"You get a private little booth to mark the ballot. But then you have to go stand in line and stick it into some kind of motorized paper sucking thing."
The similarity to a shredder is purely coincidental...
"In network security monitoring one doesn't always want every packet, they only want relevant packets. When polling a population one doesn't want every vote but rather only the votes from people who are making informed and intelligent decisions."
Which is why the votes of the American people aren't used, but the votes of the electoral college members are. They're the experts.
(Note to the confused: I'm basing that on the 2000 election, where the peoples' votes were 50,456,002 to 50,999,897 in favour of Al Gore, while the electoral college vote was 271 to 266 in favour of George Bush)
"in Maryland demanding a paper ballot and saying "because I don't trust your damn voting machines" is NOT a valid reason. Yes, its on their FAQ."
You do know that having your own vote on paper is going to be irrelevant as far as voting-fraud goes?
If anyone is allowed to vote in insecure (i.e. computerised) fashion, no matter whether some vote on paper or not, the electronic votes can nearly always* be manipulated to make the paper votes irrelevant.
* Nearly always:= for any 'normal' values of voter-turnout and where the number of people who voted on paper is either unknown (think: binned votes replaced with electronic ones) or less than 50% (?)
Admittedly it's a useful statement to make. Although the people who witness you making it aren't in a position to care.
"Does anyone have a link to an english version of a transcript of what Bin Laden said in the video? I'd like to make up my own mind about what this guy has to say VS getting just choice quotes."
"Mention of 1000 US dead in Iraq puts it within the last couple of months."
Presumably that number was somewhat predictable even before it happened. Presumably knowing Kerry's name as presidential opposition was known for a while too... And an illusionist might even ask how many tapes were filmed, to ensure that one would become accurate in the future.
Just speculation of course. Interesting to see "both" candidates reactions, almost as if they were still ignorant of the issues spoken about in the tape.
"I'm more afraid of a glitch along the lines of "all diebold machines count an extra presidential vote whenever this combination of votes is chosen""
One vote per machine could swing the election? Hands up anyone who's never found an off-by-one error in their code? Bonus points if it's in visual basic (as Diebold use) which has it's own, built-in off-by-one errors (e.g. when defining arrays)
"The idea hasn't already been patented and some company is just waiting for someone else to start producing it so they can sue them."
How would you find that out, exactly?
Even if a patent was granted, it's not something that you can easily find on google. More likely, it's still "in the process" (10 years sometimes?) which means it's impossible to check for.
The idea of patents is not, as many people believe, to document useful things so that others can produce them after a few years of artificial monopoly. The idea of patents is to give you a "kill any company" card which you can play against anyone in a similar market to yours. If you keep quiet about it, they might even purchase a factory or take out a loan before you decide to destroy their company. The best thing is that you don't even need to produce anything yourself, the system works best if you're a "leech" and just gather patents without producing anything [anyone who creates something useful is vulnerable to attack by patent-holders, so you don't want to do create something useful, just sit back and destroy things]
"It doesn't support a minority of sites that are IE-specific:
In case anyone is wondering, there are 305 such sites, many of which are using browser-detection, and many of which are just rude messages to non-IE users.
"In my opinion, this is money that should be awarded to developers, and used to further the project."
Well if it's your money, and you want it to go to developers, then you can give it to the mozilla donations page, rather than the spreadfirefox page.
But at least some small part of that $250K is my money. So you don't really get a say in how it's spent because I asked for it to be used in the newspaper advert;-)
Personally, [less offtopic?] I find that computers without firefox on are more annoying to me than any small bugs in firefox itself are. That is, if this campaign can get firefox onto more of the computers that I occasionally have to use, that provides a bigger benefit to me than fixing "bug x" would.
"It says in the redherring article referenced from SFX that the ad will be just under $50k."
So why not advertise in 5 papers? In the spreadmozilla discussions, the favourite second-choice seems to be the Metro (free paper distributed in rail stations?, widely read by young people)
"Countrywide" may be a nice term for the NYTimes to bandy around to advertisers, but Mozilla is bigger than that.
"Yet Windows insists on requiring various services (e.g. RPC) to be running and publicly available before it will run properly."
Hmm...
