No. Just because we can't guarantee 100% that our houses won't be broken into doesn't mean we should not have home security systems.
You have it backwards. If we cannot guarantee that the people who have legal right to access their homes can do so, then the prevention methods are bad. Add that to the fact that the prevention methods will not work AT ALL for anyone who is seriously trying to subvert them (and the assumption is that we are trying to stop people who ARE seriously trying to subvert them) that means doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.
Just throwing up our hands and saying, "oh well, nothing we can do" is not an option.
You are the only one doing that. Please stop if you think it is not correct. I'm saying that what is being done is meaningless virtue signaling because it cannot hope to accurately identify the location or source of a comment properly.
The presumption that their reasons are "quite reasonable" makes your argument invalid.
Newspaper editors are paid to select from the submitted letters, so not selecting one is quite reasonable. It is their job to do so, and they are selecting what appears in a forum that is owned and operated by their boss.
The "moderators" for Facebook are similarly paid to do this job, by the people who OWN THE SERVERS and thus have every right to determine what appears thereon.
Whether you agree with their choices or not is irrelevant. It is the fact that the owners of the medium are making the decision is what makes their decisions reasonable and allowable.
I have seen many times that posts are removed by moderators because they don't agree with the view the site is pushing.
There is no requirement that I must allow you to use my facilities to express your opinion. It is not censorship to deny you that privilege.
Censorship is an artificially erected barrier to any ability to speak, write, etc.
That is the useless definition that is bandied about every time someone doesn't get to use someone else's soapbox to shout their message. No, it is not "an artificially erected barrier". It is the action of an official, which implies if not expressly means "government official". It is a prohibition on speech, not simply "do it elsewhere using your own dime".
If, without that barrier, the speech would have been able to reach its intended audience, then the barrier is censorship.
Please come back to us when there is an actual serious issue to report, because neither a newspaper editor nor a facebook moderator keeping you from expressing your opinion in their fora is a significant issue. By trying to claim it is censorship you make that term worse than meaningless, because it is crying wolf and will cause others to ignore you the next time you make that cry, even when you might actually be right the next time.
"Censorship" applied to every action of an editor or moderator removes from that term any negative connotation; that negative connotation that you are relying upon to get outrage today. "Facebook is censoring me because it won't let me post fake data!" Yawn. Good for them. If censorship truly happens tomorrow, everyone will have learned how useless your cries are and will rightfully ignore you. It is no different than a woman who cries "rape" because a man brushed up against her on the subway. It trivializes the word and desensitizes the rest of us to it.
Of course, a committed criminal could still probably get through, but the point is, most criminals are not nearly as committed as you.
No, I think we should assume that these alleged Russian hackers trying to wreak havoc on our elections will be MORE committed than I am, simply because they are being paid to do this.
That means that the actual best "we" can do is eliminate anything that we don't like and call it eliminating fake news, without regard to where the person actually is or where his account is "based". If that's the best, then doing nothing it better.
Similarly fake news about voting is not going to impact anyone actually going to vote.
Actually, this is a well-known effect, and many people, myself included, wish that the national media would just shut the fuck up about election results from the East coast until the Hawaii polls close. Boo hoo if people can't hear how the Florida vote turned out within five hours of the polls closing. We used to have a country where nobody knew the answer until after the middle of December when the Electoral College finally met, and after the Pony Express carried the newspapers west.
Yes, people in the western states who hear that their candidate is winning by a landslide will often decide they don't have to get to the polls to vote for him, with the final result being that he loses. Similarly, people who weren't going to vote can hear that the person they don't want is ahead and decide to go vote after all, changing the result.
Whether this info comes from the (often wrong) mass media or from the (similarly often wrong) Facebook makes no difference.
Of course it is. It doesn't matter whether or not the government is doing the censoring, it's still censorship.
For any useful definition of censorship, it is not. If everything is censorship, then the term "censorship" is worthless. Facebook not allowing you to post your comment on their servers is not censorship, nor is the decision of an editor not to publish your letter to the editor. If both quite reasonable and allowable decisions on their part are censorship, then cries of "censorship" become like cries of wolf: "ho hum, come back when there is something real."
I'm not sure what Facebook can do about that in real time, but it doesn't mean they should ignore that. They certainly have the resources to try.
Something must be done, and Facebook is doing something. Whether that something will do anything positive or not is still a question; one that many of us can answer very easily.
You're still not seeing the obvious. If you want to minimize fake reports of line length at polls, just don't allow any post that reports line length from any account that does not allow Facebook location tracking.
I replied to a comment that said:
If an account based in Minsk reports a long line in a community 25 miles outside of Topeka,
Where my account is "based" depends on what I've told Facebook about where I live.
I'm talking about actual location data that is a lot more difficult to spoof.
In my hypothetical -- I have a fake GPS app on my phone that says I'm in Portland IF I allow location services to tell Facebook where I am at all, I am using satellite networking that says I'm in Mexico, and my account is based in Florida. Am I really standing in Portland or not? Facebook has no clue.
It's really not a difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports.
It is a very difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports without also eliminating many true reports. All it takes, in your plan, to eliminate a true report is for the person making the report to value his privacy more than Facebook's ability to track him. You can assume every person who is privacy-aware is also lying about election day events, but that would be a very rash and unwarranted assumption. All it takes, in your plan, to get a false report past the censors at Facebook, is to use a fake GPS app on your phone. This doesn't sound like a very good technical solution to me at all.
Indeed, how IS it that someone on Slashdot cannot understand how information can be accessed globally now?
Not just accessed globally, but it can lack any identification of where the poster actually is. I've moved at least twice since I got my Facebook account, and I've not told them about either move. I could be reporting a long line in Portland Oregon while I'm standing in it, even though I created my account ten years ago when I was living in Ocalala Florida. And through the magic of technology my IP address while reporting it could be in Mexico (satellite internet).
No, it was removed from the ballot before it was mixed into the box with the other ballots, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Counting took place after the polls closed. If they had waited until "before counting" then I would have to trust that it was being done.
So they counted them before they mixed them? Otherwise, pretty sure I'm still correct. Also do you not trust yourself? You witnessed it.
I said they count them AFTER THE POLLS CLOSE, which is long after the ballots are put into the box. How you get "before they mixed them" from "after the polls close" I do not know, but it has to be either a complete lack of reading comprehension or a deliberate attempt at misinterpreting what I actually said.
Yes, pedantically, the strip is removed "before being counted", but that's only because the strip is removed before the ballot goes into the box. Just "before being counted" implies that it is removed after the ballots come back out of the box. Otherwise, you'd say it was removed before it went into the box -- which is what I said happens. So, if you wait to remove the strip until they are being counted, then NO, I do NOT see the strip removed with my own eyes. I have to TRUST that it was removed.
Just like you have to trust the local coffee shop not to serve everyone cyanide,
If the person in front of me doesn't fall over dead when he takes a drink from his coffee, I can be very certain they are not serving everyone cyanide. Further, there is no financial or political motive for them to do that. They gain nothing and have everything to lose. It is also something that anyone who buys coffee there, or interacts with someone who has bought coffee there, can easily detect. That means it is not "just like", there is a different level of trust needed. Don't be stupid by trying to equate outright murder of thousands of people with recording vote data.
The odds of recording your vote info from either of the scenarios you mention is astronomically small.
It is not astronomically small, and it not impossible as you claimed.
It would require vast conspiracies, involving tens of thousands of people,
There are not tens of thousands of people packed into every election office during the counting of by-mail ballots. At most ten for many offices. You vastly over-estimate the number of people involved, which makes your argument disingenuous at best. Bye.
Prove me wrong.
Already done. I've already given one easy method of doing it that could be missed by even a dozen observers.
There is no realistic way for anyone to connect someone to a particular ballot much less create a database of how everyone voted.
It is easy to do that. You take the incoming envelope and scan it on one system to bring up the stored signature on the display to validate it. You press OK. You remove the ballot from the "secrecy envelope" and scan it on another system. Oops, the systems are interconnected behind the scenes so a data collector can collect your ID from the first system and then how you voted from the second.
I am NOT saying that this happens. I'm only pointing out that it is quite possible to do this.
Vote by mail is far more secure than polling place balloting.
Bullshit. First, you spread valid ballots out to the four winds and hope that only valid voters get their hands on one. With a polling place you validate the voter before you hand them a ballot. Second, once the ballot gets to someone, they can mark it as they please, or they can order someone else to mark theirs the way they want it marked in a way that they can verify that the order was complied with. With a polling place, you go into a booth away from everyone else and cast your vote, so even if someone tries to coerce you into voting their way they cannot verify that you have, or have not, done so. (Note that the verified coercion issue is a problem that every "verification of electronic vote" system has to deal with. If it is important for those systems, it cannot be irrelevant to by-mail voting.)
You hand-wave away this issue by claiming nobody has ever done it. Well, if someone else has sufficient power over you to coerce you vote on election day, they will still have that power the day after, and the day after that, and you will still suffer the consequences if you turn them in. And there have been people here who have reported personal knowledge of employers coercing their employees, so yes, it has been reported.
Third, when someone returns their "by mail" ballot the free way (which by law must exist, otherwise you'd have a poll tax) it can sit unwatched in a box in a location open to the public. For a polling place, there are people who watch the boxes until they are locked away out of public access.
Fourth, the only validation of any ballot by mail is the signature, which can change over time or due to transient circumstances. (I broke my right wrist a few years ago -- why should that prohibit me from voting?) At a polling place you see a physical person who can present ID to prove who they are if there is any question.
Vote by mail is a godsend to anyone who doesn't care about vote fraud at all. It is not more secure than in-person voting in any number of ways.
My thoughts exactly regarding line length. It's (relatively) easy to verify reports of violence,
"When I showed up at the polls there was a scary looking black man carrying a club standing at the door, so I didn't vote." Ummm, a disabled person who carries a cane was waiting for his wife to finish voting before they went to church services... "When I went to vote there was a scary looking white man with a club standing at the door, so I didn't vote." His church services start half an hour after the first guy's, and his wife is just as slow a voter.
It's not as easy as you think to verify a report of "violence" or "alleged violence" or "voter deterrence".
How is Facebook supposed to know which reports are illegitimate and which are simply reports that they can't verify?
They cannot. But there is an outcry that "something must be done" to solve this problem, so Facebook is "doing something". How dare you question Facebook as to the effectiveness or accuracy of what they are "doing"?
The mail in envelopes are opened under supervision of election judges from both parties,
Which is why I said that you have to trust that they don't record the information. All of the description you provided is how they operate so that they create this trust.
As for the ballot ID, as you said, it was removed from the ballot before being counted.
No, it was removed from the ballot before it was mixed into the box with the other ballots, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Counting took place after the polls closed. If they had waited until "before counting" then I would have to trust that it was being done.
Do you not understand the difference between "know" and "trust"?
What consumer would consider net neutrality to be bad?
Any consumer who understood that "zero rating" is a target of the pro-NN people and who was benefiting from an existing zero rating system. For example, I don't care if Flurble ISP throttles NetFlix because I don't subscribe to NetFlix, but I do make a lot of use of the Snorklewhack streaming audio service that is zero rated on Flurble's network. If NN means I have to pay more, then NN is bad, in my opinion.
It is rare to find someone who is pro-NN and who also understands that zero rating is not a violation of true net neutrality principles. Like the CA law, which includes a prohibition on zero rating, but is painted as "net neutrality".
This is a misconception. This was not a vote. This was a public comment system. It doesn't matter how many yays and nays there are. The system was intended, and is still intended, to get input from the public, not make the decision. Ten million people all saying the same pro-NN thing isn't ten million votes for NN, it is one piece of information to take into consideration. Saying it ten million times doesn't make it righter or wronger.
Your identifying data isn't anywhere on the ballot or machine.
In a vote-by-mail state, your identifying data is on the envelope that contains your ballot. You TRUST that the election officials do not enter this data when they scan your ballot --- it is in a machine readable format so could be OCRd easily.
This is the system that Wyden wants implemented for the entire country.
When I voted in a "show up and vote on a paper ballot" system, there was a strip of paper on each ballot that contained the ballot number, which was recorded in the electoral rolls when it was given to you. You could see the election official remove that strip (after verifying the number against the number recorded next to your name) before your ballot joined the others in the box.
I don't understand what problem they are solving for consumers.
It solves the problem that some people assume that the only place you will ever encounter a link is on a web page.
There are these things called "magazines", and "billboards", and TV and radio ads, and even "letters", that can provide URLs to things. This causes people to want to type in a URL, and a shortener can make the URL easier to remember and mostly easier to type in.
If your URL is insanely long, then present it to the user in an anchor tag...
States absolutely are not barred from regulating commerce within their borders. Thus, they are authorized to pass laws - like California's - to do just that.
But they are barred from regulating interstate commerce, and the Internet is inherently interstate commerce.
California isn't regulating other states, or the internet.
How is regulating the internet's neutrality not regulating the internet?
You're asserting that "If not A, then B" is equivalent to "If A, then not B". It most definitely is not.
Wrong. Here is the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In plain English, that amendment means that powers that are reserved to the states or the people must meet both requirements. They must not be delegated to the United States (the federal government) and they must not be prohibited to the states. If the Constitution grants (takes) the power to do something, that takes it away from the States. If the Constitution does not take a power for the federal government but does prohibit it to the States, then nobody has it.
This isn't just me confusing things. The federal courts have regularly ruled that the power to regulate interstate commerce IS delegated by the Constitution to the US and is NOT prohibited in the Constitution to the States, but the States do not have power to regulate interstate commerce based on the 10th Amendment. It's not that difficult. ICC IS one of the two limits, thus the result is prohibited.
Minor correction. The former FCC regulation was US only.
Yes. Did I say otherwise?
The CA case is no different.
Yes, it is. CA is in the US. The FCC is in the US. The US Constitution covers CA as well as the rest of the country. A clause in the US Constitution has no bearing on Korea, but it does apply to CA.
Clearly Trump wasn't the most electable republican- and Hillary wasn't the most electable democrat
So what? Who said that was the purpose of the primary?
You get to vote for who you really want to get elected rather than the best of the worst, the person you think is more likely to "beat the worst".
And then when THAT person loses, you've gotten to vote for someone else, too. Two votes. This is compatible with "one person one vote" exactly how?
There would be a lot more spread of votes in America if we weren't forced into a polarized binary system.
Nobody is forced into a two party system. In fact, do you know how you get completely away from a two party system? PEOPLE VOTE FOR WHO THEY WANT INSTEAD OF WHO THEY THINK WILL BE ELECTED. If 40% of the people voted Green Party, guess what? We'd have at least a three party system. Whose fault is it that we don't?
But that doesn't answer the question.
