Somebody in your link really screwed up the Australian numbers, regular(91octane) is more expensive than super(95) and premium(98) is in the mid price??? I couldn't see a date on the table but if you rearrange the prices in the right order and multiply by ~1.2 they sound about right.
Hmmmm, seems when that sort of shit happens to me they have already got my money and I no longer have a "choice" of not paying. In other words, lots of luck with a refund when you refuse the search at the gate.
"Don't worry, by helping Chinese officials silence those Chinese citizens brave enough to criticize their regime, we are in fact bringing freedom to China!"
Trivia: Before the interwebs came along "Yahoo" was (still is) Australian slang for an obnoxiously loud fool, as in: "I wish that yahoo would shut the fuck up".
Not saying it's good/bad but why the permit? What's wrong with "public nuicance" laws that target the problem (blocked access) rather than the technicalities of tripods? Perhaps it's the risk that such "nuicance" laws might backfire and the (political/commercial) event attracting tripods could be seen by the courts to be the "nuicance".
"They're automatically tracking everyone and keeping a log of that tracking indefinitely."
It does not say whether or not that is the case, the key phrase in your quotes is is "All matches". Are they talking about a match with a wanted plate, or does "match" mean the device was able to read the plate.
It's impossible to distinguish between "OMG 1984!" and "Hey they found my car!" from what is written in TFA.
Yes there's some truth there, but like NZ'ers it just encourages us to take the piss to a higher level. Don't underestimate public ridicule as a good "leveler", remeber Pauline Hanson was laughed out of politics first, and thrown in jail later. Little Johnny has told so many fibs that they (like the US Administration) are butt of all jokes, and the ridicule is not restricted to their own country (do a simple "bush" or "john howard" search on YouTube and then play spot the serious one).
Do you ever sit up and watch the parlimentry broadcasts, I do sometimes and it's as boring as dogshit - but a great "sleeping pill".
We are very much like the US in that we have a bad case of ADD when it comes to politics, however I think our collective "bullshit detector" seems to work ok - except for this guy(NSFW). He once stood for election on a country party ticket and now has a radio show dedicated to inciting race riots amoungst teen gangs. Problem is, his is the "most popular talk show" in Sydney, so naturally all the pollies line up to get on his show, which in turn makes his the most popular show...., you can see where I'm going.
"When all redundancy is removed, the bitstream is for all practical purposes random.....I dare you to propose a method that will defeat this approach reliably"
I think your reasoning is sound and the "art" bit is a nice touch, lets wait and see if he answers your dare with something more substantial than nitpicks.;)
My point (and I belive the GP's) is that it was a "quick OTP hack", building/obtaining/programming a device (specialized or otherwise) to generate white noise and convert into a digital form to obtain the random stream is not what I would call a "quick OTP hack".
"I keep being baffled by so-called "Computer Scientists"
Most people do:)
If you would like to be less "baffled" I respectfully suggest that you dampen your pedantic volume and listen to the quiet pragmatisim in the GP's OP.
"While that sounds cool and all, the question is, how difficult would it be to for them to program it print out the votes the way the voter put them in and then to count votes differently?"
Yes, the main issue is not the kind of ballot used, the issue is how do you "keep the bastards honest"?
It's not about a "perfect system" (there is no such thing), it's about minimizing the opportunity and scope for cheats. Provided the voter understands the ballot paper in the first place, a machine that prints the ballot for the voter is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts the ballot for the election is at best a waste of money.
A traditional hand-counted paper system (where the counters themselves are political adversaries) may be imperfect in many small ways that can be exploited by both sides. The traditional paper system with it's "checks and balances" (ie: international observers and adversarial counters) has been seen to be fair by countless real life tests all over the western world for at least the last 100yrs - why dick around with the fundemental principles of the most basic tool of democracy?
Trivia: Edison's first patented invention way back in 1869 was a mechanical voting machine - he proposed to install the system in the Senate to count up/down votes. The Senate declined to use it with many senators from all sides sighting it as a risk to democracy and an insult to their integrity.
It beggar's belief that an informed "Joe Sixpack" would fail to draw a similar conclusion.
"I don't need an auditable paper trail to prove that most voters are self-serving "what can you do for ME" idiots. People who can't tie their shoes, have no teeth, vote based on what the candidate says about baby jesus or what kind of free government services they'll get out of it, think men used to ride dinosaurs and pronounce cement like it was something that came out of the ocean"
Since it's a tad unusual to have a radio-active source lying around please point out why his simple but effective implementation would NEED a "trully random pad" other than to satisfy a highly pedantic definition of OTP.
"and you must use it only once."
I can't see where the OP says how many times he used it, can you?
Good points, I was a bit vaugue about automatic counting in my post and it pays to be explicit about these things.
"I've been an election integrity activists for about 2 years now."
My interest came about from the diebold machines a few years ago, I wouldn't call myself an activist but I usually put my $0.02 in on the many/. discussions. The electorol commision here in Australia was investigating the plausability of using diebold systems over here. The investigation IMHO was an "honest assesment" that basically said they wouldn't touch "paperless elections" with a cattle prod. Had they gone the other way I may have become more of an activist. ( The report itself is probably somewhere in this list )
The thing I think that smelt the worst in the last US election was the exit polls, one or two "odd counts" I can see as a statistical possibility, but as I understand it the "odd counts" were much more that that - so "odd" that it prompted Putin to make snide remark about the validity of the result. (Not saying that Putin is any kind of benchmark, but it was an extrodinary thing for him to say)
"with a computer, there is no doubt, it's either a 0 or a 1." - Maybe I'm feeding a troll but here goes anyway...
Speaking as degree qualified programmer with 20yrs experience, I don't trust the machines and TFA clearly demonstrates why.
My number one reason for distrusting computerised systems is that they enable "wholesale fraud" with a single point attack, it might be "unlikely" but it is a technical possibility that the result of the whole election could be predetermined and the "race fix" can be implemented by one person sitting at a desk. Worse still it's a technical possibility that a "fix" can be done in such a way that it is undetectable after the fact.
Contrast that risk with old-fashioned paper and international observers. With that system the best a cheat can hope for is "retail fraud" - some stuffed boxes over here, the senator's hound dogs voting over there, ect. Fraud and corruption are a fact of life, nowhere on the planet can they be totally eliminated from such high stakes "games" as national elections.
The traditional paper system with it's well-known and thouroughly tested procedures minimizes the risk of a "fixed race" simply because of the fact that it is much more difficult and requires a hell of a lot more people to get away with "wholesale fraud". Speed is not a big issue since there are plenty of counters in the form of eager voulenteers from the various parties. And it's crucial to security that you pair off "opposing counters" since they also embody the imporatnt "checks and balances" of watching each other like hawks and arguing so loudly about something as mundane as "hanging chads" that even I remeber it and I live 10,000 miles away!
Hi again, when I said I was genuine I meant it, so here goes.:)
In the same vein as the link I provided I am going to assume we have the same basic things in common. I was raised a Christian in the 60' and my mum was a sunday school teacher so I figure we have the same basic "values" although we may differ on the details. Don't get me wrong, I'n ot trying to "score points", "take the piss", or set you up for an intellectual and/or moral debate, I just want to let you know what I belive your blessing "told me" today through my "faith" in the Universe that connects us all, ( god if you insist:).
Today was a lovely sunny winter's day here in Oz, it's a Saturday and I went to visit a mate of mine I've known for 20yrs and had a cuppa with my daughter and her spouse. I was pulling out of my driveway and paused to put my sunglasses on and my mind "displayed" this...
"Have a Blessed day and I hope you don't play in the shadows."
Mabye my mind just connected the "sunshine-blessed day" link or the "sunglasses-shadow" theme, I don't know. I voted for the sunshine and drove off. Later when leaving my friends house, I again reached for my sunglasses and my mind "displayed" this...
