To be a god it has to be a thinking entity. People who worship liberty generally don't believe that it's actually a cognisant being - just a human-invented concept that should be upheld.
And Christians would do well to remember that among western cultures, those nations with state-endorsed religion have the highest percentage of atheists today. That's not a coincidence. Non-believers like me don't want religious belief to become a requirement for government participation, while believers with the ability to think clearly recognize that it's bad to let government get involved with religion as it will dilute it and secularize it. BOTH groups have good incentive to keep religion and government far away from each other. Combine them and they BOTH suffer from it.
Deism is the notion that a god created the universe but has had NO EFFECT on it since then, and has left things to run on their own according to the laws of nature that he wisely set up to need no tweaking. It is incompatable with the believe that miracles have occured, and is thus incompatable with Christianity. A deist will not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, for example, or in the parting of the red sea by Moses. As for those founding fathers that were deists, yes they got there FROM Christianity as a starting point, but they weren't Christians anymore.
Even as an atheist, the "under god" part isn't really the big problem for me - it's egotistical and presumptuous, but not anywhere near as much as the rest of the thing - It's a pledge of national allegience - that is PRECISELY the sort of thing that MUST REMAIN VOLUNTARY if it is to have any real deep meaning at all. We don't need mandatory patriotism. It's empty-hearted and evil.
Run Lola Run is linear. It's just repeated. A non-linear story would be, for example, one with a flashback in it, or one told in random order like Resivior Dogs.
I really strongly dislike the use of non-linear storylines because they don't add anything interesting, but often moviemakers THINK they do, and so they use it as a replacement for actual interesting artisitc talent. (Tarantino does this a lot).
The first time I saw it, thought, "Okay this must have been the part where she saved the game..."
Yeah, it's an awesome movie. A bit short, but the music was just great, and kept you interested even when the scenes were just a lot of running. The music made you keep thinking, "Hurry, hurry, hurry", just like it was supposed to.
Actually, on the subject of the music, I find that I like to have music on when I program, but it has to be a very particular kind of music - it has to be fast and mostly wordless. If it's fast it keeps me thinking, but there can't be lyrics (or the lyrics have to be mindless and thus ignorable). Hearing the stream of words tends to interfere with the stream of "words" I'm thinking as I type code. Some types of classical work well, and some techno works well, but the Run Lola Run soundtrack is exactly the right kind of music to program to for me.
What I said: He would be stupid to show bias. What you seem to be under the false impression I said: He would be stupid to show any political opinion at all.
Notice the difference. Saying that you are going to do what you can (as a CEO of a voting machine company) to hand the victory to one side - that's bias. Saying you support one side - that's not.
Having a preference does not make someone biased. Being biased is making use of that preference to skew something so it's not fair.
YOU should really read what I wrote before belittling me unnecessarily like that. Next time try responding to what I said instead of a strawman of it.
Given the incredulity of your claim, I'm not going to believe you on just your say-so. I'm sorry if that sounds insulting, but what you are telling me sounds like someone claiming they just saw aliens land in their yard. I'm going to need more than just their claim before I believe it. It doesn't match up to my observations of people - where the desire to fit in only matters when they think they're being observed.
My tax money had already paid for part of the tuition at this one, like it or not. Besides, college isn't as portable as some services and products. Changing your mind and going with a different "company" partway through means losing credits in the transfer. It's not like switching brands of cola or something simple like that.
I was using the generic "you" when I asked why "you" would do this, not the specific "you". In other words, why would these other people you speak of act like you claim they would. Nobody would do that as it is counterproductive to their own desires, in a way that's obvious even for a person of low intelligence. I think you are assuming people are even stupider than they actually are. Also, the "want to be on the winning team" incentive you speak of is nonexistant when the polls are by secret ballot and nobody has any clue who you voted for unless you tell them.
Riiiight.... I'm sure that's what he meant while talking at a Republican fund-raiser.;-)
It's funny when someone uses a sarcastic tone while saying something perfectly reasonable. He'd have to be a complete moron to mean it the way you guys keep interpreting it. Evil he may be, but he's not enough of an idiot to show a bias publicly when his company NEEDS him to have the appearance of evenhanded neutrality.
