Aside: What kind of legal system allows you to drop a case without a settlement?
Especially after having dragged it out for years.
If you bring a lawsuit against someone, you should be legally obligated to follow through with it barring a settlement. You shouldn't just be able to say "Oh, my bad. Nevermind."
If the defendent has filed a counterclaim against you then you then it certainly isn't the end...
I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Another alternative would be to have a different piece of hardware doing the capturing and encoding. Linked by 1G ethernet...
Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy.
Most people arn't video/audiophiles in the first place
Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters much less than price.
It's a combination of price and availability. It's rather hard to make a pirate DVD which costs more than an airline ticket, especially if you factor in all the stress involved with "security". Being able to just download a movie or TV episode is also very convenient. Even if it is not "on demand" it's often close to it, likely to be quicker than mail order video rental and with better choice than a physical video library.
That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.
Nor has cybernetics advanced to the point where televisions are sentient entities. "Bob" is a machine owned and controlled by "Jack".
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).
There are many digital codecs which are lossy. Thing is that the average viewer (including most "geeks") dosn't care too much about the technical quality of television. The picture has to be quite awful before most people's brains will give up.
On the contrary, paper and pencil are verifiable and you can be quite confident that the person counting your vote will see the X you wrote the same way you think.
In a decent system you can be sure that there will be several people making sure that the ballot paper you marked will be counted correctly. Many of the problems in the US appear to be to do with lack of transparancy and openness. Something which "voting machines" actually make worst. More or less anyone can be a scrutineer, it dosn't require a PhD in computer systems with the equiptment to carry our a forensic level examination of an operating computer.
But voting systems, given the constraints - perfect anonymity, one-vote-per-person, and count-every-vote - are just hard to do well. Your statement above is a great example of this: if we adopted your suggestion, any polling worker with a UV-reflective marker could "invalidate" votes just by marking an extra candidate or two. The over-marked ballots would then be set aside and left uncounted.
The voter themselves places the ballot into a locked box, the only place there are keys to open the box is at the place where it will be counted. If anyone is caught with such a pen there then they are arrested.
I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it.
Not all spoilt ballots are actually mistakes on the part of the voter. e.g. someone may place an unmarked ballot paper into the box as a way of indicating choosing to abstain. Whereas an electronic system may force them to choose a candidate.
You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure.
It anything the problem is with the procedure, good ballot paper design isn't exactly rocket science.
For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine.
OMR machines don't need anything as fancy as UV-reflective ink.
If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)
Unless the "spoil papers" are actually the largest pile. In which case it probably makes more sense to consider the result "None of the Above" and hold a new election where none of the previous candidates may stand.
Seriously, what is the problem with you Americans, I've seen my 3 year old neighbour doing Paint-by-numbers and get it in the assigned spaces, how hard is it to follow the simple instruction "Mark the box next to the person you want to vote for with an X and no where else"?
Together with "If you mess it up or change your mind ask the offical to exchange your ballot paper for a blank one." Which is an option the 3 year old artist dosn't tend to have...
In a typical American election, you might be voting for President, Governor, a Senator (2/3 chance), a Representative, a Mayor, School Board Members, State Representatives, ballot initiatives, etc. A 2-inch-square box for each of these would require a lot of paper.
You don't actually need a box that big. Paper isn't exactly expensive. Not that you need expensive paper, newspaper or till roll grade would be fine. Paper is also highly recyclable.
Here's the thing: When there's human error in vote counting, you get a vote wrong. Maybe you get a couple votes wrong. Probably each incorrect vote was an independent mistake, so the errors tend to be random - and random errors will tend to average out.
The counting is also done in front of scrutineers, who represent each candidate on the ballot. If a vote not for a candidate ends up on that candidate pile at least the scruitneer for the candidate it was for will object. Most likely all of them, including the scrutineer for the candidate who would otherwise have benefitted, are likely to call attention to the error. If someone is consistently poor at spotting mistakes which favour his or her candiate the other scrutineers are likely to complain. There may also be other observers present at the count. Thus many mistakes are likely to be quickly spotted. The errors which get through are those missed by several people.
In Australia we are very confident that votes are properly counted. In fact, in order to issue a rigged count you would have to bribe the opposing party's scrutineers in the 5 minute window between the submission of the scrutineer's form and the beginning of the count for every polling place as well as have all the electoral officers bribed, or else have a mole planted within the committee of each and candidate as well as having all the scrutineers and electoral officers bribed.
To rig the vote requires a large and complex conspiracy involving people who are unlikely to want to conspire in the first place. Especially where it is possible for members or the press and public to observe (even if not as offical scrutuineers). "Small" parties (and independents) also have exactly the same scrutineering rights as "big" parties. A big problem in the US appears to be domination by two political parties who may well want to conspire in such a way, as well having election officials which arn't independent of the candidates.
Well, except for the fact that you've just replaced a $0.25 pen or $1.29 sharpie marker with a $600 electronic voting machine for a somewhat marginal benefit.
This machine also needs supplies of paper, inked ribbons, ink/toner cartridge, etc. Also how do you cope with paper misfeeds without the possiblity of losing or duplicating ballots?
Then have someone help the voter. In front of witnesses, so there's no chance of them being cheated.
That someone could also be someone chosen by the voter or they could appoint someone to ack as their proxy. Proxy (and absentee) voting is likely to need steps to prevent organised fraud. However it isn't the job of the state to cover the voter being simply foolish.
For the seeing impaired (but not blind) use large fonts on special paper and have vision magnification machines they can put them under in a suitably private area.
Even a standard ballot paper with magnification. Which means once it goes in the ballot box it is the same as everyone elses.
That reduces the number of people who need help to a small percentage of the population (less than 1%) and we can just help them rather than come up with Rube Goldberg device to accomodate them.
Which could easily end up being difficult for the vast majority of people to use.
Hey, it wouldn't only exlude many immigrants (as you realize),
In most places you have to be a citizen to vote. Usually you need to be resonably literate in respect of at least one official language of a country in order to become a naturalised citizen.
but I've known a couple of high school kids who couldn't read English. Granted, they could speak it well enough, but I digress.
Wouldn't you also need to be literate to use a computer based voting machine? Especially if the instructions are more complex than "Put a cross in the box next to the name of the candidate you want to vote for. Do so with each ballot paper you have been given. Fold each paper in half so the side with writing on isn't visible. Post them into the box."
It's possible to support multi-lingual paper ballots, and it's possible to have mono-lingual electronic voting. Voting fraud is too important an issue to let people get distracted by "they should learn english" vs. "that's racist".
The only "natural language" you need on a ballot tend to be proper nouns (the names of people and/or political parties) which don't need to be translated in the first place. If low levels of literacy are an issue you can always print logos and/or photographs as well. Instructions can be printed separatly as posters and placed inside privacy kiosks and other relevent places. About the only situation where you'd need to provide translations on ballot papers would be in a country were you have multiple official languages which use different alphabets, e.g. Arabic and English. Where you have combinations such as English and French; English and Spanish; German and French; French, Flemish and Walloon; etc this tends not to be an issue.
You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)
You can have the ballots printed with counterfoils attached with the same number as the paper. These also need not be printed in sequential number. RFID has the problem of increasing printing costs and makes the paper more difficult to recycle. Barcodes, even special ink, are unlikely to signficently increase printing costs.
Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.
These machines can be made simple enough that they have no "knowlage" of what the various marks mean. You might even want two machines, the first one to put all the ballots the same way around and the second to collate and count them. If there are any problems, including machines breaking down human beings can still do the job.
Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.
How long do these last compared with a metal or plastic ballot box? Similarly a basic privacy kiosk made of plastic or wood...
District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.
You'd also want to record how many ballots are spoiled and how many are left.
