I'm currently catch-all for ten domains. Recently my spam load has increased exponentially. It went from 400/day to 4000/day in the last six months, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doubles in another week or two.
In short, if you don't have a very effective spam filter, don't do it.
... New Jersey Lottery actually sends money to private schools...
Thereby turning them into public schools, with all the attendant disincentives to excellence.
... Private schools qualify their students.
Students qualify themselves. Or if you prefer, their parents do. I'm an individualist, not a socialist. I don't believe that "society" is a sentient being, with responsibility for caring for its poor. Allow people to fail and some will choose to succeed. Remove the possibility of failure and none of them will succeed.
You think there are people spending 5-10 grand a year on lotto?
Not before working at 7-11, I didn't.
Maybe you should try living on some of the public assistance programs and see how much fun it is "freeloading" off of everyone else.
Do you know where lotto money goes? In New Jersey, it is split 36/56 between a mostly educational fund and the prize pool... Is that really a bad way to spend money?
Considering that public education already spends twice as much (on the average) per child than private education, and achieves comparatively poor results, yes, I consider it a very bad investment.
There are a lot of poor parents who could send their children to a good private school for what they spend on lottery tickets. Instead, they send their children to inner-city slum schools and create another generation of dependency on public assistance programs.
RAID 5 is most effective in a business situation, offering a good compromise of speed, capacity and redundancy.
Nope. In a real business situation, i.e. data-warehousing or ISP hosting
environment, nobody trusts RAID 5. It's slow and fragile. Instead, everybody
I know goes with RAID 10 (striped mirrors). Here's a typical 8-drive configuration:
Stripe:
Disk 1 mirrored with Disk 2
Disk 3 mirrored with Disk 4
Disk 5 mirrored with Disk 6
Disk 7 mirrored with Disk 8
Total storage equals the same as a 4-drive RAID-0 system.
Performance should be slightly better, on a high-end dedicated controller,
as the mirrors should be able to seek to different files independently for
concurrent read requests (thus lowering latency), while the stripes should be
able to operate simultaneously for large-block i/o
(thus raising the streaming i/o rate).
Reliability is better than Raid-5, for two reasons:
When a drive fails and is replaced, only that particular stripe is rebuilt.
That means that until the rebuild is done, one drive will be doing streaming-reads,
and the other will be doing streaming writes.
None of the other drives are affected. Contrast this with Raid-5, where one drive
is doing block-writes and all the others are doing block-reads, interspersed with
CPU checksum calculations, until the entire drive array is rebuilt. The result is
that RAID-10 has much shorter disaster recovery times.
In a RAID-10 system, up to half the drives can fail simultaneously without
data loss, as long as one drive in each stripe remains functional. In a RAID-5
system, the loss of two drives guarantees loss of all your data.
... your walkman is not a
"limited resource computing device".
</blockquote>
Think again.
First, let's discard the "limited resource" prefix, which is syntactically meaningless. (Everything is limited, though the limits vary.)
Next, let's examine the definition for "computing device."
Wordnet simply lists it as a synonym for "computer."
A computer is a device which is used to process information according to a well-defined procedure. Although it may not be a general purpose computer, your walkman would certainly qualify as an embedded computer. It has input (the afore-mentioned single-button), a finite but distinct number of operational states, and output. Shucks, a simple mercury-bulb thermostat qualifies as a computer, under the most general definition. A machine does not have to contain a modern microprocessor chip to qualify as a "computing device."
Re:As long as developers can make their pages fit
on
Mozilla's Mini-Me
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Blockquoth the poster:
There's nothing I hate more than having to scroll sideways on a website.
<sarcasm>
Wow. You must be a really cool dude, if something as trivial as that makes the top of your hate list.
Or maybe just really, really sheltered.
</sarcasm>
On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 03:09:46PM -0400, Richard Neal wrote:
This idea has one bad flaw. How do you handle the problem of a voter printing out multiple VVA receipts if the receipt is created before the vote is recorded and placing two or more in the ballot box, or saving one to prove to someone how they voted.
In the best (and most prominent) plans, the voter doesn't actually handle the printed copy, but gets to view it behind glass before it drops into the secure container.
Also how to handle the receipts if incorrect.
I'm not sure. But at least they'd KNOW it's incorrect.
Are you saying that we don't want to take any kind of precautions
against tampering, system failure, or fraud? Just because we don't
want to think about what we'd do if it happens?
Or how to handle the recount if the number of ballots does not agree with the number of voters who cast ballots (either way)?
