Paper ballots are excellent. I'm all for keeping paper ballots. Paper ballots don't crash, can't be hacked from the internet, etc.
As well as needing minimal infrastructure to keep working. Even if it is dark there are plenty of sources of artifical light sufficent for writing which are incapable of powering even one computer.
You can be sure that the code on the machine is the same as the source by compiling the source code yourself, building the data image, then comparing that to the flash memory.
It's perfectly possible that the "code" is simply an interpreter for a high level language. If you want features such as "vote validation" the data is at least as important as the code.
In Ohio during the paper ballot years, there was a rule that any stray marks on a ballot invalidated the ballot. The rationale was that stray marks would both make optical scanning of the ballots unreliable and indicate that the ballot was mishandled because in the voting booth, only valid areas of the ballot are exposed and available to be marked.
This is not a "paper ballot" as understood by most of the workd.
Fraud was reportedly rampant. At the vote counting, a pair of representatives from each party with a candidate on the ballot would count. Each ballot was removed from a box, and handed from person to person for inspection before the ballot was fed into the optical counting machine. The (typically little old ladies) inspecting the ballots would place a small piece of pencil led under their fingernail and inadvertently place stray marks an ballots containing the wrong votes.
At least part of the problem here is using machines to do the counting. It's also a bad idea to let partisan people handle ballot papers if it is this easy to invalidate them.
This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state.
This might be applicable to England in Scotland and Wales you have at least 4 main parties and Northern Ireland has a completly different set of political parties from the rest of the UK.
Paper is no good because we "need" to let people vote in 42 different languages.
Paper ballots can be used by the illiterate.
Paper does not self-validate. What if somebody messes up? They get disenfranchised!
They could always ask for a replacement ballot paper.
We "need" to ensure that every moron can just play with the ballot until it is valid.
Idiots are infinitly resourceful. This "validation" also has the problem that it can force someone to cast votes they didn't want to cast in order for the machine to accept their vote. (Will "don't care" and "none of these" always appear in all relevent options?)
More seriously, paper is hard to reprint when a candidate dies a week before the election.
In which case don't print the ballot papers until the eve of the election/if the dead candidate wins then you need to have another election, the same as if the winning candidate had died the week after the election.
but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...
Not really a meaningful comparison, it would make more sense to compare sizes of electoral districts.
I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots:)
Manual counting of paper ballots typically is quite rapid. Though the interesting thing is that many US elections do not take effect for several months...
What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries,
Things go beyond the ballots being on paper. It would be perfectly possible to count Canadian ballot papers using a machine. But doing so would lose several layers of transparancy and supervision of the counting process.
What's wrong with paper ballots? They work great in Canada. We even have election results within a few hours, at most.
As well as in many other parts of the world. However the whole process of running elections just appears to completly non-standard when it comes to the US.
The reasoning behind this is because, generally, if you have that much debt, you do *not* have the means to pay it off.
Even though a credit card company should not be loaning money to people in such circumstances. Being that they are a business rather than a charity.
Therefore, they generally reason that any time you suddenly have a large pile of cash, they want to know where you got it from (the implication being that you might have stolen, embezzeled, or acquired it from some other illegal activity).
As opposed to winning a lottery, having long term savings mature, selling things, having a relative die, etc...
Furthermore, teachers are very good at picking up proprietary software,
Which can include demo software and stuff which isn't licenced for anything other than single user (even where the licence specifically excludes use in schools).
throwing it at their IT staff and expecting it to work.
Within an unrealistic timescale quite often lacking essential documentation.
The kids actually quite like it, the teachers sometimes don't... or at least the older teachers. Now why is that... because people seem to dislike change at older ages.
This issue tends to be ignored with Windows (and Office) even though change is a constant with these. No doubt when Vista comes along people will be told "like it or lump it"...
A lot of teachers have to do their own IT work. In my school, there was an IT supported computer lab (with about 20 three-year-old PCs). If there was a problem in the lab, you either fixed it yourself, or waited three or four days until one of the IT guys from the district office could come out and troubleshoot. This means that something that's familiar (Windows, Office, etc) is a better bet for a lot of teachers, because it's a lot easier to figure out how to resolve a problem with something you're already familiar with. Printing is a good example; if the printer went on the fritz, I already knew the five Windows-centric things to try.
