A properly-created virtual machine ought to be absolutely undetectable from withinside. The simple fact is that all commercial offerings to date haven't tried to be undetectable.
If you lock a person in a windowless room where the only "access to the outside world" is a TV set where you control all the programmes, you essentially control everything they know about the outside world; and you then can make that person believe anything you want them to believe. You could even cause them to think night was day, if their only reference was the continuity announcer's time checks (and/or you could give them a special watch which displayed your manipulated version of the time). But if you accidentally or deliberately let, say, BBC1 get through unaltered, you aren't controlling everything they see; and by comparing the news on the real BBC1 with your altered news on the other stations, they could ascertain that something was amiss.
If your virtualised environment behaves absolutely "correctly" with respect to undocumented instructions and the like (i.e. they aren't trapped and made to do something specific to your virtualisation application), and all I/O channels are properly manipulated (to the point where even the scan line count on the graphics card is adjusted to account for the slowdown in the virtual environment), then it's undetectable from withinside. If, however, even one undocumented instruction does not behave exactly as the real processor, or even one I/O channel is left unmunged, then there is a potential way the virtual environment could be detected.
Of course, all that manipulation of stuff is bound to impose some kind of overhead, so a truly undetectable VM might end up being slow as hell..... but on the inside, you don't know it's slow, precisely because you've been fed misinformation about the time things are taking. And processors are getting faster. They used to think that chop-and-swap analogue TV encryption would never be trivially crackable in practice.....
I think the existing WordPress feature hides everything from Google, which is not quite what I want. I was going to hide only /<a.*href.*?\/a>/is from search engines; meaning that the substance of the post would still be visible, just not any links it contained.
We have free universal healthcare in the UK, and it doesn't cut the amount of drug spam. I even get it addressed to.uk e-mail addresses.
Still, you should implement free universal healthcare anyway -- it might help you look more like a civilised country and less like a tin-pot theocratic fascist dictatorship. You could afford it if you spent a bit less on throwing your military weight around, and as a bonus other people might stop hating you.
Worse, I think, is the act of spamming blogs with links. The theory is that, the more links there are pointing to a website, the more popular it must be; so, by using commonly-available, spam-advertised commercial software to pollute blogs with links unrelated to the subject matter, webmasters imagine they can improve their ranking without paying baksheesh to the search engine companies.
I have had an idea for a hack to WordPress, which will make all links invisible to GoogleBot (and maybe the other search engines too). This should make it pointless for anybody to spam blogs with links to their site, since the links won't be picked up by search engines. In a nod to Mel, I call this "Search Engine Pessimisation".
OK, I'll sort-of buy it..... depends on the application, of course. If you're writing X?HTML, then you need to use HTML codes (and the "ctrl+I" shortcut isn't likely to be implemented in anything but a dedicated HTML editor). Anyway, "EM" makes sense once you know it's short for "emphasis". (In non-visual media [e.g. voice synthesis], or visual media incapable of rendering italics [some character terminals], a different form of emphasis might be used. The tag is the same. That's the point with HTML, it's WYSINNWEEG -- What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets.)
Too many people confuse "hard to learn" with "hard to use". For example, typing less-than, e, m, more-than followed by text to italicise then less-than, divide, e, m, more-than is much quicker -- once you know how to do it -- than highlighting the text (an operation requiring leaving the keyboard, getting hold of the mouse, manoeuvring it with pixel precision, clicking and dragging), either clicking on an icon (invariably an italicised "i") or selecting something from a context menu (involving a tricky finger-swap or possibly even a keyboard operation), and then returning to the keyboard.
Also, anything that was hard to learn will be even harder to forget.
Or you could download the Debian netinstall CD; and install WindowMaker desktop, the GTK2 libraries and a bunch of Open Source applications, all for the cost of a few gigs' bandwidth and one blank CD-R. Ting! Next, please.
Debian (and Ubuntu) have a kernel-build system whereby you open an xterm, type one command exactly as it's printed and it compiles the kernel for you. If you have problems with the part in bold type, you shouldn't be using a computer.
Or just install the newer version anyway, and don't tell the boss. It's not like he's going to know the difference anyway. I heard of an outfit whose IT department were given the money for several licences of Windows NT Server, IIS and whatever SQL Server used to be called. They pocketed the cash, installed a bog-standard LAMP stack, and management were never any the wiser.....
The MP3 patent hasn't long to run, and isn't even valid in most of the world. It'd almost be worth someone's while just chancing it. Even if they do get found out before the expiry of the patent, the courts will probably have drier lentils to soak than possible infringement of a now-expired patent (which formerly was of questionable validity anyway), by someone who hasn't much by way of assets.
As you say, OpenOffice.org is easy to download for Windows (and all the "easy" Linux distros have precompiled packages that you can download with a few mouse clicks; if you're using a distro where you have to compile it yourself, you probably already can handle stuff like that). But thanks to Microsoft's weaselly behaviour, it'll almost certainly never be able to render OOXML documents exactly as per MS Office. The specification is incomplete (it makes frequent references to Microsoft internal documents, with which nobody else could reasonably be expected to be familiar) and it's far from certain that Microsoft will truly adhere to the published spec with what they release. For example, they might well deliberately mung layouts in subtle ways, so someone else's generated "by-the-book" OOXML document won't look right in Word. And without forcing Microsoft to reveal their Source Code (something which, TTBOMK, no court has ever ordered anyone to do) nobody could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Microsoft were to blame.
It's in Microsoft's interest never to be able to export a document so that anyone else's software can make sense of it. Office has always had the ability to import various data formats, but exporting is something it deliberately doesn't do. If anything other than Word or Excel could open a document created using Word or Excel, then at least some people would use that in place of Word or Excel -- and Microsoft would lose their monopoly.
They might add ODF import (in fact, it makes good sense to do that), but there's no way in hell they'll ever add ODF export. Although, as I've hinted, it could be done by some third party prepared to rewrite OpenOffice.org's save routine in Office VBA macros.
For Microsoft to support ODF would require them to give up the monopoly that results from being able to write files that only Office can truly understand. Early versions of MS Word used to be able to import documents from all the popular word processors..... just not export back to them. So MS Word ended up becoming the "default" word processing application because only it was certain to be able to read its own savefiles.
The.doc format contains various tricks and hacks designed especially to thwart reimplementation. So when your £20 otherwise-adequate office suite mucks up a Word document, you get a pirate copy of MS Word instead and you warn your friends not to buy cheap software. Microsoft haven't got your money, but they have got your heart and mind; and maybe the next time you buy a computer, you'll insist for it to come with Office pre-installed. That of course will be a newer version, and maybe some of your friends' older versions won't be able to read the files you save -- so some of them will upgrade.
Microsoft could mung their ODF export filter so that any document saved as ODF didn't render properly; but they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because then Word wouldn't be able to read back properly any ODF documents it had saved. And also, ODF is a human-readable format; so it will be obvious what has happened. (MS could put in an obfuscated proprietary XML container that would tell Word and only Word about the munging, but it'd still be obvious.)
It wouldn't actually take much to get ODF support into Word, because the relevant modules are already licenced under the "leech-friendly" LGPL. But -- unless someone rewrote the code in VBA -- only Microsoft -- or some renegade with access to the Office Source Code -- could actually link it into Word.
Or, just make it law that software be distributed in Source Code form. Absence of source code does nothing to prevent unauthorised copying. It just makes it a lot harder for users to (1) know what is going, (2) fix problems and (3) adapt the software to their established workflow instead of the other way around.
No they shouldn't. The B scale is the square of the C scale. 2 on C or D == 5 on C1 == 4 on B or A.
If there's an extra line on the cursor that intersects the A scale only, then that's set at pi/4 times wherever the big line is; and if you line the main line of the cursor up against a number on the D scale representing the diameter of a circle, the area in square whatever units will be wherever the little line intersects the A scale.
When my grandad died, he left his "old" slide rules to my dad and me. My dad kept the original wood and cellulose one from the 1940s; I got the plastic one from the 1960s / 70s.
I soon got the hang of using it (and it can be quicker than a calculator sometimes), but I knew the general principle from before anyway. The main thing you have to remember is the slide rule only ever gives you the mantissa; you have to work out the exponent yourself. This means you have to do a rough mental calculation. People often put too much trust in calculators. When I was filling in order forms by hand in a previous job, I never used a calculator -- and I never got called out on a wrong total.
But you've got almost the same situation with ATMs. If it takes more money out of a customer's account than it actually dispenses in real live pound notes, then customers will complain to the bank and the bank will eventually change ATM suppliers (or go bust as customers withdraw their money the old-fashioned way). If it takes less money out of a customer's account than it dispenses, then the bank will twig onto this and eventually change ATM suppliers. Either failure mode ends up hurting the manufacturer.
