Four-term US Senator for California Barbara Boxer is not running for re-election. There are 34 candidates who want the job. In the Secretary of State's pre-election mailer, candidates can try once more to get voters to like them--for $25/word. Among them is engineer[1] Jason Hanania.
El Reg reports
...whose entire [message] comprises: 01100101.
Why? Because, as Hanania explains on his own website, "01100101" is binary for decimal 101, which is the ASCII code for the letter "e", which is short for "e-voting candidate", which is how he describes himself.
What's an e-voting candidate? Well, according to Hanania's vision, it is one that directly follows the wishes of his or her constituents through online votes, regardless of his or her personal views.
His system, which he outlines in a 33-minute video, will allow decisions in the United States to move "from the 1 per cent to the 100 per cent" by giving everyone a direct vote on matters in front of the US Senate.
He's wrong, of course. The system would fall apart within minutes, but he seems genuinely persuaded in the way that only a patent engineer could imagine a theoretical solution would work in the messy world of real people.
TFA goes into some detail on how California state election rules and the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) pull in opposing directions, as do a wish to balance a democratic right to run for office while avoiding cheap corporate advertising.
[1] He is clearly an engineer who doesn't check his work.
Orange County political forum Orange Juice Blog notes that the statements of candidates reveal points about them such as that some don't know where to get help with things e.g. verifying that their English-language statements don't read like gibberish.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:09PM
NERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRD
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:15PM
Accompanied with the metal image I always get whenever I try to picture what Europeans must picture us as:
A grotesquely overweight middle aged man, holding a cheap beer in one hand and a hamburger in the other, while simultaneously shooting bottle rockets out of his asshole.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:17PM
To be fair, he probably also has the hamburger kebabed by a miniature American flag.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:24PM
Beer in one hand, murican flag wrapped around assault rifle in other hand, hamburger between his teeth, bottle rocket firing out of asscrack.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:22PM
Wrong: The beer is flying in the air, and the second hand holds a gun. Bullets miss the bottle. A lawyers watches closely.
The torn t-shirt covered in grease and ketchup stains has the US flag on it. The whole scene is in the bed of a pickup truck, with the A/C on.
When did hillbillies hijack the US image?
(Score: 5, Informative) by DECbot on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:29PM
This is fairly close to the image I have of 'Mericans [imgur.com].
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:32PM
Yeah, that pretty much sums up my neighbours.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @06:36PM
This is fairly close to the image I have of 'Mericans [imgur.com].
Hey - I'm suing you for doing publicity of me without my permission!
(Score: 3, Funny) by ilPapa on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:04AM
That's easy:
https://chrishernandezauthor.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/449x497xscreen-shot-2014-05-20-at-8-33-33-am-png-pagespeed-ic-ptz7eyu-yt.jpg [wordpress.com]
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/002/046/best_guy_ever.jpg [kym-cdn.com]
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by devlux on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:16PM
El Reg is being a bit biased. This is a great segue into a direct democratic platform.
I have worked on secure electronic and verifiable voting for some time now.
www.democracycounts.org
https://nxtforum.org/democracy-counts!/whitepaper-11229/ [nxtforum.org]
it could easily be adapted to his particular use case. In fact I think I'm going to ask the others to reach out to him, pretty sure have some members in Orange County.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by edIII on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:58PM
I personally don't give a shit about their opinions. What I know right now is that democracy is broken, the richest elites own the process, and there is zero representation for the rights and needs of the working class. We're just cattle to them.
I'm perfectly willing to engage in what may turn out to be a flawed process simply because it would be progress towards something resembling representation. As it stands, their complaints are akin to a person complaining about possibly dying while on fire even though their neck deep in rising waters already.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @10:38PM
I personally don't give a shit about their opinions. What I know right now is that democracy is broken, the richest elites own the process, and there is zero representation for the rights and needs of the working class. We're just cattle to them.
And when, precisely, was it any different? I'd bet your rose colored glasses were just working a bit better back when....
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:58PM
No, I'm pretty sure the Reg has it exactly right.
