And while we are at it, let's fix Voter Fraud with one simple tool: a freaking indelible inkwell at the desk where you pick up your ballot. That way, once you've picked up ONE ballot, you cast your ONE vote. People with purple fingers cannot pick up ballots.
Then we can toss all of this disenfranchising "voter ID" crap on the ashpile too.
Cool. If you don't have to present an id to vote, then it means that resident foreigners will be able to vote too. Finally there won't be taxation without representation anymore!
One election in the mid-1800s in San Francisco was won when someone imported an invertible ballot box with a false bottom from the east. No computers involved there. There are plenty of ways to cheat.
Which has been made impossible in France by mandating that ballot boxes be transparent. When proper modern procedures are followed for paper elections, fraud is very very hard at the polling place level and impossible on a large scale. The only remaining avenues for rigging are things like gerrymandering and rigging the voter lists, i.e. stuff that happens way before the election and is open to anyone to see.
How about Saturday/and/ Sunday... And require workers to have six hours during voting hours off on at least one of the two days.
Very bad idea. Now the ballot boxes will be unattended all night long, free for anyone to do with as they please. And no, relying on the power in place to pick the guards who will make sure they cannot be tampered with is not a good idea either.
How about Saturday/and/ Sunday... And require workers to have six hours during voting hours off on at least one of the two days.
Very bad idea. Now you will leave your ballots unattended all night long, free for anyone to do with as they please. And no, relying on the power in place to make sure no one can tamper with the ballot boxes is not a good idea either.
The point of the trapdoor function is that the server doesn't have to have your password stored on it, because you can just verify the password presented by comparing a hashed form of the presented password to the hash you have stored.
But with a time+password hashing scheme, the server must know the user's password because each time the user logs in, the must construct a new hash from the password and the current time.
Not true. The server can just store the salt + hash of the password. Then when a client wants to authrenticate the server sends the salt + random one-time value. The client uses the salt to generate the password hash. Then it concatenates the random value and resulting hash and hashes the whole and sends the result to the server. The server too computes the hash of the concatenated random value and password hash. It then compares that with what the client submitted. If it matches then the client had the right password. The hash sent by the client cannot be used for replay attacks because the random value will be different for the next login. The server does not know the user password and the hash is salted making it hard to recover the user password (which helps if it was used on other sites). The stolen hash can however be used to authenticate through the login algorithm however.
There's probably better solutions but this is enough to prove the server does not have to know the user password even if timestamps or one-time random values are used.
Yes, reusing greywater is definitely done, but quite rarely because it's much more work to set up, especially as a retrofit. And almost impossible as a retrofit for appartments. So where it's not practical low-flush toilets are the cheap easy next best option.
Either you're completely forgetting that the US has lots of regulation too, or you're saying it would be better off without the FDA, the DMV, the NHTSA, the EPA, construction codes, codes mandating earthquake resistance for public infrastructure in California, etc. Of course what you're missing is that there's a huge space for a middle ground between 'governement run planned economy' and 'the wild west'.
If an incandescent bulb costs you $1.00 to buy, but $10.00 per month to operate, and lasts only one year, and an LED bulb that costs $60 to buy, $1.67 per month to operate, and lasts 20 years, which would you buy? Most people are actually really stupid, and continue to buy the $1 bulbs because they're "cheaper", not realizing the real difference is $121 per year vs. $23 per year.
To expound a little on this, the issue is that one cost is "in your face" while the other one is hidden and hard to figure out. When you go to the store it's obvious the more expensive bulb is going to cost you $59 more. But while you may pay $50 (or whatever) in electricity per month, nowhere is it written how much of that is attributable to the bulb you're replacing. So how much will you really save, it really depends on how much you use said bulb. But few people have even spent time thinking about how long each light is on per day in their home. So I would not call these people stupid, they face known costs, unknown savings, and saving is just not part of the culture anyway.
So we cannot count on customers forcing the change on the industry for now. We can continue as if there was no issue until a crisis forces their hand. Or we can have government regulation ban the more wasteful appliances so society is somewhat prepared for when the enrgy crisis comes around.
That water isn't free - price is a great motivator for people to use less. [...] if the resource were actually scarce, it would be expensive, and people would naturally use less. Funny old world.
A pound of cure is so much better than an ounce of prevention.
That seems to be the motto of economists and Americans alike. They probably like the side-effects of the cure (you know, recession, poverty, disease, etc.).
