Why are you happy that he's dead? Wouldn't you be more happy if he was simply neutralized?
Anyway, the way things are going now, we might be looking at genocide in not too long. Or an islamic republic, which does not bode well for women, as Saddam effectively suppressed (yes, hard-handedly) the more fundamentalist groups in his country, along with fighting terrorism and resisting Iran.
Just look at Afghanistan. Opium production is up by several orders of magnitude, and one top NATO commander there commented that if the situation doesn't change, a *majority* of the population might support a restoration of the Taliban regime come summer.
Here in Norway, we've been using magstripe and PIN for ages (yes, scary), and we recently switched to chip and PIN (although there will be a magstripe as well for a while). Couple of years ago, I think.
What makes you think I'm more comfortable with FSF/GNU/RMS taking away my freedom than having a commercial entity do the same?
And how does GPLv3'ing your software protect me from this? If a company that wants to use DRM or whatever cannot use GPL'ed software to do it, they will develop (or buy) proprietary solutions to do the same thing, netting me nothing, and possibly costing me standards compliance.
As long as the free software remains free to use for anything, including using it for stupid purposes, some marginal control over the process remains with the developers.
Whatever happened to "Unix is like a gun; if you point it at your foot and pull the trigger, it should effectively and reliably deliver the bullet to its intended target: Mr. Foot"? Just get the job done, and let people decide for themselves if they want to use your software for something stupid or not.
What's next? "Cannot be used in software directly or indirectly furthering the development, availability and/or deployment of WMDs" would be a tempting target, for instance. Until the day one is required to fragment a stellar object on a collision course. One small step at a time, moving towards one group's definition of "good" and "right". When will they start mandating EULA clauses?
Businesses aren't inherently The Enemy(tm). Part of the goal of many free software people is to provide business applications. There are many motivations for open source and free software, and to enforce a particular dogma is restricting/encumbering the software unneccessarily. Personally, I find the three appealing concepts to be (a) better interoperability through open standards compliance and the elimination of cost associated with complying by making compliant implementations available for free, (b) source code disclosure, allowing modification/customization and inspection of the software, and (c) availability of free software. The GPL, and particularly their political agenda, is not required to protect this.
Consider the BSD 2-clause licence.
Exactly how is it that a business can thwart the spirit of free software there?
If the software is any good, someone will have the source code, even if the original project shuts down for some reason or other. The software will thus always (or at least as long as it is relevant) be available under the original licence terms, permitting the project to continue as it has always done.
Consider that with open software, the source itself is part of the application in a stronger sense, and restricting what you can do with the source code is restricting what you can use the application for. How is that any different from stuff like DRM, EULAs, etc.?
If I'm going to give my software up for the world to do with as they see fit, I want it to remain free for them to use, not be encumbered by all manner of political dogma. Nor do I particularly relish the idea of making my creation (or my contribution) a vehicle for furthering a dogma and policy that may change into something I do not support without me having a say in what I am implicitly endorsing.
Move to flipchips with eutectic bonding, and get an electrical engineer to handle the electrical engineering rather than just sticking a part in and hoping it will work. Doing a proper power up and power down is trivial, and mechanical shock tolerance can be managed (shock damping, as well as using a less shock-sensitive way to bond the chips). Soldering is best outsourced, unless you're in a company that has proper automation equipment, in which case you should have the expertise inhouse to eliminate these problems during prototyping.
That's the nice thing about factor analysis. They don't have a clue why it matters, they just know that it does (because desireable employees have certain traits, and undesireable employees lack them).
You're looking for predictors of good or poor performance, and the only thing that matters is how well those predictions fare in keeping your standards at an acceptable level and making sure people end up in positions where they will be able to deliver, and get to work with people they will gel properly with.
There is a difference between paring things down to a score and doing a complex inventory and evaluating it along several axis to find out whether there is a spot for you in the company and, if so, where it is.
Also, what the industry really needs, actually *is* one more reason to reject you. The right reason.
