I've wanted something like this for years.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 3
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I've wanted something like that for years. (Actually, I wanted the raw punchcard data to go onto the net as a downloadable file.) Just raw card images in the order the cards hit the reader. Then you could:
- check that a ballot voted exactly your way appeared.
- get together with other supporters of your candidate and check that you all got counted
- check that the software crunching up the official tally followed the rules
- look for anomalies that might suggest voter fraud (such as a long run of identical ballots)
- look for anomalies that might suggest handling error (such as a repeated run of cards, suggesting that one deck went in the reader twice and another was missed)
and so on.
I have heard that there may be legal problems with getting this data published. Apparently this has been blocked by courts or legislation in the past, in an attempt to impeed vote-buying. (The raw data can be used by vote buyers to check that the sellers kept their part of the bargain.)
But it seems to me that concerned citizens wishing to determine that computer-aided vote fraud is absent would have an overriding interest in the open publication of the data. And that argument might be used to overturn any previous impediments.
FOIA, anyone? B-)
Myth of 19,000 lost Gore votes.
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 4
For days we've heard about how there were 19,000 double-punched ballots that were thrown out in Palm Beach county. This story seems to come up right after mention of the confusing "butterfly ballot", with the implication that about 19,000 people:
- got confused when trying to vote for Gore,
- punched the Buchannan hole
- realized they goofed and punched the Gore hole
- turned the ballot in, and
- the computer kicked it out as dobule-punched, so
- their vote didn't get counted, and
- Gore lost most of those 19,000 votes.
Well, it turns out that's NOT what happened.
It seems that Mary Matialin (a conservative commentator) got suspicious. So she actually CALLED the poll workers and ASKED what this was about.
It turns out that the 19,000 "spoiled ballots" were ACTUALLY people who:
- mispunched their ballot (in ANY way at all),
- realized they'd goofed,
- took the ballot to the election officials and said "I goofed. Please give me a replacement.",
- were told "Sure. Here",
- punched that one,
- (maybe screwed it up too... loop until they're happy with one), and
- turned it in.
So if any of these 19,000 ballots was a Gore supprter, Gore GOT the vote in question. (He might have missed some votes if the voter didn't realize until after they'd turned it in that they'd screwed up. But there aren't 19,000 worms in THAT can.)
You won't hear about this on the establishment media, of course. But Mary talked about it, and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, and put it on both his show and his web page. Here is the link.
(The page also makes an anaecdotal claim about Palm Beach county being a hotbed of Buchannan support, which could also explain its outlier status in the Buchannan count.)
(Again I'm not claiming to have checked any of this myself - just posting the reference for your perusal. Enjoy!)
That's right, it's not democratic. It's not supposed to be. We are not a democracy, we are a "republic". The rational behind the EC was to have the states elect the president, with the states using the popular vote to decide how they voted. This also prevented the "mob rule" problems inherent in true democratic governments.
Indeed.
Further:
The Senate's composition (two Senators from each state, regardless of the State's population), the minimum of 1 representative (again regardless of the state's population), and the composition of the electoral college (the sum of the number of Senators and representatives from the state) were there for a very important purpose:
To prevent a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the states with small populations.
This election is EXACTLY what that is about!
Just take a look a the map on any of the media outlets to see what I mean.
Gore took the urban and/or industrial seaboard states of the northeast and west coasts and the urban/industrial states of the Midwest. Gore took the states those folk dismiss as the "flyover country". There are only two exceptions: One rural northeast for Bush (Live Free or Die!) and one with heavy immigration from California for Gore.
Radio commentators are claiming that the number of Buchannan votes in the county in question are in the same proportion to the number of registered Reform Party members in the county as in other large Florida counties with significant amounts of Reform Party membership. A neighborhood full of Buchannan voters in a retirement community would hardly be surprising.
Norstadt's graph doesn't show the proportion of Reform Party registrants. So it is useless in distinguishing between the hypotheses (Democrat confusion vs. a concentration of either Reform Party voters or Buchannan supporters.)
More interesting might be a scatter-plot of Buchannan votes/Reform registration vs Gore votes/Democrat registration in counties with non-trivial Buchannan vote counts.
Such a graph would be so much MORE informative than Buchannan/Bush ratio that it raises the question of whether Norstadt chose that ratio because makes a good-looking graph for the Gore camp's "confused seniors" argument.
(Note, if you try to check this stat, that the Reform Party is called the "Independent Party" in Florida.)
Just checked my history: Slashdot corrupted the HTML tags in the entry window when it previewed my post. Changed the / to a ; in the tag ending the link and the / to a space in the tag ending the itallic.
On the radio they make it sound like there are two rows of holes exposed, and the two for Gore and Buchannan are side-by-side. The picture is nothing like that.
This actual picture looks abundantly clear to me. There are arrows pointing to the holes from the center of each section, and the Buchannan hole appears to be exactly on the line between the Bush and Gore sections.
I don't see how a large number of people - even the nearly blind - could make the claimed error, or that errors could be so biased toward Gore->Buchannan and away from Bush->Buchannan to give Buchannan thousands of extra Gore votes.
On the other hand, the text claims that there was a handout (that was NOT shown) giving the candidates in a different order. If it matched the layout but switched Buchannan and Gore that might be a different kettle of fish.
Actually, a few basic statistical principals show that once you have even a few thousand votes the chances of the winner being different from the one predicted is incredibly small
That only applies if the sample is unbiased, i.e. it is equally likely to pick any particular member of the sampled population.
