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Last I checked we had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. A kid with down syndrome would die rather early without help, I would say that is denying him the right to life and most certainly liberty since he inherently has to rely on others until he can come into his own for the most part. That's also just one use of social security.

How is the concept behind graduated rates arbitrary. Are you disputing that it is not easier for someone making a few million a year to pay 35% than it is for someone making 38k paying 18%? I would be interested in how you arrive at that conclusion. This is not anymore tyranny than taxes are in general. You are benefiting more from society so you should have to pay more back to society.

Just from your posts that you referenced again and again which don't actually define socialism, they only demonize it with a libertarian slant that the strong should survive like they have over the last couple billion years. Libertarians often forget that when 38k a year people struggle to pay rent they quite often turn to crime as you can see with the sizable increase in crime-rates of late. Don't take my word for it. CNN Source.

It is the same all over the world, when people are desperate they take desperate measures and that isn't good for anybody including the rich.

I don't see another method of fair distribution, wealthy people can't get that way on their own, they have to rely on public funds in one way or another whether it be through roads, telecomm, or power infrastructure which was all publicly funded while it got off the ground.

Socialism is not a dirty word nor a dirty concept, as long as it is applied appropriately it serves the vast majority of people's interests. As you like to keep saying, you give up a little liberty so that there isn't chaos.

Here is some more material. more evidence.

So you agree that police and fire are necessary evils to prevent chaos but you ignore that financial causes of the crime that needs to be prevented. They are intrinsically linked.

I also think you need to read the comments on your graph more carefully as they state why those numbers are misleading. No one was disputing that the rich put more dollars into the pot but those graphs don't add up. The author himself contradicts himself with his graphs. He presents different numbers with the same title and then his other graph shows that the bottom bracket pay 96.93% while the top bracket pays 39.38%

I find that whole page very poorly written.

Everyday school teachers should record children questions and disclose them in school notice boards or in a website.
This will enhance intrinsic motivation of school children.

As per the scientific research there is no such thing as intrinsic motivation.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm

Hence it is imperative to solicit why and how type of questions from Kids whether they sound rational or not.
All high school teachers across the private and public schools should record these questions everyday from Kids and display them in school notice boards or their websites.

I happen to have a friend named Matt Hazard. He's a former marine, and pretty close to an action hero to begin with. Just look at his awesome shades.

If you're going to make a controversial statement like the energy cost of recycling is higher than disposing, please back it up with references.

Here's something I found about the energy benefits of recycling. From http://ohioline.osu.edu/cd-fact/0108.html.

"Energy

Recycling aluminum requires 95 percent less energy than producing aluminum from bauxite ore. Making paper from recycled stock requires 64 percent less energy than using wood pulp. Containers made from recycled plastic save up to 60 percent of the energy required to make the same product from virgin material. Recycled ferrous scrap consumes 75 percent less energy than new ore. Virtually every material recycled uses less energy than using virgin materials. How much energy is this? Using and discarding just two aluminum cans in one day uses more energy than is used daily by each of a billion people in less developed countries. The average saving, however, does not include added energy costs of collection and transportation. "

"Blah-blah, CO2 is good for plant growth, blah-blah, things will be better than ever before..." The problem is that plants need more than CO2 to grow, like minerals, nitrogen and water. IOW, increased CO2 will just sap up those resources even faster. Not to mention that "Nutritional quality declines because while the plants produce more seeds under higher CO2 levels, the seeds contain less nitrogen."

And yes they do seem to care because they make you take an oath under penalty of law.

AFAIK, not a single person has been arrested for lying about their partisan preference.

In fact, there was a court case that made a point that a candidate should have known that the poll workers weren't actually doing their jobs and checking people's partisan affiliations.

Oh, and then there's those certain portraits that have depressions on the eyes so that seem to follow you everywhere. Like they're painted on the inside of spoons.

