Suppose someone is suicidal and willingly takes a gunshot to the head
I highlighted the difference between your strawman and the crime of rape.
You cannot say that it is violent just because the victim did not want it to happen.
In the case of rape, yes I can. Go talk to a rape victim and then try to tell us that it isn't a violent action. Try to convince us that the action of having your body violated is not an inherently violent act.
I would personally resist a rapist with my last ounce of strength. The fact that some people might be too scared to do so does not reduce the violence of the encounter in any way, shape or form.
By this logic (STDs exist) you are also endangered by consensual sex. So do states also have laws permitting the execution of anyone caught copulating, for their own protection?
I highlighted the difference between your ludicrous "example" and the crime of rape.
So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same manner?
Are not being threatened with a weapon of some sort
Weapons are not limited to guns and knives. If you were a 100 pound female facing a 200+ pound male who has three or more times your muscle mass are you seriously going to argue that it shouldn't be considered a violent crime just because he didn't happen to have a firearm, knife or some other technological piece of weaponry?
Were not poisoned or endangered
Being raped is endangerment. Ever heard of STDs? Ever heard of the ones that can't be cured and which are eventually fatal? There's a reason why most states (even the liberal blue ones) allow for the use of deadly force when confronted with a would-be rapist. A rapist is arguably every bit as dangerous as a loaded gun pointed at your head or knife at your throat.
Violent crimes involve violence of some sort
I would argue that having your body penetrated against your will is an inherently violent act.
And the right to bear them is guranteed by the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
Part of which (the Constitution) says:
"No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
Thus it seems that for better or worse the Constitution has a provision that allows for the deprivation of the liberties of convicted criminals who have been accorded due process of law. If we can take away their right to vote and keep and bear arms, why not the "right" to use Facebook?
If they are so likely to commit their crime again, then keep them in jail.
Amen to that. It seems to me that if we kept all of the perverts in jail that this whole discussion about "registries" would be a moot point. May I suggest that we stop arresting ~900,000 people annually for marijuana related offenses in order to make room for the perverts?
Maybe that's the argument the legalization crowd should be making. "Think of the children! Legalize pot!"
but rape that involves no weapon or fighting is just not something I would call "violent."
Bullshit. It's rape if one of the partners doesn't consent to the activity. The fact that the rapist wasn't armed really shouldn't enter into the calculation, except in so far as that they wind up charged with additional weapons offenses in addition to the rape charge.
Mind you, I don't think statutory rape should be regarded in the same manner as what I described above, but to say that rape isn't a violent crime just because no weapon was involved kind of misses the mark, IMHO. You don't regard it as a violent act to have something penetrate your body against your will?
Inspectors in TX rarely live in that precinct, but the poll workers do (EJ, AJ, and poll clerks).
In NYS the Inspector has the same rule as your EJs. We sign voters in, handle any challenges that may arise, etc, etc. Generally we don't have poll clerks except in the really busy urban districts -- where they exist their job is to assist the inspectors and help to ensure that the polling place continues to operate smoothly. They don't have any vote on disputes or any authority beyond that granted to them by the Board of Inspectors.
It was my impression that your parent post was saying inherent weaknesses in DREs weren't a primary concern
DREs scare the hell out of me. I'm glad that my state hasn't adopted them. I was mainly trying to respond to the tin-foil hat crowd that thinks anything electronic must be bad. I don't see a problem with a system that relies on paper ballots and which only uses the electronic side of things as an assistance mechanism for handicapped voters and a tabulation device.
The burger flipper should make a living wage. Maybe that's not $50,000, but he should be able to support himself and his family on that wage.
And who pays his "living wage"? The customers who pay more for the burger? The employer who can't hire more cooks because you are telling him what he has to pay the ones he already has? The Government who takes the money from one group of people in order to distribute it to another?
