When I saw the mention of six figure revenue from SCOScam^H^H^Hource, I thought, oh shit, the FUD has been working. But then I remembered the EV1Servers deal. Didn't that happen too late to be counted on last quarter? Really, has anyone publicly stepped up and said, "SCO is right, and we're buying a license." I mean, since EV1 got slapped by the community for swallowing the BS hook, line, sinker, rod, and fisherman?
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. The contest is now closed. Thanks for playing.
Seriously, though, I'm not sure where the joke ends and the reality begins. They're going to have an animal mascot to teach kids about their (the BSA's) view of copyright? It works for breakfast cereal ("They're gRRRRRRReat!") so I guess it will work for getting kids to rat out their friends for mod-chipping an x-box.
However, they seem to be forgetting something from their school years - NOBODY likes a snitch. Most of the kids who have x-boxes or similar consoles at home are keenly aware of how the price of a game compares to their weekly allowance, and their reaction to seeing a chipped console would most likely be "cool, where can I get one, too?"
I would suggest, though, that people who are moving scope out the ISP and broadband provider scene before they settle on a place.
I tried this in 1998. I was moving to a city where PacBell had announced 3 months prior they would roll out DSL, along with all the standard "3 miles away" stuff. I wanted to know roughly where the service areas were, so that as we looked at rentals, one additional consideration would be availability of broadband. So, call customer service.
Drone: "Thank you for being a victim of our local monopoly, how can I help you?" Me: "I'm interested in getting DSL, but I don't live in [XXXXX] yet. I'd like to know general areas so that as I look at a rental, I can know that I'll be able to get DSL there." Drone: "Well, if you give me your phone number, I can check." Me: "That's just it. I haven't moved yet, and so there is no phone number." Drone: "But I can check if you give me your phone number." Me: "Did you hear me? There is no phone number. I haven't moved yet. I would like to know what areas are close enough to the C.O. to get DSL so I can move into one of those." Drone: "I can't give you that information; it's confidential. If you give me your phone number, I can check for DSL." Me: "Never mind."
In the end, we picked the best place, and it turned out that we could get DSL about 1 year later. When we were looking at houses to buy last year, I asked the agent to give me the current resident's phone number so I could check for DSL. It was available, and we made an offer.
My long-winded point is that it isn't always easy to find out if you can get broadband until after you've signed the lease and tried to get the connection. And by then it's too late.
You can say a lot of bad things about MS, and I'd probably agree with most of them. But they never screwed their investors the way that almost every open source IPO did. (emphasis mine)
If memory serves correctly, very few of the not-coms were "open source" companies. Most of the spectacular flame-outs were "eyeball" companies, as in "we'll throw up a gawd-awful website with crappy free content, and we'll make BILLIONS off advertisers paying for eyeballs."
Don't lay the dot-bomb crisis at the feet of open-source. The problem with the not-coms was that greedy investors heard "website" and lost all sense of fiscal realities like product, revenue, and so on.
Be careful; you're going to get me started on one of my favourite threads - "secret ballot" in my book means that, once you leave the voting booth, your ballot is completely secret even from the voter who just cast the ballot.
I have yet to see a proposal for post-election voter verification that does not have some gaping huge hole for coercion. And that, boys and girls, is why the voting process itself must be so trustworthy. Something just "feels right" about dropping a piece of paper into a locked ballot box. Pressing a few buttons on an electronic machine just doesn't inspire nearly the same level of confidence.
One nasty rumour I heard during the Florida debacle was that some ballots were found where every single office was voted republican, including George W. Bush, but the hole for Al Gore was also punched. The insinuation was that somebody took a stack of votes and punched the "Gore" hole on every one of them, which would either have no effect (if was already a "Gore" ballot) or disqualify their non-Gore vote on the basis of it now being an overvote. With paper ballots, such an allegation could be investigated. Electrons are just a little harder...
Let me join you as a techincal professional who absolutely does not trust electronic voting. I prefer to punch holes in paper or mark boxes with a pen. At least in those cases, someone has to make my physical ballot disappear.
I'm a little shocked, however, that more professed conservatives haven't spoken out against the new systems. To hear some of them tell it, the Democratic Party practically invented vote fraud
Haven't you ever heard the saying "when I die, bury me in Chicago so I can keep voting" ? The Democrats did invent modern-day vote fraud, getting all sorts to vote for them: dead people, illegal immigrants, and in one California case, over 120 people in alphabetical order with identical handwriting signing the voter roll. I found it particularly ironic that Al Gore's team in the Florida recount included Daley, who is from... CHICAGO!
