I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. But what the hell, I'll give it one more try:
"Impartial software?" "Impartial ballot?" That doesn't make sense. The issue is the partiality of people, not of inanimate objects. As long as one or both are impartial the result is the same. You can have biased people judging a neutral thing, or you can have neutral people judging a differentiated thing, or you can have neutral people judging neutral things. In any of those cases you should get an output that in unaffected by human bias. You solution of one from each interested party and one from a pool just doesn't work, because you won't be guaranteed a unanimous decision.
Not at all. A mechanical voting machine can't do logic like "if (candidate.party == 'GREEN') then (candidate.votes += 100)". (Not unless your mechanical voting machine was designed by Charles Babbage...) OK, so you don't know what a backdoor is. Fair enough. What I was talking about was a real *backdoor* a secret way to modify the tally through the normal interface. Both unreviewed mechanical devices, and unreviewed electronic devices are susceptible to this. Reviewed electronic machines are not. Reviewed electronic machines are also not susceptible to the problem you described.
My position is pretty much that of the ACM: "voting systems should enable each voter to inspect a physical (e.g., paper) record to verify that his or her vote has been accurately cast, and to serve as an independent check on the result produced and stored by the system." It's also pretty much the position of computer security experts like Avi Rubin and Bruce Schneier.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any independent authority or expert who thinks that paperless DREs, even peer-reviewed open-sourced ones, should be trusted.
Of course an argument from authority doesn't make right; but to dismiss the view of experts, backed up by a majority of the membership of the premiere professional associate for software, as "the traditional luddite position" is ludicrous. Nowhere in my comments will you find me saying that an electronic voting machine shouldn't produce a paper verification, or that said verification shouldn't be used as a backup. Nowhere in any of the articles that you linked will you find somebody advocating that said paper ballots be tallied by hand to obtain the certified result. You are advocating hand counted paper ballots. This is what I'm arguing against with you. The position you have presented so far is not in line with the ACM proposal that you linked. I believe, however, that mine is.
So what? If the open access is attractive to customers, AT&T will be forced to open the B block by the market instead of the FCC.
I don't think we have to worry about that happening though, 'cause Verizon will simply price their open-access service out of the market. Then when nobody buys it they can tell the FCC how terrible an idea it was.
Do they sell Honda, Acura, Nissan, or Infiniti vehicles there? All of them have mild blue LED interior ambient lighting at all times as a standard feature.
This argument is going in circles. As I said earlier, you can find impartial experts to review impartial software. There is no such thing, however, as an impartial ballot, since somebody has already used it to vote one way or the other. Regardless, you could have checks from all the interested parties to at least get consensus. Hypothetical situation: you have two candidates, and representatives for one side raise objections on a ballot that the other side thinks should count as a vote for them... That's way harder to resolve than the similar dispute over a voting machine. You can reject any machine both sides don't approve of before the voting has started, and design the machine to produce clearly discrete results, but you can't reject the ballot without disenfranchising the voter. Mine is a much easier problem to solve.
Regarding your counting of ballots, keep in mind that recounts rarely return the same numbers. Multiple recounts typically return an array of unique values. That is a fundamental flaw in distributed human counting. If you have a solution to it that is actually workable, yours will be the first.
The average person doesn't even consider the typical embedded system to be a "computer", much less actually read those stories about holes, so that seems like a non-issue to me. They trust ATMs and Credit Card processing machines, and that's despite the fact that most people have clearly demonstrated the find their credit card more valuable than their vote. The majority consensus already seems to be that electronic voting is more secure even with these current, broken machines. They keep voting for their localities to buy them after all...
As for a "back-door that effects all electronic machines by a manufacturer" I have two things to say. First, that is still exactly equivalent to a mechanical voting machine. Second, something like that should be caught in the independent review of the code (which should be in ROM on the machines. Unchangeable. Ever. Period. It shouldn't even be copied to RAM to execute. It should run in place).
You are taking the traditional luddite position, because you seem to be incapable of understanding how electronic voting could work securely. Yet you're willing to fool yourself that manual vote tallying doesn't have equivalent or worse problems. Why is that?
