It's the verification that takes the time and effort. At first glance, it does indeed seem quite simple to make an electronic voting machine. All you require is two variables:
However, that's going to assume that everybody in the system is honest and you've only got one machine. You've now got to verify that every user in the system not only is a registered voter, but hasn't voted at any other terminal. In addition, you have to make sure that someone doesn't get into the box and change the code or just break the terminal. (If you have physical access to a box, you have root / administrator access.)
One slackware box is cheap. Millions might not be. It might be cheaper to go with slackware, but I think a large part of the price involves the touch-screen. Compared to the diebold machines, it would probably be a little cheaper, so I can see your point here.
You now have to put in code that checks with, say, the driver's licence. Now you've got to interface with the DMV database. Ah, nuts, I said database. Now you've got communication protocols and database protocols. If it's not the DMV, then it's going to have to be some other set of records. It's not that hard to do, but I think there's a substantial difference between "getting it to work" and "Guaranteed to work under all circumstances, and we promise that everyone who should vote gets to vote."
Okay, the power goes out. It's restored within about 20 minutes, but what does your box do? Has it lost the votes of the previous people? Does it boot up into voting mode, or does it sit there waiting for a tech to show up? Does your techs want Bush or Kerry in the White House? Do they not care, but were paid off one way or the other?
My view is that the voting machine code should be held to the high standards that military-grade software is. I mean, if the voting machine code is not a national security issue, I don't know WTF is.
All I know about American Law, I learned from Law & Order.
From what I understand, if you act in a way which shows a depraved or reckless indifference towards human life, you can be charged with murder in the second degree.
That's been my only HDD failure in 19 years - a Quantum Fireball lct08. It actually burst into flames. Yes, really - fire came out of one of the chips, burning the HDD's board and cable. (Aside: That's how you use an apostrophe with an abbreviation, kids.)
They refused to send me a replacement PCB. They also refused to send me the replacement chip. I now have a total of 0 Quantum products in my house.
Russian components... American components... They're all made in Taiwan! I guess that's one benefit to outsourcing to India and China.
Remember how the P3s had the unique ID, and it went over really well, and now the P4s all have unique IDs? The market, not the government, will decide what goes into the chips.
This would be a better post if it's wasn't 5. Bye.
You're not the only country in the world. You're not even the only country on your land mass.
Your friendly neighbour to the north (Canada) allows filesharing technology. The Internet cares not for borders.
Our stores will sell gear without DRM. (It's cheaper to make stuff without it.)
You can walk or drive to Canada. If not, our stores will ship gear to you. Pick up a high-flow toilet while you're here - they're great!
Also, our legal system is loser-pay. That means that if someone sues me in a Canadian court and I win, they pay my legal bills. The RIAA's tactics can't work in Canada.
I like PnP organizers. They're cheap, versatile, and nobody will steal them unless they want your data. I can drop mine, get it wet(ish), drill a hole through it, or leave it in the lobby overnight.
It will work right away and requires no batteries. It automatically intergrates with every single device I own. If I want to use it to email a contact, all I have to do is open my book next to a computer and type the email address I have written down into any email program. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It will seamlessly integrate into legacy analog machines (e.g. the phone network) using the same interface.
I can even rip out a page and hand someone a note if I really want to. What's the PDA equivalent - giving someone the battery cover?
Best of all, they're a fraction of the price of the electronic versions. I can get an organizer for $0 (from my old University).
I've been called a bad example by other Engineers. "Wait, you're an Electrical Engineer and you don't have a cell phone or a PDA?" I just like paper. It's easier to use and works with any number of contacts. (How many of the "hundreds" of people in your PDA have you called this week? This month?)
In the main computer labs, you could choose from over 200 Macs. These were generally used for surfing, email, and word processing.
In the Engineering building, we had Solaris boxes. These were really old and clunky, but they had AutoCAD and MATLAB installed.
In a few of the labs(including the final project labs), you could find Windows boxes. There weren't that many, and the priviledges were too low to be useful. (Have fun doing any development if you're not an administrator!)
Several other labs let you telnet into a unix server and run the epxensive programs. (I still telnet into the unix server to check my email with PINE.)
