I think it's a shame that this software is getting leaked because it throws a significant wrench in the gears of the natural progression of democracy. Although I agree that the paper ballot system works just fine, the bottom line is that computerized voting - if implemented properly - stands to improve elections in terms of accessability of ballots to the electorate, workload for electoral officials and overall cost.
Your posting shows that you believe that the "natural progression of democracy" is to expand the franchise and poll as many people as possible, and you appear to be in favor of this. That is a misunderstanding of the function of elections.
Elections are the mechanism by which a republic is made stable. The elections are intended to model the outcome of a civil war. If the losing side believes that they are a good enough model to predict that they'd ALSO lose the war if they started it, they then refrain from starting it.
To do this they don't need to be perfect. But they DO need to be visibly free of gross corruption, and to selectively poll those people who are likely to fight if a civil war erupted and who care about the issues in question.
You'll notice that, in the US, the franchise has been extended to one group after another, in each case only AFTER the group in question has proven itself capable of organizing mass violence. Starting with landowners and merchants after the revolution, national sufferage was extended to all free males after a couple post-revolutionary incidents, to women after their participation in the bar-burnings of the temperance movement, to blacks (for real) after the civil rights movement degenerated into the mid-'60s urban riots, and to the 18-20 year-olds after the Vietnam protest and associated riots, bombing, and sabotage.
Making it easy to qualify and vote - rather than requiring registration about as hard as going out and hooking up with a militia - means more people who don't really care will vote, skewing the results of the civil-war prediction. It also makes it easier to create fake voters and corrupt the count. Both make the election outcome less believable by the losers, reducing stability.
Exposing defects in the counting mechanism - especially defects that can lead to massive fraud - may destabilize things temporarily. But it will lead either to fixing the defects or to immediate destabilization of a potentially corrupt and unrepresentative government - followed by fixing the defects if (as is likely) the post-war population also opts for a republic. Either will lead to government that is more representative of the peoples' will and thus more stable.
How do you "accidentally" put software on a public FTP server[?]
Trivial:
By FTPing it TO a directory that is read/write for anonymous FTP, rather than read only or login-required.
Easy to do if a company is trying to deliver a copy of an executable to a customer and both the person doing the delivery and the person receiving it aren't on their toes, or if the person receiving it doesn't have enough sysadmin privileges to configure the FTP server and the sysadmin who does isn't cooperative or available.
These things are NOT NEW. in 1985 I was a Jet Propulsion laboratory. A caltech professor there was using a light modulator to perform convolution matrix a operations to decode synthetic aperature radar data. THe design is identical.
I was a tech in Emmet Leith's "Radar and Optics" lab at the UofMich and one of the first things I did was run an optical processor using essentially this hack - again to process synthetic aperture radar data. This was in 1967.
Multi-megapixel 2-D FFT plus some geometry corrections in the time it took the laser light to go from the input film plane to the output film plane - about 6 feet on that device.
We were already considering how to replace the photographic film input and output devices with electronic substitutes in those days, too. The size of the device we used was large only because it was convenient to construct it with aluminum U-beams and stock lasers, lenses, and lens holders. Given decent I/O, making a disk-drive sized model, say to do realtime processing in an aircraft-mounted radar, would have been trivial. (The signals to be processed were already electronic and at reasonable bandwidth - lower than a TV image.)
Nowadays this is done by DSPs. Why? Because they're adequately fast and are FLEXIBLE. Optic processors do only one type of computation, and require physical adjustment to tune the parameters. If you can do that computation on something more general-purpose, as fast as your data arrives, why bother building something larger and more limited to do it faster?
I always understood it to be more the lines of intent. If you intend to stand at the corner of a school and get kids to buy crack by telling them to go to the store then it is illegal. If you tell them where to go buy ice cream ral cheap and it just so happens that the place also sells crack then it is not. Or at least that is what the founding fathers meant - which we have drifted quite a bit in the last 50 or so years from that.
Given that Jefferson and Washington exchanged letters on cultivation techniques for increasing a hemp crop's potency as a drug (at the expense of its usefulness for rope and paper), and Franklin wrote and published pornography (and acknowledged fathering several dozen children on women to whom he wasn't married), I strongly suspect they didn't intend the new "limited" federal government to have drug wars or smut wars in the first place.
Well, the phrase having links to terrorist organisations keeps popping up as a vague but severely incriminating description in the media.
A few decades back, "having links to organized crime" was used, much more often, as a similar undisprovable slam by both the media and government.
In the Xanadu archetecture links were first-class objects, like documents rather than text IN documents, and could be authored in isolation.
And it seemed like every time some A-hole politician or reporter would slam someone as "linked to organized crime", one of us would say something like: "[A-hole] is linked to organized crime, and I can prove it. I just made the link myself."
It sounds like the GPL is going to get an airing in court. IBM and most of the other big firms with a stake in Linux probably want that because the GPL is the cornerstone on which Linux was built.
And how nice that SCO is being an obvious pack of assholes about the whole thing. This puts the defenders of the GPL in a much better situation than if they had been reasonable.
You'll recall how, when the Forces of Law'nOrder try to set a precedent confirming the enforcability of some new law (especially if it's constitutionality is questionable), they'll go after the worst scumbag they can find first. (Like going after child pornographers when trying out the latest restriction on the free press.) Once they get the precedent set, they can then use it to club anybody else who publishes something they don't like.
