E-voting and Open Source

There has been yet another electronic voting problem that cropped up recently. Sequoia doesn’t seem to like the way one New Jersey county wanted to vet their machines. It seems that allowing an “unauthorized” third party look at them would violate the license agreement, and endanger their intellectual property.

Any major voting system is going to have problems, and any new technology is going to have naysayers following it around with the proverbial pitchfork. But, when it comes to electronic voting machines, I’m less opposed to the machines themselves as I am with the secrecy surrounding them. I’m coming at this from a very simple perspective: nothing about the way we vote should be hidden from the public. The very idea that a company can simply refuse to allow someone access to the program code in voting machines used in our elections is fundamentally opposed to the concept of an open democracy. The solution is so simple, that I can’t even begin to wonder why this hasn’t already been legislated: mandate that all voting machine software be made open source.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people fear open source software for the very reason why it’s better than closed source software: security. People make the assumption that, if you open up a program’s code, all the holes and security flaws will shine through, and no one will ever be able to make such software secure. I won’t deny that that’s probably true, in the case of Windows (which had an innumerable amount of holes from the start). The moment Microsoft sends out a patch to fix a security flaw, someone reverse engineers it, and starts sending out viruses to exploit all the people who haven’t patched their systems yet. But, that doesn’t happen nearly as often with well supported open source software. When a security flaw is seen, it gets patched almost immediately. What’s more, there are a lot fewer security flaws to begin with, because so many more people are analyzing the code for such flaws.

Yes, opening a voting machine’s software would expose all of the security flaws in the code. But that’s the point, isn’t it? We want to know where the flaws are so we can fix them.

In the case of Sequoia specifically: I really don’t understand what their problem is. It’s not like counting votes should be all that complicated of a program. Any first year CS major knows how to write a counting program. Hell, you don’t even need a full year; most learn it in the first week or two. The only complicated aspect, I suppose, would be how that program interacts with the hardware. Even that shouldn’t be all that complicated; every cash register at Wal-Mart counts the number of products that go through. One really begins to wonder what it is Sequoia thinks their protecting.

And that, more than anything else, is why people lack confidence in these voting machines. They shouldn’t be all that complicated, and yet, the manufactures are so secretive about how they work, that people can’t help but wonder if they’re doing things they shouldn’t. There are clear and documented instances where electronic voting machines have provided incorrect answers, and yet the public is forbidden to find out why due to copyright law. I can’t express in words how fundamentally idiotic I think that is.

I used to oppose the idea of electronic voting machines, because I thought it would consolidate the votes too much. I don’t worry about that anymore, because I learned that the old paper system we had already did that. Like I said, any voting system is going to be flawed. My opposition now, however, is based on my opposition the idea that I’m not even allowed to know how my vote is being counted. Like I pointed out, it shouldn’t be a complicated procedure, and yet, the companies making these machines are protecting their closed software as if it is. That simply doesn’t make sense to me.

Common sense states that, if these companies want to allay suspicion of wrongdoing, then all they need to do is open their code. Their refusal to do so, or even to allow scrutiny from people they don’t like, suggests that there is some form of illegal activity at work.

This needs immediate legislative action, in my opinion.

Obama’s Full Speech vs Sound Bite Culture

I’m sorry to post about the same event twice, but I feel I must. I’ve seen the way some in the media have handled Obama’s speech, and it has appalled me.

During the 2004 presidential election, I had tried repeatedly to convince my father’s wife at the time to actually watch the debates in full, rather than just watch the news coverage of them after the fact. She argued against it adamantly, claiming that it was just a waist of time. She argued that, as long as she just watched the clips, and ignored all the commentary before and after them, that she’d get enough of an opinion about what had been said to make a suitably valid and unbiased decision.

She was wrong, and given how things have turned out since then, I hope she knows it now. The sound bite culture has spoiled us, and the validity placed upon all those sound bites by all the talking heads on television have stupefied us. Some issues take more than thirty seconds to address. A well composed and thorough half-hour speech can not be adequately understood through sound bites.

I don’t want people to listen to the sound bites on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or even NPR. In my opinion, if you didn’t watch or listen to the speech in full, you didn’t watch or listen to the speech at all.

