I've always wondered how people can claim they can 1:1 a drive that's been rewritten 70 times. I'd believe 1:71, but there's no way the tool could pick the only incriminating cycle out of 71 cycles without recovering all of them to examine. Alternatively, you could try overwriting your incriminating xfs disks with filesystems of non-incriminating images and text, and see if they quit when they find data.
The reason this whole thing is vitally important is that there are legitimate explanations for at least some of these things (e.g, the 88,400 extra votes were absentee ballots which hadn't been counted in the number of voters but had been counted in the number of votes). In order for people to trust the election results, it is necessary to examine them and determine whether they are accurate or not.
It's perfectly plausible that Bush won OH and FL based on absentee ballots; there were certainly enough absentees to cover the margin, and these are obviously not counted in exit polls which showed Kerry winning. If that happened, it tells us things about the electoral process, and lays to rest a lot of doubts that people have about the election. It is therefore important to raise and quantify the issues, rather than just ignoring them.
Before this election, only 30% of voters polled in FL thought that the election would be honest. Surely this is a cause for alarm, and something needs to be done about it, like explaining the election in sufficient detail that doubters will be satisfied that the outcome was actually correct.
Dance music and major-label electronica isn't any good (for listening to, at least). Etherine, for example, is doing musically interesting things with the instrumentation. There's a lot of possibilities which open up when you can use arbitrary instruments as needed, and can actually play them with feeling.
The reward is only to get people to agree to the details of the rules, not to actually pay for the whole thing. $10m was sufficient to get the spaceship one team to fly with the specified turnaround time, altitude, and weight, rather than using different values which would make their achievement harder to compare to other teams. $50m should be sufficient to get teams to set up docking with a particular sort of station connection, orbit the earth twice, and so forth. Without the prize money, someone laying out the rules wouldn't have the necessary authority to get people to agree on what is sufficient.
I personally find it interesting that the people offering the prize intend to have their own space station in orbit at that point.
It's not like 1200-word essays will actually solve the major problems. What entrants do for free is demonstrate that they have ideas about how to solve the problems. The major effort is actually putting those ideas into practice, which is likely to be done either by IBM employees or by the students who get scholarships; in either case, with funding from IBM.
It is only possible to have a direct self-compiling system when the target is native code. The standard Java build process only generates native code internally and temporarily, so that isn't really possible.
As for machine-level abstraction, all of the recent x86 processors are actually RISC-style processors running optimized x86 emulators. Even RISC processors these days are run with microcode running on different and newer RISC architectures. Pretty much only microcontrollers actually implement the processor you're using in hardware.
People who want to put their computers on different desks every day. Business people who travel frequently like to pull out their desktop-like computers and use them in their hotels. People like to take them to cafes and use them there. People sometimes bring their work machines home. Gamers take their machines to other other's houses, etc. I actually know someone who uses his laptop without a battery and plugs it into a UPS.
Essentially, some people like to move their computers from place to place, while never using them in places without outlets.
I think fingerprint ID for guns may be a better idea than most biometrics. The tricks for defeating fingerprint scanners (using copied fingerprints) generally involve stuff that would make it hard to shoot a gun with that hand. For that matter, the same hacks could be used to leave your fingerprints on the gun, which is currently considered strong evidence.
Of course, biometrics aren't good authentication for almost any other purpose they're put to. In order to have a good biometric test, you need to make the user demonstrate that the data source is actually a functioning body part, which is too intrusive for many purposes.
BitTorrent is probably one of the most transparent systems. It gives each file a unique identifier which is not particular to the site providing the data, so it is much easier to precisely identify an illegally-distributed torrent than a mirrored web or ftp site. It's also easy to determine what places a file is coming from.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ??AA put up searchable lists of the torrents which they claim to own and which they'd looked at and don't own. Clients could check against these lists and inform the user about the claimed license status of files before downloading them.
I don't know about you, but I use wireless sound all the time. Wires just don't have the frequency response you want, and the impedance-matching with your ear is generally terrible.
Plants don't mutate or reproduce fast enough for that to really happen naturally. But with people helping them reproduce, it's bound to happen. You'll notice that it was the cash crop that got resistance, not any of the other plants which were presumably also in the area.
