If CAPTCHAs do continue, I'd like the next problem to be facial recognition software. I'd love a package that could look at a picture and tag it "Nicholas and Andrea" or "Glen and Helene". Digital camera software everywhere could benefit from this technology. Not sure how you'd bake that into a CAPTCHA, but it's a good problem to solve.
How about this: The user is presented with a short message that they have to mark as "Spam" or "Not Spam". If the spammers get really good at solving this problem, they've effectively written themselves out of a job. And if they can't do it, then they can't get new accounts.
My options for Amtrak are a $310 round trip ticket on the "Acela Express" (the high-speed train that travels the Northeast corridor) which takes about 3h37min to NY and 3h34min back to Boston.
I should add that I just checked and the distance from Boston, South Station to New York, Penn Station is 231 miles. This means the Acela averages 64mph between Boston and New York, while the slower train averages 56mph. Awesome job Amtrak, keep up the good work on your high-speed rail line.
The North East corridor. Boston/New York/Philly/DC, San Diego/LA/SF and maybe up to Portland and Seattle, Dallas/Houston, and maybe Miami up to Palm Beach, Orlando, Tampa and that is a big maybe.
Amtrak can't even get their act together between Boston and New York. I was curious to see what it would cost via rail for the following situation: leave Boston after work on a Friday to spend the weekend in New York, then return Sunday evening. My options for Amtrak are a $310 round trip ticket on the "Acela Express" (the high-speed train that travels the Northeast corridor) which takes about 3h37min to NY and 3h34min back to Boston. My other option is the regular train for $214 round-trip, which takes 4h15min to NY and 4h5min back to Boston.
First of all, the high-speed train only shaves off 14% of the travel time, and costs 45% more. Second of all I just priced a round-trip flight via expedia and I got $338.02, 1h29min to NY and 1h22min back to Boston. I know that there's a whole bunch of hassle involved with flying and all, but come on!! Flying between New York and Boston is a little more expensive than taking the high-speed Amtrak train, but is 60% faster. For $14 more each way, you get there in less than half the time.
Am I the only one that's sick of the "download caps" == "network neutrality" thing? Am I the only one who thinks the author of this article is an idiot?
Without net neutrality, ISPs not only charges for speed packages but also for how much you download.
That's not what the net neutrality debate is about at all (at least as far as I'm concerned). It's about Verizon charging Google to give their service priority over other services. Say maybe prioritize YouTube traffic over Hulu traffic. With that you have end users fully paying for their bandwidth, content providers fully paying for their bandwidth, and then content providers also paying extortion money to ISPs so that their content won't be degraded.
If I sign up for a contract that says "Your download speed is X Mbps, and you're capped at Y GB/month." It's not violating network neutrality as long as all providers are being treated the same. If your ISP had a deal with Netflix where streaming their movies didn't count against your cap, that would violate the principles of network neutrality. This is at least as far as I understand the debate, it's also the only behavior I'm willing to get up-in-arms over, anything else is just leechers whining that they have to pay for what they use.
Furthermore, the author of the article goes on to say:
If you only watch 7.25 hours a video per week, via Netflix, your Xbox 360, or any other service, you will be slapped with a bill of $200 at the end of the month.
So let me get this straight... If I only watch 3 to 4 movies a week for every week in the month I'll go over. By the way, this is 12 to 16 movies a month via the internet only. If I'm doing this through my Netflix account, it means I'm also get DVDs in the mail which I'm watching as well. I don't think it's fair to say that watching 20+ movies a month is normal. The author is an idiot.
It's probably for the best. If you open the link in Firefox on Ubuntu 8.10 (32- or 64-bit), gnome-panel will segfault, restart, segfault, restart... until you change the tab that firefox is showing.
Bug report [launchpad.net], and here [launchpad.net]
Wow. I tried to visit the site yesterday when it was down, and just got through today and my panel did exactly that. I then went to the bug reports you listed, but I get a "Forbidden" message:
"Not allowed here
Sorry, you don't have permission to access this page.
I know bugzilla.mozilla.org doesn't allow referrers from slashdot, so I tried copying the links and visiting the pages directly, and I got the same message. Even just searching launchpad for their bug IDs is forbidden. What the hell?