I’m embedding the full video this time, because I really think it is that important for people see the entire speech.

Obama, Race, and Unity

I refused to post anything about the Geraldine Ferraro or Reverend Wright issues for one primary reason: I thought the media’s focus on those issues was already excessive, and were horrible distractions away from the candidates themselves; their positions on the issues, their priorities, and their words. It’s not that I thought race was an unimportant issue, but that I knew continuing to loop those sound bites wasn’t going to do anything beneficial for the issue of racial inequality.

Barack Obama recently addressed the issue in a real and substantive way. My positions haven’t changed: I still believe we will need to get rid of affirmative action at some point in the future, because the more we make an issue of race, the more of an issue it will be, and at some point, affirmative action will do more racial harm than good. I also don’t think reverse racism is an illusion. But, nor do I think anything Barack Obama said was untrue.

I think it was important that this issue be addressed now, before the racial mudslinging got even more out of hand. I think Barack Obama’s speech, even if not a landmark event, is nevertheless important to see.

 

Edit: I’m having a little trouble with the embed code, so you can just watch it here.

The Future Soon

Even as a SciFi geek growing up in the 90s, this song still applied to me.  I can’t think of any Jonathan Coulton song I particularly dislike, but there are times when he hits the nail on the head perfectly.  The Future Soon is one of those times, for me.

Weak Economy Places USA at #2

It had to happen some time. One of the primary reasons the European Union was formed in the first place was to compete with the US economy. Well, they’ve managed to finally beat us. I suspect this will continue for a while.

This should help to make isolationist happy. I suspect this will reduce foreign trade even more. And maybe, some people in Washington will finally come to the realization that all our struggling and squirming to remain #1 is partially to blame for why we aren’t anymore. Let’s stabilize the dollar, rather than inflate it to artificially increase circulation. Let’s realize that being #1 isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and start focusing a lot more on increasing people’s standards of living, rather than focusing on their spending habits. We’ve spent so much time focusing on our own economy that, while we weren’t looking, most of the other westernized nations passed us by on things like healthcare. And now, the EU has even passed us in the economic arena that we were so worried about all along, because they worked to establish a better social infrastructure back when we were still contemplating our own dollar.

Granted, the EU is more than one country, and as a whole has a higher population than the US (roughly 490 million to our 303 million), so one can’t be too upset over these numbers. We’ve never been #1 in standard of living, or wealth per person, in my life time, so the fact we aren’t the #1 economy anymore shouldn’t be too surprising. It was bound to happen as the EU continued adding countries, and increasing its population. But still, one must admit, the issue is a good springboard for one to complain about the state of our country.

Goodbye Tucker

Tucker Carlson hasn’t been treated very well by a lot of liberal pundits on the web, but I’ve tended to have a lot of respect for him. I disagreed with him more times than not, but I always respected him because he still made sense, even when I knew he was wrong. His conservatism is based mostly in libertarian ideals, rather than party affiliation, and I’ve always been of the opinion that that was the course the Republican party should really be taking, if they want to start winning elections again without coming off as close minded religious zealots.

Goodbye Tucker. I didn’t often agree with you, but I almost always respected you.

Ender’s Game & Speaker for the Dead

I recently finished listening to the unabridged audio books of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead.

Ender’s Game in particular was awesome. I can’t say enough about how powerful this book is, all things considered. My biggest problem with it was that it just didn’t feel complete. It wasn’t much of a surprise, therefore, when Orson Scott Card came on at the end of the audio book and said that he’d written it as an introduction to another book he had already been working on: Speaker for the Dead. The zero gravity game had been an idea he’d had a while before, and had written about in the novelette of the same name, but the actual book Ender’s Game had only really gotten written because he needed to flesh out Ender’s back story so he could finish the book he really wanted to write.

It’s ironic, therefore, that Ender’s Game is the significantly more well known and widely read novel. And rightly so, in my opinion. I hated all the loose ends he left dangling about, but the process of creating those loose ends is just a more powerful story than Speaker for the Dead.

