Since you seem to have been on Mars at the time, perhaps you didn't know that the reason republicans were outraged at the early call was that they called the state before the polls had closed. The VNS and all the networks promised that this would not happen. The networks made the lame excuse that they "forgot" that Florida is in two time zones.
As for a complete, final, accurate count, that's not possible at this late stage. The ballots have been handled by two many people to be absolutely certain that a few thousand here or there haven't been altered. It's absurdly easy to take a wire to a stack of votes and punch down on the Gore chad in Palm Beach county and thus invalidate legitimate Bush and Buchanen votes wholesale (by turning them into double punch votes). Frankly, I don't buy it that only 60% of republicans voted for Bush in Palm Beach while the numbers are much higher in every other county in the state. At the same time the number of double punched ballots is much, much higher in Palm Beach. As for Buchanen. He got over 8k votes in '96. I don't see how 3k votes in '00 is so far-fetched.
Now, you claim a count done under FOIA is somehow believable. Dream on. A partisan organization asks for the ballots, counts them under their own private rules, and then declares Gore the winner. Surpries, surprise. If anybody on the republican side has spine, they'll be doing their own FOIA count and I predict that it will be astounding how different the count will be.
Don't be so sure about the benefits of closely divided government. A fuzzy government with a lot of bipartisan handshaking is likely to produce government greased with bribes to the district back home. pork barrell bribery is the only way they are going to be able to move forward on any major issue. You can bet there will be a lot of it.
Actually, it's a declaration of the incompetence and/or incoherence of the Florida court. You would think that getting to the highest court in the state would require the ability to write a reasoned opinion based on the law. Apparently not.
I'm sorry but you can't seriously believe that the Florida court just interpreted the law.
The law *was* contradictory. Behind door number 1 it says that the secretary of state shall reject late votes. Behind door number 2 it says that the secretary of state may reject late votes. Interpretation would mean picking between door number 1 and door number 2. In neither case did the law allow for what Al Gore needed to win this election.
The Florida Supreme Court chose go off and do their own thing and said that the secretary of state must accept the late counts. And even with that bit of judicial reworking the rules after the fact, Al Gore still lost and now has to sue his allies on the county boards claiming that they were against him. It's bizarre.
The states *can* do recounts. In fact they have done recounts. Sorry buddy, Bush still won. But we have a federal government in order for it to provide some minimum standards like federal officeholders are to be elected by rules that are established before election day. Palm Beach county threw out ten year old rules as to how votes should be counted and, by my count, imposed four different sets of rules on various parts of the recount, each time at the prompting of the Gore statisticians who figured out that they weren't getting "enough" votes under the rules in use.
That's vote stealing. The Florida Supreme Court gave these democrat dominated boards extra time to manufacture more votes. The Supreme Court just stepped in and told the Florida court that they need to have some basis in the law to make judicial judgements and their tissue of fantasies didn't make the cut for even deciding whether or not it was wrong.
In short, the Supreme Court didn't say that the Florida Supremes got it wrong. They said that they were incoherent to the point where the federals couldn't even figure out whether the state court was right or wrong.
The Florida Supremes need to be out on the basis of incompetence.
Now the rest of your post makes it clear that you believe that GW Bush's policy prescriptions are so bad that a little vote stealing is OK if it saves the US from him. Shame on you.
You are arguing for the disenfranchising of the military on the grounds that they are too aggressive while liberals are arguing for giving the vote to violent felons? Have you no shame?
Right now, the US is in a precarious place. It has one party that thinks nothing of calling the other party, violent, fascistic, wife-beaters, and a host of other, ugly, ugly names. The scary part is that they actually think that way. You cannot have peaceful government in a situation where there is the good party and the evil party. The only reason we are not in a civil war over this is that the other party has not given up on civil discourse yet and they generally don't reciprocate the hate.
When republicans call democrats bolsheviks as often as democrats call republicans fascists, it's time to dust off the passport and make plans to sit out the civil war. Frankly IMHO, neither of them is worth dying for.
Personally, I like the electoral college. It keeps the amount of voter intimidation down. I live in an area (Chicago metro) that's overwhelmingly democrat and quite famous for it's creative methods of getting the dead and otherwise disqualified to the polls early and often. But they don't go full bore to corrupt the presidential election because they know that all they can do, no matter how hard they make it for republicans is they can move 22 votes in the electoral college. Stealing twice as many increases the risk without any extra electoral reward.
In a direct system, they would have direct input into the final result with the large cities able to steal enough votes to make anybody president. I don't understand why anybody would consider this a good thing.
Let's face it. Electoral fraud is a hard thing to prove. They have these tight deadlines to limit the amount of fraud opportunity without regard to putting one party up over another.
