You may want to check your sarcasm detector to see if it was on the big recall list last spring. If not, you probably have your filter threshold set wrong (remember, 1.0 on the filter means "never detect sarcasm," not "always detect sarcasm").
a more professional color scheme with purple and orange.
Because brown seems so frivolous compared to a pair of secondary colours, and the other combinations were already taken by Barney, the Irish rebels, and these folks?
I suppose that's why industries that care about their professional image never use brown for anything.
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has merely issued a Demand for Information rather than shutting down a plant that is lacking a full compliment of safety personnel.
Give me a break. If you strip away the inflammatory wording, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
The NRC "merely" did something reasonable rather than taking some draconian action that the fossil fuel industry apologists could then use to argue against the safety and reliability of their biggest competitor ("Look! They had to shut it down for safety violations! Oh Noooooooo!")
Honestly, what's the justification for this nonsense? Are the local constabularies that bored? And what the hell was with the SWAT-like response? Do they seriously think Osama bin Laden is going to turn up and spin techno for three hours?
It would be interesting to see if there were any political connections--local officials in this country have been known to use almost
almost identical "SWAT-like" tactics to break up an opponent's fund raiser, for example.
The "we thought it was a rave" BS would make a lot more sense as a cover for some stronger (but presently obscure) motive.
When I read "Your Rights Online: India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database" I was horrified, But then I read further and realized that, while bad, it wasn't nearly as bad as the headline makes it sound.
Turns out they're only planning on putting some data about the citizens in the database. But it looks like people will still be allowed to keep their own grocery lists and address books etc. and manage them however they wish.
They said he's not a climate scientist, but he has an undergrad physics degree and a PhD in economics and he's seems to have spent most of his career writing position papers for economics think tanks! Heck, that should be enough to qualify him as a client scientist...oh wait. What I mean is, with those credentials he should be able to practice dentistry and set policy on...no, that's not it.
He's a...race car driver? No, that's not it either.
Let me think.
I know! He's an economist.
So now all I have to do is prove that climate science is a subset of economics and the "how dare they say he isn't a climate scientist" outrage will be justified.
--MarkusQ
P.S. From what I can gather, the "suppressed opinion" was just that--an opinion. It isn't like the guy had gone out and done any original research.
I think you are missing the point. You are describing how the system is supposed to work (e.g. "the identifying information is encrypted" and "only the machine holds the key"). But there is no way to verify that that is actually how it does work (as opposed, say, to something that gave all the external signs of working the way it should but still reported bogus results).
Further, the vote-challenge mechanism could be used (in a statistical sense) to enforce compliance in a vote coercion scheme, so it also fails the privacy test.
You're assuming the vote doesn't contain identifying information. For example the booth could display a value which incremented each time a vote was completed, and which the machine must include in the vote cast. You could also use the time or a hash of the voter's identity. The voter can verify a vote with the correct ID was cast from the machine by challenging the vote, and the poll workers and other machines can verify that the vote ID is behaving correctly.
Where is the new avenue of attack?
Yes, I'm assuming the vote doesn't contain identifying information. That's what I mean by anonymity. You could make something reasonably trustworthy if (and only if) it includes enough information to verifiably connect votes and voters. But unless you are willing to take this step and give up anonymity you're out of luck.
So an attacker can no longer silently change votes by compromising just a single voting machine.
Sure they could. All they have to do is remember the votes that have been cast so far (at least, of the sort they don't like) and then give the same code to the next sap that votes that way, while silently throwing his vote the way you like.
And yes, you could add safeguards to prevent this, but they would open up new avenues of attack. Until you get to the point where it is possible to see that person A's vote for candidate X was properly cast and counted (thus compromising anonymity) you're out of luck.
Finally, the real concern in all of this shouldn't be on the voting machines per se, but on the whole process (including the central tabulators). Protecting the individual machines doesn't help if a compromise of the tabulators gives the game to the bad guys. And saying that the tabulation will be done by multiple third parties doesn't help because it will either have to be done real time (compromising anonymity) or the ballots will have to be held somewhere between being cast and being tabulated, introducing a new point of attack.
