...I'm not impressed with any browser right now. Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues), Firefox is getting very slow and will occasionally leave zombie processes, IE is as naff as always, Opera and Safari don't support the plugins that I actually do need.
And NONE of them support scripting using LaTeX or Metapost (HTML is becoming an inferior typesetting language rather than the presentation language it used to be, with virtually nobody implementing the complex standards anyway). Seems to me that if people want CSS and HTML to let you typeset, you'd be better off with a browser supporting LaTeX 2e and the A tag natively, then emulating HTML. The results can't be any worse and would add all the features people wanted in HTML5 and will doubtless pester for in HTML6.
Actually, its not. Its extremely easy to read. Its only ambiguous if you don't understand proper syntax. This fact has been recently brought home by the courts. Its reading is extremely easy and frankly, can be done by most any any one. The only difficulty is the old english.
I won't pretend to be a subject-matter expert in 18th century English, but I have a number of books from 1750-1780 (the timespan of interest). These are originals, not copies or updates. They are from a mix of backgrounds and include philosophy texts, physics texts, medical texts, cookbooks and personal diaries. A total of about a dozen or so rare books of that vintage.
I can say with absolute certainty that I =am= in a superior position to say whether the Second Amendment is ambiguous than the average Joe, and likely superior to many judges on the grammar.
Now, I won't say I'm better than them over the legal interpretation, but that is distinct to the grammatical phrasing. To me, the grammar in the Second Amendment is simply not consistent with a single interpretation, given the nature of grammar of that vintage. However, Legal English is not the same as Common English. If there is a single reading that works with Legal English, I'll accept that.
The Japanese did actually land in Alaska, but my knowledge of the extent of that invasion is limited. It was certainly very limited. However, I am not convinced the Second Amendment made much of a difference. Britain has technically never been invaded (every "invasion" of Britain for which any record exists was by invite). Britain's ownership of weapons has varied over the millenia, but the degree of ownership has not noticeably altered the number of nations attempting attacks or the ability to repel such attacks.
In other words, overseas invasions of a nation tend to be extremely difficult and it takes a very brave soul to say that there is one definite reason in any given case. It seems to me to be a harder problem.
In terms of pro-gun, I guess my attitude has been shaped by the measure of hostility I have received for not wanting to own or carry a gun. That has been the only pro-gun attitude I've really experienced. If you are pro-choice, I appreciate that. Yours has not been an attitude I have encountered a lot of. In the 11 years I've been in the US, I've met exactly one other person who was pro-choice on the issue. Maybe I've just encountered a lot of really whacked-out freaks, that is certainly possible.
I'm not as sure as you on the debt I owe to the Second Amendment. I'm open to the possibility that such a debt exists, and if an impartial analysis of World War 2 does confirm such a debt exists then I'll be willing to acknowledge it.
Certainly, I have no desire to condemn others to any fate, specific or otherwise. Nor do I have any desire to tell any individual or collective what they can or cannot do. (I'd make a lousy politician.)
However, I do dispute that my views are "ok with everyone". I have experienced enough hostility (and one e-mailed death threat) to know that there are plenty of people who really do want to make it illegal to not own. Like I said, you're only the second person in the US I've debated this with who is truly pro-choice. That is a frighteningly bad ratio.
As far as others are concerned, my concerns are limited strictly to others having the means to make an informed choice, the wherewithal to put information over and above either emotion or tradition and then the freedom to exercise that choice. What their choice is or how they made that choice, at that point, is not for me to judge.
I'm Anglo-American, raised in Britain but have birth certificates (legally) for both countries. My view on guns is non-trivial, but can be summarized as:
Nations with few or no guns are probably better off not getting more.
Some nations have been highly successful in developing an understanding between the legal and criminal organizations. Where this balance works in practice, disturbing the balance with firearms is probably not a good idea.
No nation has the right to tell another nation what their Constitution should be.
In order for the above three to be held true, nations that Constitutionally or legally protect the right to own firearms would necessarily carry a moral obligation not to export arms to countries that hold different points of view, even when that would create a technical infringement at the borderline.
As someone who grew up within the British perspective, I do not have the right to dictate gun policy within America.
However, I equally hold that nobody has the right to tell me that I should/must carry a gun or be trained in the use of one, regardless of whether I happen to live in the US at the time or not.
The Second Amendment is ambiguous - probably deliberately so. However, since there is no real possibility of a gentlemen's agreement being reached with criminals, interpretations that restrict gun ownership should be done with extreme care and should be done only under close supervision by criminologists and psychologists.
