When the maximum an individual can recover is $1000, the value of trying to prove one was injured only makes sense in a class action.
But if each individual has to prove harm this becomes prohibitive. Say if my SS is left exposed for a few months on a web site, and later my identity is stolen. Can I prove that one caused the other? Not likely.
It seems like certain information shoul dbe designated as must-be-kept-secure and its very exposure shifts the burden of proof that no harm was done to the government.
Of course as a practical matter this could get sticky if one day say a server containing all of the SSN numbers were hacked or a disgruntled employee posted them.
In new mexico our secretary of state has a generous definition fo chain of custordy. the people who drive the machines to the polling places leave them abandoned and go have a beer. The only reason they got caught was they had a traffic accident that over turned the truck and destroyed the machines. I'm not making this up. Google for it, I think it was in the albuqueque tribune.
Hi, I collect documentation on this sort of thing. Could you point me to an article or priimary source on this. What did you tell the board and how did you tell them. What did you do to get access (public comment periods?) Elaborate!
The score so far is: california SOS requires verifiable voting Louisiana SOS wants to replace all their ES&S machines, not sure with what yet. Nevada SOS has called for a public forum to determine if the public wants verifiable voting, he doesn't think its essential for security but recognizes it may have value for public confidence. New York Assembly passes bill requiring verified voting. Companion bill is awaiting a vote in the NY senate
Russ Holts bill is now up to 84 sponsors some republican. But it's stuck in a committee chaired by Rep Nye (Ohio--- AKA Diebold) so its unlikely to pass in advance of strong public support. On the bright side, the NY times is now covering this not as a technical issue but as a political issue: Krugman has two columns dedicated to it, and the candidate Kucinich put it on his congressional web site. So its moving into the mainstream at least. Hopefully it can not become tainted as partisan.
Also relevant: NY City's Council (? not sure what they call it) passed a resolution calling for the senate to pass the bill and the Elections's manager supports it too. I should note that the population of NY City comparable in size to many small states so this is no small endorsement.
So the tide is slowly turning.
The GAO, and the Library of congress have both said the problems are formidable and FEC regulations are not yet up to date.
Marylands SIAC report is an interesting case. The govenor redacted about 80% of it so we dont know exactly what was said. We do know that the Elections officials said the problems are all fixed now, thank you. To which the response from Rubin, the John hopkins researcher that anaylsed the diebold code said: "If they are all fixed then you should release the report", and the Election official had to respond: "oh that would be giving a roadmap to how to break in". What the fuck is going on! are these people blind zealots or retards?
Well I figure the phone will cost $100 with a discount for a service contract. Then add on the $1399 per platform SCO tax and you get $1499. ouch.
But on a more serious note if they really want to put a nice OS with an exapansible API on the phone some company should think about partnering with apple to do it.
Also I dont know much about kernels, but from a superficial knowledge level I'd speculate that BSD with its modular microkernel might be slightly more adapted to niche platforms than linux which is more globally integrated and optimized for its more standard platforms. Perhaps some more wise person can comment on this?
this is exactly the sort of thing that the SCO debacle is messing up. Wind river nust clearly think twice what would happen if they made the leap to linux and next year there was a judegement which gave SCO the advantage. Perhaps it would be better to stay with windows a year longer and see what happens, the reasoning might go.
Perhaps Someone can explain. As I understand macs dont by default go beyond the local netinfo/passwd file to authenticate unless instructed to do so. You can turn on directory access and enable authentication by ldap or remote net-info, but I dont beleive this on by default is it?
if so this is pretty much a non-bug since it would require some idiot to both be doing remote authentication and be plugged into a dhcp network. For that matter one could just pretend to be a known authtication host and provide bogus authentication regardless of the dhcp status.
what am I missing here. or is this thing on by default?
Open voting.org doesn't just have a "design" they have the whole system including the hardware and screen shots. Even the ballot design. Most importantly its not just a mthematical show piece, it actually conforms to the bizarre voting system laws common in states.
