"If this is true, then a 2% failure rate would be extremely low in comparison to traditional paper ballot systems."
Cite please.
"Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy."
If the voter (usually via thier representative) can't determine that the election procedure is trustworthy then by default it isn't.
PS: To the OP and others who keep making the suggestion that "stupid people shoudn't be allowed to vote" - I submit that they are petitioning to disenfanchise themselves but are too stupid to realise it.
"Don't dismiss the message because of the messenger."
I for one dissmiss it because it does not even try to propose a solution, I would hardly even call it a "message", it's more of a general complaint that can be summed up as "the net sucks".
According to comments from others it would appear his site has improved recently. My guess is he solved his own scalability problems and now feels his "genius" would be best utilized by "educating" others who did not have those problems in the first place. Had he told us what he did to his own site to improve it then the "message" may have been worth reading, but as it is his message is not content-centric, it's content-phobic.
Nice distinction. I worked for big blue for several years as a contractor, I realised one particular project was going nowhere when our (genuine) manager was shifted sideways and replaced by a late 20-ish biologist who kept playing with a yo-yo.
Sorry to hear that but it does get better in uni. I'm a computer scientist from Victoria, in the early 90's I taught lab classes at RMIT and have been a commercial developer for 20 odd yrs. My own son did his VCE in the late 90's and I have to say the teacher was brilliant. Basically the course consisted of writing a database in Pascal which if done correctly (in stages that build on previous stages), is a great introduction to programing. The same teacher taught maths to my daughter, he introduced the concepts of algebra using excell which I also thought was a good use of technology for year 7-8(?)
However I realise everyone's milage will vary with the education system and some of the hoops you jump through are just societies "rubber stamp" or even your teacher being "human". If you find your course boring you have to be carefull you actually do know what they want you to know. I got bored and dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11 and it wasn't until I was thirty that I got a chance to go to uni again as a mature age student. No matter which way you look at it, failing because you haven't memorised the sequence of menu selections required to create a pie-graph isn't going to help you.
Yes, I remeber reading my dad's copy in the early 70's, and it doesn't say that "incompetent people get promoted" it says people get promoted to their level of incompetence and then remain at that level.
BTW: The "zen" of the Peter Principle is to realize it applies to EVERYONE, including yourself. This is why the best project managers will happily admit they "don't know anything" when in reality they probably have 20+yrs experience on the floor.
"When people say they are opposed to wealth redistribution, they mean when government money goes to those who, in their view, haven't earned it, e.g. welfare recipients."
The GP is correct, most people don't understand or care what "wealth redistribution" means, they just don't want to pay tax. They see tax as a pure cost and have never once sat down and tallied up what they get in return.
For instance how many 5 year olds have "earned" the government money that is spent on their education? How many welfare recipients have spent the last 50-60yrs paying taxes to build the infrastructure that is used by the taxpayers of today?
"Manual counting is practical when the ballots are simple. With Texas and Florida having outrageously large ballots (multipage, double sided affairs), manual counting isn't nearly as simple as you portray it to be."
It's not about simplicity it's about TRUST. It's not about trusting a machine either, it's about trusting the system as a whole, sysadmins are never going to be as transparent as the counters in a paper election are.
Here in Australia we have paper and proportional voting and routinely get the count done the same night as the election. Texas and Florida simply have badly designed ballots by the sounds of things, they also have a taste for paperless voting, negligence/malice - take your pick.
I can tell you why I don't like it at first sniff, I'm a coumputer scientist with a fair amount of years and math under my belt and from the link you gave I barely understand what it's supposed to be and have no idea how you would implement such a thing to improve over pen and paper (which by my reckoning has already proven itself to be a secure MPC).
"The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly. Everybody, not just programmers, can watch the process and see what's happening. There's no "black magic" involved and it's completely transparent."
May I just add that those who don't understand this are doomed to screw things up until they do.
"So clearly, the only right time for a mother to no longer be allowed to abort their child, is after they no longer require others to feed and pamper them and they are able to fend for themselves."
As the father of two grown children I can attest to the fact that that point in time arrives about 15-20yrs after they are born.
Oh! It refers to the hippy commune sterotype, tree-huggers living in the bush, stoned 24X7, and yes probably having outdoor sex...lucky bastards... "Poofs" is a derogotory term but they would vote for Molly Medrum as prime-minister...you're spot on with the sheep thing:o.
"Well, I don't support the right of any group to break the law, but I do support free speech, no matter who is speaking or what they are saying. A Jamaican friend of mine summed it up for me - he doesn't care what any bigot says, and will happily tell them so to their faces."
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our mind." - Bob Marley.
I stand corrected I was thinking of Argyle but they have 800 staff, perhaps what I vauguely recall as an automated diamond mine was actually their automated "alluvial procesing plant".
"Coal has nothing to do with smelting alumina to make aluminium. However it does require a huge amount of electricity - via coal fired power plants to do."
Umm yeah, that was my point, my question is why do we need to ship the ore several thousand kilometers to use a coal fired plant? Is all that transport infrastructure and another mine for the coal really more economical than an onsite solar thermal plant? And why the hell are they expanding the existng smelter?
"fact is that to create iron from iron ore you must add carbon (in the form of coking coal) to reduce the iron oxide (iron ore) into pig iron. Using solar energy to provide the heat for this process will still release huge amounts of C02."
Yes and I don't propose we stop using concrete either, in fact in general I don't propose to change the laws of chemistry, OTOH the "laws" of economics could do with some tweeking...
Heh a mate of mine blasted two cars who cut him off at high speed at a point where the highway merged into one lane. As he blasted and swore the speakers in the rear of the second car flashed red and blue for a few seconds while the driver held up his middle finger.
I have, and I can listen to informed reason - tell me what's the problem with pebble bed reactors?
I'm not sure if your obtuse post is infering I'm youthfull because of a typo and/or conservative because I don't subscribe to the nuclear taboo, but just to be clear - you're wrong on both counts.
"Which is a crying shame considering how much uranium and easy disposal options we have. Fear trumps reason again. Cue: 30 year outdated arguments.."
The point is mute because as others have pointed out TFA claims that AGL will use renewables, however I have to object to your implied conclusion that Australia should build reactors.
Australia has both huge uranium reserves AND huge renewable potential (enough to power most of SE Asia), why not sell the uranium and disposal services to other nations that don't have such an embarrasing wealth and under-utilisation of renewables? Personally I think the shame I cry over the most is how we consitently sell taxpayer funded IP for pennies, as in the case of The Sun King. IMHO we should be selling uranium and keeping ideas, not the other way around.
The meat from the link:
"The new technology Dr Shi helped develop has now been put into commercial production at this factory near Leipzig, in Germany. But it is protected by patent - he might have helped develop it but the Sun King can't use it. Indeed the failure by Pacific Solar to commercialise the technology so disheartened Dr Shi at the time that he considered giving away research altogether and starting a restaurant or a supermarket in Sydney...[snip: but he went back home to China]...Six years later Dr Shi and his wife have transformed $6 million in seed capital into a $6 billion company. Oh, not only did we sell his invention, we even built the factory for the Germans who are now pumping about a gigawatt of EXCESS back into the grid from rooftop PV - quite an achivement considering "sunshine" is not the first thing that comes to one's mind when they think about German weather.
And while we are at it, why do we ship ore to China to smelt with coal, why not refine the metal where it is dug up using solar thermal and "value add" to our product? Even the small quantity we smelt is done with horrendous inefficiency and still makes a profit, eg: Aluminium in the south using a purpose built coal plant but the ore is dug up under the sweltering sun in the north. To get the ore from north to south there's all this infrastructure of railraods, ports and ships. If we can automate the world's largest diamond mine to operate with a dozen staff why can't we build intergrated mine/refine/power stations that take maybe 100 people to run? Plonk it on the ore deposit and away you go.
If I had my tinfoil hat on I might think that a lot of the insanity in the economy is nothing more than a "full employment" scheme for western society.
