But then you can't verify that your vote was counted for the correct candidate, making the entire idea pointless. You can't have a secret ballot with verification, its just not possible
I don't think it's necessarily impossible... it would be a form of zero-knowledge proof. As defined by Wikipedia:
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is an interactive method for one party to prove to another that a (usually mathematical) statement is true, without revealing anything other than the veracity of the statement.
Whether it's doable in practice or simple enough for non-computer people to understand/accept is debatable, but perhaps this guy has a viable solution. (I don't know, I can't watch flash files on the computer I'm on)
If its done by a machine its safer as there is less handling by humans and there is a paper (or source code) trail.
If it's done solely by machine then nobody is able to check that the machine counted correctly... you just have to trust the people who created the machine to be honest (and competent!). That isn't acceptable. The safest way to count ballots is to have a Democrat and a Republican (and a representative from any other interested party) sit down at a table together, in public, and have them tally up the vote out loud... and preferrably have their counting session videotaped for posterity also. That way if anyone tries to cheat, they will be caught out by the others immediately.
Of course that's a very tedious way to do things, so it probably is only worth doing that during recounts of suspect elections... which means there must be a paper trail no matter what mechanism is used for the initial count. Paper ballots are an excellent implementation of that. If you want to use a machine to place marks on those paper ballots, fine. If you want to hand-mark them with a pen, that's good too.
Basically, if you check your vote, your vote can be determined... trivially. Or at least that vote from that house-hold. Which is "good enough" for profiling purposes
There's no reason that the ACLU/NRA/NAACP/(insert your preferred organization here) couldn't set up proxy servers that would hide the user's IP address from the government. All the government would know is that the request came from such-and-such and organization.
Maybe the press and liberals will stop complaining when they lose elections, and start focusing on the real issue. Voter fraud brought about by liberals
Fascinating... the liberals have been fixing the vote so that they themselves lose the elections? No doubt it's all part of their devious strategy to avoid responsibility for the Iraq debacle by keeping themselves out of power. Those wily bastards! They won't get away with it this time, though, the GOP has their number for sure!
And don't even get me started about the press losing elections... those sorry saps blow it every time, usually by forgetting to declare their candidacy.
I will sell my vote for $100. Lets just me more direct with this political corruption:D
Aim higher, my good man. Sell your vote to the Republicans for $100, to the Democrats for another $100, and maybe you can also get the Greens and Libertarians to chip in $50 each. Since you won't be able to prove who you voted for, none of them will be any the wiser.:^)
Plants at least demonstrate reactions - the original post that I made pointed out - they are aware and respond to attackers, and can warn other plants via hormones. Milk does not possess these abilities.
Milk isn't the issue -- cows are. It's a simple question of whether the production of each item causes suffering in sentient beings. Again, the concensus opinion is that plants are not sentient. Argue otherwise if you want, but it only makes you look silly. Drinking milk, on the other hand, is thought to cause suffering to cows, who are believed to be sentient. Hence, vegans don't drink milk. If you can create milk without using animals, vegans are happy to drink it (e.g. soy milk, rice milk)
If vegans truly and honestly cared for living creatures, they'd commit suicide before they inflicted any more damage to the planet's ecology. But then, because they do not, they are inherently valuing their lives over a multitude of other living things. Which defeats their own argument that they are protecting life and preventing suffering. They're just redistributing it to something that isn't so cute and fluffy, that can't stare them back in the eyes. That is my argument.
Again, you are deliberately misrepresenting the Vegan position so that you can cut down a straw man. Vegans' goal is not to protect all living things, but rather to not cause suffering in sentient beings. Vegans (like most people who aren't trying to construct a spurious argument) believe that plants are non-sentient and therefore okay to eat.
There is no contradiction between not wanting to cause suffering in other sentient creatures, and in valuing your own life. Indeed, committing suicide would not be consistent with the vegan position, because committing suicide would cause suffering in sentient creatures (specifically, the people who care about you).
Your argument is unfounded. I suspect you are merely trying to demagogue vegans because you feel threatened by them. If you were to consider their arguments seriously, you would then be forced to critically examine your own life choices, and that scares you.
-Jeremy (not a vegan, but not afraid to consider their line of reasoning)
that's entirely a matter for debate. Plants show more sentience than animal lactate, but which do Vegans consume, and which don't they?
Neither milk nor plants show any signs of sentience. Zero is not greater than zero, so your premise is false. That said, the reasons vegans don't drink milk is because milk production requires the use of animals, which they find distasteful. What is so illogical about that?
If you're going to post an argument, at least make it defensible and reasoned...
