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Comment Re:Heh. (Score 1) 213

You mean to print ballots that are pre-filled out? I could print about one a second. Not that this matters as I could do it at my leisure.
A ballot-counter should be able to identify printed ink against pen ink. If not, I think the consistency of hand-writing would be a little bit of a giveaway. Moreover, you shouldn't have access the ballot paper before the election. If you do, you would need to construct the correct images, trim papers to the right size, etc. in a short period of time previous to the election.

If I pre-stuff the box with my pre-printed ballots before the polls even open... Zero. If you swap the ballot box out after the polling and dispose of the original, then you need a replica of the box... Sorry to say it but any retard can stuff a paper ballot box. It takes an experienced hacker to hack an electronic election.
What, you have your own ballot box at home? There should be enough security so that there isn't just one person watching a ballot box at any one time. The whole point of physical ballot-counting is that the records exist in perpetuity AFTER an election, and can't be retrospectively altered without difficulty and physical access.

Moreover, so what if you can swap a single ballot box? A hacker that can hack an entire election is far more dangerous than a loony who has access to a several (at most) ballot boxes. Even assuming some wide-spread fraud, there are enough individuals and ballot-counters involved in the process to identify any such problems, and the physical ballots are kept such that fraud can be retrospectively identified, even if the sources of such fraud cannot.
The Internet

Submission + - Olympic Web Site Features Pirated Content (thepencilfarm.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Despite all the emphasis on protecting Olympic copyrights in China this year, the official web site of the Beijing Olympics features a Flash game that is a blatant copy of one of the games developed at The Pencil Farm. Compare the game on the Olympic site (http://en.beijing2008.cn/funpage/game/clouds/) with 'Snow Day' at The Pencil Farm (http://www.thepencilfarm.com/games/snow_day/?id=1).

The URL for this submission links to the blog post about this at The Pencil Farm.

PC Games (Games)

Electronic Arts Offers $2B For Take Two 173

quanticle writes "The New York Times is reporting that EA has offered $2B for Take Two Entertainment. The effort appears to be a move to consolidate the two companies before Take Two releases the next iteration of its blockbuster franchise, Grand Theft Auto 4. Take Two has politely declined the offer."
AMD

Submission + - Is AMD dead yet?

TheProcess writes: Back in February 2003, IBM predicted that AMD would be dead in 5 years (original article here), with IBM and Intel being the only remaining players in the chip market. Well, 5 years have come and gone, and AMD is still alive. However, its finances and stock price have taken a serious beating over the last year. AMD was once a /. darling; the plucky, up-and-coming challenger to the Intel behemoth. Do you think AMD will be here in 5 years? Can they pose a credible competitive threat to Intel's dominance? Do they still have the superior, but unappreciated technology, or are they finally old hat? Can they really recover?
Patents

Submission + - IBM Trying to Patent Restaurant Waits

theodp writes: "If all goes IBM's way, it'll soon constitute patent infringement if Bennigan's gives you a free lunch for being inconvenienced by a long wait for your meal. Big Blue is seeking a patent for its Method and Structure for Automated Crediting to Customers for Waiting, the purported 'invention' of three IBM Researchers, which IBM notes 'could be implemented completely devoid of computerization or automation of any kind.' Can we count on IBM to withdraw this patent claim, Bob, or will Big Blue weasel out of its patent reform pledge again?"
Medicine

Submission + - Identical Twins Not Identical After All

Hugh Pickens writes: "Contrary to previous beliefs, identical twins are not genetically identical. Researchers studied 19 pairs of monozygotic, or identical, twins and found differences in copy number variation in DNA which occurs when a set of coding letters in DNA are missing, or when extra copies of segments of DNA are produced. In most cases, variation in the number of copies likely has no impact on health or development but in others, it may be one factor in the likelihood of developing a disease (pdf). "Those differences may point the way to better understanding of genetic diseases when we study so-called discordant monozygotic twins....a pair of twins where one twin has a disorder and the other does not," says Carl Bruder, Ph.D. "If twin A develops Parkinson's and twin B does not, the region of their genome where they show differences is a target for further investigation to discover the basic genetic underpinnings of the disease.""
PC Games (Games)

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?
Programming

Submission + - Amazon EC2 Open to All

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon just announced that the beta program for their EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service is now open to all developers. They also seem to have added new instance types. It appears that you can now get the equivalent of an 8-core machine. Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?
Space

Submission + - "All Quiet Alert" issued for the sun

radioweather writes: "The phrase sounds like an oxymoron, and maybe it is, but the sun is extremely quiet right now, so much in fact that the Solar Influences Data Center in Belgium has issued an unusual "All quiet alert" on October 5th.

Since then, the sunspot number has remained at zero. Because solar cycle 24 has not yet started. There are signs that the sun's activity is slowing. The solar wind has been decreasing in speed, and this is yet another indicator of a slowing in the suns magnetic dynamo. There is talk of an extended solar minimum occurring.

There are a number of theories and a couple of dozen predictions about the intensity solar cycle 24 which has yet to start. One paper by Penn & Livingstonin 2006 concludes: "If [trends] continue to decrease at the current rate then the number of sunspots in the next solar cycle (cycle 24) would be reduced by roughly half, and there would be very few sunspots visible on the disk during cycle 25."

We'll know more in about six months what the sun decides to do for cycle 24."
Microsoft

Submission + - Out of memory in Vista while... copying files? (zdnet.com)

ta bu shi da yu writes: It appears that, incredibly, Vista often runs out of memory while copying files. ZDNet is reporting that not only does it run out of memory after copying 16,400+ files, but "often there is little indication that file copy operations haven't completed correctly". After several billion dollars spent developing Vista, surely Microsoft could get their OS to copy files properly?
Networking

Submission + - Attacking Criminal Networks on the Internet

Hugh Pickens writes: "Computer Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University are developing techniques to analyze and disrupt black markets on the internet, where criminals sell viruses, stolen data and attack services estimated to total more than $37 million for the seven-month period under study. To stem the flow of stolen credit cards and identity data, researchers have proposed two technical approaches to reduce the number of successful market transactions. One approach to disrupting the network is a slander attack where an attacker eliminates the verified status of a buyer or seller through false defamation. Another approach undercuts the cyber-crooks' network by creating a deceptive sales environment. "Just like you need to verify that individuals are honest on E-bay, online criminals need to verify that they are dealing with 'honest' criminals," says Jason Franklin, one of the researchers. "The scary thing about all this is that you do not have to be in the know to find black markets, they are easy to find, easy to join and just a mouse click away," Franklin added."
Lord of the Rings

New Hope for Jackson Hobbit Film? 268

DrJimbo writes "Just in time for the 70th Anniversary of the Hobbit (published September 21, 1937) Entertainment Weekly has a 5-page article on a possible reconciliation between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema that may pave the way for the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to return and helm the filming of The Hobbit. It was previously reported here that Jackson would not be making the Hobbit film. The EW article says that Jackson wants to make two films: first the Hobbit in its entirety and then another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately Jackson already has a lot on his plate with filming of The Lovely Bones scheduled to start this month and a live action Tintin film in the works."

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