Worse. Named after an astronomer who made very accurate observations but whose celestial mechanics were comprehensively wrong (he thought that the sun with all the planets orbited the Earth.) Do you want to travel in a space vehicle named after someone who got space wrong?

These studies largely ignore confounding factors, and are useless as a result. A kid who spends large amounts of time watching tv doesn't do homework. The tv watching isn't the cause. A student who spends lots of time playing basketball and does no studying has the same result. We could also conclude that playing basketball affects mental ability as well. A better study: compare students who study the same amount of time, but watch different amounts of tv.

Better still, a monitor with a webcam built in.

So, um, grab a monitor and a webcam, and mount them to the wall...

Does anybody ever read /. journals?

ClickOnThis's Journal: Why Do Voting Machines Suck?
Journal by ClickOnThis on Sunday November 05 2006, @12:33AM

Electronic voting machines have been an incendiary topic on Slashdot for a very long time, and for good reason. Software errors, cheesy hardware, political patronage to put them in place, strong-arm tactics by the manufacturers to cover up flaws, not to mention the impossibility of verifying results...there's not much to like. And it seems that any technically-minded person is (rightly) well aware of the vulnerabilities of e-voting, and is unequivocally in favor of a paper trail to verify voter intent.

Obviously I come to bury e-voting, not to praise it. But there is something that continues to trouble me as very strange: the consistent reports of unreliability in the software that runs these machines. How can it be that difficult to write software that simply counts votes? It seems like a straightforward exercise in software engineering. Yet the problems with voting machines appear to be far out of proportion to their inherent technical simplicity.

Only for the sake of argument, let's ask: are the programmers that write this software blissfully incompetent, brazenly reckless or have they embraced a covenant that is unwholsomely against the mainstream of democracy? I can't accept any of the above as true. So, what's going on? Are these machines (or the process that manufactures them) "broken by design", and if so, why?

No, it doesn't. But there's nothing I can say to get any of the lying idiots to compare a reasonable implementation of paper vs a reasonable electronic solution. It's always the best paper vs the worst electronic. So there's no reason for me to argue the points, other than tell you that you are wrong.

Have you never been to a magician's stage show? He gets 500 people to all look at the wrong thing at the same time with close to 100% accuracy. And you are claiming that a well timed car backfire won't make people look. Really? Really? All it takes for voter fraud to be easy is for stupid people to think they have a fool proof system, when they are the ones that are the fools.

ATMs are incredibly reliable these days. The fact that these POS voting machines are built, in large part, by the same people who build ATMs indicates strongly that Occam's Razor beats Hanlon's (or Napoleon's) Razor here; malice, rather than stupidity or incompetence, is the simplest and most likely explanation.

I've been reading and posting to Slashdot for over 10 years.

The stories have always been sensationalist, trolling, or sometimes even deliberately deceptive. Despite that the comments nearly always put it right.

If you read Slashdot, and care about understanding the many fascinating and important issues discussed, you need to read the high-modded comments too. That's always been true for as long as the site existed.