Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted).
If I can log into a website after the fact and display who I voted for, my boss can stand over my shoulder while I do so to make sure I voted the way he wants me to. Your voting DRM is just as vulnerable to the analog hole as music or videos.
Basically, when you vote, you're given a ballot that looks something like this:
Alice | ___
Billy | ___
Craig | ___ ..... | [barcode]
After voting, you retain a receipt that contains only the right-hand side of the ballot:
___
_X_
___
[barcode]
The only thing you can verify yourself is that the information on the website exactly matches the information on your receipt. From that point on, you have to trust the tallying process (which, like I said before, can be independently verified by multiple parties).
Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid.
And you can't do that with paper? Why?
At the end of a pure-paper election, you're left with a bunch of ballots and a bunch of names of people that supposedly voted. You can check the list of names for validity, but you have no guarantee that it actually corresponds to the ballots in the box.
Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot).
This would be a nice feature, granted. But I'm skeptical that this would provide more than a false sense of security. Would the system be secure against attacks such as this?
Did you miss the word "independently?" There can be many verification programs written by completely independent parties, and attacking all of them simultaneously sounds pretty difficult.
Any electronic voting that doesn't suck is no better than pen and paper.
I used to think this as well, but then I saw a talk by a Ben Adida, a cryptographic voting researcher. It turns out there are electronic and hybrid voting systems that allow every step of the process to be independently audited. Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted). Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid. Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot). This is far superior to traditional paper ballots, and there's no technical reason we can't have it today.
Here's a paper that gives some more information. I believe Dr. Adida mentioned that this particular system has a few problems that would prevent it from being used in practice, but it still gives a pretty good example of how a cryptographic voting system could work.
In chess, every permutation has a low number of values (every turn has few possible moves). In poker, every turn has a large number of possible moves/choices, such as how much to bet.
They were playing limit hold-em, so at any given time there were at most three possible moves (fold, call, or raise a predetermined amount).
But it's not 1000 independent samples. As an extreme case, say there was only one woman, and 1000 guessers. If all 1000 guessers chose the same picture, it would really only prove one picture looked better than the other. It wouldn't be statistically significant evidence that women tend to look better when they're ovulating.
Simply finding the optimal path from point A to point B is pretty efficient. For things like maps, where each vertex has only a constant number of edges, it can be done in O(n*logn) time, where n is the number of vertices (size of the map). Some related problems, like finding the optimal path that visits a bunch of points in any order, are NP-complete, however.
I have a simple rule - I don't respect any culture that does not give equal rights and protections to people irregardless of their sex, race, and age
Do you respect the United States? It pretty blatantly fails this test, denying those under 18 the right to vote. Also, out of curiosity, why did you leave sexual orientation and religion off the list?
States like MA that have consistantly voted Democrat since, forever, would probably not join anything like this. Other states that always vote Republican would probably do the same. The only states where their people would feel they have something to gain would be those that are consistantly "too close to call". Otherwise, it's betting too much state power on something that could only have a downside.
I think that's exactly backwards. Under the current system, swing states have all the power -- there's no reason for a candidate to concede anything to a state that's a sure thing. On the other hand, large states that solidly vote one way or the other have everything to gain by switching to a popular vote system. I can easily see California and Texas agreeing to adopt something like this.
An interesting proposition, but I think efforts would be better spend on getting Congress to disband the electoral college and actually having a vote count as a vote.
Of course that would be preferable, but you're kidding yourself if you think it'll ever happen. The brilliance of this plan is that it's so easy to enact -- as soon as 2 large states on either side of the aisle (say, California and Texas) agree to it, for all practical purposes it's implemented.
Let the two "senator" votes go to the popular majority, but let the "representative" votes be divided proportionally to the popular vote.
That gives small states even more power than they currently have, because a small state will be able to assign all 3 of its votes to one candidate, while a large state will be forced to split its votes.
If we insist on giving residents of small states relatively more power than residents of large states, why not just give each California resident 1 vote, each Wyoming resident 1.3 votes, etc., and just count up the votes? This seems strictly better than either the current system or the system you outlined.
I'm sure the fact that they only looked at data from origo.hu is a larger source of bias than the fact that they only looked at IE users. But I don't think that's a reason to write off the results entirely -- just a reason to take them with a grain of salt. I think it's reasonable to guess that if the distribution follows a power law for Hungarian IE users, then it also follows a power law for American Linux users (though the mean may be a little off).