If you couldn't use all of them you wouldn't get your degree because you couldn't run some of the programs required for assignments.
So, in answer to your question, no, not every school is locked into MS.
The ideal way is to use a surface-mount solder and a surfcaae-mount soldering heat gun. It's really quite an easy process this way, but in can be expensive. You're looking at a few thousand dollars for the right equipment. This gives a really good, high-reliability soldering job. (You acutally run the solder across the pins, and when it melts, the solder will bead onto the pins and stay there.)
Another way is to use regular solder, a fine-tipped regular soldering iron, and a microscope. You have to have pretty steady hands, but this will work just fine. (This is what we use at work.) You'll have to use flux or it just won't work very well at all.
If you're running thousands of boards, you get a robot to wave-solder the chips on.
The same holds true in Canada as well. The loser in a ***CIVIL*** trial pays the loser's legal fees, including the cost of filing the suit, representation, lost wages, etc. The idea is that if you sue me and I win, I won't lose any money.
One of the types of damages is "actual damages", which include all legal bills and other things for which you have a receipt. (Not exactly true, but close enough.) Thus, in order to have the lawyer's bill paid by the courts, you'd have to have paid the bill yourself first. So, if you wanted to pay your lawyer a million dollars an hour, they'd have to be paid out of your pocket. However, I don't think the judge would buy the "million dollars an hour" argument; if one of the reciepts is totally out of line, then you could potentially be charged with fraud. Obviously if your lawyer is on staff, you're not paying them $2 billion a year.
The US is one of a few countries where there isn't a loser-pay system. I remember watching some show on an American station where a lawyer spent her day suing people for no reason, simply because all the lawyer is ever out of pocket is the price of filing the complaints. The lawyer had ruined many lives by forcing people to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal fees, lose time from work, etc.
Next time the sun and the moon are out at the same time, try and figure out the distance and angle the sun has to be to make the moon light up the way it is and have your shadow get cast at that angle. It's quite impressive if you can visualize it.
I'm an Engineer. (EIT) I get paid the same no matter what I do at work. (For example, I'm getting paid to post this.) If I invent something fantastic, my company gets richer, not me. If someone rips off my circuit and/or the code that runs it, I wouldn't be mad - I'd be happy. Not only did someone hear about my work, but they thought it was better than anything they could possibly come up with. Not only that, but they thought it was so great that they were willing to go to JAIL just to use my invention. THAT'S a compliment.
As for the car idea, that's exactly what Henry Ford did. His replicating machine was the assembly line. Before he came along, cars were hand-built and friggin' expensive. The old auto makers had a conniption when they found out that cars could be made really cheaply. They lobbied the US gov't to try and prevent Ford from making cars because it would infringe on their livelihood. We know how that turned out.
The RIAA has to accept the fact that the music they have the rights to is going to be copied. Any copy protection system will fail under the correct circumstances. No system - NO SYSTEM - is secure. Instead of trying to supress MP3 and file-sharing, what they should do (have to do?) is come up with a value-added system. I can tell when I get a 96k/22kHz MP3 instead of a 128K/44K MP3. It bothers me when I get a song and it's cut off. I hate hisses, pops, whines, or the guy's dog barking in the background. Why not sell me the songs differently? Let me go down to Future Suck or Worst Buy and let me select a disk full of MP3s for $20. Print me off the lyrics or let me get special remixes. (You'd be surprised how hard it is to get certain remixes of some songs.) Hallmark does this with custom greeting cards.
Slashdot Mirror
For details, google for "Microsoft Search Engine".
NatSec is only an issue when profits are involved.
Thanks, Mike!
I rarely see ads in either IE or Mozilla.
Pretty soon, GWB will have killed more Americans (by sending them to their deaths in Iraq) than Al-Queda.
Go ahead: one little -1 won't affect my Karma.
Pee in the bathtub. The walls are waterproof.
