Note that California *benefits* slightly from the fact that House districts do not cross state lines. They actually have more (about.5) representatives than they should. States like Delaware, Montana, and South Dakota get screwed out of influence by this system.
The electoral college was never intended to give the same result as a direct popular election. If they had wanted that, they could have had the same system except not counting the senators (i.e. 435 or 436 electoral votes instead of 535 or 538). They chose not to do so. It deliberately gives more weight to preferences by states. It is also worth noting that the amendment process which would be needed to change it also deliberately gives more weight to preferences by state.
"I don't see why everyone doesn't just use these machines, or machines like them."
But how would you game them? You act like it's a good thing for people's votes to be recorded correctly!
Besides, how much money could Diebold make off of something that just works election after election. It makes much more sense to sell something with buggy software that will require update every couple years.
Oh, one recommendation. If you do decide to reject the Diebold profit alternative and stick with the simple, secure system that works, I would suggest one thing (which you may or may not be doing now):
Allow each voter to run their ballot through the machine and view their result before locking away the ballot. If their result does not match what they thought, destroy the ballot and start over. This is the step that was missing from the Florida ballots where votes intended for Gore went to Buchanan (and would also catch votes that are outside the line; i.e. the optical hanging chad).
I actually have seen optical ballots where either the candidates' names or the broken arrows were printed offline such that filling in the arrow next to the name would result in an incorrect vote.
"He got 59% of the votes. In any small-town mayoral race, that would be called close."
An 18% (59-41) lead is close?
Sure, most small town mayoral elections are more lopsided. That's because they usually have one candidate who is obviously unqualified. If Jimmy Carter had run against Buddy Carter or Bill Clinton against Roger Clinton, chances are that they would have had 80+% of the vote as well.
The electoral college awards *consistency* with landslides. Reagan successfully convinced a majority of the people in 49 states that he was the better candidate (and was only 50,000 votes off in Minnesota, his opponent's home state; Reagan was only trounced in the District of Columbia). It's also interesting to note that 2000 was the first direct voted election where the electoral college did not go to the candidate who won the popular vote. Especially since it only did so as a result of flawed ballots that tricked some Gore voters into voting for Buchanan (i.e. a more accurate ballot would have awarded Florida to Gore, giving him the electoral college).
"Now ask yourself why he was drinking to the point of destroying himself ; in the richest society of the world."
Because he could? Because he took his government provided food stamps and the results of his beggings and traded both for alcohol? You mean originally? It could be anything. Perhaps his wife or child died. Perhaps his wife left him. Etc. Trigger events are not necessarily economic.
There is no way that a government program is going to be able to "fix" loss of a spouse or child. At best, they can provide money. I.e. they can treat a symptom (lack of money) rather than the problem (emotional collapse caused by a loss of a social tie). However, family/church/community *can* address the actual problem in ways that national systems can't, as they are areas of social ties.
National programs stomp on local programs. A relationship that needs to be individual and understanding (why does this person need money? can we fix it? how?) becomes generalized and clinical.
I am quite sure that people will not type in a password every time they send email. Positive in fact. If the private key is accessible for that, it can be stolen.
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopdlx/de sktop_deluxe.html ? It's supposed to come with Crossover preinstalled. I.e. as I understand it, Xandros claims that you can install your copy of MS Office on a clean, normal install.
If you publish (more than a year?) prior to applying for the patent, you aren't supposed to be able to get the patent. Open Source is all published; you should not be able to patent things that are already in an open source project.
Of course, Kodak apparently holds a patent on Smalltalk for which Wang Labs applied more than a decade after Smalltalk was published. The system is a bit broken.
"Without publishing your invention, what is the benefit to society gained by granting the patent?"
The patent is the publication; you don't need to publish separately. Note that in some cases publication is not really necessary: it would be relatively trivial to reverse engineer most pharmaceuticals. The benefit to society is not the publication, but that someone paid for the discovery of that pharmaceutical's benefit. Without a patent system, it wouldn't be worth it. They couldn't recoup their development costs (including medical trials).
New wrinkle: they compromise your computer but can't get a keylogger installed. However, they can monitor your internet traffic. They pick out sites with whom you deal and target the most clueless. Sneaky, eh? Targetting the clueless.
