My comment was..... about proudly showing everyone the beauty of your software. That's all good and well, but when there's money to be made, secrecy is often necessary. Not all closed source software is badly made, and if people know your trick they can easily put you out of business by copying your trick and extending it.
You are not so special. If you can solve a problem ("write a program to do X") then other people can solve the same problem. Your code is not unique. If you carry on thinking like that, you will end up making as much money as someone running a pay-toilet in a forest.
Almost every newsagent and bookshop has a photocopier. Yet people don't commonly "pirate" books and newspapers. Why? Well, because it's cheaper to buy than to pirate.
I think it's also that printed text is still the best media for reading, while most new cell phones can play your digital music collection just as well as a CD player.
What's interesting is that there actually is "piracy" of expensive, specialised books (mostly university textbooks with a limited readership; certainly not big sellers such as Harry Potter novels) in poor countries where it is economically justified. I presume publishers have done the maths and can afford to write that off; selling the books more affordably in those countries would mean they would also have to be sold cheaper in the West to avoid parallel importation.
Format-shifting (AKA home taping) of CDs you own is explicitly legal in most jurisdictions and unprosecutable in the others (no jury is going to convict you, they've all done it themselves; and more to the point, neither is any prosecutor prepared to run the risk of a jury acquitting you, so the evidence will go "missing" and you'll be off the hook). What I would like to see is an arrangement for direct payment of royalties; so if you copy an album someone else owns, you can pay the copyright holder directly (minus unused services e.g. stamping, sleeve artwork, delivery, sundry markups) and your copy is then just as legal as one bought in a record store.
Not in all countries. MP3 encoding and decoding, being pure mathematical operations, are beyond the scope of patentability in at least the EU and the UK.
Almost every newsagent and bookshop has a photocopier. Yet people don't commonly "pirate" books and newspapers. Why? Well, because it's cheaper to buy than to pirate. It's my reckoning that if CDs cost about £3.00 (€4.55 / $5.88) each, then it would not be worth most people's while to go to the effort of copying them. Nor would anyone think twice about buying a CD at that price. The record companies could easily afford to sell CDs at for £3.00 if they didn't spend so much pursuing failed copy-prevention schemes and paying fatcats to do nothing useful. And they'd probably sell enough units to be earning more than they were before. People would be more willing to take a gamble; if it turns out to be shite, it's not such a great loss.
Now I'm going to tell you a story. It's a sad story. About music, and greed, and the Perversity of Human Nature.
There was a bar I used to drink in once. They had a juke box in there. An NSM Prestige, played 45s, 160 selections. 10 pence a song, six for 50p., and it was always playing. Everyone who came into the place used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, drop in a coin and put on a tune.
Actually, the juke box wasn't always playing. For one hour a fortnight, it would be silent, while the man from the amusement machine hire company emptied the coin box, changed the records and cleaned and serviced the machine. And the bar was closed sometimes. But you get the general idea. It was a popular machine. It also played the records in the order they were arranged in the magazine, not the order in which they were selected (that way, it used only 20 bytes of RAM to store all its selections; which is important when your brain is a single-chip micro with just 64 bytes of RAM), and it was quite possible that you'd have to stay awhile to hear your track if there were a lot of selections from the other end of the machine to be played. That meant the bar sold more beer and food, since the Perversity of Human Nature is such that someone who has paid to hear a song will gladly spend a few pounds on refreshments rather than waste ten pence by leaving before the song comes around on the record machine.
All that changed one sunny afternoon. The man from the amusement hire company came round as usual; only this time, as well as merely emptying the coin box, changing the records, cleaning and servicing the machine, he also tweaked the price up to 20 pence a song.
After that, people just used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, and walk away again.
And the moral of the story, if you're really choking for this story to have a moral, is that if you charge too much then people won't pay it.
No. It needs some fuel to warm it up initially. After that, it's able to power itself on the potential energy stored in the garbage. For every kWh. of "starter" fuel you put in, you get out 1.9kWh; of which the extra 900Wh. are coming from the garbage.