Politics: The Greens have two problems, first their nuclear dogma directly contradicts their platform of "science based policy". Second their leader is as boring as dogshit. I'm an old fart who was an adult during the Franklin thing and I admire Brown for what he did back then, I also admire him for standing up for the rule of law in the Hicks case even though Howard neutered him by branding him a "Hick's supporter". I really DO want to hear what he has to say but his voice and his predictable dogma are like auditory valium, two sentances and I'm asleep. The last time I remember him doing anything effective was the time he got the Greens locked out of parliment while the Chineese were visting, and when I say effective I mean he was effective in convincing the nation that he's a wack-job. (Not that different to how McCain has "lost his way", once that happens your credibility is dead to the casual observer and the one-eyed dogmatists are drawn to you like flies are drawn to a turd.)
"Conroy may be Labor by party, but would you call censorship on this scale progressive?"
I'm would not call myself a conservative and I am not in favour of censorship but what on earth makes you think that censorship is not promoted by some "progressives"?
To be sure Americans would call him a "moderate" in his own party and Liberal vs Labor doesn't give the voter a lot of choice but the Labor party is definitely to the left of the Liberal party. They were born from the union movement, strongly support social welfare and are no more or less religious than the Liberals.
This traditional view has changed over the last couple of decades mainly because Labor governments have campained on a platform of fiscal conservatisim and social liberalisim. The last real left wing government was in the 70's.
Personally I grossly generalise Australian politics as: White collar = Liberal, Blue Collar = Labor, Farmers = National, Bush Bunnies = Greens.
Yes exactly, except he will be able to point to the slashdot summary as proof it was the conservatives.
From the summary: "The Government Minister in charge of the censorship plan, Conservative Stephen Conroy"
For the edification of non-Aussies, Stephen Conroy is a federal minister in a left-wing government, the conservatives (known as the Liberal party) are currently in opposition - clear as mud?
Slashdot Mirror
"If this is true, then a 2% failure rate would be extremely low in comparison to traditional paper ballot systems."
Cite please.
"Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy."
If the voter (usually via thier representative) can't determine that the election procedure is trustworthy then by default it isn't.
PS: To the OP and others who keep making the suggestion that "stupid people shoudn't be allowed to vote" - I submit that they are petitioning to disenfanchise themselves but are too stupid to realise it.
"Don't dismiss the message because of the messenger."
I for one dissmiss it because it does not even try to propose a solution, I would hardly even call it a "message", it's more of a general complaint that can be summed up as "the net sucks".
According to comments from others it would appear his site has improved recently. My guess is he solved his own scalability problems and now feels his "genius" would be best utilized by "educating" others who did not have those problems in the first place. Had he told us what he did to his own site to improve it then the "message" may have been worth reading, but as it is his message is not content-centric, it's content-phobic.
Pffft, New Zealander's aren't that easy to fool are they Richard...
What if the "morons" got together and declared that YOU were too stupid to vote? - Nah, that would never happen, would it?
Nice distinction. I worked for big blue for several years as a contractor, I realised one particular project was going nowhere when our (genuine) manager was shifted sideways and replaced by a late 20-ish biologist who kept playing with a yo-yo.
Sorry to hear that but it does get better in uni. I'm a computer scientist from Victoria, in the early 90's I taught lab classes at RMIT and have been a commercial developer for 20 odd yrs. My own son did his VCE in the late 90's and I have to say the teacher was brilliant. Basically the course consisted of writing a database in Pascal which if done correctly (in stages that build on previous stages), is a great introduction to programing. The same teacher taught maths to my daughter, he introduced the concepts of algebra using excell which I also thought was a good use of technology for year 7-8(?)
However I realise everyone's milage will vary with the education system and some of the hoops you jump through are just societies "rubber stamp" or even your teacher being "human". If you find your course boring you have to be carefull you actually do know what they want you to know. I got bored and dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11 and it wasn't until I was thirty that I got a chance to go to uni again as a mature age student. No matter which way you look at it, failing because you haven't memorised the sequence of menu selections required to create a pie-graph isn't going to help you.
Once you are confident you know the course material and can pass the course with ease, read what interests you the most, if your interested in programming/science then personally I recommend three "classics", The Art of Programming", The C Programming Language", The Demon Haunted World.
Now get off my lawn!
"That's the Peter Principle."
Yes, I remeber reading my dad's copy in the early 70's, and it doesn't say that "incompetent people get promoted" it says people get promoted to their level of incompetence and then remain at that level.
