When considering the properties of voting systems, the United States isn't special. In fact, if something would be sketchy in - say - Iraq it would be even more sketchy here in the USA because we should know better.
I think the US must stop having elections driven by locals and have a federally mandated independant voting "authority" that answers only to the judicial branch. Politicians must not have any say in the way it is run and the legal standards must be very stringently applied.
Uhh... that's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's *already been shown* that federal standards on this sort of thing have exactly one effect - they require everyone to get it wrong.
The federal government isn't more trustworthy than local governments. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case - as the governmental body governs more people it tends to have less accountability to the people.
Holy crap! It doesn't matter if the votes would have mattered. That's not even close to important. If every vote wasn't counted properly, the election is meaningless - especially in a small election like the one in the article. With computer voting systems involved, we should expect 100% accuracy - there's no excuse for any "issues" like this.
Here's an interesting question: What percentage of yearly microprocessor production can even run Windows? How about Linux? (Hint: Cellphones)
You're right - at the moment, Linux has only really won a few battles. Here's the thing - Linux is the only OS that's even engaged in all the battles of the war, and with Linux, fighting on more fronts helps it on all fronts.
Yea, costed is an english word - but only in game developer jargon when talking about game balance decisions. "Yea, we costed long swords at 50 gold after we realized that they were unbalanced at 40."
Computer Science is no more "outdated" because a school could also offer IT and SW Eng degrees than Physics degrees are outdated because there are Engineering degrees.
Even external attacks are the fault of internal departments. You can think of the internet as having an automatic mechanism whereby insecure servers get pwned by script kiddies - the script kiddie isn't the problem, it's whoever didn't secure the server.
Isn't the good PS3 package selling for more like $600?
The 8800 GTS is around $450. You can easily get the rest of a solid gaming PC for $450. So you're talking more about a $900 PC than a $2,000 PC. And that's before pricing a decent HDTV vs. a decent gaming monitor.
What's the upload speed to go with those downstream speeds (24, 8, 2)?
I mean, sure, begin able to have more Google Video pages open at the same time is neat, but most of the interesting applications of decent bandwidth (like, say, sending someone a file) are constrained by the lower of upload and download speeds.
Optical scan vote counting is potentially a good idea, but it leaves a loophole compared to hand counting the ballots.
Consider the following situation from the 2004 election:
In one of the counties in Ohio, computer counted ballots were used. When a presidential candidate challenged the results and suggested a recount, the county election officials first recounted a random 3% of the county votes as required by Ohio state law. When that 3% showed no discrepancies with the computer vote totals, the recount was stopped.
Now, there's a perfectly reasonable statistical argument for the 3% law - except for a couple issues. First, if there was vote tampering limited to a few select polling stations, it will only be noticed if the 3% selected includes those stations. Second, in the Ohio case, the election officials manually selected the 3% that was recounted - note that it not being actually random completely destroys the statistical argument *and* if the officials were in on it would allow them to make sure that there was no chance of known-questionable stations being recounted.
Conclusion: Computer counting is fine. It saves time and man hours. But... if there is *any question at all* about the validity of the computer results, the procedure needs to specify a complete hand count - and that count needs to actually occur. Anything less provides opportunity for voting fraud.
There's no reason to be screwing around with bar codes. I can assure you that a computer can reliably OCR a candidate's name *way faster* than a poll worker can feed the ballots into the counting machine.
This is actually an interesting question. Fraud is also not covered as protected speech.
I guess the trick is that it's still not censored. No-one's going to stop you from yelling Fire in a crowded theater, you'll just be legally responsible for the injuries (since you maliciously acted to cause them). You can go ahead and claim that your old computer is "the fastest computer money can buy", but you'll get tagged when they buyer takes you to small claims court.
Note that even in the Fire case there's only a legal issue because the act will obviously and directly result in an immediate panic. There's nothing illegal about, say, having a website that gives advice on how to commit suicide - even if someone follows that advice. It can be hard to see the difference here, but it comes down to the fact that the "Fire" could be a real threat, and the website is just a website.
Barcodes on machine generated ballots are super-sketchy. The user needs to be able to be able to see and understand the marking on the ballot that the counting machine will read.
You say all these things, without any supporting evidence, just because they're not the "radical", "conspiracy theorist" view. Rational thinking isn't just choosing the option that "sounds least foolish".
Based on the information I have, it's not possible rule out the possibility of election fraud in either the 2000 or 2004 presidential election. The important resulting issue isn't "OMG! George Bush Cheated", it's "OMG! If someone does cheat we'll never know". The simple fact that a significant number of people question the validity of electronic voting results and we can't prove that they're wrong is a problem that should be fixed.
As for Iraq, I'm stuck back on Article I Section 8 of the constitution - you know the part that limits military budgets to 2 years. I think that really prohibits the whole foreign invasion that lasts forever thing and makes any other question about Iraq sort of irrelevant.