That the left is opposed to democracy. The democratically elected government introduced the death penalty, and now it should not be carried out
Interestingly enough, so were the founding fathers of America. They specifically implemented the Bill of Rights to avoid the dangers of "mob rule". The idea was that public passions can lead to abuses, so there should be some things that should remain illegal even if a majority of the people favor them. Banning freedom of speech is one such abuse; curbing the right to bear arms is another.
So, if you consider capital punishment a human rights abuse (as some people do), then opposing it despite its popularity is a perfectly logical position to take. You can disagree with the position if you like, but holding doesn't make one "opposed to democracy".
The point of the death penalty is that society has its limits on what it will allow anyone to do.
But killing people is not the only way to stop them from doing things that society can't tolerate. Imprisoning them for life works just as well. The real motivations for the death penalty are deterrence and revenge. Revenge may be psychologically satisfying on a personal level, but it has no place in a civilized legal system. As for deterrence, it's debatable whether the presence or absence of the death penalty has any effect -- it's true that nobody wants to be executed, but nobody wants to be locked up in prison for the rest of their life, either. People who commit capital crimes assume that they aren't going to get caught, so they don't really care what their punishment would be.
But how much does the next guy oppose the death penalty? If I'm the next guy, then you oppose opposing the death penalty. Would that be like negative opposing?
Perhaps I'm the next guy, in which case the best course of action would be to not execute Saddam -- not because he doesn't deserve execution (he actually deserves much worse, considering the atrocities he's committed) but to show that civilized people are above that sort of thing.
Of course, nobody would believe that now anyway... the last 4 years have shown that there is very little that so-called 'civilized people' are above.:^P
What would YOU do with someone who is a habitual theif? Theifs don't always harm people. What are you going to do, constantly slap him on the wrist and tell him "Bad man. Bad bad man! Ok now you're free to go."?? What about someone who commits fraud repeatedly? Or someone who constantly pulls fire alarms?
Using the previous poster's logic, these people could be legitimately imprisoned as a means of protecting the innocent from their likely recidivism.
Such is the great conceit of Americans, to think that the legal system of a foreign country timed a verdict so as to coincide with our mid-term elections.
Sure, but Iraq isn't just any foreign country, now is it? It's a country that 125,000 American soldiers are currently occupying, and whose government's continued existence depends largely on the continued presence of those soldiers.
So yes, I would say that the US government might be able to exercise a certain amount of influence over the current Iraqi government's legal system.
Oh, you should thank the Japanese for stopping an evolving animal specie, which may/may not replace the human being as the dominant specie in the future
Unless the killing is done completely at random, the murder of certain individuals tends to promote evolution, not prevent it.
Of course, there's also the possibility that dolphins replacing humans as the dominant species might be a good thing...
vegans are hypocrites too. It's just they conveniently forget that most nutritious food that they can eat is/was living at some point..
Obviously they don't think that. Kindly count to 100 next time before posting, so that you won't throw out such obvious false accusations. There's nothing uglier than someone bleating 'hypocrisy' while being full of shit themselves.
The distinction they make (the ones that are vegan for moral reasons, anyway) is between sentient and non-sentient creatures, not between living and dead ones. You can debate where to draw the line on sentience in the animal kingdom, but the concensus is that plants are non-sentient, and therefore okay to eat.
Yup, and it's all the retort I needed to make my point: economics isn't a cure-all for everything. Species can (and have) gone extinct despite the existence of economics.
But in the real world, most code (other people's code... always other people's) isn't that well modularized and can't be reused without introducing lots of bugs to an application.
Very true... that's why it is your job as a software engineer to think long and hard about what code libraries you will use as part of your project. Choose well, and your problem is already partially solved.... choose poorly, and your project can be doomed to failure before it even begins.
Every hour saved writing code will cost you three in debugging and re-writing.
If you adopted buggy code, yes. But adopting poor/inappropriate code was your mistake.
What happens when someone finds a security flaw? How can you contact the people who are reusing your code if you have no idea who they are?
A mailing list or RSS feed is a good idea for an open-source project... anyone using/relying on the code should be strongly encouraged to subscribe to it. Of course, you can't force people to subscribe, but those that don't can't complain if they miss the big bug announcement.
Can Bush even be president again? I thought US law only permitted 2 consecutive terms for any president, to offer some protection against evil dictators.
You are correct, he cannot (although I wouldn't put it past him to try it anyway, under the right circumstances).
This election will still effect Bush though... if the Democrats gain control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate, then they will have the power to issues subpoenas and conduct oversight of the Executive Branch (something the Republican-controlled Congress has been tragically unwilling to do over the last 6 years).
First, "they" claim that the worlds fish population will be gone by 2048. How do they know? By the best evidence... anecdotal? Or is it just fearmongering?
