Anyone who's thinking about getting somebody a puppy, or any other animal, as a surprise for Christmas... do them, you, and not least of all the poor animal a favor and get them a Wii instead.
If you get tired of playing with a video game system, it just sits in the closet. Chances are, if people get tired of that puppy, it'll be sent to a shelter to be slaughtered.
How badly do we want to handicap American ingenuity - do we really want to eventually hand the industry to Europe and Asia (places without barratry- I mean, software patents)?
It reminds me a little of another industry that was one the 'crown jewel' of the U.S. economy: the automobile industry. The unions and management never seemed to stop and take a look around, even as most of their jobs and business moved to non-union factories in Asia (which, in addition to being cheaper, produced an arguably superior product). Even today, they're still bickering over the bloated, living-dead corpse of GM.
So to answer your question, I fully expect that the idiocy over software patents will end when the last American software programmer hangs himself with the entrails of the last American intellectual-property attorney, and not a moment sooner.
If you need a double-entry general ledger, I can see GNUCash being a good thing, but for most people's personal finances, the fact that it won't integrate and pull data down from their bank or credit card company automatically is a deal-breaker.
If I didn't have the online hookup that Quicken does, where I just hit "download" and it pulls in all the transactional data from all of my credit cards and my checking account, letting me approve it and reconcile it against the account totals, I wouldn't even bother to keep my finances electronically. (Unless I had a small army of servants to type everything in; but then I'd probably be able to afford an accountant, too.) That's the only feature that's worth anything.
I've heard that in Germany, GNUCash will do that, because the government mandates that banks have transactional data available in some sort of standard format. But in the U.S., I think only Quicken and MS Money will do it.
Aside from your error in naming the three 'branches' (as others have helpfully pointed out), I mostly agree; I don't think it's particularly great for either party to control both houses and the presidency. The "fast track" is generally a bad thing, stifles debate, and results in poorly thought-out legislation.
That said, I would have preferred that the Republicans retain the House and the Democrats take the Senate, than the other way around; the House was already acting as a check to the President in some respects, by being more conservative than him. For example, it was the Republican-controlled House, not the Senate, that was blocking Bush's unpopular "immigration reform."
My preference is for the Senate to be more liberal than the President, and for the House to be more conservative/populist; this way if the executive starts to swing too far in either direction, you can have a brake to slow him down by.
I can still see a lot of bad legislation coming out of the arrangement that looks like it will happen, based on yesterday's election.
I remember the mechanical lever systems from where I used to live, and I think they had a small paper tape down at the bottom of the levers, next to its own lever. If you wanted to write somebody in, you pulled that special lever, and then wrote it on the tape.
It's been a while since I've seen one though. There was definitely a way to do write-ins, though.
I'm just going to respond to a few things here, unfortunately I don't have the time to give you a more complete response to all your points; I think the majority of your criticisms were well-founded and there is certainly room for debate.
Just as an aside, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm an open source 'bigot' or zealot. I don't think I mentioned open source at all in my original post. Although I do think that there is a big place for open source software, I wouldn't ever argue that it is the be-all and end-all, or that every piece of software must be open source. I prefer it, but there are reasons why a company selling software wouldn't want to open its code, and reasons why a buyer of software might not care whether it's open or not. That's not really relevant to this discussion at all; you can have competition and open standards with or without open source. I wasn't really taking sides in that issue.
As to your first question, "Ok, then name one company that can push technology better/fast than [Microsoft]?" There's no way I can even respond to this, because it's a loaded question; I reject the premise of it. Microsoft, with a few very small exceptions, doesn't and hasn't "pushed" any technology. (The exceptions are mostly trivial things, like them pushing one programming language over another, etc.) I might potentially accede to a claim of them 'pushing' the deployment of the GUI on commodity hardware with Windows originally, but even then, it was something the market was ready for and they were just in the right position to provide it. It's easy -- but wrong -- to give them credit.
This isn't exactly a criticism of Microsoft per se. Very few companies "push" technology; the great majority of them simply respond to consumer demand. Microsoft is definitely in this second camp. When they saw a market for web servers (as one trivial example), they produced a web server. They didn't "push" web servers, and giving them credit is silly; the demand existed, and the market hates a vacuum. If they hadn't produced IIS, it's ridiculous to think that there would be 30% (or whatever their marketshare is) fewer webservers in the world, those servers would just be running something else.
So to answer your question, there are lots of companies that 'push' more technology than Microsoft. MS doesn't push, it gets pulled; its M.O. is to wait and watch a budding market, and then insert itself and capture the business. They "push" the market in the same way that a surfer 'pushes' a wave -- they're not driving it, they're riding on it.