Don't get me wrong. I hope you find a satisfying job. But the most important thing for an employer is, in many cases, to avoid hiring the wrong guy; most of them don't even seem to realize this. Once cruft (in the form of "bad" employees) starts to accumulate, you lose the edge and have to fall back on the usual "10.000 monkeys and a strategy to limit the amount of damage they do" approach of using money as a substitute for the skills of now interchangeable employees.
I've lost two jobs over the years, both times due to incompetent people elsewhere, and both times costing the company money and necessitating a rethink. I also quit two due to being held back by superiors who should never have been hired in the first place; one company went tits up, the other lived on but experienced no further economic growth.
The best way for the "right" people to get the jobs they want, is for the "wrong" people to be rejected, leading to more realistic market pressure (competence, as opposed to sheer numbers) and better results (which translates into further expansion and more jobs).
A lot of secondary questions that could be useful in determining the ideal people for you to work with are going to be useful in determining the disparity between your self-rating and the truth.
Include some personality inventory items (to improve gelling of teams), IQ score items (to assay the analytic intelligence), psychiatric inventory items (to correct other scores and improve gelling), a few practically applicable tests (applied intelligence) and some random questions (to make it harder to predict what constitutes enhancing an answer for the person considering cheating), for instance.
Self-criticism corresponds to the inverse of intelligence, and self-rating items (as opposed to the items that are tests) can be appropriately compensated both ways. Embellishment and outright lies can be caught by collecting feedback from how people are doing, and using it to refine the algorithms and assign proper weights. Random questions (submitted by the existing employees) with a database to select them from will allow serendipitous discovery of new factors of importance, etc.
There's really a lot you can do with this stuff, and if you approach it seriously, it will beat any two regular HR people. And with the volumes they're looking to hire, it is no longer feasible to treat people all that individually, so having the tech people quiz skills and so forth is not at all viable.
I'm not claiming they're unique in this respect. It is human nature, pure and simple. The US happens to be more empowered to express that nature than many, but power shifts over time and others will be better situated to do the same things in a not too distant future.
I'm not predicting that any other nation of similar size and economy will do better.
That said, I don't think any post of mine has received modpoints so far, since I don't spend a whole lot of time here, so that isn't a great loss. The modpoint system is crap. How often do I even see the lowids anymore? It is selfpropagating: I don't bother posting a well put argument, since it'll be lost in the noise anyway, and hence frequently end up adding to the noise myself. Sorry for that.
If direct pain is the only thing that will regulate your behaviour, you are operating on a stage of moral development (ref Kohlberg) that is inappropriate to that age group, and will most likely not progress in moral development to a level that is appropriate for unmedicated participation in society...
Pain as feedback is conditioning, nothing else.
Either way, different strategies work with different students. You're looking to further their development, comprehension and so forth, not to program them (there are computers for that). Being a jerk is a choice the teacher can choose to make or not, and it is a choice that involves responding to an action with an inappropriate reaction, or initiating an inappropriate action in the first place. It doesn't matter if you intended it otherwise.
I've encountered teachers with different preferred approaches and different levels of sternness, and I've found teachers I liked at both ends of the spectrum; ones I respected and worked hard to try to learn something from. I've been punished without being angry with the teacher about it. The ones that got physical, punished me for something others had done (that stings if you're actually trying to play nice) or simply had no respect for me, got their exact flavour of jerk back in response.
Funny... if you just swap "teacher" for "student" or "pupil", swap "work" for "study", and swap "low pay" for "forced participation", then I think the text above pretty perfectly summarizes what led to the video (or indeed a majority of "troublesome" students) in the first place.
Maybe the teachers should try to connect with these people who are in a fairly similar situation to their own, and foster a "we'll get out of this crap together, and then you can vote for something better" attitude instead?
Students have duties (show up, do the work, behave, etc.) but frequently few or no rights.
Hence, it is irrelevant if you fuck up the slaves^Wstudents.
