But security isn't the question. The problem is that with secure and anonymous electronic voting there is no outside way to verify that the results reported have anything to do with the votes cast.
What you might be saying (and what I'll claim) isn't that there is no secure way of implementing the currently implemented protocol. It's that it's the wrong protocol, since it's basically "1. Tell the vote-counter what your vote is; 2. trust the vote-counter to report the correct final tally."
Last time I voted, I wasn't strip-searched for cameras.
Here's how Tony the Mobster buys your vote: you'll deliver to him a small video of you in the booth, with the ballot clearly made out as a vote for what he wants, and you exiting the booth putting the vote in the urn. The he won't shoot your kneecaps.
He'll probably even help you with a good enough covert camera if your cell phone will attract too much attention.
Anybody got an idea for how to limit this? Tony is a resourceful man, he can send goons to your polling station who'll observe you...
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +5 Insightful.
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +3 Informative.
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +5 Funny.
Consider this: If I'm modded funny, that should stop the recursion. Otherwise, this thread will grow infinitely large and overflow your browser's stack. Mods: do your duty towards the safety of browser stacks everywhere;)
Here's a few snippets from the article, selected to show how TalkTalk gets it:
TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.
"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," [...] This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."
TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
Mature engineering fields have standards and codes of practice, both science-based and empirically derived.
How is science-based != empirical?
It's math (and the math-ish parts of CS) which stick out as the sore thumb, in that we think of them as science but their practitioners occupy themselves with proofs rather than experimental evidence.
Math (and CS) are the oddballs, not the set {every other science}. Or do you think that math+CS got it right, and physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, medicine, geology, (softening up) economy, archeology, anthropology, sociology, ethnography, history, psychology,... got it almost right but still has that unfortunate aspect where they need to look at the real world to verify their ideas?
So, where's the online MagicSetEditor? Or the on-line sound editor? Or the on-line wesnoth map editor (FOSS turn-based strategy game)?
Depending on the data format, you might be able to collaborate with client-side apps and version control with on-line storage. If you can convince your friends or co-workers to use version control.
If what you care about is collaboration, all you need the cloud for is a place to store the data that everyone agrees on. And that's only if you can't have your cloud be in-house.
You don't need to edit your data in your browser. You don't even need a browser to store your data on-line.
(for binary/non-diffable/non-mergeable data, you might need exclusive per-file locking...)
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app?
Last I heard, Google is losing money on youtube, per unit of traffic.
If they convert youtube to HTML 5 (or in other ways break it for IE 6, and tell the users that it doesn't work in IE 6), would people switch?
If no, then the IE 6 users would go away, and Google would lose less money. If yes, then woo-hoo;) maybe if Google advertised Chrome as a replacement...
But... is it evil to use your power to make people do something they don't really want? If Google felt Opera was better than Firefox and tried to force me to switch, I definitely wouldn't be happy with them, so I think it's bound to generate some ill will.
Also: if your corporate IT overlords won't let you use anything other than IE 6, you just lose, so the web app needs to be a must-have to corporate users (and more so than their IE 6-only web apps).
Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.
It also sucks for text and markup...
Let me explain. Consider your average LaTeX document: rendered it beautiful fonts (computer modern roman ftw), sane hyphenation, lines that are around 66 characters long (which is optimal for readability, I hear), and probably tons of typographic considerations I don't know about. Plus, it's easy to do columns that are nice to look at.
The web: has no standardized beautiful fonts (you may set up your client to use CMR), forcing your own fonts on sites may break their CSS, has no support for 66-char lines, no columns, no good way to make use of wide screens without making lines very long (see also: no columns), and the browsers seem to not care much about doing typographic work.
In LaTeX, you can define your own semantic markup. In my stdlib.tex I define \mathbold to either \mathbb or \mathbf, depending on whether I want a bold Z or a blackboard-bold Z to represent the integers.
In HTML, you can't define your own semantic markup. Also, people don't want semantic markup, they want pixel-by-pixel positioning.
The only thing HTML seems to be really good at is the "Hyper" part. And that's more a function of HTTP than of HTML.
I wonder if we would have been better of by using NeWS (Sun's Networked Windowing System; no relation to NNTP) instead of X, and running remote NeWS clients instead of fetching HTML pages.
