And what happens to people who mark an "X" next to two candidates? Or people who turn in a ballot with no visible "X", but what appears to be a small pencil mark next to one candidate's name? Don't tell me such things don't happen in Canada. I'm certain they do. They're spoiled ballots, and how do they get counted?
Of course it happens. They don't get counted. Spoiled ballots are, by definition, invalid.
Voters have a simple opportunity to make their choice clear. The counters should not have to interpret the ballot to determine that choice.
More user-friendly installer => wider user-base => less zombies for DDoS.
You are putting the wrong cart in front of the horse.
Maybe that's the wrong metaphor.
The point is that an easier installer is not what OpenBSD needs. What OpenBSD needs is application support. Office productivity stuff, browser plugins, etc. If you want OpenBSD to take over the world the place to start is the corporate market where there are dedicated admins to install and configure things. OpenBSD can then use this experience to prepare to take on the clueless masses.
I totally agree. AC was almost perfect for me (I felt a little constrained by the story at times).
Some of my favourite bits were:
dynamic terrain which affected weather patterns
the unit editor - no fixed units, just mix and match technologies
mixing and matching government, economy, and future society options
sea cities
I was hoping Civ 3 would just be the AC engine set on Earth, but was very disappointed. The unit editor would rock for Civ. Start with a horse chassis...
Key wonders:
Pyramids (grannery in every city)
Adam Smith's thingy (reduce costs of improvment maintenance)
DaVinci (free unit upgrades)
There are more, but those three are key to rapidly develop your society.
Two of my favourites: The Great Library and Women's Suffrage. Early on the library gives you an enormous science advantage. It effectively keeps you on par with the other nations without doing any research of your own. Women's Suffrage let's you conduct large scale military campaigns as a democracy later in the game.
Creative didn't put them [Aureal] out of business. They bought their IP after they were done.
Yes, they did put them out of business. Creative sued Aureal. Aureal won the court battle but the effort bankrupted them. Then Creative scooped up Aureal's IP at bargain basement prices. Classic example of a big company using its army of lawyers to crush a small company instead of competing in the market.
I don't know why it sounds contradictory. Perhaps I wasn't clear, so here we go again: All taxpayers paid for the development of the software; I don't think it's fair if some of the taxpayers can then modify the software in such a way that some other taxpayers no longer have access to the full benefit for it.
Ah, but they do still have access to the full benefit of the publicly funded software. It's still freely available. Modifying freely available software does not make the original disappear. The authors of the modification should be allowed to do with it as they choose. You seem to think that all software should be free, I disagree. It would be wonderful if it was, but I will not force this view on others.
It's a funny thing about the world we work in that you can make a worthless change and charge for it and make money from it, even though the market wouldn't choose to pay for that change if they knew what they were paying for. Effectively, if AOL bundles a modified version of the chat software, the people who get this version don't know or care about it. It's only when they find that they can't chat with non-AOL using friends that the problem starts. And if you say that AOL isn't that big so it doesn't matter, assume that it is Microsoft, with their 90%+ share of the market which does the bundling.
I agree. The market is deeply stupid, particularly when it comes to high-tech. So? The potential for correction is still there: the original free software. What is stopping anyone from doing the exact same thing AOL or MS did? With a truly free license, nothing.
This is not a counter-example. If they were charging $100 for the SW, there would be less of a problem, because people would actually have to make a positive decision to use it. But that's not the way they would do it. They could create value out of the SW without having to charge for it initially, because of their dominant position in the market. You might argue that they deserve to be able to do this because they've built up that position etc etc, but that is an ideological arguement; it is not value-free.
I'm having difficulty parsing this. Are you saying it is bad that MS can give software away for no charge? I'm really not sure what your point is.
So many people are commenting about how awful Real's player is and the dreaded "Buffering..." that always pops up.
But if they read the article they would see that this model does not use streaming, but rather just downloading. If they are downloaded onto your local drive, you aren't going to have buffering issues!
This is Real we're talking about. They will find a way.
The best thing about the GPL is that it's simply not possible for a company to then exploit it without giving some benefit back to the people who paid for it. (And yes, I understand that companies pay taxes too).
Why does this sound contradictory? You say you understand that companies pay taxes but in the same breath you imply that they did not pay for the software.
For example, the GPL prevents small, meaningless changes which simply change protocols without adding value.
Yay, my favourite GPL FUD. "We must stop these nasty companies from selling the free code!" They are not charging money for the freely available code, they are charging for changes to the code. It doesn't matter how "meaningless" a change is, if the market decides it is worth paying for then that change has value.