That said, about 1/3 the teachers I have met (both when I was in school, and as an adult outside the educational setting) have been pretty cool people. 1/3 have been neutral filler. 1/3 were people who had no business being anywhere near a school or the age groups that attend them. Probably, there is a bell curve and my perception is just skewed by the people on both fringes sticking out like sore thumbs or... well, anyway.
I'm betting you'll find the same distribution among the students as well.
Now if only someone would do some factor analysis to come up with a form the students could fill in on their first day of school (or a webform), then they could be matched better with their teacher and suddenly everyone would be happy...
I'd consider it more likely that a lab "accident" causes it to kill off the Palestinian population, or possibly even the majority of the Arab world. All it takes is one wrong person in the right place at the right time. And the majority of current leaders in Israel fit every criterion but "right time" at the moment.
Of course, I'd hate for them to pick up this idea, but they've probably thought about it already:
If they are willing to sacrifice the majority of their population as well, they could create a biological weapon that targets everyone except the Ashkenazi jews. That particular group is probably one of the most studied groups out there because they almost never breed with outsiders, so tons of interesting stuff can be found from their DNA. (Note that I'm using the word "breed" as a technical, not derogatory, term here)
Actually, if this happens a few weeks past sexual maturity, it will be an enormous advantage for the species, although not for the individual. Such a mutation would be assured survival if the original mutant was allowed to procreate, barring unforseen accidents that wipe out that subpopulation.
You can avoid burnout with a bit of genetic engineering.
For instance, if you could modify the common cold into two strains that, when combined, cause the original strain to be reassembled in the victim, then you could choose two patient zero groups with a wide geographical spacing and watch the clock tick.
The real issue is choosing the right way to limit burnout and then finding a way to control them, so they can be applied as anything other than WMDs, although the US has displayed its eagerness to deploy WMDs in the past.
Of course, such a strain of anything might be a couple of mutations short of an extinction event, but that has never bothered anyone actually working on these things or funding them to the extent that it stopped "progress".
If you wanted to do it, it's not all that hard, I think. Think along the lines of geocaching; a network of people interested in it place tons of small units all over the place, and some of them operate a series of transmitters with a known geographical location.
The unit would have a receiver that can lock to a signal someone has requested a fix on, another for receiving the control information and a timing pulse, one for transmitting data back to the operator of the local hub, a local clock, some logic and a power source.
You measure the signal strength, use the timing pulse to make sure the correct point in time is used for the sampled reception, and send it back. For instance.
Even if they weren't using One Time Pads, this would make absolutely no difference.
Infosec theory has long regarded crypto more as a means to delay the availability of information to unauthorized parties than as a means of actually denying its availability.
You use a form of crypto that is convenient for the target use and known to take longer to break than the time this information will remain sensitive. Information that will remain sensitive indefinitely should always be OTP-encrypted.
I did not say "verified". I said "formally verified". As in formally proven to do everything in the top level spec correctly and do nothing else. As in full mesh analysis. As in formally proven softs running on a hardware solution that is engineered such that the non-inspectable parts are delivered by multiple independant vendors and will operate on the same voting principle as in spacecraft.
More concisely, a formal top level specification is derived from a requirements spec, which details the exact requirements of an election. Going from the election requirements to the voting machines' top level specs in the correct manner is critical for something like formal verification to work in the intended manner. Proper formal verification (which is feasible for such a "small" (though quite important) task) will provide a guarantee that the software does what the TLDS specified; apply the necessary oversight to make sure the election requirements are fulfilled by the TLDS, and you know, to the limits of current engineering capability, that the voting machine fulfils its role properly.
Of course, formal verification on the hardware side will be tougher, but you can take a shortcut by opting for the independant vendors plus inter-processor voting option, which also has the very nice property of reducing the likelyhood of tampering with an uninspectable component causing problems.
That said, of course they don't really want elections to work properly. No politician does, except when they're popular and out of office at the same time;).. So this is just a suggestion as to how it *could* be done, if you're looking for a (virtually) no-compromise voting solution.
