Paper ballots could still be altered en mass by hacking the input device.
The ballots I'm familiar with are just numbered punch cards that are stuck into a metal device that lines the punch outs with the proper, English readable options. Change a couple of the option listings in a few booths in a precinct so that a demographic likely to vote for one candidate more often votes for their opponent, and then destroy the hacked option listings after the election, and you've hacked thousands of votes undetectably.
The logic would follow that for every pirated copy marked as legal, someone with the legal copy is being marked as a pirate. That supposed "fraction" starts to look something like 1/2 or 3/5 or worse.
That logic doesn't really follow at all. Anyhow, in tests like these, if you want to diminish false positives, then false negatives usually increase. We should be applauding Microsoft for not being overzealous.
But then again, this is slashdot. MS never gets applause here. At most a murmur of reluctant approval.
That not being the case then we're left with the far more optimistic Murphy's Law, a sure relief.
I wouldn't relax so quickly there, alex.
Pratchett's Law is all and good, but this situation is a perfect example of Ball's Corollary, which states that odds can often be reduced (By Pratchett's Law) to a superposition of two things:
a chain of odds, all 1/1,000,000 that lead to the event *and*
1/1 odds, also known as perfect certainty.
In this particular case, it turns out to be fairly simply: there is a 1 in a million chance that NASA researchers will reclassify this asteroid's odds of hitting earth to exactly 1 in a million. The odds of it being reclassified as that are (you guessed it) exactly 1 in a million.
According to Pratchett's Law, this means that it will be reclassified as 1 in a million, and then we will know for certain that it will hit earth. But then, given that it's odds of hitting earth have risen to 1 in 1, it would no longer be subject to Pratchett's Law, and instead would be subject to Murphy's Law, which has played havoc with prediction so long that the only thing we can be sure of the happening when we watch the weather is that the weatherman will be wrong in the only way that matters to us that day. Therefore, we can be certain that we will be wrong about being certain about the asteroid hitting earth.
~adjusts phase coil on tinfoil hat~
If, however, I was trying to divert attention from a serious abuse I'd performed, I'd release a story exactly like this. It's got the word "cookie", which is about as high-tech as Joe Sixpack ever gets about security, so he can get all upset -- and it's simultaneously a non-issue, which means everyone from the Blogosphere to Dan Rather can trot out an "expert" to tell Joe Sixpack that if this is the NSA at its most dastardly, then he has nothing to fear even if he's got something to hide
~readjusts phase coils ~
and the story I'd release would be the same, whether or not I was NSA, looking to divert attention from the fact that I wanted to trawl through the set of data originally destined for/dev/null
~tweaks fnord emitter~
or whether I was the Party official who ordered NSA to do stop dumping all that good stuff into/dev/null, and where NSA complied with my orders only under protest.
Which is it, one coil, or more than one? With that, you have lost all legitimacy to me... your cover is slipping, you CIA spydog! I will not trust you!
I'll only list one; the grappling hook or grappling gun, an old Batman standby, used in almost every comic book, and many of his encounters in single books.
The answer, unfortunately, is from Wayne Enterprises. Batman's utility belt is a one-of-a kind prototype climbing harness, paired with a magnetic grappling gun with a monofilament decelerator climbing line. Fortunately, you've got other options. A decent nylon utility belt can be procured for about $10 from any martial arts supply store. You can also equip yourself with:
Climbing spikes: $70 (Black Diamond Spectre Ice Beak Ice Piton)
Small digital cell phone: $150 (Motorola RAZR, with cellular contract)
Ninja spikes: $10 (Set of three)
Throwing stars: $30 (Set of four)
Medical kit: $20
I'm not even going to address the other missing items; gas masks, underwater breathing apparatus, etc...
Why not just use the water pressure of your house as the the pump, attach a hose from a faucet to the heat exchanger, and then open the tap however much you need to get a good, solid flow, and dump the waste water into your dehydrated lawn?
More likely it's cheaper, as they've already invested the time in developing Hubble and learning what worked and didn't work, they can simply replicate that. Prototypes and one-offs are always more expensive do to the research and design work that goes into them. Theoretically, there are plans sitting somewhere that they could simply follow, and save a pretty penny.
Are you saying that there was never ballot stuffing by Democrats in Chicago because no one was able to find substantive proof? I guess that O.J. didn't really kill Nicole because they couldn't prove it in court. He is, after all, still looking for the "real killer."
Both of your statements are completely unrelated to my assertion that the last two sentences of this post (Remember, in an election you have to fix things before its a problem. Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000)(emphasis mine)) is unsubstantiated nonsense that doesn't belong in a reasonable discussion of voting reform that is based on *facts*.
I've seen your type arguing with the random rabbit trails. In my opinion it's a fruitless way to examine things, and seems to be centered on arguing, not determining truth.
Why? If the Republicans studied the system, determined ways to commit fraud in a manner that couldn't be countered by the system (i.e. if they really did purposefully identify Democrat demographics and drop them from the rolls, and people that weren't allowed to vote, even by fraud, can't have their vote ever counted), then it would have been rigged and stolen. Perhaps there could have been more overt fraud that was overlooked because the governor, president, and courts were leaning Republican.
You really think that this is possible, and that there wouldn't be substantive proof of this after four years of bitter partisan contesting by democratic party supporters? They would love to come out and show evidence that the Republican victory was a complete fraud, but they don't have any. I find it hard to believe that, after four years, we would still have just theories, speculation, and vindictive jabs, if there is substantive proof of fraud on the winner's side.
Ergo, I still stand by my statement that any arguments for change to the election system of the U.S. should be made apart from claims that an election was "stolen" or "rigged", when it is not commonly accepted as such by reasonable people.
However, with the way the electoral college works, it' be more accurate to compare Ohio's size (11M) to Venezuela's (24M).
To a point, but you would have to factor in what percentage of the complete electoral vote Ohio controls (20 out of 538 -> 3.7%), which, due to small population states getting more weight per popular voter in the electoral college, yields an equivalent 298 Venezuelan votes, less significant than based off of the complete population ratios...
You can question the rules all you want,
you can question whether the checks and balances that were in place were effective, you can postulate Bush defeats based on different voter guestimates, but, following the system that has been in place for quite some time now, since what, 1804?
But those were the rules that were in place, and he won. Stop 'questioning' an election that was decided, and provide good arguments for what you want to change. Without claiming that an election was 'stolen' or 'rigged'.
In the end, Chavez won by 18 percentage points, verified by both the voting comission as well as by the Carter center. The process was standardized and each ballot looked the same and each voter was given the same experience. Exit polls matched, roughly, the actual results. If there had been even HALF the problems in Venezuela that the US has seen, the opposition in Venezeula would NEVER have accepted the results. They would have demanded another election. If 4000 votes were put for Chavez that didnt really exist, the opposition would go crazy. And thats with an EIGHTEEN PERCENTAGE POINT win.
Considering the differing population sizes between the US and Venezuela, an equivalent number of non-existant votes would be, get this, a whopping 342 votes! Consider the flip side. If Bush had won by EIGHTEEN PERCANTAGE POINTs, he would have had more than 20 million more votes than Kerry, which reasonable people see as an overwhelming margin. The stupidity of your theoretical venezuelan voting population in demanding a recount in such a situation is demeaning to the actual Venezuelan people, and doesn't really bolster your argument that we need better paper trails and checks on the voting process.
Bush, on the other hand, won by 2 percentage points. TWO percentage points. (i.e. 3,510,358 votes. THREE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED TEN THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED FIFTY-EIGHT. Making the non-existent votes a whopping.11%. That's ELEVEN HUNDREDTHS OF A PERCENT of Bush's winning margin. I guess that's pretty significant.) There were no paper trails. The voting process was NOT standardized. (Per the fact that we are not a straight democracy, but a democratic republic, with power for the federal government being derived from the state governments. It's part of the way the US was designed. If you have a problem with that, you are questioning the founding principles of this country, not just the voting process. Standardization should happen on the state level through the individual decisions of the states.) The exit polls did NOT match the final results. (Err. Care to site a major news source that backs this up? I've seen it on a lot of "blogs", but not on CNN.com, BBC.com, ABC, NBC, CBS, Foxnews, Washington Post... well, hopefully you get the point.) Then all these problems arise. And you say "well, he still won by more votes than those which got messed up."
...
Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000).
Actually, he won. Playing by the rules. You can question the rules all you want, you can question whether the checks and balances that were in place were effective, you can postulate Bush defeats based on different voter guestimates, but, following the system that has been in place for quite some time now, since what, 1804? I'll give you a break, since you're Angry, but give it up already. You sicken me with your partisan puppet talk.
The new driver IC has overcome the physically impossible VGA-class and higher resolution images on small size TFT-LCD panels of less than 2.4 inches
by resolving the vast space required for wiring connections between the panel and driver IC
So it's a wiring issue they are working around, not the display's limit on resolution. Too many wires to actually connect seems improbable, but then, I'm not a small TFT-LCD display engineer, so I'm willing to take Samsung's word that there was a problem.
Is that CmdrTaco's "power"? That explains why he keeps it a secret. Even a framing hammer is more intimidating than a ball-peen. Possible a sledge, if he's into the whole "intimidation by display of strength" thing.
"squeaking" means "having (potential?) financial consequences,"
We are eating up (Miniscule?) bandwidth and storage space, plus using electricity making the DB do all of these queries. If enough people chipped in, it would become a noticable effect.
If there's no financial penalty for the current course of action, why would they change
I'm thinking about that saying, "The squeaking wheel gets the grease". Maybe if we complain enough, they will slow down on new development and actually fix all the bugs on the current system, and, maybe if we gripe enough, they'll set up a test environment and do things decently and in order.
If I had to communicate anything other than "Our base is 0wn3d!" I would probably get something better.
Actually, you'd probably be able to communicate with your team better, and they might appreciate it more, if you said, "Our base is owned!" rather than, "Our base is Zero double-you en Three-dee!"
Wow, that's an Astounding Coincidence! Do you think it's a sign, some sort of miraculous finger of God pointing you to a career as a washed up heavy metal guitarist?
Deep man, really deep.
Just an aside, your title is misleading. Your post is in no way funny. Now, a more accurate title would have been, "Boring thing is...".
have invented a system that makes us keep our mouths shut...
No, you can still open your mouth, but now people's eyes don't glaze over as you describe, in detail, the lapping of your processor before you attach your custom made 40 gpm watercooling system to it, and achieve a 13% higher overclock than with the factory hsf combo.
It also makes all that inscecent yammering about HL2, Doom3, and DNF suddenly, magically, go away.
Ah, the peace. The solitude.
Hey, how come nobodies listening to my story about tweaking the Mandrake kernel for faster database resonse times? Don't act like you can't hear me. You know you can! Listen to me! I DESERVE TO BE HEARD! STOP LAUGHING AT ME. I DO NOT LOOK LIKE A GASPING FISH!!!! I WILL HACK ALL YOUR COMPUTERS AND ALL YOUR FAMILIES COMPUTERS. YOU WILL PAY!!!
So now they're threatening physical violence and homicide if I don't agree with them? This place is becomming more and more like Jim Jones' People's Church...
I've got to break loose before they start asking for money, and brainwashing hordes of readers to think exactly like each other, and to shut down any discension. Oy, my mind is already starting to get numb!
Slashdot Mirror
Paper ballots could still be altered en mass by hacking the input device.
The ballots I'm familiar with are just numbered punch cards that are stuck into a metal device that lines the punch outs with the proper, English readable options. Change a couple of the option listings in a few booths in a precinct so that a demographic likely to vote for one candidate more often votes for their opponent, and then destroy the hacked option listings after the election, and you've hacked thousands of votes undetectably.
Protecting the interests of the firs^H^H^Hsecon^H^H^Hthir^H^H^Hfourth estate since 1780 BC!
What's the "fsetfourth estate"?
The logic would follow that for every pirated copy marked as legal, someone with the legal copy is being marked as a pirate. That supposed "fraction" starts to look something like 1/2 or 3/5 or worse.
That logic doesn't really follow at all. Anyhow, in tests like these, if you want to diminish false positives, then false negatives usually increase. We should be applauding Microsoft for not being overzealous.
But then again, this is slashdot. MS never gets applause here. At most a murmur of reluctant approval.
I wouldn't relax so quickly there, alex.
Pratchett's Law is all and good, but this situation is a perfect example of Ball's Corollary, which states that odds can often be reduced (By Pratchett's Law) to a superposition of two things:
In this particular case, it turns out to be fairly simply: there is a 1 in a million chance that NASA researchers will reclassify this asteroid's odds of hitting earth to exactly 1 in a million. The odds of it being reclassified as that are (you guessed it) exactly 1 in a million.
According to Pratchett's Law, this means that it will be reclassified as 1 in a million, and then we will know for certain that it will hit earth. But then, given that it's odds of hitting earth have risen to 1 in 1, it would no longer be subject to Pratchett's Law, and instead would be subject to Murphy's Law, which has played havoc with prediction so long that the only thing we can be sure of the happening when we watch the weather is that the weatherman will be wrong in the only way that matters to us that day. Therefore, we can be certain that we will be wrong about being certain about the asteroid hitting earth.
Or can we?
~adjusts phase coil on tinfoil hat~ /dev/null /dev/null, and where NSA complied with my orders only under protest.
If, however, I was trying to divert attention from a serious abuse I'd performed, I'd release a story exactly like this. It's got the word "cookie", which is about as high-tech as Joe Sixpack ever gets about security, so he can get all upset -- and it's simultaneously a non-issue, which means everyone from the Blogosphere to Dan Rather can trot out an "expert" to tell Joe Sixpack that if this is the NSA at its most dastardly, then he has nothing to fear even if he's got something to hide
~readjusts phase coils ~
and the story I'd release would be the same, whether or not I was NSA, looking to divert attention from the fact that I wanted to trawl through the set of data originally destined for
~tweaks fnord emitter~
or whether I was the Party official who ordered NSA to do stop dumping all that good stuff into
Which is it, one coil, or more than one? With that, you have lost all legitimacy to me... your cover is slipping, you CIA spydog! I will not trust you!
Why not just use the water pressure of your house as the the pump, attach a hose from a faucet to the heat exchanger, and then open the tap however much you need to get a good, solid flow, and dump the waste water into your dehydrated lawn?
Now, he's basically made a heat exchanger - a radiator type of thing. Pump cold water by the fan circulating air, dump the waste water outside.
Unfortunately, LARGE flat files are all too common in the workplace.
More likely it's cheaper, as they've already invested the time in developing Hubble and learning what worked and didn't work, they can simply replicate that. Prototypes and one-offs are always more expensive do to the research and design work that goes into them. Theoretically, there are plans sitting somewhere that they could simply follow, and save a pretty penny.
Are you saying that there was never ballot stuffing by Democrats in Chicago because no one was able to find substantive proof? I guess that O.J. didn't really kill Nicole because they couldn't prove it in court. He is, after all, still looking for the "real killer."
Both of your statements are completely unrelated to my assertion that the last two sentences of this post (Remember, in an election you have to fix things before its a problem. Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000) (emphasis mine)) is unsubstantiated nonsense that doesn't belong in a reasonable discussion of voting reform that is based on *facts*.
I've seen your type arguing with the random rabbit trails. In my opinion it's a fruitless way to examine things, and seems to be centered on arguing, not determining truth.
Why? If the Republicans studied the system, determined ways to commit fraud in a manner that couldn't be countered by the system (i.e. if they really did purposefully identify Democrat demographics and drop them from the rolls, and people that weren't allowed to vote, even by fraud, can't have their vote ever counted), then it would have been rigged and stolen. Perhaps there could have been more overt fraud that was overlooked because the governor, president, and courts were leaning Republican.
You really think that this is possible, and that there wouldn't be substantive proof of this after four years of bitter partisan contesting by democratic party supporters? They would love to come out and show evidence that the Republican victory was a complete fraud, but they don't have any. I find it hard to believe that, after four years, we would still have just theories, speculation, and vindictive jabs, if there is substantive proof of fraud on the winner's side.
Ergo, I still stand by my statement that any arguments for change to the election system of the U.S. should be made apart from claims that an election was "stolen" or "rigged", when it is not commonly accepted as such by reasonable people.
However, with the way the electoral college works, it' be more accurate to compare Ohio's size (11M) to Venezuela's (24M).
To a point, but you would have to factor in what percentage of the complete electoral vote Ohio controls (20 out of 538 -> 3.7%), which, due to small population states getting more weight per popular voter in the electoral college, yields an equivalent 298 Venezuelan votes, less significant than based off of the complete population ratios...
In the end, Chavez won by 18 percentage points, verified by both the voting comission as well as by the Carter center. The process was standardized and each ballot looked the same and each voter was given the same experience. Exit polls matched, roughly, the actual results. If there had been even HALF the problems in Venezuela that the US has seen, the opposition in Venezeula would NEVER have accepted the results. They would have demanded another election. If 4000 votes were put for Chavez that didnt really exist, the opposition would go crazy. And thats with an EIGHTEEN PERCENTAGE POINT win.