The bank called and asked that you go to [url] and update your banking info. Otherwise they are going to have to freeze the account. I guess that I'm listed as your emergency contact.
"It's impossible to look legit. eBay state they will never ask for your details like this."
And eBay is the only phishing target?
I once almost called my bank to tell them that their email had all the elements of a phishing scheme, and they might want to revise it to be less phishy. Then I figured out how they obfuscated the URL (which finally killed Outlook Express for me; Thunderbird shows the URL correctly), so I just called the bank and told them that it looked like someone was phishing (and confirmed that there were no problems with the account).
Now, I was never in danger of actually putting my password in on the site (I never even clicked on the link), but I did seriously think my bank had sent the email. Most people are less paranoid than me.
"This guy mentions that but then switches to say that he enjoys multi-tasking and watching a movie at the same time as he is working. Personally, that's not exactly "productive" and honestly it's likely not something that's permitted outside of your home."
I do this at home now with a single monitor and a *TV*. My sister used to watch DVDs on her computer, since she didn't have a DVD player for her TV. However, for the price of a decent sized monitor, one could buy a TV and DVD player. I don't see the point of this.
There are productive uses for dual monitors. For example, I would use them to have a web page (and/or email client) on one monitor and a PHP code editor in the other. Or slashdot in one monitor and TFA in the other (in play circumstances). In a more office setting, perhaps your spreadsheet in one monitor and the base data in another.
"You could call them Patent Noproliferation Pacts."
That's a bad analogy. A nonproliferation pact would mean patents in the hands of fewer companies (nukes in the hands of fewer countries). They would be agreements by companies (countries) that did not have patents not to apply for patents (build nukes). These are just agreements saying that we won't sue (nuke) you if you don't sue (nuke) us. The patents have already proliferated by that point. In fact, this encourages proliferation (my patent portfolio/nuclear arsenal is my protection against being sued/nuked; without one, I am defenseless).
Open Source is more of a nonproliferation pact: open source publishes, which precludes patenting (if the system works).
"Open Source has its benefits, but I don't think it has proven itself in the main-streem market yet."
Err...Apache remains the number one web server; most of the time when you are looking at a web page, it is served via Apache. Now, if you are limiting to the desktop market, then no, open source is unproven as a mainstream source of desktop software. Open source will continue to be mainstream in servers and workstations. Note how Microsoft is having to add open source auditability to their software to work with governments. They will also need to offer the ability to offer custom versions (another feature already part of open source) if they want to be a serious player in the embedded market.
The chief advantage that proprietary software offers over open source is that it includes a mechanism for people to group together to trade money for software. However, as we shift from general purpose appliances built by third parties (i.e. PCs) to special purpose appliances built by the same people who are specializing the software (e.g. router, Tivo, PDA, web server, etc.), the advantages of this fade.
It makes more sense for Tivo to share the same OS as Linksys or IBM. By submitting their changes back, they get free support from other companies. Further, they don't need bells and whistles (they will develop their own), just the basics. Amazon currently has a Tivo for $80 after rebate; they can't afford to pay a $50 Microsoft tax out of that. Linux saves them the $50 and is better suited to their needs (because they can trim out the parts they don't use, saving resources and increasing security).
"you should have an IT-user-whatever (user service/support) which should do that job for you."
No, no. You *had* someone who did that for you. Then they left. Now, you just have someone who sort of knows how to make little changes but has no real idea of how things work. Most software like this is just one big kludge. Of course, that's the Wrong (TM) way to do it, but it's also the way that they are doing it.
So long as the switching costs are (perceived) higher than the current Microsoft tax, they will keep paying Microsoft.
Ok, now everyone has adopted PGP. What's to stop spammers from zombifying PCs using PGP and using their keys to sign a bunch of other keys which they can use to spam?
Absolutely nothing.
That's why server authentication is necessary. PGP is great for verifying repeated transmissions (although still vulnerable to compromise of the sending machine); it is almost useless for verifying an initial contact if you can't trust everyone who signed the keypath. The best that it can do is verify that someone knows the sender. SPF verifies the server in the initial contact (so at least you can verify the user later).
The other issue is that PGP's encryption capabilities make the government afraid of it. They are actively discouraging companies from verifying their identity in this way (PGP signatures would be great at catching attempted phishes). They don't want encrypted emails to become the norm.