You're making a big assumption about the potential attackers.
Here's an attack: A poll worker who will be setting up the voting machines brings a hacked memory card with him to work on election day and slips it into a voting machine that he's setting up.
Here's another attack: An elections official hacks the whole bag of memory cards before the election.
These memory cards are supposed to be equivalent to ballot boxes, and the routine at the beginning that is meant to "check that the ballot box is empty before the voting starts" *doesn't work*. This attack is actually better than pre-stuffing the ballot box, because the numbers still come out right.
As a Massachusetts voter, I can assure you that Ted Kennedy *is* a Scotch Drinking Orangutan. That doesn't change the fact that all of the elections that have used electronic voting machines have been super-sketchy and raise the very real possibility that there was voting fraud. On the other hand, I'm not sure it matters. When was the last time we had a president or congressional majority that wasn't democrat or republican?
You could complain about the same rehashed points (that don't matter) over and over, or you could realize that there have been perfectly functional Linux desktops available for a couple years now. Sure, it runs Windows apps worse than Windows does. Well... Windows runs PS2 games worse than a PS2, but you don't see anyone saying that Windows isn't good enough for that reason (unless they want to play PS2 games...).
As for porting your product to Linux, this isn't especially complex. Google seems to have figured out how to do it with Google Earth for example. You mention a "Standard GUI". There are two. Pick one. They both work fine. If you're having trouble figuring this out: the answer is Gtk.
You should see this sort of problem coming. Software gets upgraded. Whoever decided to rely on a service tied to a specific browser configuration should have realized that it was going to bite your organization in the ass in the future and should have avoided the problem.
Regulated capitalism is more robust than you give it credit for.
The problem with this is that the regulations themselves tend to be influenced by market forces. That means that the system tends to stabilize on regulation-sustained monopolies rather than regulations that prevent monopolies. If there were no corporate->regulation feedback, this sort of system might work great.
Scenario 1 isn't especially realistic. People will, at minimum, pay Jane Doe for custom enhancements to her software. She's not going to starve. Even the current copyright system can be maintained without throwing people in jail - Jane's corporate customers will pay for licences so they don't get sued.
In fact, major software companies *love* piracy... it gets people using / trained in their software for free, who will later recommend that software to their employeers (who buy licences). Take Adobe... every time some kid pirates Photoshop they throw a party because it means he's not trying PaintShop Pro or The Gimp.
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When considering the properties of voting systems, the United States isn't special. In fact, if something would be sketchy in - say - Iraq it would be even more sketchy here in the USA because we should know better.
Uhh... that's got to be the dumbest thing I've ever heard. It's *already been shown* that federal standards on this sort of thing have exactly one effect - they require everyone to get it wrong.
The federal government isn't more trustworthy than local governments. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case - as the governmental body governs more people it tends to have less accountability to the people.
Holy crap! It doesn't matter if the votes would have mattered. That's not even close to important. If every vote wasn't counted properly, the election is meaningless - especially in a small election like the one in the article. With computer voting systems involved, we should expect 100% accuracy - there's no excuse for any "issues" like this.
Bah! You'd sound like an idiot if you said "I priced Manastorm up today" rather than "I costed Manastorm up today".
Here's an interesting question: What percentage of yearly microprocessor production can even run Windows? How about Linux? (Hint: Cellphones)
You're right - at the moment, Linux has only really won a few battles. Here's the thing - Linux is the only OS that's even engaged in all the battles of the war, and with Linux, fighting on more fronts helps it on all fronts.
Yea, costed is an english word - but only in game developer jargon when talking about game balance decisions. "Yea, we costed long swords at 50 gold after we realized that they were unbalanced at 40."
Computer Science is no more "outdated" because a school could also offer IT and SW Eng degrees than Physics degrees are outdated because there are Engineering degrees.
Even external attacks are the fault of internal departments. You can think of the internet as having an automatic mechanism whereby insecure servers get pwned by script kiddies - the script kiddie isn't the problem, it's whoever didn't secure the server.
Isn't the good PS3 package selling for more like $600?
The 8800 GTS is around $450. You can easily get the rest of a solid gaming PC for $450. So you're talking more about a $900 PC than a $2,000 PC. And that's before pricing a decent HDTV vs. a decent gaming monitor.
What's the upload speed to go with those downstream speeds (24, 8, 2)?
I mean, sure, begin able to have more Google Video pages open at the same time is neat, but most of the interesting applications of decent bandwidth (like, say, sending someone a file) are constrained by the lower of upload and download speeds.
Optical scan vote counting is potentially a good idea, but it leaves a loophole compared to hand counting the ballots.
