In a democratic system, anyone should be able to verify the security and integrity of the electoral apparatus. With an online voting system, I doubt even 10% of the Slashdot audience could do it, let alone the general population
Let's see, in a paper voting system how many Slashdotters could have access to the counting process? Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct? Or would you necessarily depend on other people, believing they are honest?
If you're trusting a political committee to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place, right?
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct. Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check. With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
Electronic voting systems are, potentially, the most secure alternative.
I didn't mean to say anything about voters electing Bush, this has nothing to do with it.
What I said is that everybody here on Slashdot shit bricks when electronic voting is mentioned, but paper voting has problems too. I was taking issue with the GP who said "Diebold elected Bush", which is a totally false assertion.
If people need to resort to lies in order to attack electronic voting, then it becomes reasonable to assume electronic voting is the best system. If it weren't they could just tell the truth.
It shows that the electronic systems do not do even the simplest sanity checking.
How do you reconcile that statement with this sentence from the link you provided: "The error was caught and corrected the night of the election"?
No, what you mean is this electronic system had a bug that was found and corrected, not that electronic systems in general lack sanity checking.
With butterfly ballots the problem is *much* worse, because the error is absolutely uncorrectable. How could anyone possibly guess which of the alternative candidates in a badly designed ballot the voter preferred?
When was that? If you are referring to the Florida 2000 elections it was the disadvantages of paper ballots that did the trick. Things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots.
I'm not defending Diebold, just want to set the record straight. A bad system is a bad system, no matter the technology used.
It's lifetime is determined by the probability of one crazy person using "their" personal property to cause catastrophic damage to everyone else.
Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts. That's the difference between libertarianism and anarchy.
No, the problem with a free state is defence against external threats. The DEA would never rest until they got the Navy to occupy a territory that didn't agree to waste all its resources in a "war on drugs".
You do realize that Python 3.x purposely broke capability with 2.x?
Yes. When Niklaus Wirth wanted to improve Pascal he called the new version Modula. Then when he extended Modula he called it Oberon. Guido van Rossum should try to learn from the masters.
If I could guarantee that i would have Python 2 available in the future separate from Python 3 I would have nothing against Python 3. The problem is that my programs that work in "Python" will present unpredictable bugs when someone changes some library I use from version 2 to version 3.
C is so awesome because I can get a program I developed in 1985 for the PDP-11 and compile it today to run in an embedded processor somewhere, it will compile and run without problems.
Say what you will but I've recently decided to go back to my roots and work in C and C++ just for that reason -- there's never a loud outcry that the languages will die a horrible death or go anywhere.
Amen, brother! I've just presented the same argument here. After Python 3 came out, for me it's just C or C++ for programs that need to last for an indeterminate time.
If you are able to reliably track your objects then why do you need garbage collection at all? If you are so sure you won't need that object from that point forward, why don't you insert a free() or delete instruction at that point?
It took about 45 minutes to write and test (and I'm not a Ruby expert by any means) and it's less than 100 lines, compared with the 1000+ line C program. I call it a win for Ruby
Challenge accepted! I bet I could rewrite that program in less than ten lines of Perl code. Any takers?
Seriously now, I've tried nearly every language I can put my hands on. I still use C when the going gets tough. One of the reasons is that C is not likely to change.
I've done a lot of small systems in Python lately and, yes, for a small system I can get it going faster than in C. HOWEVER, now comes Python 3. They tell me now that I should have used "from future import division". Apparently I'm too stupid to read the proper documentation, it was clearly stated in PEP 947, or something like that, that the behavior of the division operator would change. It seems that I should read carefully every single one of those thousands of PEPs to make sure they won't pull the rug from under my feet.
If I ever have to go through every division operation in a program to check which ones can stay as '/' and which ones have to be changed to '//' I will take the opportunity to rewrite that program in C, as, I can see it clearly now, I should have done from the start.
some have suggested an auction every second, with no trades done in between those seconds. IE there would be only 28,800 "trades" in an 8 hour day
I'm an electronics engineer and have worked in control systems design for thirty years. There's one thing I can tell you, when you have an unstable system there are many ways you can stabilize it, but decreasing the amount of information you have available is certainly not going to help.