Wind turbines off U.S. coastlines could potentially supply more than enough electricity to meet the nation's current demand
The Slashdot headline:
Offshore Windpower To Potentially Exceed US Demand
I know the word 'potentially' is still in there, but when you say something is going to do something, it means it is imminent. For example just go to google news and search for "mayor to" (with the quotes), or "ibm to", or "[any entity] to". You'll get back stories of people and things who are actually going to do the task at hand. In addition, the slashdot headline makes it sound like we already have the offshore turbines in place and this year it could come close to exceeding demand, which is certainly not the case. Leaving 'could' in there indicates that if we were to have the wind turbines in place, they could potentially meed our demand.
Maybe you and Dr. Happer are just among those who don't believe CFSs and such had anything to do with ozone depletion
Which, of course, would be true.
From your linked article:
The results provide strong evidence of the physical mechanism that the CR driven electron-induced reaction of halogenated molecules plays the dominant role in causing the ozone hole.
Ahh... so CRs (cosmic rays) reacting with halogenated molecules causes ozone depletion. I guess you're right, looks like Freon and other CFCs are in the clear... Hey I wonder if you could tell me more about these halogenated molecules that are the real culprit? Oh, so it's a compound that contains a halogen atom. Interesting, you must be right, it has nothing to do with CFCs at all. Say, just what is a halogen atom? Oh so the following elements are all halogens: flourine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine? Looks like your story of this having nothing to do with CFCs is still holding up. I guess ozone depletion is caused by some sort of compound of one or of your halogens with some other element, say maybe chlorine and flourine with carbon. Those dumb scientists, they're probably just trying to confuse us with acronyms, I bet no one even knows what CFC stands for.
Maybe I'm just too liberal for Gore, but I think that Bjorn Lomborg is absolutely right in this debate. Take 15 minutes to see where he's coming from:
Bjorn Lomborg talk on TED [ted.com]
I didn't have any problem with Bjorn Lomborg's talk, but he was talking about priorities for solutions to various problems. He made it very explicit that the findings didn't say global warming wasn't happening or that it's junk science. It was that maybe following the Kyoto protocol didn't make as much economic sense as spending the same amount of money on other solutions.
Actually, I'll go back on saying "I didn't have any problems with Bjorn's talk". Regarding the Kyoto protocol, his example was that if everyone immediately signed onto the Kyoto protocol it would cost the global economy 150 Billion dollars and only delay the effects of global warming by 6 years in 2100. This completely ignores the fact that no one advocating for Kyoto is saying we stop there, it would simply be a starting point. His 150 billion dollar figure also leaves out the economic costs of ignoring global warming. It also doesn't take into account the economic stimulating effects in industries that would research and develop environmentally friendly technologies. (I remember listening to a great story on the radio about an American businessman who was very eager about the prospects opening up due to tighter environmental controls. When asked about other countries (China) getting huge exemptions from Kyoto, he was even happier. If the US is forced to start working on new clean technologies now while China can wait then it means we'll get a head start and become the leaders in that technology. When China finally wants to start cleaning up their act, guess who they'll have to buy their solutions from). I also have a huge problem when people throw around big stupid numbers and say "it'll cost the economy this much." Analysts do it all the time for everything and it's nonsense.
In 1993, he testified before Congress that the scientific data didn't support widespread fears about the dangers of the ozone hole and global warming, remarks that caused then-Vice President Al Gore to fire him. "I was told that science was not going to intrude on public policy", he said.
So a scientist with an axe to grind with Al Gore "remembers" something Al Gore said to him 15 years later. What does Al Gore have to say about this episode? If their versions differ, would you automatically believe Dr. Happer's version over all Gore's? Why? Do you have a bias?
And as for the content of what Dr. Happer testified about, ozone depletion? Do you really not think that was/is a problem? From the wikipedia article on ozone depletion:
On October 2008 the Ecuadorian Space Agency published a report called HIPERION, an study of the last 28 years data from 10 satellites and dozens of ground instruments around the world among them their own, and found that the UV radiation reaching equatorial latitudes was far greater than expected, climbing in some very populated cities up to 24 UVI, the WHO UV Index standard considers 11 as an extreme index and a great risk to health. The report concluded that the ozone depletion around mid latitudes on the planet is already endangering large populations in this areas. Later, the CONIDA, the Peruvian Space Agency, made its own study, which found almost the same facts as the Ecuadorian study.