But like-minded people cluster. For instance: voters in inner city neighborhoods may vote almost entirely Democrat while those in rural districts vote almost entirely Republican. (Or vice-versa - NOT! B-) ) Selecting a couple PRECINCTS at random is NOT an unbiased sample of VOTERS.
Further: The first precincts to report are the first ones to get their data to the counting operation. This may be small rural precincts that closed early after everybody registered had voted. Or it might be inner-city urban precincts that happened to vote at, or near, the place where votes are counted.
So early returns don't tell you anything - unless you compare them to the demographics of the precincts in question and correctly extrapolate them to the demographic mix of the entire state.
The reporting operations do - which is why you'll sometimes see early returns massively in favor of one candidate and the news services calling the election to go to the other.
Majors slow? An alternative is even slower!
on
Election Wrapping Up
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· Score: 2
The major news sites are all covering the results, but they are also really bogged down.
You think the majors are bogged?
Matt Drudge promised to break the embargo by reporting exit poll data before the polls close. But I haven't been able to get his site to respond with a page for more than 6 hours. (Last success was at 11:15 PST, or 2:15 PM EST.)
Site responds to pings, though. (Paranoia strikes: Maybe somebebody doesn't like Matt reporting results before poll closing. B-) )
ABCnews.com is providing a really nice map... complete with mouseover election results.
Unfortunately the mouseover doesn't give the percentage of the vote counted in that state. OOPS! Makes it useless.
It's especially annoying because they HAVE the percentage available! They show it on the grand totals - where you can't tell how solid the electoral votes are.
Probably somebody with moderator points hit the wrong menu item by mistake. It also got two "informative"s and two "interesting"s, so I wouldn't complain.
Who knows? The original moderator might have given you some of his remaining points to make an appology. B-)
It was released several days ago... Oct 30th I believe.
If you'll take a look at the original post you'll see this:
... October is almost gone.
Looks to me like the the post was submitted a few days before the release, worked it's way through the Slashdot queue, and hit the board a couple days after.
"Crossed in the mail" as they say.
I don't fault anybody here: The poster did check his info, the post-approvers have too much to do already to dig on the net when they're publishing a question (and the question serves as an informative conversation starter even if it IS slightly outdated) and it's easy for the responder to miss the verbal cueue and the mechanism "behind the curtain" at slashdot.
Everything there is static info. no, the 'password' is not so you can change info. it is just used to access the info.... There is no real chance for fraud here, just a chance for people to get your address, which there are about 1000 other ways to do.
Thanks. It's nice to know that Denton didn't open that security hole.
I don't see what the problem is. It just means that the parties are able to tailor their policies to the individual, and thats what democracy is all about, isn't it?
I think a point is being missed. Consider:
It seems your username is your first and last name, and your password is your year of birth.
Why is there a password? To let you CHANGE your info, right?
So if somebody knows your birthday and age, they can deregister you, or change your address and request an absentee ballot in your name. Maybe that's not too likely for active voters (and likely to be detected). But those who rarely or never vote become a rich source of fraudulent ballots.
As do the recently dead. How many berieved relatives are going even THINK of logging in and killing the registration. Once the mailing address is changed nothing will arrive to show the registration wasn't automatically canceled.
Worse, it automates the creation and administration of phantom voters - a form of fraud that has ballooned since the federal motor-voter law.
What's especially dangerous about voter fraud is that the stability of a republic depends on the perceived accuracy of the elections. The election models a civil war closely enough to convince the loser that they'd lose the war, too - so they don't try to reverse it by violence. Break the faith in the election process and you may "destabilize" the society. And the surest way to break that faith is to destroy the reality behind it, by institutionalizing massive election fraud.
This has happened repeatedly in the history of republics, including the US. Fortunately, in the US the normal response is for a committee of vigilance to run the rascals out of town, maybe lynching a couple kingpins [San Francisco], publicly and repeatedly spank them until they go elsewhere [Portland OR], or capture the ballot box and count the ballots publicly [I forget which town]. Elsewhere in the world it has gotten much bloodier.
err, it's irrational, so it's not quite a ratio...
Ratios can be irrational. Ratios of integers can not.
The reviewer (or the author) misrepresented memes.
on
Candle
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· Score: 3
I have heard this Idea before.
Sounds like these "Memes" are religions. The author has take the idea of absolute beliefs (religions) and given it a new carrier (a virus) instead of being passed through tradition.
You have heard it before and are reminded of religion because the reviewer's description of memes misrepresents meme theory. (I haven't read the book yet, so I can't tell whether the misrepresentation originates with the reviewer or the author.)
Memes are not something that just happened. Instead, "meme" is a recent term for an ancient phenomenon - probably as old as sentience, certainly as old as tradition.
The term was used in an analysis of the spread of ideas between people. The analysis that showed that an idea system had many of the characteristics of a lifeform, specifically: a virus.
Like other lifeforms that infect another species and modify its behavior, such idea-based lifeforms can be beneficial (improving the host's health, survival potential, ability to manipulate its environment, etc.), harmful (converting the host into a machine for propagating the infection to others, often at enormous cost), or some mix of the two. Like other lifeforms, what matters is that it does spread faster than it dies off (not whether some or all of its component ideas is "true"). Like other lifeforms it changes as it spreads, or even as it ages - with the more infective variants being more likely to propagate. And like other lifeforms it finds ways to defend its territory from other, similar-but-distinct, competitors.
So all the idea systems of history - philophies, religions, nationalisms, ideologies, scientific theories (and the scientific method itself), schools of medicine, schools of art, political movements, etc. - can be analyzed as species of meme. This allows the bulk of human history - including all the social movements, most of the wars, and the bulk of the misery of "the human condition", to be analyzed as epidemics of meme infection, evolution of distinct species of memes, battles for "ecological niches", inter-meme parisitization, and so on.