Finally, let's shoot down your next argument, which will be that I'm only saying this because it would benefit me.
You're dead wrong. Next time wait until you hear my response before putting words in my mouth.
My next point is that your stance is inconsistent with itself. You say that voting should be based on something other than personal greed, immediately followed up by a complaint that the riches one has accumulated aren't being taken into account.
A 3d format that correctly stores the exact coordinates of everything is still "lossy" if the textures are not perfectly re-renderable. If I say "this curve absorbs 50% of the light that hits it and reflects 50% of the light that hits it, whith a diffused spread factor of 5, and this foggy area has a thickness factor of 10 (whatever that might mean in the format)", then two different renderers will take that very same information and produce two similar, but slightly different images. Thus it is possible for a 3-d format to be lossy. There are enough parts of the scene that are subject to fudgy algorithms.
Primary elections are still needed because, despite their attempts to change this, the two big parties are still just ordinary private organizations of concerned in individuals, NOT an official part of the government. Therefore a primary election is really NOT suppoesd to be an open public civil election. It's a private group deciding whom they will put forth to try to get people to vote for. It's downright wrong that some states force parties to allow non-members to vote in their PRIVATE decision making process. That's like going up to a company and telling the shareholders that the entire country has to be allowed to tell them who to pick for CEO, and they are required to accept the results. I live in such a state and I refuse to participate in primaries as I am not a member of a party, even though the state would let me do so. I refrain because it would be wrong to do so. And making the process into a public civil vote has turned the parties into ensconsed parts of the government, when they aren't suposed to be. It makes them more powerful, overall, when what I would like to see is more of a free-for-all, with more third-parties having a chance of getting somewhere. Then I might actually finally find a party I can agree with, isntead of having to "wing it" and drift from party to party to party as I vote (only in the final elections, mind you) each time.
Printing a receipt doesn't guarantee that your vote is counted right, by the way. Consider the following code:
int pick;// (pick = candidate choice)
... ...
int original_pick = pick;
// one out of every 5 times, change the pick: if( ((unsigned int)rand()) <= (UINT_MAX/5) { if( pick == 2 )
pick = 1; }
candidate[pick].tally++; printf( "You voted for %s\n", candidate[original_pick].name );
The problem is that there is no guarantee that the reciept reflects the number actually tallied.
I prefer a two-part approach - One machine produces a paper, human-readable receipt. This is more than just a receipt. It is also the ballot itself. This is taken to a second machine that scans the ballot in and does the tallying. Thus the touchscreen is nothing more than a device to help people fill out the ballot. It's the ballot itself that is the REAL vote, and you can still fill it out by hand if you prefer.
The two machines should be independanty designed, with both companies making them going off a public spec for how the ballot has to look, and the ballot itself is the ONLY means for the two to communicate to each other.
What a perfect way to skew the country's leaders toward the hawks and away from the doves. (Which was the whole point of the system in Starship Troopers, of course - you do realize that it was meant as a DIStopia, not a Utopia, right?). Placing the good of society above personal gain takes many forms. If you only accept military service as the only acceptable form that counts, then anyone not in agreement with military policy is going to be either disenfranchised, or have to be a hypocrite by joining in with the system he disagrees with.
Would I be willing to kill someone, or put myself in a position be killed, in order to further the good of others? I haven't been in a situation yet like that, so I honestly don't know if I'd have the guts to do that. I'd like to believe I would, but I honestly can't know until it happens. But, if I have to make such a decision, the decision has to come from ME, not from a commanding officer giving me an order. It has to be MY decision to make, or it means nothing. *I* decide the causes I am willing to die for, not some political figure with his own agenda that doesn't match my ethical views. That's why I would never join the military (well, I'm too old now unless things go so badly that they'll take anyone, but this is the reason I never joined in the first place, even though I onc e wanted to be a pilot, and that was the cheapest way to have done it.) I'm too stubborn to accept the "kill when I say so, because I say so" kind of orders that could theoretically occur if I was in the military.
As an American who votes, I have to say that you are wrong. My precinct uses a single-sheet ballot where you mark a blue felt-tip pen line pointing at the candidate you want (or pointing at the write-in blank where you can fill something in). There are a bunch of "broken" arrows drawn pointing at each choice, and your line essentially 'finishes' one of the arrows, like so: Before:
- -> Foo
- -> Bar
- -> Write-in: _____________
After:
- -> Foo
---> Bar
- -> Write-in: _____________
(The ascii art is mangled a bit by slashdot - those white spaces that break the arrow are supposed to be wider than that.)
These ballots contain all the federal, state, and local elections on them, just like everywhere else, and there is still plenty of room for those big arrows (they are really large, in something like a 30 point font, I would guess).
The ballots are a bit oversized, but that's not because of the arrows, it's because the text is printed very large for people who can't see well. The ballot still fits on one sheet, although it is double-sided, and about 8.5x15 inches instead of the typical 8.5x11.
So, my point is that a system with a box for an X next to the choice would work just fine here in the US. It would end up being about the same size as the ballot I do use.
(I think for "electronic voting" the ballot I use is the best idea - I walk it over and feed it into the scanning machine right after I finish marking it. The scanner will detect if I screwed up with a stray mark somewhere that confuses it, and it will tell me RIGHT THERE that the ballot is invalid and it will beep at me and spit my ballot back at me (at which point I can ask the poll worker for another, and they will give it to me and shred my fouled ballot, right where I can see them do it, and right where I can see them carefully averting their eyes so as not to see my votes on the old ballet they are shredding. Yes, I did test this system personally. Last time I deliberately voted a double-vote on one of the lesser elections that I didn't care about - county clerk of courts (and therefore would have normally left blank, and not mind if the machine ended up taking my vote that way.), just to test this and see it in action. It does work.
If your ballot is scannable, you get feedback RIGHT THERE that it worked, and the machine gives you a green light, and ticks up the "number voted today" counter, and you can leave. Your ballot is dropped into a box on the back side of the scanning machine. If your ballot has a write-in arrow somewhere. At the end of the day, the machine has already totalled the votes that were scanned through it, and has an electronic count of them all. Totalling up the tally is merely a process of adding the subtotals from all the individual machines in all the precincts, which doesn't take long, and is double-checked by hand. If there is a dispute, the paper ballots are still there for manual recount purposes. Also, a random selection of a small subset of the machines are counted anyway to verify that their electronic counts match the paper ballots in their boxes.
The way write-in votes are handled is that "Mr Write-in" is tallied as if it was a single candidate. If Mr. Write In doesn't win, then there's no point in reading the individual write-ins. If Mr. Write In does win, then a manual count has to be done to see if a write-in really did win. (The write-ins might still all lose if the write-in votes were spread among several candidates, but you are guaranteed that you don't need to count them if they can't even collectively "win" as a single entity.)
The process I would like to see for electronic voting is just like what I already do, except that the machines would be able to transmit counts to a central location in a networked fashion instead of having to add them together as a manual step at the end.
The big security risk of electronic voting like Diebold does it is not external tampering. It's internal tampering from the company itself - either deliberate or through bugs. There's no way to doublecheck that the software is telling the truth when it counts the ballots, because the software's claim of what the count is is your only actual record of the votes. Your claims as to the "security" of the system are based on the falsehood that external tampering is the big problem everyone's concerned with here.
I hear people claim that a lot, but I don't believe it, not for a moment. Why the hell do you care if you are on the "winning team" when your vote is secret? What would motivate someone to switch their vote to the winner? Nothing. If anything the problem is the other way around - when you find out early that your candidate is starting to lose, you have more motivation to get out there and vote for that candidate. Another problem is with those who might have otherwise voted third-party. If their second-favorite choice (the lesser of the big two evils) is winning, they'll be able to 'safely' vote for their preferred candidate. If their second-favorite choice is losing, then they might switch, but not to the winner as you say, but to the losing second-favorite choice to try to keep the worst choice from winning.
I agree that there should be a ban on reporting results before the polls are closed, but the problem this would fix is exactly the opposite of the problem you described.
"electoral votes for the president" has an ambiguous interpretation. It could mean "votes for the guy who is currently president", or it could just mean "votes in the presidential election, as opposed to votes in the other elections, like for mayor or senator."
Claiming to be competent when you know you are not, in an area like this where you know it's really important, IS a form a malice in and of itself.
