I'd advise sending that suggestion into your local congresscritter, but the party in power doesn't seem to be too enthused about increasing voter turnout.
(There's a joke somewhere about the differences in how both parties attempt voter fraud: Republicans try to disenfranchise voters, Democrats try to turn out the "dead" vote:-)
I don't understand why someone else thinks they have the "right" to tell me what I can do with my own private property (except if I use that private property to cause physical harm to someone).
The whole basis of "Intellectual property" is a socialist experiment - an attempt to use the power of law to encourage "innovation and creativity" that is supposed to provide a net benefit to society.
My personal experience & observation has told me that any zealot can rationalize just about any sort of behavior, as long as they can find someone or something that uses the right keywords to justify that behavior. The keywords don't even have to be used for consistent reasons, since the zealot has the ability to ignore any cognitive dissonance (or they will attack anyone pointing out the cognitive dissonance) that might point that they're behaving irrationally.
For ALL you nutjobs out there, please note that I'm being non-denominational in my condemnation. (I also understand that all those nutjobs will think that my statements don't apply to them - because they're RIGHT and everyone else is WRONG.)
I'm just curious if the old addage about "Republicans have no heart, and Democrats have no brains" has any truth to it.:D
From my perspective as an independent, it seems more like the Republican leadership has no heart(compassion), Republican followers have no brains (or refuse to use them), and the Democrats have no self-discipline or sense of cooperation (which leads to irrelevancy of having either brains and/or hearts). Not quite as catchy as the original, but it fits more of the behavior from both parties that I've seen lately.
There are rational reasons for some of the obscure aspects of our voting system, all of them could be solved by scrapping the high-tech crap and just using paper ballots.
A lot of those mechanisms were designed _specifically_ because of problems that have occurred historically with corruption in voting schemes. All of this (voting screwup) is a direct application of the adage "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
All election supervisors & staff members should be absolutely required to study (and get a passing grade) in classes devoted to studying the history of voting, and how episodes in corruption led to advances in voting methodology. They should be required to do this before they are ever allowed anyway near the voting process, and if it's discovered that they haven't applied those lessons to running the election process, you can conclude that they did it on purpose and should be throw in jail.
There has to be PLENTY of people into embroidery that have the skills to design their own patterns right?
How are they going to prove that they really did design the pattern? If their pattern looks similar to something that's already available (and there have been a _lot_ of "simple" patterns generated by the industry), they're targets for potential lawsuits - and most grannies can hardly afford to fight any lawsuit, even if they have a fair chance at winning.
i support the right of a people to choose their governments.
Ah yes, the old choose-us-or-you-and-your-family-will-be-imprisone d-or-executed choice. It's a good way to blame the common people for abuses perpetrated on them by a bad government. Somehow I don't think the people who have their heads being crushed on the ground by jackboots are going to be terribly impressed with your assessment of their situation.
It takes a lot of peoples' blood to change a government once it has been firmly established, even more so if the government has all the weapons. Maybe a historian knows the answer, but I'd guess you could probably count the number times a "bloodless" transition of a large society's government has occurred throughout history on your hands. But hey, if a government starts abusing the society, the "little guys" can always "choose" their government by "choosing" to sacrifice themselves, and their friends & family, right?
Look, most of these issues with security & anonymous voting have _already_ been worked out with paper balloting - often because they had to deal with situations like are being described in the above comments. Naturally with enough effort, there are still ways to abuse the system, but if the policies are followed carefully by most of the people involved, it's entirely feasible to keep the fraud & corruption to a reasonably low level.
You don't need to reinvent everything just because you're using an electronic voting machine - you just need to make sure that you follow all of the guidelines that have already been worked out over the past couple of centuries of fighting electoral fraud. The fact that all these election supervisors & voting-machine manufacturers are completely ignoring all of this history is at the very best screaming of sheer incompetence, and at the very worst is a prime example of corruption.
As far as implementing anonymous voting is concerned, you only that need to authenticate that someone is a valid voter, and that they haven't already voted. That's the reason why they check your ID at the polling locations, and then give you a valid ballot (and mark down that you have received a ballot).
Once they've given you the ballot though, you do NOT need to associate your id with that ballot. The fact that you have one, and only one, validated ballot per voter is good enough for counting votes without sacrificing anonymity (unless you've got only one voter of course).
