Don't forget that the GOP leadership also offered a member of congress from MI a bribe of $100,000 (IIRC) in campaign funds to go along with them.
I voted for Gore, and can't see myself voting for a Green candidate anytime soon (not because they're an alternative party--because I actually disagree with their planks). That said, if Nader really believes there's no real difference between the Dems and Reps, he should stick to his guns.
In fact, I would encourage him to reiterate this belief regularly, as it will show even his supporters that he is cracked.
it's passingly unlikely that the ones who really deserve a morale booster are the ones who got one.
It's passing unlikely that the ones who really deserve a morale booster would have gotten one from the opportunity to be gladhanded by GW.
Mike--
Your criticism of Erik's point (on the coding requirements) is really addressing a separate issue. Erik was talking about tabulation; you're talking about presentation and validation. Assuming the voting machine won't let you vote wrong, the tabulator can be dead simple.
This discussion makes me think that a dual-counting system--paper and electronic--would be ideal. Have each voting machine spit out a paper tape. Tabulate the votes electronically as a first pass, but use paper tapes for the real count. Major discrepancies would indicate a problem. Will we see it? Not anytime soon.
Correction: I said above "they can come close". I should probably revise that to say "they could come close if they really had their shit together."
On the one hand, their incompetence increases the odds that my vote will be mis/uncounted. On the other, at least I don't have to worry about visits from the goon squad for my unwise voting.
Even if Diebold were storing voting records in a tab-delimited text file, we would still have a problem.
I am not familiar with the communications protocols, etc, used by the voting machines, but my guess is it works something like this:
Each machine has a serial number. Each voter gets a ticket number (when I voted using an e-vote machine, I was given a slip with a number to punch into my machine as a sort of password). The machine accumulates all the vote data internally, perhaps along with time-stamps, and at the end of the day uploads it to the mothership.
Also: when I vote, I have to present ID (obviously) and sign in. I'm not sure if they record my ticket number next to my name--I'll have to check next time--but if they do, that's the end of secret ballots.
Even without that, they can come close to associating specific votes to specific voters. And again, it doesn't matter whether the data is primarily stored in a RDBMS or not, since it could always be imported to one after the fact.
Depressingly, Michael Bolton is #4 on that list.
That's a mondegreen (not surprising). Boom Boom fought Alexis Arguello.
Novak is also still guilty of some religious bigotry by saying that a secular state can only proceed from a Jewish/Christian position. Admittedly I can't conjure up a whole lot of counter-examples, but Islam has not always and everywhere been the Wahabbist variety that frightens people. The Mogul empire in India was quite ecumenical.
Saw Dick Morris pimping his book on the Daily Show a little while back. An astoundingly self-aggrandizing prick. Not many people make me want to throw the TV out the window, but he is in that select minority now.
Dave S--The preferred alternative to px is em as a unit of measure--this makes everything relative to your base font size. It can be tricky to make this work, and on my own site, I've taken a cheap way out by using a graphic (which doesn't change size, of course) for my banner), and used px to position around that, and em for the main text body.
Also strongly recommended is to define a base font size for BODY or HTML, so that "em" has something to scale from. I've seen some web pages where "rootless" em sizing results in really, really tiny text.
What strikes me as a weird side-story to all this is that Pappy was head of the CIA.
Word of this must be reaching him, and he'll probably be having a serious talk with Junior. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.
Hoodathunk that I'd ever look sympathically upon a maybe-CIA operative.
"It92s almost beyond belief that the WSJ pretends that it92s the Bush administration critics who are politicizing intelligence in this case "
On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. As they did with accusing their critics of "revisionist history", they are taking the stickiest accusation against them and pre-emptively flinging it in the faces of their accusers. This is roughly equivalent to the Johnny Cochrane's Chewbacca defense, as seen on South Park.
I visited Australia back in '93, and watched a little TV. I saw, among other things, an interview between a journalist and some government minister, who was explaining why the blatantly unqualified nominee for Attorney General was the most qualified man for the job.
The journalist responded "Oh, come off it!"
I would love to see more of that here in the USA. Politicians routinely say things that don't even pass the laugh test, and they're not called on it--what--out of politeness?
Alan--You make a good point, but the intent (if it matters) is very different. If you are organizing a malicious DDOS attack with the intention of bringing down the system, that's one thing. If, however, you are one of many people who *want their message to get through*, and are unintentionally contributing to an overload, that's quite another. If you are the organizer who is encouraging people to try to get a message through, that's still different from someone trying to bring the system down.
There was the notorious Victoria's Secret webcast a few years ago that wound up gobbling up a significant portion of the Internet's then-capacity. This could be construed as a DDOS, using an overly loose definition. VS might have been able to estimate that this would happen, but still, getting people to over-use the system is not the same as getting them to abuse it. There have been analagous incidents, I believe, with the phone network.
The New York Sun, apparently in all seriousness, suggested that NYC should gather evidence against peace protestors to try them for treason. The mind boggles.
http://www.newyorksun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=529
I have already speculated publicly that the 2004 elections will be suspended because of some "emergency"--though on further reflection, it'd be easier to just rig the vote.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 21 |
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