because then he immediately loses me as his "servaant" in exchange for the annual salary he provides me.
I think you mean "he loses your services as an employee," right? You make it sound like this is some sort of horrible arrangement, where you get a respectable income for providing a valuable service to someone. I'm not sure I see the shame in that.
He wants to pay me just enough to keep me just happy enough to continue working 40+ hours a week making him richer.
Should he pay you more than you are worth to him and his business? Should you in turn offer to pay 3x times the asking price for everything you buy just so shopowners and retailers don't need to keep running their store? Employment is a voluntary exchange of money for services. Don't like the conditions, don't work for the person.
Worse...if I were to somehow magically become rich,
If you continue to think it only happens through "magic" and "abusing other people," it will always remain a mystical process to you, and you will never "become rich," through natural or supernatural means.
assuming he's a successful businessman, I could easily have learnt more than enough to copy what he does, enhance and refine it that little bit, and drive him out of business.
Indeed, why don't you do exactly that, since clearly you have learned enough to drive him out of business and offer the products and services he does at a lower price, while still maintaining the profit margins which have "magically" made him rich? I would if I could... I see no reason why you shouldn't.
because they have zero incentive to see me "succeed" in any way that doesn't further their own wealth over mine.
You are mistaken. Your success increases the size of the market, or puts him out of business - either you corner new areas of the market, or he loses customers. If you put him out of work, he can come work for you (he already knows the market, the services, and the people - you win, and he wins), and you can pay him 2x what he's worth to you (to show what a cool enlightened boss you are), and try to make him "magically" rich with your new-found success just like you wish he'd do for you. He wins, and you win, and in the end the market & the consumers win, because you both are producing more at lower cost, while making enough profits to make you and your old boss "magically" rich.
Sounds like an ideal situation to me. Any man who sees another man's abilities as an existential threat in a free market will not remain "rich" for long.
Because the people you're asking to fund 90% of the cost are being turned into beasts of burden, where it is their duty to cash any check somebody in the bottom 10% of wealth writes on their abilities.
How is that fair?
For anybody who thinks that "the rich" swim around in a vault full of gold coins, Scrooge McDuck-style, stop and take a look at how most of them *actually* store the majority of their money. Hint: it's called the stock market.
Now go look at the function of the stock market, and try to convince yourself that taking the money *out* of the stock market (where it provides liquidity as investment for growing businesses) and instead turning it over to consumers to buy consumer goods with it is going to help businesses thrive?
In short: If you keep eating a pie that doesn't grow, sooner or later, the pie will be gone, even if it's a REALLY big pie. The only way for you to keep eating pie indefinitely is if you allow the people who control most of the pie to continue baking NEW pies for you to eat. If you eat the ingredients before they bake the pies, don't be surprised when there are - someday - no more pies.
If you make them pay 90% of the taxes, will you give them 90% of the say in what gets done with their tax money?
Because let's be honest, that top 10% probably isn't much worried about funding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and prescription drug benefits, and other welfare-state entitlements.
Please disconnect yourself from the technological society you obviouslywish you didn't have to be a part of.
If you think that people will magically not have an incentive to tamper with election results just because the ballots are paper, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Anybody can tamper with paper ballots. Literally anybody. If it were as easy to hack devices and systems as you suggest, then we would have no such thing as the internet because you wouldn't be able to trust anything - literally anything any computer told you unless you had assembled it from raw silicon, and even then, it's best not to take chances.
Pro tip: Slinging insults and calling names does nothing to bolster the validity of your limp-wristed arguments, you luddite twat.
But I think I see where you get it: Constructing a post with random bold & italics for emphasis is fucking hard work. I'd hate computers if I typed that way, too.
Oh and by the way: if you REALLY feel that way about it, then why not put up live internet cameras in your bedroom so we can watch you have sex with your wife? After all, you have nothing to hide and you honestly don't care with what anyone does with your personal information, right?
Funny thing is, GP didn't say he "had nothing to hide" - he said that the stuff he posts on facebook isn't that private anyway, and he doesn't care that it's up there, or that Facebook knows it. He didn't say "I post every detail of my life there," he said "I don't care if people know the details I do post up there."
There's worlds of difference between "I don't care that Facebook knows I like golf (but suck at it), have half a dozen friends who live in New York City, and like rock and alt-country music, and uses that knowledge to display advertisements I might be interested in seeing based on those interests." and "I don't care if Facebook films me having sex with my wife and posts that up on facebook.com/bobsmith_porking_lisajones/livestream, and uses it to sell male enhancement products and plastic surgery."
Reasonable people are able to draw the distinction between these two scenarios. You seem to have missed the distinction. Conclusions that may be drawn from these facts are left as an exercise to the reader. The rule to keep in mind on Facebook is: don't post it if you consider it private information.
If elections can have magically undetectable counting errors, why would you ever trust your bank to not also have undetectable counting errors?
