The point is: is the chip important enough to matter?
If I swing an axe at a red door, and put a chip in it, thenI swing at a green door and chip it, then a blue door (chip), purple door(chip), what is reasonably expected when I swing at a yellow door?
A chip. The color of the door is not important enough to matter.
And a chip in a solid wood door is not important, either. True, enough chips in a door will weaken it. But the difference in strengeth between a door with 0 chips and one with 1 chip is negligible.
So, you are (to a certain approximation) 'doing the same thing' and expecting a different outcome.
And who is going to do the actual "seizing" of the equipment?
local cops. WHo know very little about computers, and will happily seize your toaster and microwave, too. (You think I'm joking...)
What happens if no infringing material is found?
You receive a notice (mailed 10 days ago) telling you to pick up your stuff within a week or it will be thrown away (or auctioned off).
Can the victim turn around and sue them?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Will this be like the seizure/forfeiture laws under the War on Drugs in which they take your assets on the merest suspicion, then if you are not guilty, you have to jump through 197 legal hoops to even have the remotest hope of getting your stuff back?
Bingo!
I'm waiting for someone in guvmint to start making the argument that sharing copyrighted music is a terrorist act
No need to wait: "In an attempt to convince U.S. prosecutors to crack down on music piracy, the National District Attorneys Organization has said that downloading music will lead to "everything from handguns to large quantities of cocaine [and] marijuana," as well as terrorism, according to published reports."
Hell, if they started using all the fuckin' kudzu we 'grow' down south here, we'd have plenty of fuel to get off the foreign oil teet immediately....and probably fuel for 30-100 years in the future without any other source of plant needed.
Seriously, we've got tons of the stuff...and if we took all the lawn clippings from everyones yard in the US...I'd have to guess with other sources of waste plant life, we could make a huge dent in the need for fossil oil.
Which is why they need to look into a bacteria that 'eats' cellulose, 'drinks' water, and 'shits' ethanol. Dump your lawn clippingd, raked leaves, wood chips, kudzu, whatever, into a barrel, add just enough water, and dump in a packet of bacteria. Keep insulated in a warm place (too hot or cold will kill the bacteria or at least stop them from working. It's a safety device to stop them from escaping and eating the leaves off the trees, etc). A few days/weeks later, pour off the layer of ethanol, and the remaining sludge might make a good fertilizer. Repeat.
Of course, that's just for private use. Commercial production would be slightly different. but you get the point- waste, water, and bacteria in, ethanol (or whatever the bacteria are designed to make) out.
No, I did not factor in the amount of power produced. (I assumed it would be adequate.)
What I calculated was how long it would take (at your current electric payments) to pay off the windpower equipment.
Actually, if you look, I assumed a house would use 1,000,000wh (1000kwh) per month. A 10,000w system could make this in 100 hours, or about 4 days. Of course, it won't be running at full power, but even at 1/4 power, it only needs 16 days to make all the power you need in a month.
Not always true. There are two types of 'buy back'- One (netmetering) uses one meter that can go in both directions. If you are using more than you are producing, the meter goes forward. If you are producing more, it winds Backward. If it ends up at at a higher number at the end of the period (month/quarter/year), you pay for the net amount you used. If it ends up at at a lower number, you do NOT get paid for the extra you gave them.
The other way is to have 2 meters- one for what you use, and one for what you sell to them. Even though they only pay wholesale rates, it would be possible to sell them more than you use, and actually make money.
"The BWC EXCEL (http://www.bergey.com/) is a modern 6.7 meter (22 ft) diameter, 10,000W wind turbine designed for high reliability, low maintenance, and automatic operation in adverse weather conditions" "Prices, which include a voltage regulator, pump controller, or a line-commutated inverter, range from $21,900 to $27,900." "The BWC EXCEL is most often installed on a guyed lattice tower, which is available in heights of 18 m (60 ft.) to 43 m (140 ft.). Prices range from $7,400 to $12,680. "
SO, *worst case scenario* is 27,900 + 12,680 = $40,580.
