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"Well, it turns out that this conviction is all based on evidence provided by an informer who was paid $250,000 to find the sleeper cell. He couldn't find it, but he found that this one young guy had gone to a camp in Pakistan..."

Additionally, there are many self-righteous "moralists" who are willing to snitch for free as long as they get their pat on the head or perhaps a doggy bone. And don't forget that there's been a huge explosion in the "private security" or "stalking-by-proxy" industry that agents could leverage. Private security has come a long way from being mall cops - many of them are full-fledged private or corporate Gestapos.

FBI Raids Office of Vivek Kundra, DC CTO

No, Kundra wasn't found to be corrupt. But everyone else in his office was.

Imagine that.

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN!!!

Thank you for piping up with your comment, we are all very glad you had the opportunity to share.

Next time, however, please pay closer attention to what is actually being said. Misunderstanding someone's remarks so you can make snobbish comments isn't nice and makes you look an idiot to anyone whose brain functions surpass that of simian (shame on the moderators who modded you up!).

The gp was saying it was awkward, not that there was anything wrong with it. And he was modded funny. For a reason.

Oh, and if you want to throw your superior knowledge around, try to actually have superior knowlege.

Carry on. I'll jump in if I notice any more errors.

What we need is legal access to the actual code (+source, compiler, bootstrap process) running on the machines, not an illegal access to a piece of code someone chose to 'leak'.

And more importantly, we need voter-verified paper trail.

India's e-voting seems to be a pretty good system: Learning from India's Electronic Voting System

I agree with paper elections. I also think that digital machines can have a place in elections. You make your choices on a computer, the computer prints out the ballot. The ballot is plain english and human readable. Nothing computer readable, not even a barcode.

Actually India has a pretty good e-voting system:

Slate magazine pokes fun at America's continuing electronic voting anxiety by using India as an example of how to do things right:

While we in the United States agonize over touch screens and paper trails, India managed to quietly hold an all-electronic vote. In May, 380 million Indians cast their votes on more than 1 million machines. It was the world's largest experiment in electronic voting to date and, while far from perfect, is widely considered a success. How can an impoverished nation like India, where cows roam the streets of the capital and most people's idea of high-tech is a flush toilet, succeed where we have not?

Apparently India uses an incredibly simple technology that may not be as fancy as the machines here, but does the job well.

The result is a machine that looks like a cross between a computer keyboard and a Casio music synthesizer. In fact, it's not much of a computer at all, more like a souped-up adding machine. A column of buttons runs down one side. Next to each button is the name and symbol of a candidate or party. These are written on slips of paper that can be rearranged. That means unscrupulous politicians couldn't rig the machines at the factory, since they wouldn't know which button would be assigned to which candidate. Also, the software is embedded--or hard-wired--onto a microprocessor that cannot be reprogrammed. If someone tries to pry open the machine, it automatically shuts down. After much testing, India adopted the machines for nationwide use this year.

Why do our machines suck?

American machines, by contrast, may be vulnerable to wholesale fraud. Our machines are far more complicated and expensive--$3,000 versus $200 for an Indian machine. The U.S. voting machines are loaded with Windows operating systems, encryption, touch screens, backup servers, voice-guidance systems, modems, PCMCIA storage cards, etc. They have millions of lines of code; the Indian machines hardly any at all.

That's why democracy and paper ballots work in a country like India, with 1 billion citizens and more potential voters than the total US population.

Interesting example, considering that India has given up counting votes by hand.

I'm sure I'll hear that the plural of anecdote is not data, that it is too expensive to fix, that we should throw up our hands and accept things. Global warming is not happening; and even if it is, we didn't do it; and so what if we did, so what - we should write off Bangladesh, forget the polar bears, and be happy to grow wheat in Canada instead. Sure. But please, read some of these stories.

Nor should a voting system require a multi-function operating system like windows nt. Really, do we need something with more power than nasa had 10 years ago just for the ++ op of voting? See the solution that India came up with. Cheap, simple, verifiable and easy to copy. Honestly, how many Mhz do you need to count a vote and how many MB do you need to store a tally?

Holy Crap! Vijay Singh is black?!!?

Holy Crap! Vijay Singh is black?!!?

The Indian steam engine you're talking about perhaps:
"Automatic door opening and closing mechanism and the train cannot move unless all doors are closed and locked. If a door opens accidentally in the moving train, brakes will apply automatically, bringing the train to a halt."

Check out this , this and this.

On second thoughts, why bother. I forgot I am at /.
:roll: