Actually, the "best" (i.e. most efficient) solution for society would be to execute the unproductive members.
If you're thinking this way, then you'd get a _much_ better efficiency by executing the people who actually cause _damage_ to the society, i.e., the parasites who tend to be at the "top" who loot the society for all it's worth & return relatively minor benefits. Compared to them, the "unproductive" members of society are insignificant matters.
Got quite a few family members who use AOL, and they _ALL_ hit Google as soon as they need to search for something, bypassing the AOL default searching mechanism.
They like its simplicity and the fact that it's pretty good about giving them something close to what they were looking for, even with some of the weirdest keyword queries I've seen.
Anecdotal, I know, but don't rule out Google's mindshare even among the technically incompetent.
Whether you call that a "service" or "product" is rather irrelevant.
No it's not. Providing a service or providing a product are completely different business models. In the absence of IP laws, you would not be able to charge one customer more than once for a single piece of information - and if that customer is really cavalier about that information, then as you say, you probably won't be able to charge anyone else for that information either (since it would be spread around). In a situation like that, you would not be able to make a living by selling information in the same way that you would sell a product. You would have to make a living by selling your SERVICES as an information generator/gatherer, which is a different business model than selling information as a product.
Companies hire scientists in order to produce patentable information.
Companies hire scientists & engineers to help them develop products & services that will help them beat their competition. Companies which hire scientists & engineers only for the reason of generating patents are abusing the patent system, and represent a net drain on society (i.e., are like parasites).
You are proposing whiping out whatever is left of private-sector research (which is the majority - depending on one's field, the private sector hires 50-65% of PhDs and even higher fractions of BS/MS scientists).
That's your personal opinion. I've never seen a study which provides more than anecdotal evidence that the patent system actually encourages innovation, and almost everything I've read leads me to believe that the current implementation of the patent system is discouraging innovation by the scientists & engineers in THIS country and making it harder to compete with the overseas folks.
If the U.S. really wants their workforce to compete with the overseas folks, then we should deemphasize patents & should really be investing a LOT in locally-based publicly-funded & public-domain research & development. Not only will this encourage a lot of local kids to become scientists & engineers, but the results of such research will be seeds for a massive entrepreneurial push (since businesscritters are often not willing to invest in the upfront basic research, but are quite willing to take something that's already roughly developed & run with it).
I am a scientist. Why do people pay us for our work?
I'm a programmer. People pay me to write programs. Once I've written the program for them, however, I don't expect them to pay me every time they use the program. If I want to keep getting paid, then I have to keep writing programs.
You seem to have difficulty perceiving the results of your work as anything other than a product. Get over it. The true worth of your work is as a service. People who want your service will pay you for your service. As a scientist, you will have certain skills & attitudes that someone (hopefully) will find valuable. You use those skills to provide them with a desired service, they pay you, transaction done & everyone's happy. Expecting more than that is just getting greedy.
Of course, the current IP system is very entrenched and has powerful interests who want things to stay the way they are. If you are making extra bucks off such a system, then have fun. But don't pretend that you "deserve" that money.
Now when you go and try to sell that invention to someone, what's to prevent them from saying, "No thanks. We can make that for much less than you're trying to sell it for. But thanks for the idea and design."
If someone can duplicate the invention that easily at a glance, then it wasn't worth what you thought, no matter how much hard work you put into it. That's the way entrepreneurship goes, and to expect big payoffs just because you did a lot of hard work is being unrealistic.
In a similar manner, I'd be a fool to expect people to pay me a lot of money for breaking tons of rock into pebbles using a handheld sledgehammer, even though they would probably acknowledge that it was "hard work". If the market isn't willing to pay at the price you're selling, then your idea isn't worth that much no matter how much work you put into it.
It could also be argued that from a societal-benefit viewpoint, it is actually beneficial that a big entity exploit the best ideas, since they have the resources to make the benefits of such exploitation available to the society on a wider scale than an individual or small company would be able to. Of course, since innovative & risky ideas are often "seeded" at the small level, maximal societal benefit would truly occur if there is a societal mechanism for generating those seeds (publicly-funded R&D for example).