It publicly debuts in beta next month! And its open source and voter verifiable. Its on source forge right now if you want to look.
see EVM2003 or open voting
By the way they still need more developers, testers and documentation writers. Also they need financial backers to package finished systems with tech supprt for the end users.
.mac is so seemless its absurd. With iDisk you almost cannot tell its a remote disk other than the speed. Everything about the user interface just makes it look like its part of the file system and FINDER that you know already. Panther takes it way beyond jaguar and light years beyong Goliath. its just so fast and robust now.
.mac gives you iBlog software, backup software, iPhoto, and home page templates. Of these only the home page templates are primitive, but frankly you dont want to give illiterates to many choices. If they want more they can roll their own web pages.
Also the.mac site also has other things like update software, sample tunes for your imovies and lots of stuff thats not just a collection of freebies but focused on assisting your mac in ways that are actually productive.
No they dont have cgi, but you dont want that for your case anyhow.
Dont say, well.mac is out of the question cause I dont have a mac or a free.mac site. for illiterates macs a re cheap compared to the training you would have to give these people to be as productive on any other computer. THROW the WIINDOWS machine on the trash and buy a used mac for them on e-bay--it's way cost effective.
I doubt that hint is the answer you think it is. they are talking about stealing your existing cookies. in the case of the test site i would imagine they are writing and then stealing back a test cookie. since this takesplace all in one session the lock should be irrelevant.
2.2 million over 4 years is 550K$ per year. I would guess that the cost of employing a teacher is in the neighborhood of 100K$ including salary, benefits, overhead including associated janatorial staff, offic admin, and other indirect costs. (just a wild guess, not based on research). that means that sum is probably equivalent to 5 teachers plus their computers, and other materials and suppies, per year.
the are 950 studens in the school system. this mean each student would get about 0.5% more teacher attention. Assuming an average classroom size of 30, that's about 15% more teachers per classroom, or one hour per day more of supervision. Or to put in plainly, one daily course.
personally I think immersive computer education is equivalent to an extra course, probably more so. Thus I'd say the trade off between books and computers is acceptable.
Mac has never been known for being cheap, just a good value. Now even this seems to be fading: macs are a cheap too!
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10. its cheaper than many it beat by a factor fo ten (more than that considering some of the building infrastructure are in that figure). Even more interesting these were stock mac at full price loaded with DVD-roms, firewire, blue tooth, the OS, etc..---not some stripped down model.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time given the macs attention to cooling, the use of high quality hard drives and power supplies, and high end memory chips. (on our cluster a tenth that size we blew 60 hard drives in the first 6 months and had to replace 10% of the motherboards.
Oops: reposting: heres' what one county is doing
on
E-Voting Expert Testifies
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you aren't up to date on the controversy over so called "black box voting" here's just a few recent articles to give you a flavor about what is being said in the media:
The state deadline for HAVA compliance is over two years off, the planned system wont meet expected new federal requirements (sponsored by Tom Udall and 61 other congressmen), and better, equivalently priced, systems will be available in the forseable future. Finally, the federal law and state law requires voting machines to be FEC and NIST standards compliant; these standards have not yet been set for touch screens.
STATE DEADLINE IS OVER TWO YEARS AWAY
First, some comments by the clerks office indicate a belief that Los Alamos must have touch screen systems in place for the 2004 vote. Recent information contradicts this deadline. In fact, the N.M. Secretary of States draft plan for implementation of the HAVA act, calls for a goal of January 1 2006, for placement of one touch screen DRE in every polling place. (http://www.sos.state.nm.us/Election/HAVA/HAVA03.h tm )
NEW FEDERAL LEGISLATION MAY DISQUALIFY PLANNED SEQUOIA SYSTEM
Second, federal legislation currently in committee would disqualify the proposed Sequoia voting systems equipment. In may 2003, our representative Tom Udall co-sponsored H.R. 2239, to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified hardcopy, also know as The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. This bill requires DRE systems to produce a voter verifiable hardcopy and the software to be fully disclosed to anyone (i.e. open source). The Sequoia system meets neither of these requirements at present (however, the next generation of Sequoia systems may possibly be able to meet this requirement.) http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
This bill has 61 co-sponsors: even if this bill fails to pass this session, the strength of this overwhelming endorsement ought to indicate to the council that Voter verifiable hardcopies and open source software are extremely desirable characteristics. Indeed this is so important that the country of Brazil, which has 400,000 electronic voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable systems.
(see http://www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/BtF.html ) Australia, New Zeland, and Canada require open-source voting systems.
VASTLY BETTER TOUCH SCREEN SYSTEMS AVAILABLE AT NO ADDITONAL COST
Third, already three manufacturers offer touch screen systems, which provide paper voter verifiable records of vote and some offer software disclosure. The Avante Vote-Trakker, Accupol, and Advanced Voting Systems (Hewlet Packard) all print voter verifiable ballots. The "big three" touch screen makers ( ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia) all have prototypes that produce voter verifiable paper records that should be certified in the near future. (http://verifiedvoting.org) Finally, Vogue Election Systems, offers an alternative to touch screen systems: a HAVA compliant device that assists handicapped voters to independently mark a conventional optical scan ballot. (http://www.vogueelection.com/ )
These newer systems are not expected to be more costly that the current non-voter-verifiable systems. After pressure by California's Santa Clara county (19 million dollar contract), Sequoia voting system has agreed to implement (at no added cost) a voter verified, recountable, paper ballot addition to the touch
screen system. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/states/ca/ca-scco.as p
Here's part of a presentation to a county in New mexico which is considering Sequia systems
If you aren't up to date on the controversy over so called "black box voting" here's just a few recent articles to give you a flavor about what is being said in the media:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61068,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID =3529556&thesection=news&thesubsection=wor ld
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61045,00.ht ml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1397-200 3Nov5?language=printer
Why there is no need to rush
The state deadline for HAVA compliance is over two years off, the planned system wont meet expected new federal requirements (sponsored by Tom Udall and 61 other congressmen), and better, equivalently priced, systems will be available in the forseable future. Finally, the federal law and state law requires voting machines to be FEC and NIST standards compliant; these standards have not yet been set for touch screens.
STATE DEADLINE IS OVER TWO YEARS AWAY
First, some comments by the clerks office indicate a belief that Los Alamos must have touch screen systems in place for the 2004 vote. Recent information contradicts this deadline. In fact, the N.M. Secretary of States draft plan for implementation of the HAVA act, calls for a goal of January 1 2006, for placement of one touch screen DRE in every polling place. (http://www.sos.state.nm.us/Election/HAVA/HAVA03.h tm )
NEW FEDERAL LEGISLATION MAY DISQUALIFY PLANNED SEQUOIA SYSTEM
Second, federal legislation currently in committee would disqualify the proposed Sequoia voting systems equipment. In may 2003, our representative Tom Udall co-sponsored H.R. 2239, to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified hardcopy, also know as The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. This bill requires DRE systems to produce a voter verifiable hardcopy and the software to be fully disclosed to anyone (i.e. open source). The Sequoia system meets neither of these requirements at present (however, the next generation of Sequoia systems may possibly be able to meet this requirement.) http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
This bill has 61 co-sponsors: even if this bill fails to pass this session, the strength of this overwhelming endorsement ought to indicate to the council that Voter verifiable hardcopies and open source software are extremely desirable characteristics. Indeed this is so important that the country of Brazil, which has 400,000 electronic voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable systems.
(see http://www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/BtF.html ) Australia, New Zeland, and Canada require open-source voting systems.
VASTLY BETTER TOUCH SCREEN SYSTEMS AVAILABLE AT NO ADDITONAL COST
Third, already three manufacturers offer touch screen systems, which provide paper voter verifiable records of vote and some offer software disclosure. The Avante Vote-Trakker, Accupol, and Advanced Voting Systems (Hewlet Packard) all print voter verifiable ballots. The "big three" touch screen makers ( ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia) all have prototypes that produce voter verifiable paper records that should be certified in the near future. (http://verifiedvoting.org) Finally, Vogue Election Systems, offers an alternative to touch screen systems: a HAVA compliant device that assists handicapped voters to independently mark a conventional optical scan ballot. (http://www.vogueelection.com/ )
These newer systems are not expected to be more costly that the current non-voter-verifiable systems. After pressure by California's Santa Clara county (19 million dollar contract), Sequoia voting system has agreed to implement (at no added cost) a voter verified, recountable, paper ballot addition to the touch
screen system. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/states/ca/ca-scco.as p
OTHER UNCER
You dont want to go to a dealer if you can help it since they'll just sell you something you dont need. Watch and I'll prove it right now:
the best system is oddly enough SVGA and not XGA or SXGA, if you main goal is to show DVD movies. The reason is simple. DVD movies only have a certain amount of information on the disk and that is almost exactly matched to the 800x600 projector size. XGA has to interpolate and even the expensive one do a crummy job creating jagged edges on fast moving sharp edges, and moving type.
the most important spec is contrast ratio followed by noise level followed by lumens.
finally almost all the low end ones are made by the SAME company, PLUS (thats the name) then rebranded as Sharp, mitsubishi, and many others.
On the other hand if you plan to give presentsations or watch HDtv then get an XGA since its better matched. But whatever you do dont buy more pixels than your source supports.
now as I said at the start a lot of people will now reply that I'm totally wrong. THese are people the dealers like to see coming into their stores. dont be one.
His previous article was called the Linux Hitmen and painted the EFF in a really ugly light almost like they were the extortionists not SCO. So its quite a aturn around. or maybe he just hates everyone.
The article is written in a very casual almost unbussiness-like tone of voice--odd for forbes. I bet it does not make it into the dead-tree edition of forbes read by real bussiness types, so it wont have much impact
The similarities are too high to be considered a design pattern.
The variable names and even choices for captialization are the same. for example, "ThreadNDCConverter" So are optional argument strings. like "CELLPADDING" which if two different people did might have come out as "CELL_PADDING" or "CELLPAD" or "PADCELL" etc...
The best they can hope for is it was copied from a common source or contributed by the same copyright holder.
In case you haven't notice all the other companies that sell music, sell it for higher (average) prices, or offer premiums services, or sell the premium versions of their players (music match) or pay to burn CDs or they have lousy anti-consumer DRM.
my guess is that apple pays a few cents more for the rights to offer a weaker form of DRM that benefits consumers. the others are probably trying to pocket a few pennies by skimming on consumer oriented drm.
Apple has always lost money software as a driver for hardware sales. Do you really think they make money on Panther? they sell it for less than MS sells their OS and to a lot fewer people. Yet it (OBVIOUSLY) contains a lot more research and effort so their costs are much higher and profits not much on software.
Via and transmeta and to a much lesser extent centrino and the G4 have all showed that a better processor LOGICAL architecture can achieve a better power/gflop ratio than conventional x86 chips. Of course they aren't pushing the speed limits for a single processor like the fast intels and poser pc chips do.
but the point is that ratio is actually quite large. via's 7 watt chip is 2 to 3 times slower than intels 300 watt chips. which is about an order of magnitude. Moreover the transmeta designs have shown an increasing ratio of gigflops/watt as their designs evolved.
therefore multi processor designs with say 10 to 100 chips, would use less power than the power4 or intel chips. even if they were only 50% efficient in throughput this would still be vastly faster computer.
the figure 50% might be reasonable. currently most small cpu-count multi-processors do much better than this on code that is suited to multi-processing. Most code as currently written is not. thus we need clever compilers and maybe more expressive computer languages (e.g. steal the brilliant ideas in fortran 2000) which allow the programmer to give hints on how a singly threaded procedure can be tranparently parallelized. THis wont be highly efficient but heck we've got chips to waste: 100 VIAs would only use 700 watts of power.
moreover IBM has long been pointing out that the problem ultimately is not processor speed, its memory access speed. If you think about this for a while you suddenly realize that the ideal computer is one that is 1) accessing a given bank of memory at the memorys maximum possible rate continuously without pausing 2) that every byte that is fetched is always used and never just along for the ride as part of a page load or part of a predictivie lookup that might be tossed out. 3) that the memory should be divided into banks all of which can be fetching simultanouesly. This computer would have many many very slow CPUS each fetching exactly what they need at the moment and nothing else; each bank of memory would be shared by enough slow cpus to saturate the memory request rate--often the CPUS would be waiting on memory but that's okay sinc enothing is wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
But if each individual has to prove harm this becomes prohibitive. Say if my SS is left exposed for a few months on a web site, and later my identity is stolen. Can I prove that one caused the other? Not likely.
It seems like certain information shoul dbe designated as must-be-kept-secure and its very exposure shifts the burden of proof that no harm was done to the government.
Of course as a practical matter this could get sticky if one day say a server containing all of the SSN numbers were hacked or a disgruntled employee posted them.
In new mexico our secretary of state has a generous definition fo chain of custordy. the people who drive the machines to the polling places leave them abandoned and go have a beer. The only reason they got caught was they had a traffic accident that over turned the truck and destroyed the machines. I'm not making this up. Google for it, I think it was in the albuqueque tribune.
Hi, I collect documentation on this sort of thing. Could you point me to an article or priimary source on this. What did you tell the board and how did you tell them. What did you do to get access (public comment periods?) Elaborate!
The score so far is:
california SOS requires verifiable voting
Louisiana SOS wants to replace all their ES&S machines, not sure with what yet.
Nevada SOS has called for a public forum to determine if the public wants verifiable voting, he doesn't think its essential for security but recognizes it may have value for public confidence.
New York Assembly passes bill requiring verified voting. Companion bill is awaiting a vote in the NY senate
Russ Holts bill is now up to 84 sponsors some republican. But it's stuck in a committee chaired by Rep Nye (Ohio--- AKA Diebold) so its unlikely to pass in advance of strong public support. On the bright side, the NY times is now covering this not as a technical issue but as a political issue: Krugman has two columns dedicated to it, and the candidate Kucinich put it on his congressional web site. So its moving into the mainstream at least. Hopefully it can not become tainted as partisan.
Also relevant:
NY City's Council (? not sure what they call it) passed a resolution calling for the senate to pass the bill and the Elections's manager supports it too. I should note that the population of NY City comparable in size to many small states so this is no small endorsement.
So the tide is slowly turning.
The GAO, and the Library of congress have both said the problems are formidable and FEC regulations are not yet up to date.
Marylands SIAC report is an interesting case. The govenor redacted about 80% of it so we dont know exactly what was said. We do know that the Elections officials said the problems are all fixed now, thank you. To which the response from Rubin, the John hopkins researcher that anaylsed the diebold code said: "If they are all fixed then you should release the report", and the Election official had to respond: "oh that would be giving a roadmap to how to break in". What the fuck is going on! are these people blind zealots or retards?
But on a more serious note if they really want to put a nice OS with an exapansible API on the phone some company should think about partnering with apple to do it.
Also I dont know much about kernels, but from a superficial knowledge level I'd speculate that BSD with its modular microkernel might be slightly more adapted to niche platforms than linux which is more globally integrated and optimized for its more standard platforms. Perhaps some more wise person can comment on this?
this is exactly the sort of thing that the SCO debacle is messing up. Wind river nust clearly think twice what would happen if they made the leap to linux and next year there was a judegement which gave SCO the advantage. Perhaps it would be better to stay with windows a year longer and see what happens, the reasoning might go.
if so this is pretty much a non-bug since it would require some idiot to both be doing remote authentication and be plugged into a dhcp network. For that matter one could just pretend to be a known authtication host and provide bogus authentication regardless of the dhcp status.
what am I missing here. or is this thing on by default?
dang. linked to wrong page. try this instead: openvoting.org
It publicly debuts in beta next month! And its open source and voter verifiable. Its on source forge right now if you want to look. see EVM2003 or open voting By the way they still need more developers, testers and documentation writers. Also they need financial backers to package finished systems with tech supprt for the end users.