The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
There are plenty of disabilities (other than blindness) which can cause someone difficulty using any method of casting a vote. Whilst a computer might be easier for some people it might actually be harder for other people than using a standard writing impliment. There just isn't a simple solution to address all disabled people.
You don't have chads with paper ballots. Since you are marking them not punching them.
Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)
Unless you have a system where the counting can be verified by the average person fraud becomes a lot easier (and fraud detection becomes a lot harder.)
Takes too long to count.
With many US elections it wouldn't matter if counting took months. Proper paper based counting systems give results in hours and are used in places where elections take effect the day after polling closes.
Takes up a lot of space.
Ballot boxes stack quite efficently. Whereas computers tend to be need to be first boxed. There are also plenty of places you can store metal (or plastic) boxes which are not suitable for storing sensitive electronic machines.
Costs a lot more money.
Computer's don't? You also need things such as electricity at all of the polling places. All you need with a pencil and paper method is light, carry out the election in summer and you will have daylight for all polling hours.
If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time
Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste
Newspapers appear to have similar issues solved and elections generally don't happen every week (or every day). Unused ballot papers can also easily be recycled (into other paper/card).
Blind people have issues.
And they don't have issues using a complex machine?
People that don't read english have issues.
Even illiterate people can recognise the name of a candidate, it's also possible to put a photo of the candidate next to their name. You put the instructions on a poster in all official languages of your country (which in many places dosn't include English), if people can't understand at least one of those they probably shouldn't be voting in the first place.
Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers.
Either print in alphabetical or random order. If anything this is more an issue for a computer screen, which is a finite length, than a piece of paper, which can be cut to any length desired.
Those magnetos have problems just like everything else. They can be very reliable, but mostly because there are two of them.
You also have magnetos on the likes of lawnmower engines, which can easily last the life of the engine. Of course a lawnmower (or chainsaw) engine might not work too well a few km up in the air.
Universities have a lot invested in each student and receive a lot from each in the form of tutition and various grant monies, along with other rewards from their success. And they have a lot to lose in other intangibles (such as security of their papers, reputation when recruiting students, staff, and faculty, etc.) So letting students swing in the wind is not just a bad idea academic-freedom wise, it's bad financially as well.
There's also the possibility that a university student could have easier access to legal advice than a member of the general public.
Yep, they can do that but without the help from state law enforcement which is a big let down for them. The DEA has heavier things to do than bust every nickel and dime dealer, or even semi-respectable pot growing operations.
There appears to be a states vs federal rights issue currently ongoing in North Dakota, involving farmers wishing to grown hemp for non drug purposes.
I don't even think it's that much of a risk; the first game to thumb its nose at the family-values whining minority. Everyone who would have bought the game will want it, 90% of them are old enough to legally buy it, and most of those will be willing and able to make the effort necessary to do so.
If they have already finished (or nearly finished) the game it's hardly a "risk" because they have already spent the money.
The question is: is there any compelling reason a nanny state should be making decisions for the parents? As other have pointed out, AO is a retail death sentence. "Thinking of the children" means adults (the "A" in "AO") probably won't get to play the game either since it won't get released.
This may well be the intention of some of the "think of the children" crowd. Because they know they will be told to get lost if they were to actually come out and say they wanted it banned from anyone. Ironically parts of the world which have the highest proprtion of the population being children tend to be warzones...
Heaven forbid your little angel finds out that death can be a messy gruesome affair, that people kill each other in these ways for no good reason,
If anything there might be a better argument for keeping children away from violence which is shown as without consequence or even as being funny.
A "perfect phone" should take into account that text messaging and IMing are at least as important if not more so than actual audio calls.
For some users. There are plenty of people for whom the primary function is that of a telephone. They might want features such as background noise supression, being able to change the volume and switch between calls without having to take the phone from their ear, etc.
If they're all using the patented innovations the innovations must be good ones. And they're now in the public domain, free for anybody to use, complete with instructions. The 20 or 30 companies appearing at once is indicative of the innovation being widely understood, which is what patents are for.