" What about all of those zombie machines out there that send spam via Outlook"
As a general rule, zombies do not use Outlook; they just read its address book; they send using their own SMTP server. You see, if they used Outlook like you say, it would tell everyone who is infected. Then we could just block email from that one sender until they fixed their computer.
According to this post, DomainKeys won't protect from this either. I.e. it has exactly the same problems identifying a phish as does SPF: it happily verifies the Sender and leaves the From alone.
It would be about as easy to fix this in SPF as in Domain Keys. It's mostly a client issue (should highlight that the From and Sender are different).
"In your mail reader, configure your various email accounts to send mail to the appropriate mailserver for each account, connecting to the port that was allocated specifically for new mail submissions, port 587, the mail submission port."
"With SPF, you can only say that pobox was that last to touch it."
No, the account to which it is forwarded can only say that it came from pobox. Pobox still contains the proof that it came from eBay. It wouldn't be that big of a fix to allow pobox to forward that proof as well.
Also, what happens when a domain key is cracked (Yahoo, GMail, etc.) or stolen (vanity domains, etc.)?
You print things on television? Stewart's book is not printed? Journalism is not printing things. Publishing is.
In fact, Paine pretty clearly says what I am saying: there is no special freedom of newspapers (it's not journalists claiming special freedoms of "the press" in his essay, it's publishers) that is not held by all citizens. Freedom of the press applies just as much to me printing a handbill or Jon Stewart publishing a book as it does to a newspaper. What Carlson and Begala are doing is not "press," it is speech.
Slashdot Mirror
It can go both ways in the house. Your electoral vote example is confused, since it includes senators. Actual numbers (voters per house seat):
.5) representatives than they should. States like Delaware, Montana, and South Dakota get screwed out of influence by this system.
California: 640,203
Delaware: 785,068
Wyoming: 495,304
US: 646,946
Note that California *benefits* slightly from the fact that House districts do not cross state lines. They actually have more (about
The electoral college was never intended to give the same result as a direct popular election. If they had wanted that, they could have had the same system except not counting the senators (i.e. 435 or 436 electoral votes instead of 535 or 538). They chose not to do so. It deliberately gives more weight to preferences by states. It is also worth noting that the amendment process which would be needed to change it also deliberately gives more weight to preferences by state.
"I don't see why everyone doesn't just use these machines, or machines like them."
But how would you game them? You act like it's a good thing for people's votes to be recorded correctly!
Besides, how much money could Diebold make off of something that just works election after election. It makes much more sense to sell something with buggy software that will require update every couple years.
Oh, one recommendation. If you do decide to reject the Diebold profit alternative and stick with the simple, secure system that works, I would suggest one thing (which you may or may not be doing now):
Allow each voter to run their ballot through the machine and view their result before locking away the ballot. If their result does not match what they thought, destroy the ballot and start over. This is the step that was missing from the Florida ballots where votes intended for Gore went to Buchanan (and would also catch votes that are outside the line; i.e. the optical hanging chad).
I actually have seen optical ballots where either the candidates' names or the broken arrows were printed offline such that filling in the arrow next to the name would result in an incorrect vote.
"And that's the biggest differential anyone can name."
Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were reelected with over 60% of the vote.
"He got 59% of the votes. In any small-town mayoral race, that would be called close."
An 18% (59-41) lead is close?
Sure, most small town mayoral elections are more lopsided. That's because they usually have one candidate who is obviously unqualified. If Jimmy Carter had run against Buddy Carter or Bill Clinton against Roger Clinton, chances are that they would have had 80+% of the vote as well.
The electoral college awards *consistency* with landslides. Reagan successfully convinced a majority of the people in 49 states that he was the better candidate (and was only 50,000 votes off in Minnesota, his opponent's home state; Reagan was only trounced in the District of Columbia). It's also interesting to note that 2000 was the first direct voted election where the electoral college did not go to the candidate who won the popular vote. Especially since it only did so as a result of flawed ballots that tricked some Gore voters into voting for Buchanan (i.e. a more accurate ballot would have awarded Florida to Gore, giving him the electoral college).
"Libertarians expect people who have spent hundreds of years not giving a fuck about each other to pick up the slack."
How'd we get a "social welfare system" then? Since people don't care?
