My point exactly. You keep the election honest by keeping the process open. Most voting machine problems have related to the fact that their operation is a secret, not that they're machines.
If you keep the design of ballot boxes a secret, you can fix elections that way too:
Have you ever cast an absentee ballot? The one's I've used were quite anonymous.
Want to fix an election? Send your guys to the polling places and have them beat up the people that vote against you and reward the people who voted against you. Oh wait, secret ballot....
OK, maybe the Canadian system would work in the U.S., assuming that people here didn't reject it just because it's Canadian, and assuming we could find 100,000 counters willing to put in a full days work for $30.
My big point here is not that paper ballots are bad and voting machines are good. You can have a good or bad system either way. (And there have been a lot of bad elections using paper ballots. I'm just trying to shoot down the idea that all our troubles are the result of using them newfangled machines.
You guys in Canada have an advantage because your Federal elections are managed by Elections Canada, an independent federal authority. Imagine what a mess you would have if every province, county, district, and town had its own election rules and procedures, with election officials all political appointees, and with the lawyers ready to litigate over every local result they don't like. And guess what? That's what we have in the U.S. And that is why our system sucks and yours doesn't. It has nothing to do with your not using machines.
A problem that doesn't exist? How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand? The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
Paper ballots aren't even that reliable. Elections have turned on judgement calls over how sloppy a ballot can be before it's ignored.
And one more time: they are not a safeguard against fraud. Where do you suppose the term "stuffing the ballot box" comes from?
If it's the GNU model, then they have to issue long, sleep-inducing manifestos about how the Cloud Wants to Be Free. I don't think Rackspace and Amazon are up for that.
Vim is just a demo. Lots of people run terminal apps every day, mostly to access legacy systems. Like any other application, a terminal is easier to deploy if it runs on the cloud.
... not something I'd ditch SSH for. The implementation is impressive, though. I'd encourage these guys to work on creating more web-based apps and frameworks,.
Excuse me? I'm an MS person and I use VIM every day. I actually consider it obsolete, but I've been using Vi-like editors for 30 years and am too old to start over.
The Slashdot effect happens when somebody implements a simple-minded LAMP server and suddenly becomes popular. Modern web applications are more robust. They're implemented using lightweight frameworks that don't have such a high per-user cost and which can scale up quickly when unexpected demand appears. This is the sort of advance people overlook when they say "cloud" is just marketspeak for "server".
I'd love to see a creative young genius like Mayhall become an independent force in the technology sector. But 21st-century capitalism just has no room for small independents. They can't get the money to grow. The capital markets like big names and known brands.
Go to local mall. Thirty years ago it would have been all mom+pop operations. Now it's all big-branded chains and franchises. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Sell out while you can!
According to this web page, greenhouse tomatoes are pollinated either by hand or using cultured (not wild) bumblebees. I suspect that Sky Green is simply starting out with crops that are easy to grow
The payphone thing is part of a much larger problem. Forty years ago, the entire U.S,. phone system (except for a few independent pockets) was owned by a single company. That company did a pretty good job of maintaining a robust, disaster-resistant communication infrastructure. But it also stifled competition and innovation.
In the deregulation-happy 80s, we got rid of that official monopoly. This has had many positive results (hard to imagine the modern Internet being built in such a restrictive environment) but also meant that nobody was responsible for making sure the system always works.
Not at all true. Certain memes about government surveillance originate in the book (the viewscreens in the book promoted exactly the kind of surveillance MS is trying to patent) but the book is mainly about groupthink (a word Orwell invented) and people's tendency to give up their autonomy and demand that everybody edit reality to conform to the norm. Really, the most Orwellian person alive today is Carl Rove.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, closed source voting machines are bad. Do voting machines have to be closed source? They do not.
My point exactly. You keep the election honest by keeping the process open. Most voting machine problems have related to the fact that their operation is a secret, not that they're machines.
If you keep the design of ballot boxes a secret, you can fix elections that way too:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Ballotstuffing.jpg
I'm not saying that machines are the only solution. I'm saying that they are not a solution to "a problem that doesn't exist".
Have you ever cast an absentee ballot? The one's I've used were quite anonymous.
Want to fix an election? Send your guys to the polling places and have them beat up the people that vote against you and reward the people who voted against you. Oh wait, secret ballot....
OK, maybe the Canadian system would work in the U.S., assuming that people here didn't reject it just because it's Canadian, and assuming we could find 100,000 counters willing to put in a full days work for $30.