A sampled system with a lag, which is what this proposal amounts to, would almost certainly be less stable than the original system. Introducing time delays tend to destabilize control systems because the controlling signals get amplified without a corresponding feedback during the delay.
In a HFT market everyone gets a continuous information on how each paper is valued by everyone else. In a market with limited auctions everyone would be guessing wildly between the auctions. Extrapolating from limited information wouldn't contribute to stabilize the system.
Why this obsession with high frequency trading among nerds? It's no different from any other industrial equipment.
I cannot build a car in my garage shop because I do not have the high-power presses needed to stamp structural steel body parts. I cannot make a million dollars in my home office because I do not have the billion dollars it take to effectively use high frequency trading.
I could build a fiberglass kit car or invest my savings on the stock market, but it will not bring the same results.
It takes big investment to profit from economy of scale, it's as simple as that.
The way I did it was alternating a few years with zero tax with a few years at the top 20% bracket. That way I raised money faster than letting taxes at the theoretically optimum 7%.
If you have something that someone thinks looks like a bomb, how is that unreasonable?
I guess the TSA people should get better training than Hollywood movies to know what a bomb "looks like".
If I were a terrorist intent on bombing something the last thing I would do would be to make my bomb look like a bunch of cardboard tubes with wires connected to a black box with a countdown LED display. I would make my bomb look like a pair of sneakers bundled in a jacket or something like that.
Anyone who has the ability to make a bomb could make it look harmless, look how the Unabomber did it for instance.
What's needed is real government regulation, like a debt ceiling that cannot be raised, no matter what. What's the use of a ceiling if it can be raised at will?
Economics theorists always have their pet theories, like Keynes had with that government spending could always save the day, but they forget that real life needs not follow their theory.
In the 1990s there was this matter of government regulations stating that people could not be denied mortgages based on where they lived because there could be hidden racial prejudice in that. The result today is that today in Detroit there are houses being sold for $7.
Try to regulate the market and people will find a way to create a speculative bubble out of that. You cannot create artificial regulations on the market, because the market is a natural thing. You cannot control the market any more than you can control nature. Nature takes revenge.
That's the big difference between market and government, the market is a natural process, government is an artificial entity.
Sane economists and a few lawmakers want to increase government stimulus.
Yes, because government stimulus is working so well, right? Those keynesians are going "La, La, la, la, I can't hear you!" when confronted with the evidence.
Stimulus spending has failed miserably so far, time to act responsibly and acknowledge that you cannot spend your way out of debt.
Do you know that anybody can play that game? Any economist can say that his theory is correct because no country ever followed exactly what he proposed.
People are protesting in Greece, Spain, Portugal, wherever the government proposes austerity measures in order to keep functioning. They are protesting against proposed cuts in their benefits. In a way, they are right. Their benefits are guaranteed by laws approved by popular vote in democratic systems.
However there's no money available to pay for those benefits. It's not right to cut benefits that were approved by the popular vote. The solution? Increase taxes on the rich.
The problem with that approach is that it was tried before and failed miserably. The top marginal income tax in the UK in the 1970s was 98%, how much more do you think you can tax the rich? And it still wasn't enough to maintain the salaries, pensions, and benefits of the workers. In the end the Winter of Discontent brought down the Labour government and brought Margaret Thatcher to power. In the following years the UK came close to becoming a single party state.
I see no other way for most of the industrialized countries today than to make deep cuts in workers pensions and benefits. No matter how you handle it, there's no available funds to keep paying them at the current level. But the people will not accept that, they have worked all their lives to get those benefits, they have earned them.
Unfortunately, democracy has that weak point. The majority of the people will accept a situation that's not maintainable. It's easy to get elected by promising the workers increases in their pensions. It's easy because the problematic situation is in the future, when the politicians who proposed the populist laws will be retired or dead.
In the US many people think Social Security is not a problem because it's self-maintaining through payroll taxes. Wrong. It would be OK if every worker had stored that money in gold buried in the backyard. As it stands now, what the payroll taxes bought were US government bonds. In the day when the US government defaults in its obligations, Social Security will stop paying pensions.
