[ale] Its over. Maybe

[James P. Kinney III]

On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 13:29, Jim Popovitch wrote:

> 
> THAT IS MY POINT!!!  The *implementation*, and the way the system is
> managed, is the problem, NOT the hardware.  YOU obviously haven't read
> the report.

I guess if all you want to evaluate is the hardware, sure, the Diebold
systems are just as secure and reliable as any other PC product out
there.  The *implementation*, however, is composed of both hardware and
software. It _IS_ the implementation that everyone else on this list has
been concerned about. If the software were ported to run on a a palm
pilot in the same manner is currently runs on, we would _still_ be
(nearly) up in arms about it (Jonathan "you'll pry my guns from my cold
dead fingers" not withstanding:).

I guess your earliest point of "gee the hardware works OK" got lost in
the flood of "$%(*&%^ the )(^&^$ implementation is FSCKING CRAP!

Sure, I had no obvious problem with my use of the hardware. I touched
the screen and the display indicated I had touched the screen. As far as
ANYONE, this list or most other people, can tell, what happened behind
the screen was a complete mystery. What I took away from that machine
was not something that showed my indication at all. In fact, it showed
nothing at all. It looked just as it did when I was handed it.

But, yes, the screen was pretty and had colors and changed when I
pressed it. The write in process also looked like it took the buttons I
pressed and put them on the screen nicely.

The point is, Jim, I and others here work with computer systems every
single day of the week. We all know how they can fail and a reasonable
estimate can be made of the random failure rate if the hardware is well
known (i.e. we have experience with it). Given the knowledge of systems,
hardware and software, most people on this list when the create
something on a computer that is important to them, they treat it with
special care. The save it and then re-open it to make sure it got saved
where they think they put it. They make a back-up copy in case the
original gets damaged somehow. In extreme cases where the information
must be preserved at all costs, it gets printed out on a laser printer
on acid-free archival paper and bound and placed in a humidity
controlled room.

That's how I want _my_ vote to be treated. It matters to me _THAT_MUCH_
that my vote, and yours and Aaron's and Jonathan's, and everyone else's
get treated with the utmost care, that I can't understand why anyone
with neurons above the waistline would put any trust in anything less.

Unless they want it that way for reasons that this country went to war
over in 1776.

I can live with elected officials in office that I voted for or didn't
vote for. But if that election is a sham, and those Diebold machines, or
any others, are shown to be the medium of falsehood in an election, I
want to see the machines dumped in the Boston harbor and the people who
designed and built and pushed for and authorized the purchase of and who
ran them added to a prison roster for a very long time.

Gun-toting liberals can be _MUCH_ more ferocious than many people can
imagine. :)

-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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