"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
Pretty much sums up the last 20 SCO press release.
While it's indeed shit, the particulars of the shit in question vary from one voiding to another. And if we're not careful, a piece is likely to stick.
This posting is not about SCO's latest press/anal release. It's about a detailed lab report on SCO's fecal output. And the particulars of the report are very useful for forming a treatment plan - or for arranging a suitable quarantine or form of euthenasia for SCO - to prevent an epidemic.
So let's not just dismiss all SCO suit articles out of hand as redundant, shall we?
Unfortunately, when the tenant moves out they're going to want to take all their switching equipment with them. That leaves a load of loose wires which may or may not be labelled.
So put a "buzzer" on it at the endpoint site, and sniff for it at the patch-panel site.
A commercial cable installer will already have the equipment. (If you don't and are too cheap to buy your own, use a literal buzzer-and-battery to make radio noise and a battery-powered pocket radio to sniff for it.)
This is a real problem. When Vannevar Bush conceived the Memex system, his goal was to facilitate the exchange of scientific research. Later, Doug Englebart built on Bush's ideas as did Ted Nelson (the guy who coined the term "hypertext") and Tim Berners-Lee.
And one of the design goals of the Xanadu server project was to provide exactly this sort of permanent storage and location-redundant backup. (We even refered to it as the "Library of Alexandrea Problem" and named one of the machines after the Alexandrean librarian. B-) )
Unfortunately the project didn't succeed and the web filled the niche.
So now we have a distributed Library of Alexandrea, holding the single copy of every "book", constant brushfires taking out important works, and a few "scribes" frantically trying to make copies of the whole thing (which copies, IF they exist, have to be accessed a different way than the original).
(Also coarse-grained one-way (text snippet->page or image) rather than fine-grained (text snippet, image region, or database entry->text snippet, image region, or database entry), one-way links rather than backfollowable links, and I could go on...)
If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?
Because the internet is communication, not power. So the correct comparison is the telephone company, not the power company.
Power can be backed up locally. Communication can not. So power only needs to be available MOST of the time, with backups on any critical services, to achieve its "critical infrastructure" level of reliability. Communications, on the other hand, requires an infrastructure with multiple links, routing around failures, and local power backup at the active nodes to achieve its own "critical infrastructure" service levels.
The telephone company HAS this level of backup power built in. Switching centers, for instance, run their equipment directly from TWO banks of 48v batteries suitable for days of operation, and run battery chargers continuously when there's power available. Repeaters on long copper trunks are powered from the endpoints - and can run with only one endpoint hot. Telephone instruments are powered from the central office switch via the copper wire. Active customer premesis equipment has battery backup for critical features or is designed to connect at least one POTS phone directly to a copper pair to the switch in case of blackout, and so on. SONET nodes are wired as rings rather than trees, so you have to cut TWO fibers in different places to isolate them. Other trunks are redundant and switch over automatically in case of outage. I could go on. About the only place a single cable cut can cut you off is the line to your house - and if you pay (a lot!) extra (as some businesses do) you can get another run in by a different path, so no single backhoe or downed pole can isolate you.
The Internet was ORIGINALLY designed with this kind of redundancy built in. Individual links were via the tellco's infrastructure, with its power-failure resistance. Routing was automatic, and would find a route between any two nodes if one still existed. (It WAS designed by people who were at least THINKING about surviving a nuclear attack, after all.)
But with the "inflation" of the commercial internet this robustness was lost. The explosion of active IP addresses made routing tables impossibly large, while most sites were connected via a local ISP rather than ad-hoc connection to two (or more) internet neighbors.
So the internet split into a "backbone" with SOME of the old routing redundancy, interconnecting ISPs, who in turn give you a default route JUST to their own servers. If your ISP fails you're cut off, and if the backbone connections to your ISP fail, ditto (even if you in principle COULD reach the rest of the net through somebody with a two-ISP feed.)
The ISP buisness has FIERCE price competition, and one BIG way to cut costs is to reduce redundant routing internally and neglect backup power.
At the backbone level the long-haul networks carrying the data had an even FIERCER price war, due to the excessive long-haul buildout of the internet bubble. Perhaps some of the upstarts powered their switches and repeaters with local power (on the assumption that the could slough any site that had a local power failure and that they'd have a path with all equipment powered between any two customers still live). A major blackout would violate that assumption, cutting off not just the dead area but others who could only reach the rest of the net by routing through it.
How about your DSL or cable IP feed? Did your cable company include battery backup power in the repeaters, pole-mounted routers, and fiber/cable bridges? Is you settop box battery backed up? How about your DSL modem? If you're corporate, are all your routers, your VoIP bridge, and any desktops running a softphone on the UPS? Do your SIP phones run if the power fails? (Home users ditto for your PC.)
Until all these are fixed the internet is NOT running at "critical infrastructure" reliability levels. So you'll want to think VERY CAREFULLY before disconnecting your POTS line and depending on Internet-VoIP. B-)
Here's where to order (for Win XP/2K) in December
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Synthesized Singers
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· Score: 1
Here's where the Yamaha software products are available online - for windoze XP or 2000- starting in December.
