"Can they at least use calculators? Can they enter the votes into a spreadsheet?"
Yes, but the idea of human counters is that they are drawn from all of the different candidates loyal campain workers in equal number. They can add up any way they like but the point is the "other team" can also use their own methods on the very same ballots. IMHO you underestimate the value of the existing adversarial system where all sides must agree how to count EVERY ballot. BTW: I am not from the US so the fact that an argument about "hanging chads" was heard 12,000 miles away speaks volumes for how seriously the physical act of counting should be taken.
"In any event, the schemes I've discussed don't really use machines to count the votes."
I don't dispute that, as I understand it the main goal of your scheme is to allow the voter to verify to him/herself that their vote was counted correctly, but as another poster said this is a "red herring". The problem with voter verification after the fact is: if a voter can "prove" to themselves their vote was correctly counted after the fact then it is no longer a secret ballot, ie: the voter can be coerced/forced to "prove" how they voted, it's common knowledge Saddam obtained his famous 99% results using this particular technique in a unusually systematic and ruthless manner.
"So I am saying, your assumptions about voting are broken. If you want to be able to judge voting systems competently, the first thing you have to do is figure out what your requirements are and what's good and what's bad. And you are probably doing that wrong because you have a lot of mistaken assumptions about properties of voting systems. (Not you personally.)"
I've answered you elsewhere but this bit struck me, I am of the opinion you (personally) do not understand the "checks and balances" built into the traditional human counting system. As a degree qualified developer with 20yrs commercial experience it is my considered (and privately researched) opinion is that there is no "safe" way for a machine to count votes, the human counting system is by far the most fault tolerent system.
"I take offense at your usage of the word "dick". To me, a "dick" is a person who, through malice, indifference, or stupidity, adversely affects someone else."
Go away, your nerdy definitions are cluttering up my pornographic search results.
"How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper...."
The basic protocols of manual counting have been tried and tested for well over 100yrs. They are not perfect and are suscepible to "retail fraud" (eg: box stuffing, stand over tactics, ect), ANYTHING that can tie an individual to a particular vote opens the door to stand-over merchants. What is worse is that ANY counting machine is suceptible to "wholesale fraud" (eg: one person + one point of attack = flip an entire election any way you want).
The old fashion system is fast, efficient, auditable, well understood and extensively tested - most importantly the human counters MISTRUST each other by design. Before you reinvent the wheel try googling for "election observers" or "secret ballot".
"I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help."
There is just one simple, practical, logical rule for machine assisted voting that anyone need remeber:
A machine that prints your choice is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your choice is at best a waste of money.
OBL's stated reason for 9/11 was "revenge for US bombs raining down on Lebanon". The fact that US funds, weapons and trainning created this mess in an effort to drive the soviets out of Afghanistan would be totally lost on a patriotic parrot. The Taliban were pals with the US and they were praised far and wide for "eliminating opium poppys" and "driving the soviets out". Nobody "asked for" 9/11 but to claim it was unprovoked is complete and utter nonesense. Your whole post is one sad, misinformed appology for Bush and his neo-con mates.
"we fight for the rights of others to make their own choices."
Yeah right, tell that to the 70+% of Palestinians who democratically elected Hamas to represent their interests. When the US fights, the rest of the planet is left with one choice: "either your with us or against us".
Perhaps you could point to a couple of these "linguists", I would like to see their reasoning but I am assuming they are the same as the "scientists" who to this day continue to poo-poo Jane Goodall's work.
In other words, I assume their objections boil down to the philisophical viewpoint that "humans are not animals" and like yourself wouldn't be seen dead "talking to a dog" even if it got up and started reciting Shakespear.
"51% of Americans voted for George Bush Jr. Twice."
From what I have read a USA election doesn't even attract 51% of eligible voters, let alone 51% of Americans.
A misunderstanding is also evident by all the posts about "suing", the ACCC is a government body similar to an ombudsman. It has just enough teeth to nip at the heels of large corporations, they can impose fines when companies are colluding to rig prices and/or service levels. Most Aussies see the ACCC for what it is...state sponsored FUD department designed to misdirect real issues using irrelevant drivel about petrol prices and Google search rankings.
