We now have, for the Diebold machines, a proof-of-concept vote-changing virus that spreads from machine to machine via the memory slot.
But the initial infection is also via the memory slot, which requires opening the machine. (Granted that's quick and easy. But it's also visible if anyone is paying attention.)
Of course such a virus can be embedded in an installer that would inject it via any active and compromiseable port on the machne: Network connection, IR port, touch screen cable connection, WiFi (if present), etc. With such a tool and access to such a port, any voter could instantly infect the machine he uses via any port he can access during the election.
The obvious port for such an attack is the smartcard port: Inserting a card there is a normal part of voting, while substitution of the card is unlikely to be noticed. (Even if a normal card doesn't have enough memory to insert a virus, a fake card could be built that does, or that can access memory external to itself.) And the smartcard reader is necessarily active during the voting process, regarless of other aspects of the polling-place configuration.
Is there any indication of a flaw in the smartcard reader driver that might be exploited in this way?
As a close friend with a degree in Foods and Nutrition points out:
The rodent calorie-restriction longevity increase only shows up in laboratory settings, where the rodents are protected from exposure to infectious agents. When they are allowed such exposure, they prove to be much more susceptable to them, becoming ill more easily and dying form it ditto. So calorie restriction in ordinary environments REDUCES lifespan from this effect alone (i.e. not counting competitive disadvantages of underfeeding).
Lowered body temperature has been known for a long time to suppress the immune system. Lowered temperature a symptom of the calorie restriction and lowered temperature alone able to produce the longevity increase is entirely consistent with the previous info - just pushing understanding of the mechanism one step further down.
Of course a big push in researching the longevity increase was to see if there was a point where the mechanisms leading to immune suppression and the absent-infection logevity increase diverge, so a practical intervention can be designed. This research implies they're still coupled at the lower-body-temperature step.
Yes, such laws do exist. (They're apparently why you can't get the raw voteing machine and punchcard ballot reader output to examine for statistical signs of vote tampering, too.)
But the point of the printed reciept is NOT for the voter to take it home. The point is for him to put it in a ballot box. Then it's no longer in his possession, so the laws to prevent vote-buying don't apply.
The printed "reciept" is actually the official ballot, and subject to recounts and audits. The voting machine becomes simply a ballot marking aid - which can opportunistically take a count as it operates. The machine's count can be used for rapid return reporting, but only becomes the official count if there are no challenges and the precinct doesn't happen to be randomly selected for auditing.
With a spit-out printed ballot added to the voting machines, the rest of the current software can remain in place. With an audit trail any fraud can be detected and corrected. (Further: With random sampling and the inevitable recount requests in close races and those where fraud is suspected, it is LIKELY to be detected.)
In the absense of the ability to untracably corrupt the count, voting macine fraud attempts become much less likely - and a path to prison rather than to political power.
Jeez, I see my original post was modded flamebait. I was just trying to be funny. I hope that doesn't hurt my karma. I guess you can't joke about this stuff.
Sarcasm doesn't come across well in print. You have to be more blatant. (That's why emoticons were invented. B-) )
Granted your post was VERY blatant. But your parody was too close to what the moonbats are actually saying to be recognized by many of the posters here.
The folks at BlackBoxVoting.org are zealots that are against any voting technology other than hand-counting votes.
I know at least one of the principals of Black Box Voting personally.
I'm sure that they would be exstatic about a mod to the Diebold system that turned it into a printer of the OFFICIAL, human-checkable, deposited in the ballot box for potential auditing and recounts, ballot - even if the system then opportunistically counted them and gave a quick (but hackable) return.
After all, five days is just long enough for the documentry to teach Republicans how to eploit the "bugs", but not long enough to deal with the red tape of changing the voting devices. They'll have it rigged more than ever!
Also just long enough to teach the Democrats, in the districts where they control the election, exactly the same. (You know, like the one where the Democrat designed the Butterfly Ballot that was the source of that controversey in Florida in '06.) B-)
I bet the Republicans would be perfectly happy to sign on to a bill mandating an auditable paper trail for all voting - IF it ALSO mandated a federal voter identification system to insure that only elegible, live, voters cast votes (no more than one each) and had them counted (exactly once).
when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted but only you are able to tell which vote was yours by the corresponding ticket number
That's illegal - because it enables a voter to prove how he voted to someone else.
- This enables vote-buying schemes.
- It also breaks the secret ballot by enabling pressure (by employers, thugs, and corrupt officials) on the voters to vote a particular way and prove they did.
(Part of the following assumes the position of the candidates is chosen by officials, rather than being prescribed by law. I don't know Florida's law on the subject - but some of the coverage of the "butterfly ballot" controversey seemed to indicate that ballot design is the choice of local election officials.)
If a misalignment of the touch sensor with the screen (which would systematically move the touch point in a particular direction) systematically transfers votes for Democrats to Republicans, and not the other way around, it means the ballot was constructed with the Democrats systematically above, or systematically below, the Republicans in balot position. Since moving the touchpoint up would tend to move it to a different, already voted, race, the implication is that they were moved down - which would mean the Ds are systematically above the Rs on the ballot.
That amounts to a systematic bias in the balot design.
Higher ballot position gives the candidate a preference. So such a ballot would be biased toward Democrats when the machines are operating correctly.
It's like saying that Wendy's can "compete" with McDonalds if the government passes a new law that everyone has to pay to eat all their meals at McDonalds, and then can show up and get the food they already had to pay for for no additonal charge. In order to go to Wendy's, you have to also buy a McDonalds meal and throw it away. That's not "free market competition." For another example where this is already happening, consider the public school system.
(In cash-strapped California, for instance, about HALF the state budget goes to the schools and universities. Then, if you want your kids to exit their K-12 education intact, literate, and with a chance to get into those tax-funded universities, you have to pay AGAIN to send them to a private school.)
Can anyone explain to me what this story is actually about, in really simple terms,
Large ISPs deploy broadband first (only?) in big cities, where there are lots of potential customers in a small area, producing lots of revenue for their investment. They haven't had a lot of interest - yet - in deploying in small towns and out in the spaces between towns.
Some towns have gotten tired of waiting for some company to decide to wire them for broadband, and have tried to set up their own, local, town-owned-and-operated (or town contracting with some company to operate but town-controlled), tax-subsidized, ISP to get it to happen sooner. This is on the model of other utilities (water, gas, electricity) which some cities operate.
Some of the cities doing this would be hugely profitable for the big ISPs that haven't gotten around to them yet. So they've gone to the state governments containing those cities and lobbied for (and sometimes gotten) state laws passed to block ALL cities, towns, villages, counties, townships, etc. from setting up their own ISPs. That includes the ones they want to wire and profit from, and the ones that they probably won't be interested in for years or decades.
Reason Foundation - a free-market think tank - came up with a report suggesting that municipal ISPs are a bad idea.
The big ISPs are using that to support their lobbying.
Broadband Reports did an editorial flaming the Reason Foundation report.
(I only skimmed the editorial and glanced at the report since I'm at work right now. The editorial seems to be ad-hominems attacking the expertese and independence of the people involved in creating the Reason Foundation report, rather than arguments on the issues. But I could be wrong.)
= = = =
Personal take: Free market theory suggests that if the big guys leave some market untapped that leaves opportunities for others. For instance: If the population is too spread out for DSL to be profitable or high-bandwidth, it might be a good spot for something else, like a WISP (WiMax or WiFI based), to provide lots of bandwidth with little infrastructure and reap a profit while providing service at decent rates. But a subsidized municipial ISP might provide enough service at low enough rates (suplemented by tax money collected whether you subscribe or not) to kill the opportunity for the WISP and leave the residents with only the municipial system (which would likely be lower quality) and satellite.
I'm seeing that in Nevada, where some of the smaller towns are being supplied by a WiMax operator. And they're about 20 miles from my place (with a mountain in the way) and aren't interested in hopping the hill to my valley any time soon. I'm left with a 28Kish dialup unless I want to subscribe to a satellite service.
Given the amount of propaganda (both commercial and political) built into current TV shows, sorting out advertisements from commercials themselves rasises issues of definition - and opinion.
Especially during the period before an election.
This bodes ill for applying AI to the CONTENT of the shows and advertisements in an attempt to separate them.
Listening to the radio this morning, they said Newark airport staff failed 20 of 22 tests involving guns and bombs being smuggled past security by undercover agents.
A few years ago I was in a security-check X-ray line. The guy ahead of me was such a "tester", smuggling a gun in his carrr-on bag. The gun was positioned against the side of the bag and sitting on its top surface, so the grip was up. It looked like a flattened-out bracelet on the X-ray.
The screener didn't catch it. The guy showed the screener how she had flunked and what a gun in that position looked like.
And I, along with a number of other people standing nearby, now know how to pack a gun in a carryon bag so it has a good chance of being missed in the X-ray screening.
Fortunately, screening machines have improved since then. For instance, some of the modern ones measure various parameters of the objects' interaction with the X-rays and generate false-color images coded by the type of material, rather than a grey-scale transmission map of a single view angle. This hack would be much tougher to get away with on the newer machines.
However in this case the low mass of the platter lets it recoil from the head on the air cushion rather than squeezing the cushion out.
This makes it more resistant to crashing than a rigid (and massive) platter that, on impact, is accellerated by the hub while the heads, on their flexible mounts, are accellerated much less. A much larger shock is necessary before an impact occurs between the platter and something else (whether head or other structure).
This is much like the old Iomega high-capacity high-speed floppy drives, which had the same characteristic for the same reason.
You're right: At the very least about OpenOffice, and I should have remembered that they DID release the code (even though they kept the "Star" version, which my employer runs on many of its machines, proprietary.)
The first time they "opened" Solaris they didn't really - one of those non-free licenses - and I threw in the towel on paying attention to them when I migrated from last personal Sun instalation to Linux.
Which decade are you referring to?
'80s and '90s. The above-mentioned migration was near the end of 1999. (No point in dealing with the Y2K bug on more than one platform.)
I'll be happy if Sun is truly opening things, and sincerely apologize if I have wronged them.
But for me it's too little too late. I spent too many years crippled by their closed / semi-opened software and hardware to go back. Linux and BSD each suit my needs and both are truly open (in slightly different ways).
[Google has historically changed the algorithm] to stop link farms and spam from getting through.
And this is a link farm for stories critical of their political opposition. It was deliberately and very publically done to bias Google search results in favor of one party's candidates over another's, in the midst of a hotly contested election that might change the party in in control of one or both houses of congrees.
As such (if Google is being consistent about their core mission) they should check their algorithms to insure that they recognize and discount this attack, and tweak them as necessary to do so if they currently do not.
However, Google's owners and much of its personnel are supporters of the Democratic party. It will be instructional to see if they follow through on this in a timely manner, or ignore it (or let it slide until just before the election).
... they are linking the candidate's OWN NAME to a news article about the candidate. Therefore people who are searching for information about the candidate are more likely to read the targeted article. It's simple and not at all misleading.
Actually, it's simple and VERY misleading: It's a classic propaganda technique.
While "The Big Lie" gets all the press these days, more effecitve techniques involve manipulation of perceived ratios. Omission or deemphasis of stories about events contrary to the message, repeated, emphasized, trumpeting of every event, no matter how rare, that supports the message.
(Childhood deaths from X in the home may be orders of magnitude less likely than deaths from tricycle tipovers, falling into swimming pools, or drowning in buckets of water. But splash stories of "child killed by X" on the front page every time it happens while reporting nothing about deaths by the others (or of kids' lives saved by use of an X), and pretty soon the man in the street thinks X is the major cause of childhood death.)
It's the same effect as a researcher "cherry-picking" his data - except the media do the cherry-picking for the readers/viewers.
This is a conscious effort to do exactly that to the Google search results for the candidates they oppose: Bring every bad story to the front search pages, push the good ones down to lower rank, to deliberately create a false impression.
Now if they would only build a layer showing the various reality TV show locations and stars' houses.... 'cause that is about all the general population cares about anyways.
I'd prefer for the people who don't care how the election comes out to NOT vote. That makes the votes of the people who DO care and ARE paying attention more effective.
This is actually important for proper functioning of the elections: Their REAL purpose is to predict the outcome of a hypothetical civil war on each issue, accurately enough to convince the loser not to "appeal the outcome" by force of arms. So people who don't care enough to fight about an issue or candidate SHOULDN'T vote in that race.
1) Until the court throws the law out, you have no idea whether it will.
Bullshit. Most of the time you have a very good idea, and so do the legislators who wrote the law.
Bullshit right back at you.
By breaking a law to create a test case you're not just betting that the court will rule your way - and not come up with some unexpected twist. You're also betting that they will bother to take it, that the way the prosecution will construct the case against you will let you even bring up the issue, and that a number of other potential mishaps will not happen. Miss on any one and you've gone to a lot of trouble and expense, and lost a lot of your freedom, without even getting your question heard.
Prosecutors trying out a new law generally use it first on the rottenest scumbags they can find, not idealists who are itching for the fight. Once a few convictions are on the books to set the precedents it becomes much harder to bring up the constitutionality issues. THEN they'll work their way down to you. (That's why it's so important to protect the rights of scumbags and "get them off on technicalities": The "technicalities" are essentially all important constitutional issues, exactly what you must defend.)
Courts at all levels have a fine track record of ducking the issues.
The initial court will generally not apply a constitutionality test unless the particular issue has already been ruled on by the Supremes or their appelate circuit. So with a new law (that isn't totally blatant) you have to LOSE there - and if it's NOT totally blatant the judge will be trying to find anything that will let him throw it out.
Appellate courts have a marvelous track record of making decisions that the Supremes reverse. (Look at the Ninth Federal Circuit {AKA "Ninth Circus"} for examples.)
Getting the Supreme Court to take a case is tough - especially when they know the consitituional issue should go one way but they really WANT it to go the other.
For an example look at gun ban laws and the Miller decision: The actual decision was that, in the case of short-barreled shotguns, the government could regulate them despite the Second Amendment, because nobody had "brought to judicial notice" that they WERE usable as military weapons by a "militia". (Miller wasn't there to argue his side, being dead at the time. Without him and his lawyers to "bring to judicial notice" things like the use of "trench guns" in WW I, only the government's side got heard.) Since that time the lower courts have misconstrued the decision into "government can ban and/or regulate particular weapons" and used it to uphold bans on exactly the sort of military weapons the actual Miller decision said WERE the subset that is protected, while the Supremes have refused to hear further cases on the issue for more than half a century.)
The courts only decide whether or not something's constitutional. Until they do so, it is constitutional.
Sorry, no cigar.
IF the court declares something unconstitutional, it was ALWAYS unconstitutional. It "didn't exist". Get out of jail free, etc.
Not that it matters a whole lot. The problem is fourfold:
1) Until the court throws the law out, you have no idea whether it will.
2) Neither does the rest of the legal system. So it still goes after you. "Get out of jail free." doesn't refund your bondsman's fee, your lawyer's fee, replace your lost chunk of lifetime, reassemble the broken family, get you your job back - with back pay, replace your repossessed house and car, restore your credit rating, replace the expensive collectable guns you had to dispose of, fill in the hole in your resume, etc. It does purge the criminal record - which doesn't help you if the info is already out in hundreds of non-court databases. And even if they knew damned well this one would get thrown out you have no way to sue them. "I vas Chust Dooink my Chob!"
3) The courts normally don't even take up the issue until somebody gets convicted of violating the law in question AND there's NO other way to dispose of the case without addressing the issue. Even then it takes the Supreme Court to definitively strike a new law, and they can arbitrarily refuse to even hear it - which they usually will do unless two appellate courts disagree, and sometimes even then.
and...
When the courts strike down COPA, it will be replaced by something even worse.
4) It takes a LOT of time and work to strike a law. It takes the legislators and chief exec very little time and work to pass another like it, with slight tweaks.
And another. And another. And another dozen. And another thousand. And put riders on every "must-pass" bill, like the budget, or a use-of-force authorization, or...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think I'd admit it if it wasn't, do you? B-)
We now have, for the Diebold machines, a proof-of-concept vote-changing virus that spreads from machine to machine via the memory slot.
But the initial infection is also via the memory slot, which requires opening the machine. (Granted that's quick and easy. But it's also visible if anyone is paying attention.)
Of course such a virus can be embedded in an installer that would inject it via any active and compromiseable port on the machne: Network connection, IR port, touch screen cable connection, WiFi (if present), etc. With such a tool and access to such a port, any voter could instantly infect the machine he uses via any port he can access during the election.
The obvious port for such an attack is the smartcard port: Inserting a card there is a normal part of voting, while substitution of the card is unlikely to be noticed. (Even if a normal card doesn't have enough memory to insert a virus, a fake card could be built that does, or that can access memory external to itself.) And the smartcard reader is necessarily active during the voting process, regarless of other aspects of the polling-place configuration.
Is there any indication of a flaw in the smartcard reader driver that might be exploited in this way?
I hear it turns out those folks were from a culture where age was venerated and they tended to lie about their age.
As a close friend with a degree in Foods and Nutrition points out:
The rodent calorie-restriction longevity increase only shows up in laboratory settings, where the rodents are protected from exposure to infectious agents. When they are allowed such exposure, they prove to be much more susceptable to them, becoming ill more easily and dying form it ditto. So calorie restriction in ordinary environments REDUCES lifespan from this effect alone (i.e. not counting competitive disadvantages of underfeeding).
Lowered body temperature has been known for a long time to suppress the immune system. Lowered temperature a symptom of the calorie restriction and lowered temperature alone able to produce the longevity increase is entirely consistent with the previous info - just pushing understanding of the mechanism one step further down.
Of course a big push in researching the longevity increase was to see if there was a point where the mechanisms leading to immune suppression and the absent-infection logevity increase diverge, so a practical intervention can be designed. This research implies they're still coupled at the lower-body-temperature step.
Yes, such laws do exist. (They're apparently why you can't get the raw voteing machine and punchcard ballot reader output to examine for statistical signs of vote tampering, too.)
But the point of the printed reciept is NOT for the voter to take it home. The point is for him to put it in a ballot box. Then it's no longer in his possession, so the laws to prevent vote-buying don't apply.
The printed "reciept" is actually the official ballot, and subject to recounts and audits. The voting machine becomes simply a ballot marking aid - which can opportunistically take a count as it operates. The machine's count can be used for rapid return reporting, but only becomes the official count if there are no challenges and the precinct doesn't happen to be randomly selected for auditing.
With a spit-out printed ballot added to the voting machines, the rest of the current software can remain in place. With an audit trail any fraud can be detected and corrected. (Further: With random sampling and the inevitable recount requests in close races and those where fraud is suspected, it is LIKELY to be detected.)
In the absense of the ability to untracably corrupt the count, voting macine fraud attempts become much less likely - and a path to prison rather than to political power.
Sarcasm doesn't come across well in print. You have to be more blatant. (That's why emoticons were invented. B-) )
Granted your post was VERY blatant. But your parody was too close to what the moonbats are actually saying to be recognized by many of the posters here.
A flamebait mod and a handfull of serious replies, I can see.
But not even one post from somebody who read the parent as an obvious satire and sarcasm?
Geez, guys. Get a grip!
(I guess we have another example of sarcasm not coming across in print.)
The folks at BlackBoxVoting.org are zealots that are against any voting technology other than hand-counting votes.
I know at least one of the principals of Black Box Voting personally.
I'm sure that they would be exstatic about a mod to the Diebold system that turned it into a printer of the OFFICIAL, human-checkable, deposited in the ballot box for potential auditing and recounts, ballot - even if the system then opportunistically counted them and gave a quick (but hackable) return.
After all, five days is just long enough for the documentry to teach Republicans how to eploit the "bugs", but not long enough to deal with the red tape of changing the voting devices. They'll have it rigged more than ever!
