However, I believe we should try to make sure it was the act of a lonely loonie rather than something more serious. (I base this on an estimate of expected value: if it's one guy, the costs of checking are relatively minor and labs institute more careful controls over dangerous stuff; if there's something more nefarious going on but we fail to notice, the costs are likely much greater.)
Whatever the actual story is, the person who knows best is no longer in a position to say much about motivation, intent, process, or context.
The two senators intended to receive the toxic envelopes were, at the time, significant players in the politics of the day. Whether Ivins intended to implicate "Islamic terrorists" or merely encourage the raging paranoia of the U.S. political power players at the time, those anthrax letters likely had an effect on the politics relating to the passage of the U.S. PATRIOT act.
Its connection to the desperate politics of the day make it a story worth following even if it turns out, as is most likely, the act of a lonely lunatic.
The Man Who Never Was was a wonderful story, or at least I found it to be wonderful reading in 7th grade when I read it... The U.S. government sought and received permission from a woman whose husband died to use his body in the misdirection.
I agree, there's a good chance that woman's husband's body very likely saved many many lives.
If this sort of plan fails, it could mean a serious depression
Check out the economic effects of substantial multiplication of cost of the cost of energy, the primary input to essentially every economic process this society operates.
Sticking with fossil fuel technology while continuing the current process of neglecting research into alternatives (funded appropriately, based on reasonable expectation of results) is a recipe for an economic disaster in this country.
We are far far more dependent on energy than emerging societies, so it is important for the U.S. to engage in energy research right damn now in order to avoid a serious economic meltdown.
You have a glass jar worth 6.2 trillion dollars, and from which you to draw about 100 million dollars per year of income.
In this glass jar is a candle, which is burning, and there is a rough consensus among jar researchers that the heat gradient could break the jar. Extinguishing the candle is estimated to cost about 1000 million dollars.
If the jar breaks, you have lots of shiny shards of glass and no more income; if the jar doesn't break, it is likely to generate income at the rate of probably 90 million dollars per year.
The question: What about that candle?
Demanding absolute proof that the experiment we are performing on the life support system of the one and only spaceship we have available to us is basically stupid.
I suggest based on your requirement of proof of climate change that you terminate all health insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, and stop with that silly 401k, since there is only reasonably consistent consensus that you will have a really expensive accident, or cancer, or live long enough to benefit from your 401k.
I just brought out the most commonly known technologies that can be converted to high-count multi-core systems quickly and relatively efficiently.
I didn't claim that SQL, spreadsheets, etc are THE solutions, only that multi-core systems are not wasteful cruft even given the ordinary techniques we have available today.
Here's the bottom line: we agree that somewhere, sometime, a new language or language family is very likely to replace the current procedural (or half-object, half-procedural language families we use now). But in the meantime, multicore systems will be more useful more quickly than is implied by the idea that hardware designers are out of ideas. Our world is not stagnating, and is (in my opinion) not under threat of stagnation.
I'll accept the argument that the single-threaded model is (temporarily) being preserved in current systems. That said, I believe that there is a natural progression toward multithreaded computing as the technologies become more pervasive.
What do you think of such things as SQL and spreadsheets already starting down a road of declarative style of "programming", which would implicitly allow the engines to make their own decisions about how to run multi-threaded?
I had good experience with a quad-phenom running a classical web application recently: The system used all 4 cores very effectively without our needing to make a single adjustment to our extremely simple application.
To me, it appears that we (the developers, theoreticians as well as practical implementers) are already naturally moving to use the resources that the hardware developers are providing. However, I really don't see multi-core systems as "cruft"y as your first comment claims.
I can see your point... I can imagine a thing that looks a whole lot like an FPGA whose cells are designed to accept new functional definitions extremely dynamically.
(As you can tell, I don't agree with using the name "non-algorithmic": It's algorithmic by any reasonable theoretical definition. This is why I refer to it as being an extremely fine-grained data flow model.)
However, if you look at modern FPGAs, you will discover that even there, the macrocells are fairly large objects.