That's not even required. It is just a matter of perception. A painting with a figure staring straight again, that's it... (link)

This site will tell you a great deal about the graphics in TRON and how they were produced. They were done by several different companies on a bunch of different hardware.

AFAIK, the only things that were hand-painted were the rotoscoped "circuitry" traces on the costumes, and the Grid Bugs.

http://www.osu.edu/findpeople.php

"Information on how to opt-out of the "Find People" service:
Students: Send email to Registrar (registrar@osu.edu)"

Nuclear waste blather? Launch it all at the sun??

Yes, let's take all these tons and tons of radioactive material, pack it on top of some of the most efficient chemical explosives known to mankind, and elevate it into the atmosphere's global air currents. Paging the what-could-possibly-go-wrong department....

Okay, even disregarding this point, you and most people in this thread seem to be operating under a very common misconception about what "nuclear waste" is and the nuclear power industry as a whole. Most people will think of spent nuclear fuel as nuclear waste, when in fact there are many more kinds. The most often overlooked, and by far the largest source of volume in nuclear waste, is so-called "low-level waste," and is a very important window of insight into what actually goes on in a nuclear plant in reality.

From wikipedia: "Low-level waste (LLW) is a term used to describe nuclear waste that does not fit into the categorical definitions for high-level waste (HLW), spent nuclear fuel (SNF), transuranic waste (TRU), or certain byproduct materials known as 11e(2) wastes, such as uranium mill tailings."

To put this into plain English, this usually consists of everything that has been exposed to radiation in the course of a nuclear plant's facilities. "Nuclear waste" isn't just spent fuel rods. It's hammers, it's protective suit coverings, it's old pipes that have had to be replaced. There is a --huge-- volume of things that get contaminated by radiation in a plant. More information than you could ever use on this subject is found here Just to launch the low level nuclear waste alone in the state of Ohio alone (generated by only two nuclear reactors mind you) in the year of 1987 alone would require launching a satellite holding 50,000 cubic feet of material into space.

The simple fact is that in a nuclear power plant, radiation is --everywhere-- and it, to some degree or another, infects --everything--.

On an anecdotal note, of my family's grandfathers worked in the Pilgrim Power plant in Massachusetts for decades. He doesn't talk about his time at the nuclear plant much, even though it comprises pretty much all if his adult life. As more and more of his friends started dying of cancer, he just stopped mentioning it at all. While this is melodramatic, it's true: it reminds me in an uncanny fashion of how several other family members do not talk about their time in Vietnam.

The few things he did say gave me an insight into the nuclear industry that is very different from anything that shows up in G.W.'s nuclear power proposals.

He told me about how whenever he was working, he had to wear what he called a "dosometer." It was shaped like a security badge, and it changed color as it was continuously exposed to radiation, which was always present in some level at the plant. After a certain threshhold of accumulated radiation deemed "dangerous" was reached, the employee was supposed to stop working. Sometimes due to fiscal and work pressures, they just got a new tag. I'm sure safety procedures might be somewhat better nowadays, but humans are humans, and corners will always be cut on some level, by both management and by the employees, especially as economic times get harder.

While he has lived to a ripe old age, literally every one of his friends from the plant died a horrible death due to every type of cancer imaginable. "Incidents" like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl grab the headlines, but the nuclear industry kills each and every day in a way that is incredibly hard to quantify.

So, please. This "magic uranium" stuff is wishful thinking at best. If nuclear power truly is the only solution until humanity hypothetically masters fusion, that is a truly depressing option.

My school insists on using a java applet for its email The Ohio State University. Needless to say, it's the worst email system ever devised and has lots of cross browser incompatiblities. To top it off, they really think the java applet is a good idea, because they just did a major update to it, overhauling the entire program.

I avoid it like the plague by using pop3 and smtp

Crops have higher yields when more CO2 is available, even if growing conditions arenâ(TM)t perfect.

"But there's a tradeoff between quantity and quality. While crops may be more productive, the resulting produce will be of lower nutritional quality."

"Wild plants are constrained by what they can do with increased CO2. They may use it for survival and defense rather than to boost reproduction."

Nutritional quality declines because while the plants produce more seeds under higher CO2 levels, the seeds contain less nitrogen.

"The quality of the food produced by the plant decreases, so you've got to eat more of it to get the same benefits," Curtis said. "Nitrogen is a critical component for building protein in animals, and much of the grain grown in the United States is fed to livestock.

Here's the pdf http://www.ece.osu.edu/~shroff/journal/worm.pdf. Seems like if these countermeasures were put in place, viruses would have to be choosy about which hosts they scan instead of just scanning tons of random addresses if they wanted to propagate.

SO the amount in the air goes up.

      And plants everywhere are happy. There are studies that show that increased atmospheric CO2 is sequestered more quickly by plants. After all, if you eat more burgers you're bound to get fat. Feed the plants more CO2 (while avoiding toxic levels), and they will find a way to use it.

Hypnosis can be used to remember e.g. a phone number you saw when you were 6 months old and couldn't read yet...

Hypnosis is a state of suggestibility. If while you are in a trance, I suggest to you that you can remember something, odds are good that will you will believe that you remember it. That doesn't mean you're doing so accurately. This is what leads to false memories.

http://8help.osu.edu/3618.html

Is this problem fixed? I still have no idea what the hell causes it and the solution is less then ideal. If anyone has any other information they would like to add on this, please do so, because it bewilders me.

Walk into high school math class at 9:45, pop quiz says the teacher, reads the questions, pausing for 30 seconds after each one, computer whirring in the corner, at 10:05 the teacher announces "Well, since 6 of you failed today we are going to study xyz"

This is already being done in classrooms with clickers.

Among the Vista *features* I've found the most annoying, is this: At some point, not exactly sure when, or why it happens, but Vista will completely quit playing any and all media files in any media application. A search for trying to fix this problem will just tell you to get codecs. However, at the same time this occurs, one may notice that their network connectivity icon in the systray has a little red x over it even though you are connected. Any attempts to bring up network devices through the start menu or by right clicking on the icon usually will result in a long delay before any network options are presented to you. (It may appear that it is frozen, but given enough time, it will come up). Researching this problem led me to discover that in order to fix this problem I need to type "net localgroup Administrators /add Local Service" at the command prompt. I've found this both in Vista Home Premium 32bit and Vista Enterprise 32bit and 64bit.

Interestingly enough, Ohio State University has a tech page for this problem:
http://8help.osu.edu/3618.html

Unless you use this:

http://www.ece.osu.edu/ssh/

To be precise, a robot walks dynamically if its center of gravity extends beyond the boundaries of its support polygon while walking. Take a look at the robot I work on to see dynamic walking. The difference lies in what happens if all the joints suddenly locked up completely while walking. A robot that actually walks dynamically would almost certainly fall over. Asimo and this robot would not. This appears to be the static or quasi-static situation described in the second link.

I guess people on slashdot like facts, so here's a handy historical CGI timeline. Check out 1969 for the first CGI commercial.

The problem is that the natural gene/chromosome hopping (and the associated traits) never brought about lawsuits before. It's not like the bees in an area have read any literature saying that the corn they gathered pollen from earlier is the patented technology of XYZ corp and they should therefore not visit other plants.

http://ohioline.osu.edu/agf-fact/0153.html

What happens when the weeds and other pest plants become round-up ready as well?

Oh, and my favorite link so far http://www.nelsonfarm.net/

Ohio State also has a program (I was a student in '98) that uses the same controller with the same idea. Teams of 3-4 students get roughly 8 weeks to build and it also ends in a competition (with now over 50 teams). Design project page here. Video of this past year's competition or search youtube for "FEH robot" to find more.

The physics department at my university has started using "clickers." They are small handheld devices resembling calculators that students can use to wirelessly answer multiple-choice questions an instructor poses via e.g. a slide on a presentation. After everyone answers the question and the timer ticks down to zero, the instructor can display a histogram of counts/answer.

