Pre-printed ballots have a security code on them (otherwise anyone with a decent photocopier could make 100 of them).
It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.
The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http://postalvoting.blogspot.com/)
The practice was stopped, luckily. It was found people were stealing/buying unused ballot forms and sending them in bunches to influence the vote (the whole husband/wife thing came out.. with no anonymous voting the pressure on one person to vote the same as their spouse was extremely strong).
An election official, who should never be working at their designated voting location, has to be very careful that they don't get seen by anyone. If for some reason there arn't enough people around then multiple video cameras watching the ballot box are a far more useful application of technology.
Also every voting station I've ever seen has representatives from each party as well as other volunteers. Nobody ever gets left on their own and the ballot boxes are in plain view in front of everyone.
Even in our relatively small ward there are something like 20-30 people watching.. It would take cross-party collusion and for nobody to ever blow the whistle... in multple wards simultaneously probably.
Once you get to the counting hall they're absolutely packed with people - if you get the chance watch on TV sometime.. every counting table has representatives from each party watching the counters like a hawk for anything going wrong, and there are independent monitors too who are flown in at the last minute - so even if all the other parties worked together to try something the monitors could declare the result void if they saw anything.
Now with electronic voting all that scrutiny is gone. People press a button and a big number pops out of the end. The process in the middle simply isn't able to be monitored, unless you get enough geeks together who support different parties to go over the code line by line (which is why it should be 100% open otherwise it's not trustable).
Maybe not but there aint a lot of air pressure at 20,000 feet... it's not like you'd just go 'oh there's a hole in the plane'... you'd be too busy fighting over the oxygen masks.
but if I were to download a 'backup' of one of my legally purchased CDs--mind you, I'd -never- infringe on a copyright, goodness
You just admitted that you did. It's just as illegal to download a copy of a CD that you own than it is to download a copy of a CD that you don't own. That's the way it works - when you buy a CD you buy limited rights to play that *exact CD* on your CD player. That's all. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
You must have picked a shitty mirror - FTP can normally saturate your downstream. Torrent is limited to the slowest upstream of the peers, so you're looking at 64kb/s normally.
That's the upside. The down side is that everything gets pushed through every link which means more than 3TB/day.
OTOH with P2P every time anyone requests a file that data has to traverse every link even though it might have been requested only 5 minutes earlier from someone else.
My own ISP reckons the off peak backbone usage over 80% is P2P from only 5% of users... it's horribly inneficient.
A lot of the new ones do... dedicating a PC (especially one capable of running Vista) to data storage when there's cheap NAS devices that can do the same thing is silly.
I've got DVDs in my collection that are 10 years old. And they haven't been kept in a storage environment either. I find it hard to believe the assertion that they break down after 2 years.
This is digital data. There is either degradation that affects the data or there isn't.
Just for kicks I just pulled out my old collection of Redhat 6 made on an old DVD-R when it was current arround 1999. It reads perfectly.
Alas this is doomed to failure, as it would require them to have a database containing the locations of all towers in the world.
They don't have this, and neither do any of the other companies that claim to do this kind of thing.. I've *never* seen such applications actually work even right in the middle of major cities.
The thing that pisses me off most about the cellphone carriers is that they design..
Stop right there.
Carriers do not design or make Phones. They take the phones made from Nokia, Motorola etc. and rebrand them. Sometimes they disable features (but smart consumers just reflash with the generic firmware anyway).
Once cellphones become generic TCP / IP traffic riding on some standardized physical layer...
All phones support TCP/IP. An increasing number have wifi etc. There are VOIP applicaitions freely available for most of them (with Nokias it's even built into the firmware). Google are doing nothing particularly new here, but their platform is certainly interesting, if only because it's totally open so is a good base for future innovation.
I get many times the life of a 'normal' bulb out of mine, but it's nothing like the number of hours on the packet when you buy them. They last about 12-18 months whereas the old type bulbs lasted about a month each. OTOH this flat has terrible wiring.
A good firewall doesn't allow any incoming connections. There's simply no need to. You need to learn how firewalls work.
I actually have a server based in a datacentre I can test on. With the firewall up bittorrent maxes out at about 5kbps and frequently stalls and dies. Open up ports for it and it goes up to about 400kbps max.
FTP can saturate the link at 10mbps+ download. Every time. It's *much* more efficient.
Blizzard have only one seed that means that *Everyone* downloads from the same source. It can take literally days to download the patches - that's why Wow attempts to download in the background rather than do it all at once. The last patch was downloading for *two weeks* before they made it live and I still had 40% of it to do.
900kbps is >100mpbs. Unless you're actually *inside* the blizzard data centre I call bullshit.. that's faster than most people get on the LAN.
I've heard a lot of complaints of 'throttling' even on the ISP I'm on who don't throttle anything at all. I'm not convinced anyone is doing it.
Basically bittorrent is slow because you always end up downloading from people on dialup etc. instead of downloading from a fast mirror as you do with FTP. Plus unless your firewall is wide open you aren't uploading.. which means the trackers will throttle you because your upload ratios are too low.
Bittorrent is designed to only give the fastest rates to those that also share. That means those behind no firewall or a very permissive one (since it can use just about any port depending on the tracker). Many trackers won't even let you connect at all unless you have the right upload ration, and those that do will throttle you to hell and back.
If you want to download something large use FTP. It's designed for downloads, it works well, and doesn't have all this throttling bullshit.
That's not a good use of bittorrent... their torrent seeds suck the big one, because they're totally saturated and get about 1kbps peak rate. Everyone just waits until the mirrors are available.
I remember trying to write something for System 6 (System 7 was just out at that time).
Got a copy of zortech (sp?) C (codewarror wouldn't run on our hardware).. then there were 5 books you *needed* to buy to write code for it. Those cost £150 *each*, and 'book 5' (apparently the one that actually had code examples in it... the other 4 were just descriptions of the UI) was damned near impossible to get. No internet in those days so you had to just get magazines etc. and phone people.
The project was canned before a line of code was written. We never did source a copy of the elusive book 5. I believe that was the last time that company ever bid for a Mac contract.. although I left them many years ago.
Competing with that was the relatively open Windows 3.0 (3.1 was in beta IIRC), DOS, and all the other platforms like Amiga, ST, etc. which were dirt cheap to write for. It's not surprising which won out.
Slashdot Mirror
Pre-printed ballots have a security code on them (otherwise anyone with a decent photocopier could make 100 of them).
It's theoretically possible to link the ballot number to the person but quite hard.
The worst are postal ballots are 100% traceable, and 0% verifiable. In the UK they forced postal ballots on us for a couple of years (closed the polling stations) - you had to fill in your vote then sign and date the form!! So much for anonymous ballots... (only ref. I can find these days is an old blog: http://postalvoting.blogspot.com/)
The practice was stopped, luckily. It was found people were stealing/buying unused ballot forms and sending them in bunches to influence the vote (the whole husband/wife thing came out.. with no anonymous voting the pressure on one person to vote the same as their spouse was extremely strong).
An election official, who should never be working at their designated voting location, has to be very careful that they don't get seen by anyone. If for some reason there arn't enough people around then multiple video cameras watching the ballot box are a far more useful application of technology.
Also every voting station I've ever seen has representatives from each party as well as other volunteers. Nobody ever gets left on their own and the ballot boxes are in plain view in front of everyone.
Even in our relatively small ward there are something like 20-30 people watching.. It would take cross-party collusion and for nobody to ever blow the whistle... in multple wards simultaneously probably.
Once you get to the counting hall they're absolutely packed with people - if you get the chance watch on TV sometime.. every counting table has representatives from each party watching the counters like a hawk for anything going wrong, and there are independent monitors too who are flown in at the last minute - so even if all the other parties worked together to try something the monitors could declare the result void if they saw anything.
Now with electronic voting all that scrutiny is gone. People press a button and a big number pops out of the end. The process in the middle simply isn't able to be monitored, unless you get enough geeks together who support different parties to go over the code line by line (which is why it should be 100% open otherwise it's not trustable).
The worlds greatest democracy would be ancient greece or early rome before the empire.
The USA is a republic.
Yeah but they normally don't glow in the dark.
Well except the ones in chernobyl.. and those are killer zombie mutant trees anyway.
Maybe not but there aint a lot of air pressure at 20,000 feet... it's not like you'd just go 'oh there's a hole in the plane'... you'd be too busy fighting over the oxygen masks.
Vista at 30%? Has it even hit 3% yet?
but if I were to download a 'backup' of one of my legally purchased CDs--mind you, I'd -never- infringe on a copyright, goodness
You just admitted that you did. It's just as illegal to download a copy of a CD that you own than it is to download a copy of a CD that you don't own. That's the way it works - when you buy a CD you buy limited rights to play that *exact CD* on your CD player. That's all. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
You must have picked a shitty mirror - FTP can normally saturate your downstream. Torrent is limited to the slowest upstream of the peers, so you're looking at 64kb/s normally.
That's the upside. The down side is that everything gets pushed through every link which means more than 3TB/day.
OTOH with P2P every time anyone requests a file that data has to traverse every link even though it might have been requested only 5 minutes earlier from someone else.
My own ISP reckons the off peak backbone usage over 80% is P2P from only 5% of users... it's horribly inneficient.
A lot of the new ones do... dedicating a PC (especially one capable of running Vista) to data storage when there's cheap NAS devices that can do the same thing is silly.
I've got DVDs in my collection that are 10 years old. And they haven't been kept in a storage environment either. I find it hard to believe the assertion that they break down after 2 years.
This is digital data. There is either degradation that affects the data or there isn't.
Just for kicks I just pulled out my old collection of Redhat 6 made on an old DVD-R when it was current arround 1999. It reads perfectly.
Alas this is doomed to failure, as it would require them to have a database containing the locations of all towers in the world.
They don't have this, and neither do any of the other companies that claim to do this kind of thing.. I've *never* seen such applications actually work even right in the middle of major cities.
Cairo, WinFS.. and that's just two things that I can think of off the top of my head right now.
Microsoft have been using Vapor as a marketing tactic for years.. it goes like this:
1. Competitor announces product
2. Announce your product coming 'real soon' that is same as competitor
The thing that pisses me off most about the cellphone carriers is that they design..
Stop right there.
Carriers do not design or make Phones. They take the phones made from Nokia, Motorola etc. and rebrand them. Sometimes they disable features (but smart consumers just reflash with the generic firmware anyway).
Once cellphones become generic TCP / IP traffic riding on some standardized physical layer...
All phones support TCP/IP. An increasing number have wifi etc. There are VOIP applicaitions freely available for most of them (with Nokias it's even built into the firmware). Google are doing nothing particularly new here, but their platform is certainly interesting, if only because it's totally open so is a good base for future innovation.
RFI? As far as I can tell they don't emit any.. and I have a house full of them.
I get many times the life of a 'normal' bulb out of mine, but it's nothing like the number of hours on the packet when you buy them. They last about 12-18 months whereas the old type bulbs lasted about a month each. OTOH this flat has terrible wiring.
The purpose of government is to act for the good of society. Things like this are *precisely* what they should be doing.
'used to be'?
It's still run every year. http://llanwrtyd-wells.powys.org.uk/eventmanvhorsevbike.htm
These days they have bikes too.
A good firewall doesn't allow any incoming connections. There's simply no need to. You need to learn how firewalls work.
I actually have a server based in a datacentre I can test on. With the firewall up bittorrent maxes out at about 5kbps and frequently stalls and dies. Open up ports for it and it goes up to about 400kbps max.
FTP can saturate the link at 10mbps+ download. Every time. It's *much* more efficient.
Blizzard have only one seed that means that *Everyone* downloads from the same source. It can take literally days to download the patches - that's why Wow attempts to download in the background rather than do it all at once. The last patch was downloading for *two weeks* before they made it live and I still had 40% of it to do.
900kbps is >100mpbs. Unless you're actually *inside* the blizzard data centre I call bullshit.. that's faster than most people get on the LAN.
I've heard a lot of complaints of 'throttling' even on the ISP I'm on who don't throttle anything at all. I'm not convinced anyone is doing it.
Basically bittorrent is slow because you always end up downloading from people on dialup etc. instead of downloading from a fast mirror as you do with FTP. Plus unless your firewall is wide open you aren't uploading.. which means the trackers will throttle you because your upload ratios are too low.
Sorry, I call bullshit.
Bittorrent is designed to only give the fastest rates to those that also share. That means those behind no firewall or a very permissive one (since it can use just about any port depending on the tracker). Many trackers won't even let you connect at all unless you have the right upload ration, and those that do will throttle you to hell and back.
If you want to download something large use FTP. It's designed for downloads, it works well, and doesn't have all this throttling bullshit.
That's not a good use of bittorrent... their torrent seeds suck the big one, because they're totally saturated and get about 1kbps peak rate. Everyone just waits until the mirrors are available.
Just tried it and flash player neither crashed nor took down firefox.
You need a better example.
I remember trying to write something for System 6 (System 7 was just out at that time).
Got a copy of zortech (sp?) C (codewarror wouldn't run on our hardware).. then there were 5 books you *needed* to buy to write code for it. Those cost £150 *each*, and 'book 5' (apparently the one that actually had code examples in it... the other 4 were just descriptions of the UI) was damned near impossible to get. No internet in those days so you had to just get magazines etc. and phone people.
The project was canned before a line of code was written. We never did source a copy of the elusive book 5. I believe that was the last time that company ever bid for a Mac contract.. although I left them many years ago.
Competing with that was the relatively open Windows 3.0 (3.1 was in beta IIRC), DOS, and all the other platforms like Amiga, ST, etc. which were dirt cheap to write for. It's not surprising which won out.