After all they're undetectable, and apparently, no computer system can be designed where tampering is evident, or detectable, and since people only have altruistic motives when they are managing trillions of dollars worth of other peoples' money via computer programs, but not when they are building an open electronic voting system which can be inspected, audited, and verified by anybody who wishes to do so.
Yeah, you're right, let's just forget the whole idea and go back to subjective interpretations of the law where local election officials can and do tamper with the election results. It'd be much better to do that than to design a secure electronic system to replace it.
In fact, let's just scrap computers altogether - they're entirely too unreliable and risky to trust with anything more than porn.
And for the record, your use of EMPHATIC TYPEFACES just doesn't make you sound any less like a conspiracy nutter.
My parents and my brothers were all enthusiastically encouraged (by me) to get Macs, because a huge part (for me) of every 'family get-together' was devoted to troubleshooting their computer problems - I'm the 'computer' guy in the family, and so whenever Windows made funny beeps, acted strangely, or just broke, it invariably fell to me to fix it.
My family tech support workload has dropped off almost to zero since they all finished switching, and they're all quite pleased with the capabilities of the computers.
I guess I just object to the 'illiterate moron' tag - dad's a chemistry professor, mom's a speech-language pathologist, one brother is a pilot, and the other brother is a civil engineer... I wouldn't say any qualify as illiterate morons, but when it comes to computers, it's just not their area of expertise. Though it's entirely possible that I'm more inclined to be charitable because I've never worked a helpdesk.
I'll agree, though I wouldn't call somebody an illiterate moron just because they're not incredibly knowledgeable about computers. Very few (if any) people who have the money & knowledge to sit down at a computer qualify literally as "illiterate morons."
Remember that not every smart person knows a lot about computers - sometimes their interests & training lie elsewhere, and a LOT of software is designed to piss-poor usability and interface standards - what seems like completely logical layout to a developer may be completely counterintuitive and frustrating for the user: as an example, witness my doctor's slow & painful conversion to electronic medical records. I talked to her about it during a checkup when I noticed that every exam room had a little computer terminal in it. According to her, updating them worked so ass-backwards that she spent more time fighting with the computer than she did seeing patients.
Nothing to see here, slippery slopes are pure fallacy and do not exist. Not ever.
This doesn't even take the form of a slippery slope scenario, and you know it.
They've expressly stated in the past that they *don't* intend to lock down OS X like they have iOS. Yesterday's announcement made no mention of a change to that previous position.
In short, there is no reason to believe this will be anything but "another way" for software distribution to happen.
For a small-time / part-time developer who's interested in selling his software, it's awfully convenient to have the turnkey solution for handling billing & distribution. For a consumer, it's awfully convenient to always have the up-to-date version of the software with latest & greatest bugfixes. But DVD installs,.dmg installs from the web, and building your own will all still be options.
Yep, and when they go home, and Katherine Harris is alone in the storehouse where the paper ballots are stored, are those poll watchers making sure that she doesn't slip a stack of extra ballots into one of them, all carefully filled in with votes for the Republican candidate?
When the election official who voted for Obama is recounting paper ballots and sees a "dubious" hanging chad which *appears* to be a vote for Barack Obama, but which really isn't a clear vote and should be disqualified, think he's going to say "Ah, it's close enough?" or think he's going to disqualify it?
Point is, subjective judgements by humans are and always have been a source of error and/or fraud. Eliminating the involvement of humans between voter and tally eliminates potential fraud. The whole "but they haz papr ballotz!" argument falls flat when the difference isn't close enough to trigger an automatic recount. The lesson: engage in fraud big enough to push it outside the couple % margin that triggers automatic recounts, and you don't ever have to worry about being discovered.
Based on what? Your say-so, or the say-so of some other expert who has examined the code?
Do you have money in a bank somewhere? How do you trust that they aren't going to foul up your information and lose your money? You trust the bank computers, probably without a second thought - based on what? The bank having a logo with comforting, solid-looking stationery?
If we can have massively interconnected banking without people routinely losing their life savings to banking glitches, it is possible to build a voting system that will do what it's supposed to. Opening the source code & the specs of the systems to review & audit allows everybody who has an interest to verify that the systems operate as expected.
As far as 'taking it on faith' - we do exactly that in the banking system - we take it on faith that the experts have done their job and secured our information. And yet... we don't have widespread systemic fraud where the banks are just... losing... people's money. Or randomly awarding a million dollars to someone's account. Or randomly jacking up the rate on their mortgage.
So please do explain the mechanism by which an electronic voting system would 'guarantee' fraud?
The point is not that you should just "tell everybody who you vote for" - the point is that we trust stuff to computers ALL THE TIME that is *way* more sensitive & has way more potential to fuck up your life if it's handled poorly than "who I voted for."
So why would people trust every shred of their financial data to a computer - trust it to be accurate, right, and secure... but then in the next breath, turn around and say "But I would NEVER trust voting on a computer!" Voting computers (and throughout this discussion, I have stipulated that the software and systems should be open, auditable, audited, transparent, etc. etc. etc. - not "Bob's Republican or Democratic VoteGetter!") are not subject to special laws of physics where they can randomly start doing 'bad things' of their own volition.
