The biggest advantage physical voting has it is follows human-scaling laws. Which often is a problem (inefficient) but for voting this is a massive benefit for one particular reason - due to lack of automation any fraud doesn't also benefit from the same automation so has to be large scale and widely distributed for it to be impactful (the fraud has to be distributed to the humans involved). Which isn't to say that it can't happen (and does!) but requires a lot more effort and in the physical world there always a lot more fingerprints left, cameras looking, informants, etc.
This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.
With EVMs the polling officer can just deactivate the machine (which stops the counting at that moment) making booth capturing pointless.
Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths (especially if the candidate in question is bound to lose due to corruption/scandal and needs to cling onto political power to prevent himself/herself from going to prison).
> This probably only works properly in the developed countries. In developing countries like India we suffered through decades of "booth captures" [1] where armed gangs would take over a polling booth and cast votes for their political candidate at gun point. Villagers would be disallowed from casting their votes. In many instances, the polling booth itself would be set on fire, ensuring that those votes are never counted.
Yeah, but these are visible! They provide evidence that the voting was not fair.
Compare to electronic voting, where a capture might be done and no one ever finds out.
We want rigging of elections to be visible. That's the whole point.
I mean looks like booth capture can only capture a booth at most and to capture more you practically need armed rebellion. But if we automate it, then you only need to capture a location to capture all booths in the region.
> Not saying this is not possible in developed countries. It could very well happen sometime in the future where armed gangs take over polling booths…
I fully expect this happening more as the systems degrade in the west and, arguably, it already has happened several times now in many different ways, even if executed in more “sophisticated” ways that make it less apparent.
What do you call the many “color revolutions” the US and EU have now perpetrated in many different ways and places? The ”gang” was just a state level actor with immense resources and methods that exceed the local capacity to prevent them… just like a local gang using arms to take over a local polling booth.
There are declassified versions of old and obsolete CIA guides on how to conduct the precursors of such “color revolutions” through long term “capacity building” that is then activated if/when necessary. That’s the voluntarily declassified manual of the CIA; someone might suggest there are more effective instructions that are classified.
There have also been medium sophistication level events like what has happened over the last several years in Europe, where Merkel ordered an election result cancelled through technicalities because she/the literal The Party, did not like the result (I guess you can take the woman out of the dictatorship…), the EU simply used the judiciary to force a “runoff” because the election results were not to its liking, de facto canceling elections, or even all the subtle measures like visually misrepresenting election results where the bar or pie chart does not match the numerical data to suppress public mandate and perceptions about results, i.e., higher result numbers being represented by smaller bars than lower numbers.
I would argue they are all examples of the very same things you describe, the equivalent of “…gangs take over polling booths…” only it’s done through process, authority, policy, or even law and those in power tell themselves they’re doing it for “our democracy” and justified through similar dystopian, narcissistic, megalomanic, authoritarian mindsets; “I need to be in power for your own good because you don’t know any better”.
It could go both ways, either things will increasingly start degrading even more as the power slips out of the “gang’s”hands, and the system starts crumbling around them; or if “digital voting” is fully implemented there will essentially be “backdoors” to make sure the powers can “preserve our democracy” just like they need OS backdoors and media control to “protect the children”, which coincidentally seems to always coincide with them remaining in power and control and the people not even being asked about major upheavals of their society and their votes being effectively meaningless because the agenda is continuous regardless of election results.
It’s like those people who used to play slot machines at the casino, (now doing so digitally on their phones) pounding at the buttons that do absolutely nothing since the algorithm is what determines where the spin ends, not them rapidly hitting an essentially dead button just because the “clicking”, the “voting”, makes them think they have control. . . . “our democracy” where you and I are not part of that “our”.
The other advantage in physical voting is that so many people are needed to participate in the process. The probability of aligned bad actors goes down significantly when the voting process is a civic responsibility shared by volunteers who monitor each other. It's not perfect but public participation adds to the legitimacy of the process itself.
The filled out ballot is intended to be fully anonymous.
It is then slipped into a security sleeve to make it harder to read within the envelope.
The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Security is provided by the envelope which is the attestation that the citizen cast their ballot. Offhand, the county voting office is likely required to retain the ballot as part of the state/federal records. I haven't checked but that or a centralized ballot repository are the only things that make sense.
Once the ballot is removed from the envelope, it is just a sheet of paper with votes on it. There's no name, serial number, or signature on it.
Hence "stuffing" in more ballots cannot be detected.
Printing the ballots on security paper will not eliminate this risk, but it will make it much harder.
I don't know if there is an auditable "chain of custody" of ballots from mailbox to the counting center. The fraud here would be "losing" ballots that are from precincts that tilt significantly in one direction or another.
There's bigger issue than stuffing. In "rural" Hungary chain voting is customary where people are taken to the voting place by gangs and are either awarded with some money or a bag of potatoes, or threatened to be beaten if they do not comply. The first voter of the chain goes in, takes the ballot, hides it and takes it out. It is then pre-filled by the gang. The next voters take the prefilled ballot in, throw it in the box and bring a fresh clean ballot out, and so on...
In other cases, people get money/bag of potatoes for a photo of their correctly filled ballot.
That sounds good. But it doesn't account for the ballot from your mail box to the processing center. Nor does it check citizenship & residency status. Ballot harvesting is also legal and takes place in Washington state.
>The envelope is sealed and signed by the citizen.
Alas, the signature must reasonably match one on file (from somewhere ... presumably a state ID) or the ballot may be rejected. Since human signatures can vary wildly for reasons, this non-deterministic feature requires a human guess for -each- ballot. No mechanism to dispute that decision.
Mine has been disputed several times (because it changed due to name change and wasn't updated). There is a very clear mechanism to dispute that decision, and in fact that's why they ask for your phone number and/or email on the envelope--so when they want to dispute it, they have a way of contact for you to do what's necessary to make the ballot count (provisionally, only if the race is close enough for your vote to matter).
It's not fraud is difficult to do, it's difficult to do so without people noticing. The problem of r-country is not that fraud is not discovered, they problem is they are not capable to course-correct (in general, but in regards to having elections specifically)
It's also very difficult to scale. For one voting site you might need a few people to force it, plus a few more counting the votes. For thousands of sites you need many thousands of people.
Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.
> Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.
No the thing you're missing is that the ballots are always electronically counted. Sure, at the very low level they'll manually count each ballot but the sums are then provided to different people electronically who then report the combined total sum.
But also a handful of people can just remove registered voters to have the same effect.
The fraud is easy to scale though because it if you win local offices you can use that to control state offices which you can then uses to control federal offices.
They are counted by hand in Denmark. We used to post the results on physical paper at the voting site afterwards + have them published for the entire country (including a list of the votes at each voting site) in the national papers.
If the local results anywhere were different from those published in the papers, people would notice. If they were different in different papers, or in different parts of the country, people would notice.
We have, unfortunately, switched to a list on a website instead of in the papers :(
Apple buries this info but the memory bandwidth on the M series is very high. Doubly and triply so for the Pro & Max variants which are insanely high.
Not much in the PC line up comes close and certainly not at the same price point. There's some correlation here between PCs still wanting to use user-upgradable memory which can't work at the higher bandwidths vs Apple integrating it into the cpu package.
They don't bury it. It's literally on the spec page these days. And LPCAMM2 falls somewhere between the base M and Pro CPUs while still being replaceable.
The new MacBook Neo is a less than half the memory bandwidth of the base model MacBook Air.
The Guardian article linked has chosen to omit material facts regarding Karen... This is par for the course when it comes to Guardian reporting and doubly so for immigration related articles. The Guardian only prints hit pieces nowadays that reinforce their group-think propaganda.
>What the media won’t tell you: this woman was BANNED from our country for 10 years for violating terms of her visa.
Here are the facts:
Karen Newton has violated the laws of our nation, and overstayed her visa waiver admission for almost FOUR years after visiting her spouse. Her husband, William Newton ALSO broke the law for nearly 20 years by overstaying an H-1B visa.
The Biden Administration granted her a tourist visa, and she traveled to the U.S. under this visa and was let into our nation.
When she and her husband attempted to cross the Canadian border, they did not have proper paperwork for their vehicle and were denied entry into Canada. During her inspection re-entering the U.S., she was unable to provide clear details about her situation, including her husband’s legal status.
Given her history of overstays, her husband’s unlawful presence, and the vehicle documentation issues, officers determined scrutiny and detention were warranted under the law and she was detained.
The sad thing is that you believe what DHS has to say about absolutely anything, especially after Alex Pretti has proven them in death to be complete liars.
Yes, because a DHS statement, published on Twitter of all places, isn't going to be propaganda. I can't think of any instances of them blatantly lying even against their own video evidence in, like, at least a week. /s
When a publication only publishes the "oppresseds" point of view without ever publishing the other view then it is by definition propaganda. The Guardian has been incredibly consistent in this over years now.
Generally large companies will have an existing vendor that they use to dispose their IT equipment through. They will shred parts like storage devices and anything that can reasonably be resold will be sold through various auction houses.
Sticks of ram will certainly be resold, custom aws motherboards - not so much.
I have seen custom (unpublished) intel cpu parts on ebay before which are almost certainly aws's custom ones.
Almost nothing will get used by consumers - enterprise server gear is designed for heat/air speed/noise/energy cost requirements which are incompatible with consumer requirements. It's recycled only in the sense that a smaller business might be interested in it because at the end of its economic life its now cheap to buy (but not cheap to run).
I broadly agree with you in regards to server-class equipment as a whole.
Simply put, your average gamer isn’t going to snag a 16-unit rackmount blade server to game with. Not only is it supidly inappropriate for home use, but it is also wildly out-of-spec with what gaming requires.
However, normal rackmount servers - especially 3U+ units that have a decent number of PCIe slots - can be extracted from rackmount cases and put into eATX cases that can better serve them on a desktop. It’s what I have done before, to great effect. With the right heatsinks and case fans, it can end up being a moderately quiet system. Loud for a consumer system, sure, but nothing like the “Boeing Dreamliner at full takeoff power” that an actual server setup would generate for sound.
I’m Elvin from the RustFS team in the U.S. Thanks for pointing out the issues with our initial CLA. We realized the original wording was overreaching and created a lot of distrust about the project's future.
We’ve officially updated the CLA to a standard License Grant model. Under these new terms, you retain full ownership of your contributions, and only grant us a non-exclusive license to use them. You can check the updated CLA here: https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs/blob/main/CLA.md.
More importantly, the RustFS team is officially pledging to keep our core repository permanently open-source. We are committed to an open-core engine for the long term, not a "bait and switch."
Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to RustFS and to recipients of software distributed by RustFS a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works under any license, including proprietary or commercial licenses and open-source licenses, at RustFS's sole discretion.
Lol, maybe you should fund the RustFS team yourself or sponsor a top-tier legal team for them. If you can help them rewrite their CLAs and guarantee they'll never face any IP risks down the road, then sure, you're 100% right.
Fair point on the frequency of my comments, but there’s a nuance to the CLA discussion. Even with Apache 2.0, many major projects (like those under the CNCF or Apache Foundation) require a CLA to ensure the project has the legal right to distribute the code indefinitely.
My focus on the CLA is about building a solid foundation for RustFS so it doesn't face the licensing "re-branding" drama we've seen with other storage projects recently. It’s about long-term stability for the community, not just a marketing ploy.
And again - what IP risk does a CLA solve, that a DCO wouldn't? Like, IANAL so I certainly could be missing something, but I'd like to hear what it might be.
I’m also maintaining an open-source project and have spent significant time drafting our CLA, so I completely understand the concerns surrounding them.
While DCO is excellent for tracking provenance, we opted for a CLA primarily to address explicit patent grants and sublicensing rights—areas where a standard DCO often lacks the comprehensive legal coverage that a formal agreement provides.
It’s a common and sustainable practice in the industry to keep the core code open-source while developing enterprise features. Without a solid CLA in place, a project faces massive legal hurdles later on—whether that’s for future commercialization or even the eventual donation of the project to an open-source foundation like the CNCF or Apache Foundation. We're just trying to ensure long-term legal clarity for everyone involved.
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