Sometimes it seems as though MS is 'pushing' something, but it's rarely anything productive: they obviously pushed Windows 95, and are pushing Vista, by pulling support for older products and thereby forcing users to upgrade. But neither of these products represented great steps forward in technological development, nor did they respond to any new desires or really give any innovative solutions to existing problems. They were at most an incremental step forward, and came at great cost. Causing a lot of needless hardware replacement isn't a good thing -- at best it's a broken-window fallacy; forcing something to be "fixed" that wasn't broken, and thereby diverting resources that could have been spent elsewhere.
In terms of its actual products, Microsoft's offerings are rarely superior at any one thing. They make a word processor, but not the best word processor (a lot of people liked Word Perfect, back before it became nearly impossible to use because everyone else was using Word). Similarly, Excel was a decent spreadsheet program, but Lotus 1-2-3 was arguably superior. Windows always was a mediocre desktop OS; for years, Apple was widely accepted as having the better UI. Windows NT is a passable server; BSD is and was arguably more secure. Etc. For almost any Microsoft product, you can find some offering that's better in that particular niche. A coworker once described Microsoft as the company of "good enough." They maintain themselves at
Then have a poll worker or other trusted person help the disabled person vote. Or let them bring somebody with them to read the ballot and mark it, if they'd prefer.
I'm pretty sure that anyone living with a disability that severe, is probably used to dealing with obstacles far greater than checking a box on a ballot on a daily basis. Just stay out of their way.
Electronic voting systems might have big buttons, but what do you do if you're a paralyzed quadriplegic? Obviously we need to think of a new system that you can use, using only your eye muscles and tongue, and make everyone use that. Would that be fair? No, it would be stupid.
There's a point where you have to say "this is a system that works for 99% of the population, and the remaining 1% aren't going to have any more trouble with it than they do with any other daily task." You're always going to be able to find someone that's disenfranchised by a particular system or voting method, but that doesn't mean the entire system needs to be scrapped.
I define Paper Ballot as an election device that is easily readable by anyone old enough to vote without any special tools more complicated than reading glasses.
Then you probably ought to say "human readable paper ballot," because when most people read "paper ballot," they're going to assume (work with me here) a ballot... that's made out of (you guessed it!) paper.
As other people have pointed out, even considering the problems down in Florida in 2000, the "cure" we're looking at might have been worse than the "disease." At least with spoiled/malformed ballots (pregnant chads, hanging chads, etc.), unless the supporters of one candidate are for some reason dumber than the supporters of the other, you're probably going to have an equal distribution.
With electronic voting, you might eliminate the number of voter-errors, but you introduce many more avenues for exploitation. Doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me.
Throw them in your trunk, take them out to the boondocks, burn them, at bury the ash (making sure the ballots are thoroughly burned and the ash is mixed in the dirt). Voila! No evidence!
No, not "no evidence;" there are a dozen opportunities for you to get caught there (not least of which is what do you do if you're caught driving around with a bunch of ballots in your car?); believe it or not, that's not a very creative plan, and people have probably thought about it before, and we have a lot of experience at preventing such things. The police are pretty good at investigating physical-world crimes.
Even that scenario would create far more evidence than most electronic attacks, and it's evidence that the police have a far better chance of being able to follow. The resources and experience of law-enforcement with regards to computer crime are far less than physical-world crime, not to mention the signs of an ongoing computer crime wouldn't be recognizable to most people.
By tying each vote to a physical object, you remove them from the non-conservative realm of information and put them into the physical world, which as a civilization we're much more practiced at dealing with. We've just been doing it longer.
Everyone from the lowliest poll worker on up, can basically understand how paper ballots work. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that somebody carrying a bunch of them around is a potential problem. Doesn't mean they still couldn't do it, with the right amount of social engineering, but it's at least a recognizable attack. But when I walked into the polling place with electronic voting machines earlier today, I had a smart card hanging off of my belt (cleverly 'disguised' as a company ID card, which in fact it was); I could easily have slotted that into the voting machine while I was standing there. Nobody would have recognized me, or the smart card, as a possible threat.
People aren't as familiar with computers and electronic systems in general, as they are with the physical world and its "exploits." This means electronic systems that don't have a physical-world component are more vulnerable to manipulation, because the number of people who can investigate it -- or even recognize and understand the problem -- is lower.
As for some of your other comments, I don't understand the relationship between allegations of Republican physical vote-tampering and electronic voting. That people have recognized signs of physical-world vote manipulation just serves to further my feelings that there are fewer unguarded (or at least unrecognized) avenues of attack in the physical world than there are in the electronic.