The only place in an election situation where you've got any naturally-existing conflict like this is between the various candidates, who would not be trusted one another to tell what colour shoes they were wearing if they could see each other's feet. And the way you can exploit this is to let the candidates be the "counting machine". It's what's been done since democracy was first invented and there's no good reason to change it.
Great, so now the receipt is encrypted..... you're adding all these layers of complexity apparently without a thought for the problem you're actually trying to solve.
I wrote some time ago how easy it would be to pull a fraud in a situation where a Big List of everyone's name, address and way they voted is published on the Internet. All you need is some advance knowledge of who knows who (which you can get from studying correspondence, CCTV records &c) and a big nasty DRM system. (Actually you don't need the DRM; you can do the whole lot with Open Source, but it helps with the "theatre" aspect.) Then you just make sure every individual gets a copy of The Big List in which their vote, and the vote of anyone in their immediate social network, is recorded correctly; but the votes of strangers are munged to create whatever final result you want.
The point is that a receipt does not help you. Not one bit. It is a complete red herring. It only shows how you voted; when in actual fact, what you need to know to be sure the result is accurate, is how everyone else except you voted.
Use pencil-and-paper, and have several people count the actual ballot papers by hand. Then the only failure modes are: (1) extra ballot papers getting into the box somehow, and (2) ballot papers being taken out of the box and not counted. Both can be minimised by using simple wire seals and independent scrutineers.
You don't even really need proof that you voted. An abstention is a valid vote (but won't give a receipt according to any known system). You only need proof that you were entitled to vote. Since there are only three ways you can not be entitled to vote -- under age, in prison / mental home or dead -- that ought to be obvious.
This old saw crops up again and again in discussions about voting machines. But the reason why gaming machines are so secure and so reliable depends entirely upon the relationship between operators and punters. The punter wants to make money at the operator's expense, and the operator wants to make money at the punter's expense.
If a machine pays out less than it's meant to, the punters will notice and just leave it alone (or better, post all over the Internet that it's crap). The amusement arcade / casino / chip shop operator suffers reduced takings as a result, and probably tells their friends in the industry. That machine, and others by the same manufacturer, will be shunned because it's unpopular with punters. End result, the manufacturer won't sell many machines which underpay.
If a machine pays out more than it's meant to, the punters will notice and empty it (and maybe post all over the Internet that it's a pushover). The arcade operator suffers reduced takings as a result, and probably tells their industry contacts. That machine won't be kept long because it's too popular with punters. End result, the manufacturer won't sell many machines which overpay.
Either way, the failure mode disfavours the manufacturer. And that's the real reason why gaming machines do what they say. A vote-recording/counting machine can have failure modes which don't necessarily disfavour the manufacturer (in fact, electing a candidate who promised a bung is a failure mode which favours the manufacturer).
It doesn't matter how harsh you make the punishment. The fact is that most people who set out to commit a crime, don't entertain the possibility that they might get caught.
When the stakes are this high, you can't trust anyone.
A receipt that shows which candidate a person voted for is of absolutely no benefit to anybody except cheats. It doesn't help the voter one single bit. The only way it could ever be useful is if everyone who voted in the election gets together in the same place, with their receipts. And that simply ain't gonna happen, my friend. Even if you did manage to get everyone together, can you really be sure that some of the people -- bear in mind that as far as you're concerned, they're mostly strangers -- really are who they say they are, and not just a bunch of hired stooges who travel around from town to town pretending to have voted for the winning candidate in the election there? (OK, that's a bit wild. But if a bent politician thought they could actually get away with it.....)
And you still haven't explained what good the machines are, if you have to hand-count paper ballots just to check that the machines were right.
The voter walks to the electronic machine, votes, and then two copies of a reciept, matching what's on the screen, come off a receipt printer. One copy for the voter, one for the election auditors.
Extremely bad idea. No record of a vote must ever be allowed to leave the polling station -- it could be used for coercion. ("Everybody who takes time off work to go and vote had better show a receipt for [factory owner's brother] when they get back, otherwise they're fired.")
If the paper count doesn't match the machine count then you have election tampering.
If you're going to have to count the papers by hand anyway, then what's the freaking point in having the machine?
