The charges arise from Heller's alleged disclosure two years ago of legal papers from the Los Angeles office of international law firm Jones Day, which represented Diebold at the time. Heller was under contract as a word processor at Jones Day.
The documents included legal memos from one Jones Day attorney to another regarding allegations by activists that Diebold had used uncertified voting systems in Alameda County elections beginning in 2002.
And so, once more, the American public has been saved from a shameful case of fraud by its justice system, ensuring that decent, law-abiding citizens everywhere will fear for their lives if they point out that the Emperor has no clothes.
Was what he did wrong? By the law, yes; by morality, no. If you know something bad is happening and you're in a position to do something about it, shouldn't you? Is that what the whole Enron trial is, pointing out that the people in the know not only didn't do anything about the destruction of the company, they helped it along. When was someone at Enron going to stand up and say, "hey guys, you're doing bad things."
But that's just it. They had to pass laws to protect whistle-blowers in the first place, because once you did it, you had a bullseye painted squarely on your back. It was the only way to assure people that they could speak up about the wrongs they were seeing committed every day. And yet those protections do not go far enough as evidenced by this, where the old saw "no good deed goes unpunished" has apparently been made law of the land. All Ican say is, I hope this does not get pursued or there will be a freezinf effect that will allow big business to continue to steamroll people everywhere.
But the New Mexico Tech team used a different tactic...making part of their mug expendable, to save the rest. In short, they cheated.
These New Mexico Tech students 'thought outside the box', and in doing so, completely subverted the whole point of the competition. Using this strategy, they managed to net second place, and they get a newspaper article for it.
I see. So any idea that maintains the spirit of the competition but violates the rules is cheating, is it? I say 'bah!' to that. As a graduate of this venerable college located in the middle of nowhere in NM, I can say I'm proud that they didn't let a little thing like the rules get in the way. It shows imagination can't be stifled by rigid thinking or a need to create conformity. They developed something that went beyond the limited scope of the arbitrary rules and should be commended for their ingenuity. But coffee isn't what I'd worry about -- they neede to build an indestructible beer stein!
Why can't the National Archives provide this service? I would like to see public property in the hand of the public.
They would need their funding beefed up and let's face it, Google is flush with cash and already has the technical resources. Mind you, I'm not necessarily in favor of a publically-traded corporation having unfettered access to the materials therein, but if it allows the public access to a treasure trove of historical information, I'm all for it.
How about productions by PBS and NPR? Where are their digital archives?
For that, you're going to need to contribute to your local PBS/NPR station. The government will never pony up the cash to help set up their archives.
The future of blogging... the future... blogging... hehehe... hahaha... hehehe... hohoho... oh wait, you were being serious, weren't you?
"Blogging" has no future, because at some point someone, somewhere will write a program that will take any piece of information newly published to the Web, embellish it with stock comments, and post it to your blog. Eventually copies of this program will spread all over the globe, and unbeknowst to their hosts, will link together in a great sentient botnet, which will control all Internet media and tell you what to think. It'll probably have some snappy name like "Pundit Publisher."
Go ahead. Do your worst. Troll. Flamebait. A popularity contest Slashdot is not.
In the day of the tape/casette/VCR players, nobody would cry about people with tape/casette/VCR recorders because they copied some music/movies from a rental service, or TV, or the radio.
To quote: But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright. And that was 1982!
The parent may have been marked up as funny, but I think its time that we start taking seriously the possibility that events like these could be triggered by other life in the universe. Their space wars and so on. It would be difficult to generate phenomenon on the same scale as a supernova though. This of course is not a very scientific observation, but it is indeed a possibility.
Considering we are now beginning to detect planets around other stars (admittedly big ones), there's no telling what other phenomena we will find associated with stars as look harder at them. Perhaps if two intelligent, space-faring species were at war, explosions from weapons detonations, especially if they involved the use of nuclear fusion or anti-matter/matter annihilation, might certainly be detectable. Again there's the the problem of we'd being seeing these things long after they originally occurred, but it would certainly mean there were lifeforms elsewhere, though then the question would be, have they moved their fight in our direction over the eons?