"Stand back, I'm a doctor, I'll save him" is a malicious statement if you are in fact not a doctor, and you know it, and "We're competent and know exactly how to make safe voting machines" is also a malicious statement if you know it's not true.
Slashdot Mirror
% cp foo.jpg bar.jpg
% cp bar.jpg baz.jpg
% diff foo.jp baz.jpg
%
Everyone calls JPEG lossy, but the format does not degrade further every time it's saved. So, No that's not what "lossy" means.
Being open minded does not mean automatically believing everyone who claims something.
To be a god it has to be a thinking entity. People who worship liberty generally don't believe that it's actually a cognisant being - just a human-invented concept that should be upheld.
And Christians would do well to remember that among western cultures, those nations with state-endorsed religion have the highest percentage of atheists today. That's not a coincidence. Non-believers like me don't want religious belief to become a requirement for government participation, while believers with the ability to think clearly recognize that it's bad to let government get involved with religion as it will dilute it and secularize it. BOTH groups have good incentive to keep religion and government far away from each other. Combine them and they BOTH suffer from it.
Deism is the notion that a god created the universe but has had NO EFFECT on it since then, and has left things to run on their own according to the laws of nature that he wisely set up to need no tweaking. It is incompatable with the believe that miracles have occured, and is thus incompatable with Christianity. A deist will not believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, for example, or in the parting of the red sea by Moses. As for those founding fathers that were deists, yes they got there FROM Christianity as a starting point, but they weren't Christians anymore.
Even as an atheist, the "under god" part isn't really the big problem for me - it's egotistical and presumptuous, but not anywhere near as much as the rest of the thing - It's a pledge of national allegience - that is PRECISELY the sort of thing that MUST REMAIN VOLUNTARY if it is to have any real deep meaning at all. We don't need mandatory patriotism. It's empty-hearted and evil.
Run Lola Run is linear. It's just repeated. A non-linear story would be, for example, one with a flashback in it, or one told in random order like Resivior Dogs.
I really strongly dislike the use of non-linear storylines because they don't add anything interesting, but often moviemakers THINK they do, and so they use it as a replacement for actual interesting artisitc talent. (Tarantino does this a lot).
The first time I saw it, thought, "Okay this must have been the part where she saved the game..."
Yeah, it's an awesome movie. A bit short, but the music was just great, and kept you interested even when the scenes were just a lot of running. The music made you keep thinking, "Hurry, hurry, hurry", just like it was supposed to.
Actually, on the subject of the music, I find that I like to have music on when I program, but it has to be a very particular kind of music - it has to be fast and mostly wordless. If it's fast it keeps me thinking, but there can't be lyrics (or the lyrics have to be mindless and thus ignorable). Hearing the stream of words tends to interfere with the stream of "words" I'm thinking as I type code. Some types of classical work well, and some techno works well, but the Run Lola Run soundtrack is exactly the right kind of music to program to for me.
I have no response to points that are based on false premises like yours were.
What I said: He would be stupid to show bias.
What you seem to be under the false impression I said: He would be stupid to show any political opinion at all.
Notice the difference. Saying that you are going to do what you can (as a CEO of a voting machine company) to hand the victory to one side - that's bias. Saying you support one side - that's not.
Having a preference does not make someone biased. Being biased is making use of that preference to skew something so it's not fair.
YOU should really read what I wrote before belittling me unnecessarily like that. Next time try responding to what I said instead of a strawman of it.
Given the incredulity of your claim, I'm not going to believe you on just your say-so. I'm sorry if that sounds insulting, but what you are telling me sounds like someone claiming they just saw aliens land in their yard. I'm going to need more than just their claim before I believe it. It doesn't match up to my observations of people - where the desire to fit in only matters when they think they're being observed.
Heard of PBX's? The dorm usually isn't wired up the same way a person's house is.
My tax money had already paid for part of the tuition at this one, like it or not. Besides, college isn't as portable as some services and products. Changing your mind and going with a different "company" partway through means losing credits in the transfer. It's not like switching brands of cola or something simple like that.
I was using the generic "you" when I asked why "you" would do this, not the specific "you". In other words, why would these other people you speak of act like you claim they would. Nobody would do that as it is counterproductive to their own desires, in a way that's obvious even for a person of low intelligence. I think you are assuming people are even stupider than they actually are. Also, the "want to be on the winning team" incentive you speak of is nonexistant when the polls are by secret ballot and nobody has any clue who you voted for unless you tell them.
Riiiight.... I'm sure that's what he meant while talking at a Republican fund-raiser.
It's funny when someone uses a sarcastic tone while saying something perfectly reasonable. He'd have to be a complete moron to mean it the way you guys keep interpreting it. Evil he may be, but he's not enough of an idiot to show a bias publicly when his company NEEDS him to have the appearance of evenhanded neutrality.
Finally, let's shoot down your next argument, which will be that I'm only saying this because it would benefit me.
You're dead wrong. Next time wait until you hear my response before putting words in my mouth.
My next point is that your stance is inconsistent with itself. You say that voting should be based on something other than personal greed, immediately followed up by a complaint that the riches one has accumulated aren't being taken into account.
Make up your mind.
A 3d format that correctly stores the exact coordinates of everything is still "lossy" if the textures are not perfectly re-renderable. If I say "this curve absorbs 50% of the light that hits it and reflects 50% of the light that hits it, whith a diffused spread factor of 5, and this foggy area has a thickness factor of 10 (whatever that might mean in the format)", then two different renderers will take that very same information and produce two similar, but slightly different images. Thus it is possible for a 3-d format to be lossy. There are enough parts of the scene that are subject to fudgy algorithms.
Primary elections are still needed because, despite their attempts to change this, the two big parties are still just ordinary private organizations of concerned in individuals, NOT an official part of the government. Therefore a primary election is really NOT suppoesd to be an open public civil election. It's a private group deciding whom they will put forth to try to get people to vote for. It's downright wrong that some states force parties to allow non-members to vote in their PRIVATE decision making process. That's like going up to a company and telling the shareholders that the entire country has to be allowed to tell them who to pick for CEO, and they are required to accept the results. I live in such a state and I refuse to participate in primaries as I am not a member of a party, even though the state would let me do so. I refrain because it would be wrong to do so. And making the process into a public civil vote has turned the parties into ensconsed parts of the government, when they aren't suposed to be. It makes them more powerful, overall, when what I would like to see is more of a free-for-all, with more third-parties having a chance of getting somewhere. Then I might actually finally find a party I can agree with, isntead of having to "wing it" and drift from party to party to party as I vote (only in the final elections, mind you) each time.
I prefer a two-part approach - One machine produces a paper, human-readable receipt. This is more than just a receipt. It is also the ballot itself. This is taken to a second machine that scans the ballot in and does the tallying. Thus the touchscreen is nothing more than a device to help people fill out the ballot. It's the ballot itself that is the REAL vote, and you can still fill it out by hand if you prefer.
The two machines should be independanty designed, with both companies making them going off a public spec for how the ballot has to look, and the ballot itself is the ONLY means for the two to communicate to each other.
What a perfect way to skew the country's leaders toward the hawks and away from the doves. (Which was the whole point of the system in Starship Troopers, of course - you do realize that it was meant as a DIStopia, not a Utopia, right?). Placing the good of society above personal gain takes many forms. If you only accept military service as the only acceptable form that counts, then anyone not in agreement with military policy is going to be either disenfranchised, or have to be a hypocrite by joining in with the system he disagrees with.
Would I be willing to kill someone, or put myself in a position be killed, in order to further the good of others? I haven't been in a situation yet like that, so I honestly don't know if I'd have the guts to do that. I'd like to believe I would, but I honestly can't know until it happens. But, if I have to make such a decision, the decision has to come from ME, not from a commanding officer giving me an order. It has to be MY decision to make, or it means nothing. *I* decide the causes I am willing to die for, not some political figure with his own agenda that doesn't match my ethical views. That's why I would never join the military (well, I'm too old now unless things go so badly that they'll take anyone, but this is the reason I never joined in the first place, even though I onc e wanted to be a pilot, and that was the cheapest way to have done it.) I'm too stubborn to accept the "kill when I say so, because I say so" kind of orders that could theoretically occur if I was in the military.
Before:After:(The ascii art is mangled a bit by slashdot - those white spaces that break the arrow are supposed to be wider than that.)
These ballots contain all the federal, state, and local elections on them, just like everywhere else, and there is still plenty of room for those big arrows (they are really large, in something like a 30 point font, I would guess).
The ballots are a bit oversized, but that's not because of the arrows, it's because the text is printed very large for people who can't see well.
The ballot still fits on one sheet, although it is double-sided, and about 8.5x15 inches instead of the typical 8.5x11.
So, my point is that a system with a box for an X next to the choice would work just fine here in the US. It would end up being about the same size as the ballot I do use.
(I think for "electronic voting" the ballot I use is the best idea - I walk it over and feed it into the scanning machine right after I finish marking it. The scanner will detect if I screwed up with a stray mark somewhere that confuses it, and it will tell me RIGHT THERE that the ballot is invalid and it will beep at me and spit my ballot back at me (at which point I can ask the poll worker for another, and they will give it to me and shred my fouled ballot, right where I can see them do it, and right where I can see them carefully averting their eyes so as not to see my votes on the old ballet they are shredding. Yes, I did test this system personally. Last time I deliberately voted a double-vote on one of the lesser elections that I didn't care about - county clerk of courts (and therefore would have normally left blank, and not mind if the machine ended up taking my vote that way.), just to test this and see it in action. It does work.
If your ballot is scannable, you get feedback RIGHT THERE that it worked, and the machine gives you a green light, and ticks up the "number voted today" counter, and you can leave. Your ballot is dropped into a box on the back side of the scanning machine. If your ballot has a write-in arrow somewhere. At the end of the day, the machine has already totalled the votes that were scanned through it, and has an electronic count of them all. Totalling up the tally is merely a process of adding the subtotals from all the individual machines in all the precincts, which doesn't take long, and is double-checked by hand.
If there is a dispute, the paper ballots are still there for manual recount purposes. Also, a random selection of a small subset of the machines are counted anyway to verify that their electronic counts match the paper ballots in their boxes.
The way write-in votes are handled is that "Mr Write-in" is tallied as if it was a single candidate. If Mr. Write In doesn't win, then there's no point in reading the individual write-ins. If Mr. Write In does win, then a manual count has to be done to see if a write-in really did win. (The write-ins might still all lose if the write-in votes were spread among several candidates, but you are guaranteed that you don't need to count them if they can't even collectively "win" as a single entity.)
The process I would like to see for electronic voting is just like what I already do, except that the machines would be able to transmit counts to a central location in a networked fashion instead of having to add them together as a manual step at the end.
The big security risk of electronic voting like Diebold does it is not external tampering. It's internal tampering from the company itself - either deliberate or through bugs. There's no way to doublecheck that the software is telling the truth when it counts the ballots, because the software's claim of what the count is is your only actual record of the votes. Your claims as to the "security" of the system are based on the falsehood that external tampering is the big problem everyone's concerned with here.
I hear people claim that a lot, but I don't believe it, not for a moment. Why the hell do you care if you are on the "winning team" when your vote is secret? What would motivate someone to switch their vote to the winner? Nothing. If anything the problem is the other way around - when you find out early that your candidate is starting to lose, you have more motivation to get out there and vote for that candidate. Another problem is with those who might have otherwise voted third-party. If their second-favorite choice (the lesser of the big two evils) is winning, they'll be able to 'safely' vote for their preferred candidate. If their second-favorite choice is losing, then they might switch, but not to the winner as you say, but to the losing second-favorite choice to try to keep the worst choice from winning.
I agree that there should be a ban on reporting results before the polls are closed, but the problem this would fix is exactly the opposite of the problem you described.
"electoral votes for the president" has an ambiguous interpretation. It could mean "votes for the guy who is currently president", or it could just mean "votes in the presidential election, as opposed to votes in the other elections, like for mayor or senator."
Claiming to be competent when you know you are not, in an area like this where you know it's really important, IS a form a malice in and of itself.
"Stand back, I'm a doctor, I'll save him" is a malicious statement if you are in fact not a doctor, and you know it, and "We're competent and know exactly how to make safe voting machines" is also a malicious statement if you know it's not true.