It's the verification that takes the time and effort. At first glance, it does indeed seem quite simple to make an electronic voting machine. All you require is two variables:
do
{
if( candidate1_button )
{
candidate1++;
print_result();
}
if( candidate2_button )
{
candidate2++;
print_result();
}
}while( ELECTION_TIME );
announce_winner();
However, that's going to assume that everybody in the system is honest and you've only got one machine. You've now got to verify that every user in the system not only is a registered voter, but hasn't voted at any other terminal. In addition, you have to make sure that someone doesn't get into the box and change the code or just break the terminal. (If you have physical access to a box, you have root / administrator access.)
One slackware box is cheap. Millions might not be. It might be cheaper to go with slackware, but I think a large part of the price involves the touch-screen. Compared to the diebold machines, it would probably be a little cheaper, so I can see your point here.
You now have to put in code that checks with, say, the driver's licence. Now you've got to interface with the DMV database. Ah, nuts, I said database. Now you've got communication protocols and database protocols. If it's not the DMV, then it's going to have to be some other set of records. It's not that hard to do, but I think there's a substantial difference between "getting it to work" and "Guaranteed to work under all circumstances, and we promise that everyone who should vote gets to vote."
Okay, the power goes out. It's restored within about 20 minutes, but what does your box do? Has it lost the votes of the previous people? Does it boot up into voting mode, or does it sit there waiting for a tech to show up? Does your techs want Bush or Kerry in the White House? Do they not care, but were paid off one way or the other?
My view is that the voting machine code should be held to the high standards that military-grade software is. I mean, if the voting machine code is not a national security issue, I don't know WTF is.
All I know about American Law, I learned from Law & Order.
From what I understand, if you act in a way which shows a depraved or reckless indifference towards human life, you can be charged with murder in the second degree.
Again, IANAL. IWTV. (I watch TV)
I hope it's as good as the movie. The ones based off those Lord of the Rings movies seemed drawn out.
That's been my only HDD failure in 19 years - a Quantum Fireball lct08. It actually burst into flames. Yes, really - fire came out of one of the chips, burning the HDD's board and cable. (Aside: That's how you use an apostrophe with an abbreviation, kids.)
They refused to send me a replacement PCB. They also refused to send me the replacement chip. I now have a total of 0 Quantum products in my house.
I can only think of one reason to bring a laptop into the john, and that's for pr0n.
;)
If you're halfway through and start wondering what's going on on Slashdot, I'm a little concerned for you.
I liked the finger. That was a good program.
Russian components... American components... They're all made in Taiwan! I guess that's one benefit to outsourcing to India and China.
Remember how the P3s had the unique ID, and it went over really well, and now the P4s all have unique IDs? The market, not the government, will decide what goes into the chips.
This would be a better post if it's wasn't 5. Bye.
You're not the only country in the world. You're not even the only country on your land mass.
Your friendly neighbour to the north (Canada) allows filesharing technology. The Internet cares not for borders.
Our stores will sell gear without DRM. (It's cheaper to make stuff without it.)
You can walk or drive to Canada. If not, our stores will ship gear to you. Pick up a high-flow toilet while you're here - they're great!
Also, our legal system is loser-pay. That means that if someone sues me in a Canadian court and I win, they pay my legal bills. The RIAA's tactics can't work in Canada.
Link to the bounty.
Up until he decided to keep the money, that was a pretty clever idea. I'm impressed.
I like PnP organizers. They're cheap, versatile, and nobody will steal them unless they want your data. I can drop mine, get it wet(ish), drill a hole through it, or leave it in the lobby overnight.
It will work right away and requires no batteries. It automatically intergrates with every single device I own. If I want to use it to email a contact, all I have to do is open my book next to a computer and type the email address I have written down into any email program. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It will seamlessly integrate into legacy analog machines (e.g. the phone network) using the same interface.
I can even rip out a page and hand someone a note if I really want to. What's the PDA equivalent - giving someone the battery cover?
Best of all, they're a fraction of the price of the electronic versions. I can get an organizer for $0 (from my old University).
I've been called a bad example by other Engineers. "Wait, you're an Electrical Engineer and you don't have a cell phone or a PDA?" I just like paper. It's easier to use and works with any number of contacts. (How many of the "hundreds" of people in your PDA have you called this week? This month?)
I just graduated from UVic.
In the main computer labs, you could choose from over 200 Macs. These were generally used for surfing, email, and word processing.
