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IBM, the big blue company, decided a long time ago that Open Source isn't so bad.
Sun, the UltraSPARC Processors maker, decided that Open Source isn't so bad.
Intel, the 8086 Processor maker, decided that Open Source isn't so bad.
Munich, Germany's third-largest city, decided that Open Source isn't so bad.

"Microsoft decides Open Source isn't so bad" will be news.

"We don't even know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything -- much less that it's very close" to yielding major advances"

reference link

In the southern city of Basra, police said Thursday they had arrested five Arab foreign fighters who escaped from Fallujah with plans to attack coalition troops and Iraqi police in the south.

The five - two Saudis, two Tunisians and a Libyan, were arrested Wednesday night at a checkpoint north of Basra, police said.

What do you call this?

Or this?

Or this?

Beyond that, the point is that a president does *have the power* to instate a draft, and it seems worth having a president who understands the full implications of that power.

In any case, I find it strange that you call Bush and Kerry children during Vietnam, but yet our all-volunteer military is mostly composed of persons the same age. If today's 18 year-olds are adult enough to make such a binding decision, wasn't Bush old enough not to make a "childish" decision during Vietnam?

we can't put a dollar amount on the "total" costs of oil because we don't know what all the effects are, nor do we know what all the effects are of the hydrogen system suggested by the poster. There are too many unknowns in the equation.

So because not enough research has been done to figure out these values, we should just ignore them and not bother trying to determine them or figure them into cost/benefit analyses of major capital expenditures?

All of these costs may not be totally determined, but that does not mean they don't exist. This is something we should all be working towards.

"Write your congressman and plead for reform."

I hate to break it to you but it won't help. Your congressperson doesn't give a shit about you. Read this article. Here is a quote.

While all 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election in November, the truth is that only about 25 to 40 seats are truly contested

So unless you live in one of those 24 t0 40 districts your congressmen gets re-elected automatically. As they say their only risk is to be caught with a dead girl or a live boy.

MS is bribing them, they know they will get re-elected no matter what.

When push comes to shove they will simply say that if you vote for their opponent gays will marry and terrorists will kill you and voila! They will get re-elected. Your neighbors are dumb and are much more concerned with preventing gays from being married then patents.

As usual, the technology really kicks off when the pr0n industry starts using it.

Remember VCR? DVDs? internet?

After scanning through the comments on today's duplicate post I still don't see any mention anywhere of the problems we experienced with the Nintendo DS, probably because most people who have one don't know anyone else who also has a DS to try the wireless network games and functions with.

I'm wondering if the problems that we encountered on a few Nintendo DS units were anomalies or if the problem was addressed with updated firmware. Please comment below if you are experiencing any of the same issues we saw, or new ones.

The details below are crossposted from the original, in the spirit of dual-screen/dual-posting goodness.

A month ago, after spending a couple of hours with the hardware and games, we published our Nintendo DS hands-on review / preview that includes discussion of some problems that we haven't seen anyone else mention even once.

We previewed and played Nintendo DS games Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, Super Mario 64 DS, Spider-Man 2 DS and the onboard PictoChat instant messaging software.

We've been testing out the production models of the Nintendo DS for about a week now. When we've put the DS through a few weeks of use we'll let you know how how it rates.

AP reporter Matt Slagle has his review of the device as well, and he loves it (the headline is Nintendo DS a Sleek Powerhouse, also at USA Today), although we are a little more reserved until we see how it holds up, if the problems are persistent, and until we see some more applications that support and take advantage of the platform, and live up to the hardware's potential.

After scanning through the comments on today's duplicate post I still don't see any mention anywhere of the problems we experienced with the Nintendo DS, probably because most people who have one don't know anyone else who also has a DS to try the wireless network games and functions with.

I'm wondering if the problems that we encountered on a few Nintendo DS units were anomalies or if the problem was addressed with updated firmware. Please comment below if you are experiencing any of the same issues we saw, or new ones.

The details below are crossposted from the original, in the spirit of dual-screen/dual-posting goodness.