What you might be saying (and what I'll claim) isn't that there is no secure way of implementing the currently implemented protocol. It's that it's the wrong protocol, since it's basically "1. Tell the vote-counter what your vote is; 2. trust the vote-counter to report the correct final tally."
Agreed. Specifically, the anonymity "requirement" means that you're left with nothing but trust, because ultimately you'll want to address problems of the form "These N people voted for X yet X only got N-1 votes" and you can't do that unless you have "These N people" to start with. Otherwise, as long as each candidate that anyone votes for is given at least one vote in the final tally, you're stuck with trust.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Even that low standard has been failed, as in the case of the guy who objected because he officially got zero votes even though he had voted for himself.
The system you linked to has numerous obvious flaws for internet voting, even after skipping over the fact that it isn't intended for use in an unsupervised environment. For example, a compromised machine could simply delay transmission of a ballot it wished to tamper with until after the user had decided to challenge or cast it. Likewise, the central tabulator could still produce bogus results. And there appears to be nothing that would prevent the transmission of phantom ballots for voters who never showed up. And so on.
For example, consider a commit-or-verify scheme. After you cast a ballot you can either commit the ballot or verify that it was recorded correctly and repeat the process.
Phooey. For any such system you can devise, it would be possible to implement a "mock-up" system that appeared to use your clever safe, secure, and trustworthy system but in fact did not (to see this just consider the fact that any software solution could itself be simulated in software). This simulation could be presented to the user while the actual election was run by a guy in another city with a spreadsheet.
If the electronic system encompasses enough of the process and provides perfect anonymity there is no way to be certain that the results are coming from the process you designed and not from some clever simulation of it that looks the same but fudges the results.
I still refuse to believe that eventually we couldn't make Internet voting more secure than paper ballots.
But security isn't the question. The problem is that with secure and anonymous electronic voting there is no outside way to verify that the results reported have anything to do with the votes cast. Whoever controls the system can make it report whatever results they want, and there's no way to tell if they are telling the truth or not. If your first thought is "well, make it open source," think again.
I already consider online banking to be at least as secure as ATM transactions, and I see no reason why a properly designed online voting system couldn't be the same.
The difference being that the banks (which run both ATMs and online banking sites) don't also control the money supply. If they did (e.g., if they could just create money the way the government does) we'd have a major problem. No matter how secure the process is, once it subsumes enough levels that you have know way of knowing if it's just reporting made-up numbers, you have a problem.
And if you read TFA, the sensor drift started in January 2009, was spotted within a few weeks and only affected their daily images which are effectively "live" and hence haven't gone through QA.
So how exactly does an error which occurred in Jan/Feb 09, was almost immediately spotted and declared affect a (misreported) prediction made last May?
Congratulations. You appear to have been the first person here to read beyond the flamebait summary and respond to the actual content. On a site full of people conditioned by years of rickrolling (and worse) to never RTFA, you sir, are a member of a rare and vanishing breed.
Keep up the good work.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I used to be skeptical of global warming myself (years ago), until I realized that the best the anti-HCGW crowd could offer as counter case was crap like this--the scientific analog of "Marty look, your shoe's untied."
On the one hand, tons of data, much of which is easily checked, and all of which hangs together to form a consistent picture, and on the other a hodge podge of nonsense that doesn't stand up to a moments scrutiny glued together with this sort of BS. They've gotten as bad as the anti-evolution people.
Coming up next, I fear:
GLOBAL WARMING WEBSITE ISN'T W3C COMPLIANT
How can we trust their climate data when they can't even get their HTML/CSS right?
That's pretty damn abrupt in geologic time scales, and a shift in carbon levels will have never occurred that quickly before.
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
For those who have missed it, Mars is also undergoing global warming.
For those who may have missed it, Mars is not undergoing global warming. But why let a few pesky facts get in the way of good clean coal and oil industry lobbying?
