Ivan and Randu are probably going to fuss at me for Slashdotting their server, but they have a funny take on the situation at the Violent Pacification Corporation:
Today, VioPac would like to offer you a quiz. It's very easy, and will take only moments of your time. In fact, it only has one question, and it is this: What rocks more, Iron Maiden or Evidence Eliminator? Think about that carefully now.
The correct answer, of course, is Iron Maiden. In fact, there is very little out there that could beat Maiden in any contest you care to devise. Observe:
Iron Maiden doesn't send nastygrams to ISPs who host critical websites, as do Evidence Eliminator.
They certainly wouldn't threaten those ISPs with lawsuits in foreign countries because they know they have no case in the US.
Iron Maiden has Eddie as a mascot. I don't give a good god-damn who Evidence Eliminator has, but Eddie can kick his ass.
Iron Maiden doesn't spam the internet far and wide.
Iron Maiden doesn't lie to people -- even when they could. Just look at the back cover of Maiden Japan.
If Iron Maiden ever met Eric Lee Green, the creator of Evidence-Eliminator-Sucks.com, they would probably get along famously. If however they met the people involved in Bank Balance Eliminator, Steve Harris would no doubt smash his guitar over their heads and use their pulped remains as props in their next tour.
When Iron Maiden re-releases their entire back catalog every 15 and half seconds, people welcome it, for the most part. When Windows Registry Eliminator pops up dialog boxes every 15 and a half seconds, there is no one who doesn't want to beat them senseless.
Simply put, the spammers at Evidence Eliminator have now threatened the ISP that hosts Evidence-Eliminator-Sucks.com with a libel suit in England. As intended, the ISP in question can't afford to defend itself in a foreign country. What this means is that every one of you, regardless of your nation of origin, should write to Iron Maiden immediately and ask them, politely of course, to find these EvElim scumbag spammers and beat the shit out of them.
Note: I don't think he's *really* serious about writing to Iron Maiden:-).
If I had time to waste, the rant wouldn't be semi-incoherent:-). Alas, when I have no time to edit, things do get somewhat disheveled. I promise I'll try to make it funnier and tighter, okay?
But not now. Sorry, gotta get back to job hunting, have a couple of people to hit with resumes (thanks to tips from the Conspiracy). Who sez that getting even and getting a job are incompatible?:-).
I've seen their product reviewed by someone in the security community who I respect. He reports that it's a bit slow and bloated (being Visual BASIC), but does appear to erase files (doh! Like you said, it don't take a genuis!). The only real complaint he had was that the user interface was somewhat non-intuitive -- it was easy to set up the program so it'd erase critical system files and make your system unbootable, for example.
As for their ethics, yes, their ethics suck. Their advertising says you'll go to jail if you don't use their product, they have popup scare ads that display your hard drive (if you're using Windows) and says that they're looking at your hard drive and you better buy their software or all those porn gifs will get you thrown in jail (it's a simple btw, with C:\ as the source -- i.e., it's just displaying your hard drive to yourself), and then of course there is the virus that their affiliates are sending around to hijack people's web browsers and point it back to the Evidence Eliminator site, and... well. I think you're getting the picture now. These are not Nice Folks. And if we can trace that virus back to their offices, they will be wearing stripes soon.
Well, when I staggered to my laptop at 5:45am this morning, immediately after putting on the coffee, and I couldn't read my EMAIL (which resides on the same server)... it took me about 5 minutes to reboot the server, watch it start all up again, killall httpd, read the server logs, and note where all the referers were coming from:-) Then I just set up the vhost to point to another directory (with the 'slashdotted!' in it), and set to retrieving the actual article of interest.
Re:At least they take their Slashdotting in style.