As long as the ability to vote is intact, and the govverment isn't taken over by assholes it can still be salvaged and repaired over time without violent conflict.
Unfortunately, sometimes it DOES get taken over by assholes who just ignore the voters. Especially if they think the voters can't do anything about it.
If it comes to that you either have to sit there and take it or resort to violence. (Which is what the Second Amendment is about.) To serve as a credible threat, the vote must be backed up by the POTENTIAL for a civil war.
Fortunately, with a well-armed and determined population you usually only have to resort to a LITTLE BIT of violence - along with a lot of talking and saber-rattling. Once they're convinced they've lost they usually go quietly and things return to normal.
You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for
If you can verify that votes for A, B, and C encrypt to hash H, so can anybody else. Claim you voted for A, B, and C and got hash H, and Mr. Bagman can verify this and give you your $10
This is a very good step being taken by California, but I think they need to go one step further and mandate a recount for every election, regardless of whether it is seen to have irregularities or not.
I believe they also mandated a manual recount of a random sample of the precincts, to detect large-scale machine tampering.
Of course the loser - or perhaps even the Secretary of State - will demand a recount of any precinct where the results are significantly different from unofficial polling results.
The majority of voters don't even bother to vote - should they all be made to?
Since the REAL purpose of elections in a Republic are to find out how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it, people with no interest in the outcome of a particular issue SHOULDN'T vote on it. Requiring them to vote (or even making it TOO EASY to vote) pollutes the result and destabilizes the government.
(Of course it's up to THEM how interested they are.)
In the 1970's millions came on capitol hill to do their work. Nowadays, if you get a couple hundred people together to protest anything you get charged with unlawful assembly and get teargassed.
They did that in the '60s and '70s, too. (Trust me - I was there.)
It just didn't USUALLY end up in the media - until Mayor Daily made the mistake of doing it to the reporters, too.
He did this JUST as the TV networks (with major studio/distribution centers in Chicago) deployed the first minicams (backpacks of electronics plus giant shoulder-mounted cameras). By the time the billyclub hit the lens the image was already on millions of TV screens. B-)
- - - -
Republics have ALWAYS been about finding out how the civil war would come out so you don't have to actually fight it. To do that the election has to be believablely accurate enough to predict the outcome of the war. That way the losers aren't tempted to reverse it by violence. (That's why each group of voters was given the franchise [for real] just AFTER they'd proven capable of organizing violence.)
The election doesn't HAVE to be dead-on accurate to serve this purpose. If a close election comes out wrong the losers still won't be tempted, because staging the war would bring out a lot of opposition from people who don't like reversing elections by force.
But it DOES have avoid the appearance of massive corruption. Or you get things like the cleanout of San Francisco's government back in the gold rush days, or the "Battle of Athens" just after WW II.
Fortunately the people of the US have generally resorted to force only to RETURN their governments to honest elections (or establish them in the first place), rather than replace it with a particular power-group's totalitarianism.
If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close.
If a take-home paper reciept can be used to verify TO YOU that your vote was counted, it can also be used to verify TO SOMEONE ELSE that you voted in a particular way.
This enables vote-buying schemes: Show up at the party headquarters, show your reciept, collect $10, a chicken dinner, or what-have-you.
Such schemes are banned by law. And the laws also prohibit you from taking home a copy of your ballot to aid in prevention of the schemes.
There is a very big problem with this type of system: it enables vote selling (someone gives 10$ to every person that produces a receipt proving they voted for a specific candidate)
You misunderstand the "receipt".
They don't keep it. They put it in the ballot box for potential recounts. It IS the official ballot - the count in the machines is just a convenience.
- - - - -
The point about vote selling, however, is significant.
One thing I'd have liked to do, a few elections back, was to get a raw record of the ballot-reader output from the individual precincts with electronically-tabulated ballots (punched cards, OCR marked cards, etc.)
Putting the raw record up on the internet would allow:
- anyone to write their own software to check the counting software.
- individuals (or neighborhood groups) to check that a ballot marked THEIR way (or the correct number of ballots marked their way) was included in the count.
- Statistical analysis to hunt for signs of election tampering (i.e. runs of identical ballots, precincts with counts wildly divergent from polling expectations, systematic spoiling of ballots otherwise voted for one party or candidate, etc.)
Unfortunately this might fall under the bans on exposure of individual ballots that were passed to hinder vote-buying schemes.
[...] if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
The Democrats might take issue with you on that, judging by the moaning in Florida about how their poor, elderly, and illiterate voters were more likely to make errors on "butterfly ballots" and other "unfair" voting systems.
There is no reason a spoiled ballot from a computer should be treated any differently than a spoiled ballot from a punchcard machine, or you accidentally messing up an optical scan ballot.
Actually there is ONE reason: You have to clear the "spoiled ballot"'s count from the machine, to prevent corruption of the electonic count.
Sample procedure:
- Good ballots go into the "good ballot" box, sight-unseen.
- Spoiled ballots go in the "spoiled ballot" box, sight-unseen.
