It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting.
Whoops, you did not write a single line of your program yet, and it's already afflicted by a huge design flaw!
Votes are supposed to be anonymous, remember?
So how smart is it to have a single program check the identity of the voter and then record his vote? Sure it may not keep the two correlated but if it ever gets subverted in any way it will be trivial to keep track of who voted for whom. Furthermore, how would you feel as a voter about having to insert you id card in the computer before you are allowed to vote? Would you really trust the computer to not record who you're voting for?
It is a good point that we can't allow an easy way to prove a particular vote. There are ways around that, though. One method would be that a hash number is printed on the top of a ballot. Anyone is allowed to make up a different receipt as they wish before leaving (naturally that one won't count!).
So you want to give a receipt to the people so they can prove how they voted to combat fraud, but at the same time you want to only give them a hash so they cannot prove how they voted? See the contradiction?
I personally could not do so on the spur of the moment,
You would not be allowed to check the code of the voting computer on election day anyway. And with good reason.
just like I personally cannot follow my paper ballot from beginning to end to make sure it shows up in the final tally.
In France you can. That the whole point of not moving the ballots around before tallying. So all you need to do is stay in the same room as the ballot box until they start counting the ballots.
I could, however potentially form a political organization (not necessarily a party running a candidate, just a citizen's group) and take part in the process of auditing, including watching the code being flashed into the voting machines and spot checking the final loaded code. Even disassembling the binary and verifying that it corresponds to the source.
Can political parties really freely access the voting computers in Belgium? In France they are not allowed to. And in any case, if the voting computers were to leave our sight for more than a few minutes, e.g. because you went home at night (silly you), then you would have to start over from scratch (see hacking a Nedap in 60 seconds).
The machine CAN print out 2 copies of my ballot in human readable form, one submitted for tallying and one for me to do with as I wish.
Wrong! In most countries, and I'm pretty sure Belgium is one of them, machines are forbidden by law from giving you a ballot to do with as you wish. For good reason: so you cannot either be coerced or rewarded to vote a given way.
Electronic voting CAN work, but first the source needs to be freely auditable by any interested party, the binaries must be auditable to make sure they actually correspond with the source and the hardware must be auditable to make sure it faithfully executes the binary.
Electronic voting CAN work? Really?
So you get in front of the voting computer on election day. How are you going to verify that this computer is running the exact same code that you audited the previous day?
If you cannot perform this basic task on election day, then what's the point of public source and public binaries published on some official website?
It's like buying a used car from the guy in a cheap suit because he smiles big and says "you can trust ME!".
To continue the car analogy, auditing the electronic voting source code is like auditing the car's paperwork, but not being allowed to check it actually corresponds to the car you're being sold.
It's weird how everyone in the US seems to think ISPs cannot survive without download caps and small bandwidth limits. In France most ADSL contracts say your bandwidth is only limited by the quality of your phone line, which means you usually get 10Mbps or more. They also have no download caps, and include free phone calls to 90+ countries, including the US, and 100+ TV channels. And with all the cash they still managed to make, they are now deploying fiber to the home where you'll get >50Mbps down and >50Mbps up all for the same price of 40 US Dollars.
So if US ISPs cannot survive selling 1Mbps ADSL connections with none of the extra services normally found in France, it means something is wrong. Maybe it's the regulations that need to change, or the city layout (sprawl?), or that there's no real competition (or all of the above).
The distinction between "drug" and "medicine" or "medication" is similar in English
Not really. As far as I understand, 'drug' is a synonym for 'medicine' and 'medication' in English, even in modern speech. This is not (no longer) the case in French. So while in English any 'zero drug tolerance' policy automatically and clearly bans every 'medicine' and 'medication', in French it would have no impact on them.
How are the two set apart legally where you are? Potential for abuse, or effect of the chemical or similar?
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not aware of similar cases in France. But I think the following spells it out pretty clearly:
drogue - Which nowadays is only used for substances that have mind altering effects and and introduce dependence.
Ibuprofen does not have mind altering effects and does not introduce dependence so it's not a 'drogue'.
medicament - That's medications, that is stuff you take when you're ill.
drogue - Which nowadays is only used for substances that have mind altering effects and and introduce dependence.
So if a French school were to have a 'zero drogue' policy, there's no way someone carrying a mere 'medicament' would be in trouble. It's only if that 'medicament' was also a 'drug', like morphine, that they would be in trouble.
So the proper solution is obvious: fix the English language to distinguish the two meanings;-).