Example. Microsoft takes public domain (more likely BSDL) software, presses it onto CDs and drops it in a shiny box. No other changes. They charge $100 for it. If the market will bear this price then yes, the shiny box and convenience of a CD is worth $100. It doesn't matter how trivial the change is, if people will pay for that change then the change is worth the price. Value has been added.
Now if everyone decided that the change was indeed worthless then Microsoft would have to obey the market and start looking for a landfill in New Mexico for all those CDs.
He could also either formally refuse to vote (as suggested by another poster), or spoil his ballot if he feels all the candidates are not worth voting for. Either one sends a clearer message. Voting Rhino (back when they existed) was a slap in the face of the other major parties, especially when, despite not winning, still managed to get more votes than the other two major parties that were in the election.
You have a much higher opinion of politicians than I do. They don't care about spoiled ballots. They care about winning and money. Do you honestly think they will be concerned if they win with only 10% of the vote? Nope, they won. But with the new financing laws that means they missed out on a lot of campaign money. And that they will care about, but only if the money is going to their competition, which would not happen with spoiled ballots.
You could very well be like me, decide no one party comes close to representing your views, conclude that Canadian 'democracy' sucks and is broken, and consequently you won't bother voting but will just go back to playing video games instead.
Vote anyways. With the new campaign finance law votes == dollars. If you are not going to use your vote to pick a candidate use it to give money to a fringe party with few resources. They can then use the money to create better debate next election, forcing the major parties away from business as usual.
Years back the UofA got sold on PeopleSoft, even though we had the people on staff who could do a better job inhouse. It has been an unmitigated debacle. Payroll systems are less reliable. Course registration is now a pain in the ass (before it was okay). There are some major security/privacy concerns. Last I heard the project was over 300% over budget, and that was a few years ago.
I had a dog that had remarkable sleep inducing powers. She didn't like to sleep without a warm human to curl up against so she would make people sleepy when she wanted to sleep. It was really impressive: she could walk into a room and within minutes everyone would say how sleepy they were. She usually targetted me so I actually built up a bit of a resistance over the years. But if I had to pull an all-nighter I would still lock here out of the room.
One thing that needs to watched is receipts not matching votes, if anyone complains of that then rhose machines need to be analysed with a fine tooth comb and people thrown in jail and another election held.
If suffieciently paranoid you could do a paper of the entire election everytime - you trust the machine counts if the random recounts pass, and take your time with a full recount. If the count differs people go to jail, and you hold new elections.
You all are either not reading what I wrote or not thinking hard enough. Here's an example off the top of my head. If I had more time (say, if a wealthy individual hired me to throw an election) I could come up with some more sophisticated methods of fraud.
I assume these machines allow people to change their votes before finally committing and casting their final vote. Keep track of how often the voter changes their choices. Hmmm, I wonder if they aren't sure who to vote for. Maybe they are not comfortable with these voting machines. Maybe they're a half-blind, arthritic senior citizen. If they hit some threshold of changes flip some of their choices after they commit and have the paper receipt reflect these flipped choices. Are they going to notice the changes on the (probably small) receipt? What will they do if they notice? Assume they screwed up and be too embarrassed to speak up? Even if they do complain, what is going to happen? You have coded the voting machine to do this only once (maybe once every few hours). They key here is that the paper receipt matches the electronic vote. No amount of manual counts will detect this fraud.
Think evil. Think how much you can tell about the voters from how they are voting; not just the choices they make but how they interact with the user interface. It gets even easier if you know what the demographics of the polling station are.
..So now we only need to bribe a few people from each party to rig an election. Say, at two or three polling places...
No, because anybody can walk in from the street to observe the counting. Journalists, wacko conspiracy theorists, police officers: it quickly because extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to keep the fraud a secret.
With electronic voting, you should (in theory) get more accurate results, in less time, using fewer people. The paper verification means that if there is a dispute and a recount is called for, the option is available. However, you don't have to front that level of expenditure everywhere. It's much more efficient.
Why is it so damn important that results be known RIGHT NOW? Less than half the people in your country vote, and therefore don't care. For those that do your TV networks are projecting winners the second polls close. Up here we know the results before we go to bed. By morning most of the counts are official. Within days MPs are being sworn in.
Why is efficiency even an issue? I care about efficiency when I order a pizza. I care about efficiency when I buy a car. For one night every four years (or so) efficiency can go to hell. When deciding who will be governing me and my country I want accuracy.
It's worth noting that in their national elections in 2000, Canada had 21 million voters and the US had 105 million. You can see why the US might be a little more obsessed with the cost and speed elements.