Does Boeing pay their interns (although in this case life insurance might be the more important bit)?
Since the market price for the trip is $20~35 million they are paid much better than the Boeing CEO. They are getting in one week the value of what's paid to the CEO in a year
The problem is that politicians never prepare properly for the next recession by stabilizing their budgets and then paying down debt
Exactly. Politicians behave like there's always a crisis that can only be solved through more government spending.
And its US government debt which has helped China keep its currency artificially low and allowed the US to import from China without needing an export industry
The problem here is that the US is transitioning to a services economy and it's very difficult to export services. An industrial worker makes products, let's say telephones, that can be sold to other countries. OTOH, how do you export the services of a hairdresser?
If all the jobs in the country are for lawyers, accountants, realtors, insurance adjusters, etc, from where will you get the valuta to pay for the smartphones and oil you import?
Your post represents perfectly the causes of the problems the US has right now: partisanship. You want to fix the blame on the other side instead of fixing the problem.
Regardless of what Bush II did, the spending under Obama stuck up in that level. If it were really Bush's fault Obama could have simply got the spending to the levels they were when Clinton left office. The reason why he didn't do that is because his Administration seems to have an unlimited belief in keynesianism. Obama's policy seems to be to spend his way out of debt.
It's not quite fair to say that it was Republicans who held the government hostage, because it was Obama who insisted on standing right on the ledge. If you do not stand too close to the precipice no one will be able to tell you "do it my way or I will push you over".
It would be good for America to remember what happened when Germany had a debt, imposed by others on them, that they felt they could never pay.
Slashdot Mirror
In Canada ballot counting is done under the supervision of representatives from all of the candidates
Yes, and there is no way to fool someone by manipulating pieces of paper.
In a democratic system, anyone should be able to verify the security and integrity of the electoral apparatus. With an online voting system, I doubt even 10% of the Slashdot audience could do it, let alone the general population
Let's see, in a paper voting system how many Slashdotters could have access to the counting process? Could you, personally, get the votes from each ballot in the country and verify that the count is correct? Or would you necessarily depend on other people, believing they are honest?
If you're trusting a political committee to count your votes, then you may as well trust it to cast the votes in the first place, right?
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct. Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check. With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
Electronic voting systems are, potentially, the most secure alternative.
I didn't mean to say anything about voters electing Bush, this has nothing to do with it.
What I said is that everybody here on Slashdot shit bricks when electronic voting is mentioned, but paper voting has problems too. I was taking issue with the GP who said "Diebold elected Bush", which is a totally false assertion.
If people need to resort to lies in order to attack electronic voting, then it becomes reasonable to assume electronic voting is the best system. If it weren't they could just tell the truth.
It shows that the electronic systems do not do even the simplest sanity checking.
How do you reconcile that statement with this sentence from the link you provided: "The error was caught and corrected the night of the election"?
No, what you mean is this electronic system had a bug that was found and corrected, not that electronic systems in general lack sanity checking.
With butterfly ballots the problem is *much* worse, because the error is absolutely uncorrectable. How could anyone possibly guess which of the alternative candidates in a badly designed ballot the voter preferred?
Diebold elected Bush
When was that? If you are referring to the Florida 2000 elections it was the disadvantages of paper ballots that did the trick. Things like hanging chads and butterfly ballots.
I'm not defending Diebold, just want to set the record straight. A bad system is a bad system, no matter the technology used.
It's lifetime is determined by the probability of one crazy person using "their" personal property to cause catastrophic damage to everyone else.
Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts. That's the difference between libertarianism and anarchy.
No, the problem with a free state is defence against external threats. The DEA would never rest until they got the Navy to occupy a territory that didn't agree to waste all its resources in a "war on drugs".
You do realize that Python 3.x purposely broke capability with 2.x?
Yes. When Niklaus Wirth wanted to improve Pascal he called the new version Modula. Then when he extended Modula he called it Oberon. Guido van Rossum should try to learn from the masters.