If you were a business and some third party, who is not a paying customer, came to your place of business waving some piece of paper in your face and told you to "cut off" certain customers and never serve them again (resulting in a loss for your business) would you just do it?
This depends on the details of the legislation. At least in France you will have to continue paying the ISP while your internet access is blocked!
No measurement is perfectly accurate. Counting votes by hand is not a perfectly accurate method.
You seem to imply that manually counting the ballots has an error rate of 2% or higher. I would really like you to provide a link to a study that would confirm that. Because I have participated in many ballot counts in France and I would take exception to that assertion. I don't see how you could even get a 0.1% error rate if the procedures are followed properly. But of course if other countries have broken elections (like voting on 60 different things at once) or broken ballot counting procedures (like moving the ballots to a central location before counting them), then all bets are off, no matter how you count the ballots.
But that is not the real issue: the real issue is that nobody knows or can proof why which votes were lost, and the electronic voting systems make it completely impossible to find out even if 60% of votes were lost.
No, it's not impossible. We're talking about computers here, they can be audited.
The code is a trade secret and thus cannot be audited. I'm not sure about Finland, but nobody, not even the state, can audit the voting computer's code in the USA or in France.
There are plenty of waste-to-energy plants around the US, but most of them simply burn the waste, dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Gasification technology, by contrast, converts nearly all of the waste into gases like hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to run generators and furnaces.
The summary got this wrong of course. Gasification technology produces gas, which is then burned to either produce heat or electricity. And this burning produces... drum rolls... CO2!
So as far as CO2 is concerned there's no difference with regular waste-to-energy plants. The only difference is that this produces gases as an intermediate step, which makes it possible to do the burning outside the plant. In a vehicle's engine for instance.
Because as everybody knows Codeweavers fully supports FreeBSD 7.x, wait, you say that it's very early stages and doesn't actually run on any of the recent versions?
Although CodeWeavers doesn't officially support FeeeBSD, we are unofficially relatively active on the FreeBSD front. See bug 16023 for instance.
Interestingly, based on the wine-patches.tar.gz posted on Bordeaux's page, they don't use my work, which means they don't work on recent FreeBSD either (or the binaries they distribute don't match the source they publish which would be contrary to the LGPL).
Your EVoting proposal does not work because it fails on the following points (I'm pretty sure the list is not exhaustive):
No coercion resistance
Since you can prove how you voted, you could get fired/get your knees broken/etc for not voting 'right' (or refusing to prove how you voted).
Voting from unsecure location
Voting from home/the office exposes you to physical coercion from your relatives/coworkers/etc.
Not anonymous
You provide your SSN, date of birth and password to vote, allowing the system to tie them together. In fact the previous point _requires_ the system to tie them together.
It is not transparent
Only technical people can verify system works as advertised: for instance that the total actually corresponds to the ballots, or that the anonymity of your vote is preserved.
Requires the voting place to be networked
This leaves the voting stations and servers vulnerable to hacking. This allows many forms of attack, not necessarily to steal votes. One possible attack would simply be to disrupt voting in areas that are known to lean one way or the other.
Labeling of the areas instead of the lines. For instance 'SD', '480p+', '720p+', etc.
Some metric units thrown in. For instance on the top and right side of the chart. This way even people who do not have a calculator at hand could use it.
Except if you double the frame rate, then you half the data available for each frame so the quality will be lower.
Nobody suggested to double the framerate while keeping the same bandwidth.
Note also that if your argument held water, then it would be definitive proof that HD TV quality is worse than SD: 'Except if you more than quadruple the resolution, then you have less than a quarter the data available for each frame so the quality will be lower.' QED
I'm also bothered by the low framerate, especially in movie theaters, and to me it would likely be worth halving the resolution (e.g. 1920x1080->1357x763) to double the framerate. Also note that since all current codecs do temporal compression, doubling the framerate should not quite double the needed bandwidth.
Maybe because at the moment there are very few applications of an Internet connection for which you'd notice the difference between 1mbit and 10mbit.
Unless you are a habitual downloader, you won't notice any difference to your web and email by moving above 1mbit
With 1mbps you cannot get a proper TV signal through your ADSL connection. With 7mbps+ you can watch one SD channel. And I'm not talking about YouTube but about 100+ real national TV channels on 24h/7. With 10mbps+ you can watch HD TV. With 14mpbs+ you start can watch two SD channels at once which is actually nice if you have a few teenage kids. With 20mbps+ you can do the same with HD channels.
No I'm not talking about science fiction here but triple-play. Stuff that has been around for years in France, is taken for granted by many non-geeks and can save you on the order of $50/month (by dropping your redundant cable subscription).
