The Republican lead jihad against the "liberals" has torn down almost all the remaining protections (those both legal as well as merely traditional) between public officials and their private lives.
Yeah, those damn republicans really stuck it to Dick Nixon and his tapes, and Bob Packwood with his diaries, and to Clarence Thomas and....
Oh, wait.
Now imagine if that president was instead selling weapons to the sworn enemy of the state?
Oh, you mean kinda like private citizen Marc Rich did? As long as we're talking about quid pro quo and the presidency...
Some would argue that EPIC (the ISA for IA64 chips like Itanium) is a fundamental change in hardware design - it combined VLIW (an old idea) with explicit encoding of inter-opcode dependency, among other things. That kind of explicit "helper" data for internal ILP engines could end up proving valuable, if the compiler technology can keep up.
Calling web site defacement "hacktivism" is a joke. It's like throwing rotten fruit at a Microsoft billboard and patting yourself on the back for making a bold social statement.
If you're serious about hacking as a tool for forcing social change, then you need to focus on the ones that have let proverbial cats out of the bag - cracks like DeCSS or SDMI-defeaters and hacks [engineering sense] like Napster. These embody true "direct action in cyberspace to attack globalization and corporate domination". These are the cyber-accomplishments that are shaping political, legal, and cultural dialog about issues precisely because they're forcing the issues upon the public consciousness.
Of course, there's less room in activism like this to tout how l33t you and and give m4d pr0pz to your h0m1ez, but it's where honest-to-goodness geeks are making a real impact.
I hate to be an old.fart.kernel.hacker and rain on your parade, but there is no news here. Stuff like this has been going on since 1995, at least, with all of the non-ia32 ports. It's a pretty simple problem - Linux supports a lot of platforms, and platform developers don't usually synchronize well with Linus's attempts at keeping some sort of release schedule for the "core" kernel. Linus himself worked on the initial AXP port, and it wasn't long before it fell off the "core" radar and had a separate team with independent patches feeding it. It wasn't a fork, it was just a concession to practical limits on Linus's time and energy.
IIRC, Linus' usual behavior with platforms he doesn't frequently use is to let the primary maintainers feed him big merges periodically... he basically lets them run their own "development" cycles (the "odd" cycles for the core kernel) and merge "stable points".
Since we're now in 2.4.small# mode, Linus is going to be extremely anal retentive about what he accepts, at least until 2.5 launches. I don't know the nature of the stuff the PPC people may be trying to feed him right now, but odds are unless it's either a critical bugfix or an "independent merge" that's been long planned for (f.e. reiserfs), it'll be rejected. When we get into later 2.4.X's, the policy will probably become more liberal.
The rule has always been (ever since the Alpha and M68k ports) that if you run on an alternative platform and follow the latest greatest developments for that platform, track with its maintainers kernels, not with the "mainstream". If you want to follow latest-greatest core stuff, either use ia32 or use a known-good arch bundle and cross-port any necessary changes from your arch maintainer's tree.
Multiply that by 518 chances and you get about 1 in 257.
Strictly speaking, multiplying here is the wrong thing to do. Assuming each impact is an independent random event, then the probability of there being zero impacts is:
1 - ((1 - 0.0000075) ^ 518)
Numerically, the results are 1 in 257.9 for the correct method and 1 in 257.4 for your incorrect method; with small probabilities and small numbers of events, your method is a good approximation. (It becomes a problem when p*n isn't << 1.)
What I find particularly disturbing about that article are the numbes turned up: they put in about 5000 calls to PBC voters. They say 100 had not yet voted - but the turnout rate for PBC was most certainly not 98%. What's more, "2400/b> felt they may have made a mistake on the ballot". It concerns me that almost half of their respondants had problems - compared to ~5% of actual ballots having any sort of problem. It makes me wonder if the form and content of the phone call might have been not a little bit suggestive (as political telemarketers are prone to do).
Ah, well... it's only news, not like it's supposed to be investigated or make sense or anything.
We've always used poor interfaces; therefore, we must maintain this grand Floridian tradition.
Matter of law: the interface was well-defined and well-known and well-publicized prior to the election. There is a well-defined procedure for contesting the layout of the ballot. That procedure was not activated. The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballot - noone expressed any concerns about it being a "poor user interface" prior to election day, OR IN ANY INSTANCE OF ITS USE IN THE PAST! Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida. If they knew about the ballot issue and believed it was a legitimate concern prior to Tuesday, then saving their complaints until after the election was in progress was an act of bad faith (to put it gently). And while I don't find it improbable that they could fire up a phone bank in a few hours even without prior knowledge of this problem, the sudden and situational rush to judgement (on an issue that, if legitimate, is long-standing) gives me pause, and the desire to circumvent current law to achieve a political end makes me sick.
How dare disgruntled voters try to make their grievances heard!
Not the issue, nor is it what I said. If you want to be heard, great. But the right to be heard is NOT the right to be agreed with, nor the right to not have your position mocked when it is a thinly-veiled political move rather than a grass-roots objection to some inappropriate or faulty component of the mechanism of state. If you want to update the system, update the procedure, update the methodology, great! Yes, 19K discarded ballots is unacceptable, just like 16K were. So where was the outcry in 1996? So why is it only when Gore is losing the presidency that people give a rat's ass about this supposed problem (a particularly long-standing one)?
Don't pretend that this somehow justifies us overturning the results of a lawfully conducted and lawfully counted election! This is a motivation for overhauling the system in the future, not for overturning what has already been lawfully done. ex post facto, dude.
After all, if these nutty super-liberal Democrats don't have the intelligence to properly fill out a ballot, how educated could their opinion on who should run the country be?
Again, arbitrarily inserting words in my mouth. Thanks for your input.
(no offense intended, other than to elitism)
Election law requires that a voter exercise due care and give due attention to the process of executing their vote. You can argue until the cows come home about what constitutes an "adequate diligence" and whatnot, but it seems to me that we're stooping pretty low on this one; call me elitist if you want, but this is the kind of decision lawmakers and judges make daily, and many of them set a much higher bar for "due diligence" and "appropriate care" than I would. And it worries me that "elitism" is (once again) being used as an inflammatory mark against those who disagree with the political ends some wish to see accomplished.
I do not disagree with you that there may be room for improvement in the layout and format of ballots - in Palm Beach County and at large. I would love to see computerized voting stations printing out bar-coded hard copy ballots, so we have a physical ballot count to validate the computer count. But as a matter of present case law, there is no right to ballots being a "perfect user interface", and as a matter of present statutory law the election was conducted properly, and as a matter of constitutional law we are able to redress concerns raised by this election (that, if they're such a big deal, should have been raised and addressed long ago) for the purposes of future elections.
IIRC (and I may be mistaken), the 1996 ballot was a straight-line one-side ballot layout. If that's correct, then the number indicates there's a problem far more fundamental than the butterfly layout.
As a resident of Palm Beach County, I find the widely-accepted claim that the ballot was complicated to be highly offensive. There was nothing complicated about the ballot design. There was nothing novel about the ballot design (it has been used in PBC before). There was nothing about the ballot design that an average 3rd grader could not grasp. And the ballot design was distributed before the election to registered voters so they knew what to expect.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.) Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote? Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
The only answer I've heard anyone make is "I was too embarassed to ask for help". Which is not surprising given the pride and snootiness that permeates much of PBC. But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
I'll probably get marked as flaimbait for saying this, not to mention ruin my chances of ever getting elected to public office in PBC, but I'm getting tired of seeing so much pandering to this kind of irresponsibility and foolishness.
I really like Bill O'Reilly's program. However, he tends to be a little too intolerant of question-dodging for any major candidates to really like the idea of him moderating a debate.
I would love to see it, I just doubt I ever will. I could see Chris Matthews, though.
Because "I think the blacks and the Jews are destroying our culture" can not (for most rational people) be thought of as a consequence of "a culture disrespecting life", nor did you phrase it as one. Perhaps you would like to come up with an example preopositioned by "where"? (And be aware, your example is a flirtation with Godwin's Law, which I promise will bring an end to this thread AFAIAC)
If you want it to be the centerpiece, then it's your prerogative to think so. But I think a cause-effect relationship was pretty clearly indicated here, and (to go way out on the political stereotype limb) the Republicans tend to prefer fixing causes over patching up effects. [duck]
Context, dude, context. The centerpiece of the sentence is "It's a culture that... we've begun to disrespect life", and the internet as a vehicle of culture is an example.
If he wanted to make the internet the issue, it wouldn't have been hard to make that clear, and I would have been flaming him full-on for it. The fact is, it's pundits like Katz that are trying to make everyone think the internet was the main issue on Bush's mind. It's not.
Bush implied Wednesday night that the Net can, by itself, turn otherwise bright and
youthful hearts dark, and even goad youth to murder
Ballocks. He implied no such thing to any fair-minded listener. It takes a fair degree of zealotry to think that his comments about the larger culture applied exclusively to the internet (a microchosm of the larger culture).
Frankly, I'm too disappointed by Katz's shameless partisanism to say any more, and I'm too irked about the mass media calling an attack upon a united states ship of war "terrorism" when by the standards of every nation on earth that is an outright act of war.
Oliver announced to Opus that he had devised a grand unifying theory of the universe, which accounts for absolutely everything except flightless water fowl.
You can imagine the hilarity that ensued.
I'll dig up the strip and post the punchline if anyone is interested:-)
Re:64bit? you mean it will work on alpha procs????
on
XFS Beta
·
· Score: 2
Has compaq got their own journaling fs [...]
You're thinking of AdvFS, which is bundled with Tru64 (formerly Digital Unix). If I remember correctly, it's log-structured (the precursor to modern journaling), supports multiple independent directory trees across multiple volumes internally (i.e. an N-to-M mountable-namespace to physical device mapping), has nice features like snapshotting, and just generally kicks ass.
I would pay good money to see AdvFS for Linux. I even wrote some code for a work-alike, but got distracted by other things and had to set it aside.
Those boys over at MF are no, well, fools. Time and time again I've seen commentaries in their "rulemaker" and other sections about Microsoft, and they (gasp) get it what it means to be an innovator, what it means to push an industry forward, and what it means for an industry to have an all-consuming(and suppressing) monopolist driving the popular understanding of that industry.
Are you suggesting that technology hasn't also been a "handmaiden of mass murder"?
Whenever it is pointed out that certain atheistic (some proportedly "scientific") regimes of the 20th century have slaughtered more people, by orders of magnitude, than all the religious zealotry of the world's history, it is quickly pointed out that those numbers were a product of technology, not of philosophy. ("You witch-burners would have taken Spain and Turkey right off the map if you had the right weapons!")
And I would hardly consider any of the humanities ("philosophy, literature, political science, history") as irrelevancies. Science and technology can address some problems, but humans are not merely creatures of knowledge; we are also creatures of heart, of emotion and of purpose, and science cannot begin to tell us, personally, who we are.
And as for exorcism, well... that's another debate for another day.
Call me an old fart, but I remember when 75% of slashdot posts were things like this.
Is this a breakthrough technology? No. Is this an earth-shaking legal or political development? No. Is it something that geeks the world over will have wet dreams about tonight? You bet your ass.
You're right, but it's not really fair to say they're "just improved RS codes"; by adding epsilon to the reconstruction requirement, the cost of doing the initial encoding changes orders, which is a huge win considering how prohibitive the RS encoding algorithms are for non-trivially sized objects.
DF's work is based on Tornado Codes, which use some really neat tricks with graphs and XORs to reconstruct an N-packet file from any N+e (small e) out of a stream of KN (for some non-trivial K, say 4) packets. John Byers is largely responsible for this invention - see his SIGCOMM98 and INFOCOM99 papers, among others. He's currently doing lots of work in the multicast/congestion control/next-gen network areas. (How do I know this? His office is maybe 20 yards from mine.)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, wait.
Oh, you mean kinda like private citizen Marc Rich did? As long as we're talking about quid pro quo and the presidency...Some would argue that EPIC (the ISA for IA64 chips like Itanium) is a fundamental change in hardware design - it combined VLIW (an old idea) with explicit encoding of inter-opcode dependency, among other things. That kind of explicit "helper" data for internal ILP engines could end up proving valuable, if the compiler technology can keep up.
http://home.wxs.nl/~lamoen/wiskunde/concur.html
The extremely vague statements in the article look similar to what is presented there...
