You are correct. The proposal I'm putting forward (where a voter needs to serially scan perhaps millions of votes) is - at least in principle - just too expensive for vote selling. At least with computers as they stand. The compute cycles required for any large-scale checking would require a significant piece of big iron, which means it won't be portable. To go round and check, using portable computers, would need an army of vote-checkers of a size comparable to the number of voters.
There's no reason someone wishing to implement vote-selling couldn't precalculate a hash table of of the ballots cast rather than doing a serial scan each time -- no big iron required. Also, vote-selling is often distributed. There's no need for an army of laptops and people to operate them; just get local employers or unions on-board, and let validation and intimidation and/or retribution take place within the workplace.
I far prefer something akin to the Punchscan solution, where the information available as part of the validation corpus (1) is insufficient to prove how any single individual voted regardless of an adversary's computing resources [short of an outright break in the crypto, which would allow the linkage between ballot serial numbers and votes to be exposed], but (2) is sufficient to make vote alteration statistically infeasible to get away with on any significant scale (50% chance of detection per vote altered where the voter chooses to participate in after-the-fact validation).
(Well, technically the voter can tell, as they have their public key and know what vote they cast, so can re-generate the vote, re-encrypt it, and look to see if a vote posted over the network matches the vote that was re-calculated. But nobody else could do this, and given the time overheads, this could never be used to check up on voters to see who they voted for. It could only be used by voters themselves to ensure their vote was in the system.)
One of the massive historical problems folks need to solve is "vote selling", which is enabled whenever a voter can prove how they voted to someone else. This gives the mob the ability to enforce threats against anyone who votes John Law ("prove to me you voted for ${CORRUPT_BASTARD} or I'll..."), corrupt employers the ability to fire employees who don't prove that they voted the way the employer requested, removes effective privacy in the voting booth between husbands and wives (and I do know folks whose votes in the most recent US presidential election would have been viewed in an extremely unkind light by immediate family members), and otherwise allows undue influence.
There are systems which address this; look into how Punchscan is implemented, or any other Vocomp finalist.
I would also point out a famous quote of Newton in this context: "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
You might not be aware of the original context of that quote -- Newton was mocking one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, who happened to be -- if not a midget -- unusually short.
After this comment, this person is not getting anything free from me. Paid product or not.
Then it's a good thing you don't do tech support -- letting comments the customers make do anything other than roll off your back is a good way to be thoroughly overstressed for the duration of your very brief employment.
(In a former life, I handled L4 support escalation when not working on development of the product, and spent plenty of time in the support office listening to L1/L2 folk on the phones. Customers don't call support unless something's wrong, and when something is wrong they tend to be angry -- fact of life, that).
If you RTFA, what he needed to run at the point when he was being upsold on a services package (and told that no other option was available) was a freely-available utility to remove previously-installed Symantec tools.
Moreover, Symantec's management acknowledged that they were in the wrong, and indicated they would be addressing this -- hardly indicative of the no-fault scenario you proclaim.
"Killing them"? Is getting a vasectomy or wearing a condom murder, by removing all the potential children I might otherwise have? (Hint: No, because the "potential children" don't exist yet, and thus cannot be killed).
This isn't aborting implanted embryos that don't meet the desired profile -- instead, it's simply not implanting them at all, and selecting a different embryo with more desirable characteristics instead.
Why do people keep assuming that corporations have free will?
Because shareholder lawsuits are far more tenuous and harder to push through than some people infer when they're trying to push a particular (largely anti-corporate) agenda? The officers of a corporation have a duty to the shareholders, true. However, they have a great deal of discretion with regard to how they go about executing that duty -- and if they make an even tenuously-justifiable decision that pursuing that $1 million would lose them more than $1 million in goodwill, no judge is going to overrule them.
It's the cases where members of the board are going for personal enrichment at the shareholders' expense that a shareholders' lawsuit actually has some kind of ground to stand on, and even then they're not successfully prosecuted with any kind of frequency.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've been there/done that with regard to the disgruntled shareholder thing. Also see PJ's answer when it was asked on Groklaw why SCO's shareholders couldn't put an end to management's obviously broken strategy -- judges don't want to be in the business of second-guessing managers' business decisions.
Maybe -- but if we're doing a large enough batch size, the cost for an individual unit may not be so awful.
Then again, not my field, so I wouldn't really know. My next-door neighbor used to be an engineer for 3M who specialized in coming up with scalable manufacturing processes for products coming out of R he'd be the person to ask how this compares.
No. Taking a picture of your house isn't "copying" it. Taking the plans of your house and building an exact copy of it _might_ be a violation of copyright.
If only common sense reigned, this would be so. See ASMP's page on photographing public buildings; not every building is impacted, but I've seen cases where museums and the like claimed that the architecture of the building itself constitutes a work of art, and that photography of the same was forbidden.
Obviously anything that lowers their capacity to reproduce, directly damaging or not, will be evolved around.
They've had plenty of time to out-evolve it "in the wild", when it was being used as part of the sponge's self-defense mechanism. Given that that hasn't happened, why would you expect it to occur now?
So - something that's out - right now, is pretty much the king of the hill, or hmmm - wait for something that's *going to be friggin awesome man*...
Hey -- it's friggin' awesome right now, as long as you're trying to use it for what it's good for right now, or willing to put in a little elbow grease in the cases where it isn't. I'm much, much happier down in the trenches fighting the occasional bug than spending my time fighting bureaucracy to get a software budget that would be several times my infrastructure's hardware cost.
Sorry, I'll go with something that works now, has all major vendor support (IBM, HP, Sun) and is rock solid, and continuing to evolve.
KVM is maintained by folks who draw their paychecks from Intel, AMD and IBM; has continuous QA work done by Intel staff; and is rock solid if one sticks to builds and functionality known to work (a large enough set to cover everything I need). I've never been very happy with Red Hat's paid support offerings myself, either, but the informal/community support for the toolchain is fantastic as it is -- and it runs on plenty of platforms other than RHEL, despite Red Hat's status as the folks who purchased Qumranet and thus are titular owners.
oh - and as for scriptable? *Everything* in ESX is scriptable - you can run 100% from command line if you want (I prefer command line for most operations).
Everything you're allowed to do, anyhow. For instance -- let's say I have a subnet with 8 VMs on it, and I want to create exact copies of those VMs attached to a different bridge (with an embedded appliance between the bridge and the host running a NETMAP rule such that they're all addressable from the host despite using the same IP addresses internally) without rebooting any of the guests.
It may be that this is possible under VMware -- but when I was doing a quick feasibility analysis for porting over to that platform, it's one of the things I couldn't find an available analog for.
Meh. Red Hat's next-gen virtualization stack (libvirt+kvm+oVirt) supports all that (yes, including the live migration), without paying the big bucks for VMotion on top of the already-hefty ESX pricetag. The oVirt embedded distro+UI isn't all there yet -- but I'm doing QA automation and care far more about how flexible and scriptable everything is than what kind of pretty frontends are on top out-of-the-box.
Taking its cost into account, VMware leaves me thoroughly unimpressed.
I do that on my home phone line (actually even simpler than that -- "Press 1 to continue in English"), and it works quite well.
Could you please provide a link that could explain how one would go about doing this themselves?
I'm using a Gumstix box running Asterisk with a SPA-3102 for the connectivity to the actual phone line proper, and a compact flash adapter (on the Gumstix) for storing voicemail. It also routes outgoing international calls to my SIP account with the Gizmo Project folks (much cheaper than AT&T, the local landline provider), and feeds incoming SIP calls into the house phone.
This was set up as a hobby project, so I wasn't going for a lowest-cost solution. If I were doing it again, I'd probably see about using my home router in place of the Gumstix box (I'm waiting for stable OpenWRT support for the WRT610N, with its USB host interface and 64MB of RAM -- more than powerful enough to run Asterisk in addition to its normal workload, with the voicemail storage and software that won't fit in 8MB flash kept on an attached external drive), or at least get one of the newer Gumstix motherboards with an FPU onboard to be able to receive and send faxes with iaxmodem (as the SpanDSP library it uses hasn't yet been ported to fixed-point, and so doesn't run acceptably on FPUless embedded hardware).