Ah yes, the old "That won't work here, we're special" argument.
Yes, you have an order of magnitude more voters. But that also means that you have an order of magnitude more polling stations and volunteers to count votes. In terms of voting there is no fundamental difference between a Canadian city of 1 million people and an American city of 1 million people. The fact that you have 10 times as many of those cities is irrelevant to this problem.
Who says we can't have a simple solution? Printing out a piece of paper most certainly WILL address all of the security concerns. At a stroke it allows voter verification, recounts, and auditing to find both corruption and machine errors.
It can address the concerns, but not necessarily.
First, a quick clarification for a lot of posters: voters will not leave the polling station with their receipt. They are supposed to check it for accuracy and then drop it into a secured box so it is available for recounts and verification of the electronic results.
But when should polling stations do a paper recount? At random, say 1% of stations? Whenever a race is tight? How do they know the thresholds they are setting are sufficient to stop cheating? In an electoral system where a few dozen votes could determine the presidency there are simply too many ways things could go wrong. What guarantee is there that voters will correctly verify their ballots? Remember that the reason people love electronic voting is because paper ballots are "too hard". I see too many ways Diebold could be extremely clever by just flipping a few votes in certain situations to swing things. Think about it. Really thing about it. If you had access to these machines, what are the strategies you might use to influence the results? If you aren't terrified you aren't thinking hard enough (or just plain aren't devious enough).
The fundamental problem is that the votes are obfuscated from the voters. All the paper receipts in the world will not change this. What you type into the machine does not count. What is on the paper does not count. The only thing that counts is the number the box spits out.
The true solution is the simplest. Go back to paper ballots. What is your vote? Whatever you marked on the paper with a pen. No chance of anything changing your vote. Count the ballots by hand, with an observer from each party watching every vote get counted. No chance to drop any votes to swing a close result. Isn't this the true geek way? Ultimate transparency? Many eyeballs making the problem shallow?
This is how we do it in Canada. It's not sexy, it's not instantaneous (takes a few hours after polls close) but it works.
You have to play the game a quarter million (250,000) times, and then you get to take pictures of naked Iraqis six times. That pretty much puts the 6 or so assholes in perspective out of the 250,000 men and women serving overseas.
You make it sound like the entire problem is just a few assholes. Guess again. The problem is systemic and goes all the way to the top (or at least near the top).
heh, using freebsd for some time made slack my favorite gnu/linux distribution as well.
Yeah, Slackware is definitely the Linux distro of choice for BSDers.
I'm an OpenBSD fan forced to support Linux at work, so Slack it is. Everytime I have to use some other Linux I end up pulling my hair out in frustration.
Or the digital equivalent. Something small that you can carry in a pocket. Pull it out whenever you want to take some notes. You can do improv stuff or record a more organized daily summary. And you can grab sounds from the environment. Nothing connects people more than the sound of voices (particularly if the voice is of a friend or relative). Instead of describing the ocean with words, just record "I'm at the ocean. Listen." When you get back to a computer all you have to do is encode it and put it on the web. You can probably do that at Internet cafes while you travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it happens. They don't get counted. Spoiled ballots are, by definition, invalid.
Voters have a simple opportunity to make their choice clear. The counters should not have to interpret the ballot to determine that choice.
Heyyyy, that sounds a bit like an insult towards my favourite boutique car maker.
Mmmmmm, BMW E39 M5. Even better if kitted out by Dinan.
(completely off-topic, but a man must be allowed to dream...)
You are putting the wrong cart in front of the horse.
Maybe that's the wrong metaphor.
The point is that an easier installer is not what OpenBSD needs. What OpenBSD needs is application support. Office productivity stuff, browser plugins, etc. If you want OpenBSD to take over the world the place to start is the corporate market where there are dedicated admins to install and configure things. OpenBSD can then use this experience to prepare to take on the clueless masses.
Don't hold your breath.
Some of my favourite bits were:
- dynamic terrain which affected weather patterns
- the unit editor - no fixed units, just mix and match technologies
- mixing and matching government, economy, and future society options
- sea cities
I was hoping Civ 3 would just be the AC engine set on Earth, but was very disappointed. The unit editor would rock for Civ. Start with a horse chassis...Pyramids (grannery in every city)
Adam Smith's thingy (reduce costs of improvment maintenance)
DaVinci (free unit upgrades)
There are more, but those three are key to rapidly develop your society.