Chicago was famous for electoral fraud & taking advantange of non-anonymous voting, where the mob bosses would make sure that everyone in their district voted the "right way" (or you got your kneecaps broken as an example to the other "voters"). I think labor unions often did similar things to their members to who didn't vote the "right way". A slightly more friendly way was to pay off apathetic voters to vote your way - much more cost effective (in many cases) than a major advertising blitz, but really corrupting to proper democratic decision-making.
Anyone trying to maintain topsoil needs to have some sort of way of replenishing the nutrients in the topsoil.
If you think about it, it's a simple conservation of matter: any crops you grow & sell from a given plot of land represents nutrients that were removed from that plot of land. If you don't replenish those nutrients, eventually the soil will no longer have the necessary nutrients to support those crops. If you keep trying to grow lots of different kinds of plants looking for anything that will grow, then you will eventually exhaust ALL the nutrients in that soil, and that patch of land will become essentially sterile.
You can replenish the nitrogen-compounds in the soil by using nitrogen-fixing bacteria (helped by rotation of crops), but there are lots of other kinds of nutrients/minerals that plants need to grow where you get only what was in the soil in the first place.
Agricultural scientists (& successful long-term farmers) have understood this for quite a few years, of course - the fertilizers they use are fortified with everything they know that they are removing from the land. Unfortunately, it takes energy to transport the crops away, energy to till the land, energy to harvest the crop, & energy to transport the stuff used to replenish the land, and in all cases that energy is being provided by oil.
The big question is this: when the fossil fuel-based oil runs out (or becomes extremely expensive), will we still be able to get enough energy from alternative sources to keep using the current large-scale agricultural business models? Don't be sure that biodiesel or ethanol will take up the slack, since there is no guarantee that enough biodiesel/ethanol can be generated from a farm to be cost effective after taking into account how much biodiesel/ethanol they'll have to burn to do their business.
It is entirely possible that, in the long run, our agricultural system might yet be reduced down to using horses.
There's a pretty funny story in Portland, Oregon where local law enforcement was caught going through various peoples' trash, and they claimed that once the trash had been put out on the curb (never mind that in some cases the trash was still on the peoples' properties), that it was available to the public.
Whereupon one of the local papers took it upon themselves to look through the Mayor's & the Chief of Police's trash, and reported what they found. Fortunately for the two officials, they didn't have anything condemning in their trash, but apparently the Mayor was absolutely furious (and of course was making suing noises), whereas the Police Chief seemed to be a bit more stoic.
I think I hunted down the link here. It was quite awhile ago, so they might've passed a law by now that protects officials (but not ordinary citizens of course) from such shenanigans.
You seem to be completely ignoring the basic points of the messages that you are responding to.
If an intelligent attacker can figure out the criteria that you are using for profiling, then they will _deliberately_ look for an agent who will bypass that profile. The only part that statistics will play in this scenario is how long it takes for them to find a matching recruit or unknowing patsy.
Profiling is useful _only_ when the potential targets you are attempting to profile to don't or can't change their behavior in response.
Since they can and do change their behavior, encouraging the use of profiling simply makes you _think_ you're being efficient about your searching, when you're really opening up a hole in your security for an intelligent attacker to exploit (since your searching resources are being concentrated based on your profile).
If somebody is primarily motivated by money, then when it comes down to a choice between helping someone and making money, you'll expect them to go after the money.
It doesn't necessarily make them "evil", but they wouldn't be someone that you would trust to do altruistic things for the public on their own initiative.
Another idea you might want to consider is a hard limit on spending. A Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, for instance, restricting the feds from spending more than they're getting in revenue.
Once the Congresscritters figure out that everyone else's pork will take _their_ pork away, you'd better believe they'll be fighting tooth & nail to slap down anyone who looks like they're getting more than their "fair" share.
Do you honestly believe that those two issues have caused more fundamental damage to the fabric of U.S. society than what has occurred while the neoconservatives (both Congressional & in the White House) have been in power?
The U.S. economy has long ago shaken off any effects from those policies.
We'll be struggling for decades with the financial, diplomatic and civil liberty effects of what the current crop of "leaders" have done.
Somebody on kuro5hin.org posted a really good FAQ of how feelings that cause stress (outrage, fear, anger, etc) can end up in clinical depression. I dug it up here.
The basic idea is that stuff which triggers adrenaline, will also slowly build up cortisol levels. Once your cortisol levels reach some threshhold (different for each individual), you'll become clinically depressed. Once you're clinically depressed, your ability to cope with normal life activities is greatly reduced, which causes more stress (and thus adrenaline), which prevents your cortisol levels from ever decreasing, thus trapping you in the clinical depression.