You cite the Florida 2000 election in an interesting way as well, even though it seems to back my position. Florida used paper ballots. You say people "mistakenly" believe that Bush won the popular vote, yet no full count was ever done that put Gore ahead in the popular vote, so how can you say "mistakenly"? (Yes, this takes into account the Florida Ballot Project review which only counted rejected ballots, even though there were discrepancies in the recounts of the accepted ballots. It is estimated that thousands of people voted for the wrong candidate, even though they had the paper ballot in front of them to review. The ballot is static, whereas an interactive system could have validated the voter's choice... "Are you sure you want to vote for Candidate Joe?"... The whole situation exhibits exactly the types of problems with paper voting that we would want to move to secure electronic voting to avoid in the future.
I state my position again: The problem with the machines isn't that they're electronic or computerized. The problem with the machines is that they aren't open to examination by experts and interested parties before being certified; and that said experts and interested parties can't block the certification when they find problems.
I think that my default position outlined in my initial post is one of respect. I go into interactions with more senior engineers than myself with an attitude of respect. The assumption is that they are competent, and have insight from their experience. However in a working relationship it quickly becomes apparent to even the inexperienced that somebody is either unskilled in their field of experience or unwilling to share that knowledge in a productive way. Unless those people provide some level of manual labor (they won't) such people are equally as useless.
In many companies, titles and salary levels are based on years of experience, not quality or level of knowledge and work. Hence the need for an independent judgment for each person.
I don't know enough to say whether this is specific to my generation, as I wasn't around to see how those older than me treated the people above them when they were young.
The summary has three pretty common statements in it:
they have no job loyalty, they demand more than they're worth, they disrespect older employees, Let's take them on individually, shall we? I think I can, since I think they all apply to me in one way or another...
No job loyalty? Well, my employer will ditch me whenever it's convenient for them, so why shouldn't I treat them the same? My older co-workers do the same. This is a fact of the modern workplace and is generation neutral.
Demand more than we're worth? Ok... Well if I have a job offer for 20% more elsewhere, I'm worth 20% more... It's not my problem that you have "no budget for raises" three consecutive years. My value increased over those years even if your shitty business model didn't. Now if you want to tell me that I demand more than I'm worth to you, then we'll talk... Or if you want to revisit the loyalty issue, maybe I'll be willing to cut you some salary slack... Either way, I also don't think this is a generational issue since many of my older co-workers are significantly overpaid for their contribution level without even needing to ask. This leads into the third point.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves. The ones that a right all the time because of what their resume says, and not due to any critical thinking, and who contribute zero to an effort beyond their experience can go suck a nut. I can put an older co-worker into one of these buckets within a few technical conversations. If somebody disagrees with me on a technical issue and tells me why with a reasoned explanation, they go in the "earned my respect, and a mental note to learn as much from them as possible". If the same situation arises and the more senior co-worker explains that their right by quoting their resume to me they go in the "probably full of shit 90% of the time" bucket.
You've missed my point. You get experts to verify every aspect of the engineering "at the factory". The tampering controls are to make it trivial for the average person to verify that the box is still compromised.
It is not easy to understand a system of paper ballots. It's easy to think you understand. There are tens of millions of voters in this country. The task of counting all the ballots in a reasonable timeframe is unfathomable to the majority of people. I actually wonder if you comprehend how complex it is. Have you already forgotten the recent botched elections? Have you not heard of how the "simple" system has been subverted in our own country in the past?
Lastly, it will be no difficult for the average person to understand and trust electronic voting than it was for them to understand and trust mechanical voting (which is a huge step up from paper), and many states have been using that for decades.
Yeah. What do you do when "something is wrong"? If the answer is "re-vote", how do you fix the people who claim they are disenfranchised because they can't get back to the polls a second time for whatever reason. How do you compare the numbers on the paper ballots to the master list in a timely fashion?
Knowing there was fraud isn't enough. The idea is to prevent the problem.
Your post is yet another that assumes electronic voting was a solution searching for a problem. It was a solution to real problems with manual voting.
But not just the design, but the implementation, distribution, installation, and configuration of the systems would have to be protected. Every line of code must be scrutinized by experts, and every installed voting machine must be check by a different sort of expert. But pretty much any doofus can monitor the collection of ballot boxes or look over the shoulder of someone counting physical ballots. That makes it easier to verify the use of paper ballots than electronic ones.
