How to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.

Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters.  Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:

  • The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
  • Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
  • It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
  • The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
  • Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
  • The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
  • Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.

If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here.  Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed.  You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.

Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …

Continue ReadingHow to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.

Sen. George Allen and the “M” word

"Macaca," that is.  Salon.com is reporting that Sen. George Allen is denying the claims in a separate Salon article by three of Allen’s former football teammates that Allen used a racial epithet and demonstrated racist behavior during college. Within hours of Allen's denial, though, two additional acquaintances of Allen's had…

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Video Interview of Richard Dawkins discussing his new book: The God Delusion

In this lively 9-minute interview, Dawkins discusses his new book, The God Delusion. The interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, asked Dawkins what he intended to accomplish with his book.  Here’s Dawkins’ answer: I hope to persuade . . . a substantial number of middle of the road people that there’s nothing wrong…

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How I almost ate a worm.

Worms are fascinating critters.  There’s no getting around it.  Or maybe they’ve just seemed fascinating, ever since I first read Gary Larson’s hilarious 1999 book, There’s a hair in my dirt!  A Worm’s Story. 

Now, though, worms have made it to the big screen.  Last week I took my two young children to a movie called “How to Eat Fried Worms.”  We all enjoyed the movie, which provided some lessons on eating earthworms, as well as a lesson or two on getting along.  Click here for more information on the movie, which features a large cast of youngsters, along with Tom Cavanagh and Kimberly Williams.

There’s an interesting side story here. I was surprised that the book on which the movie is based has been the target of censors: 

Because of the novel’s content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some, it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six.

Amazing, eh?  But back to the main topic of my post. I’d like to tell you the story about how I ate worms . . . but I can’t.  I didn’t even come close. 

Watching “How to Eat Fried Worms” reminded me of the time I was visiting Guangzhou, China in 2001 with my wife and our newly adopted daughter.  We were traveling with a large group …

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My limited vision.

A Young Earth Creationist with whom I often discourse pities me my small view of the universe. You see, I apparently cannot see the vast immensity and perfection of a 7,000 year old universe created and micromanaged by a spoiled-child-like deity. He is sure that I cannot conceive of how time might mean different things to God than to man. Or how mutually exclusive states of being (God and Man) might have existed simultaneously and yet separately in a single organism here on Earth about 2,000 years ago, and never anywhere else.

My tiny universe is about 15,000,000,000 years old, and I watch it unfurl from a curdled cloud of mesons and quarks to chill and congeal into lumpy proton soup in a quark broth. As it cools it further clumps into first generation stars that are huge, bright, and short-lived: On the order of 10 million years from ignition (when fusion begins) until explosion (when the Hydrogen-Helium cycle breaks down, and gravity collapses it into a mild nova that creates more Helium, and a few of the other light elements. Much of the residue clouds of these stars collect into clusters of smaller stars , galaxies. When they burn out and die, they form and expel the whole periodic table in the hotter, tighter crucibles of their bright supernovae. Then these clouds condense and we get third generation stars, like our sun. The remnants around it also cluster into smaller chunks that are not heavy enough to sustain fusion, …

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