Such a system would be hacked in about 13 minutes flat, and the hacking would be repeated on a weekly basis for years on end. Access to electronics is uneven, and people couldn't be dragged kicking and screaming to express as much as a binary opinion on most issues, so it would come down to whoever has the most time and money to spend hacking the system. I think this was tried by some state representative in New Hampshire or Vermont and he finally quit doing it in disgust.
Besides, we live in a Republic, not a Democracy. Some might call it a representative democracy. We elect people to specialize in doing the business of government, and charge them with taking care of all their constituent's interests to the extent that is possible. To be a filter for nut cases and unconstitutional ideas. To protect the vulnerable. The system has warts and imperfections.
This guy is shirking his responsibility in a fundamental and more serious way than the fat cats that currently hold office today. At least they "pretend" to look out for little guys.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Cornwallis on Thursday May 05 2016, @12:55AM
Yep. Internet voting is a solution to a problem that isn't
http://boingboing.net/2016/04/21/why-internet-voting-is-a-terri.html [boingboing.net]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by devlux on Thursday May 05 2016, @01:23AM
I respect your opinion but also strongly disagree.
You start with a basic premise that the system could easily be hacked.
While I posit that hacking things is the norm, it doesn't have to be. As long as best practices are followed then the system can be made secure against even the resources of a determined nation state.
Cryptographic proof of right to vote could be provided cheaply and easily.
Using ECDSA or GPG style signatures to prove identity, would be enough to prove 1 voter, 1 vote and would be hard as hell to fake.
It gets even harder to fake if these keys were in a timestamped and widely distributed ledger. A blockchain or something similar.
The Russian central bank is experimenting with using the NXT blockchain for shareholder voting and the results have been a success.
https://www.nsd.ru/en/press/ndcnews/index.php?id36=628973 [www.nsd.ru]
This would not be any different and could be locked down even tighter since the right to vote can easily be determined through existing voter registration schemes. To be clear I'm only advocating replacement of existing voter registration numbers with a cryptographically secure public key. If you read my white paper I have outlined a method of doing this that still preserves strong anonymity but I'm not sure that would be needed or even good under what this fella is proposing.
You support a republic system, and I say that those are naive and easily corrupted by money and influence peddling. You call these warts, but to my mind they are fatal flaws that disconnect those who make the law from those who must bear it's consequences.
I support a hybrid of republic and direct democracy wherein legislators propose laws that make it onto the ballot and citizens decide what will and will not become law, along with strict term limits of a single term of 5 years. Politics should never be a career and it doesn't have to be.
You also mention that this is an abdication of duty, but the reality is that the opposite is true.
What this man is doing is for more in line with the founding fathers vision of a representative republic than anything I've proposed or anything we currently have. He is directly posing the questions to his constituents, ceding his own will to that of the people whom he claims to represent. This is awe inspiring to me. But in the end it's little different than inviting his constituents to write him in regards to issues and promising to follow the will of the majority. Honestly I fail to see a problem with that at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @01:48AM
> As long as best practices are followed then the system can be made secure against even the resources of a determined nation state.
I think "best practices" is a really big hand-waving away of where the difficulty lies. The major cost won't be in the design, it will be in the administration to keep up with the arms race of 'zero-day' exploits.
If you are willing to sacrifice the anonymity of the ballot and you are able to force voters to verify that their vote was tabulated as cast then maybe it becomes feasible. Although you are still vulnerable to MITM attacks on the process, and I don't mean cryptographic MITM, I mean something like mass hacks of smartphones to silently vote in opposition to the user's intent and then spoof any verification results. You don't have to hack every vote, only enough to move the needle from one side to the other.
And that completely ignores the problems associated with public voting records. It is bad enough our current 'secret' ballots can be usually be reverse engineered with Big Data techniques of cross-referencing with other public-ish records like party registration, income, residence, age, sex, marital status, offspring, spending patterns, religious affiliation, etc.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:35AM
I think "best practices" is a really big hand-waving away of where the difficulty lies. The major cost won't be in the design, it will be in the administration to keep up with the arms race of 'zero-day' exploits.
This does not have to be as much as a problem as it appears to be. I'll run with some of the other assumptions you pointed out that must be satisfied such as sacrificing the anonymous ballot and focus only on the crypto aspect here.
Although you are still vulnerable to MITM attacks on the process, and I don't mean cryptographic MITM, I mean something like mass hacks of smartphones to silently vote in opposition to the user's intent and then spoof any verification results.
You are extremely correct here however it is more complicated than that. This particular failure mode involves the cryptographic key being improperly secured and would be considered operational failure leading to a compromise of the key. It is simply a bad idea to keep a key in readable form on any general purpose computing device. Its not even a good idea if they are encrypted; it is something that is at times necessary but it is not strictly required that the cryptographic key be available in a form where accessing the binary data that makes up the key is easy. Well by easy I mean subverting it is an extremely expensive and time consuming process involving melting/shaving layers of silicon off the chip that holds the key then performing extensive analysis which is possible only if it was not accidently destroyed during the disassembly process or the chip did not destroy itself through a tamper detection system.
There are plenty of smart cards that implement exactly these features. They are hardware devices with RNG (often times very good ones using hardware entropy gathering) and PROM and can typically be used two ways: an existing PKI key pair is loaded into the device and from then on can not be extracted or the device generates a key internally and never exposes the raw contents. When cryptographic operations need to be performed that require the key the operation is handed off to the cryptocard which is typically inserted into a USB reader device that has a PIN pad on it. Depending on the cryptographic operation being done there will be PIN requirements to unlock the card and these can be per individual operation such as a signing operation. This is an extremely secure mechanism for handling PKI.
The problem you describe is only in the fact that the key is readable on a general purpose device that is globally connected. If data can be read it can be stolen. The solution is to make the data unstealable and to ensure that physical presence is required when cryptographic operations are required so the card can't be used in an unauthorized way remotely even if the end user does something like leave it attached to their device when they don't need it.
This works already and an extremely good use case is holding SSH keys for access to servers. It is actually even quite simple to setup and Debian Jessie even supports it given the right packages in the standard package repository. Another damn good example is holding your PGP keys. The hardware tokens can be had for down to $50 though you lose out on things like the PIN pad which compromises the security in my opinion. Here's some links, I hope you find it useful, this stuff has been working great for me:
I don't work for Yubico but I do use them as standard PIV smart cards and as GPG hardware tokens. They don't have a PIN pad which I don't care for but the price is good. They also don't seem to take security seriously so I don't use them in a serious capacity either. Mostly at this point I'm gaining operational discipline while using them and I expect to soon invest in a standard setup involving dedicated card readers and standard cards. Though the Yubikey is also a neat hack and lets you violate standards so it can pull off tricks that can't be done with a normal smart card such as gluing openssl to it so a webserver does not have access to the private key for the SSL cert. Though this can also be achieved with a TPM which exposes the standard PKCS API and can be a drop in replacement for the Yubikey or other cards; don't expect it to be fast though and this isn't something that would work in production in that exact configuration at any sort of scale.
Cryptography is awesome and can actually solve this though it solves real world operational immediate problems too. There's plenty of other problems that e-voting may or may not have solutions for but cryptographic hardware dongles solve this one. The costs of the dongle is something I'm not going to address either. Other people can argue about how to achieve distribution of something like that fairly. Technology only argument here.
Cheers
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:22AM
I think you have missed my point. I posited that the crypto actually worked. The problem is with the user interface. You select candidate A on your phone's touchscreen but the app secretly switches it to candidate B before handing it off to the crypto. Similarly when you go to verify your vote, the crypto returns candidate B but the app displays candidate A to you.
Now maybe you use different devices to vote and to verify your vote. So both devices have to be compromised. But since the attacker only needs to tamper with the votes on the margins, he can figure out what devices are associated with you (i.e. your phone, your PC, your husband's phone, etc) and will only tamper with the votes of people who have had all of their devices compromised.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:31AM
I think you have missed my point.
I think you are right thanks for restating the problem. This is an interesting operational consideration. There are a number of thoughts that come to mind though this is going to start sacrificing convenience which perhaps ruins the entire point. Though personally I don't mind if voting takes effort and I like going to the polling places I can run with a concept such as microvoting as a mental exercise. Lets explore the use case in depth though because I think that sets some of the requirements. First if the expectation is that senator so and so will fire off an email to constituents@mydistrict.net and everyone gets texted "should the committee entertain blah blah blah" (actually I know little about these procedures in congress) and the public is supposed to immediately go "oooh hell no" and palm mash their vote into their smart phone this is going to be worse than what goes on now. It does not seem like a realistic use case because voting involves thinking. Or it should. So instead of crafting a workflow intended for a voting population with the attention span of a fruit fly and that wont even bother to push pause on the jersey shores playing when the text comes I'm going to move the problem domain to one that makes some level of sense to me so I can make some compromises in the system.
First a vote gets a 1 week turn around. There's many reasons it would take at least a minimum time period for this to be anywhere near remotely fair otherwise the decisions will be highly biased towards those who have spare time during hours the Congress is operating or people who are voting with out being able to pay adequate attention. Fair representation would involve enough time for most people to get a shot at researching the problem and forming a decision. I'm pulling 1 week out of my ass.
Second the voter has to be willing to expend effort. Cellphones and computers should not be considered trusted devices. In fact being lied to by the equipment is a big enough deal that there is probably a very real requirement that the system must be able to operate in a verifiable way even when compromised. Someone else can try to argue how it can be done with out that constraint but I don't see another way it can be done right. This may be fatal to the concept too.
What ever solution is generated, if one ever is, needs to exist in a way that it can be analyzed and proven correct but the process has to be easy enough it resembles the standard voting process. I propose then that despite the fact that high technology is getting involved that votes are submitted in the old fashioned way: chunks of paper with the voting information present on it. I'm fairly sure a QR code can hold enough bytes that there would be plenty to spare but it can also just function as a stand in for some other optical data storage technique. Though what ever the format it is it would need to be well standardized and with requirements like reading it does not require a specialized sensor and decoding it does not require specialized software or is wrapped up in garbage like algorithms with patents, and interpreting the data is straight forward and well defined. The barrier to validation needs to be extremely low - low enough that a nerd should be able to write a validation system in a few days of work and the vote data can come from any optical source such as a camera or computer scanner. I don't think this is impossible requirement for a single person if existing open source software is used and it is a very solvable engineering problem to construct a complete solution from scratch.
Now we can generate voting data on a non-trusted device, move the voting data between devices as necessary, have a permanent physical copy of the vote information and it can be duplicated if desired, and data formats that guarantee verifiability. This is getting close to becoming a workable solution to the problem of becoming a victim of fraud through focused attacks on devices that are conveniently close to you. Or as you put it your phone has been hacked and also your girl friends and some of your friends. Lets spread verification around so far it becomes a significant burden to anyone attempting to MITM enough things to maintain the lie that exists in the voting record. Verify at the library, maybe the high school students also built a verification machine as a project, build your own, use one at a polling place. I'm not sure this exact issue can be solved in another way.
There is the problem that we have decided to get rid of anonymous voting so the voter can always be tracked by their public key and it provides essentially a dead simple targeting mechanism for this attack. Adopting defense in depth practices is wise here and this risk can be mitigated through operational process that resembles how voting by mail works for me. The verification machines do not actually need to communicate in any way aside from reading the encoded vote information and displaying the recorded results to the end user. There is zero actual requirement for real time communication to any other device aside from the photons coming off the piece of paper and photons headed to the users eyeballs. The target information would have to exist in the device and the last opportunity to do so in an obvious way would be when it was constructed, had the firmware updated, etc etc etc. Though this thing should be so simple firmware updates shouldn't be necessary often unless the software is incredibly shoddy. It would also be conceivable to slip in hidden commands to an evil verification device in order to load it up with target public key fingerprints but at least the resources to pull this off have been drastically increased over sitting in a chair and eating Cheetos, you've got to be at the machines doing this to them slowly in person and handling each machine individually. Damn serious headache here.
If we get these machines isolated so the target information has to be loaded in advance we can solve this fairly easily with temporary keys and an envelope. The voter has their personal key pair that forms their identity. Specifically this authenticates the user as a registered voter and acts as the voter id so when they vote the voter can be confirmed to still be able to vote. This gives the voting authorities the auditability they require but this key does not have to be used for proving validity of the vote. The voters key can be used to prove that another signed piece of information is from them. This other signed information would be the vote specific data, signature, and public key. The voter creates the vote specific key after the vote verification machines have been checkpointed and the voter key is left off. Now there isn't any information present that existed prior to when the targeting data had to be loaded into the devices that need to be MITM so in theory there can't be targeting information for the voting data.
That's two pretty powerful ways to severely increase the resources it takes to maintain the lie to the voter. Its not impossible but this is no longer in the realm of something a 14 year old can do and hacking people's cell phones certainly is.
The final thing to tidy up is linking the vote data back to the registered voter. In this case the voter key is used to sign the votes public key (or maybe just the vote data itself) to authenticate the vote to themselves. The vote is submitted to a polling place as both the independent signed vote data which includes built in integrity validation and the proof that the vote is from the voter. Votes can be correlated back to the voter but we already gave up on stopping that behavior.
Whew that was a fun mental journey. Would anyone do this? I've got no idea. Is this good or at least less bad than the vote tabulation machines we use now? I've got no idea. Is it even actually correct? I've got no idea.
Anyone else want to give it a shot please do so. Reducing the complexity would be nice.
Note this was a purely academic exercise to explore the logic behind the process. Practical application of the technology is a different argument.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday May 06 2016, @02:51AM
Look, I enjoy your little thought exercises as well as the next guy, (which is to say not at all), but none of this matters.
Your little world is NOT the world we live in. We have elected representatives for a very good reason, and that is because people have a hard time following the rules or even understanding them, let alone following ever piece of legislation.
The last couple of big bills in congress were in excess of 1600 pages, and you want people voting on that?
People would vote for blatantly unconstitutional laws, out of ignorance or fear. This kind of stuff mostly gets caught in congress, although some amount does still slip through.
Article 4 section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, ...
We aren't changing the constitution for your little thought exercise or this crack pot wanna-be senator's scheme to avoid doing his job.
The titular Senate Hopeful would be derelict in his duty, and in violation of his oath should he choose to carry out his plan.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Friday May 13 2016, @03:28PM
Your little world is NOT the world we live in.
Errrr it was just a thought exercise. Did it really sound like I thought the population should be licking their votes into smart phones every time there is a commercial break for celebrity apprentice? If it isn't clear I don't really think that is a good idea.
Look, I enjoy your little thought exercises as well as the next guy, (which is to say not at all)
Oh ok then. Well I enjoyed it because crypto tangles like that are really useful in practice. But that's cool that you aren't interested. I'm glad you shared that part so I can be sure to continue to not be interested in your interest.
For some reason I had figured it'd be a good idea to try to stop being so snippy and dickish towards you frojack since I can't really place the reason that happens. Perhaps though that is just how it'll play out in practice. Maybe you could try being not so dickish too? We might accidently figure out how to cooperate, maybe. At least until someone brings up photovoltaic panels anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:53AM
As long as best practices are followed
Corporations have shown time and time again that they don't give a shit about best practices.
What's really important, however, is that 100% of the software in these cars is Free Software. If it isn't, then these cars don't respect the users' freedoms and shouldn't be used. Same goes for other cars as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @05:58AM
I thought this was a different article. Whoops.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @06:19AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:56AM
1) The general public doesn't have the time nor the desire to learn about all the sides of an issue and vote for the general good. They're supposed to elect someone smarter than them who can be trusted to research the issues and make the right decisions.
2) It's trivial to sway people's opinions in the short term, say right as they're about to vote. Having someone respond "yes" to questions three times in a row is enough to statistically increase the chances of them answering yes to the fourth question.
3) Click "yes" on this issue and we'll give you the download link or let you into our site. People already fall for these scams.
wherein legislators propose laws that make it onto the ballot and citizens decide what will and will not become law
You mean like almost all local elections in USA?
"As long as best practices are followed", every form of government works extremely well. You can't wish things away, you need to deal with the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @08:03PM
Blockchain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @12:19AM
Online polls, even when made resistant to the multiple-votes-by-the-same-individual thing, are too often turned into a farce.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by devlux on Thursday May 05 2016, @01:28AM
People get the government they deserve. If they don't take the process seriously then they still get exactly what they asked for.
Also my youngest LOVES Boaty McBoatface!
There are better examples that prove your point though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @12:29PM
Hosting your paper on a website (jumpshare.com) that requires javascript in order to serve a PDF is a bad start. It is especially bad for someone working in a field where privacy and security are central issues. I'm sorry that I can not evaluate the quality of your work because I can not download your paper without permitting an untrusted web server to execute untrusted software on my computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @07:16PM
Are you posting to the proper thread?
In the past, I have noted when a page's content is behind scrips.
These days, for pages of that kind, I just go ahead and link to a site that runs the scripts on -their- server and delivers the results.
If you found that link deeply embedded in one of the pages linked in this summary, you're going to need to be more specific.
...and, to a major degree, whining about scripts hasn't been necessary since 2012 [archive.org] when archive.is [archive.is] came online.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2016, @05:53PM
Pay attention to the reply chain. I was not talking to you. I was talking to devlux wrt his citing his own "white paper."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06 2016, @10:15PM
Yeah. A lengthly (sub)thread and Nested view had me a bit lost.
My error.
The archive.is trick wasn't useful in getting the PDF either. 8-(
<Roseanne Roseannadanna mode> Nevermind.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Dunbal on Wednesday May 04 2016, @11:40PM
Using ASCII - everyone uses utf-8 nowadays...
(Score: 1) by otherwhere on Thursday May 05 2016, @12:25AM
The first 127 code points of UTF-8 are U.S. ASCII. El Reg called it ASCII; the candidate on his website just says "in computer programming".
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 05 2016, @07:59AM
The Register may be too specific, but at least correct; saying "in computer programming" is wrong, as also other encodings are used in computer programing, like UTF-16 where "e" is either "0000000001100101" or "0110010100000000" depending on whether you are using little-endian or big-endian. And probably there are still a few programs using EBCDIC where "e" is encoded as "10000101".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:17PM
UTF-16 where "e" is either "0000000001100101" or "0110010100000000"
Which are still 01100101 if you truncate the extra zeros.
And probably there are still a few programs using EBCDIC
Oh come on, dude, you're really reaching. What the guy said was clear and essentially accurate.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:31PM
Which are still 01100101 if you truncate the extra zeros.
Well that depends if your machine is big or little endian :)
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 05 2016, @03:16PM
Search Results
trun·cate
ˈtrəNGˌkāt/
verb
verb: truncate; 3rd person present: truncates; past tense: truncated; past participle: truncated; gerund or present participle: truncating
1.
shorten (something) by cutting off the top or the end.
Well, it doesn't seem to indicate which end you have to do the cutting-off on. And with max's example it works either way as long as you choose the right end. And whatever the opposite of MOVZX is should always work appropriately on its architecture, right?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 05 2016, @07:19AM
If her word is just 8 bits, she is utterly outdated. Even the original IBM PC, had 16-bit words, and the modern standard is 64 bit words.
0101100101101111011101010010000001100110011000010110100101101100
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 05 2016, @12:35PM
More properly, it is an octet. 8-bit bytes are pretty much standard nowadays, but there are still a few oddball systems that use different sizes for their "bytes".
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @09:26AM
What has to be done is to make the candidate to sign a contract that obliges them to propose bills and vote according to what has been voted by the members of the voters. Membership can then be had by proving you voted for the candidate.
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Thursday May 05 2016, @02:30PM
I am not saying that a representative system is perfect, but I don't think direct voting is a good solution. Typical bills that come out of a legislature are dozens of pages or more, written in specific legal terms, negotiated to balance many points of view. Is every Joe Citizen expected to read every page of hundreds of bills annually, and truly make an informed choice? The likely scenario is they will watch their favorite news channel, or read a friend's Facebook post, and vote based on a biased, one paragraph summary. If they even bother to vote at all.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday May 05 2016, @04:44PM
Probably better to have a representative for the less important decisions or at least to present a less complicated list of alternatives. But the more important decisions should be up to the voters to decide upon. The system in Switzerland is perhaps something to look into.