Having the exact stream of bytes of an ARM program will do you no good if you place it in an x86 CPU and expect it to run. Or even one variant of an ARM to another with different I/O, timers, etc.
Simply transferring entire genomes between far distant organisms on Earth won't work. When the organisms are distant enough from each other there is variance in the code itself (stop codons, etc) and the machinery the specific code will be manipulating must be there to be controlled. Ribosomes vary, organelles certainly vary.
In fact it's rather presumptive of us to assume the genetic mechanism must be DNA or RNA when there are probably all sorts of other mechanisms that would work suitably.
Even presuming life had a common origin and there was some event that seeded Mars with Earth bacteria (or the other way around) a few billion years ago, doesn't mean there is the slightest chance it's in any way compatible with anything that could be found on Earth today. Very different environments will select for very implementations over those billions of years.
The story is casting too wide a net in simply saying "Medical Apps".
Apps which help me record or log or communicate should not be strongly regulated (other than following HIPAA guidelines). They are no different than if I were to manually keep a journal or call the doctors office. There is nothing "new" about them other than the convenience. But apps which attempt to diagnose, analyze, or treat an illness should be regulated. Bugs or outright fraud in their capability can directly and seriously impact my health.
Of course you can use YOUR own personal camera to record people in public. But you have no right to take over and use Apple's display computer cameras and use it to record people and upload to the web.
This wasn't art, it was rude. We decry the loss of privacy in this country and yet when it's done for "art" some people are shocked that anybody could be upset.
The vast majority of posts I see point out the obviousness of rooting your phone and running any of a number ad-blockers and how great they are. That's no different than someone responding to a regular Joe's desktop Linux complaint with a "Duh, change your config, rebuild your kernel and move on....". You've just lost the average person who might otherwise be interested in playing.
The VAST majority of Android users have absolutely no ability or interest in having to "root" their phone, finding a good ad-blocker, and then install it.
There are millions of people having a less-than-steller experience, probably not even realizing what's going on and the best answer from the tech community isn't "Let's fix the process", or even "Let's exhort Google to fix the process", but rather an almost patronizing rolling of the eyes and an explanation of how "easy" it is to fix.
Gee a few months ago, they were not taking Apple seriously...
Apple "...is not having an impact on Nintendo... I’ve seen data that suggests that while consumers are constantly downloading apps, they play with them for a few times and then they are moving on to the next thing,” Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s president, told Kotaku. “Clearly it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.”
"iPhone and iPad not viable gaming platforms", "Apple games are not even a mouthful"
A year ago, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo was argued that iPhones and Nintendo products were not competitors because they appealed to different people.
This is soooo clearly an April Fools joke. It's nowhere to be found except on blogs and only on April 1st.
The name is clearly meant to be bad English for "I like cartoons", becomes "I lika cartoonen" becomes "Ilkka Karttunen".
I think you confuse the point of building a Difference Engine from LEGO.
It was not built in mockery of the original to somehow be useful to compute lower order polynomials. It was built as a serious effort to see how far I could push the limits of a plastic construction toy.
The real Babbage machine is a wonder of any age. The LEGO one, not so much. But it certainly makes people think and it certainly encourages a sense of wonder of what can be accomplished with ordinary things when you set your mind to it.
Nothing which has been purchased can be overpriced, at least not in that transaction. The buyer weighs the money in one hand and the product in the other. They decided that they wanted the product more than the money. The seller has done the same calculus and arrived at the opposite conclusion. They would rather have the money more than the product.
Both parties believe they received the "better" bargain or they would not have traded. Of course a wise seller will offer a product at a price they feel will be the most profitable overall to sell at, balancing margin versus volume.
Nothing has an "intrinsic" value; only the value the seller and potential buyers would assign it. It will vary by person, time, and circumstance. Two people, one recently well fed at a nice restaurant and the other tired from working all day and skipping lunch would value a street venders hot-dog very differently.
Great metaphor, but California doesn't have many brick houses because we have earthquakes and masonry construction is far more dangerous in those cases.
Wood "gives" and flexes during minor earthquakes, often with little or no damage. If the house "breaks" wood is relatively light, you will likely walk away from the disaster. Brick cracks if the house is even slightly flexed and a brick wall falling on you is ill-advised.
I'm not even sure traditional masonry is allowable in new construction here.
Which is exactly the problem. The idea the States can be "allowed " to do something by a political party is laughable.
The major parties entered a devils agreement with the States. The State agreed to pay for the whole thing in exchange for their making rules. Rules like "Open Primaries" where people from one party could legally vote in another parties primary. Or when the date of the primary is. The parties have allowed the government to have a large voice in who they run for office. Huge conflict of interest!
If the party wants the money (i.e. to have the State pay millions to run the primary election) the party has to get used to losing control of their own process.
The whole idea is bad for the country. The parties should make their own arrangements and pay for the primary themselves. This would wholly remove the party nominating process from State control.
California (heavily Democratic controlled) also foolishly moved their primary earlier.
The real point is not the idiocy of moving the primary, but that the powers in the parties themselves don't like States to do that and so the parties themselves are talking about making more primaries "advisory". People think they will have a voice in choosing a nominee, but the parties themselves will do the choosing.
Pay attention to how many "at large" voting delegates go to each parties convention who are NOT chosen by a popular vote of the people. Most people don't even know this happens yet they are the swing votes who actually choose the nominee.
Of course, I'm not sure why the State (i.e. the public) must have anything to do with the primaries anyway? Why do the people PAY to have the Republicans and Democrats pick their candidates? This is not a Constitutionally mandated election. This is a way for large parties to use the machinery of the people and have the people pay for it.
Each party should figure out who their nominee is how ever they want (I figure an election by their members is smartest, but it's their party) and whomever they choose would stand in the "real" election.
The government and people of the State of Florida are not giving up the pretense of anything. The party bosses of the Democratic (big D) party in Florida has given up any pretense of caring about democratic (little d) issues.
This is all about control. Florida (like many states) is trying to move the primaries earlier so that Florida has a larger say in who the nominees for each party are. Of course its an arms race no state can win 'cause other states will simply move it even earlier. The entire attempt is foolish, but not anti-democratic.
The party bosses (of both parties) don't want a "new" guy they can't control to get early buzz from a primary without other coverage. They want it to be "non-binding" so the party power owners can make their deals and get their guy.
I don't think you understand what "free market" means. Google owns the index, Google decides how it works. The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
If they please their customers with the best possible results they will make more money. If they allow themselves to be gamed, searchers will go elsewhere and Google will lose money.
If you don't like that, go start your own search engine.
BTW, they have been sued over this kind of thing and they have always won. The ranking is their opinion and they are entitled to it.
I suspect your definition of "rights" is far narrower than that of the founders.
One important component of protecting citizens rights is for us to pony up and do jury duty every once in a while. Those precious online rights you care about are based on precedent from good old fashioned civil rights in "First Life".
They never said they intentionally shut the engine down. The shutdown was an unavoidable side effect of a strong roll. Their quote was "If you have a significant roll, what could happen is that the propellants can centrifuge out."
If the spacecraft is spinning, all the fuel is pushed to the outside walls of the tank and away from the fuel outlet at the center of the tank bottom. This leaves the fuel pumps with nothing to pump. Engine shut down. Rocket fall, go boom.
Who had to bribe who? This had NOTHING to do with the "Alaskan Pipeline" and everything to do with the Permanent Fund. Every year Alaska write checks to almost every man, woman, and child living in the state distributing a percentage of the States oil royalty to the people.
The oil companies could care less, they've already paid the money. The $200,000 the state paid to recover involved rescanning and doing keyentry on the thousands of applications citizens wrote to get their share.
Left or right wing has NOTHING to do with this. Truth does.
The greenhouse effect is real, there is no doubt. But it's also true that just a few thousands of years ago an ice age ended. The earth was warmed by enough to melt ice miles thick. What casued that? Isn't it interesting that the earth went through such a recent warming that clearly was not caused by our emissions?
You can't fight global warming (which is real) without knowing WHY it's happening. Clearly we can reduce our emissions. But what if that's not enough because it's NOT ENTIRELY THEIR FAULT?
What do we do if it's a solar cycle? We may have to think BEYOND cutting our CO2. We may need to find ways to sequester more CO2 than we make, or find clever ways to reflect solar energy.
People are so focused on "blame" they may not be seeing this is really a larger problem than it first appears.
It's indisputable the Earth is warming. People differ as to why. Answers range from natural cycles to human activity. Perhaps it's both.
I would ask what ended the ice age 10,000 years ago? There used to be ice MILES thick over much of Europe and the US northeast. The few hundred thousand people on Earth at the time had no technology more advanced than a camp fire. What ended that ice age? Clearly the earth has warmed because of non-human causes.
That said, it does not matter why it's warming. Our house is burning and people are bickering over it being arson or lightning. If we don't do something about it the climate will continue to change and probably not in a good way. The vast number of people live where they do because they have food/water available to them there.
This is not about "fault" or people's "guilt" that we've ruined eden. It's about deciding we are gonna do something about it even if that means trying to compensate for a "natural" progression caused by the earths orbit or the sun, etc. This may mean altering our technology to reduce CO2 to make up for more solar activity or doing other more imaginative things.
If the responsible disclosure rules are well designed there is no reason to treat any vender good or bad differently. You give them all the same amount of time to fix the problem then you disclose the bug. This is self correcting. Good venders would never be caught with their pants down, bad venders will get embarassed time after time until they improve.
Sensible people should debate "how long is long enough", but I think it insane to fully reveal dangerous expoits directly to the public without providing a reasonable chance to get it fixed by the vender. A month sounds like a nice round easy to work in period of time, but more or less may be better.
Too short and fixes will be rushed which may introduce other bugs. Too long and the exploit will leak and innocent people/companies may well pay a very high cost for using the vulnurable app or OS.
A handful of Edison bulbs still run today because they are run at VERY low power, not because they had some kind of special process. There is a famous edison bulb at a California Fire Station still burning 90 years later. It's a 4 watt bulb. People today want 100 watts or higher.
LEDs won't succeed (in the short term) because they are VERY expensive to produce, and their lifetime is short when run at high enough power to make people happy. They have their place in situations where you simply don't want to have to ever change it (car brake lights, indicators, flash-lights, traffic lights, etc). But they are not really there yet for general purpose illumination in cases where it's very easy to replace a bulb every few years.
You can't compare PUNCH ballots in Florida with optical pen marked ballots where you FILL in a square with ink. They proved that simply by handling the punch cards, some chads would partially fall out or that older people could not muster the strenth to fully punch them. There were chad falling out all the time which really confused the effort.
Where I live I must sign when I arrive to vote to show I voted. If an elderly person can sign to vote I suspect they can fill a clearly marked box with a marker pen.
Businesses DO have printers which work 99.9% of the time. This is 'cause a supermarket is a money making business. It's in their financial interest to keep them going. Their checking staff replace ink and paper EVERY SINGLE day they are at work and they know how these printers operate. "Problem" machines are quickly identified and repaired.
But voting machines are used at most once a year. They are stored who knows how, packed, and dropped off just before the election, then unpacked and run by ill-trained volunteers who have no job at stake and who can't be expected to keep them going if there is a paper jam or ink issue or other mechanical problem. 99.9% isn't good enough if it hinders voting.
With hand marked optical ballots if the machine screws up you simply slide the ballots into the sealed and locked ballot box and they can be counted by hand later or with another scanner. Most importantly THE VOTING DOES NOT SLOW DOWN if a scanner fails. But if either the touch screen or computer or printer machine fails, it does not register or print votes and voters must share fewer machines to continue voting. This makes already long lines in urban areas even longer.
I think of the scanner as something which can make the process faster, but which is not required.
Large format, clearly designed sturdy paper pen-marked ballots are a reliable and easy way to vote with and easy to count. If the voters "screws up", our ballots clearly state you should ask for a fresh ballot and tear up the mis-vote.
Paper ballots ask no more out of someone than we ask of kindergardeners and there is very little to go wrong. I know some older people who are terrified of computers because "they are so complicated" or they are afraid they will "break" it. Yet they can fill in a crossword puzzle without a hitch.
Keep it simple. High tech is not always the solution.
You can have a computer validate, but at the cost of a million lines of OS, GUI, and Application. You also lose transparancy. So the machine says what I expect, but what vote did it ACTUALLY tabulate? There is no paper trail. If you add a printer, then we have issues with a million printers plus paper plus ink on election day.
They can't keep them working in the gas-pumps, ATM, and supermarkets. How do we expect a bunch of ill-trained poll workers to keep a million printers going on election day?
With paper ballots they can be stockpiled in the weeks prior. All you need to vote is a supply of sharpi markers.
Paper ballots are not like hanging chad that can come loose on their own. These ballots are large, with boxes that encourage you to "fill them in" with pen. I care enough when I vote to fully fill in the box.
I think of the scanner as a "helper". The machines are really cheap, reliable, and best of all they are NOT REQUIRED. The power can go out, all the machines could fail and the election would go on with hardly a hicup.
Cost is also an issue. No matter how inexpensive and reliable you can make a touch screen (with printer) I can make a scanner for far less money. Consider that a 20 booth polling station needs 20 touch screens or 2 scanners you can see which one is more likely to have a good outcome.
Then think of poor counties or States which have to ask voters to pay for all this. Which do you think they will do better getting?
A properly engineered mature design will not "break." Think about 5-function calculators... do they crash?
Touch screen machines DO break. And if it breaks people that many fewer people get to vote! They are complex machines with "sensor" screens and current machines have MILLIONS of lines of code in the OS and application.
Again, the machines need not be that expensive. Hell, we can build an entire damn laptop for under $100 a pop, how expensive can a touchscreen that performs a fraction of the functions of a laptop be?
It needs to be far better built than a laptop as it will be handled, not by a careful owner, but by thousands of people over it's lifetime. People who are encouraged to poke at the glass screen with their fingers. Most of the "advantages" require a screen of enough resolution to display complex character sets or very large fonts. That means a larger-higher resolution display than a cheap LCD.
This directly contradicts your first point about the voting machines breaking. If a touch-screen can break, so can a scanner.
Any robustness you mandate on the touch screens I can mandate on the scanners and there are far fewer of those required. If all else goes wrong I still have the paper ballot I hand marked which can be hand counted, or counted on another scanner.
Only because the systems are poorly engineered (see my response to point 1). What if the ballot is printed crooked on the paper, or your pen runs out of ink, or someone forgot to bring #2 pencils and the scanner won't recognize the #1 pencils they did bring? Misalignment and ease-of use are engineering problems, not systemic ones.
There is much more experience printing paper forms in this country than designing highly robust AND inexpensive touch screen computers. Bringing a bunch of "sharpies" to the polling station is easier to deal with than a broken touch screen. Even if the scanner were 100% dead, ballots and sharpies cover the election.
Voting machines with built in printers scare me even more than touch screens do. Imagine hundreds of thousands of printers each with their own fouling, jamming, and ink problems. There is no way to train a million poll workers how to deal with bad printers or loading paper or changing ink. If the machines fail it's useless to help with the vote. Have you never seen a supermarket, ATM, or gas station with printer problems?
The whole point of optical scanners is if it UTTERLY FAILS it becomes a locked ballot box and the votes can be counted by hand or by another scanner. No training for poll workers. If a real "touch screen" machine dies the overall line increases at that station. If more than a few fail then some people simply don't get to vote.
Paper ballots have a lot less to go wrong with them in practice. Think of the optical scanner as purely a counting convenience, it's not required to actually vote. All I need for that is ballot and sharpie.
While open source will be a critical part of the solution, most of the practical mechanical issues would remain:
Touch screen requires a complex GUI level machine with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code. Even if the code is "open source" there is still that complexity there. Stuff to go wrong.
Some systems have no paper trail. Open source does not change this.
One machine per voting booth solutions are VERY expensive. Optical ballot systems allow my booth to be a curtain, pen, and table. I can then walk to a shared optical scanner and "cast" my vote.
I happen to take my time to vote. If I am standing in front of an expensive touch screen that they can't afford too many of, I am stopping others from voting. But if the only resouce I'm consuming is a table and pen, more people can vote at the same time.
I personally think the solution is optical scanning. These require very little software, which could easily be open source.
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Having the exact stream of bytes of an ARM program will do you no good if you place it in an x86 CPU and expect it to run. Or even one variant of an ARM to another with different I/O, timers, etc. Simply transferring entire genomes between far distant organisms on Earth won't work. When the organisms are distant enough from each other there is variance in the code itself (stop codons, etc) and the machinery the specific code will be manipulating must be there to be controlled. Ribosomes vary, organelles certainly vary. In fact it's rather presumptive of us to assume the genetic mechanism must be DNA or RNA when there are probably all sorts of other mechanisms that would work suitably. Even presuming life had a common origin and there was some event that seeded Mars with Earth bacteria (or the other way around) a few billion years ago, doesn't mean there is the slightest chance it's in any way compatible with anything that could be found on Earth today. Very different environments will select for very implementations over those billions of years.
The story is casting too wide a net in simply saying "Medical Apps". Apps which help me record or log or communicate should not be strongly regulated (other than following HIPAA guidelines). They are no different than if I were to manually keep a journal or call the doctors office. There is nothing "new" about them other than the convenience. But apps which attempt to diagnose, analyze, or treat an illness should be regulated. Bugs or outright fraud in their capability can directly and seriously impact my health.
Of course you can use YOUR own personal camera to record people in public. But you have no right to take over and use Apple's display computer cameras and use it to record people and upload to the web. This wasn't art, it was rude. We decry the loss of privacy in this country and yet when it's done for "art" some people are shocked that anybody could be upset.
The vast majority of posts I see point out the obviousness of rooting your phone and running any of a number ad-blockers and how great they are. That's no different than someone responding to a regular Joe's desktop Linux complaint with a "Duh, change your config, rebuild your kernel and move on....". You've just lost the average person who might otherwise be interested in playing. The VAST majority of Android users have absolutely no ability or interest in having to "root" their phone, finding a good ad-blocker, and then install it. There are millions of people having a less-than-steller experience, probably not even realizing what's going on and the best answer from the tech community isn't "Let's fix the process", or even "Let's exhort Google to fix the process", but rather an almost patronizing rolling of the eyes and an explanation of how "easy" it is to fix.
Gee a few months ago, they were not taking Apple seriously... Apple "...is not having an impact on Nintendo... I’ve seen data that suggests that while consumers are constantly downloading apps, they play with them for a few times and then they are moving on to the next thing,” Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s president, told Kotaku. “Clearly it doesn’t look like their platform is a viable profit platform for game development because so many of the games are free versus paid downloads.” "iPhone and iPad not viable gaming platforms", "Apple games are not even a mouthful" A year ago, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo was argued that iPhones and Nintendo products were not competitors because they appealed to different people.
This is soooo clearly an April Fools joke. It's nowhere to be found except on blogs and only on April 1st. The name is clearly meant to be bad English for "I like cartoons", becomes "I lika cartoonen" becomes "Ilkka Karttunen".
I think you confuse the point of building a Difference Engine from LEGO.
It was not built in mockery of the original to somehow be useful to compute lower order polynomials. It was built as a serious effort to see how far I could push the limits of a plastic construction toy.
The real Babbage machine is a wonder of any age. The LEGO one, not so much. But it certainly makes people think and it certainly encourages a sense of wonder of what can be accomplished with ordinary things when you set your mind to it.
Nothing which has been purchased can be overpriced, at least not in that transaction. The buyer weighs the money in one hand and the product in the other. They decided that they wanted the product more than the money. The seller has done the same calculus and arrived at the opposite conclusion. They would rather have the money more than the product.
Both parties believe they received the "better" bargain or they would not have traded. Of course a wise seller will offer a product at a price they feel will be the most profitable overall to sell at, balancing margin versus volume.
Nothing has an "intrinsic" value; only the value the seller and potential buyers would assign it. It will vary by person, time, and circumstance. Two people, one recently well fed at a nice restaurant and the other tired from working all day and skipping lunch would value a street venders hot-dog very differently.
Great metaphor, but California doesn't have many brick houses because we have earthquakes and masonry construction is far more dangerous in those cases.
Wood "gives" and flexes during minor earthquakes, often with little or no damage. If the house "breaks" wood is relatively light, you will likely walk away from the disaster. Brick cracks if the house is even slightly flexed and a brick wall falling on you is ill-advised.
I'm not even sure traditional masonry is allowable in new construction here.
Which is exactly the problem. The idea the States can be "allowed " to do something by a political party is laughable.
The major parties entered a devils agreement with the States. The State agreed to pay for the whole thing in exchange for their making rules. Rules like "Open Primaries" where people from one party could legally vote in another parties primary. Or when the date of the primary is. The parties have allowed the government to have a large voice in who they run for office. Huge conflict of interest!
If the party wants the money (i.e. to have the State pay millions to run the primary election) the party has to get used to losing control of their own process.
The whole idea is bad for the country. The parties should make their own arrangements and pay for the primary themselves. This would wholly remove the party nominating process from State control.
California (heavily Democratic controlled) also foolishly moved their primary earlier.
The real point is not the idiocy of moving the primary, but that the powers in the parties themselves don't like States to do that and so the parties themselves are talking about making more primaries "advisory". People think they will have a voice in choosing a nominee, but the parties themselves will do the choosing.
Pay attention to how many "at large" voting delegates go to each parties convention who are NOT chosen by a popular vote of the people. Most people don't even know this happens yet they are the swing votes who actually choose the nominee.
Of course, I'm not sure why the State (i.e. the public) must have anything to do with the primaries anyway? Why do the people PAY to have the Republicans and Democrats pick their candidates? This is not a Constitutionally mandated election. This is a way for large parties to use the machinery of the people and have the people pay for it.
Each party should figure out who their nominee is how ever they want (I figure an election by their members is smartest, but it's their party) and whomever they choose would stand in the "real" election.
The government and people of the State of Florida are not giving up the pretense of anything. The party bosses of the Democratic (big D) party in Florida has given up any pretense of caring about democratic (little d) issues.
This is all about control. Florida (like many states) is trying to move the primaries earlier so that Florida has a larger say in who the nominees for each party are. Of course its an arms race no state can win 'cause other states will simply move it even earlier. The entire attempt is foolish, but not anti-democratic.
The party bosses (of both parties) don't want a "new" guy they can't control to get early buzz from a primary without other coverage. They want it to be "non-binding" so the party power owners can make their deals and get their guy.
I don't think you understand what "free market" means. Google owns the index, Google decides how it works. The searcher is their customer, NOT the "small business owner".
If they please their customers with the best possible results they will make more money. If they allow themselves to be gamed, searchers will go elsewhere and Google will lose money.
If you don't like that, go start your own search engine.
BTW, they have been sued over this kind of thing and they have always won. The ranking is their opinion and they are entitled to it.
I suspect your definition of "rights" is far narrower than that of the founders.
One important component of protecting citizens rights is for us to pony up and do jury duty every once in a while. Those precious online rights you care about are based on precedent from good old fashioned civil rights in "First Life".
Fuel tanks have baffels to reduce slosh during flight. Those baffels will do a great job imparting rotation to the fuel.
They never said they intentionally shut the engine down. The shutdown was an unavoidable side effect of a strong roll. Their quote was "If you have a significant roll, what could happen is that the propellants can centrifuge out."
If the spacecraft is spinning, all the fuel is pushed to the outside walls of the tank and away from the fuel outlet at the center of the tank bottom. This leaves the fuel pumps with nothing to pump. Engine shut down. Rocket fall, go boom.
Who had to bribe who? This had NOTHING to do with the "Alaskan Pipeline" and everything to do with the Permanent Fund. Every year Alaska write checks to almost every man, woman, and child living in the state distributing a percentage of the States oil royalty to the people.
The oil companies could care less, they've already paid the money. The $200,000 the state paid to recover involved rescanning and doing keyentry on the thousands of applications citizens wrote to get their share.
Left or right wing has NOTHING to do with this. Truth does.
The greenhouse effect is real, there is no doubt. But it's also true that just a few thousands of years ago an ice age ended. The earth was warmed by enough to melt ice miles thick. What casued that? Isn't it interesting that the earth went through such a recent warming that clearly was not caused by our emissions?
You can't fight global warming (which is real) without knowing WHY it's happening. Clearly we can reduce our emissions. But what if that's not enough because it's NOT ENTIRELY THEIR FAULT?
What do we do if it's a solar cycle? We may have to think BEYOND cutting our CO2. We may need to find ways to sequester more CO2 than we make, or find clever ways to reflect solar energy.
People are so focused on "blame" they may not be seeing this is really a larger problem than it first appears.
It's indisputable the Earth is warming. People differ as to why. Answers range from natural cycles to human activity. Perhaps it's both.
I would ask what ended the ice age 10,000 years ago? There used to be ice MILES thick over much of Europe and the US northeast. The few hundred thousand people on Earth at the time had no technology more advanced than a camp fire. What ended that ice age? Clearly the earth has warmed because of non-human causes.
That said, it does not matter why it's warming. Our house is burning and people are bickering over it being arson or lightning. If we don't do something about it the climate will continue to change and probably not in a good way. The vast number of people live where they do because they have food/water available to them there.
This is not about "fault" or people's "guilt" that we've ruined eden. It's about deciding we are gonna do something about it even if that means trying to compensate for a "natural" progression caused by the earths orbit or the sun, etc. This may mean altering our technology to reduce CO2 to make up for more solar activity or doing other more imaginative things.
If the responsible disclosure rules are well designed there is no reason to treat any vender good or bad differently. You give them all the same amount of time to fix the problem then you disclose the bug. This is self correcting. Good venders would never be caught with their pants down, bad venders will get embarassed time after time until they improve.
Sensible people should debate "how long is long enough", but I think it insane to fully reveal dangerous expoits directly to the public without providing a reasonable chance to get it fixed by the vender. A month sounds like a nice round easy to work in period of time, but more or less may be better.
Too short and fixes will be rushed which may introduce other bugs. Too long and the exploit will leak and innocent people/companies may well pay a very high cost for using the vulnurable app or OS.
A handful of Edison bulbs still run today because they are run at VERY low power, not because they had some kind of special process. There is a famous edison bulb at a California Fire Station still burning 90 years later. It's a 4 watt bulb. People today want 100 watts or higher.
LEDs won't succeed (in the short term) because they are VERY expensive to produce, and their lifetime is short when run at high enough power to make people happy. They have their place in situations where you simply don't want to have to ever change it (car brake lights, indicators, flash-lights, traffic lights, etc). But they are not really there yet for general purpose illumination in cases where it's very easy to replace a bulb every few years.
You can't compare PUNCH ballots in Florida with optical pen marked ballots where you FILL in a square with ink. They proved that simply by handling the punch cards, some chads would partially fall out or that older people could not muster the strenth to fully punch them. There were chad falling out all the time which really confused the effort.
Where I live I must sign when I arrive to vote to show I voted. If an elderly person can sign to vote I suspect they can fill a clearly marked box with a marker pen.
Businesses DO have printers which work 99.9% of the time. This is 'cause a supermarket is a money making business. It's in their financial interest to keep them going. Their checking staff replace ink and paper EVERY SINGLE day they are at work and they know how these printers operate. "Problem" machines are quickly identified and repaired.
But voting machines are used at most once a year. They are stored who knows how, packed, and dropped off just before the election, then unpacked and run by ill-trained volunteers who have no job at stake and who can't be expected to keep them going if there is a paper jam or ink issue or other mechanical problem. 99.9% isn't good enough if it hinders voting.
With hand marked optical ballots if the machine screws up you simply slide the ballots into the sealed and locked ballot box and they can be counted by hand later or with another scanner. Most importantly THE VOTING DOES NOT SLOW DOWN if a scanner fails. But if either the touch screen or computer or printer machine fails, it does not register or print votes and voters must share fewer machines to continue voting. This makes already long lines in urban areas even longer.
I think of the scanner as something which can make the process faster, but which is not required.
Large format, clearly designed sturdy paper pen-marked ballots are a reliable and easy way to vote with and easy to count. If the voters "screws up", our ballots clearly state you should ask for a fresh ballot and tear up the mis-vote.
Paper ballots ask no more out of someone than we ask of kindergardeners and there is very little to go wrong. I know some older people who are terrified of computers because "they are so complicated" or they are afraid they will "break" it. Yet they can fill in a crossword puzzle without a hitch.
Keep it simple. High tech is not always the solution.
You can have a computer validate, but at the cost of a million lines of OS, GUI, and Application. You also lose transparancy. So the machine says what I expect, but what vote did it ACTUALLY tabulate? There is no paper trail. If you add a printer, then we have issues with a million printers plus paper plus ink on election day.
They can't keep them working in the gas-pumps, ATM, and supermarkets. How do we expect a bunch of ill-trained poll workers to keep a million printers going on election day?
With paper ballots they can be stockpiled in the weeks prior. All you need to vote is a supply of sharpi markers.
Paper ballots are not like hanging chad that can come loose on their own. These ballots are large, with boxes that encourage you to "fill them in" with pen. I care enough when I vote to fully fill in the box.
I think of the scanner as a "helper". The machines are really cheap, reliable, and best of all they are NOT REQUIRED. The power can go out, all the machines could fail and the election would go on with hardly a hicup.
Cost is also an issue. No matter how inexpensive and reliable you can make a touch screen (with printer) I can make a scanner for far less money. Consider that a 20 booth polling station needs 20 touch screens or 2 scanners you can see which one is more likely to have a good outcome.
Then think of poor counties or States which have to ask voters to pay for all this. Which do you think they will do better getting?
A properly engineered mature design will not "break." Think about 5-function calculators... do they crash?
Touch screen machines DO break. And if it breaks people that many fewer people get to vote! They are complex machines with "sensor" screens and current machines have MILLIONS of lines of code in the OS and application.
Again, the machines need not be that expensive. Hell, we can build an entire damn laptop for under $100 a pop, how expensive can a touchscreen that performs a fraction of the functions of a laptop be?
It needs to be far better built than a laptop as it will be handled, not by a careful owner, but by thousands of people over it's lifetime. People who are encouraged to poke at the glass screen with their fingers. Most of the "advantages" require a screen of enough resolution to display complex character sets or very large fonts. That means a larger-higher resolution display than a cheap LCD.
This directly contradicts your first point about the voting machines breaking. If a touch-screen can break, so can a scanner.
Any robustness you mandate on the touch screens I can mandate on the scanners and there are far fewer of those required. If all else goes wrong I still have the paper ballot I hand marked which can be hand counted, or counted on another scanner.
Only because the systems are poorly engineered (see my response to point 1). What if the ballot is printed crooked on the paper, or your pen runs out of ink, or someone forgot to bring #2 pencils and the scanner won't recognize the #1 pencils they did bring? Misalignment and ease-of use are engineering problems, not systemic ones.
There is much more experience printing paper forms in this country than designing highly robust AND inexpensive touch screen computers. Bringing a bunch of "sharpies" to the polling station is easier to deal with than a broken touch screen. Even if the scanner were 100% dead, ballots and sharpies cover the election.
Voting machines with built in printers scare me even more than touch screens do. Imagine hundreds of thousands of printers each with their own fouling, jamming, and ink problems. There is no way to train a million poll workers how to deal with bad printers or loading paper or changing ink. If the machines fail it's useless to help with the vote. Have you never seen a supermarket, ATM, or gas station with printer problems?
The whole point of optical scanners is if it UTTERLY FAILS it becomes a locked ballot box and the votes can be counted by hand or by another scanner. No training for poll workers. If a real "touch screen" machine dies the overall line increases at that station. If more than a few fail then some people simply don't get to vote.
Paper ballots have a lot less to go wrong with them in practice. Think of the optical scanner as purely a counting convenience, it's not required to actually vote. All I need for that is ballot and sharpie.
While open source will be a critical part of the solution, most of the practical mechanical issues would remain:
Touch screen requires a complex GUI level machine with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines of code. Even if the code is "open source" there is still that complexity there. Stuff to go wrong.
Some systems have no paper trail. Open source does not change this.
One machine per voting booth solutions are VERY expensive. Optical ballot systems allow my booth to be a curtain, pen, and table. I can then walk to a shared optical scanner and "cast" my vote.
I happen to take my time to vote. If I am standing in front of an expensive touch screen that they can't afford too many of, I am stopping others from voting. But if the only resouce I'm consuming is a table and pen, more people can vote at the same time.
I personally think the solution is optical scanning. These require very little software, which could easily be open source.