Yes, you're right that coding is best done in English for the resons you said. I used to live in easern Europe, and I knew plenty of people there who could barely speak English, but could read and write code in English. But this isn't really the point.
Putting an applicatin like this in local languages is not to benefit the coders, but to inrease the potential user base. Anybody wanting to code will still have to learn to code in English, but one shouldn't need English to write a letter in one's own language.
Rememebr that this project was not done by OOo, and so no time was 'wasted' as far as coding, security, bugfixing, etc goes.
I know a lot of people are making jokes about this, but it actually is a pretty big deal.
Swahili is a very common language in east Africa with around 60 million native or second-language speakers. It is much more a lingua-franca in Africa than the patchwork of imported European languages.
Remember, people speak Swahili, or dialects of it, in Kenya (colonized by the British), Tanzania (Germans), Mozambique (Portugese), Congo (French), and countries in between.
It is correct to say this market has largely been ignored for being too poor to support the costs of translating commercial applications, but this is the strength of OSS, isn't it?
Granted, one could ask what the point is in developing local-language software in places where few beneficiaries have the prerequisites to take advatage -- like electricity, let alone computers.
Nevertheless, it is definitely a step in the right direction, especially considering that PCs will only become more common, and increasing the potential access to those PCs to people who don't speak English (or whatever language MS ships/gets pirated there) will help the countries involved. Not to mention the cost savings, as well as the creation of an African Linux service sector.
As far as the name goes, ki- is a prefix in Swahili denoting a language (it is called Kiswahili in Kenya), the gender of a noun, or a diminutive.
I used to know a bit of Kiswahili, but unfortunately all I can remember is hakuna pombe baridi , there is no cold beer. Unfortunately, this is still a problem in many parts of Africa.
I'm not really looking for the latest and greatest accelerated 3D in a Linux video card, and I don't think there's all that many people who need it.
That being said, what I would like to see in a card of this type is built in TV-out capability, either through coax, RCA composite, or S-video.
I'd also like to see a dual-head card that supports multiple monitors.
If this project can deliver a card that supports these features and is easier to set up in Linux than the old nvidia geforce 2 I'm using now for TV-out (on a Myth box), or the Matrox G450 for dual monitors (desktop system), I'll definitely be in line to buy it.
Ummmm. Please read your links before posting them, and think for a minute before saying something wrong.
According to the article you cite, automobiles featuring 4-stroke internal combustion engines, carburators, and four wheels were being made in the mid 1880s. By the end of the decade, the transmission had been added.
Before the turn of the century, there were automobile factories (of a sort -- no mass production), automobile races, and fatal automobile accidents. You've already posted the link to this info, so I don't need to repeat it.
The point made by the parent is a valid one -- that all the improvements to cars in the last 100+ years (direct fuel injection, turbo, electric windows, beaded seatcovers, fuzzy dice, etc) are embellishments of the same basic design.
A modern car is of course faster and more efficient than one from the late 19th century, but if you stripped a new car down to its core, an engineer from the Benz workshop could still identify the parts and tell you how it worked.
You have to look at this from the MS viewpoint. Firefox is NOT a threat, if you are looking at it from a revenue standpoint.
True business threats (as in the SWOT model) usually have some kind of financial impact. Swapping a browser that comes with your OS for one that is "free" is not exactly going to cripple Microsoft's sales numbers.
Ah yes, but remeber that IE effectvely tied browsing to an OS. Firefox unties it.
This doesn't mean a mass switchover tomorrow, but think for a minute about how many kiosk-type stations there are that only run a browser. In my local library, for example, there are at least 20 or so machines that run an interface to the library's catalog off of IE (pre XP, but I don't know which windows version). If these were replaced by Firefox on top of a Linux distro next time they upgrade, that would be a significant cost reduction for the library, and that's just one branch in one county.
There are plenty of niche machines in other places that only run browsers, or POS stuff, or database apps, etc. From the user's point of view, the OS is irrelevant as long as the application functions. From the organization's point of view, saving money is a good thing.
From Microsoft's point of view, once the applications (internet browsing, for example) are not dependent on an MS OS, then their hegemony is in serious jeaopardy.
If, to continue the example, the library were to make the switch, it would almost certainly be carried out by technicians on the county payroll, which would provide invaluble experience for when the county decides to upgrade its payroll system, or its voter registration system, or its DMV, or its school administration, and so on.
From a library looking to save a few dollars per machine, it is an easy progression to an overhaul of county, then state administrative IT systems.
That is a clear and definite threat to MS, and it will require a much better response than a more complexly dancing paperclip, or more sharply rendered 3-D screensavers.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
Lets be clear about one thing -- One hundred million people DID NOT vote for President of the US. They voted for presidential electors in their given state.
There are no national elections in the US, only 50 separate state elections, plus the District of Columbia. There is little point then in designing an elections system that would be identical in every state, particularly as different states have different laws governing elections.
Try to remember how your ballots were arranged, if you voted. First, there was a Federal section, which had options for presidential electors (though your ballot may not have presented it as such), for Senate (in some states) and for Representatives. The next section had state offices, followed by local offices for county, city, township, school board district, or whatever jurisdiction applied. Following that, depending on the particular ballot, were initiatives and propositions, some of which were state-wide, some of which were specific to certain counties or other jurisdictions.
Most of the purchasing decisions for elections hardware, as well as ballot design and printing, and publications of voter information materials is done at the county level, and for a good reason. It is simply madness to expect one system could work for every jurisdiction, much less that materials could be produced centrally by the Federal government, or even state governments.
The fact is that DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines are a bad idea, but not so much because of the reasons ably presented by Schneier as something much simple: They are much more expensive than existing systems and offer little benefit to justify the price.
They already have a system to get students to work for free -- its called internship, and there's plenty of students willing not only to work for free, but to pay their respective institutions for the privilege (and the course credit).
On the other hand, this is an excellent way for IBM to do some university recruiting without having to pore over thousands of resumes.
A voter cannot take any record of their vote away from the polling place. This would be the end of the secret ballot, and effectively mean state-sponsored, verifiable vote fraud.
The biggest problem, in my view, with the current crop of electronic voting machines is that they are an attempt to offer a $1000 solution to a $0.10 problem -- poorly designed paper ballots. Your idea -- multiple machines, webcams, barcode readers, multiple printouts on card-stock -- is a faulty $3000 solution to the same $0.10 problem.
How do we know the open source we saw is actually running on the machine? It would be more than easy to get the GUI to SAY that it was running "so-and-so version X.X". How do we actually KNOW it's running that though?
Voting machines have to be submitted to state inspectors and/or independent labs for verification and Logic and Acuracy (L&A) testing. If they pass all the tests, they are certified, sealed, and stored in a secure location until election day.
When poll workers set up a polling place, the first thing they have to check is that each machine's seal is intact. If not, the machine is not used.
If you remember, Diebold got in big trouble in the California primary for updating firmware on the machines after certification but before the election.
Voting Machines, including DREs, are only a small part of the reason why this election will be a train wreck.
There are a few others of pressing concern.
1) Provisional ballots: The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress to prevent some of the nonsense from Florida in 2000, requires that a voter who tries to vote but does not show up on the list of eligible voters be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which will be set aside to be later verified and counted, if valid.
There are a number of legitimate reasons why this may happen -- a voter shows up at the wrong precinct for example, or has moved to a different precinct in the same county, or a different county in the same state, or their registration wasn't properly processed, etc.
HAVA, however, only requires that these prospective voters be given a provisional ballot; it does not require the states to count provisional ballots. In Ohio, the Secretary of State issued an order that provisional ballots will not be counted, and instead errant voters are to be directed to the proper polling place. This order was upheld, overturned on appeal, and overturned again in Federal Appellate Court about a week ago -- meaning the secretary's original order stands, and provisional ballots in Ohio may be collected but not counted.
Expect more lawsuits, especially if the vote is as close as it now appears it will be.
2) Absentee Ballots: All states allow for voting by absentee ballots, but most require that the ballots are returned by the close of polls on election day. Not postmarked, but returned.
A state cannot even print absentee ballots untill all primary election results have been certified by the state. Some states (can't remember which off the top of my head) have primary elections as late as October, meaning there's less than one month to certify primary results, print, mail, and recieve absentee ballots.
I suppose most of you heard about the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida. They were supposed to mail out new ones on Friday, but even with overnight mail, there is no way those can be returned by Tuesday, 7:00 pm, at least by mail. There is talk about extending the deadline, but one can expect quite a few gripes in the coming weeks about lost ballots. Again, expect lawsuits.
Also of note, though purely anecdotal, is that in 2000 I was living in a former Warsaw-Pact country and requested an absentee ballot (Cuyahoga County, OH) through the US embassy in September. I never got my ballot. Expect more complaints, and yes, lawsuits.
3) Multiple voting: In most states, it's piss easy to get on the voter registration rolls, and much more difficult to get off them. This issue has already been raised in Florida this year, particularly concerning 'sun birds' who have residences there and in other states, notably New York. It is not difficult at all to cast valid votes in both states, provided one is registered in both states. This shouldn't be possible, but it is not unusual.
4) Experience. This is something that has largely been ignored by the media, but an unprecedented number of county-level election supervisors will be running their first national elections.
There are an awful lot of county clerks, board of elections chairmen, recorders, and elections supervisors who saw the writing on the wall after November 2000, and who opted for private sector jobs or retirement, early or otherwise, to avoid a Florida-type scandal. Not that their replacements are not competent, but they are rookies. Check with your local government to find out who is running this election, and how long he or she has been there.
All this is not to say that DREs are absolutely acurate and foolproof, but there are many more problems besides the physical mechanisms of voting, just as there were in 2000. Problems 2 and 3 happen every four year, for example; they just don't matter unless the vote is close.
This has been all well and good in the past because the margin of victory has been
I don't find it surprising that the RIAA is going after university students, because that's a demographic whose spending on music has definitely declined.
P2P is not really the reason, however.
When I was in school in the early '90s, very few people had TVs in dorm rooms, and of those only a very small handful had VCRs. Also, I'd guess that by the time I graduated in '96, only about 25 percent of dorm rooms had computers. I never saw a single game console at university until the end of my junior year.
What this means is that the students had a fixed entertainment budget, and when they couldn't get beer, about all they could buy was CDs, or film/concert tickets (or less-than-licit substances).
Back then I copied music like crazy from CDs to tape, but I also bought loads of CDs.
Now, however, pretty much every room has a computer, and pretty much every computer has a DVD player. I don't know the prevalence of consoles, but I reckon PS2s and X-boxen are pretty common.
Eight to ten years ago CDs had the students' entertainment budget line pretty much all to themselves. Now CDs have to compete with DVD and game sales and rentals.
It's not about file sharing, but about more products chasing the same dollar.
The drop in CD sales has less to do with sharing, which I don't think is any more common now than it ever was, and more to do with the fact that the consumer's percieved value of a CD has dropped thanks to competition from other media.
The only possible answer for people trying to sell CDs is to lower the price.
The only problem with that is that most people like to save their phone's juice for using the phone. Listning to music on a phone is all well and good, but not if it means having to charge it every few hours. Some companies are also talking about porting TV to cell phones, which is a bit silly.
As far as portability goes, an iPod with an FM transmitter is whole hell of a lot easier than hauling a suitcase full of CDs back and forth between home, office and car. And its a much cheaper solution than a car stereo with a memory card reader.
Portability IS accessibility. MiniDiscs failed because they didn't really add anything to the mix. The advantages were slight, and the costs were high. iPods and similar players, on the other hand, offer quite significant advantages. They don't take up any space, and they hold an entire library.
I already have most of my CDs copied to a Myth box at home. That's accessibility that beats the pants off the 5-CD changer I used to use. The FM-enabled iPod let me take the whole collection on a 5-hour drive last week. Beats the pants off switching tapes (or CDs) every little while.
The industry certainly does need a reality check, but it's as much in how they promote and distribute music as it is how people choose to play that music back.
Umm. Most of the rest of the world already does spell internet without the capitalization.
I used to work at an English-language newspaper in central Europe and we made the editorial decision to stop capitalizing in late 2002. Yes, yes we all knew about the 'an internet (network of networks) vs. the Internet' argument, but in the end, we dropped the capital to keep better consistency with the rules of English grammar -- i.e. that it's more akin to 'the sun' than to 'the Queen'.
I've wondered more than once why the capital letter was thought neccessary in the first place.
China is attractive for producers for two reasons. Tne first is that, at least for now, labor is much cheaper there than elsewhere. But a company forever chasing the cheapest labor will find problems. As more investors move in, the price of skilled labor rises.
Secondly, and more important than labor costs, is that China presents new markets and new opportunities.
You're right that the country is not now the world's powerhouse in consumption, but it certainly has the potential to be.
Business is not attracted by temporarily cheap labor, but by a market of over 1 billion people.
It's well known that Bollywood already produces more films per year than Hollywood. I've never seen any statistics on this, but I would bet that in terms of PPP (puchasing power parity) Bollywood is more successful.
We in America seem to forget how recent our industrial revolution was, and how greatly it changed the lives of people who lived here.
When people have a bit of disposable cash, they spend it. And like it or not, there are four times the number of people in China as here, and many of them are finding themselves with a bit of cash, and many of them want things like TVs and DVDs and cars. And as things stand, there won't be many people in Beijing (or Jakarta or Mumbai) selling Zeniths, RCAs or Fords.
The goal isn't in making things half-way around the world to sell in Chicago, but creating new markets to sell things locally.
Even at a $1 margin, I'd much rather sell to a billion Chinese and another billion Indians than to 300 million whiney Americans.
I don't know what you think folks at the CIA are like, but for the most part, they're just regular people who go to work in the morning and do their jobs. On weekends, they relax, watch football on TV, or whatever. They're a lot more Joe Sixpack than James Bond.
The difference is that the CIA has a lot of very strict rules and procedures.
In this case, the CIA knew Cullison had the computers, knew how he got them, and knew he had the time and ability to copy them. They probably knew he had copied the one simply by checking when the files on it had last been accessed.
Even if the CIA analysts didn't know for sure the disks had been copied, they would have assumed they had because they knew they could have been, and the rules demand such an assumption.
So, they had to trace the possession of these computers to find out who could have copied, or did copy, the information, not to mention who could have (or did) alter the data.
You can be sure that some very serious government officials had some very serious conversations with Cullison, as well as the guy he bought the PCs from, at the time this all happened -- late 2001.
Or are you suggesting that it took a Wall Street Journal reporter 2.5 years to translate some emails?
While there may be some truth the the story of how Cullison acquired these computers, I highly doubt the CIA would simply let him publish the information the HDs contained.
They have special rooms in Cuba for people who disseminate this kind of material.
Which means that the stuff published was vetted (and probably carefully rewritten) by the CIA. To what end, I don't know. But rest assured, there is nothing in the article that you (or the bad guys) are not meant to see.
The reason tracks say they need slots is because the slots pay for the racing and allow the racing to make more for the state while keeping the game cleaner.
Slot machines earn steadily, work all day, and attract lots of people.
With races, the state gets a cut (24-26 percent, IIRC) of the total action. The more people play, the more the state makes.
Tracks in the US work on a parimutuel system. This means that all the money wagered on a given bet (win, place, show, exacta, trifecta, etc) goes into a common pool for that bet. The state gets a cut, and the remainder is divvied out to everyone with a winning pick on that bet.
This means that the actual odds are based on money bet per horse or combination, and are not set by the track or anyone else. The track has absolutely no interest in whichever horse wins, only that as many people as possilbe play.
Also, when there are few people betting it is much easier to manipulate the odds by placing devious strategic bets. Here's how that works: Odds at a track come from the parimutuel system. Off-track betting uses the track odds, but OTB wagering may not be included in the parimutuel calculation. Certainly betting with a bookie is not.
Let's say I know a trainer at course X who says "Da numbah 3 in da fifth is a lock." If I go to the track and throw a large amount (eg $1000) on number 3, it will tilt the odds proportionally to how much has been bet in total -- the less has been bet at the track, the greater effect it will have on final payouts, meaning a lower return for me when 3 comes in.
Let's say for the sake of argument that my $1000 bet at the track takes the 3 horse from 6:1 to 3:1. If I make the bet at OTB, the horse is still 6:1 (because my bet is not figured in the parimutuel).
Now, let's say that I make my bet on the 3 at an OTB or with a bookie for $5,000 instead of $1,000, but have a friend lay a $1,000 bet at the track on the number 8 horse. This would increase the odds for the 3 proportional to the total handle at the track. By doing this I could increace my off-track odds from 6:1 to, say 10:1 -- meaning my take from an off-track win would go from $35,000 to $55,000, at the cost of a $1000 loss.
This sort of thing has happened before. But the more people bet at the track, the larger the handle, and therefore the more money is required to tilt the odds.
If slots bring more people to the track, they also make it harder for people to fix races this way (although it is not 'fixing' so much as playing with payoffs).
So to recap, many tracks have found that slots, besides being gold mines themselves, tend to bring in more punters, meaning a bigger slice for the state, and a much bigger investment by people wanting to rig the numbers. This technique is still possible, just much more difficult.
While this may be a bad thing for those unfortunate enough to think they can actually beat the slots, it has been good for tracks and good for racing.
Incidentally, I was at the Charles Town (WV) racetrack today and lost $2 on slots in about 1 minute, but won about $35 on horses over 12 races. It was a good day. My dad did even better -- he hit a $120 exacta ($1 bet) in the last race and ended up about $180 ahead.
For people whose job it is to create or host web-based advertising, you should pay attention to what people here are saying.
Those with the misfortune not not to have a geeky friend install Firefox or lacking the wherewithal to do it themselves get frustrated with animated gifs/flash/overlays. Those who have made the switch never see the ads in the first place.
I, for example, block all flash and gif animation by default, and if one gets through, I just use NukeEverything.
On the other hand, I have quite frequently clicked through google text ad links because they were relevant to my search.
The internet is not TV; the audience is neither captive nor passive. If you drive people to distraction or frustration, you will soon have no visitors.
If I'm looking for information on Product X or News Story Y and the page renders to slowly because of ads, or is distracting becauise of ads, or is frustrating to use because of ads, I simply go elsewhere.
Its not a matter of 'free sites need the revenue' -- there are other ways of earning revenue than distracting your visitors from what they wanted to accomplish.
If I read a nice, clean page with nice, clean ads, I may or may not choose to click through. But if those ads are blinking, blocking, or otherwise bothering my experince, not only will I not follow them, but I may choose not to return to the site.
Please be sure of your facts before you post, and try to avoid statements that are foolish, offensive, and wrong.
Firsly, Ghana is not an Islamic country in any sense -- 63 percent of the population is Christian.
While half of the Nigerian population is Muslim, it is not an Islamic country. Would you call Canada a Roman Catholic country? Unfortunately, there are a lot of sectarian tensions in Nigeria that sometimes result in violence. But it is not an Islamic state.
