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...if it weren't for stuff like this:

http://upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060125 -125458-3247r ...and this:

http://www.cleveland.com/ohio/plaindealer/index.ss f?/base/news/113774992055330.xml&coll=2 ...and this:

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/whoops.asp

Come on folks, look at the people in the offices you work in. Do you really think that workers and executives at nuclear power companies are any different? No, they aren't. Do you want a responsibility like that in the hands of a PHB?

Wind is closing in on nuclear -- it costs just about the same to install. Use that for peak load, adding solar as it becomes more economical. Develop tidal/wave and geothermal for baseload. At least that way the worst thing that's going to happen when a doofus takes hold of the wheel is a few chemical explosions and maybe some high-velocity icicles.

The State legislature then overrode members who argued for the necessity of a voter verified paper trail. Again, guess which side the Dems were on in that debate and which side the Republicans were on. (The Republicans simply argued that a paper trail was unnecessary.) So Blackwell signed a $100-million contract for voting machines with two companies who'd both shown a political bias toward the right.

Google "Plain Dealer" and "Diebold" and you'll get a bunch of stories like that. There's no shortage of evidence of bias, all through the whole system, and lots of "We can't assume the worst" excuses for not doing anything about it. Stinks to hell.

Better pop-up extentions? 1. A popup blocker that works %100 of the time. Even with Firefox 1.5 Beta2 build, I still get a popup by clicking this link http://www.activewin.com/awin/default.asp and then clicking anywhere on the page at all. Appearently they have a javascript that knows when you're 'touching' a webpage? I have to highlight text to read better so I don't know why this is going on. I do have my settings set at opening pages or user clicked popups in the same window as the current tab. Don't know if that's causing it or not. Is there a nicer Windows news website than Activewin? I'm really starting to hate that pop-up infested site. 2. Flash pop-up detector. Go here. http://www.cleveland.com/ a flash ad flys across the page. I like using Flashblock that blocks all flash (yeah, right) until I allow it to. Happens sometimes on yahoo.com news pages too. I guess I'm asking for a noscript type extension, but is dormant until I ask it to block scripts for a webpage since it's only these websites driving me nuts right now. A blacklist if you will. I spent more time messing with NoScript extension then going to my daily 45 websites. Plus I like installing a new clean install of firefox and updated extensions meaning I don't have time redoing this crap all the time. Disabling SOME scripts for websites would be cool too. Spellcheck as you type for Firefox would be a killer extension too. :)

I would only agree with it if it were permanent.

Perhaps we'll be able to count you onboard then. Look here:

"The NASA brass is considering reworking the Prometheus program to develop a nuclear reactor to serve those purposes."

That "NASA brass" bit is Griffin. The existing Prometheus program is an attempt to design a nuclear propulsion system. Griffin is, right now, redirecting funds for Prometheus to the US Navy. Why the Navy? Because they are really good at building and operating small nuclear power plants and Griffin wants to put one on the moon! Permanent habitation of the moon.

Gosh - everyone's getting pretty bent out of shape over a CNN article. Anyone have any ideas on where we can see specifics? The Cleveland Plain Dealer has another article: The general feeling I'm getting is that this is going to apply to auctioneers; those who sell things, for a fee, as a service to other people, or are professional resellers. This would exclude people selling used things that they own. Until I see the text, I'm reserving judgement.

Remember, your future is in their hands ("and I have to eat with those hands, doc.")

From the Plain Dealer: http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ss f?/base/news/1109932227143740.xml

Erin Davis, aide to Sen. Tom Roberts, a Dayton Democrat, said eBay was never intended to be part of the legislation. "It is a complete, unintended consequence," he said. "We did refer to Internet auctions in the bill, but we were talking about Internet auction houses, not individuals. It is important that the law be changed before it goes into effect."

Hani Durzy, eBay spokesman, said the company has reviewed Ohio's law and is not concerned.

"We do not believe the law applies to people who sell items on eBay or to eBay itself," he said. "There are 430,000 people in the United States who sell a great quantity of things on eBay and make a living doing it or a significant part of a living. There are 135 million registered eBay users around the world."

A spokesman for Gov. Bob Taft, who signed the bill on Feb. 1, said the Department of Agriculture has been asked for clarification.

Sen. Eric Fingerhut said the law is "clearly a mistake that needs to be fixed." He speaks from the heart.

Freedom of religion is not absolute either. Look at the problems that native americans have with payote, and as much as Michael Jackson would like it, if I started a religion that one of the tenants was child rape, that activity/religion would not be proctected.

Forgive the lack of real cite for most of this stuff, no WL/LX access now.

Similarly, "freedom of the press" is not absolute either. Journalists DO NOT, despite their assertion that they have the right, have the right to not divulge a source if a court orders them to. Look at the Taricani case in Rhode Island. (http://www.turnto10.com/plunderdome/3983915/detai l.html).

There have been courts that HAVE increased protection for journalists. (http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.s sf?/base/news/1107426969235690.xml).

Freedom is NOT absolute guys! There are limits that affect us every day. deal with it.

