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Excerpt - Switching gears. Walt asks about Vista and the lousy reception it’s been given. Is Vista a failure? Ballmer: Vista is not a failure. Is it something we’d like to improve? Of course. Is it something that with 20/20 hindsight we’d do differently? Sure, he confesses. But Vista has sold a lot of copies, he adds. Walt jumps in and asks about the percentage of Vista sales that result in downgrades to XP. Ballmer dodges. Gates looking a little depressed. Walt asks if Vista has damaged with Windows brand. Gates says Microsoft’s philosophy is to “do things better.” And...

October 3, 2007 Sharp yesterday began publicly demonstrating a new technology that could have far reaching effects on the way we interact with the mounting tide of mobile information available to us through diminutive devices such as smart phones, PDAs, cameras and UMPCs – the marriage of sensing function with an LCD screen is not new, but Sharp’s technology puts an optical sensor into each pixel enabling the screen to become a multiple touch-point screen and a scanner. The technology is a simple one to understand, but one that has massive implications as it is a fundamental building block in...

"Other affected owners have taken their iPhones to local Apple stores, where after a brief inspection, Apple Store Geniuses have routinely recommended that the handsets be sent into Apple for a 3-day repair. Apple offers customers a $29 iPhone rental in the meantime, though one customer speaking directly with AppleInsider observed that he successfully negotiated a waiver of the fee during his repair process."

Live coverage at MacRumorsLive.com

Excerpt - Microsoft Corp. has taken the wraps off "Surface," a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects. The machines, which Microsoft planned to debut Wednesday at a technology conference in Carlsbad, Calif., are set to arrive in November in T-Mobile USA stores and properties owned by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc. Surface is essentially a Windows Vista PC tucked inside a shiny black table base, topped with a 30-inch touchscreen in a clear acrylic frame. Five cameras that can sense nearby objects are mounted beneath...

TALLAHASSEE — Congressional hopeful Christine Jennings' drive for a new election in Southwest Florida suffered two blows Friday when Congress announced it would seat her opponent and a state judge denied her request to inspect vote-counting software in Sarasota County. But Jennings, a Democrat who has fought relentlessly since official results showed her losing by just 369 votes to Republican Vern Buchanan in last month's election, was unfazed. She pledged to appeal the judge's ruling and said she supported the seating of Buchanan "temporarily," in part because congressional leaders promised to remove him if she prevails in her call for...

Brief excerpt - go to the source for amazing video - While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops. Since refining the FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection) sensing technique, we've been experimenting with a wide variety of application scenarios and interaction modalities that utilize multi-touch input information. These...

Researchers in academia are apparently starting to punch rather large holes in the Berkeley study (http://ucdata.berkeley.edu) that supposedly showed that something went amiss with e-voting in Florida that gave Bush 130,000+ extra votes. Here are some links for whoever is interested. Be warned some of it is pretty heavy reading. http://elections.gmu.edu/Berkeley.html http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jasonl/vote_note.html http://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2004/11/still_more_on_t.html http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/more_on_the_ber.html http://alex.strashny.com/2004/11/electronic_voting_machines_florida_and_bush_votes_in_2004.html P.S. This is my first post so please be forgiving if I screwed up! :^)

Yesterday my day started at 0600 hours. In my role as 'inspector' of a local polling place, I had five clerks to supervise in setting up the five electronic touch screen units we were going to use, and prepare for a 0700 hours opening of the poll to voters. Each of the clerks had received a three hour training course from staff of Registrar of Voters office, to acquaint them with their function election day. I formally opened the polling place at 0700 hours. All went well, as voters were processed - each received a plastic card which would activate...

WEXLER, ET AL. v. LEPORE, ET AL. (October 26, 2004) The state of Florida will not be required to create a paper record from touch-screen voting machines. U.S. Representative Robert Wexler had argued that the touch-screen voting machines used in some Florida counties lacked a manual recount procedure. Memorandum Opinion [PDF] http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/voting/wexlervlepore20041025opn.pdf Final Judgment [PDF] http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/voting/wexlervlepore20041025fj.pdf Related Materials: FindLaw Legal News Special Coverage: Election 2004 http://news.lp.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/election2004/index.html

IT WAS an affair with technology that began in the early part of the last century and lasted several blissful decades before ending in an ugly divorce.Now Americans have simply fallen out of love with their not-so-trusty old mechanical voting machines, which were widely blamed for the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. But as voters in the United States rush to embrace the wonders of touch-screen voting and other electronic improvements on the notorious butterfly ballots and hanging chads of four years ago, many believe the old system was not so bad. "If this is how it is starting,...

Black Voters 'Afraid' of Electronic Voting Machines, Activist Says Miami (CNSNews.com) - An African-American civil rights spokeswoman said on Wednesday that the new computerized voting machines "terrify" her, and that blacks are "afraid of machines like that." Joanne Bland, the director and co-founder of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, Ala., told CNSNews.com on Wednesday that the new computerized voting machines are going to intimidate black voters in Florida and elsewhere and surpress their vote in the November presidential election because many blacks are not "technologically savvy." "The computers really terrify me. The electronic voting -- the...

TALLAHASSEE - Florida's election system, ridiculed and maligned during the 2000 presidential election and then rebuilt with new technology, was thrown into chaos again Monday with five weeks to go before Election Day. A federal appeals court in Atlanta reversed a lower-court judge and ordered him to hear a lawsuit that demands voters be given paper receipts when they use touch-screen voting machines so there is a paper trail in a close election. The court's decision is vindication for U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, the Palm Beach County Democrat who filed the lawsuit, and a potential nightmare for election officials in...

Group challenges Florida rule on touchscreen recountsBy BRENDAN FARRINGTON, Associated PressJuly 8, 2004TALLAHASSEE — A group sued the state Wednesday, hoping to reverse a Division of Elections rule that tells elections supervisors that they don't have to include touchscreen ballots in manual recounts. The rule ignores the fact that machines can malfunction or be tampered with, according to the suit filed by a group calling itself the Voter Protection Coalition Round Table. "The prohibition of a manual recount does in fact cover up — perhaps not intentionally or maliciously — malfunctioning machines and ... covers up when there is malicious...

Florida's Elections Published: March 26, 2004 To the Editor: A March 14 [NYT] editorial makes references to our elections process that hold Florida to a different and, in one case, impossible standard. You say, "There is still time before the November vote to put printers in place." In fact, no manufacturer has submitted printers for required certification, and the manufacturers of the Florida equipment have testified it would not be ready. Your insistence that Florida employ printers when no other state has ever provided a voter-verified paper trail sets an unfair standard. But when such new technology is fully developed,...

Two Democratic senators often mentioned as possible candidates for the vice presidential spot on the 2004 ticket talked voting Wednesday - but not for themselves. Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are pushing legislation that would ensure a printed receipt of votes cast on new touch-screen computer terminals, arguing it will restore voter confidence in the election process. They both insisted the move had nothing to do with future political aspirations - and everything to do with past political confusion. "We can't ever go through what we went through in 2000," said Clinton, referring...

Voting machines become a US election issue Financial Times [FT.com] By Henry Hamman in Miami, Florida Published: March 2 2004 21:12 | Last Updated: March 2 2004 21:12 When voters in the 10 Super Tuesday states went to the polls on Tuesday, they were not only picking who they wanted to take on President George W. Bush in November. They were also engaging in the first important test of the US's retooling of its voting system since the debacle of the 2000 presidential election. The new system was highly contentious long before this year's primary season began. At the core...

It is Election Night 2004. The presidential tally stalls in a near-tie. All eyes turn to a pivotal state, a rich source of electoral votes, where election supervisors scrutinize ballots. Punch-card ballots. Yes, punch-card ballots, the much maligned voting system -- dimpled chad, hanging chad, pregnant chad -- that symbolized Florida's botched election four years ago, politically paralyzed the nation for 37 days and altered the course of electoral history. Punch cards may be gone in Florida, but chads still thrive elsewhere and are actually gaining favor in some quarters. As many as 32 million voters in 307 counties in...

Hello. I’m the webmaster of www.verifiedvoting.org. I’m a Democrat, and you folks presumably will want to flame me on that point alone. But if you would bear with me, perhaps we could avoid that. I need to talk about an issue that affects all of us, and I am not here to pick a fight. I need your help. VerifiedVoting.org is NOT about conspiracy theory. We are NOT about screaming about “Wally O’Dell delivering the votes to GWB”, but I do have to admit that his remarks were about as ill-conceived as they might have possibly been, and have made...

Computer Experts Fear Recall Voter Fraud Mon Oct 6, 2:43 PM ET By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. - Punch-card ballots from Tuesday's historic recall election are sure to get a going-over by political activists, but some computer scientists think touch-screen voting machines deserve just as much scrutiny. AP Photo Reuters Slideshow: Calif. Recall Election Latest news, photos, video While punch-card ballots caused headaches for Florida election officials with their "hanging" and "pregnant" chads, nearly one in 10 California voters will be using touch-screen machines, which don't produce printouts voters can see. And no paper printouts,...

The research and activism arm of BlackBox Voting.com   CONTENTSIntroductionPart 1 - Can the votes be changed?Part 2 - Can the password be bypassed?Part 3 ? Can the audit log be altered? ************* Introduction According to election industry officials, electronic voting systems are absolutely secure, because they are protected by passwords and tamperproof audit logs. But the passwords can easily be bypassed, and in fact the audit logs can be altered. Worse, the votes can be changed without anyone knowing, even the County Election Supervisor who runs the election system. The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how...

<p>15:05 PST (AP) -- Scattered problems, a few serious but most described as hiccups, marred the debut of touchscreens and other high-tech voting machines Tuesday, including in all of Georgia and in Florida's most election-challenged counties.</p> <p>The most serious appeared in two Georgia counties where officials said they could result in contested elections and lawsuits. The state has the nation's largest deployment: 19,000 touchscreens.</p>

The Miami Herald reported Saturday, "In an increasingly eerie replay of the 2000 presidential election in Florida, former attorney general Janet Reno today demanded a statewide, manual recount of the votes in Tuesday's Democratic gubernatorial primary." By Sunday, Janet Reno was denied a recount, since McBride won by at least 8000 votes. This seems to be a replay of the 2000-voting debacle in Florida. There, if you remember, a "butterfly ballot," created by a Democrat, was the fault somehow of Governor Jeb Bush. Now, we hear, from the Reno camp that the newest voting debacle in Florida "could be...

<p>WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Elections officials in Palm Beach County, where voters were confused by a controversial "butterfly" ballot in the hotly contested 2000 U.S. presidential election, declared a test of new touch-screen voting machines a success on Sunday.</p> <p>The electronic voting machines were put before voters at 21 sites on Saturday. Elections officials said 3,810 people used them to cast votes in a mock election that asked voters to choose their favorite patriotic landmark, patriotic song and to decide whether the words "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance.</p>