BTW: The "zen" of the Peter Principle is to realize it applies to EVERYONE, including yourself. This is why the best project managers will happily admit they "don't know anything" when in reality they probably have 20+yrs experience on the floor.
"When people say they are opposed to wealth redistribution, they mean when government money goes to those who, in their view, haven't earned it, e.g. welfare recipients."
The GP is correct, most people don't understand or care what "wealth redistribution" means, they just don't want to pay tax. They see tax as a pure cost and have never once sat down and tallied up what they get in return.
For instance how many 5 year olds have "earned" the government money that is spent on their education? How many welfare recipients have spent the last 50-60yrs paying taxes to build the infrastructure that is used by the taxpayers of today?
Ahhh yes the good 'ol days.....are overatted.
"Manual counting is practical when the ballots are simple. With Texas and Florida having outrageously large ballots (multipage, double sided affairs), manual counting isn't nearly as simple as you portray it to be."
It's not about simplicity it's about TRUST. It's not about trusting a machine either, it's about trusting the system as a whole, sysadmins are never going to be as transparent as the counters in a paper election are.
Here in Australia we have paper and proportional voting and routinely get the count done the same night as the election. Texas and Florida simply have badly designed ballots by the sounds of things, they also have a taste for paperless voting, negligence/malice - take your pick.
I can tell you why I don't like it at first sniff, I'm a coumputer scientist with a fair amount of years and math under my belt and from the link you gave I barely understand what it's supposed to be and have no idea how you would implement such a thing to improve over pen and paper (which by my reckoning has already proven itself to be a secure MPC).
"The _only_ practicable and moderately secure way to do an election is by pen and paper and manual counting. It's done all over the world and it works near flawlessly. Everybody, not just programmers, can watch the process and see what's happening. There's no "black magic" involved and it's completely transparent."
May I just add that those who don't understand this are doomed to screw things up until they do.
...no I don't want that, I want the law changed so that bankers get punished for what they did, I want my pound of flesh and I want it NOW! /jk
"The correct term is not "retrospective law", but rather "ex post facto law". See the constitution."
US or Australian version?
"So clearly, the only right time for a mother to no longer be allowed to abort their child, is after they no longer require others to feed and pamper them and they are able to fend for themselves."
As the father of two grown children I can attest to the fact that that point in time arrives about 15-20yrs after they are born.
Oh! It refers to the hippy commune sterotype, tree-huggers living in the bush, stoned 24X7, and yes probably having outdoor sex...lucky bastards... "Poofs" is a derogotory term but they would vote for Molly Medrum as prime-minister...you're spot on with the sheep thing :o.
"Well, I don't support the right of any group to break the law, but I do support free speech, no matter who is speaking or what they are saying. A Jamaican friend of mine summed it up for me - he doesn't care what any bigot says, and will happily tell them so to their faces."
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our mind." - Bob Marley.
I stand corrected I was thinking of Argyle but they have 800 staff, perhaps what I vauguely recall as an automated diamond mine was actually their automated "alluvial procesing plant".
"Coal has nothing to do with smelting alumina to make aluminium. However it does require a huge amount of electricity - via coal fired power plants to do."
Umm yeah, that was my point, my question is why do we need to ship the ore several thousand kilometers to use a coal fired plant? Is all that transport infrastructure and another mine for the coal really more economical than an onsite solar thermal plant? And why the hell are they expanding the existng smelter?
"fact is that to create iron from iron ore you must add carbon (in the form of coking coal) to reduce the iron oxide (iron ore) into pig iron. Using solar energy to provide the heat for this process will still release huge amounts of C02."
Yes and I don't propose we stop using concrete either, in fact in general I don't propose to change the laws of chemistry, OTOH the "laws" of economics could do with some tweeking...
Heh a mate of mine blasted two cars who cut him off at high speed at a point where the highway merged into one lane. As he blasted and swore the speakers in the rear of the second car flashed red and blue for a few seconds while the driver held up his middle finger.
"Do a little research, on many topics."
I have, and I can listen to informed reason - tell me what's the problem with pebble bed reactors?
