That's because partisans are SUPPOSED to be in charge. I can't comment on the situation over there, but over HERE, there is this independent body called The Electoral Commission, which is entirely non-partisan. There's also a non-partisan position called the Returning Officer who's responsible for overseeing the vote, one per constituency. Over here partisans should NEVER be in charge. That seems like a fairly basic part of the democratic process to me, but perhaps I'm just assuming what I know is "normal"...
No, it made me feel humiliated, as did the rest of the country. Doesn't it make you feel humiliated to be a citizen of a country whose government is despised by virtually everyone else in the world? I'm in the UK, BTW, one of the staunchest allies of the USA over the last century, but I have to tell you that there's not a cat in hell's chance we'll join the next US military action we're invited to. It would be political suicide. Your president is an international laughing stock. There's a round on a popular UK radio show - listened to by let's say a "mature" audience (the panelists are in the 60s, 70s and the chairman's 85...) did an entire round where they were invited to complete some well-known Bushisms ("I opposed breaching those dams... I know that humans and fish can coexist peacefully") and they simply poured ridicule on him. (And no, BTW, these are the epitome of the bourgeouis, usually completely apolitical, BTW, not young left wing tear-aways. Bush is so intrinsically funny that it transcends politics entirely.
Incidentally I'm in the UK.
OK let's start with your three suggested advantages.
it would eliminate these huge ballots
If the large ballots are good enough now, they're good enough for the future. Has anyone actually researched the number of people for whom this is an issue? I seriously doubt it's a significant enogugh factor to merit spending the money and taking chances with such a core process. (Where's the change control for democracy?!) There are plenty of other ways of dealing with the problem, if it IS a real problem: change your system so that you don't have dozens of candidates. There's no need for it. In the US they elect lots of civil servants (judges, school boards and the like); that's potty, to me, but if they really insist on it, run them as separate races. (After all, during the main elections you only get to hear about national issues anyway.) Or give our multiple ballot papers to each elector.
Next!
"just hire some of the non-idiot (programmers)"
Ahh, it's all so simple now! Consider the competition for those non-idiot programmers.... consider where those people tend to work. Consider the non-orthogonality of the two sets....
Next!
3) speed (in counting as well as voting)
I don't know about Belgium, but here in the UK polling stations close at 10pm on the evening of the ballot; exit polls are out in the next half hour, and are usually fairly accurate (though our weird non-proportional system can keep things unexpectedly interesting, thus making the once-every-four-years ritual of election night parties actually FUN and INTERESTING!:) Generally the outcome is clear by 2am, and the second-placed party has conceded defeat by 3am or 4am at the latest. A few especially large consistuencies don't finish their count until the following day (I believe the Scottish Western Isles constituency is the geographically largest, and consists of LOTS of islands scattered over a large distance - check the map.) There are only three or four such constituencies and they never affect the final outcome.
Incidentally, you may be thinking "aha, but if/when you get a proper proportional system (first preference, second preference, third pref and so on) that this will slow things down.)
Now consider the advantages of this system that are lost with eVoting:
Simple, transparent system everyone can understand. What percentage of the population do you think will really believe a black-box computer answer? Many will either not believe it, or will AFFECT not to believe it - partly because of farces like the slow-motion car crash in the US and a couple of other countries which have had problems, partly for the hell of it, partly because there will always be conspiracy theorists,... and so on.
cheap! The only special equipment needed are very cheap plywood partitions (dead, dead cheap over here, believe me, "home made" in many cases) but they work perfectly well);
local community are much more involved in the process - in the form of the volunteers who count the votes;
no danger of an election being stolen - any attempt at fraud on a large scale is impossible. A few centuries back the voting system was massively corrupt, but everyone knew it because it required lots of organisation and money to pay off / threaten enough people to buy the vote.
self-generating audit trail. If it's a close count, just ask for the ballots to be recounted. There are always a few close contests in seats where this happens - any candidate has the right to request a recount - it's never a problem (except that the counters can get very tired. Sometimes they pack up for the night and restart the following day.)
No need to pay huge sums to private commercial enterprises, with all the risk of corruption, conflict of interest, etc that entails.
No risk of someone hiding a secret trapdoor in the blueprint for the ballot papers that makes every third Tory vote disappea
Why is the parent post moderated flamebait?! It's a perfectly realistic possibility in the current climate and it's the obvious implication of the story, to the extent that it's ironically redundant in that it states the obvious.
Third of all, if Joe Blow wants access to Facebook, Hotmail, and whatever, he shouldn't be paying for an operating system to begin with. There are plenty of perfectly good free ones out there that are perfect for that kind of thing.
YOU know that, and I know that, but... FWIW, I do think Vista is going to cause significant damage to Microsoft in the long run, but sadly most of us live in the short and medium runs;(
Exactly... my Aunty Mabel doesn't have much of a high-end audio system. She, and the vast majority of suckers who will be ripped off after being fooled by the marketing will never even notice most of the ways Vista sucks, either because they never use the functionality, or they don't perceive any difference, or they just see that "that's the way it works" and never think that there might be any other way to do it.
It might come as a shock to you, but Joe Blow just doesn't care about all that stuff, long as he can see Facebook and Hotmail and whatever other tripe .
[why is it] that what should be the a simple implementation in modern technology is an unmitigated train wreck? Three reasons:
Voting is a lot more complex than it appears at first glance.
Many computer and system programmers, developers and PMs are idiots. They don't have the resources to do a good job.
Ballot boxes are a terrible, terrible mechanism or device to try to replace with a computer. There is absolutely no reason whatsover to switch from a bit of paper with 3" of pencil on a bit of string. However politicians (like most of the rest of the population) have gradually come to believe that Computers == The Future, The Future == Good, and thus all manual processes should be replaced with "the system" (any system, so long as it goes beep and looks cool.)
Take a look at the history of UK government IT procurement for far more proof than you ever needed that the benefits of "computerisation" are a mirage that disappears in a mass of requirement changes, scope creep, poorly understood specs, broken code, inadequate project management and above all, thousands and thousands of people whose mortgage payments depend on them not mentioning that the Emperor is naked.
I ask this on every eVoting story that appears on Slashdot, I never get an answer. Why on earth would you WANT to replace a bit of paper and a pencil, with a computer? If you think the latter must obviously be better than the former in some way... you're either an idiot, or you haven't thought about the problem properly, or you have a vested interest.
Absolutely. I learned Z80 assembler as well as Basic (and tried learning Forth, but failed miserably... sending my dreams of being the next Matthew Smith spiralling into oblivion, like a Hungry Horace who's just been consumed by a disembodied head.
I've got an old paperback book called "The Coming War Between China and the USSR", published in the mid/late 60s IIRC.
However the US and Russia (as well as China and to some extent India) do have a major resources issue. The state is compelled to keep petrol prices artificially low (what is it these days, $2 a US gallon?) That's just the most visible resource conflict; water and metals (copper in particular) are in great demand which is only going to get bigger. As we've seen, the USA sees no problem with using military strength to try to preserve access to oil reserves. There's no reason to expect China not to take the same approach. Come to that, whereabouts on the production curve are the Siberain oilfeeds? Anyone?
Does it address the number of overflows, smashed stacks, tap-dancing on the heap vulnerabilities? I monitor software vulnerabilities for my employer, and there has been a stready flow of exploitable bugs in archiving software (everything from zlib , to Winzip. (Who knew Wz includes an ActiveX control, allowing users to be owned via a wenbsite?!) Many anti-virus apps have also been vulnerable to issues in unpackers of various flavours.
Where do you hear that the US has by far the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment of any democracy? I can't find a better source than Wikipedia with 10secs googling, but this will do:
"The USA has 738 people per 100,000 serving time
New Zealand has the second highest prison population per capita amongst developed countries, with 169 prisoners per 100,000."
Nice attempt to evade the issue by raking up redundant matters. The crux of the problem here is that MS Word needs or provides Internet access for some of it's functions. Even if it had any buffer overflows, the problem would not be exploitable from remote systems.
No, I'm afraid you're completely wrong. Word is not being exploited via "network-aware" functions. The exploits are Word.doc files with particular malformed elements. Nothing to do with networks except insofar as the booby-trapped documents are transmitted to the victim via email.
You shouldn't really need to monitor their browsing/e-mail unless they're not getting the results required. What about filtering mail for spam and malware? What about filtering HTTP for malware and other badness, come to that? This (the scenario in the article) is a corner-case, in that someone was clearly going out of their way to breach another individual's privacy. It remains to be seen which way the courts will jump on mass surveillance of everyone, disclosed in Ts& Cs, and where it's done by automated systems rather than humans.
Do you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when using work email for personal use, even though your employment contract specifically says you may be monitored? Apparently the answer is YES in some EU countries (notably,m Germany and Switzerland.)