The water is forced down into the Earth's crust where heat trapped millenia ago boils the water.
I'd agree with most of you post, but not the "young Earth" model behind this statement. The heat wasn't "trapped" (or at least what little "trapping" there was occurred billions of years ago, not thousands); it is being constantly procuded by radioactive decay.
There's another resource being unsustainably wasted on renewable energy, neodymium for neodymium-iron-boron magnets in wind turbines generators.
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Wind turbines produce even more worthless power than solar panels(see West Texas where wind farms pay ERCOT to take their electricity 20% of the time. If nobody wants the power ERCOT has to do the equivalent of running a giant toaster to get rid of it or the voltage and frequency would get out of wack).
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
For things like solar, sure. But I don't see wind or tidal power generation needing anything more advanced than fiberglass.
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Who ordered that? And where do they fit in the standard model?
Phonons are just a very weird state of photons, for suitably high values of "very weird"--they propagate by the dipole interactions of the substrate, and are thus at the bottom an EM phenomena. But that isn't a very useful way to look at them (about as useful as saying that sound in air involves oscillatory motion of masses and thus could be considered a source of gravity waves).
Rather than asking "how do they fit into the standard model?" it makes more sense to ask "how tight is the analogy between phonons in a lattice and photons in a vacuum?" and "where does the analogy break down?" Note also that the analogy is pretty good in places (the governing equations are identical) so the concept is more useful than you think.
--MarkusQ
P.S. IANALP -- I am not a licensed physicist; I am not your physicist, and this is not physical advice. If you have questions about the laws of nature you should conduct experiments, not rely on the advice of people you meet on the internet.
Mitchell ends by questioning how much good it does for banks or credit card companies to require 4, 5, or more independent identity "factors" before providing access to account details, when most or all of the factors they request can be found online about nearly anyone.
Psha. Search all you want, and you'll never discover whether "rw^j8*=1IF9d" is my mother's maiden name, my favorite desert, or where I got my first kiss. And it won't matter anyway, 'cause that's not actually one of the strings I use.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And for an added level of security, I'm not really me, nor am I the person I told the bank I was.
I put the flag in the flower pot, on my window ledge. Then they know we are to meet.
I cannot further discuss this matter at this time. I can explain it all, once "they" come forward on "their" own.
You do realize most of the readers here are too young to know what a mimeograph is, right?
Ok, at least you get points for being as old as I am. But don't try to leave the island, six.
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to check your sarcasm detector to see if it was on the big recall list last spring. If not, you probably have your filter threshold set wrong (remember, 1.0 on the filter means "never detect sarcasm," not "always detect sarcasm").
--MarkusQ
Because brown seems so frivolous compared to a pair of secondary colours, and the other combinations were already taken by Barney, the Irish rebels, and these folks?
I suppose that's why industries that care about their professional image never use brown for anything.
--MarkusQ
Give me a break. If you strip away the inflammatory wording, this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. When was the last time you heard of a coal fired plant or a coal mine being shut down because they didn't have a "full complement of safety personnel"?
The NRC "merely" did something reasonable rather than taking some draconian action that the fossil fuel industry apologists could then use to argue against the safety and reliability of their biggest competitor ("Look! They had to shut it down for safety violations! Oh Noooooooo!")
-- MarkusQ
It would be interesting to see if there were any political connections--local officials in this country have been known to use almost almost identical "SWAT-like" tactics to break up an opponent's fund raiser, for example.
The "we thought it was a rave" BS would make a lot more sense as a cover for some stronger (but presently obscure) motive.
-- MarkusQ
When I read "Your Rights Online: India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database" I was horrified, But then I read further and realized that, while bad, it wasn't nearly as bad as the headline makes it sound.
Turns out they're only planning on putting some data about the citizens in the database. But it looks like people will still be allowed to keep their own grocery lists and address books etc. and manage them however they wish.
For now at least.