Which says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of any of the idea systems, of course, whether religious, scientific, political, or whatever.
So religious wars can indeed be analyzed as "meme wars". Particularly successful religious or philosophical memes can easily produce generations of (relative) social unity (or brainwashed zombism, depending on your point of view) among large fractions of the human population. (Recent examples: Confuscianism, Islam, the Christianity of the middle ages, Communism, etc.) But their rise (or fall) can be accompanied by enormous battles (the Crusades, Jihad, assorted revolutions, the World Wars) as they displace or are displaced by their competitors, and their unity requires maintainence as those with other ideas or who otherwise don't fit are converted, often forcibly, or eliminated (Pogroms, Inquisition, "self-criticism").
Right now much of the English-speaking world (and some of the rest) is blessed with a small number of prevalant meme-sets that include religious tolerance and the suppression of violent religious conflict, and political mechanisms that subvert meme conflict from war into elections and lobbying. There's a major meme battle going on in the United States (between what I call the "American Pluralist" culture and a newer one that labels itself "Progressive"), but its battles occur mainly in schools, legislatures, and bureaucracies, rather than on the streets.
But there's no reason to believe that the memes that keep the battles sanitized will survive indefinitely. So the future might also be a scene of religious/philodophical shooting wars and inquisition-ridden Paxen.
And as "artificial intelligence" databases and other computer programming begins to approximate human thought patterns, or even as it becomes more integrated with human activity, forming an intelectual system with components on both sides of the hardware/meatware boundary, the boundary between a meme and a computer virus blurs, and may eventually disappear.
Perhaps it already has: Look at internet rumors and chain letters for examples. B-)
It's the sysadmin's job to secure his boxes, which is generally done after installation. First, you only select the services you need, then you tighten things up.
Why not make it easy on everybody? Just make the default maximally tight, and make it "The Sysadmin's job" to OPEN any holes he wants open, rather than closing all the holes in the swiss cheese?
Especially when the distribution doesn't come with any document that even LISTS the holes in the cheese.
That way:
- The box is secure from the start: No temporary holes for somebody to break through and plant a backdoor while the sysadming gets around to closing holes.
- Ordinary users, or even newbies, can install and go right to work, without having to become a skilled sysadmin just to have a safe box. (Something not working? Bring up the config tool and turn it on.)
Both ordinary users and sysadmins would thank any distro vendor who did it this way.
So why don't they?
Probably because they fear a flood of support calls when things don't work because they aren't turned on yet.
So they leave their customers hanging out there with the wind blowing through the holes in their cheese.
While I understand the legal issues involved... it still irks me that reading something can get you into trouble.
Well, I DON'T understand something about this, and the flap surrounding it:
As I understood it, a trade secret is GONE once the secret is out of the bag. The holder of the secret has an action ONLY aginst the person who improperly exposed it - either after stealing it, or in violation of a valid confidentiality agreement - and perhaps anyone in collusion with that person. (Collusion would be things like hiring him to steal it, or giving him some benefit in return for a copy you knew to be stolen. Downloading it from an open internet site would not be collusion.)
Since when is there an action against anyone found using part of a FORMER secret that is now widely distributed? Since when is there NOT a big-time countersuit and other legal grief for anyone who brings such a bogus suit?
Yes, you can sue anyone for anything. Yes, if you have enough lawyers you can cause anybody a lot of trouble. But you can't just use your money and the court system to make life hell on any random person or company you don't like. You have to have a palusible case. If you knowingly bring a bogus suit you're on the hook big-time - both civilly and (if you're blatant and unpopular enough) criminally.
Has the deCSS case broken the legal system THAT badly?
(I'd have replied in email but you don't have one listed.)
and now slashdot has cut off the end of your sig, too..
I guess these days I've been demoted from hacker to hackee. B-)
taco was laughing about you, specifically, (regarding the truncation of your user name) when he gave the talk at IT recently.
Just so he was laughing WITH me.
Maybe I should give up and pick a new handle.
(He once offered to make an exception to the "no changing handles" rule due to my being savaged by the software revision, but I couldn't think of a good replacement and couldn't resist the sigline pun. Perhaps I should think harder and then see if the offer is still open.)
It's a pity that Ellison is merely demonstrating, rather than actually publishing, the relative performances.
That means they could defend a suit by claiming they weren't in violation, rather than having to claim the clause is unenforcable.
Of course that's to be expected - since they had such a clause before Microsoft.
Which brings up a question: Microsoft apparently put the clause in in reaction to Oracle's using it. Perhaps they'll sue in order to break such clauses themselves.
Granted their current product's performance has sloth in places that allows Oracle to come up with a benchmark that makes them look bad relative to Oracle. But benchmark hacking is a well-known art. So even if Microsoft IS generally slower they can no doubt come up with benchmarks that make them look better - or buy experts to modify their products until they ARE faster. And they can afford a lot more advertising. So it may still be in their interest to kill such clauses.
One thing about the sort of people who push things like UCITA - they are relentless. No matter how many times they are beaten they keep coming back. They want to win by exhaustion...
[the fight] will never be won - but you have to keep fighting. Set yourself mentally for the fact that you are in a fight that will last your lifetime.
There's a way to put a stake through its heart:
Come up with an alternative and start lobbying to get THAT passed. This puts them in much the same position we are in now, and we've got more voters and callers.
Once an alternative, setting forth OUR idea of what the law should be, is in place, they have to convince legislators, not just to fill in the void, but to repeal a popular law and replace it with an unpopular one. And you even get to argue on the relative merits!
(Of course as any movie fan knows, occasionally the baddie gets the stake pulled OUT of it's heart. So it's not necessarily a win for all time. But at least you get to sleep more easily for a few decades. B-) )
Need I remind you that the Branch Davidians were a
Christian cult?
Calling myself a tomato wouldn't make me one. The Branch Davidians were very clearly not Christians. All Christian denominations agree on certain core beliefs, and there is freedom to differ on particulars.
That depends on your definition of Christian, doesn't it?
As I see it, "Christians" are adherents to ANY of a set of belief systems that can trace their origin to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They generally think there was something special about him. But beyond that there's a LOT of variation.
That includes the early church - the Roman immortality cult.
It includes "The Church" of the middle ages - and its current incarnation: the Roman Catholic church.
It includes the Russian Orthodox and the Episcopalians.
It includes the classic protestant sects.
It includes the Unitarians. (Or it did until a few years ago, when they got together and voted, deciding that they WEREN'T Christians any more. B-) )
It includes the Satanists. (They believe in the same holy and unholy teams. They're just rooting for the other side. They apparently got their origin from some of "The Church"'s own propaganda.)
It includes snake handlers.
It includes Holy Rollers.
It includes Pentecostals.
It includes Mormons. (Their theology is a similar sort of expansion on classic Christian teaching as Christianity was an expansion on the Jewish sects that preceeded it.)
And it includes all sorts of apocolyptic sects. Members of that class include the several kinds of Seventh Day Adventists, one of which was (still is?) the Branch Davidians.
Now different sorts of Christians often decide that their particluar form of Christanity, or some set of religions similar to it, are the True Religion, and those OTHER things are NOT. (Sometimes they can be quite insistent about it. Especially if they think that God is going to be mad if those OTHER people keep doing whatever it is they're doing.)
But just because some religion is VERY different from yours, and shares very few (if any) beliefs, doesn't mean it didn't grow from the same roots.
And if it grew from those roots, it can also claim the tag "Christian".
Some corporate funding of research has worked well in the past (Bell Labs?), but it just doesn't seem to be feasable today.
How about Xerox PARC? B-)
Bell Labs was an artifact of government regulation.
The Bell Telephone system was granted a set of monopolies and their rates regulated. But part of the "costs" that went into computing the rates, when they were adjusted, was money spent on research on improving telephony.
So they set up Bell Labs. And hired a BUNCH of new PHDs. And gave them lots of equipment. They had a free hand, provided they published (in the publicly-available house journal) an article now and then that had something to do with improving SOMETHING related to telephony.
And no matter how much they spent, Bell got to up the rates to make it all back plus a profit. (6%, I think it was.)
So Bell Labs' mission was really to spend as much money as they could. Because the more the spent, the more the AT&T made. B-) They worked on metalurgy, and voice recognition, and speech synthesis, and graph theory, and cyphers, and semiconductors, and assistance for the deaf, and remote-controlled servos, and... (I could keep this up for days.)
But it DIDN'T WORK!
You see, anything they invented belonged to AT&T. They could patent it and licence the patents for a fee. (In fact, they HAD to license it, and HAD to release it if it had applications outside telephony. Think UNIX...)
And the licensing fees made Bell Labs ENORMOUSLY profitable! They never WERE able to spend more than they made.
So Bell Labs was an unintentional case study showing that well-funded basic-plus-applied research can turn a profit (big time!) Despite the fact that with basic research you have no idea, in advance, what will turn up and where the resulting profit will be made. You just know that if you do enough of it SOMETHING will turn up and you'll make out like a bandit.
Xerox PARC, on the other hand, was a case study in management error. This was Xerox's version of Bell Labs, dedicated to research into things related to office workflow.
Early in their existence they designed a computerized control panel for Xerox copiers. What it replaced was a mass of hardwired discrete components (relays, semiconductors, switches, etc.) It saved a bundle.
So they got credited with saving Xerox a bundle. And they KEPT ON being credited with saving Xerox a bundle, as all future production used their bright idea, indefinitely. So they could spend a lot of money and still look, on the books, like they were making money for the company, even if management NEVER USED any of their new bright ideas.
And that's about what happened. They came up with a lot of great stuff. And people in Silicon Valley cloned it, or bought rights for peanuts, while Xerox didn't pursue it themselves. (Think Ethernet - once known as "The Xerox Line". Think Graphical User Interfaces ala Mac & Windows.)
So again basic research was enormously profitable. And it could have been even more profitable for the company that funded it - IF management had had a clue. (Fortunately for the rest of us, Xerox's other product lines were profitable enough to keep the money flowing...)
(For the moment let's ignore whether the connection you make is valid.)
The US was able to survive without income tax because they owned an extrememly large piece of real estate: all the land west of civilization. You'll notice that once the land dried up, that's when they implemented income tax.
But the US STILL claims ownership or "stewardship" of much (about half?) of the land west of the Mississippi, and non-trivial amounts east of there. And it's constantly grabbing more.
Suppose the portion of that land that properly belongs to someone else were returned (for instance: indian lands to the descendants of tribes improperly "terminated", i.e. declared extinct), and the rest sold off.
Even taking into account a resulting drop in land prices that could easily pay off the national debt, with a pretty penny left over.
If you're concerned about the "delicate ecology" of some piece of the land being ruined by its new owners, get together with others who believe the same way and BUY it!
