Halo 4 will not affect the election. Microsoft's a very smart company. They know the deal and that's why they're doing what they're doing.
The Big Picture: One Day in November
- Thread starter MovieBob
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Just write him in like I'm doing.zombflux said:
That way, you can say that you actually supported fixing this damn country as opposed to picking between two pro-war power-hungry assholes.
Whoops. Sorry. But yeah, anyone saying that this election actually means something is just kidding themselves. Besides, a particular person's vote will never matter, so they should vote for who they want to win over who they think WILL win.
You do know that not voting for either of them won't mean that neither of them get the job?zombflux said:
Surely there is one you would PREFER to have as president? You not voting is not going to be interpreted as protest, it's going to be interpreted as laziness. If you have to choose between a ham sandwich and a dirt sandwich, pick the ham sandwich even if you don't like ham. You do not have a choice on no sandwich, come 2013 America WILL get a new President.
You don't have to like either of the candidates, you just have to decide. It's like being on a jury deciding if a man is either "Guilty" or "not Guilty", you aren't voting for the winner of Big Brother. You just have to decide of the candidates which is best for the job.
The only reason I'd have for deliberately not voting (if I was capable of) is if I REALLY COULD NOT DECIDE which was better or worse or I thought it really wouldn't matter which got elected.
Technology would make things a lot easier for voters, but this would bring up far more problems then 'distracting voters on election day'Treblaine said:
e-votes can be hacked remember: http://www.geekosystem.com/bender-school-board/
so until we can figure out a way to insure that these machines can't be hacked (how many systems have claimed to be un-hackable over the years?) we're stuck doing it the ancient way.
I don't vote unless I feel strongly one way or the other. The America voting system isn't the best anyway, how come there are only 2 viable candidates for presidency?
Actually, in local politics it does kind of matter. My home town with a population of 3000 had new Mayor based on a right in vote.
A handful of votes for County Commissioner could result in a varitey of ordinance changes that could have State Wide ramifications.
Of course that's a little off topic, back to the Halo 4 game being released the same day as the election. It probably won't matter.
The people who would rather get Halo 4 first over voting, probably were not going to vote anyway. Also I several people in the bigger cities will organize the an event to encourage both actions. Like a bus that stops at the nearest polling place first than goes to the nearest retail store, or the other way around.
I can see it now. Loud mouth liberals and conservatives standing in front of video game stores handing out political materials to the long line of gathering video game nerds.
That's it, we get all the Halo 4 fans to register to vote while waiting in line. Perfect.
A handful of votes for County Commissioner could result in a varitey of ordinance changes that could have State Wide ramifications.
Of course that's a little off topic, back to the Halo 4 game being released the same day as the election. It probably won't matter.
The people who would rather get Halo 4 first over voting, probably were not going to vote anyway. Also I several people in the bigger cities will organize the an event to encourage both actions. Like a bus that stops at the nearest polling place first than goes to the nearest retail store, or the other way around.
I can see it now. Loud mouth liberals and conservatives standing in front of video game stores handing out political materials to the long line of gathering video game nerds.
That's it, we get all the Halo 4 fans to register to vote while waiting in line. Perfect.
I have to be 100% completely honest here. If you are so obsessed with getting and playing Halo 4 that you would skip voting to do it then you have no business voting in the first place. Doing something like that proves that you have no priories or even a clue what so ever.
Sure I like Halo and I'm going to get the game but I'll do it well after I have voted. I'll crack it open and play it after the election is called. Electing a new president is way more important than playing a video game... even if is going to be a kick ass game.
Sure I like Halo and I'm going to get the game but I'll do it well after I have voted. I'll crack it open and play it after the election is called. Electing a new president is way more important than playing a video game... even if is going to be a kick ass game.
Yeah, e-votes can be hacked. And ballot boxes can be stuffed. What is the distinction? There is none.Limecake said:
I have no tolerance for such fatuous concerns, we accept the possibility of ballot-box stuffing because it is as old as democracy, but we won't accept the risk of "hacking" because it is new and we don't understand it. That is a ridiculous logic.
For example with internet banking ALL YOUR LIFE SAVINGS can be stolen, that's not a reason to never use internet banking. In fact the move to internet and digital serviced has been a nightmare for fraudsters as while a signature is literally child's play to forge obtaining a pin-code is next to impossible. Computer hacking/cracking is way way harder, less reliable and more risky.
The example you cite of election fraud had laughably poor security. It is the digital equivalent of leaving the main ballot box in the middle of the street with a sign on it said "Official votes, do not tamper with" and leaving it unguarded - but WOW, turns out someone tampered with it when they weren't looking! The Login was "admin" and the password was "admin". That's not a grand heist, that's stealing candy from a baby. There are not superlatives extreme enough for how careless this is.
I'll spell this out for you:
For the same amount of money invested and expertise employed, you can make electronic internet-based voting a whole order of magnitude more secure than paper voting
Is that clear enough? Is it unhackable? HELL NO! But it IS more secure. Stop using "hack" in some colloqual TV-trash way for "magic with computers". Some things ARE impossible to seize illicit control. Like the United States's nuclear missiles silos. The point is even if you can hack into it YOU WILL KNOW IT WAS HACKED! But if someone starts stuffing ballot boxes... you have [no way of knowing. The security you need for ballots is extraordinary and there is a while encyclopaedia of techniques to defraud an election submitted in paper and unlike on a computer they are untracable and undetectable.
You false assumption is because paper-based in-the-booth voting has been around for so long it is somehow immune. am fed up with this double standard against new technology that can make people's lives so much better. This is like refusing to have new surgical procedure to remove a tumour by citing an example of a charlatan doctor who performed a botched surgery while drunk.
I don't think you realise quite how much the democratic process is severely undermined by low voting turnout, as people can be elected into power with as tiny a proportion of 20% of the population actually voting for them. How can a president have the authority to exercise his power as the people's choice with such a situation? Something must be done to alleviate this and neo-luddite logic "ooooooh the dangers of new technology aren't worth it" won't get us anywhere. Legally mandating votes is a recipe for disaster and goes against the free choice of elections.
I remind you, the hack at UoM would work just as well whether the votes were entered on paper or via the internet, as it attacked the central counting system which MUST be a digital computer to count them reliably and quickly. Would you rather wait weeks for votes to be counted with a 5-10% margin of error?
PS: There are two main candidates for the same reason there are two main parties in America, as the political establishment doesn't want to end up like the Weimar Republic where you have dozens of different parties and impossible to gain a majority. With two presidential candidates, the winner will most likely also have the majority of he vote, it's important for legitimacy so you don't have a case where only 30% of those who actually voted chose them. Anyway, the voting doesn't even begin there, it begins at the caucuses. Did you vote in the caucuses? If not, why not? Don't complain you don't have democratic choice if you discard your opportunity to choose.
There's a game store that's literally underground? And it happens to be directly beneath a voting booth? That's pretty awesome.vxicepickxv said:
Surprised Bob didn't mention one of the big, frightening truths of the issue- regardless of whether the release is a deliberate conspiracy by Microsoft to influence the vote or simply a big coincidence as they state, it WILL probably cause a fair number of young people to skip voting to pick up and play the game instead. Whether or not it's relevant, it will still be significant. If Microsoft genuinely don't want to influence the presidential election then they really should release the game the next day- what could it really cost them?
I wish Bob would not use some clip of filler footage multiple times in an episode. For instance, all the Halo 3 clips in this episode came from one trailer.
I find it kind of distracting. I know for movies you're usually stuck with just the one trailer, but there are tons of Halo trailers. Even if you only wanted Master Chief related clips you have nearly 5 games worth of trailers at this point. Let's see some variety!
Fine episode otherwise.
I find it kind of distracting. I know for movies you're usually stuck with just the one trailer, but there are tons of Halo trailers. Even if you only wanted Master Chief related clips you have nearly 5 games worth of trailers at this point. Let's see some variety!
Fine episode otherwise.
I'd like you to show me a ballet stuffer who is not only able to stuff thousands of extra votes into the box while at the same time removing opposing votes. That would be quite impressive.Treblaine said:
I don't think you understand me, I'm not scared of e-votes because they are a new way of doing things. I'm scared of them because of the incredible importance of their job coupled with the fact that they can be altered to completely skew the results.
Yes the security was laughably terrible, the thing is that the people who created the system challenged people to try to hack it in an attempt to prove how 'secure' the e voting system is. This is equivalent to placing a ballot box in the middle of the street with a sign that says "We created the most secure ballot box ever, you can't tamper with it even if you tried"
The fact that the login/password was admin just furthers the point, this was a human error. It's actually a lot easier to take advantage of a human error than a computer one since people are idiots: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-27/human-errors-fuel-hacking-as-test-shows-nothing-prevents-idiocy.html
alright thanks for spelling it out, but please explain it. Just because you claim that e-voting can be made secure doesn't make it so. How would you prevent human errors? how would you make sure that these systems can't be hacked? It's hard to fix a problem in the software if you don't even know it's there and by the time you figured it out the damage would have already been done.