This blanket mistrust of a well-designed electronic voting system as an alternate to error-prone, manually recounted ballots that are validated (or invalidated) by the whim of the election officials who most certainly have a horse in the race smacks of foolishness and ludditism, especially on a tech site like Slashdot.
Agreed, but Linux's failure to market itself successfully is a different problem than "Microsoft's marketing suppressing Linux in the marketplace."
Microsoft obviously thinks about Linux internally, but I can't think of the last time they took a shot at Linux in advertising - they're focused on what they view their key features as, and it's also clear that the recent successes at Apple are making them a little nervous.
A default Ubuntu desktop probably WOULD be fine for 90% of users, but if nobody's pushing it, and they're not marketing it... why would anybody switch from the known, comfortable Windows or Apple platforms they're familiar with?
I see this argument here a lot, and it still boggles my mind - if somebody thinks that there is this huge benefit & business opportunity to building & selling Linux desktops... why is nobody succeeding at it? If it's just as simple as "if you build it, they will come," then surely some company (or enterprising geek here) would have put together a successful run by now.
And have they EVER made a statement to that effect about Mac OS X that would lead you to believe they would prevent you from installing software any other way?
They were pretty up-front about it with the iPhone - if you want to distribute to the iPhone, this is the only way to do it.
In today's announcement, it was simply "a way to distribute apps" - not "the only" way to distribute apps. Frankly, I'm not sure why people seem to think that the Mac OS X and iOS platforms will necessarily, or ever, converge to that point. They've stated that they don't intend to lock down Mac OS X that way, and they've made no comments that would contradict that today.
You can secure the doors and makes sure no one walks in or out with one.
And who secures the doors? And who do we trust not to walk away with one? Humans. And we all know that corruption, prejudice, and underhanded behavior are completely nonexistent in the species, right?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Or have you never heard of things like the Daley Machine, or Boss Tweed and the Tammany Society? Or simply seen the numerous cases of dead people voting, controversially voided ballots, and numerous cases where towns of a few hundred people magically turn in thousands of votes, that have all been reported over the past few election cycles?
Let's not pretend that paper ballots are some magical cure-all. The problem is the involvement of biased, agenda-driven people in a manual process of counting, recounting, validating, and securing the data.
We use computers every day to track, monitor, validate, and secure data that is WAY more sensitive than "who i voted for" - half the people around you put a goddamned bumper sticker on their car or sign on their lawn so you KNOW who they fucking voted for, for christ's sake. Why are we treating a piece of paper with some pen marks that somebody with bias is going to say "That's clearly not completely filled in, I'm going to disallow it," as if it's some holy relic that can't possibly be subverted, discarded, altered, misinterpreted, miscounted, destroyed, or otherwise perverted just as easily as you seem to believe the signals on a computer chip can be?
What's more practically important to you: keeping 'who i voted for' completely secret from the world, or maintaining control of your money? If it's the latter - do you ever use a bank? And yes, I mean 'a bank' - even if YOU choose not to use online banking, ATMs, and the like, do you think they have a little bag in the vault manually labeled with "BOB's Money!"? Please. All of your money and financial information is tracked, secured, and managed using computers, even if you go talk to a teller every time you make a transaction. They're just using a keyboard on your behalf.
And yet you trust that the bank hasn't screwed up your transactions every time you go talk to them, or been stolen by all the thieves and scammers out there. Why?
So what you're saying is that closed-source readers + paper ballots is the correct system to use.
Great, +1 for openness and transparency.
I am not appealing to emotion - I'm pointing out the simple fact that humans are biased, and frequently do behave in ways that undermine the 'sanctity' of your 'vote = physical object' ideal.
How can you recount a ballot if somebody shreds a box of them? How do you account for the fact that people were alternately reporting that absentee ballotts were (and weren't) allowed even though they came in after (or before) the deadline? Once I've marked MY ballot, and turned it in, what distinguishes it from any other ballot - how do I know they haven't thrown away my ballot and replaced it with one marked exactly the same?
When it comes to objectivity and accuracy, I'm sorry, I'm going to trust the machine more than I'm going to trust the human. That's not an appeal to emotion - your laptop isn't a republican or a democrat. If the code running the vote machines is openly audited, and verified fair by both sides, then we can stop with the analog 'interpretation' of an incomplete mark, or a hanging chad, or a badly-filled-in-circle by a human who's quite likely to interpret what they see to fit their biases.
Let's also not forget the miracle of the "butterfly ballots" and all the controversy those caused because they were "just so hard for ordinary people to understand," and as somebody else mentioned above, people who were disallowing perfectly valid ballots because "they couldn't have meant to mark that candidate."
Really? What safeguards are there against unscrupulous election workers 'losing' ballots for the guy they don't support? Or ballot box stuffing with bogus votes? Or giving a wink and a ballot to the guy who's been through 4 times already giving different names?