Individual devices are tied to students in that only one id number is allowed per device, so these are also useful for taking attendence in large classes. Students enter their id upon connecting to the instructor's master node at the beginning of the class. Their utility for teaching depends largely on the questions the instructor asks, of course. If two answers receive similar amounts of support from students, individuals could be called on to explain their reasoning, helping the instructor to highlight where their weaknesses in understanding lie.

The devices are sort of a mixed blessing. I found that the best problems for them were those with two very similar answers that differed only conceptually, rather than mathematically.

Here's a link to one kind of clicker that's being used this semester (XP software via Parallels on OS X :) http://telr.osu.edu/clickers/ (I am not affiliated with OSU at this time)

I was one of those kids: my 1st grade teacher said I should be on Ritalin.

10 bored years later, I was saved by PSEOP. I'm not sure of the name in states other than Ohio, but it lets high school students apply to and take classes at colleges on the school's dime.

The Academy http://undergrad.osu.edu/academy/index.html at Ohio State was wonderful. So many choices, and it shaved off about a year from my engineering degree in math, science & electives. Of course it's no help before high school, but it is a nice option once you're there.

http://buckeyebullet.com/
http://www.osu.edu/features/2007/bullet/
http://engineering.osu.edu/news/archive/2007/07042 0.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_Bullet_2

Go Bucks!

http://buckeyebullet.com/
http://www.osu.edu/features/2007/bullet/
http://engineering.osu.edu/news/archive/2007/07042 0.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_Bullet_2

Go Bucks!

The rest die off in at most a few years, and decay pretty quickly.

Bingo! What do you think is trapped in decayed plant matter? Hydrocarbons.

No, I understand the biology completely. Unfortunately, you appear to be looking at this through an ideological lens. Plus you don't seem to understand where that 'soil-produced' CO2 comes from.

No, you're still missing my point. Fallow land looks like this:

CO2 -> live plant -> dead plant -> soil organic matter

This goes on for hundreds of years. Lots of carbon builds up in the ground that way. Sometimes that carbon gets buried for millions of years turning it into fossil fuels:

soil organic matter -> buried millions of years -> fossil fuels

You are complaining about the combustion of fossil fuels because it releases CO2:

fossil fuels -> oxidation -> CO2

Plowing exposes soil organic matter to natural weathering which results in erosion/oxidation and releases CO2 back into the atmosphere. Therefore, a plan to take land not currently in crop production to grow corn for bio-fuels looks like this:

soil organic matter -> oxidation -> CO2

Look familiar? I'm not talking about the CO2 that is in the air that you plan to recycle. I'm talking about the CO2 already captured in the ground where it will stay until you start your plows. Putting more land into crop production will release that CO2. You're essentially burning tons of fossil fuels before they become fossil fuels.

Besides that elementary fact about the carbon cycle... Keep in mind that farmers use lots of lime to raise the pH of acidic soils rich in organic matter.... CaCO3 + H -> Ca + OH + CO2. Then there's nitrogen fertilizer, used abundantly in corn production... yielding acid rain, smog, holes in the ozone, and greenhouse gases. Hooray!!

The sequestered carbon becomes fossil fuels.

Not if you oxidize it before it gets there.

Releasing that carbon is what upsets the balance and leads to a net increase in CO2 level.

And that's exactly what will happen with this retarded corn bio-fuel scheme. Releasing billions of tons of sequestered carbon that lived happily as soil organic matter until you decided to plow land it was trapped in. I'll assure you the people advocating this scheme know this. They only care about themselves and their corn prices. Starving people be damned, lets burn food!

If you really cared and wanted to reduce CO2, you'd be advocating no till farming. Maybe algae based bio-fuels would accomplish the goal of reducing CO2. Personally, I don't see CO2 as a problem, but if you do, you should at least know that this scheme is a really bad idea on a number of different levels. Sorry if any of this sounded condescending, but having to explain this stuff over and over again to people who've been misled by the talking heads isn't very rewarding. Don't let people with hidden agendas (Bush, realclimate.org, etc) lead you around by the nose.