Secondly, there is very little reason to believe that religious beliefs and AIDS are somehow corelated. Just look at some statistics from west African countries:
Country / % Christian / % Muslim / Adult AIDS prevalence rate
Outsourced IT work is a great economic opportunity for African countries. They continue to be shafted on agriculture through US and EU farm subsidies, and on natural resources through international conglomerates, kleptocratic governments, and war profiteers.
Things like call centers and support centers don't cost much to set up, bring money to local economies, and provide jobs for skilled workers, giving a boost to education systems.
This will also create local markets for IT goods and services, creating a positive feedback loop -- as more people learn the trade, more people demand products and services the trade offers.
How long before we see a cheap, solar-powered PC running an African-brewed Linux?
I think this is actually part of a planned campaign, and if you think about it for a minute or two, it's brilliant.
There's not really any reason they would need a rough mix of their album to do a photo shoot.
I suppose they might want the photographer, art director, or whomever to hear it to get a feel for the music before snapping photos, but there are other ways of doing that. Playing their new tunes before a photo shoot sounds a bit more like a garage band with a decent first-time-in-the-studio recording rather than an international blockbuster act.
So what's the gimmick? U2 says the rough mix was stolen and if it shows up on P2P, they'll rush it out on ITMS -- weeks before the CD will show up down at the Sam Goody.
Which means it will be online first, and legally.
There's lots of U2 fans who will buy this record as soon as they can, and don't much care about the format, so long as it can be burned. There are some who will just copy it, but many people will pay because they know it's the right thing to do.
By releasing releasing early only on ITMS, they'll be reap all the profits the CD would (at least for a few weeks), while cutting out CD, burning, printing, distribution, and stocking costs.
These costs are not insubstantial, but they are a bit out of whack. If you look at CD production costs, you will notice that there are three elements (not counting time and labor): 1) physical disc; 2) jewel case; 3) printed cover. Of these, the most expensive is the paper cover; the cheapest is the disc.
The publicity from the theft story gets them loads of coverage over several weeks, also providing convenient details about how to buy the goods.
U2 may be on to something here.
1) Create buzz with free coverage in world media (here's where the obligatory ?????? comes in)
2) Make product available only through download, cutting out a great deal of manufacturing expense
3) Profit
4) After delay, release product in lower-margin physical form
5) Profit more
Don't forget the best thing about the Xbox -- that Microsoft will sell you $300 worth of computer for $150.
With a mod chip, an ethernet cable and a Debian disk, your Xbox becomes a great distributor for all you.avi,.mpg, wmv, etc. files through the tv -- and all your mp3s through you home stereo.
Add an off the shelf 100GB HDD and it's a warehouse too.
MS's Big Idea(tm) behid Xbox was to lose money on the hardware but make it back on games and Xbox Live subscriptions.
The best thing you can do is buy an Xbox for yourself and another for your brother/sister, mod it, install MythTV or somesuch, show your siblings how to use it to store.avi,.mpg, mp3, etc, and play them back through gear they already have.
Every Xbox that sells, MS loses cash; every person who buys an Xbox and doesn't sign up for Xbox live is another loss for Redmond.
It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to know I can help ruin an evil company by buying their product.
The 2000 election was supremely screwed up, particularly in Florida, because people were voting with some old-timey machines that made holes in paper ballots, which could then be counted by machine. Only sometimes the holes didn't punch all the way through, or sometimes the ballots themselves were a little bit confusing.
The ballots had to be recounted by hand in Florida, with the help of a lot of volunteers and quite a bit of state money in order to deal with these problems -- also that Florida state law (as in most other states) requires a manual recount in case of extremely close races.
So the solution from the Federal Government is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that says states need to have secure, accurate voting machines that meet stringent guidelines for security and accuracy (not to mention accessibility by the disabled). If these machines are electronic, so much the better.
Under HAVA, the Federal government will grant the states buckets of money ($861 million so far, and plenty more to come) to get their voting machines compliant.
Only there's a few problems. States don't yet know what being compliant means, because the standards and definitions are still being worked out by the Election Assistance Commission (eac.gov) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist.gov).
The EAC has got as far as appointing a subcommittee, but they're not due to meet again until Jan 2005, at the earliest.
What you're left with is states looking for machines they THINK will be compliant with HAVA -- particularly with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which calls for private, unassisted voting by blind people -- meaning that the voting machines will have to have audio components that read a person's choices and, before casting a vote, read a person's selections.
Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are very good in this regard -- they can be very easily customizable at the state level to work at the precinct (or school board district) level.
But the problems with DREs are well documented -- inaccurate counts, easy (relatively) to manipulate, hackable, etc. And without a hard-copy record, impossible to do a recount.
So the solution proposed by California Sec of State Kevin Shelly, among others, is to have DREs create a 'voter-verifiable paper audit trail' (his term). Which means that the electronic machines have to print a paper record of the ballot which is then kept securely for recount, if neccessary.
Now this begs a couple of questions.
If a jurisdiction uses these fancy new machines to record, tabulate, and transmit vote results electronically, but at the same time has to keep paper copies of the votes for recount, then the paper ballots will surely be subpeonaed after any vote that is reasonably close (say within 5 percent).
It is a given that the paper ballots are going to be counted anyway, especially considering the number of races (town, county, school district, congressional district, senate, etc.) that are 'close' in any given year.
What this means is that HAVA is asking states to trash existing, functional machines that produce machine-readible paper ballots, machines that originally cost maybe $300 each and are already paid for, and replace them with new machines that cost more than $1000 each, and produce ballots that will have to be counted by hand.
Another issue that the press has not yet gotten wind of is the large number of election officials who have retired, gone on early retirement, or changed jobs since 2000. An unprecendented number of chief election officers in counties and states across the country will be supervising their first general elections this November. A comforting thought.
The outgoing officials saw sense -- that there is a train wreck approaching. An awful lot of people will be voting on machines untested in an actual election environment, and those machines are by many measures inferior to the
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Yes, you're right that coding is best done in English for the resons you said. I used to live in easern Europe, and I knew plenty of people there who could barely speak English, but could read and write code in English. But this isn't really the point.
Putting an applicatin like this in local languages is not to benefit the coders, but to inrease the potential user base. Anybody wanting to code will still have to learn to code in English, but one shouldn't need English to write a letter in one's own language.
Rememebr that this project was not done by OOo, and so no time was 'wasted' as far as coding, security, bugfixing, etc goes.
Incindentally, this piece was lifted from The Onion without attribution.
Yes, it is funny, and yes, it was posted anonymously, but the source should have been identified.