There are plenty of alternative explanations including patents being granted on "obvious ideas" thus holding back development until those patents expired. Or patents being granted at a time before it was possible to create a mass market product.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside: What kind of legal system allows you to drop a case without a settlement?
Especially after having dragged it out for years.
If you bring a lawsuit against someone, you should be legally obligated to follow through with it barring a settlement. You shouldn't just be able to say "Oh, my bad. Nevermind."
If the defendent has filed a counterclaim against you then you then it certainly isn't the end...
I'm not sure if the hardware could handle both decoding and re-encoding a digital video stream simultaneously in real-time, along with the audio that accompanies it -- but that's something easily solved by either storing everything temporarily in uncompressed form (if the HDD can keep up), or by waiting a few years for faster/more parallelized hardware which can do these task simultaneously).
Another alternative would be to have a different piece of hardware doing the capturing and encoding. Linked by 1G ethernet...
Many audiophiles would disagree with you, and would argue that analog presents the best "true" copy.
Most people arn't video/audiophiles in the first place
Anyway, we're talking about the grey/black market, in which quality matters much less than price.
It's a combination of price and availability. It's rather hard to make a pirate DVD which costs more than an airline ticket, especially if you factor in all the stress involved with "security".
Being able to just download a movie or TV episode is also very convenient. Even if it is not "on demand" it's often close to it, likely to be quicker than mail order video rental and with better choice than a physical video library.
That's an extremely common view (as said in your comment title), but it's not true. Bob is your television, and you are Jack. I don't care how much cybernetics has progressed, we're not televisions yet, and we as human beings can't assimilate, store, and regurgitate digital content with any kind of quality.
Nor has cybernetics advanced to the point where televisions are sentient entities. "Bob" is a machine owned and controlled by "Jack".
Both are analog holes. If it's not a digital copy, it's not a quality copy, and thus not in a position to compete with the real thing. Do you want to pirate an mpeg of some guy taping his television screen, or do you want to bittorrent the actual dvd contents? In the absense of the availablity of the dvd on bittorrent, would you be more inclined to buy the material? (For this paragraph, forget that you are a geek when I use words such as "quality" and when I presume you're a pirate - I'm talking about average users).
There are many digital codecs which are lossy. Thing is that the average viewer (including most "geeks") dosn't care too much about the technical quality of television. The picture has to be quite awful before most people's brains will give up.
On the contrary, paper and pencil are verifiable and you can be quite confident that the person counting your vote will see the X you wrote the same way you think.
In a decent system you can be sure that there will be several people making sure that the ballot paper you marked will be counted correctly.
Many of the problems in the US appear to be to do with lack of transparancy and openness. Something which "voting machines" actually make worst.
More or less anyone can be a scrutineer, it dosn't require a PhD in computer systems with the equiptment to carry our a forensic level examination of an operating computer.
My thinking is that it should be illegal to use any voting software unless the source code is available for inspection by anyone.
This dosn't actually help much. Since it's not easy for anyone to verify that a specific machine is actually running that software.
But voting systems, given the constraints - perfect anonymity, one-vote-per-person, and count-every-vote - are just hard to do well. Your statement above is a great example of this: if we adopted your suggestion, any polling worker with a UV-reflective marker could "invalidate" votes just by marking an extra candidate or two. The over-marked ballots would then be set aside and left uncounted.
The voter themselves places the ballot into a locked box, the only place there are keys to open the box is at the place where it will be counted. If anyone is caught with such a pen there then they are arrested.
I disagree. Paper systems make a certain amount of human error (feel free to call it 'stupidity,' I won't stop you) visible. Electronic systems hide it.
Not all spoilt ballots are actually mistakes on the part of the voter. e.g. someone may place an unmarked ballot paper into the box as a way of indicating choosing to abstain. Whereas an electronic system may force them to choose a candidate.