It seems to me that the only real option to satisfy your requirements would be a formally verified design akin to the ones used in space shuttles. Lockheed-Martin would probably be one of the companies write and verify the source. You'll probably want three independent companies delivering the hardware with voting logic between them to assure that the logic has not been compromised. A formally verified design gets very complex if it's big, so you'll probably want a very simple interface (e.g. 2x40 display with usual up/down/left/right/select buttons), which can be good in and of itself, as it would reduce the incidence of misunderstandings.
No. Because then I could demand proof that you voted what I wanted you to, and since you would have the means to provide it for me, I could reasonably threaten you if you didn't provide it.
In fact, the failure of the tests to show accuracy errors when the real world revealed plenty can be taken as something very close to proof that the testing procedures are inadequate, and the software therefore suspect.
The fishing expedition argument might actually be worth something. Speaking from the admittedly small sample of the people I've met and talked to, about half have confirmed illegal music downloads. This will vary with age group and, I suppose, other factors. It shouldn't be hard to make a case that this is not so much a case of precision work as it is pointing a shotgun at a flock of birds and pulling the trigger; they want to recuperate their legal expenses and keep going with a track record that has nothing but won and settled cases. They have every reason in the world to make the gamble that her son has commited the alleged crime, rather than accepting defeat.
As far as technical arguments go, I don't think that will fly with a jury of non-technical peers. If you want to use a technical argument, you will need to make a demonstration on-site with stock hardware and stock parts, uncontested by either participant, which shows the flawed argumentation you want to expose.
With regards to a reformatted or reinstalled harddrive, if you know there is nothing incriminating on the harddrive, talk to Ibas and/or OnTrack (1-800-872-2599) to get a history of the contents of the harddrive. They do certified forensic work, and will be able to recover the old data, as well as analyzing it or handing it over to another certified forensic company to do the analysis.
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Why are you happy that he's dead? Wouldn't you be more happy if he was simply neutralized?
Anyway, the way things are going now, we might be looking at genocide in not too long. Or an islamic republic, which does not bode well for women, as Saddam effectively suppressed (yes, hard-handedly) the more fundamentalist groups in his country, along with fighting terrorism and resisting Iran.
Just look at Afghanistan. Opium production is up by several orders of magnitude, and one top NATO commander there commented that if the situation doesn't change, a *majority* of the population might support a restoration of the Taliban regime come summer.
Both, usually. Pure credit cards sometimes use magstripe only.
The PIN is the same; I wasn't aware that it was possible to use a different PIN for the ATMs and the payment terminals until it was mentioned here.
Here in Norway, we've been using magstripe and PIN for ages (yes, scary), and we recently switched to chip and PIN (although there will be a magstripe as well for a while). Couple of years ago, I think.
This kind of fraud has happened; a colleague had his card duped and pin stolen this way. And the UK isn't the only place to use the chip.
What makes you think I'm more comfortable with FSF/GNU/RMS taking away my freedom than having a commercial entity do the same?
And how does GPLv3'ing your software protect me from this? If a company that wants to use DRM or whatever cannot use GPL'ed software to do it, they will develop (or buy) proprietary solutions to do the same thing, netting me nothing, and possibly costing me standards compliance.
As long as the free software remains free to use for anything, including using it for stupid purposes, some marginal control over the process remains with the developers.
Whatever happened to "Unix is like a gun; if you point it at your foot and pull the trigger, it should effectively and reliably deliver the bullet to its intended target: Mr. Foot"? Just get the job done, and let people decide for themselves if they want to use your software for something stupid or not.
What's next? "Cannot be used in software directly or indirectly furthering the development, availability and/or deployment of WMDs" would be a tempting target, for instance. Until the day one is required to fragment a stellar object on a collision course. One small step at a time, moving towards one group's definition of "good" and "right". When will they start mandating EULA clauses?
Businesses aren't inherently The Enemy(tm). Part of the goal of many free software people is to provide business applications. There are many motivations for open source and free software, and to enforce a particular dogma is restricting/encumbering the software unneccessarily. Personally, I find the three appealing concepts to be (a) better interoperability through open standards compliance and the elimination of cost associated with complying by making compliant implementations available for free, (b) source code disclosure, allowing modification/customization and inspection of the software, and (c) availability of free software. The GPL, and particularly their political agenda, is not required to protect this.