Who determines what this magical "living wage" is? What exactly is a living wage? I know someone who makes ~$20,000 and manages to support a family of four on it. Is it easy? No. But are his children going hungry and wanting for basic necessities? Not that I've seen.
If you think he should not make a living wage, you are advocating oppression and wage slavery.
What you see as "wage slavery" I see as the natural order of things. No matter how much you may wish it to be different people are never going to be on an entirely equal footing. In the end all you would accomplish if you had your way would be to move the oppression from one that's based on economics to one that's based on how much influence your particular group can wield in the halls of government. I don't regard that as an improvement.
and they all could if we didn't give the vast majority of the wealth we collectively create to the top 1%
The top 1% is already paying 25%-40% of all taxes in this country, depending on whose numbers you believe. The bottom 50% pays nothing. I'm rather skeptical of people who place the blame for our problems at the feet of the "top 1%" as it seems to be a simplistic view of a complex society.
There are plenty of examples in history of the people, acting through their elected representatives, ending unfairness.
There are also plenty of examples in the history of the people of the government taking rights, liberties and freedoms away from the individual citizen. In fact it seems to happen more often than not. It's not limited to banana republics either -- take a look at what's going on in the UK right now. Given this historical trend I'm of the belief that it's best to keep government as small as possible and that whatever benefits we gain from increasing it are vastly outweighed by the loss of liberty and risk of oppression. You apparently disagree.
You have a distorted view of human nature
And yours is a naive one, my friend:)
We aren't the evil, selfish creatures you seem to think we are
I've never claimed that humans are evil and selfish creatures. In fact I spent the better part of two days arguing the exact opposite in a different discussion a little while ago.
In other systems, people do not feel the need to be so cut-throat.
I don't feel the need to be particularly cut-throat. As I said earlier I'm more or less happy with my lot in life. If I wanted to be cut-throat I suspect that I could make quite a bit more money than I currently do.
Do you honestly think that there is equality of opportunity in this country?
Have I claimed there is? How many times do I have to say that there is unfairness in our society before you stop beating this dead horse?
That all anyone needs to do is pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, remove their obstacles, and succeed?
Do I think that everyone can "pick themselves up by their own bootstraps"? No. Do I think that you will generally be more successful by relying on yourself than by relying on Uncle Sam? Yes. At the end of the day I have a lot more confidence in myself and my neighbors than I do in Washington or Albany.
Is it okay that some people are forced to take menial positions because of some supposed inferiority
People love to use the 'republic vs. democracy' line, but it is not meaningful
Correction: It's not meaningful to you. I regard it as meaningful because those who talk about our 'democracy' are seemingly unaware of our actual system of government and/or can't be bothered to use accurate terms in a discussion. I regard it as meaningful because a true democracy would lead to the tyranny of the majority. I regard it as meaningful because I don't happen to think that my region should be dictated to by another region just because they have a higher population than we do.
If you work for an employer and make less than $50,000, I'd say you are not receiving all the fruits of your labor.
So you think the burger flipper who is performing a job that anyone can be trained to do in a matter of days and which requires no formal education should be making at least $50,000?
It can be done right.
No, it can't. Human nature will prevent it from being doing 'right' (whatever that means)
Valuation is arbitrary and in our system, the value of something is determined by a vote, using dollars. The more dollars you have, the more votes you have. It's still a democracy, but a completely unfair one. Those with the money make the rules, they set the prices, and they determine the income that we, the peons, receive.
I don't know why you keep coming back to this "it's unfair!" argument when I've already acknowledged that our country is anything but fair. What you seem to be unwilling to consider is that any attempt to use the government to correct "unfairness" invariably creates more problems than it solves.
If you truly regard yourself as a "powerless peon" then you have my pity. I used to feel the same way until I realized that I'm ultimately responsible for my own success or failure and that I can't rely on others to remove the roadblocks that I may encounter along the way.