Asterisk is very easy to set up. You just have to be good at setting Asterisk up. The way to get good at setting Asterisk up is to set Asterisk up. For your first assignment, use just two hardware SIP phones. Once you have got them talking to each other, then you can think about adding more phones and things like POTS gateways.
Within weeks you'll be writing advanced dial plans to do things like ring all the phones in a department or divert calls to your mobile if you haven't picked up in twelve rings, and you'll have DHCP and TFTP set up so each phone on the network can configure itself at switch-on. Then it'll all be working exactly how you want it to, with nothing for you to do except occasionally unplug and replug a misbehaving telephone.
About a year or eighteen months later, you will want to add a simple new feature. Unfortunately, by this time you will have forgotten altogether how you set everything up in the first place.
If you run closed-source software on your machine, then you deserve everything you get.
If the suppliers of software weren't ashamed of it, they would gladly show you what was inside, beaming with pride as you carefully inspected each immaculately-tooled part. If they won't let you look, it's always for one of two reasons. Either it's doing something they don't want you to know about (*cough* ActiveX *cough*), or it's so badly written that they wouldn't want to admit to it (*cough* StarOffice *cough*).
Stick to open standards like SIP and IAX. Only download Skype if you're planning to try to force it open.
The big advantage that BSD and Linux have over Windows in this space (migration away from commercial Unix) is that most of what you have already learned is, as near as damn it is to swearing, directly portable. Even most of the applications you are already running, need no more than a swift recompile.
There was a bar I used to drink in once. They had a juke box in there. An NSM Prestige (think what a hypothetical 1988 Seeburg would be like if the company had still been going then), played 45s, 160 selections. 10 pence a song, and it was always playing. Everyone who came into the place used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, drop in a coin and put on a tune.
One sunny afternoon, the man came round from the amusement hire company like he did once a fortnight, to service the machine and change the records. He also tweaked it up to 20 pence a song.
After that, people just used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, and walk away again.
First, connect the monitor's VGA cable directly to the PC's graphics card, not via a KVM switch or extension cable -- those things can muck up the monitor's data comms lines which are used for autodetection -- and use the Open Source driver from X.org, not the closed source nVidia/ATI binary driver (at least, until you've got it set up properly; once you have a picture, feel free to pollute your system with slaveware, but if you break both your legs you'd better not come running to me). Restart your computer. In the worst case, rm -rF/etc/X11* to blow away all your old configuration files, and forcibly reinstall X.org. Only when you have it working can you begin to muck about with KVM switches, extension leads and binary drivers.
I hope I'm not feeding a cut-n-paste troll here. But this is high grade troll poison anyway, so it's OK if I am.
I mean Adobe Reader is not OSS, but it is better then the OSS PDF viewers out there.
How so? I have never missed it. What does it do that kPDF doesn't do?
MP3s are not open source, but how many teenagers prefer to trade OGG files over MP3s?
How so? The "source code" for an MP3 file is surely the original, uncompressed sound recording. There are plenty of Open Source MP3 encoding and decoding applications. The MP3 encoding/decoding process itself is a purely mathematical operation, which is beyond the scope of French patent law.
See my point? Why limit your software options based on whether or not the source (which we will probably never read) is available?
Because if the Source Code is not available, then the software is no good. Just because you aren't going to read it, doesn't mean nobody else is going to read it and make improvements to it. In fact, if young, inquisitive people who don't want to be bound by convention have access to the Source Code, some of them probably will read it; and some of them probably will change it. Every user of closed, proprietary software is -- until we have a working decompiler, and hopefully that won't be long now -- beholden to the vendor. If you're using Adobe reader, or Flash player, you have to dance to Adobe's tune. They can change the record, or stop the music altogether, anytime they like, and there's fuck-all you can do about it.
Going only open source and excluding user driven proprietary software limits choice for no logical reason.
