I don't see what the contribution is. If the requirement is to have X counts to achieve a confident result, you can just get X sets of people to count it. No need to bother with the computer.
The computer did the first count, so at most, you only need X-1 sets of people to count. Moreover, as benhocking pointed out, the types of errors that are made are different. Anytime you can get N different methods to agree on the same answer, you have more confidence in the result than just repeating one method N times.
In the UK and Canada where hand counts are the norm, debates like the one we're having about the accuracy of the count itself never arise, because none of the candidates or the electorate including the losers see the need to challenge the vote. That situation would change quite rapidly if automated vote counting was brought in.
Right. Just look at what happened this year. Nearly all of the losing politicians demanded recounts. Oh wait, no they didn't. So your argument is simply wrong.
Hand counting is not infallible, but at least a layman can go and watch the people doing the counting.
Big deal... I can watch the guy count. I can understand what he's doing. Without actually recounting it myself, I can't make sure he's actually counting it correctly. The fact that it's simpler to understand doesn't make it simpler to verify.
How do you determine whether your voting machine is working or not ? You have to employ an engineer ($$$), and then you have to trust that he's not lying to you or incompetent when he tells you it's working just fine. Why bother ?
There's no need for an engineer that costs a lot of money. You just hand recount the ballots. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the end, it doesn't matter if the machine is working properly or not. It only matters that it produces the right numbers.
Define "serious challenge". I double-dare you.
I meant "serious" in the sense of formally asking for a recount. If it is asked, my belief is that it should be granted. But full-scale recounts aren't the issue, because you're going to pay the time & effort to hand-count them whether the first pass is done with machines or hand-counted. Your argument that every politician is going to demand a recount is simply not credible. How many politicians demanded a recount in this last election?
Who gets to decide which sample gets tested, and how can we be sure that they don't tip off any would-be vote riggers ?
This isn't a hard problem: you randomly select a few and throw in the outliers in the Republican/Democrat/Independent distribution. You can also allow challenges to certain machines if observers have any questions about them (i.e. there appeared to be 3K votes already on the machine before the polls opened). You have an independent group of observers to do this, so it's not the same people running the machines as testing them.
Another option is just to recount all of the machines by hand. Then in order to rig the election, a worker would have to rig the electronic machines and rig the recount. This is still a time saver because now you only have to hand-count the ballots once.
Your question about how to avoid collusion in order to rig an election is a tough one. But you have the same problems happen with paper ballots, so it's not a problem with e-voting specifically.
And what if your sample finds problems. What do you do then ?
Then you check everything. That's why you have a paper trail in the first place.
I want a transparent, public count process easily understood by the layman...
It's a machine that counts votes. How hard a concept is that to understand?
...with as near as possible to zero potential for any candidate or interest to interfere with the vote. No automated vote counting system can provide this.
I keep hearing this argument that electronic voting machines should have a paper trail. Apart from the fact that it is meaningless (any programmer knows that the printout doesn't have to match the vote that was recorded internally) there is a more fundamental problem.
The idea is that the voter can verify that the printout matches their wishes. The printout is the master copy, not the internal count. The latter is just more convenient -- for the voter and for the tallier.
By adding a printer, you're conceding that the electronic voting machine may not innately be able to provide complete confidence in the result.
No piece of non-trivial software can ever be considered bug free, and therefore, no software ever deserves complete confidence. For that matter, hand-counting shouldn't have your complete confidence either. People make mistakes; shit happens. That's the whole reason for QC.
By conceding that the electronic voting machine's results cannot be trusted, you're saying that you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts. In other words, you're back to hand-counting paper votes each time.
You should have no basis upon which to reject a recount. The paper ballots are the masters. If there is a serious challenge, then they should be recounted. But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
Except, unfortunately, as of this writing neither Google news nor CNN or FOXNEWS has any stories about this, or even returns any results for 'Badnarik arrest'. Not only is a presidential candidate on the ballot in 48 states refused entry into a presidential debate, but his arrest isn't even covered!
Actually, Google News does have a few stories about it, you just have to search for
badnarik arrested.
Note, however, that Slashdot comes up second in that list (at the time of my post).
Why would Badnarik, who campaigns bitterly against such government intrusions on private citizens and corporations, take part in such an intrusion?
Because somewhere around (i.e. pulled from my ass) 97% of Americans have never heard of the Libertarian Party and 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Michael Badnarik.
And now an additional 2% have heard of him, and will recognize his name (for the next few weeks) as that whacko from the Liber-whatever party that got arrested.
He now gets prominent headlines and a nice association with freedom of speech. He's making himself impossible to ignore. The right thing to do, IMHO.
Sacrificing your prinicples in order to get votes... yup, he sounds like a natural politician to me.
Netscape 4.x and beyond were just nowhere near the standard of IE 5.x and above.
Did you pay attention to the previous discussion? The argument was about NS 4 vs. IE 4... IE 4 was when IE really won the browser war, so arguments about how IE5 is superior are pointless.
Microsoft didn't win because IE was preinstalled, it won because it was a better browser.
Wrong (and right). IE won because it was a better browser. But the only reason it was better was that it was preinstalled. Featurewise, both browsers were about equal... but IE was already there, and it was good enough, so there was no reason to download Netscape.
Well, that's exactly what a trademark is supposed to protect against; someone else using your brand-name for their own purposes. And because the way the trademark law works, Microsoft has to defend their trademarks; writing letters, suing; or else they risk the trademark being generic; free for anyone to use.
...yeah, because if there's one thing we know about the archetypical terrorist, it's that they frequent frickin' jewelry stores.
Aren't diamonds one of the best ways to surreptitiously carry around (i.e. smuggle) large amounts of money? So asking jewelry stores and pawn shops about their recent purchases might not be a bad idea...
Except, because of the way it works, a popup blocker has no effect, unless it blocks ALL popups (possible in Opera, but not in Moz), or JavaScript is disabled (I can do that like *that* in Opera, but Moz? No.
Strange. I clicked on it in Galeon (based on Mozilla), and didn't see a single popup. I have JavaScript enabled and only disallow unrequested popups.
You didn't mention that 'evil sig' meant "spawns hundreds of windows that won't stop popping up.
Don't worry... IE will have a pop-up blocker sometime next year. For those of us who have joined the 21st century and use a goodbrowser, popups aren't a problem.
When the CEO comes in screaming "ship it! ship it!" and you are given very little alternative, that is exactly what happens. And yes, it does cost more money to repair the bugs later than sooner, but management knows no logic...
There most certainly is logic. I know because I've been in that situation. While I'm not a CEO and I'm not in the software industry, I have released a product with "bugs" which we'll try to work around or fix eventually. So I think I understand the desire to ship things before they're "ready".
It comes down to two simple words: market share. Every day, people are making decisions and buying products that serve their needs. If they're not buying your product, then they're buying your competitor's product. Moreover, if you don't have a relatively recent product, you start to lose mindshare. It's very possible to release a product so late that even though it's the best, no one cares anymore: they all bought a competitor's product and are locked in to it. So in a very real sense, every day you delay the release date is costing you money.
Thus, you need to balance the desire to ship a product with no bugs with the desire to have a product in the market now. And the way to choose when to do that is to balance the monetary costs and try to release the product when the cost is minimized.
Every time the subject of spam comes up, there are always innumerable people talking about how if spam is left unchecked, it's going to destroy the Internet and\or e-mail as we know it... Are there, in fact, any NUMBERS backing this hypothesis up?
Yes, in fact there was one quoted in the article:
More than half of e-mail users trust it [email] less because of spam, while one in four uses it less
In other words, spam has already destroyed email as we knew it. There was a time when you could put your address on your webpage without fear of getting spammed to death. In fact, this was true as few as five years ago. This allowed people to connect easier with people they don't know or people they used to know.
But now, it can take less than nine minutes for you to start getting spam after posting your email address somewhere. So those who don't install spam filters will guard their email addresses or go by pseudonyms, which lowers the usefulness of email.
That would be a very bad name. You see, "Darlsux" is a contraction of "Darl's Unix" (Darl'sU'x, and drop the apostrophes), which implies that Darl owns whatever makes up "DarlsUx", which of course is Linux. So by changing their name to "DarlsUx", Lindows would be bolstering SCO's claim to owning Linux (at least in the delusions of Darl & Kevin).
Lindows as a name gives the wrong impression about where linux wants to be anyway.
They should concentrate on marketing their product as a decent OS and not a cheap and inferior copy of windows.
How did the goals of Michael Robertson's Lindows become the same as those of Linus Torvalds' Linux? As far as I can tell, a "cheap and inferior copy of Windows" is exactly what Lindows wants to be... it's kind of like the Simpsons episode where Homer's looking for a TV at an outlet mall: "I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny."
All of the participants come from a business administration perspective. It's not really a wonder they think moving elements around in a gantt chart is "higher level work" than writing lines of code.
