Anger is always - always - fear in disguise. -- Spider Robinson
This "Spider Robinson", whoever that is, is wrong. You can get angry about something which you are not directly involved in, and thus are under no danger from, and thus have no fear about. All it takes for that to happen is to witness a wrongdoing against someone else, and to have a shred of human empathy for that someone else.
Normally, MS cannot get into the unix business due to an agreement they signed when they spun off Xenix to a different company (They agreed that they would not compete against the product line they were selling off to someone else, and thus they would not get involved in the unix market again.) But - here's the interesting thing - what's the company they signed this agreement with? SCO. (Not the current people at SCO, mind you, but I would imagine the company still owns that contract even though none of its members are the same people as back then.) So, the ONLY way Microsoft could get into the Unix business legally would be if SCO ceased to exist (or became a part of Microsoft so that MS would be in charge of both sides of the agreement and thus could nullify it.)
I've sometimes suspected that this is the reason some aspects of Windows that are copies of some unix idea get greatly mutated. They can't just use all of the same technology directly the same way without being in danger of producing a unixy enough system that it might violate that previous agreement. So they make stupid changes perhaps just to cover their ass legally.
It's sad that most vehicles don't even START to pull over until they're sure that the siren is coming right for them.
NO, that's a good thing. You can hear a siren for a long way off. You don't want to have all traffic on side streets and parallel streets coming to a stop too - that would actually clog up traffic worse and make the ambulance/fire/police car have more congestion to deal with. You should only pull over if the vehicle with the siren is on the road behind you.
(But, people do wait too long to realize this fact. As soon as you hear the siren you should be checking behind you to see coming from behind you on your street. Most people wait too long to make that check.)
The first traffic detectors were electric-eyes. They discontinued the practice because pedestrians could make "fake" cars get counted by just waving an object across the sensor, and thus get the light to change frivolously. The induction sensor is used because it ONLY gets triggered by large quanities of metal like a car (which sucks for bicyclists.)
Standing waves are a big culprit in causing and keeping traffic jammed.
If you model the traffic as a single road with no intersections, or on-ramps then this makes sense. But in the real world, the length of road each car takes up affects the capacity of the road per mile, and thus leads to more congestion when you take into account the need to insert new cars into the flow (from on-ramps and/or intersections.)
If more people were like him, then traffic jams would cover more length of the road, and thus get worse. (If a traffic jam covers one mile when drivers are leaving a distance of D between cars, then that same number of cars will cover 2 miles if the drivers switch to leaving a distance of 2*D between them. In theory, if NO OTHER CARS are taken into account, that doesn't matter. But in the real world, where there is other traffic entering and leaving the road, the distance the jam covers is quite relevant. If it covers twice as much distance, that typically means the congestion affects twice as many OTHER people not originally part of it (waiting at intersections, jamming up on-ramps, and so forth), which then expands the size of the jam off to more side-streets and so on.
The more distance a jam covers, the worse it gets as it affects all the side streets attached to it.
If you count the number of cars crossing the sensor *even when the light is green and cars are passing right through*, then you can get a good impression of the level of traffic going each way, and adjust the light's timings to match. Some traffic lights already do this.
Those things piss me off when I'm on a bicycle. There's a bike lane painted on the road, and I'm supposed to stay in it - but if I want the light to change I have to go over to the side of the road and hit the pedestrian button by the sidewalk. (Since a bicycle doesn't have enough metal to trigger the sensor.) Thus I *have* to break a rule in order to get across the intersection - I either have to go through the light when it's red, or I have to ride on the sidewalk to use the pedestrian light. Now, I know you're thinking "But then the legal solution is to walk your bike in the pedestrian crosswalk" - but the thing is if they wanted me to do that WHY THE HELL DID THEY PAINT A BIKE LANE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD IF I CAN'T USE IT?
Kinda proves Steve Ballmer's comments about the lack of security in Open Source development, doesn't it?!