"Now ask yourself why he was drinking to the point of destroying himself ; in the richest society of the world."
Because he could? Because he took his government provided food stamps and the results of his beggings and traded both for alcohol? You mean originally? It could be anything. Perhaps his wife or child died. Perhaps his wife left him. Etc. Trigger events are not necessarily economic.
There is no way that a government program is going to be able to "fix" loss of a spouse or child. At best, they can provide money. I.e. they can treat a symptom (lack of money) rather than the problem (emotional collapse caused by a loss of a social tie). However, family/church/community *can* address the actual problem in ways that national systems can't, as they are areas of social ties.
National programs stomp on local programs. A relationship that needs to be individual and understanding (why does this person need money? can we fix it? how?) becomes generalized and clinical.
I am quite sure that people will not type in a password every time they send email. Positive in fact. If the private key is accessible for that, it can be stolen.
http://www.xandros.com/products/home/desktopdlx/de sktop_deluxe.html ? It's supposed to come with Crossover preinstalled. I.e. as I understand it, Xandros claims that you can install your copy of MS Office on a clean, normal install.
If you publish (more than a year?) prior to applying for the patent, you aren't supposed to be able to get the patent. Open Source is all published; you should not be able to patent things that are already in an open source project.
Of course, Kodak apparently holds a patent on Smalltalk for which Wang Labs applied more than a decade after Smalltalk was published. The system is a bit broken.
"Without publishing your invention, what is the benefit to society gained by granting the patent?"
The patent is the publication; you don't need to publish separately. Note that in some cases publication is not really necessary: it would be relatively trivial to reverse engineer most pharmaceuticals. The benefit to society is not the publication, but that someone paid for the discovery of that pharmaceutical's benefit. Without a patent system, it wouldn't be worth it. They couldn't recoup their development costs (including medical trials).
New wrinkle: they compromise your computer but can't get a keylogger installed. However, they can monitor your internet traffic. They pick out sites with whom you deal and target the most clueless. Sneaky, eh? Targetting the clueless.
Seriously, you can't envision a mother writing:
Dear son,
The bank called and asked that you go to [url] and update your banking info. Otherwise they are going to have to freeze the account. I guess that I'm listed as your emergency contact.
Love,
Mom
"It's impossible to look legit. eBay state they will never ask for your details like this."
And eBay is the only phishing target?
I once almost called my bank to tell them that their email had all the elements of a phishing scheme, and they might want to revise it to be less phishy. Then I figured out how they obfuscated the URL (which finally killed Outlook Express for me; Thunderbird shows the URL correctly), so I just called the bank and told them that it looked like someone was phishing (and confirmed that there were no problems with the account).
Now, I was never in danger of actually putting my password in on the site (I never even clicked on the link), but I did seriously think my bank had sent the email. Most people are less paranoid than me.
"This guy mentions that but then switches to say that he enjoys multi-tasking and watching a movie at the same time as he is working. Personally, that's not exactly "productive" and honestly it's likely not something that's permitted outside of your home."
I do this at home now with a single monitor and a *TV*. My sister used to watch DVDs on her computer, since she didn't have a DVD player for her TV. However, for the price of a decent sized monitor, one could buy a TV and DVD player. I don't see the point of this.
There are productive uses for dual monitors. For example, I would use them to have a web page (and/or email client) on one monitor and a PHP code editor in the other. Or slashdot in one monitor and TFA in the other (in play circumstances). In a more office setting, perhaps your spreadsheet in one monitor and the base data in another.
"You could call them Patent Noproliferation Pacts."
That's a bad analogy. A nonproliferation pact would mean patents in the hands of fewer companies (nukes in the hands of fewer countries). They would be agreements by companies (countries) that did not have patents not to apply for patents (build nukes). These are just agreements saying that we won't sue (nuke) you if you don't sue (nuke) us. The patents have already proliferated by that point. In fact, this encourages proliferation (my patent portfolio/nuclear arsenal is my protection against being sued/nuked; without one, I am defenseless).
Open Source is more of a nonproliferation pact: open source publishes, which precludes patenting (if the system works).
"Open Source has its benefits, but I don't think it has proven itself in the main-streem market yet."
