So essentially, they're attempting to patent math. Boolean algebra, to be exact, and a representation of DeMorgan's Law. If this patent doesn't get rejected on that basis alone, that's just pathetic and retarded. In other words, I'm sure the USPTO will accept it...
Heh heh. Seriously though... While there are plenty of people who don't RTFA (which is somewhat understandable in some cases, what with the/. effect and all), it's just pathetic to post without reading Slashdot's article abstract. C'mon, that's just sad. Be ashamed, be very ashamed. ^_~
At any rate, no, I'm not new here. This guy is ^_^.
(Personally, I think the "you're new here, aren't you?" joke is getting pretty stale.)
Now, I'm all for open source, but I don't release my stuff under the GPL because I want to give it away. Fro all things, I stand on the shoulders of others that have gone before me, I'd like to keep doing that. But with the GPL, there are many times where I cannot leverage the 'free' code because my boss won't let me use it, or I don't want to give all my hard work away for free (sometimes this is appropriate). In all such cases I have to find alternatives - the GPL free and open and use-me-all-you-want-I-give-to-society isn't any use to me all of a sudden. That's bad because people don't get the benefit of open source any more.
Well that's too bad for you then. Basically you're saying that you want to release *your* code however you want, but you don't feel that people that release GPLed code should have the same right. They've decided that they want their code to always remain open. They don't want it incorporated into a proprietary product. Who are you to be pissed off at them? All you're showing is that you don't want to respect another coder's licensing terms, and "steal" his/her code to incorporate into a piece of software that could become proprietary/closed-source.
Maybe I just don't like licences telling me what I can and can't do with my work.
If you have a BSD licensed program, and you want to incorporate GPLed code, you can: you just have to license the *collective work* as GPL. The collective work is no longer *your* work. You're doing the release, but the entire package does not belong to you. If you want to use someone else's code, you have to listen to what they say you can and can't do with it. If you don't like it, then don't use their code.
At any rate, all of *your* code is still BSD, and if someone wanted to create a BSDed fork of your code, they'd only have to remove the GPLed code and either leave the functionality out, or write (or obtain) a BSDed implementation. If you later find some BSDed code that does the same thing the GPLed code does, you can simply swap them, and you suddenly can release the entire package as BSD, not just your portion of it. Note that this does not somehow make the *collective work* "your work", but it does follow the licensing agreement of all the component parts.
I'll easily agree with you that licenses like BSD, MIT, the old X11 license, etc., are more "free" than GPL. Personally, all of the code I release is GPLed (or LGPLed). I'm selfish. Some of us want to maintain a little more control of our code.. Is that so wrong? Is it so wrong that we've put hours of our free time into some of this stuff, not getting paid one whit for it, but still want some amount of control over what people do with it? You apparently don't care what people do with your code, and I applaud you for being so selfless. But some of us do, and as long as we have some form of copyright law, you are bound to respect that.
Here's a downside. If you write some GPLed code, and Big Corporation A violates your license, you have no recourse unless you have the money for some hefy legal fees. If you assign your copyright to the FSF, they'll fight the legal battle for you.
He had an opinion, like many people are wont to have, and, being a person of some importance at the time, his opinion was remembered. I happen to agree with him in this case. Just because you don't, it doesn't suddenly make him an arrogant bastard for having an opinion.
Right, but I think the parent's point is that the filesystem isn't GNU/Linux-specific; it's a Linux kernel module. Calling distros GNU/Linux is fine; while I don't share your insistence in calling them that (mainly due to laziness), that is correct in that that's what they are. But calling a Linux filesystem driver "GNU/Linux" is incorrect.
Sorry. I'm just a nitpicky, pedantic bastard.
Having said that, I skimmed through the info on the project website, and it looks like some interesting stuff. At the very least, NFS is old and nasty and performs terribly. It's nice to see a new solution (albeit one not really intended for standard network shares).
It isolates voting irregularities to a single state. This can be important. For example, if Diebold voting machines showed 3 billion people voted in Montana, it wouldn't have a drastic effect on the outcome since Montana only has 3 electoral votes.
No. That's not how you fix problems like this. That's a band-aid. You fix the root of the problem, you don't patch the symptom.
It balances differences in voter turnout. New York is roughly twice the size of North Carolina. However, lets assume that New York gets hit by thunderstorms and has massive flooding on election day making it less convenient for people to vote. As a result, New York might have 30% voter turnout while North Carolina might have 60% voter turnout. This would mean North Carolina would have roughly the same representation as New York -- a state twice its size. The electoral college reduces the impact of weather, disasters, and even regional voter apathy on the final election results.
If there's a state of emergency in New York, likely they'll just postpone the election in that state until after the emergency subsides. And besides, why design a complex system that has many present-day flaws just to account for the _possibility_ for a disastrous event?
A specific point on regional voter apathy: if people are too lazy to vote, they don't get a say. Period. There's no reason whatsoever to balance for voter apathy.
# Not everyone that lives in a state may be eligible to vote because they may not be citizens. If a state has a large immigrant population, it is important the state's interests are represented in proportion to its size even though many of its residents may be unable to vote. The electoral college ensures this since electoral representation is determined based on raw population data from the census. A nationwide popular election would short-change states with lots of immigrants, or lots of children, or any other sizeable block of ineligible voters.
No again. There's a reason why they're ineligible to vote: either they are deemed unable to make an informed decision, or they are legally not allowed representation. If a large portion of a state consiss of people that are not allowed a say, then there's no reason why the state itself should get more of a say. At any rate, I believe the allocation of electors in the electoral college is based on official census data, which does not include illegal immigrants.
I have no argument with your final point, about the electoral college providing a "definite outcome", except to say that disagreement with the way a particular state's elector's vote is still an important problem that makes a "definite outcome" somewhat pointless.
I suppose we're talking about two different things (rather, you and the OP are talking about one thing, and I'm talking about another). I agree; it's not too much to ask to expect that a visitor would be able to mumble through a few basic phrases in the local language. I guess I took the OP's statement of "lack of any interest in speaking local languages" a bit too literally, in that s/he was expecting the visitors to actually be competent in the language.
(Personally, I find the garish clothes, arrogant demeanour and lack of any interest in speaking local languages enables us to do this pretty easily anyway).
Funny; I find that the same is true when I'm in any tourist-attracting American city, like New York City or Washington DC. While there's a higher percentage of people that speak English (though often very difficult to understand), that's hardly surprising, since English is generally accepted as a language of international exchange.
Put another way... So I'm an American. Aside from English, I speak Spanish passably well (though I'm a bit rusty), and I have some rudimentary ability in Mandarin. Say I'm taking a whirlwind tour of Europe, visiting a variety of historical sites and countries. Are you saying I'm obligated to learn French, German, Italian, and possibly more? That's a bit unreasonable (though Italian shouldn't be too much of a stretch for someone who already knows Spanish).
I honestly don't understand the whole garish clothing thing. I'm pretty subdued when it comes to my wardrobe for everyday life, and I wear the same clothes when I travel. If this makes me look garish in some areas, well, I guess that's too bad. Traveling costs enough money already; I don't have the spare cash to buy a new wardrobe for a vacation.
As for the arrogance, that's a personal thing. You find arrogance everywhere, in different forms. Perhaps the reason we generally see more arrogance in tourists is because it's generally the more affluent (read: rich bastards) who can afford to travel? I suppose it's a bit of an unsupported generalisation on my part, but I think it's safe to assume at least a weak correlation between a person's arrogance and the size of their bank account. (Note that I'm not saying that only rich bastards travel, just that it seems that there would be more people traveling that fit that description than you'd see in a normal population cross-section.)
But the fact of the matter is: these arrogant, out-of-place tourists are everywhere, and from everywhere. They're not just Americans. Pull your head out of your ass and get some perspective.
I'm not sure what the point would be of running it using cygwin. The idea here is to run the entire "secure environment" inside the virtual machine that qemu provides. As others have noted, there are still some problems with this approach, but if you're going to run it in cygwin, you might as well just run the normal native apps. Then basically you'd just have a thumb drive with some privacy-related apps (such as thunderbird+enigmail) on it, which you can make in your spare time; no need to have this productised.
Interesting... do most flash drives actually have the capability to "remember" how often a particular area has been written to? Seems to me that it would require a fair amount of storage just to do that. You can't do this at the driver level, since there's no guarantee that the device is going to be used in the same machine all the time (of course, using the device in only one machine kinda defeats its purpose).
The MPL, GPL, and LGPL cover distribution rights, and by distributing the code, the this project is indeed accepting the license.
Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird) are indeed GPLed. Period. If any user can take the app, modify it, and release it under the terms of the GPL, then that does indeed count as the app being GPLed. At any rate, from a simple user's perspective (that is, a person that just wants to run the software, not modify and/or distribute it), it's totally irrelevant what the license is, as long as the person they get it from has the right to distribute it.
Free Software licenses give you the right to distribute the code, whether you modify it or not. It doesn't matter if the distributor wrote any code or not, it's still licensed under the GPL (and in Mozilla's case, under two other licenses, that a potential developer/user/distributor/whatever can use at their option to license a derivative work).
This is really interesting stuff. For the theoretical erasure-code-based bittorrent client, wouldn't this increase the overall bandwidth required considerably? Or are you saying that, since the oversampling is tuned so you don't get redundant data, you can essentially use the erasure codes to "reconstruct" data that you haven't gotten yet? If so, this is cooler than I even think, probably...
Re:Is it an open protocol?
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Replacing TCP?
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It doesn't really matter how they release their own implementation of it. If this is going to get adopted, they're going to have to write an RFC, which will be sufficient to write a closed-source implementation, if someone so desires.
The real question is if they plan on patenting something about the protocol, and then trying to charge royalties to license the patent. Or if they plan on giving it a nifty name, trademarking the name, then requiring silly fees to use their trademark to say your implementation is compliant. Though I suppose if that were the case, we could just call it something else.
The protections on their particular implementation are irrelevant; if they want this protocol of theirs to go anywhere, they're going to have to write an open document describing it.
I never said anything about the case where you're by yourself. Sure, go ahead and turn the thing off. But if someone else comes by, sits down, and wonders why the TV's off, you should turn it back on, as you say. I could argue that some hypothetical person might come by, sit down, and not actually voice his annoyance with the fact that the TV has been turned off, but I'm sure you'd just say, "well then he doesn't deserve to watch it because he doesn't have the balls to speak up". Doing what you can to make your life more livable is all well and good, but doing so at the expense of others is one of the multitude of things that's wrong with our society today.
Do you really think four hours of CNN will make anyone feel better? No, it's just repetitive, annoying bullshit. The person who has to listen to it the most is the one who wants it least.
that would be a value judgement, and a matter of personal taste. i personally have no desire to watch CNN for four hours, but you don't have the right to deny someone else the ability to do so if the TV's already on and that's what they want to do.
Need I go on? This talk of "rights" is pointless. It's all about whose ox is being gored. I also am frustrated with the growing level of rudeness, noise, and inconsideration I encounter from hour to hour. If I can use some type of hidden device to, how shall I say it, "get even", then so be it. Sure I don't have "the right" --- but so what? If everyone else can have their "entertainment", then so can I.
so basically you're saying "if everyone else does annoying things, i deserve to be able to to get back at them." way to be a part of the problem, dude. how childish.
Incidentally, as regards your comment about what the vast majority are fine with --- the vast majority are probably fine with smoking marijuana and driving 90 m.p.h. on the highway. But just let the cops catch you doing it.
i never said we lived in a perfect society (hence my use of the word "should"). you advocate adding to the annoyances people face, which doesn't sound productive to me. at any rate, your two examples are unsupported by any evidence, and i wouldn't be surprised if the opposite were true. i'm fine with people smoking marijuana, but i'm not fine with just anybody driving 90 MPH on the highway. i've seen some good drivers doing it, and i've seen some bad ones (though arguably the speed isn't the problem, it's the lack of driver education).
2. Raid 0 is completely worthless. Waste of money, waste of harddrive space.
huh? waste of space how? RAID0 is a simple scheme that just makes logical volumes out of smaller physical volumes. you have two 80GB drives; in RAID0 you have 160GB of space.
RAID0 isn't intended for redundancy (despite the acronym). say you do a lot of video editing/transcoding/capturing, and need huge amounts of space on the same volume. you have several smaller disks lying around, so you put them in a RAID0 array. a nice cheap way of making use of older hardware. you don't care about reliability or redundancy, because it's mainly transient data that gets reencoded and moved elsewhere.
You and the airport do not have a right to bomb me with adverts from some crappy TV. I'm sick of it and I'll be getting one of these devices so that I can contemplate whatever I like while you go into some kind of broadcast stupidity withdrawal.
