Agreed. My statements are in the context of one paper record, not two!
We really don't need the machines. We've plenty of students and elderly willing and able to perform their civic duty. Properly scaled, we can have results just as fast as we do now, with one heck of a lot more trust.
No complaint from me! As far as I am concerned, we should be voting on paper with people doing the count. To put my sentance in context, what I really mean is audits, exit polls and other measures designed to check the overall accuracy of the machine count. Better that we don't have the thing in the first place.
As for the polarization, that's bunk. The truth is the majority of us agree on the majority of issues. It's our media and our parties forcing the polarization.
Designing a trustworthy system, with trustworthy being justly trusted by ordinary people, is very difficult. The whole voting by proxy thing is what throws a wrench into what would otherwise be a dead simple task. The requirement for anonyminity is another biggie too.
Unless said e-voting system personally identifies the votes, it's going to be untrustworthy because of how the technology impacts the democratic process. People are fallable and corrupt by nature. That's why elections should be public! The more eyes the better, because conflicting agendas tend to cancel out. Would not be a bad idea for us, as a nation, to reaffirm the value of our democracy while we are at it too.
Electronic Voting machines are not a trustworthy technology. They can be made reasonably trustworthy, but only with significant and constant public involvement and oversight. The core element to this happens to be our requirement of anonyminity for our votes. Being unable to link votes to voters means we must then capture the actual votes themselves if we are to be sure the election is just and true.
Roughly 80 percent of Americans will be using these machines in the coming elections. That should scare the tar out of every one of you, regardless of your political bent.
In 2004, this number was about 30 percent and the problems were so great, we really have no assurance our election results actually reflect the will of the American people, whatever that may be.
Think of it this way. Let's say I'm the voting machine counting votes. You tell me what your vote is, and I update my mental count. Can you see that I updated the count correctly? I could report your vote back to you correctly, yet still maintain a different internal count. There is no way to really know is there? That's the problem we face with electronic votes.
The votes are encoded into states stored on devices nobody can directly observe, other than via the proxy of other electronic technology. Essentially, we are voting by proxy when we vote electronically. Without an accounting in the form of a serial voter-verified paper record, or the use of vote storage that is both human and machine readable, we cannot oversee the election results in a manner that brings confidence to the whole affair.
These machines are general purpose computers for the most part. We all know how easily these things are tinkered with because it's what most of us do! Biggest problems are:
-no direct accountability on elections officials to actually hold a just and true election. Technology can and will be blamed for problems, leaving these folks off the hook for failed / unjust elections. Not good. Where the incentive for corruption and manupulation exists, you can bet it's happening. There is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.
-poor understanding of the core technology differences between paper voting and electronic voting. I summarized it above and have a longer, easy to understand, paper here. Mail it to your legislators along with a request for their position on the matter. If you do the mailing, please also do the request. That forces a response, which helps increase the overall perception of the importance of the issue. http://www.opednews.com/dingusDoug_112604_electron ic_voting.htm
Said poor understanding extends to all of us really, legislators and citizens alike. Too many people consider electronic data processing systems as being better than they actually are. Consider this: If they are so infallable, why do ATM machines deliver receipts? Also, be careful about ATM comparisons. The primary difference between an ATM machine and an electronic voting machine lies in the anonymous nature of voting. ATM transactions are keyed to people, electronic voting records are not --thus the need for a voter-verified paper trail.
What do we need to ask for?
Voter verified paper trails that are human readable, serial in nature and easily handled / processed for recounts. Flimsy, thermal rolls that can discolor from improper storage and or handling won't cut it.
Audits at the precinct level. These can catch abnormalities easily and quickly before too much damage is done. Use the paper record to verify issues and act accordingly.
Strong exit polling. Notice how that is being downplayed now? The reason is simple. In 2004, the exit polls did not jive with the voting records, yet we have been exit polling for a good long time. The differences did not appear in this way until the advent of the electronic machines.
Legislation that reinfo
This is easy to deal with, no monitoring required
on
Big Mother Is Watching
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Only pay for school lunch one day per week. In the home, provide solid food choices and make them pack their lunch. Once in a while a kids load gets high and just being able to buy a lunch makes sense. So let them do that 4 times per month and let them choose when.
Done early, they will become used to eating good food for lunch, thus making the poor choices and their low energy content, more than obvious.
There is little to be done about trading. When you make your solid food choices, include some really great stuff. This keeps the incentive to trade down in that they will be at the top of the school lunch pecking order.
Most of my kids are into high school now. I wish I had done this earlier. The transition to packing lunch was difficult. Peer pressure to not bag their lunch is high. My schools have setup a kind of food mall, which only makes this worse. The haves, being those with excess lunch money, get to "shop" at the more upscale offerings provided by the school. The have nots get the standard fare. Why schools encourage this crap is beyond me. Don't they have enough trouble with student tension as it is?
If school lunches went back to a lower choice model, and quit bulk buying stinky old fast food for resale, our kids would have a better time of it. Everybody says how horrible their school lunch is. The schools have fought this by trying to improve their offering. The silly thing is that everybody still says school food sucks, but they will work like hell to get the better offerings!
Back to monthly menus and two choice meals. Everybody gets the tray and chooses one main course or the other, and either eats it, or doesn't, or brings their own. This does not have to be that hard.
Remembering back to my lunches, they were not bad in hindsight. The reality is that kids are used to specific foods and will discourage alternatives, unless forced. This is where the bad school lunch perception comes from. By keeping the choice very narrow, the overall food value can be kept high with out all of this passive aggressive control crap. It's gonna affect our kids in more ways than their waistline.
The other nice thing about this approach is that the kids do get to provide effective feedback too. Once our High School made this horrible Quech (however you spell it). Nobody ate it! Well, maybe a couple suckers went for it, but by and large the food sat right where they left it. One special mid-afternoon assembly later and the school decision was clear. No more of that kind of food ever. Done, next.
-the wife is generally not so willing to make changes
-the kids will bitch but will also deal with change far more easily
-nobody really needs all the crap they think they need.
