It would still take multiple individuals to manipulate the votes in an electronic system. Especially if the verifiers had access to the source code.
Most electronic voting systems are not hooked up to the internet or any comptuer network. The communicate by reporting the results over the phone lines. Hack the central server? Someones going to notice an unscheduled 15+ minute call. Hack the terminals? Only connected to the phone lines at reporting time. Someones going to notice someone taking an unusally long time at the machiens with a laptop out and trying to open them up.
The most insecure part is the sourc code. Which you can look at ahead of time and compile yourself if necessary. Plus, no campaign head is going to allow them to recompile the code each election. They are also going to test out the code before hand.
How do you count Avagadros number? Besides, I'm just expanding on one already sugest by the scientists themselves. either a quantity of light or the mass of a fixed number of atoms. Water goes along witht the second part. Had chemistry, had physics. Have had more than most people.
The reasoning behind letting a Felon out and still not voting is that while they may have paid back their "Debt" to society, they still have to earn back the trust. That said, not all felons have their voting rights eliminated. Also, felons can get their voting rights back by a court order from a judge.
I'm not sure I like this one. I'm generally pro-rights, but they're not citizens. But they do live in the country. So I don't know.
Does any country allow people who are not citizens of it's country to vote in it's elections? This requirement is good, even if they live in the US. Should otehr countries ambasadoors be allowed to vote in US elections? Should people who are visiting for the week be allowed to? At least if you are a citizen, you have a stake in the outcome. To allow non-citizens to vote, you might as well allow non-citizens to run for office.
One would hope that this would be determined on a basic fairness level, not a partisan, vote-gaining level... but just ask Washington DC's citizens (which number more than Wyoming) to call their senators and congressmen on the issue.*
You still don't have a point. DC still has fewer than Vermont, which only has 3 as well. The rules on the number of votes DC gets is this. Calculate the total as if they were a state. If this is more than the least populas state, it becomes equal to the least populas state. It's 3 either way.
As for DC not having a vote in congress (remember, it took a constitutional amendmant to get them a vote in the first place). The reasoning was that DC was never intended to have a permanent population. This goes back to even before DC was founded. It was never meant to be a state so that it couldn't get political. That all changed when large numbers of people started residing there permanently.
"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.
Federal Holiday, not National. Won't affect anyone who is not a federal employee. Businesses don't have to give people off days on federal holidays. People will still be required to work on those days. You too, in all likelyhood. Me, my company gives us up to 2 hours off in order to vote. Thats more than most do.
This bill will make it easier for people who work a lot to vote, they can just fill out an absentee ballot at home and mail it in
You can already do that. All states allow you to do that. It's how the military votes. And it's how out of state college students vote. You don't have to be out of state in order to get one. You just need to request one.
on a paper ballot system, i can not easily submit 15,000 votes for Fred Flinstone. In an electronic system, I can.
You're obviously not from Chicago. Where dead people vote. Often more than once. They need to clean out the voter roles to get people who are no longer in the jurisdications/are dead off the roles. But unfortunately this has always been portrayed as racist and an attempt to dissenfranchise minority voters.
Otherwise, what's to prevent joeblow gifted hacker from jiggering the machine, whether that be via mechanical or through code modification, to throw a few votes to his favorite candidate.
The fact that the machine is not hooked up to the internet? And physical access to the machine is kept under more security than a bank vault? And when the machines are not in said vault, there are a shitload of people in the room that would notice if you tried to open them up?
We could've had mechanical voting machines a hundred years ago, which, if you think about it, electronic voting is essentially the same thing. I feel now as they did back then - paper was better.
Funny, we were using mechanical machines in my county prior to the electronic ones for several decades. No one ever had a problem with them. (Fairfax County, VA)
what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?
Well, having talked to my county election commisioner. I specifically asked this question after we made the front page of slashdot the 2nd or 3rd time (Fairfax County, VA, ain't life grand? [it's a blue county btw]). The reason for not having a paper balot is this. "If we had one, people would always demand a recount and would never trust the computer tally". Mind you, we have not used paper in a long time. We were using mechanical voting machines prior to this so we STILL did not have a paper trail. (Side Note: This bill would appear to eliminate those mechanical ones as well). The reason we went to the laptop style machines was due to the cost of moving these 500+lb gorilas to the polling stations and storing them in a warehouse for a year. Laptop sized machines are much easier for transport. If she did not believe that the machines were working correctly, she would not have purchased them. (Another side note: No internet was used in transfering the votes either)
TO address the others one by one:
To encourage more citizens to exercise their right to vote, the Count Every Vote Act designates Election Day a federal holiday and requires early voting in each state.