The industry and agriculture don't use drinkable water. By your own admission toilets use 25% of the drinkable water supply(*) which is much harder to produce and distribute. Plus there does not seem to be any good reason to make inefficient toilets so it just makes sense to enforce it.
(*) It's not just the US, it's 20% in France, 35% in Belgium for instance.
and here is some more bad (but not as bad as yours) math to counter your argument. Amsterdam metro has about 2.15 million people on about 3 500 sq km of land. That amounts to about 615 person per sq km. With a population density of Amsterdam, which has beautiful parks and recreational areas, the world should be able to house some 92 billion people with ease.
Overpopulation is a myth.
Now that's some really bad math. Where earth's population is by force self-sufficient, Amesterdam's is of course not at all; for all their nice parks and recreational areas they don't grow their own food, produce their own electricity, manufacture the goods they use, etc. Where it not for all the other regions of earth that provide them with these they would be unable to live. So your conclusion is completely unsubstantiated.
You're forgetting about the third dimension. Lots of people live vertically on top of each other in this world.
Part of the american dream (also true in many other countries) is 'one house per family'. Houses don't stack too well vertically. So that's one dream that you agree we have to give up on.
But I think you're missing the point. Even if our dwellings took no space that's not much area per person. It's an area that a single person can easily have a big impact on. Give each person a spade and we can manually plough the earth in days! So anyone still believing that the earth is so huge there is no way that we can substantially affect it is clearly deluded. On the contrary it's now very easy for us to mess it up.
It's also forgetting the dimension of time. The 210m x 100m doesn't need to include any shared space (such as roads) since we take turns occupying it.
Oh! In your world the road is created in front of your car and disappears behind it leaving only lush fields of green?!!! What a wonderful world! Even forgetting your nonsense about time, where would you be putting the shared roads if not somewhere on the land mass? Thus a fraction of them will come from the 210m x 100m land area per person.
(*) Only economists think that if it takes a thousand researchers 20 years to develop fusion reactors then by putting 1 million researchers on the case they can get them operational by the end of next week.
Only idiots think economists think this.
Armchair economists seem to. Their reaction typically is that whenever we run into an issue the market will provide incentives to solve it and thus scientists will find a solution. So there is no reason to worry, try to plan ahead or, worst of all, incite people to change their behavior to conserve resources or reduce pollution (e.g. raise gas prices). For most of them it does not even enter their consciousness that while a solution is being developped decades may pass, a major global recession may strike, wars may erupt over precious resources, and millions may die from it all.
And when we're 10 billion as predicted by demography experts it's going to be under 150m x 100m.
That's for your house, workplace and the roads; for growing your food and raising the cattle and poultry you eat (but not the fish), for deserts, mountains and forests.
Is it really so hard to believe that this may not be enough for everyone to live the 'dream western life' or that with so many people we may exhaust some resources? (be it oil, rare earths, etc) Or on the opposite cause global pollution?
I understand that you're optimistic that we can invent technology to make this work. But you have to at least acknowledge that there's the possibility of a problem before you can decide to try and solve it. You also have to acknowledge that given the world population density we're more likely than ever to hit global scale issues before you can consider their implications. The first of which being that they are likely to require a bit of lead time to solve(*). Isn't any of that a good reason to be just a bit humble?
(*) Only economists think that if it takes a thousand researchers 20 years to develop fusion reactors then by putting 1 million researchers on the case they can get them operational by the end of next week.
Why without introducing a discrepancy in the voter list? Haven't you ever heard of dead people still getting to vote?
Because even the dead sign the voter list. So now if you have 612 votes from dead and living people but you have 618 ballots in the ballot box, everyone will see that there's been fraud.
Paper ballots can be "multiplied" too. They can also be "deleted", and ballot boxes can be stuffed. Paper is in no way a secure system. Being able to physically count it afterwards doesn't prevent fraud between voting day and recount day.
Come back when you have devised a way to introduce enough ballots to swing an election (so at least a hundred) in a ballot box while it is being watched by the 5 or 6 people who are there to do just that, all the while without introducing a discrepency with the voter list. Anytime paper fraud is possible it's either obvious there has been fraud, or because the country has a stupid election process.
In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit.
All they have access to is the code that purportedly is being run on the voting computers. But on election day they have no way to verify that the code that runs is the one they looked at and signed.
With so many eyes looking at the whole process,
What you see as 'so many eyes' I see as so few eyes. In a paper election anyone can verify the process and a significant fraction of the population actually does. In electronic voting very few people can verify anything. And in particular none of the parties or universities you mentionned above can do anything to verify that the election is fair.
nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.
