"Most "average Joes" are shareholders. Many have personal investement accounts, some have pension plans, and most everyone with a semi-decent job has a 401K, or equivalent."
And plenty of these "average joes" as we call them, have had their pension money invested in companies who helped to outsource their own jobs.
Increase in pension earnings versus having a job... interesting choice. I doubt that most people would automatically choose the rise in share prices.
"Since most users don't have a firewall and don't use Windows Update, I wonder how many machines will be infected by Monday?"
Bank holiday weekend, remember. Any worm released today has 3 days' free propogation time before anyone gets back to work and calls the helpdesk about their infected machines.
"Electronic voting is in theory 100% accurate. It's not susceptable to getting a ballot jammed in the machine"
Good point. Is the guaranteed accountability of a paper system worth the additional inaccuracy it might introduce?
"Two reasons I'd trust a fully audited system over a hand counted one"
What could possibly be audited about an electronic system? You touch the screen, and *as if by magic*, the machine somehow records a count.
To quote slashdot:
[1] Take your vote
[2] ???
[3] Announce a winner
Did you vote? Well, I pressed the button on the machine, so I assume that my vote got counted, and for the correct candidate.
Perhaps we underestimate the scale of the auditing necessary. Look at the methods for producing safety-critical software, an approximate standard for something which MUST be verifiably correct. A quote from NASA indicates $1000 per line of code (that's 1960's money), and even then they were accepting a certain probability of errors for which they had to compensate with additional checking and redundant systems.
How many lines of code will a voting machine take? For it to be "fully audited", somebody needs to spend that $1000 per line of code. And don't forget that the voters are expecting a shiny antialiased GUI at $1000 per line, encryption (which is difficult enough to verify at the best of times), and everything down to the disk access, kernel and filesystem needs to be verified. It's a big job, just to reach the same standards that paper ballots already offer.
And what standards will we set for ourselves? At the moment, they're using which can only be descibed as Visual-Basic like.
When people talk about electronic voting, they're talking about using Access databases, and Windows interfaces, and programmers who haven't even heard of auditable development techniques.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be? The last big election I voted in had over 100 candidates. Minor candidates, but I'm sure they all thought they were as important as the other. There is NO way the average voter is going to be able to see and check that each of their votes went into the right bin -- and thats what matters -- the person voting can check this... I'd take on you other points, but this one irked me the most..."
Sorry to irk you, but I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion as some way of sorting votes as soon as they're made. I wasn't. (in my country, it's illegal to count votes before the polls close.) I was referring to a system where the votes are cast, placed in a box, and later that evening, they're all taken to a town hall somewhere and counted.
Firstly, the voter doesn't verify that their vote went into the right bin, that's for the vote-counters to do. The voter marks their vote (using a machine if necessary), then checks that their vote is correct by looking at the card. If it's correctly marked candidate 84, then they're happy, and they put their voting card into a locked black box with all the other cards. (showing the election officer's stamp on the back of the card to prove it's a valid vote)
Repeat as necessary until the polls close.
The returning officer then supervises a hundred volunteers who empty the ballot boxes onto the table, and sort them into piles. That's where the sorting machine helps.
If you do have a limit on the number of bins a machine can sort, then you need to be a bit more organised. "candidates 1-10", "candidates 11-20". And then send each part-sorted pile to somebody with another machine.
You comment about being able to find the right candidate when voting -- that's irrelevant to the vote-counting. Finding the right person to vote for is done *when the ballot card is marked*, not when it's counted. I believe I used the phrase "using whatever method of selecting candidates is in favour this month" or such like, to describe the method for marking your vote card. Whatever, once that's done, the task of sorting them into piles and counting each candidates vote is done completely separately, after the polls have closed.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be?" -- if you have 100 candidates, you're going to have at least 100 piles of voting cards on your counting-tables, regardless of the method chosen to mark or count them, so I don't see how an automated card-sorter can do anything but help the people dealing with so many candidates. If 3 people get 80% of the vote, then separate those piles out first. The idea of such machines is that they're tools to make a human job easier. If you want 20 machines, get 20 of them, because they don't need to have any intelligence or any knowlege of what's being voted for.