No, it limits "choice" for a very logical reason: it's a false choice in the first place. Look at it this way: you can buy fifty brands of fags, but they all give you cancer. Is that really a real choice? The real choice is whether to have control over your own destiny or be a sad pathetic nicotine addict, a puppet of the tobacco companies. One minute they'll tell you Benson and Hedges are cool, and you'll smoke B&H, next they'll say Silk Cut are cool and B&H are old men's fags. And, because you have no choice, you will obey.
A choice of masters is still slavery. A choice of hanging or firing squad is still a death sentence. And a choice of different closed software is still abandoning control of your computer to the whims and caprices of another.
If anything, I'd imagine that they are attempting to build a competency around OSS.
Exactly so. If French kids grow up comfortable with OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird, then they are less likely to fall into the MS Office pit of despair. Also, since there are Linux versions of all these applications, it will make it easier for them to make the Big Jump.
If Microsoft et al ever start with making a big anti-piracy push in France, you can bet that the end result won't be that everyone who used to have been using pirated Microsoft software will start using paid-up Microsoft software..... c'est pas comment on fait ces choses. Microsoft will be lucky ever to sell a licence in France again.
Also, there's a really good chance that France could be one of the first countries actually to ban closed source software. They've got some quite savvy IT policies; they have even gone to the trouble of creating words in their own language for concepts like RAM (memoire vive) and Source Code (lisible). And they still haven't forgiven the USA for making them invent a word for "inch" (France literally went straight from holding two fingers apart and saying "about so big" to using a mètre divided into a hundred centimètres; until imported American computer equipment began turning up in the 1960s, there was no word for "inch" in the French language, with environ deux centimètres et demi the official translation.) Well, that and laughing at their word for a printer buffer.....
I wasn't around during World Wars One or Two; but, unless it's a recent phenomenon for the Americans to shoot soldiers on their own side, I'd say the French would have managed just fine without.
If it were law that Source Code must be available, it would also have to be law that the Source Code supplied must be buildable to the binary supplied. And that would deal with last-minute changes. Someone builds the Source, it doesn't match the binary, someone at Microsoft gets a ride in a police car.
Any last-minute changes to the Source Code would be fixable by Apple developers or the Community At Large, again in hours, and the fixes posted on the Internet. And iTunes is, by its very nature, not a hell of a lot of use without the Internet.
There is plenty of precedent to look at. Not only have you the modern Open Source community for a mostly-shining example; but before about the 1970s-1980s, all software was distributed this way as a matter of course. (It had to be, since even computers of the same make and model would not necessarily be able to run binaries compiled for each other if there were slight differences in hardware configuration.)
All I can see, looking at this whole sorry mess, is a good argument for why all software should be made available in Source Code form.
If Apple had had access to the Source Code for Vista, there would be no excuse for them churning out a shoddy product; but if the Community At Large had had access to the Source Code for iTunes, then it would have been patched in a matter of hours.
Concealing Source Code hurts users and developers.
We RAIG our governing process. Redundant Array Inexpensive Governments.
You mean like having two separate sets of Houses of parliament, with a Labour government in one and a Tory government in the other, and then everyone just chooses who they are going to pay their taxes to? If someone doesn't pay taxes to anyone, both governments get to gang up against them and hunt them down. Both governments also have to pitch in together for things like police, road-building and national defence (but a police officer will be less likely to arrest someone on the say-so of the government which paid them less, the armed forces will try harder to keep the bombs from falling on the side which paid them more, and so forth). If one government banned something that the other government kept legal, then anyone who paid their taxes to the government where it was legal couldn't be arrested for it.
What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail?
What's right with them?
