It doesn't matter if everyone can verify, only that anyone can verify. Say you have a complex voting machine only understandable with a computer science education. As long as such education is open to all, the system works. Not everyone has to invest the months or years it takes understand the system. As long a representative group does, transparency holds.
No. I've already mentioned that it's groups or individuals in the society fighting against others, that characterises interests in an election - it is not a "us vs. government" case.
Verifiability has to be distributed, basically at least one person from each party and/or candidate, plus a number of independent - as in not obviously invested in any party and/or candidate - observers have to be present and verify the results per polling station. The absolute worst is to erect barriers by using computerised systems. Using computers reduces the number of people verifying from tens of thousands to a group less than 50 - even if that - because under current conditions it's zero.
How many people really understand the way paper voting works: the lock boxes, unique ballots, authentication, secure storage & transport, multiple representative counting, etc? Very few. And yet the system works because anyone can learn about and verify these things.
While I have no experience with the US system, I did serve as a independent observer for multiple elections here in Hungary and I do have to say it's not that all complicated. People come in, you authenticate them by id, hand them the ballot, they go to the booth, fill in the details, put the ballot in the envelope, come out and place the envelope in the ballot box. The ballot box is clearly visible for all the observers during the duration of the election and after the polls close you count the results under the observation of the observers. When all is counted, we send the results via internet to the election center. The center publishes the election results broken down to the level of voting stations and you verify that the numbers you have in your hand match the numbers they have used. People also verify whether the tally adds up correctly.
There. Now try to compare this to electronic voting and try to guess at how many hundred steps could an attacker compromise the voting. If you use electronic voting you just might as well say "I don't care about people and representation - let's abolish voting alltogether and spare ourselves of a costly circus".
My point is that when your system is broken due to voting fraud, you can't fix the system by voting.
That's entirely correct. What the US needs is more people who can get above the level of petty politics and willing to be active in protesting, activism,...
So your solution is to just give up on democracy because "they'll never let you do that" anyway? Noone said it's easy, but it's doable and it is certainly easier than most people think it is.
Ballots would mean something if people wouldn't just give up and accept defeat. (Sometimes I wonder whether all the french bashing with the "white flag and surrender" isn't just really a projection of one's mental state to others for certain US citizens...)
Can technology companies build systems today that are safe, reliable and secure with the votes cast on them?
Definitely. I've seen designs of voting systems that I'd be happy with. I don't think anything is totally secure. Ultimately, I think the goal is to do the best we can and not be perfect. When you're talking about 100 million votes, all cast pretty much on the same day across the country, there's no dress rehearsal.
I don't understand why is that even educated people miss the point. The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!
How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.
Remember, during an election, citizens and groups of society are in _conflict_. You can't trust* the government, you can't trust individual groups. What makes or breaks democracy is whether you, as a citizen, can verify independently at least the transparency of your local voting station, because if you can, you can be reasonably certain that other people will do the same in their respective areas and that the general elections are not rigged!
* Remember, democracy has to start somewhere. If you trust the government to conduct the voting process, then you're placing the means of controlling the government's composition in the hand of itself. The risk and temptation is just too high to do that. One thing that should not be government responsibility, but more of a civic duty is voting. In the absense of that, the bare minimum is to let the government conduct the elections, but at least verify it! When the government both runs the elections and through government is the only way to verify the transparency of an election, then that's not democratic anymore.
Mod parent insightful, instead of funny. Various people and some papers have suggested that upgrading network capacity is a betterway to handle high traffic than trying to mess with QoS, because 1. it's cheaper 2. it actually works, which isn't really proven to be the case for QoS on a large ISP level network.
...European issues, particularly issues of transparency. I'm glad the Irish had the guts to throw away the stupid mistake that was the Lissabon pact. It would have reduced transparency a lot (come on, 200+ pages of legalese as a constitution?! You've got to be kidding!), which we need more of and not less! In most countries in the EU, the EU and the way it operates seems to be a distant thing, barely interrupting the constant stream of local politics. The positions some parties take on European issues are often the result of internal, local, interior pacts and struggles.
Highly annoying that it has come to this. Sarkozy is just another fool, but with power.
You have to remember that they are recruiting people to kill other people in the name of a country while those actions are directed by corrupt politicians for the sake of hidden agendas.
When you put it that way, it doesn't sound that appealing, does it? It's interesting to see how the US is but one country of many in a long line of countries where sustaining a military has became a partly self-serving process, as in the military (-industrial complex) existing for it's own sake. Other examples like Russia, Turkey or Pakistan come to mind when thinking of the same contemporary phenomena. When the military becomes a _political_ power, then, THEN things are really messed up.
The rules of war have always been their own; yet we have always held American forces to a higher standard.
The cynic in me interprets these words to mean that american lives always mattered much more than any other human being's, but then again knowing US history quite well, I'm quickly forced to admit it to myself, that this is in fact the objective historical interpretation. Sad.
The servers are in the US, so we europeans can't do shit about it unfortunately. (Enforcing EU directives outside the EU is the same nonsense that happens when the US tries to apply their laws abroad).
We would have legal standing to prevent this, if the servers were located at least partly in the EU.
John Nash in "beautiful Mind" tries to prove this one too.
And I would have succeeded if it weren't for these meddling kids! What do you mean you can't see them?!
Re:promotional "studies"
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Yeah, right. I bow down before your sophisticated reasoning equating completely different kinds of things with each other. Clearly Richard Stallman, a known capitalist enterprenour made rich from GPLv2 royalties, tries to bolster GPLv3 adoption by commissioning groundless studies to deceive people.
(This post contains absolutely no sarcasm at all. Not even a very small amount. Nada. Zero. Look! Shiny!)
Exactly. Proponents of the "lesser of two evils" line of thinking forget that elections are not a single round game. There is an election every four years. Unless people think that voting for the lesser of two evils makes the difference between having future elections at all or not, the sound strategy is to vote for who you think represents your interests the closest. Btw, google for "douglas adams lizards"
Not voting at all doesn't express disgust, it expresses laziness.
Low voter turnout in the USA is regularly interpreted as people being digusted and disillusioned of the system. A politically correct name to put it is "voter apathy".
Voting for third party and independent candidates shouldn't scoffed at as a vote of disgust either but rather a willingness to leave the beaten path.
Of course not. Votes for small parties are not protest votes at all. Protest votes are mainly voting for "the other big party".
To put it in a historical analogy (which is bound to be a huge success), you're planning to defeat the evil Cubans by supporting the Soviet Union? Do you honestly think the republicans are the democrats' biggest enemy? They are the closest allies! The two major parties are closer to each other than to any other entity. As I said, don't be part of the problem.
Thanks to this man I will never believe again, and I will vote republican across the board, even as a staunch progressive libertarian, until the democrats wake from their sleep.
A saner course of action would be to vote for a small party, or express your disgust by not voting at all. Don't be part of the problem by keeping the duofascists in power.
In my opinion, our system really IS a one party system.
Essentially, yes. All you get is a change of paint every four years. The two parties being in power for so long created a stagnant system of politics, where the same financial interests are in the background and where backroom deals and agreements decide the major issues. Voter choice is minimalised, since there is nothing a voter can do when both parties in power have the same stand on most issues.
The "brilliance" of the system is that you can always point and say, "but other parties and candidates are free to run and try to get elected", which is true theoretically, but not practically. The system is rigged in a way to support major power blocks. It's the difference between taking the stairs and climbing the wall. Small and mid size parties have no chance of existing and building public support from there, which prevents voters giving support to smaller parties and taking it away from larger ones. A large amount of propaganda is part of the problem.
Finally, you understand why a two party system is just marginally better than a one party system and why a system that tends toward a two party system is bad.
Everyone who wants to impose their values on the world, or proclaim their superiority, calls themselves "enlightened". It's a great word, because, who doesn't want to be enlightened? And, it's nice and vague. Mormans, Southern Baptists, and all sorts of religious extremists call themselves "enlightened". So do strong-atheists.
But not everyone who is enlightened wants to impose their values on the world. From Webster's:
en.light.ened adj
1: freed from ignorance and misinformation
2: based on full comprehension of the problems involved
I used enlightened to mean "free from ignorance", as it relates to sexual matters.
I object to your characterization of sex as polyamorous. While some people enjoy that, I don't particularly. I don't enjoy penises being inserted into me either though, so I recognize that it takes all types to make up the world. I enjoy my "intense feelings".
I guess I failed to state my views correctly. In my opinion it is same underlying problem, caused by the evolutionary history that shaped our bodies and thinking, that prevents people from being _able_ to exist in a polyamorous relationship and being able to tolerate public displays of sexuality. There is a difference between "prefers not to" that you're referring to, and "not being able", which I'm referring to. In my opinion the majority of people wouldn't be able to exist in a polyamorous relationship, a smaller percentage would be able to, but prefers not to and an even smaller percentage is able and prefers to.
What's wrong with the violence that sex causes? I mean, you have to respect safe words, but other than that...
I specifically ment violence that stems from relationships and sex, like murder committed because of jealousy. I tried to find relevant statistics, but a quick googling and wikipedia didn't provide any statistics as to the leading causes of murder, however I remember reading Hungarian specific statistics, that murder committed because of jealousy and other sexual/relationship related causes is the single biggest cause of murder in Hungary.
Violence and sex are both deeply rooted in humanity's past. One important distinction might be is that sex is a more hierarchical, selection driven aspect. The one who gets to reproduce wins. Violence just happens, due to outside factors or it is a tool to enforce sexual wants. A huge number of contemporary murders are due to jealousy and "love sickness".
This makes me think that sexual behaviour, the display of sexual behaviour and the depiction of sexual behaviour would tend to be more sensitive subject in the standard psychological setting.
It takes conscious effort and education to get rid of this feeling.
In today's world it is not a bad policy to excercise reasonable restraint on one's sexual behaviour (I'm thinking avoiding sleeping with everyone), because while violence is condemnable, sex causes violence. Yeah, some people are enlightened enough to handle sex (polyamorous relationships), but most of the people are not like that and it leads to extreme feelings, which then leads to violence.
Security theater
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If I'd be forced to guess I would say that the security theater methods actually increase violence on the plane, due to people getting annoyed and doing stupid things. Therefor this security measure might actually cost lives, instead of saving them.
The requirement is: if you distribute the binaries, you need to provide the source too. If they are using an unmodified vanilla kernel, they still need to respond at least with "grab the code from kernel.org".
The matter of the fact is that I've been simply trying to make a point that while it is true this kid committed something immoral and possibly illegal, the scope of punishment, even if it is "just" a few years of jailtime, is not in balance with the seriousness of his crime. There is nothing equivocational (oh gaed, I always wanted to say that!) about this.
Viewing the question from the standpoint of the legal system, I think that it harms the robustness, fairness and the balance of justice to talk about 60+ counts of offense and 38 years in jail, even if in reality the punishment will probably be much lighter. The theoretical possibility gives rise to personally biased judgements in the case of people who just "don't look right". The upper limit for someone breaking into a school and modifying grades on the school computer is 38 years in prison, apparently. That is preposterous.
Slashdot Mirror
No. I've already mentioned that it's groups or individuals in the society fighting against others, that characterises interests in an election - it is not a "us vs. government" case.
Verifiability has to be distributed, basically at least one person from each party and/or candidate, plus a number of independent - as in not obviously invested in any party and/or candidate - observers have to be present and verify the results per polling station. The absolute worst is to erect barriers by using computerised systems. Using computers reduces the number of people verifying from tens of thousands to a group less than 50 - even if that - because under current conditions it's zero.
While I have no experience with the US system, I did serve as a independent observer for multiple elections here in Hungary and I do have to say it's not that all complicated. People come in, you authenticate them by id, hand them the ballot, they go to the booth, fill in the details, put the ballot in the envelope, come out and place the envelope in the ballot box. The ballot box is clearly visible for all the observers during the duration of the election and after the polls close you count the results under the observation of the observers. When all is counted, we send the results via internet to the election center. The center publishes the election results broken down to the level of voting stations and you verify that the numbers you have in your hand match the numbers they have used. People also verify whether the tally adds up correctly.
There. Now try to compare this to electronic voting and try to guess at how many hundred steps could an attacker compromise the voting. If you use electronic voting you just might as well say "I don't care about people and representation - let's abolish voting alltogether and spare ourselves of a costly circus".
That's entirely correct. What the US needs is more people who can get above the level of petty politics and willing to be active in protesting, activism,...
So your solution is to just give up on democracy because "they'll never let you do that" anyway? Noone said it's easy, but it's doable and it is certainly easier than most people think it is.
Ballots would mean something if people wouldn't just give up and accept defeat. (Sometimes I wonder whether all the french bashing with the "white flag and surrender" isn't just really a projection of one's mental state to others for certain US citizens...)
I don't understand why is that even educated people miss the point. The whole fucking point of an election is that it has to be transparent and auditable. By transparent and auditable we don't mean to an electrical engineer and a computer scientist, but to a sane adult citizen!
How would you go on about auditing a voting machine, even if the design is open? You'd have to either trust a government or civilian organization to do the auditing or do the auditing yourself, requiring months if not years to verify the design and then verify that the machine you got in the voting district behaves like it is designed to behave! This raises the verifiability bar many orders of magnitude above simple pen and paper.
Remember, during an election, citizens and groups of society are in _conflict_. You can't trust* the government, you can't trust individual groups. What makes or breaks democracy is whether you, as a citizen, can verify independently at least the transparency of your local voting station, because if you can, you can be reasonably certain that other people will do the same in their respective areas and that the general elections are not rigged!
* Remember, democracy has to start somewhere. If you trust the government to conduct the voting process, then you're placing the means of controlling the government's composition in the hand of itself. The risk and temptation is just too high to do that. One thing that should not be government responsibility, but more of a civic duty is voting. In the absense of that, the bare minimum is to let the government conduct the elections, but at least verify it! When the government both runs the elections and through government is the only way to verify the transparency of an election, then that's not democratic anymore.
Mod parent insightful, instead of funny. Various people and some papers have suggested that upgrading network capacity is a better way to handle high traffic than trying to mess with QoS, because 1. it's cheaper 2. it actually works, which isn't really proven to be the case for QoS on a large ISP level network.
...European issues, particularly issues of transparency. I'm glad the Irish had the guts to throw away the stupid mistake that was the Lissabon pact. It would have reduced transparency a lot (come on, 200+ pages of legalese as a constitution?! You've got to be kidding!), which we need more of and not less! In most countries in the EU, the EU and the way it operates seems to be a distant thing, barely interrupting the constant stream of local politics. The positions some parties take on European issues are often the result of internal, local, interior pacts and struggles.
Highly annoying that it has come to this. Sarkozy is just another fool, but with power.
You have to remember that they are recruiting people to kill other people in the name of a country while those actions are directed by corrupt politicians for the sake of hidden agendas.
When you put it that way, it doesn't sound that appealing, does it? It's interesting to see how the US is but one country of many in a long line of countries where sustaining a military has became a partly self-serving process, as in the military (-industrial complex) existing for it's own sake. Other examples like Russia, Turkey or Pakistan come to mind when thinking of the same contemporary phenomena. When the military becomes a _political_ power, then, THEN things are really messed up.
The cynic in me interprets these words to mean that american lives always mattered much more than any other human being's, but then again knowing US history quite well, I'm quickly forced to admit it to myself, that this is in fact the objective historical interpretation. Sad.
An international incident cuts both ways. Most of us pissed about this are located outside the US, comfortable outside juristiction.
The servers are in the US, so we europeans can't do shit about it unfortunately. (Enforcing EU directives outside the EU is the same nonsense that happens when the US tries to apply their laws abroad).
We would have legal standing to prevent this, if the servers were located at least partly in the EU.
And I would have succeeded if it weren't for these meddling kids! What do you mean you can't see them?!
Yeah, right. I bow down before your sophisticated reasoning equating completely different kinds of things with each other. Clearly Richard Stallman, a known capitalist enterprenour made rich from GPLv2 royalties, tries to bolster GPLv3 adoption by commissioning groundless studies to deceive people.
(This post contains absolutely no sarcasm at all. Not even a very small amount. Nada. Zero. Look! Shiny!)
Exactly. Proponents of the "lesser of two evils" line of thinking forget that elections are not a single round game. There is an election every four years. Unless people think that voting for the lesser of two evils makes the difference between having future elections at all or not, the sound strategy is to vote for who you think represents your interests the closest. Btw, google for "douglas adams lizards"
Low voter turnout in the USA is regularly interpreted as people being digusted and disillusioned of the system. A politically correct name to put it is "voter apathy".
Of course not. Votes for small parties are not protest votes at all. Protest votes are mainly voting for "the other big party".
To put it in a historical analogy (which is bound to be a huge success), you're planning to defeat the evil Cubans by supporting the Soviet Union? Do you honestly think the republicans are the democrats' biggest enemy? They are the closest allies! The two major parties are closer to each other than to any other entity. As I said, don't be part of the problem.
A saner course of action would be to vote for a small party, or express your disgust by not voting at all. Don't be part of the problem by keeping the duofascists in power.
Or rather, he thinks his constituents aren't that bright.
A UNIX manual, of course!
Essentially, yes. All you get is a change of paint every four years. The two parties being in power for so long created a stagnant system of politics, where the same financial interests are in the background and where backroom deals and agreements decide the major issues. Voter choice is minimalised, since there is nothing a voter can do when both parties in power have the same stand on most issues.
The "brilliance" of the system is that you can always point and say, "but other parties and candidates are free to run and try to get elected", which is true theoretically, but not practically. The system is rigged in a way to support major power blocks. It's the difference between taking the stairs and climbing the wall. Small and mid size parties have no chance of existing and building public support from there, which prevents voters giving support to smaller parties and taking it away from larger ones. A large amount of propaganda is part of the problem.
Finally, you understand why a two party system is just marginally better than a one party system and why a system that tends toward a two party system is bad.
Violence and sex are both deeply rooted in humanity's past. One important distinction might be is that sex is a more hierarchical, selection driven aspect. The one who gets to reproduce wins. Violence just happens, due to outside factors or it is a tool to enforce sexual wants. A huge number of contemporary murders are due to jealousy and "love sickness".
This makes me think that sexual behaviour, the display of sexual behaviour and the depiction of sexual behaviour would tend to be more sensitive subject in the standard psychological setting.
It takes conscious effort and education to get rid of this feeling.
In today's world it is not a bad policy to excercise reasonable restraint on one's sexual behaviour (I'm thinking avoiding sleeping with everyone), because while violence is condemnable, sex causes violence. Yeah, some people are enlightened enough to handle sex (polyamorous relationships), but most of the people are not like that and it leads to extreme feelings, which then leads to violence.
If I'd be forced to guess I would say that the security theater methods actually increase violence on the plane, due to people getting annoyed and doing stupid things. Therefor this security measure might actually cost lives, instead of saving them.
The requirement is: if you distribute the binaries, you need to provide the source too. If they are using an unmodified vanilla kernel, they still need to respond at least with "grab the code from kernel.org".
The matter of the fact is that I've been simply trying to make a point that while it is true this kid committed something immoral and possibly illegal, the scope of punishment, even if it is "just" a few years of jailtime, is not in balance with the seriousness of his crime. There is nothing equivocational (oh gaed, I always wanted to say that!) about this.
Viewing the question from the standpoint of the legal system, I think that it harms the robustness, fairness and the balance of justice to talk about 60+ counts of offense and 38 years in jail, even if in reality the punishment will probably be much lighter. The theoretical possibility gives rise to personally biased judgements in the case of people who just "don't look right". The upper limit for someone breaking into a school and modifying grades on the school computer is 38 years in prison, apparently. That is preposterous.