No. I just proves you're a posturing idiot. The crack was detected as soon as it was attempted to be inserted, in the experimental development version of the code that hadn't even made it into any final distributions yet.
And here's another example of your idiocy: If it happened in a software company, the hacker would be fired and probably charged with some kind of "espionage" charge and arrested.
This wasn't an "inside" job. If this happened at a company, to fill the analogy, it would have been an external person, NOT someone they could fire.
So, are you ignorant or are you a deliberate liar? Those are the only two possiblities given that you said the suit over Java between Sun and MS was based on the speed of the engine, when over here in the real world it was based on MS claiming their engine was Java when it didn't fit the standard to be called Java.
What about bugs or fraud making the receipt incorrect? You press "candidate A", the receipt says "cadidate A", but the electronic record says candidate B. That the machine *claims* it counted your vote as A is no guarantee that it really did. This would be a great way for the manufacturer of the vote machines to rig the election. For any verification to be worthwhile, it cannot depend on the honesty of the manufacturer. (A good idea is to mandate that a randonly selected subset of the machines must be manually counted in each election, to verify that their receipts match the electronic tallys those machines produced.)
You don't even need to register to vote to avoid the memory overflow. All the election officials needed to do was count the total population in the precinct which could, in theory, be a voter, registered or not, and then make sure the system can handle that capacity at least. Unless it's storing a gigantic amount of data per vote (and if it is, that makes me suspicious of why it needs to), then millions of votes could be stored easily in the memory of a cheapass desktop PC even. This shouldn't have been an issue at all.
So a few old goats in Florida don't know their right from their left.
That's not the problem that they're trying to solve. The problem is that the current mishmash of systems leads to a large margin of error in the COUNTING of the votes (not just the placing of the votes by stupid people). In the 2000 election, the margin of error in florida due to the counting was bigger than the difference in the vote totals. That's a failure of the system. If people keep parroting the mantra that "Every vote counts", then they'd damn well better mean it by making sure the system counts the votes with 100% accuracy. (For example, some ballots were lost in transit, which is obviously not the fault of the voters who were thus disenfranchised.)
However, I do agree that the current proposals don't make a good replacement, as they are even MORE error prone (and worse yet, FRAUD prone).
Actually, what is proposed doesn't depend on voters having to verify ballots (that would be no good anyway since the machine can lie and store a different vote electronically than was printed on the receipt.) The propsal is that in any election, a random sampling of the machines must be manually counted to verify that the paper reciepts in the box match the totals the machine is reporting electronically. This is to keep the company that make the machines honest and avoid fraud in the software.
Without making me read the entire thing right now, can you answer this about HR2239? The way you phrased it makes it sound like it makes touch screens with receipts mandatory. That I would not support. I would, however, support a bill that says IF you are going to do the idiocy of trusting a company to make good electronic voting machines THEN you must include the paper receipt feature. (Phrasing it that way leaves open the possibility that you don't HAVE to implement touch-screens if you don't want to.)
elecrronic devices are more reliable and less prone to failure than the older voting hardware
Oh, but they *are*, in general. The problem isn't *failure*. It's *deliberate fraud*, which is harder to detect with an electronic system than with a paper one.
While I too don't like the "one vote" system, as it tends to make people polarize into two parties, you have to realize that a ranking system doesn't work either because (in theory) in the USA a write-in candidate should always be an option. So, how do I rank *your* write-in candidate low when I didn't even know you were going to write it in? So, to vote *agaisnt* a candidate by ranking it low, that candidate has to be printed on the ballot. It could be possible to make a grassroots campaign unfairly sneak a write-in under the radar such that people don't know to vote against it.
Here where I vote, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, we have the same thing (except that they make you use a blue felt tip pen on a chain at the booth instead of a pencil - apparently it's crisper and easier for the reader to scan the pen than a pencil, although I have seen people use pencil and the scanner accepted it.)