If you vote for someone decent in the middle your vote is wasted because they stand no chance.
You know, that's exactly like what happens in any voting district where there is a solid majority of one party voters. The other party in a two party system stands no chance. Do we change the system so that the guy whose party is in the minority has a good chance of being elected? Do we re-wire the voting district lines (gerrymander) so that every voting district is a 50/50 split? This is good because... ?
So, do you know why your "decent in the middle" candidate stands no chance? BECAUSE NOBODY VOTES FOR HIM. You want to solve a problem of the voters choosing the wrong guy based on your definition of "the wrong guy", or improve the chances of "the right guy" based on your definition of "the right guy", but either way you want to improve the chances of someone the voters did not vote for to be elected. By giving everyone TWO votes instead of just one. If the candidate benefiting from this was one of the two main party's, this would be called "rigging the election". Because it is for someone you prefer, it's "the right thing to do".
The constitution gives congress the power to regulate interstate commerce if and when it so chooses but makes no prohibition against the states, and the 10th amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The 10th Amendment is what gives congress the authority to prevent states from regulating interstate commerce. Regulating IC is a power delegated to the United States by the Constitution", so IC meets the logical statement "delegated to the US OR not prohibited to the states", thus "not reserved to the States".
Since this is about regulating broandband access, they'll have a presence wherever you are located.
No it is not just about broadband access. Net neutrality is agnostic when it comes to bandwidth or speed.
If all the routers and wires and physical infrastructure is in CA, all of that equipment need to treat communication neutrally.
And if all the routers and wires and physical infrastructure ISN'T in CA, it still need to treat communication neutrally. That's messing with interstate commerce.
There's still one scenario that get's left out.
If your broadband provider is connecting you to an Internet access point, and it's all in CA, then there isn't any Interstate issue.
And if the access point is not, then there is. The laws don't talk about where the "access point" is, they talk about ISPs who do business in the state. The fact that a Boston ISP is selling someone in CA service means the Boston ISP is doing business in the state.
But, if all the traffic manipulation happens after it leaves the state, then it's easy to argue that that location is outside of the state's control.
Yes, if the border gateway is outside the state of CA, and the border gateway is where congestion creates an apparent lack of net neutrality, then does the state law apply? The law says it does, but that border gateway serves users from at least two states, so the CA law is attempting to regulate a company's action in another state.
States do, in fact, attempt to impose sales tax on goods sold by a grocery store headquartered out of state which sells a good and ships it across state lines.
The question is not where the headquarters are, but where the goods came from and if the company has a physical presence within the state.
If you walk into a Kroger that isn't in the state of Ohio where Kroger is headquartered, you will pay whatever sales tax is appropriate for the state the store is in, not Ohio's.
For ISP, there are two parts to "the product or service". One is the pipe that carries the packets, the other is where the packets enter "the Internet". There is no requirement that your ISP be located within the state where you live, and thus any ISP regulation must be broad enough to deal with the interstate commerce limitations. California, for example, that wants to put regulations on ISPs that provide service within the state of California have to recognize that they will be regulating ISPs that have no physical presence in California.
I have an ISP that is in a state on the other side of the continent from me. When I dial into that network, the only way the ISP has of knowing my packets are winding up in my state is... well, they flag the account as being from here, but the packets don't care what state they are coming from or going to. The routers and gateways at that ISP have no way of knowing that information, either. Thus, any laws my state makes regarding "ISPs who do business" in my state are completely unenforceable against my ISP because my ISP cannot differentiate. If they are required by law to treat MY packets in some way, then they must treat everyone's packets the same way simply because they cannot tell them apart. That's a violation of interstate commerce, because it is one state telling a company in another state how it must act, and that action impacts their business with every other state.
I would like to get rid of primaries too as they tend to polarize the parties and get the worst* overall candidate nominated from each party.... * Worst from a neutral's perspective or the other parties perspective- best from that party's hardliners normally.
Who cares what the other party's members think about the candidate? Isn't it almost a "by definition" that one party will think the candidate that wins their primary is better than the one that wins the other party's?
The purpose of a primary is not to make the other parties happy. It's to nominate someone who can BEAT the other party's, which will, of course, make them UNHAPPY. In fact, the more that the other parties whine about the candidate I've help select for mine, the better I know mine is.
if you pick the lesser of the two main evils for your second pick- your vote still counts rather than being "wasted" on a third party.
So you essentially get to vote twice. This is compatible with "one person one vote" exactly how?
and means the electorate as a whole picks the best candidate...
No, it does not. It still means that the minority doesn't pick. That's a problem with current election, you know. The losers keep claiming that their voice wasn't heard or that the winner "isn't my President" or whatever office they didn't win.
He didn't say "Obama" - he said Homeland Security and they DID attempt to infiltrate their systems along with several other states.
You can't have it both ways. If Trump is responsible for everything done by anyone in the executive branch today, then Obama was responsible for everything done by anyone in the executive branch, such as DHS.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Just because we can't guarantee 100% that our houses won't be broken into doesn't mean we should not have home security systems.
You have it backwards. If we cannot guarantee that the people who have legal right to access their homes can do so, then the prevention methods are bad. Add that to the fact that the prevention methods will not work AT ALL for anyone who is seriously trying to subvert them (and the assumption is that we are trying to stop people who ARE seriously trying to subvert them) that means doing nothing is better than doing the wrong thing.
Just throwing up our hands and saying, "oh well, nothing we can do" is not an option.
You are the only one doing that. Please stop if you think it is not correct. I'm saying that what is being done is meaningless virtue signaling because it cannot hope to accurately identify the location or source of a comment properly.
The presumption that their reasons are "quite reasonable" makes your argument invalid.
Newspaper editors are paid to select from the submitted letters, so not selecting one is quite reasonable. It is their job to do so, and they are selecting what appears in a forum that is owned and operated by their boss. The "moderators" for Facebook are similarly paid to do this job, by the people who OWN THE SERVERS and thus have every right to determine what appears thereon.
Whether you agree with their choices or not is irrelevant. It is the fact that the owners of the medium are making the decision is what makes their decisions reasonable and allowable.
I have seen many times that posts are removed by moderators because they don't agree with the view the site is pushing.
There is no requirement that I must allow you to use my facilities to express your opinion. It is not censorship to deny you that privilege.
Censorship is an artificially erected barrier to any ability to speak, write, etc.
That is the useless definition that is bandied about every time someone doesn't get to use someone else's soapbox to shout their message. No, it is not "an artificially erected barrier". It is the action of an official, which implies if not expressly means "government official". It is a prohibition on speech, not simply "do it elsewhere using your own dime".
If, without that barrier, the speech would have been able to reach its intended audience, then the barrier is censorship.
Please come back to us when there is an actual serious issue to report, because neither a newspaper editor nor a facebook moderator keeping you from expressing your opinion in their fora is a significant issue. By trying to claim it is censorship you make that term worse than meaningless, because it is crying wolf and will cause others to ignore you the next time you make that cry, even when you might actually be right the next time.
"Censorship" applied to every action of an editor or moderator removes from that term any negative connotation; that negative connotation that you are relying upon to get outrage today. "Facebook is censoring me because it won't let me post fake data!" Yawn. Good for them. If censorship truly happens tomorrow, everyone will have learned how useless your cries are and will rightfully ignore you. It is no different than a woman who cries "rape" because a man brushed up against her on the subway. It trivializes the word and desensitizes the rest of us to it.
Of course, a committed criminal could still probably get through, but the point is, most criminals are not nearly as committed as you.
No, I think we should assume that these alleged Russian hackers trying to wreak havoc on our elections will be MORE committed than I am, simply because they are being paid to do this.
That means that the actual best "we" can do is eliminate anything that we don't like and call it eliminating fake news, without regard to where the person actually is or where his account is "based". If that's the best, then doing nothing it better.
Similarly fake news about voting is not going to impact anyone actually going to vote.
Actually, this is a well-known effect, and many people, myself included, wish that the national media would just shut the fuck up about election results from the East coast until the Hawaii polls close. Boo hoo if people can't hear how the Florida vote turned out within five hours of the polls closing. We used to have a country where nobody knew the answer until after the middle of December when the Electoral College finally met, and after the Pony Express carried the newspapers west.
Yes, people in the western states who hear that their candidate is winning by a landslide will often decide they don't have to get to the polls to vote for him, with the final result being that he loses. Similarly, people who weren't going to vote can hear that the person they don't want is ahead and decide to go vote after all, changing the result.
Whether this info comes from the (often wrong) mass media or from the (similarly often wrong) Facebook makes no difference.
Of course it is. It doesn't matter whether or not the government is doing the censoring, it's still censorship.
For any useful definition of censorship, it is not. If everything is censorship, then the term "censorship" is worthless. Facebook not allowing you to post your comment on their servers is not censorship, nor is the decision of an editor not to publish your letter to the editor. If both quite reasonable and allowable decisions on their part are censorship, then cries of "censorship" become like cries of wolf: "ho hum, come back when there is something real."
I'm not sure what Facebook can do about that in real time, but it doesn't mean they should ignore that. They certainly have the resources to try.
Something must be done, and Facebook is doing something. Whether that something will do anything positive or not is still a question; one that many of us can answer very easily.
You're still not seeing the obvious. If you want to minimize fake reports of line length at polls, just don't allow any post that reports line length from any account that does not allow Facebook location tracking.
I replied to a comment that said:
If an account based in Minsk reports a long line in a community 25 miles outside of Topeka,
Where my account is "based" depends on what I've told Facebook about where I live.
I'm talking about actual location data that is a lot more difficult to spoof.
In my hypothetical -- I have a fake GPS app on my phone that says I'm in Portland IF I allow location services to tell Facebook where I am at all, I am using satellite networking that says I'm in Mexico, and my account is based in Florida. Am I really standing in Portland or not? Facebook has no clue.
It's really not a difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports.
It is a very difficult technical challenge to eliminate false "on-the-scene" reports without also eliminating many true reports. All it takes, in your plan, to eliminate a true report is for the person making the report to value his privacy more than Facebook's ability to track him. You can assume every person who is privacy-aware is also lying about election day events, but that would be a very rash and unwarranted assumption. All it takes, in your plan, to get a false report past the censors at Facebook, is to use a fake GPS app on your phone. This doesn't sound like a very good technical solution to me at all.
Indeed, how IS it that someone on Slashdot cannot understand how information can be accessed globally now?
Not just accessed globally, but it can lack any identification of where the poster actually is. I've moved at least twice since I got my Facebook account, and I've not told them about either move. I could be reporting a long line in Portland Oregon while I'm standing in it, even though I created my account ten years ago when I was living in Ocalala Florida. And through the magic of technology my IP address while reporting it could be in Mexico (satellite internet).
No, it was removed from the ballot before it was mixed into the box with the other ballots, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Counting took place after the polls closed. If they had waited until "before counting" then I would have to trust that it was being done.
So they counted them before they mixed them? Otherwise, pretty sure I'm still correct. Also do you not trust yourself? You witnessed it.
I said they count them AFTER THE POLLS CLOSE, which is long after the ballots are put into the box. How you get "before they mixed them" from "after the polls close" I do not know, but it has to be either a complete lack of reading comprehension or a deliberate attempt at misinterpreting what I actually said.
Yes, pedantically, the strip is removed "before being counted", but that's only because the strip is removed before the ballot goes into the box. Just "before being counted" implies that it is removed after the ballots come back out of the box. Otherwise, you'd say it was removed before it went into the box -- which is what I said happens. So, if you wait to remove the strip until they are being counted, then NO, I do NOT see the strip removed with my own eyes. I have to TRUST that it was removed.
Just like you have to trust the local coffee shop not to serve everyone cyanide,
If the person in front of me doesn't fall over dead when he takes a drink from his coffee, I can be very certain they are not serving everyone cyanide. Further, there is no financial or political motive for them to do that. They gain nothing and have everything to lose. It is also something that anyone who buys coffee there, or interacts with someone who has bought coffee there, can easily detect. That means it is not "just like", there is a different level of trust needed. Don't be stupid by trying to equate outright murder of thousands of people with recording vote data.
The odds of recording your vote info from either of the scenarios you mention is astronomically small.
It is not astronomically small, and it not impossible as you claimed.
It would require vast conspiracies, involving tens of thousands of people,
There are not tens of thousands of people packed into every election office during the counting of by-mail ballots. At most ten for many offices. You vastly over-estimate the number of people involved, which makes your argument disingenuous at best. Bye.
Prove me wrong.
Already done. I've already given one easy method of doing it that could be missed by even a dozen observers.
There is no realistic way for anyone to connect someone to a particular ballot much less create a database of how everyone voted.
It is easy to do that. You take the incoming envelope and scan it on one system to bring up the stored signature on the display to validate it. You press OK. You remove the ballot from the "secrecy envelope" and scan it on another system. Oops, the systems are interconnected behind the scenes so a data collector can collect your ID from the first system and then how you voted from the second.
I am NOT saying that this happens. I'm only pointing out that it is quite possible to do this.
Vote by mail is far more secure than polling place balloting.
Bullshit. First, you spread valid ballots out to the four winds and hope that only valid voters get their hands on one. With a polling place you validate the voter before you hand them a ballot. Second, once the ballot gets to someone, they can mark it as they please, or they can order someone else to mark theirs the way they want it marked in a way that they can verify that the order was complied with. With a polling place, you go into a booth away from everyone else and cast your vote, so even if someone tries to coerce you into voting their way they cannot verify that you have, or have not, done so. (Note that the verified coercion issue is a problem that every "verification of electronic vote" system has to deal with. If it is important for those systems, it cannot be irrelevant to by-mail voting.)
You hand-wave away this issue by claiming nobody has ever done it. Well, if someone else has sufficient power over you to coerce you vote on election day, they will still have that power the day after, and the day after that, and you will still suffer the consequences if you turn them in. And there have been people here who have reported personal knowledge of employers coercing their employees, so yes, it has been reported.
Third, when someone returns their "by mail" ballot the free way (which by law must exist, otherwise you'd have a poll tax) it can sit unwatched in a box in a location open to the public. For a polling place, there are people who watch the boxes until they are locked away out of public access.
Fourth, the only validation of any ballot by mail is the signature, which can change over time or due to transient circumstances. (I broke my right wrist a few years ago -- why should that prohibit me from voting?) At a polling place you see a physical person who can present ID to prove who they are if there is any question.
Vote by mail is a godsend to anyone who doesn't care about vote fraud at all. It is not more secure than in-person voting in any number of ways.
My thoughts exactly regarding line length. It's (relatively) easy to verify reports of violence,
"When I showed up at the polls there was a scary looking black man carrying a club standing at the door, so I didn't vote." Ummm, a disabled person who carries a cane was waiting for his wife to finish voting before they went to church services ... "When I went to vote there was a scary looking white man with a club standing at the door, so I didn't vote." His church services start half an hour after the first guy's, and his wife is just as slow a voter.
It's not as easy as you think to verify a report of "violence" or "alleged violence" or "voter deterrence".
How is Facebook supposed to know which reports are illegitimate and which are simply reports that they can't verify?
They cannot. But there is an outcry that "something must be done" to solve this problem, so Facebook is "doing something". How dare you question Facebook as to the effectiveness or accuracy of what they are "doing"?
The mail in envelopes are opened under supervision of election judges from both parties,
Which is why I said that you have to trust that they don't record the information. All of the description you provided is how they operate so that they create this trust.
As for the ballot ID, as you said, it was removed from the ballot before being counted.
No, it was removed from the ballot before it was mixed into the box with the other ballots, and I saw it happen with my own eyes. Counting took place after the polls closed. If they had waited until "before counting" then I would have to trust that it was being done.
Do you not understand the difference between "know" and "trust"?
What consumer would consider net neutrality to be bad?
Any consumer who understood that "zero rating" is a target of the pro-NN people and who was benefiting from an existing zero rating system. For example, I don't care if Flurble ISP throttles NetFlix because I don't subscribe to NetFlix, but I do make a lot of use of the Snorklewhack streaming audio service that is zero rated on Flurble's network. If NN means I have to pay more, then NN is bad, in my opinion.
It is rare to find someone who is pro-NN and who also understands that zero rating is not a violation of true net neutrality principles. Like the CA law, which includes a prohibition on zero rating, but is painted as "net neutrality".
it would still count as a single vote against.
This is a misconception. This was not a vote. This was a public comment system. It doesn't matter how many yays and nays there are. The system was intended, and is still intended, to get input from the public, not make the decision. Ten million people all saying the same pro-NN thing isn't ten million votes for NN, it is one piece of information to take into consideration. Saying it ten million times doesn't make it righter or wronger.
Your identifying data isn't anywhere on the ballot or machine.
In a vote-by-mail state, your identifying data is on the envelope that contains your ballot. You TRUST that the election officials do not enter this data when they scan your ballot --- it is in a machine readable format so could be OCRd easily.
This is the system that Wyden wants implemented for the entire country.
When I voted in a "show up and vote on a paper ballot" system, there was a strip of paper on each ballot that contained the ballot number, which was recorded in the electoral rolls when it was given to you. You could see the election official remove that strip (after verifying the number against the number recorded next to your name) before your ballot joined the others in the box.
I don't understand what problem they are solving for consumers.
It solves the problem that some people assume that the only place you will ever encounter a link is on a web page.
There are these things called "magazines", and "billboards", and TV and radio ads, and even "letters", that can provide URLs to things. This causes people to want to type in a URL, and a shortener can make the URL easier to remember and mostly easier to type in.
If your URL is insanely long, then present it to the user in an anchor tag ...
An example of the problem I referred to.
States absolutely are not barred from regulating commerce within their borders. Thus, they are authorized to pass laws - like California's - to do just that.
But they are barred from regulating interstate commerce, and the Internet is inherently interstate commerce.
California isn't regulating other states, or the internet.
How is regulating the internet's neutrality not regulating the internet?
You're asserting that "If not A, then B" is equivalent to "If A, then not B". It most definitely is not.
Wrong. Here is the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
In plain English, that amendment means that powers that are reserved to the states or the people must meet both requirements. They must not be delegated to the United States (the federal government) and they must not be prohibited to the states. If the Constitution grants (takes) the power to do something, that takes it away from the States. If the Constitution does not take a power for the federal government but does prohibit it to the States, then nobody has it.
This isn't just me confusing things. The federal courts have regularly ruled that the power to regulate interstate commerce IS delegated by the Constitution to the US and is NOT prohibited in the Constitution to the States, but the States do not have power to regulate interstate commerce based on the 10th Amendment. It's not that difficult. ICC IS one of the two limits, thus the result is prohibited.
Minor correction. The former FCC regulation was US only.
Yes. Did I say otherwise?
The CA case is no different.
Yes, it is. CA is in the US. The FCC is in the US. The US Constitution covers CA as well as the rest of the country. A clause in the US Constitution has no bearing on Korea, but it does apply to CA.
Clearly Trump wasn't the most electable republican- and Hillary wasn't the most electable democrat
So what? Who said that was the purpose of the primary?
You get to vote for who you really want to get elected rather than the best of the worst, the person you think is more likely to "beat the worst".
And then when THAT person loses, you've gotten to vote for someone else, too. Two votes. This is compatible with "one person one vote" exactly how?
There would be a lot more spread of votes in America if we weren't forced into a polarized binary system.
Nobody is forced into a two party system. In fact, do you know how you get completely away from a two party system? PEOPLE VOTE FOR WHO THEY WANT INSTEAD OF WHO THEY THINK WILL BE ELECTED. If 40% of the people voted Green Party, guess what? We'd have at least a three party system. Whose fault is it that we don't?