In the Engineering building, we had Solaris boxes. These were really old and clunky, but they had AutoCAD and MATLAB installed.
In a few of the labs(including the final project labs), you could find Windows boxes. There weren't that many, and the priviledges were too low to be useful. (Have fun doing any development if you're not an administrator!)
Several other labs let you telnet into a unix server and run the epxensive programs. (I still telnet into the unix server to check my email with PINE.)
If you couldn't use all of them you wouldn't get your degree because you couldn't run some of the programs required for assignments.
So, in answer to your question, no, not every school is locked into MS.
I thought the same thing: ... and?
You can do it a few ways:
The ideal way is to use a surface-mount solder and a surfcaae-mount soldering heat gun. It's really quite an easy process this way, but in can be expensive. You're looking at a few thousand dollars for the right equipment. This gives a really good, high-reliability soldering job. (You acutally run the solder across the pins, and when it melts, the solder will bead onto the pins and stay there.)
Another way is to use regular solder, a fine-tipped regular soldering iron, and a microscope. You have to have pretty steady hands, but this will work just fine. (This is what we use at work.) You'll have to use flux or it just won't work very well at all.
If you're running thousands of boards, you get a robot to wave-solder the chips on.
The same holds true in Canada as well. The loser in a ***CIVIL*** trial pays the loser's legal fees, including the cost of filing the suit, representation, lost wages, etc. The idea is that if you sue me and I win, I won't lose any money.
One of the types of damages is "actual damages", which include all legal bills and other things for which you have a receipt. (Not exactly true, but close enough.) Thus, in order to have the lawyer's bill paid by the courts, you'd have to have paid the bill yourself first. So, if you wanted to pay your lawyer a million dollars an hour, they'd have to be paid out of your pocket. However, I don't think the judge would buy the "million dollars an hour" argument; if one of the reciepts is totally out of line, then you could potentially be charged with fraud. Obviously if your lawyer is on staff, you're not paying them $2 billion a year.
The US is one of a few countries where there isn't a loser-pay system. I remember watching some show on an American station where a lawyer spent her day suing people for no reason, simply because all the lawyer is ever out of pocket is the price of filing the complaints. The lawyer had ruined many lives by forcing people to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal fees, lose time from work, etc.
No, that was the Band.
Next time the sun and the moon are out at the same time, try and figure out the distance and angle the sun has to be to make the moon light up the way it is and have your shadow get cast at that angle. It's quite impressive if you can visualize it.
I'm an Engineer. (EIT) I get paid the same no matter what I do at work. (For example, I'm getting paid to post this.) If I invent something fantastic, my company gets richer, not me. If someone rips off my circuit and/or the code that runs it, I wouldn't be mad - I'd be happy. Not only did someone hear about my work, but they thought it was better than anything they could possibly come up with. Not only that, but they thought it was so great that they were willing to go to JAIL just to use my invention. THAT'S a compliment.
As for the car idea, that's exactly what Henry Ford did. His replicating machine was the assembly line. Before he came along, cars were hand-built and friggin' expensive. The old auto makers had a conniption when they found out that cars could be made really cheaply. They lobbied the US gov't to try and prevent Ford from making cars because it would infringe on their livelihood. We know how that turned out.
The RIAA has to accept the fact that the music they have the rights to is going to be copied. Any copy protection system will fail under the correct circumstances. No system - NO SYSTEM - is secure. Instead of trying to supress MP3 and file-sharing, what they should do (have to do?) is come up with a value-added system. I can tell when I get a 96k/22kHz MP3 instead of a 128K/44K MP3. It bothers me when I get a song and it's cut off. I hate hisses, pops, whines, or the guy's dog barking in the background. Why not sell me the songs differently? Let me go down to Future Suck or Worst Buy and let me select a disk full of MP3s for $20. Print me off the lyrics or let me get special remixes. (You'd be surprised how hard it is to get certain remixes of some songs.) Hallmark does this with custom greeting cards.
Every time someone orders a site down, it gets posted on Slashdot.
Guess what - the sites go down.
In Canada, anything you write or build is automatically copyrighted. That includes the form and the content.
I don't know about the US.