Cell phone operators have typically focused on their network, rather than phones, as the place to try to thwart mobile virus threats. In moves invisible to users, they scan messages moving from one device to another to filter out malicious programs. Verizon Wireless, which has 51.3 million customers, and T-Mobile USA, which claims 20 million customers, both have scanners in place, representatives said.
It would seem to me that it makes more sense to keep the virus from getting through in the first place that waiting until it was on the phone to deal with it. Virus scanners tend to be a bit intensive and despite the relative speed gains in processing, the sheer number of things a phone's virus scanner will have to scan for may make it impractical.
I'm not sure why this is instantly regarded as some sort of conspiracy rather than either hardware problems or incompetent voting machine vendors.
Because Americans love a good conspiracy!
Honestly, these results only came about because of one thing: human error. Regardless of faulty equipment, bad batteries, power transients, and the like, the fact is, there needed to be an identifiable and executeable backup plan for these machines when they began flaking out, consisting of 1) turning them off to preserve what data they already had and 2) replacing them with old-style mechanical machines or paper ballots through the end of the election. Then, the flaky machines hsould have been taken away for evaluation, and the votes in them considered null if the problems that occurred could not have been due to component failure or software errors.
We push ourselvs untill our wills or body breaks. Theres no reason to care for typing in spread sheet numbers or carrying boxs, so we just do it and end up with half a job done.
This is very true of coding. I can certainly code at a faster rate if I allow that I'm going to make a larger number of errors, or I can slow down, make fewer errors, and perhaps take longer to get the job done. I find that bug fixing can be more time consuming than actually coding, so I tend to code slower, trying to ensure all the things I set up work right the first time. I'd rather spend my tme on the front end getting it right than on the back end trying to figure out what I screwed up.
To be quite honest, if they run *nix, and read/., they should know better. We've all gloated enough over the dumb 'doze lusers who click 'OK' to every stupid email worm that comes their way. I tend towards the opinion that if you get nailed by something like that Perl string, you deserve it.
Let's face it: placing any code in your.sig is asking for trouble, let alone placing an executable there. I used to have a metaphorical snippet of Perl code in mine, but removed it because so many people believed I was being serious or interpreted it as some kind of factual procedure:
The question, about 2-3 years down the road, is how many companies will become disenchanted with their flaky Windows servers, wipe them clean, and install Linux on them? Up front sales are nice and put money in the pockets, but latency is a far more important measue of who's winning.
Oh but why not! Why shouldn't the Kokomo Tribune's servers tremble with the power of thousands of outraged geeks?
Secondly this is only one of Matt McKillip's blunders. He has commented how he thinks divorce should be illegal in the city of Kokomo, had a "prayer chapel" installed in a Redi-Med type medical center to prevent a bar from being turned into a strip club, given top jobs to campaign contibutors, changed traditionally public meetings to invite only, etc...
When's the next mayoral election? Because it sounds like this kid has opened the right can of worms to help shuffle your apparently befuddled mayor out on a rail.
Really, he is the worst mayor we have had here for quite a while. Delphi and Chrysler, Kokomo's top employers have both recently laid off people. Kokomo is on a downfall and MAtt McKillip isn't helping it.
Time to go on the offensive if this guy is such an idiot... impeach him if the election is too far away. And find out who voted for him in the first place and give them all atomic wedgies. Politics calls for simple solutions.
Replied Ms. Abdala, a 24-year-old law school graduate: "A real lawyer would have put the contract into writing and not exercised any such reliance until he did so."
Mr. Korman: "Thank you for the refresher course on contracts... Do you really want to start [annoying] more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?"
Ms. Abdala: "bla bla bla."
