This is intriguing, but I think in the end this is actually more secure though possibly slightly less anonymous than paper voting.
For a conspiracy to do what you describe, it would need to have cooperation between a major corporation that produced or maintained the machine, and corrupt local officials to intimidate voters. The local officials acting alone would not be enough, because if the machines are acting properly, the number of misvotes shouldn't be large enough to completely control the outcome of the election. Because even if what you say is true--that correcting a misvote would require losing anonymity--I don't think that alone is enough to conduct an intimidation campaign.
Essentially, you have an almost-paper system acting alongside a purely-electronic system--both systems have to be corrupted in order to corrupt the final outcome. That is the brilliance of the new system.
These guys are taking public tax money and, if allowed to escape scrutiny, have the power to fuck with the democratic process. I think the public has the right and responsibility to give them as much shit as fucking possible. We the people are supposed to be the boss of these guys. Being a government contractor means you need to take a lot of shit from the public--it's just part of the job description. You've got a problem with that? Then go back to Russia and leave those of us who actually enjoy democracy and free speech the fuck alone.
No. If we threw everyone who made death threats, even very specific ones, into Gitmo, then we'd have to conquer the rest of Cuba to make room for all of them.
Of course, if a company forwards a threat it receives to the FBI, they have to take it seriously. However, I hope the judge or jury in this case will realize that that jail time is just too much for someone who blows off steam inappropriately in email.
The media, including slashdot, is DEFINITELY doing the right thing here, though. Albion Medical is just manipulating the law into overreacting to this guy's overreaction. But by doing so, they have emerged from the shadows into public spotlight. Now that Albion Medical has the world's attention, if the world manages to find a legal way to make life less pleasant for Albion Medical, that could only be a good thing. I salute the Houston Chronicle.
HOLY POOP YOU MENTIONED AN AMERICAN FOOD WITH DISAPPROVAL NOW I HATE YOU!!!!!!! its a good thing u r anonymous coward because u do not want 2 mess with my SUPER AMERICA MILITARY powers
For an awful lot of unemployed and uneducated manufacturers in this world, this is far off alright--far off in the past. The 80s, actually. It's a gradual, continuous thing--the machines slowly get better, the labor market gets more competitive, until it's simply too competitive for the vast majority of humans to be useful to industry any longer.
The eventualities, possibilities, etc. won't necessarily be up to "us"--they'll be up to whoever has the power.
Wait, now its all well and good if machines are better at some things than humans, but if they really did make a machine that was better at everything humans do, I'm not really so sure you'll have the luxury of going on with your day so cavalierly--exactly what are you planning to do all day to earn your bread if machines can do anything you can do more cheaply?
It doesn't vindicate anything, it just means you do not like more open and non-linear RPG's.
For me, the sheer size and non-linear aspects of Morrowind/BG2/NWN is superb and has put me off many Japanese RPGs because they are so linear
It does not mean that--I liked System Shock 2 and Deus Ex for their non-linear RPG aspects, because the text and story in those games was actually kind of interesting.
As I said, in the likes of Morrowind, BG2 and NWN I can skim read the text and exit it all by clicking the 'Cancel' button. In something like Zelda I cannot - they have to finish their little speech first, and even then that requires me to keep pressing the A button to scroll it two lines at a time.
To me, having to skim through the text and realize that I've already skimmed through this text 20 times already is infinitely more annoying than having to press A a bunch of times.
Your last sentence emphasises why MS has to rely on 3rd party so much - because they are just starting out. Nintendo certainly didn't have such a pool of development talent when they started out.
The analogy is ridiculous--Nintendo certainly couldn't rely on contracting out to an already existing billion dollar industry of game developers. I am just saying that it is perfectly okay for Microsoft to have no understanding of what goes into a good game because they aren't in the business of making games. If they were primarily game developers, they would see that throwing more money and resources onto a project in the form of better graphics and sound isn't always a recipe for success.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say with your comment on shiny graphics technology and voices, though.
Those things are expensive. Things that are expensive increase the cost of risk associated with your project. A project unwilling to take risks is unwilling to be creative. Therefore, a creative project would be wise to disregard expensive things.
Voice is the enemy of good writing. Think how much more politics and negotiation are involved with adding a line to a voice-acted game--in Animal Crossing, just give the programmer the text file.
If a game has a lot of people saying things, then I want either of two things - 1) Have everything spoken like in KoToR, Baldurs Gate 2 and Shenmue or 2) Have no speech, but make it so I can skim read and skip ahead as I want like in Baldurs Gate 2, Morrowind or Neverwinter Nights.
In something like Zelda, you can only read a couple of lines at a time and it is far too slow to try and skip ahead with what they are saying, especially if you didn't mean to talk to that person again.
You're complaining about Zelda, and then you defend Morrowind? In Zelda, you just push the A button a bunch of times and they shut up. Maybe B shuts them up immediately, I dunno, but in any event I do not remember ever being annoyed by the conversation system of any Zelda game. (Sailing around empty oceans in wind waker or building experience in zelda 2--okay that sucks.)
Morrowind, on the other hand, was a nightmare. They had that terrible "question" system, so that you could ask every single person about every single stupid thing your avatar had ever heard in the entire universe, but 99% of the time every character would say the exact same text that every other character in the universe would say.
In fact, Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights actually vindicate the stance of Miyamoto et. al.. I own both of those games, but I've played very little of them, because I was completely put off by all the meaningless text, cookie cutter plots, and general busy-work philosophy of gaming and narrative design that went into making them. (I also own BG2, and never finished it, but the dialogue in that game actually seemed interesting).
It's true that if you take a great game and add great voices to it without making it any more cumbersome than sure that's just dandy. (I can't think of any examples of that happening, but perhaps you can.) But Nintendo is correct to realize that voice work is a massive new cost to a game that doesn't automatically increase the quality of the final product.
This whole discussion shows me why Microsoft is dependent on second and third party developers to make good software for it (which is no big deal, Sony is too.) Microsoft has a typical business mentality that it can just throw money into a process and expect better quality products to result. But Art and Games are differnt from Operating Systems. The more money and investment you throw into a project, the higher the risk involved with making it, and therefore you become less willing to allow your staff to be creative and take the risks necessary to produce a truly ground-breaking game. Nintendo has been around the block a few times, and wisely understands the tradeoff between willingness to take risks and an emphasis on shiny graphics technology and voices.
No, eBay has the advantatge of network effects--I want to go to the auction site which everyone else uses, but I don't really care if I use the same search engine that everyone else does, as long as it works.
a modern Squaresoft RPG drama, joining a bunch of ragtag characters as they embark upon an epic adventure, or
Dude, it's called Final Fantasy X for a reason: they made freaking nine other ones before they made that game! Sadly, in Squaresoft's transition from Super NES to Playstation, they seemed to have lost all of their game design abilities and replaced them with incredible visual design and narrative design.
They made a great many of incredible looking PS1 and PS2 games, and some truly amazing stories (Legend of Mana always comes to mind) but almost all of them have some glaring game play problem, like too many sit-back-and-watch moments, repetitive battles, load times, etc.
No, no, no...choice to Microsoft is choice in every catagory of product that their product either depends on, or every product that depends on their product. In other words, if we don't sell it, take your pick.
And that's always been the Microsoft way--pick any flavor of hardware you want--Dell, Gateway, HP, whatever, we don't care, just so long as it forces you to run our software.
Pick whatever mp3 player you want, just so long as your connecting it to a Microsoft OS.
It has always been the Microsoft way to maximize choice among things that are not within Microsoft's domain.
Now, michael didn't say Free Software is the only way to go, he just suggested it as one possible solution. I don't see a problem with that. Interestingly, if you actually follow the link he provided to free-project.org, it contains this statement:
We used to develop the GNU.FREE Internet Voting software and we retain a strong interest in electronic voting issues, primarily through advocating why we feel it's an undesirable advance.
Apparently, they're no longer fully interested in developing internet voting software (which is quite different from electronic voting anyway), and now their just an advocacy group or something. Hmm.
This needs to be amended--everything NEW just works. But dig out a sound card from four years ago or a SCSI hard drive or anything consumers are likely to have but not likely to buy in Best Buy tomorrow afternoon, and Linux support tends to be superior, albeit requiring a lot more effort. It takes longer for something to be supported by Linux, but once it is supported, it tends to be supported forever--whereas each new Microsoft OS tends to lose a good chunk of hardware compatibility from previous versions--all that matters to Microsoft is new hardware.
But really, this whole argument is too skewed towards an American perspective (at least i think so, and I'm American too.) Microsoft is a national security risk to any government other than the united states. It is a risk to proprietary information to all corporations outside America. All over the world the credibility of american institutions is fading-- American finance, American journalism, American diplomacy, American intelligence--no one trusts any of it anymore. American software will be next, and Microsoft will have to be satisified selling outrageously priced monopoly products for America only.
Actually, the poster said "compared to MacOS", and its general wisdom even outside Slashdot that the poster would be correct. General wisdom might not be correct, but its up to the person arguing against it (you) to explain why.
Personally, I see a future where most of the world uses Linux or some free-ish descendant of Linux, but America remains stays dominated by Microsoft. Right now, the biggest reason to switch to Linux for you desktop is because you don't like Microsoft. And while Americans love to gripe about Microsoft, these gripes are never enough to overcome the network effects of switching.
On the other hand, outside America dependence on Microsoft is a major national security risk. Who caN SAy what backdoors are required by the United States to exist in Windows? Imagine how Americans would feel about Microsoft if it's headquarters were in, say, Germany? There are simply too many reasons for foreigners to oppose Microsoft for any obstacle to Linux adoption not to be passed.
Yeah, I have no social skills. I'm what you would call a dork or a nerd. But thats ok, because am not here to be please everybody.
That would have worked a few years ago, when computers were still a bold new frontier. Think about the Old West--at first rugged individualist cowboys and adventurers are rewarded, because the place was so empty that ability to deal with nature was more important than ability to deal with your neighbor. In fact, people probably went out west because they couldn't stand their neighbors back east.
Think about how much of America was built by people who couldn't stand their old neighbors. Even the native americans must have really hated China at some point.
Then, as things began to get crowded, the same sort of business men and politicians from back east began to rise above everyone else, and the cowboy lifestyle began to decline.
It's the same with computers--first it was dominated by nerds like you (and possibly me...) who were really good with machines. But as there got to be more and more of us, and as the machines got more and more reliable, then yet another frontier starts to close, and making people happy once again becomes more important than making machines go.
Now, the mature thing for folk like us to do is to either find a new frontier, or accept the world as it is, and try to improve our social skills as best we can.
Yet before I do that, I'd like to take a moment to shed a tear for the death of yet another frontier, yet another chance to make the American dream a reality. The American Dream, by the way, is that one can improve one's own lot in life simply by doing a better job, through physical or intellectual effort, rather than by kissing the asses of whatever feudal lord happens to be dominating our lives at the moment. That individual worth could somehow beat out nepotism and favortism. A sweet, yet elusive dream
And before I allow Stockholm syndrome to completely overwhelm me, I lament how much of humanities effort is wasted in the collective solipsism advocated by so many people who reply to you--the opinion that physical reality outside humanity is of less importance than social reality within humanity. A society which believes that itself is the most important thing in the universe will experieince very limited growth.
For a long time, on Macs, you had all kinds of "accelerators", but they were only that: you did not need to memorize obtuse key combinations (different for each app, of course), but you could run most of them with just the mouse (except for text entry).
On the other hand, windows tends to be more friendly to non-memorization-based keyboard usage--particularly by letting you navigate the menus with arrow keys (push alt first). It turns out to be possible to do in later versions of Mac OS X, but you need to set an option in System Configuration to do it, and I never remember which button I have it set to. While windows makes you right click needlessly (though honestly I can't think of too many windows programs that force me to use key stroke combinations), the mac makes me reach for the mouse somewhat needlessly.
Consuming less resources? Yeah right--I hope you enjoy paying for my medical bills in the coming decades, cause I plan to ingest a lot of toxins! wheeeeee!
But General Clark was talking about FTL, not the implications of FTL.
I mean, one of the implications of the Bush tax cut might be that TRACK-YOUR-POSITION will buy more video games, but it would be pretty misleading to post a link to George Bush's ideas on TRACK-YOUR-POSITION's video games.
One of the implications of time travel might be that General Clark can travel into the past and have sex with his great great grandparents, so are we justified in posting a link to Clark's ideas on causally paradoxical incest?
Essentially, Clark was dreaming of a Star Trek-style future--a cute, impossible, but harmless dream for a presidential candidate. Very much different than dreaming of Back To The Future, which would be absurd and inexplicable.
Slashdot Mirror
For a conspiracy to do what you describe, it would need to have cooperation between a major corporation that produced or maintained the machine, and corrupt local officials to intimidate voters. The local officials acting alone would not be enough, because if the machines are acting properly, the number of misvotes shouldn't be large enough to completely control the outcome of the election. Because even if what you say is true--that correcting a misvote would require losing anonymity--I don't think that alone is enough to conduct an intimidation campaign.
Essentially, you have an almost-paper system acting alongside a purely-electronic system--both systems have to be corrupted in order to corrupt the final outcome. That is the brilliance of the new system.
These guys are taking public tax money and, if allowed to escape scrutiny, have the power to fuck with the democratic process. I think the public has the right and responsibility to give them as much shit as fucking possible. We the people are supposed to be the boss of these guys. Being a government contractor means you need to take a lot of shit from the public--it's just part of the job description. You've got a problem with that? Then go back to Russia and leave those of us who actually enjoy democracy and free speech the fuck alone.
Of course, if a company forwards a threat it receives to the FBI, they have to take it seriously. However, I hope the judge or jury in this case will realize that that jail time is just too much for someone who blows off steam inappropriately in email.
The media, including slashdot, is DEFINITELY doing the right thing here, though. Albion Medical is just manipulating the law into overreacting to this guy's overreaction. But by doing so, they have emerged from the shadows into public spotlight. Now that Albion Medical has the world's attention, if the world manages to find a legal way to make life less pleasant for Albion Medical, that could only be a good thing. I salute the Houston Chronicle.
You threaten to do harm to someone, for whatever reason, its a crime.. you should goto jail...
If that's true, then can we please send the government and police to jail?
did i not mention SUPER AMERICA MILITARY powers?! that is how
HOLY POOP YOU MENTIONED AN AMERICAN FOOD WITH DISAPPROVAL NOW I HATE YOU!!!!!!! its a good thing u r anonymous coward because u do not want 2 mess with my SUPER AMERICA MILITARY powers
For an awful lot of unemployed and uneducated manufacturers in this world, this is far off alright--far off in the past. The 80s, actually. It's a gradual, continuous thing--the machines slowly get better, the labor market gets more competitive, until it's simply too competitive for the vast majority of humans to be useful to industry any longer. The eventualities, possibilities, etc. won't necessarily be up to "us"--they'll be up to whoever has the power.
What extra time? Somehow, robots taking all of our jobs away means we now all work two or three jobs for far less pay.
Wait, now its all well and good if machines are better at some things than humans, but if they really did make a machine that was better at everything humans do, I'm not really so sure you'll have the luxury of going on with your day so cavalierly--exactly what are you planning to do all day to earn your bread if machines can do anything you can do more cheaply?
It does not mean that--I liked System Shock 2 and Deus Ex for their non-linear RPG aspects, because the text and story in those games was actually kind of interesting.
As I said, in the likes of Morrowind, BG2 and NWN I can skim read the text and exit it all by clicking the 'Cancel' button. In something like Zelda I cannot - they have to finish their little speech first, and even then that requires me to keep pressing the A button to scroll it two lines at a time.
To me, having to skim through the text and realize that I've already skimmed through this text 20 times already is infinitely more annoying than having to press A a bunch of times.
Your last sentence emphasises why MS has to rely on 3rd party so much - because they are just starting out. Nintendo certainly didn't have such a pool of development talent when they started out.
