Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted.
As soon as you can produce misleading receipts, you can't make verifiable claims about non-counting.
I remember thinking about this sort of problem, and the basic answer is that if you want to have verifiable voting, you'll need a trusted party to hold the votervote relationship. Though you can split it between multiple places and so on.
The fact is that the notion of DRM is intrinsically flawed. This 'print screen' workaround is another version of what has been referred to as the 'analog hole'. Any time something like this is being done on a general purpose machine (read 'in software') it's trivial to get a machine-readable copy of the content by using storage as the audio/video device.
The secret ballot was an Australian innovation, and the first US presidential election that took place involving secret ballots was in 1892 when the US was already more than 100 years old. So, up until 1892, there was no "Australian Ballot." Clearly the electoral system worked before then.
Of course, anyone who can be sufficiently coerced to vote a particular way is also going to be vulnerable to being coerced into using an absentee ballot - a widely accepted method that provides no political privacy whatsoever. Moreover, there are situations where states give voters no other choice - for example, CA may do so when there are fewer than 250 voters in a precinct.
Clearly, and wisely, the state does not consider political privacy to be more important than the ability to vote. Despite claims by the electronic voting machine industry, and others, to the contrary, secret ballots are not an essential part of an effective democracy.
And, although this is a bit off topic, asking whether the costs of secret voting are larger than the benefits is a more reasonable and intelectually honest approach to the situation. In fact, providing voters with reciepts provides for auditing and accounting possibilties that make election fraud much more difficult while voter coersion and bribery is not necessarily curtailed by current secret ballot practice.
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that all of these stories involve her? I don't mean to deny the importance of the issues, but it's a bit off to see that she represents an apparent common thread.
After all, this article is more about her running around with a tinfoil hat than it is about problems with voting software.
Not sure if they do anymore, but IIRC hard drives already have or have had write protect tabs available. Write protect works just fine for floppy disks.
Multiple heads seems like it would be a massive extra expense compared to changing the firmware that doesn't really provide a whole lot of extra security.
I recall that a while ago some navy ships were stopped dead in the water due to computer failure, so there are legitimate concerns. Most ships have a large number of fallback systems - notably crew - that can recover from most problems.
Large ships also benefit from a reasonable physical security structure - limited bridge and engine room access for crew - that help computer security
In light of a natural physical isolation, limiting the net access of the navigation computers is a natural and effective security boost.
Most of the 'essential' computer systems that are currently used are not OS based, but embedded. It would be silly to worry about the electronic fuel pump in your car getting a worm. These embedded systems are often virus proof because they use ROM program space. Any bugs are the result of programmer error and insuficient testing
So, I suspect that only high-level systems like navigation are vulerable to worms. Now, let's take a look at possible damage
Massive failures can be caused by hardware, so there must be a backup system regardless of the software that you choose
The same redundant systems can also be used to keep the master system honest
In general good policy and management is more important that what software is used.
Personally I think that issues like this are a symptom of the problem that IP is a flawed concept, but that doesn't help you any does it?
Some things that you should consider --
What kind of feedback are you getting from them as beta testers? If they're redesigning your software, then they really have some claim to IP -- If they're making a list of repeatable bugs that cause the program to crash, then probably not.
What kind of relationship do you have with these clients? If you're constantly dancing on a knife edge with them, you should probably take your buisness elsewhere. If you depend on their buisness, you may be stuck with their terms.
What are normal buisness practices for betas? Depending on the type of software, and the type of test there is often compensation for the testing time. Beta once meant 'stable', but I've seen betas that were less stable than alpha software once was.
What concessions/costs are associated with granting the beta tester IP rights for their observations? You should be clear on what will happen after you come to terms with the IP issue.
IP is traditionally something that has been used against the small guy. Initiating an IP fight can be an attempt to weaken you before buying you out, or a part of some other avericious buisness strategy.