--MarkusQ
They said he's not a climate scientist, but he has an undergrad physics degree and a PhD in economics and he's seems to have spent most of his career writing position papers for economics think tanks! Heck, that should be enough to qualify him as a client scientist...oh wait. What I mean is, with those credentials he should be able to practice dentistry and set policy on...no, that's not it.
He's a...race car driver? No, that's not it either.
Let me think.
I know! He's an economist.
So now all I have to do is prove that climate science is a subset of economics and the "how dare they say he isn't a climate scientist" outrage will be justified.
--MarkusQ
P.S. From what I can gather, the "suppressed opinion" was just that--an opinion. It isn't like the guy had gone out and done any original research.
I think you are missing the point. You are describing how the system is supposed to work (e.g. "the identifying information is encrypted" and "only the machine holds the key"). But there is no way to verify that that is actually how it does work (as opposed, say, to something that gave all the external signs of working the way it should but still reported bogus results).
Further, the vote-challenge mechanism could be used (in a statistical sense) to enforce compliance in a vote coercion scheme, so it also fails the privacy test.
--MarkusQ
Yes, I'm assuming the vote doesn't contain identifying information. That's what I mean by anonymity. You could make something reasonably trustworthy if (and only if) it includes enough information to verifiably connect votes and voters. But unless you are willing to take this step and give up anonymity you're out of luck.
-- MarkusQ
Sure they could. All they have to do is remember the votes that have been cast so far (at least, of the sort they don't like) and then give the same code to the next sap that votes that way, while silently throwing his vote the way you like.
And yes, you could add safeguards to prevent this, but they would open up new avenues of attack. Until you get to the point where it is possible to see that person A's vote for candidate X was properly cast and counted (thus compromising anonymity) you're out of luck.
Finally, the real concern in all of this shouldn't be on the voting machines per se, but on the whole process (including the central tabulators). Protecting the individual machines doesn't help if a compromise of the tabulators gives the game to the bad guys. And saying that the tabulation will be done by multiple third parties doesn't help because it will either have to be done real time (compromising anonymity) or the ballots will have to be held somewhere between being cast and being tabulated, introducing a new point of attack.
-- MarkusQ
Agreed. Specifically, the anonymity "requirement" means that you're left with nothing but trust, because ultimately you'll want to address problems of the form "These N people voted for X yet X only got N-1 votes" and you can't do that unless you have "These N people" to start with. Otherwise, as long as each candidate that anyone votes for is given at least one vote in the final tally, you're stuck with trust.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Even that low standard has been failed, as in the case of the guy who objected because he officially got zero votes even though he had voted for himself.
The system you linked to has numerous obvious flaws for internet voting, even after skipping over the fact that it isn't intended for use in an unsupervised environment. For example, a compromised machine could simply delay transmission of a ballot it wished to tamper with until after the user had decided to challenge or cast it. Likewise, the central tabulator could still produce bogus results. And there appears to be nothing that would prevent the transmission of phantom ballots for voters who never showed up. And so on.
-- MarkusQ
Phooey. For any such system you can devise, it would be possible to implement a "mock-up" system that appeared to use your clever safe, secure, and trustworthy system but in fact did not (to see this just consider the fact that any software solution could itself be simulated in software). This simulation could be presented to the user while the actual election was run by a guy in another city with a spreadsheet.
If the electronic system encompasses enough of the process and provides perfect anonymity there is no way to be certain that the results are coming from the process you designed and not from some clever simulation of it that looks the same but fudges the results.
-- MarkusQ
But security isn't the question. The problem is that with secure and anonymous electronic voting there is no outside way to verify that the results reported have anything to do with the votes cast. Whoever controls the system can make it report whatever results they want, and there's no way to tell if they are telling the truth or not. If your first thought is "well, make it open source," think again.
The difference being that the banks (which run both ATMs and online banking sites) don't also control the money supply. If they did (e.g., if they could just create money the way the government does) we'd have a major problem. No matter how secure the process is, once it subsumes enough levels that you have know way of knowing if it's just reporting made-up numbers, you have a problem.
--MarkusQ
When you meant to write:
Of course, I would have dodged that particular bullet by writing:
But that's just me.
Congratulations. You appear to have been the first person here to read beyond the flamebait summary and respond to the actual content. On a site full of people conditioned by years of rickrolling (and worse) to never RTFA, you sir, are a member of a rare and vanishing breed.
Keep up the good work.
--MarkusQ
P.S. I used to be skeptical of global warming myself (years ago), until I realized that the best the anti-HCGW crowd could offer as counter case was crap like this--the scientific analog of "Marty look, your shoe's untied."
On the one hand, tons of data, much of which is easily checked, and all of which hangs together to form a consistent picture, and on the other a hodge podge of nonsense that doesn't stand up to a moments scrutiny glued together with this sort of BS. They've gotten as bad as the anti-evolution people.
Coming up next, I fear:
GLOBAL WARMING WEBSITE ISN'T W3C COMPLIANT
How can we trust their climate data when
they can't even get their HTML/CSS right?
A girl with psychic powers says "T-bone, what's your sign?"
I blink and answer "neon"--I thought I'd blow her mind.
--MarkusQ
As it happens, we have one (1) known occurrence of similarly abrupt increase in CO2 level. At the end of the Permian, a volcano system known as the "Siberian traps" set huge coal beds afire (think pacific "ring of fire" meets middle east oil fields). A large percentage of the worlds coal was burned in a geological eye-blink.
The was immediately followed by the Permian mass extinction, the largest mass extinction event in the worlds history, when pretty much every living thing on Earth died and only a handful of species (think things like cockroaches) had enough surviving members to struggle through.
--MarkusQ
For those who may have missed it, Mars is not undergoing global warming. But why let a few pesky facts get in the way of good clean coal and oil industry lobbying?
--MarkusQ
For a minute I thought it was a dupe of this story but it's not (different team, different school, and slightly different goal).
It'd be interesting to compare the two...
--MarkusQ
I'd agree with most of you post, but not the "young Earth" model behind this statement. The heat wasn't "trapped" (or at least what little "trapping" there was occurred billions of years ago, not thousands); it is being constantly procuded by radioactive decay.
--MarkusQ
Too bad we don't have any other way to make magenets...oh wait.
Don't you love the impartial scientific tone here? And the sheer illogic of this statement is staggering. If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps. I wouldn't be surprised if the "giant toaster" is some clever over supply utilization system being ridiculed by TFA's evidently clueless author.
--MarkusQ
Take it even further. Neither nuclear nor geothermal suffer from this supposed problem. And not even all solar power systems face it--molten salt and biomass-mediated systems, for example, won't suffer either.
So really we're down to a potential problem with photo-voltaic solar power, and only then on the assumption that no systems based on plentiful materials are waiting in the wings.
Bah.
--MarkusQ
Phonons are just a very weird state of photons, for suitably high values of "very weird"--they propagate by the dipole interactions of the substrate, and are thus at the bottom an EM phenomena. But that isn't a very useful way to look at them (about as useful as saying that sound in air involves oscillatory motion of masses and thus could be considered a source of gravity waves).
Rather than asking "how do they fit into the standard model?" it makes more sense to ask "how tight is the analogy between phonons in a lattice and photons in a vacuum?" and "where does the analogy break down?" Note also that the analogy is pretty good in places (the governing equations are identical) so the concept is more useful than you think.
--MarkusQ
P.S. IANALP -- I am not a licensed physicist; I am not your physicist, and this is not physical advice. If you have questions about the laws of nature you should conduct experiments, not rely on the advice of people you meet on the internet.
Psha. Search all you want, and you'll never discover whether "rw^j8*=1IF9d" is my mother's maiden name, my favorite desert, or where I got my first kiss. And it won't matter anyway, 'cause that's not actually one of the strings I use.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And for an added level of security, I'm not really me, nor am I the person I told the bank I was.
Ok, at least you get points for being as old as I am. But don't try to leave the island, six.
--MarkusQ