Once the cards are sorted into piles by candidate, you have a verifiably correct answer. Anyone can flick through a pile of votes to see that there isn't a vote in the wrong pile. Anyone can count a pile of votes to check that it matches the official answer. And anyone can see how many votes each candidate has, by looking at the count for their pile.
And the results are then published, so you can check that the numbers add up when you take all the different counting stations into account.
(as an aside, have you ever read those usability studies which show that people can't cope with more than 7 choices at a time, and shouldn't be presented with them? 100 candidates is never going to be a good election)
Go ahead and have a go at the other points, they ought to withstand critisism if they're to be suggested for a voting system.
It's not just one massive replacement machine you need for voting. It's incremental improvement over paper voting.
[a] Design a machine which helps voters to tick a voting card. Uses whatever touchscreen display is fashionable this month, and spits out a card with that box ticked.
- If it fails, voters can tick the box by hand.
- If it misvotes, voters can bin it and ask for another card
- It can be verified as the voter takes the printed card and sees the tick in the right box
[b] Design a machine which takes poll cards and sorts them into piles, depending on which candidate is ticked (plus an "invalid selection" pile)
- If it fails, the cards can be sorted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which box represents which candidate.
- It can and should be verified by people flicking through the sorted piles of cards to confirm they're all for the same candidate.
[c] Design a machine which can count how many cards are in a stack (similar to banknote counting machines)
- If it fails, the number of cards can be counted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which candidate's cards are being counted at any one time
- It can and should be verified by people randomly selecting piles of cards to count by hand, as many as they can manage, and checking the accuracy of their answers against the counting machines.
How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically? Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer? Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers? It's not even much faster to use a computer, especially not when the machines are untrustworthy and the result can't be announced until the lawsuits subside.
"Free does not mean much to a professional who needs to get things done. Would a pro photographer use a quikimart freebe camera to shoot promo material?"
Why do you choose those analogies? If you want to compare one of the best graphics programs available to a throwaway camera, you're stretching the bounds of credibility.
Would a pro photographer use a 3-megapixel SLR if they could get as many as they wanted for free?
"Where grid starts taking off is in corporate (or educational) environments where you have tons of hardware on desktops all over the place that spend 99% of the time doing nothing."
University computers: queues for PCs at any hour of the day or night, and 80% CPU when they're being used because they're 500MHz pentiums running Windows.
Normal corporate computers: okay, these aren't being used at night, but remember they're being maintained by petty little people whose ideal day at work involves imposing a coffee-machine policy: don't be surprised if they're all powered-down at night to save electricity.
Corporate development machines: Rather better specified (racks of dual 3GHz machines), but again being used day and night, almost continously compiling, running, or testing something, and at night (when the developers leave at midnight), they're either left compiling something that takes all night, or left downloading ISOs that would take too much bandwidth in daytime.
Grannys' home computers: turned on when needed. Arguably it's mostly idle, but the owner will complain like buggery if it's ever slow to respond, plus it's internet connection is a 56K phone line once every 3 days.
Slashdotters' home computers: Constantly on, and constantly in use. How many people are going to put up with Tribes running slowly because their "idle" computer is being used to fold proteins? And how many people want their pr0n to download slower because they're DDoSing some public target?
So where are all these PCs running at 1% CPU continuously?
"False. They don't "broadcast" anything. They're passive receivers. They are unpowered. They respond to radio stimulation. They no more "broadcast" a number than the money in my wallet is "broadcasting" serial numbers."
False. When powered, they broadcast. They're powered whenever they're within range of a reader. That is, they're powered and broadcasting whenever they're near the door of a department store, in a warehouse, or anywhere else that a reader is placed.
Regardless if that's the same store who supplied your tags. You can pick up scanners that work from a few feet away. That's more than enough. You can get scanners which scan everyone walking through an area (that's what the ones at shop doors do), they can be installed anywhere. Why would you want to put scanners at airports, bars, and stadiums? I don't know, but expect to find out soon enough.