That way, the remote client can have its pixel-by-pixel layout; we can still transport them via HTTP so the "Hyper"-part will still be there. We could also have native-looking widgets, and people could update the widget library independent of the w3c or the NeWS Standards Organization or whatever.
It's not that I hate the web. I think the hyper is great. It's just that I want a better medium for text, markup and language. And a much, much better medium for applications.
With h.264, Apple is [protected against patent suits] because they've licensed the format.
Really? So if vendor A and vendor B has a patent, and user C buys a license from vendor A, then vendor B can't come after user C and say "hey! We have a patent. Pay us or stop what you're doing!"... no?
If that's true, I'm founding a shell company which is going to sell me patent licensing.
If that's false, then Apple paying license money to vendor A isn't going to protect them against suits from vendor B.
I patched Battle for Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Fluxbox, Openbox, slocate, and a buncha' other programs. Where's my money?
I'm not entitled to any money for writing that code. I can ask people to pay me money. I can ask companies to pay me money to write whatever code they want me to write.
If I feel like it, I can even write some code myself, offer it to people in exchange for money, and forbid them from sharing that code with other people.
That's what the world is. Now let's discuss what the world should be.
I think there should be economic incentives to create the software that people benefit the most from in a cost-effective way. (i.e. lots of bang, maximal bang for the buck). Is that by a hands-off free market-esque policy (i.e. copyrights don't cover software)? Is it by short copyright terms? Is it by long copyright terms? Is it by the current restrictions on the freedoms of the masses, or a smaller or a larger set?
I'm not sure. But don't make the mistake of justifying the law because it is what it is at this instant in time. The law should follow, not lead, our collective sense of morality.
Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than youÃ(TM)d find on a standard Qwerty layout.
[...] making it even HARDER to type accurately [...]
Bingo!
I predict that the smaller keys will cause users to hit the keys less often, and that the decrease in key hits will be spread out uniformly randomly.
One consequence is that there will be fewer false hits (you unintentionally hit a key). But unless the user has a sub-50 accuracy percentage (true hits vs. false hits), the decrease in false hits will be smaller than the increase in false misses (you miss a key you intended to hit).
You'll make fewer errors of one particular kind, but overall you'll make more errors.
(at least until you adjust to the new shape; then you might approach your regular old typing speed and accuracy)
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "[...] Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience [...] against OSX and Linux [...]" without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Did they discuss the impact that different disk timing has on usability and user experience?
Here's a bold statement: if you can write to disk faster than the network can send you data, you don't care how much faster. Here's the argument: you cache the data you want to write in memory, and then write it whenever the user isn't doing anything important.
What you really want to care about is read speeds. Either your read is small, so it's going to be fast anyways, or it's big, and then your biggest win is to do the reading in parallel. (Or you do a lot of small reads, and then you want parallel reads again, like when you boot.)
And for many of my big files, the real question is: can it be read faster than mplayer needs to play it? If so, in those cases, why do I care about faster reads?
Slashdot Mirror
But security isn't the question. The problem is that with secure and anonymous electronic voting there is no outside way to verify that the results reported have anything to do with the votes cast.
Have a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems
What you might be saying (and what I'll claim) isn't that there is no secure way of implementing the currently implemented protocol. It's that it's the wrong protocol, since it's basically "1. Tell the vote-counter what your vote is; 2. trust the vote-counter to report the correct final tally."
There are ways to remove the trust requirement.
Last time I voted, I wasn't strip-searched for cameras.
Here's how Tony the Mobster buys your vote: you'll deliver to him a small video of you in the booth, with the ballot clearly made out as a vote for what he wants, and you exiting the booth putting the vote in the urn. The he won't shoot your kneecaps.
He'll probably even help you with a good enough covert camera if your cell phone will attract too much attention.
Anybody got an idea for how to limit this? Tony is a resourceful man, he can send goons to your polling station who'll observe you...
Hmm, matrix scene, only with the rows of pods being mental monkeys hammering on mental idea writers?
You're saying we should all become playwrights? ;)
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +5 Insightful.
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +3 Informative.
Only on Slashdot would this be modded +5 Funny.