The bluring of user and administrator roles is something "Windows-centric" in the first place. This means that a lot of problems can easily be caused by user tampering, including those who think they are "fixing"... N.B. Just because someone is familiar with Windows in a standalone does not mean they are qualified to handle a client/server network, potentially involving thousands of users and hundreds of applications.
Another issue is that most teachers aren't geeks, so they want a "just works" system. They don't want to have to fiddle around to get things working--they want to insert the Oklahoma Trail CD and have the students playing the game.
If you want "just works" you certainly want to avoid messing around with physical media. There are a whole string of potential problems completly independent of any operating system here. Even if you can completly eliminate vandalism by users...
Unfortunately, there is not one single "problem". First, they are used WAY TOO OFTEN. This is the fault of doctors (at least in countries that require prescriptions). Second, doctors (and hospital staff) don't understand the concept of DISINFECTION. Or if they do, they don't practice it (hospitals are terrible places to get well and often the sources of really bad infections).
It's possible for ineffective disinfection to be worst than none at all. Using too little disinfectant can be a good way to breed bacteria resistant to that chemical.
Most nosocomial organisms (cause hospital aquired infections) become resistant despite the best of practices in prescribing, eg using fewest drugs according to drug sensitivity culture results.
A fairly fundermental problem here is that hospitals generally have a lot of sick people. Which means a high concentration of both pathogenic organisms and potential hosts for them.
I know people like to say docs overprescribe antibiotics, and that's probably somewhat true -- though to a much lesser extent now as medicals schools really emphasize restraint. BUT my g/f will literally get into heated debates with patients (who apparently are experts even though they didn't go through med school & residency) that demand antibiotics, needed or not. She, along with many of her fellow docs, get several formal complaints a month from patients saying they aren't being properly taken care of because they didn't get the drugs they wanted.
Can't these doctors perscribe placebos? Possibly with names similar to real drugs. Since the people demanding them arn't doctors or pharmacists they wouldn't know that they were being given pills containing X milligrammes of sand or whatever.
But I have to question the wisdom of prescribing antibiotics for an infection that might happen. Is the creation of new antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains worth preventing a hypothetical, non-serious infection?
As well as all the side effects of poisoning harmless and symbiotic bacteria.
There's also the fact that too many doctors (not you I trust) overprescribe antibiotics. I get the impression that they're often used as placebos during flu season. Not cool!
Possibly not as big a problem as routinely dosing farm animals with antibiotics.
There are some ways to work around this mess. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a micro cell for the phones in the aircraft which would present a reasonable signal to all the phones and take over all of the traffic. This would accomplish several goals: (1) it would cause all the phones to reduce power because the cell is right there. (2) It would manage all the phone traffic so that special airline rates could apply (and thus fund the investment in equipment). (3) It would also shut the phones down to some minimal level during instrument approaches so that it would not have the chance to screw around with the aircraft navigation instruments.
Including blocking incomming calls at these times. It's also likely to be lot cheaper to maintain for the airline than seatback phones with credit card readers with the associated PBX.
If you want to destroy the plane, it's simpler to use a bomb. It doesn't take much in the way of explosives to rupture the fuselage.
Passengers and cargo tend to be screened for explosives, but not electronic devices. There's also a big difference between making a hole in the fuselage and crashing a plane. Plenty of planes have landed safely with large holes in the fuselage.
Also, if the system is networked, Windows NT in any guise places an outrageous load on the system in order to download the student's desktop in the same shape it was previously last seen in. This more often than not is the last thing you want to do since the kids, and many of the teachers for that matter, are constantly trashing their configurations. This is broken in Windows 9 unless you turn on profiles which -- I guarantee you -- a sane administrator will do only once. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory way the emulate Windows 9's behavior -- revert to a standard desktop at login with the user's directory assigned a drive letter -- in NT.