"Don't shop at Wal-Mart. I mean, really. For all the bitching here on/. about MS, Wal-Mart is a MUCH bigger, MUCH nastier company. I haven't been in to a Wal-Mart for many years, and I haven't missed it one bit."
For those in the UK, I've noticed RFID tags in packets of Sainsburys own-brand sliced ham, and presumably this will start to be seen in other Sainsbury products.
"Sit there and complain about it, but the reason you're able to do things like read news for free online, perform fast google searches, and even use some software without paying for it is because companies pay for these services with advertisements. Remove the advertisements and you can kiss all of this goodbye."
Go back to your nikes and your commercial television, Consumer. The rest of us will continue providing and using free content.
"Here's an example of this style of anti-popup-blocker advertisement"
Don't see anything abnormal there, just a normal page with no popups or anything.
Though they do have an advert (ironic if they are trying to force their way into protected computer systems): "Protect computers from scumware, spyware, adware and hackers!"
Oh yeah, and they have MSSmartTagsPreventParsing in their headers. Targeted advertising is too evil for you eh?
I'll try reloading the page in case it's random... Reload it a few times maybe... Sod it, let's just wget the site continously to see if it's a 1-in-100 chance of being served a different page... nope, still no adverts.
"How is the ms office compatability. Currently my school wants assignments in a word.doc format."
"AbiWord cannot export Microsoft Word documents at the moment; you should use RTF (see below) for sending files to people who use Word." File format FAQ
"Rich Text Format, or RTF, is a file format that contains all the formatting information about your file, and which can be read by almost all word processors. This is the format you should use if you need to send a file to someone who doesn't use AbiWord. 'Rich Text Format for old apps' is an older version of RTF, but applications have to be very old to need it. You should use normal RTF unless you know that you need to use the older version."
In other news, you can rename a.rtf document as.doc. Your prof's computer will then send it to MS-Word (because it has a.doc extension). Their copy of Word will then read it, see that it's a RTF, and open it using the RTF filter.
"Why do you install NetTime? Does this offer any advantages over XP's built in ntp stuff?"
The primary advantage would be that NetTime runs on Windows98, and XP's built-in NTP program doesn't.
Another advantage would be that NetTime runs on Windows2000, and XP's built-in NTP program doesn't.
Besides, anyone who's chosen WindowsXP for themselves probably isn't interested in Free Software, we know that because they installed WindowsXP despite the license agreement. So it would be a bit silly to assume that someone installing TheOpenCD has WindowsXP available. (and that list came from TheOpenCD, which is a CD full of Free Software to use on Windows. I assume they included NetTime because it's small and useful.)
"If you don't mind me asking as well, what does abiword offer that openoffice does not?"
It's easier to use if you don't want to do something really complex. It's the sort of program you'd give to eight-year-olds so they can learn how to use a computer.
As a program which does word-processing and nothing else, it's a much nicer interface for writing notes and letters, and anywhere that you don't want the extra overhead of something capable of organising an entire office all by itself. It caters for people to whom less features is a benefit.
That's four so far. Would anyone else like to make a comment about not having more than 10 programs worth installing? Join the queue, guaranteed funny modifier.
"I used to get dententions for not covering my books. What the hell kind of punishment are these kids gonna get for not properly treating their ThinkPads?"
How would you reach the serial port if the laptop was neatly covered in brown paper?
And would the sticky label on the "inside front cover" obscure the screen?
Slashdot Mirror
"Most "average Joes" are shareholders. Many have personal investement accounts, some have pension plans, and most everyone with a semi-decent job has a 401K, or equivalent."
And plenty of these "average joes" as we call them, have had their pension money invested in companies who helped to outsource their own jobs.
Increase in pension earnings versus having a job... interesting choice. I doubt that most people would automatically choose the rise in share prices.
"Since most users don't have a firewall and don't use Windows Update, I wonder how many machines will be infected by Monday?"
Bank holiday weekend, remember. Any worm released today has 3 days' free propogation time before anyone gets back to work and calls the helpdesk about their infected machines.