I'm not sure if your obtuse post is infering I'm youthfull because of a typo and/or conservative because I don't subscribe to the nuclear taboo, but just to be clear - you're wrong on both counts.
Moot
;)
I have nothing to say about that...
"Which is a crying shame considering how much uranium and easy disposal options we have. Fear trumps reason again. Cue: 30 year outdated arguments.."
The point is mute because as others have pointed out TFA claims that AGL will use renewables, however I have to object to your implied conclusion that Australia should build reactors.
Australia has both huge uranium reserves AND huge renewable potential (enough to power most of SE Asia), why not sell the uranium and disposal services to other nations that don't have such an embarrasing wealth and under-utilisation of renewables? Personally I think the shame I cry over the most is how we consitently sell taxpayer funded IP for pennies, as in the case of The Sun King. IMHO we should be selling uranium and keeping ideas, not the other way around.
The meat from the link:
"The new technology Dr Shi helped develop has now been put into commercial production at this factory near Leipzig, in Germany. But it is protected by patent - he might have helped develop it but the Sun King can't use it. Indeed the failure by Pacific Solar to commercialise the technology so disheartened Dr Shi at the time that he considered giving away research altogether and starting a restaurant or a supermarket in Sydney...[snip: but he went back home to China]...Six years later Dr Shi and his wife have transformed $6 million in seed capital into a $6 billion company. Oh, not only did we sell his invention, we even built the factory for the Germans who are now pumping about a gigawatt of EXCESS back into the grid from rooftop PV - quite an achivement considering "sunshine" is not the first thing that comes to one's mind when they think about German weather.
And while we are at it, why do we ship ore to China to smelt with coal, why not refine the metal where it is dug up using solar thermal and "value add" to our product? Even the small quantity we smelt is done with horrendous inefficiency and still makes a profit, eg: Aluminium in the south using a purpose built coal plant but the ore is dug up under the sweltering sun in the north. To get the ore from north to south there's all this infrastructure of railraods, ports and ships. If we can automate the world's largest diamond mine to operate with a dozen staff why can't we build intergrated mine/refine/power stations that take maybe 100 people to run? Plonk it on the ore deposit and away you go.
If I had my tinfoil hat on I might think that a lot of the insanity in the economy is nothing more than a "full employment" scheme for western society.
Politics: The Greens have two problems, first their nuclear dogma directly contradicts their platform of "science based policy". Second their leader is as boring as dogshit. I'm an old fart who was an adult during the Franklin thing and I admire Brown for what he did back then, I also admire him for standing up for the rule of law in the Hicks case even though Howard neutered him by branding him a "Hick's supporter". I really DO want to hear what he has to say but his voice and his predictable dogma are like auditory valium, two sentances and I'm asleep. The last time I remember him doing anything effective was the time he got the Greens locked out of parliment while the Chineese were visting, and when I say effective I mean he was effective in convincing the nation that he's a wack-job. (Not that different to how McCain has "lost his way", once that happens your credibility is dead to the casual observer and the one-eyed dogmatists are drawn to you like flies are drawn to a turd.)
"Conroy may be Labor by party, but would you call censorship on this scale progressive?"
I'm would not call myself a conservative and I am not in favour of censorship but what on earth makes you think that censorship is not promoted by some "progressives"?
"The summary used a worthless label".
It worthless because it's incorrect.
To be sure Americans would call him a "moderate" in his own party and Liberal vs Labor doesn't give the voter a lot of choice but the Labor party is definitely to the left of the Liberal party. They were born from the union movement, strongly support social welfare and are no more or less religious than the Liberals.
This traditional view has changed over the last couple of decades mainly because Labor governments have campained on a platform of fiscal conservatisim and social liberalisim. The last real left wing government was in the 70's.
Personally I grossly generalise Australian politics as: White collar = Liberal, Blue Collar = Labor, Farmers = National, Bush Bunnies = Greens.
Yes exactly, except he will be able to point to the slashdot summary as proof it was the conservatives.
From the summary: "The Government Minister in charge of the censorship plan, Conservative Stephen Conroy"
For the edification of non-Aussies, Stephen Conroy is a federal minister in a left-wing government, the conservatives (known as the Liberal party) are currently in opposition - clear as mud?