"From what I have heard" some slashdotter's think they know more about things they have never heard of than the actual scientists who have spent decades studying the subject. That's nothing like science, it's just the parroting of ancient man/beast concepts.
As the owner of many large parrots and dogs over the last 40yrs, I can attest to the fact that both species understand certain words, phrases and gestures to the point that they can comunicate what they desire. Of course the owner also needs a modicum of intelligence before the animal goes to the trouble of communicating with them.
"As any psychologist can tell you...[parents have a stong influence]....discuss Paris Hilton's latest cunt flash [vs] mathematical proofs.......the child will develop an interest in math and science"
Yes, but I belive Gallileo was the orphaned son of a prostitute and even nerdy kids need to learn something about cunts ( both kinds ).
Yes, most corporate users don't realise there are generally three levels of help desk on a large system.
1. The "one number" help desk.
2. The system specific help desk.
3. The development team.
One time I had an irrate customer reach me down at the third level, I asked him to explain the problem and he started ranting and raving about how he had been bounced all round the company for a couple of weeks and insisted I "look it up because he has told the story to enough people and just wants it fixed". I said something like "You won't bounce any further, I wrote the program. You MAY have discovered an unknown bug and we want to know first hand what's going on.". He calmed down immediately and after I listened to his problems (all but one of them totally unrelated) I organised to send out a replacement laptop so we could investigate his problem at our lesiure. Another problem that made it down to third level quite quickly meant a week or two of interstate travel (Australia), an investigation by "the IT department" into the tower logs, and a motorala expert flown in from the states. All this to investigate "bad reception" and discover a certain type of radio modem had a hitherto unknown firmware bug that meant it stayed "attached" to the first tower it "saw".
One user with a specific problem out of thousands without it means the problem goes directly to lowest priority unless the developers can be found and shown the bug, OTOH a spreading case of "bad reception" correlated to a certain type of modem that is "not repetable in the lab" is a high priority concern - IIRC the one user turned out have had a faulty system clock that was screwing up his automatic job scheduling and what the dev team found was incorporated into the higher levels of help desk in the hopes we could avoid future stressed out employees/customers with broken hardware. This just means that a higher level help desk had one more inane question - "Does your clock keep accurate time" - it would be irrelevant to 99% of the calls, OTOH: just one percent of 10,000 users is still quite time consuming, good job the wonky modem was caught and patched before all but a couple of dozen "trial users" received the new hardware.
Here in Oz the search for a run of the mill tourist (who is presumed to be in mortal danger) gets similar effort to a missing prime minister, however the length and publicity of the search for a presumed body would seem to relate to your social standing, most "lost in the bush" searches are scaled back after a couple of weeks depending on the chances of survival - none are forgotten by the authorities. Judging by the intensity of the search for the missing English girl in Portugal I would say Europeans behave in a similar manner and I think many US citizens at least expect similar treatment in their own country.
Note: Because of the circumsatnces of his dissapearence Holt was presumed dead after two days and despite a long and expensive search for the body, it was never found (people get suspicious when a politician or a billionare dies and there is no body to burry). I live not far from where Holt went missing, but hundreds (if not thousands) of seals and the two ton white pointers that prey on them live closer.
"My truck is completely invisible under those lights"
Driver: I was turning right officer when I spotted this guy was hovering 4' above the ground, he was travelling along the road with a lunchbox and newspaper like he was driving an invisible truck or something...next thing I knew I hit the tree.
Officer: We better get you checked out for concussion.
That would indicate that nowhere on Earth could you get a "darkness" that existed in the 50's and I find that kinda hard to belive since particulate pollution in the form of sulphur and soot was worse then than it is now and as another post pointed out has little affect at high altitude. Also I assume if he flew planes in the 50's your dad is now a passenger and (besides the double glazing) the inside of a modern commercial jet is probably a lot brighter than the cockpit of a B49.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 60's in the rural outskirts of Melbourne Australia (40-50Km east of the city center) there were few street lights and the sky at night was nothing less than brilliant, patches of stars so numerous and intesnse they looked like small thin clouds. In the early 70's a faint glow appeared in the west (like twilight was refusing to end), now the city has grown upwards and outwards, "twilight" is permenent, the market gardens where I grew up have been replaced with houses, factories and shopping malls.
