'Let the output be carted off to windows machines to make nice pretty spreadsheets, fine. But all else would have to be custom.'
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard yet. Custom means full of ripe to be discovered bugs. It's security through obscurity and it has been proven that security through obscurity does NOT work.
Windows is a poor choice because its riddled with holes and it can't be trimmed down appropriately. Build on a solid *nix like Linux or BSD that has stood the test of time and can be trimmed down to minimal services that are needed to run the machine.
The actual voting software should be simplicity itself. A 5 hour veteran of quick basic could write it.
'And probably best done in fimware, at least in PROMS.'
Any rom media will do. I recommend hardware supported DRM and signed CD-R's to allow for easy updating.
The final machine should print out a paper ballot. It should be simple and human readable, it should also be numbered with a simple numeric code. A receipt should also print out with just the code and not the vote.
The voter then slips this into a slot and watches on a big publically visible screen showing the incremented tally, the vote number, and who was voted for. If there is a problem they can notify someone immediately and watch an equally visible process in which the vote is corrected.
There are a number of people voting at any one moment, so an outsider watching the screen could not determine which of them voted for who but the voter knows their number and knows their vote was counted. Nobody but the voter knows their vote number so the voter is anonymous. After the vote disappears from the machine only the election officials will be able to see vote numbers so it would be difficult to buy votes and verify the purchase on any scale.
'So when these machines actually do get hacked on election day, and verifiable albeit anonymous fraud occurs, perhaps those with the power will declare the election results null, and retain power. It would be much the same as if the elections had been suspended.'
Yeah, cuz you know that happened immediately the last time it was proven that there was fraud *cough* ohio *cough*
The main reason for moving to a secret ballot is to reduce the risk of reprocussions based upon your vote. Be they from your employer, the guy who paid for your vote, a political party, or government, or the cia, insert other parties who would do this at the drop of a hat here.
It really doesn't matter though. If you can't trust the government to conduct a fair election then it doesn't matter if the ballot is secret. And with our corrupt government the elections are about as blatant a farce as the former elections for Saddam.
'In my opinion, for a modern democracy to work the vote must be mandatory, secret and universal.'
Absolutely not. Not voting is a vote in itself. I refuse to cooperate in the corrupt rigged election process for canned candidates that do not represent anything that could be construed as a choice even without election rigging.
Not voting is a form of protest. It's the 'if you don't vote you have no right to complain' morons who make sure that protest is ignored. The truth is that if you help to perpetuate the current corrupt, flawed, and unworkable system then YOU have no right to complain about the results.
'furthermore, i'm all for revoking a lot of these churches' tax exempt status.'
How are you going to do that? Congress has no authority to make a law with regard to churches. Its the whole freedom of religion thing, it cuts both ways.
I have never heard that interpretation of citizenship before. My understanding was that anyone born in the U.S. or any child with a U.S. Citizen as a parent was a natural born citizen because they were born with the right to US citizenship even though in the case of flings in a foreign nation that citizenship might not be RECOGNIZED until later.
Those who aren't born of this country and come here and are granted citizenship are naturalized citizens.
'or they just plain had a bad business idea to begin with that was never going to fly.'
I suppose with a liberal interpretation this would work. Most businesses I see going out of business are going out because of increased fuel costs and less available business.
I suppose if you were starting a business today that went out due to those reasons then it wasn't a viable business idea but for existing businesses the fact that we are in a recession on the fast track to a depression is probably a bigger factor than incompetence these days.
I have to speak, people keep demolishing the same strawman. If google has a monopoly it is in the search industry, NOT the online advertising industry. The barrier to entry to look at is in building a search engine that can compete with Google.
Personally, I do not think there is any form of vendor lockin with google and therefore competition is wide open. But building a google class search engine would require millions of dollars worth of networking and data warehousing, and that is ignoring the talent required to actually build such a thing.
Actually, the fact that Google leverages its search technology and engine to profit gain marketshare in the advertising industry would be pretty much textbook anti-trust violation IF Google search technology were determined to be a monopoly.
Aside from that, google bundles other services with its search engine in order to gain marketshare with them. Were they declared a monopoly this would be no different than Microsoft bundling IE with windows.