A month ago, after spending a couple of hours with the hardware and games, we published our Nintendo DS hands-on review / preview that includes discussion of some problems that we haven't seen anyone else mention even once.

We previewed and played Nintendo DS games Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, Super Mario 64 DS, Spider-Man 2 DS and the onboard PictoChat instant messaging software.

We've been testing out the production models of the Nintendo DS for about a week now. When we've put the DS through a few weeks of use we'll let you know how how it rates.

AP reporter Matt Slagle has his review of the device as well, and he loves it (the headline is Nintendo DS a Sleek Powerhouse, also at USA Today), although we are a little more reserved until we see how it holds up, if the problems are persistent, and until we see some more applications that support and take advantage of the platform, and live up to the hardware's potential.

Look at GameSpy. Their overall scores are out of five stars, with the possibility of half stars in the score. The overall score that a game can get is severely restricted, and as long as it's decent, it's almost guaranteed to get seven stars or higher - a score that most of us would consider to be "good."

On the other hand, look at the mainstream media. Papers like the USA Today and the Detroit Free Press grade games on a scale of one to four. This is even more restrictive...but not in a good way. A game can only get one of two positive scores - a three or a four - and it's usually got to be bloody amazing to reach the four star level. Most of the games that I see get revieved in papers tend to get scores of two or three stars. That's not terrible, but I know that most of the people I know tend to think of a 3/4 as being much worse than a 7/10. Maybe it just seems harsher. I'm not sure why that is, but observations that I've made over the years seem to back that up.

The scoring systems vary from site to site and from one kind of media to another, and that could be enough to make up the difference.

Thank you. I find things like this very upsetting. For instance, in order to save money (read: free up funds for $15.8 Billion in pork), the current budget proposed in the U.S. Congress had cuts for science funding, low-income education, environmental concerns, and other things.

NASA did get a boost; however, I wonder if that boost will go towards Star Wars II more than anything?

Here are some facts to consider.

Number one killer in the US- Heart Disease.
Second most prolific killer- Cancer.
Number one actual cause of death- Tobacco.

Meanwhile, the US government resists allocating federal research funds for a treatment that might lengthen peoples' lives. It also desires an international treaty against researching this medical technology- Stem Cell Research.

In 2018 benefits owed will be more than taxes collected, and [the current] Social Security will need to begin tapping the trust funds to pay benefits.

The US Government continues to subsidies tobacco farmers and resists holding the tobacco companies responsible for the damage incurred by their products.

Good for the economy, good for the future of social security: fewer humans living longer.

Yes, as so was your boses behavior when he, while driving drunk, killed a woman.

Well, that's pretty much off the topic--so what? That doesn't change the fact that what he's saying is correct.

But if we're merely trading partisan barbs, it is fascinating how many prominent politicians are guilty of drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter.

This intrigued me; a bit of Googling and I found this URL: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2003-1 2-23-perfect-wife_x.htm

A month ago, after spending a couple of hours with the hardware and games, we published our Nintendo DS hands-on review / preview that includes discussion of some problems that we haven't seen anyone else mention even once.

We previewed and played Nintendo DS games Metroid Prime Hunters: First Hunt, Super Mario 64 DS, Spider-Man 2 DS and the onboard PictoChat instant messaging software.

We've been testing out the production models of the Nintendo DS for about a week now. When we've put the DS through a few weeks of use we'll let you know how how it rates.

AP reporter Matt Slagle has his review of the device as well, and he loves it (the headline is Nintendo DS a Sleek Powerhouse, also at USA Today), although we are a little more reserved until we see how it holds up, if the problems are persistent, and until we see some more applications that support and take advantage of the platform, and live up to the hardware's potential.

The won't need to pass a law...TiVo is already planning on popping up ads when users try and skip commercials. I'm going to need to dig back into my "Hacking TiVo" book and see if there's a way to prevent the TiVo software from being updated automatically.

