Yeah, I just resubscribed to the Economist. For one thing, their
articles already are at the quality of the best blog posts around.
For another, they're one of the few formerly solely print magazines
that actually figured out how to make a profit. I don't understand
why more newspapers haven't tried some variation of their biz
model. So many continue indefinite downward spirals rather
than address the problem.
That's the way clearances are SUPPOSED to work here in the US, since the early '50s.
Let's just say implementation often falls short of theory. Polygraphs and other ongoing digging for evidence of inconsistency have become ways of using the classifications system to aid purges.
All that can be said for it is that it probably IS better than the disturbinglty KGBesque loyalty officer system that preceded it.
I used to look at this 3d environment space, and I instantly agreed
with the assessment of fraud.
There's no need for a separate network. Do notice that plenty of MMOs
operate at decent quality today, over today's network. They mostly
use bittorrent-like stuff to deal with performance issues.
Losing domain names is a real worry, since several businesses actively snap up unused domain names in bulk and hold them for ransom.
If I have to maintain a domain name to maintain redelegability of my underlying OpenID provider, that's going to be a real problem.
And won't somebody snapping up my or my blog's domain name be able to steal my identity as well now? That's decidedly awful (far worse than losing your email address) if your bank or credit card provider is using OpenID.
Is there something I'm missing? (hopefully?)
If not, I know I'm not implementing this on any site I run, and will take steps to avoid allowing this protocol to be active for financial accounts.
> it was) that displayed the GPL as if it were a EULA. But rather
> than having "Accept" and "Don't accept" buttons, it has a single
> button labeled "Cool!".
But what if you're Bill Gates? What does he click?
Except, it isn't, is it? If it's so free, then why is the
GPL so long. Is it all preamble?
What if the recipient's idea of use is to spread the One True And
Undeniable Cult of Emacs by handing out binary CDs at work? Oopsie!
It may seem free to people who believe that Free Software licenses
maximize freedom, but remember you're a minority - most either don't
understand the issue, or disagree with you. Certainly you can't
ASSUME that everybody else will see a 339-line license as obvious
freedom.
..to a MP slot. He never won a free and fair election for an
executive post. His rise thereafter was conducted by fraud, bullying,
and unconstitutional maneuvers.
He did hold elections after his rise, but of the sort where those who
voted against him were seen to vanish to concentration camps.
Obviously, though, that just validates your larger point on elections
not necessarily being free.
Maybe what you're trying to do is to set up a centrist blog.
There is no such thing as nonpartisan polical discussion, but there
are a surprising number of centrist blogs, running normal blog
software, that succeed in perpetuating a culture of thoughtful
comments, rather than paranoia or personal attack.
Spam's more of a real problem than trolls.
It was started by a couple of people of centrist inclination getting
together and recruiting a initial core. That's since changed
drastically, but it's still going strong.
I post at one called
Centerfield. It also
includes a blogroll of other centrist blogs.
Have you read any ancient Greek works? That's
halfway back to 5,000, and I find plenty of them
intelligible and interesting; I have plenty of company,
notably for The Odyssey.
Aristotle and Thucidydes even remain deeply relevant to
today's political arguments.
There are plenty of cultural and technological differences - Aristotle simply assumes
women are inferior - but I keep imagining Aristotle or the center-right politician Thucydides
having drinks with the similarly bigoted,
and much more recent Adams, Washington, and Hamilton. I think they'd get along easily, grumbling
about the servants and women.
I think the thread of shared human experience will keep both The Odyssey and things written today
relevant and interesting indefinitely.
> What's that? You only have one ISP > available? Well then THAT's your problem. Let's > fix that rather than allowing congress critters > to become our system admins.
That happens alot. But despite that there are still plenty of people with one choice, for a variety of structural reasons ranging from being between wireless ISP startups to fatal troubles getting the telco to set up the sizeable wire to the Internet proper, to just plain bad luck.