It fails to normalize each unit of time against the remaining base of users - So, for example, if 90% of the regular visitors to a site see an article within an hour of posting, that leaves only 10%
every compact n-manifold is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere if it is homeomorphic to the n-sphere
I'm pretty sure this is backwards -- it should read "every compact n-manifold is homeomorphic to the n-sphere if it is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere." That's probably why you were confused;)
Actually, if you can prove P=NP, you can construct a poly-time algorithm to solve any problem in NP -- see here for details. You're right that the proof wouldn't necessarily give a practical algorithm, but it would give an algorithm in P.
Jeopardizing fair use and impeding competition and innovation are not unintended consequences. They're major reasons some DMCA supporters wanted it passed.
The Declaration
I accept and declare to the world my support for the idea that no one in the United States of America be in prison for any non-violent activity related to the use, possession, cultivation, transportation or sale of hemp / marijuana.
You don't believe in jailtime for selling pot to children? I agree with your site's general message, but that seems a little extreme.
Congrats. You're part of an extremely small minority. Personally, I don't have the time or expertise to understand the propositions in that amount of detail. So on the grounds that a bad law typically does more harm than a good law does good, I typically vote 'no' on everything.
There's always someone who thinks the rules don't apply to them.
It's a boy-who-cried-wolf problem -- there are so many ridiculous rules that people have stopped listening. Do we really need 5 minutes of instruction for what to do if the plane slams into the water? Is it really that important to keep people without tickets away from the gate? Is taking off your shoes going through security really going to save lives? Given that "the FAA has found nothing to indicate that the use of passive devices like laptops or game-playing electronics poses a threat to the aircraft," why can't I listen to my mp3 player on takeoff? A lot of rules for flying seem arbitrary and feel-good, so it's not surprising that people don't respect them.
Careful! Depending on your definition of sentience, a 6-month-old baby, a child with severe mental disabilities, and/or an adult in a coma (maybe even just asleep) may not be "human beings" by your definition. It's exceedingly difficult to come up with a set of logically grounded moral guidelines that imply that everything "obviously right" is right and everything "obviously wrong" is wrong. It's a bit like trying to come up with a workable definition for what constitutes life.
The gender-based discrimination really bothers me. I have a strong suspicion that if women were statistically more expensive to insure than men, their rates would be the same. But since it's men that are more expensive, they are charged a higher rate. It's PC to discriminate against men, but not against women.
Newton's theory of gravity is just a theory too. Does that mean that we can just decide not to believe it and fly?
I hope so (well, not the flying part) -- Newton's theory of gravity is wrong! Children learn about it because science class is not about teaching facts; it's about teaching science. If ID advocates believe otherwise, they should be arguing that we stop teaching Newton and jump straight to Einstein.
Fortunately, it looks like most of the Senate (including a few noteworthy Republicans who crossed the aisle on this one) have a slightly higher regard for the Constitution of the Unites States.
Not most -- a majority voted to end the filibuster, but they fell short of the required 60%.
Speaking as a jazz musician, (a more recent edition of) the original Real Book is still the de facto standard. It's important that everyone in a group use the same book, because different books might have different tunes, or tunes in different keys, or slightly different chords, etc. So everyone uses the Real Book because they expect everyone else to use the Real Book -- it's self-perpetuating, and it's unlikely to change in the near future.
A "lead sheet" is a piece of sheet music containing only melody and chord symbols. A "fake book" is a book containing a bunch of lead sheets. The Real Book is a specific fake book, the most popular among jazz musicians.
- Nate
Re:PS3? No thanks, Sony; you screwed the pooch
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't imply that at all. Let's say that independently, the music division is worth A and the Playstation division is worth B. If the music division screws over the Playstation division for its own gain, the music division is worth A+X and the Playstation division is worth B-Y. If X>Y, Sony's shareholders benefit, otherwise they lose.
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. Do you also think women shouldn't be allowed to compete on the PGA tour unless men are allowed to compete on the LPGA tour?
Basically, when you vote, you're given a ballot that looks something like this:
Alice | ___
..... | [barcode]
Billy | ___
Craig | ___
After voting, you retain a receipt that contains only the right-hand side of the ballot:
___
_X_
___
[barcode]
The only thing you can verify yourself is that the information on the website exactly matches the information on your receipt. From that point on, you have to trust the tallying process (which, like I said before, can be independently verified by multiple parties).
At the end of a pure-paper election, you're left with a bunch of ballots and a bunch of names of people that supposedly voted. You can check the list of names for validity, but you have no guarantee that it actually corresponds to the ballots in the box.
Did you miss the word "independently?" There can be many verification programs written by completely independent parties, and attacking all of them simultaneously sounds pretty difficult.
- Nate
I used to think this as well, but then I saw a talk by a Ben Adida, a cryptographic voting researcher. It turns out there are electronic and hybrid voting systems that allow every step of the process to be independently audited. Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted). Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid. Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot). This is far superior to traditional paper ballots, and there's no technical reason we can't have it today.
Here's a paper that gives some more information. I believe Dr. Adida mentioned that this particular system has a few problems that would prevent it from being used in practice, but it still gives a pretty good example of how a cryptographic voting system could work.
They were playing limit hold-em, so at any given time there were at most three possible moves (fold, call, or raise a predetermined amount).
But it's not 1000 independent samples. As an extreme case, say there was only one woman, and 1000 guessers. If all 1000 guessers chose the same picture, it would really only prove one picture looked better than the other. It wouldn't be statistically significant evidence that women tend to look better when they're ovulating.
Simply finding the optimal path from point A to point B is pretty efficient. For things like maps, where each vertex has only a constant number of edges, it can be done in O(n*logn) time, where n is the number of vertices (size of the map). Some related problems, like finding the optimal path that visits a bunch of points in any order, are NP-complete, however.
Do you respect the United States? It pretty blatantly fails this test, denying those under 18 the right to vote. Also, out of curiosity, why did you leave sexual orientation and religion off the list?
I think that's exactly backwards. Under the current system, swing states have all the power -- there's no reason for a candidate to concede anything to a state that's a sure thing. On the other hand, large states that solidly vote one way or the other have everything to gain by switching to a popular vote system. I can easily see California and Texas agreeing to adopt something like this.
Of course that would be preferable, but you're kidding yourself if you think it'll ever happen. The brilliance of this plan is that it's so easy to enact -- as soon as 2 large states on either side of the aisle (say, California and Texas) agree to it, for all practical purposes it's implemented.
That gives small states even more power than they currently have, because a small state will be able to assign all 3 of its votes to one candidate, while a large state will be forced to split its votes.
If we insist on giving residents of small states relatively more power than residents of large states, why not just give each California resident 1 vote, each Wyoming resident 1.3 votes, etc., and just count up the votes? This seems strictly better than either the current system or the system you outlined.
I have no idea what this means.
My friend proposes that we call it by a different name: the AAAARRRRRGH-I-A-A.
Actually, if you can prove P=NP, you can construct a poly-time algorithm to solve any problem in NP -- see here for details. You're right that the proof wouldn't necessarily give a practical algorithm, but it would give an algorithm in P.
Jeopardizing fair use and impeding competition and innovation are not unintended consequences. They're major reasons some DMCA supporters wanted it passed.
You don't believe in jailtime for selling pot to children? I agree with your site's general message, but that seems a little extreme.
Congrats. You're part of an extremely small minority. Personally, I don't have the time or expertise to understand the propositions in that amount of detail. So on the grounds that a bad law typically does more harm than a good law does good, I typically vote 'no' on everything.
It's a boy-who-cried-wolf problem -- there are so many ridiculous rules that people have stopped listening. Do we really need 5 minutes of instruction for what to do if the plane slams into the water? Is it really that important to keep people without tickets away from the gate? Is taking off your shoes going through security really going to save lives? Given that "the FAA has found nothing to indicate that the use of passive devices like laptops or game-playing electronics poses a threat to the aircraft," why can't I listen to my mp3 player on takeoff? A lot of rules for flying seem arbitrary and feel-good, so it's not surprising that people don't respect them.
Careful! Depending on your definition of sentience, a 6-month-old baby, a child with severe mental disabilities, and/or an adult in a coma (maybe even just asleep) may not be "human beings" by your definition. It's exceedingly difficult to come up with a set of logically grounded moral guidelines that imply that everything "obviously right" is right and everything "obviously wrong" is wrong. It's a bit like trying to come up with a workable definition for what constitutes life.
The gender-based discrimination really bothers me. I have a strong suspicion that if women were statistically more expensive to insure than men, their rates would be the same. But since it's men that are more expensive, they are charged a higher rate. It's PC to discriminate against men, but not against women.
I hope so (well, not the flying part) -- Newton's theory of gravity is wrong! Children learn about it because science class is not about teaching facts; it's about teaching science. If ID advocates believe otherwise, they should be arguing that we stop teaching Newton and jump straight to Einstein.
- Nate
Not most -- a majority voted to end the filibuster, but they fell short of the required 60%.
- Nate
- Nate
It doesn't imply that at all. Let's say that independently, the music division is worth A and the Playstation division is worth B. If the music division screws over the Playstation division for its own gain, the music division is worth A+X and the Playstation division is worth B-Y. If X>Y, Sony's shareholders benefit, otherwise they lose.