You're an idiot. People steal a lot of cars off of dealer lots, is that clearly a failed business model? Maybe we should give them all away for free instead.
If someone takes a car then the dealer has one less car to sell. Also a car, as a physical machine, has a real and quantifiable cost of manufacture. A music recording is simply data, which can be copied at negligable cost. A better analogy would be if someone used a matter replicator on the car dealer's stock. Matter replication machines do not exist outside of fiction...
Does this mean artists wont have incentive to create?
A more fundermental question would be "Does the possibility of making money act as an incentive for creation?"
No. Artists will still make a living the way they have for centuries before and during the age of recordings- by sponsorship and charging for live performances.
Or they have a job and make music, write books, etc in their "spare time".
This has been my argument against gun control laws for years. Why do we "need" gun control laws, I ask.
"Because people might commit crimes with guns," apologists for unchecked government power tell me.
So then I ask: if the bad things people might do with guns are crimes, aren't there, by definition, already laws against them? Why do you then need another law making guns illegal too?
Do you think a criminal is going to be that concerned that they can't use a legal gun? It's not as if these laws appear to have much effect on black market gun supply...
Come now, the reason for the open container law is because it's often hard to catch someone drinking in the act.
But there are standard forensic tests to find out if someone is too intoxicated to drive. If they are it dosn't really matter where they consumed the alcohol.
But if they have an open container of alcohol in the car, what possible reason could that have other than that they've been drinking from it?
Could just as easily be a passenger, most cars are designed to carry several passengers. If there is a real requirment to prove the driver was drinking from that container then (again) well known forensic tests will do the job.
This is just like so-called open container laws. It is already illegal to drive drunk. But, the very act of having an open bottle of booze in my car is illegal. Why? By itself, there is nothing wrong with it. The only problem is when I, as a drive, start drinking from it. But then I'm breaking an already existing law!!!
Also whilst it isn't illegal for a passenger to be drunk, these laws make it illegal for passengers to drink. But odds on they are not used against the rich who have minibars in chauffeur driven cars.
That isn't a new idea. Frighteningly, it used to even be one that was explicitly stated. When a bill was proposed to introduce public libraries, there was massive opposition from the Tories (closest equivalent in the US being the Republicans). Favourite quote from one being: "the people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage."
If the copyright laws of today had existed in the past then public libraries would have been impossible in the first place.
it needs to end corruption in the various governments so that education can be given a budgetary priority.
Hardly applicable only to African states. Corruption and wastage of money appear to be common problem amongst many governments. e.g. the US hardly has the best schools in the world yet is perfectly willing to give public money to highly questionable governments and go around invading military weak Asian countries.
Yes, a truckload full of computers won't make a difference in the case where a kiddy who can only speak Sepedi or Setswana, because Windows doesn't come in anything even close to their language. However, since Open Source has become a Big Thing (tm) in Africa as a whole, people now have the power to localize things for themselves.
With translations involving native speakers likely to be far more use than those done by some big foreign corporation from thousands of miles away.
Please bear in mind that about a year ago, Micro$oft offered a plethora of Software to the schools for *FREE*. This was part of their schools project. The result is that schools were not interested in running alternate OS's, as they didn't have the price factor for software.
Except that the TCO becomes an issue here. The phrase "it's only free if your time is free" becomes rather relevent. Especially relevent is that Microsoft produces personal computer software. Which simply dosn't tally well with the way computers are used in education.
Even though, I dont see why they taking on South Africa. South Africa is developing, and well, and hopefully soonl, this wont be a problem. It would be nicer to see this hapen in other countries that are even less developed.
"Developing" also means less legacy (i.e. MS Windows) apps to accomodate.
One major item that puts the HP 441 system apart from similar efforts is work that has been done in the USB device department. As you know, the system consists of 1X AGP (using PS/2 k/b and mouse) and 3X PCI (each with it's own USB k/b and mouse). With the 441 system we have added the capability for each user having their individual sound card as well, so that they can listen to their own audio.
A pity things like the Applica U2 Multimedia are Windows only. I've always though that these kind of things make far more sense with Linux than Windows, especially with Microsoft's licencing model...
Each machine would have a UPS, so that'd provide 15-20 minutes without power.