- Official sets the authorization token to "revoting spoiled ballot" to tell the machine to dump the previous vote and record the new one.
Variants:
1) Same machine is not reused by another voter until the previous voter declares his vote "good" or comes back to revote. Machine holds the tentative vote in temporary memory, recording it as valid only when the next voter votes or the election ends.
2) Machine stores each ballot, spoiled or not, separately. Re-authorization identifies the stored ballot that is to be marked "spoiled". Voter votes at same machine.
3) The smartcard voter-authorization token holds a copy of the ballot vote, which persists if the card is marked "revoting spoiled ballot". Voter can vote at any machine. (Note that this can produce negative vote totals on individual machines (if the valid and spoiled counts aren't tallied separatly), which is OK but might be confusing to some observers.)
Note that the voting machines can produce both a "valid" and a "spoiled" count for comparing against manual recounts.
What's so hard about using a sharpie to fill in a (relatively large) bubble next to the canidate you want to vote for? Then use any computer technology you want to count the bubbles. Sounds cheaper to me. The paper trail is there, and only what needs to be automated (counting) is.
Except that:
- Optical character readers are ALSO error prone, resulting in the equivalent of "hanging chad/dimpled ballot" recounts.
- Optical ballots are easy to accidentally mismark - much worse than "butterfly ballots".
- There's no assistance to check for accidental invalid voting choices (i.e. voting for four in a "vote for three" election).
- There's no assistance for the sensory (or literacy) handicapped. (As another poster already pointed out.)
2. [Assistance to people with sensory or literacy handicaps]
3. [Eases implementation of preferential balloting]
4. Hand counting human-marked ballots is slow, error-prone, and susceptable to selective interpretation and/or cheating.
5. Electronic counting of hand-marked ballots (i.e. optical fill-in-the-oval readers) are error-prone. Election officials "helping out" by filling in light marks opens an opportunity to cheat and destroys the original record, while falling back to a manual count with ALL the problems of 4.
You SAW the screaming with a close election with punched cards in a close election. Human-interpreted X-in-box ballots have ALWAYS had this very same problem - magnified by the manual counting of ALL the ballots, rather than selected precincts. That's one of the things mechanical/electronic vote counting is intended to solve.
The combination of using a machine to collect the vote and mark the ballot (and prevent accidental invalid voting) with a paper ballot audit trail and human recounts to audit the machine's counting looks like the best solution yet.
But in the event of discrepancy, which one is considered correct? The machine record, or the paper record? Considering one makes the other.
This has already been discussed and published.
The paper ballot (which, presumably, at least some of the voters checked before depositing in the box) is the official ballot.
The electronic count from the machines is simply another counting process, and is declared official only if it is not challenged.
Further, a sample of precincts (randomly selected AFTER the election to prevent selective UN-gimmicking of the machines) are recounted, challenge or no, to check for bugs and detect (and deter) large-scale tampering.
Way to deflect the issue, kids. "yeah yeah, we have to be accountable... but in two years". Too bad they're going to have a little thing like "presidential election" first before all that comes about, huh?
If there's a single state in the US that doesn't vote to re-elect Bush it will be California - hacked machines or not.
The (Democratic) Secretary of State just wants to get them fixed before The Gubernator is up for reelection. B-)
I wonder if diebold CEO is still promising (and meaning it) to deliver W.. Oh, wait. The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.
Give it a rest.
EVERY elected executive-branch office in California is held by a Democrat except the new gubernator - who is a flaming liberal on all issues except partly on fiscal AND married into the Kennedy clan and advised by them.
That includes the Secretary of State who promulgated this decision.
Yes we'd ALL love to have this done in time for '04. But CA is in debt up to its eyeballs and you KNOW the election machine companies will charge extra for a rush job.
It's going to be tough enough deciding how to handle the inevitable cases where the pissed-off voter comes to the official with the ballot stub and says "HEY! This machine didn't vote it right!" without leaving the barn door open for tampering with the electronic count.
You mean the same Gartner Group that recommended people to halt Linux deployment because of all the SCUD (SCO FUD)?
They're STILL recommending that:
Where feasible, delay deployment of high-performance systems until the end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.
Also a bunch of other inhibitions to Linux deployment - developing plans to migrate away, pressure on vendors to indemnify, spending lawyer time on watching the SCO suit, etc.
It's just that now they're ALSO pushing people away from SCO similarly, and advising existing Linux users not to pay the SCO tax, not to allow audits, and to keep a low profile.
So SCO also takes a further hit in deployments and revenue on the software side for solid business reasons. SCO and Linux vendors both get hit.
Who benefits? Gartner suggests preparing to move mission critical Linux apps to other Unix platforms if SCO wins. But other open Unix platforms are at risk as well (note that SCO is already sending up trial ballons on *BSD.) So only SCO-licensed commercial vendors need apply. (And of course, though Gartner doesn't mention it, there's always the Microsoft tar baby.)
SCO put all its eggs in the litigation basket. Gartner points out the paying the lawyers in stock means the lawyers exert more control and bias management toward further suits. Now Gartner's paper will drive more customers away from SCO, making it that much harder for them to back out and go back to being a software provider, rather than an IP dog-in-the-manger litigation, company.
So IMHO SCO is now committed and this will play out to the bitter end.
As if these technological blunders weren't enough, some bonehead transfered control of the power plants from the ministry that designed and built them, where all the trained personnel are employed, to the ministry of energy. There are reports of operators sitting on the control board and people showing up to work drunk.
I also saw a report that the above-mentioned rummies decided to test one of the safety systems BY DISABLING ALL THE OTHERS so the conditions could be created that would cause it to work.
So of course when it DIDN'T work (or didn't work well enough) there were no others available. Oops!
The results were detected in the west by atmospheric radiation monitors and thermal satellite imagery.
[Long, cogent answer to "what about terrorists" and assertion of the right to encrypt communications deleted.]
I think maybe you are a troll, though.
As I read it, the part about terrorists was obviously a subtle satire. Note the links to the four agencies he proposes should have a back door to let them tap phones and stage preemptive strikes (spoofing the original article's linking to, rather than naming, the NSA and the Netherlands government). The four agencies are:
- NSA: The National Security Agency,
- FBI: The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
- CBS: The Columbia Broadcasting System, and
- ALF: The Association of Libertarian Feminists.
(And I hope I havent wrecked it for anybody by explaning the punchline. *I* thought it was a scream. B-) )
Reminder: Paying the $699 opens you to suits.
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SCO has announced that the $699 discount rate will apply to the end of 2003.
Hey, the $699 troll was right, you cocksmoking teabaggers!
Reminder:
SCO is not suing IBM for infringing it's alleged IP. It's suing them for BREACHING A CONTRACT>
Right now, most Linux users don't have any contractual relationship with SCO. But if you pay the $699 for their blessing to use Linux on ONE machine, they can sue YOU for failing to pay $1399 (or whatever price they pull out of their hat next year, or next century) for ANY ADDITIONAL machines you ever run Linux on. (Which could get problematic with Linux in settop boxes, PDAs, car disk players, etc.)
It's REALLY NOT SMART to PAY them $699 to give them a license to SUE you.
Re:Linux written to compete with SCO?
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"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."
I think Darl is going to have to prove that if he wants to enforce that no-compete clause in the contract.
Probably not. It should be enough to show that it DOES compete - which would be trivial.
Anyway, if the guy really developed the code at his house, on personal time and this project isn't competing againt business opportunities of his employer, he should have legal right to the code. If the case is not as clear-cut, Apple has every right to do what it can to gain legal right on what might be theirs.
And if you read the law BEYOND the part that was quoted, you'll see that the mandatory exclusion of transfer of rights DOESN'T cover this situation.
2870. (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
1.Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or
2.Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
This work would appear to "relate at the time [...] to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer". Apple does consumer multi-media software apps for their own platform. An app to "manage rented media queues" would seem to most reasonable people to be clearly "related" to that business.
The inventor can protest all he wants that it was done on his own time with his own tools and it doesn't matter. Unless he can convince a judge or jury otherwise, 2870. (a) 1 says that 2870. (a) doesn't apply. So his contract to assign his inventions to Apple is valid.
Apple's view is that they already PAID him for this program. If they let him give it away when they could be selling it (or sitting on it for their own business reasons), they're not just letting him take something that they paid him for. They're also jepoardizing their ownership of EVERYTHING ELSE they paid their employees to do. So why are they paying all these people all this money?
Sounds to me like the situation is this:
1) Guy builds a neat software app and, misunderstanding the situation or thinking that Apple is not interested, thinks it's allright to release and/or sell it on his own.
2) Apple says "Wait a minute! We paid you to give stuff like that to US!"
3) Guy says "Oops! You're right!" and pulls the app.
4) Media finds this out and mentions it.
5) Slashdot reader doesn't recognize that the exception in 2870 (a) 1 applies, so he thinks that it's an assault on open source and composes a post saying so.
6) Slashdot editor posts the new item essentially verbatim.
and the flap is on.
2870. is the engine of California's hi-tek booms. By letting inventors keep and develop inventions that are outside their employers' interests and non-competing, it promotes an explosion of inventiveness and startups. But it falls short of giving workers the right to develop potentially competing works that their employer didn't explicitly assign them to create or doesn't wish to pursue at the moment, and didn't give them PERMISSION to take back. Some would even argue that this is deliberate, a necesary provision to avoid killing the succeeding generations of geese just as they start laying the golden eggs.
So let's not misconstrue the law. If the developer decides to press his claim and can show in court that the exception applies, it's his. If he doesn't or can't, it's Apple's. And if you don't like it, get the law changed.
Slashdot Mirror
"SCO is full of shit. And oh yeah, Darl has got balls of steel."
Pretty much sums up the last 20 SCO press release.
While it's indeed shit, the particulars of the shit in question vary from one voiding to another. And if we're not careful, a piece is likely to stick.
This posting is not about SCO's latest press/anal release. It's about a detailed lab report on SCO's fecal output. And the particulars of the report are very useful for forming a treatment plan - or for arranging a suitable quarantine or form of euthenasia for SCO - to prevent an epidemic.
So let's not just dismiss all SCO suit articles out of hand as redundant, shall we?
Unfortunately, when the tenant moves out they're going to want to take all their switching equipment with them. That leaves a load of loose wires which may or may not be labelled.
So put a "buzzer" on it at the endpoint site, and sniff for it at the patch-panel site.
A commercial cable installer will already have the equipment. (If you don't and are too cheap to buy your own, use a literal buzzer-and-battery to make radio noise and a battery-powered pocket radio to sniff for it.)
This is a real problem. When Vannevar Bush conceived the Memex system, his goal was to facilitate the exchange of scientific research. Later, Doug Englebart built on Bush's ideas as did Ted Nelson (the guy who coined the term "hypertext") and Tim Berners-Lee.
And one of the design goals of the Xanadu server project was to provide exactly this sort of permanent storage and location-redundant backup. (We even refered to it as the "Library of Alexandrea Problem" and named one of the machines after the Alexandrean librarian. B-) )
Unfortunately the project didn't succeed and the web filled the niche.
So now we have a distributed Library of Alexandrea, holding the single copy of every "book", constant brushfires taking out important works, and a few "scribes" frantically trying to make copies of the whole thing (which copies, IF they exist, have to be accessed a different way than the original).
(Also coarse-grained one-way (text snippet->page or image) rather than fine-grained (text snippet, image region, or database entry->text snippet, image region, or database entry), one-way links rather than backfollowable links, and I could go on...)
If power *is* a critical infrastructure, and lack of power is what caused these problems, how can that support a conclusion that the Internet is not ready to be considered critical?
Because the internet is communication, not power. So the correct comparison is the telephone company, not the power company.
Power can be backed up locally. Communication can not. So power only needs to be available MOST of the time, with backups on any critical services, to achieve its "critical infrastructure" level of reliability. Communications, on the other hand, requires an infrastructure with multiple links, routing around failures, and local power backup at the active nodes to achieve its own "critical infrastructure" service levels.
The telephone company HAS this level of backup power built in. Switching centers, for instance, run their equipment directly from TWO banks of 48v batteries suitable for days of operation, and run battery chargers continuously when there's power available. Repeaters on long copper trunks are powered from the endpoints - and can run with only one endpoint hot. Telephone instruments are powered from the central office switch via the copper wire. Active customer premesis equipment has battery backup for critical features or is designed to connect at least one POTS phone directly to a copper pair to the switch in case of blackout, and so on. SONET nodes are wired as rings rather than trees, so you have to cut TWO fibers in different places to isolate them. Other trunks are redundant and switch over automatically in case of outage. I could go on. About the only place a single cable cut can cut you off is the line to your house - and if you pay (a lot!) extra (as some businesses do) you can get another run in by a different path, so no single backhoe or downed pole can isolate you.
The Internet was ORIGINALLY designed with this kind of redundancy built in. Individual links were via the tellco's infrastructure, with its power-failure resistance. Routing was automatic, and would find a route between any two nodes if one still existed. (It WAS designed by people who were at least THINKING about surviving a nuclear attack, after all.)
But with the "inflation" of the commercial internet this robustness was lost. The explosion of active IP addresses made routing tables impossibly large, while most sites were connected via a local ISP rather than ad-hoc connection to two (or more) internet neighbors.
So the internet split into a "backbone" with SOME of the old routing redundancy, interconnecting ISPs, who in turn give you a default route JUST to their own servers. If your ISP fails you're cut off, and if the backbone connections to your ISP fail, ditto (even if you in principle COULD reach the rest of the net through somebody with a two-ISP feed.)
The ISP buisness has FIERCE price competition, and one BIG way to cut costs is to reduce redundant routing internally and neglect backup power.
At the backbone level the long-haul networks carrying the data had an even FIERCER price war, due to the excessive long-haul buildout of the internet bubble. Perhaps some of the upstarts powered their switches and repeaters with local power (on the assumption that the could slough any site that had a local power failure and that they'd have a path with all equipment powered between any two customers still live). A major blackout would violate that assumption, cutting off not just the dead area but others who could only reach the rest of the net by routing through it.
How about your DSL or cable IP feed? Did your cable company include battery backup power in the repeaters, pole-mounted routers, and fiber/cable bridges? Is you settop box battery backed up? How about your DSL modem? If you're corporate, are all your routers, your VoIP bridge, and any desktops running a softphone on the UPS? Do your SIP phones run if the power fails? (Home users ditto for your PC.)
Until all these are fixed the internet is NOT running at "critical infrastructure" reliability levels. So you'll want to think VERY CAREFULLY before disconnecting your POTS line and depending on Internet-VoIP. B-)
Here's where the Yamaha software products are available online - for windoze XP or 2000- starting in December.
Vocaloid LOLA - Female Soul Vocalist. $329.95
Vocaloid LEON - Male Soul Vocalist. $329.95
Vocaloid MIRIAM - Virtual Female Vocalist. $399.95
Has a screenshot and description of the process of constructing a song track.
Note that each virtual singer's voice description file is referred to as a "font". B-)
As long as the ability to vote is intact, and the govverment isn't taken over by assholes it can still be salvaged and repaired over time without violent conflict.
Unfortunately, sometimes it DOES get taken over by assholes who just ignore the voters. Especially if they think the voters can't do anything about it.
If it comes to that you either have to sit there and take it or resort to violence. (Which is what the Second Amendment is about.) To serve as a credible threat, the vote must be backed up by the POTENTIAL for a civil war.
Fortunately, with a well-armed and determined population you usually only have to resort to a LITTLE BIT of violence - along with a lot of talking and saber-rattling. Once they're convinced they've lost they usually go quietly and things return to normal.
You can verify that the hash corresponds to the vote you intend in the voting booth, but once you leave the poll, there's no information left to prove who you voted for
If you can verify that votes for A, B, and C encrypt to hash H, so can anybody else. Claim you voted for A, B, and C and got hash H, and Mr. Bagman can verify this and give you your $10
This is a very good step being taken by California, but I think they need to go one step further and mandate a recount for every election, regardless of whether it is seen to have irregularities or not.
I believe they also mandated a manual recount of a random sample of the precincts, to detect large-scale machine tampering.
Of course the loser - or perhaps even the Secretary of State - will demand a recount of any precinct where the results are significantly different from unofficial polling results.
The majority of voters don't even bother to vote - should they all be made to?
Since the REAL purpose of elections in a Republic are to find out how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it, people with no interest in the outcome of a particular issue SHOULDN'T vote on it. Requiring them to vote (or even making it TOO EASY to vote) pollutes the result and destabilizes the government.
(Of course it's up to THEM how interested they are.)
In the 1970's millions came on capitol hill to do their work. Nowadays, if you get a couple hundred people together to protest anything you get charged with unlawful assembly and get teargassed.
They did that in the '60s and '70s, too. (Trust me - I was there.)
It just didn't USUALLY end up in the media - until Mayor Daily made the mistake of doing it to the reporters, too.
He did this JUST as the TV networks (with major studio/distribution centers in Chicago) deployed the first minicams (backpacks of electronics plus giant shoulder-mounted cameras). By the time the billyclub hit the lens the image was already on millions of TV screens. B-)
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Republics have ALWAYS been about finding out how the civil war would come out so you don't have to actually fight it. To do that the election has to be believablely accurate enough to predict the outcome of the war. That way the losers aren't tempted to reverse it by violence. (That's why each group of voters was given the franchise [for real] just AFTER they'd proven capable of organizing violence.)
The election doesn't HAVE to be dead-on accurate to serve this purpose. If a close election comes out wrong the losers still won't be tempted, because staging the war would bring out a lot of opposition from people who don't like reversing elections by force.
But it DOES have avoid the appearance of massive corruption. Or you get things like the cleanout of San Francisco's government back in the gold rush days, or the "Battle of Athens" just after WW II.
Fortunately the people of the US have generally resorted to force only to RETURN their governments to honest elections (or establish them in the first place), rather than replace it with a particular power-group's totalitarianism.
If you want to see a really clever electronic voting system, check out VoteHere. They use paper receipts that basically records a hash of your vote, so your receipt cannot prove to anyone who was not looking over your shoulder when you cast the ballot what that vote was, but still allows you to prove that your vote has/has not been changed after the polls close.
If a take-home paper reciept can be used to verify TO YOU that your vote was counted, it can also be used to verify TO SOMEONE ELSE that you voted in a particular way.
This enables vote-buying schemes: Show up at the party headquarters, show your reciept, collect $10, a chicken dinner, or what-have-you.
Such schemes are banned by law. And the laws also prohibit you from taking home a copy of your ballot to aid in prevention of the schemes.
There is a very big problem with this type of system: it enables vote selling (someone gives 10$ to every person that produces a receipt proving they voted for a specific candidate)
You misunderstand the "receipt".
They don't keep it. They put it in the ballot box for potential recounts. It IS the official ballot - the count in the machines is just a convenience.
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The point about vote selling, however, is significant.
One thing I'd have liked to do, a few elections back, was to get a raw record of the ballot-reader output from the individual precincts with electronically-tabulated ballots (punched cards, OCR marked cards, etc.)
Putting the raw record up on the internet would allow:
- anyone to write their own software to check the counting software.
- individuals (or neighborhood groups) to check that a ballot marked THEIR way (or the correct number of ballots marked their way) was included in the count.
- Statistical analysis to hunt for signs of election tampering (i.e. runs of identical ballots, precincts with counts wildly divergent from polling expectations, systematic spoiling of ballots otherwise voted for one party or candidate, etc.)
Unfortunately this might fall under the bans on exposure of individual ballots that were passed to hinder vote-buying schemes.
[...] if you can't fill in a circle then you probably shouldn't be voting.
The Democrats might take issue with you on that, judging by the moaning in Florida about how their poor, elderly, and illiterate voters were more likely to make errors on "butterfly ballots" and other "unfair" voting systems.