They've studied the oceans and made their predictions to the best of their ability. You are ignorant of their methodology and don't like to hear bad news, so you assume that they are incompetent or dishonest. However, there is such a thing as science, and the scientific method is as good as any that people have come up with. This "I'm so clever that I can automatically discount any scientific data that I don't like" attitude is really making America stupid. How can you possibly make intelligent decisions if you refuse to look at the facts?
'Cause, they're just as easy to find and catch as the first 95% were, right?
What makes you so sure they aren't? It's not like fish know how to hide from nets and sonar.
Re:They seem to be forgetting something...
on
Oceans Empty By 2048?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If a can of tuna went for $300 dollars because of a tuna shortage, I bet a lot of people would start cutting back on their tuna consumption.
If tuna fisherman could get $300 for every can of tuna they sold, I bet they'd be a lot more motivated to catch every last tuna they could find. How much do you suppose the last tuna on Earth (ever!) would sell for?
And no one has indicated, once, that there was anything suspect about the actual results. Plenty wrong with the people actually understanding how to cast a vote, but that's rather a different thing, isn't it.
With an electronic voting machine, how do you tell the difference between a 'ballot' that the user screwed up and a ballot where the machine secretly overrode the user's vote?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's necessarily impossible... it would be a form of zero-knowledge proof. As defined by Wikipedia:
In cryptography, a zero-knowledge proof or zero-knowledge protocol is an interactive method for one party to prove to another that a (usually mathematical) statement is true, without revealing anything other than the veracity of the statement.
Whether it's doable in practice or simple enough for non-computer people to understand/accept is debatable, but perhaps this guy has a viable solution. (I don't know, I can't watch flash files on the computer I'm on)
If it's done solely by machine then nobody is able to check that the machine counted correctly... you just have to trust the people who created the machine to be honest (and competent!). That isn't acceptable. The safest way to count ballots is to have a Democrat and a Republican (and a representative from any other interested party) sit down at a table together, in public, and have them tally up the vote out loud... and preferrably have their counting session videotaped for posterity also. That way if anyone tries to cheat, they will be caught out by the others immediately.
Of course that's a very tedious way to do things, so it probably is only worth doing that during recounts of suspect elections... which means there must be a paper trail no matter what mechanism is used for the initial count. Paper ballots are an excellent implementation of that. If you want to use a machine to place marks on those paper ballots, fine. If you want to hand-mark them with a pen, that's good too.
There's no reason that the ACLU/NRA/NAACP/(insert your preferred organization here) couldn't set up proxy servers that would hide the user's IP address from the government. All the government would know is that the request came from such-and-such and organization.
Fascinating... the liberals have been fixing the vote so that they themselves lose the elections? No doubt it's all part of their devious strategy to avoid responsibility for the Iraq debacle by keeping themselves out of power. Those wily bastards! They won't get away with it this time, though, the GOP has their number for sure!
And don't even get me started about the press losing elections... those sorry saps blow it every time, usually by forgetting to declare their candidacy.
Aim higher, my good man. Sell your vote to the Republicans for $100, to the Democrats for another $100, and maybe you can also get the Greens and Libertarians to chip in $50 each. Since you won't be able to prove who you voted for, none of them will be any the wiser.
Milk isn't the issue -- cows are. It's a simple question of whether the production of each item causes suffering in sentient beings. Again, the concensus opinion is that plants are not sentient. Argue otherwise if you want, but it only makes you look silly. Drinking milk, on the other hand, is thought to cause suffering to cows, who are believed to be sentient. Hence, vegans don't drink milk. If you can create milk without using animals, vegans are happy to drink it (e.g. soy milk, rice milk)
If vegans truly and honestly cared for living creatures, they'd commit suicide before they inflicted any more damage to the planet's ecology. But then, because they do not, they
are inherently valuing their lives over a multitude of other living things. Which defeats their own argument that they are protecting life and preventing suffering. They're just redistributing it to something that isn't so cute and fluffy, that can't stare them back in the eyes. That is my argument.
Again, you are deliberately misrepresenting the Vegan position so that you can cut down a straw man. Vegans' goal is not to protect all living things, but rather to not cause suffering in sentient beings. Vegans (like most people who aren't trying to construct a spurious argument) believe that plants are non-sentient and therefore okay to eat.
There is no contradiction between not wanting to cause suffering in other sentient creatures, and in valuing your own life. Indeed, committing suicide would not be consistent with the vegan position, because committing suicide would cause suffering in sentient creatures (specifically, the people who care about you).
Your argument is unfounded. I suspect you are merely trying to demagogue vegans because you feel threatened by them. If you were to consider their arguments seriously, you would then be forced to critically examine your own life choices, and that scares you.
-Jeremy (not a vegan, but not afraid to consider their line of reasoning)
Neither milk nor plants show any signs of sentience. Zero is not greater than zero, so your premise is false. That said, the reasons vegans don't drink milk is because milk production requires the use of animals, which they find distasteful. What is so illogical about that?