If you're serious about hacking as a tool for forcing social change, then you need to focus on the ones that have let proverbial cats out of the bag - cracks like DeCSS or SDMI-defeaters and hacks [engineering sense] like Napster. These embody true "direct action in cyberspace to attack globalization and corporate domination". These are the cyber-accomplishments that are shaping political, legal, and cultural dialog about issues precisely because they're forcing the issues upon the public consciousness.
Of course, there's less room in activism like this to tout how l33t you and and give m4d pr0pz to your h0m1ez, but it's where honest-to-goodness geeks are making a real impact.
That's exactly the point of doing it. What more reason do you need? And mega kudos to IBM for the wristwatch thing!
Not much of a hacker, are you?
I hate to be an old.fart.kernel.hacker and rain on your parade, but there is no news here. Stuff like this has been going on since 1995, at least, with all of the non-ia32 ports. It's a pretty simple problem - Linux supports a lot of platforms, and platform developers don't usually synchronize well with Linus's attempts at keeping some sort of release schedule for the "core" kernel. Linus himself worked on the initial AXP port, and it wasn't long before it fell off the "core" radar and had a separate team with independent patches feeding it. It wasn't a fork, it was just a concession to practical limits on Linus's time and energy.
IIRC, Linus' usual behavior with platforms he doesn't frequently use is to let the primary maintainers feed him big merges periodically... he basically lets them run their own "development" cycles (the "odd" cycles for the core kernel) and merge "stable points".
Since we're now in 2.4.small# mode, Linus is going to be extremely anal retentive about what he accepts, at least until 2.5 launches. I don't know the nature of the stuff the PPC people may be trying to feed him right now, but odds are unless it's either a critical bugfix or an "independent merge" that's been long planned for (f.e. reiserfs), it'll be rejected. When we get into later 2.4.X's, the policy will probably become more liberal.
The rule has always been (ever since the Alpha and M68k ports) that if you run on an alternative platform and follow the latest greatest developments for that platform, track with its maintainers kernels, not with the "mainstream". If you want to follow latest-greatest core stuff, either use ia32 or use a known-good arch bundle and cross-port any necessary changes from your arch maintainer's tree.
1 - ((1 - 0.0000075) ^ 518)
Numerically, the results are 1 in 257.9 for the correct method and 1 in 257.4 for your incorrect method; with small probabilities and small numbers of events, your method is a good approximation. (It becomes a problem when p*n isn't << 1.)
Truly separating data and code on the ia32 platform is a little tricky since the "read" and "execute" page permissions are inseparable :-(
Ah, well... it's only news, not like it's supposed to be investigated or make sense or anything.
Don't pretend that this somehow justifies us overturning the results of a lawfully conducted and lawfully counted election! This is a motivation for overhauling the system in the future, not for overturning what has already been lawfully done. ex post facto, dude.
Again, arbitrarily inserting words in my mouth. Thanks for your input. Election law requires that a voter exercise due care and give due attention to the process of executing their vote. You can argue until the cows come home about what constitutes an "adequate diligence" and whatnot, but it seems to me that we're stooping pretty low on this one; call me elitist if you want, but this is the kind of decision lawmakers and judges make daily, and many of them set a much higher bar for "due diligence" and "appropriate care" than I would. And it worries me that "elitism" is (once again) being used as an inflammatory mark against those who disagree with the political ends some wish to see accomplished.I do not disagree with you that there may be room for improvement in the layout and format of ballots - in Palm Beach County and at large. I would love to see computerized voting stations printing out bar-coded hard copy ballots, so we have a physical ballot count to validate the computer count. But as a matter of present case law, there is no right to ballots being a "perfect user interface", and as a matter of present statutory law the election was conducted properly, and as a matter of constitutional law we are able to redress concerns raised by this election (that, if they're such a big deal, should have been raised and addressed long ago) for the purposes of future elections.