SCO, by taking on the entire world and insulting the intelligence of the judges who will be handling the case with a stack of obviously bogus claims, has voluntarily put itself in a position with respect to the GPL of the child pornographer picked by a prosecutor to try out a new censorship law. VERY convenient for the GPL side.
This reminds me of a saying from the heyday of usenet news political discussion/debate groups. Often there would be a regular poster on one side who would trot out every tired, repeatedly disproved, position of that side of the argument. He could never be convinced to change his position. But he'd make a DANDY foil for presenting the counter-arguments, for the edification of thousands of neo-lurkers who hadn't yet heard them. Then, a few weeks later, once a new crop of newbies had gathered and/or another news item made the subject front-page once more, he'd rehash them AGAIN. How convenient!
After a few iterations some of the posters would get bored or annoyed with him and start asking how he could be discouraged (or kicked off, if the group was moderated). Then the old hands would point out how CONVENIENT it was to have someone from the "other side" to periodically hoist the strawmen and give the rest of us an opportunity for a bonfire.
SO convenient, that it would often be said that "If [whomever] didn't exist we'd have to invent him.", i.e. we'd have to plant a shill in the crowd to do the same function (but less believably, because someone who actually believes the opposite position won't get the rhetoric quite right.)
Of course you'd never know if [whomever] actually WAS a shill - a particularly convincing one. (And that uncertainty also helped. It implied that if he WAS a shill, he'd only be raising arguments that were defective. So simply by raising one of "his side's" arguments he discredited it. B-)
SCO has been so PERFECT in this role that the old saw applies.
If the GPL can't handle a legal challenge, it's better to find that out sooner rather than later.
SCo has been so perfect for our side that it's almost enough to make you wonder if SCO *IS* a shill.
So, who's going to start the GNU Land Warrior project?
It's already under way.
Or at least the first module (mine detection/clearing) has been a pet project of a number of hackers (starting with John Walker) for quite a few years now. (Since well before the late Princess Di got on the band wagon.)
You are also correct that [electricity to generate hydrogen] will come from whatever's cheapest, and only the environmental nuts with rooftop PV panels will make hydrogen cleanly.
Even rooftop panels aren't "clean".
They trap virtually all the light that strikes them and turn most of it into local heat. (Several times more energy comes out as heat than comes out as electricity.) Meanwhile the energy that made hydrogen is eventually releleased as heat when the hydrogen is used.
The surface area they cover would normally have reflected much of that light back into space unaltered. Especially in deserts, which are the logical place to build large solar collection farms. That would result in a LOT of "global warming".
And none of which takes into account the pollution and energy use from manufacturing the panels in the first place. (I've seen claims that current panel designs take more energy to make than they produce in their service lifetime, though that somnds dubious, and would certainly be improved on if the panels are ever to become a major energy source rather than a convenient way to supply energy to remote locations.)
For example, once we had slavery, the preamble to the constitution cannot have meaning in a country that practices slavery. The argument arose and it was solved by an amendment to the constitution which clarified the argument completely: if all men are created equal, no man can be another's property.
This misrepresents both the logical argument and the amendment.
The logical argument from "all men are created equal [before the law]" does not lead to "No man can be another's property." Instead it leads to "No man can be BORN another's property." Eliminating HEREDITARY slavery is a major step but not a total elimination.
The amendment, as well, doesn't ban slavery either. It bans slavery "except as punishment for a crime". This goes beyond banning hereditary slavery, also banning temporary or permanent voluntary slavery (chosing now to lose ALL choices later) and slavery to repay civil judgements (debtor's prison, indenture). Only a criminal judgement can lead to involuntary servitude.
Of course this puts intstitutions like the draft in an interesting position. Ditto irrevocable powers of attorney. (And certain kinky entertainments, if performed without a bailout mechanism, can lead to both criminal and civil liability if the kinkee doesn't like how the kinker kinked.)
As to the amendment being passed to "solve the argument", it was actually passed for a much different reason: As a tactic by the US Federal Government to weaken the Confederate States of America during the "Civil War/War Between the States". The issue in THAT war was the right to secession (as Linconl made perfectly clear when he said that he'd free all, some, or none of the salves, whichever was necessary to save the Union). Slavery was constitutionally banned (except in limited circumstances) as a byproduct.
(Of course, some states explicitly go beyond the Constitution's provisions.)
Human rights trump property rights.
Property rights ARE human rights - the rights of humans to own and control pieces of property, regardless of the wishes of the non-owners. The constitutional limitation on slavery in the US, along with its current interpretation and the lack of laws establishing marketable slaveownership as a criminal penalty, just says that humans are excluded from the category of "property" over which other (non-governmental) humans can exercise rights.
Slavery is illegal and slave-owners are S.O.L with regard to their property rights pertaining to their slaves.
Isn't HIPPA supposed to protect us from this type of thing?
Perhaps the contractor who shipped the data overseas can be prosecuted, because he mishandled the data by moving it to where US laws can't be used to safeguard it.
But probably not. One of the (usually fortunate) principles of US law is that, if there is any ambiguity, the interpretation most favorable to the defendant must be used.
The studios reportedly agreed to send out VHS screeners (recipients previously had a choice between VHS and DVD) encrypted with a special security code traceable to individual Academy members.
The accademy should (quietly) distribute watermarked copies - with individual watermarks - to the members - and then take action against the responsible member(s) if the material ends up on the black market.
It's the height of hypocracy to swat at unauthorized copiers among the customer base in such a way as to create massive colateral damage among non-violators while simultaneously giving the industry insiders immunity.
Nobody signed a contract here, so the only problem is copyright law, [...]