The thing is, even if we DID have a free market in labor, the workers would be screwed by market forces. There is a serious imbalance of information between buyers and sellers of labor, and this leads to a systematic devaluation of labor in a free market.
As opposed to your ideal system where the government controls the means of production and determines what your labor is worth? Yeah, nobody will be screwed under that system either.....
Forcing people to choose between working in degrading conditions for unfair wages, or DIEING, is coercion.
First off, that simply isn't true. For better or worse we have a social safety net in this country. You aren't going to starve if you know how to utilize the system. Second, your complaints of "coercion" are hard to take seriously when are you advocating for a system that would replace monetary coercion with governmental coercion.
The free market is based on several proven falsehoods, and it is not wonder it doesn't work right.
It's ironic to hear someone advocating for socialism complaining that another system is based on several proven falsehoods.....
You are asked to part with more than half your wages, counting your mortgage, food, car payments, etc. But you feel you get good value for the wages you part with.
I can choose which house I buy, which bank holds my mortgage, which grocery store I shop at and which car I drive.
After all, they can vote and would vote socialism out if it weren't working for them.
Yes, they can vote that government out. But the individual who feels he isn't getting good value has no choice beyond "suck it up and pay your taxes". Your ideal system is all about depriving the individual of choice the theory that it's better for the whole. You may regard that as the natural order of things but I believe in individual freedom, liberty and responsibility. I don't want the Government looking out for me -- I want to be responsible for my own well being and free to live my life with a minimal amount of interference from others.
With the law, the accused are guaranteed a certain amount of prison time for refusing to give the password and still run the risk of being convicted of whatever the police are accusing them of.
Fixed that for you:)
I don't understand why the police would want to rely on a single piece of evidence to make their entire case anyway.
Because the police are human beings like the rest of us and human beings tend to be lazy creatures at heart?
While I hate RealNetworks and all it stands for, and will never forgive them for taking over online media with their crappy bloated players and codecs
How do you figure that Real "took over" online media? Most of the online media that I interact with these does uses Flash. A smaller percentage uses Sliverlight and/or WMP. I honestly can't remember the last time I ran across a site that uses Real exclusively and I don't even have the bloatware loaded on my PC anymore.
The standard technique for moving such files a while was to hide the data inside pornography. They are one of the most commonly trafficked file types on the internet and people prefer not to look at it too closely
You wouldn't happen to know where I could apply for a job looking for this hidden data, would you?
its the vile bullshit he was spewing that the authorities objected to
If the authorities get to decide that what you are saying is "vile bullshit" and punish you for saying it then free speech is worthless and we might as well abandon it.
It's depressing to think that all of the rights that I enjoy as an American came from the English Common Law and that the citizens of your country are busy surrendering those rights one by one. You've surrendered the right to keep arms, the right to keep silent, the right against self-incrimination, the right of privacy and most of the checks and balances of your Parliamentary system. Am I missing any?
Why do the British people tolerate this? Your history suggests that you should know better. What's it going to going to take before you wake up and vote the scumbags out of the Commons and/or rise up against them?
Occasionally there were not volunteers from both parties in the precinct, so we had to allow the AJ to be the same party.
Hmm, in NYS they don't require the Inspectors to be from the same election district. In fact they rarely are. I managed to get assigned to my own election district when there was an opening (mainly so I wouldn't have to leave my post to drive across town and vote) but that's a rarity.
Right now EVSes are not demonstrably safe from known attacks.
I've never advocated for electronic voting systems. But I do think there is a distinction between a DRE (direct electronic record) system and a system that relies on paper ballots and which only uses a machine to tabulate them.
Unless you're into burying USB sticks with PSK's in the backyard, thinking that your data is secure just because 'it's encrypted, and xyz encryption is unbreakable!' is a fallacy.
That would be a very bad idea. It's generally accepted in the US that if you write the password down somewhere and the authorities find out about it they can subpoena the writing. Failure to comply with the subpoena would result in a contempt of court citation and jail time until you complied. I would assume the same would apply with a USB stick.
It's much better to ensure that the password is only stored within your head. Using diceware you can come up with an easy to remember password that has enough entropy in it to be secure against brute force attacks.
How about just make some software that encrypts two parts of your drive "/legal" and "/illegal". Then have two keys - one key opens both, the other key opens "/legal" and then zeros/randomises "/illegal" irretrievably.
You do realize that if the police are actually looking at you for a crime they are first going to make an image of your hard drive before they attempt to do any forensics/decryption/etc on it, right?
Maybe it is illegal to make all these nuisance calls, but I've had more of them with my new phone over here in a month than I've had in over a decade of owning the same number in England.
I think you've answered your own question. Does it really surprise you that a prepaid number that has been recycled a few times gets more junk than the number you've had for a decade?
First, 99.99% of the EJs are good people, but there are also bad seeds. You must guard against the EJ's as much as the voter.
Indeed you must. In my state there are four of us, representing at least two different political parties. It seems unlikely to me that you could get four randomly assigned people from different political parties to all agree to rig an election.
We had an EJ voting every day of early voting, until the Alternate Judge discovered what he was doing and reported him to us.
Sounds like the system worked if he got caught. My only question would be why did it take so long? Our machines have always kept a running count of the votes cast that day that must match up with the number of people we've signed in. There are two different people who handle the signing in process (one who handles the poll book and the other who keeps a running handwritten list of the people who have voted thus far) so it wouldn't be easy to do a fake sign in to keep the numbers matching. If you tried this at my polling place I would know about it pretty quickly as I always make a point of checking the running total throughout the day.
We reported him to the County Commissioners and County Prosecutor who declined to prosecute the person for whatever (probably politically motivated) reason.
Well, that's bullshit right there. As far as I'm concerned messing with the electoral process should be regarded as a felony and punished accordingly.
But any EJ that could figure out how to upload a virus to their voting machine, and get it onto the tabulating machine, could possibly edit results in a way that would make it very hard to discover.
They could, but the machines are randomly audited and you have no way of knowing if yours is going to be one of them or not. I don't know what else you can do to protect the system at this point. You could audit every single machine but that would require manpower and resources that most Election Boards just don't have.
Second, an attacker could possibly find a way to defeat a tamper seal, or could break into the storage facility of the voting machines before election day, or I am sure there are a multitude of other attacks where someone could have a short time of unsupervised access to the voting machine that wouldn't be detected by tamper proof seals.
You've got an awful lot of "coulds" there. People could do any number of things. All you can do is make the system as secure as possible. At least with regards to New York State I haven't seen any glaring holes in the security of our electoral process or anything that I would do differently if I was in charge of the whole show.
OK, suppose the tamper-evident seal is found to be broken at the end of the election day. What happens then? Are those votes not counted?
You are going to tamper with the machine in full view of four poll workers, voters and security (at the larger polling sites)? You are a braver sort than I am -- but to answer your question it would depend on which seal was broken. The ballot box itself isn't just secured with a seal -- it's behind a locked door. Even if you could get access to extra ballots, stuffing it would require you to defeat the lock and open this door or to feed them through the scanner one at a time. You'd have to do this in full view of everybody so I think we can both agree that this outcome isn't particularly likely.
If the other seals were tampered with then the procedure would be to disregard the machine count and for the Board of Elections to count the retained paper ballots by hand and/or tabulate them with a different machine.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose someone is suicidal and willingly takes a gunshot to the head
I highlighted the difference between your strawman and the crime of rape.
You cannot say that it is violent just because the victim did not want it to happen.
In the case of rape, yes I can. Go talk to a rape victim and then try to tell us that it isn't a violent action. Try to convince us that the action of having your body violated is not an inherently violent act.
I would personally resist a rapist with my last ounce of strength. The fact that some people might be too scared to do so does not reduce the violence of the encounter in any way, shape or form.
By this logic (STDs exist) you are also endangered by consensual sex. So do states also have laws permitting the execution of anyone caught copulating, for their own protection?
I highlighted the difference between your ludicrous "example" and the crime of rape.
Do not fight, shout, shove, or resist in any way
So we can only call a crime violent if the victim is willing to resist in same manner?
Are not being threatened with a weapon of some sort
Weapons are not limited to guns and knives. If you were a 100 pound female facing a 200+ pound male who has three or more times your muscle mass are you seriously going to argue that it shouldn't be considered a violent crime just because he didn't happen to have a firearm, knife or some other technological piece of weaponry?
Were not poisoned or endangered
Being raped is endangerment. Ever heard of STDs? Ever heard of the ones that can't be cured and which are eventually fatal? There's a reason why most states (even the liberal blue ones) allow for the use of deadly force when confronted with a would-be rapist. A rapist is arguably every bit as dangerous as a loaded gun pointed at your head or knife at your throat.
Violent crimes involve violence of some sort
I would argue that having your body penetrated against your will is an inherently violent act.
And the right to bear them is guranteed by the 2nd amendment to the constitution.
Part of which (the Constitution) says:
"No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"
Thus it seems that for better or worse the Constitution has a provision that allows for the deprivation of the liberties of convicted criminals who have been accorded due process of law. If we can take away their right to vote and keep and bear arms, why not the "right" to use Facebook?
If they are so likely to commit their crime again, then keep them in jail.
Amen to that. It seems to me that if we kept all of the perverts in jail that this whole discussion about "registries" would be a moot point. May I suggest that we stop arresting ~900,000 people annually for marijuana related offenses in order to make room for the perverts?
Maybe that's the argument the legalization crowd should be making. "Think of the children! Legalize pot!"
but rape that involves no weapon or fighting is just not something I would call "violent."
Bullshit. It's rape if one of the partners doesn't consent to the activity. The fact that the rapist wasn't armed really shouldn't enter into the calculation, except in so far as that they wind up charged with additional weapons offenses in addition to the rape charge.
Mind you, I don't think statutory rape should be regarded in the same manner as what I described above, but to say that rape isn't a violent crime just because no weapon was involved kind of misses the mark, IMHO. You don't regard it as a violent act to have something penetrate your body against your will?
Inspectors in TX rarely live in that precinct, but the poll workers do (EJ, AJ, and poll clerks).
In NYS the Inspector has the same rule as your EJs. We sign voters in, handle any challenges that may arise, etc, etc. Generally we don't have poll clerks except in the really busy urban districts -- where they exist their job is to assist the inspectors and help to ensure that the polling place continues to operate smoothly. They don't have any vote on disputes or any authority beyond that granted to them by the Board of Inspectors.
It was my impression that your parent post was saying inherent weaknesses in DREs weren't a primary concern
DREs scare the hell out of me. I'm glad that my state hasn't adopted them. I was mainly trying to respond to the tin-foil hat crowd that thinks anything electronic must be bad. I don't see a problem with a system that relies on paper ballots and which only uses the electronic side of things as an assistance mechanism for handicapped voters and a tabulation device.
The burger flipper should make a living wage. Maybe that's not $50,000, but he should be able to support himself and his family on that wage.
And who pays his "living wage"? The customers who pay more for the burger? The employer who can't hire more cooks because you are telling him what he has to pay the ones he already has? The Government who takes the money from one group of people in order to distribute it to another?
Who determines what this magical "living wage" is? What exactly is a living wage? I know someone who makes ~$20,000 and manages to support a family of four on it. Is it easy? No. But are his children going hungry and wanting for basic necessities? Not that I've seen.
If you think he should not make a living wage, you are advocating oppression and wage slavery.