If the journal printer is hidden from public view, then there's no way to be sure that the printed vote matches your actual vote. If there is an observation window between the print head and the take-up spool, so you can see your vote before it winds up into the bowels of the machine, that's still not much better, and you don't know for sure your vote hasn't been changed. (Maybe if the take-up spool was wound printed-side-in, the whole mechanism could be made visible; but that doesn't preclude a second, concealed printer recording anything the manufacturer wants.) Your vote can potentially be traced back to you, since the journal roll is in strict chronological order. (Keeping multiple journal rolls, and having each vote written to a randomly-selected one, might be a way around this.) You can't be sure that the machine isn't printing additional votes while nobody is looking at it (especially if it's a thermal print head). You can't be sure that the paper already on the take-up spool before the first vote was cast, was blank. Lots of can't-be-sures.
Can you be sure that a simple ballot box was empty? Yes, if it was checked by representatives of all candidates (none of whom trust each other), sealed shut by the Returning Officer for the constituency in front of the candidates' representatives, and the seal was checked by the Presiding Officer at the polling station before cutting it open and putting the box into use. There is no way a paper can get into a ballot box except through the slot. Alternatively, use perspex boxes (which will still require pre-sealing); but this imposes a requirement for voters to fold their ballot papers text-side-in.
Receipts that the voter takes away are an even worse idea. What goes in the ballot box should stay in the ballot box, and there should be no record of it anywhere else. If you have a piece of paper about your person "proving" that you voted Conservative (although the machine, if it is rigged, might well have registered your vote as being for Labour), that can be used against you in various ways. Voter receipts, if issued, should not show the voter's choice, and should be available to abstainers (an abstention is still a valid vote). Thus a receipt would merely demonstrate entitlement to vote. But, since the only qualification for voting is reaching a certain age and the only disqualification from voting is death, such proof is redundant, since the voter need only prove that they are alive and over the age of maturity. Alternatively, receipts showing the voter's choice should be trivially forgeable, so that if (illegally, but it happens) challenged to show a vote for a particular party, one could demonstrate a vote for that party that could not be proven false. This also defeats the purpose of a receipt somewhat. Finally, the only way that take-away receipts could ever be of any use in recounting is if everyone brought their receipt to the Town Hall; it's next to impossible for this ever be made to work. Most will be lost or damaged. Not everyone will comply. The margin of error will be huge.
There has to come a point where your choice is made irrevocably. With hand-counted paper ballots, you have ample opportunity to study the names before writing a figure "1" next to your favourite, then a bit longer to choose your second-favourite, and so forth. If you make a mistake, you ask the presiding officer for another ballot paper. The spoiled one is kept; and at the close of proceedings, the number of spoiled papers handed in should exactly match the number of "extras" handed out.
Mere observability isn't enough. You can add LEDs that light up to show processes working, but it still misses the point that what is "observable" is only an indirect representation. Manual counting has the advantage of being Universally Comprehensible. Any school leaver with passing grades can understand how it works. Not to mention that it's scalable, parallelisable and verifiable.
Each candidate's representative at the count counts "their" ones from the pile. Then they pass their papers to their neighbour, who recounts them, passing any that should be in someone else's pile to whoever they belong to. When everyone's ones have been counted by everyone and everyone agrees on the count, then it is recorded. If necessary, the process is repeated for twos, threes and so forth until a candidate is elected (or nominations are to be reopened). At that point, the count is phoned through; and the ballot papers are sealed up and placed into secure storage.
Might it not be cheaper and simpler, and better for democracy in the long run, to replace the touchscreen voting machines with a number of heavy, opaque boxes, each having a lid which can be padlocked shut and in which is a single slot which can be covered with a flap and sealed with a wire seal; into which voters would drop pieces of paper, upon which they have written a number next to each candidate's name, for subsequent counting by hand in the presence of candidates and their representatives?
Slashdot Mirror
It probably doesn't take measurements accurately enough to use millimetres.
Format-shifting (AKA home taping) of CDs you own is explicitly legal in most jurisdictions and unprosecutable in the others (no jury is going to convict you, they've all done it themselves; and more to the point, neither is any prosecutor prepared to run the risk of a jury acquitting you, so the evidence will go "missing" and you'll be off the hook). What I would like to see is an arrangement for direct payment of royalties; so if you copy an album someone else owns, you can pay the copyright holder directly (minus unused services e.g. stamping, sleeve artwork, delivery, sundry markups) and your copy is then just as legal as one bought in a record store.
Not in all countries. MP3 encoding and decoding, being pure mathematical operations, are beyond the scope of patentability in at least the EU and the UK.
You could come and work for us, if we were recruiting. We reject CVs in .doc format.
What are they smoking?
Almost every newsagent and bookshop has a photocopier. Yet people don't commonly "pirate" books and newspapers. Why? Well, because it's cheaper to buy than to pirate. It's my reckoning that if CDs cost about £3.00 (€4.55 / $5.88) each, then it would not be worth most people's while to go to the effort of copying them. Nor would anyone think twice about buying a CD at that price. The record companies could easily afford to sell CDs at for £3.00 if they didn't spend so much pursuing failed copy-prevention schemes and paying fatcats to do nothing useful. And they'd probably sell enough units to be earning more than they were before. People would be more willing to take a gamble; if it turns out to be shite, it's not such a great loss.
Now I'm going to tell you a story. It's a sad story. About music, and greed, and the Perversity of Human Nature.
There was a bar I used to drink in once. They had a juke box in there. An NSM Prestige, played 45s, 160 selections. 10 pence a song, six for 50p., and it was always playing. Everyone who came into the place used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, drop in a coin and put on a tune.
Actually, the juke box wasn't always playing. For one hour a fortnight, it would be silent, while the man from the amusement machine hire company emptied the coin box, changed the records and cleaned and serviced the machine. And the bar was closed sometimes. But you get the general idea. It was a popular machine. It also played the records in the order they were arranged in the magazine, not the order in which they were selected (that way, it used only 20 bytes of RAM to store all its selections; which is important when your brain is a single-chip micro with just 64 bytes of RAM), and it was quite possible that you'd have to stay awhile to hear your track if there were a lot of selections from the other end of the machine to be played. That meant the bar sold more beer and food, since the Perversity of Human Nature is such that someone who has paid to hear a song will gladly spend a few pounds on refreshments rather than waste ten pence by leaving before the song comes around on the record machine.
All that changed one sunny afternoon. The man from the amusement hire company came round as usual; only this time, as well as merely emptying the coin box, changing the records, cleaning and servicing the machine, he also tweaked the price up to 20 pence a song.
After that, people just used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, and walk away again.
And the moral of the story, if you're really choking for this story to have a moral, is that if you charge too much then people won't pay it.
No. It needs some fuel to warm it up initially. After that, it's able to power itself on the potential energy stored in the garbage. For every kWh. of "starter" fuel you put in, you get out 1.9kWh; of which the extra 900Wh. are coming from the garbage.
Judging by your e-mail address, you probably can get a better smoke locally.
Now that we've both tried to be funny and failed, which bits ecactly were you taking issue with?
Asterisk is very easy to set up. You just have to be good at setting Asterisk up. The way to get good at setting Asterisk up is to set Asterisk up. For your first assignment, use just two hardware SIP phones. Once you have got them talking to each other, then you can think about adding more phones and things like POTS gateways.
Within weeks you'll be writing advanced dial plans to do things like ring all the phones in a department or divert calls to your mobile if you haven't picked up in twelve rings, and you'll have DHCP and TFTP set up so each phone on the network can configure itself at switch-on. Then it'll all be working exactly how you want it to, with nothing for you to do except occasionally unplug and replug a misbehaving telephone.
About a year or eighteen months later, you will want to add a simple new feature. Unfortunately, by this time you will have forgotten altogether how you set everything up in the first place.
If you run closed-source software on your machine, then you deserve everything you get.
If the suppliers of software weren't ashamed of it, they would gladly show you what was inside, beaming with pride as you carefully inspected each immaculately-tooled part. If they won't let you look, it's always for one of two reasons. Either it's doing something they don't want you to know about (*cough* ActiveX *cough*), or it's so badly written that they wouldn't want to admit to it (*cough* StarOffice *cough*).