Also the .mac site also has other things like update software, sample tunes for your imovies and lots of stuff thats not just a collection of freebies but focused on assisting your mac in ways that are actually productive.
No they dont have cgi, but you dont want that for your case anyhow.
Dont say, well .mac is out of the question cause I dont have a mac or a free .mac site. for illiterates macs a re cheap compared to the training you would have to give these people to be as productive on any other computer. THROW the WIINDOWS machine on the trash and buy a used mac for them on e-bay--it's way cost effective.
as long as I'm reposting things from MacSlash here's one: see for your self by testing the exploit here.
I doubt that hint is the answer you think it is. they are talking about stealing your existing cookies. in the case of the test site i would imagine they are writing and then stealing back a test cookie. since this takesplace all in one session the lock should be irrelevant.
whack-a-pol
the are 950 studens in the school system. this mean each student would get about 0.5% more teacher attention. Assuming an average classroom size of 30, that's about 15% more teachers per classroom, or one hour per day more of supervision. Or to put in plainly, one daily course.
personally I think immersive computer education is equivalent to an extra course, probably more so. Thus I'd say the trade off between books and computers is acceptable.
thanks for noticing and giving me the credit. the original post was indeed mine. this pig copied it.
Now this system is the cheapest of the top 10. its cheaper than many it beat by a factor fo ten (more than that considering some of the building infrastructure are in that figure). Even more interesting these were stock mac at full price loaded with DVD-roms, firewire, blue tooth, the OS, etc..---not some stripped down model.
Its a good bet too that this thing is going to have lower maintainence costs and higher up-time given the macs attention to cooling, the use of high quality hard drives and power supplies, and high end memory chips. (on our cluster a tenth that size we blew 60 hard drives in the first 6 months and had to replace 10% of the motherboards.
If you aren't up to date on the controversy over so called "black box voting" here's just a few recent articles to give you a flavor about what is being said in the media:
.html?tw=wn_tophead_5
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61068, 00
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?story ID =3529556&thesection=news&thesubsection=wor ld
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61045,00. ht ml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1397-2 00 3Nov5?language=printer
Why there is no need to rush
The state deadline for HAVA compliance is over two years off, the planned system wont meet expected new federal requirements (sponsored by Tom Udall and 61 other congressmen), and better, equivalently priced, systems will be available in the forseable future. Finally, the federal law and state law requires voting machines to be FEC and NIST standards compliant; these standards have not yet been set for touch screens.
STATE DEADLINE IS OVER TWO YEARS AWAY
First, some comments by the clerks office indicate a belief that Los Alamos must have touch screen systems in place for the 2004 vote. Recent information contradicts this deadline. In fact, the N.M. Secretary of States draft plan for implementation of the HAVA act, calls for a goal of January 1 2006, for placement of one touch screen DRE in every polling place. (http://www.sos.state.nm.us/Election/HAVA/HAVA03.h tm )
NEW FEDERAL LEGISLATION MAY DISQUALIFY PLANNED SEQUOIA SYSTEM
Second, federal legislation currently in committee would disqualify the proposed Sequoia voting systems equipment. In may 2003, our representative Tom Udall co-sponsored H.R. 2239, to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified hardcopy, also know as The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. This bill requires DRE systems to produce a voter verifiable hardcopy and the software to be fully disclosed to anyone (i.e. open source). The Sequoia system meets neither of these requirements at present (however, the next generation of Sequoia systems may possibly be able to meet this requirement.) http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
This bill has 61 co-sponsors: even if this bill fails to pass this session, the strength of this overwhelming endorsement ought to indicate to the council that Voter verifiable hardcopies and open source software are extremely desirable characteristics. Indeed this is so important that the country of Brazil, which has 400,000 electronic voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable systems.
(see http://www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/BtF.html ) Australia, New Zeland, and Canada require open-source voting systems.
VASTLY BETTER TOUCH SCREEN SYSTEMS AVAILABLE AT NO ADDITONAL COST
Third, already three manufacturers offer touch screen systems, which provide paper voter verifiable records of vote and some offer software disclosure. The Avante Vote-Trakker, Accupol, and Advanced Voting Systems (Hewlet Packard) all print voter verifiable ballots. The "big three" touch screen makers ( ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia) all have prototypes that produce voter verifiable paper records that should be certified in the near future. (http://verifiedvoting.org) Finally, Vogue Election Systems, offers an alternative to touch screen systems: a HAVA compliant device that assists handicapped voters to independently mark a conventional optical scan ballot. (http://www.vogueelection.com/ )
These newer systems are not expected to be more costly that the current non-voter-verifiable systems. After pressure by California's Santa Clara county (19 million dollar contract), Sequoia voting system has agreed to implement (at no added cost) a voter verified, recountable, paper ballot addition to the touch
screen system. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/states/ca/ca-scco.as p
OTHER UNCERTAINTIE
Here's part of a presentation to a county in New mexico which is considering Sequia systems If you aren't up to date on the controversy over so called "black box voting" here's just a few recent articles to give you a flavor about what is being said in the media: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,61068,00 .html?tw=wn_tophead_5
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID =3529556&thesection=news&thesubsection=wor ld
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61045,00.ht ml
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1397-200 3Nov5?language=printer
Why there is no need to rush
The state deadline for HAVA compliance is over two years off, the planned system wont meet expected new federal requirements (sponsored by Tom Udall and 61 other congressmen), and better, equivalently priced, systems will be available in the forseable future. Finally, the federal law and state law requires voting machines to be FEC and NIST standards compliant; these standards have not yet been set for touch screens.
STATE DEADLINE IS OVER TWO YEARS AWAY
First, some comments by the clerks office indicate a belief that Los Alamos must have touch screen systems in place for the 2004 vote. Recent information contradicts this deadline. In fact, the N.M. Secretary of States draft plan for implementation of the HAVA act, calls for a goal of January 1 2006, for placement of one touch screen DRE in every polling place. (http://www.sos.state.nm.us/Election/HAVA/HAVA03.h tm )
NEW FEDERAL LEGISLATION MAY DISQUALIFY PLANNED SEQUOIA SYSTEM
Second, federal legislation currently in committee would disqualify the proposed Sequoia voting systems equipment. In may 2003, our representative Tom Udall co-sponsored H.R. 2239, to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require a voter-verified hardcopy, also know as The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003. This bill requires DRE systems to produce a voter verifiable hardcopy and the software to be fully disclosed to anyone (i.e. open source). The Sequoia system meets neither of these requirements at present (however, the next generation of Sequoia systems may possibly be able to meet this requirement.) http://holt.house.gov/issues2.cfm?id=5996
This bill has 61 co-sponsors: even if this bill fails to pass this session, the strength of this overwhelming endorsement ought to indicate to the council that Voter verifiable hardcopies and open source software are extremely desirable characteristics. Indeed this is so important that the country of Brazil, which has 400,000 electronic voting machines has decide to replace them with voter verifiable systems.
(see http://www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/BtF.html ) Australia, New Zeland, and Canada require open-source voting systems.