I. Phillip's patents expire in 2002 and 2003. So even if Phillips goes hog wild, the issue in court will be over before it goes to trial. So Phillips is not going to try to stop the copy protected CD's in court
II. Sony is also a major CD patent holder, and is quite happily pressing massive numbers of CD's that don't even work with some of their equipment.
III. The head of Phillips made the comment that consumer activism is the means to stop CD copy protection.
IV. The Phillips CD copier hardware will probably not disable the copy protection, but just ignore it.
If I wasn't so cynical I might see this as a corporation doing the "right thing," but I cannot see this as anything but a PR sound byte. Phillips is going to sit around for the last year of its patent and collect royalties like nothing was going on. The discussion with the exec. was purely technical.
I think an alternative to MathWorld is called for. There are some serious problems with the current one:
It appears from Weisstein's story that CRC has "retroactive" copyrights to the site. When they publish a part of the site, they get copyrights for it?
Any contributers must sign CRC's boilerplate copyright agreement. Since CRC has already demonstrated some serious misbehavior, it's a quite sinister notion. Personally I'm quite reluctant to give them rights to anything I have written. It probably also precludes contributing the same material to other locations.
Let's face it. The mass media is the entertainment industry. That's right, newspapers make their money off of advertising. How many subscriptions does the NYT need to get in order to make up for one lost full page add? Probably more than six digits worth.
When eurodisney was doing crappy a while ago (AFAIK they still are) they spent a lot of advertising money. You know what they did? They bought an entire issue of a German magazine. Nothing to do with high tech, but every article in the magazine was about disney.
Next time you watch the news, and you see something that doesn't really seem like news ask yourself the following questions:
Does this draw viewers? (Think T&A fluff)
Is this really advertising? (Fluff story about some product)
If this isn't normally covered in the news, why are they making time for it? (There is *always* enough material for the news.
The magazines, all of them, know who their customers are: The advertisers. If you're dealing with a for profit publication that advertises, you can pretty much throw out the notion of integrity.
If you're dealing with a group of people that have a common interest they will certainly be biased.
Lets start by saying that what Brazil is doing is illegal. I doubt anyone is arguing with that.
Now, regarding the issue of it being wrong.
I don't know about this particular drug, but there are many pharmaceuticals that are like software: Once you have all the necessary information they are very cheap to produce. As with software there is a large up front cost. Funny that when people here start talking about software patents they're screaming, but when all that's involved is people dying then they're willing to let them die.
If was drunk, and there was someone bleeding to death, barring other options I probably would still try to drive them to the hospital. That's right, illegal act to save someone's life, even a complete stranger's. Heck, I'd probably be willing to steal a car to do it.
Now, Brazil is stealing this roche drug. Trying to save people's lives. Can't say that it's wrong from my point of view.
Funimation/infocomm has the rights to DBZ video games. TOEI (sp) does not, they've aleady sold them and could care less.
However, if the game qualifies as a parody then most of the copyrights are extremely difficult to maintain. Having had some exposure to DBZ, i'm sure that it won't be that hard to get from serious DBZ to a Parody of DBZ.
Since the obelisk weighs 6500 pounds (from site) and there are 7 sets of movable pulleys (Judging from pictures) The rope would need about 465 lbs of force to lift the obelisk clean off the ground.
Since the obelisk is not actually leaving the ground the amount of force involved is likely much smaller. Regardless, a force of 10 people could quite easily pull on a rope with 465 lbs of force. (Considering that the world weightlifting record is more like 900 lbs of force.)
Some of the potential advantages of the kite are that the kite is better for pulling long distances. Since the mechanical nature of the pulley system requires that the rope travel many times the distance of the obelisk, one may want a labor force that can move rapidly, and that the kite requires less labor (Probably only one or two people instead of 10).
The concerns about rope and pulley quality don't bother me so much since the amount of force involved is actually quite small. Good climbing rope can handle orders of magnitude more force.
I'm much more concerned with the construction of the scaffold that would be used to lift the Obelisk since it still must hold the entire weight of the obelisk and the lateral forces from the kite.