If I could guarantee that i would have Python 2 available in the future separate from Python 3 I would have nothing against Python 3. The problem is that my programs that work in "Python" will present unpredictable bugs when someone changes some library I use from version 2 to version 3.
C is so awesome because I can get a program I developed in 1985 for the PDP-11 and compile it today to run in an embedded processor somewhere, it will compile and run without problems.
The big problem with GC is that it kicks in at unpredictable times. When you do real time or time-critical applications this is a no-no.
Where are the modpoints when one needs them?
Say what you will but I've recently decided to go back to my roots and work in C and C++ just for that reason -- there's never a loud outcry that the languages will die a horrible death or go anywhere.
Amen, brother! I've just presented the same argument here. After Python 3 came out, for me it's just C or C++ for programs that need to last for an indeterminate time.
If you are able to reliably track your objects then why do you need garbage collection at all? If you are so sure you won't need that object from that point forward, why don't you insert a free() or delete instruction at that point?
It took about 45 minutes to write and test (and I'm not a Ruby expert by any means) and it's less than 100 lines, compared with the 1000+ line C program. I call it a win for Ruby
Challenge accepted! I bet I could rewrite that program in less than ten lines of Perl code. Any takers?
Seriously now, I've tried nearly every language I can put my hands on. I still use C when the going gets tough. One of the reasons is that C is not likely to change.
I've done a lot of small systems in Python lately and, yes, for a small system I can get it going faster than in C. HOWEVER, now comes Python 3. They tell me now that I should have used "from future import division". Apparently I'm too stupid to read the proper documentation, it was clearly stated in PEP 947, or something like that, that the behavior of the division operator would change. It seems that I should read carefully every single one of those thousands of PEPs to make sure they won't pull the rug from under my feet.
If I ever have to go through every division operation in a program to check which ones can stay as '/' and which ones have to be changed to '//' I will take the opportunity to rewrite that program in C, as, I can see it clearly now, I should have done from the start.
some have suggested an auction every second, with no trades done in between those seconds. IE there would be only 28,800 "trades" in an 8 hour day
I'm an electronics engineer and have worked in control systems design for thirty years. There's one thing I can tell you, when you have an unstable system there are many ways you can stabilize it, but decreasing the amount of information you have available is certainly not going to help.
A sampled system with a lag, which is what this proposal amounts to, would almost certainly be less stable than the original system. Introducing time delays tend to destabilize control systems because the controlling signals get amplified without a corresponding feedback during the delay.
In a HFT market everyone gets a continuous information on how each paper is valued by everyone else. In a market with limited auctions everyone would be guessing wildly between the auctions. Extrapolating from limited information wouldn't contribute to stabilize the system.
you've not heard of microsecond trading before?
Why this obsession with high frequency trading among nerds? It's no different from any other industrial equipment.
I cannot build a car in my garage shop because I do not have the high-power presses needed to stamp structural steel body parts. I cannot make a million dollars in my home office because I do not have the billion dollars it take to effectively use high frequency trading.
I could build a fiberglass kit car or invest my savings on the stock market, but it will not bring the same results.
It takes big investment to profit from economy of scale, it's as simple as that.
doing societal cost/benefit analysis is hard because there are lots of factors that don't have quantified costs or benefits
Welcome to Economics, it's not in vain it has been called the dismal science.
The way I did it was alternating a few years with zero tax with a few years at the top 20% bracket. That way I raised money faster than letting taxes at the theoretically optimum 7%.
Just make sure they disable disasters before they play. An alien monster destroying the power plant wouldn't be nice.
If you have something that someone thinks looks like a bomb, how is that unreasonable?
I guess the TSA people should get better training than Hollywood movies to know what a bomb "looks like".
If I were a terrorist intent on bombing something the last thing I would do would be to make my bomb look like a bunch of cardboard tubes with wires connected to a black box with a countdown LED display. I would make my bomb look like a pair of sneakers bundled in a jacket or something like that.
Anyone who has the ability to make a bomb could make it look harmless, look how the Unabomber did it for instance.
Patch the hole (with real market regulation
What's needed is real government regulation, like a debt ceiling that cannot be raised, no matter what. What's the use of a ceiling if it can be raised at will?
