"The whole point of these fancy reciepts is that nobody can use your receipt to see who you voted for. They can only use your receipt to confirm your vote is on the site (and as such, that you voted)."
I see, so the receipt doesn't tell anybody who you voted for. Just that you voted and that they didn't throw away your vote. So, it can't be used to verify that the vote was actually applied to the correct tally. So, what problem does this solve? As a voter I would be concerned that my vote was recorded correctly, not just that it was recorded.
"What can be proven outside the voting booth is that the vote was valid and counted in the process."
The only way for a voter to know that their vote was counted correctly is to have a receipt that matches a particular vote cast. Otherwise they don't really know anything.
"The whole point of the 'fancy overly complicated receipt' is that it cannot (on it's own) be read or checked by some evil enforcer type person. But it can be checked initially in the voting booth (to ensure the vote was cast correctly) and later on by the voter by referencing some website or other."
Okay I read the other half... Either I am being overly obtuse, or.... if the voter can look at the receipt and find her vote on some web site and see how she voted then how is it that someone else can't look over her shoulder and make sure she voted the right way. Or just take the ticket themselves and go to some website and make sure that the person had voted the right way. And if the receipt can't be used later to independently verify that the vote was recorded properly, then what is the point of the receipt?
Sure this is a clever system, but adding this receipt system only adds a layer of obfuscation, still it seems that it is essential that the person holding the receipt still be able to verify that the vote that matches the receipt was cast correctly which breaks the model.
I have to agree with the above comment. There is no need for the fancy overly complicated receipt that they talk about in the referenced paper.
just print out the choices and have the person verify them before they are put in a box. Then the ballots in the box can be counted if someone challenges the results of the electronic tabulation. Heck the vote doesn't have to be recorded paper, but it does have to be a physical record that is either confirmed by the person that has just voted or a directly created by the person themselves (ie pen to paper)
Having some sort of receipt just misses the point and seems overly complicated. But mostly it doesn't properly address privacy concerns and vote buying or coersion... if you have a receipt and the votes that correspond to that receipt are publicly released and you were told to vote a certain way by your union or boss, then you can be coerced to show your receipt to someone. That is essentially why anonymous voting was put into place, that social, economic and violent pressure could not be applied outside the voting center. So there must be no way of linking a specific person to a vote that has been cast once that person submits their vote. That is why the physical record is so important, since counting again is the only way to check your first count.
" Invading the privacy of innocent people to get at the guilty... I love it. You know, if the law of averages worked out in its favor, like if 99% of the people they spied on were involved in something, I wouldn't have a problem, but I'd imagine that less than 0.001% of the population is up to no good, and who knows how many they spy on."
Well, when enough laws are enacted, then most of the population is probably breaking one of them at one time or another, which is what I assume at this point. So, then logically the argument for spying on everyone holds since the majority of people are lawbreakers and people can logically be presumed to be guilty of something.
Oh and once they are in jail, then they can no longer vote on the laws that put them there, so really this is just a race to get as many people in jail before people realize that they are being swindled. Build more jails, pass more laws, ignore the constitution.
If the US was a constitution democracy, however, then we could expect that the privacy of people would be respected, because almost by defintion you should never have more than half of the people breaking the laws because they are the one agreeing to the laws in the first place. Therefore you wouldn't be able to assume that most people are breaking the law.
See, logically it all comes down to democracy, if there were democracy, then people can be assumed to law abiding until proven otherwise. But in the US current form of system of government, you can just assume that the majority is breaking some law that the ruling elite has imposed upon the majority by use of force and therefore we are all suspect.
What exactly does pulling a certificate mean? Air worthiness certificate? They could have been recertified.
Just means Airbus wanted to sell newer planes that fit their business plan. They are just machines, anyone could have serviced them with the right specifications.
I'm not nostalgic for 30 year old technology (like the US Space Shuttle), but this attitude of innevitable mediocrity and risk aversion is disasterous. Slashdot is supposed to be one of the places where the technophiles come to exchange information and rants, it is very disturbing to hear so much negativity about the prospects of someone actually trying to implement new technology. Like hearing some wonk at ATT tell Congress that nobody would every need anything more than 2400 baud or the infamous quote from Bill Gates. The conventional jumbo jet wasn't economical until someone made it so. Even today poorly managed airlines go under all the time, isn't this proof enough that one experience does not make or break a concept. The concorde was full of failures and cost way too much to develop, but it also had some success and could command a high ticket price. A new supersonic endeavor might fail or succeed or maybe just break even financially, but if no one tries then we know that the big two passenger airline companies now have very little reason to innovate. Innovation brings cost and risk and the potential for new competition, that is why monopolies very rarely innovate.