Now, Electricity is what, about 10 cents per kilowatt hour? So $40,580 will buy 405,800 kwh of electricity.
In the last 2 months, I used a total of 946 kwhs for my small 2br apartment. Let's say a house'll use twice that, or about 1000kwh per month.
It'll take 405 months (33 years) for the system to pay for itself.
Of course, Your electric bill is more than just 'kwh x price per kwh'. Heck, I pay more in "Power Supply Charges" than I do in "delivery and System charges". All in all, I pay 19.39 cents per kwh. That means $40,580 will buy 209,499 kwh of electricity, and the system pays for itself in 210 months, or 17.5 years.
Of course, that doesn't take into account any future electricity price increases. It also doesn't take into account how, with the right system, you can keep up and running indefinitely the next time there is a grid blackout or winter storm that knocks out the power.
What stops a malicious individual from reporting "ibm.com" or "microsoft.com" as a spammer?
Only 'certification aware' servers can be used to report spam. (Which is an incentive to switch to a cert'd server!) And cert-aware servers will have their own key pairs. Spam reports will be signed with the key from the server, and must be verified before the report is acted upon. Anyone who runs an email server that is falsely reporting spam will be reported to their certifier, and they risk losing their cert. Lose the cert, they can't send cert'd email.
That's a big incentive to follow up with the user whose box is trojaned: "Look, there have been a lot of false spam reports coming from our server. Our logs indicate your PC was sending them. It's evidently 'botted'. We can't afford to lose out certification, so we've cut off your email. Clean your PC, and we'll re-instate it."
Each email server gets 'certified' by the ISP that provides internet access for said server. To be certified, the ISP must be provided with verifiable information about the owner. The certification comes with a public/private key pair. All mails sent from the server have a header line encrypted with the 'private' key. The receiving server (or client, depending) will, upon receiving an email with an encrypted header, contact the certifier's server and request the 'public' key. It uses the public key to decrypt the header.
Sucessful decryption proves the email came from that specific server. And spam received can be reported to the certifier, and will result in the certification being pulled (which means the cert server no longer provides the public key, which means emails headers sent by the email server no longer decrypt correctly.) If a spammer somehow manages to get control of a certifying server, then ALL the certs from the server can be marked as 'bad' or 'compromised'.
UNsucessful decryption, and emails with no encrypted header line, can be handled however the recipient wishes. Trash them, put them in a 'spam' folder, or have the lack of good encrypted header count as a certain number of 'points' against the email, along with other indicators (like the mention of certain words (viagr@, etc) or an unresolvable domain).
This idea allows 'non-certified' mail to still be received, if the user wishes it, and white/black lists still work. No one Needs to use the system, as the 'non cert-compliant' clients will still be able to send/receive mail. Heck,you can run a (non-certified) email server if you wish. No one's stopping you. But as certification catches on, fewer and fewer people will receive your emails (unless they white-list you).
If your company has an acceptable use policy governing use of the car park, including that someone may not park across two spaces, and someone parks their $7,500 car across two spaces one day, which somehow costs the company $6, should you be allowed to remove...the car, no questions asked?
Our boy Eric should have grown a pair on fracking THURSDAY (earlier, actually) and escalated the fact that they weren't ready
What part of "there was much pressure from top management to get this release out by Friday and thus documentation and any internal training were pushed aside" didn't you understand??
Maybe he DID point out on Thursday (or even weeks earlier) that his people didn't have the training/documentation. But it was pushed thru anyway. You think they just decided to not train people at the last minute? You think they decided to not make documentation the day before they went live? That these tings weren't done indicates they were never planned from the start. Him 'growing a pair' the day before would not have made a difference.
So what that you haven't put the voter's name on the receipt. That's not going to stop the selling of votes (etc).
Sure it will... the first time someone shows up wanting to get paid with 30 receipts he found on the floor (most people will throw them away, I'm sorry to admit).
