There's (allegedly) a good example already of how electronic voting can be abused.
1996: Chuck Hagel wins "stunning upsets" in both primaries and the general election in Nebraska.
2002: Chuck Hagel gets reelected in a landslide, with 83% of the vote.
A single company programmed, installed and largely operated the machines that counted about 80 percent of those votes.
This company used to be headed by, and is still part-owned by, you guessed it, Chuck Hagel.
Coincidence, yeah right.
Oh, one more thing. Charlie Matulka, who lost the 2002 election, requested a hand count of the vote. His request was denied because Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel. Hmm, wonder who pushed that one through!
(most of the above info shamelessly plagiarised from that last link).
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't use electronic voting, just that the whole process needs to be completely open and exposed. The source code needs to be open, the hardware design needs to be open, you need independant and unbiased people to check that the open source code is actually what is running on the open hardware, the whole thing needs an open audit trail in the event that a recount is required etc. The whole process is a helluvalot more complicated than just a machine that counts votes. So people need to be given proof that their votes are not corrupted in any step of that process.
Yes, in fact, I believe in the last vote (actually a referendum on whether he should stay, hence the yes/no options), Saddam managed to swing the few floaters and scored 100%. Obviously he feels no need to further improve the voting process.
A big benefit from using Embedded Linux to run on your target hardware is that you can develop the software on a PC running Linux, get it working in a nice IDE, and then run THE SAME CODE on your hardware. I did this on a project where we were using QT for the GUI. I had 2 PCs, one running windows and one running Linux. I had a full development environment set up on both, and could use whichever I thought best for my current work. When we got our first bit of real hardware, it took me 3 weeks to get the actual hardware and Embedded Linux up and running, but my program ran first time. Anyone who's had to debug stuff only on hardware will know that not having to do this can be a major productivity improvement.
Congratulations guys and gals, we just slashdotted the Google cache! Is this a first?
Sheesh, work must be *really* slow today!
Re:Make sure to use broken drive...
on
Floppy the Robot
·
· Score: 5, Funny
>It's built like a tank
Why would anyone build a floppy drive with a revolving turret on top? Still, it gives you an advantage in those robot contests I suppose, especially if you use DU ammo.
That wouldn't work, because you'd only get an 'average' move. The really good killer moves would only be spotted by a few people, and therefore wouldn't get enough votes.
I have an HP Laserjet 4L, which has now been going for *8 years* on its original cartridge, and still prints perfectly. If HP had pulled the same trick with that printer, I'd now be about to buy my 4th replacement cartridge! For absolutely no reason other than to make money for HP. Well I say, thanks for the 8 years HP, but no thanks for the next printer.
I have a Samsung 171P, which is beautiful, but one tip when buying one is to pick it up yourself. Here's why...
Since I live a long way from any decent computer shops, I ordered online. The delivery would be by UPS. I had it delivered to my workplace so I could be sure not to miss it. Also my office window is right above the front door, so I can always see the delivery vans arrive. They also usually park in such a way that I can see inside when they open the door, so I can watch as they collect together the parcels that are for us. I had to wait for a week or so, every day checking the van when it arrived. I was already drooling. Then the big day came. The van parked, the guy slid open the door. I could see the appropriate sized box, with a picture of a monitor on it. That had to be mine. I watched with some slight consternation as the guy collected four or five other large boxes, and stacked them up on top of my monitor, but figured they're well packed for that sort of thing, and then ran down to open the door for him, to make sure he didn't need to let go with one hand to ring the bell or anything. Once he got inside, he put all the boxes down. Except, he didn't bend down to do this. He just, like, opened his arms! It must have been a meter drop, with my monitor at the bottom! I was speechless. I couldn't even scream, I just couldn't believe he'd done that. I ran over to check my new baby. Well, kudos to the packing designers, 'cos that lovely monitor survived, even the box was hardly dented. But UPS sure ain't getting my custom again.
And that monitor is absolutely gorgeous (did I mention that already). Hey, it says "designed by F.A.Porsche" on it, that's worth an extra $1000 right there. Before I show it to my friends, I have to warn them. "Prepare to want!", I say. "Prepare to want badly".