Also just long enough to teach the Democrats, in the districts where they control the election, exactly the same. (You know, like the one where the Democrat designed the Butterfly Ballot that was the source of that controversey in Florida in '06.) B-)
I bet the Republicans would be perfectly happy to sign on to a bill mandating an auditable paper trail for all voting - IF it ALSO mandated a federal voter identification system to insure that only elegible, live, voters cast votes (no more than one each) and had them counted (exactly once).
when you vote you're given a ticket with a number, anyone can go online and see how everyone voted but only you are able to tell which vote was yours by the corresponding ticket number
That's illegal - because it enables a voter to prove how he voted to someone else.
- This enables vote-buying schemes.
- It also breaks the secret ballot by enabling pressure (by employers, thugs, and corrupt officials) on the voters to vote a particular way and prove they did.
Hear hear!
(Part of the following assumes the position of the candidates is chosen by officials, rather than being prescribed by law. I don't know Florida's law on the subject - but some of the coverage of the "butterfly ballot" controversey seemed to indicate that ballot design is the choice of local election officials.)
If a misalignment of the touch sensor with the screen (which would systematically move the touch point in a particular direction) systematically transfers votes for Democrats to Republicans, and not the other way around, it means the ballot was constructed with the Democrats systematically above, or systematically below, the Republicans in balot position. Since moving the touchpoint up would tend to move it to a different, already voted, race, the implication is that they were moved down - which would mean the Ds are systematically above the Rs on the ballot.
That amounts to a systematic bias in the balot design.
Higher ballot position gives the candidate a preference. So such a ballot would be biased toward Democrats when the machines are operating correctly.
So perhaps THAT should be investigated.
Large ISPs deploy broadband first (only?) in big cities, where there are lots of potential customers in a small area, producing lots of revenue for their investment. They haven't had a lot of interest - yet - in deploying in small towns and out in the spaces between towns.
Some towns have gotten tired of waiting for some company to decide to wire them for broadband, and have tried to set up their own, local, town-owned-and-operated (or town contracting with some company to operate but town-controlled), tax-subsidized, ISP to get it to happen sooner. This is on the model of other utilities (water, gas, electricity) which some cities operate.
Some of the cities doing this would be hugely profitable for the big ISPs that haven't gotten around to them yet. So they've gone to the state governments containing those cities and lobbied for (and sometimes gotten) state laws passed to block ALL cities, towns, villages, counties, townships, etc. from setting up their own ISPs. That includes the ones they want to wire and profit from, and the ones that they probably won't be interested in for years or decades.
Reason Foundation - a free-market think tank - came up with a report suggesting that municipal ISPs are a bad idea.
The big ISPs are using that to support their lobbying.
Broadband Reports did an editorial flaming the Reason Foundation report.
(I only skimmed the editorial and glanced at the report since I'm at work right now. The editorial seems to be ad-hominems attacking the expertese and independence of the people involved in creating the Reason Foundation report, rather than arguments on the issues. But I could be wrong.)
= = = =
Personal take: Free market theory suggests that if the big guys leave some market untapped that leaves opportunities for others. For instance: If the population is too spread out for DSL to be profitable or high-bandwidth, it might be a good spot for something else, like a WISP (WiMax or WiFI based), to provide lots of bandwidth with little infrastructure and reap a profit while providing service at decent rates. But a subsidized municipial ISP might provide enough service at low enough rates (suplemented by tax money collected whether you subscribe or not) to kill the opportunity for the WISP and leave the residents with only the municipial system (which would likely be lower quality) and satellite.
I'm seeing that in Nevada, where some of the smaller towns are being supplied by a WiMax operator. And they're about 20 miles from my place (with a mountain in the way) and aren't interested in hopping the hill to my valley any time soon. I'm left with a 28Kish dialup unless I want to subscribe to a satellite service.
So I feel for both sides of the argument. B-)
Given the amount of propaganda (both commercial and political) built into current TV shows, sorting out advertisements from commercials themselves rasises issues of definition - and opinion.
Especially during the period before an election.