"One of them is dedicated to Baptising the world and the other is dedicated to making sure there are no infidels...
A split second of hostility ran through me (often a remark like that would get a hostile and/or sarcastic reply from me),...why did I "turn the other cheek" like that, in fact I barely noticed it when replying? - just because he blessed me, WTF? I was interuppted by my mind "displaying"....
"don't play in the shadows"
As Homer Simpson would say "I hear that" and voted for the sunshine again.
When I got home I sat down to a meal in front of the TV and watched SBS world news, kinda like our version of BBC international. Main story is today's bloodshed at Pakistan's Red Mosque, the video was horrific (yet in reality everyday), twisted and chared chunks of cars littered the street, blood splattered walls..."red blood-red mosque" momentarly linked in my mind and then it "displayed" this...
"Me I choose to have faith in the one thing that I do not have: perfection."
"Pffft perfection" - I said to myself - "these pricks are after perfection too, hijacking faith to justify the conversion of humans into mince meat and blood for the stray dogs to lick up when night falls...", then my mind "jumped" to what I belive your blessing is bringing back to you...
I recalled a documentry about the poorest of the poor living in the "****stan" countries. They are the women and children in bonded labour making hand knotted Persian/Afghan rugs, a life of squalor and misery, yet these people still managed express joy when not slaving their life away for food & board. Part of a timeless tradition in making these kind of rugs is that every rug ever made has a tiny but deliberate error in the tying of the intricate knots. That's a long winded way of saying, the link that my mind "displayed" when it jumped, and the reason for the errors in the rugs was: "only god is perfect".
The reason I decided to write and tell you what God / The Universe / Insanity "told me" today - I belive to have remained silent would have been "playing in the dark".
I hope your blessing of sunshine is returned tenfold someday,
"When it gets to he point where you can blame other people for your inability to understand what they are saying when they weren't speaking to you, the deaf and mentally disabled will rule the world."
That has got to be one of the funniest replies I've ever had!
I agree, technically speaking all data is "encrypted", it's the strength of the encryption that varies. Are we to assume that if forensics can't understand it then it is automatically incriminating? - That's nothing short of "guilty until proven innocent", under that policy the suspect can be locked away until he gives the investigators the non-existant key to unscramble the random sequence of bits found in the free sectors of his HDD.
"Also, The linked article...."
As is the custom on/. I didn't RTFA before shooting my mouth off.
If the thief knew what he was doing then the whole fucking car would be "recycled" before you noticed it was missing. Junkies are opportunists that grab what's fast and easy. Regardless of the true worth of the item a junkie will gladly swap it for a $50 deal.
"And promptly become an ex-consultant to that company..."
Welcome to world of professional software "engineering". In major projects where lives are involved you are expected to keep such records, failure to do so may land you in jail/court when the shit hits the fan. Keeping a record of of your own dissent is basic "arse covering", for something as bone-headed as the senario in TFA I would refuse to be part of it regardless of the impact on my wallet, simply put - No guts, no glory!
BTW: It's also a good idea to put some of that good money into a "screw you" fund. Fortunately I have never had to use mine for anything more than reassurance when calling a "if you don't do X you can pick up your pink slip" bluff.
Slashdot Mirror
Monorail, Monorail, Monorail.
Somebody in your link really screwed up the Australian numbers, regular(91octane) is more expensive than super(95) and premium(98) is in the mid price??? I couldn't see a date on the table but if you rearrange the prices in the right order and multiply by ~1.2 they sound about right.
Hmmmm, seems when that sort of shit happens to me they have already got my money and I no longer have a "choice" of not paying. In other words, lots of luck with a refund when you refuse the search at the gate.
"Don't worry, by helping Chinese officials silence those Chinese citizens brave enough to criticize their regime, we are in fact bringing freedom to China!"