That’s not to denigrate Speaker for the Dead, which is a respectable and solid novel in its own right. It’s certainly a more fulfilling story, in that most of the problems I had with Ender’s Game were resolved in Speaker for the Dead. Most notably, it infuriated me that, Ender, a child of such devastating intellect and empathic sense, was used as a mere pawn in the military’s xenocidal desires in Ender’s Game. In Speaker for the Dead, however, Ender has grown up, has retained and refined his intellect and empathy, and is now the pawn of no one. In fact, one is left with the impression that there’s nearly no situation he would be incapable of taking absolute control of, if he so desired.

But, it’s just not as good of a story. I was locked into the story of Ender’s Game from beginning to end. I only took two breaks when listening to Ender’s Game. The first was my lunch break at work. The second was because my shift was over and I needed to go home. The moment I came back home from work, I started playing the rest of it on my own desktop, because I just couldn’t stop. I never felt that sense of urgency with Speaker for the Dead. Also, Ender’s Game tends to have more of an emotional impact overall. Speaker for the Dead has its moments: when he speaks the death of Marcão, and when he switches off Jane (I’ve always had a soft spot for SciFi AI), for example. But Ender’s Game has more than emotional moments; the story itself is powerful.

I certainly enjoyed them both. In fact, I think I might have grown to despise Ender’s Game had I not seen how Ender grew up to become the person he was in Speaker for the Dead. I needed to hear Speaker for the Dead to really appreciate Ender’s Game. It’s an extremely important book to me, for that reason.

I will say that Orson Scott Card’s religions viewpoints crop up in Speaker for the Dead a lot more than they do in Ender’s Game, and I do feel the story suffers a bit from that. However, nothing in the book is particularly controversial, and I actually happen to agree with most of the stuff that’s actually there. I could still nitpick about assuming one KNOWS what GOD’S LAWS are, when the only source we have is our own common sense, and (if you’re Christian) a book written by other fallible human beings, many of whom actually admit to being fallible (something that should be common sense, even if they didn’t admit it)… But that’s really nitpicking in this case. He says nothing that I consider controversial, but I think the book does suffer, if only because the religious content was completely irrelevant to the larger story. Frankly, he’d have done better just renaming Catholicism something random for the various subplots he included. The injection of a five thousands year old religion (Speaker for the Dead takes place three thousand years after Ender’s Game) into the story without any notable changes to its dogma just stretched my suspension of disbelief, especially considering how the rigid and archaic catholic teachings are already dying off in general religious circles today.

I don’t think I’m going to continue with the other two sequels in the series. Speaker for the Dead buttoned things up for me nicely. There’s clearly more story there, since he left this book a little open ended too, but not so much that I have a burning desire to continue listening. I might listen to Ender’s Shadow eventually, but I want to listen to other things for a little bit, before coming back to this story.

Also, in Mr. Card’s comments at the end of the Ender’s Game audio book, he talks about his work to get Ender’s Game made into a live action movie. He said that a lot of people have come up to him and said that it would make a great movie. I don’t know who these people are, but I think they’re wrong. This might make a B-movie, at best. Live action SciFi can be great, but they are very uncommon when you really look at the vast amount of SciFi movies out there. He goes over a lot of the problems he faces in making it a good live action movie, and in my opinion, no one is going to be able to overcome all the obstacles in the same movie. A director might be able to make a zero gravity battle arena filmed on earth not look completely fake and retarded, but even if he could pull that off, he’d still need to make a horde of 12-year-olds look like prodigies, with intellects to rival that of most modern adults. We have examples of individual kids being able to pull it off, but never more than one at a time in a movie. No, I’m sorry, but a live action adaptation of Ender’s Game just screams Starship Troopers for kids, and I don’t want to see that.

We do, however, have a visual medium that has demonstrated the ability to pull both of those things off really well: Anime. I never got as into Gundamn Wing as I’d have liked when I was younger, but I think it does demonstrate very conclusively that Anime does space opera in a way that would complement Ender’s Game far better than some 2 hour live action Hollywood movie. Child prodigies, zero gravity combat, and deep introspective stories… These are things that live action struggles with, while Anime thrives with them. I really hope Mr. Card comes to his senses on this.

