Can You Count On These Machines?

This is about an Extremely Important Report that will be out tomorrow in the Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine.

I just caught it again posted over at After Downing Street where Dave put up the New York Times Magazine link along with posting the article.

it starts out with this:

Jane Platten gestured, bleary-eyed, into the secure room filled with voting machines. It was 3 a.m. on Nov. 7, and she had been working for 22 hours straight. “I guess we’ve seen how technology can affect an election,” she said. The electronic voting machines in Cleveland were causing trouble again.

and just goes deeper into the realm:

When the votes were finally tallied the next day, 10 races were so close that they needed to be recounted. But when Platten went to retrieve paper copies of each vote – generated by the Diebold machines as they worked – she discovered that so many printers had jammed that 20 percent of the machines involved in the recounted races lacked paper copies of some of the votes. They weren’t lost, technically speaking; Platten could hit “print” and a machine would generate a replacement copy. But she had no way of proving that these replacements were, indeed, what the voters had voted.

Now let me get this straight, students of this New Technology, now being around for a number of years, with All Sorts of programs being written and refined couldn’t come up with a Program that Actually Showed The Positive Results and Intentions?

Another example:

One famous example is the “sliding finger bug” on the Diebold AccuVote-TSX, the machine used in Cuyahoga. In 2005, the state of California complained that the machines were crashing. In tests, Diebold determined that when voters tapped the final “cast vote” button, the machine would crash every few hundred ballots. They finally intuited the problem: their voting software runs on top of Windows CE, and if a voter accidentally dragged his finger downward while touching “cast vote” on the screen, Windows CE interpreted this as a “drag and drop” command. The programmers hadn’t anticipated that Windows CE would do this, so they hadn’t programmed a way for the machine to cope with it. The machine just crashed.

Has ‘Beta’ become the norm, put something out there, let the consumer suffer the headaches for months, than Fix The Mistakes after tens of thousands of Complaints?

Who still believes we are becoming a more intelligent species?

Why are we, not only paying for, but excepting this Crap?

When are we coming out from our own created ‘Sheople’ Culture and Start Actually Leading our own Government in the Right direction, and not only the Government but the Whole Country?

Stop Saying What We Are and Start Becoming What We Should Be!!

Go over to either After Downing or New York Times, login needed, and read this `Extremely Important Report.

Someone, better as a writer, pick this up for a post Tomorrow, it should be Important Enough to get the exposure, as much as possible!