Follow the money. The idea of research chumps had to have crossed the minds of the kernel developers. Good thought!
Nothing short of full disclosure has any chance of getting the chumps past this mess.
Then the input problem remains.
Also, if we are going to manually issue tickets and such, we might as well put the record of the vote there, call it a ballot, and get the election done in a trustworthy way.
First, I am just going to say without making our votes personally identifiable, it's not possible to vote electronically in a way the voter can trust.
Why is that?
Here is an analogy:
There is a room, with a person in it, and that room is secure. Nobody can enter or leave, except for that person, and nobody has access to the resources inside that room, except the person.
You, the voter approach and communicate your vote. The person in the room makes a record, and then communicates your vote back to you. They may even produce a piece of paper for you to remember your vote by.
Once everyone has voted, this person leaves the room and communicates the total votes. There is no recording of the voter interaction, just that person interpreting the votes they hear, keeping track of them, and communicating a final tally.
The problem is obvious, right? That person can do whatever they want and nobody is going to be able to prove otherwise.
Now, that problem can be mitigated somewhat. Exit polls can be used to analyze the statistical nature of the votes and compare against the tally. And if incremental vote counts are communicated, math can be applied to that as well. We can sort of gain confidence in the election.
Compare that to a room where people collect ballots. That room is secure, so the ballots can be aggregated with few worries, but is otherwise visible to everyone.
In case of error, the ballots can be brought out, examined in any number of ways and we can arrive at a very high confidence in the election outcome.
The basic problem we have with electronic input is that the electronic record isn't directly human readable. There is no way for the voter to know the record of the vote used for the tally actually reflects their intent.
With physical vote records, a few things are true:
1) The chain of trust between voter intent and the actual vote record is intact. The voter can understand their record matches their intent. With a touch screen, button, or some other thing, that record of intent is really just a grease smudge on the input device, while the intent walks away unrecorded.
2) Because of #1, say you press "bob" on the touchscreen. The computer responds with "yup, you pressed bob" and one thinks it's all good. But the computer can also add "Jane" to the tally, and the voter can't know. Or their vote can be ignored, fractionally counted, whatever. No chain of trust.
3) Electronics are made to state change. That's how we do computation. Paper, other physical media is very difficult to change in a way that cannot be seen. Erasing a mark, making a mark, all involve basic physical processes and the rules of the world we live in more or less make changes impossible to make transparent.
4) With physical media, the voter expression of intent is used directly to form a tally. With electronics, some interpretation of the voter intent is used, and not even used directly, as it's a chain of temporary states all the way through.
Why does this matter? Should this not be a fundamental crisis in computing if true?
Nope. Now think through the things we do with computing machines. I am writing this text. I can see the text fed back to me, and it could be modified without me knowing, but for the fact that said text is a dialog. We all have some concept of the state of things and modifications would very quickly come out of changes to the text, unless said changes were very sophisticated.
Banking always has redundant paper. Ever wonder why tellers are required to report the number of bills dispensed on a cash withdrawal, or you get a receipt and they keep one too? This is why. Same goes with merchants selling things, people buying them. Multiple, personally identifiable parties, are interested in the record and multiple, distributed often physical records are kept and reconciled regularly.
We can't do this with elections because of the following four pillars of a trustworthy election:
1) Anonymonity. Everyone's vote is private. We do not personally identify votes for fear of crime associated with votes.
2) Freedom. Everyone can vote or not as they see fit.
3) Transparency. A vote can be seen from the moment it is cast, through to final tally. (admittedly, many parts of the US do this poorly, but shouldn't)
4) Oversight. Everyone can understand the election process and this depends on transparency being in play. The law, the ballots, all of it.
When one factors in the input validity and forced voter trust problems inherent in electronic voting, the problem becomes super hard. Personally identifying voters is necessary to complete the picture and make something trustworthy.
This is why we cannot write voting software. It's not incompetence, or any other lame thing. It's an unsolvable problem, unless we want to make votes personally identifiable. Should we do that, there are lots of great solutions we can draw from.
First, hello Slashdot. It's been quite some time since I last logged in. Greets and all that jazz.
This flexible polymer with seeking type robot just oozed a comment. Elon is definitely out to see some future happen in his lifetime. I am a fan, just because he's perfectly willing to take the big risks and see what can be done. Works his ass off too.
Not for everyone, but while we've got him. Thanks! Let's hope for some goodness.
In my mind, there are two things:
One, any kind of two way interface. Yeah, there will be risks, but it's like having an extra channel. I suspect just getting it in there and figuring out how to setup the feedback loop needed for a person to be aware of it and explore is the hard part. Once they do? Look out. Pretty soon, talking to someone may not be any assurance you are talking just to them. They may be consulting all sorts of information resources, even just acting. Crazy times ahead. File all the obvious enhancements under this heading. Speculate away!
The other thing is fixing broken people. Seems like amazing possibilities here. That's exciting, if nothing else.
"We have whole boatloads of activists, who think it's cool and progressive to plaster people's private sexual problems all over...that's the reason for laws like the one in TFA
Oh, but the creator and sponsors of the bill will tell you that this has nothing at all to do with transgender people. This is really about protecting women in bathrooms, don't you see?