After doing the whole win32, image, anti-virii, anti spyware dance one too many times, I finally just setup two computers.
The kids have been running Linux for about the last 4 years. Was rough at first because I had to do some extra admin to make devices and applications work. Recently my workload has dropped to almost nothing. (That's my benchmark for how well desktop Linux is doing, BTW --and it's coming along nicely.)
The kids PC is now running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It's just sweet in that it mostly just works. They've been burning CD's, dealing with cameras, surfing, word processing, etc... with no issues to speak of. I set up user accounts for them, they ended up sharing one go figure. If they want an application, I find them one and they deal with it. All in all, a very nice solution. Interestingly, their friends come over to use the machine a lot. They like it because it's not a hassle. None of them have had any significant problems using the machine.
When they ask for something windows only, we talk about why they think they need it and what the alternatives are. Not a bad conversation to be having with one's kids, IMHO. Mine know the tradeoff between all the bad programs and learning how to do some things differently. Positioned right, they can use the computer uninhibited, or use it with extreme care. They choose uninhibited and safe every time!
For my wife, she does online poker. That means win32 for the best overall experience these days. So, we've got a machine running a default copy of XP Home, that I got at a steep discount. ($200!) We load only a few open tools and her poker clients. The rest of the machine stays factory with updates off. This machine is used for paying bills online, banking, etc... so general web surfing is out. There is a VM installed for that. Once the sites are known, it's easy to differentiate which ones can be surfed from the native OS and which should be surfed through the VM.
I don't run anti anything either. I've got the home network sitting behind a simple NAT, running Linux. (Quest routers are great!) The only inbound connections allowed are for gaming and are mapped to the console IP, or the Linux box as necessary.
The Linux machine receives it's normal updates and has performed just great. No issues at all. We did get the win32 machine hosed a while back. (Switched client based e-mail to gmail and that is not likely to happen again.) Restore from the discs provided, overlay drivers and install apps and it's all good again. Takes about an hour and I printed up a quick and dirty cheat sheet and burned a CD with the installers necesary for the box.
The spyware people target kids. If you are running a win32 box, with kids on it. It's gonna have everything under the sun running on it no matter what you do. Actually that's not totally true, but your admin burden goes way up if you lock the box down too tight. --nothing works unless you deal with it. Ubuntu has been great about this. I admin the box only when major changes are necessary (new printer, network, device....); otherwise it just does it's thing in user space.
Putting the kids on Linux brought the problems to a screeching halt. I suspect a Mac would have the same effect. (I just went the cheap route.)
As for sharing computers. I've no problems sharing a win32 box with my wife. We both know what the machine is used for and do exactly that. Anything goofy happens in a VM or on the Linux machine. (I did setup quick icons for doing both of these things. The family thought it was interesting that more than one person can be using the Linux box at the same time! VNC or X window, whatever you prefer --I do the X thing personally.)
Sharing a win32 machine with kids is a mess! The Linux
While an 8 core desktop is gonna be overkill for a lot of people, it still leaves us with a nasty problem.
Peak CPU speed.
For now we have topped out on this, meaning our existing software is either gonna have to get more efficient, or it's going to have to change, unless we want to just deal with the level of performance and features we currently have.
(like that's gonna ever happen --how else would the closed corps sell upgrades then?)
Additionally, some application areas do not have enough CPU power to fully realize their potential. MCAD is one of these, by way of example. Take the fastest CPU's we have today and they are still not fast enough to fully render a solid model without wasting the operators time. Current software offerings are all working toward smarter data, creative ways to manage the number of in-memory and in-computation models, better kernel solves, etc...
But it's just not enough for the larger projects to work in the way they could be working.
Most of the MCAD stuff currently is built in a linear way. That's largely because of the parametric system used by almost all software producers today. With a few changes to how we do MCAD, I could see many cores becoming very important for larger datasets.
Peak CPU and RAM are the two primary bottlenecks that constrain how engineering CAD software develops and what features it can evolve for it's users. It's not the only example either.
The bitch is that most of the software we have is more than adequate for most of the people. For those that lie outside the norm, dependance on this software (both development and just use value need), constrains their ability to make use of multi-core CPU capabilities...
Messy.
Will be interesting to see how this all goes. Will the established players evolve multi-core transitional software that can bridge the gap, or will new players arise, doing things differently to take advantage of the next tech wave?
IMHO, there is a strong case for Intel doing the, "If we build it, they will come thing." For the higher demand computing needs, there really isn't any other way to improve, but through very aggressive code optimization.
I've been running IRIX and an older release of Mandrake for quite a while now. Took me quite a while to work all the bugs out of the Mandrake system. Once I got it right, I didn't mess with it.
Fast forward to today. Decided to build a new machine and migrate onto it. I'm at 90 percent in only a few days with Ubuntu. That's huge honestly.
Anyhoo, I still want a Mac, but not quite as bad as I thought I did. Really I wanted a Linux machine that was easier to get up and going. I'm one of the geeks, who can do this stuff, but chooses to spend his time elsewhere.
I guess I had moved beyond that. Clearly that's just not the case. IMHO, I'm more in line with the GPL version of open because it keeps things open.
BSD is open too, but can be closed again at some point.
Open Code, really doesn't do us that much good if it isn't growing. The whole GPL pool of code appears to be doing that nicely --and it's gonna stay open. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a BSD basher or snob at all. I run it on a server or two and it's top-notch actually.
For me, the GPL open is the better option because it forces those that want to make use of the code pool to respect how it got there in the first place. Additionally, there is a nice incentive for companies wanting to make closed products to recognize the developer. This happened to me recently with a GPL project. A company wanted to incorporate my code in their product --and they had improvements to pass along.
I issued them a license in return for GPL ownership of any code sent to me and a donation to the project. The project grows to it's users mutual benefit, I get some consideration for my efforts (name on box, etc...), and they save a little time and effort.
Anyway, it's more complex than it seems, which is your point well taken.
Right now, an open and neutral Internet empowers any of us to do interesting things. The old school power structures are nervous about this for the same reasons they did about the printing press way back when.
No matter how the money flows, the expectation that just anyone can make a difference on the Internet will have been reset. Now, to make a difference, you are going to not only do something that empowers people, but also get along with the established players.
Time and time again, history has seen this all play out. The established players either adapt or slowly become marginalized. It's a tough deal --so tough they will always resort to legislation and litigation rather than just step up and compete on even terms for our mutual benefit. --even though their wealth comes from us!
Nit pick all you want. These clowns are not doing you any real good. If you are a supporter (and I think you are), then you are most likely a selfish person in that you are an issue voter.
Let's play the nothing else matters game, shall we?
I'll go first:
Nothing else matters but speech. Assuming that's secured (and it isn't), the core American values of freedom, equality and democracy are to be valued above all else.
W sure does not give a rip about speech --that's clear enough from this and many other above the law efforts we are hearing about almost daily now. The whole above the law bit also violates the principle of equality easily enough, so that's out. Democracy? "Either you are with us or against us!" takes care of that one. We've got frigging free speech zones for christ sake! --In America no less! Freedom? You have got to be fucking kidding me. Legislating morality is what the base is all about! Nix that one too.
You do know in a free society, the only reason for law is to address harm. Not moral harm, because that's subjective based on one's belief system, but civil harm where such harm can be tied to cold hard facts and known truths. Not beliefs or matters of faith, but truths we all mutually agree upon.
Tolerance for one another is paramount to a free and democratic society. Sorry, but I just don't see that in our leadership. Oh, and it's supposed to be a representative government, not a dictatorship. That means when we are unhappy, we get to speak our mind as a check on power abuses. Explain to me again how these clowns are encouraging that with their emphasis on strong accountabilty and ethics? Can you spell corruption?
What's that leave that matters? Basically nothing. That's plenty for me and the 'GOP' for a good long time. I'll bet we don't even begin to right these wrongs until I'm pretty old.
With this particular administration, it's troublesome because I just KNOW they are going to use it to serve their interests, not ours in general.
I got worked up about this a while ago and the hard truth is that free speech is just that --free! We all are big kids and have spoken on the Internet. If what we have written is defensible, then we can expect to live by it. Those of us older school netizens are very likely to understand this and post accordingly. I honestly worry about the current generation however. It's difficult to differentiate casual speech where feelings are expressed in less than flattering ways from more serious speech with some measure of intent behind it.
Which again brings me back to some worry where this administration is concerned. The fact that they are looking to do this because they can suggests to me the motivation is less than pure. Honestly, why bother unless there is some benefit to all of us for doing it. Afterall we are the ones paying the bill.
We, as a people, are reaching a general state of unrest --and we've got reasons for that. The Internet empowers us to trancend the ordinary media channels and exercize our role in ways that make established power channels nervous. Real change brings with it some accountability for those gaming the system toward their own ends. Given their position, this is a perfectly logical reaction.
A government doing the right things, that has the high ground where justifying it's actions is concerned, has little reason for efforts like this. Take this as strong evidence this is not the case with our current leadership.
So, even though we have all spoken on the net and technically should not worry because it's all legal, I say there is some cause for worry for the accountability factor. (Not us, our leadership.)
Here's the takeaway: If you want to speak, in this connected day and age, on matters of government, you had better make sure what you write is defensible and that you have the high ground in your convictions. If not, you will be marginalized at some time in the future if your activities merit the effort. That sucks, but that's gonna be the way it is until such time as we elect a solid government that will modify existing legislation to keep such activities in check. Trust me, this particular one is just not ever going to do that.
The good news, IMHO, is that this same connected power that puts us in an exposed position also permits us to work together toward solid reform that is in our best interests! Best to take serious advantage of that now, before the advantage is lost, or legislated away. Is there no longer any doubt about the true intent of net neutrality? Sure, money is the big driver here, but so is speech! The blogs, for better or worse, have made complete fools of the established media channels and a growing number of people grok that now. (Why the hell did it take so long?)
We see our attorney general saying he is open to the idea of prosecution for whistle blowers, our President and Vice have claimed to be above the law and cloak pretty much everything in secrecy, our global actions are more self-serving than ever, recent court appointees are screened for their deference to established power channels, and our expectation of privacy is being marginalized under the ruse of greater security. (God damm it, a whole lotta people have no fucking backbone!) --And there is more, but hey --I've gotta work you know?
Show me some benefit and I'll ignore this whole thing. Until then, it's probably safe to say this will be used to marginalize any potential challengers to the current status quo politically.
Despite this, I personally will continue to speak. Our speech lies at the core of our freedom. Stay quiet and all is lost. Join me, put aside your fear they cultivate and speak your mind --just be sure it's true and just. --eventually we all will be better for it, IMHO.
Good for you! Our local AM here is starting these kinds of things and it's signal is getting better as a result. At the end of the day however, it's gonna be watery sounding at these bitrates... I think a fair number of people will still think it's a good deal, but it's not up to the potential of the medium.
Sorry, but AM IBOC is still quite the mess and I don't think it's viable. The mono choice, along with bandwidth limiting are going to cut the artifacts considerably. IMHO, probably the best overall way to go.
The two biggies with AM are: questionable night time service (phase issues with the digital signal) and the degradation of existing analog service.
IMHO, we would be in a far better position with AM if the new receivers would include proper AM support for analog stereo and wideband modes. With noise limiting and DSP processing an AM Stereo or just wideband AMAX broadcast would be both competitive with an IBOC one for accuracy reasons (no artifacts) and be far more viable at night.
We've got four new AM Stereo stations this year, with the first two showing very good results and listener feedback. (About 15-20 percent of cars are equipped with AM Stereo receivers today --it's an immediate return on investment if quality differentiation is your goal, compared to the fairly long term potential return embodied in IBOC.)
As the AM band gets messy with IBOC and broadcasters struggle with the limitations inherent in the core modulation technology, they are going to wish they had the full measure of supported choices. AM, unlike FM, is a community affair. Everybody needs to play well together because the signals lack any significant discrimination attributes. It's all added together. For a given market, topology and set of frequency allocations, a robust combination of analog methods and digital ones will end up being the ideal band plan. Who knows? We might get there yet on AM, but IBOC alone is not the answer.
Where content is concerned, I've a hard example here where I live. "deep tracks" is a secondary stream here too! Narrowcast formats are an attempt toward delivering the overall choice delivered by both the Internet and Satellite radio. On this basis, radio is in a losing position. (Not enough channel allocations to match, fuzzy expectations where national formats, dial positions, etc... make for a difficult to follow affair.)
AM and FM are a bit different here too.
FM is all about local coverage. We decided we didn't need national clear channel broadcasts when we moved FM to the spectrum we did. AM is both a local and more regional technology, particularly at night. Here on the west coast, Portland businesses used to run ads on KGO in Cali! (That's cool for economic reasons as well as technical ones. Far easier to run a quality station with that kind of coverage than it is locally)
The industry has decided to build a set of sub-cookie cutter formats that are aimed at putting something on the FM HD subchannels. That fails to leverage the local and community aspect of good radio.
Look a few years back. Here we had an AM (KGW) that had a double digit share! It featured great people, lots of local community and business tie ins, and was a dynamic source of local news and info.
Fast forward today. The dial is a sea of national syndicated content. Nobody has that kind of share. There is no reason really. Listeners have their choice of venues to choose from and it's only gonna get worse!
Want to sell a lot of HD radios? (And believe me when I say they are not exactly moving off the shelf!)
Dedicate a couple of sub-channels to your local talent. Give them some air time (it's not like you gotta support it with ads is it?) and let them go. They will bring with them eager listeners who will buy radios to be connected. This way, the station is connected with and is giving something back to the region it is supposed to serve in the public interest in the first place! Secondly, new and interesting con
I'm not sure that really changes the overall discussion where quality merits are concerned. IBOC voice sounds pretty bad --at least on the AM's I've heard.
The real issue dogging radio today is content. They have spent a ton, and are going to spend a lot more, only to end up with a less accurate overall signal. In return, on FM they get more choice, further marginalization of the AM band because IBOC is unstable and messy at that wavelength and channel spacing. I'm actually OK with the FM IBOC in that it really does not do much overall analog damage. So the choice is a good thing.
However, I see no solid efforts toward real content creation and cultivation. In other words, no real cool like we used to get on radio. It's still there, but very sparse. Without that, radio is just another content delivery technology and on this basis it's not a clear leader over the other means we have today.
Those dollars, invested in content creation and research on new ad models that potentially leverage the Internet and portable media delivery technologies would go a long way toward finding where the cool lies today and how to make it work to radio's advantage. Despite many years of increasingly corporate cookie cutter format programming, that could be done from a bunker full of worn and ragged PD's as it could be done locally, people still remember what radio used to be. I'm positive that's partly due to other media influences and us older folks who remember, still somehow setting that expectation. It won't last though, unless investment is made.
I've been researching this tech for a long time now. For those wanting some more accurate information than is contained in this fluff article, see the link below for a good backgrounder on the technology (it's my blog, just to be clear) and some early predictions that have so far been in line with the technology evolution to date:
Wanting to know what it sounds like? It's not really high-defintion as it is low noise. You can find audio samples of HD radio as well as samples from a lot of other comparable technologies here:
Have some samples to add? Get hold of me and I'll get them up.
I collected these samples and wrote the paper linked above out of personal interest. I'm not employed, nor have an interest in either Ibiquity or the radio industry in general. Just joe listener wondering how badly his radio will get hosed! (Short answer, FM mode is no biggie --either people will like it or not. AM mode sucks hard and will make a mess of the medium. Knife the baby quick!)
HD Radio delivers 96Kbps at it's best right now. The all digital mode promises more, but we've got to get folks to give up their analog radios first. That's gonna take a really long time. Long enough that the issue will remain relevant where the viability of both new technologies is concerned.
Additionally, most stations are giving up the higher 96Kbps bitrates in trade for multiple streams that range from 32Kbps to 64Kbps. This is on par with Satellite and does not differentate the two in a significant way.
Step two will take a very long time, if ever to come to pass.
We should have done what a lot of the rest of the world is doing and allocate a seperate chunk of spectrum for the digital broadcasts. This would have allowed us to continue to produce quality analog radio, and in the case of AM work toward changes that will benefit the medium, but we would have ended up with a far more solid digital medium as well.
The HD radio of today is a misnomer at best. 64Kbps is likely to be the median bitrate seen for most broadcasts. A few stations are going with one 96Kbps stream, while the lions share are doing 64 / 48 or something similar. These are not high-definition streams! They really are the bare minimum streams necessary to convey the audio at a level joe listener will find acceptable.
Welcome to entertainment quality radio broadcasts.
As for the cars, the Satellite radio people are way ahead. Hd radio will take another three years just to reach the penetration Sat sees today. During that time, Sat radio will have captured a *lot* of mind share. Hd radio is not a slam dunk where overall viability is concerned at this point.
The higher bitrate stream was quickly replaced with a lower one, more on par with Satellite radio and one or two extra streams was added. Result: Not so high definition radio. (It wasn't anyway, but you get the idea.)
Receivers are way too expensive. Totally agree on that score. What's worse is that they are all proprietary. Ibiquity owns the chain, lock stock and barrel. That means no hobby HD radios, no alternative source for the tech = highest prices both the broadcasters and the listeners can bear. Lovely huh?
Ibiquity: Owning the radio industry on their own dime.
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What's to prevent thugs from demanding voters "check their vote online" with their vote ID?
We cannot link the vote to the voter, if we are to insure said voter is truly free to vote their concience.
We seem to agree on the trust issue and largely on the means and methods.
Have you made your phone calls and sent your mail?
Agreed. My statements are in the context of one paper record, not two!
We really don't need the machines. We've plenty of students and elderly willing and able to perform their civic duty. Properly scaled, we can have results just as fast as we do now, with one heck of a lot more trust.
No complaint from me! As far as I am concerned, we should be voting on paper with people doing the count. To put my sentance in context, what I really mean is audits, exit polls and other measures designed to check the overall accuracy of the machine count. Better that we don't have the thing in the first place.
As for the polarization, that's bunk. The truth is the majority of us agree on the majority of issues. It's our media and our parties forcing the polarization.
Designing a trustworthy system, with trustworthy being justly trusted by ordinary people, is very difficult. The whole voting by proxy thing is what throws a wrench into what would otherwise be a dead simple task. The requirement for anonyminity is another biggie too.
Unless said e-voting system personally identifies the votes, it's going to be untrustworthy because of how the technology impacts the democratic process. People are fallable and corrupt by nature. That's why elections should be public! The more eyes the better, because conflicting agendas tend to cancel out. Would not be a bad idea for us, as a nation, to reaffirm the value of our democracy while we are at it too.
more aggressive on this issue.
Electronic Voting machines are not a trustworthy technology. They can be made reasonably trustworthy, but only with significant and constant public involvement and oversight. The core element to this happens to be our requirement of anonyminity for our votes. Being unable to link votes to voters means we must then capture the actual votes themselves if we are to be sure the election is just and true.
Roughly 80 percent of Americans will be using these machines in the coming elections. That should scare the tar out of every one of you, regardless of your political bent.
In 2004, this number was about 30 percent and the problems were so great, we really have no assurance our election results actually reflect the will of the American people, whatever that may be.
Think of it this way. Let's say I'm the voting machine counting votes. You tell me what your vote is, and I update my mental count. Can you see that I updated the count correctly? I could report your vote back to you correctly, yet still maintain a different internal count. There is no way to really know is there? That's the problem we face with electronic votes.
The votes are encoded into states stored on devices nobody can directly observe, other than via the proxy of other electronic technology. Essentially, we are voting by proxy when we vote electronically. Without an accounting in the form of a serial voter-verified paper record, or the use of vote storage that is both human and machine readable, we cannot oversee the election results in a manner that brings confidence to the whole affair.
These machines are general purpose computers for the most part. We all know how easily these things are tinkered with because it's what most of us do! Biggest problems are:
-no direct accountability on elections officials to actually hold a just and true election. Technology can and will be blamed for problems, leaving these folks off the hook for failed / unjust elections. Not good. Where the incentive for corruption and manupulation exists, you can bet it's happening. There is too much at stake for it to be otherwise.
-poor understanding of the core technology differences between paper voting and electronic voting. I summarized it above and have a longer, easy to understand, paper here. Mail it to your legislators along with a request for their position on the matter. If you do the mailing, please also do the request. That forces a response, which helps increase the overall perception of the importance of the issue. http://www.opednews.com/dingusDoug_112604_electron ic_voting.htm
Said poor understanding extends to all of us really, legislators and citizens alike. Too many people consider electronic data processing systems as being better than they actually are. Consider this: If they are so infallable, why do ATM machines deliver receipts? Also, be careful about ATM comparisons. The primary difference between an ATM machine and an electronic voting machine lies in the anonymous nature of voting. ATM transactions are keyed to people, electronic voting records are not --thus the need for a voter-verified paper trail.
What do we need to ask for?
Voter verified paper trails that are human readable, serial in nature and easily handled / processed for recounts. Flimsy, thermal rolls that can discolor from improper storage and or handling won't cut it.
Audits at the precinct level. These can catch abnormalities easily and quickly before too much damage is done. Use the paper record to verify issues and act accordingly.
Strong exit polling. Notice how that is being downplayed now? The reason is simple. In 2004, the exit polls did not jive with the voting records, yet we have been exit polling for a good long time. The differences did not appear in this way until the advent of the electronic machines.
Legislation that reinfo
Only pay for school lunch one day per week. In the home, provide solid food choices and make them pack their lunch. Once in a while a kids load gets high and just being able to buy a lunch makes sense. So let them do that 4 times per month and let them choose when.
Done early, they will become used to eating good food for lunch, thus making the poor choices and their low energy content, more than obvious.
There is little to be done about trading. When you make your solid food choices, include some really great stuff. This keeps the incentive to trade down in that they will be at the top of the school lunch pecking order.
Most of my kids are into high school now. I wish I had done this earlier. The transition to packing lunch was difficult. Peer pressure to not bag their lunch is high. My schools have setup a kind of food mall, which only makes this worse. The haves, being those with excess lunch money, get to "shop" at the more upscale offerings provided by the school. The have nots get the standard fare. Why schools encourage this crap is beyond me. Don't they have enough trouble with student tension as it is?
If school lunches went back to a lower choice model, and quit bulk buying stinky old fast food for resale, our kids would have a better time of it. Everybody says how horrible their school lunch is. The schools have fought this by trying to improve their offering. The silly thing is that everybody still says school food sucks, but they will work like hell to get the better offerings!
Back to monthly menus and two choice meals. Everybody gets the tray and chooses one main course or the other, and either eats it, or doesn't, or brings their own. This does not have to be that hard.
Remembering back to my lunches, they were not bad in hindsight. The reality is that kids are used to specific foods and will discourage alternatives, unless forced. This is where the bad school lunch perception comes from. By keeping the choice very narrow, the overall food value can be kept high with out all of this passive aggressive control crap. It's gonna affect our kids in more ways than their waistline.
The other nice thing about this approach is that the kids do get to provide effective feedback too. Once our High School made this horrible Quech (however you spell it). Nobody ate it! Well, maybe a couple suckers went for it, but by and large the food sat right where they left it. One special mid-afternoon assembly later and the school decision was clear. No more of that kind of food ever. Done, next.
Have learned a coupla things:
-the wife is generally not so willing to make changes
-the kids will bitch but will also deal with change far more easily
-nobody really needs all the crap they think they need.
After doing the whole win32, image, anti-virii, anti spyware dance one too many times, I finally just setup two computers.
The kids have been running Linux for about the last 4 years. Was rough at first because I had to do some extra admin to make devices and applications work. Recently my workload has dropped to almost nothing. (That's my benchmark for how well desktop Linux is doing, BTW --and it's coming along nicely.)
The kids PC is now running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. It's just sweet in that it mostly just works. They've been burning CD's, dealing with cameras, surfing, word processing, etc... with no issues to speak of. I set up user accounts for them, they ended up sharing one go figure. If they want an application, I find them one and they deal with it. All in all, a very nice solution. Interestingly, their friends come over to use the machine a lot. They like it because it's not a hassle. None of them have had any significant problems using the machine.
When they ask for something windows only, we talk about why they think they need it and what the alternatives are. Not a bad conversation to be having with one's kids, IMHO. Mine know the tradeoff between all the bad programs and learning how to do some things differently. Positioned right, they can use the computer uninhibited, or use it with extreme care. They choose uninhibited and safe every time!
For my wife, she does online poker. That means win32 for the best overall experience these days. So, we've got a machine running a default copy of XP Home, that I got at a steep discount. ($200!) We load only a few open tools and her poker clients. The rest of the machine stays factory with updates off. This machine is used for paying bills online, banking, etc... so general web surfing is out. There is a VM installed for that. Once the sites are known, it's easy to differentiate which ones can be surfed from the native OS and which should be surfed through the VM.
I don't run anti anything either. I've got the home network sitting behind a simple NAT, running Linux. (Quest routers are great!) The only inbound connections allowed are for gaming and are mapped to the console IP, or the Linux box as necessary.
The Linux machine receives it's normal updates and has performed just great. No issues at all. We did get the win32 machine hosed a while back. (Switched client based e-mail to gmail and that is not likely to happen again.) Restore from the discs provided, overlay drivers and install apps and it's all good again. Takes about an hour and I printed up a quick and dirty cheat sheet and burned a CD with the installers necesary for the box.
The spyware people target kids. If you are running a win32 box, with kids on it. It's gonna have everything under the sun running on it no matter what you do. Actually that's not totally true, but your admin burden goes way up if you lock the box down too tight. --nothing works unless you deal with it. Ubuntu has been great about this. I admin the box only when major changes are necessary (new printer, network, device....); otherwise it just does it's thing in user space.
Putting the kids on Linux brought the problems to a screeching halt. I suspect a Mac would have the same effect. (I just went the cheap route.)
As for sharing computers. I've no problems sharing a win32 box with my wife. We both know what the machine is used for and do exactly that. Anything goofy happens in a VM or on the Linux machine. (I did setup quick icons for doing both of these things. The family thought it was interesting that more than one person can be using the Linux box at the same time! VNC or X window, whatever you prefer --I do the X thing personally.)
Sharing a win32 machine with kids is a mess! The Linux
Agreed.
I suppose another related factor is how long the current brick wall will last.
Cheers!
While an 8 core desktop is gonna be overkill for a lot of people, it still leaves us with a nasty problem.
Peak CPU speed.
For now we have topped out on this, meaning our existing software is either gonna have to get more efficient, or it's going to have to change, unless we want to just deal with the level of performance and features we currently have.
(like that's gonna ever happen --how else would the closed corps sell upgrades then?)
Additionally, some application areas do not have enough CPU power to fully realize their potential. MCAD is one of these, by way of example. Take the fastest CPU's we have today and they are still not fast enough to fully render a solid model without wasting the operators time. Current software offerings are all working toward smarter data, creative ways to manage the number of in-memory and in-computation models, better kernel solves, etc...
But it's just not enough for the larger projects to work in the way they could be working.
Most of the MCAD stuff currently is built in a linear way. That's largely because of the parametric system used by almost all software producers today. With a few changes to how we do MCAD, I could see many cores becoming very important for larger datasets.
Peak CPU and RAM are the two primary bottlenecks that constrain how engineering CAD software develops and what features it can evolve for it's users. It's not the only example either.
The bitch is that most of the software we have is more than adequate for most of the people. For those that lie outside the norm, dependance on this software (both development and just use value need), constrains their ability to make use of multi-core CPU capabilities...
Messy.
Will be interesting to see how this all goes. Will the established players evolve multi-core transitional software that can bridge the gap, or will new players arise, doing things differently to take advantage of the next tech wave?
IMHO, there is a strong case for Intel doing the, "If we build it, they will come thing." For the higher demand computing needs, there really isn't any other way to improve, but through very aggressive code optimization.
You've hit the nail on the head.
I'm curious --thanks!
these switches.
I've been running IRIX and an older release of Mandrake for quite a while now. Took me quite a while to work all the bugs out of the Mandrake system. Once I got it right, I didn't mess with it.
Fast forward to today. Decided to build a new machine and migrate onto it. I'm at 90 percent in only a few days with Ubuntu. That's huge honestly.
Anyhoo, I still want a Mac, but not quite as bad as I thought I did. Really I wanted a Linux machine that was easier to get up and going. I'm one of the geeks, who can do this stuff, but chooses to spend his time elsewhere.
I guess I had moved beyond that. Clearly that's just not the case. IMHO, I'm more in line with the GPL version of open because it keeps things open.
BSD is open too, but can be closed again at some point.
Open Code, really doesn't do us that much good if it isn't growing. The whole GPL pool of code appears to be doing that nicely --and it's gonna stay open. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a BSD basher or snob at all. I run it on a server or two and it's top-notch actually.
For me, the GPL open is the better option because it forces those that want to make use of the code pool to respect how it got there in the first place. Additionally, there is a nice incentive for companies wanting to make closed products to recognize the developer. This happened to me recently with a GPL project. A company wanted to incorporate my code in their product --and they had improvements to pass along.
I issued them a license in return for GPL ownership of any code sent to me and a donation to the project. The project grows to it's users mutual benefit, I get some consideration for my efforts (name on box, etc...), and they save a little time and effort.
Anyway, it's more complex than it seems, which is your point well taken.
If said software can be embodied into the existing body of open code, without changing it's existing freedoms of use, then said code is open enough!
If strings are attached, then it's not open.
Done, next.
it's about control!
