Via a Slashdot story about evidence of voting machine errors — Open Voting Consortium:

Very cool stuff. You can even try a ballot via this web-based demonstration. The demonstration allows you to cast a fictional ballot and then generate a printable document. The document is approximately what you would get out of the real system if this were actually used.

This is the thread in the Slashdot article about Open Voting Consortium.

You can read the  comments on Slashdot that discuss the OVC.

A few points worth mentioning:

1. The actual hardware can be cheap, commodity systems.
2. The actual ballots are printed, submitted ballots that are readable by both computers and humans.
3. Ballots that have not been submitted are of no risk to anyone.

The nice part about this is you don’t necessarily have to vote anywhere. You could vote on your cell phone, print it, and submit it. Some jurisdictions in the USA already allow (and encourage) voting by mail.

The goal of the new voting movements (some of which aren’t so new) are generally to increase turnout, simplify the process, increase integrity of the process, and enhance the results of voting. I’m all for it.

For anyone who read my recent post about YouTube censorship, xenutv, and Scientology, you may have viewed the Jason Beghe interview conducted by xenutv.

That video commits one of the biggest sins in online video in my book, one I wrote about way back in May 2006 (A Word on Audio), having stereo sound with only one channel of audio. I listen with headphones, so it’s like I’m deaf in one ear when they pull that crap.

Unfortunately my new computer’s sound drivers are a little different. Mainly, there’s no ‘mono mix’ checkbox in Gnome Alsamixer, for reasons beyond my comprehension. But, alsa is highly configurable if you take the time to figure it out. Which I have:

1. Create a ~/.asoundrc if one does not exist.
2. Edit it per below.
3. Save it.
4. Restart any sound-using programs.
5. Rename the ‘pcm.!default’ to something (pcm.notdefault) & repeat 4 to disable mono.

The code:

pcm.!default {

  type plug

  slave {

    pcm "d"

    channels 1

  }

}

pcm.d {

  type plug

  slave {

    pcm "hw:0,0"

  }

}

This assumes your default audio device is hw:0,0

If it’s not, you’ll need to figure out what it is. One way to do that is to study the output of:

aplay -Ll

There’s probably some way you can add a checkbox, or make this more automated. I’ll look at that later. For now I’m just glad to have the option of monaural audio when I need it. Upon reflection having monaural audio is also a boon to people who actually are deaf in one ear; they can then hear the second channel mixed in.

I just wish I could figure out how to add this as a setting in alsa mixer so it would be a little simpler to switch.

Via Reuters — CNN now sued for $1.3 billion - $1 per person in China:

The suit brought because of comments by Jack Cafferty:

What’s interesting about that quote from my perspective is, foremost, the notion that you could sue for $1 for every person in the country when even the most egregious, blanketed statement is undoubtedly wholly accurate in some minority of the cases.

That is, there is no way that all of the Chinese people aren’t “goons,” etc. And there’s no case that you could convince a jury a goon can be insulted for being what he/she is.

Of course, there’s other problems with the suit. Some of Cafferty’s remarks at the time were true. Most were not directed at the Chinese people themselves, but the government and businessmen. But even excepting that, and the above point about the existence of some goons in China, and supposing that judgment was made against CNN, you’re looking at the notion that every person in China would actually get their $1.

The actual costs of distributing that money would be enormous. Would prisoners (political or otherwise) get their dollar too? It’s just a downright absurd, preposterous lawsuit. Especially taking into account what should offend the plaintiffs and the majority of the Chinese people is their government’s behavior toward human rights, especially vis-a-vis Tibet, Syria, et al.

Just as we in the United States should be insulted by our government’s behavior with regard to Iraq and the mishandling of the war on terrorism, the complete lack of respect for the law shown by our President, and so on.

If anything this lawsuit will serve to bring more attention to China’s need for reform. As will, hopefully, the silly multi-billion dollar sporting event involving the circles and the fire stick.

Jason Beghe, a former Scientologist, spoke out. I’d seen the tease for the above-linked interview and was checking back to see if the full interview had been posted. Then one day the YouTub account of the poster was suspended for prior incidents of alleged copyright infringement.

Currently the trend of media is wholesale ownership of content and increasingly comprehensive restrictions on fair use. YouTube has become an exemplar of this trend, with their shoot-first, answer-questions-never (except “with the user who posted the materials”) policy. They do not have a transparent process for reviewing content removal decisions. If a video could be construed as infringing without examining the complexities of copyright (including fair use) they’ll pull it.