The analogy is ridiculous--Nintendo certainly couldn't rely on contracting out to an already existing billion dollar industry of game developers. I am just saying that it is perfectly okay for Microsoft to have no understanding of what goes into a good game because they aren't in the business of making games. If they were primarily game developers, they would see that throwing more money and resources onto a project in the form of better graphics and sound isn't always a recipe for success.
I don't really understand what you are trying to say with your comment on shiny graphics technology and voices, though.
Those things are expensive. Things that are expensive increase the cost of risk associated with your project. A project unwilling to take risks is unwilling to be creative. Therefore, a creative project would be wise to disregard expensive things.
Voice is the enemy of good writing. Think how much more politics and negotiation are involved with adding a line to a voice-acted game--in Animal Crossing, just give the programmer the text file.
In something like Zelda, you can only read a couple of lines at a time and it is far too slow to try and skip ahead with what they are saying, especially if you didn't mean to talk to that person again.
You're complaining about Zelda, and then you defend Morrowind? In Zelda, you just push the A button a bunch of times and they shut up. Maybe B shuts them up immediately, I dunno, but in any event I do not remember ever being annoyed by the conversation system of any Zelda game. (Sailing around empty oceans in wind waker or building experience in zelda 2--okay that sucks.)
Morrowind, on the other hand, was a nightmare. They had that terrible "question" system, so that you could ask every single person about every single stupid thing your avatar had ever heard in the entire universe, but 99% of the time every character would say the exact same text that every other character in the universe would say.
In fact, Morrowind, and Neverwinter Nights actually vindicate the stance of Miyamoto et. al.. I own both of those games, but I've played very little of them, because I was completely put off by all the meaningless text, cookie cutter plots, and general busy-work philosophy of gaming and narrative design that went into making them. (I also own BG2, and never finished it, but the dialogue in that game actually seemed interesting).
It's true that if you take a great game and add great voices to it without making it any more cumbersome than sure that's just dandy. (I can't think of any examples of that happening, but perhaps you can.) But Nintendo is correct to realize that voice work is a massive new cost to a game that doesn't automatically increase the quality of the final product.
This whole discussion shows me why Microsoft is dependent on second and third party developers to make good software for it (which is no big deal, Sony is too.) Microsoft has a typical business mentality that it can just throw money into a process and expect better quality products to result. But Art and Games are differnt from Operating Systems. The more money and investment you throw into a project, the higher the risk involved with making it, and therefore you become less willing to allow your staff to be creative and take the risks necessary to produce a truly ground-breaking game. Nintendo has been around the block a few times, and wisely understands the tradeoff between willingness to take risks and an emphasis on shiny graphics technology and voices.
No, eBay has the advantatge of network effects--I want to go to the auction site which everyone else uses, but I don't really care if I use the same search engine that everyone else does, as long as it works.
Dude, it's called Final Fantasy X for a reason: they made freaking nine other ones before they made that game! Sadly, in Squaresoft's transition from Super NES to Playstation, they seemed to have lost all of their game design abilities and replaced them with incredible visual design and narrative design. They made a great many of incredible looking PS1 and PS2 games, and some truly amazing stories (Legend of Mana always comes to mind) but almost all of them have some glaring game play problem, like too many sit-back-and-watch moments, repetitive battles, load times, etc.
And that's always been the Microsoft way--pick any flavor of hardware you want--Dell, Gateway, HP, whatever, we don't care, just so long as it forces you to run our software.
Pick whatever mp3 player you want, just so long as your connecting it to a Microsoft OS.
It has always been the Microsoft way to maximize choice among things that are not within Microsoft's domain.
We used to develop the GNU.FREE Internet Voting software and we retain a strong interest in electronic voting issues, primarily through advocating why we feel it's an undesirable advance. Apparently, they're no longer fully interested in developing internet voting software (which is quite different from electronic voting anyway), and now their just an advocacy group or something. Hmm.