I strongly disagree with this. Perhaps the airlines at the aiport offering lower fares because they're being paid to show advertising on TVs around the airport? I agree that random people sitting around don't have the right to be playing loud music, or their own loud TV, but the airport itself has _every_ right to play music, or have TVs on. They own the space, and they decide what goes on in it. If you don't like it, either complain, or use a different airport.
The TV doesn't belong to you. Others may be watching it; what gives you the right to disturb that? If you're annoyed by it, try to find a place to sit such that it isn't a problem, or do the right thing and complain to someone at the information desk about it. Will it cause change? Well, probably not, because a random person complaining every now and again shouldn't cause change. If the vast majority of people are fine with the TVs on (in most of the airports i've been in, they usually have news broadcasts on, which I don't mind, and often like to watch), then they should stay on. Period. You have no right to impose your will on others in a public place, or a private place owned and operated by someone else.
In my experience, I have no problem tuning out airport TVs in order to sit and read a book. If you can't handle that, perhaps that's your problem?
Having said all that, I do agree that we in the U.S. watch way too much mindless TV. But pissing people off isn't the way to solve that problem. It's only a way to show how childish and immature you are.
The station at the other end is also used to decelerate the craft, so they'll be unable to stop. Since the plan is to include no propulsion at all in these craft, depending on the orientation of the receiving plasma station, as well as the entry path the craft takes, it might be possible to slingshot around the target planet and start the return trip (but likely at a lower speed?). Of course, if the trajectory is off, the craft will either slam into the target planet's atmosphere and incinerate (or, if no atmosphere, the planet's surface, and explode), or miss the planet and continue out into deep space until it encounters another source of gravity which slows it down (or smashes it to pieces).
That's silly. Making it easier for some group of people to vote while leaving the status quo for the rest is not at all unfair. Now, if the proliferation of online voting caused there to be fewer physical polling locations such that some voters became disenfranchised, then sure, I'm with you. But adding an extra way of doing something that makes it easier for one group while not detracting from any other groups sounds like a great idea.
Having said that, I wouldn't trust a voting system that was available to the internet at-large without some guarantees about its un-crackability (which is generally impossible).
Thanks for that; I'll look into it. I'm not a big classical collector, and I can usually fulfill my classical tastes just by going to the public library. But I'm lazy, so this might be something I'd use...
Slashdot Mirror
So essentially, they're attempting to patent math. Boolean algebra, to be exact, and a representation of DeMorgan's Law. If this patent doesn't get rejected on that basis alone, that's just pathetic and retarded. In other words, I'm sure the USPTO will accept it...
Heh heh. Seriously though... While there are plenty of people who don't RTFA (which is somewhat understandable in some cases, what with the /. effect and all), it's just pathetic to post without reading Slashdot's article abstract. C'mon, that's just sad. Be ashamed, be very ashamed. ^_~
At any rate, no, I'm not new here. This guy is ^_^.
(Personally, I think the "you're new here, aren't you?" joke is getting pretty stale.)
Did you even *read* the guy's post? I mean, I know a lot of people don't read the articles, and that's lame enough, but not even reading the *post*?
"The pchdtv card looks nice but it's RF input only for HiDef content, and only supports OTA at this point."
He knows about the pchdtv card, but would rather something with more features, and something that does cable.
At any rate, all of *your* code is still BSD, and if someone wanted to create a BSDed fork of your code, they'd only have to remove the GPLed code and either leave the functionality out, or write (or obtain) a BSDed implementation. If you later find some BSDed code that does the same thing the GPLed code does, you can simply swap them, and you suddenly can release the entire package as BSD, not just your portion of it. Note that this does not somehow make the *collective work* "your work", but it does follow the licensing agreement of all the component parts.
I'll easily agree with you that licenses like BSD, MIT, the old X11 license, etc., are more "free" than GPL. Personally, all of the code I release is GPLed (or LGPLed). I'm selfish. Some of us want to maintain a little more control of our code.. Is that so wrong? Is it so wrong that we've put hours of our free time into some of this stuff, not getting paid one whit for it, but still want some amount of control over what people do with it? You apparently don't care what people do with your code, and I applaud you for being so selfless. But some of us do, and as long as we have some form of copyright law, you are bound to respect that.
Here's a downside. If you write some GPLed code, and Big Corporation A violates your license, you have no recourse unless you have the money for some hefy legal fees. If you assign your copyright to the FSF, they'll fight the legal battle for you.