One of the interesting results about this viewpoint of depression was that, once you are experiencing clinical depression, any exercise that is vigorous enough to stimulate adrenaline will prevent you from going out of the depression (although it might make you feel good temporarily).
The only reason why Bush & Co. _wouldn't_ want to go through the secret court is because they don't want to leave a paper trail of who they chose to wiretap. Makes you wonder why.
If you've already evaluated a set of arguments & found them lacking in reason, then it's a waste of your own time to continue to give credence to a group of people who keep repeating those arguments, no matter how fervently & honestly they deliver the argument.
In other words, sometimes the opponents _are_ "dipshit fundies", and the only rational course of action is to summarily dismiss them & their opinions.
Ah, so you _are_ advocating the completely annihilation of all of the civilians. It seems your conscience must be having a good vacation - I hope it will think about sending a postcard.
How do you propose dealing with the possibility that if Israel does such a thing, the one Muslim country which we are sure has a strong nuclear weapons & ballistic missiles program (Pakistan) might decide that they have to take preemptive action out of self-defense? Maybe we should nuke them too? They probably won't be able to get more than a dozen or so cities before we can glass'm.
I sincerely hope that if anyone with your attitude achieves a position of power, that they are promptly assassinated before they have a chance to make _any_ decision more complicated than deciding what pair of pants to wear.
Your post is even less "insightful" than the parent you are complaining about.
The war-time situation with Japan is completely irrelevant to the current situation, since that was a country-against-country war-time scenario, and serves only to point out your ignorance, or lack-of-conscience, about these matters.
How do you propose achieving the "total and complete annihilation of terrorists" without also completely annihilating the civilian population that they are hiding among? How do you plan on preventing NEW "terrorists" from being created due to the fear & rage such an action would spread through the target community? Kill them all, innocent and guilty?
I just disagree that you want a testing spec. which is open to the people who are making the machine, since they might try and design something that will slip through the testing procedure.
The people who make the machines should have their own design spec., but they shouldn't have a clue as to how the machine is going to be tested.
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Damn, what a great idea to improve voter turnout!
:-)
I'd advise sending that suggestion into your local congresscritter, but the party in power doesn't seem to be too enthused about increasing voter turnout.
(There's a joke somewhere about the differences in how both parties attempt voter fraud: Republicans try to disenfranchise voters, Democrats try to turn out the "dead" vote
I don't understand why someone else thinks they have the "right" to tell me what I can do with my own private property (except if I use that private property to cause physical harm to someone).
The whole basis of "Intellectual property" is a socialist experiment - an attempt to use the power of law to encourage "innovation and creativity" that is supposed to provide a net benefit to society.
I don't find it amazing.
:-)
My personal experience & observation has told me that any zealot can rationalize just about any sort of behavior, as long as they can find someone or something that uses the right keywords to justify that behavior. The keywords don't even have to be used for consistent reasons, since the zealot has the ability to ignore any cognitive dissonance (or they will attack anyone pointing out the cognitive dissonance) that might point that they're behaving irrationally.
For ALL you nutjobs out there, please note that I'm being non-denominational in my condemnation. (I also understand that all those nutjobs will think that my statements don't apply to them - because they're RIGHT and everyone else is WRONG.)
Of course, I'm the one who's right
I'd wait for hours in that line, with a smile on my face.
From my perspective as an independent, it seems more like the Republican leadership has no heart(compassion), Republican followers have no brains (or refuse to use them), and the Democrats have no self-discipline or sense of cooperation (which leads to irrelevancy of having either brains and/or hearts). Not quite as catchy as the original, but it fits more of the behavior from both parties that I've seen lately.
A lot of those mechanisms were designed _specifically_ because of problems that have occurred historically with corruption in voting schemes. All of this (voting screwup) is a direct application of the adage "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
All election supervisors & staff members should be absolutely required to study (and get a passing grade) in classes devoted to studying the history of voting, and how episodes in corruption led to advances in voting methodology. They should be required to do this before they are ever allowed anyway near the voting process, and if it's discovered that they haven't applied those lessons to running the election process, you can conclude that they did it on purpose and should be throw in jail.
How are they going to prove that they really did design the pattern? If their pattern looks similar to something that's already available (and there have been a _lot_ of "simple" patterns generated by the industry), they're targets for potential lawsuits - and most grannies can hardly afford to fight any lawsuit, even if they have a fair chance at winning.