You could fix many of the problems experienced in Florida, keeping paper ballots, by redesigning them and fixing the procedure.
It anything the problem is with the procedure, good ballot paper design isn't exactly rocket science.
For example, the "dangling chad" problem of incompletely punched holes could be fixed by replacing the perforated-card ballots with optical ones, and giving the voter a big "dauber" type pen that they simply have to touch to the circle they want to fill in. Thousands of old people do this every day -- it's called Bingo Night. Do it with a UV-reflective marker and you can probably read them quickly using a machine.
OMR machines don't need anything as fancy as UV-reflective ink.
If someone does manage to submit a ballot with two marks, it doesn't get counted, since the only person who can legally determine the intent of a voter is a judge. (I suppose you could put them all to the side and wait to see if the election is close enough to warrant bothering to look at them, but frankly I'd prefer that they just get thrown out. It's too easy to politicize the process of 'determining intent;' better to avoid it completely and only count well-formed ballots.)
Unless the "spoil papers" are actually the largest pile. In which case it probably makes more sense to consider the result "None of the Above" and hold a new election where none of the previous candidates may stand.
Seriously, what is the problem with you Americans, I've seen my 3 year old neighbour doing Paint-by-numbers and get it in the assigned spaces, how hard is it to follow the simple instruction "Mark the box next to the person you want to vote for with an X and no where else"?
Together with "If you mess it up or change your mind ask the offical to exchange your ballot paper for a blank one." Which is an option the 3 year old artist dosn't tend to have...
In a typical American election, you might be voting for President, Governor, a Senator (2/3 chance), a Representative, a Mayor, School Board Members, State Representatives, ballot initiatives, etc. A 2-inch-square box for each of these would require a lot of paper.
You don't actually need a box that big. Paper isn't exactly expensive. Not that you need expensive paper, newspaper or till roll grade would be fine. Paper is also highly recyclable.
Here's the thing: When there's human error in vote counting, you get a vote wrong. Maybe you get a couple votes wrong. Probably each incorrect vote was an independent mistake, so the errors tend to be random - and random errors will tend to average out.
The counting is also done in front of scrutineers, who represent each candidate on the ballot. If a vote not for a candidate ends up on that candidate pile at least the scruitneer for the candidate it was for will object. Most likely all of them, including the scrutineer for the candidate who would otherwise have benefitted, are likely to call attention to the error. If someone is consistently poor at spotting mistakes which favour his or her candiate the other scrutineers are likely to complain. There may also be other observers present at the count. Thus many mistakes are likely to be quickly spotted.
The errors which get through are those missed by several people.
In Australia we are very confident that votes are properly counted. In fact, in order to issue a rigged count you would have to bribe the opposing party's scrutineers in the 5 minute window between the submission of the scrutineer's form and the beginning of the count for every polling place as well as have all the electoral officers bribed, or else have a mole planted within the committee of each and candidate as well as having all the scrutineers and electoral officers bribed.
To rig the vote requires a large and complex conspiracy involving people who are unlikely to want to conspire in the first place. Especially where it is possible for members or the press and public to observe (even if not as offical scrutuineers). "Small" parties (and independents) also have exactly the same scrutineering rights as "big" parties.
A big problem in the US appears to be domination by two political parties who may well want to conspire in such a way, as well having election officials which arn't independent of the candidates.
Well, except for the fact that you've just replaced a $0.25 pen or $1.29 sharpie marker with a $600 electronic voting machine for a somewhat marginal benefit.
This machine also needs supplies of paper, inked ribbons, ink/toner cartridge, etc. Also how do you cope with paper misfeeds without the possiblity of losing or duplicating ballots?
Then have someone help the voter. In front of witnesses, so there's no chance of them being cheated.
That someone could also be someone chosen by the voter or they could appoint someone to ack as their proxy. Proxy (and absentee) voting is likely to need steps to prevent organised fraud. However it isn't the job of the state to cover the voter being simply foolish.
For the seeing impaired (but not blind) use large fonts on special paper and have vision magnification machines they can put them under in a suitably private area.
Even a standard ballot paper with magnification. Which means once it goes in the ballot box it is the same as everyone elses.
That reduces the number of people who need help to a small percentage of the population (less than 1%) and we can just help them rather than come up with Rube Goldberg device to accomodate them.
Which could easily end up being difficult for the vast majority of people to use.
Hey, it wouldn't only exlude many immigrants (as you realize),
In most places you have to be a citizen to vote. Usually you need to be resonably literate in respect of at least one official language of a country in order to become a naturalised citizen.
but I've known a couple of high school kids who couldn't read English. Granted, they could speak it well enough, but I digress.
Wouldn't you also need to be literate to use a computer based voting machine? Especially if the instructions are more complex than "Put a cross in the box next to the name of the candidate you want to vote for. Do so with each ballot paper you have been given. Fold each paper in half so the side with writing on isn't visible. Post them into the box."
It's possible to support multi-lingual paper ballots, and it's possible to have mono-lingual electronic voting. Voting fraud is too important an issue to let people get distracted by "they should learn english" vs. "that's racist".
The only "natural language" you need on a ballot tend to be proper nouns (the names of people and/or political parties) which don't need to be translated in the first place. If low levels of literacy are an issue you can always print logos and/or photographs as well. Instructions can be printed separatly as posters and placed inside privacy kiosks and other relevent places.
About the only situation where you'd need to provide translations on ballot papers would be in a country were you have multiple official languages which use different alphabets, e.g. Arabic and English. Where you have combinations such as English and French; English and Spanish; German and French; French, Flemish and Walloon; etc this tends not to be an issue.
You can also serialize the paper ballots using UV reactive ink, barcodes or RFID tags to be sure none are missing when they're counted. Anything that is reasonably impossible for someone to read would work, so they can't associate a particular person with a particular ballot. (Before you ask, you don't have to hand out the ballots in consecutive order, either.)
You can have the ballots printed with counterfoils attached with the same number as the paper. These also need not be printed in sequential number. RFID has the problem of increasing printing costs and makes the paper more difficult to recycle. Barcodes, even special ink, are unlikely to signficently increase printing costs.
Paper ballots can still be machine counted. Use those "bingo card" markers (but in black) and you won't have any problems with half-filled circles or fills that aren't dark enough.
These machines can be made simple enough that they have no "knowlage" of what the various marks mean. You might even want two machines, the first one to put all the ballots the same way around and the second to collate and count them.
If there are any problems, including machines breaking down human beings can still do the job.
Those electronic kiosks are also free for life, never need maintenance or replacement, specially trained handlers and tighter security.
How long do these last compared with a metal or plastic ballot box? Similarly a basic privacy kiosk made of plastic or wood...
District FOO has QUXX registered voters. Send them 1.10*QUXX ballots. Have someone sign off that they received the alloted amount. And, as we all know from previous elections, there are ALWAYS enough machines to adequately serve everyone who shows up.
You'd also want to record how many ballots are spoiled and how many are left.
The electronic machines have special LCD screens that can telepathically project the choices into a voter's brain, too. Those touchscreens? High-res active tactile feedback so the blind guy knows exactly which virtual button he's putting his finger on.
There are plenty of disabilities (other than blindness) which can cause someone difficulty using any method of casting a vote. Whilst a computer might be easier for some people it might actually be harder for other people than using a standard writing impliment. There just isn't a simple solution to address all disabled people.
Chads
You don't have chads with paper ballots. Since you are marking them not punching them.
Long history of people cheating them (While the current system sucks, a combo of electtronic + paper if properly done, can double our chances of catching fraud)
Unless you have a system where the counting can be verified by the average person fraud becomes a lot easier (and fraud detection becomes a lot harder.)
Takes too long to count.