Maybe you and Dr. Happer are just among those who don't believe CFSs and such had anything to do with ozone depletion... from the same wikipedia article:
[after banning CFCs] A 2005 IPCC summary of ozone issues observed that observations and model calculations suggest that the global average amount of ozone depletion has now approximately stabilized. Although considerable variability in ozone is expected from year to year, including in polar regions where depletion is largest, the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades due to declining ozone-depleting substance concentrations, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol.
I guess all those times I thought emacs was backing up my documents and source code files, it was actually just mocking what I had written in an ironic tone.
Linux, well, why doesn't "app-install get X" work? Oh, right, it's "app-get X install"... er... "app-get install X"... er... crap, it was some stupid mis-spelling that made no sense...
Because 'apt' isn't a misspelling of 'app', it stands for Advanced Packaging Tool. And if you don't want to use the command line, you don't have to. Simply use the built-in package manager that comes with Ubuntu, no 'app', 'apt', or 'get' just install.
I should note that after doing a little more research, I found that the company has been in business for much longer. The founder has been in the getting-out-of-parking-tickets business since 1982, designed a system called ALARM in the early nineties that performed the service for companies with fleets of vehicles, and in 2001 (when they started parkingticket.com) he estimated the company's revenue at $3MM.
Yes... it is exactly like that. Parkingticket.com has been operating for 7 years, is still in business, and releasing new products. And govworks.com was in existence for only 3 years, never really got off the ground and crashed and burned before parkingticket.com even existed. So, yes, they are very eerily similar.
Indeed. I'm in the UK, which perhaps explains why the supposedly "new" Iphone offerings have been done here in ordinary phones for years. And people have the cheek to claim that other manufacturers are copying the Iphone!
I'm genuinely curious about this. I know everyone says that non-US phones are way ahead of us, but what UK phone had amazing integration with Google maps (or any online map provider) years ago? Which UK phone had multitouch? Which UK phone had a great app store? Which UK phone had visual voice mail? Which UK phone had a full blown browser years ago? Which UK phone integrated perfectly with your music collection on your computer?
For that matter did any non-US phone have all these features (and more) *years* ago? I accept that for the vast majority of phones available in the US vs. other countries, the US phones are generally behind the times (I'm guessing due to vendor lock-in and US cell providers trying to wring out every last penny they can from consumers for any semi-advanced features). But honestly, from my point of view the iPhone is really advanced, not just for the US market, but for every market. But I guess it's cool to hate the iPhone on slashdot and instead favor some obscure Korean phone that supposedly had all its features 10 years ago.
For the record, no I don't own an iPhone, but I know many who do and I've used it quite a bit, and I've never seen a phone (or PDA type thing) so well put together. Every component feels so well integrated, whereas other devices feel very cobbled together to me.
get people into the culture of exporting the file to something else when they want to send it to someone
So you're saying it's too hard to get people into the culture of saving the file often, but easy to get people into the culture of 'exporting the file'. You're just renaming 'save' to 'export' just like renaming 'file' to 'persistent object'.
Apple has now offered us a pay-to-play 'option' which fixes the display they broke in the first place (you can get matte as an option on the new 17" Macbook Pro for I think $50 but I'm not sure).
I don't know what the current policy is, but I bought a Macbook Pro in October 2008 and it was the same price for glossy and matte. In fact the salesperson recommended matte.
There's only one way the CA system can work: Responsibility and repercussions. If a certificate authority signs forged certificates, then it can no longer be trusted and must be removed from the list of trusted CAs. To trust an untrustworthy CA is a security bug and should trigger updates from all browser developers which remove the offending CA. Make the CAs work for their money.
Well, the system seems to be working... at least now. This is what I get when I try to navigate to the fake mozilla.com:
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to www.mozilla.com.
Peer's Certificate has been revoked.
(Error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate)
The page you are trying to view can not be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
* Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.
Because the universe is expanding in all directions at the same rate, the further away something is, the greater its relative velocity away from you.
Actually, the wikipedia article on the Doppler effect says:
Among the nearby stars, the largest radial velocities with respect to the Sun are +308 km/s (BD-154041, also known as LHS 52, 81.7 light-years away) and -260 km/s (Woolley 9722, also known as Wolf 1106 and LHS 64, 78.2 light-years away). Positive radial velocity means the star is receding from the Sun, negative that it is approaching.
So not everything is moving away from us at the same velocity. But the other replies (and the nice picture on that article of the light spectrum) do explain how you can look for known gaps or spikes in the electromagnetic spectrum to see how much it's been shifted.