Once the hardware is set up, the actual Asterisk configuration is embarrassingly trivial, at least until I get around to implementing all the wishlist features I've been putting off. Should you decide to go the same route, drop me an email and I'd be glad to lend some assistance.
It's that thing that says you can't make copies and illegally distribute/publicly display the work.
Wrong. You couldn't do those things even if they didn't have the FBI warning, because buying a copy of the media gives you no rights to do things copyright law restricts to the rightholder. The FBI notice is completely irrelevant, except as a warning.
So -- in the common case, your rights are spelled out by the set of things not restricted by relevant statutory law; what the copyright holder wants you to be able to do is completely irrelevant one you purchased outright a legally created copy.
When I buy a copy of a movie, I own the media, rather than having licensed it, so I can do anything legal -- ie. anything that doesn't violate copyright law. There isn't a contract, which is why it isn't a contract violation but rather copyright infringement (and thus potentially grounds for FBI involvement, rather than something resolvable only via civil suit).
Same thing -- if I go into a bookstore and buy a book, I own that book. I can't copy it -- that would be a copyright violation -- but that has nothing to do with my ownership of the book, which is mine fair and square.
Fair 'nuff. That said, 10 years from now, when we look back on this administration, what will we be judging it by?
It's the economy, stupid!
Seriously -- lots of people remember Clinton well because those were good years from an economic perspective, and the backlash against Bush wouldn't be echoed by nearly as much of the mainstream if the effects of excessive deregulation weren't being felt right now. If people remember Obama as a failure, it will be not because he didn't get some favorite pet policy passed, or because some of his campaign promises didn't happen, but because the economy sucked.
Don't worry, the press will treat this as fairly as they did when it was revealed that Governor Palin of Alaska had an email account for work use, and a separate email account for home use.
You do realize the problem was that the home account was being used for work use, right?
It's not legal to use government resources for things like reelection campaigning, so it's absolutely mandatory that one have another system; it's just also necessary that it not be used to bypass systems set up to provide public accountability.
Let's talk a bit about what "failure" means. Generally speaking, a failed policy is one which was implemented but didn't work. So, if this hypothetical policy of cutting of testicles fails, you already lose half your masculinity but get nothing for it. (If the policy wasn't implemented, it didn't fail -- it just didn't happen in the first place).
If the policy succeeds, you still lost the same thing, but got something back in return.
Now, if you have the same amount of loss no matter what, do you want to get nothing in return, or something in return?
Slashdot Mirror
Funny you mention it -- this particular rich American dude is doing just that.
There's no reason someone wishing to implement vote-selling couldn't precalculate a hash table of of the ballots cast rather than doing a serial scan each time -- no big iron required. Also, vote-selling is often distributed. There's no need for an army of laptops and people to operate them; just get local employers or unions on-board, and let validation and intimidation and/or retribution take place within the workplace.
I far prefer something akin to the Punchscan solution, where the information available as part of the validation corpus (1) is insufficient to prove how any single individual voted regardless of an adversary's computing resources [short of an outright break in the crypto, which would allow the linkage between ballot serial numbers and votes to be exposed], but (2) is sufficient to make vote alteration statistically infeasible to get away with on any significant scale (50% chance of detection per vote altered where the voter chooses to participate in after-the-fact validation).
One of the massive historical problems folks need to solve is "vote selling", which is enabled whenever a voter can prove how they voted to someone else. This gives the mob the ability to enforce threats against anyone who votes John Law ("prove to me you voted for ${CORRUPT_BASTARD} or I'll ..."), corrupt employers the ability to fire employees who don't prove that they voted the way the employer requested, removes effective privacy in the voting booth between husbands and wives (and I do know folks whose votes in the most recent US presidential election would have been viewed in an extremely unkind light by immediate family members), and otherwise allows undue influence.
There are systems which address this; look into how Punchscan is implemented, or any other Vocomp finalist.
You might not be aware of the original context of that quote -- Newton was mocking one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, who happened to be -- if not a midget -- unusually short.
Then it's a good thing you don't do tech support -- letting comments the customers make do anything other than roll off your back is a good way to be thoroughly overstressed for the duration of your very brief employment.
(In a former life, I handled L4 support escalation when not working on development of the product, and spent plenty of time in the support office listening to L1/L2 folk on the phones. Customers don't call support unless something's wrong, and when something is wrong they tend to be angry -- fact of life, that).
His complaint was not the use of a non-Symantec tool, but the claim (in chat) that the non-Symantec tool was in fact a Symantec product.
Taking credit for other peoples' work is Not Cool.
If you RTFA, what he needed to run at the point when he was being upsold on a services package (and told that no other option was available) was a freely-available utility to remove previously-installed Symantec tools.
Moreover, Symantec's management acknowledged that they were in the wrong, and indicated they would be addressing this -- hardly indicative of the no-fault scenario you proclaim.
s/social justice/profit/
"Killing them"? Is getting a vasectomy or wearing a condom murder, by removing all the potential children I might otherwise have? (Hint: No, because the "potential children" don't exist yet, and thus cannot be killed).
This isn't aborting implanted embryos that don't meet the desired profile -- instead, it's simply not implanting them at all, and selecting a different embryo with more desirable characteristics instead.
Because shareholder lawsuits are far more tenuous and harder to push through than some people infer when they're trying to push a particular (largely anti-corporate) agenda? The officers of a corporation have a duty to the shareholders, true. However, they have a great deal of discretion with regard to how they go about executing that duty -- and if they make an even tenuously-justifiable decision that pursuing that $1 million would lose them more than $1 million in goodwill, no judge is going to overrule them.
It's the cases where members of the board are going for personal enrichment at the shareholders' expense that a shareholders' lawsuit actually has some kind of ground to stand on, and even then they're not successfully prosecuted with any kind of frequency.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've been there/done that with regard to the disgruntled shareholder thing. Also see PJ's answer when it was asked on Groklaw why SCO's shareholders couldn't put an end to management's obviously broken strategy -- judges don't want to be in the business of second-guessing managers' business decisions.
Btw, that R should have been R&D -- I forgot the need to quote it into valid HTML ("R&D")
Maybe -- but if we're doing a large enough batch size, the cost for an individual unit may not be so awful.
Then again, not my field, so I wouldn't really know. My next-door neighbor used to be an engineer for 3M who specialized in coming up with scalable manufacturing processes for products coming out of R he'd be the person to ask how this compares.
If only common sense reigned, this would be so. See ASMP's page on photographing public buildings; not every building is impacted, but I've seen cases where museums and the like claimed that the architecture of the building itself constitutes a work of art, and that photography of the same was forbidden.
They've had plenty of time to out-evolve it "in the wild", when it was being used as part of the sponge's self-defense mechanism. Given that that hasn't happened, why would you expect it to occur now?
Hey -- it's friggin' awesome right now, as long as you're trying to use it for what it's good for right now, or willing to put in a little elbow grease in the cases where it isn't. I'm much, much happier down in the trenches fighting the occasional bug than spending my time fighting bureaucracy to get a software budget that would be several times my infrastructure's hardware cost.
KVM is maintained by folks who draw their paychecks from Intel, AMD and IBM; has continuous QA work done by Intel staff; and is rock solid if one sticks to builds and functionality known to work (a large enough set to cover everything I need). I've never been very happy with Red Hat's paid support offerings myself, either, but the informal/community support for the toolchain is fantastic as it is -- and it runs on plenty of platforms other than RHEL, despite Red Hat's status as the folks who purchased Qumranet and thus are titular owners.
Everything you're allowed to do, anyhow. For instance -- let's say I have a subnet with 8 VMs on it, and I want to create exact copies of those VMs attached to a different bridge (with an embedded appliance between the bridge and the host running a NETMAP rule such that they're all addressable from the host despite using the same IP addresses internally) without rebooting any of the guests.
