This title is a missed opportunity

Here is the solution to all voting problems.

Goals:
1. Confirm your vote is collected correctly.
2. Try to assure the people that no votes were added.
3. Don't hide results.
4. Keep votes anonymous.

Solution:
1. Keep a large public vote database.
2. Be able to Look up votes by voter id, county, polling location and time.
3. Keep large visible clock and voter count at each polling station. Every time a person goes into the voting room, the count goes up. Voter counts can be confirmed online. Maybe even in a graph over time.

The voter should be able to go online and see his own vote. Since every voter can see every vote counted up in every polling location in the country and know that everyone else can, they'll be assured of the results. If they're paranoid, they can watch their local polling station's voter count and confirm the published results don't have added votes.

Note: Maybe instead of voter id's, it should be a random confirmation code thats generated on the spot. That should be even more anonymous.

Problems: Some people actually vote for the wrong person on accident. That's unfortunate, but the solution isn't to hide it from them.
If vote online doesn't match your vote, have a dispute process. Keep track of dispute counts over time, for the public to see.

Why do people actually think that IE "beat" Netscape?! It was just made default and installed on every new computer. You had to use IE to go download Netscape. Ever since then, it's had a majority.

Are we assuming that the packets will be obvious IRC packets or something? It would be suggestive of a botnet if lots of traffic was moving while the computer was idle, but that could always be background programs downloading updates or whatever. If a botnet used any sort of encryption, or even a binary protocol instead of ascii, it could be extremely difficult to tell it's a botnet by just looking at packets.

I hate to point out the obvious here, but current problems are the entire reason it's even being debated right now. Legalizing marijuana would save the government huge amounts of money. Not only would they make money on taxes, but it would take a huge load off of our criminal justice system. We could also finally stop sending money to the powerful drug cartels that fund crime and are causing major violence in our southern border. There are of course plenty of other reasons to legalize marijuana that aren't related to current issues.

P.S. I don't smoke weed. I hate it.

Its implications, though startling, have gone almost un-reported. So I decided to change that.

DUUUUUUPE
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/09/2044205

I really want a million dollars. I've decided to publicly harass Google to give me a million dollars. Simply ignoring Google won't solve my problem. I will continue until one of two things happens:

1) Google dies and no one gets anything from Google ever again.
or
2) Google continues to live and gives me a million dollars.

So basically, you're saying that Google put up a lot of time, effort, money, lawyers, all at a huge risk. And no one else can compete with them because they'd have to to put up the time, effort, money, lawyers at a huge risk just like Google did?

What this slashdot post needs is:
1. A description of the law that was passed. 'three strikes and you're out' isn't very descriptive. I'm assuming it has to do with file sharing and cutting off people's internet connections?

2. How many deputies were supposed to be there? 18? 100? 300?

Should Google start paying for search results? This is idiotic. If they don't want Google to index them, thats what robots.txt is for. They can restrict Google from indexing them, they can lose traffic and everyone can move on.

SWFScan is a free Flash security tool (download here), released by HP Software, which decompiles all versions of Flash and scans them for over 60 security vulnerabilities.

It sounds like SWFScan actually scans flash SWF files, not flash itself like the post suggests.

Yeah, there isn't really an alternative to C for low level things, which is what bothers me. It seems like an alternative language is the obvious solution to huge classes of security problems.

ATS looks interesting, they even have a paper on writing linux device drivers in ATS. Maybe the alternative will turn out to be ATS, or maybe BitC, but it needs to hurry up and people need to start abandoning C/C++.

Am I the only one that thinks it's ridiculous we still have programs crash? It's 2009, why are we still programming in C? It's certainly possible to have the same speed and low level expressiveness and include assurances against crashes and buffer overflows.