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A properly-created virtual machine ought to be absolutely undetectable from withinside. The simple fact is that all commercial offerings to date haven't tried to be undetectable.
..... but on the inside, you don't know it's slow, precisely because you've been fed misinformation about the time things are taking. And processors are getting faster. They used to think that chop-and-swap analogue TV encryption would never be trivially crackable in practice .....
If you lock a person in a windowless room where the only "access to the outside world" is a TV set where you control all the programmes, you essentially control everything they know about the outside world; and you then can make that person believe anything you want them to believe. You could even cause them to think night was day, if their only reference was the continuity announcer's time checks (and/or you could give them a special watch which displayed your manipulated version of the time). But if you accidentally or deliberately let, say, BBC1 get through unaltered, you aren't controlling everything they see; and by comparing the news on the real BBC1 with your altered news on the other stations, they could ascertain that something was amiss.
If your virtualised environment behaves absolutely "correctly" with respect to undocumented instructions and the like (i.e. they aren't trapped and made to do something specific to your virtualisation application), and all I/O channels are properly manipulated (to the point where even the scan line count on the graphics card is adjusted to account for the slowdown in the virtual environment), then it's undetectable from withinside. If, however, even one undocumented instruction does not behave exactly as the real processor, or even one I/O channel is left unmunged, then there is a potential way the virtual environment could be detected.
Of course, all that manipulation of stuff is bound to impose some kind of overhead, so a truly undetectable VM might end up being slow as hell
I think the existing WordPress feature hides everything from Google, which is not quite what I want. I was going to hide only /<a.*href.*?\/a>/is from search engines; meaning that the substance of the post would still be visible, just not any links it contained.
We have free universal healthcare in the UK, and it doesn't cut the amount of drug spam. I even get it addressed to .uk e-mail addresses.
Still, you should implement free universal healthcare anyway -- it might help you look more like a civilised country and less like a tin-pot theocratic fascist dictatorship. You could afford it if you spent a bit less on throwing your military weight around, and as a bonus other people might stop hating you.
For me, it doesn't work; because google-analytics.com is in my /etc/hosts file pointing to 127.0.0.1.
Worse, I think, is the act of spamming blogs with links. The theory is that, the more links there are pointing to a website, the more popular it must be; so, by using commonly-available, spam-advertised commercial software to pollute blogs with links unrelated to the subject matter, webmasters imagine they can improve their ranking without paying baksheesh to the search engine companies.
I have had an idea for a hack to WordPress, which will make all links invisible to GoogleBot (and maybe the other search engines too). This should make it pointless for anybody to spam blogs with links to their site, since the links won't be picked up by search engines. In a nod to Mel, I call this "Search Engine Pessimisation".
OK, I'll sort-of buy it ..... depends on the application, of course. If you're writing X?HTML, then you need to use HTML codes (and the "ctrl+I" shortcut isn't likely to be implemented in anything but a dedicated HTML editor). Anyway, "EM" makes sense once you know it's short for "emphasis". (In non-visual media [e.g. voice synthesis], or visual media incapable of rendering italics [some character terminals], a different form of emphasis might be used. The tag is the same. That's the point with HTML, it's WYSINNWEEG -- What You See Is Not Necessarily What Everyone Else Gets.)
Mod parent up.
Too many people confuse "hard to learn" with "hard to use". For example, typing less-than, e, m, more-than followed by text to italicise then less-than, divide, e, m, more-than is much quicker -- once you know how to do it -- than highlighting the text (an operation requiring leaving the keyboard, getting hold of the mouse, manoeuvring it with pixel precision, clicking and dragging), either clicking on an icon (invariably an italicised "i") or selecting something from a context menu (involving a tricky finger-swap or possibly even a keyboard operation), and then returning to the keyboard.
Also, anything that was hard to learn will be even harder to forget.
Or you could download the Debian netinstall CD; and install WindowMaker desktop, the GTK2 libraries and a bunch of Open Source applications, all for the cost of a few gigs' bandwidth and one blank CD-R. Ting! Next, please.
Debian (and Ubuntu) have a kernel-build system whereby you open an xterm, type one command exactly as it's printed and it compiles the kernel for you. If you have problems with the part in bold type, you shouldn't be using a computer.
Or just install the newer version anyway, and don't tell the boss. It's not like he's going to know the difference anyway. I heard of an outfit whose IT department were given the money for several licences of Windows NT Server, IIS and whatever SQL Server used to be called. They pocketed the cash, installed a bog-standard LAMP stack, and management were never any the wiser .....