Consider the BSD 2-clause licence.
Exactly how is it that a business can thwart the spirit of free software there?
If the software is any good, someone will have the source code, even if the original project shuts down for some reason or other. The software will thus always (or at least as long as it is relevant) be available under the original licence terms, permitting the project to continue as it has always done.
Consider that with open software, the source itself is part of the application in a stronger sense, and restricting what you can do with the source code is restricting what you can use the application for. How is that any different from stuff like DRM, EULAs, etc.?
If I'm going to give my software up for the world to do with as they see fit, I want it to remain free for them to use, not be encumbered by all manner of political dogma. Nor do I particularly relish the idea of making my creation (or my contribution) a vehicle for furthering a dogma and policy that may change into something I do not support without me having a say in what I am implicitly endorsing.
Move to flipchips with eutectic bonding, and get an electrical engineer to handle the electrical engineering rather than just sticking a part in and hoping it will work. Doing a proper power up and power down is trivial, and mechanical shock tolerance can be managed (shock damping, as well as using a less shock-sensitive way to bond the chips). Soldering is best outsourced, unless you're in a company that has proper automation equipment, in which case you should have the expertise inhouse to eliminate these problems during prototyping.
That's the nice thing about factor analysis. They don't have a clue why it matters, they just know that it does (because desireable employees have certain traits, and undesireable employees lack them).
You're looking for predictors of good or poor performance, and the only thing that matters is how well those predictions fare in keeping your standards at an acceptable level and making sure people end up in positions where they will be able to deliver, and get to work with people they will gel properly with.
There is a difference between paring things down to a score and doing a complex inventory and evaluating it along several axis to find out whether there is a spot for you in the company and, if so, where it is.
Also, what the industry really needs, actually *is* one more reason to reject you. The right reason.
Don't get me wrong. I hope you find a satisfying job. But the most important thing for an employer is, in many cases, to avoid hiring the wrong guy; most of them don't even seem to realize this. Once cruft (in the form of "bad" employees) starts to accumulate, you lose the edge and have to fall back on the usual "10.000 monkeys and a strategy to limit the amount of damage they do" approach of using money as a substitute for the skills of now interchangeable employees.
I've lost two jobs over the years, both times due to incompetent people elsewhere, and both times costing the company money and necessitating a rethink. I also quit two due to being held back by superiors who should never have been hired in the first place; one company went tits up, the other lived on but experienced no further economic growth.
The best way for the "right" people to get the jobs they want, is for the "wrong" people to be rejected, leading to more realistic market pressure (competence, as opposed to sheer numbers) and better results (which translates into further expansion and more jobs).
A lot of secondary questions that could be useful in determining the ideal people for you to work with are going to be useful in determining the disparity between your self-rating and the truth.
Include some personality inventory items (to improve gelling of teams), IQ score items (to assay the analytic intelligence), psychiatric inventory items (to correct other scores and improve gelling), a few practically applicable tests (applied intelligence) and some random questions (to make it harder to predict what constitutes enhancing an answer for the person considering cheating), for instance.
Self-criticism corresponds to the inverse of intelligence, and self-rating items (as opposed to the items that are tests) can be appropriately compensated both ways. Embellishment and outright lies can be caught by collecting feedback from how people are doing, and using it to refine the algorithms and assign proper weights. Random questions (submitted by the existing employees) with a database to select them from will allow serendipitous discovery of new factors of importance, etc.
There's really a lot you can do with this stuff, and if you approach it seriously, it will beat any two regular HR people. And with the volumes they're looking to hire, it is no longer feasible to treat people all that individually, so having the tech people quiz skills and so forth is not at all viable.
I'm not claiming they're unique in this respect. It is human nature, pure and simple. The US happens to be more empowered to express that nature than many, but power shifts over time and others will be better situated to do the same things in a not too distant future.