Plus, it takes three entrants to make a robust market, and 95+% of the populace is in a place with no more than two provider choices, because wireless can't compete where cable and DSL are both present. That means choice might not help you.
IMHO the correct solution is to deregulate bandwidth. I think this country right now loses more money than it gains by having monopoly telco or cable carriers. But that's long, hard sell.
It's just a few monopoly carriers trying
to blow smoke to cover their attempted change of
the ruleset that has allowed the Internet to grow,
not a wide set of ISPs saying this.
I wrote a long post that explains network neutrality issues
in detail. The truth is that ISPs are already charging for
and being paid for the network they're providing. If they
need to raise fees on broadband users to support higher
bandwidth consumption, they can and do.
It's important, though, that they not be allowed to change the
rules to try and also collect from content providers. These
monopolies are being foolish, of course, because if the rules
changed, there'd almost certainly be less of an Internet economy
to collect bandwidth fees from.
I played alot with AmigaDOS, a message-passing OS (it was a port of Tripos,
an early research message-passing OS), as a teenager. That experience cured
me of message-passing interest, because I found myself spending 75% of my
time dealing with message-passing coding rather than dealing with the underlying
hacks I was trying to perpetrate.
Not only did one have to write more code to make an MP call (comm overhead
code), but the bugs had a way of showing up in that snippet and being harder
to debug. The tiniest change in a driver's interface meant an hour of coding,
vs the ten minutes I saw later for BSD Unix. At that, I was lucky. If I'd
been dealing much with nontrivial synchronization and threading, I expect I
would've seen more like the factor of ten coding slowdown I've always seen
dealing with threading problems (and to be fair, most ukernel code doesn't
have to either, it's just that there are more threads, more sync points,
and thus more potential for trouble).
The basic problem is that modularization is a largely orthogonal problem
from threading, address spaces, or messaging. If you split up modules into
different threads, then now you don't just have to solve modularization, but
you also have to solve threading, messaging, and address space problems, too.
Now, address space separation seems like it might save some debugging troubles,
and in fact, successful "monolithic" operating systems in fact deliver the
simplest form of that. I've been a little surprised that attempts to push
farther on that like Electric Fence or multi-address-space OS' with
traditional system call architectures have gone nowhere. But they have, so
the difficulties must exceed the return somehow.
Thus, I haven't been surprised to see ukernel project after ukernel project
fail. The idea is at least forty years old, and has seen many smart people
try to take it on - if a ukernel was going to succeed broadly, it would've
happened by now.
If you like ukernel OS' even after reading this, I say go try one, and try
hacking something in. Just watch how much time you spend actually writing
code implementing the hack vs MPI / threading drudgery.
Tanenbaum has done something non-toy before, Amoeba OS.
The fact that you haven't heard about it should tell
you something. It had some cool capability ideas in
it, though.
> QoS is the worst thing that the IETF has ever collaborated on.
> Unregulated QoS will destroy the Internet.
No, it isn't. QoS is a completely reasonable architecture.
It's the only way you can get guaranteed-good-quality audio
and video over the Internet to people willing to pay, which
is a good thing. And it's completely orthogonal to the realities of
your situation, since Vonage doesn't directly
use QoS. This is about treatment of best-effort traffic. And that's
BellSouth and Comcast want to start discriminating against.
If your provider is discrimatorially dropping traffic for which it has
bandwidth of a particular type for reasons other than misbehavior,
you can almost certainly haul him into court for breach of contract.
They said they'd provide a service, and they aren't providing it.
I've been in your shoes and gone the CEO route. But it was the wrong choice because I was wrong about having somebody else to fill the CTO slot.
It's very hard to be BOTH CEO and CTO. The jobs are too different. So one dimension of your decision should be, do you have somebody good and in town and definitely lined up to be CTO if you run things?
Oh, and if the biz guy ISN'T CEO, then IMHO you want to make him COO. Look at Ballmer. He was a great COO, even if a horrible CEO.
If the CTO thing isn't a problem, you should think about which of you has a deeper grasp of things. That's why Gates was so good at it, even though he started with more of a programmer POV. It's true that you spend most of your time selling, but that didn't stop Gates, and understanding things is a big plus to selling big.
Look, sonny boy, I wrote my first program without needing one of those
screwy video screens they have now. They're just for mental wimps and
wusses, I tell ya!
It's true, actually - I typed the program (written mostly by my
parents, of course, with very modest amounts of help from me) into a
teletype. They probably think of me as being a tad wussy in not being
able to read punch cards.
And I had to walk home both ways, because wheels hadn't been invented
yet!
But, of course, here's the thing - you adapt to use the technology you
have. If you have the latest thing, you learn to use the tools that
take advantage of it. If you're running a small business in India,
and all you can afford is this thing, you'll adapt to it, too, and be
grateful for not having to do everything with paper and pencil anymore.
I'm a young'un; campus unix was via a 3b20 named jhunix when I was
there. There were a handful of vaxen and suns sprinkled around. The
sysadmin of 'alpha' was a roomie when the Worm hit; he was mortified
because his system had survived only because it was running an ancient
OS version (4.2 pre-Tahoe?).
But most logins were still via terminal or dialin.
I just had FC3 fail horribly on me in the x.org install, but I already
have x.org running; I do it by disabling DRI and not using the i810
fb driver. You're prolly best off fetching it and compiling yourself
similarly limited.
If you have any interest in any other field (like computers?), you
might seriously want to consider changing fields for your Ph.D.
Since you're talking about a Ph.D, I'm guessing you're interested in a
research job. Currently there's a vast oversupply of labor in the
physics research labor pool. People do ten years of postdocs with
little assurance of getting a job in the end.
I knew a physics Ph.D who finished and was so discouraged that he
immediately started from scratch as a premed. He had talent and
drive, too; it wasn't a case of him being marginal for the field.
Of course, I don't know if CS is the right field either; in five
years, it'll have an oversupply as well. Your skillset might fit you
well to do nanotech, so you might want to consider that.
And those data are, note, satellite-taken, which is where energy
should be reflected under the theory stated in the article of energy
being reflected back into space from atmospheric pollutants.
To my non-climate-scientist eye, an upward redistribution of energy
seems a likelier theory than balanced warming/cooling for four reasons:
1) It would be quite a coincidence for two such different mechanisms
to just coincidentally have the same magnitude. Especially since
the best-regarded warming models have orders of magnitude lower
results.
2) Energy redistributed high in the atmosphere would explain the
observed ground data of observed weather changes with modest
temperature change.
3) Energy MOSTLY absorbed in the atmosphere would explain the SLOW
rise of satellite-observed energy emissions.
4) Aren't many particulates dark? In a polluted place, the atmophere
is visibly DARKER. Dark particles absorb most light.
...on the other hand, they may be voting more because
they have to worry more about extremists like fascists
or extreme greenies getting power. That's bad.
Maybe we have low turnout because we're basically
pretty contented with our system, despite a
small minority that keep shouting at us that
the sky is falling?
I was at the APS meeting where Cold Fusion was officially debunked. About five different highly respected labs, including at UMD and Caltech, tried and failed to reproduce the results.
BUT.
Here's the thing: at least one (maybe two?) of the labs noted that Pons & Fleischmann's results could be reproduced if one neglected one of the steps needed to reproduce it (stirring?). If one failed to do that step, you would get a chemical reaction of about the magnitude P&F described.
Note well that the likeliest reason for any other researcher to observe the reaction P&F describe would be a similar carelessness.
Could it be cold fusion? Could be. But it's very, very, very unlikely. The chances of human error are alot higher than the chances that physical theory is so wrong.