Slashdot Mirror
What if the government published a DVD-ROM with all of the votes cast in the whole country, so that you could run open software to verify the count, and verify that your vote was counted correctly?
I've wanted something like that for years. (Actually, I wanted the raw punchcard data to go onto the net as a downloadable file.) Just raw card images in the order the cards hit the reader. Then you could:
- check that a ballot voted exactly your way appeared.
- get together with other supporters of your candidate and check that you all got counted
- check that the software crunching up the official tally followed the rules
- look for anomalies that might suggest voter fraud (such as a long run of identical ballots)
- look for anomalies that might suggest handling error (such as a repeated run of cards, suggesting that one deck went in the reader twice and another was missed)
and so on.
I have heard that there may be legal problems with getting this data published. Apparently this has been blocked by courts or legislation in the past, in an attempt to impeed vote-buying. (The raw data can be used by vote buyers to check that the sellers kept their part of the bargain.)
But it seems to me that concerned citizens wishing to determine that computer-aided vote fraud is absent would have an overriding interest in the open publication of the data. And that argument might be used to overturn any previous impediments.
FOIA, anyone? B-)
For days we've heard about how there were 19,000 double-punched ballots that were thrown out in Palm Beach county. This story seems to come up right after mention of the confusing "butterfly ballot", with the implication that about 19,000 people:
... loop until they're happy with one), and
- got confused when trying to vote for Gore,
- punched the Buchannan hole
- realized they goofed and punched the Gore hole
- turned the ballot in, and
- the computer kicked it out as dobule-punched, so
- their vote didn't get counted, and
- Gore lost most of those 19,000 votes.
Well, it turns out that's NOT what happened.
It seems that Mary Matialin (a conservative commentator) got suspicious. So she actually CALLED the poll workers and ASKED what this was about.
It turns out that the 19,000 "spoiled ballots" were ACTUALLY people who:
- mispunched their ballot (in ANY way at all),
- realized they'd goofed,
- took the ballot to the election officials and said "I goofed. Please give me a replacement.",
- were told "Sure. Here",
- punched that one,
- (maybe screwed it up too
- turned it in.
So if any of these 19,000 ballots was a Gore supprter, Gore GOT the vote in question. (He might have missed some votes if the voter didn't realize until after they'd turned it in that they'd screwed up. But there aren't 19,000 worms in THAT can.)
You won't hear about this on the establishment media, of course. But Mary talked about it, and Rush Limbaugh picked it up, and put it on both his show and his web page. Here is the link.
(The page also makes an anaecdotal claim about Palm Beach county being a hotbed of Buchannan support, which could also explain its outlier status in the Buchannan count.)
(Again I'm not claiming to have checked any of this myself - just posting the reference for your perusal. Enjoy!)
That's right, it's not democratic. It's not supposed to be. We are not a democracy, we are a "republic". The rational behind the EC was to have the states elect the president, with the states using the popular vote to decide how they voted. This also prevented the "mob rule" problems inherent in true democratic governments.
Indeed.
Further:
The Senate's composition (two Senators from each state, regardless of the State's population), the minimum of 1 representative (again regardless of the state's population), and the composition of the electoral college (the sum of the number of Senators and representatives from the state) were there for a very important purpose:
To prevent a few states with large populations from running roughshod over the states with small populations.
This election is EXACTLY what that is about!
Just take a look a the map on any of the media outlets to see what I mean.
Gore took the urban and/or industrial seaboard states of the northeast and west coasts and the urban/industrial states of the Midwest. Gore took the states those folk dismiss as the "flyover country". There are only two exceptions: One rural northeast for Bush (Live Free or Die!) and one with heavy immigration from California for Gore.
Radio commentators are claiming that the number of Buchannan votes in the county in question are in the same proportion to the number of registered Reform Party members in the county as in other large Florida counties with significant amounts of Reform Party membership. A neighborhood full of Buchannan voters in a retirement community would hardly be surprising.
Norstadt's graph doesn't show the proportion of Reform Party registrants. So it is useless in distinguishing between the hypotheses (Democrat confusion vs. a concentration of either Reform Party voters or Buchannan supporters.)
More interesting might be a scatter-plot of Buchannan votes/Reform registration vs Gore votes/Democrat registration in counties with non-trivial Buchannan vote counts.
Such a graph would be so much MORE informative than Buchannan/Bush ratio that it raises the question of whether Norstadt chose that ratio because makes a good-looking graph for the Gore camp's "confused seniors" argument.
(Note, if you try to check this stat, that the Reform Party is called the "Independent Party" in Florida.)
(And no, I haven't researched this myself.)
Just checked my history: Slashdot corrupted the HTML tags in the entry window when it previewed my post. Changed the / to a ; in the tag ending the link and the / to a space in the tag ending the itallic.
Very strange...
I somehow lost the HTML end tag between my preview and my posting, so the link went on forever.
Sorry 'bout that.
Let's make that a link:
/ ELECTION_WatchdogPart4001107.html
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews
On the radio they make it sound like there are two rows of holes exposed, and the two for Gore and Buchannan are side-by-side. The picture is nothing like that.
This actual picture looks abundantly clear to me. There are arrows pointing to the holes from the center of each section, and the Buchannan hole appears to be exactly on the line between the Bush and Gore sections.
I don't see how a large number of people - even the nearly blind - could make the claimed error, or that errors could be so biased toward Gore->Buchannan and away from Bush->Buchannan to give Buchannan thousands of extra Gore votes.
On the other hand, the text claims that there was a handout (that was NOT shown) giving the candidates in a different order. If it matched the layout but switched Buchannan and Gore that might be a different kettle of fish.