I don't appreciate being patronized. just because I don't go into grand detail about certain hacking techniques doesn't mean I assume people can type for 10 minutes and steal all the money from a bank account. I'd also like to point out that just because the nuclear missle silo's haven't been hacked doesn't make them impossible to hack. Have you ever heard of Stuxnet?
Before it people assumed nuclear power plants couldn't be hacked either. How did the virus get into the power plants? through PC's used by maintenance staff, human error.
you might want to read that article again, specifically this paragraph:
By exploiting a number of equally egregious security flaws, the team was able to get inside the system, block it off from other attackers, control the ballots, modify them to include SkyNet and Bender, and accomplish this all while remaining completely covert. As a victory dance of sorts, the team programmed the machines to play the University of Michigan fight song. Authorities remained unaware of the successful hack until a tester ? who had just ruled the system ?secure,? I might add ? suggested they lose the music because it was annoying.
they got away with it, so much so that a tester wasn't able to notice it after it had already happened. It's actually fairly easy to stay hidden when using a computer.
I have nothing against new technology but just because it's new doesn't make it safe. It has already been shown that these things are hackable on more than one occasion: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44706301/ns/technology_and_science-security/t/it-only-takes-hack-voting-machine/#.T6HBlsV20kY
what's more you don't even need to be smart to do it, a lot of these hacks are done by 'injecting' the machine with software which means that anyone with a basic understanding of computers can pull it off.
how would these vote counters be hacked? the general public would not be allowed anywhere near them, they wouldn't need to be connected to the internet (which means they can't be remotely hacked) and the only way a human error could occur is if someone were to connect/install something onto the machine allowing the hack to happen.
No I didn't, because I'm Canadian.
Of course it's a ridiculous stunt. It's Halo. It's not like we're talking an Elder Scrolls or new Half Life, here. And it's not like those who want to vote one way or the other are going to be swayed by the release of a game.
People aren't actually stupid enough to forget that they can do both on the same day.... right?
Ps. I think the release date was intentional, but not to "influence voters", but more so that people would talk about the release date, similar to how Skyrim was released on 11/11/11. Of course, it's working because.... we're talking about something so benign as what date it comes out on in more than just spreading information.
Ps. I think the release date was intentional, but not to "influence voters", but more so that people would talk about the release date, similar to how Skyrim was released on 11/11/11. Of course, it's working because.... we're talking about something so benign as what date it comes out on in more than just spreading information.
Nevermind the fact that the majority of young voters with any shred of intelligence hate both Romney AND Obama... They're practically the exact same anyway.
And way to go Bob. You've proven yourself to be just as pitiful as much of the mainstream media. You forget a certain other competitor who is a thousand times more popular with the younger voters than either of those other two? Who actually IS winning a lot of states, contrary to what the media is reporting?
Really Bob, I'd expect someone like you to at least mention Ron Paul in that. Unless you really are so dense as to still think Obama is a good president.
And way to go Bob. You've proven yourself to be just as pitiful as much of the mainstream media. You forget a certain other competitor who is a thousand times more popular with the younger voters than either of those other two? Who actually IS winning a lot of states, contrary to what the media is reporting?
Really Bob, I'd expect someone like you to at least mention Ron Paul in that. Unless you really are so dense as to still think Obama is a good president.
I feel like it could just as easily swing the other way. Inertia can be a pretty powerful force, but when you're heading out to pick up the game already, why not swing by the voting booths?
Also, Obama supporter here. He might not have gotten All that much done (aside from, you know, getting some semblance of actual health care put into law, repealing DADT, killing Bin Laden, getting out of Iraq, handling the overthrow of the Libyan regime while minimizing American and civilian casualties, and slowly getting us into economic recovery), but most of the gridlock in Washington can be laid at the feet of the Repulicans intentionally keeping anything acceptable from getting through Congress.
Also, Obama supporter here. He might not have gotten All that much done (aside from, you know, getting some semblance of actual health care put into law, repealing DADT, killing Bin Laden, getting out of Iraq, handling the overthrow of the Libyan regime while minimizing American and civilian casualties, and slowly getting us into economic recovery), but most of the gridlock in Washington can be laid at the feet of the Repulicans intentionally keeping anything acceptable from getting through Congress.