Consider this: If I'm modded funny, that should stop the recursion. Otherwise, this thread will grow infinitely large and overflow your browser's stack. Mods: do your duty towards the safety of browser stacks everywhere ;)
Those would be "picosofts".
Didn't they make the Pine composer?
yeah, man. the military, police, firefighters, [...]
But what about the aqueduct, irrigation, housing, etc.?
Here's a few snippets from the article, selected to show how TalkTalk gets it:
TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.
"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," [...] This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."
TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
(I'm not paid to say that)
Personally for me, the top 3 features are: [F#, a library, C++0x]
Forgive me for being ignorant, but...
What is VS? I always thought of it as an IDE, which my devil's dictionary describes as "an editor with a compile button and delusions of grandeur."
So does VS now have syntax coloring and a compile button for F#? Or is VS something else, such as package containing {a compiler, an IDE}?
Then you start talking about libraries... so, VS is {IDE, compiler, libraries}? Does it have a VM for anything as well, or... ?
Exactly what is VS?
Mature engineering fields have standards and codes of practice, both science-based and empirically derived.
How is science-based != empirical?
It's math (and the math-ish parts of CS) which stick out as the sore thumb, in that we think of them as science but their practitioners occupy themselves with proofs rather than experimental evidence.
Math (and CS) are the oddballs, not the set {every other science}. Or do you think that math+CS got it right, and physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, medicine, geology, (softening up) economy, archeology, anthropology, sociology, ethnography, history, psychology, ... got it almost right but still has that unfortunate aspect where they need to look at the real world to verify their ideas?
FTFY. Were we not talking about schoolyard bullying?
So, where's the online MagicSetEditor? Or the on-line sound editor? Or the on-line wesnoth map editor (FOSS turn-based strategy game)?
Depending on the data format, you might be able to collaborate with client-side apps and version control with on-line storage. If you can convince your friends or co-workers to use version control.
If what you care about is collaboration, all you need the cloud for is a place to store the data that everyone agrees on. And that's only if you can't have your cloud be in-house.
You don't need to edit your data in your browser. You don't even need a browser to store your data on-line.
(for binary/non-diffable/non-mergeable data, you might need exclusive per-file locking...)
Still working on printer drivers ;-)
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app?
Last I heard, Google is losing money on youtube, per unit of traffic.
If they convert youtube to HTML 5 (or in other ways break it for IE 6, and tell the users that it doesn't work in IE 6), would people switch?
If no, then the IE 6 users would go away, and Google would lose less money. If yes, then woo-hoo ;) maybe if Google advertised Chrome as a replacement...
But... is it evil to use your power to make people do something they don't really want? If Google felt Opera was better than Firefox and tried to force me to switch, I definitely wouldn't be happy with them, so I think it's bound to generate some ill will.
Also: if your corporate IT overlords won't let you use anything other than IE 6, you just lose, so the web app needs to be a must-have to corporate users (and more so than their IE 6-only web apps).
Probably because I have a very long password
I tried changing mine to 'penis', but I was told it wasn't long enough :(
Want to be my friend on slashdot? I wanna read your journal, do you want to read mine?
I think you need to use larger values of 0 ;-)
What does android has
Cheezburgar?
the sight of European topless girls doesn't cause anguish, disgust and general trauma.
Cool, can we have those shown on US television then? ;-)
Actually, no version of HTML is really suited for "web applications" but that's how we roll anyway.
It also sucks for text and markup...
Let me explain. Consider your average LaTeX document: rendered it beautiful fonts (computer modern roman ftw), sane hyphenation, lines that are around 66 characters long (which is optimal for readability, I hear), and probably tons of typographic considerations I don't know about. Plus, it's easy to do columns that are nice to look at.
The web: has no standardized beautiful fonts (you may set up your client to use CMR), forcing your own fonts on sites may break their CSS, has no support for 66-char lines, no columns, no good way to make use of wide screens without making lines very long (see also: no columns), and the browsers seem to not care much about doing typographic work.
In LaTeX, you can define your own semantic markup. In my stdlib.tex I define \mathbold to either \mathbb or \mathbf, depending on whether I want a bold Z or a blackboard-bold Z to represent the integers.
In HTML, you can't define your own semantic markup. Also, people don't want semantic markup, they want pixel-by-pixel positioning.
The only thing HTML seems to be really good at is the "Hyper" part. And that's more a function of HTTP than of HTML.
I wonder if we would have been better of by using NeWS (Sun's Networked Windowing System; no relation to NNTP) instead of X, and running remote NeWS clients instead of fetching HTML pages.
That way, the remote client can have its pixel-by-pixel layout; we can still transport them via HTTP so the "Hyper"-part will still be there. We could also have native-looking widgets, and people could update the widget library independent of the w3c or the NeWS Standards Organization or whatever.
It's not that I hate the web. I think the hyper is great. It's just that I want a better medium for text, markup and language. And a much, much better medium for applications.
With h.264, Apple is [protected against patent suits] because they've licensed the format.
Really? So if vendor A and vendor B has a patent, and user C buys a license from vendor A, then vendor B can't come after user C and say "hey! We have a patent. Pay us or stop what you're doing!"... no?
If that's true, I'm founding a shell company which is going to sell me patent licensing.
If that's false, then Apple paying license money to vendor A isn't going to protect them against suits from vendor B.
it's certainly not like the creators shouldn't be compensated if they so wish
You make it sound like you argue that if software writers want to be compensated for their efforts, someone should.
I wrote `filling', http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/java/filling.html. Where's my money?
I patched Battle for Wesnoth, Nexuiz, Fluxbox, Openbox, slocate, and a buncha' other programs. Where's my money?
I'm not entitled to any money for writing that code. I can ask people to pay me money. I can ask companies to pay me money to write whatever code they want me to write.
If I feel like it, I can even write some code myself, offer it to people in exchange for money, and forbid them from sharing that code with other people.
That's what the world is. Now let's discuss what the world should be.
I think there should be economic incentives to create the software that people benefit the most from in a cost-effective way. (i.e. lots of bang, maximal bang for the buck). Is that by a hands-off free market-esque policy (i.e. copyrights don't cover software)? Is it by short copyright terms? Is it by long copyright terms? Is it by the current restrictions on the freedoms of the masses, or a smaller or a larger set?
I'm not sure. But don't make the mistake of justifying the law because it is what it is at this instant in time. The law should follow, not lead, our collective sense of morality.
From the article:
Baker told Register Hardware today that each triangular key has significantly more dead space around it than youÃ(TM)d find on a standard Qwerty layout.
[...] making it even HARDER to type accurately [...]
Bingo!
I predict that the smaller keys will cause users to hit the keys less often, and that the decrease in key hits will be spread out uniformly randomly.
One consequence is that there will be fewer false hits (you unintentionally hit a key). But unless the user has a sub-50 accuracy percentage (true hits vs. false hits), the decrease in false hits will be smaller than the increase in false misses (you miss a key you intended to hit).
You'll make fewer errors of one particular kind, but overall you'll make more errors.
(at least until you adjust to the new shape; then you might approach your regular old typing speed and accuracy)
Other smaller religions and factions are similarly destructive, like the Mormon faction that still practices polygamy
Just checking: is it polygamy that's destructive, or is it some other practice by the same faction?
It's somewhat easy to jump to the former conclusion based off what you said---I don't think that's the right thing to do (a priori).
Still, I don't understand how HotHardware can write: "[...] Microsoft is finally showing that it can better compete in terms of usability and user-experience [...] against OSX and Linux [...]" without having compared it with OSX or Linux.
Did they discuss the impact that different disk timing has on usability and user experience?
Here's a bold statement: if you can write to disk faster than the network can send you data, you don't care how much faster. Here's the argument: you cache the data you want to write in memory, and then write it whenever the user isn't doing anything important.
What you really want to care about is read speeds. Either your read is small, so it's going to be fast anyways, or it's big, and then your biggest win is to do the reading in parallel. (Or you do a lot of small reads, and then you want parallel reads again, like when you boot.)
And for many of my big files, the real question is: can it be read faster than mplayer needs to play it? If so, in those cases, why do I care about faster reads?
What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills?
emerge world
That's really funny... the slashdot sidebar showed me as logged in (still did after I reloaded the page).
Yet my post is by anonymous coward... Did I post anonymously by mistake, or is /. broken?
(We apologize for the interruption, and return you to the scheduled programming.)