This is mainly an advertising stunt. The State of Geneva has been promoting an evoting (internet) system for the past 6 years. They complain that citizens are not interested in the voting process, but every time computer scientists (mainly free software advocates) have indicated that they had doubts about the system (but noone except the State has access to the system), the criticisms were treated with disdain (to say the least !). Some background information about the system is at http://www.geneve.ch/evoting/english/welcome.asp (it does not talk about the criticisms, though).
Now, obviously, they can not link every citizen's computer with the central voting server with a quantum-encrypted link; here, they are just encrypting a 500 meters internal link between two servers of the State. This election does not use evoting; however, this is part of a general policy of showing "see, we do the best that's available, so our system is secure" -- they don't care about the fact that with evoting, the weakest link is the individual citizen's computer. Instead, they use quantum cryptography to protect an already secure link -- already secure, because votes are tabulated in the first center, so they get the results out from there on paper as well, which is pretty hard to hack...
Great, now Switzerland will get involved and claim that the red cross is obviously a derivative work of their flag...
Well, they potentially could, since it is true; see for example Wikipedia (Swiss flag):
The Red Cross symbol used by the International Committee of the Red Cross is based on the Swiss flag. The Red Cross on white background was the original protection symbol declared at the 1864 Geneva Convention. It is, in terms of its color, a reversal of the Swiss national flag, a meaning which was adopted to honor Swiss native and Red Cross founder Henry Dunant.
Since the emblem was to reflect the neutrality of the armed forces' medical services and the protection conferred on them, the emblem adopted was formed by reversing the colours of the Swiss flag.
(both articles do not cite the same origin, but agree that the red cross is based on the Swiss flag).
Didn't the wikimedia foundation used to provide a way for anyone to download the entire 25GB+ database for wikipedia?
http://download.wikipedia.org/ is what you are looking for; you can get monthly database dumps for all the wikis, containing XML files with the articles (or other meta-data, depending on what you are looking for).
Hells, why not link it up to the drivers license numbers.
Why should I prove that I know how to drive in order to edit Wikipedia ?
More generally, you are assuming that anonymous editors, people younger than 21 and people without a drivers license/ID currently bring more bad things than good things to Wikipedia. You may be right, but I don't see any reason to believe it just because you say it. Many anonymous editors make excellent contributions to Wikipedia, as do a lot of teenagers. What is the point of cutting down vandalism if we lose more valuable content simultaneously ?
Some more details about the study are available at http://www.bsa.org/globalstudy/
It's worth reading, even if there is not much information. Their methodology is still laughable. Any statistican who reads their study would throw it in the wastebasket immediately. Or rather, he would use it as an example of "what not to do" for his first year students.
So the study don't say anything about opensource -- so as mentioned before, anyone who uses OpenOffice counts as a pirate. The press releases of BSA say that this factor has been taken into account but (1) I haven't seen anything in the report and (2) you can't, except if you accept very wide error margins.
Talking about which, their report do not provide any kind of estimation about the errors, which is a good indication that the people who made it are not competent. For example, BSA insists on the difference between an illegal copying rate of 32%
in Australia, versus 29% in other countries -- there is NO WAY that such a difference can be significant given their methodology.
The worst thing, as mentioned by other people, is that this piece of crap will be shown to every government on the planet to lobby them to enforce IP laws and make new ones if "necessary".
Slashdot Mirror
Now, obviously, they can not link every citizen's computer with the central voting server with a quantum-encrypted link; here, they are just encrypting a 500 meters internal link between two servers of the State. This election does not use evoting; however, this is part of a general policy of showing "see, we do the best that's available, so our system is secure" -- they don't care about the fact that with evoting, the weakest link is the individual citizen's computer. Instead, they use quantum cryptography to protect an already secure link -- already secure, because votes are tabulated in the first center, so they get the results out from there on paper as well, which is pretty hard to hack...
Zorglub
http://download.wikipedia.org/ is what you are looking for; you can get monthly database dumps for all the wikis, containing XML files with the articles (or other meta-data, depending on what you are looking for).
Zorglub
Why should I prove that I know how to drive in order to edit Wikipedia ?
More generally, you are assuming that anonymous editors, people younger than 21 and people without a drivers license/ID currently bring more bad things than good things to Wikipedia. You may be right, but I don't see any reason to believe it just because you say it. Many anonymous editors make excellent contributions to Wikipedia, as do a lot of teenagers. What is the point of cutting down vandalism if we lose more valuable content simultaneously ?
Zorglub
Zorglub
It's worth reading, even if there is not much information. Their methodology is still laughable. Any statistican who reads their study would throw it in the wastebasket immediately. Or rather, he would use it as an example of "what not to do" for his first year students.
So the study don't say anything about opensource -- so as mentioned before, anyone who uses OpenOffice counts as a pirate. The press releases of BSA say that this factor has been taken into account but (1) I haven't seen anything in the report and (2) you can't, except if you accept very wide error margins.
Talking about which, their report do not provide any kind of estimation about the errors, which is a good indication that the people who made it are not competent. For example, BSA insists on the difference between an illegal copying rate of 32% in Australia, versus 29% in other countries -- there is NO WAY that such a difference can be significant given their methodology.
The worst thing, as mentioned by other people, is that this piece of crap will be shown to every government on the planet to lobby them to enforce IP laws and make new ones if "necessary".
Zorglub