Lets remember way back when this happened all the time shall we.....and we used to say to the users.....
"there is no guarantee of email delivery" (and optionally "Get over it") Sorry, I don't remember such a time. E-mail isn't supposed to just disappear.
Remember this folks, no where in the RFC's is there anything that states email will get delivered.... A previous poster explained this. You're mistaken.
Calls to support eventually indicated it was a known problem (didn't admit it until pressed) Your phrasing implies that you spoke to someone who initially lied about the problem, then eventually caved in and admitted the truth. The reality, more likely, is that the first person you spoke to had no idea the problem existed (and when they're not informed of a problem, they're trained to assume the customer is at fault, because 95% of the time, the customer really is at fault). Your persistence eventually got you in contact with someone else with the authority to (after all other possibilities have been exhausted, again) ask someone who knows something whether there's a known problem. At this point they were informed that there was, and this new information was passed on to you. It may also have been passed around (informally, during smoke breaks) to other members of that team, but almost certainly was not passed on to the lower level support people who initially handled your call. If someone else calls in with the same issue, the first person they speak to will still have no idea there's a known issue.
Actually, now that all their tech support is outsourced, the situation may be even worse than I've just described. I haven't worked for Earthlink in about five years, and I left a few months before everyone got laid off.
But my point is, when they denied that there was a known problem, they weren't lying to you - they honestly had no idea.
Nope, the BOFH would have first piped it to his home directory so he could grep for juicy bits. Having seen some of the "juicy bits" that a lot of spam includes, no, I don't think he would. Might forward it to the PFY, though.
Religion is one of the most hierarchical organizations on earth. It's a step beyond autocracy. Did you ever get to choose your leader? What makes it right for him to rule? Why does he have that power? Do you know that he's perfect, or just take his word for it?
While some religions and, indeed, some denominations of Christianity do have a hierarchical structure, please be aware that this is far from universally true. The church I am a member of did select our pastor (a search committee was formed to find one, they interviewed several candidates and made their recommendation to the congregation, and after getting to know him for awhile we all voted). Our church is affiliated with a regional association of churches of the same denomination, which provides a variety of resources including assistance with finding new pastors, but they absolutely do not dictate who our leadership will be. Nor does the pastor have ultimate authority - he is there to serve the congregation, not the other way around.
Sure OLPC is inclined to go with a FOSS solution and has some good justifications for doing so but I don't see how they in good conscience could refuse an offer from MS to pay for some *huge* number of the laptops complete with a guarantee of a free version of windows for all the OLPC machines. This may be a difficult concept for some people to wrap their heads around, but maybe Microsoft's software isn't better than what they're already planning on using. It doesn't matter how much it costs if the software sucks.
If it's a medical emergency, call an ambulance. Almost always faster and safer. When a woman is having a baby, you don't sit around and wait 15 minutes for an ambulance to show up.
Just depends on where you live. In Vancouver, Canada, there are very few left turn lanes on the major thoroughfares, so you'll always have 3-4 cars waiting in the intersection and turning left right when it turns red. (I've seen this in NYC too).
I noticed that when I lived in Phoenix AZ too, almost no left turn arrows anywhere. Here in Oregon we're not so stupid, which is part of why we have such better drivers.
I try to be a safe driver. So, I drive with the intention of leaving a couple of car lengths between me and the car in front. What happens? Someone sees that as an invitation to merge on over!! Next thing I know my "safe space" is down to inches. Best thing to do then...I upset the guy behind me and slow down opening up more of a gap trying to manage between not letting someone over and making sure I have some room to stop. You're doing the right thing. Keep doing it. In fact, leave a little extra space in front of you, to allow people to merge in front of you more safely. If people won't stop merging in front of you, get out of the left lane for awhile.
Please show me the theory that says a fully electronic DRE system with millions of lines of code and dozens of moving parts (the printer is an infamous source of hardware failure) can be made superior to a system involving a piece of paper and an ink pen. I meant the user interface, when all the hardware is working correctly, could be made easier to use than paper and pencil. I admit I haven't studied this, but I seem to recall hearing complaints that a lot of voters are confused by current voting machines, and I don't think it has to be that way.
As for the hardware working, the potentially problematic components in the machines I described are 1) the computer itself, 2) the touchscreen, 3) the printer, and 4) the scanner.
I'm confident we can build a computer that works reliably for at least a day. Even Diebold should be able to pull this off. They do make ATMs.
Thousands of restaurants use POS systems with touchscreens day in and day out, and if they weren't reliable, they wouldn't be using them.