The paper count takes precedence over the electronic count, in case of doubt or disagreement. Some voters will enter the line and leave without actually casting a ballot. Some ballots will be blank. But the "number of voters who cast ballots" and the "number of paper slips in the sealed container" should be, by definition, one and the same number. An electronic vote without a corresponding printout doesn't count as a ballot. A voter who registered and appeared at the polling booth but left without producing a printed ballot doesn't count as a
"voter who cast a ballot".
If the receipt is printed after validation of the ballot on the machine, then one level of fraud is prevented. What kind of printer and paper should be used to prevent fraud?
The paper and printer used would be similar to that used for a cash register. The main goal is avoiding jams and ink run-outs. I'm not sure what kind of fraud you are implying.
I have been told that each ballot is saved on the hard drives of the machine, which is better than the lever machines and can be recounted.
This is false. The DRE machines only record totals, not individual votes. This is one of their problems. No recount is possible. What they call a recount is simply re-running their reporting programs to
re-display the internally-generated totals. Read the references I provided for further details.
Paper ballots have a history of fraud as well. Remember Chicago. There is nothing to prevent duplicate ballot boxes with preprinted ballots. Or the problem of the ink that could not be read by the OCR machines in California.
Sure. And there's nothing preventing me from walking into my local polling place and switching their electronic smart-card with one I conveniently brought with me, that only records votes for my preferred
candidate.
And there's nothing preventing me from getting a job with Diebold and switching ALL the electronic cards for a given precinct, or making some slightly-unauthorized "upgrades" to their software.
The difference between ballot-box-stuffing and computer hacking is the scale of damage that can be easily done by a single person.
I switched from a lever machine to an button machine to an electronic ballot. All three offered the same basic level of security, trust that the voting official could read the counters on the machine. The electronic machine is the only one to provide a permanent record of the tally on paper.
Many districts use optical-scan, or mark-sense ballots which also provide a permanent paper record. Some companies offer electronic displays which automatically mark the cards via a touch-screen interface very similar to what Diebold and others provide in their un-auditable systems.
The next question is how much slower the voting proces
Despite Diebold's promises to tighten up security after two
independent investigations in July and September, a third
investigation in March of yielded the following quote:
Diebold
"basically had no interest in putting actual
security in this system," said Paul Franceus, one of the
consultants. "It's not like they did it wrong. It's like
they didn't bother."
In the the recent California audit, Diebold's own lawyers
admitted that their client had "probably broken the law."
Frustrated investigators asked whether Diebold was lying, or
only "trying to be misleading" in their answers. Here's
what Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold Election Systems, had
to say for himself:
We were caught. We apologize for that.
Direct Recording Electronic "DRE" Machines
Though Diebold has gotten bad press lately, (it's costing them
hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign "contributions" to
stay in business), their competitors are no better. Any DRE
machine would be just as vulnerable to error, tampering, and
fraud. Because they do not produce a permanent record of each
vote, modern computerized systems are no better than the huge
mechanical lever machines of 1890. Because there is no reliable
way to even detect errors, the results of any election
using these machines is open to question.
Voter-Verifiable Audit Receipt
For at least ten years, security experts around the country have
recommended the use of a Voter-Verifiable Audit, or "VVA," to
guard against these problems. If passed, Voters Confidence
and Increased Accuracy Act would require electronic voting
machines to produce a paper printout of each vote. This "VVA
Receipt" must be made available for each voter to check before
being securely deposited into a sealed container. The paper
ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over
any electronic tallies in case of doubt.
Urge your Senator and Representative to support the
Voters Confidence Act, also known as
H.R.2239 (in the House), and S.1980
(in the Senate.)
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a
computer.
There are literally hundreds of ways to tamper with the vote
when computers are doing the counting. Here are just some of
the possibilities:
Hire a programmer to create a "back door" program in the
voting software which can alter the vote count on
demand.
In Fairfax County, Virginia, during the 2003 elections,
voters in three precincts complained that the machines
changed their votes. Testing showed that a machine
seemed to subtract a vote in about "one of a hundred
tries." At least two close races may have hinged on
that one percent "error."
Replace the vote-counting software through last-minute
technical "service upgrades."
Most recently in California, thousands of election
computers were "upgraded" just before the election,
replacing the certified software with newer,
un-certified versions.
Monopolize some critic
Certification earned in the military most likely was tough to get, and thus is respected.
Military certifications are
even easier (from an academic standpoint) than correspondence-schools.
Anybody with a good short-term memory should be able to memorize
enough garbage to ace a military certification test. And as anybody
with a real military background can tell you, test scores are not
in any way, shape, or form indicative of real technical ability.
President Thomas Whitmore:
I don't understand, where does all this come from? How do you get funding for something like this?
Julius Levinson:
You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?
THIS SECTION CONTAINS MY PERSONAL OPINIONS AND
DOESN'T REPRESENT AN OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE XFree86 PROJECT.
The first incarnation of this version of libGLw used eight header files from
LessTif, four for each Motif version.
LessTif is covered by the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) whose
terms are not compatible with the XFree86 licensing policy. Since the
copyright holder of LessTif is the Free Software
Foundation (FSF), I asked Richard Stallman, president of FSF and so called
"leader of the Free Software movement", permission to redistribute a copy of
those eight headers under XFree86 terms, still maintaining the FSF copyright.
Observe that I was not asking him to change the license of LessTif as a whole,
but only to allow me to distribute copies of some header files containing
function prototypes, variable declarations and data type definitions. Even so,
Stallman said no because the files contained "more than 6000 lines of code".
Which code? The LessTif headers are mostly copies of the Motif ones and don't
contain any original GNU "code"! I can't still imagine a reason for Stallman's
negative answer except for paranoia. He seems to ignore what Motif is and
that LessTif's API is simply a copy of Motif's one.
After spending some time, I made my own headers, that became much smaller than
the previous ones because I included only a subset of the Motif API and merged
everything into four files: 417 lines instead 6000. Humm, perhaps I should be
grateful to Sallman too:-).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm currently catch-all for ten domains. Recently my spam load has increased exponentially. It went from 400/day to 4000/day in the last six months, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doubles in another week or two.
In short, if you don't have a very effective spam filter, don't do it.
Thereby turning them into public schools, with all the attendant disincentives to excellence.
Students qualify themselves. Or if you prefer, their parents do. I'm an individualist, not a socialist. I don't believe that "society" is a sentient being, with responsibility for caring for its poor. Allow people to fail and some will choose to succeed. Remove the possibility of failure and none of them will succeed.
Not before working at 7-11, I didn't.
I'd rather starve. I came close, once.
Considering that public education already spends twice as much (on the average) per child than private education, and achieves comparatively poor results, yes, I consider it a very bad investment.
There are a lot of poor parents who could send their children to a good private school for what they spend on lottery tickets. Instead, they send their children to inner-city slum schools and create another generation of dependency on public assistance programs.
Nope. In a real business situation, i.e. data-warehousing or ISP hosting environment, nobody trusts RAID 5. It's slow and fragile. Instead, everybody I know goes with RAID 10 (striped mirrors). Here's a typical 8-drive configuration:
Stripe:Total storage equals the same as a 4-drive RAID-0 system. Performance should be slightly better, on a high-end dedicated controller, as the mirrors should be able to seek to different files independently for concurrent read requests (thus lowering latency), while the stripes should be able to operate simultaneously for large-block i/o (thus raising the streaming i/o rate).
Reliability is better than Raid-5, for two reasons:According to the laws of thermodynamics, they don't.
Vacuum is relative.
When you try visiting http://projectname.sf.net/ and get an error like that, switch to http://sf.net/projects/projectname/ instead.
However, in this particular case, the project has been discontinued.
Or maybe just really, really sheltered. </sarcasm>
May I remind you that Diebold also happens to manufacture the only brand of ATM machines that have been "hacked" by a common Windows-based virus.
Now what was it you were saying?
In the best (and most prominent) plans, the voter doesn't actually handle the printed copy, but gets to view it behind glass before it drops into the secure container.
I'm not sure. But at least they'd KNOW it's incorrect.
Are you saying that we don't want to take any kind of precautions against tampering, system failure, or fraud? Just because we don't want to think about what we'd do if it happens?
The paper count takes precedence over the electronic count, in case of doubt or disagreement. Some voters will enter the line and leave without actually casting a ballot. Some ballots will be blank. But the "number of voters who cast ballots" and the "number of paper slips in the sealed container" should be, by definition, one and the same number. An electronic vote without a corresponding printout doesn't count as a ballot. A voter who registered and appeared at the polling booth but left without producing a printed ballot doesn't count as a "voter who cast a ballot".
The paper and printer used would be similar to that used for a cash register. The main goal is avoiding jams and ink run-outs. I'm not sure what kind of fraud you are implying.
This is false. The DRE machines only record totals, not individual votes. This is one of their problems. No recount is possible. What they call a recount is simply re-running their reporting programs to re-display the internally-generated totals. Read the references I provided for further details.
