-by-county basis.
It appears from this report that it may be a moot point - my initial reading is that most of the punch-card counties are heavily-Democratic, and that Gore could therefore reasonably have been expected to win a statewide manual recount. (Background: My hunch is that the optiscan system is less subject to "valid, but uncounted vote" error, whereas the chad problem with punch cards has been rehashed time and again).
So that may be the real reason for the Republicans' initial and current reluctance (which we've both interpreted as a tactical error on their part) to call for hand recounts in heavily-Republican counties.
As for the guns and the fact that most of the world's population is scrounging for food instead of worrying about politics, true enough - though if you really wanna split hairs, India has a history of electoral violence, China probably would have civil unrest, except that their elections are pretty much open-and-shut cases, and most of the countries in Africa, where people arguably ought to be most concerned with eking out a living (and least about politics) has a long and bloody history of political unrest.
s/When/Until/g
The problem with "Until" is that we're still waiting. For three fscking years.
And every one of those years has given IE more market share and marginalized Nutscrape.
I'll believe it when I see it.
And I'm someone who also prefers NS3 over NS4. It renders stuff twice as fast as NS4. And what I've seen out of Mozilla hasn't been encouraging in that regard either.
P.S. I preferred NS3 to NS4 because
NS3's its toolbar is narrower - no "My Netscape", no "Search" button - and why did "Security" have to be a menu button? My NS4 session has to take up over half the screen just to let me click "Stop"
Turning image-autoload on/off, enabling/disabling Java and Javashit are several mouse-clicks and moseovers faster in NS3 than NS4.
Until I see an offering from Nutscrape/Mozilla that makes it easier for me to turn off the spam than NS3, I'll remain skeptical.
"I don't know if it's porn, but I know what I like!"
(Emphasis mine, not the poster's, and the bulk of the poster's post is non-partisan; I emphasize this bit for a reason, which I'll get to in the second part of this post.)
Funny, I'll bet good money that the Democratic legal team understood too, and is hard at work coming up for excuses to sue the Secretary for "being arbitrary" should the (third!!!) recount go Gore's way and not be certified. They changed the definition of what constitutes a "voted" chad at least twice during the manual sample recount, and they've even sued Democratic Broward county officials for deciding that its vote was accurate enough and didn't need a manual recount.
Make no mistake - I firmly believe the Gore team intends to continue calling for recounts until it gets the result it wants, and if it hasn't won, it'll sue to get more recounts if the recounts it gets don't pan out.
> Like most lay observers, it seems that the person to whom we are replying ascribes motives to the process of law. The best thing that judges can do is rule for legal consistency, not justice, not cowardice, and certainly a pox on both your houses.
In a perfect world, I'd agree. It is not a perfect world. Which is why I (unfairly and out of context) highlighted the partisan chunk of your post.
The problem is that there are no non-partisans left - and if there are non-partisans, anyone who independently comes to any set of conclusions resembling either the Gore or Bush positions is indistinguishable from a partisan, so it doesn't matter.
(Tackhead's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently-advanced political thought in this debate is indistinguishable from partisan sniping" ;-)
There are no [detectable] non-partisans on the bench, on the street, or on Slashdot. You and I are part of the problem.
But as others have pointed out, it's a testament to the strength of our democracy that the protests on both sides have been lawful and peaceful. Damn near anywhere else in the world, people would be picking up guns.
But in America, we have enough faith in the process - even if it ends up being a bunch of lawyers in a steel cage death match - that we'll abide by its results, whether they're in favor of our preferred candidate or not. In that sense, we may be part of the problem, but we're all of the solution.
Repubs:
The smartest character today is, IMHO, the judge in his ruling on today's 5pm deadline:
His ruling on the 5pm deadline is basically: "Yeah, she [the Secretary of State] can ignore late results" (Repubs happy because that's the law), "but not arbitrarily" (Dems happy because the judge has introduced ambiguity).
- That's either the work of great cowardice ("Fuck, I don't wanna touch this!")...
- ... or wisdom of Solomonic proportions ("You two idjitz can't agree on who's [baby|election] this is? Fine, gimme a sword, we'll carve the [sprog|decision] in half and you can each have custody of your half. Now get the fsck out and don't talk to me until one of you does something that shows me who the real [mother|statesman] is.")
I'm not sure which of the two it is, but I have a hunch it's the latter.Great chocolate, great knives, and howitzers, oh my!
I don't know how it works either, but the day I find out, I'm on the next flight to Switzerland...
(Hey gang, next time, can ya show us what happens when you a 155mm shell meets a Packard-Bell at point-blank range? :-)
Agreed -- but with the caveat that each county should have used the same method when voting, so that the errors introduced by the voting/counting methodology were evenly distributed across the population.
Unfortunately, that was not the case in this election. Some counties used the Optiscan system (not subject to "chad" error), and others used punch cards (which, as we're painfully aware, are).
So any inaccuracies introduced by the hand-count (or rather, by the original vote, and possibly corrected by the hand count) are not evenly distributed among counties.
Depending on how you vote, this either unfairly skewed the election to Bush on November 7th, or it will skew the election to Gore in the days ahead as the hand recounts progress.
The time to have decided this was before the vote, when one's political leanings wouldn't have entered into the equation. Sadly, it's too late for that, which is why we're in this mess.
Quoted from a Canadian commentary (albeit a highly partisan one in favor of Bush) on the subject:
If (if!) this report (I see no substantiation here, and the article is extremely partisan, so I'm still classifying it as "rumor" - I'm sure if there's evidence for it, a Bush partisan will substantiate it :-) about the changing
of the standard between three-point severance to "sunlight" or the
"dimpled chad" partway through the recount turns out to be
true, it raises questions about the impartiality of the hand recount.
Back to my "standards" thread - this Salon article points out that heavily-Republican counties use the Optiscan system, which isn't subject to the "chad" issue. If true, it appears that votes in Republican counties already "count" about 0.001% more than those in Democrat counties, and there's a legitimate argument that Gore's calling for a hand-recount evens the score.
IMHO both the National Post and Salon articles (and the post to which I'm replying) constitute evidence that we need both a standard ballot and a standard counting system.
(And that, Constitutionally, these standards should be set on a per-state basis, not the Federal level.)
Absolutely!
By calling for "standard ballots and recount processes", I was not counting for a single, Federally-mandated ballot/process.
Like I said in my first post - it's 51 state elections - each state should standardize its own process. My only concern is that 51 standards selected be uniform across each state.
I was certainly not calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. I guess I didn't make it clear that not only is "it's 51 elections" required by the Constitution, but that I believed the "51-ness" of the system is a feature, and not a bug.