The MP3 patent hasn't long to run, and isn't even valid in most of the world. It'd almost be worth someone's while just chancing it. Even if they do get found out before the expiry of the patent, the courts will probably have drier lentils to soak than possible infringement of a now-expired patent (which formerly was of questionable validity anyway), by someone who hasn't much by way of assets.
As you say, OpenOffice.org is easy to download for Windows (and all the "easy" Linux distros have precompiled packages that you can download with a few mouse clicks; if you're using a distro where you have to compile it yourself, you probably already can handle stuff like that). But thanks to Microsoft's weaselly behaviour, it'll almost certainly never be able to render OOXML documents exactly as per MS Office. The specification is incomplete (it makes frequent references to Microsoft internal documents, with which nobody else could reasonably be expected to be familiar) and it's far from certain that Microsoft will truly adhere to the published spec with what they release. For example, they might well deliberately mung layouts in subtle ways, so someone else's generated "by-the-book" OOXML document won't look right in Word. And without forcing Microsoft to reveal their Source Code (something which, TTBOMK, no court has ever ordered anyone to do) nobody could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Microsoft were to blame.
It's in Microsoft's interest never to be able to export a document so that anyone else's software can make sense of it. Office has always had the ability to import various data formats, but exporting is something it deliberately doesn't do. If anything other than Word or Excel could open a document created using Word or Excel, then at least some people would use that in place of Word or Excel -- and Microsoft would lose their monopoly.
They might add ODF import (in fact, it makes good sense to do that), but there's no way in hell they'll ever add ODF export. Although, as I've hinted, it could be done by some third party prepared to rewrite OpenOffice.org's save routine in Office VBA macros.
For Microsoft to support ODF would require them to give up the monopoly that results from being able to write files that only Office can truly understand. Early versions of MS Word used to be able to import documents from all the popular word processors ..... just not export back to them. So MS Word ended up becoming the "default" word processing application because only it was certain to be able to read its own savefiles.
.doc format contains various tricks and hacks designed especially to thwart reimplementation. So when your £20 otherwise-adequate office suite mucks up a Word document, you get a pirate copy of MS Word instead and you warn your friends not to buy cheap software. Microsoft haven't got your money, but they have got your heart and mind; and maybe the next time you buy a computer, you'll insist for it to come with Office pre-installed. That of course will be a newer version, and maybe some of your friends' older versions won't be able to read the files you save -- so some of them will upgrade.
The
Microsoft could mung their ODF export filter so that any document saved as ODF didn't render properly; but they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because then Word wouldn't be able to read back properly any ODF documents it had saved. And also, ODF is a human-readable format; so it will be obvious what has happened. (MS could put in an obfuscated proprietary XML container that would tell Word and only Word about the munging, but it'd still be obvious.)
It wouldn't actually take much to get ODF support into Word, because the relevant modules are already licenced under the "leech-friendly" LGPL. But -- unless someone rewrote the code in VBA -- only Microsoft -- or some renegade with access to the Office Source Code -- could actually link it into Word.
It's not that long since they all did.
Here's a thought: instead of fighting with a dozen other wolves over a sheep, why don't you go and chase a deer or something?
Or, just make it law that software be distributed in Source Code form. Absence of source code does nothing to prevent unauthorised copying. It just makes it a lot harder for users to (1) know what is going, (2) fix problems and (3) adapt the software to their established workflow instead of the other way around.
Did you ever try to do 2 * 2 using 4-figure tables?
log10 2 = 0.3010
log10 2 = 0.3010
10 ** 0.6020 = 3.999
2 * 2 = 3.999. QED.
No they shouldn't. The B scale is the square of the C scale. 2 on C or D == 5 on C1 == 4 on B or A.
If there's an extra line on the cursor that intersects the A scale only, then that's set at pi/4 times wherever the big line is; and if you line the main line of the cursor up against a number on the D scale representing the diameter of a circle, the area in square whatever units will be wherever the little line intersects the A scale.
When my grandad died, he left his "old" slide rules to my dad and me. My dad kept the original wood and cellulose one from the 1940s; I got the plastic one from the 1960s / 70s.