How many pages can your average run-of-the-mill HP LaserJet print before needing maintenace? How many receipts can your average supermarket cash register print? I agree that the printer is the most likely component to have problems, which is why I would suggest that the entire printer should be a removable component that each polling location has at least one extra of. But seriously, look at businesses that rely on printing things thousands of times a day, and what kinds of printers can fill their needs.
Finally, the scanner. Again, look at scanners used commercially. What does the College Board use to scan SATs? How does the US Postal Service scan envelopes? Reliable scanners shouldn't be hard to come by.
Finally, I see no reason why paper-and-pencil ballots couldn't be used as well. Make pre-printed ballots available, and let voters fill in the bubbles by hand instead of using the touchscreen if that's what they prefer. Feed it into the same scanner, and you still get your instant count, minus the benefits of a computerized user interface (input validation/error checking, alternative interfaces for the disabled, translations for non-English speakers, no eraser smudges, etc.). This option could always be available, even when the machines are working perfectly, for voters who prefer it.
And if the scanner jams, you just keep the ballots in a locked box and count them later. This shouldn't happen, but if it does, it's not a catastrophe.
In the FOSS world the mantra is "shut up and show me the code". I'm asking you to put forth your own list of designers you feel are competent, why you feel they're competent, and what about their systems is such an improvement over the existing state of the art. Compare and contrast to Chaum's Punchscan, Rivest's triple-ballot, and the various mixin and visual cryptographic schemes. How do you feel about the Open Voting Consortium? They suggest printing a barcode on each ballot alongside the human-readable vote, which I don't agree with, but aside from that, I think they have some good ideas.
And even if they wanted to choose a cross-platform program, they have no Mac or Linux computers available to test it with. When the vendor comes in to sell the product to them, he doesn't say, "it works on Windows only" and they don't ask.
This is exactly right. The vendor shows them that the web site works in IE6 and IE7, and as far as they know, that means the web site works. There is no question of whether it works in other browsers or on other platforms if nobody there has reason to believe it might not. "Well, Macs can browse the Web, right?" That's the only requirement they know about (and they're only 95% sure the answer to that question is "yes"), until something different is explained to them.
Don't do that. Many browsers send User-Agent strings that are designed to masquerade as other browsers in order to bypass these kinds of checks - in fact, that's why nearly all modern browsers claim to be "Mozilla", because a lot of sites wouldn't work unless they thought you were using Netscape.
Do you really want to piss off these users? Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; FreeBSD i386; en) Opera 8.51 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Netscape/8.0.4 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)
Notice how Safari passes tests for "Gecko" (Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox) and "KHTML" (Konqueror): Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
By comparison, electronic voting machines are absolutely Byzantine in the complexity of their user interfaces. I don't disagree that current ones are, but in theory, they're not supposed to be. In theory, we should be able to have electronic machines that are actually easier to use than simple paper and pencil. Unfortunately the kinds of people capable of designing such systems can't get noticed by politicians responsible for buying them.
What's confusing you are the questions of "so how do I know Punchscan really works?" And look: Punchscan is so simple that J. Random Slashdotter--me--can explain it to you in just a couple of messages.
Part of my confusion was around "how do I know it really works?" but more of my confusion is around "why do we need this?" We've had elections for centuries in which there was no way to verify that a specific ballot was recorded correctly, and for the most part things have gone fine. Using the kind of electronic machines I described doesn't fundamentally change the process.
Now imagine if you were to ask "so how do I know Diebold's AccuVote TSx machine really works?" Imagine how many millions of messages that would take to explain all the code in it. And even then, you wouldn't have much in the way of assurances. Apparently they print your vote on a piece of paper and show it to you, then if you say that's OK, they count your vote electronically. This is slightly better than the same thing without the "paper trail", but it requires voters to look at a tiny printout through a magnifying glass, makes it possible to associate voters with votes (due to the sequence of votes being maintained on the roll of paper), and gets confusing if a voter disagrees with the printout and wants to fix it. Voters are not encouraged to examine the printout. The solution I described would encourage voters to examine the printout, because that printout would be their ballot, that they themselves have to cast after holding it in their hand.
The manual recount is simple. The mapping between letters and numbers is a function requiring the ballot serial number and secret information which only the counting authority possesses. This is fairly basic cryptography. If you want a manual recount, no problem. Look at the original ballot halves--a paper record--and then, for each ballot, apply the mapping function to (ballot id, secret information) to figure out which candidate was voted for. Record votes manually for the appropriate candidates. Done. OK, that makes sense - but a manual recount would be somewhat more complex, and couldn't easily be done entirely by hand.
