"I'm not saying it's impossible within SMTP. Or what is your intended point?"
My intended point is that by using the SMT protocol I'm not "basically [...] accepting that the email will be transmitted in the clear": there are known and not difficult to use protocols that are specifically designed to cypher point-to-point e-mail messages.
"They are there to replace old business processes. Replace, i.e. put new ones in their place, not replicate as in build a verbatim copy of what was there before."
Please have a look to some dictionary and look after differences between "processes" and "procedures". Surely, just too many times an ERP implatantion is seen as a good chance to substitute older processes thought to be faulty with new ones (which, by the way, tend to be no better); after all, we are going to change procedures, so it seems a good chance to try to make processes better. That's always a failure.
"it's that they've tried to replicate the old system not just in its overall results but step by step and word for word."
Usually a clear symtopmt of exactly what I was saying. Just too many times those bad processes are rooted on bad management. Trying to "micromanage" -in this case the procedures of the tool, is just a result, not the cause, then the failure.
"I haven't yet seen a convincing argument as to the why."
That's because there's no argument to give. Privacy is the naturale state of things: you usually don't know anything about me. Then it is the one that breaks such a 'statu quo' the one that needs to convincingly argument about their intentions. I need no other "convincing argument" for my privacy than "such is my mood".
"And what if the email is transmitted in the clear and passes by someone with a packet sniffer?"
I own my computer and I access e-mail (once on its mailbox) via secure protocols like IMAPS and/or HTTPS. Of course that doesn't cope with the MTA to MTA transmission which is usually in the clear.
But then, that's what PGP/GPG is for.
"Though I can't prove it, I'm pretty sure that the email is stored in the clear on Gmail's servers"
That's pretty irrelevant. It's obvious that the end user is doing nothing to decypher e-mail on their side, so no matter how it is stored, Gmail is more than able to decypher it so it would someone that owned one of their (related to email) boxes.
"What people seem to forget is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are there to replace the old business processes"
What people seem to forget, specially ERP consultors, is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are sure there *NOT* to replace the old bussiness processes. Think it that way and the project is DOOMED. ERP is there to make your *current* bussiness process faster, cheaper and more controllable. Nothing more (but nothing less). Gold rule in IT: never change two things at a time.
"So introduction of an ERP is equivalent to a complete reorganisation of the company, or it is wasted money."
When introduction of an ERP is equivalent to a complete reorganisation of the company *is* wasted money. 100 times out of 100. And yes, I'm completly aware that to be the case just so many times. No wonder how many times ERP implantations are such big fiascos.
"I've diagnosed several errors down to a specific bug in a specific application, but there isn't a damned thing that editing a plain text config file is going to fix when the program is tripping over its own feet."
Then you'd be done on privative software for windows. But on open source software for Linux there's still one more step you can walk.
"if I've spent a year picking this and that out of yast and installing it"
You'd do `rpm -qa > myinstalls.txt` and so you'd get a complete list of packages installed on your system.
"And what about stuff that I've compiled from source"
It's all on its own partition,/usr/local, just as/home is.
"You'll probably also re-image with a new version"
The first trick will work all the same; it's only it will install current versions of your cherry-picked programs too. About your locally compiled programs, that's true, they *may* break after an upgrade, but they'd break after *any* upgrade, not only because you lost your system. I you do really care, just take care about your install CD just like you'd do about your Windows 95 one; they will install the very same version then and problem vanished.
"you'll probably spend forever chasing dependencies down again"
Dependencies will be provided either by packages, and then you'll already have the complete list the way I already explained, or they'll come from source packages you downloaded too, so they'll be under/usr/local and won't be weeped out.
"The bits of your linux installation that you'll want to save aren't confined solely to/home, they're buried all over the place."
Sorry but that's WROOOOOOONG. There's the FSH that will solidly tell you what your "all over the place" comes down in reality. I'll tell you one secret: no matter what your distribution is you are safe by backing up the following items: 1) Your package list 2)/etc 3)/home 4)/var/lib 5)/opt 6)/usr/local
That's all. Print it down if you don't find yourself able to remember it.
"It isn't if you're installing something from the repository."
Are you somehow arguing that installing a program not packaged for Windows on Windows is somehow easier than installing a program not packaged for Ubuntu on Ubuntu?