Full text, in case of slashdotting:
"Electronic voting is in theory 100% accurate. It's not susceptable to getting a ballot jammed in the machine"
Good point. Is the guaranteed accountability of a paper system worth the additional inaccuracy it might introduce?
"Two reasons I'd trust a fully audited system over a hand counted one"
What could possibly be audited about an electronic system? You touch the screen, and *as if by magic*, the machine somehow records a count.
To quote slashdot:
[1] Take your vote
[2] ???
[3] Announce a winner
Did you vote? Well, I pressed the button on the machine, so I assume that my vote got counted, and for the correct candidate.
Perhaps we underestimate the scale of the auditing necessary. Look at the methods for producing safety-critical software, an approximate standard for something which MUST be verifiably correct. A quote from NASA indicates $1000 per line of code (that's 1960's money), and even then they were accepting a certain probability of errors for which they had to compensate with additional checking and redundant systems.
How many lines of code will a voting machine take? For it to be "fully audited", somebody needs to spend that $1000 per line of code. And don't forget that the voters are expecting a shiny antialiased GUI at $1000 per line, encryption (which is difficult enough to verify at the best of times), and everything down to the disk access, kernel and filesystem needs to be verified. It's a big job, just to reach the same standards that paper ballots already offer.
And what standards will we set for ourselves? At the moment, they're using which can only be descibed as Visual-Basic like.
When people talk about electronic voting, they're talking about using Access databases, and Windows interfaces, and programmers who haven't even heard of auditable development techniques.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be? The last big election I voted in had over 100 candidates. Minor candidates, but I'm sure they all thought they were as important as the other. There is NO way the average voter is going to be able to see and check that each of their votes went into the right bin -- and thats what matters -- the person voting can check this... I'd take on you other points, but this one irked me the most..."
Sorry to irk you, but I think you might have misunderstood my suggestion as some way of sorting votes as soon as they're made. I wasn't. (in my country, it's illegal to count votes before the polls close.) I was referring to a system where the votes are cast, placed in a box, and later that evening, they're all taken to a town hall somewhere and counted.
Firstly, the voter doesn't verify that their vote went into the right bin, that's for the vote-counters to do. The voter marks their vote (using a machine if necessary), then checks that their vote is correct by looking at the card. If it's correctly marked candidate 84, then they're happy, and they put their voting card into a locked black box with all the other cards. (showing the election officer's stamp on the back of the card to prove it's a valid vote)
Repeat as necessary until the polls close.
The returning officer then supervises a hundred volunteers who empty the ballot boxes onto the table, and sort them into piles. That's where the sorting machine helps.
If you do have a limit on the number of bins a machine can sort, then you need to be a bit more organised. "candidates 1-10", "candidates 11-20". And then send each part-sorted pile to somebody with another machine.
You comment about being able to find the right candidate when voting -- that's irrelevant to the vote-counting. Finding the right person to vote for is done *when the ballot card is marked*, not when it's counted. I believe I used the phrase "using whatever method of selecting candidates is in favour this month" or such like, to describe the method for marking your vote card. Whatever, once that's done, the task of sorting them into piles and counting each candidates vote is done completely separately, after the polls have closed.
"Back to the point, how many bins would this be?" -- if you have 100 candidates, you're going to have at least 100 piles of voting cards on your counting-tables, regardless of the method chosen to mark or count them, so I don't see how an automated card-sorter can do anything but help the people dealing with so many candidates. If 3 people get 80% of the vote, then separate those piles out first. The idea of such machines is that they're tools to make a human job easier. If you want 20 machines, get 20 of them, because they don't need to have any intelligence or any knowlege of what's being voted for.
Once the cards are sorted into piles by candidate, you have a verifiably correct answer. Anyone can flick through a pile of votes to see that there isn't a vote in the wrong pile. Anyone can count a pile of votes to check that it matches the official answer. And anyone can see how many votes each candidate has, by looking at the count for their pile.
And the results are then published, so you can check that the numbers add up when you take all the different counting stations into account.
(as an aside, have you ever read those usability studies which show that people can't cope with more than 7 choices at a time, and shouldn't be presented with them? 100 candidates is never going to be a good election)
Go ahead and have a go at the other points, they ought to withstand critisism if they're to be suggested for a voting system.
