No, I'm more questioning whether America is currently better, but headed rapidly in the wrong direction, while Australia is currently worse, but at least headed in the right direction. More of a cautionary statement than a value judgement per se.
On one hand, being a U.S. citizen, I'm glad to hear we aren't the absolute most backwards Western country in the world in terms of consumer rights and protections when it comes to media.
On the other hand, the Australians may be lagging behind, but at least they're moving in the right direction. Sometimes it seems like we hit the high-water mark of consumer rights in this country, and are now starting to go the other way. That pretty much takes the fun out of all the holier-than-thou comments.
My personal feeling is that the laws here with regards to content and media jumped the shark when they said it was illegal to decode certain satellite broadcasts. To me, this is illogical: they're beaming their transmissions onto my property. Why shouldn't I be able to put up an antenna, feed it into a receiver, and do whatever the hell I want with the resulting output? If you want to pick a particular moment when the FCC stopped being an agent of the public interest and instead became an organ of the media distribution companies, that's it. It's pretty much a direct line of descent from those rulings, to the DMCA and its anti-circumvention rules, to things yet to come like the broadcast flag. I truly believe that at some point in the future (which I doubt I'll live to see) people will look back at the early satellite TV scrambling/demodulation laws (and their enforcement) as a turning point in public policy.
While the concept is good for it's described purpose, I get this mental image of the government coming under fire in 20 years for illegally wiretapping somebody's panties.
Quote from the Washington Post, circa 2015:
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA's undergarment monitoring program to be an acceptable way to investigate bioterrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the panty-sniffing effort...
Does anyone remember a short science fiction story that basically had that as a premise? I can't remember what it was called or who it was by, but the idea was that a civilization built a generator that provided wireless power distribution throughout not only all three dimensions, but forward into the fourth as well. So basically as soon as it was turned on, you'd have power for the rest of eternity, even if you shut it down.
The story used this as a device to show how easily people "forget the development," -- once people take something for granted, they forget how it works and how (or even if) it was built.
I remember really liking it, but I can't think of the author or title.
Well said. I was going to comment, but I think you pretty much summed up what I had to say.
The U.S. system is a meat grinder, but if you can hack it, you can do very well for yourself. It's a matter of building relationships with people that matter (i.e., the people who can hire/fire you) and not having any misguided loyalties to institutions or companies.
Right now, I currently work as a consultant (doesn't everyone these days?) which is nearly 100% at-will employment, but at the same time is very relationship-centric. It's not uncommon for people to drift from company to company as projects come and go, pursuing higher salaries or better working conditions or free parking (don't laugh, I've seen it happen). There's no stigma associated to being let go or quitting, it's just how it goes. (Unless you develop a reputation from leaving in the middle of a project and leaving people in the lurch, that's bad business.) Everybody I know* has cash-based retirement plans, so it's (reasonably) trivial to move them around with you, provided you stay on top of things.
It's also not uncommon for someone senior to move companies and take a few junior people along with them for the ride; meaning that your most important business relationship at a particular time may not be with the person/entity who's signing your paychecks.
It seems to be the people who are inflexible and get stuck in a rut who get hit the hardest when the inevitable reorganization comes. But if you're flexible and realize that no job is forever anymore, and view your career not as a single long job but as a series of mutually beneficial "engagements," anyone with half a brain can do pretty nicely.
(* Everybody I know except for a few old-timers at certain large corporations, who are on legacy company-vested pension/retirement plans. Frankly I wouldn't touch these things with a pole; I want my retirement money in my own account, not owned by my employer. Every once in a while I hear people pining for the days of old-style retirement and I can't figure it out: throw away thousands of dollars that you've basically invested, because you don't stay at a certain place 20 years? Seems ridiculous to me. No thanks, I'll take my retirement a la carte.)
If our electoral system can't handle a company manufacturing bad voting machines, then we're in serious trouble. If someone tried to sell me voting machines, I'd assume that they were out to rig the election, because that's the only safe thing to assume. I have to assume this, because the alternative (assuming they're trustworthy) is stupid and dangerous.
The system has to be designed for the fact that people are dishonest when large amounts of money are involved. You can't trust the voting machine manufacturers. Any voting system that relies on the manufacturer of the equipment to say "Oh yeah, that machine's accurate...perfectly accurate," and takes them at their word is flawed.
We should assume -- regardless of what the people who build the machines say -- that they're rigged. Or at least designed to be rigged. From that assumption, it's the government's job to find the right people who can go through with a fine-toothed comb and prove that they're not.
I'm not totally apologizing for Diebold -- they're likely a lying bunch of scumbags. But that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. If it does, you're naive, and I'd like to visit your home planet some day. This is a caveat emptor world, especially when it comes to people who try to sell things to governments. If you sign contracts in the Millions or Billions of dollars, you need to ASSUME, each and every time that you go to buy something, that the person trying to sell it to you is a lying, cheating, filthy stinking swine, who will say and do whatever it takes to make that sale. Maybe they aren't that bad, maybe they are. But that's the attitude that we should go in with, anytime anybody tries to sell a system like this. Assume they're corrupt. Assume their system is broken. Assume they want to rig the elections. Believe nothing that they say.