>Who the fuck else would ever read "antiwar.com"? Maybe someone who doesn't write off a complete website solely on the basis of its name? Maybe someone who gets information from many different sources? Wanna know how I found that link anyway? I remembered seeing something about this, and forgot where, so I Googled for "Unmovic sadomasochism", the link to Antiwar.com came up 8th. Now I agree it might have been better just to post a link to the original Washington Post article which came in 2nd, but I used the other one because it backed up my example.
>If someone threatens you, you just sit there taking it until they kill you. Exactly how many Iraqis have threatened you recently? Iraq was a broken country after the first gulf war, and never recovered, it's been no threat to anyone since then. Shit, even Kuwait wasn't scared of them.
>The article had one reference to his deviant lifestyle I thought you said you read this article. There are references to it in paragraphs 1,9,10,11,13 and 14, out of 31. Obviously anything in paragraph 1 has a very prominent position as everyone reading the article will read at least that much, even if they don't read any further. Paragraphs 9,10 and 11 talk about nothing else. That's a heck of a lot more than 6 words.
>many references to people who think he's underqualified. And also what seemed to be a fair defence of the experience they had from Hans Blix, Mr. McGeorge himself, and other UN officials. Now *you* are adding the bias.
>"pacifist" Well, you can label me that if you like. I just think that if the weapons inspection process was a bit weak (that's also debatable but please let's not get into that too), then the next logical step is to ramp it up further, not go in with our sixguns blazing away. I don't quite get the logic of saving thousands of people by killing thousands of others.
>Did you even read the original article Why, yes I did, thank you for asking.
>The article wasn't suggesting that just because of his private life he made a poor weapons inspector Name one single other reason for mentioning this aspect of his private life in the very first sentence of the article.
>the entire article was about Pardon me for interrupting, but did you read my comment? All of it? I was commenting on an article on Wired News about privacy, not on an article on the Washington Post about weapons inspectors. My reference to the latter was an *example*, and to my mind a perfectly valid one, of how personal information can be misused. The actual point of the article had no relevance to my comment, which was why I didn't mention it.
>The article suggests that... Well, we can talk about that article if you insist, but I would hazard a guess that this might be modded as OffTopic.
>His personal life may be none of our business Great, we agree.
>dirty Hey, I had a shower this morning.
>peacenik crowd How do you deduce this one? All I did was give an example of an article which, I repeat, uses personal information to damage an individual's reputation in an attempt to also damage the process he is involved in. Whether I personally am for or against war in Iraq is irrelevant, either way I would say this article stinks.
"Your PC may experience conflicting demands when you try to run multiple programs, if its operating system is not well designed to handle such conflicts. The result may be that one or more of your programs will behave erratically, or the whole PC may shut down."
So basically, if I get a BSOD my PC is neurotic? That makes 95% of PCs in the world already neurotic. And the other 5% are probably worse, because they 'panic' when things go wrong.
OK, here's an example of misuse of such information.
In one attempt to undermine the weapons inspection process, it was revealed that Harvey McGeorge of UNMOVIC had "a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs."
Like, so what. Some people do that. It's his private life, it has nothing at all whatsoever to do with his ability to do his job as a weapons inspector. And yet, the only possible reason for publishing that information was to diminish him in the eyes of the public, to try to reduce the credibility of the inspection process as a whole.
Does anybody think their own or anybody else's private lives won't be vulnerable to such abuses?
What??? For goodness' people just slow down will you? I've only just got 1.3 up and running, and now you tell me there's a newer version? I mean, don't you people have homes to go to, or do you just work 24/7? It's not easy for me you know, I have to upgrade this 3 times, at work on windows and at home on windows and on linux. Please, just have a holiday and give me a chance, I can't keep up otherwise. Aaaagggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Seriously though, is the bookmarks menu actually sorting properly now?
You can sort your bookmarks in the bookmark manager, and this is reflected in the bookmarks sidebar, but NOT in the bookmarks menu! This bug has been around for way too long, and IMHO is in a *very* visible part of the GUI, I use this menu all the time and would really like it to be sorted.
Can this be so hard to fix, please, pretty please?
typical orbital speed of 20,000 miles per hour...Air Force radars and telescopes routinely sweep a 30-mile box ahead of spacecraft carrying astronauts
Oh that's really going to help. At that speed a spacecraft will cover that distance in, oh let me see, about 5 seconds! Doesn't sound like a lot of time to me to move a massive spacecraft onto a different trajectory.
First line of the UN Charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
This just confirms that Finnish people are mad. But especially about saunas. I worked in Finland for nearly a year. When I was looking round for a flat to rent, only about half of them had baths, but they all had saunas. One flat even had two saunas. But then, the offical figures are 1,500,000 saunas in a country of 4,500,000 people, so that's at least one per household. Where I worked, the main meeting room had a sauna next to it. You can even get saunas with full video conferencing or internet facilities now, for the executive who always needs to stay in touch (http://www.mediatampere.fi/sauna/).
One of my bugbears is that debuggers don't seem to have caught up with object oriented programming yet. For example, often when I want to set a breakpoint, it would be really useful to be able to specify which object I want to break on as well, as I can usually narrow the problem down to a particular bit of code with a narrow set of objects. Now if there are thousands of identical objects like the one I want to debug, I have a problem. At the moment I have to solve it by finding a unique objet that will be activated just before the one I'm really interested in, breaking on that, then setting the breakpoint I really want, then running to that. Each time I do this I have to unset the breakpoint again, run to the first one, set it again etc. This one single feature would greatly improve my productivity. Also, simply generating a list of objects of a certain type would also be useful, so I can see how many there are in the system etc. And I'm sure there could be lots more OO-specific features other than these too. Come on debugger designers - please!
Slashdot Mirror
1996: Chuck Hagel wins "stunning upsets" in both primaries and the general election in Nebraska.
2002: Chuck Hagel gets reelected in a landslide, with 83% of the vote.
A single company programmed, installed and largely operated the machines that counted about 80 percent of those votes.
This company used to be headed by, and is still part-owned by, you guessed it, Chuck Hagel.
Coincidence, yeah right.
Oh, one more thing. Charlie Matulka, who lost the 2002 election, requested a hand count of the vote. His request was denied because Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel. Hmm, wonder who pushed that one through!
Matulka's comment:"If you want to win the election, just control the machines."
(most of the above info shamelessly plagiarised from that last link).
Now, this doesn't mean that you can't use electronic voting, just that the whole process needs to be completely open and exposed. The source code needs to be open, the hardware design needs to be open, you need independant and unbiased people to check that the open source code is actually what is running on the open hardware, the whole thing needs an open audit trail in the event that a recount is required etc. The whole process is a helluvalot more complicated than just a machine that counts votes. So people need to be given proof that their votes are not corrupted in any step of that process.
Yes, in fact, I believe in the last vote (actually a referendum on whether he should stay, hence the yes/no options), Saddam managed to swing the few floaters and scored 100%. Obviously he feels no need to further improve the voting process.
Haha, $CO, good one.
"Relax in an award winning freedom chair"
Does this mean they used to be called French chairs?
And in fact, how is this different to any website blocking software, which uses similar means and similar lists? Anyone?
A big benefit from using Embedded Linux to run on your target hardware is that you can develop the software on a PC running Linux, get it working in a nice IDE, and then run THE SAME CODE on your hardware.
I did this on a project where we were using QT for the GUI. I had 2 PCs, one running windows and one running Linux. I had a full development environment set up on both, and could use whichever I thought best for my current work.
When we got our first bit of real hardware, it took me 3 weeks to get the actual hardware and Embedded Linux up and running, but my program ran first time.
Anyone who's had to debug stuff only on hardware will know that not having to do this can be a major productivity improvement.
Congratulations guys and gals, we just slashdotted the Google cache! Is this a first?
Sheesh, work must be *really* slow today!
>It's built like a tank
Why would anyone build a floppy drive with a revolving turret on top?
