I stand corrected - what you say definitely makes more sense than 110+mil ballot count. However, it raises another interesting issue, that of objectivity and ethics.
If you're trying to reduce the number of ballots you have to count, what are the criteria? Are you trying to challenge the amount of votes Bush got, or get the exact vote counts? If you first eliminate the states with gross Bush or Kerry majority (and those are very few, I think?) you're still left with a large volume of ballots. Do you then just count Bush ballots, to prove that he didn't get 50+% votes in XY State? Or do you also count Kerry ballots, to see who came closer?
Note also that election results could be altered by checking ballots for things other than presidential elections - i.e. if ballots for Colorado's Amendment 36 have been misscounted, and Amendment actually passes, it means Bush gets only 5 of Colorado's votes, with Kerry getting remaining 4. That's 8 point ballance of power shift in EV count. But if you're challenging the count results, the proper thing to do is a full recount?
A most... daring move, I have to say. The very perspective and magnitude of task such as doing independant audit of complete US presidential elections is... staggeringly humongous. I am afraid that the blackboxvoting.org does not posess facilities, technology and manpower to handle the avalanche of raw data that might hit them as the result of this request - obviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?
In the aftermath, I am afraid that, if the audit indicates there are irregularities or foul play involved in the elections, reply might simply be 'It is counting error on your end, you don't have capacities for competently performing an audit of this size.' Besides, I just might think not enough of Americans will actually care.
Bottom line... I sure do hope the audit works out. I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged (being from a former communist eastern european state myself, I saw a number of those:). But I'm afraid it'll be a wasted effort.
I know odds are slim, but the notion entertains me...
What happens if vote-count turns in Kerry's favor in the end? Kerry backed down, BUSH doesn't win... I say we get 4 years of anarchy!! At least it'll be better than alternatives. Either of them.
In a way, even though I was 'cheering' from him, I am glad Kerry didn't win now. A man who is ready to concede and yield -before- even all the preliminary state votes have been counted (according to CNN New Mexico and Iowa results are not in yet), not to mention all the 'secondary' ballots, is too spineless to be a president.
Saying 'Oh well, I tried, but it seems I am losing so why prolong the suffering' is, perhaps, an attitude acceptable in sports or social games, but definitely not in the high-stakes situation like this. If Kerry is willing to give up that easily, despite all the questionable situations during the elections and all the still uncounted votes, he was not worth a single vote, much less 55+ millions he got.
Well, contrary to some oppinions voiced, I must admit that Adobe might be aiming at deploying its more sophisticated tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator on Linux platforms. Why? Well, after various goverments on local and national levels, such as Germany, France, UK, Indochina, Brazil, even Basque Parliament and more have started migrating to Linux en masse, it is not even a matter of when but now that Linux users' market will develop serious need for Adobe's products. Thus, I'd dare say Adobe knows damn well what it's doing, and might well hit a platinum vein in this little undertaking.
Well, this whole issue is one large slap in the face and invitation to wake up... though it's vastly amusing how many people are more willing to bow their heads in response to the slap and even pay for it than slap back.
I guess it all comes down to having spine and standing up against something, even at the risk of being called fanatical, zealot or a rabid dog, or staying in the anonymous safety of the herd. Enjoy your curd.
Since I started using adaware tools, I learned I could rely only on Spybot and Ad-Aware. Obviously, many others noticed their reliability too - just try googling for either of two, and see how many pages you can find with fake installers - some sites even distribute AdAware installations with modified malware definitions and crippled update, so your AdAware might even refuse to detect malware on your PC.
To me, it all smells so familiar... Just as M$ loves to force, bribe, coax or cajole software producers into specialising their products for Windows compatibility, so do too the malware distributers seek their fifth collumn... Similarities are far from passing.
And my lawyers had the patent on 'posts regarding lawyer companies suing professional companies for infringement of ridiculous and vague patents'. Thus, expect to hear from my lawyers about your attempt to infringe.
I find the fact they're trying to claim the feasibility of patenting a, for computer graphics, very basic concept, nearly as amusing as the fact that they were allowed to patent it in the first place.
Having checked US Patent Database for the description of the said patent, I think I'll go ahead and patent... oh... 'Method of creating secondary colors by combining the three primary colors' ? The matter adressed by this patent is, IMVHO, not unique intelectual property - it describes a potential approach to a certain problem on an abstract plane, without describing practical solutions?
Disclaimer: I lack sufficient knowledge of legalese, so I might have missread and missinterpreted the patent description. However, my modesty prevents me from admitting I might be wrong.
Seems like a rather interesting subject - sure to give it a shot. Though it does make me wonder a certain something: Considering the rate of cybercrime is growing at astronomical rate, and causing stellar amounts of damage on a daily basis, how come there are no private cybercop agencies?
You know, companies you could hire to protect your bank clients from fraud or track already committed frauds, with proverbial cyberspace license to kill? After all, as so many net-renegades and rebels love to point out, cyberspace is free, and refuses to conform to laws of individual countries. That means a cyber-protection company stationed in some of more lawless countries, such as parts of Asia or former USSR could 'execute' ISPs who tollerate fraud originating from their servers or users or companies who actively engage in fraud and spam through well tested methods of DDoSing, server hacking etc?
I know, not completely on-topic... that's why I waited for someone else's first post:)
Space-based satellite killers? Not necessarily too expensive. 99.95% of the system cost would be getting it up. Once up there... hell, most of those satellites are fragile enough that all you need to kill them is a brick on a collision course.
As opposed to those, I think ground-based satellite killers would be far more complex and expensive, since you'd have to lob something to space every time you wanted to kill a satellite (instead of putting up a satellite of your own, armed with a brick launcher), and would need far better and more sophisticated guidance systems, since distances are larger and interference greater (lobbing a brick at a satellite in 0G vacuum does not equal lobbing a brick from surface to orbit at the same target).
In the end, I'd say the best 'efficiency to cost' systems are air-launched, such as US ASAT missile - built to be launched from F15, if I'm not mistaken. Especially since they're not limited in deployment options like slow-moving or stationary ground systems, or expensive-to-place space systems. You can deploy them from any airport or aircraft carrier.
Well, I'm just wondering how accurate that thingy is. I mean, it's a long reach from Colo. Springs, CO, USA to high geostationary orbit. And it's getting progressively crowded up there with each day. What are the odds of friendly fire? I bet EU or Japan would be very pissed if their cellphone service went down because USA tried to hit Russian network? Not to mention the fact that modern sattelite communications networks rely on large numbers of sattelites - and hitting all of them might prove to be a rather challenging task.
Also, I'm very curious about the modus operandi of that thing - I mean, I would assume it's 'direct fire' energy weapon of some sort, meaning its area of effect is greatly limited by horisont and, especially if the thing is in Colorado Springs, natural obstacles such as Rocky Mountains. In case the weapon, instead, employs physical carrier-based weapons such as special warheads on PTS (Planet To Space) missiles, the accuracy is questionable, and capability of hitting multiple targets sucessfully even more so?
Seriously, very few Linux-oriented people I know are hardcore in for only one distro. Though I admit I don't know enough of them anyway, I still think that test should've been multi-option. I, for one, can't stop toying with various distros, new or old, as the fancy strikes me.
Perhaps that makes me Pushy, aggressive, suave, timid, meek, middle of the road John Wayne with love of beer (duh), horns (?) and green eggs (?!?). I wonder, though, how come Debian users get no personality stereotype beyond 'politically correct in a free software kind of way' (aren't all the Linux users such?)
The problem is in the poorly written article - it doesn't mention warranty in any way. I started from a maybe naive, but relatively logical premise: system was still under warranty when malfunction occured (most electronics devices have 1+ year warranties nowadays)
If we start suing manufacturer of every product that breaks down while under warranty, that'll just give manufacturers an excuse to drop warranting as such - because, what's the purpose of warranty then?
..is that someone is hogging for publicity. Is there technical grounds for this lawsuit? No. warranty should damn well cover the excuse for the lawsuit, malfunction in no way threatened user's well-being, health or personal safety (withdrawal shakes aside) and compared to the number of XBox systems on the market, it's easy to claim that this is 'acceptable malfunction rate'.
IMO, this guy is trying to get a spotlight, as well as maybe a bit of money for a settlement - perhaps Micro$oft would be happier to pay him off quickly than to get some (more) negative publicity. Then again, with all the negative stuff about M$ circulating these days, what's another minor hardware-related issue? They'll just blame whoever manufactured the drives.
I wasn't aware of that. By checking here, it'd indeed seem there's something of the sort goingon. But there is no mention of SUSE moving to States... so one could assume the programmers etc are still german?
In the end, who knows - after all, I don't think there are (m)any companies left out there which could be considered exclusively one-nation-owned?
Talk about an exercise in futility. I'd put that book right next to Understanding Republican Mindset, Philosophical Debates of Military Intelligence and Filanthropy of Modern Man
Good heavens, but why? Simple scientific observation would tell you that introducing caustic alien blood into Bush gene pool would most likely dilute the Bush family gene pool. After all, what outer space monster brood queen could compare to mrs. Bush?
Sssssh! It is NOT a joke! What do you think prompted all the sudden renewed attention of world directed at that place? Surely not the personal cloaking devices, shoulder-mounted energy cannons and bioengineered killing machines!
Just imagine an army of a million 4'10" Chinese Predators!
Well, it is certainly good news - nice to know something's being done. But Massive ? That's not the word I would use. 28 people are a drop in the sea of criminals. Now, if all of those 28 spilled some names before their comrades caught the wind of arrests, there might be some collateral damage where due, but... I don't think so. Bottom line is, good thing. But scale impression is wrong. Like arresting 2 dozen street drug dealers in Bronx and calling it massive. 28 people should be weekly catch for this sort of crime.
I would venture a speculation here... perhaps the exact volume of rain isn't the only factor in the amount of water rain contributes to useable water pool. One would imagine that, with Sydney or Melbourne being warmer and sunnier than London (no, I didn't bother to check avg. temperatures and sunny days/year, I'm speculating), higher percentage of water (both rain and other) ends up evaporating instead of draining into the ground to contribute to the useable water pool?
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected - what you say definitely makes more sense than 110+mil ballot count. However, it raises another interesting issue, that of objectivity and ethics.
If you're trying to reduce the number of ballots you have to count, what are the criteria? Are you trying to challenge the amount of votes Bush got, or get the exact vote counts? If you first eliminate the states with gross Bush or Kerry majority (and those are very few, I think?) you're still left with a large volume of ballots. Do you then just count Bush ballots, to prove that he didn't get 50+% votes in XY State? Or do you also count Kerry ballots, to see who came closer?
Note also that election results could be altered by checking ballots for things other than presidential elections - i.e. if ballots for Colorado's Amendment 36 have been misscounted, and Amendment actually passes, it means Bush gets only 5 of Colorado's votes, with Kerry getting remaining 4. That's 8 point ballance of power shift in EV count. But if you're challenging the count results, the proper thing to do is a full recount?
A most... daring move, I have to say. The very perspective and magnitude of task such as doing independant audit of complete US presidential elections is... staggeringly humongous. I am afraid that the blackboxvoting.org does not posess facilities, technology and manpower to handle the avalanche of raw data that might hit them as the result of this request - obviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?
:). But I'm afraid it'll be a wasted effort.
In the aftermath, I am afraid that, if the audit indicates there are irregularities or foul play involved in the elections, reply might simply be 'It is counting error on your end, you don't have capacities for competently performing an audit of this size.' Besides, I just might think not enough of Americans will actually care.
Bottom line... I sure do hope the audit works out. I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged (being from a former communist eastern european state myself, I saw a number of those
I know odds are slim, but the notion entertains me...
What happens if vote-count turns in Kerry's favor in the end? Kerry backed down, BUSH doesn't win... I say we get 4 years of anarchy!! At least it'll be better than alternatives. Either of them.
The heck?
In a way, even though I was 'cheering' from him, I am glad Kerry didn't win now. A man who is ready to concede and yield -before- even all the preliminary state votes have been counted (according to CNN New Mexico and Iowa results are not in yet), not to mention all the 'secondary' ballots, is too spineless to be a president.
Saying 'Oh well, I tried, but it seems I am losing so why prolong the suffering' is, perhaps, an attitude acceptable in sports or social games, but definitely not in the high-stakes situation like this. If Kerry is willing to give up that easily, despite all the questionable situations during the elections and all the still uncounted votes, he was not worth a single vote, much less 55+ millions he got.