And most of the posters here come from a coding perspective (either in theory or practice). So it's no wonder that most of the replies indicate that writing a few lines of Perl (or C++ for the really advanced) is "higher level work" than managing all of the business/marketing/technical aspects of a project and/or product.
Stocks are mere gambling, imho. The house always wins...
Actually, it's the opposite: the "player" usually wins. Investing in stocks isn't a zero-sum game, and your expected rate of return is actually positive (at least judging by the last 70+ years... who knows what the future will hold).
yoshi_mon: Who ever said we needed a graphical installer? There is absolutly nothing wrong with a good text installer. And for installing small footprint it's always best.
Kjella: Average consumers
"Average consumers" don't install operating systems. They get an OS pre-installed and never change (or probably even update) it.
The parent-post and replies to it completely miss the irony of putting copy right protection on a disc and then claiming to be 'trusting the consumer'.
What copy (right) protection? Read what the story submitter wrote:
It looks like they'll be releasing multi-sessioned discs with normal audio in the first session, and compressed, DRM'ed music files in the second session, as well added 'extras', including access to exclusive online content. The article explains that the disc's audio
can still be copied
So the audio can still be copied, but they're giving the consumer extras: pre-compressed music files and access to exclusive online content.
Slashdot Mirror
The computer did the first count, so at most, you only need X-1 sets of people to count. Moreover, as benhocking pointed out, the types of errors that are made are different. Anytime you can get N different methods to agree on the same answer, you have more confidence in the result than just repeating one method N times.
In the UK and Canada where hand counts are the norm, debates like the one we're having about the accuracy of the count itself never arise, because none of the candidates or the electorate including the losers see the need to challenge the vote. That situation would change quite rapidly if automated vote counting was brought in.
Right. Just look at what happened this year. Nearly all of the losing politicians demanded recounts. Oh wait, no they didn't. So your argument is simply wrong.
Big deal... I can watch the guy count. I can understand what he's doing. Without actually recounting it myself, I can't make sure he's actually counting it correctly. The fact that it's simpler to understand doesn't make it simpler to verify.
How do you determine whether your voting machine is working or not ? You have to employ an engineer ($$$), and then you have to trust that he's not lying to you or incompetent when he tells you it's working just fine. Why bother ?
There's no need for an engineer that costs a lot of money. You just hand recount the ballots. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. In the end, it doesn't matter if the machine is working properly or not. It only matters that it produces the right numbers.
Define "serious challenge". I double-dare you.
I meant "serious" in the sense of formally asking for a recount. If it is asked, my belief is that it should be granted. But full-scale recounts aren't the issue, because you're going to pay the time & effort to hand-count them whether the first pass is done with machines or hand-counted. Your argument that every politician is going to demand a recount is simply not credible. How many politicians demanded a recount in this last election?
Who gets to decide which sample gets tested, and how can we be sure that they don't tip off any would-be vote riggers ?
This isn't a hard problem: you randomly select a few and throw in the outliers in the Republican/Democrat/Independent distribution. You can also allow challenges to certain machines if observers have any questions about them (i.e. there appeared to be 3K votes already on the machine before the polls opened). You have an independent group of observers to do this, so it's not the same people running the machines as testing them.
Another option is just to recount all of the machines by hand. Then in order to rig the election, a worker would have to rig the electronic machines and rig the recount. This is still a time saver because now you only have to hand-count the ballots once.
Your question about how to avoid collusion in order to rig an election is a tough one. But you have the same problems happen with paper ballots, so it's not a problem with e-voting specifically.
And what if your sample finds problems. What do you do then ?
Then you check everything. That's why you have a paper trail in the first place.
I want a transparent, public count process easily understood by the layman...
It's a machine that counts votes. How hard a concept is that to understand?
Hand-counting doesn't provide this either.
The idea is that the voter can verify that the printout matches their wishes. The printout is the master copy, not the internal count. The latter is just more convenient -- for the voter and for the tallier.
By adding a printer, you're conceding that the electronic voting machine may not innately be able to provide complete confidence in the result.
No piece of non-trivial software can ever be considered bug free, and therefore, no software ever deserves complete confidence. For that matter, hand-counting shouldn't have your complete confidence either. People make mistakes; shit happens. That's the whole reason for QC.
By conceding that the electronic voting machine's results cannot be trusted, you're saying that you have no basis upon which to reject a request for a recount of the paper receipts. In other words, you're back to hand-counting paper votes each time.
You should have no basis upon which to reject a recount. The paper ballots are the masters. If there is a serious challenge, then they should be recounted. But in any case: you should verify a selected sample of the machines' votes in every polling station to make sure that they are giving reasonable numbers. This is just the application of industry-standard quality control procedures to voting machines. It boggles my mind that electronic voting was ever considered without them.
