Never heard of spoofing, I guess. Maybe that's why you want to trust on-line voting.

Or maybe you want to be the spoofer?

It has been noted above, but faith is supposed to be something that gets people to think about their problems and see what they can do for themselves first.

To the extent that atheism also helps people try to solve their own problems, atheism has value in God's universe.

For many people, the prayer for help is less for intervention than for teaching.

Part of the purpose is for the person praying to at least think far enough to figure out what kind of help is really necessary, and the usual result is help figuring out what to do.

Atheists can argue that meditation should be sufficient without having to brown-nose some non-existent supreme being, but that kind of misses the point.

Sometimes there are other things that happen, too, usually people (friends, strangers, even enemies) who provide just enough help, once the person praying has started solving the problem on his or her own. Atheists can argue that such people would likely help anyway, but that's also kind of missing the point.

"cuase dingbat" it's time to boycott.

Are we willing to take a few years of limitations on high-def and premium content to take a stand here?

If freedom really matters, it should matter more than the high definition or the premium content, etc.

Standard platforms are okay, but eventually we need to start working on tools to deal with the complexity.

We need a whole bunch of co-existent forks.

And some way to manage them all.

That's the whole point here, I think.

No, not really everywhere. Not nearly as everywhere as 68K (still). No where nearly as everywhere as ARM.

x86 is not really appropriate to embedded and real time. If the other processors which are tend to get tuned, well, x86 in embedded is going to tend to get even more special hardware.

Not the same x86, however, and that's really the problem we're trying to talk about here. (And failing.)

Those are blocks.

When you need a secret but verifiable ballot, on-line voting cannot provide either in a way that most voters can understand.

Not just hard problems. Not just NP Complete. We're trying to build systems based on internal contradictions here. You're trying to say that, with a little work, we can make a system where true equals false.

(It hardly takes any work at all to make a system that says true equals false. Different problem, however.)

As someone else has pointed out, with the bank you only lose money.

Votes are more important than money.

Not worth more in monetary terms, more important. Way more important.

I have long thought the the best approach in many cases is to count a non-vote as a vote against all.

It won't work in some cases, however.

A non-vote can be a protest, but changing to a digital system does nothing to help the protest be registered.

And it opens up a huge bunch of holes to cheating.

Use machines in the counting process, after the voting is done. Keep them away from the actual place where people vote.

Butterfly ballots are not the only kind of physical ballot.

The hanging chad is only one of the problems.

They were developed when we didn't yet have optical scanning techniques and machines cheap enough to use for elections, and when paper was (comparatively speaking) expensive enough to motivate separating the candidate list from the ballot. (It was still a bad idea, but the motivation can be understood.)

Bubble sheets incorporating the candidate's names, putting the ballot in a sleeve before leaving the voting booth, is about as good as it gets. (And then someone forgets the blanks for write-in.) And those are better than any computer voting system.

You may have the skills to check a few of those boxes on voting day, but are all the non-geeks just supposed to trust you? And what about all the boxes you can't check?

You can't hide what you do and ask people to trust it. That's the problem with this kind of code. Even for the people that can understand the math, how do they know for sure that the system is not just taking all the shortcuts?

The best system is already in use, and that's the physical ballot, where the voter puts the ballot in a sleeve to hide it from the judges before it goes into the ballot box.

There are some specific details, but computers in any role other than counting physical ballots just get in the way.