VASTLY BETTER TOUCH SCREEN SYSTEMS AVAILABLE AT NO ADDITONAL COST
Third, already three manufacturers offer touch screen systems, which provide paper voter verifiable records of vote and some offer software disclosure. The Avante Vote-Trakker, Accupol, and Advanced Voting Systems (Hewlet Packard) all print voter verifiable ballots. The "big three" touch screen makers ( ES&S, Diebold, Sequoia) all have prototypes that produce voter verifiable paper records that should be certified in the near future. (http://verifiedvoting.org) Finally, Vogue Election Systems, offers an alternative to touch screen systems: a HAVA compliant device that assists handicapped voters to independently mark a conventional optical scan ballot. (http://www.vogueelection.com/ )
These newer systems are not expected to be more costly that the current non-voter-verifiable systems. After pressure by California's Santa Clara county (19 million dollar contract), Sequoia voting system has agreed to implement (at no added cost) a voter verified, recountable, paper ballot addition to the touch
screen system. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/states/ca/ca-scco.as p
OTHER UNCER
the best system is oddly enough SVGA and not XGA or SXGA, if you main goal is to show DVD movies. The reason is simple. DVD movies only have a certain amount of information on the disk and that is almost exactly matched to the 800x600 projector size. XGA has to interpolate and even the expensive one do a crummy job creating jagged edges on fast moving sharp edges, and moving type.
the most important spec is contrast ratio followed by noise level followed by lumens.
finally almost all the low end ones are made by the SAME company, PLUS (thats the name) then rebranded as Sharp, mitsubishi, and many others.
On the other hand if you plan to give presentsations or watch HDtv then get an XGA since its better matched. But whatever you do dont buy more pixels than your source supports.
now as I said at the start a lot of people will now reply that I'm totally wrong. THese are people the dealers like to see coming into their stores. dont be one.
His previous article was called the Linux Hitmen and painted the EFF in a really ugly light almost like they were the extortionists not SCO. So its quite a aturn around. or maybe he just hates everyone.
The article is written in a very casual almost unbussiness-like tone of voice--odd for forbes. I bet it does not make it into the dead-tree edition of forbes read by real bussiness types, so it wont have much impact
The best they can hope for is it was copied from a common source or contributed by the same copyright holder.
Look they already have 80% of the online sales. if they supported other formats at best they could pick up a few new sales. So why should they bother?
my guess is that apple pays a few cents more for the rights to offer a weaker form of DRM that benefits consumers. the others are probably trying to pocket a few pennies by skimming on consumer oriented drm.
Apple has always lost money software as a driver for hardware sales. Do you really think they make money on Panther? they sell it for less than MS sells their OS and to a lot fewer people. Yet it (OBVIOUSLY) contains a lot more research and effort so their costs are much higher and profits not much on software.
but the point is that ratio is actually quite large. via's 7 watt chip is 2 to 3 times slower than intels 300 watt chips. which is about an order of magnitude. Moreover the transmeta designs have shown an increasing ratio of gigflops/watt as their designs evolved.
therefore multi processor designs with say 10 to 100 chips, would use less power than the power4 or intel chips. even if they were only 50% efficient in throughput this would still be vastly faster computer.
the figure 50% might be reasonable. currently most small cpu-count multi-processors do much better than this on code that is suited to multi-processing. Most code as currently written is not. thus we need clever compilers and maybe more expressive computer languages (e.g. steal the brilliant ideas in fortran 2000) which allow the programmer to give hints on how a singly threaded procedure can be tranparently parallelized. THis wont be highly efficient but heck we've got chips to waste: 100 VIAs would only use 700 watts of power.
moreover IBM has long been pointing out that the problem ultimately is not processor speed, its memory access speed. If you think about this for a while you suddenly realize that the ideal computer is one that is 1) accessing a given bank of memory at the memorys maximum possible rate continuously without pausing 2) that every byte that is fetched is always used and never just along for the ride as part of a page load or part of a predictivie lookup that might be tossed out. 3) that the memory should be divided into banks all of which can be fetching simultanouesly. This computer would have many many very slow CPUS each fetching exactly what they need at the moment and nothing else; each bank of memory would be shared by enough slow cpus to saturate the memory request rate--often the CPUS would be waiting on memory but that's okay sinc enothing is wasted.