The brain actually has special support for recognizing the sounds of language. This means that you may be able to hear the differences between two sounds, but not with the right part of your brain. Then you'll be able to tell the difference if you're really listening to that one sound, but you can't tell the difference fast enough in the middle of continuous speech. This area is also used to produce the sounds, so it's harder to produce a non-native sound in the middle of talking than to produce it by itself. For instance, I can say "Bach" the German way, but I have to stop speaking naturally for a moment to do it.
The major Linux market is only for servers (and embedded devices) currently. The bandwagon is for the desktop, where a whole bunch of companies are pushing Linux (not necessarily effectively).
Of course, Photoshop and Illustrator aren't really desktop apps (at least, not for people who actually buy them). They're workstation apps; they're used by people who have a computer to use them on.
My guess is that they'll contribute PDF-viewing stuff, which has always been a loss-leader for them anyway.
Living in new england, I've often thought that having something on fire in your mouth during the winter isn't a bad idea. Of course, since smoking is bad for you, smelly, and addictive, I wouldn't want to take it up just to keep warm for a couple of months. On the other hand, "cigarettes" which didn't produce much of anything would be really nice.
Did your polling place run out of the privacy sleeves, too? Sounds like my polling place in MA. I'm surprised that Kerry voters in NC didn't hold their ballots closer to their chests, though; I stood in line for probably 20 minutes, and I don't think anyone saw the non-blank side of my ballot.
I suspect that NC, like most states, has a reasonable number of liberal voters in cities, and conservative voters in rural areas. You are probably not unusual in voting for Kerry at your polling place, even if your polling place is unusual state-wide in being mostly for Kerry.
Of course, it's also possible that NC, upon hearing about the missing explosives in Iraq, decided that Bush really wasn't a good wartime president, honest, or a moderate conservative, and switched to Kerry. Electoral-vote has it at 53-45 based exclusively on poll results from mid-October and before, so we wouldn't know until tonight.
Also, with 53% for Bush and 45% for Kerry, given that 4 random ballots are the same, there is a 44% chance that they are all for Kerry. That is to say, an 8% margin in the voters is not much in terms of how a notable set of ballots will probably look.
There is some concern about the issues involved with turning the binary firmware blob into a string constant in a C file to be compiled into the kernel image so that it is accessible to the driver before there is a filesystem. Having a license to distribute a file is different from having a license to distribute a program that, without any input, outputs the file.
Of course, you get into awkward circumstances here. What if your program messes up and fails to output the file exactly as it was supposed to? You now have a program that outputs a modified version of the file. Of course, you'd want to fix it so the device would work, but OSS developers don't want to be responsible for copyright violation if their code misbehaves.
So they want to be legally permitted to distribute non-working modifications to the firmware (just in case), although they don't care about having any way of making useful modifications to the firmware as sent to the device.
Probably the best thing is for the manufacturers to encrypt the firmware, and have the device decrypt and check it, and let people do whatever they want with the binary (because they won't be able to do anything useful other than send it to the device). Or, alternatively, let people mess with the firmware however they want, so long as they don't mind not having any source for it.
Of course, I think the standard practice in Linux is to distribute the original file and a program to convert it into a C file to be compiled into the driver, steps which are no less legitimate than converting it into PCI bus transfers. Then it is simply embedded in the kernel binary in much the same way that it was embedded in the filesystem.
I think Linux at some point included some C files of firmware, which were determined not to be properly licensed and were removed in favor of only distributing untranslated firmware files.
Someone analyzed the first debate, and it turns out that he doesn't pause for a longer time before saying something longer, like you would expect if he were being told what to say. Furthermore, he adds extra junk after answering the question sometimes, when he clearly doesn't need more time. E.g., something of the form, "If you're talking about (description of position), which I'm in favor of, I'm in favor of that." It's possible that he developed the habit of wasting time in speaches to cover prompting, and just does it all the time, but I don't find it particularly convincing.
I'm curious as to exactly why it would be a bad thing for a presidential candidate to be prompted. It's not like the presidency is like a game show, where you're supposed to do it entirely yourself without any help. The president is supposed to chose a cabinet of advisors, whose advice he's expected to at least listen to. In Bush's case in particular, the advice from the people behind the scenes is probably more relevant to the actual decisions he makes that what he can say himself is. We all know that, in most any situation, what Bush would really do is ask his staff what to do. Why shouldn't we hear what his staff would tell him to do?
