Well, I'd argue pen, paper, hand count, not pencil, but your point still holds.

As voting "irregularities" have been reported on over the years, I've wondered about the possibility of generating ballots on-the-fly. It would be really convenient if one could vote at any polling station in the county or state by simply presenting one's ID and having a ballot for one's various districts generated, so if one's local polling places are overwhelmed or if one wants to vote close to one's workplace one could use a different polling station, but given the failure of governments to maintain voting equipment I don't see how that can be possible. I'd also thought about electronic means that generate a paper receipt, but there's still no real guarantee that the machine tabulated the vote correctly or that the voter will have recourse if the receipt shows something other than what the voter intended.

Hence my support for optical scan with the ability to hand-count.

The second system is entirely separate. It exists to present the voting options, register your choice and add your vote to the tally. To take the example of a polling station, when you arrive and register to vote you are given a key - one key per voting machine. You present this key to the machine, it permits access to the vote casting user interface, and once the vote is cast it interlocks the machine from presenting the voting options again until it is removed from the machine and returned to the polling clerk, who inserts it in a "reset machine" facility at his desk. (This is required to stop you just running the voting programme lots of times and casting many votes.) Note that this system knows nothing about your true identity, just that it has been used to register a vote.

Except that I have no control or even a method to confirm that this second system is truly a second system. In paper ballot voting in a polling station I physically see that my ballot bears no distinguishing marks before I fill it out, I see that it goes into a hopper with hundreds of other ballots, and I see that they don't note the time that I've come in to vote, only that I have.

I have no such observation of the inner workings of an electronic voting system. They cannot prove to me that they aren't tracking my account with even something so innocent as a simple timestamp relative to when my vote is cast.

I believe that all 'electronic' voting needs to use a human-readable, human-filled-out paper form that is optically scanned.

Where I live, ballots are large pieces of cardstock with the various questions printed on them, and the voter marks a line between two pre-printed lines (one with an arrowhead pointing at the answer it corresponds with) to indicate preference. The ballots go through the scanning machine and are then deposited into a box like a traditional hand-counted system. If elections are especially close or are challenged by a candidate or group on one side of a particular ballot initiative then the paper ballots are re-counted by machine and by hand. Sometimes a voter makes a mistake when filling out the ballot (like putting X or checkmarks instead of connecting the lines) but if the election official can determine the voter's intent (ie, a checkmark next to a particular candidate's name or in place of where the line should be) then the vote can be counted.

I don't believe that any system of e-voting is practical, even if such a system somehow manages to avoid any sort of tampering with voter's selections.. The electronic safeguards that would be necessary to ensure one voter, one vote would make it impossible to anonymously vote, and the anonymous ballot box is one of the cornerstones of democracy as it prevents a sore winner from seeking retribution against those that attempted to unseat him.

But for security through obscurity to work, the level of obscurity required is generally high, bordering on outright-secret, or the payoff needs to be so scant that there's no reason to bother in the first place.

Security through obscurity might work for something like a power plant control system because we don't know the architecture of the hardware that it runs on, the operating system or if there is a third-party OS, the language it's written in, or even its name, and given the importance of the application it probably wouldn't be permanently Internet-connected, and if it needs to send out notifications it might communicate through a unidirectional RS232 link or something along those lines, or through a transmit-only fiber link (so that there's not even receive hardware on the platform). Certainly there would be some people that really want to break in, but it's exceedingly unlikely that they'll ever be in a position to do so.

Security through obscurity can also work when the system is not terribly important. I don't doubt that the Energy Management System controllers that interface the HVAC systems in commercial office buildings to the computer networks are garbage as far as their code is concerned, but there's not much someone can do with those in most cases. So even if there's ability, there's no real payoff, and the systems are so incredibly simple and underpowered that they'd make for poor intermediaries in a greater attack even.

By contrast, voting equipment is usually distributed widely and is not particularly heavily guarded, and as it needs to be inexpensive to produce in mass quantities it's often commodity hardware, off-the-shelf parts if you will, and there have been documented cases of electronic voting hardware have exposed and functional USB ports. As vote tallies are imortant it's not inconceivable that someone could borrow or steal a voting machine to figure out how it works and to find some way to mass-tamper with them, like distributing USB fobs to their fellows to use on them to load a package. In these cases, obscurity simply doesn't work because the system can't remain obscure.

I see no difference between Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, and Paypal. I see unnecessary means by which to exchange money that just adds complications.

Cash on the barrelhead works fine for all small purchases.

I guess that who you get to post is now simply a toss of the Dice...

Well, it is possible to polish a turd another way, but it takes a very, very, VERY long time.

Corpolite

Yup. It's also common to get discounts for cash. Some places like pawn shops, used bookstores, junkyards, and other businesses will always offer discounts over published or listed prices for cash, and those discounts are often much steeper than just the cost to the merchant of a credit card transaction, and sometimes are quite a bit more than the choice by the merchant to under-report taxable transactions would account for too. I suspect that in part it's a matter of the business having the money now, as opposed to having to wait until the end of the month to get paid. Plus there's always a possibility of messing up a credit/debit transaction, which can result in having one's account (and all outstanding revenue) put on-hold until the processor chooses to release it.

Credit/Debit works best for large companies where there's little to no haggling, and where the sheer volume of transactions allows that merchant to negotiate good terms with the processor, but they're still at the mercy of the processor as far as account and transaction fees are concerned, and then there's the other issue of security. Target, Neiman Marcus, and PF Changs are all going through that right now, and I don't doubt that it'll get worse as time goes on, and while "pin and chip" cards may help, I expect that someone will figure out how to steal through those too, and the cycle will just continue.

And then there's the personal sale angle. I'm not going to take paypal or have the ability to process credit cards for a yard sale or some crap that I'm selling through the classifieds or craigslist. Given how I'm mainly just trying to recoup something in the process of a sale, adding more hoops or steps will just result in my not bothering to sell junk anymore.

You're incorrect. The maps that I just picked up indicated limited-access freeways, divided highways, two-lane highways, lesser paved roads, unpaved roads, and forest service trails. Different lines for each type.

I do actually! It cost less than two smartphones!

Windows, you whore!

I wasn't saying that old smartphones were in any way comparable to modern ones. My point was that smartphone development has been occurring far longer than most people realize, and is in-parallel with PCs in that the performance characteristics of the device have outpaced the capabilities of the software and user experience to the point that there's not a whole lot of benefit in upgrading without an external reason to do so.

And as to your analogy of GPS vs maps, I can use a map without any electrical power, and I can identify on the map, if it's a good one, which roads my low-ground-clearance car can traverse, versus which roads my 2wd small pickup can traverse, versus which "roads" I'll need a 4x4 or truck with significant ground clearance to use. Most of the time the latter aren't even noted on GPS systems.

Smartphones well predate the Apple and Blackberry options. Palm and Qualcomm developed the pdQ-series in the nineties and they were on sale by 1999 and were direct variants on the Palm Pilot series of personal organizers, which themselves date back to the early nineties, and had many of the components that a phone-based device would want like an address book, a calendar, a tasks list, a calculator, etc.

And that's not even going into the other companies that built personal organizers around this same time.

I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.

Geek-chic likes to talk about and to chase the latest gadgets, but the hype really isn't as widespread as reports would indicate, and even those that have chased the newest have often gotten tired of doing it without any real, tangible improvements.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?