Not sure what early voting will do, but the federal holiday won't do much other than for federal employees. Businesses and States are not required to follow them and there are still many who would be working that day anyway (cops, doctors, firefighters, grocery workers, mom and pop stores).
In particular, the bill restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity.
Would have to see more details on this. However, something tells me that depending on how restrictive it is, it might have some 1st amendmant issues. Also, why not make it all state election officials instead of just the chief election officials? Also, why not just encourage the states to do this instead of making it a federal law? (for this segment) If a state doesn't want to pass it, there may be good reason. I'll also want to see what qualifies as politcal activity. Does helping out at a girl scout cookies sale count? Or teaching kids about the voting process at a school (it's a publicity stunt).
The bill also makes it a federal crime to commit deceptive practices, such as sending flyers into minority neighborhoods telling voters the wrong voting date, and makes these practices a felony punishable by up to a year of imprisonment.
Interesting how they specify minority in here. I'd make it for any neighborhood, personally; not just minority neighborhoods. In the 2000 poles, the national news reported incorectly at 7pm Eastern that the polls closed for all of florida. The north eastern portion is in the Central time zone and they didn't close for another hour. Those counties had noticeably lower voter turnout that year. Would that count? It was supposedly an honest mistake. So they would also have to add "intentionally". That said, I'm still curious who could mess up on that date and how. (and by how much they were off)
As usual, I'm going to have to read through the actual text of the bill. I sugest everyone else here do the same. The devil is in the details, especially on something like this. For all we know it requires that all machines be federally pre-approved or something like that. Personally, I'm partially against this from the start since it would give the federal government more control over the states. I'd like more state control. That's why, nothing more.
Actually, paper receipts are the heart of integrity. They provide the doublechecks to the electronic record, and when the typical contested election degenerates into "we counted x", "no, we counted y", the paper ballots can be trotted out and physically counted by everyone.
Paper ballots or reciepts do not garuntee an election is not rigged. There was a union in New York(?) in which the individual ballots were sealed in envelopes. The guys rigging it did the following. Steam open envelope. Change just enough votes to ensure that they will win. Re-seal envelopes. The paper trail was useless as it was corrupted. Not saying that they don't help, but it's not a garuntee in itself.
Even if it's easy to implement, won't existing energy concerns have it in their best interests to block its adoption?
Why people say this, I can not understand. The companies that make and sell energy are in the energy business. That means that they make money selling energy. They don't care how they make the energy. If a new solution comes along and it's cheaper than their current way of making energy, they will implement it to lower their costs and raise their profits. That is the way the companies work. Failure to implement anything that lowers costs risks them being undersold by a competitor that does.
That said, I'm still skeptical of what they say about 5 cents per kwh (kilo watt hour). Last time I checked coal was around 1.7 and nuclear at 1.2 cents. (extra cost is due to line maintenance and costs of people) However, that was at the cost to the companies for direct generation and not to the consumer. I'm not sure which that 5 cents figure is supposed to be.
In Europe, where software patents aren't yet valid, how does this apply?
Do only h/w versions of the codec infringe, or do s/w versions infringe as well?
Neither, I think. Video Codecs fall under something else. Probably algorithms. Easiest way to find out is to look up what the MPEG & Dirac (owned by BBC) standards fall under. I'll say this though. When SMPTE starts looking at a new standard. This kind of thing happens all the time. It's part of the process. So "nothing new, nothing to see here" applies pretty well. On a different note, I wonder how much these companies can get in cash from MS for infringing on the patents for the last several years.
As a rule of thumb, bits are measured in base 10 (thousands) and bytes are measured in base 2 (1024's). Other than when marketers get a hold of numbers, this is usually true.
Why not just give the definition of 1 kg as a certain number of water molecules? Water seems to be the universal substance in the metric system. (1 gram water being in volume equal to 1 centimeter^3 at a certain temperature). Just define it using water molecules and complete the circle.
What's really funny here is that you think I'm a bible thumper. Well, lets see. Just to have some fun with this lets say the verse is "Thou shalt not kill".
as for In fact, I suspect it's immoral that we don't duplicate every fertilized cell in IVF a dozen times, and have everyone be a set of identical dodecatuplits. I mean, those people could have existed.
If you can figure out how to do this, more power to you. But as for the "those people could have existed", well, that requires interfering with the way the cells would normally evolve. Same thing that embryonic stem cell researchers and IVF docs do. So, I don't see your point.