Has anyone ever tried both? I have. I think 'hunting' with a camera is fun, and allows me to share my love of the wild with many people. However, hunting with a gun or a bow is, by far, much more difficult than hunting with a camera.

I know the poster above meant well, but clearly has no understanding of the limitations of weapons and the realities of hunting. Let me give you some specifics:

In the woods, hunters look for clear shots. Even a twig, or a leaf, can seriously deflect the trajectory of the missile (bullet / shot / arrow / et al). I wish I had some links to point you to a more scientific description of why these seemingly light massed obstructions are so detrimental to the trajectory. Suffice it to say shooting through obstructions is a primary "Don't do this" in any hunters safety course. Besides, wounding an animal in the woods is a guarantee of it's slow death, and I assure you that type of cruelty is not the goal of a hunter.

As far as getting the shot during hunting season? Well, take it from someone who just walked out of the woods after 7 days without seeing a single deer in the daylight: it is not easy to get a shot. All animals are instinctively self-preserving, and despite all the technologies mentioned above (scents, high powered weapons, blinds, et al..), the odds of finding the right location during the open season is a rare chance indeed, at least on public land. I will readily admit that private hunt clubs and lands are a far different picture, but the sheer number of animals found on those locations is a clear sign of reproductive rates and survivability of most wild animals.

Unfortunately, that high productive rate has very serious consequences in a country building up new subdivisions everywhere, and selling of state land to private owners. Perhaps I can find some pictures of the herds of frozen deer in Michigan's Upper Penninsula after a slightly worse than average winter: you'd think twice about whether the hunters are as efficient as the original poster seemed to imply in his post. In the lower Michigan Penninsula, articles such as this one indicate that same high breeding rate has other consequences when combined with humans and shrinking wild forest lands.

One could argue that spreading freedom and democracy is in our national interests, so our viewpoints are not as incompatible as you might think. After all, other countries that more or less subscribe to "our" way of governing and recognizing freedom are far less likely to be threats to us as compared to, say, hard-line theocracies like the former Taliban.

The primary distinction between our viewpoints, I suspect, is that you subscribe more to an ends-justify-the-means philosophy than I do. While there is some appeal to me for the pragmatism of that position, I feel that it's a very slippery slope to go down. Again, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, the administration may have honestly believed in an imminent threat to our national security.

What bothers me is that even now in the face of evidence refuting the claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq, our president and his team continue to gloss over the annoying details that don't fit their worldview. I feel strongly that there was some serious spin happening in the leadup to the war, and it persisted as the war progressed.

To what do you attribute the fact that so many Americans believe(d) that there was a concrete link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Stupidity? Irresponsible journalism? I think it has a lot to do with certain key statements made by members of Bush's team.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-06 -poll-iraq_x.htm
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000653667
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.htm l
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/26/tim e.iraq/

Those are just some of the top hits I got for a quick google search for "americans believe link saddam al qaeda".

My problem is that I feel that we the people were misled. If the case for war was so compelling, why did the Bush team need to gin up the rationalizations they've been using? It just doesn't pass the sniff test. We didn't see this level of questioning and divisiveness when we invaded Afghanistan. There was a clear threat in that case, and besides, they weren't an internationally recognized sovereign state (recognition by a handful of Arab countries notwithstanding).

Whatever. We're committed for at least the next four years. My unhappiness with the current state of affairs doesn't matter now. Unless I want to take up arms and try to start a revolution, I'm just going to have to sit tight and hope for the best.

"1.Decides that Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations under relevant resolutions, including resolution 687 (1991), in particular through Iraq's failure to cooperate with United Nations inspectors and the IAEA, and to complete the actions required under paragraphs 8 to 13 of resolution 687 (1991);

This establishes Iraq was in material breach of its signed agreements, which sets the stage for the penalties of non-compliance. These are outlined as:

"13.Recalls, in that context, that the Council has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations;

"Serious consequences" were laid out as the punishment for non-compliance. Those consequences included resumption of hostilities. There is not, and there never has been, anything "illegal" about this war. If you wish to disregard the volumes of information available that prove this, you are beyond help.