IIRC (and I may be mistaken), the 1996 ballot was a straight-line one-side ballot layout. If that's correct, then the number indicates there's a problem far more fundamental than the butterfly layout.
The fact that 19K ballots were discarded in the presidential tally for double-punching is not a surprise - because it happens every time there's a presidential election in PBC! (1996 it was 16K IIRC.) Why is it that only after the fact, when it became apparent that Gore was going to lose, did these thousands of people turn up, hell-bent on telling the world that they screwed it up? If they're so certain, why didn't they address the problem at the appropriate time, when they were in the polling location casting their vote? Why is the system unfair now, after the fact, when all the mechanisms were in place at the appropriate time to address their confusion? You can't change the rules after the game has been played - remember the ex post facto clause in the Constitution?
The only answer I've heard anyone make is "I was too embarassed to ask for help". Which is not surprising given the pride and snootiness that permeates much of PBC. But find 19K (mostly Democrat) friends who made the same undeniably stupid mistake and it's not embarassing any more?
I'll probably get marked as flaimbait for saying this, not to mention ruin my chances of ever getting elected to public office in PBC, but I'm getting tired of seeing so much pandering to this kind of irresponsibility and foolishness.
Or "The American President".
I would love to see it, I just doubt I ever will. I could see Chris Matthews, though.
If you want it to be the centerpiece, then it's your prerogative to think so. But I think a cause-effect relationship was pretty clearly indicated here, and (to go way out on the political stereotype limb) the Republicans tend to prefer fixing causes over patching up effects. [duck]
Try the chick at purebsd.com
If he wanted to make the internet the issue, it wouldn't have been hard to make that clear, and I would have been flaming him full-on for it. The fact is, it's pundits like Katz that are trying to make everyone think the internet was the main issue on Bush's mind. It's not.
Frankly, I'm too disappointed by Katz's shameless partisanism to say any more, and I'm too irked about the mass media calling an attack upon a united states ship of war "terrorism" when by the standards of every nation on earth that is an outright act of war.
But that's WAAAAAY offtopic :-)
Oliver announced to Opus that he had devised a grand unifying theory of the universe, which accounts for absolutely everything except flightless water fowl.
You can imagine the hilarity that ensued.
I'll dig up the strip and post the punchline if anyone is interested :-)
I would pay good money to see AdvFS for Linux. I even wrote some code for a work-alike, but got distracted by other things and had to set it aside.
Those boys over at MF are no, well, fools. Time and time again I've seen commentaries in their "rulemaker" and other sections about Microsoft, and they (gasp) get it what it means to be an innovator, what it means to push an industry forward, and what it means for an industry to have an all-consuming(and suppressing) monopolist driving the popular understanding of that industry.
Whenever it is pointed out that certain atheistic (some proportedly "scientific") regimes of the 20th century have slaughtered more people, by orders of magnitude, than all the religious zealotry of the world's history, it is quickly pointed out that those numbers were a product of technology, not of philosophy. ("You witch-burners would have taken Spain and Turkey right off the map if you had the right weapons!")
And I would hardly consider any of the humanities ("philosophy, literature, political science, history") as irrelevancies. Science and technology can address some problems, but humans are not merely creatures of knowledge; we are also creatures of heart, of emotion and of purpose, and science cannot begin to tell us, personally, who we are.
And as for exorcism, well... that's another debate for another day.
In short: (-1, Flamebait)
Is this a breakthrough technology? No. Is this an earth-shaking legal or political development? No. Is it something that geeks the world over will have wet dreams about tonight? You bet your ass.
You're right, but it's not really fair to say they're "just improved RS codes"; by adding epsilon to the reconstruction requirement, the cost of doing the initial encoding changes orders, which is a huge win considering how prohibitive the RS encoding algorithms are for non-trivially sized objects.
DF's work is based on Tornado Codes, which use some really neat tricks with graphs and XORs to reconstruct an N-packet file from any N+e (small e) out of a stream of KN (for some non-trivial K, say 4) packets. John Byers is largely responsible for this invention - see his SIGCOMM98 and INFOCOM99 papers, among others. He's currently doing lots of work in the multicast/congestion control/next-gen network areas. (How do I know this? His office is maybe 20 yards from mine.)