# nmap localhost
25/tcp open smtp 1024/tcp open kdm 6000/tcp open X11
And that's Debian. Mandrake had about 10 ports open by default, including SUN-RPC and I think it opens NFS and CUPS by default if you choose certain configuration options. Debian also had a whole host of finger, time, echo, etc. ports open by default.
What's worse? That I can't install a firewall without recompiling the kernel.
"For each and every blockbuster movie a website pops up that is called something like foobar-themovie.com, foobar.com, foobar-film.com, etc. Would be nice to have all the official websites collected under one TLD."
A libertarian might say the market is in a position to offer foobar.imdb.com or foobar2004.imdb.com. It's a definitive independant source anyway, why not make it the domain?
Is it just my imagination, or have all the useful applications of new TLDs been completely ignored by those considering them?
Problem: Lots of people are losing lots of money from websites posing as banks. Banks all use.com domains, which can be bought by the general public for $15. Gee, I wonder if we'll ever find a solution to this horrible problem?
Problem: Tens of companies can legitimately own trademarks on a word, but they're in different areas of business, or different countries. There's only one.com domain for them all to fight over. Looks like someone completely missed the usefulness of acme.music, acme.oil, acme.travel, acme.computer domains. Or in a context we recognise, apple.computer and apple.music
Of course, we don't want to look too hard for fear of finding the real problem. One company making a lot of money out of the two scarce domains. One company in charge of allocating new domains. I'm glad those companies are so separate, democratic, and independant...
I've seen a number of studies that run something like this: Windows: N vulnerabilities in OS Linux: M vulnerabilities in OS + applications
Don't forget the other distros. If you find a bug in redhat that you can add to your list, fine, but remember there might also be a similar bug in Mandrake or Debian, and if you're doing an independant study, you can add those as individual bugs.
For best effect, we advise that you compare something like a 10-year-old version of Linux to a 2-year-old version of Windows (preferably calculating costs over a 20-year span) -- it's only fair, as the Linux box hasn't rebooted in 10 years so they can't have updated it.
Oh, and if it's been denied, it doesn't exist. If the vendor hasn't issued an email warning of the bug, then there's no need to add it to the count.
Make sure you calculate time-to-fix correctly. The industry-standard method is [time vendor admits bug] to [time the first half-assed patch was released]. It's especially important if you're averaging the time-to-fix, as some insecure and sloppy companies take ages to fix their trivial or unexploitable problems, which can reduce their average.
Remember, it's all about money, and you can measure quality by how much was spent on a product. This is especially useful with Free Software developers who all work for free. So if someone spends a week writing software for an open-source program, the product hasn't increased in value (because they're all jobless hippies), whereas if someone spends a week writing a proprietary program, its value increases by $12000.
If all else fails, remember that Free Software might be less secure, because people can see the source code. All those Windows viruses are a myth, and didn't cause any damage. Besides, the people who cleaned-up weren't working for Microsoft, so their time is worthless.
"And as Yankee Group noted in its Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO Comparison study, "Linux-specific worms and viruses are every bit as pernicious as their UNIX and Windows counterparts"
See, this is the bit which confuses me. These nasty linux worms. I'm no expert on viruses (read the wikipedia entry once), but I know about 4-5 people in my office (of 20) who got Windows viruses in the last year, all of which trashed their computers, and required a reinstall (some people realise this earlier than others)
Even looking at the virus/worm reports in the newspapers (i.e. the ones which did serious damage), we see names like Sasser, MyDoom, SoBig, Blaster, SQL Slammer, Klez, CodeRed, SirCam, LoveLetter, and Melissa, all of which affect Windows systems, and many of which had quite serious effects.
According to Wikipedia's timeline, you'd have to go back to 1988 to see a "notable" non-Windows malware ("The Morris worm"), 17 years ago when the other viruses were hitting Amigas and Apple II systems, spreading by floppy-disk.
Where are all these Linux-specific worms that Ballmer is talking about, and why hasn't their damage been reported in the news? Even the tabloids and television news are warning people about the latest "trashing all Windows computers in the world" event, but I must have missed the reporting on linux viruses, even though I read technical news.
"and in many cases [the linux viruses] are much more stealthy."
As far as I can tell, they're extremely stealthy...
"it's worded pretty cleverly, dontcha agree? "About three years ago, we made software security a top priority." Notice they don't say they've actually done anything about it, they just say they've made it "a priority""
Oh, the doublespeak gets worse! Listen to His Billness, for example: "More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot."
Presumably he calculated the equivalent hourly rate of Mozilla developers before saying that? I suppose it costs more to fix something afterwards than it does to get it right the first time.
"No, they do not. They block requests based on the HTTP Referer field. That is very different than null-routing, which is obvisouly a distinction you don't understand."
Blimey - way to miss the point and get an insult in too... Bugzilla is immune to a slashdotting, which either means that a slashdotting isn't DDoS, or that null-routes are irrelevant in this case.
Maybe I should make all posts into 3-page legalspeak, so that the pedants don't get a chance to tell us yet again what buzzwords they learnt from reading nanog.
Phase 1: Retire SMTP Phase 2: Panic Phase 3: Develop, implement and distribute new e-mail sending system (maybe profit)
Phase 4: Learn to cope with all the spam on the new system Phase 5: Wonder why you have to pay for every email Phase 6: Develop, implement, and distribute something SMTP-like again, and start signing emails.
"Kerry is more popular because the rest of the world is even stupider than the average American voter."
Actually, we get accurate and up-to-date news on what's happening in America (and in US wars) which is totally incomparable with what little news filters through to the US media. So regardless of IQ, it would appear that people outside the US are basing their opinions on better information than those inside.
Slashdot Mirror
"You get a private little booth to mark the ballot. But then you have to go stand in line and stick it into some kind of motorized paper sucking thing."
The similarity to a shredder is purely coincidental...
"They decided the devil was a little too risqué"
Someone inform these guys!
"It is better to fight the terrorist abroad than at home."
Especially when your policemen and firemen have been called-up into the reserve armed-forces to go abroad...
"In network security monitoring one doesn't always want every packet, they only want relevant packets. When polling a population one doesn't want every vote but rather only the votes from people who are making informed and intelligent decisions."
Which is why the votes of the American people aren't used, but the votes of the electoral college members are. They're the experts.
(Note to the confused: I'm basing that on the 2000 election, where the peoples' votes were 50,456,002 to 50,999,897 in favour of Al Gore, while the electoral college vote was 271 to 266 in favour of George Bush)
"I have been to iraq and because of that.. I WILL NEVER EVER EVER vote for bush. i have reasons... although I cannot discuss them"
"Going to Iraq... reasons... can't discuss them?"
Haven't I heard that phrase somewhere before?
"in Maryland demanding a paper ballot and saying "because I don't trust your damn voting machines" is NOT a valid reason. Yes, its on their FAQ."
:= for any 'normal' values of voter-turnout and where the number of people who voted on paper is either unknown (think: binned votes replaced with electronic ones) or less than 50% (?)
You do know that having your own vote on paper is going to be irrelevant as far as voting-fraud goes?
If anyone is allowed to vote in insecure (i.e. computerised) fashion, no matter whether some vote on paper or not, the electronic votes can nearly always* be manipulated to make the paper votes irrelevant.
* Nearly always
Admittedly it's a useful statement to make. Although the people who witness you making it aren't in a position to care.
"Does anyone have a link to an english version of a transcript of what Bin Laden said in the video? I'd like to make up my own mind about what this guy has to say VS getting just choice quotes."
General info
Full text
"Mention of 1000 US dead in Iraq puts it within the last couple of months."
Presumably that number was somewhat predictable even before it happened. Presumably knowing Kerry's name as presidential opposition was known for a while too... And an illusionist might even ask how many tapes were filmed, to ensure that one would become accurate in the future.
Just speculation of course. Interesting to see "both" candidates reactions, almost as if they were still ignorant of the issues spoken about in the tape.
"More iPod Killers Introduced for the Holiday"
Blimey, with this many assasins, you'd think the iPod ran BSD or something... whatever happened to the word "competitor"?
"I'm more afraid of a glitch along the lines of "all diebold machines count an extra presidential vote whenever this combination of votes is chosen""
One vote per machine could swing the election? Hands up anyone who's never found an off-by-one error in their code? Bonus points if it's in visual basic (as Diebold use) which has it's own, built-in off-by-one errors (e.g. when defining arrays)
"The idea hasn't already been patented and some company is just waiting for someone else to start producing it so they can sue them."
How would you find that out, exactly?
Even if a patent was granted, it's not something that you can easily find on google. More likely, it's still "in the process" (10 years sometimes?) which means it's impossible to check for.
The idea of patents is not, as many people believe, to document useful things so that others can produce them after a few years of artificial monopoly. The idea of patents is to give you a "kill any company" card which you can play against anyone in a similar market to yours. If you keep quiet about it, they might even purchase a factory or take out a loan before you decide to destroy their company. The best thing is that you don't even need to produce anything yourself, the system works best if you're a "leech" and just gather patents without producing anything [anyone who creates something useful is vulnerable to attack by patent-holders, so you don't want to do create something useful, just sit back and destroy things]
"It doesn't support a minority of sites that are IE-specific:
In case anyone is wondering, there are 305 such sites, many of which are using browser-detection, and many of which are just rude messages to non-IE users.
List is here[bugzilla]
According to google, these sites represent approximately 0.000007% of the web
"In my opinion, this is money that should be awarded to developers, and used to further the project."
;-)
Well if it's your money, and you want it to go to developers, then you can give it to the mozilla donations page, rather than the spreadfirefox page.
But at least some small part of that $250K is my money. So you don't really get a say in how it's spent because I asked for it to be used in the newspaper advert
Personally, [less offtopic?] I find that computers without firefox on are more annoying to me than any small bugs in firefox itself are. That is, if this campaign can get firefox onto more of the computers that I occasionally have to use, that provides a bigger benefit to me than fixing "bug x" would.
This looks just like some attempt to poke fun at sterotypes -- "debian users always count in binary", w.t.f?!?
More entertaining by far might be something like this, aka. the "what OS are you" quiz which was previously mentioned on slashdot.
"It says in the redherring article referenced from SFX that the ad will be just under $50k."
So why not advertise in 5 papers? In the spreadmozilla discussions, the favourite second-choice seems to be the Metro (free paper distributed in rail stations?, widely read by young people)
"Countrywide" may be a nice term for the NYTimes to bandy around to advertisers, but Mozilla is bigger than that.
"Any bank that puts its ATMs on the internet has a moron in charge of IT."
Welcome to the world of business. You were expecting something more organised?
"Yet Windows insists on requiring various services (e.g. RPC) to be running and publicly available before it will run properly."
Hmm...
# nmap localhost
25/tcp open smtp
1024/tcp open kdm
6000/tcp open X11
And that's Debian. Mandrake had about 10 ports open by default, including SUN-RPC and I think it opens NFS and CUPS by default if you choose certain configuration options. Debian also had a whole host of finger, time, echo, etc. ports open by default.
What's worse? That I can't install a firewall without recompiling the kernel.
"For each and every blockbuster movie a website pops up that is called something like foobar-themovie.com, foobar.com, foobar-film.com, etc. Would be nice to have all the official websites collected under one TLD."
A libertarian might say the market is in a position to offer foobar.imdb.com or foobar2004.imdb.com. It's a definitive independant source anyway, why not make it the domain?
Is it just my imagination, or have all the useful applications of new TLDs been completely ignored by those considering them?
.com domains, which can be bought by the general public for $15. Gee, I wonder if we'll ever find a solution to this horrible problem?
.com domain for them all to fight over. Looks like someone completely missed the usefulness of acme.music, acme.oil, acme.travel, acme.computer domains. Or in a context we recognise, apple.computer and apple.music
Problem: Lots of people are losing lots of money from websites posing as banks. Banks all use
Problem: Tens of companies can legitimately own trademarks on a word, but they're in different areas of business, or different countries. There's only one
Of course, we don't want to look too hard for fear of finding the real problem. One company making a lot of money out of the two scarce domains. One company in charge of allocating new domains. I'm glad those companies are so separate, democratic, and independant...
I've seen a number of studies that run something like this:
Windows: N vulnerabilities in OS
Linux: M vulnerabilities in OS + applications
Don't forget the other distros. If you find a bug in redhat that you can add to your list, fine, but remember there might also be a similar bug in Mandrake or Debian, and if you're doing an independant study, you can add those as individual bugs.
For best effect, we advise that you compare something like a 10-year-old version of Linux to a 2-year-old version of Windows (preferably calculating costs over a 20-year span) -- it's only fair, as the Linux box hasn't rebooted in 10 years so they can't have updated it.
Oh, and if it's been denied, it doesn't exist. If the vendor hasn't issued an email warning of the bug, then there's no need to add it to the count.
Make sure you calculate time-to-fix correctly. The industry-standard method is [time vendor admits bug] to [time the first half-assed patch was released]. It's especially important if you're averaging the time-to-fix, as some insecure and sloppy companies take ages to fix their trivial or unexploitable problems, which can reduce their average.
Remember, it's all about money, and you can measure quality by how much was spent on a product. This is especially useful with Free Software developers who all work for free. So if someone spends a week writing software for an open-source program, the product hasn't increased in value (because they're all jobless hippies), whereas if someone spends a week writing a proprietary program, its value increases by $12000.
If all else fails, remember that Free Software might be less secure, because people can see the source code. All those Windows viruses are a myth, and didn't cause any damage. Besides, the people who cleaned-up weren't working for Microsoft, so their time is worthless.
"And as Yankee Group noted in its Linux, UNIX and Windows TCO Comparison study, "Linux-specific worms and viruses are every bit as pernicious as their UNIX and Windows counterparts"
See, this is the bit which confuses me. These nasty linux worms. I'm no expert on viruses (read the wikipedia entry once), but I know about 4-5 people in my office (of 20) who got Windows viruses in the last year, all of which trashed their computers, and required a reinstall (some people realise this earlier than others)
Even looking at the virus/worm reports in the newspapers (i.e. the ones which did serious damage), we see names like Sasser, MyDoom, SoBig, Blaster, SQL Slammer, Klez, CodeRed, SirCam, LoveLetter, and Melissa, all of which affect Windows systems, and many of which had quite serious effects.
According to Wikipedia's timeline, you'd have to go back to 1988 to see a "notable" non-Windows malware ("The Morris worm"), 17 years ago when the other viruses were hitting Amigas and Apple II systems, spreading by floppy-disk.
Where are all these Linux-specific worms that Ballmer is talking about, and why hasn't their damage been reported in the news? Even the tabloids and television news are warning people about the latest "trashing all Windows computers in the world" event, but I must have missed the reporting on linux viruses, even though I read technical news.
"and in many cases [the linux viruses] are much more stealthy."
As far as I can tell, they're extremely stealthy...
"it's worded pretty cleverly, dontcha agree? "About three years ago, we made software security a top priority." Notice they don't say they've actually done anything about it, they just say they've made it "a priority""
Oh, the doublespeak gets worse! Listen to His Billness, for example: "More has been invested in making IE secure than any browser on the planet by a long shot."
Presumably he calculated the equivalent hourly rate of Mozilla developers before saying that? I suppose it costs more to fix something afterwards than it does to get it right the first time.
"No, they do not. They block requests based on the HTTP Referer field. That is very different than null-routing, which is obvisouly a distinction you don't understand."
Blimey - way to miss the point and get an insult in too... Bugzilla is immune to a slashdotting, which either means that a slashdotting isn't DDoS, or that null-routes are irrelevant in this case.
Maybe I should make all posts into 3-page legalspeak, so that the pedants don't get a chance to tell us yet again what buzzwords they learnt from reading nanog.
Phase 1: Retire SMTP
Phase 2: Panic
Phase 3: Develop, implement and distribute new e-mail sending system (maybe profit)
Phase 4: Learn to cope with all the spam on the new system
Phase 5: Wonder why you have to pay for every email
Phase 6: Develop, implement, and distribute something SMTP-like again, and start signing emails.
"Kerry is more popular because the rest of the world is even stupider than the average American voter."
Actually, we get accurate and up-to-date news on what's happening in America (and in US wars) which is totally incomparable with what little news filters through to the US media. So regardless of IQ, it would appear that people outside the US are basing their opinions on better information than those inside.