All of these happen with paper ballots. None of them are 'preventable' by the general public, either.
Getting the results faster doesn't matter - getting the results more accurately, and more objectively does. It depoliticizes the vote-counting process, because the *machine* is not a Republican or a Democrat - your local election workers probably are.
If the machine is open & secure, you can trust that it's not going to just randomly discard votes because it doesn't like Pres. Obama's healthcare plan or can't stand John McCain's running mate.
Having a paper ballot which must be counted (and allowed/disallowed) by a human is inviting fraud. Having an open and auditable election allows the people *with the tools* to analyze the actual data and discover irregularities and discrepancies, rather than rely on second-hand information collected by biased sources delivered days, weeks, or months after the fact.
No, but the point that you readily admit it's nothing but an anecdote does suggest that your sweeping claims of "mac users all dual boot to windows" and the strong implication that "people trying to get work done with a mac" simply can't without doing so certainly suggests that you're trolling.
The lesson here is that unless you have some actual surveys of the prevalence of dual-booting and the reasons why people need to, you're just talking out your ass and treating a bit of anecdotal data as if it represents the full market.
Using your logic, I know dozens of people who voted for John McCain in 2008 - therefore he must be president, right?
But that's beside the main point. Do you really thing most smaller developers can't find a place to host their website and software which costs less than 30% of all their sales?
Sure they can. But rolling your own hosting, mirroring, payment processing, serial numbering, and more comes at the expense of developer time and effort. And it's entirely possible that for a developer with a moderately popular application, that time and effort would be better spent on actually doing development work to improve their software, rather than engrossed in administrative details. In other words, they might actually sell more copies of their software due to exposure on the app store than they would have relying on users to find them on myfunmacapp.com. Other benefits - easy updates for users, convenient reinstall / redownload of already-purchased apps on new / second / etc. systems, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them pushing iAds as an alternative revenue model here as well.
Wow, here's the funny thing: I also know a few dozen mac owners. About 60% of those people are developers and engineers by trade, too.
Of the 3-dozen-or-so mac owners I know, there are 9 of them that I know have a Windows partition, and only 4 of them (quick survey) will admit to using Windows "sometimes" on their Macs.
Right, because nobody ever magically "found" a box full of paper ballots for their candidate, or "lost" a box full of paper ballots for the other guy.
This is what I don't get: fraud is possible via paper or electronic ballots, and in fact when you turn over the paper ballot artifacts to your local election officials, you're just as subject to fraud by way of omission or box-stuffing by unscrupulous election workers. So why not focus on making the process and the system transparent, so you can eliminate the opportunity for fraud, and eliminate the need for imprecise human counts at the same time?
I just don't see how the paper fetish solves anything, because the opportunity for error & fraud exists either way. Open the process & source code to review, put auditing in place, and let everybody (news, government, UN, interested citizens) monitor the process in realtime if they want to look for irregularities and evidence of fraud?
Actually, I'd say Linux's failure to launch as a desktop OS has a lot less to do with Microsoft's 'propaganda' and a lot more to do with the fact that "open source" isn't much of a selling point to an average consumer, and that in that segment of the market, ease of use and consistent, familiar interfaces are the driving factors.
Linux users tend to like the opportunity for endless fiddling with options and distros and packages. They like computers. For them, "open source / free operating system" is a feature. For Joe Q. Consumer, they want to sit down, check their email, browse the web, upload a few photos, and not have to worry about learning a whole new piece of software for doing that. For those people, endless choice & variety is less of a feature and more of an annoyance.
Couple that with the fact that nobody - including Ubuntu, and Dell - has been able to produce or support a desktop system with Linux pre-installed 'for the masses,' and you're looking at a recipe for commercial failure as a desktop OS.
Can I ask, though - since when is a manual recount, done with human hands and human eyes, performed by humans who are full of whim and malice, conducted in a subjective manner ("is this a legitimate ballot? No, that chat is still hanging with a bit too much paper attaching it, better discard it as invalid.", considered more reliable & less error-prone than a machine-conducted recount?
I'm not sure I understand this fetish for "a paper trail." I get the idea of open source, and open elections, in the sense that the count and the software and the machines are transparent... but really, whether you're a democrat or a republican or a green or a socialist... what benefit does having the paper trail offer if the election is open & transparent in the first place?
An electronic system should be able to give accurate, to-the-man, to-the-second tallies throughout the hours of voting, giving monitors the ability to look for irregularities in real-time. I just don't understand how "paper" is somehow better, or less error-prone when you introduce humans who have to interpret the marks made on the paper objectively, and who will no doubt try to find reasons to disqualify votes for "the other guy" while they do the recount.
Or it could be that encyclopedias are NEVER acceptable as primary sources for research? Doesn't matter if you've got the oldest working copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica Super Deluxe Edition on gold-plated acid-free paper - it's still not a primary source.
Just like wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, is not a primary source. It may help you flesh out your understanding of a particular subject, but it should be a starting point which allows you to dive deeper into a subject & find legitimate primary sources, not the end-point where you cut & paste your research papers from.
Bit of difference in scale and scope between launching an unmanned communications satellite, and 'crowdsourcing' an entire Mars colonization effort, though, wouldn't you say?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean "he loses your services as an employee," right? You make it sound like this is some sort of horrible arrangement, where you get a respectable income for providing a valuable service to someone. I'm not sure I see the shame in that.
Should he pay you more than you are worth to him and his business? Should you in turn offer to pay 3x times the asking price for everything you buy just so shopowners and retailers don't need to keep running their store? Employment is a voluntary exchange of money for services. Don't like the conditions, don't work for the person.
If you continue to think it only happens through "magic" and "abusing other people," it will always remain a mystical process to you, and you will never "become rich," through natural or supernatural means.
Indeed, why don't you do exactly that, since clearly you have learned enough to drive him out of business and offer the products and services he does at a lower price, while still maintaining the profit margins which have "magically" made him rich? I would if I could... I see no reason why you shouldn't.
You are mistaken. Your success increases the size of the market, or puts him out of business - either you corner new areas of the market, or he loses customers. If you put him out of work, he can come work for you (he already knows the market, the services, and the people - you win, and he wins), and you can pay him 2x what he's worth to you (to show what a cool enlightened boss you are), and try to make him "magically" rich with your new-found success just like you wish he'd do for you. He wins, and you win, and in the end the market & the consumers win, because you both are producing more at lower cost, while making enough profits to make you and your old boss "magically" rich.
Sounds like an ideal situation to me. Any man who sees another man's abilities as an existential threat in a free market will not remain "rich" for long.
Because the people you're asking to fund 90% of the cost are being turned into beasts of burden, where it is their duty to cash any check somebody in the bottom 10% of wealth writes on their abilities.
How is that fair?
For anybody who thinks that "the rich" swim around in a vault full of gold coins, Scrooge McDuck-style, stop and take a look at how most of them *actually* store the majority of their money. Hint: it's called the stock market.
Now go look at the function of the stock market, and try to convince yourself that taking the money *out* of the stock market (where it provides liquidity as investment for growing businesses) and instead turning it over to consumers to buy consumer goods with it is going to help businesses thrive?
In short: If you keep eating a pie that doesn't grow, sooner or later, the pie will be gone, even if it's a REALLY big pie. The only way for you to keep eating pie indefinitely is if you allow the people who control most of the pie to continue baking NEW pies for you to eat. If you eat the ingredients before they bake the pies, don't be surprised when there are - someday - no more pies.
If you make them pay 90% of the taxes, will you give them 90% of the say in what gets done with their tax money?
Because let's be honest, that top 10% probably isn't much worried about funding Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and prescription drug benefits, and other welfare-state entitlements.
Dear sir,
Please disconnect yourself from the technological society you obviously wish you didn't have to be a part of.
If you think that people will magically not have an incentive to tamper with election results just because the ballots are paper, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you.
Anybody can tamper with paper ballots. Literally anybody. If it were as easy to hack devices and systems as you suggest, then we would have no such thing as the internet because you wouldn't be able to trust anything - literally anything any computer told you unless you had assembled it from raw silicon, and even then, it's best not to take chances.
Pro tip: Slinging insults and calling names does nothing to bolster the validity of your limp-wristed arguments, you luddite twat.
But I think I see where you get it: Constructing a post with random bold & italics for emphasis is fucking hard work. I'd hate computers if I typed that way, too.
Funny thing is, GP didn't say he "had nothing to hide" - he said that the stuff he posts on facebook isn't that private anyway, and he doesn't care that it's up there, or that Facebook knows it. He didn't say "I post every detail of my life there," he said "I don't care if people know the details I do post up there."
There's worlds of difference between "I don't care that Facebook knows I like golf (but suck at it), have half a dozen friends who live in New York City, and like rock and alt-country music, and uses that knowledge to display advertisements I might be interested in seeing based on those interests." and "I don't care if Facebook films me having sex with my wife and posts that up on facebook.com/bobsmith_porking_lisajones/livestream, and uses it to sell male enhancement products and plastic surgery."
Reasonable people are able to draw the distinction between these two scenarios. You seem to have missed the distinction. Conclusions that may be drawn from these facts are left as an exercise to the reader. The rule to keep in mind on Facebook is: don't post it if you consider it private information.
If elections can have magically undetectable counting errors, why would you ever trust your bank to not also have undetectable counting errors?
After all they're undetectable, and apparently, no computer system can be designed where tampering is evident, or detectable, and since people only have altruistic motives when they are managing trillions of dollars worth of other peoples' money via computer programs, but not when they are building an open electronic voting system which can be inspected, audited, and verified by anybody who wishes to do so.