This is about firmware, which is code which gets sent to the device and helps the device work. These are not drivers, which you run on your processor. Typically, firmware is written either for some weird variant of C, or for a completely non-sequential language (for FPGAs). You'd probably have a really hard time compiling it if you had the source. One set of firmware I know of only builds with a particular non-current version of a $10K/seat commercial compiler; this isn't unusual. Furthermore, they're often signed, if only to keep people from messing up their hardware by loading a broken version into it.
In any case, these aren't programs for your computer, and it is merely a matter of convenience that they aren't sealed into the device at the factory (so you can update them without sending the device back). It doesn't make any more sense to want the source for the firmware for your NIC than it would be to ask for the source to the firmware for your microwave.
Previously, the firmware was only available from the manufacturers directly, and licensed such that you weren't supposed to redistribute it. OpenBSD people complained that making people go online to update their NIC so that it works is a bit annoying, and that they'd like to be able to get it from OpenBSD, whose CD they would be getting and who would be happy to download the firmware for them.
This research shows that, if you learn a language as an adult, your pronunciation will suck. Children are primed to learn to sound like a native speaker, whereas adults will learn to speak with an accent and be unable to hear distinctions not present in languages they learned as infants. If you were to spend 2 years speaking Hindi, you'd be able to speak Hindi fluently, but you'd still mess up the aspirated consonants. If you learn Greek as an adult, you'll never get the gammas in quite the right place, and if you learn Xhosa now, you'll be forever making the wrong clicks.
Of course, native speakers mess up their phonology frequently enough (due to having their mouths full, singing, or something) that people will still understand you perfectly well. But you'll get things consistantly wrong that people who learned as infants only mess up on occasion.
Actually, Bush does very well at what infants are learning during this period. All of the junk he says sounds just like English. Had he failed to make the step that they describe, he would have a randomly-varying accent and accidentally say things that sound Hindi or French. It may not be easy to tell what he's trying to say, but it's always clearly English he's trying to say it in.
The one exception I can think of is that the way he pronounces "Abu Gharib" may be a more accurate rendition of the actual Arabic than English-speaking non-phonologists can usually manage. It would indicate a failure to learn English phonology if he was unable to mangle Arabic like everyone else does. (Phonologists, of course, train themselves to say all sorts of things that are unavailable in their native language)
In fact, Bush's main speech issues are that when he pauses, he tends to pause for a long time, and he tends to paraphrase himself to fill up time. It's not hard to understand what he's trying to say because he doesn't speak English well, but rather because he doesn't know what he's trying to say.
Science doesn't have a clear definition of "life" or "intelligence". Evolution is certainly a process of sufficient complexity and circularity that it may be unproductive to exclude from the definitions. After all, it is a classic AI technique, so it is a bit odd to claim that genetic algorithms are a rudimentary form of intelligence, but that things which evolved in nature are not the product of intelligent design.
I expect there to be much confusion when science finds the aggregate life on earth to have all of the properties attributed by the religious to God.
A few weeks ago, he was using a model which I thought makes remarkably little sense: the final prediction was based on a least-squares fit of the poll results over time. But least-squares only makes sense if your model says that the true value varies linearly over time and the reported value is distrubed from that value by noise. Obviously, that's not a good model for votes, because people change their minds (or make up their minds) based on events, which occur in a non-linear fashion. The prediction, for example, didn't take into account the effect of the debates, which caused a sudden change in the true value of the number of people who would vote for each candidate, instead seeing it as a temporary blip in each poll.
At the moment, the least-squares approach is giving such a strikingly different set of results from the other methods (while being essentially unchanged from the beginning of the debates) that he's saying it's not a good estimate at this point. Just goes to show that applying statistics without having a reasonable model of the system is not a useful idea.
Actually, the electoral college is a better candidate for being described as micropolitics, because it makes each area's race matter, rather than getting mixed up into the popular vote. Furthermore, it is useful for isolating fraud in small regions; an area which is overwhelmingly for one party may be inclined to mess with their returns, knowing that nobody will complain or find extra votes implausible. With the EC however, this wouldn't affect the outcome, because the margin by which the winning candidate in a state wins doesn't matter.
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I've always wondered how people can claim they can 1:1 a drive that's been rewritten 70 times. I'd believe 1:71, but there's no way the tool could pick the only incriminating cycle out of 71 cycles without recovering all of them to examine. Alternatively, you could try overwriting your incriminating xfs disks with filesystems of non-incriminating images and text, and see if they quit when they find data.
The reason this whole thing is vitally important is that there are legitimate explanations for at least some of these things (e.g, the 88,400 extra votes were absentee ballots which hadn't been counted in the number of voters but had been counted in the number of votes). In order for people to trust the election results, it is necessary to examine them and determine whether they are accurate or not.
It's perfectly plausible that Bush won OH and FL based on absentee ballots; there were certainly enough absentees to cover the margin, and these are obviously not counted in exit polls which showed Kerry winning. If that happened, it tells us things about the electoral process, and lays to rest a lot of doubts that people have about the election. It is therefore important to raise and quantify the issues, rather than just ignoring them.
Before this election, only 30% of voters polled in FL thought that the election would be honest. Surely this is a cause for alarm, and something needs to be done about it, like explaining the election in sufficient detail that doubters will be satisfied that the outcome was actually correct.
Dance music and major-label electronica isn't any good (for listening to, at least). Etherine, for example, is doing musically interesting things with the instrumentation. There's a lot of possibilities which open up when you can use arbitrary instruments as needed, and can actually play them with feeling.
The reward is only to get people to agree to the details of the rules, not to actually pay for the whole thing. $10m was sufficient to get the spaceship one team to fly with the specified turnaround time, altitude, and weight, rather than using different values which would make their achievement harder to compare to other teams. $50m should be sufficient to get teams to set up docking with a particular sort of station connection, orbit the earth twice, and so forth. Without the prize money, someone laying out the rules wouldn't have the necessary authority to get people to agree on what is sufficient.
I personally find it interesting that the people offering the prize intend to have their own space station in orbit at that point.
It's not like 1200-word essays will actually solve the major problems. What entrants do for free is demonstrate that they have ideas about how to solve the problems. The major effort is actually putting those ideas into practice, which is likely to be done either by IBM employees or by the students who get scholarships; in either case, with funding from IBM.
It is only possible to have a direct self-compiling system when the target is native code. The standard Java build process only generates native code internally and temporarily, so that isn't really possible.
As for machine-level abstraction, all of the recent x86 processors are actually RISC-style processors running optimized x86 emulators. Even RISC processors these days are run with microcode running on different and newer RISC architectures. Pretty much only microcontrollers actually implement the processor you're using in hardware.
People who want to put their computers on different desks every day. Business people who travel frequently like to pull out their desktop-like computers and use them in their hotels. People like to take them to cafes and use them there. People sometimes bring their work machines home. Gamers take their machines to other other's houses, etc. I actually know someone who uses his laptop without a battery and plugs it into a UPS.
Essentially, some people like to move their computers from place to place, while never using them in places without outlets.
I think fingerprint ID for guns may be a better idea than most biometrics. The tricks for defeating fingerprint scanners (using copied fingerprints) generally involve stuff that would make it hard to shoot a gun with that hand. For that matter, the same hacks could be used to leave your fingerprints on the gun, which is currently considered strong evidence.
Of course, biometrics aren't good authentication for almost any other purpose they're put to. In order to have a good biometric test, you need to make the user demonstrate that the data source is actually a functioning body part, which is too intrusive for many purposes.
BitTorrent is probably one of the most transparent systems. It gives each file a unique identifier which is not particular to the site providing the data, so it is much easier to precisely identify an illegally-distributed torrent than a mirrored web or ftp site. It's also easy to determine what places a file is coming from.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ??AA put up searchable lists of the torrents which they claim to own and which they'd looked at and don't own. Clients could check against these lists and inform the user about the claimed license status of files before downloading them.
I don't know about you, but I use wireless sound all the time. Wires just don't have the frequency response you want, and the impedance-matching with your ear is generally terrible.
Plants don't mutate or reproduce fast enough for that to really happen naturally. But with people helping them reproduce, it's bound to happen. You'll notice that it was the cash crop that got resistance, not any of the other plants which were presumably also in the area.
Now I'm imagining a text MUD which includes automatically-generated ink-drawn-style illustrations of significant events and some nice thematic music.
Also, it could have A/V for things where figuring out what you see/hear is part of the challenge:
"In the distance, you hear a sound you can't easily identify. {sound plays}"
"Some strange characters are written on the wall: {image of strange characters}"
Yeah, I was thinking they could sell filters that don't contain nicotine, but instead contain clove oil or hickory scent or something nice like that.
