My favorite part of the article:
"Sony has this blessing and curse of [having] some of the world's smartest intellectual property lawyers, who've never built or marketed a product in their life, who are good at saying, 'no,' " said Richard Doherty, senior analyst at consultancy Envisioneering Group in Seaford, N.Y. "The sun never sets on the Sony lawyers, they're around the world, in Tokyo, London, New York." A blessing? I suppose if you consider the ability to sue the living bejezus out of someone at the drop of a hat, then I guess so...
Well, how about that... If only this sort of story were not the exception rather than the rule.
I have a friend who recently started a small business (he makes board games). On release of his first game, he was immediately sent a letter from a competitor's lawyer demanding either cease-and-desist, or a licensing agreement for the use of the term "Superheroes*". Are you kidding me?! My understanding is that this company routinely threatens any small business (they're fairly small too) that creates a game with "Superheroes" in the name, and threatens legal action or a licensing payment.
Most of these companies run on a shoestring budget and caved, but my friend hired a lawyer to write an aggressive response, threatening countersuits, etc. My understanding is that he never heard from them again. In an ideal world, this sort of through-the-legal-system extortion and bullying would be severely reprimanded, but in the real world, a small business is generally considered lucky if they only have to shell out a few hundred (or thousand) in lawyer fees.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
I wonder if a sliding scale could work? That is, you could apply for differing patent lengths. The longer the patent, the more scrutiny the patent application is put under (the cost might scale as well). Less innovative patents could last just a few years, with the more impressive and innovative ones having a timespan between tend and twenty years.
The idea is to drastically cut down on the number of top-tier patent applications, while at the same time ensuring the bar isn't set too high for small companies or individuals to receive legitimate patent protection.
And I still would say that business methods and software patents should be completely eliminated.
Thank you for elucidating what I've been thinking for quite a long time.
It feels like the same mentality as those who would try to protect a child from all common germs and illnesses. It may seem like a caring thing to do at the time, but would, in fact, be a horrible thing for the child in the long run. Getting a cold ultimately strengthens our immune system, much like learning how to lose gracefully strengthens our social skills and teaches us humility.
Yes, it's important to protect our children. I've always disagreed with people who feel the need to expose kids to the harsh reality of life at an early age, but too many people go bonkers in the other direction as well. Let the kids enjoy their childhood, and stop with the nonsense that competition is something ugly and unhealthy.
Re:Slashdot is getting slow
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 1
Or a hundred Shermans?
BTW, does anyone remember the movie Tank? "I do believe I've got you covered!"
My MMO playing friends would from time to time claim that the continuing fees of MMOs were there at least in part to ensure that there would be continuing updates and new content, aside from server maintenance costs. Yeah, I've never quite bought that line either... Most MMOs charge both for the game AND for expansions, as well as the monthly fee. If they gave the game client away, or at least gave you more than a month of free play time, I could see it (maybe six months). But the part about server maintenance - I'm not sure I buy that either. No way does a player cost Blizzard anywhere close to $15 dollars a month (see: Guild Wars). That's just what they've figured out people are willing to pay. But the monthly revenue is the big draw for all those companies.
Something I've always wanted to see would be a serious, impartial, disinterested observer sitting down and going through a point-by-point comparison of WoW, Guild Wars, and Diablo II, and maybe throw in FFXI or some one of the other popular MMOs I'm sure someone's already done this...
just to see what is objectively different between them. Oh... objectively? Hmm.... yeah, I'm not sure about that...
Kidding aside, the problem is, someone would have to get seriously invested in *all* of those games in order to make a reasonable comparison (all while trying to stay dispassionate and objective), and that's a pretty tall order. But I think you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the fan forums and discarding the obvious flames and fanboys. Many people are willing to give a pretty good list of pros and cons when discussing the multiple games they play and enjoy.
I launched the page in IE (I normally use FireFox) just to see that. Much more entertaining than the actual content.
BTW, I thought this was the best part:
Not only is IE insanely insecure, it doesn't even support the international web standards without which there would be no World Wide Web. Ironic, no? Complaining about W3 standards in a page that blocks users based on their choice of browser.
No, I only read the Boston.com article, but *now* I've read TF Smoking Gun article.
They paid $160K for the house in 2006, apparently. That's not all that expensive for a house. Fine, they're likely not the wealthiest of folks. I don't think that qualifies as "living in squalor", though. I sincerely hope you're simply succumbing to unnecessary hyperbole here.