Sure. And there's nothing preventing me from walking into my local polling place and switching their electronic smart-card with one I conveniently brought with me, that only records votes for my preferred candidate.
And there's nothing preventing me from getting a job with Diebold and switching ALL the electronic cards for a given precinct, or making some slightly-unauthorized "upgrades" to their software.
The difference between ballot-box-stuffing and computer hacking is the scale of damage that can be easily done by a single person.
Many districts use optical-scan, or mark-sense ballots which also provide a permanent paper record. Some companies offer electronic displays which automatically mark the cards via a touch-screen interface very similar to what Diebold and others provide in their un-auditable systems.
Thank you for the feedback. I'll update my flyer and also include a link to your website.
I plan to re-protest during the November elections.
Personally, I spent Tuesday (local election) passing out the following flyer:
Will Your Vote Be Counted?
Diebold
Direct Recording Electronic "DRE" Machines
Though Diebold has gotten bad press lately, (it's costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign "contributions" to stay in business), their competitors are no better. Any DRE machine would be just as vulnerable to error, tampering, and fraud. Because they do not produce a permanent record of each vote, modern computerized systems are no better than the huge mechanical lever machines of 1890. Because there is no reliable way to even detect errors, the results of any election using these machines is open to question.
Voter-Verifiable Audit Receipt
For at least ten years, security experts around the country have recommended the use of a Voter-Verifiable Audit, or "VVA," to guard against these problems. If passed, Voters Confidence and Increased Accuracy Act would require electronic voting machines to produce a paper printout of each vote. This "VVA Receipt" must be made available for each voter to check before being securely deposited into a sealed container. The paper ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic tallies in case of doubt.
Urge your Senator and Representative to support the Voters Confidence Act, also known as H.R.2239 (in the House), and S.1980 (in the Senate.)
How to Buy an Election
There are literally hundreds of ways to tamper with the vote when computers are doing the counting. Here are just some of the possibilities: Hire a programmer to create a "back door" program in the voting software which can alter the vote count on demand. In Fairfax County, Virginia, during the 2003 elections, voters in three precincts complained that the machines changed their votes. Testing showed that a machine seemed to subtract a vote in about "one of a hundred tries." At least two close races may have hinged on that one percent "error." Replace the vote-counting software through last-minute technical "service upgrades." Most recently in California, thousands of election computers were "upgraded" just before the election, replacing the certified software with newer, un-certified versions. Monopolize some criticMilitary certifications are even easier (from an academic standpoint) than correspondence-schools. Anybody with a good short-term memory should be able to memorize enough garbage to ace a military certification test. And as anybody with a real military background can tell you, test scores are not in any way, shape, or form indicative of real technical ability.
Correction: Fire needs four things:
IIRC from the special edition, the rat died about a month later of unrelated causes.
Just wondering. What are your monthly cooling costs?
s/save/create/
And a lot of people use Microsoft Outlook for the same reason ... and with the same
results.
Wake up and smell the coffee, dude. Step one was a loooooooonnnnggg time ago. We're currently at step, oh, I dunno, 65,535?
The first incarnation of this version of libGLw used eight header files from LessTif, four for each Motif version. LessTif is covered by the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) whose terms are not compatible with the XFree86 licensing policy. Since the copyright holder of LessTif is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), I asked Richard Stallman, president of FSF and so called "leader of the Free Software movement", permission to redistribute a copy of those eight headers under XFree86 terms, still maintaining the FSF copyright.
Observe that I was not asking him to change the license of LessTif as a whole, but only to allow me to distribute copies of some header files containing function prototypes, variable declarations and data type definitions. Even so, Stallman said no because the files contained "more than 6000 lines of code". Which code? The LessTif headers are mostly copies of the Motif ones and don't contain any original GNU "code"! I can't still imagine a reason for Stallman's negative answer except for paranoia. He seems to ignore what Motif is and that LessTif's API is simply a copy of Motif's one.
After spending some time, I made my own headers, that became much smaller than the previous ones because I included only a subset of the Motif API and merged everything into four files: 417 lines instead 6000. Humm, perhaps I should be grateful to Sallman too :-).
Or your elections?
Okay, I JUST installed XFree86 4.3. Care to briefly summarize what's better in 4.4?
Just to play devil's advocate, let's suppose I were a Microsoft programmer, considering the following two options:
Keep in mind that in order to justify my choice to upper management, I must prove that it generates the most profit for the least investment.
Hmm.......