Stick to open standards like SIP and IAX. Only download Skype if you're planning to try to force it open.
Serves them right really, for sending a little kid to do a grown-up's job.
The big advantage that BSD and Linux have over Windows in this space (migration away from commercial Unix) is that most of what you have already learned is, as near as damn it is to swearing, directly portable. Even most of the applications you are already running, need no more than a swift recompile.
I'm going to tell you a story.
There was a bar I used to drink in once. They had a juke box in there. An NSM Prestige (think what a hypothetical 1988 Seeburg would be like if the company had still been going then), played 45s, 160 selections. 10 pence a song, and it was always playing. Everyone who came into the place used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, drop in a coin and put on a tune.
One sunny afternoon, the man came round from the amusement hire company like he did once a fortnight, to service the machine and change the records. He also tweaked it up to 20 pence a song.
After that, people just used to walk up to the machine, look at the records, and walk away again.
First, connect the monitor's VGA cable directly to the PC's graphics card, not via a KVM switch or extension cable -- those things can muck up the monitor's data comms lines which are used for autodetection -- and use the Open Source driver from X.org, not the closed source nVidia/ATI binary driver (at least, until you've got it set up properly; once you have a picture, feel free to pollute your system with slaveware, but if you break both your legs you'd better not come running to me). Restart your computer. In the worst case, rm -rF /etc/X11* to blow away all your old configuration files, and forcibly reinstall X.org. Only when you have it working can you begin to muck about with KVM switches, extension leads and binary drivers.
I hope I'm not feeding a cut-n-paste troll here. But this is high grade troll poison anyway, so it's OK if I am.
A choice of masters is still slavery. A choice of hanging or firing squad is still a death sentence. And a choice of different closed software is still abandoning control of your computer to the whims and caprices of another.
Et qu'est-ce-qui te fait croire que les Français doivent même aimer les Etats-Unis?
La France ne vous doit RIEN!
If Microsoft et al ever start with making a big anti-piracy push in France, you can bet that the end result won't be that everyone who used to have been using pirated Microsoft software will start using paid-up Microsoft software
Also, there's a really good chance that France could be one of the first countries actually to ban closed source software. They've got some quite savvy IT policies; they have even gone to the trouble of creating words in their own language for concepts like RAM (memoire vive) and Source Code (lisible). And they still haven't forgiven the USA for making them invent a word for "inch" (France literally went straight from holding two fingers apart and saying "about so big" to using a mètre divided into a hundred centimètres; until imported American computer equipment began turning up in the 1960s, there was no word for "inch" in the French language, with environ deux centimètres et demi the official translation.) Well, that and laughing at their word for a printer buffer
I wasn't around during World Wars One or Two; but, unless it's a recent phenomenon for the Americans to shoot soldiers on their own side, I'd say the French would have managed just fine without.
Not really.
If it were law that Source Code must be available, it would also have to be law that the Source Code supplied must be buildable to the binary supplied. And that would deal with last-minute changes. Someone builds the Source, it doesn't match the binary, someone at Microsoft gets a ride in a police car.
Any last-minute changes to the Source Code would be fixable by Apple developers or the Community At Large, again in hours, and the fixes posted on the Internet. And iTunes is, by its very nature, not a hell of a lot of use without the Internet.
There is plenty of precedent to look at. Not only have you the modern Open Source community for a mostly-shining example; but before about the 1970s-1980s, all software was distributed this way as a matter of course. (It had to be, since even computers of the same make and model would not necessarily be able to run binaries compiled for each other if there were slight differences in hardware configuration.)
All I can see, looking at this whole sorry mess, is a good argument for why all software should be made available in Source Code form.
If Apple had had access to the Source Code for Vista, there would be no excuse for them churning out a shoddy product; but if the Community At Large had had access to the Source Code for iTunes, then it would have been patched in a matter of hours.
