The only "problem" I see is how to conclusively identify voters as they are with in-person polling booths.
Here in Canada you have to present your id to vote. Your name is checked off the list, written down as having voted through ballot box 2378, and you're handed a serial-numbered voting stub.
With unemployment insurance, you register an account online, your id and claim data are checked, and if it's ok, a card with your PIN is snail-mailed to you to make sure it goes to YOUR address, not random joe-schmoe's. But that's the closest I've seen to a system that could pre-identify a user.
Maybe we could issue social insurance number cards that included an embedded security code generator, ala two-factor identification systems. But then we'd still have the problem of people forgetting a password they only use once every 4 years. Given how many people reset their email and web passwords for sites they use far more frequently, this would be a HUGE issue in the validity of a two-factor authentication scheme.
But tracking the vote counts, cross-correlating the information, and being able to verify that a person's vote was recorded? That kind of "issue" is a no-brainer to the credit card industry and has been "solved" for years.
The only issue I've ever encountered with the algorithms is ONCE I made a payment at a store, but the terminal didn't receive the confirmation before timing out, so my funds were locked up because they'd been "spent" when I tried to redo the transaction. But with a voting system, you'd obviously want to wait for the confirmation page and print it out as your voting receipt, so it'd just be a matter of ensuring that there is a client-generated UUID for each voting request so it could either bring up the entered vote or create a new vote in order to allow for people hitting "submit" too quickly instead of waiting for a response.
Dude, if you're worried that a central voting system is running the version of open source software that was vetted by the community, your problem isn't the voting system -- it's the organization that's stolen your democracy and taken over the servers.
The whole point of the SaaS industry is not to sell you the software, but to sell you the services around maintaining and deploying that software. If it's "never a good idea for the purchaser", there are a "few" people in North America and around the world who've made a "mistake" in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
SaaS is the very heart of most open-source based businesses. The software is free; the packaging, testing, support, and distribution media are not.
We've come full circle right back to the leasing models that served the industry from the 50s to the 80s before there was a spurt of the concept of "software ownership" during the CD media package distribution days of the heyday of the PC. But that heyday is gone -- even "purchased" software like accounting packages now come in annual distributions with upgraded tax regulation code.
It sounds like you may be using an embedded Linux for your products.
If so, you should be using the distribution that most closely resembles your delivery systems, rather than letting users pick whatever they want.
In fact, I can't imagine ever allowing users and developers in any department I'd be managing to choose whatever distribution or operating system they want. Corporate standards are there so that maintenance and integration are manageable issues, and the differences between some distributions are just far too great. Unless there is a documented and known reason for diverging from the norm, it's just far too expensive to expect the support department and team to learn about everyone's favourite platform or distro.
The "right to choose" stops at the point where it becomes an expense to maintain and support.
I'd give serious consideration to a corporate standard desktop for similar reasons, though I realize that may well be as futile as trying to pick a text editor. (vi! emacs! eclipse! And much snarling and gnashing of teeth for years on end if anyone loses the battle.)
The difficulties of coding a secure voting system are no more difficult than those of coding a secure debit or credit card payment transaction, and subject to EXACTLY the same risks.
The bigger issue is that every single electronic voting platform I've heard of to date has been a closed-source solution, uninspected, unverified, and unaudited. With a proper open source solution that could be inspected and vetted by the hundreds of thousands of programmers out there who'd be interested in finding flaws, I've no doubt a proper solution could be implemented.
It would beat the heck out of the robocall scandal currently plaguing Canada. Making calls to misdirect voters to non-existent polling stations would be futile if people were voting from home.
As to the issue of verifying identity, when you apply for unemployment insurance, your ID is checked online and a card sent to your last registered snail-mail address with the security code needed for initial systems access. I'd think a similar system would be adequate for online voting registration.
The bigger problem is that voters would be pretty much guaranteed to forget their passwords between elections, and that would be a huge problem with the process.
So this "Beluja" scrapes websites for information about users, and this is a patentable idea?
Given that screen scraping has been pretty much a standard technology since the '80s and '90s when IBM green screen applications were scraped and repackaged as windowed interfaces, and the number of industries which employ scraping of websites for sales leads and other information, I can't imagine WHAT these bozos think they've "created" or "invented" that justifies a patent.
But then again, this IS slashdot, where we LOOK for the really stupid patents so we can all get together, laugh, point, and emulate "The Simpsons" Nelson character by derisively laughing:
The days when corporations and special-interest lobby groups could operate behind the smokescreen of media reporting are over.
There are hundreds of thousands of people interested enough in different issues to monitor the news, Parliament, Congress, twitter accounts, websites, and God knows what else for hints of abuse of the rights of citizens over the power of government and business.
What that means is it's virtually impossible to have another Watergate without someone tweaking to it well before it can escalate into such a debacle.
Witness the way the Harper government is being held to task over the robocalls. Much as they wish it would go away, it's pretty clear that the opposition MPs, the people on the internet, and the media of all kinds are not willing to "let it go" or let it be swept under the rug again. The Harper government has a major credibility problem right now, the same as the US government had when they were caught selling out to the *AA special interest lobbyists by tabling SOPA.
While the *AA have money to keep buying Congress, the people have nothing but free time to monitor Congress for each and every attempt to bring this nightmare legislation back.
Any industry which relies on kickbacks and lobbyists better rethink their strategy. Because while they can buy Congressmen and MPs, the Congressmen and MPs can't get away without getting caught any more.
They may abandon the SPE rendering of video in favour of a pure POWER based instruction set, though. With some of the vector operations and such that have become part of the POWER standard instruction set, the SPE really doesn't serve much purpose any more.
Switching to "traditional" PC-based 3D rendering solution would make sense, but even that may prove difficult unless the SPE APIs had been abstract enough to be replaced or emulated on the new hardware.
Otherwise you've just locked your existing customer base' investment in software for your platform obsolete. And that would not fly with the public, methinks.
Yes, I know damned well how widely date manipulation packages are used.
And I know what this little thing called "regression testing" is.
And I blame the MANAGEMENT for failing to ensure that the testing was done before approving rollout of the software. Why do you think management gets paid the big bucks? Because at the end of the day, THEY'RE responsible for ensuring that joe-schmoe-programmer and the QA team did their jobs before they sign off on rolling out product.
Any organization which approves a $1000+ budget for a bulk purchase of machines in this day and age should be fired and investigated to find out how they got their kickbacks from the winning vendor.
Because you can go to Dell, Lenovo, HP-Compaq, and even Apple and get machines in such quantities for FAR less than $1000/pop.
Given how many DECADES leap year calculations have had to be done and how many years it's been since we fixed the Y2K issues (at great expense, I might add), it is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE for someone to blame a leap year calculation for down time.
The DIRECTOR of the service division at Microsoft should be FIRED for this failure.
Expect lawsuits from customers, Microsoft. Because this was a problem you KNEW about and should have written code to deal with.
What a pathetic excuse for planning and testing on Microsoft's part.
This kind of abuse would be why the rest of the world is demanding that internet control be transferred to an INTERNATIONAL organization like the UN and ITU. WE'RE TIRED OF US JACKBOOTING ALL OVER OUR LAWS AND PROCEDURES.
In this case, the site SHOULD have been shut down, because they have evidence they were taking US customers. But there are CHANNELS for taking the sites down through CANADIAN law, and that was circumvented and ignored for the sake of American convenience.
Check out what the rest of the world pays per litre, look at how far down the US is on the list -- even lower than Canada, which produces the damned stuff.
I didn't SEE any valid points from Schmidt, only fear-mongering of the idea that anything but US control would be a disaster.
What a shock -- an American seeing loss of US control as a disaster.
You're the bozos who tried to push crap like SOPA on the world and who've been taking down websites without going through proper channels whenever your corporate lobbyists demand it.
The US had their chance to run a free and open internet.
They sold out to the media companies.
At least the ITU doesn't have a history of selling out to media companies who don't know shit about technology.
Aren't we cool and relevant and creative and all that shit?
"Interface changes?" You mean one change
on
GNOME 3.4 Preview
·
· Score: 1
The only interface change I saw mentioned in the article was provisioning for a top-of-screen style menu bar.
Everything else is tweaking widgets and pickers, not adding functionality or new features.
It's great that they're taking the time to polish and tweak the UI, but I didn't see a single thing mentioned that would be worth the hassle of an upgrade unless it were automatically done by my distro's update service.
i.e. If I had to work to install the upgrade, like rolling my own build, I wouldn't bother.
Slashdot Mirror
The only "problem" I see is how to conclusively identify voters as they are with in-person polling booths.
Here in Canada you have to present your id to vote. Your name is checked off the list, written down as having voted through ballot box 2378, and you're handed a serial-numbered voting stub.
With unemployment insurance, you register an account online, your id and claim data are checked, and if it's ok, a card with your PIN is snail-mailed to you to make sure it goes to YOUR address, not random joe-schmoe's. But that's the closest I've seen to a system that could pre-identify a user.
Maybe we could issue social insurance number cards that included an embedded security code generator, ala two-factor identification systems. But then we'd still have the problem of people forgetting a password they only use once every 4 years. Given how many people reset their email and web passwords for sites they use far more frequently, this would be a HUGE issue in the validity of a two-factor authentication scheme.
But tracking the vote counts, cross-correlating the information, and being able to verify that a person's vote was recorded? That kind of "issue" is a no-brainer to the credit card industry and has been "solved" for years.
The only issue I've ever encountered with the algorithms is ONCE I made a payment at a store, but the terminal didn't receive the confirmation before timing out, so my funds were locked up because they'd been "spent" when I tried to redo the transaction. But with a voting system, you'd obviously want to wait for the confirmation page and print it out as your voting receipt, so it'd just be a matter of ensuring that there is a client-generated UUID for each voting request so it could either bring up the entered vote or create a new vote in order to allow for people hitting "submit" too quickly instead of waiting for a response.
Dude, if you're worried that a central voting system is running the version of open source software that was vetted by the community, your problem isn't the voting system -- it's the organization that's stolen your democracy and taken over the servers.
That depends entirely on what you're buying.
The whole point of the SaaS industry is not to sell you the software, but to sell you the services around maintaining and deploying that software. If it's "never a good idea for the purchaser", there are a "few" people in North America and around the world who've made a "mistake" in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.
SaaS is the very heart of most open-source based businesses. The software is free; the packaging, testing, support, and distribution media are not.
We've come full circle right back to the leasing models that served the industry from the 50s to the 80s before there was a spurt of the concept of "software ownership" during the CD media package distribution days of the heyday of the PC. But that heyday is gone -- even "purchased" software like accounting packages now come in annual distributions with upgraded tax regulation code.
It sounds like you may be using an embedded Linux for your products.
If so, you should be using the distribution that most closely resembles your delivery systems, rather than letting users pick whatever they want.
In fact, I can't imagine ever allowing users and developers in any department I'd be managing to choose whatever distribution or operating system they want. Corporate standards are there so that maintenance and integration are manageable issues, and the differences between some distributions are just far too great. Unless there is a documented and known reason for diverging from the norm, it's just far too expensive to expect the support department and team to learn about everyone's favourite platform or distro.
The "right to choose" stops at the point where it becomes an expense to maintain and support.
I'd give serious consideration to a corporate standard desktop for similar reasons, though I realize that may well be as futile as trying to pick a text editor. (vi! emacs! eclipse! And much snarling and gnashing of teeth for years on end if anyone loses the battle.)
I'm alertness-challenged. :P
The difficulties of coding a secure voting system are no more difficult than those of coding a secure debit or credit card payment transaction, and subject to EXACTLY the same risks.
The bigger issue is that every single electronic voting platform I've heard of to date has been a closed-source solution, uninspected, unverified, and unaudited. With a proper open source solution that could be inspected and vetted by the hundreds of thousands of programmers out there who'd be interested in finding flaws, I've no doubt a proper solution could be implemented.
It would beat the heck out of the robocall scandal currently plaguing Canada. Making calls to misdirect voters to non-existent polling stations would be futile if people were voting from home.
As to the issue of verifying identity, when you apply for unemployment insurance, your ID is checked online and a card sent to your last registered snail-mail address with the security code needed for initial systems access. I'd think a similar system would be adequate for online voting registration.
The bigger problem is that voters would be pretty much guaranteed to forget their passwords between elections, and that would be a huge problem with the process.
So this "Beluja" scrapes websites for information about users, and this is a patentable idea?
Given that screen scraping has been pretty much a standard technology since the '80s and '90s when IBM green screen applications were scraped and repackaged as windowed interfaces, and the number of industries which employ scraping of websites for sales leads and other information, I can't imagine WHAT these bozos think they've "created" or "invented" that justifies a patent.
But then again, this IS slashdot, where we LOOK for the really stupid patents so we can all get together, laugh, point, and emulate "The Simpsons" Nelson character by derisively laughing:
And what software are you planning to install to run the web applications described?
The days when corporations and special-interest lobby groups could operate behind the smokescreen of media reporting are over.
There are hundreds of thousands of people interested enough in different issues to monitor the news, Parliament, Congress, twitter accounts, websites, and God knows what else for hints of abuse of the rights of citizens over the power of government and business.
What that means is it's virtually impossible to have another Watergate without someone tweaking to it well before it can escalate into such a debacle.
Witness the way the Harper government is being held to task over the robocalls. Much as they wish it would go away, it's pretty clear that the opposition MPs, the people on the internet, and the media of all kinds are not willing to "let it go" or let it be swept under the rug again. The Harper government has a major credibility problem right now, the same as the US government had when they were caught selling out to the *AA special interest lobbyists by tabling SOPA.
While the *AA have money to keep buying Congress, the people have nothing but free time to monitor Congress for each and every attempt to bring this nightmare legislation back.
