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Diebold CEO Resigns Under Cloud
Philip K Dickhead writes "After numerous ethical lapses and much controversy, Diebold CEO, Wally O'Dell resigned to the applause of the markets. Diebold's price improved more than 5% today, as the story broke. Business Week is reporting that O'Dell is leaving for "personal reasons", although the news blog Raw Story cites board action on imminent securities fraud litigation, and legal challenges by states claiming fraudulent certification of Diebold voting machines. Latest vulnerability tests show an impossibly negligent attention to vote security and privacy." Not overly surprising, considering their recent childish antics in NC.
anyone here really trust the age of digital voting? i dont even have faith in the system when votes are done by hand, much less so in digitizing it.
A small price to pay for four more years. Go ahead and mod me troll, but you know it's true.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Boy, is this long overdue. This man bears a lot of responsibility for the current lack of confidence in the legitimacy of our elected officials and elections.
Whether or not you believe that elections in this country were stolen, you must admit that Diebold's response to questions about the security of their machines and software have, to put it mildly, not been helpful.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
Working in the software business I can tell you customers expect the world from software but aren't willing to pay for it. The blame belongs to the customer (i.e. the government) for accepting lowest bidder contracts instead of the software developers. Sometimes paying less costs more than doing it right the first time. Your tax dollars at work, folks.
He delivered Ohio to Bush, as promised.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Do you have any idea what Halliburton is and what they do?
Obviously you and the moderators don't because that comment was made without having a clue.
I understand slashdot is a place for techies with leftist bents but the rampant idiocy being encouraged and rewarded is ridiculous. At least try to get the facts because you just looked foolish with that comment.
Oh, what a beautiful symbol it is though!
The downside as I see it is that there’s an excellent chance that in the long run Diebold will be depicted as a good company that was badly run for a while by one bad man, but once he left, returned to goodness. This would make his resignation, ironically enough, a setback for that vanishingly small minority of us who care deeply about the legitimacy of our nation’s electoral process.
But hey, I’d love to be wrong about this.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
" Many of us know from experience that lots of users cannot figure out what seem to us to be rather simple computer interfaces."
perhaps the intefaces arn't as simple as we believe?
Just becasue we can use them only means we've been trained, not that they are simple.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If it's good enough for fostering democracy, it ought to be good enough to maintain it!
he gets to live the rest of his days in absolute luxury, his family, children nor him ever need to work again!, with a multi-million dollar pension, on top of a multi-million dollar bank account and living in a mansion (compared to N.O residents) and holiday homes in the caribbean he doesnt have to worry about much, even if he went to prison, 10years for a few more million pays a lot more than a consulting job
dont let anyone tell you crime doesnt pay, it does and it pays well
Huh? The ad says "Anti-Bush Gifts and Gear". That doesn't strike me as a very credible news site.
Yes, because if someone doesn't like Bush (like 2/3 of us now), then up is down, black is white, and the sky is every color except the one they say it is.
Raw Story is well known to be a source of very early, unripe, possibly wrong information. It's raw, like the Drudge Report. But I check it all the time (rather than give hits to Drudge) because whenever a big story erupts I see it there first. It's a good site for the latest scuttlebutt. In this particular case there have been plenty of confirming sources during the past few days.
You saw "anti-Bush gifts and gear" and assumed the site is not credible because of a bias. Credible opinions are not necessarily "balanced". It's gotten to the point where editors at major newspapers are deliberately skewing stories to make them more "balanced" to please people like you. If I see "balance" in a story anymore I have to assume I'm being lied to.
Can the impossible be done and have this machines produce a paper trail now?
Thank the gods of real democracy this guy is gone.
I still want him indicted though...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
*snort* That's rich.
Face it. If there's any activity which is truly steeped in human sin, vanity, arrogance, and utter foolishness, it's politics. There is nothing divine about it. Why would God have anything to do with politics at all? Didn't someone once say something like, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's"?
Be a disciple of Christ, and go out and feed the hungry, clothe the homeless, and visit the imprisoned. Christianity has everything to do with serving the poor, and nothing to do with politics.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
Even if he's indicted, tried by a jury, found guilty and sentenced to a PMTA prison, his alleged services to the current administration would probably buy him a "Get out of Jail Free" card in the form of a presidental pardon for all crimes.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I know it's a stretch for you kids, but just once can the subject of prison come up without you all coming out with the tired old litany of lame rape jokes please? You Yanks have a fucking obsession with prison rape. Seriously, it's not funny, it's creepy, quit it.
While I'm sure there'll be plenty of partisan blows over the Diebold machines, at the end of the day this is about a company that, at the very least, was thoroughly negligent in the machines that it put out. There are serious questions not just to be answered by Diebold, but by various officials who approved these machines.
It's rather sad that it is, to some extent, turning into a partisan battle, because one would hope that all people; politicians, voters and investigators, irregardless of their political leanings, would care more about democracy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
why the company's machines were even used in the first place. The minute he announced his very partisan feelings on the election, his machines should have been instantly pulled as suspect. It should have been up to Diebold to prove they were secure and accurate instead of up to the public to prove that they weren't.
I'll tolerate anything except intolerance.
The "e-voting" concept should be ... the computer prints the ballot and that paper ballot is your vote. That ballot lists ONLY the names you chose. You read that and drop it into the ballot box.
The computer counts the number of paper ballots it has printed for each candidate. This number can be released to the news agencies. But the real vote is the paper ballot.
At the end of the day, the names of the voters who used that machine are counted, the paper ballots are counted and both of those are compared to the total number of votes the machine says were cast. If they don't match, there is a problem.
In case of recount, the paper ballots are hand counted.
A random number of machines should also be checked against the ballots cast at them.
Multiple checks.
Diebold is a major manufacturer of ATMs. If they're so terrible at security, I guess I'll think twice before inserting my ATM card into one of their machines.
Just getting rid of the Diebold CEO does not fix the problem because the problem is the *system* rather than just one man. It is the system that allows one company to submit voting systems for use by the public with no oversight of their accuracy and integrity and it is the system that enables corrupt elected officials to allow Diebold to do as it pleased. The next Diebold CEO might be worse than the last one. Even worse, there will likely be other diebold-like companies springing forth to provide similar voting systems. Until the American public are able to throw off their cloak of indifference, timidity and cowardice and stand up to the Diebolds in their local jurisdictions, the system will remain broken.
Two of those are fine, the third makes it completely uncredible as a "news" source, sorry.
Resignation is not enough, I want prosecution
It's not the stapler joke or a couple of lines that make the movie great. Office Space is a satire about the typical corporate work environment. I'd imagine a lot of slashdotters have experienced the same frustrations as the main character and share his disdain for the--in many ways backwards--corporate culture immanent in most IT work places. If you think Office Space is primarily a Romance, then you missed about 80% of the plot.
Ah jeez. Listen people, God doesn't play politics. Frankly, He's got better things to do. I wish people would quit trying to claim God is on the side of their party. If you people would bother to actually read what Christ taught you might understand this. [generalization]Republicans are sorely lacking the social justice of Christianity and Democrats are sorely lacking the moral judgements of Christianity[/generalization]. Republicans don't care about Christ any more than the Democrats do and vice versa. Quit using religion as a political tool.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
to the "true believers" that remain among my fellow Americans, but firing Walden W. O'Dell will not automagically bring back integrity to the voting system here in the U.S. Most slashdotters are savvy enough to know that paperless voting using secret, proprietary code can be easily manipulated. We will not be safe from this type of fraud until paperless voting is outlawed in ALL states.
Also, many slashdotters have knowledge of the "Law of Large Numbers", and know that a well-designed exit poll should be accurate within its designed level of confidence. Large statistical "anomalies" between exit polling and "recorded votes" associated with the 2002 (Georgia, Minnesota), 2004 (Presidential election, many states) and 2005 (Ohio referendums) verge on the quasi-impossible, until you factor in deliberate fraud. Exit polls do not lie, and when the margin of error is exceeded time and again, all with identical bias, we can be sure that the system is being gamed. Exit polls, after all, are how the fairness of elections is assessed in those "corrupt, third-world" countries.