Actually, a few basic statistical principals show that once you have even a few thousand votes the chances of the winner being different from the one predicted is incredibly small
That only applies if the sample is unbiased, i.e. it is equally likely to pick any particular member of the sampled population.
But like-minded people cluster. For instance: voters in inner city neighborhoods may vote almost entirely Democrat while those in rural districts vote almost entirely Republican. (Or vice-versa - NOT! B-) ) Selecting a couple PRECINCTS at random is NOT an unbiased sample of VOTERS.
Further: The first precincts to report are the first ones to get their data to the counting operation. This may be small rural precincts that closed early after everybody registered had voted. Or it might be inner-city urban precincts that happened to vote at, or near, the place where votes are counted.
So early returns don't tell you anything - unless you compare them to the demographics of the precincts in question and correctly extrapolate them to the demographic mix of the entire state.
The reporting operations do - which is why you'll sometimes see early returns massively in favor of one candidate and the news services calling the election to go to the other.
The major news sites are all covering the results, but they are also really bogged down.
You think the majors are bogged?
Matt Drudge promised to break the embargo by reporting exit poll data before the polls close. But I haven't been able to get his site to respond with a page for more than 6 hours. (Last success was at 11:15 PST, or 2:15 PM EST.)
Site responds to pings, though. (Paranoia strikes: Maybe somebebody doesn't like Matt reporting results before poll closing. B-) )
ABCnews.com is providing a really nice map ... complete with mouseover election results.
Unfortunately the mouseover doesn't give the percentage of the vote counted in that state. OOPS! Makes it useless.
It's especially annoying because they HAVE the percentage available! They show it on the grand totals - where you can't tell how solid the electoral votes are.
Applause for Clinton.
This veto gets him a DAMNED big score in the "good" column when it comes to toting up his legacy.
(And anyone who knows my opinion of him will understand how significant it is that he gets any praise from me at all.)
How is this offtopic?
Probably somebody with moderator points hit the wrong menu item by mistake. It also got two "informative"s and two "interesting"s, so I wouldn't complain.
Who knows? The original moderator might have given you some of his remaining points to make an appology. B-)
It was released several days ago... Oct 30th I believe.
If you'll take a look at the original post you'll see this:
Looks to me like the the post was submitted a few days before the release, worked it's way through the Slashdot queue, and hit the board a couple days after.
"Crossed in the mail" as they say.
I don't fault anybody here: The poster did check his info, the post-approvers have too much to do already to dig on the net when they're publishing a question (and the question serves as an informative conversation starter even if it IS slightly outdated) and it's easy for the responder to miss the verbal cueue and the mechanism "behind the curtain" at slashdot.
Everything there is static info. no, the 'password' is not so you can change info. it is just used to access the info. ... There is no real chance for fraud here, just a chance for people to get your address, which there are about 1000 other ways to do.
Thanks. It's nice to know that Denton didn't open that security hole.
I think a point is being missed. Consider:
Why is there a password? To let you CHANGE your info, right?
So if somebody knows your birthday and age, they can deregister you, or change your address and request an absentee ballot in your name. Maybe that's not too likely for active voters (and likely to be detected). But those who rarely or never vote become a rich source of fraudulent ballots.
As do the recently dead. How many berieved relatives are going even THINK of logging in and killing the registration. Once the mailing address is changed nothing will arrive to show the registration wasn't automatically canceled.
Worse, it automates the creation and administration of phantom voters - a form of fraud that has ballooned since the federal motor-voter law.
What's especially dangerous about voter fraud is that the stability of a republic depends on the perceived accuracy of the elections. The election models a civil war closely enough to convince the loser that they'd lose the war, too - so they don't try to reverse it by violence. Break the faith in the election process and you may "destabilize" the society. And the surest way to break that faith is to destroy the reality behind it, by institutionalizing massive election fraud.
This has happened repeatedly in the history of republics, including the US. Fortunately, in the US the normal response is for a committee of vigilance to run the rascals out of town, maybe lynching a couple kingpins [San Francisco], publicly and repeatedly spank them until they go elsewhere [Portland OR], or capture the ballot box and count the ballots publicly [I forget which town]. Elsewhere in the world it has gotten much bloodier.
err, it's irrational, so it's not quite a ratio...
Ratios can be irrational. Ratios of integers can not.
I have heard this Idea before.
Sounds like these "Memes" are religions. The author has take the idea of absolute beliefs (religions) and given it a new carrier (a virus) instead of being passed through tradition.
You have heard it before and are reminded of religion because the reviewer's description of memes misrepresents meme theory. (I haven't read the book yet, so I can't tell whether the misrepresentation originates with the reviewer or the author.)
Memes are not something that just happened. Instead, "meme" is a recent term for an ancient phenomenon - probably as old as sentience, certainly as old as tradition.
The term was used in an analysis of the spread of ideas between people. The analysis that showed that an idea system had many of the characteristics of a lifeform, specifically: a virus.
Like other lifeforms that infect another species and modify its behavior, such idea-based lifeforms can be beneficial (improving the host's health, survival potential, ability to manipulate its environment, etc.), harmful (converting the host into a machine for propagating the infection to others, often at enormous cost), or some mix of the two. Like other lifeforms, what matters is that it does spread faster than it dies off (not whether some or all of its component ideas is "true"). Like other lifeforms it changes as it spreads, or even as it ages - with the more infective variants being more likely to propagate. And like other lifeforms it finds ways to defend its territory from other, similar-but-distinct, competitors.