The brain actually has special support for recognizing the sounds of language. This means that you may be able to hear the differences between two sounds, but not with the right part of your brain. Then you'll be able to tell the difference if you're really listening to that one sound, but you can't tell the difference fast enough in the middle of continuous speech. This area is also used to produce the sounds, so it's harder to produce a non-native sound in the middle of talking than to produce it by itself. For instance, I can say "Bach" the German way, but I have to stop speaking naturally for a moment to do it.
The major Linux market is only for servers (and embedded devices) currently. The bandwagon is for the desktop, where a whole bunch of companies are pushing Linux (not necessarily effectively).
Of course, Photoshop and Illustrator aren't really desktop apps (at least, not for people who actually buy them). They're workstation apps; they're used by people who have a computer to use them on.
My guess is that they'll contribute PDF-viewing stuff, which has always been a loss-leader for them anyway.
Living in new england, I've often thought that having something on fire in your mouth during the winter isn't a bad idea. Of course, since smoking is bad for you, smelly, and addictive, I wouldn't want to take it up just to keep warm for a couple of months. On the other hand, "cigarettes" which didn't produce much of anything would be really nice.
Did your polling place run out of the privacy sleeves, too? Sounds like my polling place in MA. I'm surprised that Kerry voters in NC didn't hold their ballots closer to their chests, though; I stood in line for probably 20 minutes, and I don't think anyone saw the non-blank side of my ballot.
I suspect that NC, like most states, has a reasonable number of liberal voters in cities, and conservative voters in rural areas. You are probably not unusual in voting for Kerry at your polling place, even if your polling place is unusual state-wide in being mostly for Kerry.
Of course, it's also possible that NC, upon hearing about the missing explosives in Iraq, decided that Bush really wasn't a good wartime president, honest, or a moderate conservative, and switched to Kerry. Electoral-vote has it at 53-45 based exclusively on poll results from mid-October and before, so we wouldn't know until tonight.
Also, with 53% for Bush and 45% for Kerry, given that 4 random ballots are the same, there is a 44% chance that they are all for Kerry. That is to say, an 8% margin in the voters is not much in terms of how a notable set of ballots will probably look.
There is some concern about the issues involved with turning the binary firmware blob into a string constant in a C file to be compiled into the kernel image so that it is accessible to the driver before there is a filesystem. Having a license to distribute a file is different from having a license to distribute a program that, without any input, outputs the file.
Of course, you get into awkward circumstances here. What if your program messes up and fails to output the file exactly as it was supposed to? You now have a program that outputs a modified version of the file. Of course, you'd want to fix it so the device would work, but OSS developers don't want to be responsible for copyright violation if their code misbehaves.
So they want to be legally permitted to distribute non-working modifications to the firmware (just in case), although they don't care about having any way of making useful modifications to the firmware as sent to the device.
Probably the best thing is for the manufacturers to encrypt the firmware, and have the device decrypt and check it, and let people do whatever they want with the binary (because they won't be able to do anything useful other than send it to the device). Or, alternatively, let people mess with the firmware however they want, so long as they don't mind not having any source for it.
Of course, I think the standard practice in Linux is to distribute the original file and a program to convert it into a C file to be compiled into the driver, steps which are no less legitimate than converting it into PCI bus transfers. Then it is simply embedded in the kernel binary in much the same way that it was embedded in the filesystem.
I think Linux at some point included some C files of firmware, which were determined not to be properly licensed and were removed in favor of only distributing untranslated firmware files.
Someone analyzed the first debate, and it turns out that he doesn't pause for a longer time before saying something longer, like you would expect if he were being told what to say. Furthermore, he adds extra junk after answering the question sometimes, when he clearly doesn't need more time. E.g., something of the form, "If you're talking about (description of position), which I'm in favor of, I'm in favor of that." It's possible that he developed the habit of wasting time in speaches to cover prompting, and just does it all the time, but I don't find it particularly convincing.
I'm curious as to exactly why it would be a bad thing for a presidential candidate to be prompted. It's not like the presidency is like a game show, where you're supposed to do it entirely yourself without any help. The president is supposed to chose a cabinet of advisors, whose advice he's expected to at least listen to. In Bush's case in particular, the advice from the people behind the scenes is probably more relevant to the actual decisions he makes that what he can say himself is. We all know that, in most any situation, what Bush would really do is ask his staff what to do. Why shouldn't we hear what his staff would tell him to do?