In any case, the current patent system seems to be doing more to prevent innovation than provide any sort of encouragement. Not a big surprise, since the fundamental nature of a patent is to prevent competition instead of encourage it. Patents should be phased out & some other method of encouraging innovation should be sought.
took a cue from the nurses' union, which complains of "understaffing" every time you turn around, so they can get more members.
Gee, and I thought the nurses might be feeling stressed out and worried that they might not be able to do their jobs properly because there aren't enough of them. I'm sure glad that there's an unbiased person like yourself to set me straight.
There has to be some way to protect intellectual effort
It's called payment for service. It works perfectly well and requires only limited government enforcement.
If you can't convince somebody to pay you a certain amount for an idea, then it wasn't really worth what you thought it was. That's the nature of a free market. Expecting to get paid more than what people are willing pay, or to keep control over the idea after revealing it, is greed and arrogance in action, respectively.
If the RIAA can prove she commited the crime a jury will convict her. It's that simple, it doesn't matter how many brats she has or if she has a vagina. If the RIAA can convince the jury they will convict her.
Not necessarily. If the RIAA representatives act like total buttheads and really piss most of the jury off, you can bet that the jury members will look for _any_ interpretation of the law, no matter how stretched, that will let them tell the RIAA to F-off.
Of course, most competent lawyers will at least make an attempt to be polite to the jury, so more often than not the jury will go along with whoever appears to be the authority figures. But it's not a 100% sure thing.
Doesn't it encourage the second inventor to develop an even better widget that doesn't infringe the patent of the first?
It more likely discourages the second inventor from inventing anything, since they probably blew a lot of their personal resources working on the concept & watched all their hard work get flushed down the tubes because somebody managed to file some paperwork faster. Even if they get another good idea (and have the resources to try again), how can they be reasonably sure that the same thing won't happen to them again without spending a ton of money just to check? In such a scenario, only wealthy individuals/organizations will continue to pursue patents, while the "poor inventor-who-might-make-it-big" (who patent supporters always bring up as a reason for supporting patents) will most likely become another working peon to pay the bills.
I have yet to see a solid and convincing argument to support the whole "patents hinder innovation" notion. All I've seen is people complaining about anecdotal cases where patents caused a problem for someone, and then people jumping to the conclusion that "patents hinder innovation." Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that people are less likely to innovate as a direct result of the existence of a patent?
Let's try modifying your paragraph like this: "I have yet to see a solid and convincing argument to support the whole 'patents encourage innovation' notion. All I've seen is people using anecdotal cases where a patent made someone rich, and then people jumping to the conclusion that 'patents encourage innovation.' Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that people are more likely to innovate as a direct result of the existence of a patent?" (Thanks for providing such an easily rewordable set of words.:-)
I'd argue that before we give private individuals the privilege of using government enforcement powers to limit competition, it is the burden of patent supporters to PROVE that such privileges will provide a net benefit to society. If they can't prove such a thing, then government policy should default to protecting normal free market behavior.
I'm pretty happy with the way we vote here in Oregon.
I'm an Oregonian too, and I like the convenience of vote-by-mail, but I'm not going to pretend that it is a safe way of voting. There is no way to make sure that someone isn't being intimidated or bribed into voting a certain way.
I'm leaning toward the opinion that there should be a national Voting Holiday so that everyone is encouraged to think about voting, and can take the time to arrange trips to the places where the local voting machines are available. I sometimes find it odd that people take Halloween more seriously than voting.
Explain to me the problem with a lever based voting machine. The ones that New York uses are quite tamper evident (nothing is tamper proof). All the Board of Elections does is read the counts off the machine. The machine itself does the counting and unless it was initally setup wrong (in a process that anybody can understand and witness if so desired) then it can not be tampered with.
If the voter can't validate what they voted for, then your lever-based voting machine is almost as flawed as any similar electronic system (albeit harder to organize a large-scale voting fix). The voter can't tell that what the machine is recording is how they intended to vote.
There's nothing wrong with using an electronic interface to generate the voting ballot (and there are a lot of advantages to do so), but the generated ballot had better be easily readable (and correctable) by the voter & the readable answers should be used directly by the counting process (to avoid the possible cheat of printing a code which counts differently than what the readable text says). If you generate your ballots like that, then you'll have a solid point to start counting the votes.