Still, it gives you an advantage in those robot contests I suppose, especially if you use DU ammo.
That wouldn't work, because you'd only get an 'average' move. The really good killer moves would only be spotted by a few people, and therefore wouldn't get enough votes.
I have an HP Laserjet 4L, which has now been going for *8 years* on its original cartridge, and still prints perfectly. If HP had pulled the same trick with that printer, I'd now be about to buy my 4th replacement cartridge! For absolutely no reason other than to make money for HP. Well I say, thanks for the 8 years HP, but no thanks for the next printer.
Wow, a new way to flatten your enemies...
"OK men, wait until you see the whites of their eyes, then fire a short burst of Britney Spears!"
Anyone else here reminded of Monty Python's funniest joke in the world sketch?
Eh? Yes it did, watch it again.
And I would say you're being a little hasty writing off the movie on account of a single line, but hey it's your $9. Just my 2c.
I have a Samsung 171P, which is beautiful, but one tip when buying one is to pick it up yourself. Here's why...
Since I live a long way from any decent computer shops, I ordered online. The delivery would be by UPS. I had it delivered to my workplace so I could be sure not to miss it. Also my office window is right above the front door, so I can always see the delivery vans arrive. They also usually park in such a way that I can see inside when they open the door, so I can watch as they collect together the parcels that are for us.
I had to wait for a week or so, every day checking the van when it arrived. I was already drooling. Then the big day came. The van parked, the guy slid open the door. I could see the appropriate sized box, with a picture of a monitor on it. That had to be mine.
I watched with some slight consternation as the guy collected four or five other large boxes, and stacked them up on top of my monitor, but figured they're well packed for that sort of thing, and then ran down to open the door for him, to make sure he didn't need to let go with one hand to ring the bell or anything.
Once he got inside, he put all the boxes down. Except, he didn't bend down to do this. He just, like, opened his arms! It must have been a meter drop, with my monitor at the bottom! I was speechless. I couldn't even scream, I just couldn't believe he'd done that. I ran over to check my new baby.
Well, kudos to the packing designers, 'cos that lovely monitor survived, even the box was hardly dented. But UPS sure ain't getting my custom again.
And that monitor is absolutely gorgeous (did I mention that already). Hey, it says "designed by F.A.Porsche" on it, that's worth an extra $1000 right there. Before I show it to my friends, I have to warn them. "Prepare to want!", I say. "Prepare to want badly".
>Who the fuck else would ever read "antiwar.com"?
Maybe someone who doesn't write off a complete website solely on the basis of its name? Maybe someone who gets information from many different sources?
Wanna know how I found that link anyway? I remembered seeing something about this, and forgot where, so I Googled for "Unmovic sadomasochism", the link to Antiwar.com came up 8th. Now I agree it might have been better just to post a link to the original Washington Post article which came in 2nd, but I used the other one because it backed up my example.
>If someone threatens you, you just sit there taking it until they kill you.
Exactly how many Iraqis have threatened you recently? Iraq was a broken country after the first gulf war, and never recovered, it's been no threat to anyone since then. Shit, even Kuwait wasn't scared of them.
>The article had one reference to his deviant lifestyle
I thought you said you read this article. There are references to it in paragraphs 1,9,10,11,13 and 14, out of 31. Obviously anything in paragraph 1 has a very prominent position as everyone reading the article will read at least that much, even if they don't read any further. Paragraphs 9,10 and 11 talk about nothing else. That's a heck of a lot more than 6 words.
>many references to people who think he's underqualified.
And also what seemed to be a fair defence of the experience they had from Hans Blix, Mr. McGeorge himself, and other UN officials. Now *you* are adding the bias.
>"pacifist"
Well, you can label me that if you like. I just think that if the weapons inspection process was a bit weak (that's also debatable but please let's not get into that too), then the next logical step is to ramp it up further, not go in with our sixguns blazing away. I don't quite get the logic of saving thousands of people by killing thousands of others.
>Did you even read the original article
...
Why, yes I did, thank you for asking.
>The article wasn't suggesting that just because of his private life he made a poor weapons inspector
Name one single other reason for mentioning this aspect of his private life in the very first sentence of the article.
>the entire article was about
Pardon me for interrupting, but did you read my comment? All of it? I was commenting on an article on Wired News about privacy, not on an article on the Washington Post about weapons inspectors. My reference to the latter was an *example*, and to my mind a perfectly valid one, of how personal information can be misused. The actual point of the article had no relevance to my comment, which was why I didn't mention it.
>The article suggests that
Well, we can talk about that article if you insist, but I would hazard a guess that this might be modded as OffTopic.
>His personal life may be none of our business
Great, we agree.
>dirty
Hey, I had a shower this morning.
>peacenik crowd
How do you deduce this one? All I did was give an example of an article which, I repeat, uses personal information to damage an individual's reputation in an attempt to also damage the process he is involved in. Whether I personally am for or against war in Iraq is irrelevant, either way I would say this article stinks.
So basically, if I get a BSOD my PC is neurotic? That makes 95% of PCs in the world already neurotic. And the other 5% are probably worse, because they 'panic' when things go wrong.
In one attempt to undermine the weapons inspection process, it was revealed that Harvey McGeorge of UNMOVIC had "a leadership role in sadomasochistic sex clubs."
Like, so what. Some people do that. It's his private life, it has nothing at all whatsoever to do with his ability to do his job as a weapons inspector. And yet, the only possible reason for publishing that information was to diminish him in the eyes of the public, to try to reduce the credibility of the inspection process as a whole.
Does anybody think their own or anybody else's private lives won't be vulnerable to such abuses?
(More details on this can be found here.)
What??? For goodness' people just slow down will you? I've only just got 1.3 up and running, and now you tell me there's a newer version? I mean, don't you people have homes to go to, or do you just work 24/7? It's not easy for me you know, I have to upgrade this 3 times, at work on windows and at home on windows and on linux. Please, just have a holiday and give me a chance, I can't keep up otherwise. Aaaagggggghhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Seriously though, is the bookmarks menu actually sorting properly now?
You can sort your bookmarks in the bookmark manager, and this is reflected in the bookmarks sidebar, but NOT in the bookmarks menu! This bug has been around for way too long, and IMHO is in a *very* visible part of the GUI, I use this menu all the time and would really like it to be sorted.
Can this be so hard to fix, please, pretty please?
Oh that's really going to help. At that speed a spacecraft will cover that distance in, oh let me see, about 5 seconds! Doesn't sound like a lot of time to me to move a massive spacecraft onto a different trajectory.
First line of the UN Charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
Sorry, did you say "the contractor's Greed?
Well, maybe they didn't notice I left.
And the world's favourite government is currently well into line 80!
Time to move guys!
This just confirms that Finnish people are mad. But especially about saunas. I worked in Finland for nearly a year. When I was looking round for a flat to rent, only about half of them had baths, but they all had saunas. One flat even had two saunas.
But then, the offical figures are 1,500,000 saunas in a country of 4,500,000 people, so that's at least one per household.
Where I worked, the main meeting room had a sauna next to it.
You can even get saunas with full video conferencing or internet facilities now, for the executive who always needs to stay in touch (http://www.mediatampere.fi/sauna/).
One of my bugbears is that debuggers don't seem to have caught up with object oriented programming yet. For example, often when I want to set a breakpoint, it would be really useful to be able to specify which object I want to break on as well, as I can usually narrow the problem down to a particular bit of code with a narrow set of objects. Now if there are thousands of identical objects like the one I want to debug, I have a problem. At the moment I have to solve it by finding a unique objet that will be activated just before the one I'm really interested in, breaking on that, then setting the breakpoint I really want, then running to that. Each time I do this I have to unset the breakpoint again, run to the first one, set it again etc.
This one single feature would greatly improve my productivity.
Also, simply generating a list of objects of a certain type would also be useful, so I can see how many there are in the system etc. And I'm sure there could be lots more OO-specific features other than these too. Come on debugger designers - please!