The radio frequency emitted by the water molecules was Doppler shifted by the expansion of the Universe from 22.2 GHz to 6.1 GHz.
Okay, this is what I've never understood. We're sitting here on Earth and we see through our telescopes an electromagnetic wave at frequency X. If you're told, "Actually the galaxy that emitted that wave is moving away from us at Y km/s." Then I get how you can use that to figure out the original "real" frequency of that wave... But if the only information you have here on Earth is X, how can you use that to figure out both how fast the source is moving away from us and what the original frequency was?
The illusion of being awake was so strong -- the cliche that we can tell the difference between reality and dreams is a crock -- that I refused to believe her until I had to rouse her for doing the same thing.
I can't tell you how many times I've over-slept because I dreamed that I had woken up, got ready, headed out the door and was on my way to work. It's really aggravating because my brain has fooled me into sleeping longer, and with a particularly boring dream.
It has been suggested that if one was somehow able to change history so that aspirin had never been discovered until now, it would have died in the lab and stand no chance of FDA approval.
That's strange, because I remember doing a report (10 years ago maybe) on Aspirin in high school, and I distinctly remember reading in several books on the subject that if aspirin were discovered today, it would be hailed as an amazing wonder drug instead of its current image as a ho-hum headache remedy.
You know how to deal with that "problem"? Print-out occurs behind a glass plate. Voter can confirm vote on print-out, and push a button that says "Confirm". No take-home, no problem.
It's even simpler than this. You don't need a glass plate separating the voter from the printed out ballot. The machine spits out the ballot with the user's choices and the voter brings it over to a ballot box or scantron or something where they deposit it and leave. There's still no way for vote buying to occur because if the voter brings their ballot to the big boss, then it means they *didn't* vote. The counting system should be completely separate from the interactive voting machine. Ideally they should be made by different manufacturers, or should just be completely different kinds of systems ie. electronic voting machine for voter to use to make selections, it prints out a ballot and the ballots are hand counted.
I'd call the FBI and the telephone company again. Be firm but polite when asking for help. Get names and phone numbers of everyone you talk to. If that person says no, ask for the next person up in the chain of command.
Oftentimes, people just don't know how to ask for help correctly when contacting an agency such as the FBI or telephone company. If she can't clearly articulate the problem to the person on the other end of the phone they simply might not be aware of the issue or its ramifications.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. I'd also suggest you read the Comsumerist article, How To Mind Control Customer Service Reps. It details tactics you can use over the phone to get them to solve problems for you. It seems the trick is to simply tell them right off the bat that they are going to help you solve your issue.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this: The user is presented with a short message that they have to mark as "Spam" or "Not Spam". If the spammers get really good at solving this problem, they've effectively written themselves out of a job. And if they can't do it, then they can't get new accounts.
I should add that I just checked and the distance from Boston, South Station to New York, Penn Station is 231 miles. This means the Acela averages 64mph between Boston and New York, while the slower train averages 56mph. Awesome job Amtrak, keep up the good work on your high-speed rail line.
Amtrak can't even get their act together between Boston and New York. I was curious to see what it would cost via rail for the following situation: leave Boston after work on a Friday to spend the weekend in New York, then return Sunday evening. My options for Amtrak are a $310 round trip ticket on the "Acela Express" (the high-speed train that travels the Northeast corridor) which takes about 3h37min to NY and 3h34min back to Boston. My other option is the regular train for $214 round-trip, which takes 4h15min to NY and 4h5min back to Boston.
First of all, the high-speed train only shaves off 14% of the travel time, and costs 45% more. Second of all I just priced a round-trip flight via expedia and I got $338.02, 1h29min to NY and 1h22min back to Boston. I know that there's a whole bunch of hassle involved with flying and all, but come on!! Flying between New York and Boston is a little more expensive than taking the high-speed Amtrak train, but is 60% faster. For $14 more each way, you get there in less than half the time.
Am I the only one that's sick of the "download caps" == "network neutrality" thing? Am I the only one who thinks the author of this article is an idiot?
That's not what the net neutrality debate is about at all (at least as far as I'm concerned). It's about Verizon charging Google to give their service priority over other services. Say maybe prioritize YouTube traffic over Hulu traffic. With that you have end users fully paying for their bandwidth, content providers fully paying for their bandwidth, and then content providers also paying extortion money to ISPs so that their content won't be degraded.