If you're going to post an argument, at least make it defensible and reasoned...
I would ask the same of you.
Interestingly enough, so were the founding fathers of America. They specifically implemented the Bill of Rights to avoid the dangers of "mob rule". The idea was that public passions can lead to abuses, so there should be some things that should remain illegal even if a majority of the people favor them. Banning freedom of speech is one such abuse; curbing the right to bear arms is another.
So, if you consider capital punishment a human rights abuse (as some people do), then opposing it despite its popularity is a perfectly logical position to take. You can disagree with the position if you like, but holding doesn't make one "opposed to democracy".
But killing people is not the only way to stop them from doing things that society can't tolerate. Imprisoning them for life works just as well. The real motivations for the death penalty are deterrence and revenge. Revenge may be psychologically satisfying on a personal level, but it has no place in a civilized legal system. As for deterrence, it's debatable whether the presence or absence of the death penalty has any effect -- it's true that nobody wants to be executed, but nobody wants to be locked up in prison for the rest of their life, either. People who commit capital crimes assume that they aren't going to get caught, so they don't really care what their punishment would be.
Perhaps I'm the next guy, in which case the best course of action would be to not execute Saddam -- not because he doesn't deserve execution (he actually deserves much worse, considering the atrocities he's committed) but to show that civilized people are above that sort of thing.
Of course, nobody would believe that now anyway... the last 4 years have shown that there is very little that so-called 'civilized people' are above.
Using the previous poster's logic, these people could be legitimately imprisoned as a means of protecting the innocent from their likely recidivism.
Sure, but Iraq isn't just any foreign country, now is it? It's a country that 125,000 American soldiers are currently occupying, and whose government's continued existence depends largely on the continued presence of those soldiers.
So yes, I would say that the US government might be able to exercise a certain amount of influence over the current Iraqi government's legal system.
Unless the killing is done completely at random, the murder of certain individuals tends to promote evolution, not prevent it.
Of course, there's also the possibility that dolphins replacing humans as the dominant species might be a good thing...
Obviously they don't think that. Kindly count to 100 next time before posting, so that you won't throw out such obvious false accusations. There's nothing uglier than someone bleating 'hypocrisy' while being full of shit themselves.
The distinction they make (the ones that are vegan for moral reasons, anyway) is between sentient and non-sentient creatures, not between living and dead ones. You can debate where to draw the line on sentience in the animal kingdom, but the concensus is that plants are non-sentient, and therefore okay to eat.
Yup, and it's all the retort I needed to make my point: economics isn't a cure-all for everything. Species can (and have) gone extinct despite the existence of economics.
Very true... that's why it is your job as a software engineer to think long and hard about what code libraries you will use as part of your project. Choose well, and your problem is already partially solved.... choose poorly, and your project can be doomed to failure before it even begins.
Every hour saved writing code will cost you three in debugging and re-writing.
If you adopted buggy code, yes. But adopting poor/inappropriate code was your mistake.
Oh sure. Writing machine language to run on a nice pre-designed, pre-built piece of hardware that someone else had to create for you.
Pansies. For Real engineers, the first stage of software design is the design and fabrication of the hardware it will run on.
Well you have to admit that would be convenient... no need to get up after a big meal.
A mailing list or RSS feed is a good idea for an open-source project... anyone using/relying on the code should be strongly encouraged to subscribe to it. Of course, you can't force people to subscribe, but those that don't can't complain if they miss the big bug announcement.
Amazing indeed. Care to explain why economics didn't work to save the dodo from extinction?
You are correct, he cannot (although I wouldn't put it past him to try it anyway, under the right circumstances).
This election will still effect Bush though... if the Democrats gain control of either the House of Representatives or the Senate, then they will have the power to issues subpoenas and conduct oversight of the Executive Branch (something the Republican-controlled Congress has been tragically unwilling to do over the last 6 years).
They've studied the oceans and made their predictions to the best of their ability. You are ignorant of their methodology and don't like to hear bad news, so you assume that they are incompetent or dishonest. However, there is such a thing as science, and the scientific method is as good as any that people have come up with. This "I'm so clever that I can automatically discount any scientific data that I don't like" attitude is really making America stupid. How can you possibly make intelligent decisions if you refuse to look at the facts?
What makes you so sure they aren't? It's not like fish know how to hide from nets and sonar.
If tuna fisherman could get $300 for every can of tuna they sold, I bet they'd be a lot more motivated to catch every last tuna they could find. How much do you suppose the last tuna on Earth (ever!) would sell for?
With an electronic voting machine, how do you tell the difference between a 'ballot' that the user screwed up and a ballot where the machine secretly overrode the user's vote?