Of course there's countries where one cannot even dream of getting a TV signal through the ADSL (USA, UK, etc). But that's not a good reason for putting in snide comments about 10mbps+ only being useful to 'habitual downloaders'.
Electric Mini:
2.095 lbs CO2 *.233 kWh/mile ==.488 lbs CO2/mile
Gas Mini:
13,400 lbs / 15000 Miles ==.893 lbs CO2/mile
Converting to metric units this gives:
Electric Mini: 0.488 lbs CO2/mile * 453.6 g/lbs / 1.609 km / mile = 138 g CO2/km
Gas Mini: 0.893 lbs CO2/mile * 453.6 g/lbs / 1.609 km / mile = 251 g CO2/km
The value for the Gas Mini tells me that something is wrong in your calculations since that would be typical of a big SUV, and not of a car in the Mini size range. Also note that you're comparing the figure for highway driving conditions (for the Electric Mini), with the figure for mixed driving (45% highway & 55% city) for the Gas Mini. This will increase the Co2/km figure for the Gas Mini and thus puts it at a disadvantage.
Now the site below says the Mini produces between 104g CO2/km and 150g CO2/km which at least falls right into the range for that car class and is a fairer comparison to your figure for the Electric Mini (essentially two constructor values).
Now before anyone draws conclusions, I'm not sure your calculations are more accurate for the Electric Mini. For once I would expect the car range to not correspond to the full 35kWh or the battery as completely depleting it would reduce its lifetime. If one assumes only 75% of the battery range is actually used for the 150 miles range, then the value becomes 104g CO2/km. Another weird fact is that the article you quote mentions 'regenerative braking' which is very strange when quoting a range figure (is it supposed to be 150 miles of city driving?). Finally you did not account for the efficiency loss in the charging operation.
So your calculations are nowhere near as conclusive as they first looked.
Slashdot Mirror
It still amazes me how "hard" it is to write a simple program. First have something to scan the ID, check that its unique then move to the voting.
Whoops, you did not write a single line of your program yet, and it's already afflicted by a huge design flaw!
Votes are supposed to be anonymous, remember?
So how smart is it to have a single program check the identity of the voter and then record his vote? Sure it may not keep the two correlated but if it ever gets subverted in any way it will be trivial to keep track of who voted for whom. Furthermore, how would you feel as a voter about having to insert you id card in the computer before you are allowed to vote? Would you really trust the computer to not record who you're voting for?
It is a good point that we can't allow an easy way to prove a particular vote. There are ways around that, though. One method would be that a hash number is printed on the top of a ballot. Anyone is allowed to make up a different receipt as they wish before leaving (naturally that one won't count!).
So you want to give a receipt to the people so they can prove how they voted to combat fraud, but at the same time you want to only give them a hash so they cannot prove how they voted? See the contradiction?
I personally could not do so on the spur of the moment,
You would not be allowed to check the code of the voting computer on election day anyway. And with good reason.
just like I personally cannot follow my paper ballot from beginning to end to make sure it shows up in the final tally.
In France you can. That the whole point of not moving the ballots around before tallying. So all you need to do is stay in the same room as the ballot box until they start counting the ballots.
I could, however potentially form a political organization (not necessarily a party running a candidate, just a citizen's group) and take part in the process of auditing, including watching the code being flashed into the voting machines and spot checking the final loaded code. Even disassembling the binary and verifying that it corresponds to the source.
Can political parties really freely access the voting computers in Belgium? In France they are not allowed to. And in any case, if the voting computers were to leave our sight for more than a few minutes, e.g. because you went home at night (silly you), then you would have to start over from scratch (see hacking a Nedap in 60 seconds).
The machine CAN print out 2 copies of my ballot in human readable form, one submitted for tallying and one for me to do with as I wish.
Wrong! In most countries, and I'm pretty sure Belgium is one of them, machines are forbidden by law from giving you a ballot to do with as you wish. For good reason: so you cannot either be coerced or rewarded to vote a given way.
This same system has been working since at least 1995 with zero reports of fraud or failure (except normal "computer is broken" style failures).
You mean that this did not happen?
Do you really think the cosmic ray is a believable explanation?
Electronic voting CAN work, but first the source needs to be freely auditable by any interested party, the binaries must be auditable to make sure they actually correspond with the source and the hardware must be auditable to make sure it faithfully executes the binary.
Electronic voting CAN work? Really?
So you get in front of the voting computer on election day. How are you going to verify that this computer is running the exact same code that you audited the previous day?
If you cannot perform this basic task on election day, then what's the point of public source and public binaries published on some official website?