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When Good Spammers Go Bad
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· Score: 3, Informative
Well, it wasn't as if I was planning for my *blog* to get slashdotted. But once I realized what was happening (i.e., why my web server's hard drive light was on solid!), it wasn't a big deal. After all, I already knew that GeekCode was slow as a slug, the only reason I used it was because it was the easiest of the PHP-based weblogs for me to modify, and my blog has never gotten more than a few thousand hits a day so the speed didn't matter. But if everybody's coming there for one article... (shrug) serve it to them statically. My web server (which is running FreeBSD, BTW, not Linux) is now quite happy.
Yep, I have a fairly low user number here:-). The blog is still down, but I retrieved the story and posted it as a static page at the URL in question. No more Slashdot Effect. I didn't realize that my poor Celeron 800 with a whole 64mb of RAM couldn't keep up with a 512kbit DSL line when serving dynamically-generated pages, but it's having no problems handling the load with a simple static page.
You're right, that was a bit over the top, and I'll take it out once I get the site back up (it's currently somewhat slashdotted -- GeekCode isn't exactly the fastest blogging software out there!).
Err, many of the events of the Filipino war and the Moro war that followed are well documented in primary sources such as soldier's letters home and in military reports. There were entire communities that were wiped off the face of this planet, with every man, woman, and child put to death and every building razed, generally in retaliation for what was viewed as a "terrorist attack" against the American occupation forces and their supporters and dependents (such as the one where Moros sneaked onto a base in the dead of night and slit every throat they could come across, regardless of whether it was a soldier or a dependent).
It was a bloody war by any definition of the word, and was near continuous until 1946, when Douglas Macarthur handed the keys of the Phillipines to a democratically elected President. However, the democracy did not last out the night -- members of opposition parties were kicked out of the Congress, a bloody insurrection started against Manilla's rule, and the new government, dependent upon the United States for military aid, basically became a puppet of the United States, finally descending into outright military dictatorship after the election of Ferdinand Marcos as President. It was not until 1986, after close to 100 years of struggle, that the Phillipines achieved true independence.
Regarding the behavior of other countries, they were not posing as "the land of the free and the home of the brave". The British Empire had no problem with calling itself an Empire. The American Empire, alas, is not so honest. I suppose it is the lies, more than the actions, that irritate me. If we are going to have an empire, let's at least do it honestly, rather than pretend that we aren't one.
Let's not forget that Teddy Roosevelt killed over 500,000 Filipinos for their audacity in demanding that U.S. soldiers leave their country, in order to bring the wonders of democracy^w military rule and dictatorship to them for the next 90 or so years.
Teddy Roosevelt winning the Nobel Peace Prize is like Idi Amin winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But of course, Filipinos were "darkies", and thus didn't really count as people back in that imperial era.
Hmm.... does this mean that George W. Bush qualifies for a Nobel Peace Prize too, for his excellence in bringing peace to Afghanistan and Iraq?!
The defendent gets to decide whether it goes to a jury, or is decided by a judge.
The rule of thumb is, "if you're guilty, get a jury, sometimes they do stupid things and let guilty people free. If you're innocent, demand a trial by judge alone".
This is why Microsoft decided to not demand a trial by jury when they were sued by the Justice Department -- they felt they were innocent, and that a trial by judge would more likely find them such than a trial by jury. Similarly, IBM is most likely to decide to be tried by a judge, not by a jury. Juries are just too, uhm, haphazard.
Nonsense. They don't have to point out exact lines of code. All they have to do is give me a filename. "It's in ufs.c in the filesystems directory!", for example. Re-write ufs.c from scratch, and the issue is solved.
But to state that Linux incorporates Unix code in any large way is ridiculous. The Unix kernel is structured entirely differently from the Linux kernel, if I'm reading my Bach book correctly while reading my LInux source. And any similarities in certain algorithms can be easily explained by the fact that some of us *did* read the Bach book. I honestly can't see any place where any Unix code would be useful in kernel-land, aside from possibly some of the UFS code for dealing with the Unix Sys V.3/SysV.4 filesystem. The kernels are just structured too differently.