'That quite obviously means that these timescales should simply count (micro-, nano-, femto-)seconds from a defined point in time and leave the days and years to the timescales where these words make sense.'
mmm hmm
'"Human" time on the other hand,'
Explain to me the difference between the first description and 'human' time.
In the past 10yrs or so things have been fairly consistently late. My birthday is in late september and normally there would chilled or even frosty days in Sept. by November things were rather frigid and by late November you'd normally see a snow that stuck. Dec-Jan were damn cold. Feb might be warmer but was usually still cold, and march was noticably warmer than feb. Actually I haven't noticed much change at the end of winter, mostly its the earlier months.
We moved a lot, so this was in Delaware, Central Illinois, and Northern Nevada.
'Because that's how safe harbor works. If they're inspecting each packet, then they lose their safe harbor'
IANAL but based upon the fact that every major ISP is looking at packets already and they still all enjoy safe harbor protections I am skeptical. My understanding is that the ISP must do some sort of filtering based upon content and/or destination to lose safe harbor protection.
'Once you start poking inside of packets you lose safe harbor protections of various sorts, because now the ISPs become responsible for the data.'
That is highly debatable. Unless the ISP is somehow discriminating and blocking in a manner which hinders or advances 3rd party entities I fail to see the basis for your argument.
Simple automated network optimization based on protocol priority is a far cry from examining the data encapsulated within the packet or discriminating based on destination.
Where did you get that silly idea? There is nothing my ISP can do that I can't do in terms of traffic management.
In any case, you are thinking of throttling not QoS. You throttle and QoS inbound traffic BY controlling outbound traffic. QoS is about latency, not bandwidth but since my router sends out packets for say VOIP first, then I have the best chance of packets from VOIP back first.
If I were throttling on the hand, I would slow the rate at which I send ack's and the connection would automatically slow down because TCP/IP thinks the network is congested.
'Doing a scaled rollback of bandwidth is the fairest way for a ISP to run things, IMO.'
Idle bandwidth costs no more or less than utilized bandwidth. The pipes aren't saturated now so the so called 'bandwidth hogs' aren't actually hogging anything.
This entire 'problem' was invented by the ISP's to defeat net neutrality.
'Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it.'
Sure, but we don't because there aren't bumper to bumper trucks on the highway. Just like nobody is experiencing slow internet because of a lack of bandwidth.
In Canada they forced the ISP's to show transfer data and it showed that their pipes AREN'T saturated at all. I wouldn't say the ISP's are overselling, and I wouldn't say the heavy users are overusing, because there is no bandwidth shortage!
This entire issue is a non-issue. The ISP's are claiming they can't keep pace because they want to double sell bandwidth and they need an excuse to try to block net neutrality.
'As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting.'
First this is silly, if the pipe is otherwise sitting idle then there is no reason for a user to be punished or charged extra even if he were using up the entire pipe. It costs money to make the bandwidth available whether it is utilized or not.
Second, and this is a big one. People seem to misunderstand capitalism. Grandma has already demonstrated that she will pay $50/month for her internet access. If the ISP's start charging for usage they will price it in such a way that grandma pays about the same amount she is now and just pocket the extra they get from the higher bandwidth users.
No matter what pricing model an ISP switches to, you can pretty guarantee that they will make sure it INCREASES their profits, not reduces them. That means higher costs to consumers regardless of their usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is still separate and distinct than refusing to participate in our present government as a form of protest.
I am not merely protesting the R's and the D's. At this point I am protesting the system itself.
'Let the output be carted off to windows machines to make nice pretty spreadsheets, fine. But all else would have to be custom.'
That is the most ridiculous thing I've heard yet. Custom means full of ripe to be discovered bugs. It's security through obscurity and it has been proven that security through obscurity does NOT work.
Windows is a poor choice because its riddled with holes and it can't be trimmed down appropriately. Build on a solid *nix like Linux or BSD that has stood the test of time and can be trimmed down to minimal services that are needed to run the machine.
The actual voting software should be simplicity itself. A 5 hour veteran of quick basic could write it.