I now live on the beach (much cleaner than it was in the 70's), it's ~20Km south-east of the city center. The shit farm still operates but long ago stopped pumping turds directly into the ocean and now pumps out clean water that has restored the wetlands into a haven for water birds. Sitting between the ocean on one side and a large strip of wetlands on the other I can still easily make out the planets and the main contellations, on an clear night after a storm the milky way and the seven sisters are visable away from street/house lights. But to get the same sort of view I had from my back yard when I was a kid requires a two hour drive in order to put a mountains range between me and the permenent twilight. In other words, the "primeval sky" (best viewed with a young naked eye) is still there, but these days I really have to go out of my way to find it.
"How can IT think it can tell us what software it does and does not support?"
Stop firing people and grow up a little bit. IT doesn't "think", it works on mandated processes so that the people who work there can be seen as easily replaceable cogs by the people who put them there. If you have ever had anything to do with a "mission critical" system in a large corporation you would know the "IT department" can be extremely cooperative when the board of directors are involved. Like I said I am a developer and see that as a different task to "the IT department", I have never worked in "the IT department" but IMHO it looks like an underpaid and thankless job.
Exactly, IT is there to manage "the network", not spend all day repairing the broken apps of OTHER DEPARTMENTS. As a software developer for 20 years I see IT as providing a "sandpit" for the rest of us to fight. They are the "gatekeeper" whose demands usually seem quite reasonable demands (if you bother to ask before you build your app). And when the department that payed for the app are not willing to pay the dev team to maintain what they produce....well...it's a bit rich blaming IT who are even further removed from an orphaned/legacy project.
I am old enough to remeber the TMI excitement, the media worry AT THE TIME was a "china syndome" event ( I belive the movie came afterwards ). I cannot remeber any "blob" ( the movie came first ) but it was certainly a concern in the media. However the original concern seems to have morphed over the years into a fruitless hunt for side-effects from the vapour release.
In the 50's & 60's atmospheric tests spread airborne plutonium across the planet that turned up in alarming concentrations in childeren's bones (CSIRO-Australia first discovered this in the glands of sheep and came under enormous political pressure from the US, UK and Oz governments to burry the findings). This is one reason why the Australian & NZ public were so fervently against the French Pacific tests in the 70's. The puff of steam from TMI was in the media because of "what could have happened", not what did happen.
Chernobyl was detected across the northern hemisphere triggering a ban on dairy products in the UK, ect. That is what scared the shit out of people when talking about reactors, not TMI. The problem I have with the sudden resurgence of interest in reators around the world (apart from the current politics that is tearing up treaties in an attempt to control the market on fuel) is that they still want great big central plants, far too little attention is paid to the pebble bed idea.
However when you weigh the risks from pollution and GHG, large modern reators with strict oversight (re: modern day France and other EU countries) are a signifigantly lower risk to health, environment and infrastructure than coal fired plants. But "the public" is not a logical beast, consider the fact that a random individual is far more likely to be murdered by their spouse than by a terrorist.
My source - CSIRO and the foggy memory of a distant but interested observer.
As much as I like to bash "corporate media" I simply can't agree they ALL behave like Alan Jones and the infomercials disguised as current affairs programs. The morning talk show on channel TEN had the organiser of the main protest (scheduled for Saturday) as a guest today, the two hosts (David & Kim) asked pertinent questions and got reasonable answers.
"marginalise dissent"
The main reason the protesters had to change their planned route (yet again) was that the cops suddenly decided a roadblock in the middle of the planned route was necassary, the court determined that said roadblock was likely to incite a violent confrontation. I expect to see the same agent provocators responsible for the Cronulla riots at work on Saturday.
Slashdot Mirror
"Can they at least use calculators? Can they enter the votes into a spreadsheet?"
Yes, but the idea of human counters is that they are drawn from all of the different candidates loyal campain workers in equal number. They can add up any way they like but the point is the "other team" can also use their own methods on the very same ballots. IMHO you underestimate the value of the existing adversarial system where all sides must agree how to count EVERY ballot. BTW: I am not from the US so the fact that an argument about "hanging chads" was heard 12,000 miles away speaks volumes for how seriously the physical act of counting should be taken.
"In any event, the schemes I've discussed don't really use machines to count the votes."