Finally, open source voting software is not the panacea you seem to think it is. Australia has had GPLed election software for a few years now, and it's only marginally less cruddy than everything else. You cannot make a voting system trustworthy simply by sprinkling it with DFSG/OSI/FSF Software Licensing Fairy Dust. I love the fairy dust idea. I didn't make it clear in my post, but I completely agree that open source software isn't a panacea - the system needs to be designed so that it doesn't rely on any software at all. The answer is to get as many people involved in the process as possible, so that if anyone sees anything fishy, they can draw attention to it.
Punchscan would work, but my personal feeling is that the downsides (it's a bit confusing to the voter - I'm a Slashdotter, and I needed further explanation - and manual recounts involve cryptography) outweigh the advantages (each voter can verify that their vote was recorded correctly). The system I like is a friendly electronic voting machine that prints a human-readable paper ballot, which is then optically scanned as it is inserted into the ballot box. The voting machine gives you all the user-interface advantages like error checking, ability to go back and fix a mistake, an audio version for the blind, translations to other languages, etc. The printout lets the voter verify that their ballot was printed correctly. The scanner gives an instant count at the end of the election. The ballot box stores the actual ballots that were scanned, and recounts are easy and can be done by anyone (no cryptography required).
And you weer able to fix it. Try fixing a zombiefied Windows machine, short of pulling the infected drive and replacing it with a fresh, virgin drive.
What do you think antivirus and antispyware apps do? On Linux I had to track it down by hand.
Which will be 0wned after 30 minutes connected to the Net, due to the POS that is Windows, coupled with the ignorance of the bog-standard Windows luser.
Windows XP Service Pack 2 won't be 0wned just by connecting it. And if you're gonna throw user ignorance into the mix... Try creating an account with a username like "temp" and a simple password like "temp123" on an average run-of-the-mill non-firewalled Linux box, and see how long it takes.
I've looked at the Punchscan system, and I'm a bit confused. I can see that it would prevent vote buying, but beyond that, it looks like the only thing it really verifies is that my vote was physically scanned correctly, which is something I'm not currently worried about. I still have to trust that the machine correctly remembers which candidate was associated with the hole I stamped, and there's still no chance for a manual recount. So, compared to current paperless electronic voting machines, I can be assured that SOMETHING was counted, but I have to put up with the confusing aspect of not having the hole I stamp line up with the name of the candidate I want.
Of course, I can trust that once my vote is correctly scanned, it will be correctly counted, because the software is open source. But if paperless electronic voting machines were open source, I would trust them just as much, even if I couldn't log on to verify which side of a blank piece of paper had my stamp.
Am I missing something?
Will other voters be as confused by this idea as I am?
We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
My apologies; I didn't mean to debate the risks of vote buying vs. the risks of unverifiable ballots. I had assumed it was generally agreed upon that the danger of vote buying is significant, and most people calling for some mechanism for voters to be able to confirm which way they voted had simply not considered this issue.
If you believe that the possibility of vote buying is worth it, if it lets us verify how our votes were counted, then that's a legitimate opinion (which I happen to disagree with), and should not be silenced.
Linux botnets don't get as much publicity, but they do exist; my own server fell prey once when I did something stupid, and I only found out about it when I got a spam complaint forwarded by my ISP.
Vote buying. We've been over this. If you've got some code that will allow you to determine from the published results how your vote was counted, then I can ask you to tell me your code as soon as you've voted (before the results are published), use it to verify your vote the same way you can, and reward/punish you accordingly. Knowing that I have the ability to do this, people without strong convictions will vote how I tell them in exchange for the reward I offer or to avoid the punishment I threaten.
Yes, that would be illegal, and if I'm caught, I'd be in trouble, unless I just got my friends elected to a position where they can get me off the hook.
Jesus christ. Here we have an OS based on Unix and we can't remap keys until the third release? That's pathetic.
Oh, you could remap the keys if you really wanted to. There just wasn't a user interface to make it easy to do built into the operating system.
And the remapping feature I really want still isn't included: remapping the useless Enter key on my iBook to Option. I'm using a kernel extension called FKeys to do it. Note that I can still get Enter on the rare occasions I need to by pressing Fn-Return; I have no idea why Apple thinks I need a separate Enter key.
I disagree that existing behavior should never be changed, if the new behavior is better. However, I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to use the backspace key to scroll.
Thanks for pointing this out, so now I know how to disable it altogether (I sometimes hit it accidentally, thinking a form field has focus, and I've always hated it).
Slashdot Mirror
"there is no guarantee of email delivery" (and optionally "Get over it") Sorry, I don't remember such a time. E-mail isn't supposed to just disappear. Remember this folks, no where in the RFC's is there anything that states email will get delivered.... A previous poster explained this. You're mistaken.