With many US elections it wouldn't matter if counting took months. Proper paper based counting systems give results in hours and are used in places where elections take effect the day after polling closes.
Takes up a lot of space.
Ballot boxes stack quite efficently. Whereas computers tend to be need to be first boxed. There are also plenty of places you can store metal (or plastic) boxes which are not suitable for storing sensitive electronic machines.
Costs a lot more money.
Computer's don't? You also need things such as electricity at all of the polling places.
All you need with a pencil and paper method is light, carry out the election in summer and you will have daylight for all polling hours.
If someone is removed from the ballot, we have to reprint, which may not happen in time
Delivery must be assured with enough to all, which means a lot of waste
Newspapers appear to have similar issues solved and elections generally don't happen every week (or every day). Unused ballot papers can also easily be recycled (into other paper/card).
Blind people have issues.
And they don't have issues using a complex machine?
People that don't read english have issues.
Even illiterate people can recognise the name of a candidate, it's also possible to put a photo of the candidate next to their name. You put the instructions on a poster in all official languages of your country (which in many places dosn't include English), if people can't understand at least one of those they probably shouldn't be voting in the first place.
Ballot design for large number of possible candidates - people seriously want to be the guy on the top of the list, it gives a small, but real boost to their numbers.
Either print in alphabetical or random order. If anything this is more an issue for a computer screen, which is a finite length, than a piece of paper, which can be cut to any length desired.
Those magnetos have problems just like everything else. They can be very reliable, but mostly because there are two of them.
You also have magnetos on the likes of lawnmower engines, which can easily last the life of the engine. Of course a lawnmower (or chainsaw) engine might not work too well a few km up in the air.
Universities have a lot invested in each student and receive a lot from each in the form of tutition and various grant monies, along with other rewards from their success. And they have a lot to lose in other intangibles (such as security of their papers, reputation when recruiting students, staff, and faculty, etc.) So letting students swing in the wind is not just a bad idea academic-freedom wise, it's bad financially as well.
There's also the possibility that a university student could have easier access to legal advice than a member of the general public.
Yep, they can do that but without the help from state law enforcement which is a big let down for them. The DEA has heavier things to do than bust every nickel and dime dealer, or even semi-respectable pot growing operations.
There appears to be a states vs federal rights issue currently ongoing in North Dakota, involving farmers wishing to grown hemp for non drug purposes.
I don't even think it's that much of a risk; the first game to thumb its nose at the family-values whining minority. Everyone who would have bought the game will want it, 90% of them are old enough to legally buy it, and most of those will be willing and able to make the effort necessary to do so.
If they have already finished (or nearly finished) the game it's hardly a "risk" because they have already spent the money.
The question is: is there any compelling reason a nanny state should be making decisions for the parents? As other have pointed out, AO is a retail death sentence. "Thinking of the children" means adults (the "A" in "AO") probably won't get to play the game either since it won't get released.
This may well be the intention of some of the "think of the children" crowd. Because they know they will be told to get lost if they were to actually come out and say they wanted it banned from anyone. Ironically parts of the world which have the highest proprtion of the population being children tend to be warzones...
Heaven forbid your little angel finds out that death can be a messy gruesome affair, that people kill each other in these ways for no good reason,
If anything there might be a better argument for keeping children away from violence which is shown as without consequence or even as being funny.
A "perfect phone" should take into account that text messaging and IMing are at least as important if not more so than actual audio calls.
For some users. There are plenty of people for whom the primary function is that of a telephone. They might want features such as background noise supression, being able to change the volume and switch between calls without having to take the phone from their ear, etc.
If they're all using the patented innovations the innovations must be good ones. And they're now in the public domain, free for anybody to use, complete with instructions. The 20 or 30 companies appearing at once is indicative of the innovation being widely understood, which is what patents are for.
There are plenty of alternative explanations including patents being granted on "obvious ideas" thus holding back development until those patents expired. Or patents being granted at a time before it was possible to create a mass market product.