That wasn't strictly an election though, it was a website soliciting potential names from which they could then choose the name of a bridge. I like the 5th placed entry "Perl Script" - the name of the ballot box stuffer;).
What I'm suggesting is that people prove that the voting machines are insecure by proving it during a real election. Starting websites, proving theoretically it's possible is just not cutting it. Even having former Diebold employees admitting to committing electoral fraud is not breaking through to the mainstream media.
The right response to reports of election fraud is not to stay home: we need an even bigger turnout to overwhelm the bogus votes.
Maybe the correct response is to hack the electonic voting machines & overwhelm them with so many bogus votes people HAVE to take notice.
What do I mean? Well, if a county with 10,000 registered voters logs 10,000,000+ votes each for both of the main candidates and 15,000,000 for the libertarian (or other "fringe") candidate not even Miami or Ohio's election supervisors would be able to turn a blind eye. Also the "wrong" candidate would have won - a sure reason to fix the system;)
Er, if you look at the last two presidential elections the amount of fraud is incredible and, indeed, provable (Wikipedia has some nice articles with links to the raw data otherwise try blackboxvoting.org). The scary thing to me (as an outsider) is not the fact that fraud occurs. It's just the fact that the American public seem so utterly apathetic to the fact that democracy has been extinguished.
For example, exit polls are a proven and incredibly accurate way of estimating results. In fact, the only times anywhere in the world ever that they have broken down is when gross electoral fraud has taken place - except in America during the last two presidential elections where the pollsters suddenly and catastrophically failed to conduct an accurate exit poll, but it wasn't due to electoral fraud, oh no.
It seems to have turned into a party political issue where the supporters of the winning party accuse the losers of "whining" when the actual evidence of fraud should scare them more than their opponents because it means that they, the loyal voters have become expendible. They don't need you anymore. They can win the election without you. The president now has the power to declare martial law & he has the machinary (hah!) to deliver the results he wants.
Anyone remember the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST/TT/Mega systems? If only they decided to port AmigaDOS/AmigaOS and TOS/GEM to the Intel platform before Windows became really really popular in the 1990's. That way there would be no OS Fascism and Microsoft would have had a good run for their money.
Former Atari Owner
They DID port GEM to the PC - I used it at work in the late '80s early '90s & even as a happy Atari Owner at home I still thought it sucked. Not as much as Windows back then but it sucked.
IIRC it came bundled with a GEM desktop publishing package (who's name I can't recall) WYSIYWYG being a pretty cool thing back then. Remember this was the era of Wordperfect, Lotus 123 & Harvard Graphics & all the other DOS software M$ put out of business through illegal anti-competitive behaviour. Allegedly.
Well, I still rate "Signs" as the worst movie I have ever seen. And I've seen "Plan 9 From Outer Space"
The only way to redeem it would have been to have gone for the "Barry Mackenzie" ending with Mel unzipping his trousers, sucking down a beer & saying "you keep the beer coming & I'll get rid of the aliens for you".
I mean this alien scout was on earth for a WEEK in a humid part of the world (s)he'd have melted. Remember, no protective gear because of the chamelion thing. Crappy, crappy writing destroyed the movie for me, such a letdown at the end you forget how good anything earlier might have been.
Did I say the Silmarillion sucked? I've got a first edition hardcover. IMHO, not as good as LOTR but YMMV & it's a worthy book to own. Unfinished Tales was patch but interesting. I haven't bothered with any of the other stuff because I'm not that much of a Tolkien Nerd;) but if enough people say it's great I might buy it.
My point is that if it wasn't worth putting out earlier (in one of the previous 14 IIRC posthumous Tolkien books) this new stuff probably does suck.
One word, "Reins"
Love them, use them until your child is old enough not to run away on a whim & get lost.
Anyone who tries to tell you it's "restrictive" or "Bad parenting" is either clueless or a paedophile.
I remember seeing an article in Scientific American circa 1999 where they did MRIs of adults using mobile phones & children & the kids heads were lit up like Christmas trees by the radiation - can you say "Brain Cancer Epidemic in the making?"
Disclaimer, I am in Australia so I don't know the exact circumstances
Look very carefully at how much interest you're paying on your loan and how much you're making on your investment. If you can't make enough to cover the loan interest, paying off the loan is the "best investment" - it's not a sexy answer but it's the truth. Oh & for deity's sake don't run up credit card debt.
Congratulations, first insightful post & I'm out of mod points.
If they were serious about stopping piracy they'd just send the Police to three or four locations I've visited several times;) let's just say Mong Kok and clean up an awful lot of piracy for relatively little outlay...
I don't think that women are genetically built for programming - and I don't mean to sound like a chauvinist, scumbag, etc, but I don't believe that they're cut out for it which is probably why there is a shortage of women in the industry. For those that are in the industry (and I've met many), they tend to be kick ass cool and rather smart as hell, but they often feel the need to emphasize "I'm a woman... blah blah" women's lib stuff... Its like a few have chips on their shoulders. Anyway... back to doing nothing
Why then, back in the 1960s in England were women were being preferentially recruited as programmers? It happened to my aunt. Back then women were thought to be better set genetically to be programmers & I've encountered a few of the old school female programmers in my time. Remember, coding back then wasn't glorified pixel pushing like VB it was hardcore stuff for real programmers and women held their own.
