Self-Titled

The problems with electronic voting machines are threefold:

• Your votes can be changed and there’s no record if they’re changed.
  • Pen is permanent and cannot be hidden.
• Your votes cannot be authenticated.
  • It’s difficult to forge a signature and impossible to do on a large scale.
• The process by which votes are tabulated is not transparent.
  • Counting by hand is understandable and easily verifiable.

We should use paper ballots with ink circles to indicate our votes and ink signatures to authenticate them. Votes should be counted twice by hand by two different people at two different times.

I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary to count our votes quickly. Why do we need to find out the winner the same day or even the same week? The new president isn’t inaugurated for more than a month after election day. The country didn’t grind to a halt a hundred years ago when the only way was to take a couple days to count votes by hand. I say we put priority on electing the correct candidates and not on convenience.

Most computer users probably assume that their computers are secure. They don’t see the complexity and brittleness of the hardware, the operating system, the network, and the applications because it’s hidden under a pretty user interface with abstracted toy operations. They never considered evaluating security when purchasing software; they assumed it would just work. It’s understandable if they get upset when something goes wrong.

It annoys me, however, when lawmakers see this and decide to fix the problem from their end. They make laws outlawing things like exploiting security vulnerabilities so they can have something to show their constituents. Don’t get me wrong, I think exploiting security vulnerabilities is unethical, but making these laws takes away the motivation for software vendors to improve their products that the market would normally give them. They can use the law as a crutch to support their faulty products instead of innovating better ones. Rather than preventing consumers from being victimized, laws patch up the damage after the fact. What’s sad is that most people think this is acceptable. This is why denial-of-service vulnerabilities won’t be fixed for a long time, if ever.

Yet these kinds of laws have been made before, are made now, and will be made in the future. But I think that as the layperson gains more understanding of what software is and how it’s made, we’ll get back some of that market pressure to innovate.

Is my identity constant or variable? On the one hand, my identity could be some thing or things about me that always have and always will be unique. On the other hand, my identity could be the variable but unique combination of my characteristics at any given moment, like my location, appearance, personality, relationships, and memory. I think it is a mix of the two. I think my choices identify who I am. My choices are set in stone; I leave them behind me in time and they mark the paths I have walked. My journey is unique to me; no one ever has, nor ever will, tread the same path. Yet my choices are driven by my current characteristics, which are not always a product of my choices. While my identity is bound to an ever-lengthening sequence of choices, that identity is also constantly evolving as I make new choices, which in turn are influenced by characteristics inside and outside my control.

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Babylon 5:

What a sad thing you are! Unable to answer even such a simple question without falling back on references, and genealogies, and what other people call you! Have you nothing of your own? Nothing to stand on that is not provided, defined, delineated, stamped, sanctioned, numbered and approved by others? How can you be expected to fight for someone else when you haven’t the fairest idea who you are?

It strikes me as ironic that some have argued that the growing prevalence of Spanish in America, or at least the west and southern states, threaten American culture while there is little effort to teach immigrants English. NPR was reporting a little while ago that in New York City, it’s almost impossible to enroll in an English class because they’re so impacted. I believe they said conditions were similar in many other places.

I suspect most immigrants desire to acclimate to American culture, including learning the common language, to make a life here and broaden their prospects. It’s what I would do. Yet most immigrants work a lot, which causes conflicts with English class schedules, and those classes are heavily impacted. The incentive to learn English is there, but the opportunities aren’t. So they continue to speak their native languages.

Lots of foreigners learn English to take part in American culture and business. English is the unofficial language of international business and much of politics. We shouldn’t be worrying about the prevalence of English in America because it sells itself. The lower we set the threshold to integrating into American society, like offering more English classes, the faster it’ll happen.

If invalid, informal, and injustice are the opposites of valid, formal, and justice, then why does inflammable mean the same as flammable? Since English is my first language, I obviously prefer it to any other language, but damn, English sucks. One thing I’ve always appreciated about Spanish is that you can look at any word and know immediately how to pronounce it correctly.

If you haven’t done so already, check out Street View on Google Maps. Google rocks!