Hi, everyone. I'm the author of the news release referenced in the post... It looks like you linked to an older story. The new one is here: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/smartbox.htm Thanks for posting it! Pam Gorder

I was a classmate of Gary Demos at Caltech. Through him I met John Whitney Jr.,and John Whitney, Sr. I've got to point out that Demos and Whitney, Jr., played a key role in the history of CGI, including on TRON. John Whitney, Sr. is the father of computers in film animation, going back to analog computers in the 1950s; he also invented the credit crawl technique from the opening of Star Wars (30 years old today).

To excerpt from

http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/timeline.html

While at CalTech, Gary Demos was made aware of the work of John Whitney, Sr. who was teaching classes there, experimenting with early CG images. Whitney's work, and that of the University of Utah, prompted Demos in 1972 to go to work for Evans and Sutherland. E&S used DEC PDP-11 computers along with custom E&S hardware, including the Picture System and a variation of the UofU frame buffer. At E&S, Demos began discussions about filmmaking with Ivan Sutherland, and together they started a company in LA called the Picture/Design Group. Demos met John Whitney Jr. at P/DG, and they started to work on some joint projects with Information International, Inc. Founded in 1962, III was in the business of creating digital scanners and other image processing equipment. Jim Blinn developed software (TRANEW) for III, which ran on a modified DEC 10, called the Foonly F1, which came out of the Stanford Research group and was originally used for OCR.

The III graphics effort was founded as Motion Pictures Product Group by Whitney and Demos (with Art Durinski, Tom McMahon, and Karol Brandt) in 1974. Early software was written by Blinn, Frank Crow, Craig Reynolds, and Larry Malone.They did some early film tests and broadcast graphics work for the European market. Motion picture work included TRON, Futureworld, Westworld, and Looker. They also produced Adam Powers, the Juggler as a demo of their capabilities. They marketed their services as "Digital Scene Simulation", and did several spots for Mercedes ABC and KCET. III hired Richard Taylor, an art director at Robert Abel, to handle the creative director efforts there. He brought a sense of film production to III, which in his words were lacking. He directed "Adam Powers" and was assigned as the effects supervisor for TRON (III produced the MCP, the Solar Sailor, and Sark's Carrier). Other projects included tests for Close Encounters, Star Wars, The Black Hole and the Empire Strikes Back, a stereo production called Magic Journeys, and many groundbreaking television promotion sequences.

Although they defined much of the early commercial perception of CGI, disputes regarding the computing power necessary to continue in the business prompted Whitney and Demos to leave to establish Digital Productions in 1982. They departed before TRON was completed, so much of the III contract was taken up by MAGI. Richard Taylor continued to handle the effects supervision, and was hired by MAGI when the film wrapped.

Gary Demos and John Whitney, Jr. went on to Digital Productions and then Whitney/Demos, and Demos more recently founded DemoGraFX (which was acquired by Dolby Laboratories in 2003), where he worked with digital TV, HDTV standards, digital compositing, and other high technology graphics related projects. Whitney founded USAnimation, which later became Virtual Magic Animation, in 1992. Demos and Whitney received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Scientific and Engineering Award for the Photo Realistic Simulation Of Motion Picture Photography By Means of Computer Generated Images in 1984 for work on the movies "The Last Starfighter" and on "2010" using the Cray XMP. Demos also received an Academy Scientific and Engineering Award in 1995 for Pioneering Work In Digital Film Scanning", and an Academy Technical Achievement Award in 1996 for Pioneering Work In Digital Film Compositing Systems.

Equipment included PDP-10s, the famed Foonley F1 (a modified DEC 10), a propri

it seems possible that in some point in the future we will have no moon walkers among us.

Ohio State http://www.osu.edu/ and Ohio University http://www.ohio.edu/ are two totally different universities.

Students pay a small fraction of the highly subsidized costs of their education - tuition, facilities, infrastructure, salaries - at a TAXPAYER funded public institution such as Ohio University.

And I assure you, the taxpayers of Ohio have much better things to do with their money than to foot enormous bandwidth bills so that students can illegally download copyrighted music, movies, and porn faster.

I'm all for figuring out that corn isn't a miracle for anything except winning votes in Iowa, but where did you get the idea that potatoes require "next to no fertilizers"? I grow potatoes and you have to fertilize the bejeezus out of the things or you end up with cute little micro-potatoes.

More data:

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1619.html

Potatoes are still better than corn; for all I know you're right that they're the most efficient. But I just wanted to point out that fertilizers are still going to be necessary.

As per research studies there is no such thing as "intrinsic" motivation. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm
Even though they are talented, rest of the society does not inject the required "extrinsic motivation".

Ohio State != Ohio University

http://www.osu.edu/ http://www.ohio.edu/

Reposting now that I recalled my login info...

There is a program through NSF that does almost exactly what you describe, with the added benefit of funding graduate students. It's called GK-12 and is designed to involve science and engineering graduate students in teaching science in public schools. The program at my university focuses on grades 3-5 but other programs focus on different grades. I'm currently involved in the program and I enjoy helping the teachers with whom I work improve their science lessons. We're part technical consultant and part co-teacher, no certificate required, just that you develop and teach the plans together. The grad students get tuition and a stipend and the teachers get the assistance of the grad students and some funding for materials and the like.

It even looks like your university has this program in place for grades 6-8.

There is a program through NSF that does almost exactly what you describe, with the added benefit of funding graduate students. It's called GK-12 and is designed to involve science and engineering graduate students in teaching science in public schools. The program at my university (http://gk-12.osu.edu/index.html)focuses on grades 3-5 but other programs focus on different grades. I'm currently involved in the program and I enjoy helping the teachers with whom I work improve their science lessons. We're part technical consultant and part co-teacher, no certificate required, just that you develop and teach the plans together.

So the question to ask is: How many tropical glaciers are advancing or staying the same instead of receding? The report does not say, so it is impossible to draw any global conclusions.

What are you trying to teach the students? If you get a bare microcontroller like a PIC then you quickly have to spend a lot of time teaching electronics so that the students know how to properly connect hardware to collect sensor data and drive motors. You end up explaining different communications protocols (what is this RS232-TTL chip for, what is SPI and I2C, etc.) which may or may not be the purpose of the class. If the purpose is to "build a robot that does task x" then you're better off getting a kit of some sort that has some built-in interfaces for sensor inputs and motor outputs. I've had many years of experience with the Handyboard and must suggest it has a good choice, though $200-250 may be a bit pricey to get started. Oregon State and Atmel have teamed up to produce a system for their EE curriculum that looks promising, though you would have to get in contact with them to see how you might be able to purchase their boards in bulk (they have a website you can order some parts from, base kit is $105). If you want to teach "this is how you program a robot" then you can pick up any programmable robotics set and get going quickly. For younger students that haven't programmed before something more graphical may be better for them (Mindstorms for example, though you don't seem to want this sort of thing). Any way you go you'll probably end up teaching teamwork skills (and you should probably throw in some documentation skills also). There is a freshman program developed around the Handyboard that teaches such skills at Ohio State (dislaimer: I was a TA for this program) which has quite a few materials you may find useful. In summary, make sure you decide on your curriculm, then pick a controller that best fits into both that and your budget.

The Chicxulub event, while large, is not the only large impact suffered in Earth's history. There are quite a number of large craters in the geologic history, and probably more that we have not stumbled upon yet. The Earth Impact Database lists two craters larger than Chicxulub:

http://www.unb.ca/passc/ImpactDatabase/CIDiameterS ort2.htm

Wikipedia blurbs on the two largest (as usual, do more research to verify if interested:)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_crater
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

There are also questions about a possible crater in Antarctica, but it's too new an announcement to know if the features observed are actually impact related: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/erthboom.htm

My question is, why would the Chicxulub event have been so uniquely deadly?

I suppose one possible scenario is a double (or more) sucker punch of large impact followed by volcanic activity and/or other factors that happened to hit while the Earth was still recovering from the impact. Of course, that's a bit complex for a spectacular headline.

I hope work continues on this - it's a fascinating insight into our environment and might be useful in knowing how to safeguard ourselves against changes in the future.

Er, that's THE Ohio State University, thank you very much.

GO BUCKS!

.....That's the reason that Kyoto largely exempts developing economies.....

Kyoto is a farce designed to hobble western economies and give some an unfair advantage. If pollution is really bad and affects the entire planet, then it doesn't really matter where it is generated. Unlike many pollutants man generates, CO2 is a natural component of the atmosphere. Every time you exhale you add some.

Climate is subject to many variables, including solar output. There is evidence that human activity has had little if any effect on global climate in the past.

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/5200event.htm

There is nothing that says solar output may not oscillate again like it did 5200 years ago. There are two intriguing mentions in the Bible about a future time when there will be significantly increased solar output. (Isaiah 30:26, Revelation 16:8-9) People may scoff at these ancient writings, but neither can anyone unequivocally say this could never happen.

We humans did not make the earth nor the sun. We are incredibly arrogant creatures who think we can affect the work of the Creator in any material way.

A lot of that I'm sure is safe, but I can't imagine that somewhere in there and among Microsoft's untold zillions of software patents that there isn't a (legally) reasonable case that could be made against something OSS that people would care about.


A good many GUI's existing before MS-Windows. Just as there are timelines which document how OS kernel's have evolved, there are also timelines which document how GUI's have evolved. This site documents the evolution of each and every GUI, along with every icon that each GUI has used. This is particularly important for commercial application developers who wish to avoid any lawsuits caused by using someone elses "trademarked" icon.

As an example, here is the components page, which documents the evolution of the most commonly used icons.

As long as the Linux community can prove that any feature in an application has prior art in earlier GUI's that haven't been patented or copyrighted by Microsoft, then it is pure Microsoft FUD. If MS want to sue Linux, then they will have to sue the other OS vendors as well.

The use of the phrase "such as" means "here are a couple examples", not "this is all we've found"
If i say the employee database at work has employee names in it, such as "bob johnson" and "larry anderson"; that doesn't mean there are only two names in the database.
you undermine your own argument when you misinterpret statements like that.

First off, the GP claimed that the fraud was on the order of "thousands of registrations", but the only places in which his article mentioned numbers were the 7 duplicates and 1 dead person, along with 4 people getting 2 counts of fraud-related indictments. Stretching it a bit, I could see dozens. But it you want to talk about misinterpreting statements, talk to the GP poster.

An unfortunate history of election fraud in certain parts of the South? (this coming from someone born and raised in Virginia)
election profiling?

Just an understanding of history. Both long ago and not-so-long-ago.

I agree that if an area has a history of problems with elections, I'd probably want to institute things like a mandatory recount in those areas so that you verify the accuracy of the results, but a history of illegal behaviour isnt itself evidence of criminal activity.

And I wrote that I was 100% certain fraud had occurred .... where, exactly? I believe I was simply saying that something was rotten in Denmark and it was time to actually get to the bottom, not make unfounded accusations of "thousands" or "tens of thousands" of fraudulant registrations. At the very least, the GP needed to find a better source for their numbers because they one they cited conflicted with their claims by at least two orders of magnitude.

The Florida election board made a rule saying that there would be no recounts in districts using paperless voting systems because there were no ballots to count in a recount. Districts that used systems that produced paper ballots would still be subject to recounts.