I don't dispute that, as I understand it the main goal of your scheme is to allow the voter to verify to him/herself that their vote was counted correctly, but as another poster said this is a "red herring". The problem with voter verification after the fact is: if a voter can "prove" to themselves their vote was correctly counted after the fact then it is no longer a secret ballot, ie: the voter can be coerced/forced to "prove" how they voted, it's common knowledge Saddam obtained his famous 99% results using this particular technique in a unusually systematic and ruthless manner.
"So I am saying, your assumptions about voting are broken. If you want to be able to judge voting systems competently, the first thing you have to do is figure out what your requirements are and what's good and what's bad. And you are probably doing that wrong because you have a lot of mistaken assumptions about properties of voting systems. (Not you personally.)"
I've answered you elsewhere but this bit struck me, I am of the opinion you (personally) do not understand the "checks and balances" built into the traditional human counting system. As a degree qualified developer with 20yrs commercial experience it is my considered (and privately researched) opinion is that there is no "safe" way for a machine to count votes, the human counting system is by far the most fault tolerent system.
"I take offense at your usage of the word "dick". To me, a "dick" is a person who, through malice, indifference, or stupidity, adversely affects someone else."
Go away, your nerdy definitions are cluttering up my pornographic search results.
"How is your vote being printed on a piece of paper...."
The basic protocols of manual counting have been tried and tested for well over 100yrs. They are not perfect and are suscepible to "retail fraud" (eg: box stuffing, stand over tactics, ect), ANYTHING that can tie an individual to a particular vote opens the door to stand-over merchants. What is worse is that ANY counting machine is suceptible to "wholesale fraud" (eg: one person + one point of attack = flip an entire election any way you want).
The old fashion system is fast, efficient, auditable, well understood and extensively tested - most importantly the human counters MISTRUST each other by design. Before you reinvent the wheel try googling for "election observers" or "secret ballot".
"I would have much more confidence in a cryptographic scheme that makes it effectively impossible for a voting machine to cheat. This is not all that difficult to accomplish and the necessary design criteria are widely available in the literature. A paper trail doesn't really help."
There is just one simple, practical, logical rule for machine assisted voting that anyone need remeber:
A machine that prints your choice is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts your choice is at best a waste of money.
Spoken like the real Archie Bunker.
OBL's stated reason for 9/11 was "revenge for US bombs raining down on Lebanon". The fact that US funds, weapons and trainning created this mess in an effort to drive the soviets out of Afghanistan would be totally lost on a patriotic parrot. The Taliban were pals with the US and they were praised far and wide for "eliminating opium poppys" and "driving the soviets out". Nobody "asked for" 9/11 but to claim it was unprovoked is complete and utter nonesense. Your whole post is one sad, misinformed appology for Bush and his neo-con mates.
"we fight for the rights of others to make their own choices."
Yeah right, tell that to the 70+% of Palestinians who democratically elected Hamas to represent their interests. When the US fights, the rest of the planet is left with one choice: "either your with us or against us".
""what I've heard" comes from reading linguists"
Perhaps you could point to a couple of these "linguists", I would like to see their reasoning but I am assuming they are the same as the "scientists" who to this day continue to poo-poo Jane Goodall's work.
In other words, I assume their objections boil down to the philisophical viewpoint that "humans are not animals" and like yourself wouldn't be seen dead "talking to a dog" even if it got up and started reciting Shakespear.
"....no longer definitions of political ideology but epithets"
Not the first time it's happened.
"51% of Americans voted for George Bush Jr. Twice."
From what I have read a USA election doesn't even attract 51% of eligible voters, let alone 51% of Americans.
A misunderstanding is also evident by all the posts about "suing", the ACCC is a government body similar to an ombudsman. It has just enough teeth to nip at the heels of large corporations, they can impose fines when companies are colluding to rig prices and/or service levels. Most Aussies see the ACCC for what it is...state sponsored FUD department designed to misdirect real issues using irrelevant drivel about petrol prices and Google search rankings.
"From what I have heard" some slashdotter's think they know more about things they have never heard of than the actual scientists who have spent decades studying the subject. That's nothing like science, it's just the parroting of ancient man/beast concepts.
