... Mars is too light to hold it's own atmosphere.
I propose planetary bombardment by perturbing the asteroid belt. At the same time, automated gas mining around jupiters moons would propel frozen gasballs down at mars.
It would take hundreds of years to settle. But in the end you want a BLUE planet, not a RED one!!!
If the atmosphere isn't breatheable, it's a fucking waste of time.
The chances of a person actually LIVING on Mars is considerably less!!!!
And you're right if we ever do waste trillions of dollars to establish a colony, it would be far easier to scavange metal from our "probe litter" than to dig thousands of pounds of ore to derive a couple pounds of titanium.
The Beauty of a Smartcard system is that you HAVE an ID. But you really don't know what it is. Only the smartcard and the ID bureau would know.
This would make it possible to index databases by a unique but private identifier. It would make it IMPOSSIBLE to cross-link databases by individuals since private keys are NEVER given out, you only get a hash out of the smartcard based on a key fed by whoever wants your info.
This provides unique identification as well as privacy protection.
This legislation would and should be accompanied by a law making indexing on social security numbers ILLEGAL for non governmental organizations. Everyone would use the new ID methodology in their databases.
But it's still not tamper proof. And it certainly is NOT auditable.
It is the equivalent to the mechanical tabluting voting booths that we employ in the US. Except, that you cannot watch the wheels spin. And that is STILL an essential problem.
Yes, the software cannot be reprogrammed at the site. But the election officials control the machines themselves. That means they can replace the motherboards with more "favorable" hard wired microprocessors. As long as the local officials are in on the fix, they can effectively control the elction and the people would NEVER know.
Had Kerry won, he STILL would have lost ...
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If Kerry came up a winner, they Republicans would have done the SAME thing they'd done in 2000. They would have voided the results of an electronic voting machine (Volusia County 2000) and taken votes AWAY from Kerry.
This time, their vote theft was so overkill as to avoid that unfortunate event in 2000.
The Moonie Paper, written by Moonies, edited by Moonies. OWNED AND OPERATED as a propaganda arm for a man who believes himself to be the arisen Jesus Christ.
Syun Myung Moon, the man who claims to commune with the spirits of Hitler and Stalin, has given you the leading conservative paper in the nation. It's NOT a commercial venture. If it was, he wouldn't have lost half a BILLION dollars operating it!!!!
Look, I really don't like the NY Times. I don't like ANY paper because they're ALL corporate/conservatively biased. The ONLY liberal sources of information out there are Mother Jones, The Nation, Genesis Communication Network, blogs and Air America.
Everything else... It's ALL owned by a handful of media conglomerates, it's ALL conservative.
FOX News(F/X, Fox Network) - Blatently right wing biased ABC (Disney/ESPN etc..) - Right wingers NBC (GE, MSNBC, etc..) - Corporate Syncophantic war provacateurs. Shoddy consultant run news division. Brokaw is a blatant partisan. CBS/Viacom (Comedy Central, MTV) - Center Right. These guys are the closest to fair and balanced in commercial TV.
PBS/NPR - straight down the middle. Many of Fuax's "left wing" commentators are "right wing" commentators on NPR;-)
Because some of the voting machines out there cannot handle more than 32,768 votes in a race. They can only handle 16-bit integers. It's NOT a limitation of the 32-bit machines they're using.
Apparantly the term "long int" isn't in their vocabulary.
Look, there is nothing wrong with making "new mistakes". But programmers should be a little more mature to realize that they aren't working on systems with 64k or RAM anymore.
The "programs" used in this election software would probably take the average slashdotter a week to write. The good ones (myself not included) could write it in a day.
The testing for these systems is EXTREMELY simple and can be EASILY automated.
The fact that these machines don't even perform their BASIC functionality is a sign that they are FUBARd. The fact that they contain ZERO security is evidence that they are MEANT to be hacked.
... I'm starting to believe Ralph Nader. The Democrats seem to have neither spines nor BALLS to address the issues that are truly plagueing our nation.
BTW, Volusia county was also the place that turned the 2000 election for Bush. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in an electronic voting machine there. They published the results, than the state was called for Gore. THAN, they [b]YANKED[/b] the results and those 16,000 votes were distributed among 3rd party candidates.
