Diebold to patent addition - Democratic Underground

scottxyz

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Wed Nov-03-04 05:22 PM
Original message

Diebold to patent addition

Edited on Wed Nov-03-04 06:21 PM by scottxyz

Diebold, ChoicePoint and Sproul - in a new partnership between government and business involving unprecedented interagency cooperation between the RNC/PNAC, the Patent Office, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security - and funded in part by venture capital from Microsoft's capital-markets division - have announced plans to form a joint venture to leverage core software patents and other intellectual property for the purpose of maintaining America's strategic edge at providing "the best democracy money can buy."

Diebold's flagship product - their distributed "black box" implementation of what assembly-language programmers used to refer to as the "INCR" operator, better known to the rest of us as "plus one" or "addition" - will to be the first of several strategic arithmetic operators to be included in the joint venture's portfolio of vital information-technology (IT) trade secrets, which will soon include implementions of other core mathematical functions, such as subtotal, percent, and greater-than-or-equal-to.

Meanwhile, ChoicePoint's proprietary software-based disenfranchisement algorithms, whose Florida 2000 rollout transparently scrubbed tens of thousands of undesirable second-class citizens from the voter rolls, are expected to provide the perfect "synergy" with more prosaic, paper-oriented Jim Crow technologies such as Sproul's circular-file-based voter-deregistration methodologies, and the RNAC's innovative use of mail fraud and racketeering successfully deployed against the 2004 voter-registration drives in Ohio and other states.

Gone is the primitive, labor-intensive "addition" operator many Americans recall struggling with in elementary school and the messy, error-prone process of counting dangling "chads" in antiquated punch-card vote-tabulation systems: With Diebold's state-of-the-art paperless touchscreen technology - complemented on the back-end by their modem-based wide-area-network protocols for addition, subtotaling, and numerical comparison - all audiences ranging from local county poll workers to vendor personnel to Secretaries of State can quickly get up to speed and enjoy an unprecedented level of ease and quality control for delivering precisely targeted electoral results.

Unlike Diebold's bank ATMs, which many users have criticized for being "stodgy" or "lacking upside" due to their overly rigid reliance on pre-Enron accounting standards such as double-entry bookkeeping and paper trails, Diebold's voting systems division has wisely gone with a more "virtual, interactive, open-systems" computing philosophy featuring dynamically reconfigurable memory cards, freely published polling-station telephone numbers, short, easy-to-remember passwords and standard dialup modems sending unencrypted data over common carriers for greater transparency and efficiency. Avoiding the "heavy iron," high overhead and inherent inflexibility of outmoded client-server systems favored by the global financial networks and airline-reservation systems, Diebold has decided to go with agile, "off-the-shelf" desktop components such as Windows and Access which can be easily customized by anyone willing to master Microsoft's popular VBA programming language - increasing interactivity and reducing the learning curve for key players in all phases of the electoral process, as well as enhancing flexibility with exciting new features such as anonymous remote access and unlogged updates.

"People might be quite surprised if they knew how big a chunk of our revenue stream is due to our exclusive proprietary implementation of the 'plus' operator, which has been an essential component of our strategy to deliver Florida and now Ohio as promised to our partners in government in the last two Presidential elections," Diebold's president stated at a recent press conference. "Diebold's cutting-edge implementation of the '+' operator is the result of years of painstaking research and development by the kind of highly-paid Harvard MBAs who have been keeping America's GDP strong with innovative product rollouts such as New Coke and Windows XP Service Pack 2. Diebold's AoIP - Addition over Internet Protocol technology - has been proven to demonstrate the kind of 99.999% reliability required by America's Fortune 500 and White House CEOs for the most demanding desktop applications. America's national security and technological prowess are predicated on a robust defense of our vital intellectual property rights. We can't allow key state secrets - such as our formulas for computing sums and percentages - to fall into the wrong hands," he added.

To enhance the user acceptance of Diebold's addition algorithms among the so-called "reality-based" community, new legislation dubbed the "Dipper Chip" bill is being drafted in Congress which will now formally require all "systems of mass summation" such as opinion surveys and exit polls to include a "back door" allowing RNC/PNAC officials sneak-and-peek-and-delete access for the purpose of "dipping in" to continuously monitor and update poll results so as to guarantee backward compatibility between Diebold-computed vote tallies, "news" reported in the media, and individually perceived "reality."

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