If we don't have the capability to check that the system doesn't work the way we want it to, without just blindly swallowing whatever Diebold says, then we shouldn't be using their machines for anything important.
When you have a prison breakout, you punish the criminals. But it was the prison that didn't do what it was supposed to do: it's supposed to be built with the assumption that people are going to try and break out of it. Likewise, any voting system that depends on the machines' manufacturer being trustworthy is like a prison that assumes none of the inmates will ever try to get up and leave.
Punish the criminals that try to break out, and by all means lambast Diebold if that makes you feel better, but neither of them are acting in an unexpected way. It's the system that failed for foresee their (obvious) behavior that's broken.
Unfortunately, I don't think that trick would work so well. At least, not very practically. You'd need to be putting some significant current through those wires in order to reliably degauss a hard drive (remember, those hard drives are usually in ferrous-metal cases). I've never done the math, but I have a feeling it might make your doorframes into serious electromagnets. The thieves might catch on when all of their tools get ripped out of their pockets and stick to the doorjambs as they brush past it.
Now, doing something like that to keep someone from taking magnetic tapes out of a room, that might be more practical: backup tapes are usually in plastic or other nonferrous containers, and I think the energy required to degauss them would be less.
However, the thinking that's at work here: namely it's better to destroy something than to let it be stolen, I think lends itself to a variety of other self destruct systems. Personally, I'd like to see a system -- not running on the host machine's OS (so, in a separate microcontroller, with it's own EPROMs) -- that "phoned home" to a central site every once in a while via telephone or TCP/IP, and could receive a "kill code" for a particular machine if it was stolen. The kill code could be programmed to do any number of things, from reformatting the disks to igniting a thermite charge to shorting the battery in such a way that it would explode. (How about all three, in that order?) I could think of lots of neat nasty tricks to do with that.
chances are he might just format the drive and sell it at pawn shop.
In many cases true, but if you had sensitive (we're talking geopolitically sensitive, not credit-card and Social Security numbers sensitive) then such an assumption might be unwarranted and a very bad idea. Certainly it's not a chance that I want people taking if I was in a position of responsibility.
I think the analogy he's getting at is the most people don't go out and buy electric motors by themselves. You're basically an anomaly.
Most people go out and buy a sewing machine. They plug it in, and it works. The smarter people probably realize that it has an electric motor in it, but they don't think about it very much. It's just a sewing machine. Similarly, people buy all manner of motorized devices without thinking about the motors themselves.
Unless they break, of course, in which case a rare person or two might take the device apart and replace the motor with a new one (or take it to someone who does this). But that's becoming more and more rare anyway.
The point is that motors aren't something that the average person deals with much anymore. People buy devices that include motors in them, and just expect them to function as sealed units. They don't buy a belt-driven sewing machine, take it home, and attach it to the drive shaft that runs along their ceiling which is connected to their "home motor" in the garage.
The analogy breaks down -- as most analogies do -- when you look at it too closely or start splitting hairs. But the point is that where once, people thought of "a computer" as a product, something that individuals would go out to the store and buy, today and in the future, people just buy music players, digital television recorders, and other computerized devices. The Device is the product, and it may include a computer in it, in the same way that the sewing machine includes a motor, but nobody really thinks about that.
Your point about motors may not be too much of a disagreement: that motors have become standardized even as they've become integrated into other products and basically invisible to the average user, might suggest that the "computing machinery" which drives everyday devices will become more-or-less standard, so that inside a purpose-built device there is a number of standard components, put together in a particular configuration in order to efficiently accomplish a set task, but that those components are replaceable (or at least understandable) if someone desires it.
As a tinkerer and hobbyist, I fervently hope that will be the case: that I'll be able to take apart a DTV recorder (or my offspring, should I have any, will) and be able to identify and replace parts of it as easily as I can open up a sewing machine and with a little skill, replace the motor.
You're not the only one to notice this. It's not even a new phenomenon.
Charles Dickens wrote a book that's arguably a gigantic illustration of that point: people fight, but the lawyers always win. (I'm talking about Bleak House here, and for those who haven't read it, it's basically about a probate dispute over a large estate that drives a family apart; the punchline is at the end when one guy wins, he does so only to have the entire estate seized and sold off to pay the lawyers and court fees.)
How does a ROM store the votes? Is it a WORM type system? Or do you mean that the machine's programming / firmware is stored on a ROM?
That sort of shortsightedness is unfortunate, but unsurprising. At the least we could have bought the designs to the machines. They're probably more open about it than Diebold is.