No, virtually no one can read it. They don't have a barcode scanner in the voting booth with them.
But they will have scanners during recounts, which is the only time the barcodes really matter.
Without a reference to compare against, I cannot tell if a line is thick or thin.
If you can't tell the relative sizes of two objects, that's YOUR problem.
Besides, that's not a legitimate symbology (from your point #1.)
It was an example, not a suggested coding. Sheesh.
I can easily print bars that contain the word "VALID" but print the word "VOID" beneath them and you would never know.
And it wouldn't matter until a manual recount was done, at which time the difference wuld be detected, and a major scandal exposed.
Fine, sine you seem to have such a problem with them, do away with the barcodes, then. MY POINT was, it's easy to come up with a simple Electronic voting system, so why haven't they??
Although in my opinion you ought to do away with the barcode. If a recount is required it should be done manually,
That's fine by me. It's just easier and faster to feed a roll of paper under a laser scanner than it is to manually read each name.
If you can't trust the machine the first time around, I won't trust it the second
Different machines.:-) The recount machine is just a laser scanner (like at your local grocery store or whatever), hooked to a pc that 'translates' the barcodes into text, and counts them. If you use a standard barcode format, anyone with a good eye can 'manually' translate the barcode to verify.
The problem with barcodes is that most ordinary humans cannot read them, so the ordinary humans don't know for sure what information is contained in them.
1) use an established barcode encoding standard such as code 93 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_93). That way, anyone who wants to can read it.
2) You can tell the difference between 'thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line' and 'thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line', right??
3) I said "in both barcode and human-readable formats". You Can tell the difference beween "VOID" and "VALID", right?
I'm not sure what you mean. It's a fairly simple system, with only one purpose. All the software, including print drivers, will be designed and tested exclusively for this system. The possibility of a random error does exist, however.
And the solution is simple- A voter can always go to the officials, give them the ID number off the receipt (or, lacking that, the machine number and time) and they can enter a 'manual' cancellation. These manual cancellations will be done on a seperate client, and require passwords from more than one official.
I mean, come one, people. Do I HAVE to think of ALL the details?
the simplest solution with receipts, is to fold them in half, and drop them in a separate box, that the voting poll place provides, so they can compare receipts to the big master rolls.
They're printed on 2-ply paper. Both receipts get impact-printed at the same time. There is no way they can differ.
if they see a print out other than what they chose,
They would get a chance to review their choices before printing, and a chance to view the receipt before it feeds out of the machine. If it is incorrect, they hit 'cancel, and a special 'cancel this vote' barcode is printed. If they hit 'okay', then a 'this vote confirmed' barcode is printed and the 'upper' copy emerges from the machine.
What is so goddamn hard about producing a simple, easy to use, secure, electronic voting machine/method? Take a podium, put a mini-atx MB in a locked metal box under it, a touch-screen lcd on the top, and strap a printer to the side. The thing boots over the network from a server locked a cage in the corner of the room. The software is not much more than a web page that displays the pictures/names of the candidates (or the text of referendums, etc), and allows you to touch the name/face of who you want. The printer uses a big 2-ply roll of paper. The 'upper' copy is the receipt the voter can take. the 'lower' coppy is stored inthe printer as a journal. I know what you're thinking- receipts are a problem, you can sell your vote, or your boss will threaten to fire you unless you show him a receipt for the candidate he likes. Not with this- there is no info on the receipt that links to a specific person, thus no way to prove it is 'your' receipt, and not one you picked up off the ground. All it contains is the voting machine ID number, the time (to the minute, nothing more required), and the votes, in both barcode and human-readable formats. Need a recount? Run the journal spool(s) thru a barcode scanner, and beep, beep,beep, it counts the votes. Need a more in-depth recount? have humans look at the journal spool, and add the names up. As a final recount method, you can have voters return with their receipts for machine and human verification. There, simple, safe, and secure. And not too expensive.