Currently, I’m about half way through listing to Ringworld by Larry Niven. Unfortunately, the narrator I’m listening to (it’s not the same guy on audible) isn’t nearly as good as I’d like, but he’s good enough to tolerate for a suitably interesting book. I won’t say too much about the book itself, but I’ve noticed the contrast between these authors, and it’s funny in and of itself. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead were written by a religious social conservative in the early-to-mid 80s (published in 1985 and 1986 respectively). Ringworld was written during the late 60s (published in 1970) by a man who, deep down, would probably have liked to be a free loving hippie. I don’t know what his opinion of the issue is now, but I think in the late 60s he had a lot of respect for the idea. Though, I’d find it a lot more funny if the main female character in Ringworld wasn’t such a ditz (very smart, but still a ditz). Granted, her being a ditz adds to the humor too. I just think the combination of the humor inherent in “free love” and that inherent in ditziness don’t work together as nicely as they do independently…but that’s a side note.

In conclusion, Ender’s Game is great, and Speaker for the Dead is really good, and helps to give the series a far more satisfying conclusion than is provided by Ender’s Game alone.

GNOME, I’m Breaking Up With You

After looking over some of the lackluster new features in GNOME 2.22, and having experimented with other versions of GNOME through Ubuntu for a couple years, I’ve finally come to a realization: I’m a KDE man. It’s hard to admit it, but the fact remains that the only Linux operating system I’ve ever been able to run exclusively for more than a few months (Mandrake 10) ran KDE.

It’s hard for me to break up with GNOME, because we’ve had a lot of good times together. It’s certainly a more user friendly desktop. It’s a really easy transition from the Windows desktop to GNOME. However, a lot of the applications that I love Linux for are KDE applications (Amarok, and K3b, for example). Yes, I know GNOME is fully capable of running KDE applications, but I feel that KDE runs them better. What’s more, KDE runs GNOME applications just as well as GNOME does, while GNOME takes forever just to get a KDE app on the screen.

Also, KDE handles online video better. I don’t know why, but I get far less frame tearing with flash video while running KDE than with GNOME. That’s a huge issue, with online video and cloud computing becoming more important as time passes.

I haven’t tried KDE 4 yet, but it’s looking very good. I’ll probably try it when a distro I like starts running it. Kubuntu didn’t exactly thrill me the last time I tried it, but I’m willing to give it another shot for KDE 4.

Kentucky Doesn’t Like Web Anonymity

Tim Couch, a representative in the Kentucky legislature, has filed a fundamentally idiotic bill:

The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.

Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.

If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.

Representative Couch says he filed the bill in hopes of cutting down on online bullying. He says that has especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district.

There are a couple issues here (apart from the whole First Amendment of the Constitution thing):

First and foremost, anonymity helps to ensure personal security. If your 9-year-old daughter is posting on a social website, do you want her real name, and home address to show up every time she posts something, for any pedophile to see?

Second, I don’t understand the regional component here. What is it about Eastern Kentucky that makes online harassment worse? Also, does this bill only try to affect websites created by people within Kentucky, does it only affect websites hosted in the state, or does it try to affect all websites accessible from any computer within that state? That’s not really fleshed out in the article, and each potentiality has its own enforcement problems. Finding out who the webmaster really is, for a start…addressing interstate regulation about web hosting…or dealing with international regulations, if we’re talking about the whole web.

I think this is just another lawmaker who doesn’t have a clue about how the internet works. There’s simply no way of enforcing this sort of thing on a state by state basis. You could certainly enforce it for every Kentucky State Government operated site, and they have every right to do so, but you don’t need laws for it, and I suspect the “online bullying” he’s talking about isn’t taking place on the state government website.

This popped up on digg recently, and in the comments, someone posted this representative’s phone number, e-mail, and home address. After a few days, I suspect this guy will have seen what it really means to have your personal contact information posted on popular websites. I’m going to assuming the Kentucky government is generally more intelligent than this guy, so this bill probably didn’t have a change of getting passed. However, after all the negative feedback I’m sure he’s received by now, I suspect he regrets submitting this bill in the first place.

Homosexuality

Recently, homosexuality as an issue has cropped up in the media that I browse through more often then it has in the past. That trend might be restricted to the media I read and watch, but I feel it’s worth addressing.