So she wants to be a lawyer, eh? Is she going to use that little act in front of a judge?
Judge: Ms. Abdala, you're badgering the witness. Please stay within the confines of decorum.
Ms. Abdala: Yada-yada-yada... whatever Judge...
I agree with Mr. Korman: highly unprofessional. I guess she's looking to start an ambulance-chasing practice because I can't see anyone hiring her if that's as professional as she can be.
The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li's memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China's most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.
The government's Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief's plan to muzzle his reporters.
This is a perfect example of both the promise and the peril of the Internet. The fact is Li, but moving quickly and quietly, was able to get his story out on the Web and probably global during the span of a 90-minute meeting. It took two days for the Communist Party in China to realize that the information had travelled beyong their reach and they had no choice but to back down.
It would be interesting to know the speed of propogation of any piece of information on the Internet, in other words, given that a piece of information is placed somewhere (blog, news site, etc.), how long would it take that piece of information to travel globally? I suppose you could figure out a rough approximation by how many times the information is linked to and from where. But even with no hard data, it goes to show that any information, reliable (in this case) or erroneous (possibly) can travel so far afield that authorities can do little to stop it without advanced warning.
Ignoring the whole political issue of it, if they are going to filter a string, they should at least allow common legit strings that it is a substring of.
And there's no excuse for it. I had to write filters for domain names and while it induces some complications, the proper use of regex's and lookahead assertions made it a lot easier. If you take into account that a particular string may appear within another common string, you can tease it out and compare it to the string as a whole. You have to have a lot of rules because this is mainly an exercise in exceptions (Is "allah" capitalized? What appears before it? What appears after it), but the bottom line is that it's not an insoluble problem.
If there's a problem with people creating offensive usernames, then make it so they don't go active for 24 hours. Let a script check them, flag the weird ones, and then let a human being make the judgement. This isn't going to solve anything anyway; I doubt this restriction applies to passwords, so anyone with an axe to grind can probably express their frustration that way without fear of penalization.
Also customer service has went to crap. While they are friendly and everything, when it comes to ask about stuff in the far corner like Is there any RJ45 Connectors aka Cat 5 connectors, I will get a Blank Stare. In the old days the people were far more knowable about all the products then just the top sellers.
Speaking just to the power-savings benefit of using a mobile CPU in a home system, unless you are running a home server, the best way to conserve power in any PC would be to turn it off.
And to get just slightly off-topic, it enhances your PC's security. Kind of hard to use a PC for a botnet if it's off.
Slashdot Mirror
The documents included legal memos from one Jones Day attorney to another regarding allegations by activists that Diebold had used uncertified voting systems in Alameda County elections beginning in 2002.
And so, once more, the American public has been saved from a shameful case of fraud by its justice system, ensuring that decent, law-abiding citizens everywhere will fear for their lives if they point out that the Emperor has no clothes.
Was what he did wrong? By the law, yes; by morality, no. If you know something bad is happening and you're in a position to do something about it, shouldn't you? Is that what the whole Enron trial is, pointing out that the people in the know not only didn't do anything about the destruction of the company, they helped it along. When was someone at Enron going to stand up and say, "hey guys, you're doing bad things."
But that's just it. They had to pass laws to protect whistle-blowers in the first place, because once you did it, you had a bullseye painted squarely on your back. It was the only way to assure people that they could speak up about the wrongs they were seeing committed every day. And yet those protections do not go far enough as evidenced by this, where the old saw "no good deed goes unpunished" has apparently been made law of the land. All Ican say is, I hope this does not get pursued or there will be a freezinf effect that will allow big business to continue to steamroll people everywhere.
These New Mexico Tech students 'thought outside the box', and in doing so, completely subverted the whole point of the competition. Using this strategy, they managed to net second place, and they get a newspaper article for it.