"Isn't it about time for remote hole #2?"
They're lagging. Windows has had 4 just in April...
It's not just one massive replacement machine you need for voting. It's incremental improvement over paper voting.
[a] Design a machine which helps voters to tick a voting card. Uses whatever touchscreen display is fashionable this month, and spits out a card with that box ticked.
- If it fails, voters can tick the box by hand.
- If it misvotes, voters can bin it and ask for another card
- It can be verified as the voter takes the printed card and sees the tick in the right box
[b] Design a machine which takes poll cards and sorts them into piles, depending on which candidate is ticked (plus an "invalid selection" pile)
- If it fails, the cards can be sorted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which box represents which candidate.
- It can and should be verified by people flicking through the sorted piles of cards to confirm they're all for the same candidate.
[c] Design a machine which can count how many cards are in a stack (similar to banknote counting machines)
- If it fails, the number of cards can be counted by hand.
- It can't misvote because it has no knowledge of which candidate's cards are being counted at any one time
- It can and should be verified by people randomly selecting piles of cards to count by hand, as many as they can manage, and checking the accuracy of their answers against the counting machines.
How hard can it be? Why do people insist on votes being recorded electronically? Why do people insist on votes being sent by modem, rather than announced by the returning officer? Why do people trust machines to count their votes, when it's trivial to do so with a hall full of volunteers? It's not even much faster to use a computer, especially not when the machines are untrustworthy and the result can't be announced until the lawsuits subside.
"what is to stop you from taking Photoshop's single big MDI window and expanding it to the right until it more or less fills both monitors?"
Having to move your mouse two monitor-widths to get a menu (which will now be on the left hand side of the first monitor)?
"Free does not mean much to a professional who needs to get things done. Would a pro photographer use a quikimart freebe camera to shoot promo material?"
Why do you choose those analogies? If you want to compare one of the best graphics programs available to a throwaway camera, you're stretching the bounds of credibility.
Would a pro photographer use a 3-megapixel SLR if they could get as many as they wanted for free?
"Where grid starts taking off is in corporate (or educational) environments where you have tons of hardware on desktops all over the place that spend 99% of the time doing nothing."
University computers: queues for PCs at any hour of the day or night, and 80% CPU when they're being used because they're 500MHz pentiums running Windows.
Normal corporate computers: okay, these aren't being used at night, but remember they're being maintained by petty little people whose ideal day at work involves imposing a coffee-machine policy: don't be surprised if they're all powered-down at night to save electricity.
Corporate development machines: Rather better specified (racks of dual 3GHz machines), but again being used day and night, almost continously compiling, running, or testing something, and at night (when the developers leave at midnight), they're either left compiling something that takes all night, or left downloading ISOs that would take too much bandwidth in daytime.
Grannys' home computers: turned on when needed. Arguably it's mostly idle, but the owner will complain like buggery if it's ever slow to respond, plus it's internet connection is a 56K phone line once every 3 days.
Slashdotters' home computers: Constantly on, and constantly in use. How many people are going to put up with Tribes running slowly because their "idle" computer is being used to fold proteins? And how many people want their pr0n to download slower because they're DDoSing some public target?
So where are all these PCs running at 1% CPU continuously?
"False. They don't "broadcast" anything. They're passive receivers. They are unpowered. They respond to radio stimulation. They no more "broadcast" a number than the money in my wallet is "broadcasting" serial numbers."
False. When powered, they broadcast. They're powered whenever they're within range of a reader. That is, they're powered and broadcasting whenever they're near the door of a department store, in a warehouse, or anywhere else that a reader is placed.
Regardless if that's the same store who supplied your tags. You can pick up scanners that work from a few feet away. That's more than enough. You can get scanners which scan everyone walking through an area (that's what the ones at shop doors do), they can be installed anywhere. Why would you want to put scanners at airports, bars, and stadiums? I don't know, but expect to find out soon enough.