I just finished listening to the audio book of Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, and I loved it (though I’ll save my final judgment about whether it’s a good book till I listen to Speaker for the Dead, because I feel too much was left unresolved to fully judge it on its own). Imagine my surprise while listening to MacBreak Weekly, Mr. Card’s opinions of homosexuality were brought up. It really shocked me. So, I took a look at his Wikipedia entry, and followed a couple of the links provided. It made me think about how a person can feel that way, and still think of homosexuals as good people. Because it’s clear to me, that is how Mr. Card feels on the matter.

Also, Crooks and Liars recently posted a response to a youtube video about an Anti-Gay speech a member of the Oklahoma state legislature gave to her constituents (No, I don’t regularly surf Crooks and Liars; I found it on Digg). I can’t say I agree with either side’s rhetoric fully, though I do find Sally Kern’s statements notably more dangerous and/or unhealthy.

Orson Scott Card’s opposition to homosexuality seems fully based on religion. Though I won’t address his personal interpretation of the issue specifically, I will address, in general terms, religious opposition to homosexuality. There’s no argument one can make against religious opposition without attacking the religion itself. I won’t bother. I’ve got innumerable bible quotes that make a literal interpretation of scripture look certifiably sadistic and insane, and I’ve also got information about biblical translations that help debunk the bible’s assumed opposition to homosexuality in the New Testament (nothing in the Bible was written in English, so if you’ve only ever read one English translation of it, you’ve missed a hell of a lot of the nuances). The problem isn’t the Bible, though. The issue is that this is something the person believes without question. You can’t argue against religion. The individual can only ever come to his or her own conclusions, because no amount of physical or logical evidence can dissuade someone from believing something they already know can’t be proven. It’s like punching fog.

However, the logical and statistical arguments against homosexuality, like some of the ones made by Sally Kern, can be addressed.

The cultural argument—that gay culture will destroy straight culture somehow—frankly baffles me, so I won’t bother addressing it. The health argument, however, is very straight forward, and so I will use common sense: Sodomy and oral sex are no more physically dangerous when performed by homosexuals than they are when performed by heterosexuals. The gender of the people performing these acts simply doesn’t matter.

However, there is a greater potential to contract a sexually transmitted disease when engaging in sexual activity with bisexual or gay men then there is when engaging in similar activity with straight partners (these diseases are by no means restricted to homosexuals, but they do appear to spread faster among gay men). The reason for that is not because of homosexual sex. The reason is the promiscuity inherent in certain aspects of gay culture.

It logically follows that sexually transmitted diseases will spread more in cultures with more sexual activity, and that, if the sexual activity level remains constant, the rate the diseases are spread will increase exponentially, as more people within that culture contract the diseases. I think it’s pretty well known that men generally have more demanding libidos than women. In straight culture, women generally act as a moderating factor (not always, but generally). In gay culture, the female moderating factor does not exist, and men are left to decide what is appropriate amongst themselves. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as all people concerned act responsibly. The question is: Are men generally responsible creatures by nature? I submit that we are more responsible by choice, and if we’re presented with the opportunity for nooky, we’re more likely to partake, then ask if we were responsible about it after the fact.

That’s my biggest issue with sexuality in general. I don’t limit my opposition to promiscuity to homosexuals by any means. One of my best friends has heard my criticisms of open relationships so often, that it has simply become boring, and now I just cheer her on when she decides to be monogamous (Grats on moving in with the guy, btw!).

I am in favor of promoting monogamy everywhere. I’m an indiscriminant monogamy pusher, and I’m proud of it. In fact, it’s one of the biggest reasons why I support gay marriage: I think (and hope) it will promote monogamy. I also think it’s a matter of equality, and if the government insists on sticking its nose into the loving, monogamous, and domestic relationships of straight people, they should do it for gay people too. But, like I said, monogamy is my issue with this post.

I do believe that most opposition to homosexuality is based primarily on religion, and that those religious people run to the health statistics to support their point. However, I adamantly believe they are attacking the wrong issue. Homosexual sex is not a problem. Promiscuity and irresponsible sexual activity among people of all sexual orientations is the problem, and I feel that is what needs to be addressed.