Same thing happened to me under Debian. And no, AFAIK, Ubuntu does not package or distribute Skype (it's a MicroSkype-made package).

Or even 2007... Memory blurry now.

I have a last-generation iMac G5. IIRC, I bought it in 2008 or 2009. Five years... Is a lot in Apple years. You must upgrade your hardware.

Do you mean Laurassian or Gondwanan tyrannosaurus rex?

Of course, this technology is just begging the Tor network to adopt it!

A computer does not rely on a single fan - We have fans cooling the CPU, the GPU, the power supply... And they all cause air to move around inside the case. Air carries dust with it. And dust is quite likely to get trapped inside structures as this one, very sponge-like.

Give it enough time, and it will become a mass of dust with a metallic skeleton... (I don't know, it reminds me quite a bit User Friendly's Dust Puppy ;-) )

That does not sound like a good recipe.

I'm very sorry... Slashdot interviews tend to summon interesting people, with real answers to tough questions. This one, however, is quite disappointing. The answer for a half-technical questions should not be "go look at the nice video our marketing chaps did", but a explanation of the process, as thorough as possible. And if his answers are all like the one where he says, "mail-in voting is fucked-up as well, but people tend to accept it"... It is a clear no-go. If he is pushing the technical-social part to change a perceived shortcoming, he would have (IMO) the moral obligation to oppose mail-in voting, as it dillutes security and trust.

I am a (small) academic myself. His viewpoints, saying "I'm not here to fix the political part, just to research on the social issues" is short-sighted at best. And it lacks in what is often criticized about the academics: An obsession with our line of work, without caring for how it interfaces with reality. The same happens with many who research on the mathematical side of e-voting. It might be all sound and good as long as you don't factor in humans. Put humans in the equation, and we end up clearly better with good ol' paper voting.

Firefox 3000 should arrive no later than Summer 2016.

Why is in the best interest of our country to build fences? No, building a free-transit area akin to what Europe and Mercosur have would be way better. But I know that won't happen, because of the strong assymetry between our countries.

But anyway: Yes, university education is free and has a very high level. But we do lack in many aspects. My university is huge (350,000 students; the main universitary campus is about 6Km, which would be about 3 square miles; around 35,000 full-time academic staff). However, it only manages to accept about one tenth of the people that try to enter (and some courses, mainly in the first semesters, have up to 70 students — Far from ideal. I teach, however, in 5th-6th semester courses, and my groups have been 15-35, much better).

But how many people reach university? Or how many people reach even high school? If your work is needed at home at age 12 because there's no other way the family has enough money, most probably you won't ever consider entering a university.

And... Guess who are the people that leave the country for the USA without proper migration documents? Right. It's not the lucky ones who get through profesionalization, but those that don't have the opportunity.

So, yes, there is no contradiction between us having very good universities and very low income, particularly in some areas. Of course, there's a lot to criticize our government's priorities about. But it is also not by a long shot a simple problem to solve.

I would be more interested in making it harder for educated people to migrate (legally) to the USA. If one of my students graduates and leaves to work in the USA, he will probably earn 5-10 times as much as here (to begin with), but it will also be a waste of public resources, because his talent and intelligence will not benefit our society. Funding universities is a long-term investment from a government, and the only way to get a ROI is to have the students stay here for their professional life.

...I find this whole thread really amazing to read, and almost impossible to understand.

Most countries I know have large, well-reputed public university systems. I happen to work on the largest university of Mexico (and Latin America), UNAM. Tuition? Virtually zero (there is a 1940s law where it stipulates a tuition for this university... It currently sits at MX$0.30, or ~US$0.02 per semester). Most public schools in Mexico have 100% free programs. Not only that, the same situation holds for most of Latin America. And that's for college level ("Licenciatura") — Want to study a Masters or Doctorate degree? In all of the "excellence"-rated programs, you are automatically entitled to receive funding from the government so you don't have to find a way to pay for your life while you work to become a more productive member of society. And yes, we do have private universities, often as expensive as USA-based ones are. But the fields where they excel are usually very different.

I know this same model exists in most Latin American countries. European states have a somewhat different program, but still, public (government-funded and tuition-free) universities are all but the norm. I just cannot understand how the USA continues to function (some would even say, thrive) under such schemes.

I did read your previous comment, and did reply to it.

Again: I offer you $100 for your vote, if you prove me you voted for my candidate. You go in and vote. You generate this secret code, known only to you. Then, you come to my evil lair, connect via my computer to Teh Interwebz, and type in your secret code. The system verifies you voted for my Master, and I give you your well-earned money.

That should be impossible. But any system where you can prove *to yourself* you voted a certain way opens the door to vote selling or coercion.

Of course, it's obvious today that a test for behavior on inconsistent requests should have been done in OpenSSL. As well as a test for each failure cause should have been done by Apple. And next week, when an off-by-one bug bites us on an integer overflow in libfoobar, people will say testing for that condition should have been trivial.

So, yes, some conditions can be found with fuzzers. Of course, fuzzers work in an erratic way, and not all bugs can be triggered by them. But maybe fuzzing our code (more importantly, our security-sensitive code) will yield better results than preparing tests for those components in the system we are aware of.

Then again, properly fuzzing takes quite a bit of time. It is way less fun to watch a fuzzer than to see tests making green check marks...

The problem with voter-verifiable systems is that they are very prone to vote coercion or buying. If you can prove your "right way" vote was correctly counted, you can get the cheque. Or avoid the punishment for exercising your free will.

Say this system is approved. Say you want to buy my vote. You demand proof that I voted the way you wanted me to — If the e-voting platform allows me to confirm my vote was properly counted. So, all you have to do is to promise me to hand over the money if I prove you I did what we agreed. (or you can threaten me with physical violence unless I can prove it to you, same reasoning).

A secure voting system should never allow me to prove what was my vote — But that would make me very suspicious, as it could be recording false votes from the beginning, right? Right. The only solution is to have voters deposit papers with their stated vote (and no personal identifying marks!) in a booth, and allow for recounts if needed.

Your scheme is very similar to what we use in Debian for voting for the project leader (unlike the fully-open tally sheets for voting on issues, not people). However, this scheme is good only where people trust each other, for ocassions where you know there will be no vote buying/coercion. Not for a national elected government.