Weapons that have absolutely no psychological defensive value and whose physical defensive value is grossly outweighed by the collateral damage likely, and have no meaningful hunting value, have dubious merit. I cannot tell you they should be banned or even restricted, only that a lack of restriction doesn't appear to achieve anything. Of course, not everything "has" to achieve something.
So, to sum up, I'm not "anti-gun for America" (because I think the situation has long-since deteriorated past the point where that's practical), but I AM "anti-gun" in the sense of America has no bloody right to tell other nations that the Second Amendment should apply to them whether they like it or not.
I am ALSO anti-gun with regards to myself, in that I will not handle a gun under any circumstance, I will not take any orders to do so and will not tolerate any viewpoint that says I should believe otherwise. Anyone who holds that I am "Un-American" for refusing to own a gun can take a long walk off a short plank, in my opinion. Preferably off the top of a skyscraper, but I'm not fussy.
I also firmly believe that if the situation in America changed radically, that some sort of truce could be achieved, that gun advocates should at least consider putting something on the table. Nothing for nothing. It may be that those advocates would reject giving up any freedoms, but it should be by choice and not by obstinacy.
And that is really my bottom-line on any of this. Any view held "just because" - regardless of what it is - is stupid, naive and ultimately very destructive. Views should be considered, rational and based on the best information available at the time.
I don't have to agree with a view to agree that it is rationally-held. I don't have to disagree with a view to believe it irrational. If you believe that 1+1=2 because a purple ant told you so in a dream, it's an irrational belief. That it is true is of no consequence.
The discussion is mostly going round in circles as we're covering really only one specific cause of a very general problem that all first-past-the-post democracies and republics have.
There's two possible solutions that I can think of which would kill the root cause outright - proportional representation would be one, doubling the sizes of house and senate, having first- and second-place candidates enter, and setting their vote's worth equal to the percent they got in the election (they represent who voted for them, no more and no less), would be another. In either case, the idea would be to make the impact any feasible corruption can have sufficiently small that it is infeasible to maintain it.
If corporations must be treated as individuals, in addition to the individuals comprising them, then all corporations have a vote in and of themselves in addition to the vote cast by the members. That sounds dodgy to me.
Just so we're clear, are you calling all anti-gun people crazy, or merely distinguishing between those anti-gun people who are sane from those who are not?
Even easier fix - if a service is "Common Carrier", it is not responsible for the content on it. That is why phone services can't be sued if someone does something illegal over them, same with the post office. (Which is one big reason it's Bad Juju for ISPs to differentiate between users. If they aren't Common Carrier, they ARE liable for content. Same as newspapers or magazines are, even if the author of an article isn't a member of the staff. They're not Common Carriers, they select. Slashdot isn't liable for comments again because they're Common Carrier - they're not selecting who can post and everyone plays by the same rules - even though in many ways they look like a newspaper.)
In the Old Days, when people used Archie to find files, the authors of FTP and Archie weren't liable for a damn thing. Common Carriers. LimeWire is perceived (right or wrong) as not a Common Carrier. Fix that perception (if necessary by fixing the code) and the law will protect it in every country that recognizes the notion. (Which is most of them, US included.)
I said "you shouldn't need to add it to the language syntax", I did not say they developed it that way. I deal with correct design only, whether or not that is the design that any given group uses.
In this case, the correct design is to have security pushed into the kernel, since security implemented once WILL have fewer bugs than security implemented in many places, and checks done once WILL be faster than the same checks made at multiple levels.
You are correct. Actually, strong languages like Occam-Pi are better for security as the security is largely a product of making things much more specific. It is ambiguity that allows a lot of bugs to creep in.
It's essentially mandatory access controls at the object level. In which case, you shouldn't need to add it to the language syntax - you should be able to code it into the virtual machine and use the security labeling available in the native OS. The security would then be scripted as data, rather than hard-coded, allowing any existing program to gain this security with no modification to the code, merely a suitable XML file with the MAC labeling data. Minimal bloat, the speed should be unaffected (since the OS runs the same number of checks, just on different settings per class), and you get most of the benefit.
(The only difference is that their system would have each class running checks against other classes, which is unnecessarily bulky.)
128-bit logic was being developed in the 1970s. I could easily see 256-bit processors being of practical use today (since UUIDs, IPv6 addresses, and other portable data types tend to be 128-bits and it's handy to be able to handle two objects at the same time). This would imply that a "next-generation" processor should really be 512-bits.