Trivia: Before the interwebs came along "Yahoo" was (still is) Australian slang for an obnoxiously loud fool, as in: "I wish that yahoo would shut the fuck up".
Probably some idiot thought you were first post and decided to throw away their points on a very old 'joke'...
Not saying it's good/bad but why the permit? What's wrong with "public nuicance" laws that target the problem (blocked access) rather than the technicalities of tripods? Perhaps it's the risk that such "nuicance" laws might backfire and the (political/commercial) event attracting tripods could be seen by the courts to be the "nuicance".
"They're automatically tracking everyone and keeping a log of that tracking indefinitely."
It does not say whether or not that is the case, the key phrase in your quotes is is "All matches". Are they talking about a match with a wanted plate, or does "match" mean the device was able to read the plate.
It's impossible to distinguish between "OMG 1984!" and "Hey they found my car!" from what is written in TFA.
Yes there's some truth there, but like NZ'ers it just encourages us to take the piss to a higher level. Don't underestimate public ridicule as a good "leveler", remeber Pauline Hanson was laughed out of politics first, and thrown in jail later. Little Johnny has told so many fibs that they (like the US Administration) are butt of all jokes, and the ridicule is not restricted to their own country (do a simple "bush" or "john howard" search on YouTube and then play spot the serious one).
Do you ever sit up and watch the parlimentry broadcasts, I do sometimes and it's as boring as dogshit - but a great "sleeping pill". We are very much like the US in that we have a bad case of ADD when it comes to politics, however I think our collective "bullshit detector" seems to work ok - except for this guy(NSFW). He once stood for election on a country party ticket and now has a radio show dedicated to inciting race riots amoungst teen gangs. Problem is, his is the "most popular talk show" in Sydney, so naturally all the pollies line up to get on his show, which in turn makes his the most popular show...., you can see where I'm going.
"When all redundancy is removed, the bitstream is for all practical purposes random.....I dare you to propose a method that will defeat this approach reliably"
;)
I think your reasoning is sound and the "art" bit is a nice touch, lets wait and see if he answers your dare with something more substantial than nitpicks.
My point (and I belive the GP's) is that it was a "quick OTP hack", building/obtaining/programming a device (specialized or otherwise) to generate white noise and convert into a digital form to obtain the random stream is not what I would call a "quick OTP hack".
:)
"I keep being baffled by so-called "Computer Scientists"
Most people do
If you would like to be less "baffled" I respectfully suggest that you dampen your pedantic volume and listen to the quiet pragmatisim in the GP's OP.
"While that sounds cool and all, the question is, how difficult would it be to for them to program it print out the votes the way the voter put them in and then to count votes differently?"
Yes, the main issue is not the kind of ballot used, the issue is how do you "keep the bastards honest"?
It's not about a "perfect system" (there is no such thing), it's about minimizing the opportunity and scope for cheats. Provided the voter understands the ballot paper in the first place, a machine that prints the ballot for the voter is at worst a waste of money, a machine that counts the ballot for the election is at best a waste of money.
A traditional hand-counted paper system (where the counters themselves are political adversaries) may be imperfect in many small ways that can be exploited by both sides. The traditional paper system with it's "checks and balances" (ie: international observers and adversarial counters) has been seen to be fair by countless real life tests all over the western world for at least the last 100yrs - why dick around with the fundemental principles of the most basic tool of democracy?
Trivia: Edison's first patented invention way back in 1869 was a mechanical voting machine - he proposed to install the system in the Senate to count up/down votes. The Senate declined to use it with many senators from all sides sighting it as a risk to democracy and an insult to their integrity.
It beggar's belief that an informed "Joe Sixpack" would fail to draw a similar conclusion.
"I don't need an auditable paper trail to prove that most voters are self-serving "what can you do for ME" idiots. People who can't tie their shoes, have no teeth, vote based on what the candidate says about baby jesus or what kind of free government services they'll get out of it, think men used to ride dinosaurs and pronounce cement like it was something that came out of the ocean"
You left out "intellectual snobs".