As other's have pointed out, bandwidth is being charged for. What the telco's are complaining about is that the bandwidth necessary for voice used to be a big (relatively) fat pipe and VoIP transmits the same information over a trivially thin amount of bandwidth, thus blowing the telco business plans to hell.
Essentially, the telcos are complaining that people are using a compression scheme to not pay 'enough'.
If you go along with that, all modern modem useage needs to be regulated since it too uses compression.
There is a difference between capitalism and corporatism. When you have the government regulating the economy for the benefit of 1 or more established companies that's not the free market and its not capitalism. It's a limited, blood free form of fascism, sort of like Sweden is a limited, blood free form of communism. In all cases, it's still wrong, it just hasn't gotten to the gulag stage.
"hand editing when you have better tools is silly. "
I didn't say that you needed to clunk 'through a bunch of menus'.
The particulars of wrapping all the config files in xml tags means that you can use any editor, including vim. It's just that primitive editors aren't going to be able to handle it as prettily, like you care about that.
This kind of data handling is exactly what XML is best for. Mac OS X is going to give you clear and pretty when you are unfamiliar with a package and leave the config files as text for when 'you know what you want to change' and you want to use vim.
Or they can release an easy to use set of business servers that run on the same hardware (x86) that is already deployed but without the CAL license requirements that prop up Microsoft's profits. Apple could get away with selling an OS X server for Intel for $500-$1000 and make out like a bandit because they would have a product easier to use than NT, more stable than NT, and cheaper than NT. Linux gets 2 out of three but Apple's positioned better.
Go ahead, price out a file & print server with Win2k for 200 people and you will see the price savings for the end user. Apple isn't in this market to any significant degree so there is no cannibalization and if somebody wants to spend $499 on an OS to run it on their desktop, I would guess that Apple's making more money as a software seller than they would have if it were an iMac sale.
right now the terminal.app is scriptable. I would guess that sooner or later somebody is going to make it (or a drop in replacement) recordable. What that means is that any techno-savvy hackers out there only have to issue a start recording command, do their hack, stop recording and voila, a double clickable applescript to fix whatever itch needs scratching. As for editing/etc files by hand, isn't that what the xml tool is there for? hand editing when you have better tools is silly.
There are threre environments in Mac OS X, Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic. Now you might have an argument that there aren't a lot of Cocoa apps out (mostly stuff that's been ported over from the NEXT platform), you might even have something of an argument for Carbon (though they've been coming fast and furious). You have no argument, and certainly deserved a flamebait when you look at the apps that run in classic. Given that you can compile and run a heck of a lot of the GNU software as well, it's quite likely that OS X in beta has more software that can run for it in binary and source form than Linux has right now.
The only advantage that Linux has is in applications that are released binary only for it and thus can't be tweaked and recompiled for OS X
You may note that I was saying that Microsoft has left a gaping wide opening for a savvy alternative to enter. Star Office may or may not be that alternative, that's for the collective market to decide.
All I'm saying is that IT managers are much more open to MS alternatives that meet their needs than is often let on at Slashdot whine fests
OK, here's your evidence. I've been a network admin for over a decade and I am trying desperately to get MS out of my company. From the people that I talk to, I am certainly not alone.
Saying MS "ain't all that bad" is like saying a prison date with 'Tiny' and 'Moose' "ain't all that bad". (think goatse.cx)
BTW: I'm moving over to starting my own business and I'll be doing my best to avoid the MS tax where possible. It isn't a matter of ideology. It's a matter of keeping control of your own business destiny.
While it may be true for Microsoft there are software companies that will sell you cross platform upgrades at a reduced price. I believe that both Adobe and Macromedia do this on some of their products.
Unfortunately, it's a bad idea. I would estimate that a majority of institutions have some piracy coupled with sloppy record keeping. They are all potential criminals. The society that you get when everybody is a criminal was quite well described by Solzhenitsyn(sp?) and I wouldn't want to go there.
From my understanding, they issue these letters *after* they've gathered enough information to turn over to the police to request a search warrant.
If you think that a compliance letter like this is bad, can you imagine the state police coming in to all the local government locations and executing a massive search warrant on the local government, especially if said warrant turns up enough violations for multi-million dollar headline screamers? Even if they come up relatively empty, you blow a day or two of productivity since they don't allow you to work on your computers until they finish searching.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you seem to have been on Mars at the time, perhaps you didn't know that the reason republicans were outraged at the early call was that they called the state before the polls had closed. The VNS and all the networks promised that this would not happen. The networks made the lame excuse that they "forgot" that Florida is in two time zones.
As for a complete, final, accurate count, that's not possible at this late stage. The ballots have been handled by two many people to be absolutely certain that a few thousand here or there haven't been altered. It's absurdly easy to take a wire to a stack of votes and punch down on the Gore chad in Palm Beach county and thus invalidate legitimate Bush and Buchanen votes wholesale (by turning them into double punch votes). Frankly, I don't buy it that only 60% of republicans voted for Bush in Palm Beach while the numbers are much higher in every other county in the state. At the same time the number of double punched ballots is much, much higher in Palm Beach. As for Buchanen. He got over 8k votes in '96. I don't see how 3k votes in '00 is so far-fetched.
Now, you claim a count done under FOIA is somehow believable. Dream on. A partisan organization asks for the ballots, counts them under their own private rules, and then declares Gore the winner. Surpries, surprise. If anybody on the republican side has spine, they'll be doing their own FOIA count and I predict that it will be astounding how different the count will be.
DB
Don't be so sure about the benefits of closely divided government. A fuzzy government with a lot of bipartisan handshaking is likely to produce government greased with bribes to the district back home. pork barrell bribery is the only way they are going to be able to move forward on any major issue. You can bet there will be a lot of it.
DB
Actually, it's a declaration of the incompetence and/or incoherence of the Florida court. You would think that getting to the highest court in the state would require the ability to write a reasoned opinion based on the law. Apparently not.
DB
And what would you put in place of the winner take all rules? Do you like the Maine rules or do you have your own proposal?
DB
I'm sorry but you can't seriously believe that the Florida court just interpreted the law.
The law *was* contradictory. Behind door number 1 it says that the secretary of state shall reject late votes. Behind door number 2 it says that the secretary of state may reject late votes. Interpretation would mean picking between door number 1 and door number 2. In neither case did the law allow for what Al Gore needed to win this election.
The Florida Supreme Court chose go off and do their own thing and said that the secretary of state must accept the late counts. And even with that bit of judicial reworking the rules after the fact, Al Gore still lost and now has to sue his allies on the county boards claiming that they were against him. It's bizarre.
DB
The states *can* do recounts. In fact they have done recounts. Sorry buddy, Bush still won. But we have a federal government in order for it to provide some minimum standards like federal officeholders are to be elected by rules that are established before election day. Palm Beach county threw out ten year old rules as to how votes should be counted and, by my count, imposed four different sets of rules on various parts of the recount, each time at the prompting of the Gore statisticians who figured out that they weren't getting "enough" votes under the rules in use.
That's vote stealing. The Florida Supreme Court gave these democrat dominated boards extra time to manufacture more votes. The Supreme Court just stepped in and told the Florida court that they need to have some basis in the law to make judicial judgements and their tissue of fantasies didn't make the cut for even deciding whether or not it was wrong.
In short, the Supreme Court didn't say that the Florida Supremes got it wrong. They said that they were incoherent to the point where the federals couldn't even figure out whether the state court was right or wrong.
The Florida Supremes need to be out on the basis of incompetence.
Now the rest of your post makes it clear that you believe that GW Bush's policy prescriptions are so bad that a little vote stealing is OK if it saves the US from him. Shame on you.
DB
Let's see, is that -1 flamebait or -1 troll?
You are arguing for the disenfranchising of the military on the grounds that they are too aggressive while liberals are arguing for giving the vote to violent felons? Have you no shame?
Right now, the US is in a precarious place. It has one party that thinks nothing of calling the other party, violent, fascistic, wife-beaters, and a host of other, ugly, ugly names. The scary part is that they actually think that way. You cannot have peaceful government in a situation where there is the good party and the evil party. The only reason we are not in a civil war over this is that the other party has not given up on civil discourse yet and they generally don't reciprocate the hate.
When republicans call democrats bolsheviks as often as democrats call republicans fascists, it's time to dust off the passport and make plans to sit out the civil war. Frankly IMHO, neither of them is worth dying for.
DB
Personally, I like the electoral college. It keeps the amount of voter intimidation down. I live in an area (Chicago metro) that's overwhelmingly democrat and quite famous for it's creative methods of getting the dead and otherwise disqualified to the polls early and often. But they don't go full bore to corrupt the presidential election because they know that all they can do, no matter how hard they make it for republicans is they can move 22 votes in the electoral college. Stealing twice as many increases the risk without any extra electoral reward.
In a direct system, they would have direct input into the final result with the large cities able to steal enough votes to make anybody president. I don't understand why anybody would consider this a good thing.
Let's face it. Electoral fraud is a hard thing to prove. They have these tight deadlines to limit the amount of fraud opportunity without regard to putting one party up over another.
DB
That's a bitterly fought split decision where no justice on the other side thought enough about it to write a minority opinion. Yeah right.
DB
As other's have pointed out, bandwidth is being charged for. What the telco's are complaining about is that the bandwidth necessary for voice used to be a big (relatively) fat pipe and VoIP transmits the same information over a trivially thin amount of bandwidth, thus blowing the telco business plans to hell.
Essentially, the telcos are complaining that people are using a compression scheme to not pay 'enough'.
If you go along with that, all modern modem useage needs to be regulated since it too uses compression.
The horror.
DB
There is a difference between capitalism and corporatism. When you have the government regulating the economy for the benefit of 1 or more established companies that's not the free market and its not capitalism. It's a limited, blood free form of fascism, sort of like Sweden is a limited, blood free form of communism. In all cases, it's still wrong, it just hasn't gotten to the gulag stage.
DB
Ok, read it again,
"hand editing when you have better tools is silly. "
I didn't say that you needed to clunk 'through a bunch of menus'.
The particulars of wrapping all the config files in xml tags means that you can use any editor, including vim. It's just that primitive editors aren't going to be able to handle it as prettily, like you care about that.
This kind of data handling is exactly what XML is best for. Mac OS X is going to give you clear and pretty when you are unfamiliar with a package and leave the config files as text for when 'you know what you want to change' and you want to use vim.
DB
Or they can release an easy to use set of business servers that run on the same hardware (x86) that is already deployed but without the CAL license requirements that prop up Microsoft's profits. Apple could get away with selling an OS X server for Intel for $500-$1000 and make out like a bandit because they would have a product easier to use than NT, more stable than NT, and cheaper than NT. Linux gets 2 out of three but Apple's positioned better.
Go ahead, price out a file & print server with Win2k for 200 people and you will see the price savings for the end user. Apple isn't in this market to any significant degree so there is no cannibalization and if somebody wants to spend $499 on an OS to run it on their desktop, I would guess that Apple's making more money as a software seller than they would have if it were an iMac sale.
DB
right now the terminal.app is scriptable. I would guess that sooner or later somebody is going to make it (or a drop in replacement) recordable. What that means is that any techno-savvy hackers out there only have to issue a start recording command, do their hack, stop recording and voila, a double clickable applescript to fix whatever itch needs scratching. As for editing /etc files by hand, isn't that what the xml tool is there for? hand editing when you have better tools is silly.
DB
There are threre environments in Mac OS X, Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic. Now you might have an argument that there aren't a lot of Cocoa apps out (mostly stuff that's been ported over from the NEXT platform), you might even have something of an argument for Carbon (though they've been coming fast and furious). You have no argument, and certainly deserved a flamebait when you look at the apps that run in classic. Given that you can compile and run a heck of a lot of the GNU software as well, it's quite likely that OS X in beta has more software that can run for it in binary and source form than Linux has right now.
The only advantage that Linux has is in applications that are released binary only for it and thus can't be tweaked and recompiled for OS X
DB
Why wouldn't the X based stuff work? There's an implementation for X windows (Tenon) with commercial support as well as a free X Server.
DB
You may note that I was saying that Microsoft has left a gaping wide opening for a savvy alternative to enter. Star Office may or may not be that alternative, that's for the collective market to decide.
All I'm saying is that IT managers are much more open to MS alternatives that meet their needs than is often let on at Slashdot whine fests
DB
How many VBA viruses does it take for the PHBs to get the idea that maybe it might be a good idea to look around for alternatives?
How many buffer overruns does it take until it becomes clear that the QA and testing that Microsoft does on its products is perennially insufficient?
Whatever those numbers Microsoft blew past them some time ago. The only question is which alternative is going to take advantage of the opening?
DB
OK, here's your evidence. I've been a network admin for over a decade and I am trying desperately to get MS out of my company. From the people that I talk to, I am certainly not alone.
Saying MS "ain't all that bad" is like saying a prison date with 'Tiny' and 'Moose' "ain't all that bad". (think goatse.cx)
BTW: I'm moving over to starting my own business and I'll be doing my best to avoid the MS tax where possible. It isn't a matter of ideology. It's a matter of keeping control of your own business destiny.
DB
While it may be true for Microsoft there are software companies that will sell you cross platform upgrades at a reduced price. I believe that both Adobe and Macromedia do this on some of their products.
DB
Actually that would be Eldred vs Reno
DB
Please don't feed the trolls. Anybody that posts at -1 without moderation is down there for a reason.
DB
Unfortunately, it's a bad idea. I would estimate that a majority of institutions have some piracy coupled with sloppy record keeping. They are all potential criminals. The society that you get when everybody is a criminal was quite well described by Solzhenitsyn(sp?) and I wouldn't want to go there.
DB
From my understanding, they issue these letters *after* they've gathered enough information to turn over to the police to request a search warrant.
If you think that a compliance letter like this is bad, can you imagine the state police coming in to all the local government locations and executing a massive search warrant on the local government, especially if said warrant turns up enough violations for multi-million dollar headline screamers? Even if they come up relatively empty, you blow a day or two of productivity since they don't allow you to work on your computers until they finish searching.
DB
Start->Programs->Common Administration Tools->License Manager
I'm not saying its good (It sucks), I'm just saying its there by default on any NT Server product installed
SMS does something of a better job at license management but I'd rather be tarred than have to use that again.
DB