Sure, the politicians made that one of the justifications, although it was a late addition to the schedule after the previous justifications had been exposed as lies.

Lies? Then I suppose this stuff (see slide #2) doesn't really exist. Forty vials of sarin are enough to kill ten times as many people that died on 9/11. It doesn't matter that you can fit it into a briefcase, it is a WMD, a substanced banned by U.N. declaration, and quite notably not disclosed by the Iraqis. You can claim all day long that this "little bit" of sarin isn't justification for an invasion. However, if it had been used to kill thousands of Americans, or thousands of Europeans, would they be any less dead because you refuse to call it a WMD?

I wonder how "free" Iraq will be in the future. Would your government recognize and accept it if the Iraqi people voted to establish an Islamic theocracy in a fair, democratic election?

I don't know the answer to that and neither do you. Given Iraq's history of being relatively secular (especially in comparison to the surrounding theocracies), I would say the likelihood of that happening is rather low without outside influence (i.e. an influx of non-Iraqi insurgents). If the armed forces are allowed to do their jobs and given the time to do them right, this will not happen.

I'm not, because of the deliberate lies we were fed

While it must be agreed that democracy and freedom are noble goals, it is unclear whether the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq had anything to do with spreading democracy and freedom.

I have to disagree with your assertion that this was an unlawful invasion. In 1991, Iraq signed a document with the USA ending a war. Saddam then thumbed his nose at said document. How many times does the UN need to tell Saddam to behave before there are consequences? Well, the USA decided Saddam had been told enough, so the USA, the initiator of the document (The United Nations is not a signatory to said document) decided since Saddam didn't want to play by the document, they wouldn't either and they resumed hostilities. What law was broken? I would like to say that I feel W completely messed up the political end of the resumption of hostilities, but legally, I don't believe there is an issue.

because of the deliberate lies we were fed by Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice and their lapdog Blair.

Don't forget Clinton, Berger, Pelosi, Gore, the other Clinton,and Kerry as well. Prior to the invasion, the list of people thinking Iraq didn't have WMDs was pretty darn short, please show me someone who knew at the time....no one was lying, they were merely fooled by Saddam Hussein (who was in turn fooled by his weapons experts telling him he did have such weapons...in my opinion).

My spacefaring friends, the parking lot is getting rather full. Good luck finding room for them up there.

Hey, they are not the only ones using satellite pictures for various other tasks. Maybe their purpose is the same as some US activities:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/200 4-09-26-civilian-spying_x.htm

I call bullshit. Just because you supposedly went over to Iraq doesn't mean you know shit about what's going on. In a previous post of yours, you dismissed the Abu Gharib atrocities as not really atrocities, saying:

"Wearing panties on your head and being forced to pose nude for photographs is not an attrocity -- except in your morally twisted mind."

Forgetting that there was at least one Iraqi prisoner beaten to death and then posed with, as well as numerous instances of proven sexual abuse and many allegations of rape and torture. You don't think that's an atrocity? I don't think your opinion is very valid.

You're taking the opportunity to quote me out of context, so I'll take the time to correct you where you're wrong. The fact that you actually quoted one thing but then said I said something else ought to have been evidence enough of the innaccuracy of your post. I stated exactly as you quoted: wearing panties on your head and being forced to pose nude is not an attrocity, and I still stand by that. Being beaten to death is an attrocity and should be punished as such. I never once said or indicated anything otherwise, and I am angered that you would portray my feelings otherwise.

That's funny. I was pretty sure al-Sistani and al-Sadr, who have nothing to do with the Sunnis or the Sunni triangle area were pretty pissed at the continued American presence. Oh, I'm sure they're just an exception too, right? Or maybe you'll claim they're all foreign al Qaeda fighters, even though most media reports say otherwise.

Al-Qaeda is taking advantage of the unrest in an attempt to push its agenda, much like you're taking advantage of misquoting me to serve yours.

In past posts, you've also made the claim that the sarin gas that was fired at troops constitutes weapons of mass destruction.