Two of my favourites: The Great Library and Women's Suffrage. Early on the library gives you an enormous science advantage. It effectively keeps you on par with the other nations without doing any research of your own. Women's Suffrage let's you conduct large scale military campaigns as a democracy later in the game.
Yes, they did put them out of business. Creative sued Aureal. Aureal won the court battle but the effort bankrupted them. Then Creative scooped up Aureal's IP at bargain basement prices. Classic example of a big company using its army of lawyers to crush a small company instead of competing in the market.
Ah, but they do still have access to the full benefit of the publicly funded software. It's still freely available. Modifying freely available software does not make the original disappear. The authors of the modification should be allowed to do with it as they choose. You seem to think that all software should be free, I disagree. It would be wonderful if it was, but I will not force this view on others.
It's a funny thing about the world we work in that you can make a worthless change and charge for it and make money from it, even though the market wouldn't choose to pay for that change if they knew what they were paying for. Effectively, if AOL bundles a modified version of the chat software, the people who get this version don't know or care about it. It's only when they find that they can't chat with non-AOL using friends that the problem starts. And if you say that AOL isn't that big so it doesn't matter, assume that it is Microsoft, with their 90%+ share of the market which does the bundling.
I agree. The market is deeply stupid, particularly when it comes to high-tech. So? The potential for correction is still there: the original free software. What is stopping anyone from doing the exact same thing AOL or MS did? With a truly free license, nothing.
This is not a counter-example. If they were charging $100 for the SW, there would be less of a problem, because people would actually have to make a positive decision to use it. But that's not the way they would do it. They could create value out of the SW without having to charge for it initially, because of their dominant position in the market. You might argue that they deserve to be able to do this because they've built up that position etc etc, but that is an ideological arguement; it is not value-free.
I'm having difficulty parsing this. Are you saying it is bad that MS can give software away for no charge? I'm really not sure what your point is.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
More Doctor Fun.
But if they read the article they would see that this model does not use streaming, but rather just downloading. If they are downloaded onto your local drive, you aren't going to have buffering issues!
This is Real we're talking about. They will find a way.
Why does this sound contradictory? You say you understand that companies pay taxes but in the same breath you imply that they did not pay for the software.
For example, the GPL prevents small, meaningless changes which simply change protocols without adding value.
Yay, my favourite GPL FUD. "We must stop these nasty companies from selling the free code!" They are not charging money for the freely available code, they are charging for changes to the code. It doesn't matter how "meaningless" a change is, if the market decides it is worth paying for then that change has value.
Example. Microsoft takes public domain (more likely BSDL) software, presses it onto CDs and drops it in a shiny box. No other changes. They charge $100 for it. If the market will bear this price then yes, the shiny box and convenience of a CD is worth $100. It doesn't matter how trivial the change is, if people will pay for that change then the change is worth the price. Value has been added.
Now if everyone decided that the change was indeed worthless then Microsoft would have to obey the market and start looking for a landfill in New Mexico for all those CDs.
You have a much higher opinion of politicians than I do. They don't care about spoiled ballots. They care about winning and money. Do you honestly think they will be concerned if they win with only 10% of the vote? Nope, they won. But with the new financing laws that means they missed out on a lot of campaign money. And that they will care about, but only if the money is going to their competition, which would not happen with spoiled ballots.
Or maybe I'm too cynical.
Vote anyways. With the new campaign finance law votes == dollars. If you are not going to use your vote to pick a candidate use it to give money to a fringe party with few resources. They can then use the money to create better debate next election, forcing the major parties away from business as usual.
Years back the UofA got sold on PeopleSoft, even though we had the people on staff who could do a better job inhouse. It has been an unmitigated debacle. Payroll systems are less reliable. Course registration is now a pain in the ass (before it was okay). There are some major security/privacy concerns. Last I heard the project was over 300% over budget, and that was a few years ago.
I had a dog that had remarkable sleep inducing powers. She didn't like to sleep without a warm human to curl up against so she would make people sleepy when she wanted to sleep. It was really impressive: she could walk into a room and within minutes everyone would say how sleepy they were. She usually targetted me so I actually built up a bit of a resistance over the years. But if I had to pull an all-nighter I would still lock here out of the room.
Think harder, you need to be more evil. I posted this example fraud elsewhere.
If suffieciently paranoid you could do a paper of the entire election everytime - you trust the machine counts if the random recounts pass, and take your time with a full recount. If the count differs people go to jail, and you hold new elections.
You all are either not reading what I wrote or not thinking hard enough. Here's an example off the top of my head. If I had more time (say, if a wealthy individual hired me to throw an election) I could come up with some more sophisticated methods of fraud.
I assume these machines allow people to change their votes before finally committing and casting their final vote. Keep track of how often the voter changes their choices. Hmmm, I wonder if they aren't sure who to vote for. Maybe they are not comfortable with these voting machines. Maybe they're a half-blind, arthritic senior citizen. If they hit some threshold of changes flip some of their choices after they commit and have the paper receipt reflect these flipped choices. Are they going to notice the changes on the (probably small) receipt? What will they do if they notice? Assume they screwed up and be too embarrassed to speak up? Even if they do complain, what is going to happen? You have coded the voting machine to do this only once (maybe once every few hours). They key here is that the paper receipt matches the electronic vote. No amount of manual counts will detect this fraud.
Think evil. Think how much you can tell about the voters from how they are voting; not just the choices they make but how they interact with the user interface. It gets even easier if you know what the demographics of the polling station are.
No, because anybody can walk in from the street to observe the counting. Journalists, wacko conspiracy theorists, police officers: it quickly because extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to keep the fraud a secret.
Even better would be a write in candidate. Especially if the machines don't support write in candidates.
President Harry Ass McGee.
Why is it so damn important that results be known RIGHT NOW? Less than half the people in your country vote, and therefore don't care. For those that do your TV networks are projecting winners the second polls close. Up here we know the results before we go to bed. By morning most of the counts are official. Within days MPs are being sworn in.
Why is efficiency even an issue? I care about efficiency when I order a pizza. I care about efficiency when I buy a car. For one night every four years (or so) efficiency can go to hell. When deciding who will be governing me and my country I want accuracy.
It's worth noting that in their national elections in 2000, Canada had 21 million voters and the US had 105 million. You can see why the US might be a little more obsessed with the cost and speed elements.
Ah yes, the old "That won't work here, we're special" argument.
Yes, you have an order of magnitude more voters. But that also means that you have an order of magnitude more polling stations and volunteers to count votes. In terms of voting there is no fundamental difference between a Canadian city of 1 million people and an American city of 1 million people. The fact that you have 10 times as many of those cities is irrelevant to this problem.
It can address the concerns, but not necessarily.
First, a quick clarification for a lot of posters: voters will not leave the polling station with their receipt. They are supposed to check it for accuracy and then drop it into a secured box so it is available for recounts and verification of the electronic results.
But when should polling stations do a paper recount? At random, say 1% of stations? Whenever a race is tight? How do they know the thresholds they are setting are sufficient to stop cheating? In an electoral system where a few dozen votes could determine the presidency there are simply too many ways things could go wrong. What guarantee is there that voters will correctly verify their ballots? Remember that the reason people love electronic voting is because paper ballots are "too hard". I see too many ways Diebold could be extremely clever by just flipping a few votes in certain situations to swing things. Think about it. Really thing about it. If you had access to these machines, what are the strategies you might use to influence the results? If you aren't terrified you aren't thinking hard enough (or just plain aren't devious enough).
The fundamental problem is that the votes are obfuscated from the voters. All the paper receipts in the world will not change this. What you type into the machine does not count. What is on the paper does not count. The only thing that counts is the number the box spits out.
The true solution is the simplest. Go back to paper ballots. What is your vote? Whatever you marked on the paper with a pen. No chance of anything changing your vote. Count the ballots by hand, with an observer from each party watching every vote get counted. No chance to drop any votes to swing a close result. Isn't this the true geek way? Ultimate transparency? Many eyeballs making the problem shallow?
This is how we do it in Canada. It's not sexy, it's not instantaneous (takes a few hours after polls close) but it works.
Oh yeah? Mine would be "Is Doom 3 out yet?"
I notice that you won't even bother asking about Duke Nukem Forever.
You make it sound like the entire problem is just a few assholes. Guess again. The problem is systemic and goes all the way to the top (or at least near the top).
Yeah, Slackware is definitely the Linux distro of choice for BSDers.
I'm an OpenBSD fan forced to support Linux at work, so Slack it is. Everytime I have to use some other Linux I end up pulling my hair out in frustration.
Or the digital equivalent. Something small that you can carry in a pocket. Pull it out whenever you want to take some notes. You can do improv stuff or record a more organized daily summary. And you can grab sounds from the environment. Nothing connects people more than the sound of voices (particularly if the voice is of a friend or relative). Instead of describing the ocean with words, just record "I'm at the ocean. Listen." When you get back to a computer all you have to do is encode it and put it on the web. You can probably do that at Internet cafes while you travel.
Absolutely. How bad has training become? This bad.