Right now, an open and neutral Internet empowers any of us to do interesting things. The old school power structures are nervous about this for the same reasons they did about the printing press way back when.
No matter how the money flows, the expectation that just anyone can make a difference on the Internet will have been reset. Now, to make a difference, you are going to not only do something that empowers people, but also get along with the established players.
Time and time again, history has seen this all play out. The established players either adapt or slowly become marginalized. It's a tough deal --so tough they will always resort to legislation and litigation rather than just step up and compete on even terms for our mutual benefit. --even though their wealth comes from us!
Nit pick all you want. These clowns are not doing you any real good. If you are a supporter (and I think you are), then you are most likely a selfish person in that you are an issue voter.
Let's play the nothing else matters game, shall we?
I'll go first:
Nothing else matters but speech. Assuming that's secured (and it isn't), the core American values of freedom, equality and democracy are to be valued above all else.
W sure does not give a rip about speech --that's clear enough from this and many other above the law efforts we are hearing about almost daily now. The whole above the law bit also violates the principle of equality easily enough, so that's out. Democracy? "Either you are with us or against us!" takes care of that one. We've got frigging free speech zones for christ sake! --In America no less! Freedom? You have got to be fucking kidding me. Legislating morality is what the base is all about! Nix that one too.
You do know in a free society, the only reason for law is to address harm. Not moral harm, because that's subjective based on one's belief system, but civil harm where such harm can be tied to cold hard facts and known truths. Not beliefs or matters of faith, but truths we all mutually agree upon.
Tolerance for one another is paramount to a free and democratic society. Sorry, but I just don't see that in our leadership. Oh, and it's supposed to be a representative government, not a dictatorship. That means when we are unhappy, we get to speak our mind as a check on power abuses. Explain to me again how these clowns are encouraging that with their emphasis on strong accountabilty and ethics? Can you spell corruption?
What's that leave that matters? Basically nothing. That's plenty for me and the 'GOP' for a good long time. I'll bet we don't even begin to right these wrongs until I'm pretty old.
Now, your turn?
Nothing else matters but:
Translation:
"Clinton did it."
Next.
With this particular administration, it's troublesome because I just KNOW they are going to use it to serve their interests, not ours in general.
I got worked up about this a while ago and the hard truth is that free speech is just that --free! We all are big kids and have spoken on the Internet. If what we have written is defensible, then we can expect to live by it. Those of us older school netizens are very likely to understand this and post accordingly. I honestly worry about the current generation however. It's difficult to differentiate casual speech where feelings are expressed in less than flattering ways from more serious speech with some measure of intent behind it.
Which again brings me back to some worry where this administration is concerned. The fact that they are looking to do this because they can suggests to me the motivation is less than pure. Honestly, why bother unless there is some benefit to all of us for doing it. Afterall we are the ones paying the bill.
We, as a people, are reaching a general state of unrest --and we've got reasons for that. The Internet empowers us to trancend the ordinary media channels and exercize our role in ways that make established power channels nervous. Real change brings with it some accountability for those gaming the system toward their own ends. Given their position, this is a perfectly logical reaction.
A government doing the right things, that has the high ground where justifying it's actions is concerned, has little reason for efforts like this. Take this as strong evidence this is not the case with our current leadership.
So, even though we have all spoken on the net and technically should not worry because it's all legal, I say there is some cause for worry for the accountability factor. (Not us, our leadership.)
Here's the takeaway: If you want to speak, in this connected day and age, on matters of government, you had better make sure what you write is defensible and that you have the high ground in your convictions. If not, you will be marginalized at some time in the future if your activities merit the effort. That sucks, but that's gonna be the way it is until such time as we elect a solid government that will modify existing legislation to keep such activities in check. Trust me, this particular one is just not ever going to do that.
The good news, IMHO, is that this same connected power that puts us in an exposed position also permits us to work together toward solid reform that is in our best interests! Best to take serious advantage of that now, before the advantage is lost, or legislated away. Is there no longer any doubt about the true intent of net neutrality? Sure, money is the big driver here, but so is speech! The blogs, for better or worse, have made complete fools of the established media channels and a growing number of people grok that now. (Why the hell did it take so long?)
We see our attorney general saying he is open to the idea of prosecution for whistle blowers, our President and Vice have claimed to be above the law and cloak pretty much everything in secrecy, our global actions are more self-serving than ever, recent court appointees are screened for their deference to established power channels, and our expectation of privacy is being marginalized under the ruse of greater security. (God damm it, a whole lotta people have no fucking backbone!) --And there is more, but hey --I've gotta work you know?
Show me some benefit and I'll ignore this whole thing. Until then, it's probably safe to say this will be used to marginalize any potential challengers to the current status quo politically.
Despite this, I personally will continue to speak. Our speech lies at the core of our freedom. Stay quiet and all is lost. Join me, put aside your fear they cultivate and speak your mind --just be sure it's true and just. --eventually we all will be better for it, IMHO.
Good for you! Our local AM here is starting these kinds of things and it's signal is getting better as a result. At the end of the day however, it's gonna be watery sounding at these bitrates... I think a fair number of people will still think it's a good deal, but it's not up to the potential of the medium.
Sorry, but AM IBOC is still quite the mess and I don't think it's viable. The mono choice, along with bandwidth limiting are going to cut the artifacts considerably. IMHO, probably the best overall way to go.
The two biggies with AM are: questionable night time service (phase issues with the digital signal) and the degradation of existing analog service.
IMHO, we would be in a far better position with AM if the new receivers would include proper AM support for analog stereo and wideband modes. With noise limiting and DSP processing an AM Stereo or just wideband AMAX broadcast would be both competitive with an IBOC one for accuracy reasons (no artifacts) and be far more viable at night.
We've got four new AM Stereo stations this year, with the first two showing very good results and listener feedback. (About 15-20 percent of cars are equipped with AM Stereo receivers today --it's an immediate return on investment if quality differentiation is your goal, compared to the fairly long term potential return embodied in IBOC.)