What you see as "wage slavery" I see as the natural order of things. No matter how much you may wish it to be different people are never going to be on an entirely equal footing. In the end all you would accomplish if you had your way would be to move the oppression from one that's based on economics to one that's based on how much influence your particular group can wield in the halls of government. I don't regard that as an improvement.
and they all could if we didn't give the vast majority of the wealth we collectively create to the top 1%
The top 1% is already paying 25%-40% of all taxes in this country, depending on whose numbers you believe. The bottom 50% pays nothing. I'm rather skeptical of people who place the blame for our problems at the feet of the "top 1%" as it seems to be a simplistic view of a complex society.
There are plenty of examples in history of the people, acting through their elected representatives, ending unfairness.
There are also plenty of examples in the history of the people of the government taking rights, liberties and freedoms away from the individual citizen. In fact it seems to happen more often than not. It's not limited to banana republics either -- take a look at what's going on in the UK right now. Given this historical trend I'm of the belief that it's best to keep government as small as possible and that whatever benefits we gain from increasing it are vastly outweighed by the loss of liberty and risk of oppression. You apparently disagree.
You have a distorted view of human nature
And yours is a naive one, my friend :)
We aren't the evil, selfish creatures you seem to think we are
I've never claimed that humans are evil and selfish creatures. In fact I spent the better part of two days arguing the exact opposite in a different discussion a little while ago.
In other systems, people do not feel the need to be so cut-throat.
I don't feel the need to be particularly cut-throat. As I said earlier I'm more or less happy with my lot in life. If I wanted to be cut-throat I suspect that I could make quite a bit more money than I currently do.
Do you honestly think that there is equality of opportunity in this country?
Have I claimed there is? How many times do I have to say that there is unfairness in our society before you stop beating this dead horse?
That all anyone needs to do is pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, remove their obstacles, and succeed?
Do I think that everyone can "pick themselves up by their own bootstraps"? No. Do I think that you will generally be more successful by relying on yourself than by relying on Uncle Sam? Yes. At the end of the day I have a lot more confidence in myself and my neighbors than I do in Washington or Albany.
Is it okay that some people are forced to take menial positions because of some supposed inferiority
People love to use the 'republic vs. democracy' line, but it is not meaningful
Correction: It's not meaningful to you. I regard it as meaningful because those who talk about our 'democracy' are seemingly unaware of our actual system of government and/or can't be bothered to use accurate terms in a discussion. I regard it as meaningful because a true democracy would lead to the tyranny of the majority. I regard it as meaningful because I don't happen to think that my region should be dictated to by another region just because they have a higher population than we do.
If you work for an employer and make less than $50,000, I'd say you are not receiving all the fruits of your labor.
So you think the burger flipper who is performing a job that anyone can be trained to do in a matter of days and which requires no formal education should be making at least $50,000?
It can be done right.
No, it can't. Human nature will prevent it from being doing 'right' (whatever that means)
Valuation is arbitrary and in our system, the value of something is determined by a vote, using dollars. The more dollars you have, the more votes you have. It's still a democracy, but a completely unfair one. Those with the money make the rules, they set the prices, and they determine the income that we, the peons, receive.
I don't know why you keep coming back to this "it's unfair!" argument when I've already acknowledged that our country is anything but fair. What you seem to be unwilling to consider is that any attempt to use the government to correct "unfairness" invariably creates more problems than it solves.
If you truly regard yourself as a "powerless peon" then you have my pity. I used to feel the same way until I realized that I'm ultimately responsible for my own success or failure and that I can't rely on others to remove the roadblocks that I may encounter along the way.
The thing is, even if we DID have a free market in labor, the workers would be screwed by market forces. There is a serious imbalance of information between buyers and sellers of labor, and this leads to a systematic devaluation of labor in a free market.
As opposed to your ideal system where the government controls the means of production and determines what your labor is worth? Yeah, nobody will be screwed under that system either.....
Forcing people to choose between working in degrading conditions for unfair wages, or DIEING, is coercion.