Besides all that, the articles indicate that, no, it's not a county road - it's a private drive. My understanding is that a "private drive" is a road on land you own and maintain. I know these are still included on maps if they are any significant length - that doesn't necessarily make them county roads.
And again, my opinion is predicated on the veracity of this information. It essentially boils down to this: Google simply doesn't have a right to travel onto private land and take pictures of someone's home without asking permission *first*. It makes all the difference if the picture is taken from a public road, with visual information similar to what one would see from a public view (i.e. no telephoto zoom shots through the bathroom window, etc). These folks are adamant about wanting their privacy, and I feel they should have it.
I would agree with you, except for the tiny fact that Google went onto private property in order to take the pictures. In my mind, that bit of information completely changes the legitimacy of the lawsuit.
Incidentally, I think $25,000 was a well-chosen figure. It's high enough to get Google's attention, but low enough to avoid the perception that the couple is using this as a get-rich quick scheme. As a matter of fact, it might only just cover their legal expenses. Consider that most of these sorts of lawsuits ask for multi-millions of dollars, and it starts to look a bit more reasonable.
Oh, and you really should understand how very little $25K is compared to the value of a house - particularly one with a private drive.
Bloggers talk incessantly about blogging... News at 11:00!
I get a bit tired of people who complain about their job or life, yet never take the steps necessary to alleviate the cause of said complaints. It's your life. Take some responsibility for it. Exercise more. Take a well-needed vacation (and leave the damn computer at home)! Spend some quality time with family and friends. I'll bet that when you look back at your life, you won't regret spending a bit less time at the computer, staring at updating blogs.
I also tire of how certain media industries talk about themselves as relevant news... I see this happen in the mainstream media all the time (stories about the media), and I find it somewhat annoying. Blogging has the same sort of problem - many bloggers talk incessantly about blogging and other bloggers, since that's the topic they know best.
I agree... this smacks of a corporate/blogging troll to me. Notice how T-Mobile only asked them to stop using the color magenta in a "trademark-infringing" way. They never claimed that the color magenta was trademarked - it is only trademarked in relation to their logo and corporate identity. In other words, "please don't try to confuse our customers by making it appear our companies are somehow related."
It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to me. The summary talked of "demanding", but I have to say, that was perhaps the nicest "demand" I've ever heard.
I'm not really disagreeing with you. The reason most on-board audio these days is fairly reliable is because, as you surmised, the "hardware acceleration" is so bad and so limiting, most games nowadays simply opt for software processing, which has been steadily improving with 3rd party libraries (DirectSound was horrible - RIP) or nowadays XAudio 2. CPU speeds have finally advanced to the point where this isn't too much of an overall drag on the CPU. In other words, only a single audio stream, anywhere from 2 to 7 premixed and optimally resampled channels, is being pumped into the device, so all it has to do is convert the digital stream into an analog signal.
Essentially, an add-on sound card will get you several things: a higher-quality DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) for a low-noise, high-dynamic signal, and if you get an X-Fi or equally capable device, you can get a reasonable amount of actual hardware accelerated voices for better HRTF effects (simulated 3D from stereo speakers), better EAX effects (software effects sound ok, but not quite as good as hardware), and cleaner resampled audio (typically 5-point spline instead of linear).
Ok, I just had to chime in here... I happen to do audio development for a gaming company. Make no mistake, most on-board audio is absolute crap. The drivers very often have glitches/bugs, missing features, or simply emulate "hardware" features (badly) in the driver. Creative's X-Fi lineup is one of the few decent audio cards still available, and that's a pretty small percentage of our consumer base anyhow. Generally speaking, about 75% of our customers have on-board audio, with the remaining 25% scattered among add-on cards. The X-Fi has perhaps one or two percent of the total.
That being said - the future is software processing anyhow. With multi-core machines being standard equipment on all new machines, it makes sense to simply devote part of a core to audio processing, and screw the hardware and the many, many troubles it causes audio programmers. Vista doesn't support audio hardware acceleration anymore (Creative wrote their own OpenAL pipeline to get around this). Our upcoming game will probably only support hardware acceleration on X-Fi class cards. Anything else, it's simply not worth it, and we'll switch to software mode.
I'm not condoning Creative's actions by any means. It seems pretty obvious that they're a bit panicked about the tanking sales of PC audio hardware, and so are making idiots of themselves by irritating their few remaining customers. Stupid...
Most engineers tend to be very conservative when it comes to safety issues. When mistakes are made, people die, and the engineer must live with the personal and professional consequences of those design decisions. As such, it makes sense for them to use proven and reliable systems when given a choice. Often, those proven systems are mechanical in nature.
A friend of mine told me a story about this college days. In one of his engineering classes, his professor gave the students a formula for calculating the load-carrying capacity of a steel beam given various dimensions. "You're not required to use this formula", he said. "However, if you derive your own formula, and the beam breaks, you should be prepared to answer in a court of law exactly *why* you chose not to use the standard formula."
Everyone in the class dutifully copied the standard formula into their notebooks.
At work (I'm a PC game developer), pretty much everyone has upgraded to 64-bit Vista. Here's a rundown of some of the software we're using:
Visual Studio 6, 2005, & 2008 Visual Assist X 3D Studio Max Maya Photoshop Perforce Various PC games (including ours, our parent company's games, and various competitors) Various in-house tools and utilities
All this with zero (that I'm aware of) compatibility issues. Note that these software packages are 32-bit binaries as well. We've been using it for a number of months now, and it certainly hasn't slowed us down at all.
Maybe if you're talking about drivers and low-level software like virus scanners / other utilities, sure. Or 16-bit Windows apps. But nearly all standard 32-bit Windows applications work just fine in Vista.
Having recently integrated a new audio library for our studio's upcoming Windows PC game, I can assure you that Vista does not hinder playback of audio in any way due to DRM. Audio is decoded in software in the client application. There's absolutely nothing that DRM does to affect the resulting raw PCM audio streams in any way. From a technical standpoint, this could only happen if Vista required all audio devices support DRM from end to end (think HDMI). Vista DRM really only comes into play when you're dealing with formats that are already DRM-encumbered. Our audio formats of choice, ADPCM wave files and Ogg Vorbis streams, are certainly not. Even MP3 files have no inherent DRM encumbrance, and so will remain unaffected.
And BTW, DirectSound was a part of DirectX, but is now depreciated. Their new game audio library is XACT. I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "Now even microsoft encourages game developers to use the system libraries"... Uh, yes, they encourage developers to use their newest APIs to render audio. But that doesn't mean all audio will somehow require DRM. Hell, all you'd need to do to bypass it is to buy an audio card and use OpenAL drivers - that's essentially what Creative did since hardware acceleration for their cards was dropped in Vista.
Look, I'm no fan of DRM either, but I'd prefer to avoid hype and hyperbole. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to avoid it.
For example, with Emotiv's headset and the "Emotiv EmoKey," players may be able to incorporate biofeedback into many of their favorite PC games, such as the Harry Potter game. By using the EmoKey, players can link their detected brainwaves to actions in the game. For instance, by concentrating on an object, players can cause their avatar to pick up and handle that object. Just curious, am I the only one who laughed when I read about their new "EmoKey"?
Marketers, here's a hint: Avoid the prefix "Emo" in your products' names. Nothing positive comes to mind when hearing that word.
If an "encrypted" key is stored in the document, then the format itself must be reversed by the local bits on the machine using a standardized algorithm, correct? Otherwise, the document isn't interoperable. So, you've just given out your password, with the only difference being that now it probably takes someone more work to uncover the passphrase. Worse, users are likely under the impression that the key is actually secure.
Oh, and your passphrase is: $2$gJT/A1qk$CyM4Z4UleBaoMyruOx9Ku I don't understand security stuff
I hope you didn't infer that I thought all monopolies should be broken up on principle (see c and d). I agree, utilities are a prime example of natural monopolies. Government itself is another. In those particular cases, other balancing forces must be applied. In the case of utilities, it's typically government oversight. In the case of government - elections. In both areas, the first amendment is also a powerful balancing force. An informed populous can put pressure on politicians, which is typically how government oversight occurs to begin with.
This is the Standard MO of most US companies. No, this is the standard MO of companies (or any entity) which grows to monopoly-size. Competition brings out the best in companies, because one can simply switch to a competitor if the service gets too bad. The capitalist approach typically falters when:
a) The government sticks its nose in and creates or sanctions a monopoly b) The government doesn't stick its nose in to break up an illegal monopoly c) It's the government itself that's providing the service. d) The company gets too big to care about customers anymore, and implode under the weight of their own bureaucracy.
From companies that have to compete fiercely for my business, I tend to get great service. Abusive and underhanded practices won't keep a company going long, because the negative PR will eventually drive other customers away. It's simple Darwinism - those that don't just don't survive long. Capitalism may not always be pretty, but it sure beats the living hell out of any other system the human race has tried thus far.
What exactly could I, as a member of the voting populous, do to ensure that a pen and paper system hasn't been somehow gamed? Count up every ballot myself? The idea that a single citizen can oversee the process seems a bit far-fetched, either for paper ballots or an electronic system.
The world's finances and markets are governed by computers. There are ways to ensure someone simply doesn't add or delete arbitrary amounts of money to accounts. Tell me how this problem can be solved, yet tallying votes can't somehow be secured. I have a hard time believe that just because politics are involved, somehow the rules of security suddenly don't apply.
Please understand, I'm neither disagreeing with your assertion that oversight and accountability is critical nor am I defending the manufacturer of any current voting systems. I just think that, at a fundamental level, it *is* possible to create a secure electronic voting system. Keep in mind that, as with any complex system, the human side of the equation (such as operating and oversight procedures) are just as important as the technical side.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, how about that... If only this sort of story were not the exception rather than the rule.
I have a friend who recently started a small business (he makes board games). On release of his first game, he was immediately sent a letter from a competitor's lawyer demanding either cease-and-desist, or a licensing agreement for the use of the term "Superheroes*". Are you kidding me?! My understanding is that this company routinely threatens any small business (they're fairly small too) that creates a game with "Superheroes" in the name, and threatens legal action or a licensing payment.
Most of these companies run on a shoestring budget and caved, but my friend hired a lawyer to write an aggressive response, threatening countersuits, etc. My understanding is that he never heard from them again. In an ideal world, this sort of through-the-legal-system extortion and bullying would be severely reprimanded, but in the real world, a small business is generally considered lucky if they only have to shell out a few hundred (or thousand) in lawyer fees.
* It wasn't really that, but a similarly generic term. I don't want to stir anything up for my friend. Lawyers may be listening!
I wonder if a sliding scale could work? That is, you could apply for differing patent lengths. The longer the patent, the more scrutiny the patent application is put under (the cost might scale as well). Less innovative patents could last just a few years, with the more impressive and innovative ones having a timespan between tend and twenty years.
The idea is to drastically cut down on the number of top-tier patent applications, while at the same time ensuring the bar isn't set too high for small companies or individuals to receive legitimate patent protection.
And I still would say that business methods and software patents should be completely eliminated.
Thank you for elucidating what I've been thinking for quite a long time.
It feels like the same mentality as those who would try to protect a child from all common germs and illnesses. It may seem like a caring thing to do at the time, but would, in fact, be a horrible thing for the child in the long run. Getting a cold ultimately strengthens our immune system, much like learning how to lose gracefully strengthens our social skills and teaches us humility.
Yes, it's important to protect our children. I've always disagreed with people who feel the need to expose kids to the harsh reality of life at an early age, but too many people go bonkers in the other direction as well. Let the kids enjoy their childhood, and stop with the nonsense that competition is something ugly and unhealthy.
Or a hundred Shermans?
BTW, does anyone remember the movie Tank? "I do believe I've got you covered!"
Kidding aside, the problem is, someone would have to get seriously invested in *all* of those games in order to make a reasonable comparison (all while trying to stay dispassionate and objective), and that's a pretty tall order. But I think you can get a pretty good idea by looking at the fan forums and discarding the obvious flames and fanboys. Many people are willing to give a pretty good list of pros and cons when discussing the multiple games they play and enjoy.
BTW, I thought this was the best part: Not only is IE insanely insecure, it doesn't even support the international web standards without which there would be no World Wide Web. Ironic, no? Complaining about W3 standards in a page that blocks users based on their choice of browser.
An evil man can occasionally speak the truth, even without holding the spirit of those words dear to his heart.
No, I only read the Boston.com article, but *now* I've read TF Smoking Gun article.
They paid $160K for the house in 2006, apparently. That's not all that expensive for a house. Fine, they're likely not the wealthiest of folks. I don't think that qualifies as "living in squalor", though. I sincerely hope you're simply succumbing to unnecessary hyperbole here.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0404081google7.html
Besides all that, the articles indicate that, no, it's not a county road - it's a private drive. My understanding is that a "private drive" is a road on land you own and maintain. I know these are still included on maps if they are any significant length - that doesn't necessarily make them county roads.
And again, my opinion is predicated on the veracity of this information. It essentially boils down to this: Google simply doesn't have a right to travel onto private land and take pictures of someone's home without asking permission *first*. It makes all the difference if the picture is taken from a public road, with visual information similar to what one would see from a public view (i.e. no telephoto zoom shots through the bathroom window, etc). These folks are adamant about wanting their privacy, and I feel they should have it.
I would agree with you, except for the tiny fact that Google went onto private property in order to take the pictures. In my mind, that bit of information completely changes the legitimacy of the lawsuit.
Incidentally, I think $25,000 was a well-chosen figure. It's high enough to get Google's attention, but low enough to avoid the perception that the couple is using this as a get-rich quick scheme. As a matter of fact, it might only just cover their legal expenses. Consider that most of these sorts of lawsuits ask for multi-millions of dollars, and it starts to look a bit more reasonable.
Oh, and you really should understand how very little $25K is compared to the value of a house - particularly one with a private drive.
No, that should read: One does not simply walk into Google...
Bloggers talk incessantly about blogging... News at 11:00!
I get a bit tired of people who complain about their job or life, yet never take the steps necessary to alleviate the cause of said complaints. It's your life. Take some responsibility for it. Exercise more. Take a well-needed vacation (and leave the damn computer at home)! Spend some quality time with family and friends. I'll bet that when you look back at your life, you won't regret spending a bit less time at the computer, staring at updating blogs.
I also tire of how certain media industries talk about themselves as relevant news... I see this happen in the mainstream media all the time (stories about the media), and I find it somewhat annoying. Blogging has the same sort of problem - many bloggers talk incessantly about blogging and other bloggers, since that's the topic they know best.
I agree... this smacks of a corporate/blogging troll to me. Notice how T-Mobile only asked them to stop using the color magenta in a "trademark-infringing" way. They never claimed that the color magenta was trademarked - it is only trademarked in relation to their logo and corporate identity. In other words, "please don't try to confuse our customers by making it appear our companies are somehow related."
It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to me. The summary talked of "demanding", but I have to say, that was perhaps the nicest "demand" I've ever heard.
I'm not really disagreeing with you. The reason most on-board audio these days is fairly reliable is because, as you surmised, the "hardware acceleration" is so bad and so limiting, most games nowadays simply opt for software processing, which has been steadily improving with 3rd party libraries (DirectSound was horrible - RIP) or nowadays XAudio 2. CPU speeds have finally advanced to the point where this isn't too much of an overall drag on the CPU. In other words, only a single audio stream, anywhere from 2 to 7 premixed and optimally resampled channels, is being pumped into the device, so all it has to do is convert the digital stream into an analog signal.
Essentially, an add-on sound card will get you several things: a higher-quality DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) for a low-noise, high-dynamic signal, and if you get an X-Fi or equally capable device, you can get a reasonable amount of actual hardware accelerated voices for better HRTF effects (simulated 3D from stereo speakers), better EAX effects (software effects sound ok, but not quite as good as hardware), and cleaner resampled audio (typically 5-point spline instead of linear).
Worth $100 or more? Well, that's your call.
Ok, I just had to chime in here... I happen to do audio development for a gaming company. Make no mistake, most on-board audio is absolute crap. The drivers very often have glitches/bugs, missing features, or simply emulate "hardware" features (badly) in the driver. Creative's X-Fi lineup is one of the few decent audio cards still available, and that's a pretty small percentage of our consumer base anyhow. Generally speaking, about 75% of our customers have on-board audio, with the remaining 25% scattered among add-on cards. The X-Fi has perhaps one or two percent of the total.
That being said - the future is software processing anyhow. With multi-core machines being standard equipment on all new machines, it makes sense to simply devote part of a core to audio processing, and screw the hardware and the many, many troubles it causes audio programmers. Vista doesn't support audio hardware acceleration anymore (Creative wrote their own OpenAL pipeline to get around this). Our upcoming game will probably only support hardware acceleration on X-Fi class cards. Anything else, it's simply not worth it, and we'll switch to software mode.
I'm not condoning Creative's actions by any means. It seems pretty obvious that they're a bit panicked about the tanking sales of PC audio hardware, and so are making idiots of themselves by irritating their few remaining customers. Stupid...
Most engineers tend to be very conservative when it comes to safety issues. When mistakes are made, people die, and the engineer must live with the personal and professional consequences of those design decisions. As such, it makes sense for them to use proven and reliable systems when given a choice. Often, those proven systems are mechanical in nature.
A friend of mine told me a story about this college days. In one of his engineering classes, his professor gave the students a formula for calculating the load-carrying capacity of a steel beam given various dimensions. "You're not required to use this formula", he said. "However, if you derive your own formula, and the beam breaks, you should be prepared to answer in a court of law exactly *why* you chose not to use the standard formula."
Everyone in the class dutifully copied the standard formula into their notebooks.