This may come as a shock to you, but national and supra-national law trumps pseudo-legalistic "Ts & Cs", AUPs, local security policies etc etc.
Local DACH privacy laws already prevent companies from, eg., doing automated spam-filtering on their employees' makil accounts. Mad as toast? yes I agree, but that's the law.
Where did the billions of dollars and years of development go? They were frittered away in a futile attempt to do system programming in a high-level language. When it was no longer possible to ignore the evidence that this wasn't going to work, Microsoft panicked, junked everything they'd done on Vista and changed tack. Instead of a new kernel, the actual released Vista was developed in two years, based on the kernel used in Windows Server 2003.
I haven't seen a Windows bluescreen for some months either. Oh yes, it was a failed attempt to install our work standard XP image on a new laptop (for which we had a good working image.) Just a continual cycle of bluescreen, reboot, bluescreen... I googled up the reason, I forget what it was though. I hadn't seen one before that for probably over a year, mainly because I've been running Linux at work for the last 2 years, as well as at home (for the last 5 years). It's over a decade since my first experience with Linux (Debian 2.0... I never did get X running, but I learnt vi trying;) )
And for reference, in those ten years with both the Linux and BSD kernels I have never seen a real kernel panic. Not once. That's including using and abusing a lot of crap at home as well as production servers at work. (And vice versa:) ) Perhaps Vista has finally ended kernel crashes and broken hardware and monthly security patches and botnets galore (though if you believe that, I've a friend who's inherited $20m in gold who'd like to talk to you) -- I neither know nor care. Why not give it a try... c'mon, just once can't hurt, can it?
Turn the theme crap off via Control Panel -> Admin -> Services. Sort the list by status, look at all the crap that's running. Copy the list into a text file, hit google, work out what you don't need. Remember to change the start-up to "disabled" once you're sure you don't need it (I set it to "manual".) Keep track of what you've turned off and when, because at some point something won't work and you'll want to try turning things back on to see if that fixes it. Rinse & repeat for a few days/weeks. Voila, the machine is twice as fast, looks usable (w95 interface) and is 500 times more secure.
With EMI and Apple possibly about to usher in the end of attempts to riddle music and video with DRM, the only reason for most of the crap with which they've weighed down the not-that-bad W2K3 server kernel in turning it into Vista has disappeared. But I've seen so many false dawns... Windows 2000 was going to be the beginning of the end for Windows, so was XP. Although the media profile for the problems with Vista seems a little higher than five years ago (or whenever it was XP was released), it made no difference then and probably won't now. Sadly everyone will carry on buying new machines which will come with Vista. In two or three years' time, accumulated service packs and patches will have flogged the dead horse into shambling, grotesque parody of a live one, and Ballmer gets to buy himself another new suite of office furniture.
That said, where I work (which has a relatively high number of engineers of various sorts) and an enlightened policy of "if you don't mind no support, good luck, so long as you can do your work. If you get hacked, we'll kick your arse so hard you'll be brushing your teeth with a yard broom" (I'm paraphrasing, you understand:) - we have something like 5% of users are on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks - good link, from a better nick ;)
Who do you think is lending you all that money? Think about it. No, on second thoughts don't waste your time, just Google it.
Man, you're hilarious!
Argh, Slashdot ate half my comment >:( Sorry, I haven't time to rewrite it all.
OK let's start with your three suggested advantages.
If the large ballots are good enough now, they're good enough for the future. Has anyone actually researched the number of people for whom this is an issue? I seriously doubt it's a significant enogugh factor to merit spending the money and taking chances with such a core process. (Where's the change control for democracy?!) There are plenty of other ways of dealing with the problem, if it IS a real problem: change your system so that you don't have dozens of candidates. There's no need for it. In the US they elect lots of civil servants (judges, school boards and the like); that's potty, to me, but if they really insist on it, run them as separate races. (After all, during the main elections you only get to hear about national issues anyway.) Or give our multiple ballot papers to each elector.
Next!
Next!
I don't know about Belgium, but here in the UK polling stations close at 10pm on the evening of the ballot; exit polls are out in the next half hour, and are usually fairly accurate (though our weird non-proportional system can keep things unexpectedly interesting, thus making the once-every-four-years ritual of election night parties actually FUN and INTERESTING! :) Generally the outcome is clear by 2am, and the second-placed party has conceded defeat by 3am or 4am at the latest. A few especially large consistuencies don't finish their count until the following day (I believe the Scottish Western Isles constituency is the geographically largest, and consists of LOTS of islands scattered over a large distance - check the map.) There are only three or four such constituencies and they never affect the final outcome.