'And probably best done in fimware, at least in PROMS.'
Any rom media will do. I recommend hardware supported DRM and signed CD-R's to allow for easy updating.
The final machine should print out a paper ballot. It should be simple and human readable, it should also be numbered with a simple numeric code. A receipt should also print out with just the code and not the vote.
The voter then slips this into a slot and watches on a big publically visible screen showing the incremented tally, the vote number, and who was voted for. If there is a problem they can notify someone immediately and watch an equally visible process in which the vote is corrected.
There are a number of people voting at any one moment, so an outsider watching the screen could not determine which of them voted for who but the voter knows their number and knows their vote was counted. Nobody but the voter knows their vote number so the voter is anonymous. After the vote disappears from the machine only the election officials will be able to see vote numbers so it would be difficult to buy votes and verify the purchase on any scale.
'Make it possible to look up _your_own_ voting history'
Unless everyone looks up their own votes, tabulates the results together, and compares them to the election totals that means nothing.
'Most campaigns and political parties'
Why on earth would anyone trust the people who are rigging the elections in the first place?
'So when these machines actually do get hacked on election day, and verifiable albeit anonymous fraud occurs, perhaps those with the power will declare the election results null, and retain power. It would be much the same as if the elections had been suspended.'
Yeah, cuz you know that happened immediately the last time it was proven that there was fraud *cough* ohio *cough*
In other words, it's pretty easy to gain access to the voting machines.
'The main reason for moving to a secret ballot'
The main reason for moving to a secret ballot is to reduce the risk of reprocussions based upon your vote. Be they from your employer, the guy who paid for your vote, a political party, or government, or the cia, insert other parties who would do this at the drop of a hat here.
It really doesn't matter though. If you can't trust the government to conduct a fair election then it doesn't matter if the ballot is secret. And with our corrupt government the elections are about as blatant a farce as the former elections for Saddam.
'In my opinion, for a modern democracy to work the vote must be mandatory, secret and universal.'
Absolutely not. Not voting is a vote in itself. I refuse to cooperate in the corrupt rigged election process for canned candidates that do not represent anything that could be construed as a choice even without election rigging.
Not voting is a form of protest. It's the 'if you don't vote you have no right to complain' morons who make sure that protest is ignored. The truth is that if you help to perpetuate the current corrupt, flawed, and unworkable system then YOU have no right to complain about the results.
'furthermore, i'm all for revoking a lot of these churches' tax exempt status.'
How are you going to do that? Congress has no authority to make a law with regard to churches. Its the whole freedom of religion thing, it cuts both ways.
'That is why I always early vote. It is on paper where I vote and that stands a better chance of getting counted correctly.'
You actually believe votes matter in U.S. elections? How quaint.
I have never heard that interpretation of citizenship before. My understanding was that anyone born in the U.S. or any child with a U.S. Citizen as a parent was a natural born citizen because they were born with the right to US citizenship even though in the case of flings in a foreign nation that citizenship might not be RECOGNIZED until later.
Those who aren't born of this country and come here and are granted citizenship are naturalized citizens.
Now find one with coverage of Obama voting for telecom immunity.
'or they just plain had a bad business idea to begin with that was never going to fly.'
I suppose with a liberal interpretation this would work. Most businesses I see going out of business are going out because of increased fuel costs and less available business.
I suppose if you were starting a business today that went out due to those reasons then it wasn't a viable business idea but for existing businesses the fact that we are in a recession on the fast track to a depression is probably a bigger factor than incompetence these days.
'here are strategic reasons to not want a single source for a critical material. There are no such strategic reasons relating to Google.'
I'd rate data as pretty critical
Toyota and Honda are rewarded by selling cars in this country. The others represent all that is left of the american automotive industry.
I have to speak, people keep demolishing the same strawman. If google has a monopoly it is in the search industry, NOT the online advertising industry. The barrier to entry to look at is in building a search engine that can compete with Google.
Personally, I do not think there is any form of vendor lockin with google and therefore competition is wide open. But building a google class search engine would require millions of dollars worth of networking and data warehousing, and that is ignoring the talent required to actually build such a thing.
