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The success of an e-vote is hard to verify, and a poorly designed system - like many of those used in the US - makes it fairly trivial to alter even a presidential election through tampering. With no far reaching conspiracies required either, just a few key municipalities in Ohio would need to manipulated. This would be ridiculously easy for a few corrupt local election officials, who through diebold's interface can alter tallies without an audit log. This is a built in feature for making "corrections" and incorporating things like absentee votes of course. There is so much reward involved that the potential abuse here is astronomical.

Sound ridiculous?

Yeah, I know. So while your at it, please check out this bill and write your representatives about it. Some republicans are already poo-pooing these much needed reforms and they need more momentum.

Senate Bill S. 517, introduced by Senator Kay Hutchinson (R-TX), on March 3, 2005 is pretty interesting:

S. 517: A Bill to Establish a Weather Modifications Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.

Huh? Can this be for real? You bet: Clicky.

Also interesting, this is supposed to take effect on October 1, 2005! It has only been introduced, so this is unlikely at this point. But still the timing is creepy.

Thanks to Richard C Hoagland's Enterprise Mission web site for the information. Richard is way out there sometimes, but he definately has great credentials.

It's not there.

"Code"? (As in software.)

Not in there either.

Of course, I would like to see them add a line to the effect that software code or the idea for an implementation of software is not patentable, otherwise I fear we are getting just more of the same and...

Amazon will rule the world...

Why is it that both parties always sell out for the worst aspects of the opposite party?

Well, the thing is, they don't. Plenty cross over, with politicians from the 'opposite' party voting for an issue you agree with.

How about this. The parties have become carticatures. Very few people are purely 'republican' or 'democrat', 'left' or 'right', 'conservative' or 'liberal'. They simply identify with the 'closest' party.

Heck, there's left/right ratings out there for senators. Some democrats are further 'right' than some republicans.

Texas's (D) Stenholm scored a 45, while Iowa's Leach(R), scored a 55 for their: ADA's rating(a blatently 'liberal' organization)
Method for score: 20 votes chosen as the 'most important'. If you voted their way, you got 5 points. If you didn't, you got 0(IE abstinations count as 0 points). I have some serious problems with their methodology.

Govtrack rates Miller(D,GA) as further right than many republicans. Meanwhile, Collins, Chafee, and Snowe could be called 'Rhinos'(Republicans in name only).

Why don't we slashdot our representatives, if we can take down a server why can't we take down this very foolish decision. goto http://www.govtrack.us/congress/replookup.xpd and put in your zip code to find out who to write.

I'm happy to live in Madison. Feingold really appears to represent the interests of his constituents rather than the special interest groups. My representative (Baldwin) also voted against the act.

Not everyone. My Representative, John Lewis (Georgia 5th district), has his head screwed on straight. He voted against the PATRIOT Act, and I've been watching him (via his Plogress feed) come down on the right side of every major issue.

I'm sure there are others like him. Don't throw out any babies with the bath water.

Seeing how well Rep. Sensenbrenner's RealID law went over, here comes another one: H.R. 1528 entitled "Defending America's Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005".

http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/051105sensenalert.c fm
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill= h109-1528

They want to increase penalties for every drug offense. They want a mandatory 2-year prison term for anyone who knows someone is selling marijuana on a college campus and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. They want a mandatory 5-year prison term for someone at a party who passes a marijuana joint to someone who has been enrolled in drug treatment at some point in their life. They want to expand the federal "three strikes and you're out" law to include new offenses, including mandating life imprisonment (with no possibility of parole) for anyone convicted a third time under the RAVE Act.

And if all that sounds good to you, just wait, they'll probably come up with mandatory minimum for traffic violations, or looking at the wrong porn, or something else you do. See you in the prison labor camp comrade...

One issue I can think of is that the tool to do the filtering still needs to be as contracted by the DVDCCA. The DVDCCA's contract, IIRC, forbids allowing users to skip through parts of a DVD marked as unskippable. So a DVD manufacturer who implements this feature needs to make sure they do not allow the unskippable parts of DVDs (such as those you mention) be "editable" or else lose their license to make DVD players capable of playing CSS encapsulated content.

This, ultimately, could have extreme repurcussions. The better movies could become much more difficult to view because of artists not wanting their movies to be edited in this way, and so forcing the release of "unskippable" DVDs.

Suddenly DRM is going to look a lot more attractive to artists with integrity. This is a bad thing.

Ignore the first part of the parent. I've just read the bill, and it's explicit about only covering audio and video. No problems with the GPL, unless you try to license your next blockbuster under the GPL.

Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.

But this comes with significant new civil and criminal penalties that are just apalling.

Oh, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The new 110 exemption is a statutory exemption. It applies regardless of fairness, if the criteria it sets forth are satisfied. The title of the /. article is a huge misnomer.

You can read it here.

The breakdown is basically:

Title I -- very very bad
Title II -- good, but not as good as it could be.
Title III -- meh
Title IV -- good for rather limited uses, but also not as good as it could be

To find out more about the bill, and to track it via RSS or email updates, see:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s109 -786

Feb 1, 2005: This bill passed in a vote in the Senate. The vote was conducted by Unanimous Consent, so a record of each representative's vote was not kept.

Apr 19, 2005: This bill passed in a vote in the House of Representatives. The vote was conducted by voice vote, so a record of each representative's vote was not kept.

http://www.xprizenews.org/index.php?p=764

Rep. James Oberstar [D-MN]) introduced a new bill:

H.R. 656: To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight..
To amend title 49, United States Code, to enhance the safety of the commercial human space flight industry.

You can track and check for latest updates related to this bill at:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109 -656

This could be one of the first concerns for the leaders from the newly emerging Personal Spaceflight Industry that announced their intent to organize an industry federation to design and uphold the standards and processes necessary to ensure public safety and promote growth of the personal spaceflight industry.