Jim Kuzdrall announces that Shawn K. O'Shea will present “VMware tips: features, advantages, installation, quirks, demo” at the November 16th meeting of the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. Should be a great show!
Archive | November 10, 2006
Groklaw: Microsoft Patent Pledge Useless
Groklaw is reporting SFLC's Bradley M. Kuhn's Letter to the FOSS Development Community Regarding Microsoft's Patent Promise. The Software Freedom Law Center's CTO Bradley Kuhn has issued a statement regarding the Novell-Microsoft agreements and how they will impact FOSS developers. They have analyzed in particular Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Non-CompensatedDevelopers and see little value and in fact say it's worse than useless, because it creates an illusion of safety and because it limits severely what that developer is allowed to do with his work: read more
Electronic Voting is still not ready for prime time…
InfoWorld: Top News is reporting Florida e-voting: 18,000 'missing' votes in close race.
“Government watchdog group Common Cause has called for an investigation of electronic voting machines used in Florida's 13th congressional district because of 18,000 missing votes…. About 18,000 people who cast votes in other races in Tuesday's election failed to record a vote for either candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives. At last count, Republican candidate Vern Buchanan led Democratic candidate Christine Jennings by less than 400 votes in the race to succeed Republican Katherine Harris, who ran unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate.”
… But her spirit lives on.
“This is part of the reason we've been calling for a paper trail,” Wilcox said… Ironically, Sarasota County voters on Tuesday approved a ballot measure requiring paper trail ballots to be used as a backup to the e-voting machines.”
Whether by programmer error (certainly possible), operator error (easy enough), configuration problem, or tin-foil-hat-conspiracy, electronic voting is not an improvement on paper ballots. Unless and until we can make a system than makes voting more accurate, we ought to just wait until the paper ballots get counted.