Your assessment of the situation remains clouded by the current batch of really shitty voting machines. Machines *can* be designed in such a way that tampering is obvious, and that code updates are either impossible, or impossible to do with out breaking the same types of protections that are used on traditional ballot boxes. Look at some of the hacks that have occurred on the Diebold machines... Same key for all the boxes... Security seals on one screw, but not the other, etc...
The code should not have to be expertly reviewed for every machine for every election. It should be trivial (given an open system and process, which is impossible with the current vendor(s)) to verify that all the systems are running the same code that they were running at certification time by non-skilled or even generally oblivious people. It should be unnecessary to ever update the code on these boxes after certification/manufacturing (could be done at the same time), so there's no reason for it to even be possible. The devices shouldn't be networked. Etc..
If impartial ballot counter can't be found, how do you expect to find impartial software/hardware designers and reviewers?
Presumably you design the equipment well before you know what it will be used to tally. You should be able to find plenty of qualified designers and reviewers for a device before any particular candidate or issue is associates with it; thus making bias irrelevant. Additionally, while you can work around bias, it's easier to do it for a handful of designs than for tens of millions of ballots.
With an electronic system, if the state isn't allowed to run simulated elections or do detailed inspection of the voting machine and software, the window of opportunity for tampering is huge, the potential for altering the result is high, and the risk of detection is minimal. Honestly, that's an unfair assumption have in this debate. Yes, the current electronic machines have this problem. However, that is a problem with the current machines and manufacturers, not with electronic voting in general. If you assumed the same restrictions on traditional ballot boxes you wouldn't know, for example, if there were already a bunch of ballots in the box before the election started.
That's why the ballots can be counted, or viewed by multiple parties, who should all agree on the final counts. That's why a fraudster could simply swap ballot boxes before the counting began. Or stuff ballots. Or... Well, you get the idea.
Just as you can't guarantee the machine hasn't been tampered with, you can't verify the ballot box hasn't been tampered with. It is the exact same problem.
The problem is the lack of even a single impartial ballot counter. Whereas an expertly designed and reviewed machine can be reasonably guaranteed to be bias-free.
Fixing elections is not something that has been enabled by new technology. The problem here is that the technology was supposed to reduce the fraud and inaccuracies, but it turns out it's just as hackable as the old pen & paper or punchcard systems despite the higher cost.
The worst type of user is the tech guy who doesn't work in IT. They always think they know better, they have a massive attitude, and a huge superiority complex. If you can prove to me you know your shit, I'll give you some leeway, but that leeway is probably just having your box dumped out into the DMZ, and you screw it up, you fix it. Let me preface this by saying that this may not apply to you...
I'm a non-IT tech guy who used to work in IT. I work under the assumption that any given IT person I'm working with is somebody who is stuck there because they're not good enough to move into another tech position, until they prove otherwise (Those people also have a massive attitude and superiority complex. If they didn't, BOFH wouldn't be funny.). Yes, there are fantastic system, software, and network administrators out there. I've heard rumor of good DBAs, and I once met a good storage networks engineer, but he moved to sales when he found out it paid better. Most "IT" people, in my experience, have neither the understanding, nor the desire to understand the "whys" of their job. They do what the trade rag, the certification instructor, the internet forum, or, if you're lucky, the manual told them to do, and apply zero critical thinking to the task at hand.
I think that your approach is sound, but it can be hard to realize it can go both ways. Which is scary, because the most likely situation is a bad tech consumer working working with a bad IT person.
Quite frankly, in the world of steel forgings, at this point in our technological history that's a load of bull. Not only that, but if it weren't, these parts would not be used in something as safety critical as a nuclear reactor. There may be some trade secrets involved, but I doubt they couldn't be re-discovered with relative ease. Remember that they've become the only manufacturer, not that they have always been...
I don't think I'm ignoring the issues of trust... I think you just didn't read the whole thread.
I think the bandwidth issue was pretty core to my argument. Dynamic content can, and should, use less bandwidth than static content to obtain the same level of interactivity.
I'm also not ignoring disability. I just don't think we should say "the web is text" and be stuck with that model forever in order to cater to a lowest common denominator. The fact of the matter is that the web has grown into an application platform. The "screen reader" mentality needs to evolve, because what's broken there is the assumption that the web provides consumable content and not interactive applications. The web doesn't need to be held back because of that.\
Lastly, I think you're limiting your view of the situation severely when you say "when a company puts up a page that is utterly useless unless you run flash, or javascript, that's a company I turn away from". Corporate home pages are among the least valuable content on the internet, both in terms of usefulness to end users, and in terms of revenue creation. They should be ignored entirely in discussions about the future of web technology.
Maybe if you're measuring from the ISP's backbone router, out, and not counting in-network hops? Maybe they meant 0.89 fewer hops? Sounds like they need to proofread.
Areva would be able to produce the ingot itself with an investment of about 100 million euros ($155 million), he said as workers coated the inside of a Japan Steel reactor shell part with stainless steel to prevent rust.
It also says companies are making $100 million down payments...
Something tells me that this will rapidly develop into a non-story from its current status as an advertisement for the solicitation of venture capital.
Slashdot Mirror
Here I thought this bit of mis-information died along with HD-DVD.
HD-DVD used the same blue laser as BluRay. From there you should be able to extrapolate why everything else in your post is incorrect.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of any independent authority or expert who thinks that paperless DREs, even peer-reviewed open-sourced ones, should be trusted.
Of course an argument from authority doesn't make right; but to dismiss the view of experts, backed up by a majority of the membership of the premiere professional associate for software, as "the traditional luddite position" is ludicrous. Nowhere in my comments will you find me saying that an electronic voting machine shouldn't produce a paper verification, or that said verification shouldn't be used as a backup. Nowhere in any of the articles that you linked will you find somebody advocating that said paper ballots be tallied by hand to obtain the certified result. You are advocating hand counted paper ballots. This is what I'm arguing against with you. The position you have presented so far is not in line with the ACM proposal that you linked. I believe, however, that mine is.
So what? If the open access is attractive to customers, AT&T will be forced to open the B block by the market instead of the FCC.
I don't think we have to worry about that happening though, 'cause Verizon will simply price their open-access service out of the market. Then when nobody buys it they can tell the FCC how terrible an idea it was.
Do they sell Honda, Acura, Nissan, or Infiniti vehicles there? All of them have mild blue LED interior ambient lighting at all times as a standard feature.
Sounds like an "urban legend" sort of law to me.
In New York, highway patrol has red lights.
I think that sums up quite well why the title to my initial post is what it is.
This argument is going in circles. As I said earlier, you can find impartial experts to review impartial software. There is no such thing, however, as an impartial ballot, since somebody has already used it to vote one way or the other. Regardless, you could have checks from all the interested parties to at least get consensus. Hypothetical situation: you have two candidates, and representatives for one side raise objections on a ballot that the other side thinks should count as a vote for them... That's way harder to resolve than the similar dispute over a voting machine. You can reject any machine both sides don't approve of before the voting has started, and design the machine to produce clearly discrete results, but you can't reject the ballot without disenfranchising the voter. Mine is a much easier problem to solve.
Regarding your counting of ballots, keep in mind that recounts rarely return the same numbers. Multiple recounts typically return an array of unique values. That is a fundamental flaw in distributed human counting. If you have a solution to it that is actually workable, yours will be the first.
The average person doesn't even consider the typical embedded system to be a "computer", much less actually read those stories about holes, so that seems like a non-issue to me. They trust ATMs and Credit Card processing machines, and that's despite the fact that most people have clearly demonstrated the find their credit card more valuable than their vote. The majority consensus already seems to be that electronic voting is more secure even with these current, broken machines. They keep voting for their localities to buy them after all...
As for a "back-door that effects all electronic machines by a manufacturer" I have two things to say. First, that is still exactly equivalent to a mechanical voting machine. Second, something like that should be caught in the independent review of the code (which should be in ROM on the machines. Unchangeable. Ever. Period. It shouldn't even be copied to RAM to execute. It should run in place).
You are taking the traditional luddite position, because you seem to be incapable of understanding how electronic voting could work securely. Yet you're willing to fool yourself that manual vote tallying doesn't have equivalent or worse problems. Why is that?
