Last i heard, it would only create some sort of bastardized python code that was no longer cross platform.
That's not correct; IronPython runs on Mono or.NET, so it will run on any Mono supported OS as well as Windows.
You may mean that IronPython scripts are not 100% compatible with a CPython implementation. Well, duh! Even different versions of CPython aren't 100% compatible! Jython isn't 100% compatible with CPython. IronPython is fairly compatible with CPython 2.4.4; the list of differences is available here, so you can avoid them if you ever want to run your code on different Python systems.
The big advantage IronPython has is the integration with.NET. It's trivial to access.NET libraries from IronPython, while CPython doesn't make it easy. I'd expect migration mostly from cPython to IronPython (the biggest issue I had was regex related). If you don't want.NET integration, stay with cPython.
"I was a WP user. But, the boys in Orem let the product lanquish and the Corel ignored it for too many years."
Even so that is not what killed WP. It was killed because of price. People want cheep/free (see previous./ article)
Actually, I was a fanatical WP user back then, having gone through 4.2, 5.0 and 5.1, and I knew and used all the F-key combinations. The DOS versions of WP used all modifier keys with all 12 function keys, so you had to learn what F1 - F12 did by themselves, and what they did with Shift/Alt/Ctrl. Then came Windows. I tried Word for Windows, and it had a compatibility mode for WP users that mapped equivalent functions to the same key combinations. While the mapping wasn't always perfect, since the functionality didn't overlap perfectly, it allowed me to continue using my muscle memory for text editing. When WP for windows finally came out (I believe it was 6.0), I got it immediately. It was slow, bulky and buggy, but I was horrified to see that the key combinations didn't work anymore! That completely broke it for me; instead of pressing the keyboard I had to reach for the mouse, open some menu and do something there. At this point, ironically, Word was a better WP 5.x than WP 6.0. So, I had to switch to Word because I liked WP too much:(
If it has no use in "discovering criminal activity", then how exactly will it be abused?
In discovering non-criminal activity that should be none of their business anyway. If the police gets the data, data-mining companies will get the data; they'll discover you parked 5 times last month in front of the liquor store - the trucking company where you applied for work won't hire you, because you may have a drinking problem, no matter that you were going to the computer store across the street. They'll discover your car was parked overnight in the same parking lot where a colleague keeps her car; your wife's lawyer will have a ball with this at the divorce proceedings - and try to prove you had actually lent the car to a friend that happened to live in the same building. They'll find out that you drove to the city on the date when some security-related event happened; since you don't usually drive to the city, that will be flagged as unusual behavior. Some nice people in dark suits will show up at your office and ask some discrete questions - guess the promotion to this new position where you'll work on a sensitive project won't happen anymore, just in case. And so on, and so on. The possibilities are endless.
So Einstein was an idiot to? [sic] He was quoted many times saying the same thing about science and deity.
Sigh. Here we go again. No, he wasn't. Here's a quote that should clarify Einstein's opinion: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. This quote (also others, and more detail) can be found at the site linked above. And, if you cared to read Dyson's actual speech from the link in my initial post, you could have seen that his theology is very different from Einstein's.
His main point as I understand it is that the real world is far too messy to be explained by simple, ideal meteorological models. Of course, he's right.
No, he's not. He says that, while not being a climatologist, he studied the climate models, but they don't work because "the real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand". That's a fallacy named "argument from incredulity" - I provided a Wikipedia link in another post. He doesn't explain how the current models don't work. He just asserts he can't believe they do, therefore they don't.
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
Well, with all due respect for Dyson and his past work, I'm inclined to agree here. First, I read his essay and he doesn't seem to have any real arguments, backed by real numbers. He's basically arguing from personal incredulity, and explaining at length how that makes him a heretic, and therefore right. Second, I was at one of his talks quite recently (he was promoting one of his books), and somebody in the audience asked him about Dawkins' The God Delusion (just published). Dyson almost exploded; his (very volubly expounded) thesis was that Dawkins does immeasurable harm to science, and, if I understood him correctly, he almost said that one can't be an atheist and a scientist. I was quite surprised, so I went and did a Google search on Dyson; I found a number of things, among which this. So, sadly, I believe Dyson has suffered a bad attack of the Brain Eater in his old age.
Trivia: Before the interwebs came along "Yahoo" was (still is) Australian slang for an obnoxiously loud fool, as in: "I wish that yahoo would shut the fuck up".
Trivia: Before Australia came along, "Yahoo" was the name Jonathan Swift gave to the degenerate humans in his Gulliver's Travels
used to interview like that, too. I don't think it served me well. Better for you to give a one hour assignment, hooked up to the internet, and walk away for an hour. Don't hover. Give them a problem where Google will help, but not have an exact answer. Let them Google. Googling something is part of the toolset. You're attempting to constrain their toolset. Don't do that.
I'll have to disagree; as an interviewer I'm interested in hiring a man, not a toolset. Google may find them a solution, but doesn't tell me how well they understand the issues, potential bugs, security issues or other gotchas in the solution they find. For example, the code samples they find on the web may have checks for some error conditions; what guarantee do I get that they'll include checks like those in the code they write, if they don't really understand why they were there to begin with?
The whole purpose of the interview process is not to get a solution to the interview problems; it's to evaluate the candidate. In the past I have hired people who don't actually reach a solution to the problems I give, if they convince me they can think and have good programming "instincts". I'm less interested in memorized stuff, like the meaning of all the bits in some TCP header. That can indeed be googled.
Portland, Oregon. But yes, most programmers I know are indeed either contract or government workers.
Your sample must be really skewed; I know a couple of junior to mid-level programmers working for Intel in Beaverton, and I believe at least one of them makes 80+ an year. A very quick and cursory web search found quite a few jobs paying well over $40000 in Oregon. For example, a.NET engineer position here was paying up to 48000/year, and that's really entry-level.
I don't know a single software engineer that has earned HALF that since 1999. Are you sure those numbers aren't old?
Are you sure those people really *are* software engineers? Working full time, in senior positions? I know lots of software engineers and not one of them earns less than $50000 - and that's for relatively junior positions; senior programmers, technical leads and architects make seriously more. I'd say the average is close to the estimate, or even a bit higher. Now, in other areas the salaries may be smaller, but I can't believe NO programmer makes more than 44 thou a year wherever you live. The most plausible explanation is that your sample is non representative - perhaps your social group consists mostly of contract workers? If you only manage to get a few contracts a year, your total revenue may be so small. Or maybe you're not living in the USA? If you do, I'm curious: in what region do you get such terrible salaries for full time employment as a senior programmer?
My question is why would anyone place their information security "Trust" in MS BitLocker, or Indochinese hardware (TPM chips) that likely already contain built in backdoors for John Law, and corporate drones?
Open Source Full disk encryption is fast and free
And why would you trust it any more than MS or Cisco or others? Using "Open source" as an equivalent of "cryptographically impregnable" is a dangerous misconception. A serious company selling security solutions has a compelling interest to ensure the correctness and robustness of their solution; an anonymous coder doesn't really, even assuming he's a bona fide developer trying to provide a good solution, and not some russian hacker really curious about your credit card number. You could trot out the old chestnut about how with many eyeballs all bugs are shallow, but that's just another misconception. Really, how many people actually bother going line by line through their disk encryption software to make sure that it's solid and not malicious? And how many people have the expertise to even realise there may be a backdoor in the crypto code? A good trojan will not look like if (strcmp(key, "MYSECRETKEY!!!LOLZ") != 0). And even if somebody will go through the code and find that this particular application is bugged, how will users get this information? With Cisco, Microsoft or Apple you'll get a patch sooner or later, or at least e-mail letting you know there is a problem. The process is much more difficult if you use some random application off the Internet; you'll need to scan the security lists, check often for new releases, and generally go through much more effort than a normal user would or even should do.
Now, for everyday low security tasks, such as making relatively sure a nosy 14 year old doesn't get into your "special" files, a generic encryption app is probably ok. For serious proffesional stuff, I wouldn't trust something just because it's open source.
I biked through Dagoretti Market on our way out of town
You're a braver man than me, Gunga Din!:)
I went through Dagoretti too - but in a Land Rover; scary place, but we didn't get attacked either.
In fact, we saw a lot of genuine hospitality and kindness.
I have to agree; I had very good experiences in Kenya (and got some great photos); I took the reasonable precautions (don't run at night around waving wads of banknotes;) ), and nothing bad happened. The only complaint I may have was the hard sell here and there, for touristy stuff. And even that wasn't as bad as you get in other places, like Egypt or Turkey
You should be able to build a machine based entirely on open components, from the CPU, through the firmware to the OS and finally up to the voting software.
You should be able, indeed; and, as another poster says, there is no technical requirement to run voting software on a full general-purpose computer; a dedicated machine would be safer, avoid a lot of unnecessary complication and close a lot of potential holes.
Let me note though that using a dedicated machine, even if it ran completely open software won't close all security issues. As I mention somewhere else, an intruder may intervene during the assembly of the machine (for example, replacing the trusted CPU with a backdoored chip in similar packaging), the compilation of the code (see the famous article on trusting trust), so all those steps will need to be certified. Naysayers like Mr. Lipari will surely attack those potential vulnerabilities if the OS escrow gets somehow resolved. And, in the end, such a dedicated machine and the security-enhanced fabrication will very probably be quite expensive, so Mr Lipari will have a good economic argument for discarding e-voting.
In the end, I think e-voting should happen sooner or later, but the current approach is doomed to failure. You can't trust the current unholy combination of code developed in secrecy by private firms, some of them with known political biases, difficulty of verification by external parties, interested politicians and many other issues discussed here and in other places. Until a well-designed solution emerges, pen and paper are still better - and very probably cheaper as well
I am not a programmer, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how complicated could this code be?
I can't think of any reasons why Microsoft is being difficult here. I can't think of any complex algorithms you'd have to invent and therefore protect to display and count votes.
If I understand the problem correctly (please correct me if not - but I did RTFA, and went to the source, Bo Lipari's blog as well, and also to his organization's web site), the requirement is not for MS to escrow the code for the *voting* software; MS aren't writing it anyway, Diebold and others are. The requirement is that, since some manufacturers of the above-mentioned voting software wrote it for Windows, MS is supposed to escrow all the *Windows* source code to NYC. This is very silly IMHO (from an engineering point of view), but of course reason needn't apply.
Obviously, MS doesn't want to escrow all the Windows source to a bunch of political hacks. This has been presented on Slashdot as an attack by Microsoft on democracy and mum' apple pie, but what I believe is really hapenning is just a local political maneuver, as follows:
The hullabaloo was started by a certain Mr. Lipari who seems to have a complete dislike for any kind of electronic voting. IMHO, he invented this specific requirement knowing it's totally ridiculous. He presented it as defending democracy, and managed to sell it to the public. His intention is rather, I believe, to torpedo the whole e-voting concept in NY by getting ignorant politicians to vote for impossible requirements. Well, good for him - he seems to have succeeded. And if e-voting companies switch to Linux of FreeBSD or Windows CE (or any OS with available source code) he'll then ask for the BIOS, and the CPU firmware, and so on, until they give up.
Possibly but I'd say you are less likley to be murdered in Kenya than South Africa. (...)
I went to a hotel there and we were advised not to walk on the street at any time, night or day.
Well, I've been to Nairobi, and it's quite similar - all homes in Karen and Langata (the rich suburbs of Nairobi) are small fortresses, with alarms, barbed wire, fences and dogs. You see askaris (armed policemen) everywhere in downtown Nairobi, and, when arriving at a hotel, they inspect the underside of your car for bombs. And from what I read, Nairobi and Jo'burg take turns being the crime capital of Africa. Especially lately, because of the war in neighboring Somalia, armed robbery and other attacks have grown a lot.
But except for the crime problem (which is worst in Nairobi), and for the widespread corruption (which you'll find almost everywhere in Africa) Kenya is a great place to visit, and one of the more advanced countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The education levels are fairly high, you see lots of schools everywhere, even in the impoverished countryside areas. So Google's decision to go to Kenya isn't totally unreasonable.
It should be constructed of off-the-shelf parts and it should run open source code!
I'd be careful about what "off the shelf" means, given the requirements of the NY law. You can't really use modern processors - the BIOS, the firmware on the CPU and the firmware on all other components wouldn't be in escrow, would they? Anyway, if you want to be thorough the schematics of all versions of the voting machines, all the chip fabrication masks, the schematics of the industrial tools and processes in all the factories making and assembling the chips and the voting machines should be in escrow as well; an intruder could intervene at any of those steps and create backdoors usable for falsifying the vote. I don't really see how you can control all those factors, so the NY legislature seems fairly clueless (not that that surprises me).
Of course, we need to draw a line somewhere; do we trust Lenovo, or whoever gets to assemble the voting machines themselves? Do we trust the BIOS writer? Do we trust Intel? Do we trust the OS writer? Do we trust the voting software manufacturer? The network provider?
Pen and paper don't seem to have all those issues - why not use those?
While both Europe and the U.S. have a pretty retarded policies when it comes to censorship (neither violence nor sex are appropriate things for the government to censor), the idea that sex in media is worse than violence does make sense. It is very, very, very unlikely that someone is going to commit murder. It is very, very, very likely that someone is going to have sex.
And why does it matter? It's very, very, very likely that someone is going to eat sometime, so we should censure all references to food in movies? Sex is a natural behavior, everybody will engage in it sooner or later (there's still some hope left for you slashdotters!), and educating children about sex is a much better way to go about things than making it a forbidden and hidden dirty secret. Procreation is part of the normal functioning of human race and society. Murder isn't. What's the message you send kids when you're ok showing them somebody's head blown off, but have a conniption at the accidental sight of a nipple?
No religion on earth recognizes "Marriage" as anything other than a relationship between a man and a woman. Animals are not included either, so I guess those means Republicans are not only picking on homosexuals, they are picking on the bestiality crowd too.
And why does what any religion does matter at all? We're talking about a series of rights that come with marriage, and those rights have nothing to do with religion.
The problem here is the unholy (yeah, yeah) mix between a legal/social concept (marriage and the associated rules on taxation, property ownership, inheritance, benefits and pension rights and so on), and a religious one (marriage as a church ceremony, with the associated magical verbiage). The two need to be strongly separated.
Of course, fundamentalists (and churches) dislike the idea; what they really want is to force everybody to live their lifes conforming to whatever the fundies' particular religious norms are. That's why they fight against separation between church and state: it reduces the powers of religion. So, in their usual way, they keep trying to muddy the subject. Your reference to animals is a good example of the usual FUD thrown around this concept.
Religious figures (priests, pastors, imams etc) should not be able to perform marriages in the legal sense (though of course, they can perform religious marriages for people who like the pageantry or whatever spiritual component they find there). No religious marriage should be recognized by the state or by itself confer any legal rights.
There should be an unique state mechanism (call it life-partnership or whatever you want) that allows everybody who wants to commit their love to another person to do so and get a legal base on their life commitment with all the associated legal status and benefits. Everybody should have the right to decide to share their life with somebody, and they should be able to do so without a bunch of [religious book of your choice]-thumpers interfering.
I think this makes a lot of sense; much more than having everybody pay to support "faith based initiatives", no matter what's their religious affiliation. I don't want any my tax money to support religious activities. I hope that in Germany churches do pay the government for the cost of the paperwork and collection services though.
Give me integrated live traffic updates or don't bother, no two Mondays are alike.
Repeating myself, but live traffic updates are available now in the USA on some high end Garmin GPS devices, like the Nuvi 680 or c580 (see a link in my post above). If you're in one of the supported regions, your device will receive traffic information using some wireless broadcast mechanism and use it to compute the optimum route (the Nuvi 680 uses Microsoft's DirectBand for traffic updates, and I believe RDS is also available in some areas). Now, from what I gathered, they can get traffic incident information (construction or accidents) and/or traffic flow (average speeds in certain points), depending on the region.
The broadcasting of live data itself works. In my opinion a more difficult issue is data availability. I'm talking about coverage (whether sensors for traffic flow exist in a certain area) and latency (how quickly does the information get to your device, especially accident information).
I live in a region that gets both flow and incident data, and I had a chance to play with a Nuvi 680 for a couple of weeks. The routing part is pretty cool; the device recommends different routes between the same points on different days, based on the traffic situation. The test period was rather short, but, FWIW, I didn't get stuck in traffic at all during those weeks
If i got a gps antenna, i could have a gps "device" that factors in traffic.
Already exists. I got a chance to play with one. It was quite cool: on my daily drive from work, it would route me differently on different days, depending on the traffic situation on the highway. It's still a bit expensive for me, but I'll probably buy one sooner or later (the c580 is cheaper, but I like the large screen of the 680).
Slashdot Mirror
Last i heard, it would only create some sort of bastardized python code that was no longer cross platform.
.NET, so it will run on any Mono supported OS as well as Windows.
.NET. It's trivial to access .NET libraries from IronPython, while CPython doesn't make it easy. I'd expect migration mostly from cPython to IronPython (the biggest issue I had was regex related). If you don't want .NET integration, stay with cPython.
That's not correct; IronPython runs on Mono or
You may mean that IronPython scripts are not 100% compatible with a CPython implementation. Well, duh! Even different versions of CPython aren't 100% compatible! Jython isn't 100% compatible with CPython. IronPython is fairly compatible with CPython 2.4.4; the list of differences is available here, so you can avoid them if you ever want to run your code on different Python systems.
The big advantage IronPython has is the integration with
Imagine if an atheist ran for president.
He/she would not get elected.
"I was a WP user. But, the boys in Orem let the product lanquish and the Corel ignored it for too many years."
./ article)
:(
Even so that is not what killed WP. It was killed because of price. People want cheep/free (see previous
Actually, I was a fanatical WP user back then, having gone through 4.2, 5.0 and 5.1, and I knew and used all the F-key combinations. The DOS versions of WP used all modifier keys with all 12 function keys, so you had to learn what F1 - F12 did by themselves, and what they did with Shift/Alt/Ctrl. Then came Windows. I tried Word for Windows, and it had a compatibility mode for WP users that mapped equivalent functions to the same key combinations. While the mapping wasn't always perfect, since the functionality didn't overlap perfectly, it allowed me to continue using my muscle memory for text editing. When WP for windows finally came out (I believe it was 6.0), I got it immediately. It was slow, bulky and buggy, but I was horrified to see that the key combinations didn't work anymore! That completely broke it for me; instead of pressing the keyboard I had to reach for the mouse, open some menu and do something there. At this point, ironically, Word was a better WP 5.x than WP 6.0. So, I had to switch to Word because I liked WP too much
If it has no use in "discovering criminal activity", then how exactly will it be abused?
In discovering non-criminal activity that should be none of their business anyway. If the police gets the data, data-mining companies will get the data; they'll discover you parked 5 times last month in front of the liquor store - the trucking company where you applied for work won't hire you, because you may have a drinking problem, no matter that you were going to the computer store across the street. They'll discover your car was parked overnight in the same parking lot where a colleague keeps her car; your wife's lawyer will have a ball with this at the divorce proceedings - and try to prove you had actually lent the car to a friend that happened to live in the same building. They'll find out that you drove to the city on the date when some security-related event happened; since you don't usually drive to the city, that will be flagged as unusual behavior. Some nice people in dark suits will show up at your office and ask some discrete questions - guess the promotion to this new position where you'll work on a sensitive project won't happen anymore, just in case. And so on, and so on. The possibilities are endless.
So Einstein was an idiot to? [sic] He was quoted many times saying the same thing about science and deity.
Sigh. Here we go again. No, he wasn't. Here's a quote that should clarify Einstein's opinion: It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. This quote (also others, and more detail) can be found at the site linked above. And, if you cared to read Dyson's actual speech from the link in my initial post, you could have seen that his theology is very different from Einstein's.
His main point as I understand it is that the real world is far too messy to be explained by simple, ideal meteorological models. Of course, he's right.
No, he's not. He says that, while not being a climatologist, he studied the climate models, but they don't work because "the real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand". That's a fallacy named "argument from incredulity" - I provided a Wikipedia link in another post. He doesn't explain how the current models don't work. He just asserts he can't believe they do, therefore they don't.
The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.
Well, with all due respect for Dyson and his past work, I'm inclined to agree here. First, I read his essay and he doesn't seem to have any real arguments, backed by real numbers. He's basically arguing from personal incredulity, and explaining at length how that makes him a heretic, and therefore right. Second, I was at one of his talks quite recently (he was promoting one of his books), and somebody in the audience asked him about Dawkins' The God Delusion (just published). Dyson almost exploded; his (very volubly expounded) thesis was that Dawkins does immeasurable harm to science, and, if I understood him correctly, he almost said that one can't be an atheist and a scientist. I was quite surprised, so I went and did a Google search on Dyson; I found a number of things, among which this. So, sadly, I believe Dyson has suffered a bad attack of the Brain Eater in his old age.
Marx made extensive use of Kantian dialectics, in which you have the thesis battling the antithesis until the synthesis arose.
I think you mean Hegel's dialectic, not Kant's. And, while Marx did use Hegel's dialectic, he famously claimed it's "standing on its head".
Trivia: Before the interwebs came along "Yahoo" was (still is) Australian slang for an obnoxiously loud fool, as in: "I wish that yahoo would shut the fuck up".
Trivia: Before Australia came along, "Yahoo" was the name Jonathan Swift gave to the degenerate humans in his Gulliver's Travels
That's unpossible!
For some reason the turn-out of pro voters was unexpectedly low.
used to interview like that, too. I don't think it served me well. Better for you to give a one hour assignment, hooked up to the internet, and walk away for an hour. Don't hover. Give them a problem where Google will help, but not have an exact answer. Let them Google. Googling something is part of the toolset. You're attempting to constrain their toolset. Don't do that.
I'll have to disagree; as an interviewer I'm interested in hiring a man, not a toolset. Google may find them a solution, but doesn't tell me how well they understand the issues, potential bugs, security issues or other gotchas in the solution they find. For example, the code samples they find on the web may have checks for some error conditions; what guarantee do I get that they'll include checks like those in the code they write, if they don't really understand why they were there to begin with?
The whole purpose of the interview process is not to get a solution to the interview problems; it's to evaluate the candidate. In the past I have hired people who don't actually reach a solution to the problems I give, if they convince me they can think and have good programming "instincts". I'm less interested in memorized stuff, like the meaning of all the bits in some TCP header. That can indeed be googled.
Portland, Oregon. But yes, most programmers I know are indeed either contract or government workers.
.NET engineer position here was paying up to 48000/year, and that's really entry-level.
Your sample must be really skewed; I know a couple of junior to mid-level programmers working for Intel in Beaverton, and I believe at least one of them makes 80+ an year. A very quick and cursory web search found quite a few jobs paying well over $40000 in Oregon. For example, a
[average $86400 per annum]
I don't know a single software engineer that has earned HALF that since 1999. Are you sure those numbers aren't old?
Are you sure those people really *are* software engineers? Working full time, in senior positions? I know lots of software engineers and not one of them earns less than $50000 - and that's for relatively junior positions; senior programmers, technical leads and architects make seriously more. I'd say the average is close to the estimate, or even a bit higher. Now, in other areas the salaries may be smaller, but I can't believe NO programmer makes more than 44 thou a year wherever you live. The most plausible explanation is that your sample is non representative - perhaps your social group consists mostly of contract workers? If you only manage to get a few contracts a year, your total revenue may be so small. Or maybe you're not living in the USA? If you do, I'm curious: in what region do you get such terrible salaries for full time employment as a senior programmer?
My question is why would anyone place their information security "Trust" in MS BitLocker, or Indochinese hardware (TPM chips) that likely already contain built in backdoors for John Law, and corporate drones?
Open Source Full disk encryption is fast and free
And why would you trust it any more than MS or Cisco or others? Using "Open source" as an equivalent of "cryptographically impregnable" is a dangerous misconception. A serious company selling security solutions has a compelling interest to ensure the correctness and robustness of their solution; an anonymous coder doesn't really, even assuming he's a bona fide developer trying to provide a good solution, and not some russian hacker really curious about your credit card number. You could trot out the old chestnut about how with many eyeballs all bugs are shallow, but that's just another misconception. Really, how many people actually bother going line by line through their disk encryption software to make sure that it's solid and not malicious? And how many people have the expertise to even realise there may be a backdoor in the crypto code? A good trojan will not look like if (strcmp(key, "MYSECRETKEY!!!LOLZ") != 0). And even if somebody will go through the code and find that this particular application is bugged, how will users get this information? With Cisco, Microsoft or Apple you'll get a patch sooner or later, or at least e-mail letting you know there is a problem. The process is much more difficult if you use some random application off the Internet; you'll need to scan the security lists, check often for new releases, and generally go through much more effort than a normal user would or even should do.
Now, for everyday low security tasks, such as making relatively sure a nosy 14 year old doesn't get into your "special" files, a generic encryption app is probably ok. For serious proffesional stuff, I wouldn't trust something just because it's open source.
Jambo, mzungu!
:)
;) ), and nothing bad happened. The only complaint I may have was the hard sell here and there, for touristy stuff. And even that wasn't as bad as you get in other places, like Egypt or Turkey
I biked through Dagoretti Market on our way out of town
You're a braver man than me, Gunga Din!
I went through Dagoretti too - but in a Land Rover; scary place, but we didn't get attacked either.
In fact, we saw a lot of genuine hospitality and kindness.
I have to agree; I had very good experiences in Kenya (and got some great photos); I took the reasonable precautions (don't run at night around waving wads of banknotes
You should be able to build a machine based entirely on open components, from the CPU, through the firmware to the OS and finally up to the voting software.
You should be able, indeed; and, as another poster says, there is no technical requirement to run voting software on a full general-purpose computer; a dedicated machine would be safer, avoid a lot of unnecessary complication and close a lot of potential holes.
Let me note though that using a dedicated machine, even if it ran completely open software won't close all security issues. As I mention somewhere else, an intruder may intervene during the assembly of the machine (for example, replacing the trusted CPU with a backdoored chip in similar packaging), the compilation of the code (see the famous article on trusting trust), so all those steps will need to be certified. Naysayers like Mr. Lipari will surely attack those potential vulnerabilities if the OS escrow gets somehow resolved. And, in the end, such a dedicated machine and the security-enhanced fabrication will very probably be quite expensive, so Mr Lipari will have a good economic argument for discarding e-voting.
In the end, I think e-voting should happen sooner or later, but the current approach is doomed to failure. You can't trust the current unholy combination of code developed in secrecy by private firms, some of them with known political biases, difficulty of verification by external parties, interested politicians and many other issues discussed here and in other places. Until a well-designed solution emerges, pen and paper are still better - and very probably cheaper as well
I am not a programmer, so maybe I'm way off base here, but how complicated could this code be?
I can't think of any reasons why Microsoft is being difficult here. I can't think of any complex algorithms you'd have to invent and therefore protect to display and count votes.
If I understand the problem correctly (please correct me if not - but I did RTFA, and went to the source, Bo Lipari's blog as well, and also to his organization's web site), the requirement is not for MS to escrow the code for the *voting* software; MS aren't writing it anyway, Diebold and others are. The requirement is that, since some manufacturers of the above-mentioned voting software wrote it for Windows, MS is supposed to escrow all the *Windows* source code to NYC. This is very silly IMHO (from an engineering point of view), but of course reason needn't apply.
Obviously, MS doesn't want to escrow all the Windows source to a bunch of political hacks. This has been presented on Slashdot as an attack by Microsoft on democracy and mum' apple pie, but what I believe is really hapenning is just a local political maneuver, as follows:
The hullabaloo was started by a certain Mr. Lipari who seems to have a complete dislike for any kind of electronic voting. IMHO, he invented this specific requirement knowing it's totally ridiculous. He presented it as defending democracy, and managed to sell it to the public. His intention is rather, I believe, to torpedo the whole e-voting concept in NY by getting ignorant politicians to vote for impossible requirements. Well, good for him - he seems to have succeeded. And if e-voting companies switch to Linux of FreeBSD or Windows CE (or any OS with available source code) he'll then ask for the BIOS, and the CPU firmware, and so on, until they give up.
Possibly but I'd say you are less likley to be murdered in Kenya than South Africa. (...)
I went to a hotel there and we were advised not to walk on the street at any time, night or day.
Well, I've been to Nairobi, and it's quite similar - all homes in Karen and Langata (the rich suburbs of Nairobi) are small fortresses, with alarms, barbed wire, fences and dogs. You see askaris (armed policemen) everywhere in downtown Nairobi, and, when arriving at a hotel, they inspect the underside of your car for bombs. And from what I read, Nairobi and Jo'burg take turns being the crime capital of Africa. Especially lately, because of the war in neighboring Somalia, armed robbery and other attacks have grown a lot.
But except for the crime problem (which is worst in Nairobi), and for the widespread corruption (which you'll find almost everywhere in Africa) Kenya is a great place to visit, and one of the more advanced countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The education levels are fairly high, you see lots of schools everywhere, even in the impoverished countryside areas. So Google's decision to go to Kenya isn't totally unreasonable.
Why isn't there an open source voting machine?
It should be constructed of off-the-shelf parts and it should run open source code!
I'd be careful about what "off the shelf" means, given the requirements of the NY law. You can't really use modern processors - the BIOS, the firmware on the CPU and the firmware on all other components wouldn't be in escrow, would they? Anyway, if you want to be thorough the schematics of all versions of the voting machines, all the chip fabrication masks, the schematics of the industrial tools and processes in all the factories making and assembling the chips and the voting machines should be in escrow as well; an intruder could intervene at any of those steps and create backdoors usable for falsifying the vote. I don't really see how you can control all those factors, so the NY legislature seems fairly clueless (not that that surprises me).