Incidentally, you may be thinking "aha, but if/when you get a proper proportional system (first preference, second preference, third pref and so on) that this will slow things down.)
Now consider the advantages of this system that are lost with eVoting:
Why is the parent post moderated flamebait?! It's a perfectly realistic possibility in the current climate and it's the obvious implication of the story, to the extent that it's ironically redundant in that it states the obvious.
YOU know that, and I know that, but... FWIW, I do think Vista is going to cause significant damage to Microsoft in the long run, but sadly most of us live in the short and medium runs ;(
Today's Guardian includes this interesting piece entitled "Fascist America, in 10 easy steps". Guess how many steps down the path we are?
For the benefit of those who won't read it, here's the ten points.
And in other news: Jessica Lynch comes out and condemns the Hollywood show they made of the incident she was involved in.
It might come as a shock to you, but Joe Blow just doesn't care about all that stuff, long as he can see Facebook and Hotmail and whatever other tripe .
Take a look at the history of UK government IT procurement for far more proof than you ever needed that the benefits of "computerisation" are a mirage that disappears in a mass of requirement changes, scope creep, poorly understood specs, broken code, inadequate project management and above all, thousands and thousands of people whose mortgage payments depend on them not mentioning that the Emperor is naked.
I ask this on every eVoting story that appears on Slashdot, I never get an answer. Why on earth would you WANT to replace a bit of paper and a pencil, with a computer? If you think the latter must obviously be better than the former in some way... you're either an idiot, or you haven't thought about the problem properly, or you have a vested interest.
Absolutely. I learned Z80 assembler as well as Basic (and tried learning Forth, but failed miserably... sending my dreams of being the next Matthew Smith spiralling into oblivion, like a Hungry Horace who's just been consumed by a disembodied head.
However the US and Russia (as well as China and to some extent India) do have a major resources issue. The state is compelled to keep petrol prices artificially low (what is it these days, $2 a US gallon?) That's just the most visible resource conflict; water and metals (copper in particular) are in great demand which is only going to get bigger. As we've seen, the USA sees no problem with using military strength to try to preserve access to oil reserves. There's no reason to expect China not to take the same approach. Come to that, whereabouts on the production curve are the Siberain oilfeeds? Anyone?
Does it address the number of overflows, smashed stacks, tap-dancing on the heap vulnerabilities? I monitor software vulnerabilities for my employer, and there has been a stready flow of exploitable bugs in archiving software (everything from zlib , to Winzip. (Who knew Wz includes an ActiveX control, allowing users to be owned via a wenbsite?!) Many anti-virus apps have also been vulnerable to issues in unpackers of various flavours.
"The USA has 738 people per 100,000 serving time New Zealand has the second highest prison population per capita amongst developed countries, with 169 prisoners per 100,000."
You can fill in the rest of my rant yourself.
No, I'm afraid you're completely wrong. Word is not being exploited via "network-aware" functions. The exploits are Word .doc files with particular malformed elements. Nothing to do with networks except insofar as the booby-trapped documents are transmitted to the victim via email.
To prefer OWA to ANYTHING is a sign of a diseased brain IMO. The only thing OWA is better than is no email at all...
Do you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when using work email for personal use, even though your employment contract specifically says you may be monitored? Apparently the answer is YES in some EU countries (notably,m Germany and Switzerland.)
Local DACH privacy laws already prevent companies from, eg., doing automated spam-filtering on their employees' makil accounts. Mad as toast? yes I agree, but that's the law.
Google "vista reset" for the gory details.
And for reference, in those ten years with both the Linux and BSD kernels I have never seen a real kernel panic. Not once. That's including using and abusing a lot of crap at home as well as production servers at work. (And vice versa :) ) Perhaps Vista has finally ended kernel crashes and broken hardware and monthly security patches and botnets galore (though if you believe that, I've a friend who's inherited $20m in gold who'd like to talk to you) -- I neither know nor care. Why not give it a try... c'mon, just once can't hurt, can it?
Or just install GNU and have done with it :)
That said, where I work (which has a relatively high number of engineers of various sorts) and an enlightened policy of "if you don't mind no support, good luck, so long as you can do your work. If you get hacked, we'll kick your arse so hard you'll be brushing your teeth with a yard broom" (I'm paraphrasing, you understand :) - we have something like 5% of users are on Linux.