TUBA was intended to solve that problem by having an extensible address. If you added another level to the network, you automatically added another byte to the network address. There was a lot of value to this approach (and IPv6 borrows the concept in the way it implements hierarchical addressing), but TUBA was abandoned because hardware manufacturers didn't want the complexity of variable-length addressing. Having a fixed-length address that was padded made much more sense to them. Which is understandable. An array is easy to work to as you can always jump to a specific entry. TUBA would have required address tables to use a tree for everything. It's not horrible to search, compared to the IPv4 scheme, but the overheads are much higher (you need lots of pointers, malloc/free operations, etc) and tools designed to work with IP addresses become much more complex internally.
I do think it might be handy to have a protocol derived from TUBA, though.
IPv6 addressing is wonderfully simple. Because it is hierarchical, in one byte units, there are at most 256 upstream, 256 parallel and 256 downstream router addresses for any given router. The lowest 48 bits are taken from the MAC addresses.
The only time you need to hold more addresses than 768 is if you are supporting Mobile IP or NEMO using transitory addresses (the original IPv6 mechanism), where re-routing is handled with temporary router entries that last 30 seconds or until the computer/network moves to a new network, whichever comes first.
Typical IPv4 router tables - especially for ISPs - are huge. You don't need 8 Mb router tables unless you plan on holding upwards of a million routes. I don't know if anyone sells corporate-grade routers that small any more.
Since there are no situations where you will ever want a more specific rule for a route (other than to support transitory addresses), you don't need to search for the most specific case of a routing rule. If you have found the first case, it will be the only case. Even in the transitory address case, you're comparing the whole IPv6 address, so there will be exactly one match for it, so the worst case is looking for two matches for strings. This means that searches are much, much faster. On large routers, you can use the three bytes as indexes into the table of hierarchical addresses and then use a tree to store the transitory addresses. You can search both in less time than it takes to search an IPv4 router table.
I tend to prefer reserving the term "invention" for where the bulk of the work is totally new and "innovation" for where the bulk of the work is simply a refinement on something that already exists. (Under this definition, there is very little in the way of true invention, which is actually quite realistic. True inventors are extremely rare.)
However, these are not the legal definitions. In this situation, it is the legal definitions that matter, no matter how anyone else defines the terms or how rational or irrational the legal definitions may be. (Obviously, if my definitions were used, the patent system would not have moved past the four digit range.)
There are plenty of situations where RDS or SCTP would be useful but aren't used. Which is a damn shame. What is the point of having a bunch of solutions to the major networking problems of today if nobody uses them?
(And, to be fair, apps don't make much use of these protocols because routers don't often support them. They're good for LANs and extranets, though. However, perhaps that means we should try bullying the router companies into adding support.)
In effect, that is exactly what the judge has done. Windows, Linux, the *BSDs - they all use encryption. Ok, he could probably get away with using MSDOS. Social networking will also pose a problem - if he can't use a computer with encryption, then any web browser with SSL or TLS support is automatically off-limits. So he's allowed to log on to a social networking site, provided he doesn't use any software to do it. Unless the guy has a psychic link (unencrypted) to Facebook or whatever, that will pose an... interesting challenge.
I think it was Asimov who wrote the short story "A Perfect Fit". It might be time to revisit some of the less-explored aspects of technology bans.
You've made claims but not offered any reason for them.
How, precisely, do you propose to attack an IPSec connection to an A1-rated computer? (Remember, these things are mathematically demonstrably secure.)
How, precisely, do you propose that anyone with access to the computer could add false votes to an A1-rated computer?
There is no "signing" in the system in the way you seem to believe.
Networking the computers is the ONLY way to ensure security, as it is the ONLY way to ensure that what is stored after the election in the counting computer is what SHOULD be stored after the election in the counting computer.
No, you will not be able to cast votes at the voter registration office. You would cast votes at the polling station and have the same strict physical requirements as always, BUT there will be the additional verification that what is in the system matches up 1:1 with the population that voted.
No, nobody can tamper with it, that's why I've stipulated so much bloody security. Machines that are input-only (where the voter registration office adds users) have mandatory access control, as do the voting machines themselves (by definition, since that is part of what A1 means). The counting system is essentially output only from the users perspective and therefore has no user account to crack. Input over the network would be via IPSec-utilized certificates with both client and server validating each other. Since the server has a pre-programmed list of acceptable voting machines, additional machines cannot be added in.