First off, that simply isn't true. For better or worse we have a social safety net in this country. You aren't going to starve if you know how to utilize the system. Second, your complaints of "coercion" are hard to take seriously when are you advocating for a system that would replace monetary coercion with governmental coercion.
The free market is based on several proven falsehoods, and it is not wonder it doesn't work right.
It's ironic to hear someone advocating for socialism complaining that another system is based on several proven falsehoods.....
You are asked to part with more than half your wages, counting your mortgage, food, car payments, etc. But you feel you get good value for the wages you part with.
I can choose which house I buy, which bank holds my mortgage, which grocery store I shop at and which car I drive.
After all, they can vote and would vote socialism out if it weren't working for them.
Yes, they can vote that government out. But the individual who feels he isn't getting good value has no choice beyond "suck it up and pay your taxes". Your ideal system is all about depriving the individual of choice the theory that it's better for the whole. You may regard that as the natural order of things but I believe in individual freedom, liberty and responsibility. I don't want the Government looking out for me -- I want to be responsible for my own well being and free to live my life with a minimal amount of interference from others.
it will cause a boat load of grief to the site's admins when someone automates a process for resetting passwords.
Fixed that for you :)
With the law, the accused are guaranteed a certain amount of prison time for refusing to give the password and still run the risk of being convicted of whatever the police are accusing them of.
Fixed that for you :)
I don't understand why the police would want to rely on a single piece of evidence to make their entire case anyway.
Because the police are human beings like the rest of us and human beings tend to be lazy creatures at heart?
Well, then you've got the jurybox and the ammobox if it comes to that.....
Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
That signature rocks, btw :)
While I hate RealNetworks and all it stands for, and will never forgive them for taking over online media with their crappy bloated players and codecs
How do you figure that Real "took over" online media? Most of the online media that I interact with these does uses Flash. A smaller percentage uses Sliverlight and/or WMP. I honestly can't remember the last time I ran across a site that uses Real exclusively and I don't even have the bloatware loaded on my PC anymore.
The standard technique for moving such files a while was to hide the data inside pornography. They are one of the most commonly trafficked file types on the internet and people prefer not to look at it too closely
You wouldn't happen to know where I could apply for a job looking for this hidden data, would you?
So he tries to come up with a modest proposal
I have a modest proposal: The good citizens of the UK should vote the bastards running their country out of office.
its the vile bullshit he was spewing that the authorities objected to
If the authorities get to decide that what you are saying is "vile bullshit" and punish you for saying it then free speech is worthless and we might as well abandon it.
It's depressing to think that all of the rights that I enjoy as an American came from the English Common Law and that the citizens of your country are busy surrendering those rights one by one. You've surrendered the right to keep arms, the right to keep silent, the right against self-incrimination, the right of privacy and most of the checks and balances of your Parliamentary system. Am I missing any?
Why do the British people tolerate this? Your history suggests that you should know better. What's it going to going to take before you wake up and vote the scumbags out of the Commons and/or rise up against them?
Occasionally there were not volunteers from both parties in the precinct, so we had to allow the AJ to be the same party.
Hmm, in NYS they don't require the Inspectors to be from the same election district. In fact they rarely are. I managed to get assigned to my own election district when there was an opening (mainly so I wouldn't have to leave my post to drive across town and vote) but that's a rarity.
Right now EVSes are not demonstrably safe from known attacks.
I've never advocated for electronic voting systems. But I do think there is a distinction between a DRE (direct electronic record) system and a system that relies on paper ballots and which only uses a machine to tabulate them.
Sorry, you are wrong, at least in American law. You are not and have never been under any obligation to assist law enforcement's investigation of you.
Fixed that for you. The UK is usually regarded as 'Western' and it seems that evidently you do have to assist their investigation of you.
Unless you're into burying USB sticks with PSK's in the backyard, thinking that your data is secure just because 'it's encrypted, and xyz encryption is unbreakable!' is a fallacy.