This bodes ill for applying AI to the CONTENT of the shows and advertisements in an attempt to separate them.
Listening to the radio this morning, they said Newark airport staff failed 20 of 22 tests involving guns and bombs being smuggled past security by undercover agents.
A few years ago I was in a security-check X-ray line. The guy ahead of me was such a "tester", smuggling a gun in his carrr-on bag. The gun was positioned against the side of the bag and sitting on its top surface, so the grip was up. It looked like a flattened-out bracelet on the X-ray.
The screener didn't catch it. The guy showed the screener how she had flunked and what a gun in that position looked like.
And I, along with a number of other people standing nearby, now know how to pack a gun in a carryon bag so it has a good chance of being missed in the X-ray screening.
Fortunately, screening machines have improved since then. For instance, some of the modern ones measure various parameters of the objects' interaction with the X-rays and generate false-color images coded by the type of material, rather than a grey-scale transmission map of a single view angle. This hack would be much tougher to get away with on the newer machines.
However in this case the low mass of the platter lets it recoil from the head on the air cushion rather than squeezing the cushion out.
This makes it more resistant to crashing than a rigid (and massive) platter that, on impact, is accellerated by the hub while the heads, on their flexible mounts, are accellerated much less. A much larger shock is necessary before an impact occurs between the platter and something else (whether head or other structure).
This is much like the old Iomega high-capacity high-speed floppy drives, which had the same characteristic for the same reason.
Would this include OpenSolaris and OpenOffice?
I stand corrected.
You're right: At the very least about OpenOffice,
and I should have remembered that they DID release
the code (even though they kept the "Star" version,
which my employer runs on many of its machines,
proprietary.)
The first time they "opened" Solaris they didn't
really - one of those non-free licenses - and I
threw in the towel on paying attention to them
when I migrated from last personal Sun instalation
to Linux.
Which decade are you referring to?
'80s and '90s. The above-mentioned migration was near
the end of 1999. (No point in dealing with the Y2K bug
on more than one platform.)
I'll be happy if Sun is truly opening things,
and sincerely apologize if I have wronged them.
But for me it's too little too late. I spent too many
years crippled by their closed / semi-opened software
and hardware to go back. Linux and BSD each suit my
needs and both are truly open (in slightly different ways).
[Google has historically changed the algorithm] to stop link farms and spam from getting through.
And this is a link farm for stories critical of their political opposition. It was deliberately and very publically done to bias Google search results in favor of one party's candidates over another's, in the midst of a hotly contested election that might change the party in in control of one or both houses of congrees.
As such (if Google is being consistent about their core mission) they should check their algorithms to insure that they recognize and discount this attack, and tweak them as necessary to do so if they currently do not.
However, Google's owners and much of its personnel are supporters of the Democratic party. It will be instructional to see if they follow through on this in a timely manner, or ignore it (or let it slide until just before the election).
... they are linking the candidate's OWN NAME to a news article about the candidate. Therefore people who are searching for information about the candidate are more likely to read the targeted article. It's simple and not at all misleading.
Actually, it's simple and VERY misleading: It's a classic propaganda technique.
While "The Big Lie" gets all the press these days, more effecitve techniques involve manipulation of perceived ratios. Omission or deemphasis of stories about events contrary to the message, repeated, emphasized, trumpeting of every event, no matter how rare, that supports the message.
(Childhood deaths from X in the home may be orders of magnitude less likely than deaths from tricycle tipovers, falling into swimming pools, or drowning in buckets of water. But splash stories of "child killed by X" on the front page every time it happens while reporting nothing about deaths by the others (or of kids' lives saved by use of an X), and pretty soon the man in the street thinks X is the major cause of childhood death.)
It's the same effect as a researcher "cherry-picking" his data - except the media do the cherry-picking for the readers/viewers.
This is a conscious effort to do exactly that to the Google search results for the candidates they oppose: Bring every bad story to the front search pages, push the good ones down to lower rank, to deliberately create a false impression.
Sun has a multi-decade track record of talking about opening things, but not really doing it.
I'll belive this is really "open" when (if) I see it and it's really open.