To an extent. The exact details of the recount statute and court ruling are complex, but it boils down to this:

o the only time a county can initiate any recount is if the totals are within one-half of one percent of votes cast
o even then, a manual recount may not be ordered if the number of overvotes, undervotes, and provisional ballots is fewer than the number of votes needed to change the outcome of the election
o in the unlikely event that a recount does occur, the first recount must be done electronically, either by re-printing the results from the touchscreens or by re-running the ballots through a scanner
o after the initial "recount", the only way they can move onto a manual recount is if the new totals are within one-quarter of one percent of each other
o even then, the only ballots that may be examined by hand are those that were deemed to not have a vote on them (undervote) or a vote for too many candidates (overvote).

In short, it is essentially impossible for a manual recount to occur, and when it does it will leave well over 98% of the ballots unexamined. I'd say that's a pretty good attempt at banning manual recounts.

The Florida election board made a rule saying that there would be no recounts in districts using paperless voting systems because there were no ballots to count in a recount. Districts that used systems that produced paper ballots would still be subject to recounts.
That rule was thrown out by the Florida court as a violation of state law that requires a manual recount be possible and required the paperless systems to produce some way for a recount to be possible.

Until, of course, the state-level decision was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court, allowing the

The use of the phrase "such as" means "here are a couple examples", not "this is all we've found"
If i say the employee database at work has employee names in it, such as "bob johnson" and "larry anderson"; that doesn't mean there are only two names in the database.
you undermine your own argument when you misinterpret statements like that.

First off, the GP claimed that the fraud was on the order of "thousands of registrations", but the only places in which his article mentioned numbers were the 7 duplicates and 1 dead person, along with 4 people getting 2 counts of fraud-related indictments. Stretching it a bit, I could see dozens. But it you want to talk about misinterpreting statements, talk to the GP poster.

An unfortunate history of election fraud in certain parts of the South? (this coming from someone born and raised in Virginia)
election profiling?

Just an understanding of history. Both long ago and not-so-long-ago.

I agree that if an area has a history of problems with elections, I'd probably want to institute things like a mandatory recount in those areas so that you verify the accuracy of the results, but a history of illegal behaviour isnt itself evidence of criminal activity.

And I wrote that I was 100% certain fraud had occurred .... where, exactly? I believe I was simply saying that something was rotten in Denmark and it was time to actually get to the bottom, not make unfounded accusations of "thousands" or "tens of thousands" of fraudulant registrations. At the very least, the GP needed to find a better source for their numbers because they one they cited conflicted with their claims by at least two orders of magnitude.

The Florida election board made a rule saying that there would be no recounts in districts using paperless voting systems because there were no ballots to count in a recount. Districts that used systems that produced paper ballots would still be subject to recounts.

To an extent. The exact details of the recount statute and court ruling are complex, but it boils down to this:

o the only time a county can initiate any recount is if the totals are within one-half of one percent of votes cast
o even then, a manual recount may not be ordered if the number of overvotes, undervotes, and provisional ballots is fewer than the number of votes needed to change the outcome of the election
o in the unlikely event that a recount does occur, the first recount must be done electronically, either by re-printing the results from the touchscreens or by re-running the ballots through a scanner
o after the initial "recount", the only way they can move onto a manual recount is if the new totals are within one-quarter of one percent of each other
o even then, the only ballots that may be examined by hand are those that were deemed to not have a vote on them (undervote) or a vote for too many candidates (overvote).

In short, it is essentially impossible for a manual recount to occur, and when it does it will leave well over 98% of the ballots unexamined. I'd say that's a pretty good attempt at banning manual recounts.

The Florida election board made a rule saying that there would be no recounts in districts using paperless voting systems because there were no ballots to count in a recount. Districts that used systems that produced paper ballots would still be subject to recounts.
That rule was thrown out by the Florida court as a violation of state law that requires a manual recount be possible and required the paperless systems to produce some way for a recount to be possible.

Until, of course, the state-level decision was overturned by the 11th Circuit Court, allowing the