If I sign up for a contract that says "Your download speed is X Mbps, and you're capped at Y GB/month." It's not violating network neutrality as long as all providers are being treated the same. If your ISP had a deal with Netflix where streaming their movies didn't count against your cap, that would violate the principles of network neutrality. This is at least as far as I understand the debate, it's also the only behavior I'm willing to get up-in-arms over, anything else is just leechers whining that they have to pay for what they use.
Furthermore, the author of the article goes on to say:
So let me get this straight... If I only watch 3 to 4 movies a week for every week in the month I'll go over. By the way, this is 12 to 16 movies a month via the internet only. If I'm doing this through my Netflix account, it means I'm also get DVDs in the mail which I'm watching as well. I don't think it's fair to say that watching 20+ movies a month is normal. The author is an idiot.
Wow. I tried to visit the site yesterday when it was down, and just got through today and my panel did exactly that. I then went to the bug reports you listed, but I get a "Forbidden" message:
I know bugzilla.mozilla.org doesn't allow referrers from slashdot, so I tried copying the links and visiting the pages directly, and I got the same message. Even just searching launchpad for their bug IDs is forbidden. What the hell?
From the actual article:
The Slashdot headline:
I know the word 'potentially' is still in there, but when you say something is going to do something, it means it is imminent. For example just go to google news and search for "mayor to" (with the quotes), or "ibm to", or "[any entity] to". You'll get back stories of people and things who are actually going to do the task at hand. In addition, the slashdot headline makes it sound like we already have the offshore turbines in place and this year it could come close to exceeding demand, which is certainly not the case. Leaving 'could' in there indicates that if we were to have the wind turbines in place, they could potentially meed our demand.
From your linked article:
Ahh... so CRs (cosmic rays) reacting with halogenated molecules causes ozone depletion. I guess you're right, looks like Freon and other CFCs are in the clear... Hey I wonder if you could tell me more about these halogenated molecules that are the real culprit? Oh, so it's a compound that contains a halogen atom. Interesting, you must be right, it has nothing to do with CFCs at all. Say, just what is a halogen atom? Oh so the following elements are all halogens: flourine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and astatine? Looks like your story of this having nothing to do with CFCs is still holding up. I guess ozone depletion is caused by some sort of compound of one or of your halogens with some other element, say maybe chlorine and flourine with carbon. Those dumb scientists, they're probably just trying to confuse us with acronyms, I bet no one even knows what CFC stands for.
I didn't have any problem with Bjorn Lomborg's talk, but he was talking about priorities for solutions to various problems. He made it very explicit that the findings didn't say global warming wasn't happening or that it's junk science. It was that maybe following the Kyoto protocol didn't make as much economic sense as spending the same amount of money on other solutions.
Actually, I'll go back on saying "I didn't have any problems with Bjorn's talk". Regarding the Kyoto protocol, his example was that if everyone immediately signed onto the Kyoto protocol it would cost the global economy 150 Billion dollars and only delay the effects of global warming by 6 years in 2100. This completely ignores the fact that no one advocating for Kyoto is saying we stop there, it would simply be a starting point. His 150 billion dollar figure also leaves out the economic costs of ignoring global warming. It also doesn't take into account the economic stimulating effects in industries that would research and develop environmentally friendly technologies. (I remember listening to a great story on the radio about an American businessman who was very eager about the prospects opening up due to tighter environmental controls. When asked about other countries (China) getting huge exemptions from Kyoto, he was even happier. If the US is forced to start working on new clean technologies now while China can wait then it means we'll get a head start and become the leaders in that technology. When China finally wants to start cleaning up their act, guess who they'll have to buy their solutions from). I also have a huge problem when people throw around big stupid numbers and say "it'll cost the economy this much." Analysts do it all the time for everything and it's nonsense.
So after much googling and reading other slashdot posts I finally found this DailyTech article about Dr. William Happer from 2008:
So a scientist with an axe to grind with Al Gore "remembers" something Al Gore said to him 15 years later. What does Al Gore have to say about this episode? If their versions differ, would you automatically believe Dr. Happer's version over all Gore's? Why? Do you have a bias?