I've questioned why we don't do something like this, and have the reading done by OCR.
To reduce errors you'd have to have a few rules: first, no corrections. If you fuck up, new ballot for you. (I'd prefer if you fuck up, no vote for you, but I'm guessing that won't fly.) Second, the marks have to be very distinct. That's why I'd use bingo blotters. They're like really huge magic markers that basically soak through the paper. Every old fart knows how to use one, and you could make them have to color in a fairly substantial area (like a square inch or larger) so that they can't just accidentally touch the blotter to the paper. Important elections (Presidential, Governor, etc.) go on rather largish sheets of paper, and each candidate gets a big area, with dead space in between the marking areas for each candidate equal to 5x the diameter of the marking area. So even if you're a real retard and don't color inside the lines, you've still got a lot of ways to go before you get over to the next candidate's box.
Also, there would be a test box. Just a blank box in the corner that you'd fill out, in order to make sure your marker was working and that you had the hang of things. Also, it gives the reader (human or machine) a comparison point to see what their actual marks will probably look like. (E.g. "Oh, this idiot only likes to circle the box, instead of filling it in; that's why the machine didn't read it.")
Perhaps most importantly, the indicative boxes that you mark are not placed symmetrically on the page. That is, they are placed so that they're not the same distance from the top as they are to the bottom, or from the left as on the right. This is important, since it means you can read the ballot electronically without having to orient them in one way or the other, just by measuring the distance from the mark to the edges of the sheet.
Then, use a dye in the blotters that's UV-reflective (or UV absorbent). That way they're very distinctive and easy to read through a scanning system. I'm pretty sure any pigment based marker/blotter would work here. These systems are already in existence -- the postal service uses them for automatically canceling stamps on letters (stamps are UV reflective). But the point is you can OCR them by just looking at the position on the page of the marks, you don't need punchcard-style index corners (although we'd have those too, for extra security).
I think the other thing that would help is if you gave the election officials more time between voting day and when they were expected to certify the results. Like two weeks, at a minimum. There's really no reason people should be rushing with this. Back the election up a little ways if need be, but the idea that the polls should close at 8pm and the results should be certified by 10pm is crap, and it can only lead to bad things happening ("oops! Look at this, we forgot a box of ballots! Oh, well, too late now!"). Elections are too important to rush through.
I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.
Labor is so expensive here (assuming you don't hire illegals) that there's a strong bias towards anything that's "automatic" or "electronic." People are drawn to anything they think they can 'fire and forget,' that is, set up once and then never have to touch again, and just put their feet up on their desk and watch the results roll in.
That's the allure of electronic voting. You have a bunch of highschool kids set them up and plug them in, then the Commissioner of Elections just needs to sit in his office on Election Day and watch the results roll in; that's the dream of a lot of people, I think, anyway.
The other thing is that people don't understand that computers = complexity. People have been conditioned to think that computers = simple. Thus, it's easy to pull the wool over some idiot's eyes and say "But it's computerized! That means no mistakes! It's simpler, because you don't have any of those paper ballots to miscount or get lost." Of course, people usually just nod and smile at this, and never bother to think that it's a fuckload easier to lose a microsecond's worth of zeros and ones than it is to lose a sheet of paperboard.
But anyway, the simple answer to your question I think is the cost of labor in the U.S. compared to India would make a lot of hand-counting methods prohibitively expensive. The only way we'd probably be able to do that here is if we took all the paper ballots, FedEx-ed them to India for counting, and then had them ship the results back.
Making a shitty voting machine isn't wrong or illegal.
I could make a terrible voting machine in ten minutes involving a cardboard box, if I wanted to.
It's the people who then take said shitty voting machine and USE IT FOR CHOOSING OUR LEADERSHIP who are committing treason.
The only thing I can fault Diebold for is potentially misrepresenting their products by claiming that they're useful for anything more important than picking the Prom King and Queen at a highschool dance. But that doesn't in any way absolve the people charged in this country with running the elections from using Diebold's shitty equipment in one of the most important aspects of our system of government.
It's the election officials, from the lowliest poll worker to the State commissioners, who are failing in their duties to ensure just and fair elections. It is their job to evaluate the voting mechanisms and ensure that they are fair and secure. They should never be depending on the claims of the manufacturer of the equipment, or anyone else, in order to make this determination. It's their responsibility, and they are failing miserably at it by using Diebold's machines.
about 28,000 square kilometers, or about 11,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that is about 1/8th the size of Kansas
Well, in that case, we might as well cover the other 7/8ths too, and make some for export. If anyone from Kansas asks what's going on, tell them God did it.
183. A pet bee on a string. Do not conflate with Item #228. [3 points]
Nowhere in that line does it say "live pet bee on a string". It could easily be a dead bee on a string. I don't think that a "pet" necessarily implies that the object is alive: think pet rock, etc.