Actually, the fact that Google leverages its search technology and engine to profit gain marketshare in the advertising industry would be pretty much textbook anti-trust violation IF Google search technology were determined to be a monopoly.
Aside from that, google bundles other services with its search engine in order to gain marketshare with them. Were they declared a monopoly this would be no different than Microsoft bundling IE with windows.
I'm married too
'That quite obviously means that these timescales should simply count (micro-, nano-, femto-)seconds from a defined point in time and leave the days and years to the timescales where these words make sense.'
mmm hmm
'"Human" time on the other hand,'
Explain to me the difference between the first description and 'human' time.
In the past 10yrs or so things have been fairly consistently late. My birthday is in late september and normally there would chilled or even frosty days in Sept. by November things were rather frigid and by late November you'd normally see a snow that stuck. Dec-Jan were damn cold. Feb might be warmer but was usually still cold, and march was noticably warmer than feb. Actually I haven't noticed much change at the end of winter, mostly its the earlier months.
We moved a lot, so this was in Delaware, Central Illinois, and Northern Nevada.
'Because that's how safe harbor works. If they're inspecting each packet, then they lose their safe harbor'
IANAL but based upon the fact that every major ISP is looking at packets already and they still all enjoy safe harbor protections I am skeptical. My understanding is that the ISP must do some sort of filtering based upon content and/or destination to lose safe harbor protection.
'Once you start poking inside of packets you lose safe harbor protections of various sorts, because now the ISPs become responsible for the data.'
That is highly debatable. Unless the ISP is somehow discriminating and blocking in a manner which hinders or advances 3rd party entities I fail to see the basis for your argument.
Simple automated network optimization based on protocol priority is a far cry from examining the data encapsulated within the packet or discriminating based on destination.
'only your isp can qos inbound traffic.'
Where did you get that silly idea? There is nothing my ISP can do that I can't do in terms of traffic management.
In any case, you are thinking of throttling not QoS. You throttle and QoS inbound traffic BY controlling outbound traffic. QoS is about latency, not bandwidth but since my router sends out packets for say VOIP first, then I have the best chance of packets from VOIP back first.
If I were throttling on the hand, I would slow the rate at which I send ack's and the connection would automatically slow down because TCP/IP thinks the network is congested.
'Doing a scaled rollback of bandwidth is the fairest way for a ISP to run things, IMO.'
Idle bandwidth costs no more or less than utilized bandwidth. The pipes aren't saturated now so the so called 'bandwidth hogs' aren't actually hogging anything.
This entire 'problem' was invented by the ISP's to defeat net neutrality.
'Assuming we want network neutrality'
Network neutrality doesn't prevent QoS or examining customer traffic.
Network neutrality prevents the ISP from making google and yahoo pay or the ISP will slow customer traffic to their sites/services.
'Yes, transfer makes sense. If it took you 3 hours to go 60 miles on the highway because of the bumper to bumper trucks on the highway, you'd demand something to get them off it.'
Sure, but we don't because there aren't bumper to bumper trucks on the highway. Just like nobody is experiencing slow internet because of a lack of bandwidth.
In Canada they forced the ISP's to show transfer data and it showed that their pipes AREN'T saturated at all. I wouldn't say the ISP's are overselling, and I wouldn't say the heavy users are overusing, because there is no bandwidth shortage!
This entire issue is a non-issue. The ISP's are claiming they can't keep pace because they want to double sell bandwidth and they need an excuse to try to block net neutrality.
'As a final thought, if everyone only paid per GB, it would be interesting.'
First this is silly, if the pipe is otherwise sitting idle then there is no reason for a user to be punished or charged extra even if he were using up the entire pipe. It costs money to make the bandwidth available whether it is utilized or not.
Second, and this is a big one. People seem to misunderstand capitalism. Grandma has already demonstrated that she will pay $50/month for her internet access. If the ISP's start charging for usage they will price it in such a way that grandma pays about the same amount she is now and just pocket the extra they get from the higher bandwidth users.
No matter what pricing model an ISP switches to, you can pretty guarantee that they will make sure it INCREASES their profits, not reduces them. That means higher costs to consumers regardless of their usage.