Since I stipulated that the code and mathematical proof of the code were to be circulated, the machine cannot alter the vote. If it could, this would be known well in advance, since it's trivial to compare the proof with the code to see if they differ, and trivial to inspect a proof to see if the code could do that.
Slashdot Mirror
...I'm not impressed with any browser right now. Chrome still has privacy issues (and also has standards conformance issues), Firefox is getting very slow and will occasionally leave zombie processes, IE is as naff as always, Opera and Safari don't support the plugins that I actually do need.
And NONE of them support scripting using LaTeX or Metapost (HTML is becoming an inferior typesetting language rather than the presentation language it used to be, with virtually nobody implementing the complex standards anyway). Seems to me that if people want CSS and HTML to let you typeset, you'd be better off with a browser supporting LaTeX 2e and the A tag natively, then emulating HTML. The results can't be any worse and would add all the features people wanted in HTML5 and will doubtless pester for in HTML6.
Sharks go into a feeding frenzy when things are being ripped up.
I won't pretend to be a subject-matter expert in 18th century English, but I have a number of books from 1750-1780 (the timespan of interest). These are originals, not copies or updates. They are from a mix of backgrounds and include philosophy texts, physics texts, medical texts, cookbooks and personal diaries. A total of about a dozen or so rare books of that vintage.
I can say with absolute certainty that I =am= in a superior position to say whether the Second Amendment is ambiguous than the average Joe, and likely superior to many judges on the grammar.
Now, I won't say I'm better than them over the legal interpretation, but that is distinct to the grammatical phrasing. To me, the grammar in the Second Amendment is simply not consistent with a single interpretation, given the nature of grammar of that vintage. However, Legal English is not the same as Common English. If there is a single reading that works with Legal English, I'll accept that.
The Japanese did actually land in Alaska, but my knowledge of the extent of that invasion is limited. It was certainly very limited. However, I am not convinced the Second Amendment made much of a difference. Britain has technically never been invaded (every "invasion" of Britain for which any record exists was by invite). Britain's ownership of weapons has varied over the millenia, but the degree of ownership has not noticeably altered the number of nations attempting attacks or the ability to repel such attacks.
In other words, overseas invasions of a nation tend to be extremely difficult and it takes a very brave soul to say that there is one definite reason in any given case. It seems to me to be a harder problem.
In terms of pro-gun, I guess my attitude has been shaped by the measure of hostility I have received for not wanting to own or carry a gun. That has been the only pro-gun attitude I've really experienced. If you are pro-choice, I appreciate that. Yours has not been an attitude I have encountered a lot of. In the 11 years I've been in the US, I've met exactly one other person who was pro-choice on the issue. Maybe I've just encountered a lot of really whacked-out freaks, that is certainly possible.
I'm not as sure as you on the debt I owe to the Second Amendment. I'm open to the possibility that such a debt exists, and if an impartial analysis of World War 2 does confirm such a debt exists then I'll be willing to acknowledge it.
Certainly, I have no desire to condemn others to any fate, specific or otherwise. Nor do I have any desire to tell any individual or collective what they can or cannot do. (I'd make a lousy politician.)
However, I do dispute that my views are "ok with everyone". I have experienced enough hostility (and one e-mailed death threat) to know that there are plenty of people who really do want to make it illegal to not own. Like I said, you're only the second person in the US I've debated this with who is truly pro-choice. That is a frighteningly bad ratio.
As far as others are concerned, my concerns are limited strictly to others having the means to make an informed choice, the wherewithal to put information over and above either emotion or tradition and then the freedom to exercise that choice. What their choice is or how they made that choice, at that point, is not for me to judge.
I'm Anglo-American, raised in Britain but have birth certificates (legally) for both countries. My view on guns is non-trivial, but can be summarized as:
So, to sum up, I'm not "anti-gun for America" (because I think the situation has long-since deteriorated past the point where that's practical), but I AM "anti-gun" in the sense of America has no bloody right to tell other nations that the Second Amendment should apply to them whether they like it or not.
I am ALSO anti-gun with regards to myself, in that I will not handle a gun under any circumstance, I will not take any orders to do so and will not tolerate any viewpoint that says I should believe otherwise. Anyone who holds that I am "Un-American" for refusing to own a gun can take a long walk off a short plank, in my opinion. Preferably off the top of a skyscraper, but I'm not fussy.