There is no reason a spoiled ballot from a computer should be treated any differently than a spoiled ballot from a punchcard machine, or you accidentally messing up an optical scan ballot.
Actually there is ONE reason: You have to clear the "spoiled ballot"'s count from the machine, to prevent corruption of the electonic count.
Sample procedure:
- Good ballots go into the "good ballot" box, sight-unseen.
- Spoiled ballots go in the "spoiled ballot" box, sight-unseen.
- Official sets the authorization token to "revoting spoiled ballot" to tell the machine to dump the previous vote and record the new one.
Variants:
1) Same machine is not reused by another voter until the previous voter declares his vote "good" or comes back to revote. Machine holds the tentative vote in temporary memory, recording it as valid only when the next voter votes or the election ends.
2) Machine stores each ballot, spoiled or not, separately. Re-authorization identifies the stored ballot that is to be marked "spoiled". Voter votes at same machine.
3) The smartcard voter-authorization token holds a copy of the ballot vote, which persists if the card is marked "revoting spoiled ballot". Voter can vote at any machine. (Note that this can produce negative vote totals on individual machines (if the valid and spoiled counts aren't tallied separatly), which is OK but might be confusing to some observers.)
Note that the voting machines can produce both a "valid" and a "spoiled" count for comparing against manual recounts.
What's so hard about using a sharpie to fill in a (relatively large) bubble next to the canidate you want to vote for? Then use any computer technology you want to count the bubbles. Sounds cheaper to me. The paper trail is there, and only what needs to be automated (counting) is.
Except that:
- Optical character readers are ALSO error prone, resulting in the equivalent of "hanging chad/dimpled ballot" recounts.
- Optical ballots are easy to accidentally mismark - much worse than "butterfly ballots".
- There's no assistance to check for accidental invalid voting choices (i.e. voting for four in a "vote for three" election).
- There's no assistance for the sensory (or literacy) handicapped. (As another poster already pointed out.)
Reasons to use an electronic voting terminal:
1. [Error-checking to avoid spoiled ballots]
2. [Assistance to people with sensory or literacy handicaps]
3. [Eases implementation of preferential balloting]
4. Hand counting human-marked ballots is slow, error-prone, and susceptable to selective interpretation and/or cheating.
5. Electronic counting of hand-marked ballots (i.e. optical fill-in-the-oval readers) are error-prone. Election officials "helping out" by filling in light marks opens an opportunity to cheat and destroys the original record, while falling back to a manual count with ALL the problems of 4.
You SAW the screaming with a close election with punched cards in a close election. Human-interpreted X-in-box ballots have ALWAYS had this very same problem - magnified by the manual counting of ALL the ballots, rather than selected precincts. That's one of the things mechanical/electronic vote counting is intended to solve.
The combination of using a machine to collect the vote and mark the ballot (and prevent accidental invalid voting) with a paper ballot audit trail and human recounts to audit the machine's counting looks like the best solution yet.
But in the event of discrepancy, which one is considered correct? The machine record, or the paper record? Considering one makes the other.
This has already been discussed and published.
The paper ballot (which, presumably, at least some of the voters checked before depositing in the box) is the official ballot.
The electronic count from the machines is simply another counting process, and is declared official only if it is not challenged.
Further, a sample of precincts (randomly selected AFTER the election to prevent selective UN-gimmicking of the machines) are recounted, challenge or no, to check for bugs and detect (and deter) large-scale tampering.
Way to deflect the issue, kids. "yeah yeah, we have to be accountable... but in two years". Too bad they're going to have a little thing like "presidential election" first before all that comes about, huh?
If there's a single state in the US that doesn't vote to re-elect Bush it will be California - hacked machines or not.
The (Democratic) Secretary of State just wants to get them fixed before The Gubernator is up for reelection. B-)
I wonder if diebold CEO is still promising (and meaning it) to deliver W..
Oh, wait.
The printer was delayed until AFTER the next major election.
Give it a rest.
EVERY elected executive-branch office in California is held by a Democrat except the new gubernator - who is a flaming liberal on all issues except partly on fiscal AND married into the Kennedy clan and advised by them.
That includes the Secretary of State who promulgated this decision.
Yes we'd ALL love to have this done in time for '04. But CA is in debt up to its eyeballs and you KNOW the election machine companies will charge extra for a rush job.
It's going to be tough enough deciding how to handle the inevitable cases where the pissed-off voter comes to the official with the ballot stub and says "HEY! This machine didn't vote it right!" without leaving the barn door open for tampering with the electronic count.
You mean the same Gartner Group that recommended people to halt Linux deployment because of all the SCUD (SCO FUD)?
They're STILL recommending that:
Where feasible, delay deployment of high-performance systems until the end of 1Q04 to see what SCO will do.
Also a bunch of other inhibitions to Linux deployment - developing plans to migrate away, pressure on vendors to indemnify, spending lawyer time on watching the SCO suit, etc.
It's just that now they're ALSO pushing people away from SCO similarly, and advising existing Linux users not to pay the SCO tax, not to allow audits, and to keep a low profile.