I soon got the hang of using it (and it can be quicker than a calculator sometimes), but I knew the general principle from before anyway. The main thing you have to remember is the slide rule only ever gives you the mantissa; you have to work out the exponent yourself. This means you have to do a rough mental calculation. People often put too much trust in calculators. When I was filling in order forms by hand in a previous job, I never used a calculator -- and I never got called out on a wrong total.
But you've got almost the same situation with ATMs. If it takes more money out of a customer's account than it actually dispenses in real live pound notes, then customers will complain to the bank and the bank will eventually change ATM suppliers (or go bust as customers withdraw their money the old-fashioned way). If it takes less money out of a customer's account than it dispenses, then the bank will twig onto this and eventually change ATM suppliers. Either failure mode ends up hurting the manufacturer.
The only place in an election situation where you've got any naturally-existing conflict like this is between the various candidates, who would not be trusted one another to tell what colour shoes they were wearing if they could see each other's feet. And the way you can exploit this is to let the candidates be the "counting machine". It's what's been done since democracy was first invented and there's no good reason to change it.
Great, so now the receipt is encrypted ..... you're adding all these layers of complexity apparently without a thought for the problem you're actually trying to solve.
I wrote some time ago how easy it would be to pull a fraud in a situation where a Big List of everyone's name, address and way they voted is published on the Internet. All you need is some advance knowledge of who knows who (which you can get from studying correspondence, CCTV records &c) and a big nasty DRM system. (Actually you don't need the DRM; you can do the whole lot with Open Source, but it helps with the "theatre" aspect.) Then you just make sure every individual gets a copy of The Big List in which their vote, and the vote of anyone in their immediate social network, is recorded correctly; but the votes of strangers are munged to create whatever final result you want.
The point is that a receipt does not help you. Not one bit. It is a complete red herring. It only shows how you voted; when in actual fact, what you need to know to be sure the result is accurate, is how everyone else except you voted.
Use pencil-and-paper, and have several people count the actual ballot papers by hand. Then the only failure modes are: (1) extra ballot papers getting into the box somehow, and (2) ballot papers being taken out of the box and not counted. Both can be minimised by using simple wire seals and independent scrutineers.
If you're going to count manually, why bother counting electronically at all?
You don't even really need proof that you voted. An abstention is a valid vote (but won't give a receipt according to any known system). You only need proof that you were entitled to vote. Since there are only three ways you can not be entitled to vote -- under age, in prison / mental home or dead -- that ought to be obvious.
This old saw crops up again and again in discussions about voting machines. But the reason why gaming machines are so secure and so reliable depends entirely upon the relationship between operators and punters. The punter wants to make money at the operator's expense, and the operator wants to make money at the punter's expense.
If a machine pays out less than it's meant to, the punters will notice and just leave it alone (or better, post all over the Internet that it's crap). The amusement arcade / casino / chip shop operator suffers reduced takings as a result, and probably tells their friends in the industry. That machine, and others by the same manufacturer, will be shunned because it's unpopular with punters. End result, the manufacturer won't sell many machines which underpay.
If a machine pays out more than it's meant to, the punters will notice and empty it (and maybe post all over the Internet that it's a pushover). The arcade operator suffers reduced takings as a result, and probably tells their industry contacts. That machine won't be kept long because it's too popular with punters. End result, the manufacturer won't sell many machines which overpay.
Either way, the failure mode disfavours the manufacturer. And that's the real reason why gaming machines do what they say. A vote-recording/counting machine can have failure modes which don't necessarily disfavour the manufacturer (in fact, electing a candidate who promised a bung is a failure mode which favours the manufacturer).
It doesn't matter how harsh you make the punishment. The fact is that most people who set out to commit a crime, don't entertain the possibility that they might get caught.
.....)
When the stakes are this high, you can't trust anyone.
A receipt that shows which candidate a person voted for is of absolutely no benefit to anybody except cheats. It doesn't help the voter one single bit. The only way it could ever be useful is if everyone who voted in the election gets together in the same place, with their receipts. And that simply ain't gonna happen, my friend. Even if you did manage to get everyone together, can you really be sure that some of the people -- bear in mind that as far as you're concerned, they're mostly strangers -- really are who they say they are, and not just a bunch of hired stooges who travel around from town to town pretending to have voted for the winning candidate in the election there? (OK, that's a bit wild. But if a bent politician thought they could actually get away with it
And you still haven't explained what good the machines are, if you have to hand-count paper ballots just to check that the machines were right.