But if you buy a SCO license you're entering a contract with SCO. Note that they're not suing IBM for violating a copyright - but they ARE suing them for allegedly violating a contrct.
If you buy the license you are paying $699 to give SCO the right to sue you if you ever use Linux on more than one machine. NOT smart.
A citizen enters the voting center, is authenticated as a registered voter by the volunteer staff, and given a vote card.
The citizen enters a voting booth (behind a privacy screen) and activates the selection kiosk using their vote card.
Once their candidates and referendums have been chosen, the machine prints out a 2D barcode on the vote card and returns it to them.
The citizen exits the voting booth with his completed vote card.
The citizen has the option to verify his barcode using a separate verification kiosk which deciphers and displays the barcode (behind a privacy screen, of course). Once satisfied, the citizen leaves the verification kiosk.
Why encrypt the card? That way you must trust the decryption machine, which ALSO may be corrupt.
Print the card in the clear. Then the voter can check it without mechanical intervention.
Rely on the physical security of depositing the ballot in the ballot box. There is no need to verify that the ballot was printed by the machine, both because that process can ALSO be corrupted and because it does not address the single issue at hand: "How did the voter vote?" Not "Did he vote in a particular machine?"
To prevent ballot box stuffing have poll watchers from each interested group watch the ballot box - just as is done with hand-marked paper ballots.
First, after you vote, a 2-D bar code is printed. That code contains a record of your vote, with an encryption of the machine you voted at and your selected key.
Giving the voter a record of his vote which he can use to prove what his vote is to a third party is illegal in most jurisdictions, because it facilitates vote-buying schemes.
(Whether vote-buying should be illegal is a separate issue, of course. B-) )
Would you mind pointing out specific instances where Sun has done something that made an enemy out of the Linux community?
I don't know about the Linux community specifically. But I've been annoyed with them since they bought the rights to the Grasshopper Group's NeWS implementation, hacked it into their own window system (and trashed its performance level), moved to X, then refused to let the original authors release the NeWS portion open-source after Sun had completely abandoned it.
I used Suns for a decade or more, eventually mostly as a smart terminal/web browser, and finally abandoned 'em completely at home in favor of all-Linux rather than deal with upgrading for Y2K. I'd wanted to do some hardware and driver hacking. But they wouldn't release enough info for it to be convenient. And (like Apple) they several times started to open up and then did an about-face. Meanwhile Linux is maturing and the *BSDs are now unemcumbered, so phoey on Sun.
Even at the day job, integrated circuit design flows have finally been ported to Linux from Sun, and a Linux farm is far cheaper for a given level of crunch while the tool licensing cost is comparable. (These days the license server mostly doesn't even distinguish a Sun vs a Linux license.) So the chip design crunch farm is mostly Linux now, with a few legacy Suns that it's cheaper to keep around than replace.
I'm just wondering, why is this considered flamebait and why should it be ignored?
Because it categorizes people in a heated debate, dismisses large number of them as people whose opinion should be ignored, and includes people in the "dismiss and ignore" category who have valid opinions which should be evaluated rather than dismissed out of hand.
This is guaranteed to bring heated argument from the people the author says should be ignored. Thus it's flamebait.
Taking the author's advice means ignoring important informed opinions and paying attention only to spokesmen for a particular set of positions. Thus the article's advice should be ignored.
In more detail: The article creates three categories and implies that these are exhaustive:
- Pros.
- Priests.
- Zealots.
This is a variation on the debating technique called "The Excluded Middle".
"Priests" and "Zealots" are to be ignroed. "Pros" are defined as people having good things to say about both Microsoft and Open Source software. So anyone who doesn't have a bunch of good stuff to say about Microsoft's products, but does say good stuff about open source, must be a "Priest" or "Zealot". Ignore him.
Among the excluded categories are any experts who have evaluated both sets of software, decided that open source is a much better choice than Microsoft or other proprietary products, and are attempting to bring decision makers (who would otherwise pick Microsoft or other proprietary software thorough inertia and/or conformity) to agree with their position, by pointing out the comparative disadvantages of the proprietary products.
An October 8 article states that CBS, under orders from Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin, has threatened to stop all HDTV broadcasts unless the broadcast flag is approved.
Who gives a crap?
Everybody who wanted to use the bandwidth the FCC gave away to CBS affiliates with existing analog TV channels.
If CBS is going to stop using it, the FCC should take that bandwidth back and give it to someone who will.
Why are states requiring MINORS to swear a loyalty oath?
- Minors can't make binding contracts.
- The oath uses an arcane vocabulary that they typically can't understand when they're first required to swear the pledge.
- Their attendance at the oath-making is mandatory (because the oath is mandatory at the government's schools and attendance at the government's schools is mandatory for all whose parents can't afford to provide an alternative).
This has alway struck me as suspiciously totalitarian. Is government no longer derived from the consent of the governed? Is consent valid when it is mandated, in the form of an imposed ritual, rather than based on an informed judgement by a rational adult?
Further, the pledge itself appears to be an affirmation of the Union position from the Civil War:
I pledge allegiance... to the Republic... one nation, indivisible.
While the issue of unilateral decisions by states to seceed may have been "settled" by a lot of blood, over a century ago, but it seems to me that division of the nation by constitutional amendment is still an option.
If you don't like Microsoft, for whatever reason, don't buy their software...
I tried that for years. But the hardware manufacturers wouldn't sell me a machine without their software on it - paid for out of the retail price of the machine. B-(
Back in 97, I was working at a startup where we were using the usual array of Microsoft tools to create web-based applications: IIS, ASP, Visual Basic (COM controls), and SQL server. The more I learned, the more I grew not to like it. The straw to break the camel's back was finding a significant bug in MDAC (which was acknowledged by a high-level tech once the ticket was escalated), and then having to wait 6 months for a fix.
I see they're up to their old tricks.
Back in the REALLY early days (MS-DOS on Peanut, I think, but it MIGHT have been the Altair/Imsai days) I happened to be reading the letter column of Byte magazine and ran across a complaint from a really early Microsoft user.
Seems Microsoft had come out with a Fortran complier. The letter-writer had found a bug in how it handled one of the terms of formats - one he REALLY needed to work right to port some software from a mainframe to a personal computer. He had reported it. But they hadn't fixed it. After much escalation he finally got a statement from them that they KNEW it was a bug and were NEVER going to fix it. Thus his letter.
After reading that I spent my entire carreer avoiding Microsoft software. It's decades later and I haven't regretted it for a minute.
"Your DVD player is readily and easily modifyable to illegally recieve our signal, decrypt it, and use it as a replacement for our and other recievers. Your buisness is illegal, we'll sue."
Alternatively they could embrace it - by licensing a manufacturer to make a closed (and sealed) plugin to hold a smartcard (or whatever), manage authorization messages from the downlink, and decrypt the signal.
This would be an especially good move for Dish Network (which doesn't have the bad blood from DirecTV's attack on purchasers of smartcard programming devices). Make this available and any Linux users still on DirecTV would likely switch - either immediately or as soon as their minimum committment with DTV expired - and DTV can whistle trying to get 'em back. B-)
But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
This is complete bullshit.
I'd intended to throw out the counter-meme and leave it at that, rather than continue in a gun-control thread (as Godwin's law claims will happen). But now that the discussion is off the front page and this response will mostly be viewed only by you, I'll give you a short answer to each of your points.
No single statistic or scientific inquiry supports this.
There is some excelent (and prize-winning) research in the field of criminology that supports EXACTLY this. Interestingly, much of it was done by people who were initially looking for exactly the opposite result - but had the integrity to change their opinions in the face of data.
See Kleck (one title: Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America.) for data on offensive vs. defensive uses, or Lott et. al. (one title: More Guns, Less Crime) on the effect of gun law changes. Both books summarize years of rigorous research and analysis.
For the rest I'll just throw out the facts. If you're really interested in the evidence, or just open-minded on this issue, start by googling for "pro gun faq". (Unlike the anti-gunners, the pro-gunners are quite happy to point you to their opposition's claims. B-) )
Criminality in the USA is among the highest of any Western nations and you have the most liberal gun laws.
Our gun laws vary by location. So does our criminality. It also varies by the race, religion, and national origin of the various groups of people in question. (The US has allowed massive immigration of diverse racial, cultural, and religious groups and doesn't force its own culture(s) and language(s) on them.)
But within each of these groups the crime rate is far lower than in their country of origin. As a white male of western European ancestry my risk is lower than that of a person of similar ancestry in England, Scotland, France, or Germany. The same is true for Afro-Americans vs. Africans, Japanese-Americans vs. Japanese, Latino-Americans vs. Mexicans and other south or central Americans, and so on.
Meanwhile, since its latest experiment with draconian gun bans, England has for the last couple years been suffering from a higher violent crime rate than the US. Check it out. (Don't forget that England only counts a murder when it gets a conviction, while the US counts one when a body with signs of foul play is found.)
While you're at it, don't forget to include war. The US hasn't had a big one at home since the mid 19th century. (And violence between descendants of traditional enemies is counted as crime in the US, while it would be counted as war-related in their former homeland.)
As to "most liberal gun laws", we really don't. Switzerland, for instance, REQUIRES every adult male to have at home, at a minimum, a full-auto battle rifle, along with a sealed box of ammo (to keep it ready in case of invasion - but he is EXPECTED to buy more and practice with it). Their crime rates are considerably lower than ours. (AND they got to sit out WW II, right in the middle of it.)
You also have the highest rate of mass killings by teenagers and so on.
Just not true. The teenage killing is virtually all gang activity in certain gun-banned inner cities. And it is still small compared to that in the third-world countries where the ethnic groups in question originated.
(And it's NOT a racial characteristic. A black of African ancestry, for instance, who has achieved middle-class (or higher) income has a (miniscule) crime rate and murder risk no higher than a white of equivalent income.)
Interestingly, an Oregon city experimented with gun bans. The LA gangs moved in and set up an extort
[The world's biggest machine...] is the Internet, it is way too complex and bigger than the electrical grid, and contains among other things satellites, routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices, so the Net IS the biggest machine made by man.
Almost right - but you've got the wrong net.
The overall communication network is the world's biggest machine. Geographically the telephone network is probably the largest component. It carries its own separate power distribution and goes many places the power grid does not. That's obvious when you consider POTS phones located in off-grid locations, or cell phonees.
Radio and other non-phone wireless services are more pervasive geographically - but actual components are fewer. The internet is nearly a strict subset of the phone network, though it does have a few of its own links. But almost all of it is in locations where power is supplied by the grid and little is self-powered.
For sheer included volume, though, consider NASA's communication with their space probes. B-)
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a shame that this software is getting leaked because it throws a significant wrench in the gears of the natural progression of democracy. Although I agree that the paper ballot system works just fine, the bottom line is that computerized voting - if implemented properly - stands to improve elections in terms of accessability of ballots to the electorate, workload for electoral officials and overall cost.