Cost for a license plate reader is about the same as a good RFID reader, and they are probably at least as reliable. Furthermore, you are required to keep your license plate readable.
London uses license plates to charge you if you drive into the inner city. The solution is simple: get a sheet magnet (http://www.custom-magnets.com/Adhesive_magnet_rolls.htm) and print a fake license plate on paper. Stick the paper to the magnetic sheet, and slap that puppy over your real license plate. Removal is easy, just pull it off. Reusable, and you have plausable deniability, too, since 'anyone' can stick something on the outside of your car....
Try that with the RFID's buried 1 inch deep in your tires.
I don't think a strict "loser pays" system is really what people want. Let's say you sue a medium to large corporation. The case is close, but you lose. The corporation could easily have huge legal expenses, even if yours are relatively minor. Would an individual (or small corporation) ever take the risk of suing a large corporation?
WHat about 'Loser pays the winner what the loser spent, but only up to what the winner spent'?
Sue a big corporation, you spend $1000 on a lawyer. They spend $100,000. You win, they pay you $1000. They win, you pay them $1000.
Unfortunately for that theory, the TSA has KEPT people from using transportation for havignthe same middle name as a terrorist alias. As for 'security', why do they routinely miss well over half the fake bombs testers attempt to get past them?
IF you value Transportation or Security, you're an idiot for joining the TSA.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is: is the chip important enough to matter?
If I swing an axe at a red door, and put a chip in it, thenI swing at a green door and chip it, then a blue door (chip), purple door(chip), what is reasonably expected when I swing at a yellow door?
A chip. The color of the door is not important enough to matter.
And a chip in a solid wood door is not important, either. True, enough chips in a door will weaken it. But the difference in strengeth between a door with 0 chips and one with 1 chip is negligible.
So, you are (to a certain approximation) 'doing the same thing' and expecting a different outcome.
And who is going to do the actual "seizing" of the equipment?
local cops. WHo know very little about computers, and will happily seize your toaster and microwave, too. (You think I'm joking...)
What happens if no infringing material is found?
You receive a notice (mailed 10 days ago) telling you to pick up your stuff within a week or it will be thrown away (or auctioned off).
Can the victim turn around and sue them?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Will this be like the seizure/forfeiture laws under the War on Drugs in which they take your assets on the merest suspicion, then if you are not guilty, you have to jump through 197 legal hoops to even have the remotest hope of getting your stuff back?
Bingo!
I'm waiting for someone in guvmint to start making the argument that sharing copyrighted music is a terrorist act
No need to wait: "In an attempt to convince U.S. prosecutors to crack down on music piracy, the National District Attorneys Organization has said that downloading music will lead to "everything from handguns to large quantities of cocaine [and] marijuana," as well as terrorism, according to published reports."
Why not skip the tasing and jump right to:
"cops jump on the [suspect] and cuff him/her."
Hell, if they started using all the fuckin' kudzu we 'grow' down south here, we'd have plenty of fuel to get off the foreign oil teet immediately....and probably fuel for 30-100 years in the future without any other source of plant needed.
Seriously, we've got tons of the stuff...and if we took all the lawn clippings from everyones yard in the US...I'd have to guess with other sources of waste plant life, we could make a huge dent in the need for fossil oil.
Which is why they need to look into a bacteria that 'eats' cellulose, 'drinks' water, and 'shits' ethanol. Dump your lawn clippingd, raked leaves, wood chips, kudzu, whatever, into a barrel, add just enough water, and dump in a packet of bacteria. Keep insulated in a warm place (too hot or cold will kill the bacteria or at least stop them from working. It's a safety device to stop them from escaping and eating the leaves off the trees, etc). A few days/weeks later, pour off the layer of ethanol, and the remaining sludge might make a good fertilizer. Repeat.
Of course, that's just for private use. Commercial production would be slightly different. but you get the point- waste, water, and bacteria in, ethanol (or whatever the bacteria are designed to make) out.
No, I did not factor in the amount of power produced. (I assumed it would be adequate.)
/Or I royally screwed up the math. :-)
What I calculated was how long it would take (at your current electric payments) to pay off the windpower equipment.
Actually, if you look, I assumed a house would use 1,000,000wh (1000kwh) per month. A 10,000w system could make this in 100 hours, or about 4 days. Of course, it won't be running at full power, but even at 1/4 power, it only needs 16 days to make all the power you need in a month.
Replying to myself to say:
.. 5.3 kWh Battery Bank (B220-4)
/of course 1000 watts is a little low for most people...
if the above system seems a bit costly, try this:
$2,590 1 kW XL.1 Turbine, with PowerCenter
$1,595 60 ft. Tilt-up Tower
$450
$1,044 1,500 W Inverter System
$5,679 Total Cost
$5679 = 29318 kwh, which is 30 months payback.
Not always true. There are two types of 'buy back'- One (netmetering) uses one meter that can go in both directions. If you are using more than you are producing, the meter goes forward. If you are producing more, it winds Backward. If it ends up at at a higher number at the end of the period (month/quarter/year), you pay for the net amount you used. If it ends up at at a lower number, you do NOT get paid for the extra you gave them.
The other way is to have 2 meters- one for what you use, and one for what you sell to them. Even though they only pay wholesale rates, it would be possible to sell them more than you use, and actually make money.
It's not "300-400", but...
"The BWC EXCEL (http://www.bergey.com/) is a modern 6.7 meter (22 ft) diameter, 10,000W wind turbine designed for high reliability, low maintenance, and automatic operation in adverse weather conditions"
"Prices, which include a voltage regulator, pump controller, or a line-commutated inverter, range from $21,900 to $27,900."
"The BWC EXCEL is most often installed on a guyed lattice tower, which is available in heights of 18 m (60 ft.) to 43 m (140 ft.). Prices range from $7,400 to $12,680. "
SO, *worst case scenario* is 27,900 + 12,680 = $40,580.
Now, Electricity is what, about 10 cents per kilowatt hour? So $40,580 will buy 405,800 kwh of electricity.
In the last 2 months, I used a total of 946 kwhs for my small 2br apartment. Let's say a house'll use twice that, or about 1000kwh per month.
It'll take 405 months (33 years) for the system to pay for itself.
Of course, Your electric bill is more than just 'kwh x price per kwh'. Heck, I pay more in "Power Supply Charges" than I do in "delivery and System charges". All in all, I pay 19.39 cents per kwh. That means $40,580 will buy 209,499 kwh of electricity, and the system pays for itself in 210 months, or 17.5 years.
Of course, that doesn't take into account any future electricity price increases. It also doesn't take into account how, with the right system, you can keep up and running indefinitely the next time there is a grid blackout or winter storm that knocks out the power.
What stops a malicious individual from reporting "ibm.com" or "microsoft.com" as a spammer?
Only 'certification aware' servers can be used to report spam. (Which is an incentive to switch to a cert'd server!) And cert-aware servers will have their own key pairs. Spam reports will be signed with the key from the server, and must be verified before the report is acted upon. Anyone who runs an email server that is falsely reporting spam will be reported to their certifier, and they risk losing their cert.
Lose the cert, they can't send cert'd email.
That's a big incentive to follow up with the user whose box is trojaned: "Look, there have been a lot of false spam reports coming from our server. Our logs indicate your PC was sending them. It's evidently 'botted'. We can't afford to lose out certification, so we've cut off your email. Clean your PC, and we'll re-instate it."
Email 'certification'.
Each email server gets 'certified' by the ISP that provides internet access for said server. To be certified, the ISP must be provided with verifiable information about the owner. The certification comes with a public/private key pair. All mails sent from the server have a header line encrypted with the 'private' key. The receiving server (or client, depending) will, upon receiving an email with an encrypted header, contact the certifier's server and request the 'public' key. It uses the public key to decrypt the header.