Your comment about not networking the machines is similarly incorrect; the machines don't need to be networked to propagate a virus from one to the other. Someone with enough knowledge of the systems could probably write a virus that propagated via the same smartcards that are used to collect the "votes" and take them to the tabulation system, and from there infect the tabulation system and modify other votes. You don't know, when you plug a smart card (or USB stick, or floppy disk) into the machine, what's being written to it; it could just as easily be a virus as legitimate data. Computer viruses existed back before computer networks; they spread at whatever the speed that data is being moved around is.
I'd much rather have someone semi-competent who actually examines the pros and cons in detail and makes a decision
That would be a great system. I agree with you; that idealized government would probably be far superior to the reality of a direct democratic system.
However, the real question is, would a direct democratic system be inferior to the reality of our current representative system, which functions nothing at all like how you describe?
Having every citizen decide based on a 5-sentence position statement, seems like it might be better than letting a handful of citizens decide based on that same 5-sentence position statement and a large wad of cash.
I am interested in these idiot-proof voting machines of which you speak. Please send me your catalog for your full line of idiot-proof products. I am particularly interested in idiot-proof power tools and nuclear weapons, and any other products which allow stupid people to do important things with complete safety and security.
First, because that requires a conspiracy of a large number of people. You need to have a group of people for each polling station, at least. The more people you have to involve in your vote-changing scheme, the bigger chance you have of getting caught. Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes, requiring teams of people, and keeping it all a secret? It's virtually zero.
Second, changing paper ballots leaves physical evidence. The police, having hundreds of years of collective experience investigating physical crimes, are pretty good at picking up on that stuff. As is the general public. The smell of burning paper coming from the polling places might tip someone off; and if it doesn't, the barrels of paper ash probably would. Or the truckloads of ash that you're hauling away to dump in the river/ocean/whatever. It becomes a big logistical problem.
Third, an electronic attack could self-propagate. If you infected a machine, or firmware loader, it might be possible to make that machine infect other machines, without any intervention on your behalf. This is basically impossible in the physical world: you can't (or rather, it's pretty difficult) to craft some sort of intelligent paper ballot that would sneak in and destroy or change a bunch of other ballots when nobody's looking, and then destroy itself, without leaving a trace.
Fourth, the ways of manipulating elections via the paper-ballot systems are long established and for the most part, well recognized. Chances are, you're not going to come up with a way of fudging votes that somebody hasn't already thought of. With electronic voting, it's a brave new world, rife with untried opportunities.
So are there ways to mess up an election with paper ballots? Sure. But they are much easier to combat than the various ways that you can manipulate electronic systems, and law enforcement and electoral boards are more familiar with it, and it leaves a lot more evidence that can tip people off later on.
Electronic voting might, some day, be appropriate for use in a general election. In a few centuries, I assume that every podunk police department in the country will probably be just as savvy at investigating computer crimes as they are at gathering physical evidence today, and average people will be familiar enough with the normal operation of computers to detect when something funny is going on, and there will be thousands of man-years of experience in the computer-security field as it relates to electronic voting, taken from its years of use in non-critical systems. Under those conditions, I think the feasibility of an all-electronic voting system could be revisited.
So basically, we're going to spend millions of dollars and throw our electoral system into question... so we can have the immediate gratification of official results the night of the election? (Because if it's not a close race, you can pretty much tell who's going to win based on the exit polls and unofficial results anyway.)
You make them fill it out with a Sharpie, and if they mark the wrong box, then they have to bring the ballot back to the poll worker, who destroys it, and gives them a new ballot.
If you mark two boxes, then the ballot is just spoiled and it doesn't count. The ballots need to have the check boxes sufficiently far away from each other, but if you have half-inch boxes that are at least an inch away from each other, and you still can't manage to mark one without hitting the other, you're probably too stupid to be voting anyway.
For every email you send from Yahoo mail, the IP address from where you sent is is disclosed to the receiver.
Now, I am not in any way defending Yahoo's reprehensible conduct in China, but the behavior that you describe regarding IP addresses in mail headers is the way things are supposed to work. The address of the originating machine should be listed as the first of the 'Received' headers. This just makes sense -- it's not "Yahoo" that's sending you the message, they're just passing it on behalf of some other person.
Webmail isn't supposed to automatically be an anonymizing service. It's unfortunate that many people aren't aware of this, and don't understand that many things they consider 'private' on the net are really anything but; however Yahoo shouldn't be faulted for acting according to accepted RFCs and protocols.
There are plenty of anonymous email systems out there for all your remailing needs; Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and GMail are not the tool for the job.
Now, there is a very good argument somewhere in here, for mandating that ISPs either not create, or immediately delete after a short period of time, all their logs that could be used to cross-reference actual people to IP addresses. This would effectively create anonymity at the IP address level. However, since this is not the case, users should seek privacy higher up in the stack, at the messaging-system (application) level, by choosing the correct tool for communication.
In case you hadn't noticed, there is a heavy overlap between this list and the infamous US "axis of evil" list.... Thumbs down on clumsy propaganda.
Or, in other words, "-1, Doesn't Compare Bush to Hitler".
As everyone knows, Reporters Without Borders is practically a G.O.P. front group. Those guys are nothing but lock-step, Republican, neocon fascists, all the way.
Can they really be said to be "better" or "faster" when they actively discourage other people with potentially superior products from competing with them based on technical merits?
Seems to me that almost every area where Microsoft is dominant and not faced with external competition has stagnated. Look at what happened to the browser between the demise of Navigator and the rise of Firefox: basically nothing (well, except viruses and trojans; it was a great time to be a malware writer).
They are a huge brake on what ought to be an accelerating, ever-changing industry. The outcome that Microsoft would really like -- one platform, under EULA, with per-seat licensing and DRM for all, Amen -- would be nothing less than a dark age for information technology.
Microsoft only looks like a good thing when it's compared to nothing at all; if you compare it to what might exist in the absence of such a distorting influence, they've caused nothing but harm.
Microsoft didn't 'bring computers to business;' businesses would have bought computers in the absence of Microsoft; the advantages are just too great to be ignored. What Microsoft did, was effectively eliminate any choice that businesses might have had in the OS and software they wanted to buy and run, in order to be inter-operable. They injected themselves into computing and ended up in a place where they could become one of the "costs of doing business," applicable to everyone, everywhere. You aren't just paying the Microsoft Tax when you buy a new PC, you're paying it all the time, everywhere, because everyone uses their stuff. You're paying for it in the cost of your food, your electronics, your entertainment, and even your taxes, because not even our government can live without MS.
Microsoft is a plague, a parasite, that has so thoroughly infested the business world that it's basically impossible to remove. But just because it's too close to our vital bits to get rid of it now, shouldn't prohibit us from considering the nature of the infection and realizing that there could have been -- indeed, was -- a multitude of other ways that things could have gone.
Microsoft didn't "push technology all over the globe," people in all corners of the globe pulled that technology to themselves; they bought and paid for it because of the benefits it offered, despite the necessity of paying for Microsoft software in order to get anything done. Microsoft didn't create those markets, or those benefits; they would have existed anyway, because the technology really is that good. It's not good because of Microsoft -- MS didn't invent email, or CRM systems, or word processing, or spreadsheets -- and there's little that Microsoft offers that wouldn't be offered by somebody else in their stead. (Even the 'lingua franca' that Microsoft provides to the world could be easily replaced by a variety of open standards, because such a standard would be mutually beneficial in the absence of a standard piece of software.) It's good despite Microsoft.
The history is that IBM gravely under estimated the PC revolution and handed it over to Microsoft, so Microsoft doesn't want to get shafted like they did to IBM.
I think this is the best one-sentence summary of the thought process that seems to underlie Microsoft's business, consciously or not, all the time.
They're like the king who came to power by poisoning his predecessor, forever worrying whether they'll fall the same way.
But, as I told before, this bill is so nonsensical that it will never pass into law.
If only there was a "+5 Wishful Thinking" moderation...
The problem is that -- and I doubt that this is any more or less true in basically any country -- most people don't understand why it's nonsensical. People just don't get it; they hear 'this will be a way to protect our children from pedophiles' and immediately say "go for it!" and move on to something else.
But the bright side is, if it passes _and_ the government will try to enforce it, I see a string of high-paying tech jobs in the cyberpolice coming...
Better to be the foot in the boot than the face on the pavement, eh?
you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
Hello! May I be the first to welcome you to our planet. You may find things here a little unsettling, coming from your obviously very advanced civilization and culture; in the meantime I recommend you don't try to make sense of anything.
Oh, and be sure to try the pastrami, it's excellent here.
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Just wishful thinking, but I have wondered for years why we couldn't use solar power or wave power in Africa to pump water inland.
Because the world has basically decided, through its inaction, that the lives of people in Africa aren't worth the expense of doing that.
The reality of it is that human life is cheap, when it's far away and somebody you don't know.
Or you could just heavily fine the water companies 'til they fix their pipes, rather than letting such huge amounts of water leak away.
Yeah, because it's not like they'd just pass that fine onto their customers, who, as we know, have so much choice in who they buy their water from.
Mod parent up; seriously.
... do them, you, and not least of all the poor animal a favor and get them a Wii instead.
Anyone who's thinking about getting somebody a puppy, or any other animal, as a surprise for Christmas
If you get tired of playing with a video game system, it just sits in the closet. Chances are, if people get tired of that puppy, it'll be sent to a shelter to be slaughtered.
I know how things really work, I feel it in my gut.
It's called "truthiness."
How badly do we want to handicap American ingenuity - do we really want to eventually hand the industry to Europe and Asia (places without barratry- I mean, software patents)?
It reminds me a little of another industry that was one the 'crown jewel' of the U.S. economy: the automobile industry. The unions and management never seemed to stop and take a look around, even as most of their jobs and business moved to non-union factories in Asia (which, in addition to being cheaper, produced an arguably superior product). Even today, they're still bickering over the bloated, living-dead corpse of GM.
So to answer your question, I fully expect that the idiocy over software patents will end when the last American software programmer hangs himself with the entrails of the last American intellectual-property attorney, and not a moment sooner.
If you need a double-entry general ledger, I can see GNUCash being a good thing, but for most people's personal finances, the fact that it won't integrate and pull data down from their bank or credit card company automatically is a deal-breaker.
If I didn't have the online hookup that Quicken does, where I just hit "download" and it pulls in all the transactional data from all of my credit cards and my checking account, letting me approve it and reconcile it against the account totals, I wouldn't even bother to keep my finances electronically. (Unless I had a small army of servants to type everything in; but then I'd probably be able to afford an accountant, too.) That's the only feature that's worth anything.
I've heard that in Germany, GNUCash will do that, because the government mandates that banks have transactional data available in some sort of standard format. But in the U.S., I think only Quicken and MS Money will do it.
Aside from your error in naming the three 'branches' (as others have helpfully pointed out), I mostly agree; I don't think it's particularly great for either party to control both houses and the presidency. The "fast track" is generally a bad thing, stifles debate, and results in poorly thought-out legislation.
That said, I would have preferred that the Republicans retain the House and the Democrats take the Senate, than the other way around; the House was already acting as a check to the President in some respects, by being more conservative than him. For example, it was the Republican-controlled House, not the Senate, that was blocking Bush's unpopular "immigration reform."
My preference is for the Senate to be more liberal than the President, and for the House to be more conservative/populist; this way if the executive starts to swing too far in either direction, you can have a brake to slow him down by.
I can still see a lot of bad legislation coming out of the arrangement that looks like it will happen, based on yesterday's election.
I remember the mechanical lever systems from where I used to live, and I think they had a small paper tape down at the bottom of the levers, next to its own lever. If you wanted to write somebody in, you pulled that special lever, and then wrote it on the tape.
It's been a while since I've seen one though. There was definitely a way to do write-ins, though.
I'm just going to respond to a few things here, unfortunately I don't have the time to give you a more complete response to all your points; I think the majority of your criticisms were well-founded and there is certainly room for debate.
Just as an aside, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I'm an open source 'bigot' or zealot. I don't think I mentioned open source at all in my original post. Although I do think that there is a big place for open source software, I wouldn't ever argue that it is the be-all and end-all, or that every piece of software must be open source. I prefer it, but there are reasons why a company selling software wouldn't want to open its code, and reasons why a buyer of software might not care whether it's open or not. That's not really relevant to this discussion at all; you can have competition and open standards with or without open source. I wasn't really taking sides in that issue.
As to your first question, "Ok, then name one company that can push technology better/fast than [Microsoft]?" There's no way I can even respond to this, because it's a loaded question; I reject the premise of it. Microsoft, with a few very small exceptions, doesn't and hasn't "pushed" any technology. (The exceptions are mostly trivial things, like them pushing one programming language over another, etc.) I might potentially accede to a claim of them 'pushing' the deployment of the GUI on commodity hardware with Windows originally, but even then, it was something the market was ready for and they were just in the right position to provide it. It's easy -- but wrong -- to give them credit.
This isn't exactly a criticism of Microsoft per se. Very few companies "push" technology; the great majority of them simply respond to consumer demand. Microsoft is definitely in this second camp. When they saw a market for web servers (as one trivial example), they produced a web server. They didn't "push" web servers, and giving them credit is silly; the demand existed, and the market hates a vacuum. If they hadn't produced IIS, it's ridiculous to think that there would be 30% (or whatever their marketshare is) fewer webservers in the world, those servers would just be running something else.
So to answer your question, there are lots of companies that 'push' more technology than Microsoft. MS doesn't push, it gets pulled; its M.O. is to wait and watch a budding market, and then insert itself and capture the business. They "push" the market in the same way that a surfer 'pushes' a wave -- they're not driving it, they're riding on it.
Sometimes it seems as though MS is 'pushing' something, but it's rarely anything productive: they obviously pushed Windows 95, and are pushing Vista, by pulling support for older products and thereby forcing users to upgrade. But neither of these products represented great steps forward in technological development, nor did they respond to any new desires or really give any innovative solutions to existing problems. They were at most an incremental step forward, and came at great cost. Causing a lot of needless hardware replacement isn't a good thing -- at best it's a broken-window fallacy; forcing something to be "fixed" that wasn't broken, and thereby diverting resources that could have been spent elsewhere.
In terms of its actual products, Microsoft's offerings are rarely superior at any one thing. They make a word processor, but not the best word processor (a lot of people liked Word Perfect, back before it became nearly impossible to use because everyone else was using Word). Similarly, Excel was a decent spreadsheet program, but Lotus 1-2-3 was arguably superior. Windows always was a mediocre desktop OS; for years, Apple was widely accepted as having the better UI. Windows NT is a passable server; BSD is and was arguably more secure. Etc. For almost any Microsoft product, you can find some offering that's better in that particular niche. A coworker once described Microsoft as the company of "good enough." They maintain themselves at
Then have a poll worker or other trusted person help the disabled person vote. Or let them bring somebody with them to read the ballot and mark it, if they'd prefer.
I'm pretty sure that anyone living with a disability that severe, is probably used to dealing with obstacles far greater than checking a box on a ballot on a daily basis. Just stay out of their way.
Electronic voting systems might have big buttons, but what do you do if you're a paralyzed quadriplegic? Obviously we need to think of a new system that you can use, using only your eye muscles and tongue, and make everyone use that. Would that be fair? No, it would be stupid.
There's a point where you have to say "this is a system that works for 99% of the population, and the remaining 1% aren't going to have any more trouble with it than they do with any other daily task." You're always going to be able to find someone that's disenfranchised by a particular system or voting method, but that doesn't mean the entire system needs to be scrapped.
I define Paper Ballot as an election device that is easily readable by anyone old enough to vote without any special tools more complicated than reading glasses.
... that's made out of (you guessed it!) paper.
Then you probably ought to say "human readable paper ballot," because when most people read "paper ballot," they're going to assume (work with me here) a ballot
As other people have pointed out, even considering the problems down in Florida in 2000, the "cure" we're looking at might have been worse than the "disease." At least with spoiled/malformed ballots (pregnant chads, hanging chads, etc.), unless the supporters of one candidate are for some reason dumber than the supporters of the other, you're probably going to have an equal distribution.
With electronic voting, you might eliminate the number of voter-errors, but you introduce many more avenues for exploitation. Doesn't seem like a good trade-off to me.
Throw them in your trunk, take them out to the boondocks, burn them, at bury the ash (making sure the ballots are thoroughly burned and the ash is mixed in the dirt). Voila! No evidence!
No, not "no evidence;" there are a dozen opportunities for you to get caught there (not least of which is what do you do if you're caught driving around with a bunch of ballots in your car?); believe it or not, that's not a very creative plan, and people have probably thought about it before, and we have a lot of experience at preventing such things. The police are pretty good at investigating physical-world crimes.
Even that scenario would create far more evidence than most electronic attacks, and it's evidence that the police have a far better chance of being able to follow. The resources and experience of law-enforcement with regards to computer crime are far less than physical-world crime, not to mention the signs of an ongoing computer crime wouldn't be recognizable to most people.
By tying each vote to a physical object, you remove them from the non-conservative realm of information and put them into the physical world, which as a civilization we're much more practiced at dealing with. We've just been doing it longer.
Everyone from the lowliest poll worker on up, can basically understand how paper ballots work. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that somebody carrying a bunch of them around is a potential problem. Doesn't mean they still couldn't do it, with the right amount of social engineering, but it's at least a recognizable attack. But when I walked into the polling place with electronic voting machines earlier today, I had a smart card hanging off of my belt (cleverly 'disguised' as a company ID card, which in fact it was); I could easily have slotted that into the voting machine while I was standing there. Nobody would have recognized me, or the smart card, as a possible threat.
People aren't as familiar with computers and electronic systems in general, as they are with the physical world and its "exploits." This means electronic systems that don't have a physical-world component are more vulnerable to manipulation, because the number of people who can investigate it -- or even recognize and understand the problem -- is lower.
As for some of your other comments, I don't understand the relationship between allegations of Republican physical vote-tampering and electronic voting. That people have recognized signs of physical-world vote manipulation just serves to further my feelings that there are fewer unguarded (or at least unrecognized) avenues of attack in the physical world than there are in the electronic.
Your comment about not networking the machines is similarly incorrect; the machines don't need to be networked to propagate a virus from one to the other. Someone with enough knowledge of the systems could probably write a virus that propagated via the same smartcards that are used to collect the "votes" and take them to the tabulation system, and from there infect the tabulation system and modify other votes. You don't know, when you plug a smart card (or USB stick, or floppy disk) into the machine, what's being written to it; it could just as easily be a virus as legitimate data. Computer viruses existed back before computer networks; they spread at whatever the speed that data is being moved around is.
However, the real question is, would a direct democratic system be inferior to the reality of our current representative system, which functions nothing at all like how you describe?
Having every citizen decide based on a 5-sentence position statement, seems like it might be better than letting a handful of citizens decide based on that same 5-sentence position statement and a large wad of cash.
Maybe the voting system should be idiot-proof.
I am interested in these idiot-proof voting machines of which you speak. Please send me your catalog for your full line of idiot-proof products. I am particularly interested in idiot-proof power tools and nuclear weapons, and any other products which allow stupid people to do important things with complete safety and security.
First, because that requires a conspiracy of a large number of people. You need to have a group of people for each polling station, at least. The more people you have to involve in your vote-changing scheme, the bigger chance you have of getting caught. Do you know what the odds are of you changing a city's worth of votes, requiring teams of people, and keeping it all a secret? It's virtually zero.
Second, changing paper ballots leaves physical evidence. The police, having hundreds of years of collective experience investigating physical crimes, are pretty good at picking up on that stuff. As is the general public. The smell of burning paper coming from the polling places might tip someone off; and if it doesn't, the barrels of paper ash probably would. Or the truckloads of ash that you're hauling away to dump in the river/ocean/whatever. It becomes a big logistical problem.
Third, an electronic attack could self-propagate. If you infected a machine, or firmware loader, it might be possible to make that machine infect other machines, without any intervention on your behalf. This is basically impossible in the physical world: you can't (or rather, it's pretty difficult) to craft some sort of intelligent paper ballot that would sneak in and destroy or change a bunch of other ballots when nobody's looking, and then destroy itself, without leaving a trace.
Fourth, the ways of manipulating elections via the paper-ballot systems are long established and for the most part, well recognized. Chances are, you're not going to come up with a way of fudging votes that somebody hasn't already thought of. With electronic voting, it's a brave new world, rife with untried opportunities.
So are there ways to mess up an election with paper ballots? Sure. But they are much easier to combat than the various ways that you can manipulate electronic systems, and law enforcement and electoral boards are more familiar with it, and it leaves a lot more evidence that can tip people off later on.
Electronic voting might, some day, be appropriate for use in a general election. In a few centuries, I assume that every podunk police department in the country will probably be just as savvy at investigating computer crimes as they are at gathering physical evidence today, and average people will be familiar enough with the normal operation of computers to detect when something funny is going on, and there will be thousands of man-years of experience in the computer-security field as it relates to electronic voting, taken from its years of use in non-critical systems. Under those conditions, I think the feasibility of an all-electronic voting system could be revisited.
But in our world, right now? It's insane.
So basically, we're going to spend millions of dollars and throw our electoral system into question ... so we can have the immediate gratification of official results the night of the election? (Because if it's not a close race, you can pretty much tell who's going to win based on the exit polls and unofficial results anyway.)
Well, that's a new low.
You make them fill it out with a Sharpie, and if they mark the wrong box, then they have to bring the ballot back to the poll worker, who destroys it, and gives them a new ballot.
If you mark two boxes, then the ballot is just spoiled and it doesn't count. The ballots need to have the check boxes sufficiently far away from each other, but if you have half-inch boxes that are at least an inch away from each other, and you still can't manage to mark one without hitting the other, you're probably too stupid to be voting anyway.
For every email you send from Yahoo mail, the IP address from where you sent is is disclosed to the receiver.
Now, I am not in any way defending Yahoo's reprehensible conduct in China, but the behavior that you describe regarding IP addresses in mail headers is the way things are supposed to work. The address of the originating machine should be listed as the first of the 'Received' headers. This just makes sense -- it's not "Yahoo" that's sending you the message, they're just passing it on behalf of some other person.
Webmail isn't supposed to automatically be an anonymizing service. It's unfortunate that many people aren't aware of this, and don't understand that many things they consider 'private' on the net are really anything but; however Yahoo shouldn't be faulted for acting according to accepted RFCs and protocols.
There are plenty of anonymous email systems out there for all your remailing needs; Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and GMail are not the tool for the job.
Now, there is a very good argument somewhere in here, for mandating that ISPs either not create, or immediately delete after a short period of time, all their logs that could be used to cross-reference actual people to IP addresses. This would effectively create anonymity at the IP address level. However, since this is not the case, users should seek privacy higher up in the stack, at the messaging-system (application) level, by choosing the correct tool for communication.
In case you hadn't noticed, there is a heavy overlap between this list and the infamous US "axis of evil" list. ... Thumbs down on clumsy propaganda.
Or, in other words, "-1, Doesn't Compare Bush to Hitler".
As everyone knows, Reporters Without Borders is practically a G.O.P. front group. Those guys are nothing but lock-step, Republican, neocon fascists, all the way.
better/faster than any other company in the world
Can they really be said to be "better" or "faster" when they actively discourage other people with potentially superior products from competing with them based on technical merits?
Seems to me that almost every area where Microsoft is dominant and not faced with external competition has stagnated. Look at what happened to the browser between the demise of Navigator and the rise of Firefox: basically nothing (well, except viruses and trojans; it was a great time to be a malware writer).
They are a huge brake on what ought to be an accelerating, ever-changing industry. The outcome that Microsoft would really like -- one platform, under EULA, with per-seat licensing and DRM for all, Amen -- would be nothing less than a dark age for information technology.
Microsoft only looks like a good thing when it's compared to nothing at all; if you compare it to what might exist in the absence of such a distorting influence, they've caused nothing but harm.
Microsoft didn't 'bring computers to business;' businesses would have bought computers in the absence of Microsoft; the advantages are just too great to be ignored. What Microsoft did, was effectively eliminate any choice that businesses might have had in the OS and software they wanted to buy and run, in order to be inter-operable. They injected themselves into computing and ended up in a place where they could become one of the "costs of doing business," applicable to everyone, everywhere. You aren't just paying the Microsoft Tax when you buy a new PC, you're paying it all the time, everywhere, because everyone uses their stuff. You're paying for it in the cost of your food, your electronics, your entertainment, and even your taxes, because not even our government can live without MS.
Microsoft is a plague, a parasite, that has so thoroughly infested the business world that it's basically impossible to remove. But just because it's too close to our vital bits to get rid of it now, shouldn't prohibit us from considering the nature of the infection and realizing that there could have been -- indeed, was -- a multitude of other ways that things could have gone.
Microsoft didn't "push technology all over the globe," people in all corners of the globe pulled that technology to themselves; they bought and paid for it because of the benefits it offered, despite the necessity of paying for Microsoft software in order to get anything done. Microsoft didn't create those markets, or those benefits; they would have existed anyway, because the technology really is that good. It's not good because of Microsoft -- MS didn't invent email, or CRM systems, or word processing, or spreadsheets -- and there's little that Microsoft offers that wouldn't be offered by somebody else in their stead. (Even the 'lingua franca' that Microsoft provides to the world could be easily replaced by a variety of open standards, because such a standard would be mutually beneficial in the absence of a standard piece of software.) It's good despite Microsoft.
The history is that IBM gravely under estimated the PC revolution and handed it over to Microsoft, so Microsoft doesn't want to get shafted like they did to IBM.
I think this is the best one-sentence summary of the thought process that seems to underlie Microsoft's business, consciously or not, all the time.
They're like the king who came to power by poisoning his predecessor, forever worrying whether they'll fall the same way.
But, as I told before, this bill is so nonsensical that it will never pass into law.
If only there was a "+5 Wishful Thinking" moderation...
The problem is that -- and I doubt that this is any more or less true in basically any country -- most people don't understand why it's nonsensical. People just don't get it; they hear 'this will be a way to protect our children from pedophiles' and immediately say "go for it!" and move on to something else.
But the bright side is, if it passes _and_ the government will try to enforce it, I see a string of high-paying tech jobs in the cyberpolice coming...
Better to be the foot in the boot than the face on the pavement, eh?
How the fuck are you going to remember what's legal and illegal when the laws are repealed almost daily.
Finally, a use for RSS feeds!
Well, what else do you think Fidel had to do when he was laid up?
.NET kind of guy.
Funny he'd go for C++ though. I always figured him as a C#
you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
Hello! May I be the first to welcome you to our planet. You may find things here a little unsettling, coming from your obviously very advanced civilization and culture; in the meantime I recommend you don't try to make sense of anything.
Oh, and be sure to try the pastrami, it's excellent here.