"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." - Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols
I agree that no system is above corruption - paper ballots included - but the lack of any verification is the greatest issue with the e-voting systems currently in use. Election fraud has been with us since the first Greek citizen was bribed for a vote; however, Diebold and others - with help from elected officials - are making a concerted effort to ensure that there is not - and will not be - such a system of verification. This report is terrifying, and I'm not sure what citizens can do beyond what they have been doing, given our current political climate.
Question to add some perspective: how is this different from purchasing a used book with someone's name written inside the front cover, or even one with the insipid "To [Name] on [Joyous Occasion and year]" inscription?
Because her school has K-12 - and seniors are allowed to drive. Granted, the high-schoolers are in a different building, but it's still next door, and they share a common lot.
There's truth here - my wife is a teacher, and her school has terrible IT security. She actually had to tell them (after I found out by opening my laptop while waiting for her in the parking lot) that an open wireless network is a BAD idea. They had left it open because there were no neighbors for a few hundred yards in any direction, and the IT person (ok, the school librarian) was too lazy to configure the school's laptops.
You know that "Firehose" bit at the top of the page after you've logged in? It looks like/. readers who don't flag stories as dupes in the firehose are those to whom we should assign blame.
80% and 60% are both actually very poor accuracies. I wouldn't be worried; this won't be taken seriously as any type of reliable profiling. It depends on the context. If you were talking baseball, it'd be a pretty damn good batting average. It's also good enough to get a warrant, and good enough for a grand jury to indict, and those latter two are what should worry you.
Look up the word "exonerated" in more than your free Internet dictionary. Try the Oxford English Dictionary - where definitions accepted by common law come from by longstanding tradition. Also, who taught you that "prosecutor" is not a legal position? The prosecutor represents the state in cases wherein the laws of the state may have been broken. By your definition, then, a judge (often elected) is not in a legal position.
You are correct in that the courts cannot; however, the legal system frequently finds a defendant "innocent," only we use the term "exoneration," literally, a removal of all imputation of blame or possible reproach - innocence. Witness the Duke LaCrosse case: the Attorney General, acting as District Attorney, dropped all charges and publicly exonerated the players of wrongdoing. Although the talking heads may have had an effect on those boys, there are other instances in which an accused individual is exonerated of all charges, yet must live with the consequences of a crime for which he (or she) is innocent: how many times in the past few years have you heard about some (usually black) person released from prison after DNA evidence from a twenty year old rape kit exonerated him? The accompanying stories are pretty sickening - how does a forty year old man explain to a potential employer that he was in prison for _________, but has since been exonerated? He doesn't get the benefit of a parole officer who ensures that he has work, instead, he's sent home with a "Gee, we're sorry!" (if that). His life is half over, he has no experience, no education, and little chance of gaining the sort that might land a decent job.
Did you leave out the Mac on purpose? I've had to install OS X from scratch - new hard drive because the old one shipped with some serious flaws [legal matters kept me from allowing the "Geniuses" to do anything but remove the old hard disk and stick the new one in - company paid, and important data was backed up nightly to an external USB drive]. I had absolutely no problem reinstalling Tiger from the DVD. I had no hardware issues with printers, external connections, 3rd party monitors (I use two large widescreens), etc. I was up and running the same morning. The longest wait was actually at the damned Apple store (3 total hours at the store - it was just after Christmas and the genius bar had a much longer wait than usual).
Now, as you noted, the Windoze reinstalls (much more frequent - this was the first OS X reinstall I've ever had to perform) are a pain in the ass. Every six months, my wife's computer (running Me - worst M$ mistake ever) crashes and I get to play games with every company website in the world trying to get the right drivers - which never seem to install correctly through the OS - for various peripherals. I was waiting for Christmas to get her an Intel Mac (already have mine!), but I think I'll just buy it for her for our anniversary - yay Parallels! - because her windows box is already acting funny.
Interesting idea - isn't it one that Open Office has been using for some time? I'm not being sarcastic - I'm more into the legal/public relations aspect of the geek world - but this just sort of occurred to me: OO.o can be slow to boot, but because it is a single application, switching between, say, Calc, Writer, and Impress takes no time at all, but opening Excel (or worse, PowerPoint) while running Word can take forever.
I agree fully - a Myspace identification as "pedophile" is public: as much as a newspaper's identification of someone would be. The difference is that Myspace is not bound by law to retract it's identification of and subsequent removal of someone's identity. Look at the publicity insanity that surrounds high-profile criminal cases: the defendant never wins, even if he or she is exonerated publicly. Several months' worth of reputation attacks, headlines, etc. cannot be removed from the public conscious by a single day's story (buried on page 29A) that notes the defendant's innocence. I'll admit that the preceding was an extreme example; however, the principle remains.