So, find a dead bee, some string, and some Krazy Glue. You've got your pet bee on a string. Macabre? Maybe, but not as much as the book bound in human skin...
In the future, every time you pick up your phone, you're going to hear a little synthetic female voice say "This call may be recorded for quality purposes."
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to greed.
Diebold's marketdroids have, I'm sure, come up with the ideal price point for electronic voting machines. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's got to be something less than the old mechanical "pull the lever" machines, but still substantial.
Since the price is basically fixed, they then have a motivation to produce the cheapest, shoddiest piece of shit that they possibly can, to maximize their profit.
I have no doubt that, if a major company really wanted to, they could probably make a reasonably secure electronic voting machine. We have -- as you pointed out -- reasonably secure ATM machines. There's not something magical about making a voting machine: they could build it like an ATM, run it on the software platform that drives ATMs (OS/2, in many cases, I think), and give it all the same physical and data security. Coupled with procedural safeguards (paper trail, periodic inspections on voting day), I would feel comfortable using one.
However, all this would do one of two things: 1, it would cut into Diebold's profits, or 2, it would cause the machines to be so expensive that municipalities would rethink replacing their existing machines, or rethink using electronic voting as opposed to mechanical machines or other alternatives.
There's no giant right-wing tinfoil hat conspiracy going on. They're just applying the Wal-Mart Method to voting machines: figure out what people are willing to pay, and then deliver them the cheapest piece of shit that barely fills their requirements (but does it poorly), in order to maximize your margins.
To be perfectly honest, I can't fault Diebold for this. People love to demonize them, but they're not the worst actors in all of this. What they're doing ought to come as a surprise to nobody. The people who have every last bit of the blame for the cockup that this situation has turned into -- and it's only going to get worse -- are the local governments who have accepted the shit that Diebold is turning out.
If a company turns out a shoddy product, we need to tell them that's not acceptable by refusing to buy it. If they make cheap crap, and we buy it, then we might as well just bend over and say "thank you sir, may I have another!"
It's easy to demonize Diebold because there's only one of them; but really the people you need to be looking at are the asshats that decided to adopt their shitty equipment and use it to record your votes.
First, realize that the majority of stock in the US isn't owned by rich individuals. It's owned mostly by mutual funds, which are in turn used as part of basically every retirement plan, investment account, college-savings plan, ad infinium. If you have a 401k, you probably are an indirect shareholder in Exxon-Mobil (and IBM, and Microsoft, and General Dynamics, and probably Halliburton). If any of the big oil companies were to sneeze, the whole economy would get a cold.
Second, high-priced petroleum products, especially gasoline, is not necessarily a Bad Thing. I think it sucks as much as the next guy -- if I could click my shoes together and go back to the days of 98-cent per gallon gas forever, I'd be doing it and buying a Camaro before you could say "carbon dioxide." As much as Ma and Pa Jones of Pig's Knuckle, AR think that they want the Gubbermint to step in and 'do something' about the high price of gas, they really don't. Because keeping the price of gas low will only ensure that it gets used up faster, and that we don't do a damn thing to change our usage patterns or wean outselves off of it before it runs out completely.
In other words, cheap gasoline just makes us, as a nation, press the accelerator to the floor as we're heading towards the brick wall of No More Petroleum. Paying the real market price for gas is the fairest way to wean everybody off of petroleum products: and people are listening. Go down to a Toyota garage sometime and see how many people are looking at hybrids, versus a year or two ago. The difference is pretty impressive.
The oil companies will continue to charge what they think the market will bear for gasoline and other products; when the cost of transportation fuels starts to become a major source of pain to American families, they will modify their usage patterns. This is how things have to work: people have to understand that the era of cheap gasoline -- probably of cheap fuel in general -- is over. In the future, if you want to drive 300 miles to see Grandma instead of call her, you're going to have to factor in the $30-40 in fuel that it's going to cost you. That's reality; that's life.
I have no doubt that many politicians this election year will try to come up with all sorts of creative ways of basically subsidizing or otherwise artificially deflating the price of gas. But as they're doing their financial rabbits-from-hats routine, I think it's worth it for everyone to remember that "cheaper gas" doesn't equal "more gas." In fact, it really means 'less gas' for everyone in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
America is still worse, right?
No, I'm more questioning whether America is currently better, but headed rapidly in the wrong direction, while Australia is currently worse, but at least headed in the right direction. More of a cautionary statement than a value judgement per se.
On one hand, being a U.S. citizen, I'm glad to hear we aren't the absolute most backwards Western country in the world in terms of consumer rights and protections when it comes to media.
On the other hand, the Australians may be lagging behind, but at least they're moving in the right direction. Sometimes it seems like we hit the high-water mark of consumer rights in this country, and are now starting to go the other way. That pretty much takes the fun out of all the holier-than-thou comments.
My personal feeling is that the laws here with regards to content and media jumped the shark when they said it was illegal to decode certain satellite broadcasts. To me, this is illogical: they're beaming their transmissions onto my property. Why shouldn't I be able to put up an antenna, feed it into a receiver, and do whatever the hell I want with the resulting output? If you want to pick a particular moment when the FCC stopped being an agent of the public interest and instead became an organ of the media distribution companies, that's it. It's pretty much a direct line of descent from those rulings, to the DMCA and its anti-circumvention rules, to things yet to come like the broadcast flag. I truly believe that at some point in the future (which I doubt I'll live to see) people will look back at the early satellite TV scrambling/demodulation laws (and their enforcement) as a turning point in public policy.
Of course, they'd be a right bugger to milk...
... don't try to milk it. Just stop and walk away, before you owe it dinner.
Here's a hint; if it only has one teat instead of four
Quote from the Washington Post, circa 2015:
Although ITER will produce net power in the form of heat, the generated heat will not be used to generate any electricity.
I'll bet it's great for making s'mores, though.
Does anyone remember a short science fiction story that basically had that as a premise? I can't remember what it was called or who it was by, but the idea was that a civilization built a generator that provided wireless power distribution throughout not only all three dimensions, but forward into the fourth as well. So basically as soon as it was turned on, you'd have power for the rest of eternity, even if you shut it down.
The story used this as a device to show how easily people "forget the development," -- once people take something for granted, they forget how it works and how (or even if) it was built.
I remember really liking it, but I can't think of the author or title.
Well said. I was going to comment, but I think you pretty much summed up what I had to say.
The U.S. system is a meat grinder, but if you can hack it, you can do very well for yourself. It's a matter of building relationships with people that matter (i.e., the people who can hire/fire you) and not having any misguided loyalties to institutions or companies.
Right now, I currently work as a consultant (doesn't everyone these days?) which is nearly 100% at-will employment, but at the same time is very relationship-centric. It's not uncommon for people to drift from company to company as projects come and go, pursuing higher salaries or better working conditions or free parking (don't laugh, I've seen it happen). There's no stigma associated to being let go or quitting, it's just how it goes. (Unless you develop a reputation from leaving in the middle of a project and leaving people in the lurch, that's bad business.) Everybody I know* has cash-based retirement plans, so it's (reasonably) trivial to move them around with you, provided you stay on top of things.
It's also not uncommon for someone senior to move companies and take a few junior people along with them for the ride; meaning that your most important business relationship at a particular time may not be with the person/entity who's signing your paychecks.
It seems to be the people who are inflexible and get stuck in a rut who get hit the hardest when the inevitable reorganization comes. But if you're flexible and realize that no job is forever anymore, and view your career not as a single long job but as a series of mutually beneficial "engagements," anyone with half a brain can do pretty nicely.
(* Everybody I know except for a few old-timers at certain large corporations, who are on legacy company-vested pension/retirement plans. Frankly I wouldn't touch these things with a pole; I want my retirement money in my own account, not owned by my employer. Every once in a while I hear people pining for the days of old-style retirement and I can't figure it out: throw away thousands of dollars that you've basically invested, because you don't stay at a certain place 20 years? Seems ridiculous to me. No thanks, I'll take my retirement a la carte.)
If our electoral system can't handle a company manufacturing bad voting machines, then we're in serious trouble. If someone tried to sell me voting machines, I'd assume that they were out to rig the election, because that's the only safe thing to assume. I have to assume this, because the alternative (assuming they're trustworthy) is stupid and dangerous.
The system has to be designed for the fact that people are dishonest when large amounts of money are involved. You can't trust the voting machine manufacturers. Any voting system that relies on the manufacturer of the equipment to say "Oh yeah, that machine's accurate...perfectly accurate," and takes them at their word is flawed.
We should assume -- regardless of what the people who build the machines say -- that they're rigged. Or at least designed to be rigged. From that assumption, it's the government's job to find the right people who can go through with a fine-toothed comb and prove that they're not.
I'm not totally apologizing for Diebold -- they're likely a lying bunch of scumbags. But that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. If it does, you're naive, and I'd like to visit your home planet some day. This is a caveat emptor world, especially when it comes to people who try to sell things to governments. If you sign contracts in the Millions or Billions of dollars, you need to ASSUME, each and every time that you go to buy something, that the person trying to sell it to you is a lying, cheating, filthy stinking swine, who will say and do whatever it takes to make that sale. Maybe they aren't that bad, maybe they are. But that's the attitude that we should go in with, anytime anybody tries to sell a system like this. Assume they're corrupt. Assume their system is broken. Assume they want to rig the elections. Believe nothing that they say.
If we don't have the capability to check that the system doesn't work the way we want it to, without just blindly swallowing whatever Diebold says, then we shouldn't be using their machines for anything important.
When you have a prison breakout, you punish the criminals. But it was the prison that didn't do what it was supposed to do: it's supposed to be built with the assumption that people are going to try and break out of it. Likewise, any voting system that depends on the machines' manufacturer being trustworthy is like a prison that assumes none of the inmates will ever try to get up and leave.
Punish the criminals that try to break out, and by all means lambast Diebold if that makes you feel better, but neither of them are acting in an unexpected way. It's the system that failed for foresee their (obvious) behavior that's broken.
Unfortunately, I don't think that trick would work so well. At least, not very practically. You'd need to be putting some significant current through those wires in order to reliably degauss a hard drive (remember, those hard drives are usually in ferrous-metal cases). I've never done the math, but I have a feeling it might make your doorframes into serious electromagnets. The thieves might catch on when all of their tools get ripped out of their pockets and stick to the doorjambs as they brush past it.
Now, doing something like that to keep someone from taking magnetic tapes out of a room, that might be more practical: backup tapes are usually in plastic or other nonferrous containers, and I think the energy required to degauss them would be less.
However, the thinking that's at work here: namely it's better to destroy something than to let it be stolen, I think lends itself to a variety of other self destruct systems. Personally, I'd like to see a system -- not running on the host machine's OS (so, in a separate microcontroller, with it's own EPROMs) -- that "phoned home" to a central site every once in a while via telephone or TCP/IP, and could receive a "kill code" for a particular machine if it was stolen. The kill code could be programmed to do any number of things, from reformatting the disks to igniting a thermite charge to shorting the battery in such a way that it would explode. (How about all three, in that order?) I could think of lots of neat nasty tricks to do with that.
chances are he might just format the drive and sell it at pawn shop.
In many cases true, but if you had sensitive (we're talking geopolitically sensitive, not credit-card and Social Security numbers sensitive) then such an assumption might be unwarranted and a very bad idea. Certainly it's not a chance that I want people taking if I was in a position of responsibility.
Half a bee, philosophically, must, ipso facto, half not be.
...semi-carnally
But half the bee
has got to be,
vis a vis
its entity - do you see?
But can a bee
be said to be
or not to be
an entire bee
when half the bee
is not a bee
due to some ancient injury?
Singing...
La dee dee, 1 2 3,
Eric the half a bee.
A B C D E F G,
Eric the half a bee.
Is this retched demi-bee,
half asleep upon my knee,
some freak from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric the half a bee.
Fiddle dee dum,
Fiddle dee dee,
Eric the half bee.
Ho ho ho,
Tee hee hee,
Eric the half a bee.
I love this hive employee-ee-ee
[with buzzing in background]
bisected accidentally
one summer afternoon by me
I love him carnally.
He loves him carnally... [together]
I think the analogy he's getting at is the most people don't go out and buy electric motors by themselves. You're basically an anomaly.
Most people go out and buy a sewing machine. They plug it in, and it works. The smarter people probably realize that it has an electric motor in it, but they don't think about it very much. It's just a sewing machine. Similarly, people buy all manner of motorized devices without thinking about the motors themselves.
Unless they break, of course, in which case a rare person or two might take the device apart and replace the motor with a new one (or take it to someone who does this). But that's becoming more and more rare anyway.
The point is that motors aren't something that the average person deals with much anymore. People buy devices that include motors in them, and just expect them to function as sealed units. They don't buy a belt-driven sewing machine, take it home, and attach it to the drive shaft that runs along their ceiling which is connected to their "home motor" in the garage.
The analogy breaks down -- as most analogies do -- when you look at it too closely or start splitting hairs. But the point is that where once, people thought of "a computer" as a product, something that individuals would go out to the store and buy, today and in the future, people just buy music players, digital television recorders, and other computerized devices. The Device is the product, and it may include a computer in it, in the same way that the sewing machine includes a motor, but nobody really thinks about that.
Your point about motors may not be too much of a disagreement: that motors have become standardized even as they've become integrated into other products and basically invisible to the average user, might suggest that the "computing machinery" which drives everyday devices will become more-or-less standard, so that inside a purpose-built device there is a number of standard components, put together in a particular configuration in order to efficiently accomplish a set task, but that those components are replaceable (or at least understandable) if someone desires it.
As a tinkerer and hobbyist, I fervently hope that will be the case: that I'll be able to take apart a DTV recorder (or my offspring, should I have any, will) and be able to identify and replace parts of it as easily as I can open up a sewing machine and with a little skill, replace the motor.
You're not the only one to notice this. It's not even a new phenomenon.
Charles Dickens wrote a book that's arguably a gigantic illustration of that point: people fight, but the lawyers always win. (I'm talking about Bleak House here, and for those who haven't read it, it's basically about a probate dispute over a large estate that drives a family apart; the punchline is at the end when one guy wins, he does so only to have the entire estate seized and sold off to pay the lawyers and court fees.)