.11%. That's ELEVEN HUNDREDTHS OF A PERCENT of Bush's winning margin. I guess that's pretty significant.) There were no paper trails. The voting process was NOT standardized. (Per the fact that we are not a straight democracy, but a democratic republic, with power for the federal government being derived from the state governments. It's part of the way the US was designed. If you have a problem with that, you are questioning the founding principles of this country, not just the voting process. Standardization should happen on the state level through the individual decisions of the states.) The exit polls did NOT match the final results. (Err. Care to site a major news source that backs this up? I've seen it on a lot of "blogs", but not on CNN.com, BBC.com, ABC, NBC, CBS, Foxnews, Washington Post... well, hopefully you get the point.) Then all these problems arise. And you say "well, he still won by more votes than those which got messed up."
Considering the differing population sizes between the US and Venezuela, an equivalent number of non-existant votes would be, get this, a whopping 342 votes! Consider the flip side. If Bush had won by EIGHTEEN PERCANTAGE POINTs, he would have had more than 20 million more votes than Kerry, which reasonable people see as an overwhelming margin. The stupidity of your theoretical venezuelan voting population in demanding a recount in such a situation is demeaning to the actual Venezuelan people, and doesn't really bolster your argument that we need better paper trails and checks on the voting process.
Bush, on the other hand, won by 2 percentage points. TWO percentage points. (i.e. 3,510,358 votes. THREE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED TEN THOUSAND, THREE HUNDRED FIFTY-EIGHT. Making the non-existent votes a whopping
...
Or else you get a President elected who didnt really win the election (a la Bush in 2000).
Actually, he won. Playing by the rules. You can question the rules all you want, you can question whether the checks and balances that were in place were effective, you can postulate Bush defeats based on different voter guestimates, but, following the system that has been in place for quite some time now, since what, 1804? I'll give you a break, since you're Angry, but give it up already. You sicken me with your partisan puppet talk.
If they were the size of a magic marker, it wouldn't bother me at all.
.
Clicky. Recursion gone wild.
gets a smack with a ball-peen hammer,
Is that CmdrTaco's "power"? That explains why he keeps it a secret. Even a framing hammer is more intimidating than a ball-peen. Possible a sledge, if he's into the whole "intimidation by display of strength" thing.
"squeaking" means "having (potential?) financial consequences,"
We are eating up (Miniscule?) bandwidth and storage space, plus using electricity making the DB do all of these queries. If enough people chipped in, it would become a noticable effect.
If there's no financial penalty for the current course of action, why would they change
I'm thinking about that saying, "The squeaking wheel gets the grease". Maybe if we complain enough, they will slow down on new development and actually fix all the bugs on the current system, and, maybe if we gripe enough, they'll set up a test environment and do things decently and in order.
If I had to communicate anything other than "Our base is 0wn3d!" I would probably get something better.
Actually, you'd probably be able to communicate with your team better, and they might appreciate it more, if you said, "Our base is owned!" rather than, "Our base is Zero double-you en Three-dee!"
Wow, that's an Astounding Coincidence! Do you think it's a sign, some sort of miraculous finger of God pointing you to a career as a washed up heavy metal guitarist?
Deep man, really deep.
Just an aside, your title is misleading. Your post is in no way funny. Now, a more accurate title would have been, "Boring thing is...".
Meh.
have invented a system that makes us keep our mouths shut...
No, you can still open your mouth, but now people's eyes don't glaze over as you describe, in detail, the lapping of your processor before you attach your custom made 40 gpm watercooling system to it, and achieve a 13% higher overclock than with the factory hsf combo.
It also makes all that inscecent yammering about HL2, Doom3, and DNF suddenly, magically, go away.
Ah, the peace. The solitude.
Hey, how come nobodies listening to my story about tweaking the Mandrake kernel for faster database resonse times? Don't act like you can't hear me. You know you can! Listen to me! I DESERVE TO BE HEARD! STOP LAUGHING AT ME. I DO NOT LOOK LIKE A GASPING FISH!!!! I WILL HACK ALL YOUR COMPUTERS AND ALL YOUR FAMILIES COMPUTERS. YOU WILL PAY!!!
Oh, how you will pay...
So now they're threatening physical violence and homicide if I don't agree with them? This place is becomming more and more like Jim Jones' People's Church...
I've got to break loose before they start asking for money, and brainwashing hordes of readers to think exactly like each other, and to shut down any discension. Oy, my mind is already starting to get numb!