As the owner of many large parrots and dogs over the last 40yrs, I can attest to the fact that both species understand certain words, phrases and gestures to the point that they can comunicate what they desire. Of course the owner also needs a modicum of intelligence before the animal goes to the trouble of communicating with them.
"As any psychologist can tell you...[parents have a stong influence]....discuss Paris Hilton's latest cunt flash [vs] mathematical proofs.......the child will develop an interest in math and science"
Yes, but I belive Gallileo was the orphaned son of a prostitute and even nerdy kids need to learn something about cunts ( both kinds ).
Yes, most corporate users don't realise there are generally three levels of help desk on a large system.
1. The "one number" help desk.
2. The system specific help desk.
3. The development team.
One time I had an irrate customer reach me down at the third level, I asked him to explain the problem and he started ranting and raving about how he had been bounced all round the company for a couple of weeks and insisted I "look it up because he has told the story to enough people and just wants it fixed". I said something like "You won't bounce any further, I wrote the program. You MAY have discovered an unknown bug and we want to know first hand what's going on.". He calmed down immediately and after I listened to his problems (all but one of them totally unrelated) I organised to send out a replacement laptop so we could investigate his problem at our lesiure. Another problem that made it down to third level quite quickly meant a week or two of interstate travel (Australia), an investigation by "the IT department" into the tower logs, and a motorala expert flown in from the states. All this to investigate "bad reception" and discover a certain type of radio modem had a hitherto unknown firmware bug that meant it stayed "attached" to the first tower it "saw".
One user with a specific problem out of thousands without it means the problem goes directly to lowest priority unless the developers can be found and shown the bug, OTOH a spreading case of "bad reception" correlated to a certain type of modem that is "not repetable in the lab" is a high priority concern - IIRC the one user turned out have had a faulty system clock that was screwing up his automatic job scheduling and what the dev team found was incorporated into the higher levels of help desk in the hopes we could avoid future stressed out employees/customers with broken hardware. This just means that a higher level help desk had one more inane question - "Does your clock keep accurate time" - it would be irrelevant to 99% of the calls, OTOH: just one percent of 10,000 users is still quite time consuming, good job the wonky modem was caught and patched before all but a couple of dozen "trial users" received the new hardware.
Here in Oz the search for a run of the mill tourist (who is presumed to be in mortal danger) gets similar effort to a missing prime minister, however the length and publicity of the search for a presumed body would seem to relate to your social standing, most "lost in the bush" searches are scaled back after a couple of weeks depending on the chances of survival - none are forgotten by the authorities. Judging by the intensity of the search for the missing English girl in Portugal I would say Europeans behave in a similar manner and I think many US citizens at least expect similar treatment in their own country.
Note: Because of the circumsatnces of his dissapearence Holt was presumed dead after two days and despite a long and expensive search for the body, it was never found (people get suspicious when a politician or a billionare dies and there is no body to burry). I live not far from where Holt went missing, but hundreds (if not thousands) of seals and the two ton white pointers that prey on them live closer.
"My truck is completely invisible under those lights"
Driver: I was turning right officer when I spotted this guy was hovering 4' above the ground, he was travelling along the road with a lunchbox and newspaper like he was driving an invisible truck or something...next thing I knew I hit the tree.
Officer: We better get you checked out for concussion.
That would indicate that nowhere on Earth could you get a "darkness" that existed in the 50's and I find that kinda hard to belive since particulate pollution in the form of sulphur and soot was worse then than it is now and as another post pointed out has little affect at high altitude. Also I assume if he flew planes in the 50's your dad is now a passenger and (besides the double glazing) the inside of a modern commercial jet is probably a lot brighter than the cockpit of a B49.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the 60's in the rural outskirts of Melbourne Australia (40-50Km east of the city center) there were few street lights and the sky at night was nothing less than brilliant, patches of stars so numerous and intesnse they looked like small thin clouds. In the early 70's a faint glow appeared in the west (like twilight was refusing to end), now the city has grown upwards and outwards, "twilight" is permenent, the market gardens where I grew up have been replaced with houses, factories and shopping malls.