What’s more, they’ll remove the offender’s account and will, in the future, disable any accounts that person makes if they find out. In short, YouTube is behaving as a barrier to free speech. Obviously it’s the company’s right to do as they please with regard to content, but a subordinate organization to Google, one would expect more from.

Examples of YouTube’s strong stance against freedom can be found in at least two examples I’ve personally followed. The first was covered here awhile ago also involved copyright infringement : Back on YouTube! That case amounted to the infringing use of music to accompany what was otherwise non-infringing content.

This time around the issue is xenutv posting Viacom-owned Stephen Colbert clips about Scientology. Xenutv got removed from YouTube before for this, and apparently their policy of banning repeat offenders caused another account removal more recently. Xenutv posted their Jason Beghe interview, and somehow that triggered the account removal.

There are two problems here. The first is a question of fair use. If one so-called channel on YouTube is dedicated to a specific topic when is it not fair use to post a directly-related clip? Arguably posting the Colbert clips is fair use as it was a small portion of the original work that had little, if any, potential of damaging the ability of Viacom to exploit the work commercially.

Viacom is acting for one reason: they don’t want their content reused except by direct permission. They don’t want fair use. And YouTube has been complicit in this sort of behavior. The DMCA takedowns do not account for fair use. There is no review process. Effectively, the DMCA along with its corresponding protocol amongst the media companies is effectively skirting the notion of fair use altogether.

But, in my view, there is a much larger problem. Accepting the current behavior of media companies and YouTube in handling infringement, it should be second nature to hold the process up to the light. That is the opposite of the situation. Content can be pulled from a major site like YouTube at any time for any reason, but it would seem reasonable to expect them to give the public a reason. There should be a public review process that allows the average user to see why the company took action.

Wikipedia does this via the article History does this. You can look at the revisions, you can look at the talk page. While YouTube is no Wikipedia, they should still strive to be open about why content was taken down. Otherwise we have no reason to believe it wasn’t outright censorship rather than alleged copyright infringement.

So, from all of this discovery we can tune forth a few rules for the modern media:

1. Be transparent.
2. Only remove the infringing content.
3. Offer an alternative source if applicable.

That is, put a process of review in place where users can find out what the reason was for a removal and see that it was handled properly. Don’t cull the forest to remove the weeds. And finally, if Viacom streams the offending episode, maybe YouTube and Viacom could offer the offender the choice of linking to that content instead.

In both the above cases the initial reaction of sane-minded individuals is not copyright infringement, but actions by those who disagree with the content to get the accounts pulled. That definitely was not the case in the first example. Was it, in the second? We don’t know. Obviously something triggered YouTube’s radar. Was it the volume of hits that the interview tease received? We will not know unless YouTube opens their process up to public scrutiny.

Via ars technica, via slashdot,

There’s free software, which is any software which has no monetary cost, and then there’s Free software which is any software which has liberty bundled with it. Microsoft does not give away liberty in developing countries. In fact, they don’t even allow liberty to exist in Norway if they can help it.

The GPL actually provides the complete opposite and Mr. Gates knows this. The truth is that a million times a day someone using Windows punches their inner child while wishing they could change something about the operating system. Everything from the look of the windows to changing the file system to one that doesn’t require constant defragmentation.

With Windows you can’t do that without a lot of effort. With sanely written software that’s designed to be malleable (such as many Open Source projects) it’s second nature. And when there’s source available there’s an open market to pay people to make those changes for you.

Of course you can charge for them. You can already charge for Open Source. The difference is that if you sell and distribute GPL software you’ve got to give them the source and the right to distribute that software. That doesn’t mean that you can’t customize the software for a company to give them a competitive edge. Just the opposite.

If software X can pump out 100 widgets a day by default and the company modifies it to pump out 200 widgets a day, they can make more widgets. Unless they’re distributing the software to third parties they can effectively keep those changes internally and benefit exclusively from them.

Google does this. They also do many things that are supportive of Open Source, but they modify the source internally and use it. If you don’t distribute the software to others you do not have to give them the source.

This is what Mr. Gates really disagrees with. His company is in the business of selling software to others. He doesn’t like the competition. If they can get a better, more customized application for free, or for free plus the cost of paying a developer to customize it, they won’t want to overpay for inferior software from Microsoft.

Sorry Mr. Gates, but it’s inferior because it can’t be customized. It’s inferior because it costs too much. It’s inferior because it’s encumbered by the inventor’s greed. You can sell your drugs, but increasingly you’ll find the people practicing preventative medicine, using Open Source to avoid the need for your “invented” anti-virus.