Not much good unless the polls are only intended to be open for 15-20 minutes. Just about the only thing that could screw with the system would be a prolonged electrical outage.
Human action can easily arrange that.
(At which point the precinct resorts to the paper backup ballots on hand, which are also available for people who are intimidated by the e-voting system.)
So why bother with the machines in the first place?
Actually, the US has an even more complicated political party landscape than Canada, too. There are the all-too-familiar Democrat and Republican parties, membership in which two are exclusive of each other. But there are many small parties, in which a candidate need not commit exclusive membership. Like Green, Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative (yes, officially named, with an initial capital letter), Working Families, Right to Life, Peace and Freedom, and dozens more. They typically endorse one candidate in a local or national race.
Endorsing a candidate is not the same as actually putting up a candidate. This supposed complexity means very little if the voter is still only faced with minimal choice when they come to cast their vote.
You're saying it's more secure to have one copy of the decryption key (on each player), and one copy of the encryption key (at the factory) so that it's harder to get ahold of the decryption keys?
No I'm saying that there will be multiple copies of the encryption keys and that these are highly likely to "leak". Therefore it should not be assumed that any encryption keys are secret.
The real reason paper ballots are not used universally in the US is because they are FAR more "democratic" in the US than in Canada. They vote for anything and everything. Americans vote for president, congressman, senator, govenor, judge, police chief, dog catcher, postmaster, various propositions, etc etc etc. In some elections a paper ballot would look like an income tax form!
To add to the complexity there are also elections to choose which candidate will represent a party. The "democratic" is in quotes because elections do not a democracy make.
It's been my personal experience that it doesn't matter what party the dolt is that does the fraud...
Or alternativly that the two big parties in the US are not that different.
One has to be able to trust the people counting the votes to make an accurate count. (I've seen my voting district, whose vote counters were [by law] made of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, report that a gubernatorial candidate got NO VOTES, when I know for a FACT that he got at least four.
Sounds a bit like Michael Moore's "Vote Ficus" campaign. One specifically US issue appears to be the lack of an independent "civil service" to handle elections.
Nothing is wrong with it. There are plenty of area in the US (including where I vote) that use paper ballots you write on. I actually think that the local one is ideal: you use a black marker to connect two parts of an arrow which points to the name you want to vote for. You then put the ballot into a machine which scans it and retains it for record-keeping. I suspect that the machine will tell you if the ballot was invalid, and have you try again. It's very clear visually what is a vote and what isn't (how many stray pencil marks in a circle make a vote?).
You need to be very careful with ballot design if you are mechanically "validating" ballot papers. e.g. including explicit boxes for "none of these candidates" and "don't care". With complex ballots or multiple elections it's perfectly legitimate that a voter may wish to abstain from voting for certain things.
Americans live in an overlapping hierarchy of school board, village/city, possibly an inclusive "town", county (possibly including or included by the city), metro area, state, multistate region, and nation. One state is based on a different legal paradigm (Lousiana is "napoleonic", and has parishes instead of counties), and each state has its own laws, as do cities, which include different details in representation. There are other political organizations which reconcile these differences where all must be counted together. And that's all very complex. More complex than the smaller and more consistent Canada, which is why our election process is more complex.
However the US is probably considerably less complex in these respects than the EU, it most definitly is population wise. Yet the recent elections for the European parliment elections were conducted using pencil and paper.
There are two benefits to this. First, when we do vote it is easier to focus on the issues at hand. For example, municipal races and issues do not get overwhelmed by federal campaigns. Each election voters will only have to deal with a small number questions.
Also it makes it easier for non national parties and independents to stand with a fair chance of being elected.
Canada has 1/10th the number of people as the USA. Not only is the scale of votes greater, but consequently the complexity of relationships among the people, therefore the political groupings and representations.
A better here might be the number of political parties. The US is somewhat lacking in political parties...
hardware failure: have several systems at each polling place. You'd want them anyway. If one goes down, you still have the others. Having more than one go down is very unlikely.
Really? Turn the power off and odds on they will all go down. Unless the system includes a lot of batteries...
It is very unlikely that *any* complex system will function "exactly correctly." For example, what if the voter pushes two (or three) spots on the touchscreen display simultaneously or touches them for an unexpectedly long (or short) amount of time or uses a display input with a damaged surface?
Maybe they don't realise that their sleeve, cufflinks, rings, etc are also touching the screen.
Does the POS touchscreen display at the checkout stand of your local supermarket function "exactly correctly" after a few months of use or does the operator have to push some things repeatedly to get them to activate?
The supermarket checkout generally isn't set up for a few hours, dismantled and packed in a warehouse either. It's fixed, operated by people with some degree of training/experiance.
*With 'my' system; just about the only event that I could forsee would be a prolonged computer outage. Sure, you could have all the computers fail, but this would be incredibly unlikely.
How does your system address the issue of someone deliberatly disabling power and/or communication links?
It's logistically difficult to distribute ballots in multiple languages, particularly when there will be a lawsuit whenever you underestimate number of people who will use one particular version.
I don't understand why this is a problem. Since candidates' names, being proper nouns, should not be translated in the first place. The only reason they would change is due to use of a different alphabet, in which case it is perfectly possible to print the name using Latin, Chinese, Arabic, etc characters on all ballot papers. There's also the solution used in India of including candidate photographs on the ballot paper which works even for the illiterate.
Blind people cannot use pencil/paper systems without help. ADA/disenfranchisement isssues result.
But they can use a complex touch screen machine without assistance? With these being cheaper than ballot papers having suitably textured paper...
And, really, given paper ballots, we *know* how to secure the transport and counting processes. You put the ballots in locked steel boxes, with representatives of all the major parties standing around watching whenever the boxes are transported or opened. Whenever the boxes are stored, they're guarded, again with oversight by the major political parties. Done!
You allow any interested party to watch all parts of the process of transport, storage and count. This includes representatives of the candidates, the press, pro democracy orgainsations even random members of the public. The more and the more diverse this group of people is the less likely there can be an effective conspiracy to defraud the electorate.Paper ballots too slow to count?
This isn't actually the case, manual counting of ballots is actually quite quick and easily scalable. In many US elections speed isn't even that important since the winning candidate dosn't take up office for months. Whereas there are places which use hand counted paper ballots where the result has immediate effect.
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You're an idiot. People steal a lot of cars off of dealer lots, is that clearly a failed business model? Maybe we should give them all away for free instead.
If someone takes a car then the dealer has one less car to sell. Also a car, as a physical machine, has a real and quantifiable cost of manufacture. A music recording is simply data, which can be copied at negligable cost.
A better analogy would be if someone used a matter replicator on the car dealer's stock. Matter replication machines do not exist outside of fiction...
Does this mean artists wont have incentive to create?
A more fundermental question would be "Does the possibility of making money act as an incentive for creation?"
No. Artists will still make a living the way they have for centuries before and during the age of recordings- by sponsorship and charging for live performances.
Or they have a job and make music, write books, etc in their "spare time".
This has been my argument against gun control laws for years. Why do we "need" gun control laws, I ask. "Because people might commit crimes with guns," apologists for unchecked government power tell me. So then I ask: if the bad things people might do with guns are crimes, aren't there, by definition, already laws against them? Why do you then need another law making guns illegal too?
Do you think a criminal is going to be that concerned that they can't use a legal gun? It's not as if these laws appear to have much effect on black market gun supply...
Come now, the reason for the open container law is because it's often hard to catch someone drinking in the act.
But there are standard forensic tests to find out if someone is too intoxicated to drive. If they are it dosn't really matter where they consumed the alcohol.
But if they have an open container of alcohol in the car, what possible reason could that have other than that they've been drinking from it?
Could just as easily be a passenger, most cars are designed to carry several passengers.
If there is a real requirment to prove the driver was drinking from that container then (again) well known forensic tests will do the job.
This is just like so-called open container laws. It is already illegal to drive drunk. But, the very act of having an open bottle of booze in my car is illegal. Why? By itself, there is nothing wrong with it. The only problem is when I, as a drive, start drinking from it. But then I'm breaking an already existing law!!!
Also whilst it isn't illegal for a passenger to be drunk, these laws make it illegal for passengers to drink. But odds on they are not used against the rich who have minibars in chauffeur driven cars.
That isn't a new idea. Frighteningly, it used to even be one that was explicitly stated. When a bill was proposed to introduce public libraries, there was massive opposition from the Tories (closest equivalent in the US being the Republicans). Favourite quote from one being: "the people have too much knowledge already: it was much easier to manage them twenty years ago; the more education people get the more difficult they are to manage."
If the copyright laws of today had existed in the past then public libraries would have been impossible in the first place.
Southern Africa **does not** need computers,
Plenty of South Africans appear to disagree.
it needs to end corruption in the various governments so that education can be given a budgetary priority.
Hardly applicable only to African states. Corruption and wastage of money appear to be common problem amongst many governments. e.g. the US hardly has the best schools in the world yet is perfectly willing to give public money to highly questionable governments and go around invading military weak Asian countries.
Yes, a truckload full of computers won't make a difference in the case where a kiddy who can only speak Sepedi or Setswana, because Windows doesn't come in anything even close to their language. However, since Open Source has become a Big Thing (tm) in Africa as a whole, people now have the power to localize things for themselves.
With translations involving native speakers likely to be far more use than those done by some big foreign corporation from thousands of miles away.
Please bear in mind that about a year ago, Micro$oft offered a plethora of Software to the schools for *FREE*. This was part of their schools project. The result is that schools were not interested in running alternate OS's, as they didn't have the price factor for software.
Except that the TCO becomes an issue here. The phrase "it's only free if your time is free" becomes rather relevent. Especially relevent is that Microsoft produces personal computer software. Which simply dosn't tally well with the way computers are used in education.
Even though, I dont see why they taking on South Africa. South Africa is developing, and well, and hopefully soonl, this wont be a problem. It would be nicer to see this hapen in other countries that are even less developed.
"Developing" also means less legacy (i.e. MS Windows) apps to accomodate.
One major item that puts the HP 441 system apart from similar efforts is work that has been done in the USB device department. As you know, the system consists of 1X AGP (using PS/2 k/b and mouse) and 3X PCI (each with it's own USB k/b and mouse). With the 441 system we have added the capability for each user having their individual sound card as well, so that they can listen to their own audio.
A pity things like the Applica U2 Multimedia are Windows only. I've always though that these kind of things make far more sense with Linux than Windows, especially with Microsoft's licencing model...
Each machine would have a UPS, so that'd provide 15-20 minutes without power.
Not much good unless the polls are only intended to be open for 15-20 minutes.
Just about the only thing that could screw with the system would be a prolonged electrical outage.
Human action can easily arrange that.
(At which point the precinct resorts to the paper backup ballots on hand, which are also available for people who are intimidated by the e-voting system.)
So why bother with the machines in the first place?
Actually, the US has an even more complicated political party landscape than Canada, too. There are the all-too-familiar Democrat and Republican parties, membership in which two are exclusive of each other. But there are many small parties, in which a candidate need not commit exclusive membership. Like Green, Libertarian, Liberal, Conservative (yes, officially named, with an initial capital letter), Working Families, Right to Life, Peace and Freedom, and dozens more. They typically endorse one candidate in a local or national race.
Endorsing a candidate is not the same as actually putting up a candidate. This supposed complexity means very little if the voter is still only faced with minimal choice when they come to cast their vote.
You're saying it's more secure to have one copy of the decryption key (on each player), and one copy of the encryption key (at the factory) so that it's harder to get ahold of the decryption keys?
No I'm saying that there will be multiple copies of the encryption keys and that these are highly likely to "leak". Therefore it should not be assumed that any encryption keys are secret.
The real reason paper ballots are not used universally in the US is because they are FAR more "democratic" in the US than in Canada. They vote for anything and everything. Americans vote for president, congressman, senator, govenor, judge, police chief, dog catcher, postmaster, various propositions, etc etc etc. In some elections a paper ballot would look like an income tax form!
To add to the complexity there are also elections to choose which candidate will represent a party. The "democratic" is in quotes because elections do not a democracy make.
It's been my personal experience that it doesn't matter what party the dolt is that does the fraud...
Or alternativly that the two big parties in the US are not that different.
One has to be able to trust the people counting the votes to make an accurate count. (I've seen my voting district, whose vote counters were [by law] made of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, report that a gubernatorial candidate got NO VOTES, when I know for a FACT that he got at least four.
Sounds a bit like Michael Moore's "Vote Ficus" campaign.
One specifically US issue appears to be the lack of an independent "civil service" to handle elections.
Nothing is wrong with it. There are plenty of area in the US (including where I vote) that use paper ballots you write on. I actually think that the local one is ideal: you use a black marker to connect two parts of an arrow which points to the name you want to vote for. You then put the ballot into a machine which scans it and retains it for record-keeping. I suspect that the machine will tell you if the ballot was invalid, and have you try again. It's very clear visually what is a vote and what isn't (how many stray pencil marks in a circle make a vote?).
You need to be very careful with ballot design if you are mechanically "validating" ballot papers. e.g. including explicit boxes for "none of these candidates" and "don't care".
With complex ballots or multiple elections it's perfectly legitimate that a voter may wish to abstain from voting for certain things.
Americans live in an overlapping hierarchy of school board, village/city, possibly an inclusive "town", county (possibly including or included by the city), metro area, state, multistate region, and nation. One state is based on a different legal paradigm (Lousiana is "napoleonic", and has parishes instead of counties), and each state has its own laws, as do cities, which include different details in representation. There are other political organizations which reconcile these differences where all must be counted together. And that's all very complex. More complex than the smaller and more consistent Canada, which is why our election process is more complex.
However the US is probably considerably less complex in these respects than the EU, it most definitly is population wise. Yet the recent elections for the European parliment elections were conducted using pencil and paper.
There are two benefits to this. First, when we do vote it is easier to focus on the issues at hand. For example, municipal races and issues do not get overwhelmed by federal campaigns. Each election voters will only have to deal with a small number questions.
Also it makes it easier for non national parties and independents to stand with a fair chance of being elected.
Canada has 1/10th the number of people as the USA. Not only is the scale of votes greater, but consequently the complexity of relationships among the people, therefore the political groupings and representations.
A better here might be the number of political parties. The US is somewhat lacking in political parties...
hardware failure: have several systems at each polling place. You'd want them anyway. If one goes down, you still have the others. Having more than one go down is very unlikely.
Really? Turn the power off and odds on they will all go down. Unless the system includes a lot of batteries...
It is very unlikely that *any* complex system will function "exactly correctly." For example, what if the voter pushes two (or three) spots on the touchscreen display simultaneously or touches them for an unexpectedly long (or short) amount of time or uses a display input with a damaged surface?
Maybe they don't realise that their sleeve, cufflinks, rings, etc are also touching the screen.
Does the POS touchscreen display at the checkout stand of your local supermarket function "exactly correctly" after a few months of use or does the operator have to push some things repeatedly to get them to activate?
The supermarket checkout generally isn't set up for a few hours, dismantled and packed in a warehouse either. It's fixed, operated by people with some degree of training/experiance.
*With 'my' system; just about the only event that I could forsee would be a prolonged computer outage. Sure, you could have all the computers fail, but this would be incredibly unlikely.
How does your system address the issue of someone deliberatly disabling power and/or communication links?
It's logistically difficult to distribute ballots in multiple languages, particularly when there will be a lawsuit whenever you underestimate number of people who will use one particular version.
I don't understand why this is a problem. Since candidates' names, being proper nouns, should not be translated in the first place. The only reason they would change is due to use of a different alphabet, in which case it is perfectly possible to print the name using Latin, Chinese, Arabic, etc characters on all ballot papers. There's also the solution used in India of including candidate photographs on the ballot paper which works even for the illiterate.
Blind people cannot use pencil/paper systems without help. ADA/disenfranchisement isssues result.
But they can use a complex touch screen machine without assistance? With these being cheaper than ballot papers having suitably textured paper...
And, really, given paper ballots, we *know* how to secure the transport and counting processes. You put the ballots in locked steel boxes, with representatives of all the major parties standing around watching whenever the boxes are transported or opened. Whenever the boxes are stored, they're guarded, again with oversight by the major political parties. Done!
You allow any interested party to watch all parts of the process of transport, storage and count. This includes representatives of the candidates, the press, pro democracy orgainsations even random members of the public. The more and the more diverse this group of people is the less likely there can be an effective conspiracy to defraud the electorate.Paper ballots too slow to count?
This isn't actually the case, manual counting of ballots is actually quite quick and easily scalable. In many US elections speed isn't even that important since the winning candidate dosn't take up office for months. Whereas there are places which use hand counted paper ballots where the result has immediate effect.