Transgender people, who would be LED OUT IN CUFFS if they followed your advice to "use the other restroom," are merely collateral damage in the battle against men sexually assaulting women in women's bathrooms (in a subset of government buildings).
So tell us, do you approve of this bill, and why?
Sorry for re-replying, cleaning up my formatting and adding more about why this Child Molesters will love this bill:
--
Before the "Bathroom Bill" Molester: I love Texas! I can grope whoever I want and not go to jail!
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After the "Bathroom Bill" Molester: Extremely feminine transgender women and 7-year-old boys are forced to use the men's room by themselves in a subset of government buildings!
No one has a job because every tech company pulled out of Texas, but...I'm applying for every government job I can! I'm still not on the sex offenders list!
Molester (kneels reverantly): Thanks to Jesus Christ and Dan Patrick!
This is not a rights issue or a bathroom issue.
A bill that dictates who can use the bathroom is not a rights issue or a bathroom issue?
What color is the sky in your world?
As a Texan, I've been reading about this bill for almost a year now. Here's some context around it:
1) Texas still has some of the most molester-friendly groping laws in the nation (anything short of penetration is a class C misdemeanor, you won't even go to jail for it). This bill does nothing to address it.
2)The driving force behind the bill is revenge on the federal government for dictating that transgender students can use the restroom of their identified gender (a policy that is strongly supported by local school districts). That's why the bill only applies to government buildings (and a subset of those, at that!).
3)The bill's author, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (not the sportscaster) got his start as a bargain-bin Rush Limbaugh. He realizes that the "social conservatives" lost the fight against gays, and he's using this to target a smaller, even more vulnerable minority.
Can you point us to some statistics that show
a)there's an epidemic of men in women's bathrooms committing assaults?
b)making extremely feminine transgender women go into men's bathrooms will somehow reduce assaults?
c)a law that only applies to SOME GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS will have any effect on this "epidemic"?
To put it bluntly, you've been duped by Dan Patrick and his hate squad. Don't kid yourself-this law does nothing to protect women or any victims of sexual assault. Do you think that bush-league Rush Limbaugh gives a shit about whether or not women get sexually assaulted?
It's mainly an impotent revenge play on the federal government for dictating that transgender students can use the restroom of their identified gender (a policy that is strongly supported by local school districts). If it passes, it will do untold economic damage to Texas, and INCREASE sexual assaults.
If you are a Texan, make sure you know how your state lawmakers voted, and make sure you tell them they're getting VOTED OUT if they supported this petty, oppressive law that has no place in the freedom-loving state of Texas.
Straight men dressed as women commit rapes in women's bathrooms.
Not only do you need to prove that this is true (spoiler alert: it's not), you also need to prove that the law would do anything to change this.
The real context around this law is
1)"Social conservatives" lost the battle against the gays, so they are starting a new battle against a smaller, even more vulnerable minority.
2)"Small-government conservatives" resent the federal governments above, and local school districts below, having sane policies about transgender student bathroom use. Notice that the law ONLY APPLIES TO GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS (and even that has some expections). If there was an epidemic of cross-dressing rapists, wouldn't it make more sense to have this law apply to private businesses as well?
3)The author of the bill, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, is a minor-league Rush Limbaugh that somehow got elected to high office. He's a grandstanding idiot that doesn't care how many transgender teens commit suicide, so long as he can rile up his base with this fake crisis.
how do you know that the new level isn't a simulation
As I understand it, that's the logical basis for "the universe is almost certainly a simulation". The idea being that a sufficiently advanced society will at some point want to, and have the ability to, simulate a universe (or at least simulate it to the satisfaction of the people being simulated). As technology within that society progresses they will improve the simulated universe to the degree that the simulated universe can, as societies are wont to do, simulate a universe. Also, there's no reason to believe that, if possible, those societies wouldn't want to simulate multiple universes which may, themselves, simulate multiple universes. It's turtles all the way down.
So the logic goes, if there is one physical universe and N nested simulated universes, what are the odds that this one happens to be the physical universe?
Of course, OpenStack can't implement things which are needed by real people. Wake me up when they are able to get comparable functionality to vMotion, HA, fault tolerance, or just adding disks/RAM to an image without having to kill the VM and spin up a new one from an image.
FUD. OpenStack is not a hypervisor, it's an omnibus cloud application suite. There are at least 2 nova-compute compatible hypervisors that can "vmotion" (which is snapshotting RAM and storage to a network block device). If you can't figure out how to do "HA" and "fault tolerance" with MySQL then by all means, keep transferring your entire bank account to VMWare.
All in all, your rant makes about as much sense as someone complaining that Microsoft Office can't do spreadsheets.
Microsoft is pushing a lot of testing onto early and non business users. What did they expect actually?
Secondly, Microsoft has moved to a rolling release style of development, while also pushing hard on features people aren't all that excited about. What do they expect?
If they really "demand answers", maybe they can fund the internal testing, etc... needed to get them, so their "beta" program may actually then deliver more meaningful feedback.
"Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul." -- Robert G. Ingersoll