So SCO also takes a further hit in deployments and revenue on the software side for solid business reasons. SCO and Linux vendors both get hit.
Who benefits? Gartner suggests preparing to move mission critical Linux apps to other Unix platforms if SCO wins. But other open Unix platforms are at risk as well (note that SCO is already sending up trial ballons on *BSD.) So only SCO-licensed commercial vendors need apply. (And of course, though Gartner doesn't mention it, there's always the Microsoft tar baby.)
SCO put all its eggs in the litigation basket. Gartner points out the paying the lawyers in stock means the lawyers exert more control and bias management toward further suits. Now Gartner's paper will drive more customers away from SCO, making it that much harder for them to back out and go back to being a software provider, rather than an IP dog-in-the-manger litigation, company.
So IMHO SCO is now committed and this will play out to the bitter end.
As if these technological blunders weren't enough, some bonehead transfered control of the power plants from the ministry that designed and built them, where all the trained personnel are employed, to the ministry of energy. There are reports of operators sitting on the control board and people showing up to work drunk.
I also saw a report that the above-mentioned rummies decided to test one of the safety systems BY DISABLING ALL THE OTHERS so the conditions could be created that would cause it to work.
So of course when it DIDN'T work (or didn't work well enough) there were no others available. Oops!
The results were detected in the west by atmospheric radiation monitors and thermal satellite imagery.
Get real.
[Long, cogent answer to "what about terrorists" and assertion of the right to encrypt communications deleted.]
I think maybe you are a troll, though.
As I read it, the part about terrorists was obviously a subtle satire. Note the links to the four agencies he proposes should have a back door to let them tap phones and stage preemptive strikes (spoofing the original article's linking to, rather than naming, the NSA and the Netherlands government). The four agencies are:
- NSA: The National Security Agency,
- FBI: The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
- CBS: The Columbia Broadcasting System, and
- ALF: The Association of Libertarian Feminists.
(And I hope I havent wrecked it for anybody by explaning the punchline. *I* thought it was a scream. B-) )
SCO has announced that the $699 discount rate will apply to the end of 2003.
Hey, the $699 troll was right, you cocksmoking teabaggers!
Reminder:
SCO is not suing IBM for infringing it's alleged IP. It's suing them for BREACHING A CONTRACT>
Right now, most Linux users don't have any contractual relationship with SCO. But if you pay the $699 for their blessing to use Linux on ONE machine, they can sue YOU for failing to pay $1399 (or whatever price they pull out of their hat next year, or next century) for ANY ADDITIONAL machines you ever run Linux on. (Which could get problematic with Linux in settop boxes, PDAs, car disk players, etc.)
It's REALLY NOT SMART to PAY them $699 to give them a license to SUE you.
"When (The Santa Cruz Operation) sold us the property, included in the property was a non-compete," McBride told IDG News Service. "Last time I checked, Linux was intended to compete with our core products."
I think Darl is going to have to prove that if he wants to enforce that no-compete clause in the contract.
Probably not. It should be enough to show that it DOES compete - which would be trivial.
And if you read the law BEYOND the part that was quoted, you'll see that the mandatory exclusion of transfer of rights DOESN'T cover this situation.
This work would appear to "relate at the time [...] to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer". Apple does consumer multi-media software apps for their own platform. An app to "manage rented media queues" would seem to most reasonable people to be clearly "related" to that business.
The inventor can protest all he wants that it was done on his own time with his own tools and it doesn't matter. Unless he can convince a judge or jury otherwise, 2870. (a) 1 says that 2870. (a) doesn't apply. So his contract to assign his inventions to Apple is valid.
Apple's view is that they already PAID him for this program. If they let him give it away when they could be selling it (or sitting on it for their own business reasons), they're not just letting him take something that they paid him for. They're also jepoardizing their ownership of EVERYTHING ELSE they paid their employees to do. So why are they paying all these people all this money?
Sounds to me like the situation is this:
1) Guy builds a neat software app and, misunderstanding the situation or thinking that Apple is not interested, thinks it's allright to release and/or sell it on his own.
2) Apple says "Wait a minute! We paid you to give stuff like that to US!"
3) Guy says "Oops! You're right!" and pulls the app.
4) Media finds this out and mentions it.
5) Slashdot reader doesn't recognize that the exception in 2870 (a) 1 applies, so he thinks that it's an assault on open source and composes a post saying so.
6) Slashdot editor posts the new item essentially verbatim.
and the flap is on.
2870. is the engine of California's hi-tek booms. By letting inventors keep and develop inventions that are outside their employers' interests and non-competing, it promotes an explosion of inventiveness and startups. But it falls short of giving workers the right to develop potentially competing works that their employer didn't explicitly assign them to create or doesn't wish to pursue at the moment, and didn't give them PERMISSION to take back. Some would even argue that this is deliberate, a necesary provision to avoid killing the succeeding generations of geese just as they start laying the golden eggs.
So let's not misconstrue the law. If the developer decides to press his claim and can show in court that the exception applies, it's his. If he doesn't or can't, it's Apple's. And if you don't like it, get the law changed.