I'm not predicting that any other nation of similar size and economy will do better.
That said, I don't think any post of mine has received modpoints so far, since I don't spend a whole lot of time here, so that isn't a great loss. The modpoint system is crap. How often do I even see the lowids anymore? It is selfpropagating: I don't bother posting a well put argument, since it'll be lost in the noise anyway, and hence frequently end up adding to the noise myself. Sorry for that.
If direct pain is the only thing that will regulate your behaviour, you are operating on a stage of moral development (ref Kohlberg) that is inappropriate to that age group, and will most likely not progress in moral development to a level that is appropriate for unmedicated participation in society...
Pain as feedback is conditioning, nothing else.
Either way, different strategies work with different students. You're looking to further their development, comprehension and so forth, not to program them (there are computers for that). Being a jerk is a choice the teacher can choose to make or not, and it is a choice that involves responding to an action with an inappropriate reaction, or initiating an inappropriate action in the first place. It doesn't matter if you intended it otherwise.
I've encountered teachers with different preferred approaches and different levels of sternness, and I've found teachers I liked at both ends of the spectrum; ones I respected and worked hard to try to learn something from. I've been punished without being angry with the teacher about it. The ones that got physical, punished me for something others had done (that stings if you're actually trying to play nice) or simply had no respect for me, got their exact flavour of jerk back in response.
Funny... if you just swap "teacher" for "student" or "pupil", swap "work" for "study", and swap "low pay" for "forced participation", then I think the text above pretty perfectly summarizes what led to the video (or indeed a majority of "troublesome" students) in the first place.
Maybe the teachers should try to connect with these people who are in a fairly similar situation to their own, and foster a "we'll get out of this crap together, and then you can vote for something better" attitude instead?
Because we have to Think of the Children(tm)... bleh..
There's lots of places I'd love to ban them from, but the public internet seems like a great start.
etc.
Teachers have rights (labour law etc.).
... well, anyway.
Students have duties (show up, do the work, behave, etc.) but frequently few or no rights.
Hence, it is irrelevant if you fuck up the slaves^Wstudents.
That said, about 1/3 the teachers I have met (both when I was in school, and as an adult outside the educational setting) have been pretty cool people. 1/3 have been neutral filler. 1/3 were people who had no business being anywhere near a school or the age groups that attend them. Probably, there is a bell curve and my perception is just skewed by the people on both fringes sticking out like sore thumbs or
I'm betting you'll find the same distribution among the students as well.
Now if only someone would do some factor analysis to come up with a form the students could fill in on their first day of school (or a webform), then they could be matched better with their teacher and suddenly everyone would be happy...
I'd consider it more likely that a lab "accident" causes it to kill off the Palestinian population, or possibly even the majority of the Arab world. All it takes is one wrong person in the right place at the right time. And the majority of current leaders in Israel fit every criterion but "right time" at the moment.
Of course, I'd hate for them to pick up this idea, but they've probably thought about it already:
If they are willing to sacrifice the majority of their population as well, they could create a biological weapon that targets everyone except the Ashkenazi jews. That particular group is probably one of the most studied groups out there because they almost never breed with outsiders, so tons of interesting stuff can be found from their DNA. (Note that I'm using the word "breed" as a technical, not derogatory, term here)
Actually, if this happens a few weeks past sexual maturity, it will be an enormous advantage for the species, although not for the individual. Such a mutation would be assured survival if the original mutant was allowed to procreate, barring unforseen accidents that wipe out that subpopulation.
You can avoid burnout with a bit of genetic engineering.
For instance, if you could modify the common cold into two strains that, when combined, cause the original strain to be reassembled in the victim, then you could choose two patient zero groups with a wide geographical spacing and watch the clock tick.
The real issue is choosing the right way to limit burnout and then finding a way to control them, so they can be applied as anything other than WMDs, although the US has displayed its eagerness to deploy WMDs in the past.
Of course, such a strain of anything might be a couple of mutations short of an extinction event, but that has never bothered anyone actually working on these things or funding them to the extent that it stopped "progress".