But that doesn't answer the question.
If you vote for someone decent in the middle your vote is wasted because they stand no chance.
You know, that's exactly like what happens in any voting district where there is a solid majority of one party voters. The other party in a two party system stands no chance. Do we change the system so that the guy whose party is in the minority has a good chance of being elected? Do we re-wire the voting district lines (gerrymander) so that every voting district is a 50/50 split? This is good because ... ?
So, do you know why your "decent in the middle" candidate stands no chance? BECAUSE NOBODY VOTES FOR HIM. You want to solve a problem of the voters choosing the wrong guy based on your definition of "the wrong guy", or improve the chances of "the right guy" based on your definition of "the right guy", but either way you want to improve the chances of someone the voters did not vote for to be elected. By giving everyone TWO votes instead of just one. If the candidate benefiting from this was one of the two main party's, this would be called "rigging the election". Because it is for someone you prefer, it's "the right thing to do".
The constitution gives congress the power to regulate interstate commerce if and when it so chooses but makes no prohibition against the states, and the 10th amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The 10th Amendment is what gives congress the authority to prevent states from regulating interstate commerce. Regulating IC is a power delegated to the United States by the Constitution", so IC meets the logical statement "delegated to the US OR not prohibited to the states", thus "not reserved to the States".
Since this is about regulating broandband access, they'll have a presence wherever you are located.
No it is not just about broadband access. Net neutrality is agnostic when it comes to bandwidth or speed.
If all the routers and wires and physical infrastructure is in CA, all of that equipment need to treat communication neutrally.
And if all the routers and wires and physical infrastructure ISN'T in CA, it still need to treat communication neutrally. That's messing with interstate commerce.
There's still one scenario that get's left out. If your broadband provider is connecting you to an Internet access point, and it's all in CA, then there isn't any Interstate issue.
And if the access point is not, then there is. The laws don't talk about where the "access point" is, they talk about ISPs who do business in the state. The fact that a Boston ISP is selling someone in CA service means the Boston ISP is doing business in the state.
But, if all the traffic manipulation happens after it leaves the state, then it's easy to argue that that location is outside of the state's control.
Yes, if the border gateway is outside the state of CA, and the border gateway is where congestion creates an apparent lack of net neutrality, then does the state law apply? The law says it does, but that border gateway serves users from at least two states, so the CA law is attempting to regulate a company's action in another state.
States do, in fact, attempt to impose sales tax on goods sold by a grocery store headquartered out of state which sells a good and ships it across state lines.
The question is not where the headquarters are, but where the goods came from and if the company has a physical presence within the state.
If you walk into a Kroger that isn't in the state of Ohio where Kroger is headquartered, you will pay whatever sales tax is appropriate for the state the store is in, not Ohio's.
For ISP, there are two parts to "the product or service". One is the pipe that carries the packets, the other is where the packets enter "the Internet". There is no requirement that your ISP be located within the state where you live, and thus any ISP regulation must be broad enough to deal with the interstate commerce limitations. California, for example, that wants to put regulations on ISPs that provide service within the state of California have to recognize that they will be regulating ISPs that have no physical presence in California.
I have an ISP that is in a state on the other side of the continent from me. When I dial into that network, the only way the ISP has of knowing my packets are winding up in my state is ... well, they flag the account as being from here, but the packets don't care what state they are coming from or going to. The routers and gateways at that ISP have no way of knowing that information, either. Thus, any laws my state makes regarding "ISPs who do business" in my state are completely unenforceable against my ISP because my ISP cannot differentiate. If they are required by law to treat MY packets in some way, then they must treat everyone's packets the same way simply because they cannot tell them apart. That's a violation of interstate commerce, because it is one state telling a company in another state how it must act, and that action impacts their business with every other state.
I would like to get rid of primaries too as they tend to polarize the parties and get the worst* overall candidate nominated from each party. ... * Worst from a neutral's perspective or the other parties perspective- best from that party's hardliners normally.
Who cares what the other party's members think about the candidate? Isn't it almost a "by definition" that one party will think the candidate that wins their primary is better than the one that wins the other party's?
The purpose of a primary is not to make the other parties happy. It's to nominate someone who can BEAT the other party's, which will, of course, make them UNHAPPY. In fact, the more that the other parties whine about the candidate I've help select for mine, the better I know mine is.
if you pick the lesser of the two main evils for your second pick- your vote still counts rather than being "wasted" on a third party.
So you essentially get to vote twice. This is compatible with "one person one vote" exactly how?
and means the electorate as a whole picks the best candidate...
No, it does not. It still means that the minority doesn't pick. That's a problem with current election, you know. The losers keep claiming that their voice wasn't heard or that the winner "isn't my President" or whatever office they didn't win.
He didn't say "Obama" - he said Homeland Security and they DID attempt to infiltrate their systems along with several other states.
You can't have it both ways. If Trump is responsible for everything done by anyone in the executive branch today, then Obama was responsible for everything done by anyone in the executive branch, such as DHS.