My big point here is not that paper ballots are bad and voting machines are good. You can have a good or bad system either way. (And there have been a lot of bad elections using paper ballots. I'm just trying to shoot down the idea that all our troubles are the result of using them newfangled machines.
You guys in Canada have an advantage because your Federal elections are managed by Elections Canada, an independent federal authority. Imagine what a mess you would have if every province, county, district, and town had its own election rules and procedures, with election officials all political appointees, and with the lawyers ready to litigate over every local result they don't like. And guess what? That's what we have in the U.S. And that is why our system sucks and yours doesn't. It has nothing to do with your not using machines.
A problem that doesn't exist? How about the high cost of counting ballots by hand? The fact that it's extremely hard to do a proper audit trail on dead tree media?
Paper ballots aren't even that reliable. Elections have turned on judgement calls over how sloppy a ballot can be before it's ignored.
And one more time: they are not a safeguard against fraud. Where do you suppose the term "stuffing the ballot box" comes from?
inevitable problems involved with trying to securely collect information from tens of millions of people on the same dayk
Some problems are inevitable. But most of the ones we have are avoided by other major democracies.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/05/opinion/frum-election-chaos/index.html
If it's the GNU model, then they have to issue long, sleep-inducing manifestos about how the Cloud Wants to Be Free. I don't think Rackspace and Amazon are up for that.
They also need a lame recursive acronym....
I'd be a little sick of all these major technology shift.
Vim is just a demo. Lots of people run terminal apps every day, mostly to access legacy systems. Like any other application, a terminal is easier to deploy if it runs on the cloud.
... not something I'd ditch SSH for. The implementation is impressive, though. I'd encourage these guys to work on creating more web-based apps and frameworks,.
Excuse me? I'm an MS person and I use VIM every day. I actually consider it obsolete, but I've been using Vi-like editors for 30 years and am too old to start over.
The Slashdot effect happens when somebody implements a simple-minded LAMP server and suddenly becomes popular. Modern web applications are more robust. They're implemented using lightweight frameworks that don't have such a high per-user cost and which can scale up quickly when unexpected demand appears. This is the sort of advance people overlook when they say "cloud" is just marketspeak for "server".
So, you're saying there's nothing interesting about a 19-year-old peddling breakthrough tech and maybe getting a big payday?
Yeah, it makes me want to run out and spend $50K on a high-density server.
I'd love to see a creative young genius like Mayhall become an independent force in the technology sector. But 21st-century capitalism just has no room for small independents. They can't get the money to grow. The capital markets like big names and known brands.
Go to local mall. Thirty years ago it would have been all mom+pop operations. Now it's all big-branded chains and franchises. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Sell out while you can!
I'm not questioning his administrative skill. I'm questioning his ability to actually do anything with a non-Libertarian congress.
According to this web page, greenhouse tomatoes are pollinated either by hand or using cultured (not wild) bumblebees. I suspect that Sky Green is simply starting out with crops that are easy to grow
the vegetables are already selling faster than they can be grown
So people are buying vegetables that haven't even been grown yet?
Watt?
So, people who believe in vampires but don't believe in God are religious?
You don't have to quote an entire work to infringe copyright. Also, linking an pirated work will earn you a takedown notice.
And yes, I know that a brief quote is often considered "fair use". But that's not an official rule, just a popular rule-of-thumb.
(And we're back on the "I know the law as well as any fucking lawyer" trope.)
When you go to ChillingEffects, the lead post is about suppressing anti-Semitic tweets originating in France.
The payphone thing is part of a much larger problem. Forty years ago, the entire U.S,. phone system (except for a few independent pockets) was owned by a single company. That company did a pretty good job of maintaining a robust, disaster-resistant communication infrastructure. But it also stifled competition and innovation.
In the deregulation-happy 80s, we got rid of that official monopoly. This has had many positive results (hard to imagine the modern Internet being built in such a restrictive environment) but also meant that nobody was responsible for making sure the system always works.
I doubt the planes themselves have changed that much
Right, because I'm the only one complaining about the fact that planes have turned into cattle cars.
1984 was about big brother government
Not at all true. Certain memes about government surveillance originate in the book (the viewscreens in the book promoted exactly the kind of surveillance MS is trying to patent) but the book is mainly about groupthink (a word Orwell invented) and people's tendency to give up their autonomy and demand that everybody edit reality to conform to the norm. Really, the most Orwellian person alive today is Carl Rove.