Well, since their security consisted of "So long as no one increments their unique number we assigned them by 1 in the browser location bar", I'd say that they were pretty much dumb idiots. Sloppy doesn't begin to cover this.
I'm thinking that it's time to write to my state and federal congressmen to get California's Security Breach Information Act (S.B. 1386) amended into state or national law. That way when this shit happens I can find out if any of my info is at risk.
When will these idiot companies start taking security seriously instead of being idiots about it? Time to take a page out of the "If I were an Evil Overlord List": One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation. and My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords.Source
On a side note, all this stuff just keeps reminding me about the No Networked Systems requirement in BattleStar Galactica.
Hand optimize code in places that are called a lot, and places that take a lot of processing power. Use the compiler for tasks that are not intensive. However, if you call one task a lot either as a subrotine or in a loop, hand code that to be as optimized as you can. Likewise, routines that are heavily processor intensive should be hand optimized to improve performance. Optimizing anything else won't provide as much of an over all boost in performance.
Because the embryos are alive and the research requires that they be prevented from turning into a child? It's essentially the same as the Pro-Life argument against abortion. "You're killing people".
As for banning research that could help millions, seems all I hear about lately are the stem cells coming from umbilical cords and adult stem cells. Haven't heard anything from any country on positive research using embryonics lately.
Bush banned Federal Funding of Embryonic Stem Cell research on new lines only. If you get private funding, you can do research on new embryoninc lines. Or, you can use Federal Funding on the old lines or Adult Stem Cells. This new technique used Adult Stem Cells. They can get federal funding for this.
And yet federal money can't go to stem cell research?
And yet again someone missinformed. Bush DID NOT BAN Federal Funding of Stem Cell Research. He banned Federal Funding going to Embryonic Stem Cell Research on new lines. This research used Adult Stem Cells. Something that Federal money can go to.
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It would still take multiple individuals to manipulate the votes in an electronic system. Especially if the verifiers had access to the source code.
Most electronic voting systems are not hooked up to the internet or any comptuer network. The communicate by reporting the results over the phone lines. Hack the central server? Someones going to notice an unscheduled 15+ minute call. Hack the terminals? Only connected to the phone lines at reporting time. Someones going to notice someone taking an unusally long time at the machiens with a laptop out and trying to open them up.
The most insecure part is the sourc code. Which you can look at ahead of time and compile yourself if necessary. Plus, no campaign head is going to allow them to recompile the code each election. They are also going to test out the code before hand.
How do you count Avagadros number? Besides, I'm just expanding on one already sugest by the scientists themselves. either a quantity of light or the mass of a fixed number of atoms. Water goes along witht the second part. Had chemistry, had physics. Have had more than most people.
What happens if a felony stops being one due to a change
You can petition a judge to have your voting rights restored. Many get them back this way.
The reasoning behind letting a Felon out and still not voting is that while they may have paid back their "Debt" to society, they still have to earn back the trust. That said, not all felons have their voting rights eliminated. Also, felons can get their voting rights back by a court order from a judge.
The Neocons will not fix the system that helps them cheat. Why would they? Just say conspiracy and the stupid americans turn off their brain.
Chicago. Vote early, Vote often. Never cleanse the voting roles of dead voters and ones who have moved. Next point please, that one is worthless.
non-citizens voting
I'm not sure I like this one. I'm generally pro-rights, but they're not citizens. But they do live in the country. So I don't know.
Does any country allow people who are not citizens of it's country to vote in it's elections? This requirement is good, even if they live in the US. Should otehr countries ambasadoors be allowed to vote in US elections? Should people who are visiting for the week be allowed to? At least if you are a citizen, you have a stake in the outcome. To allow non-citizens to vote, you might as well allow non-citizens to run for office.
One would hope that this would be determined on a basic fairness level, not a partisan, vote-gaining level... but just ask Washington DC's citizens (which number more than Wyoming) to call their senators and congressmen on the issue.*
You still don't have a point. DC still has fewer than Vermont, which only has 3 as well. The rules on the number of votes DC gets is this. Calculate the total as if they were a state. If this is more than the least populas state, it becomes equal to the least populas state. It's 3 either way.
As for DC not having a vote in congress (remember, it took a constitutional amendmant to get them a vote in the first place). The reasoning was that DC was never intended to have a permanent population. This goes back to even before DC was founded. It was never meant to be a state so that it couldn't get political. That all changed when large numbers of people started residing there permanently.