The counting process itself, of course, needs some kind of error-checking methodology to make it more difficult for malicious agents to modify the results without detection.
Unfortunately, neither the existing electronic machinery nor your lever-based voting machines provide the necessary voter protection.
If/when we have a long-term presence on the moon, this may be an issue. I suspect one easily solved by taking a quick shower in the airlock on your way back in.
I've also seen a suit design where you climb into your suit through a small airlock, so that the "outside" of the suit is never exposed on the inside of your living environment.
we get "normal" conditions for the vast majority of this planet's history.
Do "normal" conditions for the "vast majority of this planet's history" allow for comfortable living by us humans? As I recall, a big chunk of the planet's history included a time period where the atmosphere didn't contain much oxygen.
Geez, you just can't let go of a flawed idea can you?
Sure. But it's trivial to design the machine so that it's logic circuits aren't working even if the roms are powered.
You didn't read my response carefully - as I said, it would actually be _easier_ for the manufacturer to design their chips so that when the "logic circuits" weren't powered, then the chip would give the answers that the inspectors were expecting, and when the logic circuits were fully powered then they would behave differently.
Also, most modern circuit boards use Flash Memory modules instead of ROMs, and the Flash Memory module can be designed with custom logic circuitry as part of the chip. (Actually, custom ROM chips usually also have logic circuits onchip, although such circuitry usually only resolves bit addressing issues.) It would be quite simple to create a module which provides one set of data when accessed a certain way, and another set of data when accessed another way.
Where do you store the program if not on the roms which are being checked? Don't forget, that the original firmware has to be in the possession of whomever does the inspection. A strong enough (and proprietary) checksum calculator would make it impossible to change the programming afterwards.
Both the "illegal" program and the program that the inspectors are expecting would be on the same ROM/Flash, even in the original firmware. Almost all modern ROM/Flash modules would have plenty of space to store two sets of the data necessary to run a simplistic program like what would be necessary for a slot or voting machine.
The programming wouldn't have to be changed and no chips would have to be swapped, because the illegal program would already be there but would not be visible to the inspectors. The ROM chip would be designed to present one set of data when the inspectors tried to take a checksum, and to provide the other data when the machine was in actual use.
I will reiterate: there are practically an infinite number of ways that a shady manufacturer can create a design that your simple little checksum idea will not be able to catch. The inspectors must either be intimately involved with the design & manufacturing process, or they have to do a full reverse-engineering procedure on the machines to discover any trojans (_very_ time & resource intensive). A simple checksum is not sufficient to catch a crooked manufacturer. And what goes for slot machines goes even more so for voting machines.
Well, I don't have a big list which I can whip out on a moment's notice, but a little Google searching yields a URL that seems to list a number of recent-medium-term historical American voting events where it was fairly apparent that voter "buying" was occurring.
There were also many examples of voter intimidation in the South occurring when blacks were fighting for the right to vote.
No, most truly significant and important discoveries come from bright people.
Do you really think those "bright people" would have been able to accomplish what they did without support infrastructure? What resources did those bright people use to achieve their goals? Who gave them the equipment that they used? Where did they get educated? Did they use information provided by other "bright people"? Did they use any books from a library? What kind of mentors did they have?
Can you honestly say that those "bright people" would have been able to make those "truly significant and important discoveries" without a cooperative effort from everyone they depended on?
Don't gasp so hard. I know it's a novel idea in this day and age. Almost unthinkable.
That's because it doesn't work for any practical density of people.
The moment you get enough people together, sooner or later someone is going to disagree about "what's fair". Eventually, people will conclude that they need to write down "what's fair" in as unambiguous language as possible (putting aside the ridiculous obfuscation of the current legal language).
People will, of course, still argue about what that "unambiguous language" actually means. They will need some sort of abitration mechanism to try and clarify the meaning of "what's fair" in a manner that other people will understand.
Then someone else will decide that they don't want to play by "what's fair", whether it's written down and unambiguous or not. People will inevitably conclude that there needs to be some kind of enforcement mechanism to keep people-who-don't-follow-what's-fair from destroying the society.
And of course, often forgotten, is you need some kind of mechanism to make sure that elements of the other three mechanisms don't abuse their purposes for their own benefit.
I'm deliberately using the word "mechanism" to indicate that a strong central government isn't absolutely necessary to provide these societal services. If you can figure out some individual-based set of rules that implement these "mechanisms" in such a way to cause an overall stable society, then congratulations: you're a genius! You're going to have to be a little more specific than "if you get rid of government, people will automatically play fair" though, since that gets proven not to work quite frequently throughout world history.
The machine is switched off! The contents of the roms are read directly, and the circuit board is inspected for any tampering. It's not rocket surgery.
The diagnostic box has to provide power to get the data out of the firmware, right? There's nothing stopping the machine manufacturer from making sure their hardware provides fake results just for that scenario - heck, it would probably be easier for them to make the fake firmware show up whenever the overall machine didn't have any power, and use the real firmware when the machine was fully powered.
Simply doing a checksum on a box is a useless check. Imagine if you were in charge of QAing a piece of software, where you KNEW that the programmers might be trying to slip backdoors into the product (and for whatever reason you couldn't simply suggest firing the programmers:-). Do you think that you would be able to prevent those backdoors if you simply run the tests that those same programmers tell you will catch any shenanigans?
Both of those things are illegal and if some type of syndicate tried to do that to enough people to tip an election they would be busted under RICO or similar. If they could get away with it then the system is so flawed and corrupt that you may as well not bother to vote at all.
If you can get the people that you want for writing the laws, how long do you think will be before "RICO or similar" laws are eliminated or made gutless? There's a reason why electing legislators is so important.
And if you think the system is so flawed and corrupt that you don't want to vote at all, then you are just handing control of your life over to the ignorant & corrupt. It is better to try and figure out ways to make the system capable of self-correction and resistant to corruption. Starting with the voting systems is an absolutely required first step.
(What's really pathetic is that a lot of the paper voting systems evolved to be "corruption" resistant _because_ so much corruption was occurring during earlier versions of those systems - but now it seems like the current generation of election officials & legislators are either ignorant or willfully ignoring all of those lessons that were learned during those times. We've basically gone from a situation where we had a reasonable amount of confidence in our voting system to the point where we have to argue about the basic functionality necessary to implement such a system - most of which has been already worked out! It makes me wonder if the basic requirements of a "secure" voting system shouldn't be as important as any other of the structural requirements of the Constitution, so that it doesn't get weakened over time by well-meaning and/or corrupt legislators.
In my view, taking away the privacy of the vote only serves to give people BACK their power rather than take it away.
Your view has been proved wrong many times throughout voting history. If someone _can_ be coerced to vote a certain way, then inevitably there will be someone who will try and force them to vote a way they didn't want to. Anonymous voting is an absolute requirement for a corruption-resistant voting system.
At the very least people ought to be able to opt out of private ballots if they so choose.
That wouldn't be good. If you allow individuals to opt out of anonymous balloting, then they can be intimidated into or paid for showing how they voted to someone ("You'd better show us that you voted the 'right' way, or we'll break your kneecaps").
Making sure that the personal votes of individuals are anonymous is an absolute necessity to avoid coercion. There is no way around it.
There have been plenty of ways proposed to allow anonymous balloting while minimizing "fudge" factors, but the powers-that-be keep rejecting most of them either due to ignorance & laziness, cheapness or corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're thinking this way, then you'd get a _much_ better efficiency by executing the people who actually cause _damage_ to the society, i.e., the parasites who tend to be at the "top" who loot the society for all it's worth & return relatively minor benefits. Compared to them, the "unproductive" members of society are insignificant matters.
Got quite a few family members who use AOL, and they _ALL_ hit Google as soon as they need to search for something, bypassing the AOL default searching mechanism.
They like its simplicity and the fact that it's pretty good about giving them something close to what they were looking for, even with some of the weirdest keyword queries I've seen.
Anecdotal, I know, but don't rule out Google's mindshare even among the technically incompetent.
No it's not. Providing a service or providing a product are completely different business models. In the absence of IP laws, you would not be able to charge one customer more than once for a single piece of information - and if that customer is really cavalier about that information, then as you say, you probably won't be able to charge anyone else for that information either (since it would be spread around). In a situation like that, you would not be able to make a living by selling information in the same way that you would sell a product. You would have to make a living by selling your SERVICES as an information generator/gatherer, which is a different business model than selling information as a product.
Companies hire scientists & engineers to help them develop products & services that will help them beat their competition. Companies which hire scientists & engineers only for the reason of generating patents are abusing the patent system, and represent a net drain on society (i.e., are like parasites).
That's your personal opinion. I've never seen a study which provides more than anecdotal evidence that the patent system actually encourages innovation, and almost everything I've read leads me to believe that the current implementation of the patent system is discouraging innovation by the scientists & engineers in THIS country and making it harder to compete with the overseas folks.
If the U.S. really wants their workforce to compete with the overseas folks, then we should deemphasize patents & should really be investing a LOT in locally-based publicly-funded & public-domain research & development. Not only will this encourage a lot of local kids to become scientists & engineers, but the results of such research will be seeds for a massive entrepreneurial push (since businesscritters are often not willing to invest in the upfront basic research, but are quite willing to take something that's already roughly developed & run with it).
I'm a programmer. People pay me to write programs. Once I've written the program for them, however, I don't expect them to pay me every time they use the program. If I want to keep getting paid, then I have to keep writing programs.
You seem to have difficulty perceiving the results of your work as anything other than a product. Get over it. The true worth of your work is as a service. People who want your service will pay you for your service. As a scientist, you will have certain skills & attitudes that someone (hopefully) will find valuable. You use those skills to provide them with a desired service, they pay you, transaction done & everyone's happy. Expecting more than that is just getting greedy.
Of course, the current IP system is very entrenched and has powerful interests who want things to stay the way they are. If you are making extra bucks off such a system, then have fun. But don't pretend that you "deserve" that money.
If someone can duplicate the invention that easily at a glance, then it wasn't worth what you thought, no matter how much hard work you put into it. That's the way entrepreneurship goes, and to expect big payoffs just because you did a lot of hard work is being unrealistic.
In a similar manner, I'd be a fool to expect people to pay me a lot of money for breaking tons of rock into pebbles using a handheld sledgehammer, even though they would probably acknowledge that it was "hard work". If the market isn't willing to pay at the price you're selling, then your idea isn't worth that much no matter how much work you put into it.
It could also be argued that from a societal-benefit viewpoint, it is actually beneficial that a big entity exploit the best ideas, since they have the resources to make the benefits of such exploitation available to the society on a wider scale than an individual or small company would be able to. Of course, since innovative & risky ideas are often "seeded" at the small level, maximal societal benefit would truly occur if there is a societal mechanism for generating those seeds (publicly-funded R&D for example).
In any case, the current patent system seems to be doing more to prevent innovation than provide any sort of encouragement. Not a big surprise, since the fundamental nature of a patent is to prevent competition instead of encourage it. Patents should be phased out & some other method of encouraging innovation should be sought.
Gee, and I thought the nurses might be feeling stressed out and worried that they might not be able to do their jobs properly because there aren't enough of them. I'm sure glad that there's an unbiased person like yourself to set me straight.
It's called payment for service. It works perfectly well and requires only limited government enforcement.
If you can't convince somebody to pay you a certain amount for an idea, then it wasn't really worth what you thought it was. That's the nature of a free market. Expecting to get paid more than what people are willing pay, or to keep control over the idea after revealing it, is greed and arrogance in action, respectively.
Not necessarily. If the RIAA representatives act like total buttheads and really piss most of the jury off, you can bet that the jury members will look for _any_ interpretation of the law, no matter how stretched, that will let them tell the RIAA to F-off.
Of course, most competent lawyers will at least make an attempt to be polite to the jury, so more often than not the jury will go along with whoever appears to be the authority figures. But it's not a 100% sure thing.
It more likely discourages the second inventor from inventing anything, since they probably blew a lot of their personal resources working on the concept & watched all their hard work get flushed down the tubes because somebody managed to file some paperwork faster. Even if they get another good idea (and have the resources to try again), how can they be reasonably sure that the same thing won't happen to them again without spending a ton of money just to check? In such a scenario, only wealthy individuals/organizations will continue to pursue patents, while the "poor inventor-who-might-make-it-big" (who patent supporters always bring up as a reason for supporting patents) will most likely become another working peon to pay the bills.