How does a ROM store the votes? Is it a WORM type system? Or do you mean that the machine's programming / firmware is stored on a ROM?
That sort of shortsightedness is unfortunate, but unsurprising. At the least we could have bought the designs to the machines. They're probably more open about it than Diebold is.
I've questioned why we don't do something like this, and have the reading done by OCR.
To reduce errors you'd have to have a few rules: first, no corrections. If you fuck up, new ballot for you. (I'd prefer if you fuck up, no vote for you, but I'm guessing that won't fly.) Second, the marks have to be very distinct. That's why I'd use bingo blotters. They're like really huge magic markers that basically soak through the paper. Every old fart knows how to use one, and you could make them have to color in a fairly substantial area (like a square inch or larger) so that they can't just accidentally touch the blotter to the paper. Important elections (Presidential, Governor, etc.) go on rather largish sheets of paper, and each candidate gets a big area, with dead space in between the marking areas for each candidate equal to 5x the diameter of the marking area. So even if you're a real retard and don't color inside the lines, you've still got a lot of ways to go before you get over to the next candidate's box.
Also, there would be a test box. Just a blank box in the corner that you'd fill out, in order to make sure your marker was working and that you had the hang of things. Also, it gives the reader (human or machine) a comparison point to see what their actual marks will probably look like. (E.g. "Oh, this idiot only likes to circle the box, instead of filling it in; that's why the machine didn't read it.")
Perhaps most importantly, the indicative boxes that you mark are not placed symmetrically on the page. That is, they are placed so that they're not the same distance from the top as they are to the bottom, or from the left as on the right. This is important, since it means you can read the ballot electronically without having to orient them in one way or the other, just by measuring the distance from the mark to the edges of the sheet.
Then, use a dye in the blotters that's UV-reflective (or UV absorbent). That way they're very distinctive and easy to read through a scanning system. I'm pretty sure any pigment based marker/blotter would work here. These systems are already in existence -- the postal service uses them for automatically canceling stamps on letters (stamps are UV reflective). But the point is you can OCR them by just looking at the position on the page of the marks, you don't need punchcard-style index corners (although we'd have those too, for extra security).
I think the other thing that would help is if you gave the election officials more time between voting day and when they were expected to certify the results. Like two weeks, at a minimum. There's really no reason people should be rushing with this. Back the election up a little ways if need be, but the idea that the polls should close at 8pm and the results should be certified by 10pm is crap, and it can only lead to bad things happening ("oops! Look at this, we forgot a box of ballots! Oh, well, too late now!"). Elections are too important to rush through.
I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.
Labor is so expensive here (assuming you don't hire illegals) that there's a strong bias towards anything that's "automatic" or "electronic." People are drawn to anything they think they can 'fire and forget,' that is, set up once and then never have to touch again, and just put their feet up on their desk and watch the results roll in.
That's the allure of electronic voting. You have a bunch of highschool kids set them up and plug them in, then the Commissioner of Elections just needs to sit in his office on Election Day and watch the results roll in; that's the dream of a lot of people, I think, anyway.
The other thing is that people don't understand that computers = complexity. People have been conditioned to think that computers = simple. Thus, it's easy to pull the wool over some idiot's eyes and say "But it's computerized! That means no mistakes! It's simpler, because you don't have any of those paper ballots to miscount or get lost." Of course, people usually just nod and smile at this, and never bother to think that it's a fuckload easier to lose a microsecond's worth of zeros and ones than it is to lose a sheet of paperboard.
But anyway, the simple answer to your question I think is the cost of labor in the U.S. compared to India would make a lot of hand-counting methods prohibitively expensive. The only way we'd probably be able to do that here is if we took all the paper ballots, FedEx-ed them to India for counting, and then had them ship the results back.
Making a shitty voting machine isn't wrong or illegal.
I could make a terrible voting machine in ten minutes involving a cardboard box, if I wanted to.
It's the people who then take said shitty voting machine and USE IT FOR CHOOSING OUR LEADERSHIP who are committing treason.
The only thing I can fault Diebold for is potentially misrepresenting their products by claiming that they're useful for anything more important than picking the Prom King and Queen at a highschool dance. But that doesn't in any way absolve the people charged in this country with running the elections from using Diebold's shitty equipment in one of the most important aspects of our system of government.
It's the election officials, from the lowliest poll worker to the State commissioners, who are failing in their duties to ensure just and fair elections. It is their job to evaluate the voting mechanisms and ensure that they are fair and secure. They should never be depending on the claims of the manufacturer of the equipment, or anyone else, in order to make this determination. It's their responsibility, and they are failing miserably at it by using Diebold's machines.
about 28,000 square kilometers, or about 11,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that is about 1/8th the size of Kansas
Well, in that case, we might as well cover the other 7/8ths too, and make some for export. If anyone from Kansas asks what's going on, tell them God did it.