You cite the Florida 2000 election in an interesting way as well, even though it seems to back my position. Florida used paper ballots. You say people "mistakenly" believe that Bush won the popular vote, yet no full count was ever done that put Gore ahead in the popular vote, so how can you say "mistakenly"? (Yes, this takes into account the Florida Ballot Project review which only counted rejected ballots, even though there were discrepancies in the recounts of the accepted ballots. It is estimated that thousands of people voted for the wrong candidate, even though they had the paper ballot in front of them to review. The ballot is static, whereas an interactive system could have validated the voter's choice... "Are you sure you want to vote for Candidate Joe?"... The whole situation exhibits exactly the types of problems with paper voting that we would want to move to secure electronic voting to avoid in the future.
I state my position again: The problem with the machines isn't that they're electronic or computerized. The problem with the machines is that they aren't open to examination by experts and interested parties before being certified; and that said experts and interested parties can't block the certification when they find problems.
I think that my default position outlined in my initial post is one of respect. I go into interactions with more senior engineers than myself with an attitude of respect. The assumption is that they are competent, and have insight from their experience. However in a working relationship it quickly becomes apparent to even the inexperienced that somebody is either unskilled in their field of experience or unwilling to share that knowledge in a productive way. Unless those people provide some level of manual labor (they won't) such people are equally as useless.
In many companies, titles and salary levels are based on years of experience, not quality or level of knowledge and work. Hence the need for an independent judgment for each person.
I don't know enough to say whether this is specific to my generation, as I wasn't around to see how those older than me treated the people above them when they were young.
Guh. Should have previewed. It's they're, not their.... I want to wring my own neck over that crap....
No job loyalty? Well, my employer will ditch me whenever it's convenient for them, so why shouldn't I treat them the same? My older co-workers do the same. This is a fact of the modern workplace and is generation neutral.
Demand more than we're worth? Ok... Well if I have a job offer for 20% more elsewhere, I'm worth 20% more... It's not my problem that you have "no budget for raises" three consecutive years. My value increased over those years even if your shitty business model didn't. Now if you want to tell me that I demand more than I'm worth to you, then we'll talk... Or if you want to revisit the loyalty issue, maybe I'll be willing to cut you some salary slack... Either way, I also don't think this is a generational issue since many of my older co-workers are significantly overpaid for their contribution level without even needing to ask. This leads into the third point.
No respect for older co-workers? Well I'll cop to this in a conditional fashion. I have tremendous respect for some of my older co-workers. The ones that pull their weight, keep up with required knowledge, and appreciate the value of a more junior contributor than themselves. The ones that a right all the time because of what their resume says, and not due to any critical thinking, and who contribute zero to an effort beyond their experience can go suck a nut. I can put an older co-worker into one of these buckets within a few technical conversations. If somebody disagrees with me on a technical issue and tells me why with a reasoned explanation, they go in the "earned my respect, and a mental note to learn as much from them as possible". If the same situation arises and the more senior co-worker explains that their right by quoting their resume to me they go in the "probably full of shit 90% of the time" bucket.
Right, 'cause that worked out really well for our communications infrastructure.
You know... Everything else about the Carter administration was wonderful too. Let's bring it all back!
If we did it right, less people would get rich off a lucrative government contract.. Or the same number of people would be less-rich.. Either way.
1. Land government contract
2. Do little or nothing.
3. Profit.
Duh. Clearly that should have said "still uncompromised".
You've missed my point. You get experts to verify every aspect of the engineering "at the factory". The tampering controls are to make it trivial for the average person to verify that the box is still compromised.
It is not easy to understand a system of paper ballots. It's easy to think you understand. There are tens of millions of voters in this country. The task of counting all the ballots in a reasonable timeframe is unfathomable to the majority of people. I actually wonder if you comprehend how complex it is. Have you already forgotten the recent botched elections? Have you not heard of how the "simple" system has been subverted in our own country in the past?
Lastly, it will be no difficult for the average person to understand and trust electronic voting than it was for them to understand and trust mechanical voting (which is a huge step up from paper), and many states have been using that for decades.
Yeah. What do you do when "something is wrong"? If the answer is "re-vote", how do you fix the people who claim they are disenfranchised because they can't get back to the polls a second time for whatever reason. How do you compare the numbers on the paper ballots to the master list in a timely fashion?
Knowing there was fraud isn't enough. The idea is to prevent the problem.
Your post is yet another that assumes electronic voting was a solution searching for a problem. It was a solution to real problems with manual voting.