At least be comforted the "powers that be" that really control the country still feel the need to throw us dogs the "bones" of legitimacy. In the words of Frank Zappa,
"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see a brick wall at the back of the theater."
Amen The fact that this is such an obvious solution and that it is so trivial to implement is what makes the chosen convoluted, hackable, no-recount alternative so suspicious. What honest and experienced company would chose anything but that easy and elegant solution you describe if not because they want to open the possibility to election fraud??? No amount of electronic tweaking will make the system secure. There is always a weak link. Even if Diebold had the best intention in the world, how can they be sure that a partisant lone coder did not sneake a line of code within I'm sure what are millions of lines, converting say 5% of the votes. This could be done at any point in the chain of programs that handle the votes; from the user interface, to the final tally, through the individual machine databases, the talying computer etc. I have programed plenty and I can tell you that, it would be very easy to implement the "bug" so that it happens ONLY on the day of the election and previous and following tests show no bias. a paper trail is necessary!
Oh the irony. Or something like that.
Diebold's CEO is out because the company is not credible with a Bush supporter at the helm.
AC says says Raw Story is not credible because of an anti-Bush ad.
Now Monkey's got some insightful comment where credible is not necessarily "balanced," therefore anything "balanced" is a lie. My head hurts.
I say we go with the purple finger thingy for our voting system.
Yeah, it takes some real cognitive dissonance to laugh about the fact that your government basically sentences people to being raped. If only you Americans had some kind of document that outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.
Office Space is a brilliant movie. They could completely remove Jennifer Aniston and the (quite marginal) romance aspect from the movie and it would still be brilliant. However, to appreciate its brilliance, you do have to have some experience with the environment which it satirizes. If you don't have such experience, consider yourself lucky. If you do, and you still missed the point of Office Space, report immediately for adjustment of your sense of humor.
If the allegations against him are true - and there is every reason to believe they are - then Bush's lies killed over 2000 American soldiers and over 30000 Iraqis for no good reason. Kerry has no such blood on his hands.
+++ATH0
You're completely right--it isn't funny. It's very, very scary. It's the reason people here are scared of going to jail. Sadly, a jail sentence almost guarantees cruel and unusual punishment in the form of anal rape. Last week on The Boondocks they covered this topic. One character is a lawyer who has always been straightlaced because of the threat of anal rape.
I remember, from a few years ago, an anti-rape activist (found his name thanks to Google: Tom Cahill) who was protesting the Vietnam war while living in San Antonio, and the police basically caused him to be raped. They threw him in a room with a bunch of career criminals and allowed him to be raped for about 24 hours continuously. That was his punishment for protesting the war.
By the way, I found his current website.
I personally believe that almost all prisons in the US today violate the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. But hey, the retards in my government routinely extract suspects for torture in the name of fighting terrorism, so I shouldn't be surprised. Yet another example of why it is shameful to be an American. I just pray they don't reviolate the First Amendment by bringing back prayer in school (ahem--Intelligent Design).
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
Because there's no REAL proof.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but relying on conjecture and suppostion (which is all you have, and no amount of griping will change that) IS NOT SUFFICIENT PROOF FOR THIS CHARGE.
You see, the question I always ask myself when I see outrageous speculation like this is, "If the evidence is so credible, WHY HASN'T SOMETHING BEEN DONE?"
And like any government conspiracy, you're relying on the competence of the FUCKING GOVERNMENT to keep this secret.
Now of course, there will be the inevitable crap flood of opinions, but they ignore one fact.
There are literally hundreds of reporters with a burning desire to make a career for themselves, and the allegations of voter fraud, if true, would cement their job forEVER if proved.
The fact that no one but cranks bring it up should be a clear indication of how credible your "facts" are.