It's like buying a used car from the guy in a cheap suit because he smiles big and says "you can trust ME!".
To continue the car analogy, auditing the electronic voting source code is like auditing the car's paperwork, but not being allowed to check it actually corresponds to the car you're being sold.
Where is the proof that it is this code that was running on the voting computer you used last sunday?
Is all the proof you have 'They said so'?
It's weird how everyone in the US seems to think ISPs cannot survive without download caps and small bandwidth limits. In France most ADSL contracts say your bandwidth is only limited by the quality of your phone line, which means you usually get 10Mbps or more. They also have no download caps, and include free phone calls to 90+ countries, including the US, and 100+ TV channels. And with all the cash they still managed to make, they are now deploying fiber to the home where you'll get >50Mbps down and >50Mbps up all for the same price of 40 US Dollars.
So if US ISPs cannot survive selling 1Mbps ADSL connections with none of the extra services normally found in France, it means something is wrong. Maybe it's the regulations that need to change, or the city layout (sprawl?), or that there's no real competition (or all of the above).
The distinction between "drug" and "medicine" or "medication" is similar in English
Not really. As far as I understand, 'drug' is a synonym for 'medicine' and 'medication' in English, even in modern speech. This is not (no longer) the case in French. So while in English any 'zero drug tolerance' policy automatically and clearly bans every 'medicine' and 'medication', in French it would have no impact on them.
How are the two set apart legally where you are? Potential for abuse, or effect of the chemical or similar?
I'm not a lawyer and I'm not aware of similar cases in France. But I think the following spells it out pretty clearly:
drogue - Which nowadays is only used for substances that have mind altering effects and and introduce dependence.
Ibuprofen does not have mind altering effects and does not introduce dependence so it's not a 'drogue'.
See, in French we have two words:
So if a French school were to have a 'zero drogue' policy, there's no way someone carrying a mere 'medicament' would be in trouble. It's only if that 'medicament' was also a 'drug', like morphine, that they would be in trouble.
So the proper solution is obvious: fix the English language to distinguish the two meanings ;-).
If you were a business and some third party, who is not a paying customer, came to your place of business waving some piece of paper in your face and told you to "cut off" certain customers and never serve them again (resulting in a loss for your business) would you just do it?
This depends on the details of the legislation. At least in France you will have to continue paying the ISP while your internet access is blocked!
Ban bottled water, that stuff's a killer!
Been there, done that.
--
An airport security guard.
Heh. If they really wanted to protect schools they would ban all children from getting anywhere near them.
Did they learn nothing from Columbine?
We can never have a 100% perfect system. Paper ballots lose about 0.5% of votes in Finland.
A link to the paper finding that manual counting has a 0.5% error rate in Finland would be nice...
No measurement is perfectly accurate. Counting votes by hand is not a perfectly accurate method.
You seem to imply that manually counting the ballots has an error rate of 2% or higher. I would really like you to provide a link to a study that would confirm that. Because I have participated in many ballot counts in France and I would take exception to that assertion. I don't see how you could even get a 0.1% error rate if the procedures are followed properly. But of course if other countries have broken elections (like voting on 60 different things at once) or broken ballot counting procedures (like moving the ballots to a central location before counting them), then all bets are off, no matter how you count the ballots.
But that is not the real issue: the real issue is that nobody knows or can proof why which votes were lost, and the electronic voting systems make it completely impossible to find out even if 60% of votes were lost.
No, it's not impossible. We're talking about computers here, they can be audited.
The code is a trade secret and thus cannot be audited. I'm not sure about Finland, but nobody, not even the state, can audit the voting computer's code in the USA or in France.
There are plenty of waste-to-energy plants around the US, but most of them simply burn the waste, dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Gasification technology, by contrast, converts nearly all of the waste into gases like hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be used to run generators and furnaces.
The summary got this wrong of course. Gasification technology produces gas, which is then burned to either produce heat or electricity. And this burning produces... drum rolls... CO2!
So as far as CO2 is concerned there's no difference with regular waste-to-energy plants. The only difference is that this produces gases as an intermediate step, which makes it possible to do the burning outside the plant. In a vehicle's engine for instance.
There's a very nice Linux version of Picasa as well.
Indeed. It's been ported to Linux by CodeWeavers (working for Google) using Wine.
Because as everybody knows Codeweavers fully supports FreeBSD 7.x, wait, you say that it's very early stages and doesn't actually run on any of the recent versions?
Although CodeWeavers doesn't officially support FeeeBSD, we are unofficially relatively active on the FreeBSD front. See bug 16023 for instance.
Interestingly, based on the wine-patches.tar.gz posted on Bordeaux's page, they don't use my work, which means they don't work on recent FreeBSD either (or the binaries they distribute don't match the source they publish which would be contrary to the LGPL).
So why not make it meet the strictest standards? Partly because it just keeps pushing the costs higher for stuff nobody needs in the other 49 states.
This assumes that, if not required by law, nobody needs or benefits from safer, less polluting vehicles.
Your EVoting proposal does not work because it fails on the following points (I'm pretty sure the list is not exhaustive):
Since you can prove how you voted, you could get fired/get your knees broken/etc for not voting 'right' (or refusing to prove how you voted).
Voting from home/the office exposes you to physical coercion from your relatives/coworkers/etc.
You provide your SSN, date of birth and password to vote, allowing the system to tie them together. In fact the previous point _requires_ the system to tie them together.
Only technical people can verify system works as advertised: for instance that the total actually corresponds to the ballots, or that the anonymity of your vote is preserved.
This leaves the voting stations and servers vulnerable to hacking. This allows many forms of attack, not necessarily to steal votes. One possible attack would simply be to disrupt voting in areas that are known to lean one way or the other.
http://www.cowclops.net/resolutionchart1.png
That chart's usability would be much better with:
Except if you double the frame rate, then you half the data available for each frame so the quality will be lower.
Nobody suggested to double the framerate while keeping the same bandwidth.
Note also that if your argument held water, then it would be definitive proof that HD TV quality is worse than SD: 'Except if you more than quadruple the resolution, then you have less than a quarter the data available for each frame so the quality will be lower.' QED
I'm also bothered by the low framerate, especially in movie theaters, and to me it would likely be worth halving the resolution (e.g. 1920x1080->1357x763) to double the framerate. Also note that since all current codecs do temporal compression, doubling the framerate should not quite double the needed bandwidth.
Maybe because at the moment there are very few applications of an Internet connection for which you'd notice the difference between 1mbit and 10mbit.
Unless you are a habitual downloader, you won't notice any difference to your web and email by moving above 1mbit
With 1mbps you cannot get a proper TV signal through your ADSL connection. With 7mbps+ you can watch one SD channel. And I'm not talking about YouTube but about 100+ real national TV channels on 24h/7. With 10mbps+ you can watch HD TV. With 14mpbs+ you start can watch two SD channels at once which is actually nice if you have a few teenage kids. With 20mbps+ you can do the same with HD channels.
No I'm not talking about science fiction here but triple-play. Stuff that has been around for years in France, is taken for granted by many non-geeks and can save you on the order of $50/month (by dropping your redundant cable subscription).
Of course there's countries where one cannot even dream of getting a TV signal through the ADSL (USA, UK, etc). But that's not a good reason for putting in snide comments about 10mbps+ only being useful to 'habitual downloaders'.
Electric Mini: 2.095 lbs CO2 * .233 kWh/mile == .488 lbs CO2/mile
Gas Mini: 13,400 lbs / 15000 Miles == .893 lbs CO2/mile
Converting to metric units this gives:
Electric Mini: 0.488 lbs CO2/mile * 453.6 g/lbs / 1.609 km / mile = 138 g CO2/km Gas Mini: 0.893 lbs CO2/mile * 453.6 g/lbs / 1.609 km / mile = 251 g CO2/km
The value for the Gas Mini tells me that something is wrong in your calculations since that would be typical of a big SUV, and not of a car in the Mini size range. Also note that you're comparing the figure for highway driving conditions (for the Electric Mini), with the figure for mixed driving (45% highway & 55% city) for the Gas Mini. This will increase the Co2/km figure for the Gas Mini and thus puts it at a disadvantage.
Now the site below says the Mini produces between 104g CO2/km and 150g CO2/km which at least falls right into the range for that car class and is a fairer comparison to your figure for the Electric Mini (essentially two constructor values).
http://www.whatgreencar.com/search.php
Now before anyone draws conclusions, I'm not sure your calculations are more accurate for the Electric Mini. For once I would expect the car range to not correspond to the full 35kWh or the battery as completely depleting it would reduce its lifetime. If one assumes only 75% of the battery range is actually used for the 150 miles range, then the value becomes 104g CO2/km. Another weird fact is that the article you quote mentions 'regenerative braking' which is very strange when quoting a range figure (is it supposed to be 150 miles of city driving?). Finally you did not account for the efficiency loss in the charging operation.
So your calculations are nowhere near as conclusive as they first looked.
Does it support Power over Ethernet?