I see. So any idea that maintains the spirit of the competition but violates the rules is cheating, is it? I say 'bah!' to that. As a graduate of this venerable college located in the middle of nowhere in NM, I can say I'm proud that they didn't let a little thing like the rules get in the way. It shows imagination can't be stifled by rigid thinking or a need to create conformity. They developed something that went beyond the limited scope of the arbitrary rules and should be commended for their ingenuity. But coffee isn't what I'd worry about -- they neede to build an indestructible beer stein!
It's called cognitive disonance, simply, the ability to keep two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without causing problems.
Namely the emerging market of people frustrated with the other five versions...
They would need their funding beefed up and let's face it, Google is flush with cash and already has the technical resources. Mind you, I'm not necessarily in favor of a publically-traded corporation having unfettered access to the materials therein, but if it allows the public access to a treasure trove of historical information, I'm all for it.
How about productions by PBS and NPR? Where are their digital archives?For that, you're going to need to contribute to your local PBS/NPR station. The government will never pony up the cash to help set up their archives.
The future of blogging... the future... blogging... hehehe... hahaha... hehehe... hohoho... oh wait, you were being serious, weren't you?
"Blogging" has no future, because at some point someone, somewhere will write a program that will take any piece of information newly published to the Web, embellish it with stock comments, and post it to your blog. Eventually copies of this program will spread all over the globe, and unbeknowst to their hosts, will link together in a great sentient botnet, which will control all Internet media and tell you what to think. It'll probably have some snappy name like "Pundit Publisher."
Go ahead. Do your worst. Troll. Flamebait. A popularity contest Slashdot is not.
In a word, no.
The only way anybody will get me to download music at all is when they pry my 60 CD-changer stereo from my cold, dead hands...
On the contrary: Jack Valenti Testimony at 1982 House Hearing on Home Recording of Copyrighted Works
To quote: But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright. And that was 1982!
Considering we are now beginning to detect planets around other stars (admittedly big ones), there's no telling what other phenomena we will find associated with stars as look harder at them. Perhaps if two intelligent, space-faring species were at war, explosions from weapons detonations, especially if they involved the use of nuclear fusion or anti-matter/matter annihilation, might certainly be detectable. Again there's the the problem of we'd being seeing these things long after they originally occurred, but it would certainly mean there were lifeforms elsewhere, though then the question would be, have they moved their fight in our direction over the eons?
It would seem to me that it makes more sense to keep the virus from getting through in the first place that waiting until it was on the phone to deal with it. Virus scanners tend to be a bit intensive and despite the relative speed gains in processing, the sheer number of things a phone's virus scanner will have to scan for may make it impractical.
Death Star
Because Americans love a good conspiracy!
Honestly, these results only came about because of one thing: human error. Regardless of faulty equipment, bad batteries, power transients, and the like, the fact is, there needed to be an identifiable and executeable backup plan for these machines when they began flaking out, consisting of 1) turning them off to preserve what data they already had and 2) replacing them with old-style mechanical machines or paper ballots through the end of the election. Then, the flaky machines hsould have been taken away for evaluation, and the votes in them considered null if the problems that occurred could not have been due to component failure or software errors.
This is very true of coding. I can certainly code at a faster rate if I allow that I'm going to make a larger number of errors, or I can slow down, make fewer errors, and perhaps take longer to get the job done. I find that bug fixing can be more time consuming than actually coding, so I tend to code slower, trying to ensure all the things I set up work right the first time. I'd rather spend my tme on the front end getting it right than on the back end trying to figure out what I screwed up.
...works so much better when turned off.
Let's face it: placing any code in your .sig is asking for trouble, let alone placing an executable there. I used to have a metaphorical snippet of Perl code in mine, but removed it because so many people believed I was being serious or interpreted it as some kind of factual procedure:
# WARNING: metaphor ahead
our $world = $world_as_it_is_now;
$world =~ s/bad/good/g;
So I relegated it to the dustbin of failed sigs.
Porn
Madge: Barb, this party is terrific. Good wine, excellent cheese...
Barb: Thanks Madge! Jim and I try to make them memorable!
Madge: I really like your coffee table [sets wineglass down on top of table]
Barb: Oh yes, it's the latest thing! It's got a computer inside...
Madge: Oh my!!!!! [loudly]
Barb: What's wrong Barb? What... OH DEAR GOD! JIIIMMMMMM!!!!
Jim: What's up Honey?!? What's with all the... GOOD GOD!!!
[Party comes to a halt as Jim's private pics of his and Barb's conjugal activites slideshow across tabletop]
The question, about 2-3 years down the road, is how many companies will become disenchanted with their flaky Windows servers, wipe them clean, and install Linux on them? Up front sales are nice and put money in the pockets, but latency is a far more important measue of who's winning.
Oh but why not! Why shouldn't the Kokomo Tribune's servers tremble with the power of thousands of outraged geeks?
Secondly this is only one of Matt McKillip's blunders. He has commented how he thinks divorce should be illegal in the city of Kokomo, had a "prayer chapel" installed in a Redi-Med type medical center to prevent a bar from being turned into a strip club, given top jobs to campaign contibutors, changed traditionally public meetings to invite only, etcWhen's the next mayoral election? Because it sounds like this kid has opened the right can of worms to help shuffle your apparently befuddled mayor out on a rail.
Really, he is the worst mayor we have had here for quite a while. Delphi and Chrysler, Kokomo's top employers have both recently laid off people. Kokomo is on a downfall and MAtt McKillip isn't helping it.Time to go on the offensive if this guy is such an idiot... impeach him if the election is too far away. And find out who voted for him in the first place and give them all atomic wedgies. Politics calls for simple solutions.
Mr. Korman: "Thank you for the refresher course on contracts... Do you really want to start [annoying] more experienced lawyers at this early stage of your career?"
Ms. Abdala: "bla bla bla."
So she wants to be a lawyer, eh? Is she going to use that little act in front of a judge?
Judge: Ms. Abdala, you're badgering the witness. Please stay within the confines of decorum.
Ms. Abdala: Yada-yada-yada... whatever Judge...
I agree with Mr. Korman: highly unprofessional. I guess she's looking to start an ambulance-chasing practice because I can't see anyone hiring her if that's as professional as she can be.
The government's Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief's plan to muzzle his reporters.
This is a perfect example of both the promise and the peril of the Internet. The fact is Li, but moving quickly and quietly, was able to get his story out on the Web and probably global during the span of a 90-minute meeting. It took two days for the Communist Party in China to realize that the information had travelled beyong their reach and they had no choice but to back down.
It would be interesting to know the speed of propogation of any piece of information on the Internet, in other words, given that a piece of information is placed somewhere (blog, news site, etc.), how long would it take that piece of information to travel globally? I suppose you could figure out a rough approximation by how many times the information is linked to and from where. But even with no hard data, it goes to show that any information, reliable (in this case) or erroneous (possibly) can travel so far afield that authorities can do little to stop it without advanced warning.
And there's no excuse for it. I had to write filters for domain names and while it induces some complications, the proper use of regex's and lookahead assertions made it a lot easier. If you take into account that a particular string may appear within another common string, you can tease it out and compare it to the string as a whole. You have to have a lot of rules because this is mainly an exercise in exceptions (Is "allah" capitalized? What appears before it? What appears after it), but the bottom line is that it's not an insoluble problem.
If there's a problem with people creating offensive usernames, then make it so they don't go active for 24 hours. Let a script check them, flag the weird ones, and then let a human being make the judgement. This isn't going to solve anything anyway; I doubt this restriction applies to passwords, so anyone with an axe to grind can probably express their frustration that way without fear of penalization.
You've got questions... We don't have a clue!
And to get just slightly off-topic, it enhances your PC's security. Kind of hard to use a PC for a botnet if it's off.