Sucessful decryption proves the email came from that specific server. And spam received can be reported to the certifier, and will result in the certification being pulled (which means the cert server no longer provides the public key, which means emails headers sent by the email server no longer decrypt correctly.) If a spammer somehow manages to get control of a certifying server, then ALL the certs from the server can be marked as 'bad' or 'compromised'.
UNsucessful decryption, and emails with no encrypted header line, can be handled however the recipient wishes. Trash them, put them in a 'spam' folder, or have the lack of good encrypted header count as a certain number of 'points' against the email, along with other indicators (like the mention of certain words (viagr@, etc) or an unresolvable domain).
This idea allows 'non-certified' mail to still be received, if the user wishes it, and white/black lists still work. No one Needs to use the system, as the 'non cert-compliant' clients will still be able to send/receive mail. Heck,you can run a (non-certified) email server if you wish. No one's stopping you. But as certification catches on, fewer and fewer people will receive your emails (unless they white-list you).
If your company has an acceptable use policy governing use of the car park, including that someone may not park across two spaces, and someone parks their $7,500 car across two spaces one day, which somehow costs the company $6, should you be allowed to remove ...the car, no questions asked?
YES.
A guy at his level should have either found a way to get the basic training accomplished
Pull the training materials (and the knowledge inthem) out his exevuative ass?
or gotten the release held up
Not always possible. Not a 'politically' smart thing to do,even if possible.
if the others in management don't understand the importance of getting support caught up
They understood, they just pushed on anyway.
Our boy Eric should have grown a pair on fracking THURSDAY (earlier, actually) and escalated the fact that they weren't ready
What part of "there was much pressure from top management to get this release out by Friday and thus documentation and any internal training were pushed aside" didn't you understand??
Maybe he DID point out on Thursday (or even weeks earlier) that his people didn't have the training/documentation. But it was pushed thru anyway. You think they just decided to not train people at the last minute? You think they decided to not make documentation the day before they went live? That these tings weren't done indicates they were never planned from the start. Him 'growing a pair' the day before would not have made a difference.
Funny that Google can take pictures of people's driveways in some places, but can't even bother to get more than one road within a mile of my house.
/Long Island, NY, 20 miles from NYC
So what that you haven't put the voter's name on the receipt. That's not going to stop the selling of votes (etc).
Sure it will... the first time someone shows up wanting to get paid with 30 receipts he found on the floor (most people will throw them away, I'm sorry to admit).
No, virtually no one can read it. They don't have a barcode scanner in the voting booth with them.
But they will have scanners during recounts, which is the only time the barcodes really matter.
Without a reference to compare against, I cannot tell if a line is thick or thin.
If you can't tell the relative sizes of two objects, that's YOUR problem.
Besides, that's not a legitimate symbology (from your point #1.)
It was an example, not a suggested coding. Sheesh.
I can easily print bars that contain the word "VALID" but print the word "VOID" beneath them and you would never know.
And it wouldn't matter until a manual recount was done, at which time the difference wuld be detected, and a major scandal exposed.
Fine, sine you seem to have such a problem with them, do away with the barcodes, then. MY POINT was, it's easy to come up with a simple Electronic voting system, so why haven't they??
Although in my opinion you ought to do away with the barcode. If a recount is required it should be done manually,
:-) The recount machine is just a laser scanner (like at your local grocery store or whatever), hooked to a pc that 'translates' the barcodes into text, and counts them. If you use a standard barcode format, anyone with a good eye can 'manually' translate the barcode to verify.
That's fine by me. It's just easier and faster to feed a roll of paper under a laser scanner than it is to manually read each name.
If you can't trust the machine the first time around, I won't trust it the second
Different machines.
The problem with barcodes is that most ordinary humans cannot read them, so the ordinary humans don't know for sure what information is contained in them.
1) use an established barcode encoding standard such as code 93 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_93). That way, anyone who wants to can read it.
2) You can tell the difference between 'thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line, thick line' and 'thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line, thin line', right??