"Installing an new XP from a shrink box is a long complex process"
You can be damn sure. Just this morning a junior tech was trying to install XP SP2 on a computer. He came to me because he thought the SATA hard disk was fried. I pointed out that BIOS start messages showed it properly; then he told me the problem was that XP install just hanged. I told him, "just take the netinstall CD from Debian and run it to the point it offers to partition the hard disk and we'll see" and I returned to my stuff. 25 minutes later the boy came to tell me Debian was perfectly installed in the system, with GUI and all; just few "ENTER" keystrokes (I don't remember but I think five keystrokes will do it). It seems that somehow the SATA chipset is not of the likes of the Windows XP SP2 install CD; I let the junior to find his way out of the mess; we'll see.
"if you are running RED hat you can guarentee that the software you really want is packed for Debian, if you are running Suse its incredibly frustrating when the latest greatest version of whatever is only available at Ubuntu. How hard would it be to get a unified package management system?"
If you are running Ubuntu you can guarantee that the software you really want is packed for Windows. How hard would it be for Microsoft to get along everybody else and get a unified program system?
"It'll never work because nobody is going to want to put information in MS's database."
By "nobody" you mean that neither the American Heart Association nor Johnson & Johnson LifeScan nor NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital nor the Mayo Clinic or MedStar Health will do it, isn't it?
"The only reasonably secure way to have an Electronic Medical record is to have a standard format and an encrypted smart card that the patient owns, with a duplicate maintained at the patient's primary physician. Some sort of emergency override would have to be implemented to allow for unconsciousness of the patient, etc."
Just to be clear: what you are proposing is "in order for you data to be secure we'll go a long path to be really sure only *you* can access your data. But then, we are going to provide a very big backdoor to the system so almost anyone can have a look at it in hurry -and then we'll hope nobody will dare to misuse the backdoor"?
"The server referenced is not connected to the internet in any way, only the local LAN"
Except that somewhere, within the LAN, someone took 150000 health records out to a pendrive because he's working long hours for his PhD and loading them in his home PC.
Except that somewhere, within the LAN, someone a bit over mid-management looking for ways to outsmart those silly computer guys and their stupid web proxy attached one of those modems to his phone line and now he can freely surf the web.
"That's not leadership. It's not solid decision making. It's a lack of interest in taking responsibility"
I think Linus should read this and he, of course, would find it very agreeable since that's *exactly* how he defines his leadership model.
You can read it here (http://lwn.net/Articles/105375/), if you don't believe me.
Just look at its very first paragraph:
"Everybody thinks managers make decisions, and that decision-making is important. The bigger and more painful the decision, the bigger the manager must be to make it. That's very deep and obvious, but it's not actually true. The name of the game is to _avoid_ having to make a decision. (...)"
Now, you can agree with his managerial style or not. Linus Torvalds provides the Linux kernel as an achievement of his managerial style, what will provide Mr. ShieldW0lf to counterargument?
Well, quite an interesting briefing, I should admit, which adds light to my knowledge about the issue. I think that it can be reduce to two points: 1) There's a lot of work for a single voting day (three to six elections can be concurrent). 2) You allow mass media to control to most notorious exercise of democracy.
I think the other issues can be disregarded, since they are either "peanuts" (i.e. having a school board election is a local issue so big mass media is not interested and we are talking about a limited number of voters anyway; even if they concur, I'd say it'd be good enough to process, say, presidentials and senatorial votes first, and then everything else), or are properly managed anywhere else (do you think 10 parties is a mess? Try any european democracy! you will find parties by the dozens).
I already talked about it in a different message, but I'll sumarize again it here: when european representatives are elected it usually concurs too on a day where you have presidentials on at least some countries, and probably local majors and some state-level elections too so you end up sometimes with at least four items to vote for. Since we are talking about a population roughly the same than at USA, I'd say we are talking cualitatively more or less the same, but we manage to count the votes by hand, we usually have no less than 80% results by midnight, 100% by the morning and official results next day and it seems the process doesn't rise the kind of problems seen on the USA. Food for mind, I'd say.
So in the end, the problem in the USA is twofold: 1) Why the heck the country of the liberties allow for mass media big corps to control the election day? It seems quite counterproductive to announce east coast results when polls are still open on west coast? I don't buy your assertion about "people want results ASAP" but I see is CNN and the likes the ones that want results ASAP. And even then, I know that in EU, even with dozen of parties and three or four electoral process concurring, counting by hand doesn't take so much than your mechanical methods (I know my president in no more time than it takes to know yours... in fact much less in your two last presidentials). Well, I admit everything is a little easier from the press point of fiew in EU since we are only three hours apart from east to west instead of six. 2) Your method of "the winner takes all" for presidentials at the state level means that even if there are 100.000.000 of voters, all the show can come down to a short bunch of geographically agregated votes (like those from Florida in last two presidentials) so even a minimal margin for fraud (like about five counties in the whole USA) can make an enormous difference (on a non-geographycally bound electorial process of course you can get a winner by a single vote, but then you won't know it in advance and it makes one-by-one precinct fraud procedures almost absolutly irrelevant). But then it clearly works *against* any centrally controlled counting procedures ("centrally" meaning here things like all ballots going to single point to be processed, or a single vendor producing voting machines). I don't think there's a valid software-based voting procedure yet, and specially those based or including a voting receipt which are basically flawed by design by the very begining, but even then, it would be easy to apply some on those methods in old Europe than in USA.
In the end, I think that the "problem" is basically a made up one: mass media looking for something controversial to talk about (it brings money to them, be it Irak war, sexual tendencies of somebody relevant or the election process), and vested interest from some big corps that would be delighted if they got the monopoly for tens of thousand voting machines to be sold (not to talk about the tremendous influence they'd get if only other big corps think that influencing the voting machine vendors can mean influencing the voting output).
"Treating ballot observing like jury duty is one of the best ideas I've heard. However, if you are paranoid, you might wonder if ballot observers were still somehow planted"
That's why you use *all* of them. On each box you have a representative from party A and a representative from party B. In theory that would be enough, since party A and party B representatives cover all the interested parties. But since those representatives might be known in advance and could be bought/blackmailed, etc. you add another random probably unbiased observer (not that she will be really unbiased, but since she doesn't know nor is she known by the other observers chances for the whole lot of observers to be coalligated are almost nihil) to the process. Then they count by hand all the ballots, and you avoid marking on the papers: if it's about Bush and Kerry, you will have a paper meaning "I go with Bush" and a different one for Kerry (this way you avoid the problem of "but the cross is a bit out of the square" or "the punch is not in the center of the line" by the time you count them). This process is the one used for EU representatives (and EU's population is roughly the same than USA's) and all the votes are counted by hand in as less as four/five hours.
But your observation diservers another thought: when you say "Treating ballot observing like jury duty is one of the best ideas I've heard" I think you imply "...and I never heard about it before". Since this is (and has been) common practice in "the civilized world" for ages, and i.e. european citizens seem to agree about their voting process to work OK (there're, of course, other problems, but not this) maybe the solution for the USA goes not so much by researching about Diebold machines being good or bad but just avoiding reinventing the wheel and seeing if something can be learnt from other countries' experiencies.
"If paper ballots are counted by an automated process tampering with the automated process can be just as effective"
Of course yes. That's why you don't want any single entity (specially an amoral one) to count the ballots. That's why you have representatives of the candidates counting the ballots, because they are vestedly interested in their share to be counted at least as big as it is if not bigger (this being true for all the parties the end result is that all parties are counted for as much votes as they get but not more).
I probably don't understand in its enterity the voting system of the USA but what I don't really understand is what the problem is with just manually counting all the f* ballots! It is a highly parallelizable task which means it really doesn't matter if we are talking about 10.000 or 100.000.000 votes; just allow for about 1000 to 5000 votes for voting box and as many voting boxes as needed and you will be done in about two/three hours from the closing of the last voting box.
" The result of our proportional representation system is fragmentation of votes over many different parties, and no clear winner of the elections."
Don't think this is a disadvantage. That means that government if so much about wider representation, consensus and middle grounds.
"As a result we always have colalition governments, which means that a party can basically promise everything during campaign, then drop that promise during coalition negotiations or later"
But the promises that will tend to "fall off" will be those which rise less consensus which, again, is quite a good thing. On the other hand, you are free not to vote those parties that tend to forget too much about their campaign promises (well, if only voters didn't have such a fishy memory...)
And then, someone can "kindly" ask him for... a) In fact keep it b) Reveal his vote from it.
