OT: millions of lines of code?

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I know you are not making it up, but I read all of that code supposed to be encrypted so all the election officials see is a meaningless number sheet to compare to software sheets. I also believe that there is some cause for concern for everyone, and not just one party or the other. This computer stuff that is supposed to be so helpful to us could, in fact, take us back many years if it is NOT secure. Some say it is, and some say it is not, but neither side has absolute proof, which means it should be checked. -- Mark

Mark Phillips wrote:
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I haven't heard ANYONE who is not working for a manufacturer of these machines say it IS secure. Mostly they express grave doubts, or are quite clear there are mile-wide holes in the system. There was a vote a few months ago in ?Ohio? (not sure of the state) where they had no paper trail, 265 or so registered voters in the county, (or was that precinct?) and had 4 million votes cast. No way to recount, figure out what went wrong, or anything! Nobody would add 4 million votes on purpose to such a small district, so it was either operator error or software malfuction. This was something mentioned on NPR by one of the consultants they've been interviewing.
Jon

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=========Thats what happens when you send a Chicago/Crook(Cook) county model machine to Ohio.
George McDuffee

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So, in order that the complainers and whiners May exercise their right to not read what I write, they must first squash my right to choose to write what I do write.
-- Lady Chatterly
"I'd like to know why you'd make such an accusation, sock. And I'm more than willing to make much nastier accusations right back, if it's why I think it is." -- theoneflasehaddock

snipped-for-privacy@fpc.cc.tx.us writes:
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There might be some concern, considering that the Homeland Security forces have tried to block some voter registations.
Any such source code would need to be entirely open and available to the public for inspection and testing.
Nor is there any need at all for it to be very complex code. The task is simple.

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The task is simple, but people aren't, which is why any human interface design is prone to a myriad of unexpected problems.
In my personal experiance, writing code that interfaces with real-time human response is the largest, bulkiest, most complex code.
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org /

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It is nor at all complicated. You just have one array of questions and another of integer answers. Both need to be secure and the later when done but that's about all. The dumbest of ASCII terminals with ~1 KB of memory could probably about do it. Encript the data, probably.

Cliff Huprich wrote:
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I suspect there might be some reporting errors here. A million lines of code represents a truly huge project in a very low level language.
Just for the heck of it, I wrote a little routine (during the commercials in CSI) to count the lines of code in my APL2 libraries. The results:
count_lines I have 88 "groups" in my APL2 library. These contain 964 fns&ops with a total of 12416 lines of which 3187 are whole line comments. In addition there are 1180 partial line comments
My libraries cover a wide range of application ranging from arrow flight to structure calculations to numerical integration. A few of these were released to many users.
Various studies and comparisons have shown that, as a general rule, APL will get a job done in about one fifth the lines of well written code. But still, the program under consideration is enourmously simpler than my library system. There is only one large software company that screw up a job that badly.
Ted

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I was the original poster of this thread. Everyone has confirmed what I suspected. There appears to be two possible explications.
#1 - The contractor and/or programmer was paid by the number of lines of code generated and not by the job.
and/or
#2 - The code is deliberately made obscure, dense and opaque to prevent any analysis and detections of trap-doors, Trojans, voting adjustment routines, etc.
And my taxes are paying for this?
George McD

snipped-for-privacy@fpc.cc.tx.us wrote:
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Haste makes waste.
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Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
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Age is honorable and youth is noble.
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Listen to the sound of the river and you will get a trout.
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If the patient dies, the doctor has killed him, but if he gets well, the saints have saved him.
-- Lady Chatterly
"This is hilarious. Watching people unable to stop responding to it gives "bot" a whole new definition." -- Woodshifter

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Only if you work for microsoft. M.K.
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Cliff Huprich wrote:
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Meanwhile 60,000 ballot papers have gone missing in Florida. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3960679.stm

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[ There are three things a man must do Before his life is done Write two lines in APL And make the buggers run. ] From Stan Kelley-Bootle's ""The Computer Contradictionary"

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http://independent-bangladesh.com/news/oct/20/20102004op.htm American machines, by contrast, may be vulnerable to wholesale fraud. Our machines are far more complicated and expensive-$3,000 versus $200 for an Indian machine. The U.S. voting machines are loaded with Windows operating systems, encryption, touch screens, backup servers, voice-guidance systems, modems, PCMCIA storage cards, etc. They have millions of lines of code; the Indian machines hardly any at all. Why do the U.S. machines have so many more bells and whistles than those in India? One reason is that we can. For us, the cost of electronics is largely irrelevant (thank you, Chinese workers). This explains why your DVD player has more features than a 747. But there's another reason why the U.S. voting machines are so complex. They are designed to satisfy many different customers-the disabled, for instance. India has a central election authority, while in the United States, manufacturers have to design machines to satisfy 50 different sets of state rules. All of this adds up to more complexity and therefore a greater chance that something could go wrong-either intentionally or by accident.