I know a lot of people are making jokes about this, but it actually is a pretty big deal.
Swahili is a very common language in east Africa with around 60 million native or second-language speakers. It is much more a lingua-franca in Africa than the patchwork of imported European languages.
Remember, people speak Swahili, or dialects of it, in Kenya (colonized by the British), Tanzania (Germans), Mozambique (Portugese), Congo (French), and countries in between.
It is correct to say this market has largely been ignored for being too poor to support the costs of translating commercial applications, but this is the strength of OSS, isn't it?
Granted, one could ask what the point is in developing local-language software in places where few beneficiaries have the prerequisites to take advatage -- like electricity, let alone computers.
Nevertheless, it is definitely a step in the right direction, especially considering that PCs will only become more common, and increasing the potential access to those PCs to people who don't speak English (or whatever language MS ships/gets pirated there) will help the countries involved. Not to mention the cost savings, as well as the creation of an African Linux service sector.
As far as the name goes, ki- is a prefix in Swahili denoting a language (it is called Kiswahili in Kenya), the gender of a noun, or a diminutive.
I used to know a bit of Kiswahili, but unfortunately all I can remember is hakuna pombe baridi , there is no cold beer. Unfortunately, this is still a problem in many parts of Africa.
I'm not really looking for the latest and greatest accelerated 3D in a Linux video card, and I don't think there's all that many people who need it.
That being said, what I would like to see in a card of this type is built in TV-out capability, either through coax, RCA composite, or S-video.
I'd also like to see a dual-head card that supports multiple monitors.
If this project can deliver a card that supports these features and is easier to set up in Linux than the old nvidia geforce 2 I'm using now for TV-out (on a Myth box), or the Matrox G450 for dual monitors (desktop system), I'll definitely be in line to buy it.
Ummmm. Please read your links before posting them, and think for a minute before saying something wrong.
According to the article you cite, automobiles featuring 4-stroke internal combustion engines, carburators, and four wheels were being made in the mid 1880s. By the end of the decade, the transmission had been added.
Before the turn of the century, there were automobile factories (of a sort -- no mass production), automobile races, and fatal automobile accidents. You've already posted the link to this info, so I don't need to repeat it.
The point made by the parent is a valid one -- that all the improvements to cars in the last 100+ years (direct fuel injection, turbo, electric windows, beaded seatcovers, fuzzy dice, etc) are embellishments of the same basic design.
A modern car is of course faster and more efficient than one from the late 19th century, but if you stripped a new car down to its core, an engineer from the Benz workshop could still identify the parts and tell you how it worked.
You have to look at this from the MS viewpoint. Firefox is NOT a threat, if you are looking at it from a revenue standpoint.
True business threats (as in the SWOT model) usually have some kind of financial impact. Swapping a browser that comes with your OS for one that is "free" is not exactly going to cripple Microsoft's sales numbers.
Ah yes, but remeber that IE effectvely tied browsing to an OS. Firefox unties it.
This doesn't mean a mass switchover tomorrow, but think for a minute about how many kiosk-type stations there are that only run a browser. In my local library, for example, there are at least 20 or so machines that run an interface to the library's catalog off of IE (pre XP, but I don't know which windows version). If these were replaced by Firefox on top of a Linux distro next time they upgrade, that would be a significant cost reduction for the library, and that's just one branch in one county.
There are plenty of niche machines in other places that only run browsers, or POS stuff, or database apps, etc. From the user's point of view, the OS is irrelevant as long as the application functions. From the organization's point of view, saving money is a good thing.
From Microsoft's point of view, once the applications (internet browsing, for example) are not dependent on an MS OS, then their hegemony is in serious jeaopardy.
If, to continue the example, the library were to make the switch, it would almost certainly be carried out by technicians on the county payroll, which would provide invaluble experience for when the county decides to upgrade its payroll system, or its voter registration system, or its DMV, or its school administration, and so on.
From a library looking to save a few dollars per machine, it is an easy progression to an overhaul of county, then state administrative IT systems.
That is a clear and definite threat to MS, and it will require a much better response than a more complexly dancing paperclip, or more sharply rendered 3-D screensavers.
3. Scalability. Voting systems need to be able to handle very large elections. One hundred million people vote for president in the United States. About 372 million people voted in India's June elections, and over 115 million in Brazil's October elections. The complexity of an election is another issue. Unlike many countries where the national election is a single vote for a person or a party, a United States voter is faced with dozens of individual election: national, local, and everything in between.
Lets be clear about one thing -- One hundred million people DID NOT vote for President of the US. They voted for presidential electors in their given state.
There are no national elections in the US, only 50 separate state elections, plus the District of Columbia. There is little point then in designing an elections system that would be identical in every state, particularly as different states have different laws governing elections.
Try to remember how your ballots were arranged, if you voted. First, there was a Federal section, which had options for presidential electors (though your ballot may not have presented it as such), for Senate (in some states) and for Representatives. The next section had state offices, followed by local offices for county, city, township, school board district, or whatever jurisdiction applied. Following that, depending on the particular ballot, were initiatives and propositions, some of which were state-wide, some of which were specific to certain counties or other jurisdictions.
Most of the purchasing decisions for elections hardware, as well as ballot design and printing, and publications of voter information materials is done at the county level, and for a good reason. It is simply madness to expect one system could work for every jurisdiction, much less that materials could be produced centrally by the Federal government, or even state governments.
The fact is that DRE (direct recording electronic) voting machines are a bad idea, but not so much because of the reasons ably presented by Schneier as something much simple: They are much more expensive than existing systems and offer little benefit to justify the price.
They already have a system to get students to work for free -- its called internship, and there's plenty of students willing not only to work for free, but to pay their respective institutions for the privilege (and the course credit).
On the other hand, this is an excellent way for IBM to do some university recruiting without having to pore over thousands of resumes.
A voter cannot take any record of their vote away from the polling place. This would be the end of the secret ballot, and effectively mean state-sponsored, verifiable vote fraud.
The biggest problem, in my view, with the current crop of electronic voting machines is that they are an attempt to offer a $1000 solution to a $0.10 problem -- poorly designed paper ballots. Your idea -- multiple machines, webcams, barcode readers, multiple printouts on card-stock -- is a faulty $3000 solution to the same $0.10 problem.
Voting machines have to be submitted to state inspectors and/or independent labs for verification and Logic and Acuracy (L&A) testing. If they pass all the tests, they are certified, sealed, and stored in a secure location until election day.