This only is more than enough for the system to be utterly broken but then it's only a minor nuisance compared to the *real* problem which is, of course, that somewhere there's a pairing about what voted who or else there would be no way for the voter himself to recover what did he vote from the system (at the very least, the holder of the vote coded with the key xyz voted A; the voter with the xyz code voted on the machine X at 11:30 AM; at 11:30 on the machine X voted John Doe -or else, nothing would avoid John Doe to vote a dozen times). Of course you can claim that the pairing is one-way... unless of course, someone was toying with the only single place (one point of failure anyone?) that holds the (presumably) one-way algorithm, or just was playing the Man In The Middle game when the voter was tracking his ballot in the web... I'll on purpouse will trigger the Godwing Law by saying a Hitler-like character would be enchanted with such a system... not only because it so dangerous but because is utterly stupid too!
Why the hell would you want to recheck what did you voted? Bad memory? On one hand you already know what did you vote, it is knowing what everybody else but you voted (or at the very least that the sume of the votes of everybody else is correct) what's interesting; on the other, you still have *NO* warranty that what the "recovering machine" is showing as your registered vote is in fact registered as such anywhere else but at the "recovering machine" screen.
So even while you thougth your system to be very cute and untamperable all you really did was giving a very interesting list of names to the Hitler-do-jour about who voted the "Jew Party" without giving you not the slightest clue that the published results "Jew party: 1 vote, Arial Party: 70.000.000 votes" where in fact a little bit misleading.
"I guarantee it's harder to cheat a current vegas slot machine than the old-school paper voting systems."
That's because all parties with a saying share the same point of view (Las Vegas tycoons have a vested interest for their slot machines not to be broken into; slot machine builders could try to cheat Las Vegas tycoons, but since they are not the ones that take the money out of them, they lack the chance and even with the chance, they could be a bit of worried about their reputation and having a sorry end buried in the middle of Nevada desert).
Now, let Las Vegas tycoons have a hand on voting machines and expect the end of the bipartidism and the rise of the LVGP (Las Vegas Gambling Party) to the White House.
"The point is no matter what kind of system there is you have to trust the people running it."
What about *not* trusting them? What's the problem? You only need to trust your own observer but, of course, you won't trust the observers from the other parties, that's why you won't take out your eye from them.
By the way, that's exactly how the system goes in the rest of the world. In the USA it would be even easier since you only have two parties (for presidentials). Say party A and B present candidates on circumnscription X, then party A and B present an observer and the public government sends another one randomly chosen (like people on a jury). All of them watch for everbody else all the time and the ballot box never goes out from public view. At the end of the day, the precinct box is broken and the public observer counts the votes in presence of all the other observers. The total count must match the registered number of voters for that box; all the observers must agree on the votes that go to each candidate. Then they phone and/or send the paper resuming the results to the central agency (which eventually will be made public so every observer can recheck that published records are in accordance with their counting) and... that's basically all: simple, fast, protects the rights of the voters and it's extremely difficult to tamper. What's the problem with this? What's the problem the electronic voting machines try to solve?
"1) Again, requiring your voting information can be made illegal. 2) Make a detachable part or a separate receipt to prove you voted or hash the information. For the "abstention crowd"... vote no one. You still get a receipt.
I like #2 - how many people leave early to vote and go home for a beer instead? I know more than one or two. Accountability for your actions is something i'm a big fan of.
And once again, I never argued that we NEED receipts. I'm arguing that it's not going to destroy the voting process."
As long as for the receipts themselves, I don't know how it works in USA, but in other countries you already can ask for them ("John Doe was voting here at 11:30 AM" and an official stamp). Now, if there's some tracking about what did you vote, that's not a receipt and, sorry, such a design is basically flawed beyond salvation and, yes, it'd destroy the voting process or, to be more precise, its meaning: preserving democracy. It's as simply basic as this: you CAN'T leave an audit trail about who voted what and preserve democracy. You might think you found a cute method for this but you'd be as wrong as if you though that you found a cute method for a perpetual movement machine.
"Humans managed to survive just fine for hundreds of thousands of years without the organization of a civil state."
Well, if you think that living about 20 years serving for predators meal is "just fine" then, yes, you are right.
"If anything, the extremely hierarchical organization of civilization seems to bring out the worst in people."
Yeah, well... I can envision The Illiad, Sixtine Chapel or reaching the Moon as the output of our 10.000 years ago ancestors. Or is it that our "extremely hierarchical organization of civilization" brings out *both* the worst and the best in people, that is, it *empowers* people?
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm not saying it's impossible within SMTP. Or what is your intended point?"
My intended point is that by using the SMT protocol I'm not "basically [...] accepting that the email will be transmitted in the clear": there are known and not difficult to use protocols that are specifically designed to cypher point-to-point e-mail messages.
"They are there to replace old business processes. Replace, i.e. put new ones in their place, not replicate as in build a verbatim copy of what was there before."
Please have a look to some dictionary and look after differences between "processes" and "procedures". Surely, just too many times an ERP implatantion is seen as a good chance to substitute older processes thought to be faulty with new ones (which, by the way, tend to be no better); after all, we are going to change procedures, so it seems a good chance to try to make processes better. That's always a failure.
"it's that they've tried to replicate the old system not just in its overall results but step by step and word for word."
Usually a clear symtopmt of exactly what I was saying. Just too many times those bad processes are rooted on bad management. Trying to "micromanage" -in this case the procedures of the tool, is just a result, not the cause, then the failure.
"Basically if you agree to use SMTP you are accepting that the email will be transmitted in the clear."
Which part of "that's what PGP/GPG (or S/MIME) is for" didn't you understand?
"I haven't yet seen a convincing argument as to the why."
That's because there's no argument to give. Privacy is the naturale state of things: you usually don't know anything about me. Then it is the one that breaks such a 'statu quo' the one that needs to convincingly argument about their intentions. I need no other "convincing argument" for my privacy than "such is my mood".
"But this gets back to the other problem of accesibility. I like being able to check my email from home, work, or anywhere."
Then you could have a fixed-IP xDSL connection and manage you own mail server/webmail, not that it is such a "geeky" task.
"And what if the email is transmitted in the clear and passes by someone with a packet sniffer?"
I own my computer and I access e-mail (once on its mailbox) via secure protocols like IMAPS and/or HTTPS.
Of course that doesn't cope with the MTA to MTA transmission which is usually in the clear.
But then, that's what PGP/GPG is for.
"Though I can't prove it, I'm pretty sure that the email is stored in the clear on Gmail's servers"
That's pretty irrelevant. It's obvious that the end user is doing nothing to decypher e-mail on their side, so no matter how it is stored, Gmail is more than able to decypher it so it would someone that owned one of their (related to email) boxes.
"What people seem to forget is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are there to replace the old business processes"
What people seem to forget, specially ERP consultors, is the realisation why you have ERPs in the first place: They are sure there *NOT* to replace the old bussiness processes. Think it that way and the project is DOOMED. ERP is there to make your *current* bussiness process faster, cheaper and more controllable. Nothing more (but nothing less). Gold rule in IT: never change two things at a time.
"So introduction of an ERP is equivalent to a complete reorganisation of the company, or it is wasted money."
When introduction of an ERP is equivalent to a complete reorganisation of the company *is* wasted money. 100 times out of 100. And yes, I'm completly aware that to be the case just so many times. No wonder how many times ERP implantations are such big fiascos.
"I've diagnosed several errors down to a specific bug in a specific application, but there isn't a damned thing that editing a plain text config file is going to fix when the program is tripping over its own feet."
Then you'd be done on privative software for windows. But on open source software for Linux there's still one more step you can walk.
Use the source, Luke.
"if I've spent a year picking this and that out of yast and installing it"
/usr/local, just as /home is.
/usr/local and won't be weeped out.
/home, they're buried all over the place."
/etc /home /var/lib /opt /usr/local
You'd do `rpm -qa > myinstalls.txt` and so you'd get a complete list of packages installed on your system.
"And what about stuff that I've compiled from source"
It's all on its own partition,
"You'll probably also re-image with a new version"
The first trick will work all the same; it's only it will install current versions of your cherry-picked programs too. About your locally compiled programs, that's true, they *may* break after an upgrade, but they'd break after *any* upgrade, not only because you lost your system. I you do really care, just take care about your install CD just like you'd do about your Windows 95 one; they will install the very same version then and problem vanished.
"you'll probably spend forever chasing dependencies down again"
Dependencies will be provided either by packages, and then you'll already have the complete list the way I already explained, or they'll come from source packages you downloaded too, so they'll be under
"The bits of your linux installation that you'll want to save aren't confined solely to
Sorry but that's WROOOOOOONG. There's the FSH that will solidly tell you what your "all over the place" comes down in reality. I'll tell you one secret: no matter what your distribution is you are safe by backing up the following items:
1) Your package list
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
That's all. Print it down if you don't find yourself able to remember it.
"It isn't if you're installing something from the repository."
Are you somehow arguing that installing a program not packaged for Windows on Windows is somehow easier than installing a program not packaged for Ubuntu on Ubuntu?
Sorry, but I must disent.
"Installing an new XP from a shrink box is a long complex process"
You can be damn sure. Just this morning a junior tech was trying to install XP SP2 on a computer. He came to me because he thought the SATA hard disk was fried. I pointed out that BIOS start messages showed it properly; then he told me the problem was that XP install just hanged. I told him, "just take the netinstall CD from Debian and run it to the point it offers to partition the hard disk and we'll see" and I returned to my stuff. 25 minutes later the boy came to tell me Debian was perfectly installed in the system, with GUI and all; just few "ENTER" keystrokes (I don't remember but I think five keystrokes will do it). It seems that somehow the SATA chipset is not of the likes of the Windows XP SP2 install CD; I let the junior to find his way out of the mess; we'll see.
"if you are running RED hat you can guarentee that the software you really want is packed for Debian, if you are running Suse its incredibly frustrating when the latest greatest version of whatever is only available at Ubuntu. How hard would it be to get a unified package management system?"
If you are running Ubuntu you can guarantee that the software you really want is packed for Windows. How hard would it be for Microsoft to get along everybody else and get a unified program system?
"It'll never work because nobody is going to want to put information in MS's database."
By "nobody" you mean that neither the American Heart Association nor Johnson & Johnson LifeScan nor NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital nor the Mayo Clinic or MedStar Health will do it, isn't it?
"The only reasonably secure way to have an Electronic Medical record is to have a standard format and an encrypted smart card that the patient owns, with a duplicate maintained at the patient's primary physician. Some sort of emergency override would have to be implemented to allow for unconsciousness of the patient, etc."
Just to be clear: what you are proposing is "in order for you data to be secure we'll go a long path to be really sure only *you* can access your data. But then, we are going to provide a very big backdoor to the system so almost anyone can have a look at it in hurry -and then we'll hope nobody will dare to misuse the backdoor"?
"The server referenced is not connected to the internet in any way, only the local LAN"
Except that somewhere, within the LAN, someone took 150000 health records out to a pendrive because he's working long hours for his PhD and loading them in his home PC.
Except that somewhere, within the LAN, someone a bit over mid-management looking for ways to outsmart those silly computer guys and their stupid web proxy attached one of those modems to his phone line and now he can freely surf the web.
Except that...
"That's not leadership. It's not solid decision making. It's a lack of interest in taking responsibility"
I think Linus should read this and he, of course, would find it very agreeable since that's *exactly* how he defines his leadership model.
You can read it here (http://lwn.net/Articles/105375/), if you don't believe me.
Just look at its very first paragraph:
"Everybody thinks managers make decisions, and that decision-making is important. The bigger and more painful the decision, the bigger the manager must be to make it. That's very deep and obvious, but it's not actually true.
The name of the game is to _avoid_ having to make a decision. (...)"
Now, you can agree with his managerial style or not. Linus Torvalds provides the Linux kernel as an achievement of his managerial style, what will provide Mr. ShieldW0lf to counterargument?
Well, quite an interesting briefing, I should admit, which adds light to my knowledge about the issue. I think that it can be reduce to two points:
1) There's a lot of work for a single voting day (three to six elections can be concurrent).
2) You allow mass media to control to most notorious exercise of democracy.
I think the other issues can be disregarded, since they are either "peanuts" (i.e. having a school board election is a local issue so big mass media is not interested and we are talking about a limited number of voters anyway; even if they concur, I'd say it'd be good enough to process, say, presidentials and senatorial votes first, and then everything else), or are properly managed anywhere else (do you think 10 parties is a mess? Try any european democracy! you will find parties by the dozens).
I already talked about it in a different message, but I'll sumarize again it here: when european representatives are elected it usually concurs too on a day where you have presidentials on at least some countries, and probably local majors and some state-level elections too so you end up sometimes with at least four items to vote for. Since we are talking about a population roughly the same than at USA, I'd say we are talking cualitatively more or less the same, but we manage to count the votes by hand, we usually have no less than 80% results by midnight, 100% by the morning and official results next day and it seems the process doesn't rise the kind of problems seen on the USA. Food for mind, I'd say.
So in the end, the problem in the USA is twofold:
1) Why the heck the country of the liberties allow for mass media big corps to control the election day? It seems quite counterproductive to announce east coast results when polls are still open on west coast? I don't buy your assertion about "people want results ASAP" but I see is CNN and the likes the ones that want results ASAP. And even then, I know that in EU, even with dozen of parties and three or four electoral process concurring, counting by hand doesn't take so much than your mechanical methods (I know my president in no more time than it takes to know yours... in fact much less in your two last presidentials). Well, I admit everything is a little easier from the press point of fiew in EU since we are only three hours apart from east to west instead of six.
2) Your method of "the winner takes all" for presidentials at the state level means that even if there are 100.000.000 of voters, all the show can come down to a short bunch of geographically agregated votes (like those from Florida in last two presidentials) so even a minimal margin for fraud (like about five counties in the whole USA) can make an enormous difference (on a non-geographycally bound electorial process of course you can get a winner by a single vote, but then you won't know it in advance and it makes one-by-one precinct fraud procedures almost absolutly irrelevant). But then it clearly works *against* any centrally controlled counting procedures ("centrally" meaning here things like all ballots going to single point to be processed, or a single vendor producing voting machines). I don't think there's a valid software-based voting procedure yet, and specially those based or including a voting receipt which are basically flawed by design by the very begining, but even then, it would be easy to apply some on those methods in old Europe than in USA.
In the end, I think that the "problem" is basically a made up one: mass media looking for something controversial to talk about (it brings money to them, be it Irak war, sexual tendencies of somebody relevant or the election process), and vested interest from some big corps that would be delighted if they got the monopoly for tens of thousand voting machines to be sold (not to talk about the tremendous influence they'd get if only other big corps think that influencing the voting machine vendors can mean influencing the voting output).
"Treating ballot observing like jury duty is one of the best ideas I've heard. However, if you are paranoid, you might wonder if ballot observers were still somehow planted"
That's why you use *all* of them. On each box you have a representative from party A and a representative from party B. In theory that would be enough, since party A and party B representatives cover all the interested parties. But since those representatives might be known in advance and could be bought/blackmailed, etc. you add another random probably unbiased observer (not that she will be really unbiased, but since she doesn't know nor is she known by the other observers chances for the whole lot of observers to be coalligated are almost nihil) to the process. Then they count by hand all the ballots, and you avoid marking on the papers: if it's about Bush and Kerry, you will have a paper meaning "I go with Bush" and a different one for Kerry (this way you avoid the problem of "but the cross is a bit out of the square" or "the punch is not in the center of the line" by the time you count them). This process is the one used for EU representatives (and EU's population is roughly the same than USA's) and all the votes are counted by hand in as less as four/five hours.
But your observation diservers another thought: when you say "Treating ballot observing like jury duty is one of the best ideas I've heard" I think you imply "...and I never heard about it before". Since this is (and has been) common practice in "the civilized world" for ages, and i.e. european citizens seem to agree about their voting process to work OK (there're, of course, other problems, but not this) maybe the solution for the USA goes not so much by researching about Diebold machines being good or bad but just avoiding reinventing the wheel and seeing if something can be learnt from other countries' experiencies.
"If paper ballots are counted by an automated process tampering with the automated process can be just as effective"
Of course yes. That's why you don't want any single entity (specially an amoral one) to count the ballots. That's why you have representatives of the candidates counting the ballots, because they are vestedly interested in their share to be counted at least as big as it is if not bigger (this being true for all the parties the end result is that all parties are counted for as much votes as they get but not more).
I probably don't understand in its enterity the voting system of the USA but what I don't really understand is what the problem is with just manually counting all the f* ballots! It is a highly parallelizable task which means it really doesn't matter if we are talking about 10.000 or 100.000.000 votes; just allow for about 1000 to 5000 votes for voting box and as many voting boxes as needed and you will be done in about two/three hours from the closing of the last voting box.
" The result of our proportional representation system is fragmentation of votes over many different parties, and no clear winner of the elections."
Don't think this is a disadvantage. That means that government if so much about wider representation, consensus and middle grounds.
"As a result we always have colalition governments, which means that a party can basically promise everything during campaign, then drop that promise during coalition negotiations or later"
But the promises that will tend to "fall off" will be those which rise less consensus which, again, is quite a good thing. On the other hand, you are free not to vote those parties that tend to forget too much about their campaign promises (well, if only voters didn't have such a fishy memory...)
"The voter can keep that bit of paper"
And then, someone can "kindly" ask him for...
a) In fact keep it
b) Reveal his vote from it.
This only is more than enough for the system to be utterly broken but then it's only a minor nuisance compared to the *real* problem which is, of course, that somewhere there's a pairing about what voted who or else there would be no way for the voter himself to recover what did he vote from the system (at the very least, the holder of the vote coded with the key xyz voted A; the voter with the xyz code voted on the machine X at 11:30 AM; at 11:30 on the machine X voted John Doe -or else, nothing would avoid John Doe to vote a dozen times). Of course you can claim that the pairing is one-way... unless of course, someone was toying with the only single place (one point of failure anyone?) that holds the (presumably) one-way algorithm, or just was playing the Man In The Middle game when the voter was tracking his ballot in the web... I'll on purpouse will trigger the Godwing Law by saying a Hitler-like character would be enchanted with such a system... not only because it so dangerous but because is utterly stupid too!
Why the hell would you want to recheck what did you voted? Bad memory? On one hand you already know what did you vote, it is knowing what everybody else but you voted (or at the very least that the sume of the votes of everybody else is correct) what's interesting; on the other, you still have *NO* warranty that what the "recovering machine" is showing as your registered vote is in fact registered as such anywhere else but at the "recovering machine" screen.
So even while you thougth your system to be very cute and untamperable all you really did was giving a very interesting list of names to the Hitler-do-jour about who voted the "Jew Party" without giving you not the slightest clue that the published results "Jew party: 1 vote, Arial Party: 70.000.000 votes" where in fact a little bit misleading.
"I guarantee it's harder to cheat a current vegas slot machine than the old-school paper voting systems."
That's because all parties with a saying share the same point of view (Las Vegas tycoons have a vested interest for their slot machines not to be broken into; slot machine builders could try to cheat Las Vegas tycoons, but since they are not the ones that take the money out of them, they lack the chance and even with the chance, they could be a bit of worried about their reputation and having a sorry end buried in the middle of Nevada desert).
Now, let Las Vegas tycoons have a hand on voting machines and expect the end of the bipartidism and the rise of the LVGP (Las Vegas Gambling Party) to the White House.
"The point is no matter what kind of system there is you have to trust the people running it."
What about *not* trusting them? What's the problem? You only need to trust your own observer but, of course, you won't trust the observers from the other parties, that's why you won't take out your eye from them.
By the way, that's exactly how the system goes in the rest of the world. In the USA it would be even easier since you only have two parties (for presidentials). Say party A and B present candidates on circumnscription X, then party A and B present an observer and the public government sends another one randomly chosen (like people on a jury). All of them watch for everbody else all the time and the ballot box never goes out from public view. At the end of the day, the precinct box is broken and the public observer counts the votes in presence of all the other observers. The total count must match the registered number of voters for that box; all the observers must agree on the votes that go to each candidate. Then they phone and/or send the paper resuming the results to the central agency (which eventually will be made public so every observer can recheck that published records are in accordance with their counting) and... that's basically all: simple, fast, protects the rights of the voters and it's extremely difficult to tamper. What's the problem with this? What's the problem the electronic voting machines try to solve?
"1) Again, requiring your voting information can be made illegal. ... vote no one. You still get a receipt.
2) Make a detachable part or a separate receipt to prove you voted or hash the information. For the "abstention crowd"
I like #2 - how many people leave early to vote and go home for a beer instead? I know more than one or two. Accountability for your actions is something i'm a big fan of.
And once again, I never argued that we NEED receipts. I'm arguing that it's not going to destroy the voting process."
As long as for the receipts themselves, I don't know how it works in USA, but in other countries you already can ask for them ("John Doe was voting here at 11:30 AM" and an official stamp). Now, if there's some tracking about what did you vote, that's not a receipt and, sorry, such a design is basically flawed beyond salvation and, yes, it'd destroy the voting process or, to be more precise, its meaning: preserving democracy. It's as simply basic as this: you CAN'T leave an audit trail about who voted what and preserve democracy. You might think you found a cute method for this but you'd be as wrong as if you though that you found a cute method for a perpetual movement machine.
"I love people who automatically fail an idea because there's potential to abuse it"
You'd better do. It's an extremly good idea.
"Humans managed to survive just fine for hundreds of thousands of years without the organization of a civil state."
Well, if you think that living about 20 years serving for predators meal is "just fine" then, yes, you are right.
"If anything, the extremely hierarchical organization of civilization seems to bring out the worst in people."
Yeah, well... I can envision The Illiad, Sixtine Chapel or reaching the Moon as the output of our 10.000 years ago ancestors. Or is it that our "extremely hierarchical organization of civilization" brings out *both* the worst and the best in people, that is, it *empowers* people?