Ah yes, the old choose-us-or-you-and-your-family-will-be-imprisone d-or-executed choice. It's a good way to blame the common people for abuses perpetrated on them by a bad government. Somehow I don't think the people who have their heads being crushed on the ground by jackboots are going to be terribly impressed with your assessment of their situation.
It takes a lot of peoples' blood to change a government once it has been firmly established, even more so if the government has all the weapons. Maybe a historian knows the answer, but I'd guess you could probably count the number times a "bloodless" transition of a large society's government has occurred throughout history on your hands. But hey, if a government starts abusing the society, the "little guys" can always "choose" their government by "choosing" to sacrifice themselves, and their friends & family, right?
No, I'm pretty sure that is more applicable as the I-really-want-to-irritate-you tag.
Look, most of these issues with security & anonymous voting have _already_ been worked out with paper balloting - often because they had to deal with situations like are being described in the above comments. Naturally with enough effort, there are still ways to abuse the system, but if the policies are followed carefully by most of the people involved, it's entirely feasible to keep the fraud & corruption to a reasonably low level.
You don't need to reinvent everything just because you're using an electronic voting machine - you just need to make sure that you follow all of the guidelines that have already been worked out over the past couple of centuries of fighting electoral fraud. The fact that all these election supervisors & voting-machine manufacturers are completely ignoring all of this history is at the very best screaming of sheer incompetence, and at the very worst is a prime example of corruption.
As far as implementing anonymous voting is concerned, you only that need to authenticate that someone is a valid voter, and that they haven't already voted. That's the reason why they check your ID at the polling locations, and then give you a valid ballot (and mark down that you have received a ballot).
Once they've given you the ballot though, you do NOT need to associate your id with that ballot. The fact that you have one, and only one, validated ballot per voter is good enough for counting votes without sacrificing anonymity (unless you've got only one voter of course).
Chicago was famous for electoral fraud & taking advantange of non-anonymous voting, where the mob bosses would make sure that everyone in their district voted the "right way" (or you got your kneecaps broken as an example to the other "voters"). I think labor unions often did similar things to their members to who didn't vote the "right way". A slightly more friendly way was to pay off apathetic voters to vote your way - much more cost effective (in many cases) than a major advertising blitz, but really corrupting to proper democratic decision-making.
Anyone trying to maintain topsoil needs to have some sort of way of replenishing the nutrients in the topsoil.
If you think about it, it's a simple conservation of matter: any crops you grow & sell from a given plot of land represents nutrients that were removed from that plot of land. If you don't replenish those nutrients, eventually the soil will no longer have the necessary nutrients to support those crops. If you keep trying to grow lots of different kinds of plants looking for anything that will grow, then you will eventually exhaust ALL the nutrients in that soil, and that patch of land will become essentially sterile.
You can replenish the nitrogen-compounds in the soil by using nitrogen-fixing bacteria (helped by rotation of crops), but there are lots of other kinds of nutrients/minerals that plants need to grow where you get only what was in the soil in the first place.
Agricultural scientists (& successful long-term farmers) have understood this for quite a few years, of course - the fertilizers they use are fortified with everything they know that they are removing from the land. Unfortunately, it takes energy to transport the crops away, energy to till the land, energy to harvest the crop, & energy to transport the stuff used to replenish the land, and in all cases that energy is being provided by oil.
The big question is this: when the fossil fuel-based oil runs out (or becomes extremely expensive), will we still be able to get enough energy from alternative sources to keep using the current large-scale agricultural business models? Don't be sure that biodiesel or ethanol will take up the slack, since there is no guarantee that enough biodiesel/ethanol can be generated from a farm to be cost effective after taking into account how much biodiesel/ethanol they'll have to burn to do their business.
It is entirely possible that, in the long run, our agricultural system might yet be reduced down to using horses.
Just remember to set the combination to the air shield to something a little harder to guess than 1-2-3-4-5 :-)
Not necessarily.
There's a pretty funny story in Portland, Oregon where local law enforcement was caught going through various peoples' trash, and they claimed that once the trash had been put out on the curb (never mind that in some cases the trash was still on the peoples' properties), that it was available to the public.
Whereupon one of the local papers took it upon themselves to look through the Mayor's & the Chief of Police's trash, and reported what they found. Fortunately for the two officials, they didn't have anything condemning in their trash, but apparently the Mayor was absolutely furious (and of course was making suing noises), whereas the Police Chief seemed to be a bit more stoic.
I think I hunted down the link here. It was quite awhile ago, so they might've passed a law by now that protects officials (but not ordinary citizens of course) from such shenanigans.