Concealing Source Code hurts users and developers.
I think that could work quite well, actually.
If the journal printer is hidden from public view, then there's no way to be sure that the printed vote matches your actual vote. If there is an observation window between the print head and the take-up spool, so you can see your vote before it winds up into the bowels of the machine, that's still not much better, and you don't know for sure your vote hasn't been changed. (Maybe if the take-up spool was wound printed-side-in, the whole mechanism could be made visible; but that doesn't preclude a second, concealed printer recording anything the manufacturer wants.) Your vote can potentially be traced back to you, since the journal roll is in strict chronological order. (Keeping multiple journal rolls, and having each vote written to a randomly-selected one, might be a way around this.) You can't be sure that the machine isn't printing additional votes while nobody is looking at it (especially if it's a thermal print head). You can't be sure that the paper already on the take-up spool before the first vote was cast, was blank. Lots of can't-be-sures.
Can you be sure that a simple ballot box was empty? Yes, if it was checked by representatives of all candidates (none of whom trust each other), sealed shut by the Returning Officer for the constituency in front of the candidates' representatives, and the seal was checked by the Presiding Officer at the polling station before cutting it open and putting the box into use. There is no way a paper can get into a ballot box except through the slot. Alternatively, use perspex boxes (which will still require pre-sealing); but this imposes a requirement for voters to fold their ballot papers text-side-in.
Receipts that the voter takes away are an even worse idea. What goes in the ballot box should stay in the ballot box, and there should be no record of it anywhere else. If you have a piece of paper about your person "proving" that you voted Conservative (although the machine, if it is rigged, might well have registered your vote as being for Labour), that can be used against you in various ways. Voter receipts, if issued, should not show the voter's choice, and should be available to abstainers (an abstention is still a valid vote). Thus a receipt would merely demonstrate entitlement to vote. But, since the only qualification for voting is reaching a certain age and the only disqualification from voting is death, such proof is redundant, since the voter need only prove that they are alive and over the age of maturity. Alternatively, receipts showing the voter's choice should be trivially forgeable, so that if (illegally, but it happens) challenged to show a vote for a particular party, one could demonstrate a vote for that party that could not be proven false. This also defeats the purpose of a receipt somewhat. Finally, the only way that take-away receipts could ever be of any use in recounting is if everyone brought their receipt to the Town Hall; it's next to impossible for this ever be made to work. Most will be lost or damaged. Not everyone will comply. The margin of error will be huge.
There has to come a point where your choice is made irrevocably. With hand-counted paper ballots, you have ample opportunity to study the names before writing a figure "1" next to your favourite, then a bit longer to choose your second-favourite, and so forth. If you make a mistake, you ask the presiding officer for another ballot paper. The spoiled one is kept; and at the close of proceedings, the number of spoiled papers handed in should exactly match the number of "extras" handed out.
Exactly.
Mere observability isn't enough. You can add LEDs that light up to show processes working, but it still misses the point that what is "observable" is only an indirect representation. Manual counting has the advantage of being Universally Comprehensible. Any school leaver with passing grades can understand how it works. Not to mention that it's scalable, parallelisable and verifiable.
Each candidate's representative at the count counts "their" ones from the pile. Then they pass their papers to their neighbour, who recounts them, passing any that should be in someone else's pile to whoever they belong to. When everyone's ones have been counted by everyone and everyone agrees on the count, then it is recorded. If necessary, the process is repeated for twos, threes and so forth until a candidate is elected (or nominations are to be reopened). At that point, the count is phoned through; and the ballot papers are sealed up and placed into secure storage.
Might it not be cheaper and simpler, and better for democracy in the long run, to replace the touchscreen voting machines with a number of heavy, opaque boxes, each having a lid which can be padlocked shut and in which is a single slot which can be covered with a flap and sealed with a wire seal; into which voters would drop pieces of paper, upon which they have written a number next to each candidate's name, for subsequent counting by hand in the presence of candidates and their representatives?