Of course, we need to draw a line somewhere; do we trust Lenovo, or whoever gets to assemble the voting machines themselves? Do we trust the BIOS writer? Do we trust Intel? Do we trust the OS writer? Do we trust the voting software manufacturer? The network provider?
Pen and paper don't seem to have all those issues - why not use those?
While both Europe and the U.S. have a pretty retarded policies when it comes to censorship (neither violence nor sex are appropriate things for the government to censor), the idea that sex in media is worse than violence does make sense. It is very, very, very unlikely that someone is going to commit murder. It is very, very, very likely that someone is going to have sex.
And why does it matter? It's very, very, very likely that someone is going to eat sometime, so we should censure all references to food in movies? Sex is a natural behavior, everybody will engage in it sooner or later (there's still some hope left for you slashdotters!), and educating children about sex is a much better way to go about things than making it a forbidden and hidden dirty secret. Procreation is part of the normal functioning of human race and society. Murder isn't. What's the message you send kids when you're ok showing them somebody's head blown off, but have a conniption at the accidental sight of a nipple?
No religion on earth recognizes "Marriage" as anything other than a relationship between a man and a woman. Animals are not included either, so I guess those means Republicans are not only picking on homosexuals, they are picking on the bestiality crowd too.
And why does what any religion does matter at all? We're talking about a series of rights that come with marriage, and those rights have nothing to do with religion.
The problem here is the unholy (yeah, yeah) mix between a legal/social concept (marriage and the associated rules on taxation, property ownership, inheritance, benefits and pension rights and so on), and a religious one (marriage as a church ceremony, with the associated magical verbiage). The two need to be strongly separated.
Of course, fundamentalists (and churches) dislike the idea; what they really want is to force everybody to live their lifes conforming to whatever the fundies' particular religious norms are. That's why they fight against separation between church and state: it reduces the powers of religion. So, in their usual way, they keep trying to muddy the subject. Your reference to animals is a good example of the usual FUD thrown around this concept.
Religious figures (priests, pastors, imams etc) should not be able to perform marriages in the legal sense (though of course, they can perform religious marriages for people who like the pageantry or whatever spiritual component they find there). No religious marriage should be recognized by the state or by itself confer any legal rights.
There should be an unique state mechanism (call it life-partnership or whatever you want) that allows everybody who wants to commit their love to another person to do so and get a legal base on their life commitment with all the associated legal status and benefits. Everybody should have the right to decide to share their life with somebody, and they should be able to do so without a bunch of [religious book of your choice]-thumpers interfering.
Remind me not to move there.
I think this makes a lot of sense; much more than having everybody pay to support "faith based initiatives", no matter what's their religious affiliation. I don't want any my tax money to support religious activities. I hope that in Germany churches do pay the government for the cost of the paperwork and collection services though.
Your shop is not the universe, buddy
True, but on the other hand, neither is Slashdot.
Give me integrated live traffic updates or don't bother, no two Mondays are alike.
Repeating myself, but live traffic updates are available now in the USA on some high end Garmin GPS devices, like the Nuvi 680 or c580 (see a link in my post above). If you're in one of the supported regions, your device will receive traffic information using some wireless broadcast mechanism and use it to compute the optimum route (the Nuvi 680 uses Microsoft's DirectBand for traffic updates, and I believe RDS is also available in some areas). Now, from what I gathered, they can get traffic incident information (construction or accidents) and/or traffic flow (average speeds in certain points), depending on the region.
The broadcasting of live data itself works. In my opinion a more difficult issue is data availability. I'm talking about coverage (whether sensors for traffic flow exist in a certain area) and latency (how quickly does the information get to your device, especially accident information).
I live in a region that gets both flow and incident data, and I had a chance to play with a Nuvi 680 for a couple of weeks. The routing part is pretty cool; the device recommends different routes between the same points on different days, based on the traffic situation. The test period was rather short, but, FWIW, I didn't get stuck in traffic at all during those weeks
If i got a gps antenna, i could have a gps "device" that factors in traffic.
Already exists. I got a chance to play with one. It was quite cool: on my daily drive from work, it would route me differently on different days, depending on the traffic situation on the highway. It's still a bit expensive for me, but I'll probably buy one sooner or later (the c580 is cheaper, but I like the large screen of the 680).