BTW, the reason that the conservatives aren't screaming bloody murder about unauditable electronic voting is that the chairman of Diebold is a Republican who has pledged to help re-elect George Bush.
-paul
Re:About one of the articles posted...
on
Blackhat/Defcon Report
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Yes, I've seen what Bush has done, and I don't like almost all of it. And I don't think Kerry would be better; in fact, based on his senate voting record, I'm pretty sure he would be worse. I agree with your sentiment "let's give someone else a chance." Yes, indeed, how about a Libertarian or a Constitutionalist?
During the debate over the McCain-Feingold 1st Amendment Muzzling Act, one supporter said, "we've got to get the money out of politics." To which I respond: the only way to get the money out of politics is to get the politics out of money. Once the federal government cannot rob Peter to pay Paul, the "price" of a congressional seat will go way down.
I was going to mod you down as flamebait, but then I reconsidered, mainly because you seem to be one of the few people that understand the Declaration of Independence: the government is the servant of the people, not the other way 'round.
Still, I wish people would quit focusing so exclusively on the evils of the current administration, and acting like John Kerry would be so much better. It's exactly the kind of thinking that got us W four years ago. Remember? Clinton was corrupt to the core, Gore was seen as Clinton-Lite, and we voted (yes, W won, get over it) for W instead because he had to be better than Gore.
We need to stop thinking of Democrat and Republican and start thinking about 3rd parties, returning to the limited government our Founding Fathers envisioned.
How is it that in the US you can see as many shootings as you want on TV bvut as soon as someone says fuck or bares a breast, the loonies go nuts... I thought seeing people getting killed would harm a kid more than seeing a breast or two.
I have a theory about why violence is deemed "OK" but sex is not. It goes a little like this:
Most of us are reasonable enough that when we see a bad guy shooting random people on TV, we recognise his behvaiour as completely unacceptable and not something to be copied. I grew up seeing LOTS of gunplay on TV, and I *still* haven't shot anyone, despite carrying a concealed weapon for a number of years now. (That's another story for a different time.)
However, almost every single teenager in the world is a raging ball of hormones, and seeing T&A on TV only makes them hornier.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
From a strictly financial perspective, teenage sex is much more costly than violence. That teenage sex results in teenage pregnancies, which gives us welfare mothers, children growing up in single-parent homes (which, incidentally, has been shown in some studies to correlate with juvenile deliquency, i.e. violence, hmmmmm), and so on. The burden on society is enormous.
Contrast with teenage violence, particularly where one gang member whacks another. Now, instead of two thugs to put in jail (admit it, they were both headed there eventually anyway), you only have to bury one and put the other one in jail. Jail costs money, and now with only one thug in jail instead of two, you spend less of my tax dollars on prisons.
Of course, it could also just be the philosophical leanings of the current people in power in the U.S., but I believe that even during the Reign of Darkness (1993-2001), the administration was overly concerned with how much T&A went over the airwaves, a la the V-Chip.
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her at the door
With a loaded 44
And she ain't my teacher no more!
Nowadays, songs like these get you expelled under "zero tolerance" policies. Hell, I remember when we did the Christmas gift exchange, I brought a cap gun. The lucky bastard who drew my number was the "cop" that day during the playground game of "cops and robbers." Nobody, teachers included, said jack. Try to imagine how many people would wet their pants, not even at the sound of a cap gun on a playground, but at the very fact that a crude facsimile of a pistol was on school grounds at all.
I worry that we're teaching kids how to appreciate a totalitarian society, and worse, that some people are happy about it.
I'm always on the look-out for a better WM, so I followed the link.
Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence.
OK, sounds good so far. No bloat. That's why I want to get Windoze completely off my home network. But then I read on...
All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes. ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering that cripples Emacs and other quality pieces of software.
WHOA, NELLY! You can't talk about simple and un-bloated software, then praise emacs as a "quality piece of software," and expect to be taken seriously.
I don't know why senators even bring this stuff up. There's no chance in hell that this will pass
It's bargaining, just like when you're buying a car. The salesweasel starts high and comes down, while you start low and come up.
With the laws, they start with the most obscene and fascist stuff short of getting themselves impeached. Then, when they've "come down on price" a little, it appears reasonable by comparison.
SCO also claims "substantial similarity" between the Read-Copy-Update (RCU) routine in Linux 2.6.5 and Linux patches and SCO's copyrighted work, specifically SVR4.2 MP.
Well, knowing what I know about SCO (only what I read here and on groklaw), I'm willing to believe that there is substantial similarity. However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the code came from Linux (or more properly, IBM, perfectly within its rights) into SCO, and not the other way 'round.
Their lawyers have fudged so many facts, fumbled so many easy misses, that I wouldn't doubt this for a moment. "Please stay the RHAT case, because it will be decided by the IBM case," and "please dismiss the IBM counter-claim; it will be decided by the RHAT case."
Just create a company with a name like one of their products (Wordy, NToo, DOSy, EXCELent) and then sue them
I remember in the days of the Atari 800 series (I still have my old 800XL!) there was a word processor called "First XLEnt", intended to be pronounced "first excellent" (X-L-Ent), so there's already a product with that name.
"Wordy" sounds nice. It could have a variation of the auto-correct feature, where it replaces words with wordy phrases as you type. Imagine the potential for when you have to write a paper for a class, minimum 500 words. You type "To make..." and it replaces with "In order to produce...". Um, please excuse me while I call the patent office.
Internet Explorer will attempt to block any window opened automatically from script, with the exception of
createPopup().
I haven't done web development for a long time, so I'm probably missing something here, but what's the point of calling it "popup blocking" if you let a function called "createPopup" still execute? I guess all of those X-10 "security" *cough* naked neighbour in the pool *cough* camera ads will have to be rewritten from window.open() to createPopup(), and the problem will still remain.
I switched to Firefox at work last week, after using Opera for a few years at home. Buh-bye, IE. (And no, IT doesn't know. They also think I'm still using MS Outhouse, while I've actually been using Sylpheed-Claws with POP3 for almost 1 year now.)
It's the story of a group of engineers who built the "next best thing" for Data General. In the end, they were burned out (some beyond rescue) and the system fell victim to Moore's Law anyway.
The lesson to learn, of course, is that there's more to life than your stupid job.
You're only partly correct. If you put the windoze box behind a NAT, you won't get 0WN3D by all of the remote exploits, but that's only half of the solution. You're still vulnerable to virus-laden e-mails (especially if you use MS Outhouse) and malicious web pages (if you use IE).
Yes, you and I have a clue and use something else for mail and web, but most home users are not savy enough to switch away from the vulnerable products, and worms and viruses will continue to spread through these channels for some time to come.
You're actually off by one level of abstraction; your local telco has jack numbers for each address they serve. Your phone number is associated with the jack number in the CO. Case in point is that when we moved about 1.5 years ago, we were able to take our phone number with us, since we were still served by the same CO.
Let's hope the judge runs Spanning Tree Protocol (nay, Rapid STP) and removes the loop between his head and his ass ASAP.
-paul
Hello, Satan, is it snowing?
on
Spammer Apologizes
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's my first thought.
And then the second one is, "nah, he's just faking it, trying to dodge the artillery rounds Yahoo sent his way. Once the storm blows over, he'll be selling V1@GR@ by the truckload again."
I'll believe his apology when he delivers it in person to everyone who ever got a spam e-mail. Maybe he should set up something like a book-signing tour where he sits at a table and people queue up to hear him say, "I'm sorry for being a horrible waste of human flesh, I mean a spammer."
Please repeat after me: "I'm happy to cooperate with proper laws and procedures, officer. Do you have a warrant?"
If you are stupid enough to let two law enforcement officers into your home without a warrant, you deserve whatever false charges they can cook up. NEVER admit an LEO to your home unless they have a warrant; doing otherwise voids your 4th amendment rights against search and seizure. In fact, the conversation you had with them should have been conducted on your front porch with your door closed behind you. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
As another poster pointed out, the coercion has in fact happened in the past, blatantly and out-in-the-open. I suspected as much, but never knew of any actual account. Since Daley is not in jail, we can safely assume that the "report the person and prove it" part of your hypothesis does not work, at least not every time.
My original point remains - the idea of letting the voters take a receipt with them is bad, very bad, and will only lead to more abuses of our right to vote. And if the receipt stays in the polling place as a backup to the electronic ballot, then why is the computer being used at all?
Printing out a piece of paper most certainly WILL address all of the security concerns. At a stroke it allows voter verification, recounts, and auditing to find both corruption and machine errors.
I've hammered on this in several other posts - a receipt which the voter can take out of the polling area opens many doors to new abuses. Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around. Once there are verifiable voting receipts, your vote can be coerced after the fact.
Voting must be anonymous, even from the voter himself (once he leaves the voting booth). For that reason, no completely electronic solution will ever be acceptable to me, and that's saying something for someone who has more PC's than children (5 vs. 4). I like machines to count the paper ballots, and it would be nice to have a "ballot verifier" in a private booth just before the ballot box, but I want the option to have humans re-count, and if we're only talking about bits, then that option is lost. Think of it as an "off site" backup.
Still If you want to hurt sco a bit and get better service just don't order pizza hut, but tell them why. (say "stop using sco and hire enough people to do the job")
Actually, the best reason not to buy Pizza Hut is that they fired a driver in Indiana for defending his life. As the driver was making a delivery, a scumbag walked up and pointed a pistol at the driver. The driver responded by drawing his weapon (legally carried per a concealed weapons permit) and shot the robber dead. The driver quoted the dying robber as saying, "all I wanted was some pizza." (Yeah, sure, and the money, plus maybe murder the driver so he can't pick you out of a lineup.)
Despite the fact that the scumbag had a rap sheet a mile long, and the driver was on solid legal ground (the DA refuses to press charges, calling it "a clear-cut case of self defense"), Pizza Hut fired the driver. Fired for defending your own life, how's that for a kick in the balls?
And that, kids, is why we're not eating at Pizza Hut any more.
Slashdot Mirror
-paul
Seriously, though, I'm not sure where the joke ends and the reality begins. They're going to have an animal mascot to teach kids about their (the BSA's) view of copyright? It works for breakfast cereal ("They're gRRRRRRReat!") so I guess it will work for getting kids to rat out their friends for mod-chipping an x-box.
However, they seem to be forgetting something from their school years - NOBODY likes a snitch. Most of the kids who have x-boxes or similar consoles at home are keenly aware of how the price of a game compares to their weekly allowance, and their reaction to seeing a chipped console would most likely be "cool, where can I get one, too?"
-paul
I tried this in 1998. I was moving to a city where PacBell had announced 3 months prior they would roll out DSL, along with all the standard "3 miles away" stuff. I wanted to know roughly where the service areas were, so that as we looked at rentals, one additional consideration would be availability of broadband. So, call customer service.
Drone: "Thank you for being a victim of our local monopoly, how can I help you?"
Me: "I'm interested in getting DSL, but I don't live in [XXXXX] yet. I'd like to know general areas so that as I look at a rental, I can know that I'll be able to get DSL there."
Drone: "Well, if you give me your phone number, I can check."
Me: "That's just it. I haven't moved yet, and so there is no phone number."
Drone: "But I can check if you give me your phone number."
Me: "Did you hear me? There is no phone number. I haven't moved yet. I would like to know what areas are close enough to the C.O. to get DSL so I can move into one of those."
Drone: "I can't give you that information; it's confidential. If you give me your phone number, I can check for DSL."
Me: "Never mind."
In the end, we picked the best place, and it turned out that we could get DSL about 1 year later. When we were looking at houses to buy last year, I asked the agent to give me the current resident's phone number so I could check for DSL. It was available, and we made an offer.
My long-winded point is that it isn't always easy to find out if you can get broadband until after you've signed the lease and tried to get the connection. And by then it's too late.
-paul
If memory serves correctly, very few of the not-coms were "open source" companies. Most of the spectacular flame-outs were "eyeball" companies, as in "we'll throw up a gawd-awful website with crappy free content, and we'll make BILLIONS off advertisers paying for eyeballs."
Don't lay the dot-bomb crisis at the feet of open-source. The problem with the not-coms was that greedy investors heard "website" and lost all sense of fiscal realities like product, revenue, and so on.
-paul
I have yet to see a proposal for post-election voter verification that does not have some gaping huge hole for coercion. And that, boys and girls, is why the voting process itself must be so trustworthy. Something just "feels right" about dropping a piece of paper into a locked ballot box. Pressing a few buttons on an electronic machine just doesn't inspire nearly the same level of confidence.
One nasty rumour I heard during the Florida debacle was that some ballots were found where every single office was voted republican, including George W. Bush, but the hole for Al Gore was also punched. The insinuation was that somebody took a stack of votes and punched the "Gore" hole on every one of them, which would either have no effect (if was already a "Gore" ballot) or disqualify their non-Gore vote on the basis of it now being an overvote. With paper ballots, such an allegation could be investigated. Electrons are just a little harder ...
-paul
Haven't you ever heard the saying "when I die, bury me in Chicago so I can keep voting" ? The Democrats did invent modern-day vote fraud, getting all sorts to vote for them: dead people, illegal immigrants, and in one California case, over 120 people in alphabetical order with identical handwriting signing the voter roll. I found it particularly ironic that Al Gore's team in the Florida recount included Daley, who is from ... CHICAGO!
BTW, the reason that the conservatives aren't screaming bloody murder about unauditable electronic voting is that the chairman of Diebold is a Republican who has pledged to help re-elect George Bush.
-paul
During the debate over the McCain-Feingold 1st Amendment Muzzling Act, one supporter said, "we've got to get the money out of politics." To which I respond: the only way to get the money out of politics is to get the politics out of money. Once the federal government cannot rob Peter to pay Paul, the "price" of a congressional seat will go way down.
-paul
Still, I wish people would quit focusing so exclusively on the evils of the current administration, and acting like John Kerry would be so much better. It's exactly the kind of thinking that got us W four years ago. Remember? Clinton was corrupt to the core, Gore was seen as Clinton-Lite, and we voted (yes, W won, get over it) for W instead because he had to be better than Gore.
We need to stop thinking of Democrat and Republican and start thinking about 3rd parties, returning to the limited government our Founding Fathers envisioned.
-paul
I have a theory about why violence is deemed "OK" but sex is not. It goes a little like this:
Most of us are reasonable enough that when we see a bad guy shooting random people on TV, we recognise his behvaiour as completely unacceptable and not something to be copied. I grew up seeing LOTS of gunplay on TV, and I *still* haven't shot anyone, despite carrying a concealed weapon for a number of years now. (That's another story for a different time.)
However, almost every single teenager in the world is a raging ball of hormones, and seeing T&A on TV only makes them hornier.
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
From a strictly financial perspective, teenage sex is much more costly than violence. That teenage sex results in teenage pregnancies, which gives us welfare mothers, children growing up in single-parent homes (which, incidentally, has been shown in some studies to correlate with juvenile deliquency, i.e. violence, hmmmmm), and so on. The burden on society is enormous.
Contrast with teenage violence, particularly where one gang member whacks another. Now, instead of two thugs to put in jail (admit it, they were both headed there eventually anyway), you only have to bury one and put the other one in jail. Jail costs money, and now with only one thug in jail instead of two, you spend less of my tax dollars on prisons.
Of course, it could also just be the philosophical leanings of the current people in power in the U.S., but I believe that even during the Reign of Darkness (1993-2001), the administration was overly concerned with how much T&A went over the airwaves, a la the V-Chip.
-paul
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
Met her at the door
With a loaded 44
And she ain't my teacher no more!
Nowadays, songs like these get you expelled under "zero tolerance" policies. Hell, I remember when we did the Christmas gift exchange, I brought a cap gun. The lucky bastard who drew my number was the "cop" that day during the playground game of "cops and robbers." Nobody, teachers included, said jack. Try to imagine how many people would wet their pants, not even at the sound of a cap gun on a playground, but at the very fact that a crude facsimile of a pistol was on school grounds at all.
I worry that we're teaching kids how to appreciate a totalitarian society, and worse, that some people are happy about it.
-paul
"Um, yeah, he's OK."
"I told those fudge-packers I liked Michael Bolton's music."
-paul
OK, sounds good so far. No bloat. That's why I want to get Windoze completely off my home network. But then I read on ...
WHOA, NELLY! You can't talk about simple and un-bloated software, then praise emacs as a "quality piece of software," and expect to be taken seriously.
-paul
It's bargaining, just like when you're buying a car. The salesweasel starts high and comes down, while you start low and come up.
With the laws, they start with the most obscene and fascist stuff short of getting themselves impeached. Then, when they've "come down on price" a little, it appears reasonable by comparison.
-paul
Well, knowing what I know about SCO (only what I read here and on groklaw), I'm willing to believe that there is substantial similarity. However, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the code came from Linux (or more properly, IBM, perfectly within its rights) into SCO, and not the other way 'round.
Their lawyers have fudged so many facts, fumbled so many easy misses, that I wouldn't doubt this for a moment. "Please stay the RHAT case, because it will be decided by the IBM case," and "please dismiss the IBM counter-claim; it will be decided by the RHAT case."
-paul
I remember in the days of the Atari 800 series (I still have my old 800XL!) there was a word processor called "First XLEnt", intended to be pronounced "first excellent" (X-L-Ent), so there's already a product with that name.
"Wordy" sounds nice. It could have a variation of the auto-correct feature, where it replaces words with wordy phrases as you type. Imagine the potential for when you have to write a paper for a class, minimum 500 words. You type "To make ..." and it replaces with "In order to produce ...". Um, please excuse me while I call the patent office.
-paul
-paul
I haven't done web development for a long time, so I'm probably missing something here, but what's the point of calling it "popup blocking" if you let a function called "createPopup" still execute? I guess all of those X-10 "security" *cough* naked neighbour in the pool *cough* camera ads will have to be rewritten from window.open() to createPopup(), and the problem will still remain.
I switched to Firefox at work last week, after using Opera for a few years at home. Buh-bye, IE. (And no, IT doesn't know. They also think I'm still using MS Outhouse, while I've actually been using Sylpheed-Claws with POP3 for almost 1 year now.)
-paul
The lesson to learn, of course, is that there's more to life than your stupid job.
-paul
Yes, you and I have a clue and use something else for mail and web, but most home users are not savy enough to switch away from the vulnerable products, and worms and viruses will continue to spread through these channels for some time to come.
-paul
You're actually off by one level of abstraction; your local telco has jack numbers for each address they serve. Your phone number is associated with the jack number in the CO. Case in point is that when we moved about 1.5 years ago, we were able to take our phone number with us, since we were still served by the same CO.
Let's hope the judge runs Spanning Tree Protocol (nay, Rapid STP) and removes the loop between his head and his ass ASAP.
-paul
And then the second one is, "nah, he's just faking it, trying to dodge the artillery rounds Yahoo sent his way. Once the storm blows over, he'll be selling V1@GR@ by the truckload again."
I'll believe his apology when he delivers it in person to everyone who ever got a spam e-mail. Maybe he should set up something like a book-signing tour where he sits at a table and people queue up to hear him say, "I'm sorry for being a horrible waste of human flesh, I mean a spammer."
-paul
If you are stupid enough to let two law enforcement officers into your home without a warrant, you deserve whatever false charges they can cook up. NEVER admit an LEO to your home unless they have a warrant; doing otherwise voids your 4th amendment rights against search and seizure. In fact, the conversation you had with them should have been conducted on your front porch with your door closed behind you. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
-paul
My original point remains - the idea of letting the voters take a receipt with them is bad, very bad, and will only lead to more abuses of our right to vote. And if the receipt stays in the polling place as a backup to the electronic ballot, then why is the computer being used at all?
-paul
I've hammered on this in several other posts - a receipt which the voter can take out of the polling area opens many doors to new abuses. Imagine the scenario of "show your voting receipt to your union foreman if you ever want another raise in your career." It would never be that obvious, but word would get around. Once there are verifiable voting receipts, your vote can be coerced after the fact.
Voting must be anonymous, even from the voter himself (once he leaves the voting booth). For that reason, no completely electronic solution will ever be acceptable to me, and that's saying something for someone who has more PC's than children (5 vs. 4). I like machines to count the paper ballots, and it would be nice to have a "ballot verifier" in a private booth just before the ballot box, but I want the option to have humans re-count, and if we're only talking about bits, then that option is lost. Think of it as an "off site" backup.
-paul
Actually, the best reason not to buy Pizza Hut is that they fired a driver in Indiana for defending his life. As the driver was making a delivery, a scumbag walked up and pointed a pistol at the driver. The driver responded by drawing his weapon (legally carried per a concealed weapons permit) and shot the robber dead. The driver quoted the dying robber as saying, "all I wanted was some pizza." (Yeah, sure, and the money, plus maybe murder the driver so he can't pick you out of a lineup.)
Despite the fact that the scumbag had a rap sheet a mile long, and the driver was on solid legal ground (the DA refuses to press charges, calling it "a clear-cut case of self defense"), Pizza Hut fired the driver. Fired for defending your own life, how's that for a kick in the balls?
And that, kids, is why we're not eating at Pizza Hut any more.
-paul