Yeah, you're right, let's just forget the whole idea and go back to subjective interpretations of the law where local election officials can and do tamper with the election results. It'd be much better to do that than to design a secure electronic system to replace it.
In fact, let's just scrap computers altogether - they're entirely too unreliable and risky to trust with anything more than porn.
And for the record, your use of EMPHATIC TYPEFACES just doesn't make you sound any less like a conspiracy nutter.
My parents and my brothers were all enthusiastically encouraged (by me) to get Macs, because a huge part (for me) of every 'family get-together' was devoted to troubleshooting their computer problems - I'm the 'computer' guy in the family, and so whenever Windows made funny beeps, acted strangely, or just broke, it invariably fell to me to fix it.
My family tech support workload has dropped off almost to zero since they all finished switching, and they're all quite pleased with the capabilities of the computers.
I guess I just object to the 'illiterate moron' tag - dad's a chemistry professor, mom's a speech-language pathologist, one brother is a pilot, and the other brother is a civil engineer... I wouldn't say any qualify as illiterate morons, but when it comes to computers, it's just not their area of expertise. Though it's entirely possible that I'm more inclined to be charitable because I've never worked a helpdesk.
I'll agree, though I wouldn't call somebody an illiterate moron just because they're not incredibly knowledgeable about computers. Very few (if any) people who have the money & knowledge to sit down at a computer qualify literally as "illiterate morons."
Remember that not every smart person knows a lot about computers - sometimes their interests & training lie elsewhere, and a LOT of software is designed to piss-poor usability and interface standards - what seems like completely logical layout to a developer may be completely counterintuitive and frustrating for the user: as an example, witness my doctor's slow & painful conversion to electronic medical records. I talked to her about it during a checkup when I noticed that every exam room had a little computer terminal in it. According to her, updating them worked so ass-backwards that she spent more time fighting with the computer than she did seeing patients.
This doesn't even take the form of a slippery slope scenario, and you know it.
They've expressly stated in the past that they *don't* intend to lock down OS X like they have iOS. Yesterday's announcement made no mention of a change to that previous position.
In short, there is no reason to believe this will be anything but "another way" for software distribution to happen.
For a small-time / part-time developer who's interested in selling his software, it's awfully convenient to have the turnkey solution for handling billing & distribution. For a consumer, it's awfully convenient to always have the up-to-date version of the software with latest & greatest bugfixes. But DVD installs, .dmg installs from the web, and building your own will all still be options.
Yep, and when they go home, and Katherine Harris is alone in the storehouse where the paper ballots are stored, are those poll watchers making sure that she doesn't slip a stack of extra ballots into one of them, all carefully filled in with votes for the Republican candidate?
When the election official who voted for Obama is recounting paper ballots and sees a "dubious" hanging chad which *appears* to be a vote for Barack Obama, but which really isn't a clear vote and should be disqualified, think he's going to say "Ah, it's close enough?" or think he's going to disqualify it?
Point is, subjective judgements by humans are and always have been a source of error and/or fraud. Eliminating the involvement of humans between voter and tally eliminates potential fraud. The whole "but they haz papr ballotz!" argument falls flat when the difference isn't close enough to trigger an automatic recount. The lesson: engage in fraud big enough to push it outside the couple % margin that triggers automatic recounts, and you don't ever have to worry about being discovered.
Do you have money in a bank somewhere? How do you trust that they aren't going to foul up your information and lose your money? You trust the bank computers, probably without a second thought - based on what? The bank having a logo with comforting, solid-looking stationery?
If we can have massively interconnected banking without people routinely losing their life savings to banking glitches, it is possible to build a voting system that will do what it's supposed to. Opening the source code & the specs of the systems to review & audit allows everybody who has an interest to verify that the systems operate as expected.
As far as 'taking it on faith' - we do exactly that in the banking system - we take it on faith that the experts have done their job and secured our information. And yet... we don't have widespread systemic fraud where the banks are just... losing... people's money. Or randomly awarding a million dollars to someone's account. Or randomly jacking up the rate on their mortgage.
So please do explain the mechanism by which an electronic voting system would 'guarantee' fraud?
*sigh*
The point is not that you should just "tell everybody who you vote for" - the point is that we trust stuff to computers ALL THE TIME that is *way* more sensitive & has way more potential to fuck up your life if it's handled poorly than "who I voted for."
So why would people trust every shred of their financial data to a computer - trust it to be accurate, right, and secure... but then in the next breath, turn around and say "But I would NEVER trust voting on a computer!" Voting computers (and throughout this discussion, I have stipulated that the software and systems should be open, auditable, audited, transparent, etc. etc. etc. - not "Bob's Republican or Democratic VoteGetter!") are not subject to special laws of physics where they can randomly start doing 'bad things' of their own volition.
This blanket mistrust of a well-designed electronic voting system as an alternate to error-prone, manually recounted ballots that are validated (or invalidated) by the whim of the election officials who most certainly have a horse in the race smacks of foolishness and ludditism, especially on a tech site like Slashdot.