On a different thread I'm pleased to find I've got this far down without anyone claiming that Gnome has become so dumbed down only women would want to use it anymore - oops...
Electronic Arts seems to own them now, about 70 % of my games have their logo on which is the scary thing. They bought Maxis, asimulated Westwood Studies which made the best title of the 20th century, Command and Conquer.
Thus speaks a man who clearly has never played Total Annihilation anywhere near enough:)
Oh & before you come back with "But C&C was the original" Two Words "Dune 2"
I'd like to know how that works in practice - Authorise on 5 computers disconnect 4 computers from the Net (or at least redirect apple to dev/null in the hosts file) De-Authorise All, Re- Authorise 5 more computers, rinse, repeat...
I'm guessing from the wording of the FAQ that you might need to actually be in posession of the computer(s) in question in which case she's still out of luck unless she can persuade her old employer to let her back in to "get her iTunes" - like that's going to happen...
And that's the way it'll happen. A few unlucky people who hit the limit early but everyone who wastes money on iTunes or similar will end up re-buying in 10 years or less. While (some non-rotten) Red-book CDs & Vinyl go on, if not forever then at least long enough to piss off the record companies. But not long enough to get out of copyright the way things are going these days - Damn you Mickey Mouse!!!.
Y'know I'd have a lot less of an issue with the never-ending extension of copyright by lobbying from Disney if they actually bothered to do anything meaningful with their characters - it should be dirt cheap these days to bang out 300 new cartoons per year with the same old characters - you could use MacroAdobe Flash & re-use image assets for virtually eff.
Well this mostly depends on your DVD drive. Testing it is usually the quickest way to find out. The problem is that a lot of newer drives are RPC2 drives these days. Some of these drives don't allow raw access to the drive untill the drive firmware has done a regioncheck. VLC uses libdvdcss and it needs raw access to the DVD drive to crack the encryption key. So with these drives it is impossible to circumvent the region protection. (This goes for all software. You will need to flash your drives firmware, but sometimes there is no alternate firmware available for your drive). On other RPC2 drives that DO allow raw access, it might take VLC a long time to crack the key. So just pop the disc in your drive and try it out, while you get a coffee. RPC1 drives should 'always' work regardless of the regioncode.
I'll bet 90% of people of buy DVDs dont know what DRM is or what it does to them.
90% of American consumers. If you don't live in America you encounter DVD DRM regularly when you can't play legitimately purchased DVDs on your computer.
I bought a bunch of DVDs in England when I was living there then I emigrated to Australia. Now any (mainstream) DVD I buy is Region 4 not Region 2. My DVD player is region free but my Laptop is another story so I can't play any DVD I own on My laptop when I want to because you've only got 3 Region changes before it locks.
Can anyone explain to me why a 40 year old James Bond movie needs to be "protected" from being viewed out of region? Apart from corporate greed of course. Now we've got "fair use" in Australia does that mean I can legally shift my Region locked DVDs to region free?
A couple of years ago I went on a tour of the West Australian archives & they said that computer generated documents were their bane.
They had 150 year old documents going back to wherever but they had trouble reading 25 year old floppy disks in weird formats and converting them to the raw text-only format they used back then.
If they standardize on an XML based format like the ODF ones and convert all of their old stuff to this it will make archiving the current documents much easier. It may even in a few years prod the Australian government to standardise on a product that saves to ODF...
XP has relatively few new features over Windows 2000 which is why I didn't list Win 2k (Or Windows NT for that matter)
Win 3.1 was an (admitedly significant) upgrade of 3.0 which they charged for.
Similarly 98 was incremental on 95, 98SE on 98, Me on 98SE all of which you had to pay for yet none of which offered significantly more than bug fixes & drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm suggesting is that people prove that the voting machines are insecure by proving it during a real election. Starting websites, proving theoretically it's possible is just not cutting it. Even having former Diebold employees admitting to committing electoral fraud is not breaking through to the mainstream media.
The only thing that will is a big gesture.
What do I mean? Well, if a county with 10,000 registered voters logs 10,000,000+ votes each for both of the main candidates and 15,000,000 for the libertarian (or other "fringe") candidate not even Miami or Ohio's election supervisors would be able to turn a blind eye. Also the "wrong" candidate would have won - a sure reason to fix the system ;)
Unless they're particularly sad gamers who MUST play HALO2
For example, exit polls are a proven and incredibly accurate way of estimating results. In fact, the only times anywhere in the world ever that they have broken down is when gross electoral fraud has taken place - except in America during the last two presidential elections where the pollsters suddenly and catastrophically failed to conduct an accurate exit poll, but it wasn't due to electoral fraud, oh no.
It seems to have turned into a party political issue where the supporters of the winning party accuse the losers of "whining" when the actual evidence of fraud should scare them more than their opponents because it means that they, the loyal voters have become expendible. They don't need you anymore. They can win the election without you. The president now has the power to declare martial law & he has the machinary (hah!) to deliver the results he wants.