This is about firmware, which is code which gets sent to the device and helps the device work. These are not drivers, which you run on your processor. Typically, firmware is written either for some weird variant of C, or for a completely non-sequential language (for FPGAs). You'd probably have a really hard time compiling it if you had the source. One set of firmware I know of only builds with a particular non-current version of a $10K/seat commercial compiler; this isn't unusual. Furthermore, they're often signed, if only to keep people from messing up their hardware by loading a broken version into it.
In any case, these aren't programs for your computer, and it is merely a matter of convenience that they aren't sealed into the device at the factory (so you can update them without sending the device back). It doesn't make any more sense to want the source for the firmware for your NIC than it would be to ask for the source to the firmware for your microwave.
Previously, the firmware was only available from the manufacturers directly, and licensed such that you weren't supposed to redistribute it. OpenBSD people complained that making people go online to update their NIC so that it works is a bit annoying, and that they'd like to be able to get it from OpenBSD, whose CD they would be getting and who would be happy to download the firmware for them.
This research shows that, if you learn a language as an adult, your pronunciation will suck. Children are primed to learn to sound like a native speaker, whereas adults will learn to speak with an accent and be unable to hear distinctions not present in languages they learned as infants. If you were to spend 2 years speaking Hindi, you'd be able to speak Hindi fluently, but you'd still mess up the aspirated consonants. If you learn Greek as an adult, you'll never get the gammas in quite the right place, and if you learn Xhosa now, you'll be forever making the wrong clicks.
Of course, native speakers mess up their phonology frequently enough (due to having their mouths full, singing, or something) that people will still understand you perfectly well. But you'll get things consistantly wrong that people who learned as infants only mess up on occasion.
Actually, Bush does very well at what infants are learning during this period. All of the junk he says sounds just like English. Had he failed to make the step that they describe, he would have a randomly-varying accent and accidentally say things that sound Hindi or French. It may not be easy to tell what he's trying to say, but it's always clearly English he's trying to say it in.
The one exception I can think of is that the way he pronounces "Abu Gharib" may be a more accurate rendition of the actual Arabic than English-speaking non-phonologists can usually manage. It would indicate a failure to learn English phonology if he was unable to mangle Arabic like everyone else does. (Phonologists, of course, train themselves to say all sorts of things that are unavailable in their native language)
In fact, Bush's main speech issues are that when he pauses, he tends to pause for a long time, and he tends to paraphrase himself to fill up time. It's not hard to understand what he's trying to say because he doesn't speak English well, but rather because he doesn't know what he's trying to say.
Science doesn't have a clear definition of "life" or "intelligence". Evolution is certainly a process of sufficient complexity and circularity that it may be unproductive to exclude from the definitions. After all, it is a classic AI technique, so it is a bit odd to claim that genetic algorithms are a rudimentary form of intelligence, but that things which evolved in nature are not the product of intelligent design.
I expect there to be much confusion when science finds the aggregate life on earth to have all of the properties attributed by the religious to God.
A few weeks ago, he was using a model which I thought makes remarkably little sense: the final prediction was based on a least-squares fit of the poll results over time. But least-squares only makes sense if your model says that the true value varies linearly over time and the reported value is distrubed from that value by noise. Obviously, that's not a good model for votes, because people change their minds (or make up their minds) based on events, which occur in a non-linear fashion. The prediction, for example, didn't take into account the effect of the debates, which caused a sudden change in the true value of the number of people who would vote for each candidate, instead seeing it as a temporary blip in each poll.
At the moment, the least-squares approach is giving such a strikingly different set of results from the other methods (while being essentially unchanged from the beginning of the debates) that he's saying it's not a good estimate at this point. Just goes to show that applying statistics without having a reasonable model of the system is not a useful idea.
Actually, the electoral college is a better candidate for being described as micropolitics, because it makes each area's race matter, rather than getting mixed up into the popular vote. Furthermore, it is useful for isolating fraud in small regions; an area which is overwhelmingly for one party may be inclined to mess with their returns, knowing that nobody will complain or find extra votes implausible. With the EC however, this wouldn't affect the outcome, because the margin by which the winning candidate in a state wins doesn't matter.