"Election Day as a national holiday.": Good. Productivity could go down, but it could increase turn-out and the importance of the election in people's minds.
Federal Holiday, not National. Won't affect anyone who is not a federal employee. Businesses don't have to give people off days on federal holidays. People will still be required to work on those days. You too, in all likelyhood. Me, my company gives us up to 2 hours off in order to vote. Thats more than most do.
This bill will make it easier for people who work a lot to vote, they can just fill out an absentee ballot at home and mail it in
You can already do that. All states allow you to do that. It's how the military votes. And it's how out of state college students vote. You don't have to be out of state in order to get one. You just need to request one.
on a paper ballot system, i can not easily submit 15,000 votes for Fred Flinstone. In an electronic system, I can.
You're obviously not from Chicago. Where dead people vote. Often more than once. They need to clean out the voter roles to get people who are no longer in the jurisdications/are dead off the roles. But unfortunately this has always been portrayed as racist and an attempt to dissenfranchise minority voters.
Otherwise, what's to prevent joeblow gifted hacker from jiggering the machine, whether that be via mechanical or through code modification, to throw a few votes to his favorite candidate.
The fact that the machine is not hooked up to the internet? And physical access to the machine is kept under more security than a bank vault? And when the machines are not in said vault, there are a shitload of people in the room that would notice if you tried to open them up?
We could've had mechanical voting machines a hundred years ago, which, if you think about it, electronic voting is essentially the same thing. I feel now as they did back then - paper was better.
Funny, we were using mechanical machines in my county prior to the electronic ones for several decades. No one ever had a problem with them. (Fairfax County, VA)
what possible reason can they have for such opposition; or whether, what reason that does not mark them as irredeemably evil?
Well, having talked to my county election commisioner. I specifically asked this question after we made the front page of slashdot the 2nd or 3rd time (Fairfax County, VA, ain't life grand? [it's a blue county btw]). The reason for not having a paper balot is this. "If we had one, people would always demand a recount and would never trust the computer tally". Mind you, we have not used paper in a long time. We were using mechanical voting machines prior to this so we STILL did not have a paper trail. (Side Note: This bill would appear to eliminate those mechanical ones as well). The reason we went to the laptop style machines was due to the cost of moving these 500+lb gorilas to the polling stations and storing them in a warehouse for a year. Laptop sized machines are much easier for transport. If she did not believe that the machines were working correctly, she would not have purchased them. (Another side note: No internet was used in transfering the votes either)
TO address the others one by one:
To encourage more citizens to exercise their right to vote, the Count Every Vote Act designates Election Day a federal holiday and requires early voting in each state.
Not sure what early voting will do, but the federal holiday won't do much other than for federal employees. Businesses and States are not required to follow them and there are still many who would be working that day anyway (cops, doctors, firefighters, grocery workers, mom and pop stores).
In particular, the bill restricts the ability of chief state election officials as well as owners and senior managers of voting machine manufacturers to engage in certain kinds of political activity.
Would have to see more details on this. However, something tells me that depending on how restrictive it is, it might have some 1st amendmant issues. Also, why not make it all state election officials instead of just the chief election officials? Also, why not just encourage the states to do this instead of making it a federal law? (for this segment) If a state doesn't want to pass it, there may be good reason. I'll also want to see what qualifies as politcal activity. Does helping out at a girl scout cookies sale count? Or teaching kids about the voting process at a school (it's a publicity stunt).
The bill also makes it a federal crime to commit deceptive practices, such as sending flyers into minority neighborhoods telling voters the wrong voting date, and makes these practices a felony punishable by up to a year of imprisonment.
Interesting how they specify minority in here. I'd make it for any neighborhood, personally; not just minority neighborhoods. In the 2000 poles, the national news reported incorectly at 7pm Eastern that the polls closed for all of florida. The north eastern portion is in the Central time zone and they didn't close for another hour. Those counties had noticeably lower voter turnout that year. Would that count? It was supposedly an honest mistake. So they would also have to add "intentionally". That said, I'm still curious who could mess up on that date and how. (and by how much they were off)
As usual, I'm going to have to read through the actual text of the bill. I sugest everyone else here do the same. The devil is in the details, especially on something like this. For all we know it requires that all machines be federally pre-approved or something like that. Personally, I'm partially against this from the start since it would give the federal government more control over the states. I'd like more state control. That's why, nothing more.
Actually, paper receipts are the heart of integrity. They provide the doublechecks to the electronic record, and when the typical contested election degenerates into "we counted x", "no, we counted y", the paper ballots can be trotted out and physically counted by everyone.
Paper ballots or reciepts do not garuntee an election is not rigged. There was a union in New York(?) in which the individual ballots were sealed in envelopes. The guys rigging it did the following. Steam open envelope. Change just enough votes to ensure that they will win. Re-seal envelopes. The paper trail was useless as it was corrupted. Not saying that they don't help, but it's not a garuntee in itself.
Even if it's easy to implement, won't existing energy concerns have it in their best interests to block its adoption?
Why people say this, I can not understand. The companies that make and sell energy are in the energy business. That means that they make money selling energy. They don't care how they make the energy. If a new solution comes along and it's cheaper than their current way of making energy, they will implement it to lower their costs and raise their profits. That is the way the companies work. Failure to implement anything that lowers costs risks them being undersold by a competitor that does.
That said, I'm still skeptical of what they say about 5 cents per kwh (kilo watt hour). Last time I checked coal was around 1.7 and nuclear at 1.2 cents. (extra cost is due to line maintenance and costs of people) However, that was at the cost to the companies for direct generation and not to the consumer. I'm not sure which that 5 cents figure is supposed to be.
In Europe, where software patents aren't yet valid, how does this apply?
Do only h/w versions of the codec infringe, or do s/w versions infringe as well?
Neither, I think. Video Codecs fall under something else. Probably algorithms. Easiest way to find out is to look up what the MPEG & Dirac (owned by BBC) standards fall under. I'll say this though. When SMPTE starts looking at a new standard. This kind of thing happens all the time. It's part of the process. So "nothing new, nothing to see here" applies pretty well. On a different note, I wonder how much these companies can get in cash from MS for infringing on the patents for the last several years.
As a rule of thumb, bits are measured in base 10 (thousands) and bytes are measured in base 2 (1024's). Other than when marketers get a hold of numbers, this is usually true.
Why not just give the definition of 1 kg as a certain number of water molecules? Water seems to be the universal substance in the metric system. (1 gram water being in volume equal to 1 centimeter^3 at a certain temperature). Just define it using water molecules and complete the circle.
What's really funny here is that you think I'm a bible thumper. Well, lets see. Just to have some fun with this lets say the verse is "Thou shalt not kill".
as for In fact, I suspect it's immoral that we don't duplicate every fertilized cell in IVF a dozen times, and have everyone be a set of identical dodecatuplits. I mean, those people could have existed.
If you can figure out how to do this, more power to you. But as for the "those people could have existed", well, that requires interfering with the way the cells would normally evolve. Same thing that embryonic stem cell researchers and IVF docs do. So, I don't see your point.
Well, since their security consisted of "So long as no one increments their unique number we assigned them by 1 in the browser location bar", I'd say that they were pretty much dumb idiots. Sloppy doesn't begin to cover this.
I'm thinking that it's time to write to my state and federal congressmen to get California's Security Breach Information Act (S.B. 1386) amended into state or national law. That way when this shit happens I can find out if any of my info is at risk.
When will these idiot companies start taking security seriously instead of being idiots about it? Time to take a page out of the "If I were an Evil Overlord List": One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation. and My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords. Source
On a side note, all this stuff just keeps reminding me about the No Networked Systems requirement in BattleStar Galactica.
Hand optimize code in places that are called a lot, and places that take a lot of processing power. Use the compiler for tasks that are not intensive. However, if you call one task a lot either as a subrotine or in a loop, hand code that to be as optimized as you can. Likewise, routines that are heavily processor intensive should be hand optimized to improve performance. Optimizing anything else won't provide as much of an over all boost in performance.
Because the embryos are alive and the research requires that they be prevented from turning into a child? It's essentially the same as the Pro-Life argument against abortion. "You're killing people".
As for banning research that could help millions, seems all I hear about lately are the stem cells coming from umbilical cords and adult stem cells. Haven't heard anything from any country on positive research using embryonics lately.
Bush banned Federal Funding of Embryonic Stem Cell research on new lines only. If you get private funding, you can do research on new embryoninc lines. Or, you can use Federal Funding on the old lines or Adult Stem Cells. This new technique used Adult Stem Cells. They can get federal funding for this.
There is no outright ban. It is a myth.
And yet federal money can't go to stem cell research?
And yet again someone missinformed. Bush DID NOT BAN Federal Funding of Stem Cell Research. He banned Federal Funding going to Embryonic Stem Cell Research on new lines. This research used Adult Stem Cells. Something that Federal money can go to.