I like this system the best because it *IS* computer counted, and the machines DO collect their data together quickly, but the ballot itself is on paper and is retained in case it is needed for a recount. (And if you fill in the arrow next to the "write-in" blank, and fill in a name, then the machine detects this and sorts the ballot into a different box set aside for write-ins, which a human has to look through later. There is no dual record where the paper receipt is different from the electronic record. The electronic record was read off of the paper sheet. If a recount is called for, and the people don't trust the machine, the paper ballots are there and are guaranteed to be what you filled out.)
You don't need complex machines like punchcards or butterfly ballots to achive automated vote counting, which is why the florida system baffled me so much when I heard about it. It's simple and easy to just use a simple form that can be read by a scanner. The technology is not new - I've been doing "scan-tron"s with Number 2 pencils since the first grade of school.
Well, what happens in practice is that a lot of people ignore most of the ballot and leave it blank, only voting on the big federal stuff (US Congress, and President). The local stuff like state congress, county sherrif, county treasurer, and so on are often ignored. I wish this wasn't the case, since this is often how a minority of dedicated people end up taking over local positions even though their opinions are not representative. (For example, there was a push by fundamentalists to get onto school boards this way as a means of furthering their agenda by controlling what is told to everyone's kids in school. It worked well because everyone is so apathetic about those local elections. They shouldn't be, but they are.) When you hear these cases of school boards wanting to enforce that creationism should be taught in science classes, that usually is coming from such an incident, and is not indicative of the opinions of the general population. (But it is indicative of the laziness of the general population to not bother voting down theses people.)
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm, a lawyer being biased in favor of a client is not a problem. They are SUPPOSED to be on the client's side. That's the deal.
Anger is always - always - fear in disguise. -- Spider Robinson
This "Spider Robinson", whoever that is, is wrong. You can get angry about something which you are not directly involved in, and thus are under no danger from, and thus have no fear about. All it takes for that to happen is to witness a wrongdoing against someone else, and to have a shred of human empathy for that someone else.
Since when does the clause mention that IBM has to be the one doing the buyout for the lawyers to get the 20% share?
Normally, MS cannot get into the unix business due to an agreement they signed when they spun off Xenix to a different company (They agreed that they would not compete against the product line they were selling off to someone else, and thus they would not get involved in the unix market again.) But - here's the interesting thing - what's the company they signed this agreement with? SCO. (Not the current people at SCO, mind you, but I would imagine the company still owns that contract even though none of its members are the same people as back then.) So, the ONLY way Microsoft could get into the Unix business legally would be if SCO ceased to exist (or became a part of Microsoft so that MS would be in charge of both sides of the agreement and thus could nullify it.)
I've sometimes suspected that this is the reason some aspects of Windows that are copies of some unix idea get greatly mutated. They can't just use all of the same technology directly the same way without being in danger of producing a unixy enough system that it might violate that previous agreement. So they make stupid changes perhaps just to cover their ass legally.
It's sad that most vehicles don't even START to pull over until they're sure that the siren is coming right for them.
NO, that's a good thing. You can hear a siren for a long way off. You don't want to have all traffic on side streets and parallel streets coming to a stop too - that would actually clog up traffic worse and make the ambulance/fire/police car have more congestion to deal with. You should only pull over if the vehicle with the siren is on the road behind you.
(But, people do wait too long to realize this fact. As soon as you hear the siren you should
be checking behind you to see coming from behind you on your street. Most people wait too long to make that check.)
The first traffic detectors were electric-eyes. They discontinued the practice because pedestrians could make "fake" cars get counted by just waving an object across the sensor, and thus get the light to change frivolously. The induction sensor is used because it ONLY gets triggered by large quanities
of metal like a car (which sucks for bicyclists.)
Standing waves are a big culprit in causing and
keeping traffic jammed.
If you model the traffic as a single road with no intersections, or on-ramps then this makes sense. But in the real world, the length of road each car takes up affects the capacity of the road per mile, and thus leads to more congestion when you take into account the need to insert new cars into the flow (from on-ramps and/or intersections.)
If more people were like him, then traffic jams would cover more length of the road, and thus get worse. (If a traffic jam covers one mile when drivers are leaving a distance of D between cars, then that same number of cars will cover 2 miles if the drivers switch to leaving a distance of 2*D between them. In theory, if NO OTHER CARS are taken into account, that doesn't matter. But in the real world, where there is other traffic entering and leaving the road, the distance the jam covers is quite relevant. If it covers twice as much distance, that typically means the congestion affects twice as many OTHER people not originally part of it (waiting at intersections, jamming up on-ramps, and so forth), which then expands the size of the jam off to more side-streets and so on.
The more distance a jam covers, the worse it gets as it affects all the side streets attached to it.
If you count the number of cars crossing the sensor *even when the light is green and cars are passing right through*, then you can get a good impression of the level of traffic going each way, and adjust the light's timings to match. Some traffic lights already do this.
Those things piss me off when I'm on a bicycle. There's a bike lane painted on the road, and I'm supposed to stay in it - but if I want the light to change I have to go over to the side of the road and hit the pedestrian button by the sidewalk. (Since a bicycle doesn't have enough metal to trigger the sensor.) Thus I *have* to break a rule in order to get across the intersection - I either have to go through the light when it's red, or I have to ride on the sidewalk to use the pedestrian light. Now, I know you're thinking "But then the legal solution is to walk your bike in the pedestrian crosswalk" - but the thing is if they wanted me to do that WHY THE HELL DID THEY PAINT A BIKE LANE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD IF I CAN'T USE IT?
You can't test the truthfulness non-booleans.
The fact that C considers NULL pointers to be "false" is very handy, as in:
if( fp = fopen("file","w") )
{
file opened correctly, so use the fp pointer.
}
else
{
error handling here
}
Kinda proves Steve Ballmer's comments about the lack of security in Open Source development, doesn't it?!
No. I just proves you're a posturing idiot. The crack was detected as soon as it was attempted to be inserted, in the experimental development version of the code that hadn't even made it into any final distributions yet.
And here's another example of your idiocy:
If it happened in a software company, the hacker would be fired and probably charged with some kind of "espionage" charge and arrested.
This wasn't an "inside" job. If this happened at a company, to fill the analogy, it would have been an external person, NOT someone they could fire.
And don't kid yourselves, a computer OS is not that important in the scheme of things.
Are you trying for a +5 Funny?
So, are you ignorant or are you a deliberate liar? Those are the only two possiblities given that you said the suit over Java between Sun and MS was based on the speed of the engine, when over here in the real world it was based on MS claiming their engine was Java when it didn't fit the standard to be called Java.
It's entirely possible for something to be an elitist statement AND be simple truth. The first way you phrased it makes more sense.
What about bugs or fraud making the receipt incorrect? You press "candidate A", the receipt says "cadidate A", but the electronic record says candidate B. That the machine *claims* it counted your vote as A is no guarantee that it really did. This would be a great way for the manufacturer of the vote machines to rig the election. For any verification to be worthwhile, it cannot depend on the honesty of the manufacturer. (A good idea is to mandate that a randonly selected subset of the machines must be manually counted in each election, to verify that their receipts match the electronic tallys those machines produced.)
You don't even need to register to vote to avoid the memory overflow. All the election officials needed to do was count the total population in the precinct which could, in theory, be a voter, registered or not, and then make sure the system can handle that capacity at least. Unless it's storing a gigantic amount of data per vote (and if it is, that makes me suspicious of why it needs to), then millions of votes could be stored easily in the memory of a cheapass desktop PC even. This shouldn't have been an issue at all.
So a few old goats in Florida don't know their right from their left.
That's not the problem that they're trying to solve. The problem is that the current mishmash of systems leads to a large margin of error in the COUNTING of the votes (not just the placing of the votes by stupid people). In the 2000 election, the margin of error in florida due to the counting was bigger than the difference in the vote totals. That's a failure of the system. If people keep parroting the mantra that "Every vote counts", then they'd damn well better mean it by making sure the system counts the votes with 100% accuracy. (For example, some ballots were lost in transit, which is obviously not the fault of the voters who were thus disenfranchised.)
However, I do agree that the current proposals don't make a good replacement, as they are even MORE error prone (and worse yet, FRAUD prone).
Actually, what is proposed doesn't depend on voters having to verify ballots (that would be no good anyway since the machine can lie and store a different vote electronically than was printed on the receipt.) The propsal is that in any election, a random sampling of the machines must be manually counted to verify that the paper reciepts in the box match the totals the machine is reporting electronically. This is to keep the company that make the machines honest and avoid fraud in the software.
Without making me read the entire thing right now, can you answer this about HR2239?
The way you phrased it makes it sound like it makes touch screens with receipts mandatory. That I would not support. I would, however, support a bill that says IF you are going to do the idiocy of trusting a company to make good electronic voting machines THEN you must include the paper receipt feature. (Phrasing it that way leaves open the possibility that you don't HAVE to implement touch-screens if you don't want to.)
elecrronic devices are more reliable and less prone to failure than the older voting hardware
Oh, but they *are*, in general. The problem isn't *failure*. It's *deliberate fraud*, which is harder to detect with an electronic system than with a paper one.
While I too don't like the "one vote" system, as it tends to make people polarize into two parties, you have to realize that a ranking system doesn't work either because (in theory) in the USA a write-in candidate should always be an option. So, how do I rank *your* write-in candidate low when I didn't even know you were going to write it in? So, to vote *agaisnt* a candidate by ranking it low, that candidate has to be printed on the ballot. It could be possible to make a grassroots campaign unfairly sneak a write-in under the radar such that people don't know to vote against it.
Here where I vote, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, we have the same thing (except that they make you use a blue felt tip pen on a chain at the booth instead of a pencil - apparently it's crisper and easier for the reader to scan the pen than a pencil, although I have seen people use pencil and the scanner accepted it.)
I like this system the best because it *IS* computer counted, and the machines DO collect their data together quickly, but the ballot itself is on paper and is retained in case it is needed for a recount. (And if you fill in the arrow next to the "write-in" blank, and fill in a name, then the machine detects this and sorts the ballot into a different box set aside for write-ins, which a human has to look through later. There is no dual record where the paper receipt is different from the electronic record. The electronic record was read off of the paper sheet. If a recount is called for, and the people don't trust the machine, the paper ballots are there and are guaranteed to be what you filled out.)
You don't need complex machines like punchcards or butterfly ballots to achive automated vote counting, which is why the florida system baffled me so much when I heard about it. It's simple and easy to just use a simple form that can be read by a scanner. The technology is not new - I've been doing "scan-tron"s with Number 2 pencils since the first grade of school.
Well, what happens in practice is that a lot of people ignore most of the ballot and leave it blank, only voting on the big federal stuff (US Congress, and President). The local stuff like state congress, county sherrif, county treasurer, and so on are often ignored. I wish this wasn't the case, since this is often how a minority of dedicated people end up taking over local positions even though their opinions are not representative. (For example, there was a push by fundamentalists to get onto school boards this way as a means of furthering their agenda by controlling what is told to everyone's kids in school. It worked well because everyone is so apathetic about those local elections. They shouldn't be, but they are.) When you hear these cases of school boards wanting to enforce that creationism should be taught in science classes, that usually is coming from such an incident, and is not indicative of the opinions of the general population. (But it is indicative of the laziness of the general population to not bother voting down theses people.)
>the main argument against it here is scale
Sorry that's not on, pencil and paper scales very well.
Next time try reading the entire post. He *said* that he didn't agree with that scale argument, further down in the text.