You seem to be completely ignoring the basic points of the messages that you are responding to.
If an intelligent attacker can figure out the criteria that you are using for profiling, then they will _deliberately_ look for an agent who will bypass that profile. The only part that statistics will play in this scenario is how long it takes for them to find a matching recruit or unknowing patsy.
Profiling is useful _only_ when the potential targets you are attempting to profile to don't or can't change their behavior in response.
Since they can and do change their behavior, encouraging the use of profiling simply makes you _think_ you're being efficient about your searching, when you're really opening up a hole in your security for an intelligent attacker to exploit (since your searching resources are being concentrated based on your profile).
If somebody is primarily motivated by money, then when it comes down to a choice between helping someone and making money, you'll expect them to go after the money.
It doesn't necessarily make them "evil", but they wouldn't be someone that you would trust to do altruistic things for the public on their own initiative.
Another idea you might want to consider is a hard limit on spending. A Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, for instance, restricting the feds from spending more than they're getting in revenue.
Once the Congresscritters figure out that everyone else's pork will take _their_ pork away, you'd better believe they'll be fighting tooth & nail to slap down anyone who looks like they're getting more than their "fair" share.
Do you honestly believe that those two issues have caused more fundamental damage to the fabric of U.S. society than what has occurred while the neoconservatives (both Congressional & in the White House) have been in power?
The U.S. economy has long ago shaken off any effects from those policies.
We'll be struggling for decades with the financial, diplomatic and civil liberty effects of what the current crop of "leaders" have done.
Somebody on kuro5hin.org posted a really good FAQ of how feelings that cause stress (outrage, fear, anger, etc) can end up in clinical depression. I dug it up here.
The basic idea is that stuff which triggers adrenaline, will also slowly build up cortisol levels. Once your cortisol levels reach some threshhold (different for each individual), you'll become clinically depressed. Once you're clinically depressed, your ability to cope with normal life activities is greatly reduced, which causes more stress (and thus adrenaline), which prevents your cortisol levels from ever decreasing, thus trapping you in the clinical depression.
One of the interesting results about this viewpoint of depression was that, once you are experiencing clinical depression, any exercise that is vigorous enough to stimulate adrenaline will prevent you from going out of the depression (although it might make you feel good temporarily).
The only reason why Bush & Co. _wouldn't_ want to go through the secret court is because they don't want to leave a paper trail of who they chose to wiretap. Makes you wonder why.
Great advice! I've got to add that to the Wikipedia page on Wikipedia vandalism...
If you've already evaluated a set of arguments & found them lacking in reason, then it's a waste of your own time to continue to give credence to a group of people who keep repeating those arguments, no matter how fervently & honestly they deliver the argument.
In other words, sometimes the opponents _are_ "dipshit fundies", and the only rational course of action is to summarily dismiss them & their opinions.
Ah, so you _are_ advocating the completely annihilation of all of the civilians. It seems your conscience must be having a good vacation - I hope it will think about sending a postcard.
How do you propose dealing with the possibility that if Israel does such a thing, the one Muslim country which we are sure has a strong nuclear weapons & ballistic missiles program (Pakistan) might decide that they have to take preemptive action out of self-defense? Maybe we should nuke them too? They probably won't be able to get more than a dozen or so cities before we can glass'm.
I sincerely hope that if anyone with your attitude achieves a position of power, that they are promptly assassinated before they have a chance to make _any_ decision more complicated than deciding what pair of pants to wear.
Your post is even less "insightful" than the parent you are complaining about.
The war-time situation with Japan is completely irrelevant to the current situation, since that was a country-against-country war-time scenario, and serves only to point out your ignorance, or lack-of-conscience, about these matters.
How do you propose achieving the "total and complete annihilation of terrorists" without also completely annihilating the civilian population that they are hiding among? How do you plan on preventing NEW "terrorists" from being created due to the fear & rage such an action would spread through the target community? Kill them all, innocent and guilty?
It's not exactly good planning to assume that typical government incompetence will save your civil rights from governmental abuse.
People like this Minister will keep trying (and spending taxpayer money) until they get something that works "good enough".
The pretty & shiny ability of being able to get information on anyone anytime is just too attractive to control freaks like these types of guys.
Yeah, I understood what you were saying.
I just disagree that you want a testing spec. which is open to the people who are making the machine, since they might try and design something that will slip through the testing procedure.
The people who make the machines should have their own design spec., but they shouldn't have a clue as to how the machine is going to be tested.