Most people don't claim there has been fraud. However what most researchers in the field and most computer scientists do say is that there is no way to know, that if fraud happens there won't be any proof anyway, and that electronic voting makes the voting process opaque.
Maybe, but the airbag rotates with the steering wheel, so if you keep your hands on 3 and 9 positions as you turn the wheel, the airbag should still explode in between your arms, instead of through them.
Not true... unless your shoulders also rotate with the wheel. If that's the case, please send us the video!
Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have.
There's an interesting post on Do the Math on the topic of energy storage, including flyweels. They seem to be workable but not necessarily the most economic approach.
Note that this video concerns electronic voting, not Internet voting. Given that it assumes the presence of printed ballots that you tear apart and that have a scratch surface it's pretty clear it's incompatible with current paperless systems and Internet voting.
Physical voting isn't enough however. There were widespread allegations of vote rigging in the Russian elections for example with election officers tampering with the number of counted votes. If the whole system is corrupt then it will obtain the result it wants regardless of how the vote is conducted.
The election rules should be such that any rigging will be obvious to everyone. Then it's up to the voters to take whatever measure they find is appropriate. Electronic and Internet voting do not offer that transparency guarantee.
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
Internet voting has been introduced for a number of professional elections in France and it never increased voter turnout, and in some cases it seems to have lowered it. The same increased turnout claims were made for electronic voting but it seems they never realized even in countries that used it more widely like Belgium and the Netherlands.
Technical issues are not the only valid issues for an election system. For instance the first and foremost issue it has to solve is convince the voters that the election is fair. Otherwise they won't accept its outcome which will result in civil war.
And that's a big issue with electronic and internet voting systems: the systems involved are so somplex that nobody can truly claim to understand their theory from A to Z, and voters cannot verify in any way that practice matches the theory.
Slashdot Mirror
And while we are at it, let's fix Voter Fraud with one simple tool: a freaking indelible inkwell at the desk where you pick up your ballot. That way, once you've picked up ONE ballot, you cast your ONE vote. People with purple fingers cannot pick up ballots.
Then we can toss all of this disenfranchising "voter ID" crap on the ashpile too.
Cool. If you don't have to present an id to vote, then it means that resident foreigners will be able to vote too. Finally there won't be taxation without representation anymore!
One election in the mid-1800s in San Francisco was won when someone imported an invertible ballot box with a false bottom from the east. No computers involved there. There are plenty of ways to cheat.
Which has been made impossible in France by mandating that ballot boxes be transparent. When proper modern procedures are followed for paper elections, fraud is very very hard at the polling place level and impossible on a large scale. The only remaining avenues for rigging are things like gerrymandering and rigging the voter lists, i.e. stuff that happens way before the election and is open to anyone to see.
How about Saturday /and/ Sunday... And require workers to have six hours during voting hours off on at least one of the two days.
Very bad idea. Now the ballot boxes will be unattended all night long, free for anyone to do with as they please. And no, relying on the power in place to pick the guards who will make sure they cannot be tampered with is not a good idea either.
How about Saturday /and/ Sunday... And require workers to have six hours during voting hours off on at least one of the two days.
Very bad idea. Now you will leave your ballots unattended all night long, free for anyone to do with as they please. And no, relying on the power in place to make sure no one can tamper with the ballot boxes is not a good idea either.
The point of the trapdoor function is that the server doesn't have to have your password stored on it, because you can just verify the password presented by comparing a hashed form of the presented password to the hash you have stored.
But with a time+password hashing scheme, the server must know the user's password because each time the user logs in, the must construct a new hash from the password and the current time.
Not true. The server can just store the salt + hash of the password. Then when a client wants to authrenticate the server sends the salt + random one-time value. The client uses the salt to generate the password hash. Then it concatenates the random value and resulting hash and hashes the whole and sends the result to the server. The server too computes the hash of the concatenated random value and password hash. It then compares that with what the client submitted. If it matches then the client had the right password. The hash sent by the client cannot be used for replay attacks because the random value will be different for the next login. The server does not know the user password and the hash is salted making it hard to recover the user password (which helps if it was used on other sites). The stolen hash can however be used to authenticate through the login algorithm however.
There's probably better solutions but this is enough to prove the server does not have to know the user password even if timestamps or one-time random values are used.