"To make a OTP you need a truly random pad"
Since it's a tad unusual to have a radio-active source lying around please point out why his simple but effective implementation would NEED a "trully random pad" other than to satisfy a highly pedantic definition of OTP.
"and you must use it only once."
I can't see where the OP says how many times he used it, can you?
Good points, I was a bit vaugue about automatic counting in my post and it pays to be explicit about these things.
/. discussions. The electorol commision here in Australia was investigating the plausability of using diebold systems over here. The investigation IMHO was an "honest assesment" that basically said they wouldn't touch "paperless elections" with a cattle prod. Had they gone the other way I may have become more of an activist. ( The report itself is probably somewhere in this list )
"I've been an election integrity activists for about 2 years now."
My interest came about from the diebold machines a few years ago, I wouldn't call myself an activist but I usually put my $0.02 in on the many
The thing I think that smelt the worst in the last US election was the exit polls, one or two "odd counts" I can see as a statistical possibility, but as I understand it the "odd counts" were much more that that - so "odd" that it prompted Putin to make snide remark about the validity of the result. (Not saying that Putin is any kind of benchmark, but it was an extrodinary thing for him to say)
"with a computer, there is no doubt, it's either a 0 or a 1." - Maybe I'm feeding a troll but here goes anyway...
Speaking as degree qualified programmer with 20yrs experience, I don't trust the machines and TFA clearly demonstrates why.
My number one reason for distrusting computerised systems is that they enable "wholesale fraud" with a single point attack, it might be "unlikely" but it is a technical possibility that the result of the whole election could be predetermined and the "race fix" can be implemented by one person sitting at a desk. Worse still it's a technical possibility that a "fix" can be done in such a way that it is undetectable after the fact.
Contrast that risk with old-fashioned paper and international observers. With that system the best a cheat can hope for is "retail fraud" - some stuffed boxes over here, the senator's hound dogs voting over there, ect. Fraud and corruption are a fact of life, nowhere on the planet can they be totally eliminated from such high stakes "games" as national elections.
The traditional paper system with it's well-known and thouroughly tested procedures minimizes the risk of a "fixed race" simply because of the fact that it is much more difficult and requires a hell of a lot more people to get away with "wholesale fraud". Speed is not a big issue since there are plenty of counters in the form of eager voulenteers from the various parties. And it's crucial to security that you pair off "opposing counters" since they also embody the imporatnt "checks and balances" of watching each other like hawks and arguing so loudly about something as mundane as "hanging chads" that even I remeber it and I live 10,000 miles away!
"What exactly does Ms Bowen need until next Friday to fucking think about?"
/ducks
An excuse.
I hope your blessing of sunshine is returned tenfold someday, Insha-Allah
Hi again, when I said I was genuine I meant it, so here goes. :)
:).
In the same vein as the link I provided I am going to assume we have the same basic things in common. I was raised a Christian in the 60' and my mum was a sunday school teacher so I figure we have the same basic "values" although we may differ on the details. Don't get me wrong, I'n ot trying to "score points", "take the piss", or set you up for an intellectual and/or moral debate, I just want to let you know what I belive your blessing "told me" today through my "faith" in the Universe that connects us all, ( god if you insist
Today was a lovely sunny winter's day here in Oz, it's a Saturday and I went to visit a mate of mine I've known for 20yrs and had a cuppa with my daughter and her spouse. I was pulling out of my driveway and paused to put my sunglasses on and my mind "displayed" this...
"Have a Blessed day and I hope you don't play in the shadows."
Mabye my mind just connected the "sunshine-blessed day" link or the "sunglasses-shadow" theme, I don't know. I voted for the sunshine and drove off. Later when leaving my friends house, I again reached for my sunglasses and my mind "displayed" this...
"One of them is dedicated to Baptising the world and the other is dedicated to making sure there are no infidels...
A split second of hostility ran through me (often a remark like that would get a hostile and/or sarcastic reply from me),...why did I "turn the other cheek" like that, in fact I barely noticed it when replying? - just because he blessed me, WTF? I was interuppted by my mind "displaying"....
"don't play in the shadows"
As Homer Simpson would say "I hear that" and voted for the sunshine again.
When I got home I sat down to a meal in front of the TV and watched SBS world news, kinda like our version of BBC international. Main story is today's bloodshed at Pakistan's Red Mosque, the video was horrific (yet in reality everyday), twisted and chared chunks of cars littered the street, blood splattered walls..."red blood-red mosque" momentarly linked in my mind and then it "displayed" this...
"Me I choose to have faith in the one thing that I do not have: perfection."
"Pffft perfection" - I said to myself - "these pricks are after perfection too, hijacking faith to justify the conversion of humans into mince meat and blood for the stray dogs to lick up when night falls...", then my mind "jumped" to what I belive your blessing is bringing back to you...
I recalled a documentry about the poorest of the poor living in the "****stan" countries. They are the women and children in bonded labour making hand knotted Persian/Afghan rugs, a life of squalor and misery, yet these people still managed express joy when not slaving their life away for food & board. Part of a timeless tradition in making these kind of rugs is that every rug ever made has a tiny but deliberate error in the tying of the intricate knots. That's a long winded way of saying, the link that my mind "displayed" when it jumped, and the reason for the errors in the rugs was: "only god is perfect".
The reason I decided to write and tell you what God / The Universe / Insanity "told me" today - I belive to have remained silent would have been "playing in the dark".
I hope your blessing of sunshine is returned tenfold someday,
"Seems a bit silly though."
I agree, seems you hear a lot about what could happen, but what are the actual result if you look back a year later?
me: *Puts on tinfoil hat with built in "think bubble" generator...* - "OMG I have to burn the super 8 films of my kids as toddlers!"
"When it gets to he point where you can blame other people for your inability to understand what they are saying when they weren't speaking to you, the deaf and mentally disabled will rule the world."
That has got to be one of the funniest replies I've ever had!
"Now you can get pretty fuzzy in talking about whether or not strange filesystems constitute enough of a secret for them to be called encryption"
:)
Exactly what I was alluding to allthough I concede the "all" part was over the top ( made a nice headline though
I have held a tradition style CS degree with a major in operations research since 91', the rest of your post is spot on.
"I think this is a perfect question to ask."
/. I didn't RTFA before shooting my mouth off.
I agree, technically speaking all data is "encrypted", it's the strength of the encryption that varies. Are we to assume that if forensics can't understand it then it is automatically incriminating? - That's nothing short of "guilty until proven innocent", under that policy the suspect can be locked away until he gives the investigators the non-existant key to unscramble the random sequence of bits found in the free sectors of his HDD.
"Also, The linked article...."
As is the custom on
"I love mixed metaphors."
Heh, I love the scene in one of the back to the future movies where the older Biff is trying to give the sports almanac to his younger self.
Young Biff: "Make like a tree and get out of here!"
Old Biff: slaps YB on the head, "It's leave you moron! Make like a tree and leave!"
If the thief knew what he was doing then the whole fucking car would be "recycled" before you noticed it was missing. Junkies are opportunists that grab what's fast and easy. Regardless of the true worth of the item a junkie will gladly swap it for a $50 deal.
"And promptly become an ex-consultant to that company..."
Welcome to world of professional software "engineering". In major projects where lives are involved you are expected to keep such records, failure to do so may land you in jail/court when the shit hits the fan. Keeping a record of of your own dissent is basic "arse covering", for something as bone-headed as the senario in TFA I would refuse to be part of it regardless of the impact on my wallet, simply put - No guts, no glory!
BTW: It's also a good idea to put some of that good money into a "screw you" fund. Fortunately I have never had to use mine for anything more than reassurance when calling a "if you don't do X you can pick up your pink slip" bluff.