As the AM band gets messy with IBOC and broadcasters struggle with the limitations inherent in the core modulation technology, they are going to wish they had the full measure of supported choices. AM, unlike FM, is a community affair. Everybody needs to play well together because the signals lack any significant discrimination attributes. It's all added together. For a given market, topology and set of frequency allocations, a robust combination of analog methods and digital ones will end up being the ideal band plan. Who knows? We might get there yet on AM, but IBOC alone is not the answer.
Where content is concerned, I've a hard example here where I live. "deep tracks" is a secondary stream here too! Narrowcast formats are an attempt toward delivering the overall choice delivered by both the Internet and Satellite radio. On this basis, radio is in a losing position. (Not enough channel allocations to match, fuzzy expectations where national formats, dial positions, etc... make for a difficult to follow affair.)
AM and FM are a bit different here too.
FM is all about local coverage. We decided we didn't need national clear channel broadcasts when we moved FM to the spectrum we did. AM is both a local and more regional technology, particularly at night. Here on the west coast, Portland businesses used to run ads on KGO in Cali! (That's cool for economic reasons as well as technical ones. Far easier to run a quality station with that kind of coverage than it is locally)
The industry has decided to build a set of sub-cookie cutter formats that are aimed at putting something on the FM HD subchannels. That fails to leverage the local and community aspect of good radio.
Look a few years back. Here we had an AM (KGW) that had a double digit share! It featured great people, lots of local community and business tie ins, and was a dynamic source of local news and info.
Fast forward today. The dial is a sea of national syndicated content. Nobody has that kind of share. There is no reason really. Listeners have their choice of venues to choose from and it's only gonna get worse!
Want to sell a lot of HD radios? (And believe me when I say they are not exactly moving off the shelf!)
Dedicate a couple of sub-channels to your local talent. Give them some air time (it's not like you gotta support it with ads is it?) and let them go. They will bring with them eager listeners who will buy radios to be connected. This way, the station is connected with and is giving something back to the region it is supposed to serve in the public interest in the first place! Secondly, new and interesting con
Well, that's a way!
I'm not sure that really changes the overall discussion where quality merits are concerned. IBOC voice sounds pretty bad --at least on the AM's I've heard.
The real issue dogging radio today is content. They have spent a ton, and are going to spend a lot more, only to end up with a less accurate overall signal. In return, on FM they get more choice, further marginalization of the AM band because IBOC is unstable and messy at that wavelength and channel spacing. I'm actually OK with the FM IBOC in that it really does not do much overall analog damage. So the choice is a good thing.
However, I see no solid efforts toward real content creation and cultivation. In other words, no real cool like we used to get on radio. It's still there, but very sparse. Without that, radio is just another content delivery technology and on this basis it's not a clear leader over the other means we have today.
Those dollars, invested in content creation and research on new ad models that potentially leverage the Internet and portable media delivery technologies would go a long way toward finding where the cool lies today and how to make it work to radio's advantage. Despite many years of increasingly corporate cookie cutter format programming, that could be done from a bunker full of worn and ragged PD's as it could be done locally, people still remember what radio used to be. I'm positive that's partly due to other media influences and us older folks who remember, still somehow setting that expectation. It won't last though, unless investment is made.
IBOC isn't a means toward this end.
I've been researching this tech for a long time now. For those wanting some more accurate information than is contained in this fluff article, see the link below for a good backgrounder on the technology (it's my blog, just to be clear) and some early predictions that have so far been in line with the technology evolution to date:
- speculation-and.html
m -mp3-and-ogg-audio.html
http://www.opengeek.org/2005/03/hd-radio-thoughts
Wanting to know what it sounds like? It's not really high-defintion as it is low noise. You can find audio samples of HD radio as well as samples from a lot of other comparable technologies here:
http://www.opengeek.org/2005/03/hd-radio-analog-f
Have some samples to add? Get hold of me and I'll get them up.
I collected these samples and wrote the paper linked above out of personal interest. I'm not employed, nor have an interest in either Ibiquity or the radio industry in general. Just joe listener wondering how badly his radio will get hosed! (Short answer, FM mode is no biggie --either people will like it or not. AM mode sucks hard and will make a mess of the medium. Knife the baby quick!)
Enjoy!
HD Radio delivers 96Kbps at it's best right now. The all digital mode promises more, but we've got to get folks to give up their analog radios first. That's gonna take a really long time. Long enough that the issue will remain relevant where the viability of both new technologies is concerned.
Additionally, most stations are giving up the higher 96Kbps bitrates in trade for multiple streams that range from 32Kbps to 64Kbps. This is on par with Satellite and does not differentate the two in a significant way.
there are in service today?
Step two will take a very long time, if ever to come to pass.
We should have done what a lot of the rest of the world is doing and allocate a seperate chunk of spectrum for the digital broadcasts. This would have allowed us to continue to produce quality analog radio, and in the case of AM work toward changes that will benefit the medium, but we would have ended up with a far more solid digital medium as well.
The HD radio of today is a misnomer at best. 64Kbps is likely to be the median bitrate seen for most broadcasts. A few stations are going with one 96Kbps stream, while the lions share are doing 64 / 48 or something similar. These are not high-definition streams! They really are the bare minimum streams necessary to convey the audio at a level joe listener will find acceptable.
Welcome to entertainment quality radio broadcasts.
As for the cars, the Satellite radio people are way ahead. Hd radio will take another three years just to reach the penetration Sat sees today. During that time, Sat radio will have captured a *lot* of mind share. Hd radio is not a slam dunk where overall viability is concerned at this point.
The higher bitrate stream was quickly replaced with a lower one, more on par with Satellite radio and one or two extra streams was added. Result: Not so high definition radio. (It wasn't anyway, but you get the idea.)
Receivers are way too expensive. Totally agree on that score. What's worse is that they are all proprietary. Ibiquity owns the chain, lock stock and barrel. That means no hobby HD radios, no alternative source for the tech = highest prices both the broadcasters and the listeners can bear. Lovely huh?
Ibiquity: Owning the radio industry on their own dime.