Yes, reusing greywater is definitely done, but quite rarely because it's much more work to set up, especially as a retrofit. And almost impossible as a retrofit for appartments. So where it's not practical low-flush toilets are the cheap easy next best option.
Either you're completely forgetting that the US has lots of regulation too, or you're saying it would be better off without the FDA, the DMV, the NHTSA, the EPA, construction codes, codes mandating earthquake resistance for public infrastructure in California, etc. Of course what you're missing is that there's a huge space for a middle ground between 'governement run planned economy' and 'the wild west'.
If an incandescent bulb costs you $1.00 to buy, but $10.00 per month to operate, and lasts only one year, and an LED bulb that costs $60 to buy, $1.67 per month to operate, and lasts 20 years, which would you buy? Most people are actually really stupid, and continue to buy the $1 bulbs because they're "cheaper", not realizing the real difference is $121 per year vs. $23 per year.
To expound a little on this, the issue is that one cost is "in your face" while the other one is hidden and hard to figure out. When you go to the store it's obvious the more expensive bulb is going to cost you $59 more. But while you may pay $50 (or whatever) in electricity per month, nowhere is it written how much of that is attributable to the bulb you're replacing. So how much will you really save, it really depends on how much you use said bulb. But few people have even spent time thinking about how long each light is on per day in their home. So I would not call these people stupid, they face known costs, unknown savings, and saving is just not part of the culture anyway.
So we cannot count on customers forcing the change on the industry for now. We can continue as if there was no issue until a crisis forces their hand. Or we can have government regulation ban the more wasteful appliances so society is somewhat prepared for when the enrgy crisis comes around.
That water isn't free - price is a great motivator for people to use less. [...] if the resource were actually scarce, it would be expensive, and people would naturally use less. Funny old world.
A pound of cure is so much better than an ounce of prevention.
That seems to be the motto of economists and Americans alike. They probably like the side-effects of the cure (you know, recession, poverty, disease, etc.).
The industry and agriculture don't use drinkable water. By your own admission toilets use 25% of the drinkable water supply(*) which is much harder to produce and distribute. Plus there does not seem to be any good reason to make inefficient toilets so it just makes sense to enforce it.
(*) It's not just the US, it's 20% in France, 35% in Belgium for instance.
This is really bad maths,
Any specific flaw you'd like to point out?
and here is some more bad (but not as bad as yours) math to counter your argument. Amsterdam metro has about 2.15 million people on about 3 500 sq km of land. That amounts to about 615 person per sq km. With a population density of Amsterdam, which has beautiful parks and recreational areas, the world should be able to house some 92 billion people with ease.
Overpopulation is a myth.
Now that's some really bad math. Where earth's population is by force self-sufficient, Amesterdam's is of course not at all; for all their nice parks and recreational areas they don't grow their own food, produce their own electricity, manufacture the goods they use, etc. Where it not for all the other regions of earth that provide them with these they would be unable to live. So your conclusion is completely unsubstantiated.
You're forgetting about the third dimension. Lots of people live vertically on top of each other in this world.
Part of the american dream (also true in many other countries) is 'one house per family'. Houses don't stack too well vertically. So that's one dream that you agree we have to give up on.
But I think you're missing the point. Even if our dwellings took no space that's not much area per person. It's an area that a single person can easily have a big impact on. Give each person a spade and we can manually plough the earth in days! So anyone still believing that the earth is so huge there is no way that we can substantially affect it is clearly deluded. On the contrary it's now very easy for us to mess it up.
It's also forgetting the dimension of time. The 210m x 100m doesn't need to include any shared space (such as roads) since we take turns occupying it.
Oh! In your world the road is created in front of your car and disappears behind it leaving only lush fields of green?!!! What a wonderful world!
Even forgetting your nonsense about time, where would you be putting the shared roads if not somewhere on the land mass? Thus a fraction of them will come from the 210m x 100m land area per person.
(*) Only economists think that if it takes a thousand researchers 20 years to develop fusion reactors then by putting 1 million researchers on the case they can get them operational by the end of next week.
Only idiots think economists think this.
Armchair economists seem to. Their reaction typically is that whenever we run into an issue the market will provide incentives to solve it and thus scientists will find a solution. So there is no reason to worry, try to plan ahead or, worst of all, incite people to change their behavior to conserve resources or reduce pollution (e.g. raise gas prices). For most of them it does not even enter their consciousness that while a solution is being developped decades may pass, a major global recession may strike, wars may erupt over precious resources, and millions may die from it all.
From another post:
Land Area of the Earth: 148,940,000 km^2
World Population: 7,000,000,000
So Land Area Per Person: ~ 210m x 100m (americans read yards per person)
And when we're 10 billion as predicted by demography experts it's going to be under 150m x 100m. That's for your house, workplace and the roads; for growing your food and raising the cattle and poultry you eat (but not the fish), for deserts, mountains and forests.
Is it really so hard to believe that this may not be enough for everyone to live the 'dream western life' or that with so many people we may exhaust some resources? (be it oil, rare earths, etc) Or on the opposite cause global pollution?
I understand that you're optimistic that we can invent technology to make this work. But you have to at least acknowledge that there's the possibility of a problem before you can decide to try and solve it. You also have to acknowledge that given the world population density we're more likely than ever to hit global scale issues before you can consider their implications. The first of which being that they are likely to require a bit of lead time to solve(*). Isn't any of that a good reason to be just a bit humble?
(*) Only economists think that if it takes a thousand researchers 20 years to develop fusion reactors then by putting 1 million researchers on the case they can get them operational by the end of next week.
Why without introducing a discrepancy in the voter list? Haven't you ever heard of dead people still getting to vote?
Because even the dead sign the voter list. So now if you have 612 votes from dead and living people but you have 618 ballots in the ballot box, everyone will see that there's been fraud.
Paper ballots can be "multiplied" too. They can also be "deleted", and ballot boxes can be stuffed. Paper is in no way a secure system. Being able to physically count it afterwards doesn't prevent fraud between voting day and recount day.
Come back when you have devised a way to introduce enough ballots to swing an election (so at least a hundred) in a ballot box while it is being watched by the 5 or 6 people who are there to do just that, all the while without introducing a discrepency with the voter list. Anytime paper fraud is possible it's either obvious there has been fraud, or because the country has a stupid election process.
In Brazil, every single party or entity (like universities, etc) has access to the full source code for the elecion systems, terminals and servers. The code is digitally signed by all those parties and any of them can ask for an independent audit.
All they have access to is the code that purportedly is being run on the voting computers. But on election day they have no way to verify that the code that runs is the one they looked at and signed.
With so many eyes looking at the whole process,
What you see as 'so many eyes' I see as so few eyes. In a paper election anyone can verify the process and a significant fraction of the population actually does. In electronic voting very few people can verify anything. And in particular none of the parties or universities you mentionned above can do anything to verify that the election is fair.
nowadays only conspiracy theorists think there's been any fraud.
Most people don't claim there has been fraud. However what most researchers in the field and most computer scientists do say is that there is no way to know, that if fraud happens there won't be any proof anyway, and that electronic voting makes the voting process opaque.
Maybe, but the airbag rotates with the steering wheel, so if you keep your hands on 3 and 9 positions as you turn the wheel, the airbag should still explode in between your arms, instead of through them.
Not true... unless your shoulders also rotate with the wheel. If that's the case, please send us the video!
Flywheels, the most efficient means of energy storage we have.
There's an interesting post on Do the Math on the topic of energy storage, including flyweels. They seem to be workable but not necessarily the most economic approach.
One word:
Russia.
Indeed. With electronic or Internet voting nobody would even know that the election was rigged.
Smart people have thought of how to do it already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s
Note that this video concerns electronic voting, not Internet voting. Given that it assumes the presence of printed ballots that you tear apart and that have a scratch surface it's pretty clear it's incompatible with current paperless systems and Internet voting.
Physical voting isn't enough however. There were widespread allegations of vote rigging in the Russian elections for example with election officers tampering with the number of counted votes. If the whole system is corrupt then it will obtain the result it wants regardless of how the vote is conducted.
The election rules should be such that any rigging will be obvious to everyone. Then it's up to the voters to take whatever measure they find is appropriate. Electronic and Internet voting do not offer that transparency guarantee.
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
Internet voting has been introduced for a number of professional elections in France and it never increased voter turnout, and in some cases it seems to have lowered it. The same increased turnout claims were made for electronic voting but it seems they never realized even in countries that used it more widely like Belgium and the Netherlands.
How is that a technical problem?
Technical issues are not the only valid issues for an election system. For instance the first and foremost issue it has to solve is convince the voters that the election is fair. Otherwise they won't accept its outcome which will result in civil war.
And that's a big issue with electronic and internet voting systems: the systems involved are so somplex that nobody can truly claim to understand their theory from A to Z, and voters cannot verify in any way that practice matches the theory.