So all the idea systems of history - philophies, religions, nationalisms, ideologies, scientific theories (and the scientific method itself), schools of medicine, schools of art, political movements, etc. - can be analyzed as species of meme. This allows the bulk of human history - including all the social movements, most of the wars, and the bulk of the misery of "the human condition", to be analyzed as epidemics of meme infection, evolution of distinct species of memes, battles for "ecological niches", inter-meme parisitization, and so on.
Which says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of any of the idea systems, of course, whether religious, scientific, political, or whatever.
So religious wars can indeed be analyzed as "meme wars". Particularly successful religious or philosophical memes can easily produce generations of (relative) social unity (or brainwashed zombism, depending on your point of view) among large fractions of the human population. (Recent examples: Confuscianism, Islam, the Christianity of the middle ages, Communism, etc.) But their rise (or fall) can be accompanied by enormous battles (the Crusades, Jihad, assorted revolutions, the World Wars) as they displace or are displaced by their competitors, and their unity requires maintainence as those with other ideas or who otherwise don't fit are converted, often forcibly, or eliminated (Pogroms, Inquisition, "self-criticism").
Right now much of the English-speaking world (and some of the rest) is blessed with a small number of prevalant meme-sets that include religious tolerance and the suppression of violent religious conflict, and political mechanisms that subvert meme conflict from war into elections and lobbying. There's a major meme battle going on in the United States (between what I call the "American Pluralist" culture and a newer one that labels itself "Progressive"), but its battles occur mainly in schools, legislatures, and bureaucracies, rather than on the streets.
But there's no reason to believe that the memes that keep the battles sanitized will survive indefinitely. So the future might also be a scene of religious/philodophical shooting wars and inquisition-ridden Paxen.
And as "artificial intelligence" databases and other computer programming begins to approximate human thought patterns, or even as it becomes more integrated with human activity, forming an intelectual system with components on both sides of the hardware/meatware boundary, the boundary between a meme and a computer virus blurs, and may eventually disappear.
Perhaps it already has: Look at internet rumors and chain letters for examples. B-)
It's the sysadmin's job to secure his boxes, which is generally done after installation. First, you only select the services you need, then you tighten things up.
Why not make it easy on everybody? Just make the default maximally tight, and make it "The Sysadmin's job" to OPEN any holes he wants open, rather than closing all the holes in the swiss cheese?
Especially when the distribution doesn't come with any document that even LISTS the holes in the cheese.
That way:
- The box is secure from the start: No temporary holes for somebody to break through and plant a backdoor while the sysadming gets around to closing holes.
- Ordinary users, or even newbies, can install and go right to work, without having to become a skilled sysadmin just to have a safe box. (Something not working? Bring up the config tool and turn it on.)
Both ordinary users and sysadmins would thank any distro vendor who did it this way.
So why don't they?
Probably because they fear a flood of support calls when things don't work because they aren't turned on yet.
So they leave their customers hanging out there with the wind blowing through the holes in their cheese.
Software liability, anyone?
While I understand the legal issues involved... it still irks me that reading something can get you into trouble.
Well, I DON'T understand something about this, and the flap surrounding it:
As I understood it, a trade secret is GONE once the secret is out of the bag. The holder of the secret has an action ONLY aginst the person who improperly exposed it - either after stealing it, or in violation of a valid confidentiality agreement - and perhaps anyone in collusion with that person. (Collusion would be things like hiring him to steal it, or giving him some benefit in return for a copy you knew to be stolen. Downloading it from an open internet site would not be collusion.)
Since when is there an action against anyone found using part of a FORMER secret that is now widely distributed? Since when is there NOT a big-time countersuit and other legal grief for anyone who brings such a bogus suit?
Yes, you can sue anyone for anything. Yes, if you have enough lawyers you can cause anybody a lot of trouble. But you can't just use your money and the court system to make life hell on any random person or company you don't like. You have to have a palusible case. If you knowingly bring a bogus suit you're on the hook big-time - both civilly and (if you're blatant and unpopular enough) criminally.
Has the deCSS case broken the legal system THAT badly?
(I'd have replied in email but you don't have one listed.)
and now slashdot has cut off the end of your sig, too..
I guess these days I've been demoted from hacker to hackee. B-)
taco was laughing about you, specifically, (regarding the truncation of your user name) when he gave the talk at IT recently.
Just so he was laughing WITH me.
Maybe I should give up and pick a new handle.
(He once offered to make an exception to the "no changing handles" rule due to my being savaged by the software revision, but I couldn't think of a good replacement and couldn't resist the sigline pun. Perhaps I should think harder and then see if the offer is still open.)
It's a pity that Ellison is merely demonstrating, rather than actually publishing, the relative performances.
That means they could defend a suit by claiming they weren't in violation, rather than having to claim the clause is unenforcable.
Of course that's to be expected - since they had such a clause before Microsoft.
Which brings up a question: Microsoft apparently put the clause in in reaction to Oracle's using it. Perhaps they'll sue in order to break such clauses themselves.
Granted their current product's performance has sloth in places that allows Oracle to come up with a benchmark that makes them look bad relative to Oracle. But benchmark hacking is a well-known art. So even if Microsoft IS generally slower they can no doubt come up with benchmarks that make them look better - or buy experts to modify their products until they ARE faster. And they can afford a lot more advertising. So it may still be in their interest to kill such clauses.
One thing about the sort of people who push things like UCITA - they are relentless. No matter how many times they are beaten they keep coming back. They want to win by exhaustion...
[the fight] will never be won - but you have to keep fighting. Set yourself mentally for the fact that you are in a fight that will last your lifetime.