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"I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." - Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols
I agree that no system is above corruption - paper ballots included - but the lack of any verification is the greatest issue with the e-voting systems currently in use. Election fraud has been with us since the first Greek citizen was bribed for a vote; however, Diebold and others - with help from elected officials - are making a concerted effort to ensure that there is not - and will not be - such a system of verification. This report is terrifying, and I'm not sure what citizens can do beyond what they have been doing, given our current political climate.
Question to add some perspective: how is this different from purchasing a used book with someone's name written inside the front cover, or even one with the insipid "To [Name] on [Joyous Occasion and year]" inscription?
Because her school has K-12 - and seniors are allowed to drive. Granted, the high-schoolers are in a different building, but it's still next door, and they share a common lot.
There's truth here - my wife is a teacher, and her school has terrible IT security. She actually had to tell them (after I found out by opening my laptop while waiting for her in the parking lot) that an open wireless network is a BAD idea. They had left it open because there were no neighbors for a few hundred yards in any direction, and the IT person (ok, the school librarian) was too lazy to configure the school's laptops.
You know that "Firehose" bit at the top of the page after you've logged in? It looks like /. readers who don't flag stories as dupes in the firehose are those to whom we should assign blame.
Look up the word "exonerated" in more than your free Internet dictionary. Try the Oxford English Dictionary - where definitions accepted by common law come from by longstanding tradition. Also, who taught you that "prosecutor" is not a legal position? The prosecutor represents the state in cases wherein the laws of the state may have been broken. By your definition, then, a judge (often elected) is not in a legal position.
You are correct in that the courts cannot; however, the legal system frequently finds a defendant "innocent," only we use the term "exoneration," literally, a removal of all imputation of blame or possible reproach - innocence. Witness the Duke LaCrosse case: the Attorney General, acting as District Attorney, dropped all charges and publicly exonerated the players of wrongdoing. Although the talking heads may have had an effect on those boys, there are other instances in which an accused individual is exonerated of all charges, yet must live with the consequences of a crime for which he (or she) is innocent: how many times in the past few years have you heard about some (usually black) person released from prison after DNA evidence from a twenty year old rape kit exonerated him? The accompanying stories are pretty sickening - how does a forty year old man explain to a potential employer that he was in prison for _________, but has since been exonerated? He doesn't get the benefit of a parole officer who ensures that he has work, instead, he's sent home with a "Gee, we're sorry!" (if that). His life is half over, he has no experience, no education, and little chance of gaining the sort that might land a decent job.
Did you leave out the Mac on purpose? I've had to install OS X from scratch - new hard drive because the old one shipped with some serious flaws [legal matters kept me from allowing the "Geniuses" to do anything but remove the old hard disk and stick the new one in - company paid, and important data was backed up nightly to an external USB drive]. I had absolutely no problem reinstalling Tiger from the DVD. I had no hardware issues with printers, external connections, 3rd party monitors (I use two large widescreens), etc. I was up and running the same morning. The longest wait was actually at the damned Apple store (3 total hours at the store - it was just after Christmas and the genius bar had a much longer wait than usual).
Now, as you noted, the Windoze reinstalls (much more frequent - this was the first OS X reinstall I've ever had to perform) are a pain in the ass. Every six months, my wife's computer (running Me - worst M$ mistake ever) crashes and I get to play games with every company website in the world trying to get the right drivers - which never seem to install correctly through the OS - for various peripherals. I was waiting for Christmas to get her an Intel Mac (already have mine!), but I think I'll just buy it for her for our anniversary - yay Parallels! - because her windows box is already acting funny.
Interesting idea - isn't it one that Open Office has been using for some time? I'm not being sarcastic - I'm more into the legal/public relations aspect of the geek world - but this just sort of occurred to me: OO.o can be slow to boot, but because it is a single application, switching between, say, Calc, Writer, and Impress takes no time at all, but opening Excel (or worse, PowerPoint) while running Word can take forever.
I agree fully - a Myspace identification as "pedophile" is public: as much as a newspaper's identification of someone would be. The difference is that Myspace is not bound by law to retract it's identification of and subsequent removal of someone's identity. Look at the publicity insanity that surrounds high-profile criminal cases: the defendant never wins, even if he or she is exonerated publicly. Several months' worth of reputation attacks, headlines, etc. cannot be removed from the public conscious by a single day's story (buried on page 29A) that notes the defendant's innocence. I'll admit that the preceding was an extreme example; however, the principle remains.