Actually, now that all their tech support is outsourced, the situation may be even worse than I've just described. I haven't worked for Earthlink in about five years, and I left a few months before everyone got laid off.
But my point is, when they denied that there was a known problem, they weren't lying to you - they honestly had no idea.
Life is dangerous and it shouldn't be the government's job to protect you from it.
I can't read Japanese, but it looks like WiinRemote is a similar app for Windows; this page is linked from the DarwiinRemote page.
I tip my hat to you, sir. Never before have I seen this particular quote from Star Wars modded Informative.
Religion is one of the most hierarchical organizations on earth. It's a step beyond autocracy. Did you ever get to choose your leader? What makes it right for him to rule? Why does he have that power? Do you know that he's perfect, or just take his word for it?
While some religions and, indeed, some denominations of Christianity do have a hierarchical structure, please be aware that this is far from universally true. The church I am a member of did select our pastor (a search committee was formed to find one, they interviewed several candidates and made their recommendation to the congregation, and after getting to know him for awhile we all voted). Our church is affiliated with a regional association of churches of the same denomination, which provides a variety of resources including assistance with finding new pastors, but they absolutely do not dictate who our leadership will be. Nor does the pastor have ultimate authority - he is there to serve the congregation, not the other way around.
Just depends on where you live. In Vancouver, Canada, there are very few left turn lanes on the major thoroughfares, so you'll always have 3-4 cars waiting in the intersection and turning left right when it turns red. (I've seen this in NYC too).
I noticed that when I lived in Phoenix AZ too, almost no left turn arrows anywhere. Here in Oregon we're not so stupid, which is part of why we have such better drivers.
As for the hardware working, the potentially problematic components in the machines I described are 1) the computer itself, 2) the touchscreen, 3) the printer, and 4) the scanner.
Finally, I see no reason why paper-and-pencil ballots couldn't be used as well. Make pre-printed ballots available, and let voters fill in the bubbles by hand instead of using the touchscreen if that's what they prefer. Feed it into the same scanner, and you still get your instant count, minus the benefits of a computerized user interface (input validation/error checking, alternative interfaces for the disabled, translations for non-English speakers, no eraser smudges, etc.). This option could always be available, even when the machines are working perfectly, for voters who prefer it.
And if the scanner jams, you just keep the ballots in a locked box and count them later. This shouldn't happen, but if it does, it's not a catastrophe. In the FOSS world the mantra is "shut up and show me the code". I'm asking you to put forth your own list of designers you feel are competent, why you feel they're competent, and what about their systems is such an improvement over the existing state of the art. Compare and contrast to Chaum's Punchscan, Rivest's triple-ballot, and the various mixin and visual cryptographic schemes. How do you feel about the Open Voting Consortium? They suggest printing a barcode on each ballot alongside the human-readable vote, which I don't agree with, but aside from that, I think they have some good ideas.
And even if they wanted to choose a cross-platform program, they have no Mac or Linux computers available to test it with. When the vendor comes in to sell the product to them, he doesn't say, "it works on Windows only" and they don't ask.
This is exactly right. The vendor shows them that the web site works in IE6 and IE7, and as far as they know, that means the web site works. There is no question of whether it works in other browsers or on other platforms if nobody there has reason to believe it might not. "Well, Macs can browse the Web, right?" That's the only requirement they know about (and they're only 95% sure the answer to that question is "yes"), until something different is explained to them.
Don't do that. Many browsers send User-Agent strings that are designed to masquerade as other browsers in order to bypass these kinds of checks - in fact, that's why nearly all modern browsers claim to be "Mozilla", because a lot of sites wouldn't work unless they thought you were using Netscape.
Do you really want to piss off these users?
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; X11; FreeBSD i386; en) Opera 8.51
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Netscape/8.0.4
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)
Notice how Safari passes tests for "Gecko" (Mozilla-based browsers including Firefox) and "KHTML" (Konqueror):
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Part of my confusion was around "how do I know it really works?" but more of my confusion is around "why do we need this?" We've had elections for centuries in which there was no way to verify that a specific ballot was recorded correctly, and for the most part things have gone fine. Using the kind of electronic machines I described doesn't fundamentally change the process.
Now imagine if you were to ask "so how do I know Diebold's AccuVote TSx machine really works?" Imagine how many millions of messages that would take to explain all the code in it. And even then, you wouldn't have much in the way of assurances. Apparently they print your vote on a piece of paper and show it to you, then if you say that's OK, they count your vote electronically. This is slightly better than the same thing without the "paper trail", but it requires voters to look at a tiny printout through a magnifying glass, makes it possible to associate voters with votes (due to the sequence of votes being maintained on the roll of paper), and gets confusing if a voter disagrees with the printout and wants to fix it. Voters are not encouraged to examine the printout. The solution I described would encourage voters to examine the printout, because that printout would be their ballot, that they themselves have to cast after holding it in their hand.
Punchscan would work, but my personal feeling is that the downsides (it's a bit confusing to the voter - I'm a Slashdotter, and I needed further explanation - and manual recounts involve cryptography) outweigh the advantages (each voter can verify that their vote was recorded correctly). The system I like is a friendly electronic voting machine that prints a human-readable paper ballot, which is then optically scanned as it is inserted into the ballot box. The voting machine gives you all the user-interface advantages like error checking, ability to go back and fix a mistake, an audio version for the blind, translations to other languages, etc. The printout lets the voter verify that their ballot was printed correctly. The scanner gives an instant count at the end of the election. The ballot box stores the actual ballots that were scanned, and recounts are easy and can be done by anyone (no cryptography required).
And you weer able to fix it. Try fixing a zombiefied Windows machine, short of pulling the infected drive and replacing it with a fresh, virgin drive.
What do you think antivirus and antispyware apps do? On Linux I had to track it down by hand.
Which will be 0wned after 30 minutes connected to the Net, due to the POS that is Windows, coupled with the ignorance of the bog-standard Windows luser.
Windows XP Service Pack 2 won't be 0wned just by connecting it. And if you're gonna throw user ignorance into the mix... Try creating an account with a username like "temp" and a simple password like "temp123" on an average run-of-the-mill non-firewalled Linux box, and see how long it takes.
I've looked at the Punchscan system, and I'm a bit confused. I can see that it would prevent vote buying, but beyond that, it looks like the only thing it really verifies is that my vote was physically scanned correctly, which is something I'm not currently worried about. I still have to trust that the machine correctly remembers which candidate was associated with the hole I stamped, and there's still no chance for a manual recount. So, compared to current paperless electronic voting machines, I can be assured that SOMETHING was counted, but I have to put up with the confusing aspect of not having the hole I stamp line up with the name of the candidate I want.
Of course, I can trust that once my vote is correctly scanned, it will be correctly counted, because the software is open source. But if paperless electronic voting machines were open source, I would trust them just as much, even if I couldn't log on to verify which side of a blank piece of paper had my stamp.
Am I missing something?
Will other voters be as confused by this idea as I am?
We" may have been over this before, but that doesn't mean you are correct, and it certainly doesn't mean you should be calling for people to be modded down just because you disagree with them.
My apologies; I didn't mean to debate the risks of vote buying vs. the risks of unverifiable ballots. I had assumed it was generally agreed upon that the danger of vote buying is significant, and most people calling for some mechanism for voters to be able to confirm which way they voted had simply not considered this issue.
If you believe that the possibility of vote buying is worth it, if it lets us verify how our votes were counted, then that's a legitimate opinion (which I happen to disagree with), and should not be silenced.
Linux botnets don't get as much publicity, but they do exist; my own server fell prey once when I did something stupid, and I only found out about it when I got a spam complaint forwarded by my ISP.
Vote buying. We've been over this. If you've got some code that will allow you to determine from the published results how your vote was counted, then I can ask you to tell me your code as soon as you've voted (before the results are published), use it to verify your vote the same way you can, and reward/punish you accordingly. Knowing that I have the ability to do this, people without strong convictions will vote how I tell them in exchange for the reward I offer or to avoid the punishment I threaten.
Yes, that would be illegal, and if I'm caught, I'd be in trouble, unless I just got my friends elected to a position where they can get me off the hook.
Jesus christ. Here we have an OS based on Unix and we can't remap keys until the third release? That's pathetic.
Oh, you could remap the keys if you really wanted to. There just wasn't a user interface to make it easy to do built into the operating system.
And the remapping feature I really want still isn't included: remapping the useless Enter key on my iBook to Option. I'm using a kernel extension called FKeys to do it. Note that I can still get Enter on the rare occasions I need to by pressing Fn-Return; I have no idea why Apple thinks I need a separate Enter key.
People like you make spam harder to fight. Please stop.
I guess there are more computer programmers than framers or contractors on Slashdot.
;-)
What was your first clue?
Bizarre.
I disagree that existing behavior should never be changed, if the new behavior is better. However, I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to use the backspace key to scroll.
Thanks for pointing this out, so now I know how to disable it altogether (I sometimes hit it accidentally, thinking a form field has focus, and I've always hated it).