When poll workers set up a polling place, the first thing they have to check is that each machine's seal is intact. If not, the machine is not used.
If you remember, Diebold got in big trouble in the California primary for updating firmware on the machines after certification but before the election.
Voting Machines, including DREs, are only a small part of the reason why this election will be a train wreck.
There are a few others of pressing concern.
1) Provisional ballots: The Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed by Congress to prevent some of the nonsense from Florida in 2000, requires that a voter who tries to vote but does not show up on the list of eligible voters be allowed to cast a provisional ballot, which will be set aside to be later verified and counted, if valid.
There are a number of legitimate reasons why this may happen -- a voter shows up at the wrong precinct for example, or has moved to a different precinct in the same county, or a different county in the same state, or their registration wasn't properly processed, etc.
HAVA, however, only requires that these prospective voters be given a provisional ballot; it does not require the states to count provisional ballots. In Ohio, the Secretary of State issued an order that provisional ballots will not be counted, and instead errant voters are to be directed to the proper polling place. This order was upheld, overturned on appeal, and overturned again in Federal Appellate Court about a week ago -- meaning the secretary's original order stands, and provisional ballots in Ohio may be collected but not counted.
Expect more lawsuits, especially if the vote is as close as it now appears it will be.
2) Absentee Ballots: All states allow for voting by absentee ballots, but most require that the ballots are returned by the close of polls on election day. Not postmarked, but returned.
A state cannot even print absentee ballots untill all primary election results have been certified by the state. Some states (can't remember which off the top of my head) have primary elections as late as October, meaning there's less than one month to certify primary results, print, mail, and recieve absentee ballots.
I suppose most of you heard about the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Florida. They were supposed to mail out new ones on Friday, but even with overnight mail, there is no way those can be returned by Tuesday, 7:00 pm, at least by mail. There is talk about extending the deadline, but one can expect quite a few gripes in the coming weeks about lost ballots. Again, expect lawsuits.
Also of note, though purely anecdotal, is that in 2000 I was living in a former Warsaw-Pact country and requested an absentee ballot (Cuyahoga County, OH) through the US embassy in September. I never got my ballot. Expect more complaints, and yes, lawsuits.
3) Multiple voting: In most states, it's piss easy to get on the voter registration rolls, and much more difficult to get off them. This issue has already been raised in Florida this year, particularly concerning 'sun birds' who have residences there and in other states, notably New York. It is not difficult at all to cast valid votes in both states, provided one is registered in both states. This shouldn't be possible, but it is not unusual.
4) Experience. This is something that has largely been ignored by the media, but an unprecedented number of county-level election supervisors will be running their first national elections.
There are an awful lot of county clerks, board of elections chairmen, recorders, and elections supervisors who saw the writing on the wall after November 2000, and who opted for private sector jobs or retirement, early or otherwise, to avoid a Florida-type scandal. Not that their replacements are not competent, but they are rookies. Check with your local government to find out who is running this election, and how long he or she has been there.
All this is not to say that DREs are absolutely acurate and foolproof, but there are many more problems besides the physical mechanisms of voting, just as there were in 2000. Problems 2 and 3 happen every four year, for example; they just don't matter unless the vote is close.
This has been all well and good in the past because the margin of victory has been
I don't find it surprising that the RIAA is going after university students, because that's a demographic whose spending on music has definitely declined.
P2P is not really the reason, however.
When I was in school in the early '90s, very few people had TVs in dorm rooms, and of those only a very small handful had VCRs. Also, I'd guess that by the time I graduated in '96, only about 25 percent of dorm rooms had computers. I never saw a single game console at university until the end of my junior year.
What this means is that the students had a fixed entertainment budget, and when they couldn't get beer, about all they could buy was CDs, or film/concert tickets (or less-than-licit substances).
Back then I copied music like crazy from CDs to tape, but I also bought loads of CDs.
Now, however, pretty much every room has a computer, and pretty much every computer has a DVD player. I don't know the prevalence of consoles, but I reckon PS2s and X-boxen are pretty common.
Eight to ten years ago CDs had the students' entertainment budget line pretty much all to themselves. Now CDs have to compete with DVD and game sales and rentals.
It's not about file sharing, but about more products chasing the same dollar.
The drop in CD sales has less to do with sharing, which I don't think is any more common now than it ever was, and more to do with the fact that the consumer's percieved value of a CD has dropped thanks to competition from other media.
The only possible answer for people trying to sell CDs is to lower the price.
Music on cell phones?
Ummmm. Actualy, Microsoft is listening: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=58 1&e=3&u=/nm/20040910/tc_nm/tech_microsoft_music_dc
The only problem with that is that most people like to save their phone's juice for using the phone. Listning to music on a phone is all well and good, but not if it means having to charge it every few hours. Some companies are also talking about porting TV to cell phones, which is a bit silly.
As far as portability goes, an iPod with an FM transmitter is whole hell of a lot easier than hauling a suitcase full of CDs back and forth between home, office and car. And its a much cheaper solution than a car stereo with a memory card reader.
Portability IS accessibility. MiniDiscs failed because they didn't really add anything to the mix. The advantages were slight, and the costs were high. iPods and similar players, on the other hand, offer quite significant advantages. They don't take up any space, and they hold an entire library.
I already have most of my CDs copied to a Myth box at home. That's accessibility that beats the pants off the 5-CD changer I used to use. The FM-enabled iPod let me take the whole collection on a 5-hour drive last week. Beats the pants off switching tapes (or CDs) every little while.
The industry certainly does need a reality check, but it's as much in how they promote and distribute music as it is how people choose to play that music back.
Umm. Most of the rest of the world already does spell internet without the capitalization.
I used to work at an English-language newspaper in central Europe and we made the editorial decision to stop capitalizing in late 2002. Yes, yes we all knew about the 'an internet (network of networks) vs. the Internet' argument, but in the end, we dropped the capital to keep better consistency with the rules of English grammar -- i.e. that it's more akin to 'the sun' than to 'the Queen'.
I've wondered more than once why the capital letter was thought neccessary in the first place.
China is attractive for producers for two reasons. Tne first is that, at least for now, labor is much cheaper there than elsewhere. But a company forever chasing the cheapest labor will find problems. As more investors move in, the price of skilled labor rises.
Secondly, and more important than labor costs, is that China presents new markets and new opportunities.
You're right that the country is not now the world's powerhouse in consumption, but it certainly has the potential to be.
Business is not attracted by temporarily cheap labor, but by a market of over 1 billion people.
It's well known that Bollywood already produces more films per year than Hollywood. I've never seen any statistics on this, but I would bet that in terms of PPP (puchasing power parity) Bollywood is more successful.
We in America seem to forget how recent our industrial revolution was, and how greatly it changed the lives of people who lived here.
When people have a bit of disposable cash, they spend it. And like it or not, there are four times the number of people in China as here, and many of them are finding themselves with a bit of cash, and many of them want things like TVs and DVDs and cars. And as things stand, there won't be many people in Beijing (or Jakarta or Mumbai) selling Zeniths, RCAs or Fords.
The goal isn't in making things half-way around the world to sell in Chicago, but creating new markets to sell things locally.
Even at a $1 margin, I'd much rather sell to a billion Chinese and another billion Indians than to 300 million whiney Americans.
I don't know what you think folks at the CIA are like, but for the most part, they're just regular people who go to work in the morning and do their jobs. On weekends, they relax, watch football on TV, or whatever. They're a lot more Joe Sixpack than James Bond.
The difference is that the CIA has a lot of very strict rules and procedures.
In this case, the CIA knew Cullison had the computers, knew how he got them, and knew he had the time and ability to copy them. They probably knew he had copied the one simply by checking when the files on it had last been accessed.
Even if the CIA analysts didn't know for sure the disks had been copied, they would have assumed they had because they knew they could have been, and the rules demand such an assumption.
So, they had to trace the possession of these computers to find out who could have copied, or did copy, the information, not to mention who could have (or did) alter the data.
You can be sure that some very serious government officials had some very serious conversations with Cullison, as well as the guy he bought the PCs from, at the time this all happened -- late 2001.
Or are you suggesting that it took a Wall Street Journal reporter 2.5 years to translate some emails?
All of this is very elementary.
And no, I don't work for the CIA.
While there may be some truth the the story of how Cullison acquired these computers, I highly doubt the CIA would simply let him publish the information the HDs contained.
They have special rooms in Cuba for people who disseminate this kind of material.
Which means that the stuff published was vetted (and probably carefully rewritten) by the CIA. To what end, I don't know. But rest assured, there is nothing in the article that you (or the bad guys) are not meant to see.
The reason tracks say they need slots is because the slots pay for the racing and allow the racing to make more for the state while keeping the game cleaner.
Slot machines earn steadily, work all day, and attract lots of people.
With races, the state gets a cut (24-26 percent, IIRC) of the total action. The more people play, the more the state makes.
Tracks in the US work on a parimutuel system. This means that all the money wagered on a given bet (win, place, show, exacta, trifecta, etc) goes into a common pool for that bet. The state gets a cut, and the remainder is divvied out to everyone with a winning pick on that bet.
This means that the actual odds are based on money bet per horse or combination, and are not set by the track or anyone else. The track has absolutely no interest in whichever horse wins, only that as many people as possilbe play.
Also, when there are few people betting it is much easier to manipulate the odds by placing devious strategic bets. Here's how that works: Odds at a track come from the parimutuel system. Off-track betting uses the track odds, but OTB wagering may not be included in the parimutuel calculation. Certainly betting with a bookie is not.
Let's say I know a trainer at course X who says "Da numbah 3 in da fifth is a lock." If I go to the track and throw a large amount (eg $1000) on number 3, it will tilt the odds proportionally to how much has been bet in total -- the less has been bet at the track, the greater effect it will have on final payouts, meaning a lower return for me when 3 comes in.
Let's say for the sake of argument that my $1000 bet at the track takes the 3 horse from 6:1 to 3:1. If I make the bet at OTB, the horse is still 6:1 (because my bet is not figured in the parimutuel).
Now, let's say that I make my bet on the 3 at an OTB or with a bookie for $5,000 instead of $1,000, but have a friend lay a $1,000 bet at the track on the number 8 horse. This would increase the odds for the 3 proportional to the total handle at the track. By doing this I could increace my off-track odds from 6:1 to, say 10:1 -- meaning my take from an off-track win would go from $35,000 to $55,000, at the cost of a $1000 loss.
This sort of thing has happened before. But the more people bet at the track, the larger the handle, and therefore the more money is required to tilt the odds.
If slots bring more people to the track, they also make it harder for people to fix races this way (although it is not 'fixing' so much as playing with payoffs).
So to recap, many tracks have found that slots, besides being gold mines themselves, tend to bring in more punters, meaning a bigger slice for the state, and a much bigger investment by people wanting to rig the numbers. This technique is still possible, just much more difficult.
While this may be a bad thing for those unfortunate enough to think they can actually beat the slots, it has been good for tracks and good for racing.
Incidentally, I was at the Charles Town (WV) racetrack today and lost $2 on slots in about 1 minute, but won about $35 on horses over 12 races. It was a good day. My dad did even better -- he hit a $120 exacta ($1 bet) in the last race and ended up about $180 ahead.
Sorry this post was off-topic.
For people whose job it is to create or host web-based advertising, you should pay attention to what people here are saying.
Those with the misfortune not not to have a geeky friend install Firefox or lacking the wherewithal to do it themselves get frustrated with animated gifs/flash/overlays. Those who have made the switch never see the ads in the first place.
I, for example, block all flash and gif animation by default, and if one gets through, I just use NukeEverything.
On the other hand, I have quite frequently clicked through google text ad links because they were relevant to my search.
The internet is not TV; the audience is neither captive nor passive. If you drive people to distraction or frustration, you will soon have no visitors.
If I'm looking for information on Product X or News Story Y and the page renders to slowly because of ads, or is distracting becauise of ads, or is frustrating to use because of ads, I simply go elsewhere.
Its not a matter of 'free sites need the revenue' -- there are other ways of earning revenue than distracting your visitors from what they wanted to accomplish.
If I read a nice, clean page with nice, clean ads, I may or may not choose to click through. But if those ads are blinking, blocking, or otherwise bothering my experince, not only will I not follow them, but I may choose not to return to the site.
I am sure I am not alone.
Please be sure of your facts before you post, and try to avoid statements that are foolish, offensive, and wrong.
Firsly, Ghana is not an Islamic country in any sense -- 63 percent of the population is Christian.
While half of the Nigerian population is Muslim, it is not an Islamic country. Would you call Canada a Roman Catholic country? Unfortunately, there are a lot of sectarian tensions in Nigeria that sometimes result in violence. But it is not an Islamic state.
Secondly, there is very little reason to believe that religious beliefs and AIDS are somehow corelated. Just look at some statistics from west African countries:
Country / % Christian / % Muslim / Adult AIDS prevalence rate
Ghana / 63 / 16 / 3% (2001)
Nigeria / 40 / 50 / 5.8% (2001)
Niger / 20 / 80 / 4% (2001)
Chad / 35 / 51 / 5-7% (2001)
Benin / 30 / 20 / 3.6% (2001)
Cote d'Ivoire / 20-30 / 35-40 / 9.7% (2001)
Togo / 29 / 20 / 6% (2001)
--source: CIA World Factbook
Outsourced IT work is a great economic opportunity for African countries. They continue to be shafted on agriculture through US and EU farm subsidies, and on natural resources through international conglomerates, kleptocratic governments, and war profiteers.
Things like call centers and support centers don't cost much to set up, bring money to local economies, and provide jobs for skilled workers, giving a boost to education systems.
This will also create local markets for IT goods and services, creating a positive feedback loop -- as more people learn the trade, more people demand products and services the trade offers.
How long before we see a cheap, solar-powered PC running an African-brewed Linux?
I think this is actually part of a planned campaign, and if you think about it for a minute or two, it's brilliant. There's not really any reason they would need a rough mix of their album to do a photo shoot. I suppose they might want the photographer, art director, or whomever to hear it to get a feel for the music before snapping photos, but there are other ways of doing that. Playing their new tunes before a photo shoot sounds a bit more like a garage band with a decent first-time-in-the-studio recording rather than an international blockbuster act. So what's the gimmick? U2 says the rough mix was stolen and if it shows up on P2P, they'll rush it out on ITMS -- weeks before the CD will show up down at the Sam Goody. Which means it will be online first, and legally. There's lots of U2 fans who will buy this record as soon as they can, and don't much care about the format, so long as it can be burned. There are some who will just copy it, but many people will pay because they know it's the right thing to do. By releasing releasing early only on ITMS, they'll be reap all the profits the CD would (at least for a few weeks), while cutting out CD, burning, printing, distribution, and stocking costs. These costs are not insubstantial, but they are a bit out of whack. If you look at CD production costs, you will notice that there are three elements (not counting time and labor): 1) physical disc; 2) jewel case; 3) printed cover. Of these, the most expensive is the paper cover; the cheapest is the disc. The publicity from the theft story gets them loads of coverage over several weeks, also providing convenient details about how to buy the goods. U2 may be on to something here. 1) Create buzz with free coverage in world media (here's where the obligatory ?????? comes in) 2) Make product available only through download, cutting out a great deal of manufacturing expense 3) Profit 4) After delay, release product in lower-margin physical form 5) Profit more
Mac users are one thing, but what about all the students at these schools who are deaf?
Don't forget the best thing about the Xbox -- that Microsoft will sell you $300 worth of computer for $150.
.avi, .mpg, wmv, etc. files through the tv -- and all your mp3s through you home stereo.
.avi, .mpg, mp3, etc, and play them back through gear they already have.
With a mod chip, an ethernet cable and a Debian disk, your Xbox becomes a great distributor for all you
Add an off the shelf 100GB HDD and it's a warehouse too.
MS's Big Idea(tm) behid Xbox was to lose money on the hardware but make it back on games and Xbox Live subscriptions.
The best thing you can do is buy an Xbox for yourself and another for your brother/sister, mod it, install MythTV or somesuch, show your siblings how to use it to store
Every Xbox that sells, MS loses cash; every person who buys an Xbox and doesn't sign up for Xbox live is another loss for Redmond.
It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to know I can help ruin an evil company by buying their product.
Let me see if I get this straight.
The 2000 election was supremely screwed up, particularly in Florida, because people were voting with some old-timey machines that made holes in paper ballots, which could then be counted by machine. Only sometimes the holes didn't punch all the way through, or sometimes the ballots themselves were a little bit confusing.
The ballots had to be recounted by hand in Florida, with the help of a lot of volunteers and quite a bit of state money in order to deal with these problems -- also that Florida state law (as in most other states) requires a manual recount in case of extremely close races.
So the solution from the Federal Government is the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) that says states need to have secure, accurate voting machines that meet stringent guidelines for security and accuracy (not to mention accessibility by the disabled). If these machines are electronic, so much the better.
Under HAVA, the Federal government will grant the states buckets of money ($861 million so far, and plenty more to come) to get their voting machines compliant.
Only there's a few problems. States don't yet know what being compliant means, because the standards and definitions are still being worked out by the Election Assistance Commission (eac.gov) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist.gov).
The EAC has got as far as appointing a subcommittee, but they're not due to meet again until Jan 2005, at the earliest.
What you're left with is states looking for machines they THINK will be compliant with HAVA -- particularly with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which calls for private, unassisted voting by blind people -- meaning that the voting machines will have to have audio components that read a person's choices and, before casting a vote, read a person's selections.
Direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines are very good in this regard -- they can be very easily customizable at the state level to work at the precinct (or school board district) level.
But the problems with DREs are well documented -- inaccurate counts, easy (relatively) to manipulate, hackable, etc. And without a hard-copy record, impossible to do a recount.
So the solution proposed by California Sec of State Kevin Shelly, among others, is to have DREs create a 'voter-verifiable paper audit trail' (his term). Which means that the electronic machines have to print a paper record of the ballot which is then kept securely for recount, if neccessary.
Now this begs a couple of questions.
If a jurisdiction uses these fancy new machines to record, tabulate, and transmit vote results electronically, but at the same time has to keep paper copies of the votes for recount, then the paper ballots will surely be subpeonaed after any vote that is reasonably close (say within 5 percent).
It is a given that the paper ballots are going to be counted anyway, especially considering the number of races (town, county, school district, congressional district, senate, etc.) that are 'close' in any given year.
What this means is that HAVA is asking states to trash existing, functional machines that produce machine-readible paper ballots, machines that originally cost maybe $300 each and are already paid for, and replace them with new machines that cost more than $1000 each, and produce ballots that will have to be counted by hand.
Another issue that the press has not yet gotten wind of is the large number of election officials who have retired, gone on early retirement, or changed jobs since 2000. An unprecendented number of chief election officers in counties and states across the country will be supervising their first general elections this November. A comforting thought.
The outgoing officials saw sense -- that there is a train wreck approaching. An awful lot of people will be voting on machines untested in an actual election environment, and those machines are by many measures inferior to the