This needs to be amended--everything NEW just works. But dig out a sound card from four years ago or a SCSI hard drive or anything consumers are likely to have but not likely to buy in Best Buy tomorrow afternoon, and Linux support tends to be superior, albeit requiring a lot more effort. It takes longer for something to be supported by Linux, but once it is supported, it tends to be supported forever--whereas each new Microsoft OS tends to lose a good chunk of hardware compatibility from previous versions--all that matters to Microsoft is new hardware. But really, this whole argument is too skewed towards an American perspective (at least i think so, and I'm American too.) Microsoft is a national security risk to any government other than the united states. It is a risk to proprietary information to all corporations outside America. All over the world the credibility of american institutions is fading-- American finance, American journalism, American diplomacy, American intelligence--no one trusts any of it anymore. American software will be next, and Microsoft will have to be satisified selling outrageously priced monopoly products for America only.
Actually, the poster said "compared to MacOS", and its general wisdom even outside Slashdot that the poster would be correct. General wisdom might not be correct, but its up to the person arguing against it (you) to explain why.
On the other hand, outside America dependence on Microsoft is a major national security risk. Who caN SAy what backdoors are required by the United States to exist in Windows? Imagine how Americans would feel about Microsoft if it's headquarters were in, say, Germany? There are simply too many reasons for foreigners to oppose Microsoft for any obstacle to Linux adoption not to be passed.
That would have worked a few years ago, when computers were still a bold new frontier. Think about the Old West--at first rugged individualist cowboys and adventurers are rewarded, because the place was so empty that ability to deal with nature was more important than ability to deal with your neighbor. In fact, people probably went out west because they couldn't stand their neighbors back east.
Think about how much of America was built by people who couldn't stand their old neighbors. Even the native americans must have really hated China at some point.
Then, as things began to get crowded, the same sort of business men and politicians from back east began to rise above everyone else, and the cowboy lifestyle began to decline.
It's the same with computers--first it was dominated by nerds like you (and possibly me...) who were really good with machines. But as there got to be more and more of us, and as the machines got more and more reliable, then yet another frontier starts to close, and making people happy once again becomes more important than making machines go.
Now, the mature thing for folk like us to do is to either find a new frontier, or accept the world as it is, and try to improve our social skills as best we can.
Yet before I do that, I'd like to take a moment to shed a tear for the death of yet another frontier, yet another chance to make the American dream a reality. The American Dream, by the way, is that one can improve one's own lot in life simply by doing a better job, through physical or intellectual effort, rather than by kissing the asses of whatever feudal lord happens to be dominating our lives at the moment. That individual worth could somehow beat out nepotism and favortism. A sweet, yet elusive dream
And before I allow Stockholm syndrome to completely overwhelm me, I lament how much of humanities effort is wasted in the collective solipsism advocated by so many people who reply to you--the opinion that physical reality outside humanity is of less importance than social reality within humanity. A society which believes that itself is the most important thing in the universe will experieince very limited growth.
On the other hand, windows tends to be more friendly to non-memorization-based keyboard usage--particularly by letting you navigate the menus with arrow keys (push alt first). It turns out to be possible to do in later versions of Mac OS X, but you need to set an option in System Configuration to do it, and I never remember which button I have it set to. While windows makes you right click needlessly (though honestly I can't think of too many windows programs that force me to use key stroke combinations), the mac makes me reach for the mouse somewhat needlessly.
Consuming less resources? Yeah right--I hope you enjoy paying for my medical bills in the coming decades, cause I plan to ingest a lot of toxins! wheeeeee!
I mean, one of the implications of the Bush tax cut might be that TRACK-YOUR-POSITION will buy more video games, but it would be pretty misleading to post a link to George Bush's ideas on TRACK-YOUR-POSITION's video games.
One of the implications of time travel might be that General Clark can travel into the past and have sex with his great great grandparents, so are we justified in posting a link to Clark's ideas on causally paradoxical incest?
Essentially, Clark was dreaming of a Star Trek-style future--a cute, impossible, but harmless dream for a presidential candidate. Very much different than dreaming of Back To The Future, which would be absurd and inexplicable.
Once word gets out, people won't go in for eye tests anymore. Or they'll cheat with contacts. In any event, things will start to suck.
Tee Hee