Actually you can, though possibly only if you are using samba to do the serving, since AFAIK no Windows server version supports anything like "preexec" scripting.
1. Most of the educational software -- games, grading software, etc -- already in place has no Linux equivalent. Much of it barely runs under Windows, and lot of it probably won't run at all under WINE or an emulator (I didn't try that. I could be wrong. But probably not.)
Actually it's perfectly possible for things to work better in an emulated environment. You no longer have the issue of applications A, B, C, D, E, etc wanting the same computer set up in mutually incompatable ways. Since each application can be given its own virtual machine.
If Wine is required, odds are you need Windows still. Thus, installing Linux is a lose situation here from a cost perspective. That is, your choices become this:
Windows+maint
(Windows+main)+(Linux+maint)
You are assuming that the costs of maintaining Windows are the same for running them in an emulated environment as for running them native. When running more than one "anti-social" application being able to give each one a customised environment will drastically reduce TCO.
Take a fully functional Windows (95/98/Me/2K/XP) system. Remove the drive and put it in another system with different hardware. At least 50% of the time the sound card will quit working, and in a really bizarre way. It will be functional in device manager, but there will be no sound devices in the sound control panel.
Even simpler unplug a USB device and plug it into a different USB socket or insert a HUB between it and and the computer...
DRM is only a slight, tiny, itsy-bitsy inconvenience to pirates. A padlock won't stop a professional burglar. He has lockpicks and crowbars and I have no idea what else. A professional pirate has equivalents. They crack encryption and keys for fun and out of spite.
Why would they need to? If anyone seriously wanted to pirate the BBC's (or any other TV station's) output all they'd need to do would be to put some hardware within reception area of a transmitter.
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Paper ballots are excellent. I'm all for keeping paper ballots. Paper ballots don't crash, can't be hacked from the internet, etc.
As well as needing minimal infrastructure to keep working. Even if it is dark there are plenty of sources of artifical light sufficent for writing which are incapable of powering even one computer.
You can be sure that the code on the machine is the same as the source by compiling the source code yourself, building the data image, then comparing that to the flash memory.
It's perfectly possible that the "code" is simply an interpreter for a high level language. If you want features such as "vote validation" the data is at least as important as the code.
In Ohio during the paper ballot years, there was a rule that any stray marks on a ballot invalidated the ballot. The rationale was that stray marks would both make optical scanning of the ballots unreliable and indicate that the ballot was mishandled because in the voting booth, only valid areas of the ballot are exposed and available to be marked.
This is not a "paper ballot" as understood by most of the workd.
Fraud was reportedly rampant. At the vote counting, a pair of representatives from each party with a candidate on the ballot would count. Each ballot was removed from a box, and handed from person to person for inspection before the ballot was fed into the optical counting machine. The (typically little old ladies) inspecting the ballots would place a small piece of pencil led under their fingernail and inadvertently place stray marks an ballots containing the wrong votes.
At least part of the problem here is using machines to do the counting. It's also a bad idea to let partisan people handle ballot papers if it is this easy to invalidate them.
This is because unlike the USA, the UK is a three-party state.
This might be applicable to England in Scotland and Wales you have at least 4 main parties and Northern Ireland has a completly different set of political parties from the rest of the UK.
Paper is no good because we "need" to let people vote in 42 different languages.
Paper ballots can be used by the illiterate.
Paper does not self-validate. What if somebody messes up? They get disenfranchised!
They could always ask for a replacement ballot paper.
We "need" to ensure that every moron can just play with the ballot until it is valid.
Idiots are infinitly resourceful. This "validation" also has the problem that it can force someone to cast votes they didn't want to cast in order for the machine to accept their vote. (Will "don't care" and "none of these" always appear in all relevent options?)
More seriously, paper is hard to reprint when a candidate dies a week before the election.
In which case don't print the ballot papers until the eve of the election/if the dead candidate wins then you need to have another election, the same as if the winning candidate had died the week after the election.
but you should keep in mind -- the entire population of Canada is less (nearly half, as a matter of fact) the population of only California...
:)
Not really a meaningful comparison, it would make more sense to compare sizes of electoral districts.