Your posting shows that you believe that the "natural progression of democracy" is to expand the franchise and poll as many people as possible, and you appear to be in favor of this. That is a misunderstanding of the function of elections.
Elections are the mechanism by which a republic is made stable. The elections are intended to model the outcome of a civil war. If the losing side believes that they are a good enough model to predict that they'd ALSO lose the war if they started it, they then refrain from starting it.
To do this they don't need to be perfect. But they DO need to be visibly free of gross corruption, and to selectively poll those people who are likely to fight if a civil war erupted and who care about the issues in question.
You'll notice that, in the US, the franchise has been extended to one group after another, in each case only AFTER the group in question has proven itself capable of organizing mass violence. Starting with landowners and merchants after the revolution, national sufferage was extended to all free males after a couple post-revolutionary incidents, to women after their participation in the bar-burnings of the temperance movement, to blacks (for real) after the civil rights movement degenerated into the mid-'60s urban riots, and to the 18-20 year-olds after the Vietnam protest and associated riots, bombing, and sabotage.
Making it easy to qualify and vote - rather than requiring registration about as hard as going out and hooking up with a militia - means more people who don't really care will vote, skewing the results of the civil-war prediction. It also makes it easier to create fake voters and corrupt the count. Both make the election outcome less believable by the losers, reducing stability.
Exposing defects in the counting mechanism - especially defects that can lead to massive fraud - may destabilize things temporarily. But it will lead either to fixing the defects or to immediate destabilization of a potentially corrupt and unrepresentative government - followed by fixing the defects if (as is likely) the post-war population also opts for a republic. Either will lead to government that is more representative of the peoples' will and thus more stable.
How do you "accidentally" put software on a public FTP server[?]
Trivial:
By FTPing it TO a directory that is read/write for anonymous FTP, rather than read only or login-required.
Easy to do if a company is trying to deliver a copy of an executable to a customer and both the person doing the delivery and the person receiving it aren't on their toes, or if the person receiving it doesn't have enough sysadmin privileges to configure the FTP server and the sysadmin who does isn't cooperative or available.
Not saying this is what happened here, of course.
These things are NOT NEW. in 1985 I was a Jet Propulsion laboratory. A caltech professor there was using a light modulator to perform convolution matrix a operations to decode synthetic aperature radar data. THe design is identical.
I was a tech in Emmet Leith's "Radar and Optics" lab at the UofMich and one of the first things I did was run an optical processor using essentially this hack - again to process synthetic aperture radar data. This was in 1967.
Multi-megapixel 2-D FFT plus some geometry corrections in the time it took the laser light to go from the input film plane to the output film plane - about 6 feet on that device.
We were already considering how to replace the photographic film input and output devices with electronic substitutes in those days, too. The size of the device we used was large only because it was convenient to construct it with aluminum U-beams and stock lasers, lenses, and lens holders. Given decent I/O, making a disk-drive sized model, say to do realtime processing in an aircraft-mounted radar, would have been trivial. (The signals to be processed were already electronic and at reasonable bandwidth - lower than a TV image.)
Nowadays this is done by DSPs. Why? Because they're adequately fast and are FLEXIBLE. Optic processors do only one type of computation, and require physical adjustment to tune the parameters. If you can do that computation on something more general-purpose, as fast as your data arrives, why bother building something larger and more limited to do it faster?
I always understood it to be more the lines of intent. If you intend to stand at the corner of a school and get kids to buy crack by telling them to go to the store then it is illegal. If you tell them where to go buy ice cream ral cheap and it just so happens that the place also sells crack then it is not. Or at least that is what the founding fathers meant - which we have drifted quite a bit in the last 50 or so years from that.
Given that Jefferson and Washington exchanged letters on cultivation techniques for increasing a hemp crop's potency as a drug (at the expense of its usefulness for rope and paper), and Franklin wrote and published pornography (and acknowledged fathering several dozen children on women to whom he wasn't married), I strongly suspect they didn't intend the new "limited" federal government to have drug wars or smut wars in the first place.
Well, the phrase having links to terrorist organisations keeps popping up as a vague but severely incriminating description in the media.
A few decades back, "having links to organized crime" was used, much more often, as a similar undisprovable slam by both the media and government.
In the Xanadu archetecture links were first-class objects, like documents rather than text IN documents, and could be authored in isolation.
And it seemed like every time some A-hole politician or reporter would slam someone as "linked to organized crime", one of us would say something like: "[A-hole] is linked to organized crime, and I can prove it. I just made the link myself."
It sounds like the GPL is going to get an airing in court. IBM and most of the other big firms with a stake in Linux probably want that because the GPL is the cornerstone on which Linux was built.
And how nice that SCO is being an obvious pack of assholes about the whole thing. This puts the defenders of the GPL in a much better situation than if they had been reasonable.
You'll recall how, when the Forces of Law'nOrder try to set a precedent confirming the enforcability of some new law (especially if it's constitutionality is questionable), they'll go after the worst scumbag they can find first. (Like going after child pornographers when trying out the latest restriction on the free press.) Once they get the precedent set, they can then use it to club anybody else who publishes something they don't like.
SCO, by taking on the entire world and insulting the intelligence of the judges who will be handling the case with a stack of obviously bogus claims, has voluntarily put itself in a position with respect to the GPL of the child pornographer picked by a prosecutor to try out a new censorship law. VERY convenient for the GPL side.
This reminds me of a saying from the heyday of usenet news political discussion/debate groups. Often there would be a regular poster on one side who would trot out every tired, repeatedly disproved, position of that side of the argument. He could never be convinced to change his position. But he'd make a DANDY foil for presenting the counter-arguments, for the edification of thousands of neo-lurkers who hadn't yet heard them. Then, a few weeks later, once a new crop of newbies had gathered and/or another news item made the subject front-page once more, he'd rehash them AGAIN. How convenient!
After a few iterations some of the posters would get bored or annoyed with him and start asking how he could be discouraged (or kicked off, if the group was moderated). Then the old hands would point out how CONVENIENT it was to have someone from the "other side" to periodically hoist the strawmen and give the rest of us an opportunity for a bonfire.
SO convenient, that it would often be said that "If [whomever] didn't exist we'd have to invent him.", i.e. we'd have to plant a shill in the crowd to do the same function (but less believably, because someone who actually believes the opposite position won't get the rhetoric quite right.)
Of course you'd never know if [whomever] actually WAS a shill - a particularly convincing one. (And that uncertainty also helped. It implied that if he WAS a shill, he'd only be raising arguments that were defective. So simply by raising one of "his side's" arguments he discredited it. B-)
SCO has been so PERFECT in this role that the old saw applies.
If the GPL can't handle a legal challenge, it's better to find that out sooner rather than later.
SCo has been so perfect for our side that it's almost enough to make you wonder if SCO *IS* a shill.
So, who's going to start the GNU Land Warrior project?
It's already under way.
Or at least the first module (mine detection/clearing) has been a pet project of a number of hackers (starting with John Walker) for quite a few years now. (Since well before the late Princess Di got on the band wagon.)
You are also correct that [electricity to generate hydrogen] will come from whatever's cheapest, and only the environmental nuts with rooftop PV panels will make hydrogen cleanly.
Even rooftop panels aren't "clean".
They trap virtually all the light that strikes them and turn most of it into local heat. (Several times more energy comes out as heat than comes out as electricity.) Meanwhile the energy that made hydrogen is eventually releleased as heat when the hydrogen is used.
The surface area they cover would normally have reflected much of that light back into space unaltered. Especially in deserts, which are the logical place to build large solar collection farms. That would result in a LOT of "global warming".
And none of which takes into account the pollution and energy use from manufacturing the panels in the first place. (I've seen claims that current panel designs take more energy to make than they produce in their service lifetime, though that somnds dubious, and would certainly be improved on if the panels are ever to become a major energy source rather than a convenient way to supply energy to remote locations.)
For example, once we had slavery, the preamble to the constitution cannot have meaning in a country that practices slavery. The argument arose and it was solved by an amendment to the constitution which clarified the argument completely: if all men are created equal, no man can be another's property.
This misrepresents both the logical argument and the amendment.
The logical argument from "all men are created equal [before the law]" does not lead to "No man can be another's property." Instead it leads to "No man can be BORN another's property." Eliminating HEREDITARY slavery is a major step but not a total elimination.
The amendment, as well, doesn't ban slavery either. It bans slavery "except as punishment for a crime". This goes beyond banning hereditary slavery, also banning temporary or permanent voluntary slavery (chosing now to lose ALL choices later) and slavery to repay civil judgements (debtor's prison, indenture). Only a criminal judgement can lead to involuntary servitude.
Of course this puts intstitutions like the draft in an interesting position. Ditto irrevocable powers of attorney. (And certain kinky entertainments, if performed without a bailout mechanism, can lead to both criminal and civil liability if the kinkee doesn't like how the kinker kinked.)
As to the amendment being passed to "solve the argument", it was actually passed for a much different reason: As a tactic by the US Federal Government to weaken the Confederate States of America during the "Civil War/War Between the States". The issue in THAT war was the right to secession (as Linconl made perfectly clear when he said that he'd free all, some, or none of the salves, whichever was necessary to save the Union). Slavery was constitutionally banned (except in limited circumstances) as a byproduct.
(Of course, some states explicitly go beyond the Constitution's provisions.)
Human rights trump property rights.
Property rights ARE human rights - the rights of humans to own and control pieces of property, regardless of the wishes of the non-owners. The constitutional limitation on slavery in the US, along with its current interpretation and the lack of laws establishing marketable slaveownership as a criminal penalty, just says that humans are excluded from the category of "property" over which other (non-governmental) humans can exercise rights.
Slavery is illegal and slave-owners are S.O.L with regard to their property rights pertaining to their slaves.
Yep.
Isn't HIPPA supposed to protect us from this type of thing?
Perhaps the contractor who shipped the data overseas can be prosecuted, because he mishandled the data by moving it to where US laws can't be used to safeguard it.
But probably not. One of the (usually fortunate) principles of US law is that, if there is any ambiguity, the interpretation most favorable to the defendant must be used.
The studios reportedly agreed to send out VHS screeners (recipients previously had a choice between VHS and DVD) encrypted with a special security code traceable to individual Academy members.
I guess that'll teach me to RTFA. B-)
The accademy should (quietly) distribute watermarked copies - with individual watermarks - to the members - and then take action against the responsible member(s) if the material ends up on the black market.
It's the height of hypocracy to swat at unauthorized copiers among the customer base in such a way as to create massive colateral damage among non-violators while simultaneously giving the industry insiders immunity.
yes, much faster to build, optimize, and crack a key-based crypo scheme than to rewrite the tables in a router on a large college
Not quite. But you still need a supercomputer even to rewrite the tables. Especially after you install the supercomputer. B-)
[/tongue-in-cheek]
Nobody signed a contract here, so the only problem is copyright law, [...]
But if you buy a SCO license you're entering a contract with SCO. Note that they're not suing IBM for violating a copyright - but they ARE suing them for allegedly violating a contrct.
If you buy the license you are paying $699 to give SCO the right to sue you if you ever use Linux on more than one machine. NOT smart.
A citizen enters the voting center, is authenticated as a registered voter by the volunteer staff, and given a vote card.
The citizen enters a voting booth (behind a privacy screen) and activates the selection kiosk using their vote card.
Once their candidates and referendums have been chosen, the machine prints out a 2D barcode on the vote card and returns it to them.
The citizen exits the voting booth with his completed vote card.
The citizen has the option to verify his barcode using a separate verification kiosk which deciphers and displays the barcode (behind a privacy screen, of course). Once satisfied, the citizen leaves the verification kiosk.
Why encrypt the card? That way you must trust the decryption machine, which ALSO may be corrupt.
Print the card in the clear. Then the voter can check it without mechanical intervention.
Rely on the physical security of depositing the ballot in the ballot box. There is no need to verify that the ballot was printed by the machine, both because that process can ALSO be corrupted and because it does not address the single issue at hand: "How did the voter vote?" Not "Did he vote in a particular machine?"
To prevent ballot box stuffing have poll watchers from each interested group watch the ballot box - just as is done with hand-marked paper ballots.
First, after you vote, a 2-D bar code is printed. That code contains a record of your vote, with an encryption of the machine you voted at and your selected key.
Giving the voter a record of his vote which he can use to prove what his vote is to a third party is illegal in most jurisdictions, because it facilitates vote-buying schemes.
(Whether vote-buying should be illegal is a separate issue, of course. B-) )
Would you mind pointing out specific instances where Sun has done something that made an enemy out of the Linux community?
I don't know about the Linux community specifically. But I've been annoyed with them since they bought the rights to the Grasshopper Group's NeWS implementation, hacked it into their own window system (and trashed its performance level), moved to X, then refused to let the original authors release the NeWS portion open-source after Sun had completely abandoned it.
I used Suns for a decade or more, eventually mostly as a smart terminal/web browser, and finally abandoned 'em completely at home in favor of all-Linux rather than deal with upgrading for Y2K. I'd wanted to do some hardware and driver hacking. But they wouldn't release enough info for it to be convenient. And (like Apple) they several times started to open up and then did an about-face. Meanwhile Linux is maturing and the *BSDs are now unemcumbered, so phoey on Sun.
Even at the day job, integrated circuit design flows have finally been ported to Linux from Sun, and a Linux farm is far cheaper for a given level of crunch while the tool licensing cost is comparable. (These days the license server mostly doesn't even distinguish a Sun vs a Linux license.) So the chip design crunch farm is mostly Linux now, with a few legacy Suns that it's cheaper to keep around than replace.
I'm just wondering, why is this considered flamebait and why should it be ignored?
Because it categorizes people in a heated debate, dismisses large number of them as people whose opinion should be ignored, and includes people in the "dismiss and ignore" category who have valid opinions which should be evaluated rather than dismissed out of hand.
This is guaranteed to bring heated argument from the people the author says should be ignored. Thus it's flamebait.
Taking the author's advice means ignoring important informed opinions and paying attention only to spokesmen for a particular set of positions. Thus the article's advice should be ignored.
In more detail: The article creates three categories and implies that these are exhaustive:
- Pros.
- Priests.
- Zealots.
This is a variation on the debating technique called "The Excluded Middle".
"Priests" and "Zealots" are to be ignroed. "Pros" are defined as people having good things to say about both Microsoft and Open Source software. So anyone who doesn't have a bunch of good stuff to say about Microsoft's products, but does say good stuff about open source, must be a "Priest" or "Zealot". Ignore him.
Among the excluded categories are any experts who have evaluated both sets of software, decided that open source is a much better choice than Microsoft or other proprietary products, and are attempting to bring decision makers (who would otherwise pick Microsoft or other proprietary software thorough inertia and/or conformity) to agree with their position, by pointing out the comparative disadvantages of the proprietary products.
An October 8 article states that CBS, under orders from Viacom CEO Mel Karmazin, has threatened to stop all HDTV broadcasts unless the broadcast flag is approved.
Who gives a crap?
Everybody who wanted to use the bandwidth the FCC gave away to CBS affiliates with existing analog TV channels.
If CBS is going to stop using it, the FCC should take that bandwidth back and give it to someone who will.
Never mind "under God" for the moment.
... to the Republic ... one nation, indivisible.
Why are states requiring MINORS to swear a loyalty oath?
- Minors can't make binding contracts.
- The oath uses an arcane vocabulary that they typically can't understand when they're first required to swear the pledge.
- Their attendance at the oath-making is mandatory (because the oath is mandatory at the government's schools and attendance at the government's schools is mandatory for all whose parents can't afford to provide an alternative).
This has alway struck me as suspiciously totalitarian. Is government no longer derived from the consent of the governed? Is consent valid when it is mandated, in the form of an imposed ritual, rather than based on an informed judgement by a rational adult?
Further, the pledge itself appears to be an affirmation of the Union position from the Civil War:
I pledge allegiance
While the issue of unilateral decisions by states to seceed may have been "settled" by a lot of blood, over a century ago, but it seems to me that division of the nation by constitutional amendment is still an option.
If you don't like Microsoft, for whatever reason, don't buy their software...
I tried that for years. But the hardware manufacturers wouldn't sell me a machine without their software on it - paid for out of the retail price of the machine. B-(
Back in 97, I was working at a startup where we were using the usual array of Microsoft tools to create web-based applications: IIS, ASP, Visual Basic (COM controls), and SQL server. The more I learned, the more I grew not to like it. The straw to break the camel's back was finding a significant bug in MDAC (which was acknowledged by a high-level tech once the ticket was escalated), and then having to wait 6 months for a fix.
I see they're up to their old tricks.
Back in the REALLY early days (MS-DOS on Peanut, I think, but it MIGHT have been the Altair/Imsai days) I happened to be reading the letter column of Byte magazine and ran across a complaint from a really early Microsoft user.
Seems Microsoft had come out with a Fortran complier. The letter-writer had found a bug in how it handled one of the terms of formats - one he REALLY needed to work right to port some software from a mainframe to a personal computer. He had reported it. But they hadn't fixed it. After much escalation he finally got a statement from them that they KNEW it was a bug and were NEVER going to fix it. Thus his letter.
After reading that I spent my entire carreer avoiding Microsoft software. It's decades later and I haven't regretted it for a minute.
I know just what's going to happen to this...
"Your DVD player is readily and easily modifyable to illegally recieve our signal, decrypt it, and use it as a replacement for our and other recievers. Your buisness is illegal, we'll sue."
Alternatively they could embrace it - by licensing a manufacturer to make a closed (and sealed) plugin to hold a smartcard (or whatever), manage authorization messages from the downlink, and decrypt the signal.
This would be an especially good move for Dish Network (which doesn't have the bad blood from DirecTV's attack on purchasers of smartcard programming devices). Make this available and any Linux users still on DirecTV would likely switch - either immediately or as soon as their minimum committment with DTV expired - and DTV can whistle trying to get 'em back. B-)
But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
This is complete bullshit.
I'd intended to throw out the counter-meme and leave it at that, rather than continue in a gun-control thread (as Godwin's law claims will happen). But now that the discussion is off the front page and this response will mostly be viewed only by you, I'll give you a short answer to each of your points.
No single statistic or scientific inquiry supports this.
There is some excelent (and prize-winning) research in the field of criminology that supports EXACTLY this. Interestingly, much of it was done by people who were initially looking for exactly the opposite result - but had the integrity to change their opinions in the face of data.
See Kleck (one title: Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America.) for data on offensive vs. defensive uses, or Lott et. al. (one title: More Guns, Less Crime) on the effect of gun law changes. Both books summarize years of rigorous research and analysis.
For the rest I'll just throw out the facts. If you're really interested in the evidence, or just open-minded on this issue, start by googling for "pro gun faq". (Unlike the anti-gunners, the pro-gunners are quite happy to point you to their opposition's claims. B-) )
Criminality in the USA is among the highest of any Western nations and you have the most liberal gun laws.
Our gun laws vary by location. So does our criminality. It also varies by the race, religion, and national origin of the various groups of people in question. (The US has allowed massive immigration of diverse racial, cultural, and religious groups and doesn't force its own culture(s) and language(s) on them.)
But within each of these groups the crime rate is far lower than in their country of origin. As a white male of western European ancestry my risk is lower than that of a person of similar ancestry in England, Scotland, France, or Germany. The same is true for Afro-Americans vs. Africans, Japanese-Americans vs. Japanese, Latino-Americans vs. Mexicans and other south or central Americans, and so on.
Meanwhile, since its latest experiment with draconian gun bans, England has for the last couple years been suffering from a higher violent crime rate than the US. Check it out. (Don't forget that England only counts a murder when it gets a conviction, while the US counts one when a body with signs of foul play is found.)
While you're at it, don't forget to include war. The US hasn't had a big one at home since the mid 19th century. (And violence between descendants of traditional enemies is counted as crime in the US, while it would be counted as war-related in their former homeland.)
As to "most liberal gun laws", we really don't. Switzerland, for instance, REQUIRES every adult male to have at home, at a minimum, a full-auto battle rifle, along with a sealed box of ammo (to keep it ready in case of invasion - but he is EXPECTED to buy more and practice with it). Their crime rates are considerably lower than ours. (AND they got to sit out WW II, right in the middle of it.)
You also have the highest rate of mass killings by teenagers and so on.
Just not true. The teenage killing is virtually all gang activity in certain gun-banned inner cities. And it is still small compared to that in the third-world countries where the ethnic groups in question originated.
(And it's NOT a racial characteristic. A black of African ancestry, for instance, who has achieved middle-class (or higher) income has a (miniscule) crime rate and murder risk no higher than a white of equivalent income.)
Interestingly, an Oregon city experimented with gun bans. The LA gangs moved in and set up an extort
[The world's biggest machine...] is the Internet, it is way too complex and bigger than the electrical grid, and contains among other things satellites, routers, servers, and millions of clients, including wireless devices, so the Net IS the biggest machine made by man.
Almost right - but you've got the wrong net.
The overall communication network is the world's biggest machine. Geographically the telephone network is probably the largest component. It carries its own separate power distribution and goes many places the power grid does not. That's obvious when you consider POTS phones located in off-grid locations, or cell phonees.
Radio and other non-phone wireless services are more pervasive geographically - but actual components are fewer. The internet is nearly a strict subset of the phone network, though it does have a few of its own links. But almost all of it is in locations where power is supplied by the grid and little is self-powered.
For sheer included volume, though, consider NASA's communication with their space probes. B-)