Yes, but just imagine what President Nader will do until the recount...
They DID port GEM to the PC - I used it at work in the late '80s early '90s & even as a happy Atari Owner at home I still thought it sucked. Not as much as Windows back then but it sucked. IIRC it came bundled with a GEM desktop publishing package (who's name I can't recall) WYSIYWYG being a pretty cool thing back then. Remember this was the era of Wordperfect, Lotus 123 & Harvard Graphics & all the other DOS software M$ put out of business through illegal anti-competitive behaviour. Allegedly.
The only way to redeem it would have been to have gone for the "Barry Mackenzie" ending with Mel unzipping his trousers, sucking down a beer & saying "you keep the beer coming & I'll get rid of the aliens for you".
I mean this alien scout was on earth for a WEEK in a humid part of the world (s)he'd have melted. Remember, no protective gear because of the chamelion thing. Crappy, crappy writing destroyed the movie for me, such a letdown at the end you forget how good anything earlier might have been.
My point is that if it wasn't worth putting out earlier (in one of the previous 14 IIRC posthumous Tolkien books) this new stuff probably does suck.
Then Unfinished Tales
Then there was the seemingly endless collection of scraps - was it 12 volumes?
He's been otherwise occupied for the last 30 years, if it wasn't publishable before it's unlikely to be all that good.
One word, "Reins"
Love them, use them until your child is old enough not to run away on a whim & get lost.
Anyone who tries to tell you it's "restrictive" or "Bad parenting" is either clueless or a paedophile.
I remember seeing an article in Scientific American circa 1999 where they did MRIs of adults using mobile phones & children & the kids heads were lit up like Christmas trees by the radiation - can you say "Brain Cancer Epidemic in the making?"
Look very carefully at how much interest you're paying on your loan and how much you're making on your investment. If you can't make enough to cover the loan interest, paying off the loan is the "best investment" - it's not a sexy answer but it's the truth. Oh & for deity's sake don't run up credit card debt.
Congratulations, first insightful post & I'm out of mod points. ;) let's just say Mong Kok and clean up an awful lot of piracy for relatively little outlay...
If they were serious about stopping piracy they'd just send the Police to three or four locations I've visited several times
Sorry to be the one to break it to you but they're all avoiding you.
Why then, back in the 1960s in England were women were being preferentially recruited as programmers? It happened to my aunt. Back then women were thought to be better set genetically to be programmers & I've encountered a few of the old school female programmers in my time. Remember, coding back then wasn't glorified pixel pushing like VB it was hardcore stuff for real programmers and women held their own.
On a different thread I'm pleased to find I've got this far down without anyone claiming that Gnome has become so dumbed down only women would want to use it anymore - oops...
(Dons flameproof costume)
Thus speaks a man who clearly has never played Total Annihilation anywhere near enough
Oh & before you come back with "But C&C was the original" Two Words "Dune 2"
I'm guessing from the wording of the FAQ that you might need to actually be in posession of the computer(s) in question in which case she's still out of luck unless she can persuade her old employer to let her back in to "get her iTunes" - like that's going to happen...
Y'know I'd have a lot less of an issue with the never-ending extension of copyright by lobbying from Disney if they actually bothered to do anything meaningful with their characters - it should be dirt cheap these days to bang out 300 new cartoons per year with the same old characters - you could use MacroAdobe Flash & re-use image assets for virtually eff.
From the FAQ:-
So, in short, No.
90% of American consumers. If you don't live in America you encounter DVD DRM regularly when you can't play legitimately purchased DVDs on your computer.
I bought a bunch of DVDs in England when I was living there then I emigrated to Australia. Now any (mainstream) DVD I buy is Region 4 not Region 2. My DVD player is region free but my Laptop is another story so I can't play any DVD I own on My laptop when I want to because you've only got 3 Region changes before it locks.
Can anyone explain to me why a 40 year old James Bond movie needs to be "protected" from being viewed out of region? Apart from corporate greed of course. Now we've got "fair use" in Australia does that mean I can legally shift my Region locked DVDs to region free?
A couple of years ago I went on a tour of the West Australian archives & they said that computer generated documents were their bane.
They had 150 year old documents going back to wherever but they had trouble reading 25 year old floppy disks in weird formats and converting them to the raw text-only format they used back then.
If they standardize on an XML based format like the ODF ones and convert all of their old stuff to this it will make archiving the current documents much easier. It may even in a few years prod the Australian government to standardise on a product that saves to ODF...
I've got the same three stickers on my nesest computer - I'm running SuSE though. Don't tell Bill...
Win 3.1 was an (admitedly significant) upgrade of 3.0 which they charged for.
Similarly 98 was incremental on 95, 98SE on 98, Me on 98SE all of which you had to pay for yet none of which offered significantly more than bug fixes & drivers.
That's my point.
Windows 3.1
Windows 98
Windows ME (Bwah ha ha)
Windows XP
and ultimately Vista.
People will pay for bug fixes if you market them well enough...
Simple answer - every file would then have a minimum size of 4MB
I can confirm this from similar experience - except I didn't buy the DVD, I was loaned it