But not just the design, but the implementation, distribution, installation, and configuration of the systems would have to be protected. Every line of code must be scrutinized by experts, and every installed voting machine must be check by a different sort of expert. But pretty much any doofus can monitor the collection of ballot boxes or look over the shoulder of someone counting physical ballots. That makes it easier to verify the use of paper ballots than electronic ones.
Your assessment of the situation remains clouded by the current batch of really shitty voting machines. Machines *can* be designed in such a way that tampering is obvious, and that code updates are either impossible, or impossible to do with out breaking the same types of protections that are used on traditional ballot boxes. Look at some of the hacks that have occurred on the Diebold machines... Same key for all the boxes... Security seals on one screw, but not the other, etc...The code should not have to be expertly reviewed for every machine for every election. It should be trivial (given an open system and process, which is impossible with the current vendor(s)) to verify that all the systems are running the same code that they were running at certification time by non-skilled or even generally oblivious people. It should be unnecessary to ever update the code on these boxes after certification/manufacturing (could be done at the same time), so there's no reason for it to even be possible. The devices shouldn't be networked. Etc..
If impartial ballot counter can't be found, how do you expect to find impartial software/hardware designers and reviewers?
Presumably you design the equipment well before you know what it will be used to tally. You should be able to find plenty of qualified designers and reviewers for a device before any particular candidate or issue is associates with it; thus making bias irrelevant. Additionally, while you can work around bias, it's easier to do it for a handful of designs than for tens of millions of ballots.Just as you can't guarantee the machine hasn't been tampered with, you can't verify the ballot box hasn't been tampered with. It is the exact same problem.
The problem is the lack of even a single impartial ballot counter. Whereas an expertly designed and reviewed machine can be reasonably guaranteed to be bias-free.
Fixing elections is not something that has been enabled by new technology. The problem here is that the technology was supposed to reduce the fraud and inaccuracies, but it turns out it's just as hackable as the old pen & paper or punchcard systems despite the higher cost.
I'm a non-IT tech guy who used to work in IT. I work under the assumption that any given IT person I'm working with is somebody who is stuck there because they're not good enough to move into another tech position, until they prove otherwise (Those people also have a massive attitude and superiority complex. If they didn't, BOFH wouldn't be funny.). Yes, there are fantastic system, software, and network administrators out there. I've heard rumor of good DBAs, and I once met a good storage networks engineer, but he moved to sales when he found out it paid better. Most "IT" people, in my experience, have neither the understanding, nor the desire to understand the "whys" of their job. They do what the trade rag, the certification instructor, the internet forum, or, if you're lucky, the manual told them to do, and apply zero critical thinking to the task at hand.
I think that your approach is sound, but it can be hard to realize it can go both ways. Which is scary, because the most likely situation is a bad tech consumer working working with a bad IT person.
Quite frankly, in the world of steel forgings, at this point in our technological history that's a load of bull. Not only that, but if it weren't, these parts would not be used in something as safety critical as a nuclear reactor. There may be some trade secrets involved, but I doubt they couldn't be re-discovered with relative ease. Remember that they've become the only manufacturer, not that they have always been...
Five years is not much time at all.
I don't think I'm ignoring the issues of trust... I think you just didn't read the whole thread.
I think the bandwidth issue was pretty core to my argument. Dynamic content can, and should, use less bandwidth than static content to obtain the same level of interactivity.
I'm also not ignoring disability. I just don't think we should say "the web is text" and be stuck with that model forever in order to cater to a lowest common denominator. The fact of the matter is that the web has grown into an application platform. The "screen reader" mentality needs to evolve, because what's broken there is the assumption that the web provides consumable content and not interactive applications. The web doesn't need to be held back because of that.\
Lastly, I think you're limiting your view of the situation severely when you say "when a company puts up a page that is utterly useless unless you run flash, or javascript, that's a company I turn away from". Corporate home pages are among the least valuable content on the internet, both in terms of usefulness to end users, and in terms of revenue creation. They should be ignored entirely in discussions about the future of web technology.
Maybe if you're measuring from the ISP's backbone router, out, and not counting in-network hops? Maybe they meant 0.89 fewer hops? Sounds like they need to proofread.
It also says companies are making $100 million down payments...
Something tells me that this will rapidly develop into a non-story from its current status as an advertisement for the solicitation of venture capital.