Further, faster, smarter, more. The clock is ticking and most of you are tocking.
Re:Failure Reborn
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"There is a reason why the modern concorde died, and it wasn't only because of the accidents that occured -- it had to do with the fact that there isn't a market for super high speed travel."
Richard Branson disagrees and was willing to put money behind it. He wanted to add the old concordes to his Virgin Atlantic's fleet. His argument was that he had looked at the numbers and the Concorde was actually profitable on a per flight basis and that it was tremendously powerful for marketing purposes. So, if the concorde was full most every flight and they weren't losing money...
Branson's point was basically that the concorde's alleged unprofitability was just a persistent marketing campaign and that British Airways had just decided that it could just make more money shifting its customers over to it's regular fleet of bigger planes.
Now I don't know if Branson is right or wrong, but at least one person who was willing to put a lot of money on supersonic transport thought he could make money on it. I'm willing to believe that there is some combination of economics and engineering that make sense for faster air travel. Supersonic planes might not make sense for big airlines that have invested in large monolithic fleets, but what makes me think Branson might be right about the concorde's reputation being the result of negative marketing is the knee jerk reaction that you all have had to the prospect of renewed supersonic flight.
I'd like to see the real numbers on the concorde... operating costs versus revenue, development costs aside (which were paid for by European taxpayers). But just believing a large corporation when it says that nobody can successfully operate a supersonic aircraft just because they couldn't is just a bit too much blind faith in my book.
Hopefully now people in the press are beginning to realize that the concerns of engineers and scientists are fundamental concerns about the ability of these tools to be used to support free and fair elections. This isn't a terribly complicated problem that is hard to understand. People understand quite easily the issues of accountability when paper ballots are used in simple way.
Heck recently there was a story that made the local papers about an election worker that improperly broke the seals on some ballot boxes is some election. It turns out that the worker probably did nothing to change results and was just trying to find some papers, but people were rightly indignant that an elections official wasn't following an agreed upon procedure wich left the boxes open to tampering after the fact... With some of these computer system designs that same election worker could have physically done the same thing thousands of times without any one being able to tell. Of course, there wouldn't have been any newpaper stories since there would have been no evidence of the tampering unless the elections worker had come forward herself.
Computers are physical things. Similar rules should apply computers as they apply to paper ballots.
Wasn't low power consumption the number 1 benefit that transmeta was looking to provide, so that you could get twice the battery life (or soemthing like that) without sacrificing too much performance. Did Transmeta shoot itself in the foot by letting people think that it was going to provide higher performance chips than the competition.
The main selling point of transmeta was always power consumption, so have they lost their edge in that area? If so, then that would be serious for them, but the article doesn't answer that question.
Seems to me that energy is the problem here, all that energy moving stuff around would require a dirt cheap and plentiful supply of energy. The only candidate right now is fusion, so this is all just stupid banter until fusion becomes an everyday pracical reality.
The question is not merely philisophical though, and private vs public arguments should not hinge on considerations of tendencies towards individual corruption. Indeed, history seems to show that the individuals of both private companies and government agency have equal tendency to become mired in avarice and greed.
Those of you that believe that self interest is the motivating factor in human endeavor may sigh at the use of the word greed, but self interest is not greed and greed does corrupt in way that harms not only others, but also the greedy.
But greed is not important when we live in a society of simple expedient rules that are equally applied. Ultimately the question of setting up public internet networks is not the question that is important. What is importnant are the rules that are established to govern such an arrangement. Do they equally apply to public, non-profit and private entities? Or do they establish a monopoly of a pseudo-government institition which where ultimately individual greed will prevent others from providing a better alternative and a more reasonable price. See, there is little difference between a public monopoly and a private one. Ultimately they lead down the same path of higher cost and inadequate product, once the shiny newness wears off. Only when fair and honest rules of competion are in place can the marketplace flourish, and it does not matter who does the buying or selling of a product or service.