Actually, Google News does have a few stories about it, you just have to search for badnarik arrested. Note, however, that Slashdot comes up second in that list (at the time of my post).
Because somewhere around (i.e. pulled from my ass) 97% of Americans have never heard of the Libertarian Party and 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Michael Badnarik.
And now an additional 2% have heard of him, and will recognize his name (for the next few weeks) as that whacko from the Liber-whatever party that got arrested.
He now gets prominent headlines and a nice association with freedom of speech. He's making himself impossible to ignore. The right thing to do, IMHO.
Sacrificing your prinicples in order to get votes... yup, he sounds like a natural politician to me.
It's as good as anything else SCO has...
Did you pay attention to the previous discussion? The argument was about NS 4 vs. IE 4... IE 4 was when IE really won the browser war, so arguments about how IE5 is superior are pointless.
You're right... IE 4 didn't just crash, it exploded spectacularly, and took down your whole desktop to boot.
Wrong (and right). IE won because it was a better browser. But the only reason it was better was that it was preinstalled. Featurewise, both browsers were about equal... but IE was already there, and it was good enough, so there was no reason to download Netscape.
So why hasn't Microsoft gone after support.mycrowsoft.com?
Aren't diamonds one of the best ways to surreptitiously carry around (i.e. smuggle) large amounts of money? So asking jewelry stores and pawn shops about their recent purchases might not be a bad idea...
Strange. I clicked on it in Galeon (based on Mozilla), and didn't see a single popup. I have JavaScript enabled and only disallow unrequested popups.
Don't worry... IE will have a pop-up blocker sometime next year. For those of us who have joined the 21st century and use a good browser, popups aren't a problem.
SCO?
There most certainly is logic. I know because I've been in that situation. While I'm not a CEO and I'm not in the software industry, I have released a product with "bugs" which we'll try to work around or fix eventually. So I think I understand the desire to ship things before they're "ready".
It comes down to two simple words: market share. Every day, people are making decisions and buying products that serve their needs. If they're not buying your product, then they're buying your competitor's product. Moreover, if you don't have a relatively recent product, you start to lose mindshare. It's very possible to release a product so late that even though it's the best, no one cares anymore: they all bought a competitor's product and are locked in to it. So in a very real sense, every day you delay the release date is costing you money.
Thus, you need to balance the desire to ship a product with no bugs with the desire to have a product in the market now. And the way to choose when to do that is to balance the monetary costs and try to release the product when the cost is minimized.
Will it even run on a P3 1.33?
Yes, in fact there was one quoted in the article:
In other words, spam has already destroyed email as we knew it. There was a time when you could put your address on your webpage without fear of getting spammed to death. In fact, this was true as few as five years ago. This allowed people to connect easier with people they don't know or people they used to know.
But now, it can take less than nine minutes for you to start getting spam after posting your email address somewhere. So those who don't install spam filters will guard their email addresses or go by pseudonyms, which lowers the usefulness of email.
That would be a very bad name. You see, "Darlsux" is a contraction of "Darl's Unix" (Darl'sU'x, and drop the apostrophes), which implies that Darl owns whatever makes up "DarlsUx", which of course is Linux. So by changing their name to "DarlsUx", Lindows would be bolstering SCO's claim to owning Linux (at least in the delusions of Darl & Kevin).
They should concentrate on marketing their product as a decent OS and not a cheap and inferior copy of windows.
How did the goals of Michael Robertson's Lindows become the same as those of Linus Torvalds' Linux? As far as I can tell, a "cheap and inferior copy of Windows" is exactly what Lindows wants to be... it's kind of like the Simpsons episode where Homer's looking for a TV at an outlet mall: "I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see it. And look, there's Magnetbox and Sorny."
And most of the posters here come from a coding perspective (either in theory or practice). So it's no wonder that most of the replies indicate that writing a few lines of Perl (or C++ for the really advanced) is "higher level work" than managing all of the business/marketing/technical aspects of a project and/or product.
Actually, it's the opposite: the "player" usually wins. Investing in stocks isn't a zero-sum game, and your expected rate of return is actually positive (at least judging by the last 70+ years... who knows what the future will hold).
Kjella: Average consumers
"Average consumers" don't install operating systems. They get an OS pre-installed and never change (or probably even update) it.
What copy (right) protection? Read what the story submitter wrote:
So the audio can still be copied, but they're giving the consumer extras: pre-compressed music files and access to exclusive online content.