There was one embarrassing mistake. The funding agencies had already promised funding for cold fusion. Thus, a (sometimes persuasive) constituency was created for keeping cold fusion research dollars flowing. That constituency is basically being paid to keep the cold fusion myth alive. That's anothing thing you should keep in mind when you hear about cold fusion nonfailures (because it's as likely that you'll see cold fusion generators as it is that you'll get a real opportunity to own the Brooklyn Bridge...)
This is happening because of panic. Pretty much anything can happen
when policians panic. And it's not something the GOP did, either. We
Democrats did it to ourselves and the nation as a whole.
Democratic politicians and media were paniced after the 2000 election,
and were looking for somebody to blame. They chose the election
machines. Do you remember all the news articles and politicians
opining that everything would be better when upgraded to digital?
Do you remember any computer scientists being asked about it? No, of
course not. Since it was about panic, nobody wanted to learn the
facts.
Although, "we" computer scientists do bear partial guilt. An early
feasibility study was run, and they botched it. They did mention
problems and risks, but not in the summary or first paragraph.
You know, that article doesn't go nearly far enough... they don't
mention that by the end of this election season, somebody has quite
possibly been elected by a bug.
I will let three paragraphs speak for themselves:
(not that it was easy to do, we DID in fact slashdot
the Register).
. . . US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to
enable citizens of other countries to break local laws . . .
. . .
Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer
architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can
be used to rescue the Net from US control.
These developments, reviled and criticised by those inside and outside
the continental United States who hold on to an outdated and
unrealistic view of what the Net was or could become,
are the key to its future growth and usefulness. Whatever the
libertarians say, they must be defended, promoted - and properly
controlled.
There are European-coordinated pieces of Internet, for obvious
operational reasons. For some reason, the people running them seem to
appreciate open access.
Anybody, anywhere, who wishes, can set up local nets with local
rules. China and Singapore are good examples of countries that have
done exactly that. For some reason, some citizens of those countries
insist on being unruly and using the proxies that so annoy
Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson is welcome to buy all the network control
applications he wishes and set up his own network - but good luck
getting anybody in a free country to use it!
Slashdot Mirror
> fab("Earl Grey, Hot");
Lemme guess - you got a liquid that was almost, but not quite entirely unlike tea.
Yeah, I just resubscribed to the Economist. For one thing, their articles already are at the quality of the best blog posts around.
For another, they're one of the few formerly solely print magazines that actually figured out how to make a profit. I don't understand why more newspapers haven't tried some variation of their biz model. So many continue indefinite downward spirals rather than address the problem.
That's the way clearances are SUPPOSED to work here in the US, since the early '50s.
Let's just say implementation often falls short of theory. Polygraphs and other ongoing digging for evidence of inconsistency have become ways of using the classifications system to aid purges.
All that can be said for it is that it probably IS better than the disturbinglty KGBesque loyalty officer system that preceded it.
I used to look at this 3d environment space, and I instantly agreed with the assessment of fraud.
There's no need for a separate network. Do notice that plenty of MMOs operate at decent quality today, over today's network. They mostly use bittorrent-like stuff to deal with performance issues.
Losing domain names is a real worry, since several businesses actively snap up unused domain names in bulk and hold them for ransom.
If I have to maintain a domain name to maintain redelegability of my underlying OpenID provider, that's going to be a real problem.
And won't somebody snapping up my or my blog's domain name be able to steal my identity as well now? That's decidedly awful (far worse than losing your email address) if your bank or credit card provider is using OpenID.
Is there something I'm missing? (hopefully?)
If not, I know I'm not implementing this on any site I run, and will take steps to avoid allowing this protocol to be active for financial accounts.
> it was) that displayed the GPL as if it were a EULA. But rather
> than having "Accept" and "Don't accept" buttons, it has a single
> button labeled "Cool!".
But what if you're Bill Gates? What does he click?
Except, it isn't, is it? If it's so free, then why is the GPL so long. Is it all preamble?
What if the recipient's idea of use is to spread the One True And Undeniable Cult of Emacs by handing out binary CDs at work? Oopsie!
It may seem free to people who believe that Free Software licenses maximize freedom, but remember you're a minority - most either don't understand the issue, or disagree with you. Certainly you can't ASSUME that everybody else will see a 339-line license as obvious freedom.
> Hitler was democratically elected
He did hold elections after his rise, but of the sort where those who voted against him were seen to vanish to concentration camps. Obviously, though, that just validates your larger point on elections not necessarily being free.
Maybe what you're trying to do is to set up a centrist blog.
There is no such thing as nonpartisan polical discussion, but there are a surprising number of centrist blogs, running normal blog software, that succeed in perpetuating a culture of thoughtful comments, rather than paranoia or personal attack.
Spam's more of a real problem than trolls.
It was started by a couple of people of centrist inclination getting together and recruiting a initial core. That's since changed drastically, but it's still going strong.
I post at one called Centerfield. It also includes a blogroll of other centrist blogs.
Have you read any ancient Greek works? That's halfway back to 5,000, and I find plenty of them intelligible and interesting; I have plenty of company, notably for The Odyssey. Aristotle and Thucidydes even remain deeply relevant to today's political arguments.
There are plenty of cultural and technological differences - Aristotle simply assumes women are inferior - but I keep imagining Aristotle or the center-right politician Thucydides having drinks with the similarly bigoted, and much more recent Adams, Washington, and Hamilton. I think they'd get along easily, grumbling about the servants and women.
I think the thread of shared human experience will keep both The Odyssey and things written today relevant and interesting indefinitely.
> What's that? You only have one ISP
> available? Well then THAT's your problem. Let's
> fix that rather than allowing congress critters
> to become our system admins.
That happens alot. But despite that there are still
plenty of people with one choice, for a variety of structural
reasons ranging from being between wireless ISP startups to
fatal troubles getting the telco to set up the sizeable wire to
the Internet proper, to just plain bad luck.
Plus, it takes three entrants to make a robust market, and 95+% of
the populace is in a place with no more than two provider choices,
because wireless can't compete where cable and DSL are both present.
That means choice might not help you.
IMHO the correct solution is to deregulate bandwidth. I think this
country right now loses more money than it gains by having monopoly
telco or cable carriers. But that's long, hard sell.
It's just a few monopoly carriers trying to blow smoke to cover their attempted change of the ruleset that has allowed the Internet to grow, not a wide set of ISPs saying this.
I wrote a long post that explains network neutrality issues in detail. The truth is that ISPs are already charging for and being paid for the network they're providing. If they need to raise fees on broadband users to support higher bandwidth consumption, they can and do.
It's important, though, that they not be allowed to change the rules to try and also collect from content providers. These monopolies are being foolish, of course, because if the rules changed, there'd almost certainly be less of an Internet economy to collect bandwidth fees from.
More at http://www.centristcoalition.com/blog/archives/003 270.html
I played alot with AmigaDOS, a message-passing OS (it was a port of Tripos, an early research message-passing OS), as a teenager. That experience cured me of message-passing interest, because I found myself spending 75% of my time dealing with message-passing coding rather than dealing with the underlying hacks I was trying to perpetrate.
Not only did one have to write more code to make an MP call (comm overhead code), but the bugs had a way of showing up in that snippet and being harder to debug. The tiniest change in a driver's interface meant an hour of coding, vs the ten minutes I saw later for BSD Unix. At that, I was lucky. If I'd been dealing much with nontrivial synchronization and threading, I expect I would've seen more like the factor of ten coding slowdown I've always seen dealing with threading problems (and to be fair, most ukernel code doesn't have to either, it's just that there are more threads, more sync points, and thus more potential for trouble).
The basic problem is that modularization is a largely orthogonal problem from threading, address spaces, or messaging. If you split up modules into different threads, then now you don't just have to solve modularization, but you also have to solve threading, messaging, and address space problems, too. Now, address space separation seems like it might save some debugging troubles, and in fact, successful "monolithic" operating systems in fact deliver the simplest form of that. I've been a little surprised that attempts to push farther on that like Electric Fence or multi-address-space OS' with traditional system call architectures have gone nowhere. But they have, so the difficulties must exceed the return somehow.
Thus, I haven't been surprised to see ukernel project after ukernel project fail. The idea is at least forty years old, and has seen many smart people try to take it on - if a ukernel was going to succeed broadly, it would've happened by now.
If you like ukernel OS' even after reading this, I say go try one, and try hacking something in. Just watch how much time you spend actually writing code implementing the hack vs MPI / threading drudgery.
Tanenbaum has done something non-toy before, Amoeba OS. The fact that you haven't heard about it should tell you something. It had some cool capability ideas in it, though.
> QoS is the worst thing that the IETF has ever collaborated on.
> Unregulated QoS will destroy the Internet.
No, it isn't. QoS is a completely reasonable architecture. It's the only way you can get guaranteed-good-quality audio and video over the Internet to people willing to pay, which is a good thing. And it's completely orthogonal to the realities of your situation, since Vonage doesn't directly use QoS. This is about treatment of best-effort traffic. And that's BellSouth and Comcast want to start discriminating against.
If your provider is discrimatorially dropping traffic for which it has bandwidth of a particular type for reasons other than misbehavior, you can almost certainly haul him into court for breach of contract. They said they'd provide a service, and they aren't providing it.
I've been in your shoes and gone the CEO route. But it was the wrong choice because I was wrong about having somebody else to fill the CTO slot.
It's very hard to be BOTH CEO and CTO. The jobs are too different. So one dimension of your decision should be, do you have somebody good and in town and definitely lined up to be CTO if you run things?
Oh, and if the biz guy ISN'T CEO, then IMHO you want to make him COO. Look at Ballmer. He was a great COO, even if a horrible CEO.
If the CTO thing isn't a problem, you should think about which of you has a deeper grasp of things. That's why Gates was so good at it, even though he started with more of a programmer POV. It's true that you spend most of your time selling, but that didn't stop Gates, and understanding things is a big plus to selling big.
How can I resist that intro?
Look, sonny boy, I wrote my first program without needing one of those screwy video screens they have now. They're just for mental wimps and wusses, I tell ya!
It's true, actually - I typed the program (written mostly by my parents, of course, with very modest amounts of help from me) into a teletype. They probably think of me as being a tad wussy in not being able to read punch cards.
And I had to walk home both ways, because wheels hadn't been invented yet!
But, of course, here's the thing - you adapt to use the technology you have. If you have the latest thing, you learn to use the tools that take advantage of it. If you're running a small business in India, and all you can afford is this thing, you'll adapt to it, too, and be grateful for not having to do everything with paper and pencil anymore.
I'm a young'un; campus unix was via a 3b20 named jhunix when I was there. There were a handful of vaxen and suns sprinkled around. The sysadmin of 'alpha' was a roomie when the Worm hit; he was mortified because his system had survived only because it was running an ancient OS version (4.2 pre-Tahoe?).
But most logins were still via terminal or dialin.
I just had FC3 fail horribly on me in the x.org install, but I already have x.org running; I do it by disabling DRI and not using the i810 fb driver. You're prolly best off fetching it and compiling yourself similarly limited.
If you have any interest in any other field (like computers?), you might seriously want to consider changing fields for your Ph.D.
Since you're talking about a Ph.D, I'm guessing you're interested in a research job. Currently there's a vast oversupply of labor in the physics research labor pool. People do ten years of postdocs with little assurance of getting a job in the end.
I knew a physics Ph.D who finished and was so discouraged that he immediately started from scratch as a premed. He had talent and drive, too; it wasn't a case of him being marginal for the field.
Of course, I don't know if CS is the right field either; in five years, it'll have an oversupply as well. Your skillset might fit you well to do nanotech, so you might want to consider that.
And those data are, note, satellite-taken, which is where energy should be reflected under the theory stated in the article of energy being reflected back into space from atmospheric pollutants.
To my non-climate-scientist eye, an upward redistribution of energy seems a likelier theory than balanced warming/cooling for four reasons:
1) It would be quite a coincidence for two such different mechanisms to just coincidentally have the same magnitude. Especially since the best-regarded warming models have orders of magnitude lower results.
2) Energy redistributed high in the atmosphere would explain the observed ground data of observed weather changes with modest temperature change.
3) Energy MOSTLY absorbed in the atmosphere would explain the SLOW rise of satellite-observed energy emissions.
4) Aren't many particulates dark? In a polluted place, the atmophere is visibly DARKER. Dark particles absorb most light.
Looks like deliberate strategery to me. Be warned, Schwarts: heavy-handed FUD has a way of backfiring.
ObOldMovieRef: The Schwartz is NOT with you.
Maybe we have low turnout because we're basically pretty contented with our system, despite a small minority that keep shouting at us that the sky is falling?
I was at the APS meeting where Cold Fusion was officially debunked.
About five different highly respected labs, including at UMD and
Caltech, tried and failed to reproduce the results.
BUT.
Here's the thing: at least one (maybe two?) of the labs noted that
Pons & Fleischmann's results could be reproduced if one neglected one
of the steps needed to reproduce it (stirring?). If one failed to do
that step, you would get a chemical reaction of about the magnitude
P&F described.
Note well that the likeliest reason for any other researcher to
observe the reaction P&F describe would be a similar carelessness.
Could it be cold fusion? Could be. But it's very, very, very
unlikely. The chances of human error are alot higher than the
chances that physical theory is so wrong.
There was one embarrassing mistake. The funding agencies had already
promised funding for cold fusion. Thus, a (sometimes persuasive)
constituency was created for keeping cold fusion research dollars
flowing. That constituency is basically being paid to keep the cold
fusion myth alive. That's anothing thing you should keep in mind when
you hear about cold fusion nonfailures (because it's as likely that
you'll see cold fusion generators as it is that you'll get a real
opportunity to own the Brooklyn Bridge...)
This is happening because of panic. Pretty much anything can happen when policians panic. And it's not something the GOP did, either. We Democrats did it to ourselves and the nation as a whole.
Democratic politicians and media were paniced after the 2000 election, and were looking for somebody to blame. They chose the election machines. Do you remember all the news articles and politicians opining that everything would be better when upgraded to digital?
Do you remember any computer scientists being asked about it? No, of course not. Since it was about panic, nobody wanted to learn the facts.
Although, "we" computer scientists do bear partial guilt. An early feasibility study was run, and they botched it. They did mention problems and risks, but not in the summary or first paragraph.
I've written a blog posting on how current evote reform efforts aren't going far enough.
You know, that article doesn't go nearly far enough ... they don't
mention that by the end of this election season, somebody has quite
possibly been elected by a bug.
I will let three paragraphs speak for themselves: (not that it was easy to do, we DID in fact slashdot the Register).
. . . US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws . . .
. . .
Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control.
These developments, reviled and criticised by those inside and outside the continental United States who hold on to an outdated and unrealistic view of what the Net was or could become, are the key to its future growth and usefulness. Whatever the libertarians say, they must be defended, promoted - and properly controlled.
There are European-coordinated pieces of Internet, for obvious operational reasons. For some reason, the people running them seem to appreciate open access.
Anybody, anywhere, who wishes, can set up local nets with local rules. China and Singapore are good examples of countries that have done exactly that. For some reason, some citizens of those countries insist on being unruly and using the proxies that so annoy Mr. Thompson. Mr. Thompson is welcome to buy all the network control applications he wishes and set up his own network - but good luck getting anybody in a free country to use it!