Unfortunately, some devious scientists are working hard to end that particular source of energy:
c
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060425/sc_nm/beans_d
183. A pet bee on a string. Do not conflate with Item #228. [3 points]
Nowhere in that line does it say "live pet bee on a string". It could easily be a dead bee on a string. I don't think that a "pet" necessarily implies that the object is alive: think pet rock, etc.
So, find a dead bee, some string, and some Krazy Glue. You've got your pet bee on a string. Macabre? Maybe, but not as much as the book bound in human skin...
For just expressing an unpopular opinion?
You must be new here.
In the future, every time you pick up your phone, you're going to hear a little synthetic female voice say "This call may be recorded for quality purposes."
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be easily attributed to greed.
Diebold's marketdroids have, I'm sure, come up with the ideal price point for electronic voting machines. I don't know exactly what it is, but it's got to be something less than the old mechanical "pull the lever" machines, but still substantial.
Since the price is basically fixed, they then have a motivation to produce the cheapest, shoddiest piece of shit that they possibly can, to maximize their profit.
I have no doubt that, if a major company really wanted to, they could probably make a reasonably secure electronic voting machine. We have -- as you pointed out -- reasonably secure ATM machines. There's not something magical about making a voting machine: they could build it like an ATM, run it on the software platform that drives ATMs (OS/2, in many cases, I think), and give it all the same physical and data security. Coupled with procedural safeguards (paper trail, periodic inspections on voting day), I would feel comfortable using one.
However, all this would do one of two things: 1, it would cut into Diebold's profits, or 2, it would cause the machines to be so expensive that municipalities would rethink replacing their existing machines, or rethink using electronic voting as opposed to mechanical machines or other alternatives.
There's no giant right-wing tinfoil hat conspiracy going on. They're just applying the Wal-Mart Method to voting machines: figure out what people are willing to pay, and then deliver them the cheapest piece of shit that barely fills their requirements (but does it poorly), in order to maximize your margins.
To be perfectly honest, I can't fault Diebold for this. People love to demonize them, but they're not the worst actors in all of this. What they're doing ought to come as a surprise to nobody. The people who have every last bit of the blame for the cockup that this situation has turned into -- and it's only going to get worse -- are the local governments who have accepted the shit that Diebold is turning out.
If a company turns out a shoddy product, we need to tell them that's not acceptable by refusing to buy it. If they make cheap crap, and we buy it, then we might as well just bend over and say "thank you sir, may I have another!"
It's easy to demonize Diebold because there's only one of them; but really the people you need to be looking at are the asshats that decided to adopt their shitty equipment and use it to record your votes.
Yes, because I'm fairly certain that somebody somewhere has come up with an insidious plot to rig the elections with a Nerf gun.
... back to the drawing board. It was such a good plan, too.
God damnit
This is wrong on any number of levels.
First, realize that the majority of stock in the US isn't owned by rich individuals. It's owned mostly by mutual funds, which are in turn used as part of basically every retirement plan, investment account, college-savings plan, ad infinium. If you have a 401k, you probably are an indirect shareholder in Exxon-Mobil (and IBM, and Microsoft, and General Dynamics, and probably Halliburton). If any of the big oil companies were to sneeze, the whole economy would get a cold.
Second, high-priced petroleum products, especially gasoline, is not necessarily a Bad Thing. I think it sucks as much as the next guy -- if I could click my shoes together and go back to the days of 98-cent per gallon gas forever, I'd be doing it and buying a Camaro before you could say "carbon dioxide." As much as Ma and Pa Jones of Pig's Knuckle, AR think that they want the Gubbermint to step in and 'do something' about the high price of gas, they really don't. Because keeping the price of gas low will only ensure that it gets used up faster, and that we don't do a damn thing to change our usage patterns or wean outselves off of it before it runs out completely.
In other words, cheap gasoline just makes us, as a nation, press the accelerator to the floor as we're heading towards the brick wall of No More Petroleum. Paying the real market price for gas is the fairest way to wean everybody off of petroleum products: and people are listening. Go down to a Toyota garage sometime and see how many people are looking at hybrids, versus a year or two ago. The difference is pretty impressive.
The oil companies will continue to charge what they think the market will bear for gasoline and other products; when the cost of transportation fuels starts to become a major source of pain to American families, they will modify their usage patterns. This is how things have to work: people have to understand that the era of cheap gasoline -- probably of cheap fuel in general -- is over. In the future, if you want to drive 300 miles to see Grandma instead of call her, you're going to have to factor in the $30-40 in fuel that it's going to cost you. That's reality; that's life.
I have no doubt that many politicians this election year will try to come up with all sorts of creative ways of basically subsidizing or otherwise artificially deflating the price of gas. But as they're doing their financial rabbits-from-hats routine, I think it's worth it for everyone to remember that "cheaper gas" doesn't equal "more gas." In fact, it really means 'less gas' for everyone in the future.