Finally: I haven't looked at Unix source code since 1987. Frankly, it was pretty damned ugly back then (you should have seen the code for 'sed', for example, what a hack, and not a comment to be found anywhere!), and I haven't seen anything in the Linux kernel that looks ugly enough to be Unix source code. But what the hell, let's just toss out unfounded allegations and try to hold up people for royalties on Linux. Beats working for a living, I guess.
Sounds like the DISCstor/NAS system that I wrote the backup software for. It backs up a small NAS box to a DVD-RAM jukebox.
However, for personal use, a $16,000 DVD-RAM jukebox is overkill (grin). I'm considering buying a Firewire hard drive to back up my new laptop, with a program that uses a MySQL database to track files on my laptop and update the ones that have changed using a typical rotation strategy (sort of like the one I wrote for the NAS box, except without needing all that futzy code for deciding which platter to put data onto etc.).
For extra points, I could even buy *two* Firewire drives, and rotate one of them off-site every day, for far less money than buying a new DDS-4 tape changer.
For big stuff, however, there's no substitute for an enterprise storage system. The way that EMC etc. work nowdays are with "snapshot" technology. The SAN storage device maintains "snapshots" as of various points in time. You back up a "snapshot" as of some point in time in the recent past, rather than live data, so that the data backed up is internally consistent. It works very well, and will back up terabytes of data to LTO without any of the backup window problems that afflict traditional online backup. Of course, we're talking about terabyte-sized disk arrays, and closet-sized tape changers.
In the enterprise setups, nobody uses tapes for their portability, BTW. The tapes never leave the jukebox, except as packs occasionally removed and placed in a vault to place new blank tapes into the jukebox. A fat pipe is used to duplicate transactions between the local data center and a remote data center. For example, Wal-Mart has dedicated fiber optics running from their main data center in Bentonville to their backup data center in southern Missouri (which is designed to survive everything short of an atomic bomb). Every enterprise transaction applied to storage in their local data center is also applied to storage in their remote data center. There's still a lot of local data that is not replicated, but for the important data, redundancy via backup tapes is the least of what they do.
You are correct that accountability is the key, but I believe you are wrong in your contention that technology can preserve that accountability. The traditional paper ballot system had accountability built in. Poll watchers were allowed to examine the empty ballot box prior to the start of voting. They were allowed to observe the counting of the votes in the ballot box at the end of the election day. If there was hanky panky, this level of accountability allowed them to detect it. About the only way there could be fraud would be if the dead registered to vote -- the poll watchers could detect whether someone's signature was different, but if a dead person signed the voter registration card in the first place, there was no way to detect it. Fraud in the actual counting of the votes was impossible under that old-timey system.
Unfortunately, we've moved to technology since then. The problem with technology is that it requires special skills to detect fraud with technology. Any idiot can look into an empty ballot box at the start of the election day and verify that it is empty, and can watch that ballot box during the day to make sure it's not stuffed, then watch as the box is opened and counted at the end of the day. But few poll watchers are techno-wizzes. Even the old mechanical clunk clunk machines were fairly easy to rig (just file a cog off the wheel for the candidate you want to lose, and the machine will randomly skip his votes, and few poll watchers were sophisticated enough to detect such fiddling). When we move to technology that is not easily audited by technologically illiterate poll watchers, we lose all premise of accountability.
The problem, my friend, is that the current implementations of electronic voting machines violate basic principles of accounting. If you used those methods to account for money, the IRS would put your ass in jail, but apparently it's okay to lack a paper trail and an audit trail if it's votes rather than money.
Personally, I believe votes are as important as money, and should get the same care in their accounting. That, rather than the electronic nature of the new machines, is what irritates me about the new machines. They are fundamentally broken from an accounting point of view, and nobody seems to give a shit because, apparently, votes are not as important as dollars in the United States of America.
I suggest you look up the principle of an "audit trail", my friend. Any accounting method without a paper trail is illegal under IRS rules. At least, when you're accounting for money.
Votes, apparently, are less important than money.
As for how to use electronic voting: In Brazil, the electronic voting machines printed out little paper slips with a cryptographic checksum at the bottom. The paper slips were inserted into a ballot box. At the end of the day, these slips were then hand-counted at the end by the precinct watchers to make sure that the vote totals matched what the machine was reporting. The government in Brazil had been stealing elections for decades via fraud. The first fair election in Brazilian history brought to power a government fundamentally different from any preceding government -- it actually represented the people, rather than a small elite capable of fixing elections.
The power elite here in the United States use more subtle means of fixing elections, such as making sure that their money and wealth is used to purchase any advertising time that could possibly be used by the opposition to their candidate, but outright vote fraud is not out of the realm of possiblility. When you hear that the voting machines that count most votes in many states have no audit trail -- and that the makers of these voting machines ARE REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES -- it has a stench about it that needs addressing.
You are throwing around bullshit allegations, without a bit of proof. But that's typical for you Bush Fedayeen. You are a bunch of gullible "useful idiots" who believe anything that your Party commissars (Shawn Hammity, Rush Limbo, Anne "The Bitch" Cutlery, etc.) tells you, without the slightest bit of proof, and then go out to tell these outrageous slanderous lies as if they were facts handed down from God Above as The One and Only Truth.
Well, sir, as a by-god *AMERICAN* I will tell you that you're full of shit, and a damned fool. I refuse to let you Bush Fedayeen intimidate me or shut me up. To imply that any party has any lock on election fraud (or that Black people refusing to vote for Republican bigots is "election fraud") is an intellectual bankrupt notion that has no bearing on reality. I realize that your Party commissars believe that if they repeat a lie enough times, and make it BIG enough, they can fool you gullible useful idiots into believing that a lie is the truth. It worked for Hitler, after all. But repeating a lie doesn't make it true, sir, and you should be ashamed of yourself for being such a gullible tool of people who are fundamentally hostile to every principle that made America great.
Note that the old mechanical voting machines were easy to "fix". For example, all you had to do was open the back and file a few teeth off the gear for the candidate you wanted to lose. That would make the machine randomly skip votes for that candidate. Very few elections inspectors were mechanical geniuses with eyesight sharp enough to notice a missing tooth on an internal gear, so all that was necessary was for the elections officer who stored the machine between elections to be "on the take".
The problem with electronic machines is that they make this kind of fraud even *MORE* undetectable. How do you know whether a machine is skipping, say, every 8th vote for a particular candidate? Answer: You don't.
The IRS would put you in *JAIL* if you had an accounting system with no paper trail. Why is it that accounting for money is more important than accounting for votes? I think this says a lot about American values -- money is important enough to require a paper trail, while votes are not.
I do not think that Bush is anywhere near as bright as Mr. Jones seems to think. Bush does possess a sly feral cunning that should not be underestimated, but complex plans and complex conspiracies are not Bush's style, nor the style of the people around him (really, can you see John Ashcroft engaged in a conspiracy? The man is a bull in a china shop!). But I believe enough of it to be alarmed (as a click on my own URL should show).
Go take a look at your Roman history as the Republic slumped towards Empire, then look at modern American history. Is our Republic, too, slumping towards Empire?
Fixed costs vs. incremental costs
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More on Columbia
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· Score: 1
Most of the cost of flying the Shuttle is fixed costs -- the costs of operating the manned space centers, the costs of the engineers who inspect and refurbish it after each flight, etc. These costs are the same whether there is 3 Shuttles or 4 Shuttles, 2 flights per year or 8 flights a year. The "$500,000,000" is being arrived at by dividing these fixed costs by the number of flights per year (which comes out to about $400,000,000 per flight), then adding in the actual cost of launching and retrieving a Shuttle -- roughly $100,000,000.
Meanwhile, it actually costs approximately $24,000,000 to launch a Soyuz (that's the incremental costs), and a Soyuz carries 1/3rd the people and no cargo. Three Soyuz launches and four Progress launches would be needed to match what the Shuttle could do with one flight, a Progress launch costs about $20,000,000, so that's a total of around $150,000,000 for the equivalent of what the Shuttle does for $100,000,000, so you can see that the Shuttle is actually more cost-effective than the Soyuz/Progress combo -- if the cost of all that bloated infrastructure was divided over more flights.
Unfortunately, the current design of the Shuttle insures that a) there won't be more Shuttles because they're too expensive, and b) there won't be more flights because they require too much overhaul and re-work (and the fact that we have only a single VAB to put together Shuttle stacks, and only three launch pads for the Shuttle only one of which is routinely used because the other two have been stripped for spare parts to keep the single operational pad up and going, doesn't help either).
Actually, I don't think they're elitists. I think there's a bunch of folks there (not everyone, but some) who have easily bruised egos. I can deal with that, I wouldn't say that I'm "unable" to deal with the FreeBSD team, but it's irritating, and not something I do voluntarily (i.e., as something not part of my job). In this particular case, the person I was dealing with hadn't done anything with this type of equipment since the late 1980's, and I had a lab full of late 1990's equipment and late 1990's operating systems with some possibly valuable input. I tried explaining to him that modern equipment didn't work the way he thought it worked due to his experience back in the 80's and that my approach was what all the other major operating systems were using to drive this type of equipment and it worked fine there, and he didn't like it much, apparently thinking I was accusing him of being incompetent or something. Folks who take technical comments to be personal comments are folks I don't have much patience with unless I'm being paid to be patient with them.
Uhm, complaining about a variable name is one thing. If I recall right, it actually was a #ifdef that would go away if the patch worked, so I certainly had no problem with the variable name being changed or the whole patch discarded for that matter (undoubtedly there was a better way of doing what I was trying to do, and a bit of discussion would probably arrive at that). I might be opinionated, but if you're right, you're right, and I have no problem admitting it.
Deciding to completely ignore and discard the input of an expert on a particular subject because you dislike a variable name is another thing altogether.
So let me get this straight. He had the social skills to build one of the biggest hosting companies on the Internet, but not the social skills to stroke the bloated egos of the FreeBSD team? Uhm, okay, I'll buy that, but it certainly doesn't reflect well on the FreeBSD team.
Fact: The best programmers typically have a low tolerance for idiocy, and if you want the best programmers on your team, listening is a better solution than firing them. Poor social skills? Probably. Gets a helluva lot of productivity out of these people? You betcha.
one highly talented asshole who is a better coder than a half dozen of the rest combined?
I don't know what it is about the FreeBSD community, but I've run into that "Kumbaya" attitude too. I managed to get my fixes into the FreeBSD kernel -- barely -- then fled back to LinuxLand where you don't have to worship the developers in order to discuss idiocy. I remember one time a FreeBSD developer actually told me that he wasn't going to accept any more email from me because I used a variable name he didn't like and me and David Miller ought to get some quaaludes (true, it wasn't a very flattering variable name, it was something like "dumb_stupid_nonsense" as the name of a variable to catch an idiotic condition, but what the hey does that have to do with technical merit?!).
I'd much rather face off with David Miller about something than with the BSD guys. The BSD guys seem to have easily-bruised egos and you gotta strok'em like a Harvard MBA to get them to listen to anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Today, VioPac would like to offer you a quiz. It's very easy, and will take only moments of your time. In fact, it only has one question, and it is this: What rocks more, Iron Maiden or Evidence Eliminator? Think about that carefully now.