That would be a very bad idea. It's generally accepted in the US that if you write the password down somewhere and the authorities find out about it they can subpoena the writing. Failure to comply with the subpoena would result in a contempt of court citation and jail time until you complied. I would assume the same would apply with a USB stick.
It's much better to ensure that the password is only stored within your head. Using diceware you can come up with an easy to remember password that has enough entropy in it to be secure against brute force attacks.
How about just make some software that encrypts two parts of your drive "/legal" and "/illegal". Then have two keys - one key opens both, the other key opens "/legal" and then zeros/randomises "/illegal" irretrievably.
You do realize that if the police are actually looking at you for a crime they are first going to make an image of your hard drive before they attempt to do any forensics/decryption/etc on it, right?
Indeed. Here's two different videos to drive the point home, one from an attorney and the other from a police officer himself.
Never ever EVER talk to the police. Nothing you can say to them is going to help you. Shut your damn mouth and ask for an attorney.
Maybe it is illegal to make all these nuisance calls, but I've had more of them with my new phone over here in a month than I've had in over a decade of owning the same number in England.
I think you've answered your own question. Does it really surprise you that a prepaid number that has been recycled a few times gets more junk than the number you've had for a decade?
First, 99.99% of the EJs are good people, but there are also bad seeds. You must guard against the EJ's as much as the voter.
Indeed you must. In my state there are four of us, representing at least two different political parties. It seems unlikely to me that you could get four randomly assigned people from different political parties to all agree to rig an election.
We had an EJ voting every day of early voting, until the Alternate Judge discovered what he was doing and reported him to us.
Sounds like the system worked if he got caught. My only question would be why did it take so long? Our machines have always kept a running count of the votes cast that day that must match up with the number of people we've signed in. There are two different people who handle the signing in process (one who handles the poll book and the other who keeps a running handwritten list of the people who have voted thus far) so it wouldn't be easy to do a fake sign in to keep the numbers matching. If you tried this at my polling place I would know about it pretty quickly as I always make a point of checking the running total throughout the day.
We reported him to the County Commissioners and County Prosecutor who declined to prosecute the person for whatever (probably politically motivated) reason.
Well, that's bullshit right there. As far as I'm concerned messing with the electoral process should be regarded as a felony and punished accordingly.
But any EJ that could figure out how to upload a virus to their voting machine, and get it onto the tabulating machine, could possibly edit results in a way that would make it very hard to discover.
They could, but the machines are randomly audited and you have no way of knowing if yours is going to be one of them or not. I don't know what else you can do to protect the system at this point. You could audit every single machine but that would require manpower and resources that most Election Boards just don't have.
Second, an attacker could possibly find a way to defeat a tamper seal, or could break into the storage facility of the voting machines before election day, or I am sure there are a multitude of other attacks where someone could have a short time of unsupervised access to the voting machine that wouldn't be detected by tamper proof seals.
You've got an awful lot of "coulds" there. People could do any number of things. All you can do is make the system as secure as possible. At least with regards to New York State I haven't seen any glaring holes in the security of our electoral process or anything that I would do differently if I was in charge of the whole show.
OK, suppose the tamper-evident seal is found to be broken at the end of the election day. What happens then? Are those votes not counted?
You are going to tamper with the machine in full view of four poll workers, voters and security (at the larger polling sites)? You are a braver sort than I am -- but to answer your question it would depend on which seal was broken. The ballot box itself isn't just secured with a seal -- it's behind a locked door. Even if you could get access to extra ballots, stuffing it would require you to defeat the lock and open this door or to feed them through the scanner one at a time. You'd have to do this in full view of everybody so I think we can both agree that this outcome isn't particularly likely.
If the other seals were tampered with then the procedure would be to disregard the machine count and for the Board of Elections to count the retained paper ballots by hand and/or tabulate them with a different machine.