We need to create a federal bureau of IDs and just contract the state B/DMVs to be identification authorities. We'll all have private keys so we can securely "sign" transactions.
Voters will need one of these authenticated/secure identifications to vote.
The Republicans don't put all their eggs in one basket. They run the gambit of dirty tricks:
* Deliberate false character assasination * Minority vote suppression * Ballot tampering * Machine tampering * Moving polling places * Baseless voter challenges (against minorities) * Tabulation fraud * Feeding the pres audio cues during the debates * Voter intimidation * Registration suppression among likely democratic voters
Yeah, they cover all the bases. But most of those things can be overcome. But if they CONTROL 1/3 of the vote counting stations across the US, they'll NEVER loose another presidential election!!!!
Simply put, electronic voting is the end of Democracy.
In 2000, Bush pulled out all the SAME stops in Florida and he STILL came up short in the vote count. So they had to back out some results of an electronic machine in Volusia county. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in a matter of minutes.
They CLAIMED that the results were faulty due to a malfunctioning memory card (compact flash). In other words, they said that the vote total wasn't written totally down and some of the data was a residual image on the card. But ORIGINAL vote total CORRECTLY added up to the total number of voters!!!!
The "CORRECTED" card, distributed Al Gore's 16,000 votes among third party candidates.
Al Gore ONE the Florida 2000 election. The vote was STOLEN in 2000 by black box voting. The vote in 2002 was STOLEN by black box voting. The vote in 2004 was STOLEN by black box voting. And if we don't fix things, the vote in 2006 and 2008 will be stolen by black box voting!!!!
While I think US skills in algebra, trig, geometry and calculas are lacking. I'm pretty sure that were just fine with checking place counting marks in column A vs column B.
Despite India's increased use, there is STILL no way to validate the election. You can hack the machines and then have the malicious software delete itself without a trace. All you leave is your desired vote count.
Yes, they performed an AUDIT, not a recount. And the headline was spun to "legitamize" the election. Indeed, if you knocked out all the ballots that the machines ignored, Bush DID indeed win the election.
If you used the standards of counting a hanging chad where no other chads were displaced, and you counted obvious write ins, Gore was the winner.
But I am glad to see a Republican who mistrusts these machines. Primaries can be hacked just as well as genreal elections;-)
Simple instructions like .... "vote for Bush" ...
on
Buggy Voting Machines
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, thats where we're going. Vote for the fascist or the feds will weed you out.
Read Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" on why "stupidity" has little to do with vote spoilage. And read some accounts of the mischeif that occured on electronic machines on www.blackboxvoting.org, and you'll find out that it has NOTHING to do with smarts.
It DOES have something to do with how white your area is. See, whites tend to vote Republican. So there is little need to rig their equipment to spoil votes.
Voting may seem similar but it is VERY different. You get a statement every month to reconcile against your personal records. There is an individual trail that you can take to the bank and say "see, you fucked up!!! Give me my money back!!!"
No such burden exists for voting systems. The customer does NOT receive a statment in the mail.
Furthermore, I would suggest that the "once a year" model of "use" should NOT be a problem since these systems are SO FUCKING SIMPLE!!! Any developer worth his salt could design tests to find errors. And any company worth it's salt would EXTENSIVELY test their software before deploying it to the field.
The "private" nature of voting means that any system designed to allow a voter to "check", will probably allow others to "check" as well. The best solution I could think of is smartcard driver licenses that digitally sign your vote. But even then, the motor vehicle dept will have your "private key" as well as any other personal parameters.
I guess one could add randomly seeded keys to the voting machines and randomly generated numbers to hash each vote ID. But those to seem succeptible to precinct worker mischief.
In the end, the easiest solution is to BAN, the on-screen vote verfication phase. Vote verification takes place after a ballot is printed behind glass. If the voters rejects the ballot it is visibly voided in some way and the voter get to change their choices. If it's accepted, it's automatically placed in the ballot box.
The huge irony here is that a "voting program" is about the simplist thing you could write. Thousands of people have written RPG character generators that are more complicated than a voting program.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
In any case, you can trust the individual vote totals on the machines (with manual central tabluation) just so long as you do random audits, or targeted challenge audits to check for irregularities.
Any audit that turns up a problem would trigger a manual recount of all precincts.
BTW, I don't think there is anything wrong with hand counting. You may think it's too expensive. But what is Democracy worth to you???
