I hate the tv

As a response to this inq article, I wrote this to Nick Farrell

“To Sun,

I think an easy way to get some positive talk with your name attach to it into the heads of gamers would be to donate (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) some servers to games which are not yet MMO, like battlefield2 and battlefield 1942. I still play those a bit and we could use some non-suck 64 player servers.

I know for a fact that one of them opteron servers will do nicely. I’m sure this opportunity exists for other games.

It’s just something to think about being as I, and a surprisingly large amount of us engineers, play online games. I used to know a bunch of AMD people who gamed. I’d assume its the same accross the board with us engi-dorks.

Please and Thank You,
Ihatethetv.com”

Looks like someone finally implemented the design Cole and I were talking over a few years back. Click on “Click here to see them in action…” to watch the video.

Bastards.

I ran across this in a thread on FW…It details how to build this little guy:

It is a PC connection to a regular old phone. So you can use a regular phone like these at home:

Update:  This looks to be less work and more quick-and dirty.  Probably the way I’d go… They just open it up and solder wires to pads where sound comes in and out.

What happens when code dorks meet robots? Well they naturally enslave them to be commanded them with their voice.

See video here

Congratulations on SourceForge Project of the Month May 2005.

In a related story, Ion Sancho, the Florida Elections Supervisor who witnesssed the Harri Hurtsi Hack has been threatened with a lawsuit for not meeting the county deadline for getting new voting machines.

“Florida’s secretary of state’s office disparaged Sancho’s finding, demonstrating considerably more interest in propping up vendors than protecting elections.”

I guess no good deed goes unpunished.

UPDATE: Click here to write the state officials in Florida to protest the treatment of Ion Sancho.

Susan Pynchon, a member of Florida Coalition for Fair Elections, has a very powerful piece on CounterPunch.org, where she describes witnessing the Harri Hursti Hack, when he proved to Ion Sancho (The Leon County Supervisor of Elections) that the Diebold machines in use could be hacked.
A snippet:

“It was a powerful moment and, I will admit, it had the unexpected result for me personally of causing me to break down and cry. Why did I cry? It was the last thing I thought I would do, but it happened for so many reasons. I cried because it was so clear that Diebold had been lying. I cried because there was proof, before my very eyes, that these machines were every bit as bad as we all had feared. I cried because we have been so unjustly attacked as “conspiracy theorists” and “technophobes” when Diebold knew full well that its voting system could alter election results. More than that, that Diebold planned to have a voting system that could alter results. And I cried because it suddenly hit me, like a Mack truck, that this was proof positive that our democracy is and has been, as we have all feared, truly at the mercy of unscrupulous vendors who are producing electronic voting machines that can change election results without detection.”

The piece goes through the whole process in detail. The voting system must be open sourced and verified by the security community before it can be used. It is also probable that a paper ballot will always be needed as a check mechanism.