If you wanted to do it, it's not all that hard, I think. Think along the lines of geocaching; a network of people interested in it place tons of small units all over the place, and some of them operate a series of transmitters with a known geographical location.
The unit would have a receiver that can lock to a signal someone has requested a fix on, another for receiving the control information and a timing pulse, one for transmitting data back to the operator of the local hub, a local clock, some logic and a power source.
You measure the signal strength, use the timing pulse to make sure the correct point in time is used for the sampled reception, and send it back. For instance.
Even if they weren't using One Time Pads, this would make absolutely no difference.
Infosec theory has long regarded crypto more as a means to delay the availability of information to unauthorized parties than as a means of actually denying its availability.
You use a form of crypto that is convenient for the target use and known to take longer to break than the time this information will remain sensitive. Information that will remain sensitive indefinitely should always be OTP-encrypted.
I think perhaps you misread my comment.
;).. So this is just a suggestion as to how it *could* be done, if you're looking for a (virtually) no-compromise voting solution.
I did not say "verified". I said "formally verified". As in formally proven to do everything in the top level spec correctly and do nothing else. As in full mesh analysis. As in formally proven softs running on a hardware solution that is engineered such that the non-inspectable parts are delivered by multiple independant vendors and will operate on the same voting principle as in spacecraft.
More concisely, a formal top level specification is derived from a requirements spec, which details the exact requirements of an election. Going from the election requirements to the voting machines' top level specs in the correct manner is critical for something like formal verification to work in the intended manner. Proper formal verification (which is feasible for such a "small" (though quite important) task) will provide a guarantee that the software does what the TLDS specified; apply the necessary oversight to make sure the election requirements are fulfilled by the TLDS, and you know, to the limits of current engineering capability, that the voting machine fulfils its role properly.
Of course, formal verification on the hardware side will be tougher, but you can take a shortcut by opting for the independant vendors plus inter-processor voting option, which also has the very nice property of reducing the likelyhood of tampering with an uninspectable component causing problems.
That said, of course they don't really want elections to work properly. No politician does, except when they're popular and out of office at the same time
It seems to me that the only real option to satisfy your requirements would be a formally verified design akin to the ones used in space shuttles. Lockheed-Martin would probably be one of the companies write and verify the source. You'll probably want three independent companies delivering the hardware with voting logic between them to assure that the logic has not been compromised. A formally verified design gets very complex if it's big, so you'll probably want a very simple interface (e.g. 2x40 display with usual up/down/left/right/select buttons), which can be good in and of itself, as it would reduce the incidence of misunderstandings.
;)
Hmm... perhaps I should go make a prototype
No. Because then I could demand proof that you voted what I wanted you to, and since you would have the means to provide it for me, I could reasonably threaten you if you didn't provide it.
In fact, the failure of the tests to show accuracy errors when the real world revealed plenty can be taken as something very close to proof that the testing procedures are inadequate, and the software therefore suspect.
The fishing expedition argument might actually be worth something. Speaking from the admittedly small sample of the people I've met and talked to, about half have confirmed illegal music downloads. This will vary with age group and, I suppose, other factors. It shouldn't be hard to make a case that this is not so much a case of precision work as it is pointing a shotgun at a flock of birds and pulling the trigger; they want to recuperate their legal expenses and keep going with a track record that has nothing but won and settled cases. They have every reason in the world to make the gamble that her son has commited the alleged crime, rather than accepting defeat.
As far as technical arguments go, I don't think that will fly with a jury of non-technical peers. If you want to use a technical argument, you will need to make a demonstration on-site with stock hardware and stock parts, uncontested by either participant, which shows the flawed argumentation you want to expose.
With regards to a reformatted or reinstalled harddrive, if you know there is nothing incriminating on the harddrive, talk to Ibas and/or OnTrack (1-800-872-2599) to get a history of the contents of the harddrive. They do certified forensic work, and will be able to recover the old data, as well as analyzing it or handing it over to another certified forensic company to do the analysis.