... and in the past it has been correct within.5 percent of the vote before the absentee ballots are figured in.
The rock solid trend diverged in Florida 2000. Now it has strangely diverged in most of the Battleground states.
There is no way to prove that the electronic vote was hacked. Conversely, there is no way to prove that the electronic vote is correct. We have lost the concept of auditability.
As Stalin once said, it doesn't matter who does the voting, it's who does the COUNTING!!!! Well, Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia and other companies led by Republican devotees seem poised to take over the counting in US elections. One can only speculate as to the results and why they differ so much from exit polls.
They said the clones from the Clone War era were going mad. Not the clones that they were making in 'Heir to the Empire'.
My understanding is that Boba/Jango Fett was strong in the force but simply untrained. This is what made them such ideal candidates for the Emperor's cloning method. He could jump into their minds more easily.
Thats why the army that will be defeated is the droid army. Sidious cannot bend a droid army to his will in exclusion to anyone else. THAT is what the war is all about. Creating HIS ARMY and using it to destroy both the business classes and warrior/priestly classes that would oppose his ascension to power.
Think about it, Droid armies are cheaper to produce than Clone Troopers. Droid fighters are cheaper to produce than Clone Pilots. But Droids can be taken over by clever technicians. The force sensitive clones can only be controlled by a master of the force.
I think this is where the "balance" thing comes from.
The Jedi train as many as the can while the Sith train only one. They concentrate the power of the darkside and make it more potent.
I don't think that Anikan brings balance to the force by destroying Sidious. I think Qui-Gon was wrong, it's either Luke or his progeny that will bring the balance by learning how to channel the darkside safely.
Slashdot Mirror
...
Mars is too light to hold it's own atmosphere.
I propose planetary bombardment by perturbing the asteroid belt. At the same time, automated gas mining around jupiters moons would propel frozen gasballs down at mars.
It would take hundreds of years to settle. But in the end you want a BLUE planet, not a RED one!!!
If the atmosphere isn't breatheable, it's a fucking waste of time.
The neo-con wars here at home is bankrupting us. We'll barely have enough money to terraform our OWN ecologies back into a functioning state.
Tens of thousands of times the available resources
No colonizers.
What do you suppose the chances are for mars???
The chances of a person actually LIVING on Mars is considerably less!!!!
And you're right if we ever do waste trillions of dollars to establish a colony, it would be far easier to scavange metal from our "probe litter" than to dig thousands of pounds of ore to derive a couple pounds of titanium.
http://www.dailyhowler.com
The NY Times is just like everybody else.
The Beauty of a Smartcard system is that you HAVE an ID. But you really don't know what it is. Only the smartcard and the ID bureau would know.
This would make it possible to index databases by a unique but private identifier. It would make it IMPOSSIBLE to cross-link databases by individuals since private keys are NEVER given out, you only get a hash out of the smartcard based on a key fed by whoever wants your info.
This provides unique identification as well as privacy protection.
This legislation would and should be accompanied by a law making indexing on social security numbers ILLEGAL for non governmental organizations. Everyone would use the new ID methodology in their databases.
But it's still not tamper proof. And it certainly is NOT auditable.
It is the equivalent to the mechanical tabluting voting booths that we employ in the US. Except, that you cannot watch the wheels spin. And that is STILL an essential problem.
Yes, the software cannot be reprogrammed at the site. But the election officials control the machines themselves. That means they can replace the motherboards with more "favorable" hard wired microprocessors. As long as the local officials are in on the fix, they can effectively control the elction and the people would NEVER know.
If Kerry came up a winner, they Republicans would have done the SAME thing they'd done in 2000. They would have voided the results of an electronic voting machine (Volusia County 2000) and taken votes AWAY from Kerry.
This time, their vote theft was so overkill as to avoid that unfortunate event in 2000.
The Moonie Paper, written by Moonies, edited by Moonies. OWNED AND OPERATED as a propaganda arm for a man who believes himself to be the arisen Jesus Christ.
Syun Myung Moon, the man who claims to commune with the spirits of Hitler and Stalin, has given you the leading conservative paper in the nation. It's NOT a commercial venture. If it was, he wouldn't have lost half a BILLION dollars operating it!!!!
Look, I really don't like the NY Times. I don't like ANY paper because they're ALL corporate/conservatively biased. The ONLY liberal sources of information out there are Mother Jones, The Nation, Genesis Communication Network, blogs and Air America.
Everything else
FOX News(F/X, Fox Network) - Blatently right wing biased
ABC (Disney/ESPN etc..) - Right wingers
NBC (GE, MSNBC, etc..) - Corporate Syncophantic war provacateurs. Shoddy consultant run news division. Brokaw is a blatant partisan.
CBS/Viacom (Comedy Central, MTV) - Center Right. These guys are the closest to fair and balanced in commercial TV.
PBS/NPR - straight down the middle. Many of Fuax's "left wing" commentators are "right wing" commentators on NPR
...
Because some of the voting machines out there cannot handle more than 32,768 votes in a race. They can only handle 16-bit integers. It's NOT a limitation of the 32-bit machines they're using.
Apparantly the term "long int" isn't in their vocabulary.
Look, there is nothing wrong with making "new mistakes". But programmers should be a little more mature to realize that they aren't working on systems with 64k or RAM anymore.
The "programs" used in this election software would probably take the average slashdotter a week to write. The good ones (myself not included) could write it in a day.
The testing for these systems is EXTREMELY simple and can be EASILY automated.
The fact that these machines don't even perform their BASIC functionality is a sign that they are FUBARd. The fact that they contain ZERO security is evidence that they are MEANT to be hacked.
... I'm starting to believe Ralph Nader. The Democrats seem to have neither spines nor BALLS to address the issues that are truly plagueing our nation.
BTW, Volusia county was also the place that turned the 2000 election for Bush. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in an electronic voting machine there. They published the results, than the state was called for Gore. THAN, they [b]YANKED[/b] the results and those 16,000 votes were distributed among 3rd party candidates.
We need to create a federal bureau of IDs and just contract the state B/DMVs to be identification authorities. We'll all have private keys so we can securely "sign" transactions.
Voters will need one of these authenticated/secure identifications to vote.
The Republicans don't put all their eggs in one basket. They run the gambit of dirty tricks:
* Deliberate false character assasination
* Minority vote suppression
* Ballot tampering
* Machine tampering
* Moving polling places
* Baseless voter challenges (against minorities)
* Tabulation fraud
* Feeding the pres audio cues during the debates
* Voter intimidation
* Registration suppression among likely democratic voters
Yeah, they cover all the bases. But most of those things can be overcome. But if they CONTROL 1/3 of the vote counting stations across the US, they'll NEVER loose another presidential election!!!!
Simply put, electronic voting is the end of Democracy.
In 2000, Bush pulled out all the SAME stops in Florida and he STILL came up short in the vote count. So they had to back out some results of an electronic machine in Volusia county. Gore lost [b]16,000[/b] votes in a matter of minutes.
They CLAIMED that the results were faulty due to a malfunctioning memory card (compact flash). In other words, they said that the vote total wasn't written totally down and some of the data was a residual image on the card. But ORIGINAL vote total CORRECTLY added up to the total number of voters!!!!
The "CORRECTED" card, distributed Al Gore's 16,000 votes among third party candidates.
Al Gore ONE the Florida 2000 election. The vote was STOLEN in 2000 by black box voting. The vote in 2002 was STOLEN by black box voting. The vote in 2004 was STOLEN by black box voting. And if we don't fix things, the vote in 2006 and 2008 will be stolen by black box voting!!!!
...
While I think US skills in algebra, trig, geometry and calculas are lacking. I'm pretty sure that were just fine with checking place counting marks in column A vs column B.
...
Despite India's increased use, there is STILL no way to validate the election. You can hack the machines and then have the malicious software delete itself without a trace. All you leave is your desired vote count.
Bush governs as if he's a dictator. He does what he wants.
By NO means is 3% a mandate. But he seemed to indicate he had a mandate when his mandate was -.5% in the last election. So whats the difference.
Bush does what he wants
Yes, they performed an AUDIT, not a recount. And the headline was spun to "legitamize" the election. Indeed, if you knocked out all the ballots that the machines ignored, Bush DID indeed win the election.
If you used the standards of counting a hanging chad where no other chads were displaced, and you counted obvious write ins, Gore was the winner.
But I am glad to see a Republican who mistrusts these machines. Primaries can be hacked just as well as genreal elections
Yeah, thats where we're going. Vote for the fascist or the feds will weed you out.
Read Greg Palast's book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" on why "stupidity" has little to do with vote spoilage. And read some accounts of the mischeif that occured on electronic machines on www.blackboxvoting.org, and you'll find out that it has NOTHING to do with smarts.
It DOES have something to do with how white your area is. See, whites tend to vote Republican. So there is little need to rig their equipment to spoil votes.
Voting may seem similar but it is VERY different. You get a statement every month to reconcile against your personal records. There is an individual trail that you can take to the bank and say "see, you fucked up!!! Give me my money back!!!"
No such burden exists for voting systems. The customer does NOT receive a statment in the mail.
Furthermore, I would suggest that the "once a year" model of "use" should NOT be a problem since these systems are SO FUCKING SIMPLE!!! Any developer worth his salt could design tests to find errors. And any company worth it's salt would EXTENSIVELY test their software before deploying it to the field.
The "private" nature of voting means that any system designed to allow a voter to "check", will probably allow others to "check" as well. The best solution I could think of is smartcard driver licenses that digitally sign your vote. But even then, the motor vehicle dept will have your "private key" as well as any other personal parameters.
I guess one could add randomly seeded keys to the voting machines and randomly generated numbers to hash each vote ID. But those to seem succeptible to precinct worker mischief.
In the end, the easiest solution is to BAN, the on-screen vote verfication phase. Vote verification takes place after a ballot is printed behind glass. If the voters rejects the ballot it is visibly voided in some way and the voter get to change their choices. If it's accepted, it's automatically placed in the ballot box.
The huge irony here is that a "voting program" is about the simplist thing you could write. Thousands of people have written RPG character generators that are more complicated than a voting program.
The fact that they've fucked it up so badly strongly implies that the fuckups were all intentional.
Canada votes with plain paper and manual tabulation. They finish their counting in a single night.
In any case, you can trust the individual vote totals on the machines (with manual central tabluation) just so long as you do random audits, or targeted challenge audits to check for irregularities.
Any audit that turns up a problem would trigger a manual recount of all precincts.
BTW, I don't think there is anything wrong with hand counting. You may think it's too expensive. But what is Democracy worth to you???
Each machine could have it's one "ballot roll" that only displays YOUR vote in a private place (like the old voting booths).
Now that I think of it, it's an EXCELLENT solution. Save that it would require more specialized equipment to do OCR for counting.
Electronic tabulation should be BANNED completely. There is NO NEED to hack individual machines when you can hack the tabluator.
... and in the past it has been correct within .5 percent of the vote before the absentee ballots are figured in.
The rock solid trend diverged in Florida 2000. Now it has strangely diverged in most of the Battleground states.
There is no way to prove that the electronic vote was hacked. Conversely, there is no way to prove that the electronic vote is correct. We have lost the concept of auditability.
As Stalin once said, it doesn't matter who does the voting, it's who does the COUNTING!!!! Well, Diebold, ES&S, Seqouia and other companies led by Republican devotees seem poised to take over the counting in US elections. One can only speculate as to the results and why they differ so much from exit polls.
Yes but ...
They said the clones from the Clone War era were going mad. Not the clones that they were making in 'Heir to the Empire'.
My understanding is that Boba/Jango Fett was strong in the force but simply untrained. This is what made them such ideal candidates for the Emperor's cloning method. He could jump into their minds more easily.
Thats why the army that will be defeated is the droid army. Sidious cannot bend a droid army to his will in exclusion to anyone else. THAT is what the war is all about. Creating HIS ARMY and using it to destroy both the business classes and warrior/priestly classes that would oppose his ascension to power.
Think about it, Droid armies are cheaper to produce than Clone Troopers. Droid fighters are cheaper to produce than Clone Pilots. But Droids can be taken over by clever technicians. The force sensitive clones can only be controlled by a master of the force.
I think this is where the "balance" thing comes from.
The Jedi train as many as the can while the Sith train only one. They concentrate the power of the darkside and make it more potent.
I don't think that Anikan brings balance to the force by destroying Sidious. I think Qui-Gon was wrong, it's either Luke or his progeny that will bring the balance by learning how to channel the darkside safely.