Not backwards compatible?
At work (I'm a PC game developer), pretty much everyone has upgraded to 64-bit Vista. Here's a rundown of some of the software we're using:
Visual Studio 6, 2005, & 2008
Visual Assist X
3D Studio Max
Maya
Photoshop
Perforce
Various PC games (including ours, our parent company's games, and various competitors)
Various in-house tools and utilities
All this with zero (that I'm aware of) compatibility issues. Note that these software packages are 32-bit binaries as well. We've been using it for a number of months now, and it certainly hasn't slowed us down at all.
Maybe if you're talking about drivers and low-level software like virus scanners / other utilities, sure. Or 16-bit Windows apps. But nearly all standard 32-bit Windows applications work just fine in Vista.
Having recently integrated a new audio library for our studio's upcoming Windows PC game, I can assure you that Vista does not hinder playback of audio in any way due to DRM. Audio is decoded in software in the client application. There's absolutely nothing that DRM does to affect the resulting raw PCM audio streams in any way. From a technical standpoint, this could only happen if Vista required all audio devices support DRM from end to end (think HDMI). Vista DRM really only comes into play when you're dealing with formats that are already DRM-encumbered. Our audio formats of choice, ADPCM wave files and Ogg Vorbis streams, are certainly not. Even MP3 files have no inherent DRM encumbrance, and so will remain unaffected.
And BTW, DirectSound was a part of DirectX, but is now depreciated. Their new game audio library is XACT. I have no idea what you're talking about when you say "Now even microsoft encourages game developers to use the system libraries"... Uh, yes, they encourage developers to use their newest APIs to render audio. But that doesn't mean all audio will somehow require DRM. Hell, all you'd need to do to bypass it is to buy an audio card and use OpenAL drivers - that's essentially what Creative did since hardware acceleration for their cards was dropped in Vista.
Look, I'm no fan of DRM either, but I'd prefer to avoid hype and hyperbole. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to avoid it.
Marketers, here's a hint: Avoid the prefix "Emo" in your products' names. Nothing positive comes to mind when hearing that word.
I presume you're talking about this case:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/20/teen-couple-who-phot.html
http://www.connectsafely.org/articles--advice/commentaries---staff/teens-convictions-for--child-porn-upheld.html
If an "encrypted" key is stored in the document, then the format itself must be reversed by the local bits on the machine using a standardized algorithm, correct? Otherwise, the document isn't interoperable. So, you've just given out your password, with the only difference being that now it probably takes someone more work to uncover the passphrase. Worse, users are likely under the impression that the key is actually secure.
Oh, and your passphrase is:
$2$gJT/A1qk$CyM4Z4UleBaoMyruOx9Ku
I don't understand security stuff
I hope you didn't infer that I thought all monopolies should be broken up on principle (see c and d). I agree, utilities are a prime example of natural monopolies. Government itself is another. In those particular cases, other balancing forces must be applied. In the case of utilities, it's typically government oversight. In the case of government - elections. In both areas, the first amendment is also a powerful balancing force. An informed populous can put pressure on politicians, which is typically how government oversight occurs to begin with.
a) The government sticks its nose in and creates or sanctions a monopoly
b) The government doesn't stick its nose in to break up an illegal monopoly
c) It's the government itself that's providing the service.
d) The company gets too big to care about customers anymore, and implode under the weight of their own bureaucracy.
From companies that have to compete fiercely for my business, I tend to get great service. Abusive and underhanded practices won't keep a company going long, because the negative PR will eventually drive other customers away. It's simple Darwinism - those that don't just don't survive long. Capitalism may not always be pretty, but it sure beats the living hell out of any other system the human race has tried thus far.
What exactly could I, as a member of the voting populous, do to ensure that a pen and paper system hasn't been somehow gamed? Count up every ballot myself? The idea that a single citizen can oversee the process seems a bit far-fetched, either for paper ballots or an electronic system.
The world's finances and markets are governed by computers. There are ways to ensure someone simply doesn't add or delete arbitrary amounts of money to accounts. Tell me how this problem can be solved, yet tallying votes can't somehow be secured. I have a hard time believe that just because politics are involved, somehow the rules of security suddenly don't apply.
Please understand, I'm neither disagreeing with your assertion that oversight and accountability is critical nor am I defending the manufacturer of any current voting systems. I just think that, at a fundamental level, it *is* possible to create a secure electronic voting system. Keep in mind that, as with any complex system, the human side of the equation (such as operating and oversight procedures) are just as important as the technical side.