The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Jon Meltzer:

Show all comments by Jon Meltzer.

Posted on entry And looking very relaxed... ::: November 21, 2003, 11:47 AM:
Was George W. Bush playing vibes?
Posted on entry Keep them down. ::: October 27, 2003, 05:54 PM:
To be honest: would these people show any qualms about beating up little old ladies?
Posted on entry Happy happy joy joy. ::: October 26, 2003, 05:16 PM:
So, has the do-not-call list left the country yet?
Posted on entry Out of all them bright texts. ::: October 25, 2003, 12:22 PM:
It's a dumb, brute force string search. The only help it will give is if you want to look up, using exact spelling, a relatively uncommon phrase; and if said phrase is uncommon enough to give you a small enough result set to be comprehensible on a 10-item per page screen display downloaded over a phone line connection. For example, looking up "Nielsen Hayden" gives 100 entries and I don't think even Patrick and Teresa's mothers would have enough patience to scroll through the entire list.

Amazon has a lot of work to do, requiring professional librarians and information retrieval CS specialists, before this search can produce anything close to meaningful. Jeff Bezos was a CS major at Princeton and he has to know this. But I guess they had to get something up now for the publicity value, or stock price, or something.
Posted on entry General protection fault. ::: October 23, 2003, 04:56 PM:
It's those troops. We don't support them.
Posted on entry General protection fault. ::: October 23, 2003, 04:01 PM:
Polling predicted a clear Gore victory. Must have been an error.

Posted on entry Keen are the eyes of the Elves. ::: October 23, 2003, 03:08 PM:
If Internet Seer can do this, so can any other spammer.

Be very afraid.
Posted on entry General protection fault. ::: October 23, 2003, 03:06 PM:
No longer true, at least on the national level. Google on "exit polling" "Voter News Service".
Posted on entry Revelations. ::: October 23, 2003, 12:01 PM:
I've heard that other publishers are working on their own Left Behind clones, to try and get some of that big apocalyptic lit market.
Posted on entry Hold it right there. ::: October 23, 2003, 11:58 AM:
Those that think Diebold could fix this by using better tools or design need to think about this:

No programmers at that company will question any management decisions about design, security, or anything else, because they will be fired; and, in this economy, that means they are out of IT altogether. In fact, the people that worked on the original implementation are likely long gone and their jobs outsourced to India.
Posted on entry Hold it right there. ::: October 22, 2003, 07:29 PM:
Well, I hope that the Arkansas voting officials don't record the names along with the IDs.

Posted on entry Hold it right there. ::: October 22, 2003, 06:59 PM:
Uh, excuse me? For what possible reason would one want to record a "voter ID" ??
Posted on entry Hold it right there. ::: October 22, 2003, 06:37 PM:
Erik seems to be describing (sans fancy video UI and electronics) the old New York State voting machines I and my parents and grandparents used all our lives.

Posted on entry Hold it right there. ::: October 22, 2003, 03:25 PM:
Slashdot has been all over this story.

Latest (Tuesday 10/21): a group of Swarthmore students are defying a court order by posting Diebold confidential memos online.
Posted on entry General protection fault. ::: October 22, 2003, 11:51 AM:
Adding verification (printing or otherwise) to an electronic voting system will only increase costs and reduce potential profit. And, of course, if the customer has no reason to care about verification, why do it?
Posted on entry General protection fault. ::: October 22, 2003, 09:54 AM:
The real issue isn't Diebold trying to maximize its profit by using cheap labor and software tools; it's the very concept of an unauditable voting system. The problem would be no less severe if they were using a secure, unhackable implementation.

Posted on entry All that way for this. ::: October 22, 2003, 07:29 AM:
And some people still naively believe that there will be free elections in the United States next year.
Posted on entry Collateral damage. ::: October 17, 2003, 10:33 AM:
>Who were they trying to silence

So, were any right-leaning blogs affected?

Anyone?
Posted on entry No, it's not just you. ::: October 09, 2003, 11:29 PM:
He's back now.
Posted on entry Someone's awake. ::: July 04, 2003, 08:20 AM:
Sorry; the New York Times says there was at least one dead.

But these things don't count unless they are combat deaths, of course.

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