Consider the following situation from the 2004 election:
Now, there's a perfectly reasonable statistical argument for the 3% law - except for a couple issues. First, if there was vote tampering limited to a few select polling stations, it will only be noticed if the 3% selected includes those stations. Second, in the Ohio case, the election officials manually selected the 3% that was recounted - note that it not being actually random completely destroys the statistical argument *and* if the officials were in on it would allow them to make sure that there was no chance of known-questionable stations being recounted.
Conclusion: Computer counting is fine. It saves time and man hours. But... if there is *any question at all* about the validity of the computer results, the procedure needs to specify a complete hand count - and that count needs to actually occur. Anything less provides opportunity for voting fraud.
There's no reason to be screwing around with bar codes. I can assure you that a computer can reliably OCR a candidate's name *way faster* than a poll worker can feed the ballots into the counting machine.
How about... there's no barcode at all and just text in an easy to read / easy to OCR font. It's not like computers can't read text.
This is actually an interesting question. Fraud is also not covered as protected speech.
I guess the trick is that it's still not censored. No-one's going to stop you from yelling Fire in a crowded theater, you'll just be legally responsible for the injuries (since you maliciously acted to cause them). You can go ahead and claim that your old computer is "the fastest computer money can buy", but you'll get tagged when they buyer takes you to small claims court.
Note that even in the Fire case there's only a legal issue because the act will obviously and directly result in an immediate panic. There's nothing illegal about, say, having a website that gives advice on how to commit suicide - even if someone follows that advice. It can be hard to see the difference here, but it comes down to the fact that the "Fire" could be a real threat, and the website is just a website.
Barcodes on machine generated ballots are super-sketchy. The user needs to be able to be able to see and understand the marking on the ballot that the counting machine will read.
You say all these things, without any supporting evidence, just because they're not the "radical", "conspiracy theorist" view. Rational thinking isn't just choosing the option that "sounds least foolish".
Based on the information I have, it's not possible rule out the possibility of election fraud in either the 2000 or 2004 presidential election. The important resulting issue isn't "OMG! George Bush Cheated", it's "OMG! If someone does cheat we'll never know". The simple fact that a significant number of people question the validity of electronic voting results and we can't prove that they're wrong is a problem that should be fixed.
As for Iraq, I'm stuck back on Article I Section 8 of the constitution - you know the part that limits military budgets to 2 years. I think that really prohibits the whole foreign invasion that lasts forever thing and makes any other question about Iraq sort of irrelevant.
You're making a big assumption about the potential attackers.
Here's an attack: A poll worker who will be setting up the voting machines brings a hacked memory card with him to work on election day and slips it into a voting machine that he's setting up.
Here's another attack: An elections official hacks the whole bag of memory cards before the election.
These memory cards are supposed to be equivalent to ballot boxes, and the routine at the beginning that is meant to "check that the ballot box is empty before the voting starts" *doesn't work*. This attack is actually better than pre-stuffing the ballot box, because the numbers still come out right.
As a Massachusetts voter, I can assure you that Ted Kennedy *is* a Scotch Drinking Orangutan. That doesn't change the fact that all of the elections that have used electronic voting machines have been super-sketchy and raise the very real possibility that there was voting fraud. On the other hand, I'm not sure it matters. When was the last time we had a president or congressional majority that wasn't democrat or republican?
Just as long as it's not the 9800 Pro, that's fine.
I still say that if you didn't want to do Counter Strike, you wouldn't need Windows. Just like if you don't want to play Tekken, you don't need a PS2.
You could complain about the same rehashed points (that don't matter) over and over, or you could realize that there have been perfectly functional Linux desktops available for a couple years now. Sure, it runs Windows apps worse than Windows does. Well... Windows runs PS2 games worse than a PS2, but you don't see anyone saying that Windows isn't good enough for that reason (unless they want to play PS2 games...).
As for porting your product to Linux, this isn't especially complex. Google seems to have figured out how to do it with Google Earth for example. You mention a "Standard GUI". There are two. Pick one. They both work fine. If you're having trouble figuring this out: the answer is Gtk.
You should see this sort of problem coming. Software gets upgraded. Whoever decided to rely on a service tied to a specific browser configuration should have realized that it was going to bite your organization in the ass in the future and should have avoided the problem.
The problem with this is that the regulations themselves tend to be influenced by market forces. That means that the system tends to stabilize on regulation-sustained monopolies rather than regulations that prevent monopolies. If there were no corporate->regulation feedback, this sort of system might work great.
1996 called. They want their prediction of the future back. Oh, and sun Microsystems wants you to buy some of their stock.
Scenario 1 isn't especially realistic. People will, at minimum, pay Jane Doe for custom enhancements to her software. She's not going to starve. Even the current copyright system can be maintained without throwing people in jail - Jane's corporate customers will pay for licences so they don't get sued.
In fact, major software companies *love* piracy... it gets people using / trained in their software for free, who will later recommend that software to their employeers (who buy licences). Take Adobe... every time some kid pirates Photoshop they throw a party because it means he's not trying PaintShop Pro or The Gimp.