The correct answer, of course, is Iron Maiden. In fact, there is very little out there that could beat Maiden in any contest you care to devise. Observe:
Simply put, the spammers at Evidence Eliminator have now threatened the ISP that hosts Evidence-Eliminator-Sucks.com with a libel suit in England. As intended, the ISP in question can't afford to defend itself in a foreign country. What this means is that every one of you, regardless of your nation of origin, should write to Iron Maiden immediately and ask them, politely of course, to find these EvElim scumbag spammers and beat the shit out of them.
Note: I don't think he's *really* serious about writing to Iron Maiden :-).
But not now. Sorry, gotta get back to job hunting, have a couple of people to hit with resumes (thanks to tips from the Conspiracy). Who sez that getting even and getting a job are incompatible? :-).
As for their ethics, yes, their ethics suck. Their advertising says you'll go to jail if you don't use their product, they have popup scare ads that display your hard drive (if you're using Windows) and says that they're looking at your hard drive and you better buy their software or all those porn gifs will get you thrown in jail (it's a simple btw, with C:\ as the source -- i.e., it's just displaying your hard drive to yourself), and then of course there is the virus that their affiliates are sending around to hijack people's web browsers and point it back to the Evidence Eliminator site, and ... well. I think you're getting the picture now. These are not Nice Folks. And if we can trace that virus back to their offices, they will be wearing stripes soon.
Well, when I staggered to my laptop at 5:45am this morning, immediately after putting on the coffee, and I couldn't read my EMAIL (which resides on the same server)... it took me about 5 minutes to reboot the server, watch it start all up again, killall httpd, read the server logs, and note where all the referers were coming from :-) Then I just set up the vhost to point to another directory (with the 'slashdotted!' in it), and set to retrieving the actual article of interest.
Well, it wasn't as if I was planning for my *blog* to get slashdotted. But once I realized what was happening (i.e., why my web server's hard drive light was on solid!), it wasn't a big deal. After all, I already knew that GeekCode was slow as a slug, the only reason I used it was because it was the easiest of the PHP-based weblogs for me to modify, and my blog has never gotten more than a few thousand hits a day so the speed didn't matter. But if everybody's coming there for one article... (shrug) serve it to them statically. My web server (which is running FreeBSD, BTW, not Linux) is now quite happy.
Heh! Will have to do that if I ever get Slashdotted again :-).
Yep, I have a fairly low user number here :-). The blog is still down, but I retrieved the story and posted it as a static page at the URL in question. No more Slashdot Effect. I didn't realize that my poor Celeron 800 with a whole 64mb of RAM couldn't keep up with a 512kbit DSL line when serving dynamically-generated pages, but it's having no problems handling the load with a simple static page.
You're right, that was a bit over the top, and I'll take it out once I get the site back up (it's currently somewhat slashdotted -- GeekCode isn't exactly the fastest blogging software out there!).
It was a bloody war by any definition of the word, and was near continuous until 1946, when Douglas Macarthur handed the keys of the Phillipines to a democratically elected President. However, the democracy did not last out the night -- members of opposition parties were kicked out of the Congress, a bloody insurrection started against Manilla's rule, and the new government, dependent upon the United States for military aid, basically became a puppet of the United States, finally descending into outright military dictatorship after the election of Ferdinand Marcos as President. It was not until 1986, after close to 100 years of struggle, that the Phillipines achieved true independence.
Regarding the behavior of other countries, they were not posing as "the land of the free and the home of the brave". The British Empire had no problem with calling itself an Empire. The American Empire, alas, is not so honest. I suppose it is the lies, more than the actions, that irritate me. If we are going to have an empire, let's at least do it honestly, rather than pretend that we aren't one.
Teddy Roosevelt winning the Nobel Peace Prize is like Idi Amin winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But of course, Filipinos were "darkies", and thus didn't really count as people back in that imperial era.
Hmm.... does this mean that George W. Bush qualifies for a Nobel Peace Prize too, for his excellence in bringing peace to Afghanistan and Iraq?!
The rule of thumb is, "if you're guilty, get a jury, sometimes they do stupid things and let guilty people free. If you're innocent, demand a trial by judge alone".
This is why Microsoft decided to not demand a trial by jury when they were sued by the Justice Department -- they felt they were innocent, and that a trial by judge would more likely find them such than a trial by jury. Similarly, IBM is most likely to decide to be tried by a judge, not by a jury. Juries are just too, uhm, haphazard.
But to state that Linux incorporates Unix code in any large way is ridiculous. The Unix kernel is structured entirely differently from the Linux kernel, if I'm reading my Bach book correctly while reading my LInux source. And any similarities in certain algorithms can be easily explained by the fact that some of us *did* read the Bach book. I honestly can't see any place where any Unix code would be useful in kernel-land, aside from possibly some of the UFS code for dealing with the Unix Sys V.3/SysV.4 filesystem. The kernels are just structured too differently.
Finally: I haven't looked at Unix source code since 1987. Frankly, it was pretty damned ugly back then (you should have seen the code for 'sed', for example, what a hack, and not a comment to be found anywhere!), and I haven't seen anything in the Linux kernel that looks ugly enough to be Unix source code. But what the hell, let's just toss out unfounded allegations and try to hold up people for royalties on Linux. Beats working for a living, I guess.
However, for personal use, a $16,000 DVD-RAM jukebox is overkill (grin). I'm considering buying a Firewire hard drive to back up my new laptop, with a program that uses a MySQL database to track files on my laptop and update the ones that have changed using a typical rotation strategy (sort of like the one I wrote for the NAS box, except without needing all that futzy code for deciding which platter to put data onto etc.).
For extra points, I could even buy *two* Firewire drives, and rotate one of them off-site every day, for far less money than buying a new DDS-4 tape changer.
For big stuff, however, there's no substitute for an enterprise storage system. The way that EMC etc. work nowdays are with "snapshot" technology. The SAN storage device maintains "snapshots" as of various points in time. You back up a "snapshot" as of some point in time in the recent past, rather than live data, so that the data backed up is internally consistent. It works very well, and will back up terabytes of data to LTO without any of the backup window problems that afflict traditional online backup. Of course, we're talking about terabyte-sized disk arrays, and closet-sized tape changers.
In the enterprise setups, nobody uses tapes for their portability, BTW. The tapes never leave the jukebox, except as packs occasionally removed and placed in a vault to place new blank tapes into the jukebox. A fat pipe is used to duplicate transactions between the local data center and a remote data center. For example, Wal-Mart has dedicated fiber optics running from their main data center in Bentonville to their backup data center in southern Missouri (which is designed to survive everything short of an atomic bomb). Every enterprise transaction applied to storage in their local data center is also applied to storage in their remote data center. There's still a lot of local data that is not replicated, but for the important data, redundancy via backup tapes is the least of what they do.
Unfortunately, we've moved to technology since then. The problem with technology is that it requires special skills to detect fraud with technology. Any idiot can look into an empty ballot box at the start of the election day and verify that it is empty, and can watch that ballot box during the day to make sure it's not stuffed, then watch as the box is opened and counted at the end of the day. But few poll watchers are techno-wizzes. Even the old mechanical clunk clunk machines were fairly easy to rig (just file a cog off the wheel for the candidate you want to lose, and the machine will randomly skip his votes, and few poll watchers were sophisticated enough to detect such fiddling). When we move to technology that is not easily audited by technologically illiterate poll watchers, we lose all premise of accountability.
Personally, I believe votes are as important as money, and should get the same care in their accounting. That, rather than the electronic nature of the new machines, is what irritates me about the new machines. They are fundamentally broken from an accounting point of view, and nobody seems to give a shit because, apparently, votes are not as important as dollars in the United States of America.
Votes, apparently, are less important than money.
As for how to use electronic voting: In Brazil, the electronic voting machines printed out little paper slips with a cryptographic checksum at the bottom. The paper slips were inserted into a ballot box. At the end of the day, these slips were then hand-counted at the end by the precinct watchers to make sure that the vote totals matched what the machine was reporting. The government in Brazil had been stealing elections for decades via fraud. The first fair election in Brazilian history brought to power a government fundamentally different from any preceding government -- it actually represented the people, rather than a small elite capable of fixing elections.
The power elite here in the United States use more subtle means of fixing elections, such as making sure that their money and wealth is used to purchase any advertising time that could possibly be used by the opposition to their candidate, but outright vote fraud is not out of the realm of possiblility. When you hear that the voting machines that count most votes in many states have no audit trail -- and that the makers of these voting machines ARE REPUBLICAN OPERATIVES -- it has a stench about it that needs addressing.
Well, sir, as a by-god *AMERICAN* I will tell you that you're full of shit, and a damned fool. I refuse to let you Bush Fedayeen intimidate me or shut me up. To imply that any party has any lock on election fraud (or that Black people refusing to vote for Republican bigots is "election fraud") is an intellectual bankrupt notion that has no bearing on reality. I realize that your Party commissars believe that if they repeat a lie enough times, and make it BIG enough, they can fool you gullible useful idiots into believing that a lie is the truth. It worked for Hitler, after all. But repeating a lie doesn't make it true, sir, and you should be ashamed of yourself for being such a gullible tool of people who are fundamentally hostile to every principle that made America great.
The problem with electronic machines is that they make this kind of fraud even *MORE* undetectable. How do you know whether a machine is skipping, say, every 8th vote for a particular candidate? Answer: You don't.
The IRS would put you in *JAIL* if you had an accounting system with no paper trail. Why is it that accounting for money is more important than accounting for votes? I think this says a lot about American values -- money is important enough to require a paper trail, while votes are not.
-E
Go take a look at your Roman history as the Republic slumped towards Empire, then look at modern American history. Is our Republic, too, slumping towards Empire?
Meanwhile, it actually costs approximately $24,000,000 to launch a Soyuz (that's the incremental costs), and a Soyuz carries 1/3rd the people and no cargo. Three Soyuz launches and four Progress launches would be needed to match what the Shuttle could do with one flight, a Progress launch costs about $20,000,000, so that's a total of around $150,000,000 for the equivalent of what the Shuttle does for $100,000,000, so you can see that the Shuttle is actually more cost-effective than the Soyuz/Progress combo -- if the cost of all that bloated infrastructure was divided over more flights.
Unfortunately, the current design of the Shuttle insures that a) there won't be more Shuttles because they're too expensive, and b) there won't be more flights because they require too much overhaul and re-work (and the fact that we have only a single VAB to put together Shuttle stacks, and only three launch pads for the Shuttle only one of which is routinely used because the other two have been stripped for spare parts to keep the single operational pad up and going, doesn't help either).
-E
Deciding to completely ignore and discard the input of an expert on a particular subject because you dislike a variable name is another thing altogether.
-E
Fact: The best programmers typically have a low tolerance for idiocy, and if you want the best programmers on your team, listening is a better solution than firing them. Poor social skills? Probably. Gets a helluva lot of productivity out of these people? You betcha.
-E
I don't know what it is about the FreeBSD community, but I've run into that "Kumbaya" attitude too. I managed to get my fixes into the FreeBSD kernel -- barely -- then fled back to LinuxLand where you don't have to worship the developers in order to discuss idiocy. I remember one time a FreeBSD developer actually told me that he wasn't going to accept any more email from me because I used a variable name he didn't like and me and David Miller ought to get some quaaludes (true, it wasn't a very flattering variable name, it was something like "dumb_stupid_nonsense" as the name of a variable to catch an idiotic condition, but what the hey does that have to do with technical merit?!). I'd much rather face off with David Miller about something than with the BSD guys. The BSD guys seem to have easily-bruised egos and you gotta strok'em like a Harvard MBA to get them to listen to anything.
-E