Posts by SteveH
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to chris,
anonymity – no one here seems too concerned.
I don’t think that is generally true, at least among those who have thought about it. In the US, companies have already suggested how to vote, there no reason for next step to not be verifying how employees voted. It would be tragically naive to think that there wouldn’t be repercussions for not voting the way you were told to.
As for the rest of your objection, you seem to have missed the point (or perhaps you didn’t watch the whole thing?). Voting is not banking or applying for a sensitive document (and note that people get scammed while doing online banking all the time). Those things require secrecy and verification of identity; voting requires transparency and anonymity, literally opposite requirements. What guarantee of fair and non-corrupt elections do we have when the software is unverifiable, the transmission of data is insecure, and the counting is done by a single party in secret?
Since that video didn’t convince you, try some papers on the subject:
"… we cannot provide satisfactory security for online voting even though we can for online commerce", "… the extraordinary security problems of such a remote Internet voting system present an extraordinary, unacceptable risk to election integrity", or do a simple Google search. When IT security experts tell us the risks are too great, we would be wise to listen. -
Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to chris,
$26 million was ample to create an online voting platform that could have saved our country billions of dollars in the long run
Fuck no! Online voting sounds like a good idea but in reality it’s a complete disaster. If we go with that we might as well just give up on democracy altogether. Start here for some reasons why:
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Polity: So who exactly placed conditions…, in reply to chris,
I don’t see anyone proposing we also include the cost of building a time machine.
It's an illustration of what sort of debacle asking "would you like to change?" first could result in. I didn't think the point was that hard to understand.
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Polity: So who exactly placed conditions…, in reply to Alex Coleman,
If the first debate was ‘should we change the flag’, instead of ‘what should we maybe change it too?’, we would be debating whether or not the current flag works, and what flags ought to do, does our flag do it, and what sort of flag would do it better.
What if we'd had the "do you want to change?" referendum already and decided on change, and then the panel had presented these same four alternatives to choose from? There might have been rioting in the streets. At the very least there would be a lot of people saying "I wanted to change, but not to one of these disasters." The process has to be to choose the alternative first, then vote on whether to change to it. Because the vast majority of people will only want to change if the alternative is acceptable.
STV is a better choice because it means you still get a say if your preferred design is not first choice winner. If it was FTP and you didn't want a fern so you voted for the spiral and that lost, then your vote is gone. You might really hate the black and white fern and end up stuck with it because you didn't get to express that opinion. STV ensures that people's opinions about all the options are captured, and if people are not happy with the resulting choice then they still get the option to say no.
Labour's proposal essentially amounts to a "I don't want any of these alternatives" option. It doesn't really change anything in the process as everyone would still get to express that opinion in the second referendum. It just means we could save the cost of a second referendum if the result was going to be obvious (and since flags can grow on people over time I'd hope that second referendum would proceed unless the negative result for that question in the first referendum was overwhelming, not just a simple majority).
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Polity: So who exactly placed conditions…, in reply to simon g,
The media words today have been "stoush", "squabble", "stand-off" ... which serves Key's (revised) purpose. That's what most voters will see and hear.
Perhaps. But if you take his claim at face value then it sounds like weakness to me, and I'm sure to a lot of others. He's saying he can't govern without Labour's help. At best a few gullible red peak supporters might blame Labour for cleaning up the panel's mess, but I doubt it'll have any significant impact on the polls. And the fact remains that Labour tabled a bill and National rejected it; people will see that at least Labour made a concrete effort.
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I thought Key wanted a flag change? This sort of bullshit will just turn more people off the process.
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I really don't understand the "safety" justification for making law change retrospective. How exactly does invalidating old tickets make the anything less safe? To whatever degree speeding is dangerous, it's dangerous whether or not the speeder is caught and fined, surely?
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Hard News: Anzac Day II, in reply to simon g,
McIntyre's comments were insensitive and fail the basic interweb anger test (i.e. "do you really need to send now, or would you rather take five first?"). But the reaction to them is far more disturbing.
Unfortunately a big chunk of the population only thinks about this stuff on one day of the year, if that. McIntyre's comments were inflammatory and he should have been more tactful, but they did spark some reasonable discussion. If he had said the same at another time it's quite likely he would have been ignored.
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Meanwhile elsewhere in the world, companies are actually going after the right targets:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/67845577/sony-lobbied-netflix-to-stop-aussie-vpn-users-leak-shows -
Speaker: We don’t make the rules, we're…, in reply to Sacha,
they figure it’s cheaper to pressure the local ISPs than take on the might of Hollywood.
I think that's it. And taking on Hollywood might not work out even if they win - they could lose access to the content. A win against the ISPs would be pretty ineffectual as anyone can learn to set things up to get the same effect as Global Mode if they spend 5 minutes with Google. But it could erode the ISPs' standing in terms of not being responsible for their user's behaviour. So action against the ISPs is probably seen as the better gamble to spend money on.