Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Moreover it does no good to have voter verified paper trails in your own precint if florida or california lacks them. That paper trail only secures your one vote. You want everyone elses secure too as errors elsewhere swamp your measly vote.
So rant to the persons who could actually do something about this: the head of NASED the organization that sets voting machine standards is Denise Lamb and the head of the National Association of Secretaries of state is Rebecca Vigil-giron. Tell them you are a professional programmer and give them your candid opinion about the need for voter verified paper trails. Currently they are outspoken in nation wide advocacy agains adding paper trails to touch screen voting.
I cant speak for the florida machines. But here in new mexico the programming of logic packs for optical scan machines is awarded to a contractor. This tells me that while the programming method may be propietary its not secret; there is more than one contractor.
You are right that simply discarding votes is a less serious problem than systematic errors that bias a count one direction.
but that's were the logic ends.
first let's consider the statistical fluctuations that might be present in 13,000 votes chosen at random from a larger set.
If the votes were 50:50 for either candidate then in the variance of 13,000 cast ballots the outcome would be about fluctuate by 50 votes, or a difference bewteen the two candidates of 100 votes. That's the average deviation from the true average the actual deviation would be much higher. If more than one candidate is running, lets say nader is getting 10% of the votes, then the statistical fluctuation in naders total would be about 32 votes with those missing votes not equaly distributed among the other candidates.
Second, this is one precint in one county in florida. it's literally an island. One shoul dave ZERO expectation that its average demographics and voting pattern represents the state average.
Far from misleading the title is accurate. In most states its illegal to open an optical scan ballot box and recount without a court order. The votes are counted using a programable computing device. the good thing is that it's a rather dumb device, closer to your washing machine in general programmability. but it's still electroinc voting.
the good news is that there is paper trail. It can be secured, and it can be recounted.
It also shows the importance of spot checking paper trails. What if this error had not been so blaringly obvious? Who would ever know. Since its not routine practice (its illegal) to recount paper ballots there would not be any way to know.
hence we need paper trails and we need to spot check them.
Re:Nader's place is in the Democratic primary
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Pre-Election Discussion
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· Score: 2, Informative
Our system of voting is inherently two-party freindly for a reason. In parilmentary systems the compromise occurs after the election when a government is formed. in the US system, the compromises happen at the primary election. The goal of small parties should be either to grow or to get their positions assimilated by one or more of the candidates in the primary. In the general elections small parties have no bussniess being there (with the possible exception of 1) they credibly could become a major party or 2) if they think it will help get their position assimilated. ).
hence nader is crazy and deserves a kick in the ass. I often vote green in New Mexico because in NM local polotics greens do win. they are a growing party. But people like Nader ruin it for the greens by creating a spoiler image.
New mexico, despite being small, may well be the 2nd most important state in the nation on the electronic voting issue. (california being the first with its financial clout). The reason New Mexico is so critical is that the head of NASED is also the election director. NASED is the shell organization formed by the vendor lobby org electioncenter.org to rubber stamp the approval of all voting machines. When some one says a machine is "federally certified" this is a polite fiction: there is no federal certification process, there are only voluntary guidelines and if a machine meets these guidelines as discerened by a private contractor (wyles testing, Cyber, or Systest are the only three) then NASED gives it a gold star. Thes guidelines are woefully inadequate and test more for whether the machine will catch fire than if its follows proper coding practices (e.g. dont use floats for the vote total, or allow negative vote numbers (as happened in the bit-flip error that created -16,324 votes for al gore in florida).
That's what "federally certified means". NADA. And denise lamb is the one who does this to you (denise.lamb@state.nm.us).
Denise is a rabid, machines-can-do-no-wrong political animal, logig means nothing to her, so lying to achive an agenda is simply machivelian to her. In fact she makes up lies about the machines and tells people for example that all paper trails would be printed on 1.5 inch wide ribbons of tissue paper. (no I'm not making this up, I've saw her demo before the ACLU.).
If that were not enough, we have a Secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron who if you look on "followthemoney,org" you will see takes not only corporate donations from vendors but also personal ones. She is also head of the NAtional association of secretaries of state and issues policy reccomendations to all the others SOS. About half of her $500,000 budget comes in "gifts" from machine vendors.
So you can see that if New Mexico has a problem then the whole united states has a problem
I urge you to write Denise Lamb denise.lamb@state.nm.us and tell her you are a professional programmer and give her your candid opinion. And while you are at it ask her to mail you one of those noodle voting tapes she had made up--she hands out copies.
Slashdot-Drive is a Shell Namespace Extension that creates a virtual filesystem around your Slashdot login, allowing you to use Slashdot as a storage medium. Slashdot-Drive creates a virtual filesystem on top of your Slashdot account using a combination of the read-write Journal pages and the unlimited write-once comment fields. Slashdot-drive enables you to save and retrieve files stored on your Slashdot account directly from inside Windows Explorer. Slashdot-Drive literally adds a new drive to your computer under the My Computer folder, where you can create new folders, copy and drag'n'drop files to.
It offers high availability, and unlimited amounts of file storage.
Slashdot-drive uses hundreds of slash-dot logins mappens in a raid-0/raid-1 fashion to assure low latency and redundancy in case you are discovered. In the event an account is locked or deleted, SLASHDOT drive automaticaly rebuilds lost raid partiions in new accounts.
Data is stored in ascii-mapping or using the optional stealth-mode which decreaces storage density but improves undetectability by using phrases taken from other posts to encode a data stream,
The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish and causing OSDN to bear unacceptable server costs. But who cares becaue you are an arrogant prick
I used to use reptrspect for my personal backup, Not a distributed systetm. I used it on tapes. then I switched to DVD-Ram. One day I tried to restore from DVD ram and found restrospect could not recover. on of the DVDs it had written was unreadable. because this was a differential series of backups that one dvd corrupted meant all dvds after that could not be used.
so far this is not retropects fault as any differential backup syste has this weak link. But what pissed me off was that I could not get the program to let me revert to an earlier backup and then try to partly recover files from the more recent and readable disks. on a good system I should have been able to recover what was recoverable, not just lose it all because one earlier disk could not be read.
So that was the last time I used it. No instead I only do backward diffs not forward diffs. This way the most recent version is always the most easily recovered without having wad back through old disks. And I only store my backup files in native file format. That way if all goes wrong I can use any operating system that can read the disks to get back my files. I'm not beholden to one company's program and it's limitations.
The money I saved on retrospect went into buying large firewire drive for the reverse diffs and then I only use DVDs now for archiving the ancient reverse diffs as my firewire drive fills up. Who needs retrospect.
Perhaps if I still used tape drives I'd want to use retrospect.
First let me say that I do support ranked voting schemes for Instant run-off type voting. However I want to address the usual bull that these systems are more optimal than the system we have in place.
There supposed advantage of IRV is that its a more of a grey scal e vote that allows voters to vote for a wider spectrum of candidates without worrying about voting for a spoiler. It supposedly remedies the complaint that we have a bistable system that only supports two parties.
In actual fact there is no evidence that a bistable system is bad. Indeed the entire point of our electoral system in that the winning person enters witha strong mandate to govern, not be voted in as the lesser of multiple evils as a third choice candidate everyone could agree upon. You want a candidate that can enter office and govern with a single uncompromoised point of view for an effective period of time. You get the balance between point of views ergodically over time not by having a compromise up front. There is an old sayng that there is the right way, the wrong way and the army way. Its a joke and a truth. What it means is that in war waiting for the perfectly thought out plan is not effective--its better to have an acceptable plan than none at all even it it sometimes is couter productive in specific instances.
one can contrast and compare our 2-party system with another gray scale system: parlimentary systems. in parlimentary systems there is more of a grey scale of representation, however that is not how the voting occurs. What happens is that a consenus coalition forms a govenrment and rules with complete authority. compromise happens only within the coalition not the entire body of elected officials. So once again a strong leadership emerges and can govern effectively. In our system the same sorts of intra-organizational consensus happens but it happens at an earlier stage. If the greens get too powerful the democrats move to co-opt their positions. That might piss off the greens as a party but basically it means the greens won if your opponents adopt your platform issues. So assimilation at an early stage replaces overt inter-party consensus at the end stage. In some ways this is better. For example, a single issue minor party that joins a parlimentary consenus can in return giving up all other issues create disporotionate havoc if it does not get its way on its single issue, say mandatory prayer in schools. In contrast a two party system is less beholden to fringe elements.
A final system is our electoral college. Many people mistakenly believe it somphow is wrong that someone could win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. Wrong. To govern effectively a president has to be able to pass bills in both the house and the senate. there is a deliberate small-state bias in the senate. Therefore the best candidate for president is not the most popular one but the one whose popularity is spread out over the greatest number of states. willing a large popular vote in CA, NY, Ohio, texas and florida might win the popular vote but would make for an awful presidency. the person who is favored by in more states is actually going to be able to work more effectively with congress.
SO basically, while I support IRV systems because I like the idea of getting more diversity in candidates, I also recognize that it is not gaurentteed to produce a more stable or more representative or more efffective from of government.
GoDaddy seems like agood deal but it's not. If you use their masked domain forwarding mode to forward the domain to your host you can only forward a single page!!! yes that's right you can only forward index.html. if you try to do something like
myMaskedDomain.com/sublevel/page.html
what happens is goDaddy's asinine servers resolve this as
Godaddy.com/sublevel/page.html
which, since there is no sublevel on the godaddy server. so it breaks. you can only forward a specific page on the top level of your domain. no one can link to it.
next the way they do masked forwarding is simmilar to how most people do it, with an embedded frame html. However their HTML is faulty. for reasons I have not determined most macintosh browsers dont quite handle it right. Specifically if someone tries to print your page what comes out is different then what you see on screen. Its related to the way the frame is being displayed but its not obvious why this happens. But its a fact.
Only recently has the go-daddy webpage itself started working well with Safari. up until recently to edit your setting you had to pull up internet explorer to be able to view the web page features.
Finally their customer service is among the worst I have ever experienced. You never get any resolution and the people must be retarded since they always seem to send you out a boiler plate response taken from their FAQ to a different question than the one you asked. You cant get them on the phone. and you never get a resolution to your problem.
Contrast this to NameZero.com which cost twice as much as goDaddy but you get personal replys promptly from experts, usually the same person, till your problem is resolved. After the go-daddy experience, paying $10 more per year not to waste my time wasa relief. the tech support explanations are clear and they are able to speak in expert terms for experts and simple terms for newbies. the masked domain forwarding works for all subdirectories on your host and the frame html renders correctly on all browsers I have tried.
How will you stream data at such a huge rate when network bandwidth avilablity is very low compared to data stor
do we have gigabyte per second data links right now? yes. so just make the delay from the pre-message as large as need be to assure no plausible storage device will work.
Finally if this delay approaches the speed of decryption then stack the encrypted message with another layer of encryption inside.
if that is still not good enough then send the mathematical algorithm in english for decrypting the second message encrypted in the first--this gaurentees a human has to write a program to do the second decryption since no computer could actuall decipher it. for example inside the first RSA encrypted message I simply write the following message "at the end of this sentence you will find a message that has been encrypted in rot12 and then added usung chinese arithmatic to the text on page 11 of the novel "the key to rebecca"'. that will take a human a while to write a program to solve this.
Its possible to generate random data by technical means not just pseudo random data. for example radioactive decay events or dark noise on a ccd array. Or point a photodiode or video camera at a any fast chaotic process (e.g. a waterfall) and record the data. I beleive VIA is coming out with chips with onboard physics based random number generators.
Well I guess its just back to security through obscurity.
A while back there was a proposal to have a public onetime pad system that worked like this. there is a server, perhaps a sattelite, that is streaming random numbers at say gigabytes per second. To encode a message you weakly encrypt a prior message to the recipient telling him a precise start time: say the message reads: start colleting your onetime pad at the first occurence of the first 5 digits of the number pi that come after 12 noon. you both then collect the data that comes at that time and treat ti as a shared one time pad.
you opponents may be able to decrypt the pre-message eventually but not it time to make the start time. thus they cant collect the onetime pad data. the data rate of the random stream is chosen so that no plausible storage system could retain more than say a few hours worth of the data, so no one could just record it all. As long as no one can crack your message on that time scale you can dsafely send the one time pad whihc no one can crack by technical means.
This is like the florida Drug search roadblocks
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Is That Pirated Software?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
In florida, the sheriff's were putting put signs that said "drug search roadblock ahead". There actually was no real roadblock. instead they watched for anyone who crossed the median and headed back the other direction. they busted those folks.
I bet microsoft is watching IP addresses. If they see you turn around and leave when confronted they make a note. If they see a cluster from some company then the BSA will get a phone call. Obviously no one with pirated software and a brain is going to let them search. But of course it might uncover some cases of "shared" software between several computers.
The purpose of science fiction as opposed to say historical fiction, dramatic fiction or fantasy fiction is NOT about futurology. Well of course it can be just that and some of its is pretty cool and probably what appeals to the geek crowd.
but as a place in literature SCI fi is a context for decontextualization! It is a platform on which you can strip and re-arrange a society and see what happens when new rules are present. It allows you to make an imaginative metaphor and make it a physical possiblity. Then analyze its workings or if nothing else drive a plot.
To pick a favorite of slashdot, consider the movie blade runner which most people mistakenly believe is an updated "do androids dream of electric sheep". In fact its the merger with a second Philip K Dick book, "the man in the high castle". The plot is from "electric sheep" but the society is from "high castle". To me the two most interesting parts of the movie are never actaully stated in the movie. First this is earth after all the vibrant heathly best and brightest have left. The future is space and what remains on earth are those who cannot leave. The buildings where the ordinary folks live are mostly empty from the population drain and decaying. The markets have become asian bazarres where all is for sale and the passges tight and twisty and everyone is hustling. there is sense of just hanging on and hustling for thenext day but not a lot of prospects for advancement through career. How would this be like to live in? ridely scott decided the closest thing we had here was the Noir era so thats how he shot it. The other question the movie asks--which is pure philip K dick- was what it the nature of reality. As I drone on on this world how do I know I'm even human. The scene where harrison ford alone tinkles on the piano keys and stars at his own photographs has no words but you realize he is questioning his own human ness. could he ba a machine too or is humanness the sum of your memories and your struggle to live on. Whether or not fords character was intended to be actualy human or actually an android is moot to that issue.
the point is that SCI fi allowed the world to be stripped of certain thngs we take for granted that frame 90% of our lives. Going to school to succeed for example probably has occupied most slashdotters. But why bother in that world? Here was a man living in a world where the only people left either had no sense fo purpose--merely existance-- or were impaired in other ways and left behind to make the best their talents. we can ask what drives us, and what makes us humans in such contexts?
that is sci fi.
or it can be simple metaphors come to life like in startrek and the classic episode of the two races of people who are both half black and half white and hate each other for it. Or THX1138 where drug evasion is a crime and the masses must be contented. If you ever read bradubury's epilouge to 451 then you know his themes were the rise of political correctness leading to a society where anyhting confrontational is a crime. books and the effect they have on the mind had to be stopped. SCI fi let him take this to the extreme and create this contenment society. of course the whole plot and action is a consequence of a dissident act. but the context it what makes it interesting.
That is the beauty of sci-fi. its decontextualization of our own society so we can see it for what it it. It is in fact the closets thing to the POP art movement I can think of. Andy Warhols Soup can was art because itrecontextualized an ordinary object and made us think about how it and its design came to be and what it means to us when something so nromally invisble becomes the dominant theme.. Its not really possible to do that in traditionl fiction which build characters who live in real world with our normal rules.
According to cnet, this affects Redhat, mandrake, mac OS X and sun but not Microsoft (who wrote their own implementation). The problem is a Double-freee which is when the same memory block is freed twice. Not quite sure how that happens or how it leads to insecurity. But apparently done properly this allows arbitrary user access but is hard to exploit.
would some one explain what kerberos does and how it works? and how one exploits a double-free?
Also they made the dvd slot veritical. This is interesting because when jobs introduced the last imac he made a big deal about the design. He specifically said the reason the computer was in the base and not in the screen was because they did not want to compromise on the dvd. He specifically said that veritcal mount DVDs aren't as reliable or as fast. what changed?
I was expecting to see basically this design but with the dvd in the base.
to set this up, start by making a hardlink copy on each computers's disk of the entrie disk:
su root find / | cpio -dpl/image
this creates an (almost) no space occupying duplicate of your current disk in the subdirectory/image. Note dont do this twice in a row without adding flags to find to skip the image dir!