So, sure great. if Utah wants to lay its own cable, sure that's fine, but if in the process they keep in place all the regulatory hurdles that keep the barrier to entry too high for companies to run their own fiber on public utility poles, then that might be a short term benefit, but ultimately the public utility will suffer from the same apathy that the private companies have suffered from and everyone will be stuck with a moderate fixed increase in bandwidth rather than a network that continues to improve. The bigger an institution gets the bigger the "Why" needs to become.
Have any of you nay sayers tried the latest round of Linux distributions? They are pretty tight, could be improved, but compare very favorably to the often annoying Windows XP. Still not up to MacOS X feeling of empowerment and ease of use, but I think with the latest round of packages you see an Desktop OS that has pulled ahead of Windows.
With Redhat giving up the threat of market share on the desktop, doesn't that give Micrsoft a free hand to focus its efforts on the server market? Just as years of development of Redhat Linux on the desktop seemed to develop into a pleasantly usable state.
"Ahh, I may have misunderstood the original intent... he did seem dead-on about imaging software, not backup software, which is why I thought otherwise."
So... do you still think the original poster has a "serious case of rectal-cranial inversion"?
Well this information would help if SCO provided some context to their assertions. Otherwise, just a list of files that they say contain copied code is not going to fly except as FUD.
ah... but maybe after all the matrix was not about a mere power source, but rather it was about getting back at those bad humans for all those years of oppressing the enlightened machines.
"Space projects are fundamentally state financed projects (due to their horrific costs and risks) and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But we should be seizing the possibility of exploring space as a project for mankind.. dreaming the impossible.."
great... go dream the impossible with your own damn money. I want my tax dollars going towards public works projects that provide a better infrastructure and practical benefits to the common wealth.
Slashdot Mirror
"The whole point of these fancy reciepts is that nobody can use your receipt to see who you voted for. They can only use your receipt to confirm your vote is on the site (and as such, that you voted)."
I see, so the receipt doesn't tell anybody who you voted for. Just that you voted and that they didn't throw away your vote. So, it can't be used to verify that the vote was actually applied to the correct tally. So, what problem does this solve? As a voter I would be concerned that my vote was recorded correctly, not just that it was recorded.
"What can be proven outside the voting booth is that the vote was valid and counted in the process."
The only way for a voter to know that their vote was counted correctly is to have a receipt that matches a particular vote cast. Otherwise they don't really know anything.
might as well just publish a list with the name in pig latin next to the vote.
"The whole point of the 'fancy overly complicated receipt' is that it cannot (on it's own) be read or checked by some evil enforcer type person. But it can be checked initially in the voting booth (to ensure the vote was cast correctly) and later on by the voter by referencing some website or other."
.... if the voter can look at the receipt and find her vote on some web site and see how she voted then how is it that someone else can't look over her shoulder and make sure she voted the right way. Or just take the ticket themselves and go to some website and make sure that the person had voted the right way. And if the receipt can't be used later to independently verify that the vote was recorded properly, then what is the point of the receipt?
Okay I read the other half... Either I am being overly obtuse, or
Sure this is a clever system, but adding this receipt system only adds a layer of obfuscation, still it seems that it is essential that the person holding the receipt still be able to verify that the vote that matches the receipt was cast correctly which breaks the model.
after reading halfway through the paper...
I have to agree with the above comment. There is no need for the fancy overly complicated receipt that they talk about in the referenced paper.
just print out the choices and have the person verify them before they are put in a box. Then the ballots in the box can be counted if someone challenges the results of the electronic tabulation. Heck the vote doesn't have to be recorded paper, but it does have to be a physical record that is either confirmed by the person that has just voted or a directly created by the person themselves (ie pen to paper)
Having some sort of receipt just misses the point and seems overly complicated. But mostly it doesn't properly address privacy concerns and vote buying or coersion... if you have a receipt and the votes that correspond to that receipt are publicly released and you were told to vote a certain way by your union or boss, then you can be coerced to show your receipt to someone. That is essentially why anonymous voting was put into place, that social, economic and violent pressure could not be applied outside the voting center. So there must be no way of linking a specific person to a vote that has been cast once that person submits their vote. That is why the physical record is so important, since counting again is the only way to check your first count.
I'm sorry I missed the part where the MPAA has direct law making authority... at least most of the time they have to buy congress.