And as for the content of what Dr. Happer testified about, ozone depletion? Do you really not think that was/is a problem? From the wikipedia article on ozone depletion:
Maybe you and Dr. Happer are just among those who don't believe CFSs and such had anything to do with ozone depletion... from the same wikipedia article:
I guess all those times I thought emacs was backing up my documents and source code files, it was actually just mocking what I had written in an ironic tone.
Because 'apt' isn't a misspelling of 'app', it stands for Advanced Packaging Tool. And if you don't want to use the command line, you don't have to. Simply use the built-in package manager that comes with Ubuntu, no 'app', 'apt', or 'get' just install.
I should note that after doing a little more research, I found that the company has been in business for much longer. The founder has been in the getting-out-of-parking-tickets business since 1982, designed a system called ALARM in the early nineties that performed the service for companies with fleets of vehicles, and in 2001 (when they started parkingticket.com) he estimated the company's revenue at $3MM.
Yes... it is exactly like that. Parkingticket.com has been operating for 7 years, is still in business, and releasing new products. And govworks.com was in existence for only 3 years, never really got off the ground and crashed and burned before parkingticket.com even existed. So, yes, they are very eerily similar.
I'm genuinely curious about this. I know everyone says that non-US phones are way ahead of us, but what UK phone had amazing integration with Google maps (or any online map provider) years ago? Which UK phone had multitouch? Which UK phone had a great app store? Which UK phone had visual voice mail? Which UK phone had a full blown browser years ago? Which UK phone integrated perfectly with your music collection on your computer?
For that matter did any non-US phone have all these features (and more) *years* ago? I accept that for the vast majority of phones available in the US vs. other countries, the US phones are generally behind the times (I'm guessing due to vendor lock-in and US cell providers trying to wring out every last penny they can from consumers for any semi-advanced features). But honestly, from my point of view the iPhone is really advanced, not just for the US market, but for every market. But I guess it's cool to hate the iPhone on slashdot and instead favor some obscure Korean phone that supposedly had all its features 10 years ago.
For the record, no I don't own an iPhone, but I know many who do and I've used it quite a bit, and I've never seen a phone (or PDA type thing) so well put together. Every component feels so well integrated, whereas other devices feel very cobbled together to me.
So you're saying it's too hard to get people into the culture of saving the file often, but easy to get people into the culture of 'exporting the file'. You're just renaming 'save' to 'export' just like renaming 'file' to 'persistent object'.
I don't know what the current policy is, but I bought a Macbook Pro in October 2008 and it was the same price for glossy and matte. In fact the salesperson recommended matte.
Well, the system seems to be working... at least now. This is what I get when I try to navigate to the fake mozilla.com:
Actually, the wikipedia article on the Doppler effect says:
So not everything is moving away from us at the same velocity. But the other replies (and the nice picture on that article of the light spectrum) do explain how you can look for known gaps or spikes in the electromagnetic spectrum to see how much it's been shifted.
Okay, this is what I've never understood. We're sitting here on Earth and we see through our telescopes an electromagnetic wave at frequency X. If you're told, "Actually the galaxy that emitted that wave is moving away from us at Y km/s." Then I get how you can use that to figure out the original "real" frequency of that wave... But if the only information you have here on Earth is X, how can you use that to figure out both how fast the source is moving away from us and what the original frequency was?
Or like Versionista. http://versionista.com/diff/rnk5Hkwm9Fw!o5RC64S1rQ/?showscript.
That's strange, because I remember doing a report (10 years ago maybe) on Aspirin in high school, and I distinctly remember reading in several books on the subject that if aspirin were discovered today, it would be hailed as an amazing wonder drug instead of its current image as a ho-hum headache remedy.
It's even simpler than this. You don't need a glass plate separating the voter from the printed out ballot. The machine spits out the ballot with the user's choices and the voter brings it over to a ballot box or scantron or something where they deposit it and leave. There's still no way for vote buying to occur because if the voter brings their ballot to the big boss, then it means they *didn't* vote. The counting system should be completely separate from the interactive voting machine. Ideally they should be made by different manufacturers, or should just be completely different kinds of systems ie. electronic voting machine for voter to use to make selections, it prints out a ballot and the ballots are hand counted.
I definitely agree with this sentiment. I'd also suggest you read the Comsumerist article, How To Mind Control Customer Service Reps. It details tactics you can use over the phone to get them to solve problems for you. It seems the trick is to simply tell them right off the bat that they are going to help you solve your issue.
Was it just me or did anyone else expect to see Jayne suspended from the bottom of that rover?