Economics theorists always have their pet theories, like Keynes had with that government spending could always save the day, but they forget that real life needs not follow their theory.
In the 1990s there was this matter of government regulations stating that people could not be denied mortgages based on where they lived because there could be hidden racial prejudice in that. The result today is that today in Detroit there are houses being sold for $7.
Try to regulate the market and people will find a way to create a speculative bubble out of that. You cannot create artificial regulations on the market, because the market is a natural thing. You cannot control the market any more than you can control nature. Nature takes revenge.
That's the big difference between market and government, the market is a natural process, government is an artificial entity.
Sane economists and a few lawmakers want to increase government stimulus.
Yes, because government stimulus is working so well, right? Those keynesians are going "La, La, la, la, I can't hear you!" when confronted with the evidence.
Stimulus spending has failed miserably so far, time to act responsibly and acknowledge that you cannot spend your way out of debt.
Ah, the good old No True Scotsman! Never fails.
Do you know that anybody can play that game? Any economist can say that his theory is correct because no country ever followed exactly what he proposed.
People are protesting in Greece, Spain, Portugal, wherever the government proposes austerity measures in order to keep functioning. They are protesting against proposed cuts in their benefits. In a way, they are right. Their benefits are guaranteed by laws approved by popular vote in democratic systems.
However there's no money available to pay for those benefits. It's not right to cut benefits that were approved by the popular vote. The solution? Increase taxes on the rich.
The problem with that approach is that it was tried before and failed miserably. The top marginal income tax in the UK in the 1970s was 98%, how much more do you think you can tax the rich? And it still wasn't enough to maintain the salaries, pensions, and benefits of the workers. In the end the Winter of Discontent brought down the Labour government and brought Margaret Thatcher to power. In the following years the UK came close to becoming a single party state.
I see no other way for most of the industrialized countries today than to make deep cuts in workers pensions and benefits. No matter how you handle it, there's no available funds to keep paying them at the current level. But the people will not accept that, they have worked all their lives to get those benefits, they have earned them.
Unfortunately, democracy has that weak point. The majority of the people will accept a situation that's not maintainable. It's easy to get elected by promising the workers increases in their pensions. It's easy because the problematic situation is in the future, when the politicians who proposed the populist laws will be retired or dead.
In the US many people think Social Security is not a problem because it's self-maintaining through payroll taxes. Wrong. It would be OK if every worker had stored that money in gold buried in the backyard. As it stands now, what the payroll taxes bought were US government bonds. In the day when the US government defaults in its obligations, Social Security will stop paying pensions.
Does Boeing pay their interns (although in this case life insurance might be the more important bit)?
Since the market price for the trip is $20~35 million they are paid much better than the Boeing CEO. They are getting in one week the value of what's paid to the CEO in a year
The problem is that politicians never prepare properly for the next recession by stabilizing their budgets and then paying down debt
Exactly. Politicians behave like there's always a crisis that can only be solved through more government spending.
And its US government debt which has helped China keep its currency artificially low and allowed the US to import from China without needing an export industry
The problem here is that the US is transitioning to a services economy and it's very difficult to export services. An industrial worker makes products, let's say telephones, that can be sold to other countries. OTOH, how do you export the services of a hairdresser?
If all the jobs in the country are for lawyers, accountants, realtors, insurance adjusters, etc, from where will you get the valuta to pay for the smartphones and oil you import?
Your post represents perfectly the causes of the problems the US has right now: partisanship. You want to fix the blame on the other side instead of fixing the problem.
Regardless of what Bush II did, the spending under Obama stuck up in that level. If it were really Bush's fault Obama could have simply got the spending to the levels they were when Clinton left office. The reason why he didn't do that is because his Administration seems to have an unlimited belief in keynesianism. Obama's policy seems to be to spend his way out of debt.
It's not quite fair to say that it was Republicans who held the government hostage, because it was Obama who insisted on standing right on the ledge. If you do not stand too close to the precipice no one will be able to tell you "do it my way or I will push you over".
It would be good for America to remember what happened when Germany had a debt, imposed by others on them, that they felt they could never pay.