I guess that when it comes down to it, the "non-algorithmic" model proposed in the page you cite seems so fine-grained that benefits would be overwhelmed by connectivity issues. By this I mean not simply bandwidth among functional components, but in defining "who talks with whom under what dynamically changing circumstances". Any attempt to discuss fine-grained data flow must face the issue of efficiency in connecting the interacting data and control "elements".
There's the possibly even more interesting question about how many of each sort of functional module should be built.
What do you say to meeting in the middle, and thinking about a system that isn't so fine-grained, while also thinking of "control functions" as being just as movable as the data elements? Here's why I ask: In my opinion, there might well be some very good research work to be done in applying techniques related to functional programming to a system of extremely large number of simple functional units that know how to move functionality around with the data.
Silly. I cannot believe Donald Knuth would be that dense, there must be more to the conversation.
Every major system in existence today is already a "multiprocessor" system, we just don't think of them that way. The average PC is a parallel system running at least 14 CPUs in parallel. (two or three for every spindle, one or two for keyboard, a few for your broadband modem, a few in your firewall, etc etc etc).
Multicore systems are simply an extension of the existing computational model. Plus, every supercomputer built in the last 20 years has been massively parallel.
Actually, Sun's Niagara has that "problem". The way they solved it is to place Gbit networking close to the cores. There are also multiple DDR-2 memory buses and (I think) PCI-E lanes to feed the processor's prodigious need for memory bandwidth.
The comments to the Register article include a comment about the Transputer. (In case it's not familiar history, the transputer was a really slick idea that went nowhere... 4 high bandwidth connections, one for each neighbor CPU, with onboard memory. I recall that they were programmed in "Occam", a dataflow-oriented language.)
I believe that large-count multi-core systems will remain niche solutions until dataflow "locality", "discovery", and unification of control and data become well understood in a theoretical framework. The niches are nice places to be, though. A high quality game is "merely" a simulation of some virtual reality and simulations are perfectly matched to high-count multi-core systems.
The idea of unifying control and data is no new invention, and anyone trying to patent it should be shot. It's just an ordinary spreadsheet cell. Or possibly a neuron.
Super-complicated spreadsheets (which are becoming the norm), databases and (my current favorite) simulations fit multi-core systems very well.
I am helping a company build a simulation management system and have been salivating for a Niagara-based system for about a year now. Their requirements don't call for such performance (yet), but I remain hopeful.:-)
Finally, I'll bet Linden Labs ("Second Life") is following the large-count multicore research closely.
To simplify: Dataflow. It's been too many years, but I recall that DataFlow was a company name. Their lack of commercial success was based on the combination of being way ahead of their time.
The recent advent of multiple on-die asynchronous units ("cores") is leading to a resurgence of interest in the dataflow model.
Anyone who has implemented networked event-driven functionality has already started down the path of dataflow model of computation, though obviously it's not fine-grained. The "non-algorithmic model" looks like a fine-grained implementation of a normal network application. (I agree with a downthread post that claims that current and classical Java-based server applications are already there, accepting the idea that event-driven multithreading applications are essentially coarse-grained dataflow applications.) And when the research gets going hot and heavy, I'll wager that the research will end up focusing on organizing the connectivity model.
As far as I am concerned, one place to look for multicore models to shine would be in spreadsheets and similar applications where there is already a well-defined pattern of interdependency among computational units (which in this case would be the spreadsheet cells). I also think that database rows (or row groupings) would be naturals for dataflow computing.
An efficient dataflow system would be the most KICK-ASS life computation engine!:-) (Now you know how old I am...)
...Until he was asked to build and demonstrate an easter-egg in an electronic voting system. By a fellow Republican.
Last I heard, Clint Curtis was running for congress in a Florida district as a Democrat. His platform is basically "openness and honesty in government".
"Third World" is usually associated with a ruling junta or oligarchy the claims to be "left" when they are always, every single time, simple feudal thugs.
And the reference to the U.S. tending that way comes from the observation of the recent history of "signing statements", preventing the populace from discovering whatever the truth is in starting wars, et cetera.
This relates to elections in the context of twisting the results to make the current rulers appear popular, whether that popularity exists (sometimes) or not (usually).
The U.S. is not a third world nation. But there are these hints popping up here and there that are cause for concern.