Well, contrary to some oppinions voiced, I must admit that Adobe might be aiming at deploying its more sophisticated tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator on Linux platforms. Why? Well, after various goverments on local and national levels, such as Germany, France, UK, Indochina, Brazil, even Basque Parliament and more have started migrating to Linux en masse, it is not even a matter of when but now that Linux users' market will develop serious need for Adobe's products. Thus, I'd dare say Adobe knows damn well what it's doing, and might well hit a platinum vein in this little undertaking.
Well, this whole issue is one large slap in the face and invitation to wake up... though it's vastly amusing how many people are more willing to bow their heads in response to the slap and even pay for it than slap back.
I guess it all comes down to having spine and standing up against something, even at the risk of being called fanatical, zealot or a rabid dog, or staying in the anonymous safety of the herd. Enjoy your curd.
Bah.
Since I started using adaware tools, I learned I could rely only on Spybot and Ad-Aware. Obviously, many others noticed their reliability too - just try googling for either of two, and see how many pages you can find with fake installers - some sites even distribute AdAware installations with modified malware definitions and crippled update, so your AdAware might even refuse to detect malware on your PC.
To me, it all smells so familiar... Just as M$ loves to force, bribe, coax or cajole software producers into specialising their products for Windows compatibility, so do too the malware distributers seek their fifth collumn... Similarities are far from passing.
And my lawyers had the patent on 'posts regarding lawyer companies suing professional companies for infringement of ridiculous and vague patents'. Thus, expect to hear from my lawyers about your attempt to infringe.
This is ridiculous.
I find the fact they're trying to claim the feasibility of patenting a, for computer graphics, very basic concept, nearly as amusing as the fact that they were allowed to patent it in the first place.
Having checked US Patent Database for the description of the said patent, I think I'll go ahead and patent... oh... 'Method of creating secondary colors by combining the three primary colors' ? The matter adressed by this patent is, IMVHO, not unique intelectual property - it describes a potential approach to a certain problem on an abstract plane, without describing practical solutions?
Disclaimer: I lack sufficient knowledge of legalese, so I might have missread and missinterpreted the patent description. However, my modesty prevents me from admitting I might be wrong.
Seems like a rather interesting subject - sure to give it a shot. Though it does make me wonder a certain something: Considering the rate of cybercrime is growing at astronomical rate, and causing stellar amounts of damage on a daily basis, how come there are no private cybercop agencies?
:)
You know, companies you could hire to protect your bank clients from fraud or track already committed frauds, with proverbial cyberspace license to kill? After all, as so many net-renegades and rebels love to point out, cyberspace is free, and refuses to conform to laws of individual countries. That means a cyber-protection company stationed in some of more lawless countries, such as parts of Asia or former USSR could 'execute' ISPs who tollerate fraud originating from their servers or users or companies who actively engage in fraud and spam through well tested methods of DDoSing, server hacking etc?
I know, not completely on-topic... that's why I waited for someone else's first post
Space-based satellite killers? Not necessarily too expensive. 99.95% of the system cost would be getting it up. Once up there... hell, most of those satellites are fragile enough that all you need to kill them is a brick on a collision course.
As opposed to those, I think ground-based satellite killers would be far more complex and expensive, since you'd have to lob something to space every time you wanted to kill a satellite (instead of putting up a satellite of your own, armed with a brick launcher), and would need far better and more sophisticated guidance systems, since distances are larger and interference greater (lobbing a brick at a satellite in 0G vacuum does not equal lobbing a brick from surface to orbit at the same target).
In the end, I'd say the best 'efficiency to cost' systems are air-launched, such as US ASAT missile - built to be launched from F15, if I'm not mistaken. Especially since they're not limited in deployment options like slow-moving or stationary ground systems, or expensive-to-place space systems. You can deploy them from any airport or aircraft carrier.
Well, I'm just wondering how accurate that thingy is. I mean, it's a long reach from Colo. Springs, CO, USA to high geostationary orbit. And it's getting progressively crowded up there with each day. What are the odds of friendly fire? I bet EU or Japan would be very pissed if their cellphone service went down because USA tried to hit Russian network? Not to mention the fact that modern sattelite communications networks rely on large numbers of sattelites - and hitting all of them might prove to be a rather challenging task.
Also, I'm very curious about the modus operandi of that thing - I mean, I would assume it's 'direct fire' energy weapon of some sort, meaning its area of effect is greatly limited by horisont and, especially if the thing is in Colorado Springs, natural obstacles such as Rocky Mountains. In case the weapon, instead, employs physical carrier-based weapons such as special warheads on PTS (Planet To Space) missiles, the accuracy is questionable, and capability of hitting multiple targets sucessfully even more so?
Seriously, very few Linux-oriented people I know are hardcore in for only one distro. Though I admit I don't know enough of them anyway, I still think that test should've been multi-option. I, for one, can't stop toying with various distros, new or old, as the fancy strikes me.
Perhaps that makes me Pushy, aggressive, suave, timid, meek, middle of the road John Wayne with love of beer (duh), horns (?) and green eggs (?!?). I wonder, though, how come Debian users get no personality stereotype beyond 'politically correct in a free software kind of way' (aren't all the Linux users such?)
The problem is in the poorly written article - it doesn't mention warranty in any way. I started from a maybe naive, but relatively logical premise: system was still under warranty when malfunction occured (most electronics devices have 1+ year warranties nowadays)
If we start suing manufacturer of every product that breaks down while under warranty, that'll just give manufacturers an excuse to drop warranting as such - because, what's the purpose of warranty then?
..is that someone is hogging for publicity. Is there technical grounds for this lawsuit? No. warranty should damn well cover the excuse for the lawsuit, malfunction in no way threatened user's well-being, health or personal safety (withdrawal shakes aside) and compared to the number of XBox systems on the market, it's easy to claim that this is 'acceptable malfunction rate'.
IMO, this guy is trying to get a spotlight, as well as maybe a bit of money for a settlement - perhaps Micro$oft would be happier to pay him off quickly than to get some (more) negative publicity. Then again, with all the negative stuff about M$ circulating these days, what's another minor hardware-related issue? They'll just blame whoever manufactured the drives.
Hmm.
I wasn't aware of that. By checking here, it'd indeed seem there's something of the sort goingon. But there is no mention of SUSE moving to States... so one could assume the programmers etc are still german?
In the end, who knows - after all, I don't think there are (m)any companies left out there which could be considered exclusively one-nation-owned?
Yum, new German-flavored Linux distro! Why am I so much in favor of european distributions? Must be one of those local global patriotism things.
Eh... not all of us in the world are native english speakers. Still, I trust my english spelling & grammar beats your croatian, eh?
/me is a newbie freshman outsider clueless /.-tter, obviously.
A security guide for Windows-based systems ?
Talk about an exercise in futility. I'd put that book right next to Understanding Republican Mindset, Philosophical Debates of Military Intelligence and Filanthropy of Modern Man
Good heavens, but why? Simple scientific observation would tell you that introducing caustic alien blood into Bush gene pool would most likely dilute the Bush family gene pool. After all, what outer space monster brood queen could compare to mrs. Bush?
Sssssh!
It is NOT a joke! What do you think prompted all the sudden renewed attention of world directed at that place? Surely not the personal cloaking devices, shoulder-mounted energy cannons and bioengineered killing machines!
Just imagine an army of a million 4'10" Chinese Predators!
And it seems that guy is not completely alone. Try this site . Almost as bad as moisture farming on Tatooine.
Well, it is certainly good news - nice to know something's being done. But Massive ? That's not the word I would use. 28 people are a drop in the sea of criminals. Now, if all of those 28 spilled some names before their comrades caught the wind of arrests, there might be some collateral damage where due, but... I don't think so. Bottom line is, good thing. But scale impression is wrong. Like arresting 2 dozen street drug dealers in Bronx and calling it massive. 28 people should be weekly catch for this sort of crime.
I would venture a speculation here... perhaps the exact volume of rain isn't the only factor in the amount of water rain contributes to useable water pool. One would imagine that, with Sydney or Melbourne being warmer and sunnier than London (no, I didn't bother to check avg. temperatures and sunny days/year, I'm speculating), higher percentage of water (both rain and other) ends up evaporating instead of draining into the ground to contribute to the useable water pool?