The feds try to stay out of this. They leave to each state how to run their elections. All the feds did was pass a law that provided some minimum standards and also provided some money. States figured out the details. Since election officials were in a major panic over Bush v Gore and voters were asking questions (oh no!) they quickly spent that money on new fangled electronic voting machines without wasting precious time evaluating them on irrelevant issues like accuracy or verifiability.
Election boards just weren't qualified to deal with this. It's sort of like asking your small town school board to evaluate the computer mainframe systems to be used for record keeping (with the final decision coming down to either the blue one or the beige one).
And yet for seven long years they were given exemptions to a law that disallowed using those machines. The snag is that there was no money to replace the machines. Election officials don't think in terms of integrity or security, they instead congratulate themselves on how much money they saved. Go and read any response by an election official whenever security problems are exposed or warned about and you can see clearly that their primary goals are to save money and avoid scandals or recounts.
Election officials do not measure the success of an election by how accurate or reliable the election was. Instead election officials measure success based on how few complaints there were and how inexpensive it was to run. If "integrity" is not on the list of goals then it's easy to get into this situation.
And what problem is solved? Voting fraud by people without IDs is an extremely miniscule problem. Whereas voting fraud by electronic machines should be a real cause for worry. Yet the focus is on the non-existent problem instead of the really viable problem. The reason voting ID laws get the attention is because of the partisan angle; a way to introduce another us-versus-them scenario, get your side to shout hurray and get the other side to shout boo and split the divide even further.
Is there evidence that elections are being stolen by people actually showing up at polls and pretending to be someone else? It's far more likely that these voting machines are being hacked and stealing elections that way. But no one bothers passing laws to rectify that problem. But the fear mongering is going around in whispers about how illegal aliens are being bused in to vote in droves, and someone knows someone who saw this happen. I'd trust the voter ID advocates a lot more if most of them weren't from an extremist wing of their party and treating the whole thing as a partisan divide issue.
Do you not know US history? You forgot how voter laws were used to disenfranchise black voters in the south, so that they could not vote in any appreciable numbers so that it took one hundred years after the civil war before they got a voting rights act and the entrenched bigots were forced to acquiesce to the fact that they actually lost the war.
Thus any move to reintroduce laws that appear to resemble those older laws gets people nervous. A voting law that is more convenient to one group and less convenient to another is always going to cause troubles, especially when the push is coming from extreme wing of the same conservative block that were once in charge of Jim Crow laws (they all mass-migrated from the racist democrat wing and joined the racist republican wing but they're essentially the same bigots).
The argument against the voting ID laws is not the idea of a voting ID per se but in the implementation. You just need to ensure that it is equally convenient to all, not just to those who already have driver's licenses, those who can take time off of work, those who have access to their birth certificates, those with extra time or cash, etc. If you have a government issued ID for voting purposes then the government must pay for it entirely, especially in those states and counties with a long history of rampant racism with little evidence of remorse or reform.
Any loyal citizen of the US should be appalled if even one legal voter of the opposite party was prevented from voting. The people pushing for the voting ID laws should be volunteering en masse to help out those who have difficulty in getting the voting ID cards, even if only to prove that they're being fair rather than being partisan stooges.
Election boards are the problem. Petty bureacrats in charge staffed by volunteers and run on a shoestring budget. The problem starts with the Help America Vote Act, where they all panicked and purchased what they were in no position to evaluate. Then when problems arise they do not change because it costs money - it is literally too expensive to discard machines that are known to have problems. These WINVote machines were known the have severe problems and a law was passed to get rid of them; but then an exception was made for those machines because there was no replacement available, and they kept that exception in place for SEVEN YEARS!
In the past I have seen reports where election officials declare that the election was well run based upon lack of complaints only. That's a politically stance essentially. They greatly dislike recounts, recounts just mean that they must have done something wrong, recounts means they must be like those election folks in Florida who screwed things up for election folks everywhere else. They like electronic voting machines because no recounts are needed; any recount will give the same answer every time you push the button (manual recounts being unnecessary because the digital machines can do it faster).
They have no experience with security, and as the article noted one election official said that no matter how secure you can make voting machines someone will be able to hack them, as if not even bothering to try was an appropriate response. When they evaluated machines to use they evaluate based upon ease of use, ease of training poll workers, ease of counting, and cost. They rely entirely upon the trust of the company making the machines as to whether or not they actually work properly or are secure. They have no budget to hire experts and wouldn't know how to even identify an expert if they had a budget. If someone points out flaws they become defensive (costs money to replace, casts aspersion on the officials' competence, etc).
Sometimes a higher office holder will get involved and try to straighten things out with elections, but the election officials tend to fight back hard against their own bosses. Again, politics. The only reason something happened in Virginia is because the governor got involved personally.
And I really don't think we want cops patrolling alone in any case. That is going to lead to problems. If the person pulled over for a traffic stop is going to shoot then it's much less likely with two cops than with the solo cop.
Norway is a lot more homogenous though. If the cops are killing people who look like you and from your neighborhood then you tend to get upset. If the cops are killing people who don't look like you and from the wrong side of town then a lot of poeple don't get nearly so upset in that situation. Especially when there's this attitude going around that "it's a war zone" in that part of the town.
Right, it hurts like a motherfucker, so you should shoot first and potentially kill an innocent life just to avoid some motherfucking pain? I don't want that cop on the street. That cop is more dangerous than the gangbanger.
Keep themselves alive AND keep the suspect alive. In a confrontation, if one person is must be shot I hope it is the policeman and not the innocent kid on the way home from school. However I refuse to accept that scenario where one person must be shot, it is better if no one is shot. The job of the police in that situation is to make sure no one is shot, to make sure that innocent people are not shot, AND to make sure that guilty people are also not shot.
What we have now is untenable. They've created a war zone but without rules. The "locals" are being treated as all being potentially hostile, and the "locals" no longer trust the police. The situation will not improve as long as that mentality exists.
If routine traffic stops are so dangerous that you have to shoot first, then send out two cops in each car to do traffic enforcement and/or provide body armor. Sure it's expensive, but human lives are priceless. Shooting deaths by cops should never become a daily news item, and yet that is what has happened.
The trick then is to find some part of the internet that is not being spied upon, an ISP that can be trusted, trunk lines that are not compromised, etc. I suspect there are naive people out there saying "boy, I'm glad I've got Verizon!"
So, just assume it is ALL compromised. That means be careful; encrypt stuff, anonymize as much as possible, even use less internet overall. But most people won't do this, they want their twitter. Quite a lot of people seem to have zero concept of privacy so they won't care if the government is also looking. Basically even being concerned about privacy marks one as a kook, luddite, and old person.
Politically you can't get anywhere here unless you can blame things on the "other" party, depending upon who you're talking to. The parties would rather argue with each other than act in unison. The current horde of presidential candidates are not concerned about this and this spying won't raise to the level of an "issue" to be discussed in this election cycle. Everyone running for lesser office are all going to do whatever their party bosses tell them to do, so there's no hope there either. So this means assume that the compromised internet situation will continue indefinately.
Were they even legally allowed to disclose that the NSA had requested cooperation? How can you go to court when the judge doesn't have the necessary security clearance to hear the case and you'll certainly never be able to get a fair jury of citizens that way.
Voter ID laws are based on the idea that voter fraud is rampant, when in reality it is extremely minor. They get away with it by passing out the myth that it is common and that it is being performed by people who are not like good upstanding Americans; ie, voter fraud is caused by immigrants, felons, people from the other party, etc. That is, scare the voters and they'll do what you want.
Voter ID laws are too close to examples of disenfranchisement in the past: literacy tests, poll taxes, etc. And these new laws are being pushed by the same political heritage that pushed those old laws as well.
Voting should a fundamental right to all citizens, period. There should be no impediments to voting, I would even allow felons to vote. If we are to require voting IDs then it should be funded by the government, with zero cost to the voter, including any and all costs related to obtaining the ID such as travel time, time off from work should be protected, etc; the government should travel to the voter and not vice versa here. Not everyone has a driver's ID, not everyone even has a birth certificate, we have citizens in this country who have no way of proving citizenship.
I'm amazed at the numbers of privileged people who don't understand this. They'll say "it's not that big a burden" when it really is to some people.
The majority don't think though. Politics is like a sports game, people choose sides, they wear their rally clothes, wave the correct flags, and vote how they are told to vote. They treat democracy as a competition rather than a cooperation.
In democracy you get the government that you deserve.
Yup, you must learn to put all your trust into corporations.
People who make these sorts comments are being purely partisan. They are taking sides rather than trying to view anything objectively and weigh the pros and cons. It's easier that way, when you take sides then you don't have to think for yourself or ponder over complicated topics.
If I see "rock star" in a recruitment email, it's deleted before I can read any further. I am not making this up, HR recruiters with a clue pay attention.
It sounds crazy. But there are major corporations that routinely plan to upgrade to the latest OS as soon as possible. I kid you not, but this includes major defense contractors. We all laughed at Windows 8, but the people with the missiles went and rolled it out. I have no doubt some of these places are rolling out Windows 10. This is not driven by the corporate leadership though, but by hordes of IT people who double as the vanguard of Microsoft's marketing forces.
Even if they are not of evil intent here, they still have broken design goals. Pre-caching stuff like this is always wrong if there is no option to disable. Always. There is no excuse for this, not even Microsoft's disingenuous standard response "it's for a better user experience." It slows down the computer slightly so that you can get a ridiculously stupid feature to work slightly faster. They're still stuck on the idea that silly phone apps on a computer are a good idea. I don't turn on my computer just to see the update on an app and then turn it off again; this makes sense for a phone but is stupid on a computer. The users completely rejected the idea of a live background screen and MS is still trying to keep that idea; as well the users rejected gadgets on Windows but those are being resurrected in a different form too. All this stuff is just a different sort of layer on top of the web, the majority of these aren't even real programs but just wrappers and gloss on top of some URLs, whereas the equivalent web sites are far more useful and informative. Their eyes are blinded at the thought of having a store that all users are accustomed too, thinking they can replicate the itunes model (even though on the mac almost no one uses the apple store).
In other words, even thought they apologized and said Windows 8 was a mistake and they are trying to fix it and regain customer trust, they are still firmly behind the misguided goals of Windows 8.
Really? We rarely get a good look at movie UIs, they're flashed by too quickly. They may look cool but if you do pause the screen and look there's nothing to them really. Looking cool is not a good metric for usability.
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The feds try to stay out of this. They leave to each state how to run their elections. All the feds did was pass a law that provided some minimum standards and also provided some money. States figured out the details. Since election officials were in a major panic over Bush v Gore and voters were asking questions (oh no!) they quickly spent that money on new fangled electronic voting machines without wasting precious time evaluating them on irrelevant issues like accuracy or verifiability.
Election boards just weren't qualified to deal with this. It's sort of like asking your small town school board to evaluate the computer mainframe systems to be used for record keeping (with the final decision coming down to either the blue one or the beige one).
And yet for seven long years they were given exemptions to a law that disallowed using those machines. The snag is that there was no money to replace the machines. Election officials don't think in terms of integrity or security, they instead congratulate themselves on how much money they saved. Go and read any response by an election official whenever security problems are exposed or warned about and you can see clearly that their primary goals are to save money and avoid scandals or recounts.
Election officials do not measure the success of an election by how accurate or reliable the election was. Instead election officials measure success based on how few complaints there were and how inexpensive it was to run. If "integrity" is not on the list of goals then it's easy to get into this situation.
"Starbucks frappé"? A great example to use to show that you're in no way part of a privileged group :-)
And what problem is solved? Voting fraud by people without IDs is an extremely miniscule problem. Whereas voting fraud by electronic machines should be a real cause for worry. Yet the focus is on the non-existent problem instead of the really viable problem. The reason voting ID laws get the attention is because of the partisan angle; a way to introduce another us-versus-them scenario, get your side to shout hurray and get the other side to shout boo and split the divide even further.
Is there evidence that elections are being stolen by people actually showing up at polls and pretending to be someone else? It's far more likely that these voting machines are being hacked and stealing elections that way. But no one bothers passing laws to rectify that problem. But the fear mongering is going around in whispers about how illegal aliens are being bused in to vote in droves, and someone knows someone who saw this happen. I'd trust the voter ID advocates a lot more if most of them weren't from an extremist wing of their party and treating the whole thing as a partisan divide issue.
Do you not know US history? You forgot how voter laws were used to disenfranchise black voters in the south, so that they could not vote in any appreciable numbers so that it took one hundred years after the civil war before they got a voting rights act and the entrenched bigots were forced to acquiesce to the fact that they actually lost the war.
Thus any move to reintroduce laws that appear to resemble those older laws gets people nervous. A voting law that is more convenient to one group and less convenient to another is always going to cause troubles, especially when the push is coming from extreme wing of the same conservative block that were once in charge of Jim Crow laws (they all mass-migrated from the racist democrat wing and joined the racist republican wing but they're essentially the same bigots).
The argument against the voting ID laws is not the idea of a voting ID per se but in the implementation. You just need to ensure that it is equally convenient to all, not just to those who already have driver's licenses, those who can take time off of work, those who have access to their birth certificates, those with extra time or cash, etc. If you have a government issued ID for voting purposes then the government must pay for it entirely, especially in those states and counties with a long history of rampant racism with little evidence of remorse or reform.
Any loyal citizen of the US should be appalled if even one legal voter of the opposite party was prevented from voting. The people pushing for the voting ID laws should be volunteering en masse to help out those who have difficulty in getting the voting ID cards, even if only to prove that they're being fair rather than being partisan stooges.
Oregon requires you to get a driver's license even if you don't drive?
Election boards are the problem. Petty bureacrats in charge staffed by volunteers and run on a shoestring budget. The problem starts with the Help America Vote Act, where they all panicked and purchased what they were in no position to evaluate. Then when problems arise they do not change because it costs money - it is literally too expensive to discard machines that are known to have problems. These WINVote machines were known the have severe problems and a law was passed to get rid of them; but then an exception was made for those machines because there was no replacement available, and they kept that exception in place for SEVEN YEARS!
In the past I have seen reports where election officials declare that the election was well run based upon lack of complaints only. That's a politically stance essentially. They greatly dislike recounts, recounts just mean that they must have done something wrong, recounts means they must be like those election folks in Florida who screwed things up for election folks everywhere else. They like electronic voting machines because no recounts are needed; any recount will give the same answer every time you push the button (manual recounts being unnecessary because the digital machines can do it faster).
They have no experience with security, and as the article noted one election official said that no matter how secure you can make voting machines someone will be able to hack them, as if not even bothering to try was an appropriate response. When they evaluated machines to use they evaluate based upon ease of use, ease of training poll workers, ease of counting, and cost. They rely entirely upon the trust of the company making the machines as to whether or not they actually work properly or are secure. They have no budget to hire experts and wouldn't know how to even identify an expert if they had a budget. If someone points out flaws they become defensive (costs money to replace, casts aspersion on the officials' competence, etc).
Sometimes a higher office holder will get involved and try to straighten things out with elections, but the election officials tend to fight back hard against their own bosses. Again, politics. The only reason something happened in Virginia is because the governor got involved personally.
I remember when the NRA was all about promoting gun safety instead of being a political advocacy group.
And I really don't think we want cops patrolling alone in any case. That is going to lead to problems. If the person pulled over for a traffic stop is going to shoot then it's much less likely with two cops than with the solo cop.
Norway is a lot more homogenous though. If the cops are killing people who look like you and from your neighborhood then you tend to get upset. If the cops are killing people who don't look like you and from the wrong side of town then a lot of poeple don't get nearly so upset in that situation. Especially when there's this attitude going around that "it's a war zone" in that part of the town.
Right, it hurts like a motherfucker, so you should shoot first and potentially kill an innocent life just to avoid some motherfucking pain? I don't want that cop on the street. That cop is more dangerous than the gangbanger.
Keep themselves alive AND keep the suspect alive. In a confrontation, if one person is must be shot I hope it is the policeman and not the innocent kid on the way home from school. However I refuse to accept that scenario where one person must be shot, it is better if no one is shot. The job of the police in that situation is to make sure no one is shot, to make sure that innocent people are not shot, AND to make sure that guilty people are also not shot.
What we have now is untenable. They've created a war zone but without rules. The "locals" are being treated as all being potentially hostile, and the "locals" no longer trust the police. The situation will not improve as long as that mentality exists.
If routine traffic stops are so dangerous that you have to shoot first, then send out two cops in each car to do traffic enforcement and/or provide body armor. Sure it's expensive, but human lives are priceless. Shooting deaths by cops should never become a daily news item, and yet that is what has happened.
The trick then is to find some part of the internet that is not being spied upon, an ISP that can be trusted, trunk lines that are not compromised, etc. I suspect there are naive people out there saying "boy, I'm glad I've got Verizon!"
So, just assume it is ALL compromised. That means be careful; encrypt stuff, anonymize as much as possible, even use less internet overall. But most people won't do this, they want their twitter. Quite a lot of people seem to have zero concept of privacy so they won't care if the government is also looking. Basically even being concerned about privacy marks one as a kook, luddite, and old person.
Politically you can't get anywhere here unless you can blame things on the "other" party, depending upon who you're talking to. The parties would rather argue with each other than act in unison. The current horde of presidential candidates are not concerned about this and this spying won't raise to the level of an "issue" to be discussed in this election cycle. Everyone running for lesser office are all going to do whatever their party bosses tell them to do, so there's no hope there either. So this means assume that the compromised internet situation will continue indefinately.
Were they even legally allowed to disclose that the NSA had requested cooperation? How can you go to court when the judge doesn't have the necessary security clearance to hear the case and you'll certainly never be able to get a fair jury of citizens that way.
Voter ID laws are based on the idea that voter fraud is rampant, when in reality it is extremely minor. They get away with it by passing out the myth that it is common and that it is being performed by people who are not like good upstanding Americans; ie, voter fraud is caused by immigrants, felons, people from the other party, etc. That is, scare the voters and they'll do what you want.
Voter ID laws are too close to examples of disenfranchisement in the past: literacy tests, poll taxes, etc. And these new laws are being pushed by the same political heritage that pushed those old laws as well.
Voting should a fundamental right to all citizens, period. There should be no impediments to voting, I would even allow felons to vote. If we are to require voting IDs then it should be funded by the government, with zero cost to the voter, including any and all costs related to obtaining the ID such as travel time, time off from work should be protected, etc; the government should travel to the voter and not vice versa here. Not everyone has a driver's ID, not everyone even has a birth certificate, we have citizens in this country who have no way of proving citizenship.
I'm amazed at the numbers of privileged people who don't understand this. They'll say "it's not that big a burden" when it really is to some people.
The majority don't think though. Politics is like a sports game, people choose sides, they wear their rally clothes, wave the correct flags, and vote how they are told to vote. They treat democracy as a competition rather than a cooperation.
In democracy you get the government that you deserve.
Yup, you must learn to put all your trust into corporations.
People who make these sorts comments are being purely partisan. They are taking sides rather than trying to view anything objectively and weigh the pros and cons. It's easier that way, when you take sides then you don't have to think for yourself or ponder over complicated topics.
If I see "rock star" in a recruitment email, it's deleted before I can read any further. I am not making this up, HR recruiters with a clue pay attention.
It sounds crazy. But there are major corporations that routinely plan to upgrade to the latest OS as soon as possible. I kid you not, but this includes major defense contractors. We all laughed at Windows 8, but the people with the missiles went and rolled it out. I have no doubt some of these places are rolling out Windows 10. This is not driven by the corporate leadership though, but by hordes of IT people who double as the vanguard of Microsoft's marketing forces.
Even if they are not of evil intent here, they still have broken design goals. Pre-caching stuff like this is always wrong if there is no option to disable. Always. There is no excuse for this, not even Microsoft's disingenuous standard response "it's for a better user experience." It slows down the computer slightly so that you can get a ridiculously stupid feature to work slightly faster. They're still stuck on the idea that silly phone apps on a computer are a good idea. I don't turn on my computer just to see the update on an app and then turn it off again; this makes sense for a phone but is stupid on a computer. The users completely rejected the idea of a live background screen and MS is still trying to keep that idea; as well the users rejected gadgets on Windows but those are being resurrected in a different form too. All this stuff is just a different sort of layer on top of the web, the majority of these aren't even real programs but just wrappers and gloss on top of some URLs, whereas the equivalent web sites are far more useful and informative. Their eyes are blinded at the thought of having a store that all users are accustomed too, thinking they can replicate the itunes model (even though on the mac almost no one uses the apple store).
In other words, even thought they apologized and said Windows 8 was a mistake and they are trying to fix it and regain customer trust, they are still firmly behind the misguided goals of Windows 8.
Also "necessary" is an important keyword. If Microsoft feels it is necessary to spy on you then they'll do so.
Too many questions makes Jack a potential terrorist.
Really? We rarely get a good look at movie UIs, they're flashed by too quickly. They may look cool but if you do pause the screen and look there's nothing to them really. Looking cool is not a good metric for usability.