3) I said "in both barcode and human-readable formats". You Can tell the difference beween "VOID" and "VALID", right?
I'm not sure what you mean. It's a fairly simple system, with only one purpose. All the software, including print drivers, will be designed and tested exclusively for this system. The possibility of a random error does exist, however.
And the solution is simple- A voter can always go to the officials, give them the ID number off the receipt (or, lacking that, the machine number and time) and they can enter a 'manual' cancellation. These manual cancellations will be done on a seperate client, and require passwords from more than one official.
I mean, come one, people. Do I HAVE to think of ALL the details?
the simplest solution with receipts, is to fold them in half, and drop them in a separate box, that the voting poll place provides, so they can compare receipts to the big master rolls.
They're printed on 2-ply paper. Both receipts get impact-printed at the same time. There is no way they can differ.
if they see a print out other than what they chose,
They would get a chance to review their choices before printing, and a chance to view the receipt before it feeds out of the machine. If it is incorrect, they hit 'cancel, and a special 'cancel this vote' barcode is printed. If they hit 'okay', then a 'this vote confirmed' barcode is printed and the 'upper' copy emerges from the machine.
What is so goddamn hard about producing a simple, easy to use, secure, electronic voting machine/method? ,beep, it counts the votes. Need a more in-depth recount? have humans look at the journal spool, and add the names up. As a final recount method, you can have voters return with their receipts for machine and human verification.
Take a podium, put a mini-atx MB in a locked metal box under it, a touch-screen lcd on the top, and strap a printer to the side. The thing boots over the network from a server locked a cage in the corner of the room.
The software is not much more than a web page that displays the pictures/names of the candidates (or the text of referendums, etc), and allows you to touch the name/face of who you want.
The printer uses a big 2-ply roll of paper. The 'upper' copy is the receipt the voter can take. the 'lower' coppy is stored inthe printer as a journal.
I know what you're thinking- receipts are a problem, you can sell your vote, or your boss will threaten to fire you unless you show him a receipt for the candidate he likes. Not with this- there is no info on the receipt that links to a specific person, thus no way to prove it is 'your' receipt, and not one you picked up off the ground. All it contains is the voting machine ID number, the time (to the minute, nothing more required), and the votes, in both barcode and human-readable formats. Need a recount? Run the journal spool(s) thru a barcode scanner, and beep, beep
There, simple, safe, and secure. And not too expensive.
While they have a form (if you spend a ton of time hunting for them, not "readily available" as they claim)
If you're looking at a StreetView image, it's two clicks away.
1) Click 'Street View Help' in the top right
2) Click 'Report inappropriate image' at the bottom.
Not that hard to find.
Cost for a license plate reader is about the same as a good RFID reader, and they are probably at least as reliable. Furthermore, you are required to keep your license plate readable.
London uses license plates to charge you if you drive into the inner city. The solution is simple: get a sheet magnet (http://www.custom-magnets.com/Adhesive_magnet_rolls.htm) and print a fake license plate on paper. Stick the paper to the magnetic sheet, and slap that puppy over your real license plate. Removal is easy, just pull it off. Reusable, and you have plausable deniability, too, since 'anyone' can stick something on the outside of your car....
Try that with the RFID's buried 1 inch deep in your tires.
I don't think a strict "loser pays" system is really what people want. Let's say you sue a medium to large corporation. The case is close, but you lose. The corporation could easily have huge legal expenses, even if yours are relatively minor. Would an individual (or small corporation) ever take the risk of suing a large corporation?
WHat about 'Loser pays the winner what the loser spent, but only up to what the winner spent'?
Sue a big corporation, you spend $1000 on a lawyer. They spend $100,000. You win, they pay you $1000. They win, you pay them $1000.
Unfortunately for that theory, the TSA has KEPT people from using transportation for havignthe same middle name as a terrorist alias. As for 'security', why do they routinely miss well over half the fake bombs testers attempt to get past them?
IF you value Transportation or Security, you're an idiot for joining the TSA.