"Don't shop at Wal-Mart. I mean, really. For all the bitching here on /. about MS, Wal-Mart is a MUCH bigger, MUCH nastier company. I haven't been in to a Wal-Mart for many years, and I haven't missed it one bit."
For those in the UK, I've noticed RFID tags in packets of Sainsburys own-brand sliced ham, and presumably this will start to be seen in other Sainsbury products.
Contact details here
"USA == Land of the not so free."
Seen the photos in UK newspapers this morning? (this story)
"What, are you going to euthanize the stupid because they waste your time?"
Don't mention that to the helpdesk staff...
"Who said "Don't be evil" ?"
Google did.
Let's hope they can convince shareholders to adopt that idea.
"Please spare me the products that are at an 'excellent starting point.' Wake me up when something crosses the finish line."
Sorry to wake you
"Sit there and complain about it, but the reason you're able to do things like read news for free online, perform fast google searches, and even use some software without paying for it is because companies pay for these services with advertisements. Remove the advertisements and you can kiss all of this goodbye."
Go back to your nikes and your commercial television, Consumer. The rest of us will continue providing and using free content.
"Here's an example of this style of anti-popup-blocker advertisement"
Don't see anything abnormal there, just a normal page with no popups or anything.
Though they do have an advert (ironic if they are trying to force their way into protected computer systems): "Protect computers from scumware, spyware, adware and hackers!"
Oh yeah, and they have MSSmartTagsPreventParsing in their headers. Targeted advertising is too evil for you eh?
I'll try reloading the page in case it's random... Reload it a few times maybe... Sod it, let's just wget the site continously to see if it's a 1-in-100 chance of being served a different page... nope, still no adverts.
"How is the ms office compatability. Currently my school wants assignments in a word .doc format."
.rtf document as .doc. Your prof's computer will then send it to MS-Word (because it has a .doc extension). Their copy of Word will then read it, see that it's a RTF, and open it using the RTF filter.
"AbiWord cannot export Microsoft Word documents at the moment; you should use RTF (see below) for sending files to people who use Word." File format FAQ
"Rich Text Format, or RTF, is a file format that contains all the formatting information about your file, and which can be read by almost all word processors. This is the format you should use if you need to send a file to someone who doesn't use AbiWord. 'Rich Text Format for old apps' is an older version of RTF, but applications have to be very old to need it. You should use normal RTF unless you know that you need to use the older version."
In other news, you can rename a
"Why do you install NetTime? Does this offer any advantages over XP's built in
ntp stuff?"
The primary advantage would be that NetTime runs on Windows98, and XP's built-in NTP program doesn't.
Another advantage would be that NetTime runs on Windows2000, and XP's built-in NTP program doesn't.
Besides, anyone who's chosen WindowsXP for themselves probably isn't interested in Free Software, we know that because they installed WindowsXP despite the license agreement. So it would be a bit silly to assume that someone installing TheOpenCD has WindowsXP available. (and that list came from TheOpenCD, which is a CD full of Free Software to use on Windows. I assume they included NetTime because it's small and useful.)
"If you don't mind me asking as well, what does abiword offer that openoffice does not?"
It's easier to use if you don't want to do something really complex. It's the sort of program you'd give to eight-year-olds so they can learn how to use a computer.
As a program which does word-processing and nothing else, it's a much nicer interface for writing notes and letters, and anywhere that you don't want the extra overhead of something capable of organising an entire office all by itself. It caters for people to whom less features is a benefit.
"Can someone list any meaningfull danagers of GM food"
One danger would be that of allowing food to be patented.
Anyone else?
That's four so far. Would anyone else like to make a comment about not having more than 10 programs worth installing? Join the queue, guaranteed funny modifier.
"I used to get dententions for not covering my books. What the hell kind of punishment are these kids gonna get for not properly treating their ThinkPads?"
How would you reach the serial port if the laptop was neatly covered in brown paper?
And would the sticky label on the "inside front cover" obscure the screen?
"However, if you\'re too dumb to know the basics of sql, chances are your program won\'t work quite right."
Have you ever posted a question on MandrakeForums? They seem to have the magic quotes down to a tee.
I\\\\\\\\\'ve often wondered why they take such care.