I now live on the beach (much cleaner than it was in the 70's), it's ~20Km south-east of the city center. The shit farm still operates but long ago stopped pumping turds directly into the ocean and now pumps out clean water that has restored the wetlands into a haven for water birds. Sitting between the ocean on one side and a large strip of wetlands on the other I can still easily make out the planets and the main contellations, on an clear night after a storm the milky way and the seven sisters are visable away from street/house lights. But to get the same sort of view I had from my back yard when I was a kid requires a two hour drive in order to put a mountains range between me and the permenent twilight. In other words, the "primeval sky" (best viewed with a young naked eye) is still there, but these days I really have to go out of my way to find it.
Oblig. Simpsons
If it's happening annually you can bet it's tied to someones "KPI". ;)
"How can IT think it can tell us what software it does and does not support?"
Stop firing people and grow up a little bit. IT doesn't "think", it works on mandated processes so that the people who work there can be seen as easily replaceable cogs by the people who put them there. If you have ever had anything to do with a "mission critical" system in a large corporation you would know the "IT department" can be extremely cooperative when the board of directors are involved. Like I said I am a developer and see that as a different task to "the IT department", I have never worked in "the IT department" but IMHO it looks like an underpaid and thankless job.
Exactly, IT is there to manage "the network", not spend all day repairing the broken apps of OTHER DEPARTMENTS. As a software developer for 20 years I see IT as providing a "sandpit" for the rest of us to fight. They are the "gatekeeper" whose demands usually seem quite reasonable demands (if you bother to ask before you build your app). And when the department that payed for the app are not willing to pay the dev team to maintain what they produce....well...it's a bit rich blaming IT who are even further removed from an orphaned/legacy project.
I am old enough to remeber the TMI excitement, the media worry AT THE TIME was a "china syndome" event ( I belive the movie came afterwards ). I cannot remeber any "blob" ( the movie came first ) but it was certainly a concern in the media. However the original concern seems to have morphed over the years into a fruitless hunt for side-effects from the vapour release.
In the 50's & 60's atmospheric tests spread airborne plutonium across the planet that turned up in alarming concentrations in childeren's bones (CSIRO-Australia first discovered this in the glands of sheep and came under enormous political pressure from the US, UK and Oz governments to burry the findings). This is one reason why the Australian & NZ public were so fervently against the French Pacific tests in the 70's. The puff of steam from TMI was in the media because of "what could have happened", not what did happen.
Chernobyl was detected across the northern hemisphere triggering a ban on dairy products in the UK, ect. That is what scared the shit out of people when talking about reactors, not TMI. The problem I have with the sudden resurgence of interest in reators around the world (apart from the current politics that is tearing up treaties in an attempt to control the market on fuel) is that they still want great big central plants, far too little attention is paid to the pebble bed idea.
However when you weigh the risks from pollution and GHG, large modern reators with strict oversight (re: modern day France and other EU countries) are a signifigantly lower risk to health, environment and infrastructure than coal fired plants. But "the public" is not a logical beast, consider the fact that a random individual is far more likely to be murdered by their spouse than by a terrorist.
My source - CSIRO and the foggy memory of a distant but interested observer.
"Fsck that, they should install a vaccine that makes the machine unbootable, and more or less requires a re-install and shutdown the system."
:0
MS already offer a range of products that do just that, I hear they are very popular.
"Does this presuppose the use of television or some such nonsense?"
No, it presupposes you have a life but since we are both posting on slashdot....
"This site is not about tech...its a liberal site"
Please be carefull with your terminology, you are confusing the Howard supporters with your use of the word "liberal".
As much as I like to bash "corporate media" I simply can't agree they ALL behave like Alan Jones and the infomercials disguised as current affairs programs. The morning talk show on channel TEN had the organiser of the main protest (scheduled for Saturday) as a guest today, the two hosts (David & Kim) asked pertinent questions and got reasonable answers.
"marginalise dissent"
The main reason the protesters had to change their planned route (yet again) was that the cops suddenly decided a roadblock in the middle of the planned route was necassary, the court determined that said roadblock was likely to incite a violent confrontation. I expect to see the same agent provocators responsible for the Cronulla riots at work on Saturday.
"What would be un-Whatever would be to charge or convict them."
They were released on bail after being charged under new security laws, the charge carries a maximum penalty of 6 months jail time if convicted.
Anyone who watches their show on a regular basis knows these guys have intellegence, wit, and most importantly a huge set of balls.