I'm fairly certain that has some bearing on the ability to rapidly process the paper ballots
Manual counting of paper ballots typically is quite rapid. Though the interesting thing is that many US elections do not take effect for several months...
What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries,
Things go beyond the ballots being on paper. It would be perfectly possible to count Canadian ballot papers using a machine. But doing so would lose several layers of transparancy and supervision of the counting process.
A blind citizen given a paper ballot has to get someone to help, raising problems of confidentiality and trust.
How do blind people cope with money in the US? Given that all paper money is same size and colour scheme, regardless of demonination...
A computer UI can, in principle, be made easier to follow than a crowded piece of paper.
The piece of paper is only crowded if you either have lots of candidates or insist on putting multiple elections on one ballot paper.
A computerized ballot can do validity checking
What if the voter wants to vote in some way which is "invalid"?
What's wrong with paper ballots? They work great in Canada. We even have election results within a few hours, at most.
As well as in many other parts of the world. However the whole process of running elections just appears to completly non-standard when it comes to the US.
The reasoning behind this is because, generally, if you have that much debt, you do *not* have the means to pay it off.
Even though a credit card company should not be loaning money to people in such circumstances. Being that they are a business rather than a charity.
Therefore, they generally reason that any time you suddenly have a large pile of cash, they want to know where you got it from (the implication being that you might have stolen, embezzeled, or acquired it from some other illegal activity).
As opposed to winning a lottery, having long term savings mature, selling things, having a relative die, etc...
Furthermore, teachers are very good at picking up proprietary software,
Which can include demo software and stuff which isn't licenced for anything other than single user (even where the licence specifically excludes use in schools).
throwing it at their IT staff and expecting it to work.
Within an unrealistic timescale quite often lacking essential documentation.
The kids actually quite like it, the teachers sometimes don't... or at least the older teachers. Now why is that... because people seem to dislike change at older ages.
This issue tends to be ignored with Windows (and Office) even though change is a constant with these. No doubt when Vista comes along people will be told "like it or lump it"...
A lot of teachers have to do their own IT work. In my school, there was an IT supported computer lab (with about 20 three-year-old PCs). If there was a problem in the lab, you either fixed it yourself, or waited three or four days until one of the IT guys from the district office could come out and troubleshoot. This means that something that's familiar (Windows, Office, etc) is a better bet for a lot of teachers, because it's a lot easier to figure out how to resolve a problem with something you're already familiar with. Printing is a good example; if the printer went on the fritz, I already knew the five Windows-centric things to try.
The bluring of user and administrator roles is something "Windows-centric" in the first place. This means that a lot of problems can easily be caused by user tampering, including those who think they are "fixing"... N.B. Just because someone is familiar with Windows in a standalone does not mean they are qualified to handle a client/server network, potentially involving thousands of users and hundreds of applications.
Another issue is that most teachers aren't geeks, so they want a "just works" system. They don't want to have to fiddle around to get things working--they want to insert the Oklahoma Trail CD and have the students playing the game.
If you want "just works" you certainly want to avoid messing around with physical media. There are a whole string of potential problems completly independent of any operating system here. Even if you can completly eliminate vandalism by users...
Unfortunately, there is not one single "problem". First, they are used WAY TOO OFTEN. This is the fault of doctors (at least in countries that require prescriptions). Second, doctors (and hospital staff) don't understand the concept of DISINFECTION. Or if they do, they don't practice it (hospitals are terrible places to get well and often the sources of really bad infections).
It's possible for ineffective disinfection to be worst than none at all. Using too little disinfectant can be a good way to breed bacteria resistant to that chemical.
Most nosocomial organisms (cause hospital aquired infections) become resistant despite the best of practices in prescribing, eg using fewest drugs according to drug sensitivity culture results.
A fairly fundermental problem here is that hospitals generally have a lot of sick people. Which means a high concentration of both pathogenic organisms and potential hosts for them.
I know people like to say docs overprescribe antibiotics, and that's probably somewhat true -- though to a much lesser extent now as medicals schools really emphasize restraint. BUT my g/f will literally get into heated debates with patients (who apparently are experts even though they didn't go through med school & residency) that demand antibiotics, needed or not. She, along with many of her fellow docs, get several formal complaints a month from patients saying they aren't being properly taken care of because they didn't get the drugs they wanted.
Can't these doctors perscribe placebos? Possibly with names similar to real drugs. Since the people demanding them arn't doctors or pharmacists they wouldn't know that they were being given pills containing X milligrammes of sand or whatever.
But I have to question the wisdom of prescribing antibiotics for an infection that might happen. Is the creation of new antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains worth preventing a hypothetical, non-serious infection?
As well as all the side effects of poisoning harmless and symbiotic bacteria.
There's also the fact that too many doctors (not you I trust) overprescribe antibiotics. I get the impression that they're often used as placebos during flu season. Not cool!
Possibly not as big a problem as routinely dosing farm animals with antibiotics.
There are some ways to work around this mess. It wouldn't be that hard to set up a micro cell for the phones in the aircraft which would present a reasonable signal to all the phones and take over all of the traffic. This would accomplish several goals: (1) it would cause all the phones to reduce power because the cell is right there. (2) It would manage all the phone traffic so that special airline rates could apply (and thus fund the investment in equipment). (3) It would also shut the phones down to some minimal level during instrument approaches so that it would not have the chance to screw around with the aircraft navigation instruments.
Including blocking incomming calls at these times. It's also likely to be lot cheaper to maintain for the airline than seatback phones with credit card readers with the associated PBX.
If you want to destroy the plane, it's simpler to use a bomb. It doesn't take much in the way of explosives to rupture the fuselage.
Passengers and cargo tend to be screened for explosives, but not electronic devices. There's also a big difference between making a hole in the fuselage and crashing a plane. Plenty of planes have landed safely with large holes in the fuselage.
The kids aren't supposed to know how to mess with the os! They should be able to do a minimal number of things.
This applies in a lot more places than just schools...
Also, if the system is networked, Windows NT in any guise places an outrageous load on the system in order to download the student's desktop in the same shape it was previously last seen in. This more often than not is the last thing you want to do since the kids, and many of the teachers for that matter, are constantly trashing their configurations. This is broken in Windows 9 unless you turn on profiles which -- I guarantee you -- a sane administrator will do only once. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory way the emulate Windows 9's behavior -- revert to a standard desktop at login with the user's directory assigned a drive letter -- in NT.
Actually you can, though possibly only if you are using samba to do the serving, since AFAIK no Windows server version supports anything like "preexec" scripting.
1. Most of the educational software -- games, grading software, etc -- already in place has no Linux equivalent. Much of it barely runs under Windows, and lot of it probably won't run at all under WINE or an emulator (I didn't try that. I could be wrong. But probably not.)
Actually it's perfectly possible for things to work better in an emulated environment. You no longer have the issue of applications A, B, C, D, E, etc wanting the same computer set up in mutually incompatable ways. Since each application can be given its own virtual machine.
If Wine is required, odds are you need Windows still. Thus, installing Linux is a lose situation here from a cost perspective. That is, your choices become this: Windows+maint (Windows+main)+(Linux+maint)
You are assuming that the costs of maintaining Windows are the same for running them in an emulated environment as for running them native. When running more than one "anti-social" application being able to give each one a customised environment will drastically reduce TCO.
Take a fully functional Windows (95/98/Me/2K/XP) system. Remove the drive and put it in another system with different hardware. At least 50% of the time the sound card will quit working, and in a really bizarre way. It will be functional in device manager, but there will be no sound devices in the sound control panel.
Even simpler unplug a USB device and plug it into a different USB socket or insert a HUB between it and and the computer...
DRM is only a slight, tiny, itsy-bitsy inconvenience to pirates. A padlock won't stop a professional burglar. He has lockpicks and crowbars and I have no idea what else. A professional pirate has equivalents. They crack encryption and keys for fun and out of spite.
Why would they need to? If anyone seriously wanted to pirate the BBC's (or any other TV station's) output all they'd need to do would be to put some hardware within reception area of a transmitter.