[...] a very poorly designed reactor, a shutdown of the insufficient safety systems, and a government that didn't care about its people. None of those conditions exists in US nuclear power plants.

Move along folks, nothing to see here.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ss f?/base/cuyahoga/1100082911218052.xml

Spoilage Rates Are Most Prevalent In Counties With High Concentrations Of Minority Voters. Of the 100 counties with the highest spoilage rates, 67 have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the lowest spoilage rates, the reverse is true - only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. There is also a strong correlation between uncounted ballots and black population; specifically, as the black population in a county increases, the uncounted ballot rate correspondingly increases.

---Full Story here

The ballots aren't counted until after Election Day so officials can confirm the voter's registration and make sure the voter didn't cast a ballot elsewhere. [. . .] Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the state's chief elections official, told county boards to adhere to a rule that provisional ballots cast by voters in the wrong precincts aren't to be counted - and legions of Republican lawyers were ready to make sure the order was heeded.

---Full Story here

-FL

You find nothing scary in such a recklessly partisan person running one of the private corporations that counts your votes - in Ohio, under the *cough* watchful eye of a Sec'y of State that is an "honourary co-chairman" of the "reelection" campaign? Who has himself been abusing the law and his own power to the point even the courts are overriding him?

That is ... well, certainly not Insightful.

• The president of Diebold promissed Bush the victory.

He did that in a 2003 fundraising letter in his capacity as private citizen, not as the head of Diebold. He also realized his mistake, and banned Diebold election employees (including himself) from all political activities except voting.

How stupid would he have to be to try to rig the election, when everyone in the world is watching, when getting caught means jail time and the loss of his reputation and the loss of the Presidency for his party for at least four years and probably more? He'd have to be stupid and insane.

• It was reported that exit polls weren't matching reported votes.

That's one reason why the exit polls were not supposed to be published. They aren't statistically valid, since people in one time period may tend to vote all one way. For instance, I understand that women tend to vote early in the day, while men tend to do vote later. Urban areas are easier to exit poll, and that may have been who was reported.

• I *don't* trust the process. I consider this election to be a fraud at the presidential level, and possibly from top to bottom....

  The process was designed to be difficult to verify, so WHY should it be trusted?

It should be trusted because thousands of grandmothers are watching it. It should be trusted because it's all we've got. We must be diligent and make sure it doesn't get corrupted, but there's no need to assume it's a sham without any evidence.

"A Saudi-American captured in Afghanistan, labeled an enemy combatant and held in U.S. solitary confinement for nearly three years without charge returned to his family Monday after agreeing to forfeit his U.S. citizenship for freedom."
http://www.cleveland.com/world/plaindealer/index.s sf?/base/news/1097578544287260.xml
Detainee forfeits U.S. citizenship for freedom

Fair trade?

As to whether they actually choose to vote absentee, that surely has something to do with how easy or hard it is to go through the process and get information...
Can anyone argue that there isn't enough information available to make an informed decision? Does anyone going to a candidate's website expect to get unbiased information about the candidate anyway? If anything this hurts Bush so why should anyone else care? If you're a supporter of his you can complain to his campaign and try to get it changed, if you're not then you can register in Ohio and vote for the other guy.

Let's see. There is some reported voter registration fraud. Here is a case in Ohio were a registrar was paid with cocaine and registered "Dick Tracy" and "George Foreman":
http://www.cleveland.com/crime/plaindealer/index.s sf?/base/iscri/109818543096130.xml

along with non-anecdotal evidence of potential fraud (higher incidence of registrations from incorrect address).

There is record voter registration in important states:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/10/17/MNGAB99QEA1.DTL

The democrats have supposedly hired many lawyers to monitor polls, etc.:

http://www.voanews.com/english/US-Democrats-Republ icans-Deploy-Lawyers-for-Possible-Election-Battles .cfm

Al Gore is telling blacks to "vote early" so their vote will count, presumably not like the last time:

"Early voting is a good idea," he said. "You want to give them plenty of time to count all the votes."

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/24/gore.ap/

In all, it seems like the making for a very big mess, and I think this election, with things so close, I for one would be suspicious and at least investigate.

One thing I find interesting about this story, is that there is no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, just innuendo, but perhaps this is just part of the democrat playbook, which is to allege claiming voter intimidation, whether it's true or not:

http://cleveland.indymedia.org/news/2004/10/12700. php

There certainly are patterns all kinds.

but seriously, would you call this man sane? 63 years old (a time you would think more about your pension than aliens) with a US$ +60000 per-year salary (that you can just buys a server and a DS L account home!, then running SETI not on a stupid client machine, no! on server itself! In this article is mentioned that he was a 'programmer', would a programmer get access to a production server just like that? I guess he hijacked something too. What a loser.

Oh.

You're right.

http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ss f?/base/news/1086687227191651.xml

Slavory is still affecting us today. Segregration did not end until 1969. People are still alive from before 1969. Women's sufferage did not happen until 1920. There are less woman mentors, teachers, and role-models because of this and sexist social traditions.

The definition of affirmative action - "A policy or a program that seeks to redress past discrimination through active measures to ensure equal opportunity, as in education and employment."

There are basic prerequisites for equal opportunity: basic health care for all people, fair resources for education (districts with more to overcome get more money), and higher education scholarships. There are 40 million Americans that do not have health care. The war on drugs puts more blacks in prison than whites.

Affirmative action in it's modern day form does not punish white people. It is the promotion of minorities (non-white or women) if both people have the same qualifications. It does not employ quotes or other reverse discrimiation policies.

Oh yea the republians are the ones comitting voter fraud /Sarcasm

When you say we are to use our f*cking heads, do you mean people who vote based on someones religious beliefs or people who don't know it's illegal to be paid to vote a certain way?

Apparently you're denying that he's much more popular now?

Clearly, some people have changed their minds since the election.

I realize that this was meant as a rhetorical question, but I'll bite.
"Closed source," I think can in this case be safely assumed to equal "maximized profit." Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, has been very cozy with the Republican Party, penning invitations to a $1000-per-plate fundraiser, among other things. (Here's a link to a Plain Dealer story covering this.) If the whole project is closed-source, proprietary, and guarded by a pack of rabid weasels to boot, then Diebold stands a better chance of making sure that the politicians they /b/o/u/g/h/t/ donated to get elected. And those politicians will make sure that Diebold's investment continues to bear fruit.

(Yes, I know that I'm using a fallacious "Le etat, ces't moi" argument by extending the actions and political leanings of a corporation's CEO to the employees of the company. O'Dell!=Diebold, at least in theory. In practice, I haven't heard of many Diebold employees being sacked because they stood up to protest this issue.)

How to hack an election 1.12: Diebold tries to silence incriminating evidence : Diebold, maker of proven-to-be hackable voting systems, plays global whack-a-mole, in effort to scare ISP's into taking down websites with incriminating material. They used the DCMA to shut down BlackBoxVoting.org.

But the incriminating data just keeps popping back up on the Net, and Gun-and-Voting rights activist Jim March calls the bluff and challenges Diebold "Diebold: You are cordially invited to bite me. Bring it on. Make my day.. March has created a legal strategy/toolkit for voting rights activists who want to fight Diebold, a company which has knowingly - for 10 years - sold security-compromised voting technology, and whose CEO, an aggressive Republican fundraiser, has said he is he is committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year. In internal memos published by Scoop, Diebold's officials admit that their voting records database is (and has been for a long time) hackable ( [anyone can] access the GEMS Access database and alter the Audit log without entering a password ) but that this isn't necessarily a problem because It has a lot to do with perception. Of course everyone knows perception is reality. For background to this story, see my summary of Mefi posts on the Voting Fraud story, from this thread. Diebold's funky voting systems are in the process of being Certified, in Maryland and elsewhere, by SAIC, a company convicted of major frauds within the last decade and which has extensive ties to the Bush Administration, the CIA, and which proudly lists DARPA in its annual report as one of its prime clients., and owns Network Solutions, Inc. SAIC has not, it seems, noticed the GEMS database story (see main link). If Diebold systems win certification, we can expect an awful lot of This sort of thing.

Computer security expert Dr. Rebecca Mercuri has some pointed analysis on the subject.

You can join the effort to demand truly secure voting systems at VerifiedVoting.Org

This is just one school and less than 300 machines, but a few days ago the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Beachwood Middle School has equipped all of its students and faculty with iBooks.

MacCentral: Beachwood, Ohio school getting iBooks
Cleveland Plain Dealer: New Beachwood school virtually equipped

Administrators tend not to like Apple because they look at dollars, and Apples appear to be expensive. I know that when I worked at Northwestern University, we had to continually fight for Apple against that attitude. However, I also know that in NU's public computing labs, one Mac administrator could manage at least three times as many machines as one PC administrator.

There are some other stories on this press conference like this one.

But seriously, this wireless electricity must p*ss off those projects trying to provide internet connectivity via power lines...

I'm pretty sure he wasn't trying to be funny.

It's a real article. Read it here

Or alternatively, check out TGS Coverage

Scalia requests ban on broadcast media at talk

03/19/03
Stephen Koff and James F. McCarty
Plain Dealer Reporters

C-SPAN, the cable television network popular with political junkies and insomniacs, is outraged that the City Club of Cleveland has banned broadcast media from covering today's speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Especially galling, says C-SPAN, is that Scalia is coming to the club to collect its Citadel of Free Speech Award.
More at giant link, funny as heck except he really IS a "supreme" court judge.

Maybe we should escape to orbit, nuke the whole site, only way to be sure.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but this is the kind of thing that a national ID card would prevent.

- I can copy/paste in and out of the program
- save preferences easier (i think this has been fixed but i don't do CVS)
- use CRYPTO!
- Have it save the size of my window (fixed too?)
- pages like www.cleveland.com will load (java shit)

how's the outlook for m14? Think i'll be able to trash netscape finally?

- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto