If you haven’t noticed, the “automated” in this elections actually involves the tabulation of votes, not the actual casting of votes. Voters will be given pre-printed ballots, where they will mark their preferred candidates by shading the circles under the names of their choice. Ballots are then fed into a voting district counting machine, where votes are automatically tallied and forwarded to municipal and national servers. The counting machines will transmit election returns encrypted, and will print out eight copies for the various political parties and voting watchdogs to cross-check manually.

In case you haven’t noticed, the election automation involves Smartmatic International, which has implemented automated elections in the US, Mexico, Venezuela, Barbados, Spain, Taiwan, and of course the Philippines. It has faced controversy while handling the 2004 recall vote in Venezuela, so local agents have stepped up a campaign to educate the electorate and convince them of the process’ integrity at bagongbotante.ph.

Have you ever cast your votes through an automated system? Feel free to share your experience below.

Source:

• Dan Rather Investigates Voting Machines — Uncovers New Surprises About ES&S Touch-Screens
• ELECTION 2010: Comelec’s counting machines in action

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More stories from around the web:

Anti-piracy groups acts in bad faith, gets fined by court. Why do parties in a legal case like shooting themselves in the foot?

Meet the US Army’s new “smart” armor, which can generate power from impacts, identify what’s hitting it, and tells its operator how much of itself is left, a la video games! Now if we only had shields as well…

Marketing master Seth Godin’s words for Rupert Murdoch: “If you can’t make money from attention, you should do something else for a living. Charging money for attention gets you neither money nor attention.”

The touch screen that dynamically mimics real buttons with the use of pneumatics. Way better than the touch-only panels of Star Trek: TNG!

New Kindle firmware delivers PDF support, supports 85% better battery life. Now only if they offered it out of the US!

Last but not least, don’t play Modern Warfare 2 if you want to retain any sort of productivity today. The single player campaign is totally engrossing, and now I see why Infinity Ward’s latest creation is in the running for Spike TV’s Video Game of the Year.

Image from GameReplays.org

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Another notable trend becomes clear when comparing brands. Here’s the list of nine different brands, ranked from most reliable to least, in terms of malfunction rate:

1. Asus
2. Toshiba
3. Sony
4. Apple
5. Dell
6. Lenovo
7. Acer
8. Gateway
9. HP

Looks like Asus‘ marketing department have a new talking point to advertise, while Apple has another reason to stick its nose up at Dell. I’m also sure Sony would like to mention being second in reliability while pimping its stylish VAIO lines.

The most depressing trend noted, while somewhat obvious, is still a bit depressing: From an average of 7.2% after 12 months of ownership, the average rate of “total failure” rises to 19.7% after 24 months, and steadily rises to 31% by the third year.

Great info from Squaretrade, relevant to makers and consumers alike. What I’d like to see though is a survey on the reliability of desktops. In any case, do you own a laptop? How reliable (or not) has it proven to be?

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On the iPhone Jailbreak community.

January 10, 2001: Let’s Make a Wiki!

Why do you have to pay $200 for your city’s law code again?

Banned Xbox Live players: OVER 1 MILLION!!!!!

Who would’ve thought a cute Blue Hippo is a scammer?

One Yotabyte equals approximately one million million million gigabytes:

Is XKCD pro-DROID?

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At least that’s true if you’re a well-known baseline news source like CNN. Feltron’s graph below, aside from plotting the site traffic’s steady rise, also points out the 10 busiest weeks, shows how much of the traffic each part of the site enjoys, and marks important events in recent (American) history.

The research also makes it clear that the aftermath of the September 11 attacks represented a turning point for CNN.com’s traffic, bringing a 1053% rise in views. September 12 itself was the day when CNN had the most average page views. Apparently, with everyone wondering what happened, they turned to the internet to satisfy their curiosity.

The ten busiest weeks were during these events:

1. 2004 US presidential election
2. September 11 attacks
3. 2008 US presidential election
4. Iraq War begins
5. Hurricane Katrina
6. Virginia Tech Shooting
7. 2006 US mid-term elections
8. Week 2 of the Iraq War
9. Barack Obama’s Inauguration
10. Week after the September 11 attacks

Feltron’s research also reveals that CNN.com had nearly 122 billion page views (121,853,965,311) between May 1, 1996 to September 30 of this year. It also shows that every officially recognized country in the world visits the site.

Source

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European Parliament says: feel to cut off persistent file-sharers from the Internet, member states!

Good advice: if you no longer need a SIM, destroy it by breaking it in half. Not if you want to “protect” your hot girlfriend from potential suitors.

If you’ve never bothered researching the history of the Internet, this easy-to-digest slide show should help.

I’m a Nokia fan, but I still scratch my head over news that the Finnish maker is suing Apple for reportedly up to $1 Billion over the iPhone.

2020 Projection: A 2.5″ hard disk will be able to store 14TB and cost only $40!

Goodbye Geocities!

First US open-source election software debuts; I doubt the government will be eager to adopt it, for some reason.

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HP Desktop Deals

• Save up to $515 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion Elite e9280t Series Customizable Desktop PC! – Savings Include: $300 instant rebate, FREE 750GB hard drive upgrade (-$50), FREE 15-month Norton Internet Security subscription (-$49), 35% off a 21.5-inch diagonal widescreen monitor (-$90), and get FREE shipping (-$29).
• Save up to $415 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion Slimline s5280t Series Customizable Desktop PC! – Savings Include: $250 instant rebate, FREE 640GB hard drive upgrade (-$50), 35% off a 21.5-inch diagonal widescreen monitor (-$90), and get FREE shipping (-$29).

HP Laptop Deals

• Save up to $325 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion dv6t Quad Edition Series Customizable Laptop PC! – Savings Include: $200 instant rebate, FREE memory upgrade from 2GB to 3GB (-$30), 50% off 4GB of memory (-$20), FREE hard drive upgrade from 250GB to 320GB (-$40), and get FREE 2 day shipping (-$39 savings).
• Save up to $315 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion dv7t Quad Edition Series Customizable Laptop PC! – Savings Include: $200 instant rebate, FREE memory upgrade from 3GB to 4GB (-$40), FREE hard drive upgrade from 250GB to 320GB (-$40), and get FREE 2 day shipping (-$39).

Now for the Rest of the Net

• UK’s TalkTalk sent out an “investigator” to go around and download bootleg songs through any WiFi hotspots found. The point was to show that disconnecting file-sharers on the basis of IP alone is not a good idea. Bravo!
• New camera promises to capture your whole life. What the headline said.
• Would you buy a personal supercomputer (for $8K)?. Again, what the headline said.
• Apple gets best spot in EU browser ‘ballot screen,’ Mozilla says. So Mozilla is slamming a Microsoft proposal—because it’s too favorable for Apple! Huh?
• Totally OT: Daniel Beaty’s riveting speech about the choices you can make.

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Iceland is all about being (literally) cool, which is why they want to become the server capital of the world. They offer natural cooling crucial to cutting down data center costs and energy consumption.

Adaptive roof-tiling technology that absorbs heat during the winter and reflects it during the summer. How? Simply by switching between black and white.

A summary of Leo Laporte’s career. For some reason, I find Laporte hotter than Olivia Munn.

Bill Gates (and his own Commander Melissa) recently provided a cost estimate to the FCC: $10 Billion needed to run fiber optic cables to various educational institutions and hospitals in the US.

Apparently, around 40 years ago, the US navy was working on pigeon-guided missile technology.

Rest in peace Stephen Gately. The Boyzone singer’s last tweet is available for everyone to read here.

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How many errors? On average, about one in three Google servers experienced a correctable memory error each year and one in a hundred an uncorrectable error, an event that typically causes a crash.

Older research showed that, for every 1 billion hours, a memory chip would fail on average around 200 to 5,000 times. Google’s project revealed a much higher ratio: 25,000 to 75,000 failures within the same time period.

To be clear, those numbers aren’t anything significant for the typical consumer. A billion hours is equal to more than 100,000 years after all, worth at least ten thousand lifetimes. Nevertheless, Google’s research should be useful for projects or businesses that have to rely on lots of memory chips to get the job. A prominent example is of course other companies that maintain their own data centers.

Of course Google couldn’t pass up the opportunity to market its own technical expertise, discussing the various technologies it uses to protect end-users from crashes caused by memory errors. Apparently “error correction code” and “chipkill” are just two of the things Google relies on to protect you from the evil data corruption. (Source, thanks to Sheree for the pic!)

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My personal favorite? The “How to Infuriate Other Members” of the Mac Zealots Cult: “Write an honest, negative tech review about an Apple product [or service, for that matter].”

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