He had an opinion, like many people are wont to have, and, being a person of some importance at the time, his opinion was remembered. I happen to agree with him in this case. Just because you don't, it doesn't suddenly make him an arrogant bastard for having an opinion.
Right, but I think the parent's point is that the filesystem isn't GNU/Linux-specific; it's a Linux kernel module. Calling distros GNU/Linux is fine; while I don't share your insistence in calling them that (mainly due to laziness), that is correct in that that's what they are. But calling a Linux filesystem driver "GNU/Linux" is incorrect.
Sorry. I'm just a nitpicky, pedantic bastard.
Having said that, I skimmed through the info on the project website, and it looks like some interesting stuff. At the very least, NFS is old and nasty and performs terribly. It's nice to see a new solution (albeit one not really intended for standard network shares).
Hmm... From the feature list:
* Mirror Copy -- Simple sector-by-sector copying for all proprietary partition types (e.g. MAC, Linux, SUN, OS6).
I wasn't aware that Linux file systems were "proprietary"...
A specific point on regional voter apathy: if people are too lazy to vote, they don't get a say. Period. There's no reason whatsoever to balance for voter apathy. No again. There's a reason why they're ineligible to vote: either they are deemed unable to make an informed decision, or they are legally not allowed representation. If a large portion of a state consiss of people that are not allowed a say, then there's no reason why the state itself should get more of a say. At any rate, I believe the allocation of electors in the electoral college is based on official census data, which does not include illegal immigrants.
I have no argument with your final point, about the electoral college providing a "definite outcome", except to say that disagreement with the way a particular state's elector's vote is still an important problem that makes a "definite outcome" somewhat pointless.
I suppose we're talking about two different things (rather, you and the OP are talking about one thing, and I'm talking about another). I agree; it's not too much to ask to expect that a visitor would be able to mumble through a few basic phrases in the local language. I guess I took the OP's statement of "lack of any interest in speaking local languages" a bit too literally, in that s/he was expecting the visitors to actually be competent in the language.
Put another way... So I'm an American. Aside from English, I speak Spanish passably well (though I'm a bit rusty), and I have some rudimentary ability in Mandarin. Say I'm taking a whirlwind tour of Europe, visiting a variety of historical sites and countries. Are you saying I'm obligated to learn French, German, Italian, and possibly more? That's a bit unreasonable (though Italian shouldn't be too much of a stretch for someone who already knows Spanish).
I honestly don't understand the whole garish clothing thing. I'm pretty subdued when it comes to my wardrobe for everyday life, and I wear the same clothes when I travel. If this makes me look garish in some areas, well, I guess that's too bad. Traveling costs enough money already; I don't have the spare cash to buy a new wardrobe for a vacation.
As for the arrogance, that's a personal thing. You find arrogance everywhere, in different forms. Perhaps the reason we generally see more arrogance in tourists is because it's generally the more affluent (read: rich bastards) who can afford to travel? I suppose it's a bit of an unsupported generalisation on my part, but I think it's safe to assume at least a weak correlation between a person's arrogance and the size of their bank account. (Note that I'm not saying that only rich bastards travel, just that it seems that there would be more people traveling that fit that description than you'd see in a normal population cross-section.)
But the fact of the matter is: these arrogant, out-of-place tourists are everywhere, and from everywhere. They're not just Americans. Pull your head out of your ass and get some perspective.
I'm not sure what the point would be of running it using cygwin. The idea here is to run the entire "secure environment" inside the virtual machine that qemu provides. As others have noted, there are still some problems with this approach, but if you're going to run it in cygwin, you might as well just run the normal native apps. Then basically you'd just have a thumb drive with some privacy-related apps (such as thunderbird+enigmail) on it, which you can make in your spare time; no need to have this productised.
Interesting... do most flash drives actually have the capability to "remember" how often a particular area has been written to? Seems to me that it would require a fair amount of storage just to do that. You can't do this at the driver level, since there's no guarantee that the device is going to be used in the same machine all the time (of course, using the device in only one machine kinda defeats its purpose).
The MPL, GPL, and LGPL cover distribution rights, and by distributing the code, the this project is indeed accepting the license.
Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird) are indeed GPLed. Period. If any user can take the app, modify it, and release it under the terms of the GPL, then that does indeed count as the app being GPLed. At any rate, from a simple user's perspective (that is, a person that just wants to run the software, not modify and/or distribute it), it's totally irrelevant what the license is, as long as the person they get it from has the right to distribute it.
Free Software licenses give you the right to distribute the code, whether you modify it or not. It doesn't matter if the distributor wrote any code or not, it's still licensed under the GPL (and in Mozilla's case, under two other licenses, that a potential developer/user/distributor/whatever can use at their option to license a derivative work).
This is really interesting stuff. For the theoretical erasure-code-based bittorrent client, wouldn't this increase the overall bandwidth required considerably? Or are you saying that, since the oversampling is tuned so you don't get redundant data, you can essentially use the erasure codes to "reconstruct" data that you haven't gotten yet? If so, this is cooler than I even think, probably...
It doesn't really matter how they release their own implementation of it. If this is going to get adopted, they're going to have to write an RFC, which will be sufficient to write a closed-source implementation, if someone so desires.
The real question is if they plan on patenting something about the protocol, and then trying to charge royalties to license the patent. Or if they plan on giving it a nifty name, trademarking the name, then requiring silly fees to use their trademark to say your implementation is compliant. Though I suppose if that were the case, we could just call it something else.
The protections on their particular implementation are irrelevant; if they want this protocol of theirs to go anywhere, they're going to have to write an open document describing it.
I never said anything about the case where you're by yourself. Sure, go ahead and turn the thing off. But if someone else comes by, sits down, and wonders why the TV's off, you should turn it back on, as you say. I could argue that some hypothetical person might come by, sit down, and not actually voice his annoyance with the fact that the TV has been turned off, but I'm sure you'd just say, "well then he doesn't deserve to watch it because he doesn't have the balls to speak up". Doing what you can to make your life more livable is all well and good, but doing so at the expense of others is one of the multitude of things that's wrong with our society today.
damn, and i thought i was a die-hard cynic. really, if that's the way you think you have to look at the world, that's sad.
RAID0 isn't intended for redundancy (despite the acronym). say you do a lot of video editing/transcoding/capturing, and need huge amounts of space on the same volume. you have several smaller disks lying around, so you put them in a RAID0 array. a nice cheap way of making use of older hardware. you don't care about reliability or redundancy, because it's mainly transient data that gets reencoded and moved elsewhere.
saying RAID0 is a waste is disingenuous.
The TV doesn't belong to you. Others may be watching it; what gives you the right to disturb that? If you're annoyed by it, try to find a place to sit such that it isn't a problem, or do the right thing and complain to someone at the information desk about it. Will it cause change? Well, probably not, because a random person complaining every now and again shouldn't cause change. If the vast majority of people are fine with the TVs on (in most of the airports i've been in, they usually have news broadcasts on, which I don't mind, and often like to watch), then they should stay on. Period. You have no right to impose your will on others in a public place, or a private place owned and operated by someone else.
In my experience, I have no problem tuning out airport TVs in order to sit and read a book. If you can't handle that, perhaps that's your problem?
Having said all that, I do agree that we in the U.S. watch way too much mindless TV. But pissing people off isn't the way to solve that problem. It's only a way to show how childish and immature you are.
The station at the other end is also used to decelerate the craft, so they'll be unable to stop. Since the plan is to include no propulsion at all in these craft, depending on the orientation of the receiving plasma station, as well as the entry path the craft takes, it might be possible to slingshot around the target planet and start the return trip (but likely at a lower speed?). Of course, if the trajectory is off, the craft will either slam into the target planet's atmosphere and incinerate (or, if no atmosphere, the planet's surface, and explode), or miss the planet and continue out into deep space until it encounters another source of gravity which slows it down (or smashes it to pieces).
Doesn't sound too fun to me.
That's silly. Making it easier for some group of people to vote while leaving the status quo for the rest is not at all unfair. Now, if the proliferation of online voting caused there to be fewer physical polling locations such that some voters became disenfranchised, then sure, I'm with you. But adding an extra way of doing something that makes it easier for one group while not detracting from any other groups sounds like a great idea.
Having said that, I wouldn't trust a voting system that was available to the internet at-large without some guarantees about its un-crackability (which is generally impossible).
Thanks for that; I'll look into it. I'm not a big classical collector, and I can usually fulfill my classical tastes just by going to the public library. But I'm lazy, so this might be something I'd use...