What gives the MPAA any authority to issue this decree? Seems a bit out of scope.
" Invading the privacy of innocent people to get at the guilty... I love it. You know, if the law of averages worked out in its favor, like if 99% of the people they spied on were involved in something, I wouldn't have a problem, but I'd imagine that less than 0.001% of the population is up to no good, and who knows how many they spy on."
Well, when enough laws are enacted, then most of the population is probably breaking one of them at one time or another, which is what I assume at this point. So, then logically the argument for spying on everyone holds since the majority of people are lawbreakers and people can logically be presumed to be guilty of something.
Oh and once they are in jail, then they can no longer vote on the laws that put them there, so really this is just a race to get as many people in jail before people realize that they are being swindled. Build more jails, pass more laws,
ignore the constitution.
If the US was a constitution democracy, however, then we could expect that the privacy of people would be respected, because almost by defintion you should never have more than half of the people breaking the laws because they are the one agreeing to the laws in the first place. Therefore you wouldn't be able to assume that most people are breaking the law.
See, logically it all comes down to democracy, if there were democracy, then people can be assumed to law abiding until proven otherwise. But in the US current form of system of government, you can just assume that the majority is breaking some law that the ruling elite has imposed upon the majority by use of force and therefore we are all suspect.
very simple.
"between the rich states and the stateless masses"
How exactly do you see the "stateless masses" working through the ITU?
Only states and corporations are represented in the ITU.
What exactly does pulling a certificate mean? Air worthiness certificate? They could have been recertified.
Just means Airbus wanted to sell newer planes that fit their business plan. They are just machines, anyone could have serviced them with the right specifications.
I'm not nostalgic for 30 year old technology (like the US Space Shuttle), but this attitude of innevitable mediocrity and risk aversion is disasterous. Slashdot is supposed to be one of the places where the technophiles come to exchange information and rants, it is very disturbing to hear so much negativity about the prospects of someone actually trying to implement new technology. Like hearing some wonk at ATT tell Congress that nobody would every need anything more than 2400 baud or the infamous quote from Bill Gates. The conventional jumbo jet wasn't economical until someone made it so. Even today poorly managed airlines go under all the time, isn't this proof enough that one experience does not make or break a concept. The concorde was full of failures and cost way too much to develop, but it also had some success and could command a high ticket price. A new supersonic endeavor might fail or succeed or maybe just break even financially, but if no one tries then we know that the big two passenger airline companies now have very little reason to innovate. Innovation brings cost and risk and the potential for new competition, that is why monopolies very rarely innovate.
Further, faster, smarter, more. The clock is ticking and most of you are tocking.
"There is a reason why the modern concorde died, and it wasn't only because of the accidents that occured -- it had to do with the fact that there isn't a market for super high speed travel."
Richard Branson disagrees and was willing to put money behind it. He wanted to add the old concordes to his Virgin Atlantic's fleet. His argument was that he had looked at the numbers and the Concorde was actually profitable on a per flight basis and that it was tremendously powerful for marketing purposes. So, if the concorde was full most every flight and they weren't losing money...
Branson's point was basically that the concorde's alleged unprofitability was just a persistent marketing campaign and that British Airways had just decided that it could just make more money shifting its customers over to it's regular fleet of bigger planes.
Now I don't know if Branson is right or wrong, but at least one person who was willing to put a lot of money on supersonic transport thought he could make money on it. I'm willing to believe that there is some combination of economics and engineering that make sense for faster air travel. Supersonic planes might not make sense for big airlines that have invested in large monolithic fleets, but what makes me think Branson might be right about the concorde's reputation being the result of negative marketing is the knee jerk reaction that you all have had to the prospect of renewed supersonic flight.
I'd like to see the real numbers on the concorde... operating costs versus revenue, development costs aside (which were paid for by European taxpayers). But just believing a large corporation when it says that nobody can successfully operate a supersonic aircraft just because they couldn't is just a bit too much blind faith in my book.
What purpose do you have?
Hopefully now people in the press are beginning to realize that the concerns of engineers and scientists are fundamental concerns about the ability of these tools to be used to support free and fair elections. This isn't a terribly complicated problem that is hard to understand. People understand quite easily the issues of accountability when paper ballots are used in simple way.
Heck recently there was a story that made the local papers about an election worker that improperly broke the seals on some ballot boxes is some election. It turns out that the worker probably did nothing to change results and was just trying to find some papers, but people were rightly indignant that an elections official wasn't following an agreed upon procedure wich left the boxes open to tampering after the fact... With some of these computer system designs that same election worker could have physically done the same thing thousands of times without any one being able to tell. Of course, there wouldn't have been any newpaper stories since there would have been no evidence of the tampering unless the elections worker had come forward herself.
Computers are physical things. Similar rules should apply computers as they apply to paper ballots.
Wasn't low power consumption the number 1 benefit that transmeta was looking to provide, so that you could get twice the battery life (or soemthing like that) without sacrificing too much performance. Did Transmeta shoot itself in the foot by letting people think that it was going to provide higher performance chips than the competition.
The main selling point of transmeta was always power consumption, so have they lost their edge in that area? If so, then that would be serious for them, but the article doesn't answer that question.
Seems to me that energy is the problem here, all that energy moving stuff around would require a dirt cheap and plentiful supply of energy. The only candidate right now is fusion, so this is all just stupid banter until fusion becomes an everyday pracical reality.
The linked picture is of a rendering not the actual device. Is this thing vapor ware?
This is a great question.
The question is not merely philisophical though, and private vs public arguments should not hinge on considerations of tendencies towards individual corruption. Indeed, history seems to show that the individuals of both private companies and government agency have equal tendency to become mired in avarice and greed.
Those of you that believe that self interest is the motivating factor in human endeavor may sigh at the use of the word greed, but self interest is not greed and greed does corrupt in way that harms not only others, but also the greedy.
But greed is not important when we live in a society of simple expedient rules that are equally applied. Ultimately the question of setting up public internet networks is not the question that is important. What is importnant are the rules that are established to govern such an arrangement. Do they equally apply to public, non-profit and private entities? Or do they establish a monopoly of a pseudo-government institition which where ultimately individual greed will prevent others from providing a better alternative and a more reasonable price. See, there is little difference between a public monopoly and a private one. Ultimately they lead down the same path of higher cost and inadequate product, once the shiny newness wears off. Only when fair and honest rules of competion are in place can the marketplace flourish, and it does not matter who does the buying or selling of a product or service.
So, sure great. if Utah wants to lay its own cable, sure that's fine, but if in the process they keep in place all the regulatory hurdles that keep the barrier to entry too high for companies to run their own fiber on public utility poles, then that might be a short term benefit, but ultimately the public utility will suffer from the same apathy that the private companies have suffered from and everyone will be stuck with a moderate fixed increase in bandwidth rather than a network that continues to improve. The bigger an institution gets the bigger the "Why" needs to become.
Have any of you nay sayers tried the latest round of Linux distributions? They are pretty tight, could be improved, but compare very favorably to the often annoying Windows XP. Still not up to MacOS X feeling of empowerment and ease of use, but I think with the latest round of packages you see an Desktop OS that has pulled ahead of Windows.
What does Enterprise level mean? Does it just mean servers or do you intend on keeping Redhat on Workstations also?
With Redhat giving up the threat of market share on the desktop, doesn't that give Micrsoft a free hand to focus its efforts on the server market? Just as years of development of Redhat Linux on the desktop seemed to develop into a pleasantly usable state.
"Ahh, I may have misunderstood the original intent... he did seem dead-on about imaging software, not backup software, which is why I thought otherwise."
So... do you still think the original poster has a "serious case of rectal-cranial inversion"?
Or "suspect he is not qualified to do his job"?
Well this information would help if SCO provided some context to their assertions. Otherwise, just a list of files that they say contain copied code is not going to fly except as FUD.
Okay, someone must have a list of source code that SCO claims to be theirs... let's see it.
ah... but maybe after all the matrix was not about a mere power source, but rather it was about getting back at those bad humans for all those years of oppressing the enlightened machines.
I know I'm overpaid, I just don't want anyone else to know. ;)
"Space projects are fundamentally state financed projects (due to their horrific costs and risks) and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But we should be seizing the possibility of exploring space as a project for mankind.. dreaming the impossible.."
great... go dream the impossible with your own damn money. I want my tax dollars going towards public works projects that provide a better infrastructure and practical benefits to the common wealth.