Unfortunately, although plausible this theory doesn't seem to make any predictions (or at least not on the web site) that can be verified against available data so it is difficult to conclude weather it is better or worse than existing theories.
I can't see any use for QoS that makes sense. If you want better bandwidth or latency you can already pay a premium for them, as many/. readers are aware. QoS doesn't provide any extra availabilty there. The QoS will however provide some corporate control method for content. So that certain sections of the web may be QoS enhanced, and those corporate interests will be able to exert control over the web.
As an existing web user I am wary of QoS attacks, especially accessing QoS (probably the higher levels) to get a new nast Variety of DOS attacks.
Personally the whole End to End notion makes much sense to me as it is a viable paradigm (oops) for most internet applications and problems.
I also don't know how Voice over IP through a central server will provide many of the interesting possibilites (I.E. intranet telephones) that a point-to-point approach will.
I can't help but think that the entire school system is stuck in a 1950's attitude. I remember a couple of years ago when my high school had a homecomeing King/Queen kissing contest. It was stopped the next year because of the associated embarassment that the event caused some people. To be involuntarily singled out in fron of a crowd of peers isn't exactly pleasant, even if you are pressured to kiss someone who you might not be interested in.
So why should students be happy to be singled out as the 'most popular' or whatever the homecomeing system represents, when the school is typically fractured into a bunch of cliques, and the people who are chosen are typically those associated with the most powerfull cliques, hence the people typically chosen are football players and cheerleaders.
It's probably intended to be a disciplinary ploy along the lines of, "See those beautifull people, see how they fit in, be like them, fit in, and be happy". So by refusing the crown this student has implicitly destroyed the appearance that all is well at the high school, the disgruntled student is no longer a minority. Furthermore, he has legitimized non-cooperation of students in general by brazenly flaunting an established (read archaic) tradition in front of the entire school.
The administrators are probably dealing with massive amouts of parental attention in the form of phone calls and whatnot because of the incident. They're also more likely to have trouble dealing with students because there is a relief in the social pressure to stay in line.
OTOH this is exacly the kind of anti-hero behavior that is espoused by a lot of modern media, for example MTV's film Election (1999) where the character get uprorious cheers from the school assmebly when her presidential speech is "Don't vote for me". So don't be surprised if this incident is blamed on such media outlets, and there is a consequent policy swing to the right.
I suppose this is karma bait, but assuming that the same day fixes are all "friendly" a reasonable assumption considering the inertia of companies of these sizes then the following figures come out:
Red Hat: 348 days for 22 fixes 15.8 days per fix Microsoft 982 days for 35 fixes 28.1 days per fix Sun 716 days for 6 fixes 119.3 days per fix
Also Red Hat had 29% (about 1/3 for those non-math inclined out there) friendly bugs, MS had 42% (~2/5) friendly bugs and Sun had 25% (1/4) friendly bugs.
How much of the touted stick market gain can be accounted for by volitaile tech stock these days? A good number of the.com's including Amazon don't post a profit, and are loosing money faster than LinuxOne. Almost like LinuxOne has a better financial outlook.
Regardless, the price on internet companies, legitemate or not is overinflated, this sort of thing just points out how ridiculous the actual stock market behavior is.
J. Lartbait: Hey this web stuff is the hot new thing
T. Clueless: Yeah, let's get in on the action
J. Lartbait: but running an online store is to much work and I can't figure out this whole HTML thing, and we'd need lots of startup capital.
T. Clueless: Maybee there's something that's available for free that we can sell for a profit... like air.
J. Lartbait: Right, I heard about something like that Linux.
T. Clueless: But how do we get Linux? It's free right...
J. Lartbait: Don't worry about that. People are so blinded by the.com they won't care weather or not we have a real product.
the rest is just a story.
Honestly, who wouldn't want to make a million dollars?
Why not put the headphones on the USB bus? Fewer connectors means smaller watch. Also maybee usable with that whole USB is cool thing. Of course this does lead to specialized hardware...
Seems like you're stuck putting an amp somewhere else tho.
Slashdot Mirror
And 1984 was 28 years ago.
As hulu gets worse, it gets easier to do something else.
Easy, allow multiple votes with only the last one being counted.
As soon as you can produce misleading receipts, you can't make verifiable claims about non-counting.
I remember thinking about this sort of problem, and the basic answer is that if you want to have verifiable voting, you'll need a trusted party to hold the votervote relationship. Though you can split it between multiple places and so on.
The fact is that the notion of DRM is intrinsically flawed. This 'print screen' workaround is another version of what has been referred to as the 'analog hole'. Any time something like this is being done on a general purpose machine (read 'in software') it's trivial to get a machine-readable copy of the content by using storage as the audio/video device.
The secret ballot was an Australian innovation, and the first US presidential election that took place involving secret ballots was in 1892 when the US was already more than 100 years old. So, up until 1892, there was no "Australian Ballot." Clearly the electoral system worked before then.
Of course, anyone who can be sufficiently coerced to vote a particular way is also going to be vulnerable to being coerced into using an absentee ballot - a widely accepted method that provides no political privacy whatsoever. Moreover, there are situations where states give voters no other choice - for example, CA may do so when there are fewer than 250 voters in a precinct.
Clearly, and wisely, the state does not consider political privacy to be more important than the ability to vote. Despite claims by the electronic voting machine industry, and others, to the contrary, secret ballots are not an essential part of an effective democracy.
And, although this is a bit off topic, asking whether the costs of secret voting are larger than the benefits is a more reasonable and intelectually honest approach to the situation. In fact, providing voters with reciepts provides for auditing and accounting possibilties that make election fraud much more difficult while voter coersion and bribery is not necessarily curtailed by current secret ballot practice.
Sadly, this is due to someone more elequent than me who's nick I don't recall, but:
Electronic Voting is not a solution in search of a problem, it's a problem looking for other problems to forcibly copulate with.
Does anyone else find it a bit odd that all of these stories involve her? I don't mean to deny the importance of the issues, but it's a bit off to see that she represents an apparent common thread.
After all, this article is more about her running around with a tinfoil hat than it is about problems with voting software.
Not sure if they do anymore, but IIRC hard drives already have or have had write protect tabs available. Write protect works just fine for floppy disks.
Multiple heads seems like it would be a massive extra expense compared to changing the firmware that doesn't really provide a whole lot of extra security.
I recall that a while ago some navy ships were stopped dead in the water due to computer failure, so there are legitimate concerns. Most ships have a large number of fallback systems - notably crew - that can recover from most problems.
Large ships also benefit from a reasonable physical security structure - limited bridge and engine room access for crew - that help computer security
In light of a natural physical isolation, limiting the net access of the navigation computers is a natural and effective security boost.
Most of the 'essential' computer systems that are currently used are not OS based, but embedded. It would be silly to worry about the electronic fuel pump in your car getting a worm. These embedded systems are often virus proof because they use ROM program space. Any bugs are the result of programmer error and insuficient testing
So, I suspect that only high-level systems like navigation are vulerable to worms. Now, let's take a look at possible damage
Massive failures can be caused by hardware, so there must be a backup system regardless of the software that you choose
The same redundant systems can also be used to keep the master system honest
In general good policy and management is more important that what software is used.
Personally I think that issues like this are a symptom of the problem that IP is a flawed concept, but that doesn't help you any does it?
Some things that you should consider --
What kind of feedback are you getting from them as beta testers? If they're redesigning your software, then they really have some claim to IP -- If they're making a list of repeatable bugs that cause the program to crash, then probably not.
What kind of relationship do you have with these clients? If you're constantly dancing on a knife edge with them, you should probably take your buisness elsewhere. If you depend on their buisness, you may be stuck with their terms.
What are normal buisness practices for betas? Depending on the type of software, and the type of test there is often compensation for the testing time. Beta once meant 'stable', but I've seen betas that were less stable than alpha software once was.
What concessions/costs are associated with granting the beta tester IP rights for their observations? You should be clear on what will happen after you come to terms with the IP issue.
IP is traditionally something that has been used against the small guy. Initiating an IP fight can be an attempt to weaken you before buying you out, or a part of some other avericious buisness strategy.
Larry and Bill have been butting heads for a little while now:
Passport v. Oracle DB
Unhackable v. Secure Operating Memmo
Wonder how Bill will respond to this one...
Get yourself a bunch of HDD based TV recorders. Upsize the HDD's and hook them to the existing system.
If you read the article you will discover that:
I. Phillip's patents expire in 2002 and 2003. So even if Phillips goes hog wild, the issue in court will be over before it goes to trial. So Phillips is not going to try to stop the copy protected CD's in court
II. Sony is also a major CD patent holder, and is quite happily pressing massive numbers of CD's that don't even work with some of their equipment.
III. The head of Phillips made the comment that consumer activism is the means to stop CD copy protection.
IV. The Phillips CD copier hardware will probably not disable the copy protection, but just ignore it.
If I wasn't so cynical I might see this as a corporation doing the "right thing," but I cannot see this as anything but a PR sound byte. Phillips is going to sit around for the last year of its patent and collect royalties like nothing was going on. The discussion with the exec. was purely technical.
Who else would you recommend for the position -- who do you think is best qualified, willing, and not you?
When eurodisney was doing crappy a while ago (AFAIK they still are) they spent a lot of advertising money. You know what they did? They bought an entire issue of a German magazine. Nothing to do with high tech, but every article in the magazine was about disney.
Next time you watch the news, and you see something that doesn't really seem like news ask yourself the following questions:
The magazines, all of them, know who their customers are: The advertisers. If you're dealing with a for profit publication that advertises, you can pretty much throw out the notion of integrity.
If you're dealing with a group of people that have a common interest they will certainly be biased.
Lets start by saying that what Brazil is doing is illegal. I doubt anyone is arguing with that.
Now, regarding the issue of it being wrong.
I don't know about this particular drug, but there are many pharmaceuticals that are like software: Once you have all the necessary information they are very cheap to produce. As with software there is a large up front cost. Funny that when people here start talking about software patents they're screaming, but when all that's involved is people dying then they're willing to let them die.
If was drunk, and there was someone bleeding to death, barring other options I probably would still try to drive them to the hospital. That's right, illegal act to save someone's life, even a complete stranger's. Heck, I'd probably be willing to steal a car to do it.
Now, Brazil is stealing this roche drug. Trying to save people's lives. Can't say that it's wrong from my point of view.
Funimation/infocomm has the rights to DBZ video games. TOEI (sp) does not, they've aleady sold them and could care less.
However, if the game qualifies as a parody then most of the copyrights are extremely difficult to maintain. Having had some exposure to DBZ, i'm sure that it won't be that hard to get from serious DBZ to a Parody of DBZ.
Since the obelisk weighs 6500 pounds (from site) and there are 7 sets of movable pulleys (Judging from pictures) The rope would need about 465 lbs of force to lift the obelisk clean off the ground.
Since the obelisk is not actually leaving the ground the amount of force involved is likely much smaller. Regardless, a force of 10 people could quite easily pull on a rope with 465 lbs of force. (Considering that the world weightlifting record is more like 900 lbs of force.)
Some of the potential advantages of the kite are that the kite is better for pulling long distances. Since the mechanical nature of the pulley system requires that the rope travel many times the distance of the obelisk, one may want a labor force that can move rapidly, and that the kite requires less labor (Probably only one or two people instead of 10).
The concerns about rope and pulley quality don't bother me so much since the amount of force involved is actually quite small. Good climbing rope can handle orders of magnitude more force.
I'm much more concerned with the construction of the scaffold that would be used to lift the Obelisk since it still must hold the entire weight of the obelisk and the lateral forces from the kite.
Unfortunately, although plausible this theory doesn't seem to make any predictions (or at least not on the web site) that can be verified against available data so it is difficult to conclude weather it is better or worse than existing theories.
I can't see any use for QoS that makes sense. If you want better bandwidth or latency you can already pay a premium for them, as many /. readers are aware. QoS doesn't provide any extra availabilty there. The QoS will however provide some corporate control method for content. So that certain sections of the web may be QoS enhanced, and those corporate interests will be able to exert control over the web.
As an existing web user I am wary of QoS attacks, especially accessing QoS (probably the higher levels) to get a new nast Variety of DOS attacks.
Personally the whole End to End notion makes much sense to me as it is a viable paradigm (oops) for most internet applications and problems.
I also don't know how Voice over IP through a central server will provide many of the interesting possibilites (I.E. intranet telephones) that a point-to-point approach will.
I can't help but think that the entire school system is stuck in a 1950's attitude. I remember a couple of years ago when my high school had a homecomeing King/Queen kissing contest. It was stopped the next year because of the associated embarassment that the event caused some people. To be involuntarily singled out in fron of a crowd of peers isn't exactly pleasant, even if you are pressured to kiss someone who you might not be interested in.
So why should students be happy to be singled out as the 'most popular' or whatever the homecomeing system represents, when the school is typically fractured into a bunch of cliques, and the people who are chosen are typically those associated with the most powerfull cliques, hence the people typically chosen are football players and cheerleaders.
It's probably intended to be a disciplinary ploy along the lines of, "See those beautifull people, see how they fit in, be like them, fit in, and be happy". So by refusing the crown this student has implicitly destroyed the appearance that all is well at the high school, the disgruntled student is no longer a minority. Furthermore, he has legitimized non-cooperation of students in general by brazenly flaunting an established (read archaic) tradition in front of the entire school.
The administrators are probably dealing with massive amouts of parental attention in the form of phone calls and whatnot because of the incident. They're also more likely to have trouble dealing with students because there is a relief in the social pressure to stay in line.
OTOH this is exacly the kind of anti-hero behavior that is espoused by a lot of modern media, for example MTV's film Election (1999) where the character get uprorious cheers from the school assmebly when her presidential speech is "Don't vote for me". So don't be surprised if this incident is blamed on such media outlets, and there is a consequent policy swing to the right.
Computer current has pulled the article. May be canning some editors as we speak...
I suppose this is karma bait, but assuming that the same day fixes are all "friendly" a reasonable assumption considering the inertia of companies of these sizes then the following figures come out:
Red Hat:
348 days for 22 fixes 15.8 days per fix
Microsoft
982 days for 35 fixes 28.1 days per fix
Sun
716 days for 6 fixes 119.3 days per fix
Also Red Hat had 29% (about 1/3 for those non-math inclined out there) friendly bugs, MS had 42% (~2/5) friendly bugs and Sun had 25% (1/4) friendly bugs.
Draw your own conclusions.
How much of the touted stick market gain can be accounted for by volitaile tech stock these days? A good number of the .com's including Amazon don't post a profit, and are loosing money faster than LinuxOne. Almost like LinuxOne has a better financial outlook.
.com they won't care weather or not we have a real product.
Regardless, the price on internet companies, legitemate or not is overinflated, this sort of thing just points out how ridiculous the actual stock market behavior is.
J. Lartbait: Hey this web stuff is the hot new thing
T. Clueless: Yeah, let's get in on the action
J. Lartbait: but running an online store is to much work and I can't figure out this whole HTML thing, and we'd need lots of startup capital.
T. Clueless: Maybee there's something that's available for free that we can sell for a profit... like air.
J. Lartbait: Right, I heard about something like that Linux.
T. Clueless: But how do we get Linux? It's free right...
J. Lartbait: Don't worry about that. People are so blinded by the
the rest is just a story.
Honestly, who wouldn't want to make a million dollars?
Why not put the headphones on the USB bus? Fewer connectors means smaller watch. Also maybee usable with that whole USB is cool thing. Of course this does lead to specialized hardware...
Seems like you're stuck putting an amp somewhere else tho.