It may be that this is possible under VMware -- but when I was doing a quick feasibility analysis for porting over to that platform, it's one of the things I couldn't find an available analog for.
Yeah, but try getting live migration support.
Meh. Red Hat's next-gen virtualization stack (libvirt+kvm+oVirt) supports all that (yes, including the live migration), without paying the big bucks for VMotion on top of the already-hefty ESX pricetag. The oVirt embedded distro+UI isn't all there yet -- but I'm doing QA automation and care far more about how flexible and scriptable everything is than what kind of pretty frontends are on top out-of-the-box.
Taking its cost into account, VMware leaves me thoroughly unimpressed.
I'm using a Gumstix box running Asterisk with a SPA-3102 for the connectivity to the actual phone line proper, and a compact flash adapter (on the Gumstix) for storing voicemail. It also routes outgoing international calls to my SIP account with the Gizmo Project folks (much cheaper than AT&T, the local landline provider), and feeds incoming SIP calls into the house phone.
This was set up as a hobby project, so I wasn't going for a lowest-cost solution. If I were doing it again, I'd probably see about using my home router in place of the Gumstix box (I'm waiting for stable OpenWRT support for the WRT610N, with its USB host interface and 64MB of RAM -- more than powerful enough to run Asterisk in addition to its normal workload, with the voicemail storage and software that won't fit in 8MB flash kept on an attached external drive), or at least get one of the newer Gumstix motherboards with an FPU onboard to be able to receive and send faxes with iaxmodem (as the SpanDSP library it uses hasn't yet been ported to fixed-point, and so doesn't run acceptably on FPUless embedded hardware).
Once the hardware is set up, the actual Asterisk configuration is embarrassingly trivial, at least until I get around to implementing all the wishlist features I've been putting off. Should you decide to go the same route, drop me an email and I'd be glad to lend some assistance.
I do that on my home phone line (actually even simpler than that -- "Press 1 to continue in English"), and it works quite well.
Wrong. You couldn't do those things even if they didn't have the FBI warning, because buying a copy of the media gives you no rights to do things copyright law restricts to the rightholder. The FBI notice is completely irrelevant, except as a warning.
So -- in the common case, your rights are spelled out by the set of things not restricted by relevant statutory law; what the copyright holder wants you to be able to do is completely irrelevant one you purchased outright a legally created copy.
Umm, that's his point.
When I buy a copy of a movie, I own the media, rather than having licensed it, so I can do anything legal -- ie. anything that doesn't violate copyright law. There isn't a contract, which is why it isn't a contract violation but rather copyright infringement (and thus potentially grounds for FBI involvement, rather than something resolvable only via civil suit).
Same thing -- if I go into a bookstore and buy a book, I own that book. I can't copy it -- that would be a copyright violation -- but that has nothing to do with my ownership of the book, which is mine fair and square.
Fair 'nuff. That said, 10 years from now, when we look back on this administration, what will we be judging it by?
It's the economy, stupid!
Seriously -- lots of people remember Clinton well because those were good years from an economic perspective, and the backlash against Bush wouldn't be echoed by nearly as much of the mainstream if the effects of excessive deregulation weren't being felt right now. If people remember Obama as a failure, it will be not because he didn't get some favorite pet policy passed, or because some of his campaign promises didn't happen, but because the economy sucked.
You do realize the problem was that the home account was being used for work use, right?
It's not legal to use government resources for things like reelection campaigning, so it's absolutely mandatory that one have another system; it's just also necessary that it not be used to bypass systems set up to provide public accountability.
Let's talk a bit about what "failure" means. Generally speaking, a failed policy is one which was implemented but didn't work. So, if this hypothetical policy of cutting of testicles fails, you already lose half your masculinity but get nothing for it. (If the policy wasn't implemented, it didn't fail -- it just didn't happen in the first place).
If the policy succeeds, you still lost the same thing, but got something back in return.
Now, if you have the same amount of loss no matter what, do you want to get nothing in return, or something in return?