Err...Apache remains the number one web server; most of the time when you are looking at a web page, it is served via Apache. Now, if you are limiting to the desktop market, then no, open source is unproven as a mainstream source of desktop software. Open source will continue to be mainstream in servers and workstations. Note how Microsoft is having to add open source auditability to their software to work with governments. They will also need to offer the ability to offer custom versions (another feature already part of open source) if they want to be a serious player in the embedded market.
The chief advantage that proprietary software offers over open source is that it includes a mechanism for people to group together to trade money for software. However, as we shift from general purpose appliances built by third parties (i.e. PCs) to special purpose appliances built by the same people who are specializing the software (e.g. router, Tivo, PDA, web server, etc.), the advantages of this fade.
It makes more sense for Tivo to share the same OS as Linksys or IBM. By submitting their changes back, they get free support from other companies. Further, they don't need bells and whistles (they will develop their own), just the basics. Amazon currently has a Tivo for $80 after rebate; they can't afford to pay a $50 Microsoft tax out of that. Linux saves them the $50 and is better suited to their needs (because they can trim out the parts they don't use, saving resources and increasing security).
"Isn't microsoft a big shareholder of Apple?"
No, not anymore. They did invest a hundred million or so back when Apple looked like it might go under. They are now out though.
This is from memory. Perhaps someone else can post actual links.
"They'd buy out somebody else already in the game -- that's how MS enters new markets."
They also partner frequently. Look at CD writing (Roxio) and thin client software (Citrix) for a couple recent examples.
Has he tried Crossover Office? It's supposed to be pretty good at running MS Word and Outlook (at least the 2000 versions, not sure about XP/2002).
"you should have an IT-user-whatever (user service/support) which should do that job for you."
No, no. You *had* someone who did that for you. Then they left. Now, you just have someone who sort of knows how to make little changes but has no real idea of how things work. Most software like this is just one big kludge. Of course, that's the Wrong (TM) way to do it, but it's also the way that they are doing it.
So long as the switching costs are (perceived) higher than the current Microsoft tax, they will keep paying Microsoft.
Ok, now everyone has adopted PGP. What's to stop spammers from zombifying PCs using PGP and using their keys to sign a bunch of other keys which they can use to spam?
Absolutely nothing.
That's why server authentication is necessary. PGP is great for verifying repeated transmissions (although still vulnerable to compromise of the sending machine); it is almost useless for verifying an initial contact if you can't trust everyone who signed the keypath. The best that it can do is verify that someone knows the sender. SPF verifies the server in the initial contact (so at least you can verify the user later).
The other issue is that PGP's encryption capabilities make the government afraid of it. They are actively discouraging companies from verifying their identity in this way (PGP signatures would be great at catching attempted phishes). They don't want encrypted emails to become the norm.
" What about all of those zombie machines out there that send spam via Outlook"
As a general rule, zombies do not use Outlook; they just read its address book; they send using their own SMTP server. You see, if they used Outlook like you say, it would tell everyone who is infected. Then we could just block email from that one sender until they fixed their computer.
According to this post, DomainKeys won't protect from this either. I.e. it has exactly the same problems identifying a phish as does SPF: it happily verifies the Sender and leaves the From alone. It would be about as easy to fix this in SPF as in Domain Keys. It's mostly a client issue (should highlight that the From and Sender are different).
"In your mail reader, configure your various email accounts to send mail to the appropriate mailserver for each account, connecting to the port that was allocated specifically for new mail submissions, port 587, the mail submission port."
Exactly.
"With SPF, you can only say that pobox was that last to touch it."
No, the account to which it is forwarded can only say that it came from pobox. Pobox still contains the proof that it came from eBay. It wouldn't be that big of a fix to allow pobox to forward that proof as well.
Also, what happens when a domain key is cracked (Yahoo, GMail, etc.) or stolen (vanity domains, etc.)?
"the profession literally is "printing things""
You print things on television? Stewart's book is not printed? Journalism is not printing things. Publishing is.
In fact, Paine pretty clearly says what I am saying: there is no special freedom of newspapers (it's not journalists claiming special freedoms of "the press" in his essay, it's publishers) that is not held by all citizens. Freedom of the press applies just as much to me printing a handbill or Jon Stewart publishing a book as it does to a newspaper. What Carlson and Begala are doing is not "press," it is speech.
Please, *RTFL* before citing. Thank you.