Not very it turns out. The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, an initiative of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, recently released a report and policy proposals concluding that all three of the nation?s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks that could threaten the integrity of a state or national election.
There are also some fairly simple, common sense recommendations on how to fix these machines, such as random audits of paper records and a ban on wireless systems which currently can be compromised by something as simple as a PDA.
I encourage everyone in the US to contact all of their representatives and help get this problem fixed right away.
I have always had an interest in on line books. In fact a few years ago I had a site devoted entirely to downloadable books.
The World eBook Fair, the largest showcase for eBooks, eBook publishers, editors, and others working in the new world of eBooks is offering a free month of downloading ebooks for personal use. From July 4th-August 4, 2006 you can download your selections from 1/3 million free eBooks in celebration of Project Gutenberg’s 35th Birthday.
I can’t recommend them highly enough and until August 4th the price can’t be beat. Try them and you’ll be hooked.
For those of you in the USA, Happy Independence Day. For those of you outside the US, Happy 4th of July.
Tonight here in Pittsburgh (if the rain lets up), as in just about every other city in this country, there will be fireworks. Throughout the USA there will be millions and millions of fireworks tonight. There also will be plenty of photos taken and most will not come out very well and be deleted shortly after. Here’s an article by Digital Photography School on how to do it right.
Good luck and have a safe evening.
StepForth Placement has some very good articles on their site about search engine optimization. This recent article By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc. talks about how you can rank well on all of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.
They give you a thumbnail breakdown on all of them individually and a simple easy to understand way to help improve you rankings on all of them. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.
I was looking for some Photoshop help the other day, well OK I was looking for some GIMP tricks actually. As you may know about me, I a big open source supporter and I use GIMP not Photoshop. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
Since Photoshop is the industry standard most of the sites with help and tricks are written for it, but most all of the ideas work just as well for GIMP. Some are strictly Photoshop, but I was pretty easily able to convet and use all of the ones that I was interested in to GIMP. I found this list of tips that were more than I could have asked for. Graphic-Design has been offering Photoshop tips and tricks since 1990 and their links to different pages was by far the best site that I have found.