My digital camera was used to photograph some of the ballots that show evidence of tampering in the 2004 election. (I was too busy trying to start a business and loaned the camera to those doing the research and documentation.)
Among the many tricks that were used is the transfer of ballots among precincts, such that the (standard practice of) re-ordering candidate names would result in exceptionally high third-party votes at the expense of one candidate.
In other cases, little stickers were applied to ballots to hide voter's original marks.
It's in a book by Richard Hayes Phillips, "Witness to a Crime". The book comes with a CD containing the images used to discover these tricks.
Half right. Bob Urosevich was the president and COO of Global Election Systems, the company that Diebold bought in 2002. So the company was in transition during the time period that the story reports.
The CEO of Diebold in 2003 and 2004 (when things were most interesting for those of us who live in Ohio) was Walden O'Dell.
Mostly agreed on essentially all points. If I had mod privileges for this, I would mod your comment up.
Obviously as owner I could hire and fire and direct behind the scenes, but if my company say.. killed somebody, they can only go after my companies assets. that's why most businesses are incorporated in the first place.
A nit to pick: When your company builds a product that despite making every reasonable effort to be reliable fails catastrophically, then only the company's financial assets are at stake. When someone makes a decision which can be proved (in court, etc.) to be willfully negligent, the decisionmaker(s) must be held to account for that decision.
Too often, a corporation is misperceived as an individual entity and reponsibility for its actions are hidden from view by the corporate veil. The reason I repeat this is that too many times, the limits of corporate liability are extended beyond the original intent into (in many cases) abrogation of the personal responsibility of the people who make those decisions.
Following up on the stockholders holding management responsible for their actions: I get proxy vote requests frequently, but there are two ways my ethics do not help:
1) I am a holder of mutual funds, rather than being a stock picker; my proxy votes are related only to fund management, not the companies themselves. (I work for a living and don't have time to research all the companies. That is exactly the service that I pay the fund managers too much to deliver.)
2) Even when a normal minor stockholder is the direct holder of a stock, the board and management have many techniques that prevent ethical questions from ever appearing in stockholder vote situations.
The result is that a person with money to invest must find the 1 company in 10000 that is willing to sacrifice its financial performance in favor of improved balance with ethical concerns.
This is why I favor broad enforcement of common standards of ethical performance by the individuals deciding the direction of corporate entities.
I claim that the broadly held misperception of corporate vs personal responsibility in public understanding is intentional. The corporate apologists understand that language is an important way to misdirect the thinking of people are too busy making their way in the world to get into questions of "psycho-linguistics".
Legally speaking, corporations are considered to be individual entities. But this causes all sorts of problems with understanding what's really happening under the cover of darkness under which corporate management operates too frequently.
Every corporation is run by a group of ordinary people, making decisions for themselves, the stockholders and (on occasion) their employees and customers.
It is this impedance mismatch between the legal interpretation and reality that causes such difficulty: The people whose decisions determine the corporation's behavior in society are insulated from responsibility by the "corporate veil". This insulation of personal responsibility from corporate authority is the cause of great difficulty.
Someday, I hope our use of language will be altered to reflect reality. A corporation is run by a group of people which is best understood conceptually as they, not a singular entity which is incorrectly referred to as an it. And it stands to reason that they need to be held to account for their decisions.
Your argument has been proven as complete fucking bullshit
You really should learn to read, it's fundamental. My comment contains neither the phrase "election fraud" nor the phrase "voter fraud", idiot.
My comment describes what was done in several elections, the most famous of which was the stories of the Chicago election rigging in 1960. It probably didn't alter the outcome of the presidential election, but it came very close. Similar stories have been reported (ISTR) in Philadelphia, again associated with machine politics.
My argument is that elections have been subject to manipulations of various kinds for ever, and the introduction of unauditable voting systems, and unaudited minimal "paper trail" voting systems is a brand new attack vector, highly centralized in the proprietary code contained in voting systems. Entire counties and in some cases, states (such as Georgia) use the same voting system for all precincts. If someone is able to hack one, they're all hacked.
And that's why I refer to e-voting as yet another way to rig elections.
Assuming that when you say "voter fraud" is not rampant, I agree: There have been something less than 10 cases of voters being shown to try to vote mote than once in recent years. It's a well known misdirection by particular groups to manipulate public opinion to persuade legislatures to legislate restrictive voter ID requirements that tend to depress particular classes of voters.
Finally, I consider the phrase "election fraud" to be the union of sets of various manipulations that some people use to alter election outcomes. If you don't like that nomenclature, you are welcome to try explaining your position. If you can control your temper, we might listen.
Absolutely right, I agree completely that the insides of a system are essentially invisible.
See "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson's ACM Turing Award lecture.
For a good example showing how subtle is the electronic system security world, I cite the example of the Nevada Gaming Commission worker who hacked the *test* unit in order to alter slot machine code. His name is Ron Harris, I think. A quick google search will show some interesting stories.
I was a presiding judge for a precinct in a neighborhood north of Morse Road and east of I-71 in Columbus, Ohio. I forget its particular number, though. (after an 18 hour day, I got outside to my car in a freezing rain only to discover that my car had a flat tire! That part I remember...)
The system is broken but less intractably broken than a few years ago.
Prof. Rubin sees increasing awareness of the necessity of auditing by secretaries of state. For example, the secretary of the state of Ohio has just begun the processor implementing much better audit procedures than before.
Those of us in the election advocacy world are close to your suggestion, differing only in the voter checking process: We advocate strongly against ballot-checking outside the precinct, due to the well-known phenomena of vote-buying and extortion.
But you are right on in suggesting that the voter should be able to see his/her ballot, live on paper, before submitting it to the election for counting. This would be a perfect use of electronic systems: Print Ballots.
The voter can validate or invalidate the ballot, visually and *not* submit it for counting when it does not reflect the voter's intent. But this process must occur at the precinct. Once the ballot is in the box, it becomes evidence and should be treated accordingly. (This means implementing and following "chain-of-custody" rules, et cetera.)
Slashdot Mirror
I think your theory is most likely correct.
However, I believe we should try to make sure it was the act of a lonely loonie rather than something more serious. (I base this on an estimate of expected value: if it's one guy, the costs of checking are relatively minor and labs institute more careful controls over dangerous stuff; if there's something more nefarious going on but we fail to notice, the costs are likely much greater.)
Whatever the actual story is, the person who knows best is no longer in a position to say much about motivation, intent, process, or context.
The two senators intended to receive the toxic envelopes were, at the time, significant players in the politics of the day. Whether Ivins intended to implicate "Islamic terrorists" or merely encourage the raging paranoia of the U.S. political power players at the time, those anthrax letters likely had an effect on the politics relating to the passage of the U.S. PATRIOT act.
Its connection to the desperate politics of the day make it a story worth following even if it turns out, as is most likely, the act of a lonely lunatic.
Bad film noir at its best...
The Man Who Never Was was a wonderful story, or at least I found it to be wonderful reading in 7th grade when I read it... The U.S. government sought and received permission from a woman whose husband died to use his body in the misdirection.
I agree, there's a good chance that woman's husband's body very likely saved many many lives.
Check out the economic effects of substantial multiplication of cost of the cost of energy, the primary input to essentially every economic process this society operates.
Sticking with fossil fuel technology while continuing the current process of neglecting research into alternatives (funded appropriately, based on reasonable expectation of results) is a recipe for an economic disaster in this country.
We are far far more dependent on energy than emerging societies, so it is important for the U.S. to engage in energy research right damn now in order to avoid a serious economic meltdown.
A thought experiment:
You have a glass jar worth 6.2 trillion dollars, and from which you to draw about 100 million dollars per year of income.
In this glass jar is a candle, which is burning, and there is a rough consensus among jar researchers that the heat gradient could break the jar. Extinguishing the candle is estimated to cost about 1000 million dollars.
If the jar breaks, you have lots of shiny shards of glass and no more income; if the jar doesn't break, it is likely to generate income at the rate of probably 90 million dollars per year.
The question: What about that candle?
Demanding absolute proof that the experiment we are performing on the life support system of the one and only spaceship we have available to us is basically stupid.
I suggest based on your requirement of proof of climate change that you terminate all health insurance, auto insurance, life insurance, and stop with that silly 401k, since there is only reasonably consistent consensus that you will have a really expensive accident, or cancer, or live long enough to benefit from your 401k.
You have just received the ancient reference of the day award!
Well played! :-)
OK by me! :-)
I just brought out the most commonly known technologies that can be converted to high-count multi-core systems quickly and relatively efficiently.
I didn't claim that SQL, spreadsheets, etc are THE solutions, only that multi-core systems are not wasteful cruft even given the ordinary techniques we have available today.
Here's the bottom line: we agree that somewhere, sometime, a new language or language family is very likely to replace the current procedural (or half-object, half-procedural language families we use now). But in the meantime, multicore systems will be more useful more quickly than is implied by the idea that hardware designers are out of ideas. Our world is not stagnating, and is (in my opinion) not under threat of stagnation.
I'll accept the argument that the single-threaded model is (temporarily) being preserved in current systems. That said, I believe that there is a natural progression toward multithreaded computing as the technologies become more pervasive.
What do you think of such things as SQL and spreadsheets already starting down a road of declarative style of "programming", which would implicitly allow the engines to make their own decisions about how to run multi-threaded?
I had good experience with a quad-phenom running a classical web application recently: The system used all 4 cores very effectively without our needing to make a single adjustment to our extremely simple application.
To me, it appears that we (the developers, theoreticians as well as practical implementers) are already naturally moving to use the resources that the hardware developers are providing. However, I really don't see multi-core systems as "cruft"y as your first comment claims.
I can see your point... I can imagine a thing that looks a whole lot like an FPGA whose cells are designed to accept new functional definitions extremely dynamically.
(As you can tell, I don't agree with using the name "non-algorithmic": It's algorithmic by any reasonable theoretical definition. This is why I refer to it as being an extremely fine-grained data flow model.)
However, if you look at modern FPGAs, you will discover that even there, the macrocells are fairly large objects.
I guess that when it comes down to it, the "non-algorithmic" model proposed in the page you cite seems so fine-grained that benefits would be overwhelmed by connectivity issues. By this I mean not simply bandwidth among functional components, but in defining "who talks with whom under what dynamically changing circumstances". Any attempt to discuss fine-grained data flow must face the issue of efficiency in connecting the interacting data and control "elements".
There's the possibly even more interesting question about how many of each sort of functional module should be built.
What do you say to meeting in the middle, and thinking about a system that isn't so fine-grained, while also thinking of "control functions" as being just as movable as the data elements? Here's why I ask: In my opinion, there might well be some very good research work to be done in applying techniques related to functional programming to a system of extremely large number of simple functional units that know how to move functionality around with the data.
Silly. I cannot believe Donald Knuth would be that dense, there must be more to the conversation.
Every major system in existence today is already a "multiprocessor" system, we just don't think of them that way. The average PC is a parallel system running at least 14 CPUs in parallel. (two or three for every spindle, one or two for keyboard, a few for your broadband modem, a few in your firewall, etc etc etc).
Multicore systems are simply an extension of the existing computational model. Plus, every supercomputer built in the last 20 years has been massively parallel.
Out of ideas? I Don't think so.
Actually, Sun's Niagara has that "problem". The way they solved it is to place Gbit networking close to the cores. There are also multiple DDR-2 memory buses and (I think) PCI-E lanes to feed the processor's prodigious need for memory bandwidth.
The comments to the Register article include a comment about the Transputer. (In case it's not familiar history, the transputer was a really slick idea that went nowhere... 4 high bandwidth connections, one for each neighbor CPU, with onboard memory. I recall that they were programmed in "Occam", a dataflow-oriented language.)
I believe that large-count multi-core systems will remain niche solutions until dataflow "locality", "discovery", and unification of control and data become well understood in a theoretical framework. The niches are nice places to be, though. A high quality game is "merely" a simulation of some virtual reality and simulations are perfectly matched to high-count multi-core systems.
The idea of unifying control and data is no new invention, and anyone trying to patent it should be shot. It's just an ordinary spreadsheet cell. Or possibly a neuron.
Super-complicated spreadsheets (which are becoming the norm), databases and (my current favorite) simulations fit multi-core systems very well.
I am helping a company build a simulation management system and have been salivating for a Niagara-based system for about a year now. Their requirements don't call for such performance (yet), but I remain hopeful. :-)
Finally, I'll bet Linden Labs ("Second Life") is following the large-count multicore research closely.
To simplify: Dataflow. It's been too many years, but I recall that DataFlow was a company name. Their lack of commercial success was based on the combination of being way ahead of their time.
The recent advent of multiple on-die asynchronous units ("cores") is leading to a resurgence of interest in the dataflow model.
Anyone who has implemented networked event-driven functionality has already started down the path of dataflow model of computation, though obviously it's not fine-grained. The "non-algorithmic model" looks like a fine-grained implementation of a normal network application. (I agree with a downthread post that claims that current and classical Java-based server applications are already there, accepting the idea that event-driven multithreading applications are essentially coarse-grained dataflow applications.) And when the research gets going hot and heavy, I'll wager that the research will end up focusing on organizing the connectivity model.
As far as I am concerned, one place to look for multicore models to shine would be in spreadsheets and similar applications where there is already a well-defined pattern of interdependency among computational units (which in this case would be the spreadsheet cells). I also think that database rows (or row groupings) would be naturals for dataflow computing.
An efficient dataflow system would be the most KICK-ASS life computation engine! :-) (Now you know how old I am...)
...Until he was asked to build and demonstrate an easter-egg in an electronic voting system. By a fellow Republican.
Last I heard, Clint Curtis was running for congress in a Florida district as a Democrat. His platform is basically "openness and honesty in government".
"Third World" is usually associated with a ruling junta or oligarchy the claims to be "left" when they are always, every single time, simple feudal thugs.
And the reference to the U.S. tending that way comes from the observation of the recent history of "signing statements", preventing the populace from discovering whatever the truth is in starting wars, et cetera.
This relates to elections in the context of twisting the results to make the current rulers appear popular, whether that popularity exists (sometimes) or not (usually).
The U.S. is not a third world nation. But there are these hints popping up here and there that are cause for concern.
My digital camera was used to photograph some of the ballots that show evidence of tampering in the 2004 election. (I was too busy trying to start a business and loaned the camera to those doing the research and documentation.)
Among the many tricks that were used is the transfer of ballots among precincts, such that the (standard practice of) re-ordering candidate names would result in exceptionally high third-party votes at the expense of one candidate.
In other cases, little stickers were applied to ballots to hide voter's original marks.
It's in a book by Richard Hayes Phillips, "Witness to a Crime". The book comes with a CD containing the images used to discover these tricks.
The whole point of transparency and auditability of the process is to let everyone trust the results, whoever wins the election.
Those who are trying to prevent open, auditable elections are trying to prepare the ground for hiding something.
I live in Clintonville, and can ride my bike to see some pretty spectacular homes in UA. You are
Half right. Bob Urosevich was the president and COO of Global Election Systems, the company that Diebold bought in 2002. So the company was in transition during the time period that the story reports.
The CEO of Diebold in 2003 and 2004 (when things were most interesting for those of us who live in Ohio) was Walden O'Dell.
Mostly agreed on essentially all points. If I had mod privileges for this, I would mod your comment up.
A nit to pick: When your company builds a product that despite making every reasonable effort to be reliable fails catastrophically, then only the company's financial assets are at stake. When someone makes a decision which can be proved (in court, etc.) to be willfully negligent, the decisionmaker(s) must be held to account for that decision.
Too often, a corporation is misperceived as an individual entity and reponsibility for its actions are hidden from view by the corporate veil. The reason I repeat this is that too many times, the limits of corporate liability are extended beyond the original intent into (in many cases) abrogation of the personal responsibility of the people who make those decisions.
Following up on the stockholders holding management responsible for their actions: I get proxy vote requests frequently, but there are two ways my ethics do not help:
1) I am a holder of mutual funds, rather than being a stock picker; my proxy votes are related only to fund management, not the companies themselves. (I work for a living and don't have time to research all the companies. That is exactly the service that I pay the fund managers too much to deliver.)
2) Even when a normal minor stockholder is the direct holder of a stock, the board and management have many techniques that prevent ethical questions from ever appearing in stockholder vote situations.
The result is that a person with money to invest must find the 1 company in 10000 that is willing to sacrifice its financial performance in favor of improved balance with ethical concerns.
This is why I favor broad enforcement of common standards of ethical performance by the individuals deciding the direction of corporate entities.
I claim that the broadly held misperception of corporate vs personal responsibility in public understanding is intentional. The corporate apologists understand that language is an important way to misdirect the thinking of people are too busy making their way in the world to get into questions of "psycho-linguistics".
Legally speaking, corporations are considered to be individual entities. But this causes all sorts of problems with understanding what's really happening under the cover of darkness under which corporate management operates too frequently.
Every corporation is run by a group of ordinary people, making decisions for themselves, the stockholders and (on occasion) their employees and customers.
It is this impedance mismatch between the legal interpretation and reality that causes such difficulty: The people whose decisions determine the corporation's behavior in society are insulated from responsibility by the "corporate veil". This insulation of personal responsibility from corporate authority is the cause of great difficulty.
Someday, I hope our use of language will be altered to reflect reality. A corporation is run by a group of people which is best understood conceptually as they, not a singular entity which is incorrectly referred to as an it. And it stands to reason that they need to be held to account for their decisions.
Your argument has been proven as complete fucking bullshit
You really should learn to read, it's fundamental. My comment contains neither the phrase "election fraud" nor the phrase "voter fraud", idiot.
My comment describes what was done in several elections, the most famous of which was the stories of the Chicago election rigging in 1960. It probably didn't alter the outcome of the presidential election, but it came very close. Similar stories have been reported (ISTR) in Philadelphia, again associated with machine politics.
My argument is that elections have been subject to manipulations of various kinds for ever, and the introduction of unauditable voting systems, and unaudited minimal "paper trail" voting systems is a brand new attack vector, highly centralized in the proprietary code contained in voting systems. Entire counties and in some cases, states (such as Georgia) use the same voting system for all precincts. If someone is able to hack one, they're all hacked.
And that's why I refer to e-voting as yet another way to rig elections.
Assuming that when you say "voter fraud" is not rampant, I agree: There have been something less than 10 cases of voters being shown to try to vote mote than once in recent years. It's a well known misdirection by particular groups to manipulate public opinion to persuade legislatures to legislate restrictive voter ID requirements that tend to depress particular classes of voters.
Finally, I consider the phrase "election fraud" to be the union of sets of various manipulations that some people use to alter election outcomes. If you don't like that nomenclature, you are welcome to try explaining your position. If you can control your temper, we might listen.
Absolutely right, I agree completely that the insides of a system are essentially invisible.
See "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Ken Thompson's ACM Turing Award lecture.
For a good example showing how subtle is the electronic system security world, I cite the example of the Nevada Gaming Commission worker who hacked the *test* unit in order to alter slot machine code. His name is Ron Harris, I think. A quick google search will show some interesting stories.
I was a presiding judge for a precinct in a neighborhood north of Morse Road and east of I-71 in Columbus, Ohio. I forget its particular number, though. (after an 18 hour day, I got outside to my car in a freezing rain only to discover that my car had a flat tire! That part I remember...)
The system is broken but less intractably broken than a few years ago.
Prof. Rubin sees increasing awareness of the necessity of auditing by secretaries of state. For example, the secretary of the state of Ohio has just begun the processor implementing much better audit procedures than before.
There's still plenty of improving to do, though.
Those of us in the election advocacy world are close to your suggestion, differing only in the voter checking process: We advocate strongly against ballot-checking outside the precinct, due to the well-known phenomena of vote-buying and extortion.
But you are right on in suggesting that the voter should be able to see his/her ballot, live on paper, before submitting it to the election for counting. This would be a perfect use of electronic systems: Print Ballots.
The voter can validate or invalidate the ballot, visually and *not* submit it for counting when it does not reflect the voter's intent. But this process must occur at the precinct. Once the ballot is in the box, it becomes evidence and should be treated accordingly. (This means implementing and following "chain-of-custody" rules, et cetera.)