Any industry which relies on kickbacks and lobbyists better rethink their strategy. Because while they can buy Congressmen and MPs, the Congressmen and MPs can't get away without getting caught any more.
I'd have to agree with that.
They may abandon the SPE rendering of video in favour of a pure POWER based instruction set, though. With some of the vector operations and such that have become part of the POWER standard instruction set, the SPE really doesn't serve much purpose any more.
Switching to "traditional" PC-based 3D rendering solution would make sense, but even that may prove difficult unless the SPE APIs had been abstract enough to be replaced or emulated on the new hardware.
Otherwise you've just locked your existing customer base' investment in software for your platform obsolete. And that would not fly with the public, methinks.
I've been programming for over 30 years.
Yes, I know damned well how widely date manipulation packages are used.
And I know what this little thing called "regression testing" is.
And I blame the MANAGEMENT for failing to ensure that the testing was done before approving rollout of the software. Why do you think management gets paid the big bucks? Because at the end of the day, THEY'RE responsible for ensuring that joe-schmoe-programmer and the QA team did their jobs before they sign off on rolling out product.
Any organization which approves a $1000+ budget for a bulk purchase of machines in this day and age should be fired and investigated to find out how they got their kickbacks from the winning vendor.
Because you can go to Dell, Lenovo, HP-Compaq, and even Apple and get machines in such quantities for FAR less than $1000/pop.
I betcha Harper is going to order a dozen of these for the Canadian Parliament next week!
Watch for a "bulk order" from the US Congress and Senate by month end, too.
At $1000 per machine, that would be 4,500 PCs in their budget. One machine for every 4 students.
At $500 per machine, a reasonable price for such a bulk-volume purchase, that would be 9,000 PCs, or one machine for every 2 students.
Methinks that kind of money would be better spent on hiring better TEACHERS than buying equipment.
Given how many DECADES leap year calculations have had to be done and how many years it's been since we fixed the Y2K issues (at great expense, I might add), it is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE for someone to blame a leap year calculation for down time.
The DIRECTOR of the service division at Microsoft should be FIRED for this failure.
Expect lawsuits from customers, Microsoft. Because this was a problem you KNEW about and should have written code to deal with.
What a pathetic excuse for planning and testing on Microsoft's part.
Guess what?
I TRUST them more than the US government and it's blatant pandering to lobbyists.
They may have "missions", but at least they're understandable socially driven missions, not blatant selling out to the highest bidder.
If it cost $100/barrel to produce oil sands oil we wouldn't be producing it in the first place.
Idiot.
Check your FACTS before you post.
Look in the mirror when you talk about whining.
US gas prices are going up because your government subsidies are going away.
Once the E85 subsidy is completely gone, you can expect to pay like the rest of the world.
You don't even pay as much as Canadians do right now, and we PRODUCE the damned stuff.
This kind of abuse would be why the rest of the world is demanding that internet control be transferred to an INTERNATIONAL organization like the UN and ITU. WE'RE TIRED OF US JACKBOOTING ALL OVER OUR LAWS AND PROCEDURES.
In this case, the site SHOULD have been shut down, because they have evidence they were taking US customers. But there are CHANNELS for taking the sites down through CANADIAN law, and that was circumvented and ignored for the sake of American convenience.
Again.
Fuck the United States of Lobbyists.
Check out what the rest of the world pays per litre, look at how far down the US is on the list -- even lower than Canada, which produces the damned stuff.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_gas_pri-energy-gasoline-prices
Now STFU and pay like everyone else -- WITHOUT government subsidies!
Nobody except the farmers and citizens of just about every country EXCEPT the US.
I didn't SEE any valid points from Schmidt, only fear-mongering of the idea that anything but US control would be a disaster.
What a shock -- an American seeing loss of US control as a disaster.
You're the bozos who tried to push crap like SOPA on the world and who've been taking down websites without going through proper channels whenever your corporate lobbyists demand it.
The US had their chance to run a free and open internet.
They sold out to the media companies.
At least the ITU doesn't have a history of selling out to media companies who don't know shit about technology.
Maybe someday Monsanto will clue in to the fact that they can't buy off ALL the world's governments.
NOBODY WANTS GMOS EXCEPT THE PEOPLE PRODUCING THEM.
We called iconic borderless buttons "tiles"!
Aren't we cool and relevant and creative and all that shit?
The only interface change I saw mentioned in the article was provisioning for a top-of-screen style menu bar.
Everything else is tweaking widgets and pickers, not adding functionality or new features.
It's great that they're taking the time to polish and tweak the UI, but I didn't see a single thing mentioned that would be worth the hassle of an upgrade unless it were automatically done by my distro's update service.
i.e. If I had to work to install the upgrade, like rolling my own build, I wouldn't bother.