Next when you want to push a new image simply mount the remote disk (without roosquash) and do a differential copy of the new image to the old image directory using rsyncX or rdiffbackup or psync or whatever.
finally on each remote machine when you are ready to actually do the update, mv the / directory to old_system, mv the/image directory to/, mv back the/Users directory and reboot.
you dont actually double the disk space needed this way. the disk space only grows when you change files, the bulk of the rest that are unchanged live and single copies with hard links.
I love this sound-bite that WMA oe windows media is somehow more "open" and gives you more "choices". No it gives you one choice MS software and MS sanctioned music outlets.
THink about it. IN the long run which are you going to spend more money on, the player or the music. The music. do really want to save 30 bucks buying a rio or a whatever to play your MS locked in music. Or do you want the best you can get. freedom is overated I think.
More than digital signatures are needed. There has to be feedback to the soldier that his vote was cast and counted at the central polling place. There is a technology that can do this from the company "vote here" which allows the voter to call in later and check that their vote was recieved unchanged without actually telling them the vote (basically it tells them an encrypted checksum that cant be reversed to reveal the vote even by brute force). This does not prevent the client computer casting the ballot from making a mistake or being corrupted malicously or otherwise. But it does solve the transmisson and feedback problem. I oppose this tehcnology for general public use (favoring paper trails due to their ability ot be recounted) but for soldiers overseas prompt ballot collection may take priority over recountability since the risk is greater that your ballot wont be counted at all than it will be miscounted.
I stored a copy of firefox on my SLASHDOT_FS. then I launched this firefox application , went to slashdot, now am posting this comment using the firefox app I'm running of my SLASHDOT_FS.
I have to admit the write-latency is bad so I have ot keep the cache on my local disk. (I get around the 120 second post rate liit by having 10,000 different slashdot accounts). But the read time is quite good.
Slashdot Mirror
vvnm.org/resources/florida2004/florida_vote_patter ns.htm
Yes the patterns show a strong significance. it screams at you.
The conclusion is not what you are expecting though.
1) First Bush Won Florida On optical scan machines, kerry won on e-voting
2) e-voting agreed with the exit polls, optical scan did not
3) The key finding of the above article is that people vote DIFFERENTLY on optical scan and e-Voting.
THIS LAST FACTOR IS HUGELY IMPORTANT!!!! Assuming No hanky panky is involoved this may be due to the human-machine interface--a factor that has gone unexplored.
Moreover it does no good to have voter verified paper trails in your own precint if florida or california lacks them. That paper trail only secures your one vote. You want everyone elses secure too as errors elsewhere swamp your measly vote.
So rant to the persons who could actually do something about this: the head of NASED the organization that sets voting machine standards is Denise Lamb and the head of the National Association of Secretaries of state is Rebecca Vigil-giron. Tell them you are a professional programmer and give them your candid opinion about the need for voter verified paper trails. Currently they are outspoken in nation wide advocacy agains adding paper trails to touch screen voting.
I cant speak for the florida machines. But here in new mexico the programming of logic packs for optical scan machines is awarded to a contractor. This tells me that while the programming method may be propietary its not secret; there is more than one contractor.
but that's were the logic ends.
first let's consider the statistical fluctuations that might be present in 13,000 votes chosen at random from a larger set. If the votes were 50:50 for either candidate then in the variance of 13,000 cast ballots the outcome would be about fluctuate by 50 votes, or a difference bewteen the two candidates of 100 votes. That's the average deviation from the true average the actual deviation would be much higher. If more than one candidate is running, lets say nader is getting 10% of the votes, then the statistical fluctuation in naders total would be about 32 votes with those missing votes not equaly distributed among the other candidates.
Second, this is one precint in one county in florida. it's literally an island. One shoul dave ZERO expectation that its average demographics and voting pattern represents the state average.
the good news is that there is paper trail. It can be secured, and it can be recounted.
It also shows the importance of spot checking paper trails. What if this error had not been so blaringly obvious? Who would ever know. Since its not routine practice (its illegal) to recount paper ballots there would not be any way to know.
hence we need paper trails and we need to spot check them.
hence nader is crazy and deserves a kick in the ass. I often vote green in New Mexico because in NM local polotics greens do win. they are a growing party. But people like Nader ruin it for the greens by creating a spoiler image.
That's what "federally certified means". NADA. And denise lamb is the one who does this to you (denise.lamb@state.nm.us).
Denise is a rabid, machines-can-do-no-wrong political animal, logig means nothing to her, so lying to achive an agenda is simply machivelian to her. In fact she makes up lies about the machines and tells people for example that all paper trails would be printed on 1.5 inch wide ribbons of tissue paper. (no I'm not making this up, I've saw her demo before the ACLU.).
If that were not enough, we have a Secretary of state, Rebecca Vigil-Giron who if you look on "followthemoney,org" you will see takes not only corporate donations from vendors but also personal ones. She is also head of the NAtional association of secretaries of state and issues policy reccomendations to all the others SOS. About half of her $500,000 budget comes in "gifts" from machine vendors.
So you can see that if New Mexico has a problem then the whole united states has a problem
I urge you to write Denise Lamb denise.lamb@state.nm.us and tell her you are a professional programmer and give her your candid opinion. And while you are at it ask her to mail you one of those noodle voting tapes she had made up--she hands out copies.
It offers high availability, and unlimited amounts of file storage.
Slashdot-drive uses hundreds of slash-dot logins mappens in a raid-0/raid-1 fashion to assure low latency and redundancy in case you are discovered. In the event an account is locked or deleted, SLASHDOT drive automaticaly rebuilds lost raid partiions in new accounts.
Data is stored in ascii-mapping or using the optional stealth-mode which decreaces storage density but improves undetectability by using phrases taken from other posts to encode a data stream,
The downside is that it essentially destroys a useful public good by filling its pages with gibberish and causing OSDN to bear unacceptable server costs. But who cares becaue you are an arrogant prick
so far this is not retropects fault as any differential backup syste has this weak link. But what pissed me off was that I could not get the program to let me revert to an earlier backup and then try to partly recover files from the more recent and readable disks. on a good system I should have been able to recover what was recoverable, not just lose it all because one earlier disk could not be read.
So that was the last time I used it. No instead I only do backward diffs not forward diffs. This way the most recent version is always the most easily recovered without having wad back through old disks. And I only store my backup files in native file format. That way if all goes wrong I can use any operating system that can read the disks to get back my files. I'm not beholden to one company's program and it's limitations.
The money I saved on retrospect went into buying large firewire drive for the reverse diffs and then I only use DVDs now for archiving the ancient reverse diffs as my firewire drive fills up. Who needs retrospect.
Perhaps if I still used tape drives I'd want to use retrospect.
There supposed advantage of IRV is that its a more of a grey scal e vote that allows voters to vote for a wider spectrum of candidates without worrying about voting for a spoiler. It supposedly remedies the complaint that we have a bistable system that only supports two parties.
In actual fact there is no evidence that a bistable system is bad. Indeed the entire point of our electoral system in that the winning person enters witha strong mandate to govern, not be voted in as the lesser of multiple evils as a third choice candidate everyone could agree upon. You want a candidate that can enter office and govern with a single uncompromoised point of view for an effective period of time. You get the balance between point of views ergodically over time not by having a compromise up front. There is an old sayng that there is the right way, the wrong way and the army way. Its a joke and a truth. What it means is that in war waiting for the perfectly thought out plan is not effective--its better to have an acceptable plan than none at all even it it sometimes is couter productive in specific instances.
one can contrast and compare our 2-party system with another gray scale system: parlimentary systems. in parlimentary systems there is more of a grey scale of representation, however that is not how the voting occurs. What happens is that a consenus coalition forms a govenrment and rules with complete authority. compromise happens only within the coalition not the entire body of elected officials. So once again a strong leadership emerges and can govern effectively. In our system the same sorts of intra-organizational consensus happens but it happens at an earlier stage. If the greens get too powerful the democrats move to co-opt their positions. That might piss off the greens as a party but basically it means the greens won if your opponents adopt your platform issues. So assimilation at an early stage replaces overt inter-party consensus at the end stage. In some ways this is better. For example, a single issue minor party that joins a parlimentary consenus can in return giving up all other issues create disporotionate havoc if it does not get its way on its single issue, say mandatory prayer in schools. In contrast a two party system is less beholden to fringe elements.
A final system is our electoral college. Many people mistakenly believe it somphow is wrong that someone could win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. Wrong. To govern effectively a president has to be able to pass bills in both the house and the senate. there is a deliberate small-state bias in the senate. Therefore the best candidate for president is not the most popular one but the one whose popularity is spread out over the greatest number of states. willing a large popular vote in CA, NY, Ohio, texas and florida might win the popular vote but would make for an awful presidency. the person who is favored by in more states is actually going to be able to work more effectively with congress.
SO basically, while I support IRV systems because I like the idea of getting more diversity in candidates, I also recognize that it is not gaurentteed to produce a more stable or more representative or more efffective from of government.
myMaskedDomain.com/sublevel/page.html
what happens is goDaddy's asinine servers resolve this as
Godaddy.com/sublevel/page.html
which, since there is no sublevel on the godaddy server. so it breaks. you can only forward a specific page on the top level of your domain. no one can link to it.
next the way they do masked forwarding is simmilar to how most people do it, with an embedded frame html. However their HTML is faulty. for reasons I have not determined most macintosh browsers dont quite handle it right. Specifically if someone tries to print your page what comes out is different then what you see on screen. Its related to the way the frame is being displayed but its not obvious why this happens. But its a fact.
Only recently has the go-daddy webpage itself started working well with Safari. up until recently to edit your setting you had to pull up internet explorer to be able to view the web page features.
Finally their customer service is among the worst I have ever experienced. You never get any resolution and the people must be retarded since they always seem to send you out a boiler plate response taken from their FAQ to a different question than the one you asked. You cant get them on the phone. and you never get a resolution to your problem.
Contrast this to NameZero.com which cost twice as much as goDaddy but you get personal replys promptly from experts, usually the same person, till your problem is resolved. After the go-daddy experience, paying $10 more per year not to waste my time wasa relief. the tech support explanations are clear and they are able to speak in expert terms for experts and simple terms for newbies. the masked domain forwarding works for all subdirectories on your host and the frame html renders correctly on all browsers I have tried.
do we have gigabyte per second data links right now? yes. so just make the delay from the pre-message as large as need be to assure no plausible storage device will work.
Finally if this delay approaches the speed of decryption then stack the encrypted message with another layer of encryption inside.
if that is still not good enough then send the mathematical algorithm in english for decrypting the second message encrypted in the first--this gaurentees a human has to write a program to do the second decryption since no computer could actuall decipher it. for example inside the first RSA encrypted message I simply write the following message "at the end of this sentence you will find a message that has been encrypted in rot12 and then added usung chinese arithmatic to the text on page 11 of the novel "the key to rebecca"'. that will take a human a while to write a program to solve this.
Its possible to generate random data by technical means not just pseudo random data. for example radioactive decay events or dark noise on a ccd array. Or point a photodiode or video camera at a any fast chaotic process (e.g. a waterfall) and record the data. I beleive VIA is coming out with chips with onboard physics based random number generators.
A while back there was a proposal to have a public onetime pad system that worked like this. there is a server, perhaps a sattelite, that is streaming random numbers at say gigabytes per second. To encode a message you weakly encrypt a prior message to the recipient telling him a precise start time: say the message reads: start colleting your onetime pad at the first occurence of the first 5 digits of the number pi that come after 12 noon. you both then collect the data that comes at that time and treat ti as a shared one time pad.
you opponents may be able to decrypt the pre-message eventually but not it time to make the start time. thus they cant collect the onetime pad data. the data rate of the random stream is chosen so that no plausible storage system could retain more than say a few hours worth of the data, so no one could just record it all. As long as no one can crack your message on that time scale you can dsafely send the one time pad whihc no one can crack by technical means.
I bet microsoft is watching IP addresses. If they see you turn around and leave when confronted they make a note. If they see a cluster from some company then the BSA will get a phone call. Obviously no one with pirated software and a brain is going to let them search. But of course it might uncover some cases of "shared" software between several computers.
but as a place in literature SCI fi is a context for decontextualization! It is a platform on which you can strip and re-arrange a society and see what happens when new rules are present. It allows you to make an imaginative metaphor and make it a physical possiblity. Then analyze its workings or if nothing else drive a plot.
To pick a favorite of slashdot, consider the movie blade runner which most people mistakenly believe is an updated "do androids dream of electric sheep". In fact its the merger with a second Philip K Dick book, "the man in the high castle". The plot is from "electric sheep" but the society is from "high castle". To me the two most interesting parts of the movie are never actaully stated in the movie. First this is earth after all the vibrant heathly best and brightest have left. The future is space and what remains on earth are those who cannot leave. The buildings where the ordinary folks live are mostly empty from the population drain and decaying. The markets have become asian bazarres where all is for sale and the passges tight and twisty and everyone is hustling. there is sense of just hanging on and hustling for thenext day but not a lot of prospects for advancement through career. How would this be like to live in? ridely scott decided the closest thing we had here was the Noir era so thats how he shot it. The other question the movie asks--which is pure philip K dick- was what it the nature of reality. As I drone on on this world how do I know I'm even human. The scene where harrison ford alone tinkles on the piano keys and stars at his own photographs has no words but you realize he is questioning his own human ness. could he ba a machine too or is humanness the sum of your memories and your struggle to live on. Whether or not fords character was intended to be actualy human or actually an android is moot to that issue.
the point is that SCI fi allowed the world to be stripped of certain thngs we take for granted that frame 90% of our lives. Going to school to succeed for example probably has occupied most slashdotters. But why bother in that world? Here was a man living in a world where the only people left either had no sense fo purpose--merely existance-- or were impaired in other ways and left behind to make the best their talents. we can ask what drives us, and what makes us humans in such contexts?
that is sci fi.
or it can be simple metaphors come to life like in startrek and the classic episode of the two races of people who are both half black and half white and hate each other for it. Or THX1138 where drug evasion is a crime and the masses must be contented. If you ever read bradubury's epilouge to 451 then you know his themes were the rise of political correctness leading to a society where anyhting confrontational is a crime. books and the effect they have on the mind had to be stopped. SCI fi let him take this to the extreme and create this contenment society. of course the whole plot and action is a consequence of a dissident act. but the context it what makes it interesting.
That is the beauty of sci-fi. its decontextualization of our own society so we can see it for what it it. It is in fact the closets thing to the POP art movement I can think of. Andy Warhols Soup can was art because itrecontextualized an ordinary object and made us think about how it and its design came to be and what it means to us when something so nromally invisble becomes the dominant theme.. Its not really possible to do that in traditionl fiction which build characters who live in real world with our normal rules.
identifying you and your eating habits is what the RFID tags are for
would some one explain what kerberos does and how it works? and how one exploits a double-free?
They know its not a real signal because it said so.
I was expecting to see basically this design but with the dvd in the base.
Odd but they left off the firewire 800 ports.
Try the following:
/image
/image. Note dont do this twice in a row without adding flags to find to skip the image dir!
/image directory to /, mv back the /Users directory and reboot.
to set this up, start by making a hardlink copy on each computers's disk of the entrie disk:
su root
find / | cpio -dpl
this creates an (almost) no space occupying duplicate of your current disk in the subdirectory
Next when you want to push a new image simply mount the remote disk (without roosquash) and do a differential copy of the new image to the old image directory using rsyncX or rdiffbackup or psync or whatever.
finally on each remote machine when you are ready to actually do the update, mv the / directory to old_system, mv the
you dont actually double the disk space needed this way. the disk space only grows when you change files, the bulk of the rest that are unchanged live and single copies with hard links.
THink about it. IN the long run which are you going to spend more money on, the player or the music. The music. do really want to save 30 bucks buying a rio or a whatever to play your MS locked in music. Or do you want the best you can get. freedom is overated I think.
More than digital signatures are needed. There has to be feedback to the soldier that his vote was cast and counted at the central polling place. There is a technology that can do this from the company "vote here" which allows the voter to call in later and check that their vote was recieved unchanged without actually telling them the vote (basically it tells them an encrypted checksum that cant be reversed to reveal the vote even by brute force). This does not prevent the client computer casting the ballot from making a mistake or being corrupted malicously or otherwise. But it does solve the transmisson and feedback problem. I oppose this tehcnology for general public use (favoring paper trails due to their ability ot be recounted) but for soldiers overseas prompt ballot collection may take priority over recountability since the risk is greater that your ballot wont be counted at all than it will be miscounted.
I have to admit the write-latency is bad so I have ot keep the cache on my local disk. (I get around the 120 second post rate liit by having 10,000 different slashdot accounts). But the read time is quite good.