Let's try modifying your paragraph like this: "I have yet to see a solid and convincing argument to support the whole 'patents encourage innovation' notion. All I've seen is people using anecdotal cases where a patent made someone rich, and then people jumping to the conclusion that 'patents encourage innovation.' Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that people are more likely to innovate as a direct result of the existence of a patent?" (Thanks for providing such an easily rewordable set of words. :-)
I'd argue that before we give private individuals the privilege of using government enforcement powers to limit competition, it is the burden of patent supporters to PROVE that such privileges will provide a net benefit to society. If they can't prove such a thing, then government policy should default to protecting normal free market behavior.
I wonder what it would do if you left the batteries on & drained the battery
Just need more voltage to arc across the blown fuse terminals, right?
Why yes, I do enjoy playing with Tesla coils. Why do you ask?
I'm an Oregonian too, and I like the convenience of vote-by-mail, but I'm not going to pretend that it is a safe way of voting. There is no way to make sure that someone isn't being intimidated or bribed into voting a certain way.
I'm leaning toward the opinion that there should be a national Voting Holiday so that everyone is encouraged to think about voting, and can take the time to arrange trips to the places where the local voting machines are available. I sometimes find it odd that people take Halloween more seriously than voting.
If the voter can't validate what they voted for, then your lever-based voting machine is almost as flawed as any similar electronic system (albeit harder to organize a large-scale voting fix). The voter can't tell that what the machine is recording is how they intended to vote.
There's nothing wrong with using an electronic interface to generate the voting ballot (and there are a lot of advantages to do so), but the generated ballot had better be easily readable (and correctable) by the voter & the readable answers should be used directly by the counting process (to avoid the possible cheat of printing a code which counts differently than what the readable text says). If you generate your ballots like that, then you'll have a solid point to start counting the votes.
The counting process itself, of course, needs some kind of error-checking methodology to make it more difficult for malicious agents to modify the results without detection.
Unfortunately, neither the existing electronic machinery nor your lever-based voting machines provide the necessary voter protection.
I suppose as long as the "War on Drugs" is politically useful, it will be impossible to grow one of the more useful biodiesel-sources: hemp.
I've also seen a suit design where you climb into your suit through a small airlock, so that the "outside" of the suit is never exposed on the inside of your living environment.
Do "normal" conditions for the "vast majority of this planet's history" allow for comfortable living by us humans? As I recall, a big chunk of the planet's history included a time period where the atmosphere didn't contain much oxygen.
Geez, you just can't let go of a flawed idea can you?
You didn't read my response carefully - as I said, it would actually be _easier_ for the manufacturer to design their chips so that when the "logic circuits" weren't powered, then the chip would give the answers that the inspectors were expecting, and when the logic circuits were fully powered then they would behave differently.
Also, most modern circuit boards use Flash Memory modules instead of ROMs, and the Flash Memory module can be designed with custom logic circuitry as part of the chip. (Actually, custom ROM chips usually also have logic circuits onchip, although such circuitry usually only resolves bit addressing issues.) It would be quite simple to create a module which provides one set of data when accessed a certain way, and another set of data when accessed another way.
Both the "illegal" program and the program that the inspectors are expecting would be on the same ROM/Flash, even in the original firmware. Almost all modern ROM/Flash modules would have plenty of space to store two sets of the data necessary to run a simplistic program like what would be necessary for a slot or voting machine.
The programming wouldn't have to be changed and no chips would have to be swapped, because the illegal program would already be there but would not be visible to the inspectors. The ROM chip would be designed to present one set of data when the inspectors tried to take a checksum, and to provide the other data when the machine was in actual use.
I will reiterate: there are practically an infinite number of ways that a shady manufacturer can create a design that your simple little checksum idea will not be able to catch. The inspectors must either be intimately involved with the design & manufacturing process, or they have to do a full reverse-engineering procedure on the machines to discover any trojans (_very_ time & resource intensive). A simple checksum is not sufficient to catch a crooked manufacturer. And what goes for slot machines goes even more so for voting machines.
Then software developers will have to compete on service, rather than artificially-mandated productisation.
Well, I don't have a big list which I can whip out on a moment's notice, but a little Google searching yields a URL that seems to list a number of recent-medium-term historical American voting events where it was fairly apparent that voter "buying" was occurring.
There were also many examples of voter intimidation in the South occurring when blacks were fighting for the right to vote.
Bummer, I was hoping you'd be able to back up your viewpoint with more than just a bunch of stupid meaningless phrases. I guess I've been trolled.
Do you really think those "bright people" would have been able to accomplish what they did without support infrastructure? What resources did those bright people use to achieve their goals? Who gave them the equipment that they used? Where did they get educated? Did they use information provided by other "bright people"? Did they use any books from a library? What kind of mentors did they have?
Can you honestly say that those "bright people" would have been able to make those "truly significant and important discoveries" without a cooperative effort from everyone they depended on?
That's because it doesn't work for any practical density of people.
The moment you get enough people together, sooner or later someone is going to disagree about "what's fair". Eventually, people will conclude that they need to write down "what's fair" in as unambiguous language as possible (putting aside the ridiculous obfuscation of the current legal language).
People will, of course, still argue about what that "unambiguous language" actually means. They will need some sort of abitration mechanism to try and clarify the meaning of "what's fair" in a manner that other people will understand.
Then someone else will decide that they don't want to play by "what's fair", whether it's written down and unambiguous or not. People will inevitably conclude that there needs to be some kind of enforcement mechanism to keep people-who-don't-follow-what's-fair from destroying the society.
And of course, often forgotten, is you need some kind of mechanism to make sure that elements of the other three mechanisms don't abuse their purposes for their own benefit.
I'm deliberately using the word "mechanism" to indicate that a strong central government isn't absolutely necessary to provide these societal services. If you can figure out some individual-based set of rules that implement these "mechanisms" in such a way to cause an overall stable society, then congratulations: you're a genius! You're going to have to be a little more specific than "if you get rid of government, people will automatically play fair" though, since that gets proven not to work quite frequently throughout world history.
The diagnostic box has to provide power to get the data out of the firmware, right? There's nothing stopping the machine manufacturer from making sure their hardware provides fake results just for that scenario - heck, it would probably be easier for them to make the fake firmware show up whenever the overall machine didn't have any power, and use the real firmware when the machine was fully powered.
Simply doing a checksum on a box is a useless check. Imagine if you were in charge of QAing a piece of software, where you KNEW that the programmers might be trying to slip backdoors into the product (and for whatever reason you couldn't simply suggest firing the programmers :-). Do you think that you would be able to prevent those backdoors if you simply run the tests that those same programmers tell you will catch any shenanigans?
If you can get the people that you want for writing the laws, how long do you think will be before "RICO or similar" laws are eliminated or made gutless? There's a reason why electing legislators is so important.
And if you think the system is so flawed and corrupt that you don't want to vote at all, then you are just handing control of your life over to the ignorant & corrupt. It is better to try and figure out ways to make the system capable of self-correction and resistant to corruption. Starting with the voting systems is an absolutely required first step.
(What's really pathetic is that a lot of the paper voting systems evolved to be "corruption" resistant _because_ so much corruption was occurring during earlier versions of those systems - but now it seems like the current generation of election officials & legislators are either ignorant or willfully ignoring all of those lessons that were learned during those times. We've basically gone from a situation where we had a reasonable amount of confidence in our voting system to the point where we have to argue about the basic functionality necessary to implement such a system - most of which has been already worked out! It makes me wonder if the basic requirements of a "secure" voting system shouldn't be as important as any other of the structural requirements of the Constitution, so that it doesn't get weakened over time by well-meaning and/or corrupt legislators.
Your view has been proved wrong many times throughout voting history. If someone _can_ be coerced to vote a certain way, then inevitably there will be someone who will try and force them to vote a way they didn't want to. Anonymous voting is an absolute requirement for a corruption-resistant voting system.
That wouldn't be good. If you allow individuals to opt out of anonymous balloting, then they can be intimidated into or paid for showing how they voted to someone ("You'd better show us that you voted the 'right' way, or we'll break your kneecaps").
Making sure that the personal votes of individuals are anonymous is an absolute necessity to avoid coercion. There is no way around it.
There have been plenty of ways proposed to allow anonymous balloting while minimizing "fudge" factors, but the powers-that-be keep rejecting most of them either due to ignorance & laziness, cheapness or corruption.