Agreed, but Linux's failure to market itself successfully is a different problem than "Microsoft's marketing suppressing Linux in the marketplace."
Microsoft obviously thinks about Linux internally, but I can't think of the last time they took a shot at Linux in advertising - they're focused on what they view their key features as, and it's also clear that the recent successes at Apple are making them a little nervous.
A default Ubuntu desktop probably WOULD be fine for 90% of users, but if nobody's pushing it, and they're not marketing it... why would anybody switch from the known, comfortable Windows or Apple platforms they're familiar with?
I see this argument here a lot, and it still boggles my mind - if somebody thinks that there is this huge benefit & business opportunity to building & selling Linux desktops... why is nobody succeeding at it? If it's just as simple as "if you build it, they will come," then surely some company (or enterprising geek here) would have put together a successful run by now.
And have they EVER made a statement to that effect about Mac OS X that would lead you to believe they would prevent you from installing software any other way?
They were pretty up-front about it with the iPhone - if you want to distribute to the iPhone, this is the only way to do it.
In today's announcement, it was simply "a way to distribute apps" - not "the only" way to distribute apps. Frankly, I'm not sure why people seem to think that the Mac OS X and iOS platforms will necessarily, or ever, converge to that point. They've stated that they don't intend to lock down Mac OS X that way, and they've made no comments that would contradict that today.
And who secures the doors? And who do we trust not to walk away with one? Humans. And we all know that corruption, prejudice, and underhanded behavior are completely nonexistent in the species, right?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Or have you never heard of things like the Daley Machine, or Boss Tweed and the Tammany Society? Or simply seen the numerous cases of dead people voting, controversially voided ballots, and numerous cases where towns of a few hundred people magically turn in thousands of votes, that have all been reported over the past few election cycles?
Let's not pretend that paper ballots are some magical cure-all. The problem is the involvement of biased, agenda-driven people in a manual process of counting, recounting, validating, and securing the data.
We use computers every day to track, monitor, validate, and secure data that is WAY more sensitive than "who i voted for" - half the people around you put a goddamned bumper sticker on their car or sign on their lawn so you KNOW who they fucking voted for, for christ's sake. Why are we treating a piece of paper with some pen marks that somebody with bias is going to say "That's clearly not completely filled in, I'm going to disallow it," as if it's some holy relic that can't possibly be subverted, discarded, altered, misinterpreted, miscounted, destroyed, or otherwise perverted just as easily as you seem to believe the signals on a computer chip can be?
What's more practically important to you: keeping 'who i voted for' completely secret from the world, or maintaining control of your money? If it's the latter - do you ever use a bank? And yes, I mean 'a bank' - even if YOU choose not to use online banking, ATMs, and the like, do you think they have a little bag in the vault manually labeled with "BOB's Money!"? Please. All of your money and financial information is tracked, secured, and managed using computers, even if you go talk to a teller every time you make a transaction. They're just using a keyboard on your behalf.
And yet you trust that the bank hasn't screwed up your transactions every time you go talk to them, or been stolen by all the thieves and scammers out there. Why?
So what you're saying is that closed-source readers + paper ballots is the correct system to use.
Great, +1 for openness and transparency.
I am not appealing to emotion - I'm pointing out the simple fact that humans are biased, and frequently do behave in ways that undermine the 'sanctity' of your 'vote = physical object' ideal.
How can you recount a ballot if somebody shreds a box of them? How do you account for the fact that people were alternately reporting that absentee ballotts were (and weren't) allowed even though they came in after (or before) the deadline? Once I've marked MY ballot, and turned it in, what distinguishes it from any other ballot - how do I know they haven't thrown away my ballot and replaced it with one marked exactly the same?
When it comes to objectivity and accuracy, I'm sorry, I'm going to trust the machine more than I'm going to trust the human. That's not an appeal to emotion - your laptop isn't a republican or a democrat. If the code running the vote machines is openly audited, and verified fair by both sides, then we can stop with the analog 'interpretation' of an incomplete mark, or a hanging chad, or a badly-filled-in-circle by a human who's quite likely to interpret what they see to fit their biases.
Let's also not forget the miracle of the "butterfly ballots" and all the controversy those caused because they were "just so hard for ordinary people to understand," and as somebody else mentioned above, people who were disallowing perfectly valid ballots because "they couldn't have meant to mark that candidate."
Really? What safeguards are there against unscrupulous election workers 'losing' ballots for the guy they don't support? Or ballot box stuffing with bogus votes? Or giving a wink and a ballot to the guy who's been through 4 times already giving different names?
All of these happen with paper ballots. None of them are 'preventable' by the general public, either.
Getting the results faster doesn't matter - getting the results more accurately, and more objectively does. It depoliticizes the vote-counting process, because the *machine* is not a Republican or a Democrat - your local election workers probably are.
If the machine is open & secure, you can trust that it's not going to just randomly discard votes because it doesn't like Pres. Obama's healthcare plan or can't stand John McCain's running mate.
Having a paper ballot which must be counted (and allowed/disallowed) by a human is inviting fraud. Having an open and auditable election allows the people *with the tools* to analyze the actual data and discover irregularities and discrepancies, rather than rely on second-hand information collected by biased sources delivered days, weeks, or months after the fact.
No, but the point that you readily admit it's nothing but an anecdote does suggest that your sweeping claims of "mac users all dual boot to windows" and the strong implication that "people trying to get work done with a mac" simply can't without doing so certainly suggests that you're trolling.
The lesson here is that unless you have some actual surveys of the prevalence of dual-booting and the reasons why people need to, you're just talking out your ass and treating a bit of anecdotal data as if it represents the full market.
Using your logic, I know dozens of people who voted for John McCain in 2008 - therefore he must be president, right?
Or, it might just be enough that NOWHERE in any of today's presentation, did anybody say, "And you can't get software any other way."
You know, before we start predicting TOO hard here.
Sure they can. But rolling your own hosting, mirroring, payment processing, serial numbering, and more comes at the expense of developer time and effort. And it's entirely possible that for a developer with a moderately popular application, that time and effort would be better spent on actually doing development work to improve their software, rather than engrossed in administrative details. In other words, they might actually sell more copies of their software due to exposure on the app store than they would have relying on users to find them on myfunmacapp.com. Other benefits - easy updates for users, convenient reinstall / redownload of already-purchased apps on new / second / etc. systems, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them pushing iAds as an alternative revenue model here as well.
Wow, here's the funny thing: I also know a few dozen mac owners. About 60% of those people are developers and engineers by trade, too.
Of the 3-dozen-or-so mac owners I know, there are 9 of them that I know have a Windows partition, and only 4 of them (quick survey) will admit to using Windows "sometimes" on their Macs.
Troll more believably next time.
Right, because nobody ever magically "found" a box full of paper ballots for their candidate, or "lost" a box full of paper ballots for the other guy.
This is what I don't get: fraud is possible via paper or electronic ballots, and in fact when you turn over the paper ballot artifacts to your local election officials, you're just as subject to fraud by way of omission or box-stuffing by unscrupulous election workers. So why not focus on making the process and the system transparent, so you can eliminate the opportunity for fraud, and eliminate the need for imprecise human counts at the same time?
I just don't see how the paper fetish solves anything, because the opportunity for error & fraud exists either way. Open the process & source code to review, put auditing in place, and let everybody (news, government, UN, interested citizens) monitor the process in realtime if they want to look for irregularities and evidence of fraud?
Actually, I'd say Linux's failure to launch as a desktop OS has a lot less to do with Microsoft's 'propaganda' and a lot more to do with the fact that "open source" isn't much of a selling point to an average consumer, and that in that segment of the market, ease of use and consistent, familiar interfaces are the driving factors.
Linux users tend to like the opportunity for endless fiddling with options and distros and packages. They like computers. For them, "open source / free operating system" is a feature. For Joe Q. Consumer, they want to sit down, check their email, browse the web, upload a few photos, and not have to worry about learning a whole new piece of software for doing that. For those people, endless choice & variety is less of a feature and more of an annoyance.
Couple that with the fact that nobody - including Ubuntu, and Dell - has been able to produce or support a desktop system with Linux pre-installed 'for the masses,' and you're looking at a recipe for commercial failure as a desktop OS.
Can I ask, though - since when is a manual recount, done with human hands and human eyes, performed by humans who are full of whim and malice, conducted in a subjective manner ("is this a legitimate ballot? No, that chat is still hanging with a bit too much paper attaching it, better discard it as invalid.", considered more reliable & less error-prone than a machine-conducted recount?
I'm not sure I understand this fetish for "a paper trail." I get the idea of open source, and open elections, in the sense that the count and the software and the machines are transparent... but really, whether you're a democrat or a republican or a green or a socialist... what benefit does having the paper trail offer if the election is open & transparent in the first place?
An electronic system should be able to give accurate, to-the-man, to-the-second tallies throughout the hours of voting, giving monitors the ability to look for irregularities in real-time. I just don't understand how "paper" is somehow better, or less error-prone when you introduce humans who have to interpret the marks made on the paper objectively, and who will no doubt try to find reasons to disqualify votes for "the other guy" while they do the recount.
Or it could be that encyclopedias are NEVER acceptable as primary sources for research? Doesn't matter if you've got the oldest working copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica Super Deluxe Edition on gold-plated acid-free paper - it's still not a primary source.
Just like wikipedia, being an encyclopedia, is not a primary source. It may help you flesh out your understanding of a particular subject, but it should be a starting point which allows you to dive deeper into a subject & find legitimate primary sources, not the end-point where you cut & paste your research papers from.
Bit of difference in scale and scope between launching an unmanned communications satellite, and 'crowdsourcing' an entire Mars colonization effort, though, wouldn't you say?