There's a way to put a stake through its heart:
Come up with an alternative and start lobbying to get THAT passed. This puts them in much the same position we are in now, and we've got more voters and callers.
Once an alternative, setting forth OUR idea of what the law should be, is in place, they have to convince legislators, not just to fill in the void, but to repeal a popular law and replace it with an unpopular one. And you even get to argue on the relative merits!
(Of course as any movie fan knows, occasionally the baddie gets the stake pulled OUT of it's heart. So it's not necessarily a win for all time. But at least you get to sleep more easily for a few decades. B-) )
That depends on your definition of Christian, doesn't it?
As I see it, "Christians" are adherents to ANY of a set of belief systems that can trace their origin to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They generally think there was something special about him. But beyond that there's a LOT of variation.
That includes the early church - the Roman immortality cult.
It includes "The Church" of the middle ages - and its current incarnation: the Roman Catholic church.
It includes the Russian Orthodox and the Episcopalians.
It includes the classic protestant sects.
It includes the Unitarians. (Or it did until a few years ago, when they got together and voted, deciding that they WEREN'T Christians any more. B-) )
It includes the Satanists. (They believe in the same holy and unholy teams. They're just rooting for the other side. They apparently got their origin from some of "The Church"'s own propaganda.)
It includes snake handlers.
It includes Holy Rollers.
It includes Pentecostals.
It includes Mormons. (Their theology is a similar sort of expansion on classic Christian teaching as Christianity was an expansion on the Jewish sects that preceeded it.)
And it includes all sorts of apocolyptic sects. Members of that class include the several kinds of Seventh Day Adventists, one of which was (still is?) the Branch Davidians.
Now different sorts of Christians often decide that their particluar form of Christanity, or some set of religions similar to it, are the True Religion, and those OTHER things are NOT. (Sometimes they can be quite insistent about it. Especially if they think that God is going to be mad if those OTHER people keep doing whatever it is they're doing.)
But just because some religion is VERY different from yours, and shares very few (if any) beliefs, doesn't mean it didn't grow from the same roots.
And if it grew from those roots, it can also claim the tag "Christian".
Some corporate funding of research has worked well in the past (Bell Labs?), but it just doesn't seem to be feasable today.
How about Xerox PARC? B-)
Bell Labs was an artifact of government regulation.
The Bell Telephone system was granted a set of monopolies and their rates regulated. But part of the "costs" that went into computing the rates, when they were adjusted, was money spent on research on improving telephony.
So they set up Bell Labs. And hired a BUNCH of new PHDs. And gave them lots of equipment. They had a free hand, provided they published (in the publicly-available house journal) an article now and then that had something to do with improving SOMETHING related to telephony.
And no matter how much they spent, Bell got to up the rates to make it all back plus a profit. (6%, I think it was.)
So Bell Labs' mission was really to spend as much money as they could. Because the more the spent, the more the AT&T made. B-) They worked on metalurgy, and voice recognition, and speech synthesis, and graph theory, and cyphers, and semiconductors, and assistance for the deaf, and remote-controlled servos, and... (I could keep this up for days.)
But it DIDN'T WORK!
You see, anything they invented belonged to AT&T. They could patent it and licence the patents for a fee. (In fact, they HAD to license it, and HAD to release it if it had applications outside telephony. Think UNIX...)
And the licensing fees made Bell Labs ENORMOUSLY profitable! They never WERE able to spend more than they made.
So Bell Labs was an unintentional case study showing that well-funded basic-plus-applied research can turn a profit (big time!) Despite the fact that with basic research you have no idea, in advance, what will turn up and where the resulting profit will be made. You just know that if you do enough of it SOMETHING will turn up and you'll make out like a bandit.
Xerox PARC, on the other hand, was a case study in management error. This was Xerox's version of Bell Labs, dedicated to research into things related to office workflow.
Early in their existence they designed a computerized control panel for Xerox copiers. What it replaced was a mass of hardwired discrete components (relays, semiconductors, switches, etc.) It saved a bundle.
So they got credited with saving Xerox a bundle. And they KEPT ON being credited with saving Xerox a bundle, as all future production used their bright idea, indefinitely. So they could spend a lot of money and still look, on the books, like they were making money for the company, even if management NEVER USED any of their new bright ideas.
And that's about what happened. They came up with a lot of great stuff. And people in Silicon Valley cloned it, or bought rights for peanuts, while Xerox didn't pursue it themselves. (Think Ethernet - once known as "The Xerox Line". Think Graphical User Interfaces ala Mac & Windows.)
So again basic research was enormously profitable. And it could have been even more profitable for the company that funded it - IF management had had a clue. (Fortunately for the rest of us, Xerox's other product lines were profitable enough to keep the money flowing...)
Or at least that's the way I heard it.
(For the moment let's ignore whether the connection you make is valid.)
The US was able to survive without income tax because they owned an extrememly large piece of real estate: all the land west of civilization. You'll notice that once the land dried up, that's when they implemented income tax.
But the US STILL claims ownership or "stewardship" of much (about half?) of the land west of the Mississippi, and non-trivial amounts east of there. And it's constantly grabbing more.
Suppose the portion of that land that properly belongs to someone else were returned (for instance: indian lands to the descendants of tribes improperly "terminated", i.e. declared extinct), and the rest sold off.
Even taking into account a resulting drop in land prices that could easily pay off the national debt, with a pretty penny left over.
If you're concerned about the "delicate ecology" of some piece of the land being ruined by its new owners, get together with others who believe the same way and BUY it!