And if so it will be a first for Sun.
what does a 'tabernacle of security' mean?
Only the priesthood and those among the flock that they approve are allowed in.
Now if they would only build a layer showing the various reality TV show locations and stars' houses.... 'cause that is about all the general population cares about anyways.
I'd prefer for the people who don't care how the election comes out to NOT vote. That makes the votes of the people who DO care and ARE paying attention more effective.
This is actually important for proper functioning of the elections: Their REAL purpose is to predict the outcome of a hypothetical civil war on each issue, accurately enough to convince the loser not to "appeal the outcome" by force of arms. So people who don't care enough to fight about an issue or candidate SHOULDN'T vote in that race.
By breaking a law to create a test case you're not just betting that the court will rule your way - and not come up with some unexpected twist. You're also betting that they will bother to take it, that the way the prosecution will construct the case against you will let you even bring up the issue, and that a number of other potential mishaps will not happen. Miss on any one and you've gone to a lot of trouble and expense, and lost a lot of your freedom, without even getting your question heard.
Prosecutors trying out a new law generally use it first on the rottenest scumbags they can find, not idealists who are itching for the fight. Once a few convictions are on the books to set the precedents it becomes much harder to bring up the constitutionality issues. THEN they'll work their way down to you. (That's why it's so important to protect the rights of scumbags and "get them off on technicalities": The "technicalities" are essentially all important constitutional issues, exactly what you must defend.)
Courts at all levels have a fine track record of ducking the issues.
The initial court will generally not apply a constitutionality test unless the particular issue has already been ruled on by the Supremes or their appelate circuit. So with a new law (that isn't totally blatant) you have to LOSE there - and if it's NOT totally blatant the judge will be trying to find anything that will let him throw it out.
Appellate courts have a marvelous track record of making decisions that the Supremes reverse. (Look at the Ninth Federal Circuit {AKA "Ninth Circus"} for examples.)
Getting the Supreme Court to take a case is tough - especially when they know the consitituional issue should go one way but they really WANT it to go the other.
For an example look at gun ban laws and the Miller decision: The actual decision was that, in the case of short-barreled shotguns, the government could regulate them despite the Second Amendment, because nobody had "brought to judicial notice" that they WERE usable as military weapons by a "militia". (Miller wasn't there to argue his side, being dead at the time. Without him and his lawyers to "bring to judicial notice" things like the use of "trench guns" in WW I, only the government's side got heard.) Since that time the lower courts have misconstrued the decision into "government can ban and/or regulate particular weapons" and used it to uphold bans on exactly the sort of military weapons the actual Miller decision said WERE the subset that is protected, while the Supremes have refused to hear further cases on the issue for more than half a century.)
Sorry, no cigar.
IF the court declares something unconstitutional, it was ALWAYS unconstitutional. It "didn't exist". Get out of jail free, etc.
Not that it matters a whole lot. The problem is fourfold:
1) Until the court throws the law out, you have no idea whether it will.
2) Neither does the rest of the legal system. So it still goes after you. "Get out of jail free." doesn't refund your bondsman's fee, your lawyer's fee, replace your lost chunk of lifetime, reassemble the broken family, get you your job back - with back pay, replace your repossessed house and car, restore your credit rating, replace the expensive collectable guns you had to dispose of, fill in the hole in your resume, etc. It does purge the criminal record - which doesn't help you if the info is already out in hundreds of non-court databases. And even if they knew damned well this one would get thrown out you have no way to sue them. "I vas Chust Dooink my Chob!"
3) The courts normally don't even take up the issue until somebody gets convicted of violating the law in question AND there's NO other way to dispose of the case without addressing the issue. Even then it takes the Supreme Court to definitively strike a new law, and they can arbitrarily refuse to even hear it - which they usually will do unless two appellate courts disagree, and sometimes even then.
and...
4) It takes a LOT of time and work to strike a law. It takes the legislators and chief exec very little time and work to pass another like it, with slight tweaks.
And another. And another. And another dozen. And another thousand. And put riders on every "must-pass" bill, like the budget, or a use-of-force authorization, or