I also firmly believe that if the situation in America changed radically, that some sort of truce could be achieved, that gun advocates should at least consider putting something on the table. Nothing for nothing. It may be that those advocates would reject giving up any freedoms, but it should be by choice and not by obstinacy.
And that is really my bottom-line on any of this. Any view held "just because" - regardless of what it is - is stupid, naive and ultimately very destructive. Views should be considered, rational and based on the best information available at the time.
I don't have to agree with a view to agree that it is rationally-held. I don't have to disagree with a view to believe it irrational. If you believe that 1+1=2 because a purple ant told you so in a dream, it's an irrational belief. That it is true is of no consequence.
The discussion is mostly going round in circles as we're covering really only one specific cause of a very general problem that all first-past-the-post democracies and republics have.
There's two possible solutions that I can think of which would kill the root cause outright - proportional representation would be one, doubling the sizes of house and senate, having first- and second-place candidates enter, and setting their vote's worth equal to the percent they got in the election (they represent who voted for them, no more and no less), would be another. In either case, the idea would be to make the impact any feasible corruption can have sufficiently small that it is infeasible to maintain it.
If corporations must be treated as individuals, in addition to the individuals comprising them, then all corporations have a vote in and of themselves in addition to the vote cast by the members. That sounds dodgy to me.
Yes, but unions are outlawed in several States and damn-well nearly in the rest.
But Pluto got demoted!
Just so we're clear, are you calling all anti-gun people crazy, or merely distinguishing between those anti-gun people who are sane from those who are not?
Apologies for my part in the confusion. We seem to actually not so much be arguing as much as agreeing with excessive roughness. Truce?
Even easier fix - if a service is "Common Carrier", it is not responsible for the content on it. That is why phone services can't be sued if someone does something illegal over them, same with the post office. (Which is one big reason it's Bad Juju for ISPs to differentiate between users. If they aren't Common Carrier, they ARE liable for content. Same as newspapers or magazines are, even if the author of an article isn't a member of the staff. They're not Common Carriers, they select. Slashdot isn't liable for comments again because they're Common Carrier - they're not selecting who can post and everyone plays by the same rules - even though in many ways they look like a newspaper.)
In the Old Days, when people used Archie to find files, the authors of FTP and Archie weren't liable for a damn thing. Common Carriers. LimeWire is perceived (right or wrong) as not a Common Carrier. Fix that perception (if necessary by fixing the code) and the law will protect it in every country that recognizes the notion. (Which is most of them, US included.)
I said "you shouldn't need to add it to the language syntax", I did not say they developed it that way. I deal with correct design only, whether or not that is the design that any given group uses.
In this case, the correct design is to have security pushed into the kernel, since security implemented once WILL have fewer bugs than security implemented in many places, and checks done once WILL be faster than the same checks made at multiple levels.
What evidence do you have that IPv6 routing tables (individual addresses are immaterial) put more strain on routers than IPv4 routing tables?
What evidence do you have that it doesn't deal with multi-homing (the link you provided)?
What evidence do you have that IPSec (IPv6's security) is a form of security by obscurity?
You use a lot of words, but I'm not seeing you say a whole lot.
You are correct. Actually, strong languages like Occam-Pi are better for security as the security is largely a product of making things much more specific. It is ambiguity that allows a lot of bugs to creep in.
It's essentially mandatory access controls at the object level. In which case, you shouldn't need to add it to the language syntax - you should be able to code it into the virtual machine and use the security labeling available in the native OS. The security would then be scripted as data, rather than hard-coded, allowing any existing program to gain this security with no modification to the code, merely a suitable XML file with the MAC labeling data. Minimal bloat, the speed should be unaffected (since the OS runs the same number of checks, just on different settings per class), and you get most of the benefit.
(The only difference is that their system would have each class running checks against other classes, which is unnecessarily bulky.)
128-bit logic was being developed in the 1970s. I could easily see 256-bit processors being of practical use today (since UUIDs, IPv6 addresses, and other portable data types tend to be 128-bits and it's handy to be able to handle two objects at the same time). This would imply that a "next-generation" processor should really be 512-bits.
Actually, you're limited to 2^48 toasters, if you stack them up, since they'll all be on the same segment.
Use Delay-Tolerant Protocol or Licklider Transmission Protocol. They're designed for high-latency space-based networks.
TUBA was intended to solve that problem by having an extensible address. If you added another level to the network, you automatically added another byte to the network address. There was a lot of value to this approach (and IPv6 borrows the concept in the way it implements hierarchical addressing), but TUBA was abandoned because hardware manufacturers didn't want the complexity of variable-length addressing. Having a fixed-length address that was padded made much more sense to them. Which is understandable. An array is easy to work to as you can always jump to a specific entry. TUBA would have required address tables to use a tree for everything. It's not horrible to search, compared to the IPv4 scheme, but the overheads are much higher (you need lots of pointers, malloc/free operations, etc) and tools designed to work with IP addresses become much more complex internally.
I do think it might be handy to have a protocol derived from TUBA, though.
IPv6 addressing is wonderfully simple. Because it is hierarchical, in one byte units, there are at most 256 upstream, 256 parallel and 256 downstream router addresses for any given router. The lowest 48 bits are taken from the MAC addresses.
The only time you need to hold more addresses than 768 is if you are supporting Mobile IP or NEMO using transitory addresses (the original IPv6 mechanism), where re-routing is handled with temporary router entries that last 30 seconds or until the computer/network moves to a new network, whichever comes first.
Typical IPv4 router tables - especially for ISPs - are huge. You don't need 8 Mb router tables unless you plan on holding upwards of a million routes. I don't know if anyone sells corporate-grade routers that small any more.
Since there are no situations where you will ever want a more specific rule for a route (other than to support transitory addresses), you don't need to search for the most specific case of a routing rule. If you have found the first case, it will be the only case. Even in the transitory address case, you're comparing the whole IPv6 address, so there will be exactly one match for it, so the worst case is looking for two matches for strings. This means that searches are much, much faster. On large routers, you can use the three bytes as indexes into the table of hierarchical addresses and then use a tree to store the transitory addresses. You can search both in less time than it takes to search an IPv4 router table.
I tend to prefer reserving the term "invention" for where the bulk of the work is totally new and "innovation" for where the bulk of the work is simply a refinement on something that already exists. (Under this definition, there is very little in the way of true invention, which is actually quite realistic. True inventors are extremely rare.)
However, these are not the legal definitions. In this situation, it is the legal definitions that matter, no matter how anyone else defines the terms or how rational or irrational the legal definitions may be. (Obviously, if my definitions were used, the patent system would not have moved past the four digit range.)
If the guy doesn't join the Amish, he's probably using encryption.
There are plenty of situations where RDS or SCTP would be useful but aren't used. Which is a damn shame. What is the point of having a bunch of solutions to the major networking problems of today if nobody uses them?
(And, to be fair, apps don't make much use of these protocols because routers don't often support them. They're good for LANs and extranets, though. However, perhaps that means we should try bullying the router companies into adding support.)
In effect, that is exactly what the judge has done. Windows, Linux, the *BSDs - they all use encryption. Ok, he could probably get away with using MSDOS. Social networking will also pose a problem - if he can't use a computer with encryption, then any web browser with SSL or TLS support is automatically off-limits. So he's allowed to log on to a social networking site, provided he doesn't use any software to do it. Unless the guy has a psychic link (unencrypted) to Facebook or whatever, that will pose an... interesting challenge.
I think it was Asimov who wrote the short story "A Perfect Fit". It might be time to revisit some of the less-explored aspects of technology bans.
You've made claims but not offered any reason for them.
How, precisely, do you propose to attack an IPSec connection to an A1-rated computer? (Remember, these things are mathematically demonstrably secure.)
How, precisely, do you propose that anyone with access to the computer could add false votes to an A1-rated computer?
There is no "signing" in the system in the way you seem to believe.
Networking the computers is the ONLY way to ensure security, as it is the ONLY way to ensure that what is stored after the election in the counting computer is what SHOULD be stored after the election in the counting computer.
No, you will not be able to cast votes at the voter registration office. You would cast votes at the polling station and have the same strict physical requirements as always, BUT there will be the additional verification that what is in the system matches up 1:1 with the population that voted.
No, nobody can tamper with it, that's why I've stipulated so much bloody security. Machines that are input-only (where the voter registration office adds users) have mandatory access control, as do the voting machines themselves (by definition, since that is part of what A1 means). The counting system is essentially output only from the users perspective and therefore has no user account to crack. Input over the network would be via IPSec-utilized certificates with both client and server validating each other. Since the server has a pre-programmed list of acceptable voting machines, additional machines cannot be added in.
Since I stipulated that the code and mathematical proof of the code were to be circulated, the machine cannot alter the vote. If it could, this would be known well in advance, since it's trivial to compare the proof with the code to see if they differ, and trivial to inspect a proof to see if the code could do that.