Sarin gas is a WMD, and you don't need a supertanker full of it for it to be a threat. A single vial the size of your index finger of this stuff can kill hundreds of people. Is that not enough to qualify it as a WMD? If not, what's the lowest limit of deaths you'd accept for a WMD? A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? How many people have to be dead before you'd consider it to actually be a threat? What if it was just one person, but that person was you? As you lay there dying, I'm sure you'd think it was a WMD.

Oh, by the way, USA Today has an article up right now showing actual photographs of a cache of sarin. Forty vials of the stuff, enough to kill several thousand people if properly dispersed. Doesn't that qualify as a WMD? If not, what does? Or are you arbitrarily setting the bar just a little bit above whatever it is we're finding in Iraq so as to discredit what's going on?

I'm just glad they found the stuff (a) before it could be used on any Marines and (b) after I left.

You also dismiss the idea of globalization entirely

I'm not a fan of this "global test" stuff, if that's what you mean, and I'm unapologetic about it. The United States is a sovereign nation. We have no obligation to get anyone's permission to do anything. If we can get others on board for things like Iraq, great. If we can't, we're going to do what we think is right regardless. Too many other countries have agendas that are in conflict with ours for me to feel comfortable submitting our policy to their approval mechanisms.

and then you go on to tell all those who oppose you "Go burn a flag and worship Stalin or something."

All true. Were you expecting me to be sorry? Oh, but you forgot to post the other side of that conversation where the guy was being a complete jerk. Perhaps you were that jerk, and you're just trying to get back at me now. Since you posted AC, we'll never know. Me? I don't hide behind AC. You should try it sometime.

How are you dif

We were told WMD's were the main reason - no WMD's have been found in Iraq.

Actually, we have found them. Interestingly enough, USA Today has pictures of cache of sarin gas located in Iraq. Sure, it's not much sarin. It would barely fill a suitcase. But it's enough sarin to kill tens of thousands of people if properly dispersed, or maybe only a few thousand if released in a crude fashion via something like an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) in a metropolitan area. Why isn't this getting more press? Damned if I know. Not even Fox is covering it. But the pictures are there. Check (I think) picture #2 of the Flash presentation.

#2 Lack of international consenus before going in/impact on post-war rebuilding.

Everyone, including those in the Bush administration, would've preferred it not go down the way it did. But at some point you have to ask yourself a fundamental question: at what point is enough enough? There were 14 separate resolutions requiring, demanding, and finally threatening Iraq to comply. Suppose you break the law, get convicted, and the judge says to you "don't do it again or I'll throw you in jail." But you do do it again, yet the judge simply says the same thing. After about the fourth or fifth time, you kind of get the idea the judge really doesn't mean it when he says it, so his authority to enforce the law is essentially nullified.

So it is (or was) with the U.N. The U.N. apparently had little or no intention of actually enforcing its resolutions. It apparently expected Saddam to simply obey and that was it. Saddam was far too crafty (or daft, either way) to fall for that, and once he figured out the U.N. didn't want armed conflict, he became determined to see just how far he could push things. After all, if you know your adversary has a limit on what he or she will do, it's in your best interests to hit that limit as often as possible.

In my opinion, diplomacy with the U.N. was destined to fail to begin with, because the U.N. had no intention to ever enforce it's own laws. It is essentially an impotent organization. The fact that numerous high-ranking U.N. officials were also making massive amounts of money from the oil-for-food scandal further complicates the matter, don't you think?

Now, we have no one but the Bush Administration for the shitty post-invasion botchup.

Again, I think we're not having enough patience here. Iraq has never had a functioning modern democracy. Bringing order to a former dictatorship is not an easy task, and no matter how many U.N. countries you may have or whoever's in the Oval Office, that task is going to be difficult, bloody, and long. The Marshall plan in Europe took over a decade to restore Germany and Japan. We should give the Iraqi situation at least that much time before passing judgement on whether this was a "botched" invasion.

Speaking as one of the ones living in an area where the H2 is not trendy (Charlottesville, VA, and I don't think it's a coincidence that we were declared the best city to live in the US!), I was not making a bad joke (or even a good one!). That H2 stood for Hummer2 never crossed my mind until someone pointed it out.

Of course, this gets back to all the other acronym's used on slashdot (e.g., LSB not standing for least significant bit). Whether an acronym/abbreviation is obvious or not depends on one's experience more than a lot of people account for - frequently including myself. I'm not attempting to slam the submitters/editors - I'm just making the point.

Hm.. not quite QED, assuming religion is right, hell exists or whatever - going on fact rather than opinion (we can't prove hell either exists or doesn't exist), we do however, know that photons exist, and photons have no mass. Sorry to reign in on your parrade, but I'm a slashdotter.
And yeah, I'm a real blast at parties.

According to USA today

Franklin is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls's ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touchscreen voting system.

One of those maps:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm

There are several urban and plenty of suburban areas in those counties colored red.

But, it is exactly the grandparent poster's attitude that causes those counties to go red, election after election. As long as residents of the "blue" counties continue to treat the residents of the "red" counties as unwanted step-children, they are never going to win in them.

Whereas Microsoft is the largest business this side of Alpha Centauri.

Hardly. Walgreens is "bigger" than MSFT, based on year 2003 revenue.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/2004-03-22 -fortune-500-list_x.htm

Wal-Mart's revenue is 8x larger than MSFT's.
IBM's is 2.75x larger, HP's is 2.24x larger. AT&T's revenue is US$2.4B larger than MSFT's.

North Dakota, my home state, might not be a great place to outsource to. It pains me to say it, but unless something happens soon, it will turn into one giant retirement home. A good USA Today article hereoutlines the problems with the state: it has the highest percentage of high-school grads, the highest percentage of students going to college, and the highest dollar-per-student spending in higher-ed, but it doesn't have enough jobs to hold them. People, like me, are fleeing the state for job opportunities. It's the only state with a declining population in the last few years. Living in North Dakota is a daunting prospect for many; you might have a degree, and a good job, but there are few other work opportunities. The prospect of losing your job in a market that rarely hires people of your discipline is scary. In the bigger cities (towns, really), it's not too bad, but in the largely rural areas, there's just not enough professional work.

In a desperate attempt to hold on the college grads, the state has been offering to pay lump sums to get people to stay in the state (last I heard, it was a few hundred dollars to high-school grads--coupled with an emotional plea about the future of the state). Before I left, people were talking about raising the payout, and even the possibility of state-funded incentives for mortgages and such (although I don't know if that ever materialized).

To be fair, I think it would be a good place to outsource to right now. The state has a low cost of living and many cities have very friendly business-oriented incentives to bring business in. But the long-term prospect is scary. Educated people are leaving in droves, and most don't return. The town I left was projecting to double or possibly triple their retirement-home capacity within the next fifteen to twenty years. Many kids move away, and the average age keeps getting higher. Attracting outsourcing work might very well be the state's last-ditch effort to modernize the economy.

VANESSA: Mr. Boy 13, my job is to acclimate you to the Nineties. You know, a lot's changed since 1967.

DANGER_BOY_13: Well, as long as companies still are dedicated to their employees, only asking for hard work in exchange for life-long employment, and secure retirement benefits, I'll be sound as a pound.

(Original)

Hopefully these minutes weren't typed by Bill Burkett on his P4 using OpenOffice and then printed from his Canon PIXMA iP5000...

The Kyoto protocol is an unfair and unlikely-to-succeed treaty that will cost the US jobs while failing to accomplish exactly what it is written to do.

It is well that the US does not sign it. Too much emphasis has been put on this treaty, not surprisingly from those who are effected least from it climatically (China/India/Mexico) and who are encouraging those to sign who it will impact the most (Russia/USA).

What is worse, it is designed with mandatory cuts based on emissions figures from over a decade ago that would make it even harder to comply with (IE- more damaging to industry) and at the same time exempt nations who emit far more greenhouse gasses from their industrial regions per capita.

Similar events have happened in the Chinese community (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong), but the Chinese are more overt about the matter. Prominent Chinese essayists in Taiwan warned the Democratic Party and, specifically, Mr. Kerry that San Francisco and neighboring areas have more than 600,000 Taiwanese holding American citizenship but remaining loyal to Taipei and that if the Democrats did not sacrifice American interests on the altar of Taiwanese hypocrisy, then the Taiwanese-Americans would vote against the Democrats.

Such is the nature of the Chinese pig.

Colorado rejected a bill to split by popular vote, and Maine and Nebraska already split by house district.

Justice David Souter

Nominated by President Bush and sworn in Oct. 9, 1990. At the time of his nomination, Souter, now 61, was a virtual unknown, a government lawyer. He quickly became a disappointment to conservatives and now often sides with the court's liberal wing.

Does this mean that we'll finally be able to see Lady Justice's Li'l Kim breast again at press conferences?

1. Women, especially mom's, tend to vote heavily democratic.

A USA Today poll showed that married women tend to favor Bush over Kerry (54% to 41%) while unmarried women tend to favor Kerry over Bush (60% to 35%), before the last election.

Exit polls, predictions, and who called what state before whom aside, I'm curious what the /. crowd thinks of this county level map:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm

at least in any of the Coulteresque/Murdochian fantasies of your typical Fox News-watching, Bush-voting red stater.

Most of the country is red, when you look at it from the county level. I only see a few states where blue is the majority.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm

It's also easy to tell where the large population centers are. Hint: they're blue.

If you break it down by counties, you can see blue enclaves along rivers and lakes too, not just the coast.

Hiring in October at a seven-month peak

Good news: 337,000 new jobs, and numbers from past months adjusted up.
But: Some of it is from post-hurricane reconstruction.
(So if you believe that the man-made component of global warming is significant, you could say that polluting more creates more jobs. Ha! ;-)

Bad news: Unemployment rates went up.
But: That was because people who had not been registered as unemployed heard about more jobs being available, and started actively looking for one.

Worrying to me: Loss in manufacturing. The industrialized countries are losing manufacturing jobs to low-cost countries. In my country this is because we have ridiculously high wages and prices. You can't survive on just cutting each other's hair, you know.

I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theory nut, nut the reason why there is no resistance to electronic voting is probably for the same reasons why there is no resistance to (for example) the electoral college - those people either support it knowing that they may at one point benefit from the problems, or they simply don't understand. It's the same way during the 1950s and 1960s the UK government told us that nuclear fission power was going to be too cheap to meter. Everyone just believed them and there was no resistance.

E-voting can have advantages over hand-counting paper ballots, in both speed and accuracy.

"accuracy", what do you mean - the voting machines are not a HAL9000 "incapable of error" behemoth. An "accuracy" claim in these circumstances is either dishonest or ignorant of how voting works in practice, with a huge number of non technically savvy people using the system. On top of that, automated vote counting (particularly electronic voting) introduces a whole stack of new points of failure that do not exist with a pen and paper (programmer error; programmer maliciousness; several different kinds of voter error; several different kinds of electoral official error; electrical power failure; insufficient storage capacity for votes; the list of things that can go wrong or which can be done wrong is stupendous. How anybody can claim on the basis of a few tests that the result will be "more accurate" is frankly ridiculous.

Secondly no metric is available to determine the accuracy of a given electronic vote. To do that you would have to back up every electronic vote with a paper vote and compare the two, and you'd have to make assumptions about people's honesty over whether the paper vote matches what they really did put into the machine. By the time you do that the costs of running the whole exercise have ballooned so much the whole thing would be a complete waste of time.

In the Democratic Primary in NH, early exit polls showed Howard Dean and John Kerry in a dead heat. Yet when the votes were actually counted, Kerry won by a wide margin.

1. Exit polls (as we all remember) showed a dead heat
2. Actual results showed Kerry winning by a wide margin
3. The exit polls were retroactively adjusted to match the actuals (just like last tuesday).
4. Some people noticed that Kerry's lead over Dean was highly correlated with how the votes were counted:

   VotingTech......Margin
   Diebold..........58.1%
   ES&S.............35.0%
   Hand..............4.7%

5. When the dust settled Kerry won by (IIRC) 1.5%--close to the exit poll's "dead heat", but by then he'd been spiked by a microphone and no one cared.

-- Markus

How to understand the presidential election results.

If you haven't read any books about U.S. politics, then you probably don't know much about the activities of the U.S. government.

You cannot rely for information on TV or newspapers, or any advertising-supported media. Advertising-supported media exists to make money, not to inform. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one candidate over another.

It's a fact that Bush supporters often have a poor understanding of his actions rather than what he wants people to believe. One example of support for this is the following article: Bush Supporters Misread Many of His Foreign Policy Positions.

The U.S. government is corrupted by extreme conflict of interest. Please don't moderate this down just because you disagree. I can support my position with links to 3 movies and 35 books: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

For a quicker overview, see this article: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration.

The county-by-county results showing not only who won, but the number, are extremely interesting. So is the USA Today result map. They show what might be expected. Those who live in rural counties vote for Bush. In the past century, the more intelligent, educated, and ambitious people have migrated away from the farms to places with more opportunities. The less educated have stayed behind. Those who live in rural counties are less likely to read, and therefore are not well-informed.

Those who don't read are fooled by Karl Rove's lies. Here are books about Karl Rove's methods:

Boy Genius: Karl Rove, The brains behind the remarkable political triumph of George W. Bush by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon, 2003, PublicAffairs. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

Part of the secret of Karl Rove's success is that U.S. voters don't want to believe there is widespread corruption in their government. Lies that are extreme and unrelenting enough are accepted.

President George W. Bush has a habit of giving disrespectful nicknames to those with whom he works. "Boy Genius" is one of Mr. Bush's nicknames for Karl Rove. Mr. Bush also calls Karl Rove, "Turd Blossom". The term refers to a flower that grows in the feces of a cow.

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove made George W. Bush presidential by James Moore and Wayne Slater, 2003, John Wiley & Sons, New York, New York, USA. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

One of the Amazon reviews quotes the book: "Karl Rove matters to all Americans, many who have never even heard his name. While the president chafes at the description of Rove as 'Bush's Brain,' he can hardly deny that every policy

Take this map of the United States at Night and superimpose it over a map of "Red/Blue" Counties

Notice anything?

Please... Lies, damn lies, and statistics. Look at the simple facts. A map of results by county shows that the majority of the country really does lean conservative. Larger cities have a higher proportion of social-services users, larger gay communities, blacks, etc. which are definately liberal voter bases. The populatio of those larger cities can overwhelm the rest of the state. Look at the senate races too - the repulicans picked up a number of seats. Look at the gay-marriage initiative - all states that had that on the ballet favored banning it.

It's tough being a fiscal conservative with a liberal social bias. We look for the moderate candidates which can't seem to win the primaries. You end up with a far, far, far left candidate and a mid-right with lots of faults. You leave the voting booth feeling unclean no matter who you voted for.

People claiming large-scale voter fraud by the republicans are just angry and don't have REAL facts to back it up. I suggest using that anger to make things better. Make sure we have auditable voting with a paper trail. Get involved with politics on the local level (and not just as a cheerleader - get involved with your community) where you can have the biggest impact.

Holy shit. Have a look at the massive right wing conspiracy. Yep quite the theft. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm

30 of 35 countries favor Kerry (GlobeScan/PIPA poll).

And something like 80% of the counties in the United States favor Bush: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm

And there have been numerous well-known, well-respected people calling the Bush administration the worst in US history. You don't see this often--or ever.

What that says is that the country is very strongly divided and polarized. What it does not say is that the belief that Bush is the "worst in US history" is "widely accepted." The two points are distinct and separate.

Have a look! It's been exposed for what it is!
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm/