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Does Redskins Loss Presage A Kerry Win?
Puny Human Nick writes "As mentioned before, the last home game the Redskins play before the election has predicted who will win since 1944. Well, the Redskins v. Green Bay game ended a few hours ago and it looks as though Kerry is going to win on Tuesday."
We can only hope...
The Redskins suffered a bad call with 2:35 when they were about to tie the game. If Kerry does win, this must mean he does it unfairly.
yes
My sig can beat up your sig.
This means that the moron in office will be finally out! I wouldn't put my money on this though.
got sig?
GMAFB.
Yes, yes it does, but we will find out on Tuesday/Wednesday.
Of course, Baseball is the definitive method for predicting the outcome of political elections.
(?)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
...unless... can they tie in football?
Red Sox win 8 in a row, Patriots lose today, old sports adages are breaking all over the place when MA is involved.
As someone who watched the game it means that Bush will win the election and then it'll be overturned in favor of Kerry by the judges. That would be the exact parallel with the game.
Since the Red Sox won the Series the end of the world must be rapidly approaching.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
This is not really politically related, but I am a huge Packer fan and a Bush support (wait, do I hear hick jokes in the distance ?). What is a poor divided Elephant with a Cheesehead supposed to do ?
It was actually 1932. The washington times quoted it wrong as 1936 also.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
You would think that people with sport superstitions would have had some sense knocked into them after the World Series...
... not that I would mind Kerry winning.
http://snopes.com/sports/football/election.asp According to Snopes, Redskins have had magical powers since 1936.
I believe a better question is does collective consciousness somehow affect the outcome of certain events, and could some events be tied together?
o .com/sections/scitech/WhosCounting/whoscounting021 006.html
Remember September 11th 2002, the New York Lottery came out 9-1-1? That was very coincidental.
http://www.saliu.com/bbs/messages/911.html
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:more.abcnews.g
Loves science, hates superstition... unless it agrees with their world viewpoint...
so basically you can find a similar situation in ONE of the major league sports where a team coincides in the direct opposite.
i bet there is a team that always wins will match with the winning of the contender in the race.
this is just a stupid thing that got way to much coverage.
(now the superbowl sony thing is interesting on the other hand, because that isnt just the probability of finding one team that happens to have a patter of losing/winning on random game)
Yes, there's a limit on the number of overtime periods, and then the game is ruled a tie.
The Weekly Reader has also correctly picked the president for about the same length of time. They chose Bush.
I think I speak for at least three Slashdotters with mod points - whether they be Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, Constitution, or Guns-And-Dope Party - when I pound out the following message in Morse code using my head and the desk:
"What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?!?!"
I mean, Kerry is so close to Bush that if he wins you Americans will be no better off.
Why don't y'all just elect someone else for president? It's not really that hard. Though you wouldn't know there were any other candidates looking at the media...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Of course, I'm continually let down. What in the heck kind of superstition makes this worthy of being posted to Slashdot in the first place? Are we trying to ignite flamewars? Are there too many mod points being used in technically sound articles and we need to draw some away? Seriously.
If not now, when?
I was at this game only a few short hours ago - the mood there was incredible. I was actually surprised at the number of packers fans who showed up - there was plenty of jeering amongst everyone in the stands (me included, being both a packer fan and a democrat).
At one point there was what seemed to be the scoring play of the game from Washington Redskins - it would have made the score 21-20, but it was called back for a very interesting foul. (NFL.com reports: " The flag apparently was thrown because Thrash was not set for a full second after going into motion on the play. He said he didn't want to comment on the call because he "didn't know for sure" if it was the right one.")
Seems to me to be the exact kind of tone of the election too - very close, with some contested calls!!
Sigh...drawing causation or correlation from 5 data points is just sad. Kerry supporters are grasping at straws.
...sure helps to demystify curses with logic, but most people don't bother.
There's been 17 elections since this 'pattern' supposedly emereged. At most, that means 9 times an incumbent was running. At most, that means 5 times the incumber lost when the Redskins did.
-R
no
But this one (and its predecessor) take the cake. How many times have I read about one of these flaky statistical prediction mechanisms? When it's a bull market year, this league will win the Super Bowl, or that league will win the World Series. When this team gets in the playoffs, that party's candidate will win.
People always trot out these stupid correlations which are roughly true in the past, and then as often as not their predicted conclusions are wrong, because the correlation is entirely spurious. If you look hard enough you'll find something like this that matches past results. The question is how long does this particular metric's 'predictive' power hold up for, and I think you'd find that in general, these statistical correlations/coincidences that people like to trot out have a very poor record of actually successfully predicting anything.
But not because it predicts anything. Interresting because it allows us to discuss critical thinking. This is a perfect example of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" - a VERY common logical fallicy, also known as a "coincidental correlation".
Basically the problem is people frequently see something happen and ASSUME that something they noticed, or known about the prior situation MUST be the cause. - It gets better with increasing numbers (if the reskins game had only predicted the winner once its cute, but after 15 elections it has got to be right!)
Now the reason this is such a good exercise to use for this important critical thinking skill is because most reasonable people would already know that the redskins game predicting an election is absurd.
Then again, yesterday on the radio, Daniel Schorr said the electorate is looking for something, anything on which to base a final decision. This is why stories that would normally not be gaining a lot of attention any other time (flu shots, 'Azzam the American') are getting so much play.
#!
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Correlation does not indicate causation.
I love the way you guys run your elections.
Nonetheless, the parent article made me wax nostalgic. Economists of old have an old wives tale: as the skirt rises so goes the economy. In other words, as the economy grows faster, the average distance from the ground to the bottom of the typical woman's skirt rises, revealing more and more leg.
Anyhow, this election is still too close to call. I would bet good money that it will end up in court again. Both the Republicans and the Democrats have already hired lawyers to prepare briefs challenging the results.
Anyone remember those?
Seems Bush has a history of defying history.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
I'm glad you pointed all that out. There was me thinking there was a serious cause and effect going on here
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
They lost to (G)reen (B)ay.
http://ipod.fresh27.net/
It died in 1996 - the Redskins lost to the Bills 38-13 and Bill Clinton was reelected two days later.
I should also point out that the Red Sox broke 80+ years of losing the World Series, the Patriots just lost for the first time in 18 games, and all three major schools in Florida lost on the same day for the first time in almost 30 years.
Have the Redskins won a game since 1936?
Signed, former VA resident.
Sig it.
Until a couple of weeks ago, nobody ever won the playoffs after losing the first 3 games. Now they need a new statistic there too.
Maybe instead of using stupid non-related sports "predictions", people should look towards things that actually DO predict outcomes (or at least do a decent job of it). Futures. Try intrade.com for more information.
During the 2000 election, there was a story about a small town in New Hampshire (I think) who had ALWAYS voted for the winner of the presidential election. (Or at least for a very long time.) They open the polls at midnight and all the votes are cast and counted very quickly. Well, they voted for Gore in 2000. So that means this year there will be no story about them, since obviously they were wrong. At least THAT'S a story that is related. Sports and politics are unrelated and any correlation is just coincidence.
enough said.
go get it
Imagine the headline: Slashdot polls won by serious option (re: not cowboyneal). World assumed to end soon.
My ballot has three candidates. Bush, Kerry, and Nader. Bush and Kerry have the majority of whatever metric you use. Nader unfortunately doesn't, and I doubt one more day is enough time to change that.
As an anti-Bush Redskins fan, I can't decide whether to be happy or sad. I think my head is about to explode.
SpyDock: Scientific Python in a Docker container
No, a Redskin loss means the incumbent party is not reelected.
Say we're talking about 15 elections. To be able to predict them accurately is a 1 in 2^15 chance or 1 in 32768. All you need to have is 32 thousand things going on and you're all but assured that one of them will be a perfect predictor.
It reminds me of a stock scam from a few years back. You mail out aprediction on some random stock to 10,000 people. Half you say it will rise, half you say it will fall. Repeat until you've been right 10 times in a row. Now contact the 10 people you were right for, and offer to sell them your method for $LOTS. How many people would turn down someone who was right ten times in a row.
Of course, like every other non-american, I'm desperately hoping Bush loses
im only going to put up with this because its halloween, and even I enjoy the occasional creepy coincidence.
its not going to top the 'curse' being broken on the night of a full eclipse though.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
He he... and I have mod points, too. But I don't feel like losing Karma to M2.
If I get laid on the Saturday before, the incumbent loses.
Bush wins. Oh well....
The real reason Kerry will win is because the polls are very wrong. Just as generals always "plan to win the last war" the polls are showing methods designed to win the last election.
When they poll "likely voters" they ignore, among other considerations, people who have cellphones. AFAIK, they only poll over land lines.
Also, there's huge assumptions in the statistical breakdown of voting age. Young voters often don't care about the election and have the lowest turnout. However, many people are so worked up over this election and the results of the last one that I believe we'll see the highest percentage of young voters in a long time. Most younger voters lean more towards the left.
Thus the polls are skewed because their assumptions are totally wrong. Given that it's a dead heat in most polls right now, Kerry should come out ahead.
Unless there's some kind of cheating/manipulation of the election, but what are the odds of that?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
As much as I can't stand this fucking bi-partisan bullshit that we call our "political system", which is run by our dearly beloved Republicrats, don't you see that because of the way this stupid system works, Bush is DESTINED TO WIN!!
/.er fuck me in the ass.. i'll even provide the lube
Nader is stealing the votes away! Hello? Have we forgotten about 2000 already??
Not even that, Nader's runnning on the Independent ballot, and with the polls being close, bear in mind that they are not factoring in Nader votes.
Funny, even the polls lie. It's amazing how far the media will go to feed us such useless propaganda.
Oh well, if Badnarik wins the election, then golly gee.. I'll let every
I fear a world where this spineless John Kerry might actually get to be in charge of the US Military and make US Supreme Court (nominations for) appointments. Bush has to win; he is the better man.
'nuff said, really.
Please vote. Please encourage your friends and families to vote. Please don't vote for Bush.
-Russ
Me
Ahem. Allow me to demonstrate to you chaps my fine-tuned statisical methode for calculating the electature of the united states presidentiary - because as we all well know, a correlation implies causation, especially when we have a data set of such magnitudinous proportions ...
I personally didn't take the article as anything that was meant to be remotely serious - I figured it was just some people having fun and saying 'hey, look at this neat thing' - is that so wrong? I seriously doubt there is anyone who thinks this actually means something, but everybody's pounced on this story as if someone suggested that installing linux causes bad breath - it's obviously meant to serve as a little bit of humor to lighten to overly virtriolic political atmosohere. Let's not go crazy over it...
My blog
Yes, they're both rich white men. But aside from that there are a host of rather large differences.
For one thing, the Bush Doctrine is a serious departure from previous American foreign policy. Kerry has advocated an approach that relies on the sort of coalition-building that Bush Sr. used with such effectiveness in the first Gulf War.
Kerry believes that excessive tax cuts for those who make over $200k per year is counterproductive. Bush believes that tax cuts of any kind, particularly those that favor the wealthy, result in increased entrepreneurial activity, which pumps up the economy, resulting in more jobs for everyone. These differences definitely have an effect on economic policy.
On the environment, the candidates aren't even close. Kerry has a long history of working for the environment, and Bush doesn't even know what the word "environment" means.
Bush has to cater to his "Base" by nixing stem cell research. Kerry knows that science is not something to be feared.
The differences go on and on and on...
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Mod me anyway you want, but the "s" in Skins is for "Suck."
Lets hope the new DC baseball team doesn't suck (yeah right).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
While the umps named the wrong player, the player on the far right side of the redskins line wasn't set when the ball was hiked, so the call was a good call. They screwed up, and paid the price. Of course, we could say the first part of that about Bush, and I hope the second as well.
What the fuck does this have to do with ANYTHING??? How about putting some NEWS in your NEWS! For FUCKS sake!!!
Wow, I must have a magic penny. Maybe it will be worth something on ebay!
Complete HOGwash.
I think you're reading WAY too much in this. Get out and vote, rather than saying who's going to win based on a football game...
Holy shit .. by the looks of these replies, you'd think you folks were on his Doctoral comittee and he just submitted this as his Disertation thesis ... ... sweet jesus, it's just a funny coincidence ...
...
... hey, there is no Santa Claus either so I don't want to hear about that weird deer you saw running around on your roof on christmas eve last year, either ...
It's an 'interesting' statistic -- an urban myth. You people are busting out with Chebyshev's law this, and according to Modus Ponens that
hey, news flash, you're not going to find the meaning of life encoded in the articles of slashdot
Wow
Ignoring which team was better each year, the odds are 1/2^14 that the game would predict the outcome of the election (14 elections since 1944). That's .0061%, roughly.
Of course, you gotta realize that they look at all the games played over the years and look for patterns, and ANY football game of the season could possibly be a predictor of who will be elected. In the NFL, there are 32 teams, which have played about 8 games each so far this year. So total number of games played = 32 * 8 / 2 = 2^7. that brings our odds to 2^7/2^14 = 1/2^7 = .75%. Not at all negligible.
Now you can start including multiple criteria for each game. For instance, if the total points stored in the Redskins game is over 30, the incumbent wins. Or, you could change it to a certain party winning. And we're just considering football, imagine if we included games from other sports played this year. The sheer number of baseball games almost guarantees that one annual match-up will be a good predictor of any "coin-flip" event such as a presidential election.
So, the moral is, this isn't the least bit extraordinary.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
If ever an article deserved a flamebait mod, this post certainly does.
nobody gives a shit about statistics when it contradicts the answers they want
Supposedly Halloween mask sales have determined the winner every presidential election.
p x
If Kerry wins, that will break that statistic as Bush is outselling Kerry. Maybe Bush is just scarier !
http://www.buycostumes.com/presidentialmask.as
(Personally, I am looking forward to this trend breaking, enough of these silly pre-determinations!)
Jeez, people, the Steelers just punked the Patriots and broke their streak, and you're talking about the Redskins? /black and gold forever
I know this is light hearted... but this isn't: http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem// I believe in futures markets. If Kerry wins, I reevaluate my belief.
Until then, I'm very worried, because I think these numbers mean something very bad for my guy. We shall see.
THERE'S NO SANTA CLAUS?!?!
lameness filter... it really sucks.
-- The rest of the world
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IMHO Just like dealing with 'indian' violence had to be put on hold until after the Civil War. I really think the war on terror is likely going to need to be put on hold till the US solves some of it's internal problems. And I think this election will reflect that.
The biggest problem that no-one is talking about, but everyone is going to half to face is the trillion dollar question about copyrights. They simply can't survive in an age defined by the unrestricted flow of information so something is going to half to be fought out soon. The question is will the Government finally get it and back off on the copyright gestapo - or will they go full blast untill all hell breaks loose, and they fail crash and burn.
Since Bush is more accountable to the tech industries, and Kerry is more accountable to the legal and hollywood sector. I think a Kerry win will symbolize the copyright battle being fought inspite of the system, a Bush win will symbolize the battle geing fought within the system. It's a tough call.
I have also been informed by reputable sources that the tidal force of the moon affects human behavior, in spite of the fact that monitor you are looking at right now has a greater tidal interaction with you than does the moon.
English is easier said than done.
What was the final score? Packers 28 Redskins 14
What is a Touchdown worth? 6 points + PAT.
Now, the neo-cons are claiming a call on one touchdown prevented them from winning.
Looks like the neo-cons their touchdowns are worth 15 points.
We can see sequences and coincidence in anything. Give me a large enough stat base and I can probably work out the odds of Kerry winning based on the nth decimal place in pi.
A sig is placed here
To display how futile
English Haiku is
Except the poster was asking about the event that the teams tie. In a tie, the Redskins neither lose nor win. The election would then be thrown into complete chaos. One can only hope that never happens, for the sake of the country.
It's bad luck when a black cat crosses your path.
Walking under ladders and breaking mirrors produce similar results.
Slashdot campaigning for Kerry.
If you get your wish, boys, I have a prediction to make. Kerry will be the second president to authorize the use of nuclear weapons.
Every time kids/teenagers have been polled en masse about the presidency, the president they chose won. Strangely enough, Bush came out on top by about 10% in ChannelOne's massive poll of teenagers. Does this mean Bush will win? No, it means superstitions are bullshit.
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
Just like the Redskins were caught trying to cheat the rules and failed on the play in question.
There's also something with the world series win that says Republican in the whitehouse. I don't recall the exact way it is presented, but by the Red Sox winning it corrosponds with republican presidential win.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
That's because Gore was foolish, and only demanded a recount in counties where he expected to do well. That's a dubious strategy anyway, and as you say, it turns out Bush would have "won" counting that way too. (Never mind that it's really a statistical tie and we all pretty much lose.) But when a _real_ recount of all state ballots was conducted by a consortium of newspapers, the results came out with Gore winning by over 20,000 votes. Too bad the Supreme Court didn't order that!
Any argument about predicting 2000 by tea leaves or NH towns can always be argued to be about the popular vote, as opposed to the winner.
One problem with this: http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem// is that they don't have an electoral college vote futures market which would be much more relevant than the popular vote in a close election.
And futures markets can't be expected to function in the event of wholly novel circumstances like a Supreme Court coup d'etat.... so whether it is New Hampshire towns, or futures markets, you can't hold them responsible for the 2000 election outcome, only, perhaps, for things like the total number of votes.
Fluky electoral college votes, and supreme court interventions come under the heading of "acts of (a particularly bloody minded) God"... beyond prediction by futures markets.
The score was 28 to 14 Packers.
was when the Redskins just sort of gave up there. The Packers probably wouldn't have had the scoring opportunity if that touchdown counted, provided the defense kept its act together.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Pro football has "sudden death" ovetimes. First team to score wins. If nobody scores its a tie.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
That's why a third party will never be viable..
You silly... Everybody knows a third party candidate wins whenever the Washington Generals beat the Globetrotters.
No sig
And if I'm right then Nader will Win
...this affect is countered by the Red sox win. Bush will win!!!!
they ask 3,000 out of millions of registered voters. With 3,000 voters the standard deviation will be under 1%, so the probability that too few samples will cause an error of more than +/- 5% is less one in a million. This analysis doesn't consider biased sampling methods and voters changing their minds, but increasing the number of samples won't help with these problems anyway.
Email 262144 people, tell half that the stock will go up next week, half that it will go down. Pick another stock. Repeat 10 times. You will have 256 people who have been given a correct stock tip 10 weeks in a row.
Just because it is possible to find one sports team whose record correlates with the election, it doesn't mean you're on to anything. Nevertheless, it's a lot of fun
.... that Rome fell on a wednesday.
In 1994, we were in a war and the incumbant won.
We were busy in Baghdad, so the US forces kinda gave up the explosives there in Al Qaqaa. They wouldn't have stolen the explosives if we thought those explosives really counted, provided the British and Iraqi defense forces kept their act together.
Yet again, confusing correlation and causation (to misquote Carl Sagan). I'd hazard a guess that it's part of the reason why GWB is there in the first place, because it certainly has nothing to do with democracy!
Bush is not another Hitler!
...Hitler had charisma.
/so going to hell but I don't care.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
monkeys fly out of my ass?
Who does that mean will win? Because it happened to me this monring, I swear it did. While I was watching FOX news, a troop of flying monkeys burst forth from my rectum, wearing bellhop hats and carrying tin cups.. I also heard this strange organ grinder music while it was happening...
Damn, I knew I shouldn't drink Starbucks and watch FOX news at the same time..
...and points are taken off the scoreboard for the Packers, and the Packer were never allowed to have possession of the ball again..."
Sounds like Cheney rationalizing the lack of WoMD in Iraq.
You neo-cons rationalize ANYTHING.
You may argue with Bush's decisions, but the one thing he doesn't do is stick his finger in the wind and do whatever the public tells him to do (a la Clinton).
Just like the time he stood his ground on opposing a department of homeland security in face of public opinion?
Or the time he opposed the creation of a commission to investigate 9/11 in face of public opinion?
Or refused to allow Rice to testify in face of public opinion?
Or refused to testify before the commission in fact of public opinion?
Or stood his ground on campaign finance reform in fact of public opinion?
The Bush administration has collapsed on numerous issues when public opinion has turned against it.
What would you propose then? They had to certify somebody and Bush was ahead after 2 recounts (one was definately illegal, the other was questionable since it was not statewide) and ahead after several more recounts following the certification that were done on the whim of the various press agencies.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Head over to the National Cathedral, i'm sure some voices from the granite will be forthcoming.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
In the regular season, a game can end in a tie of no one scores during the overtime period. In the playoffs and superbowl, they just keep adding overtimes until someone scores.
Except when the connections are logical and verifiable, apparently, --particularly when the results of the observation call for decision-making and back bone.
Bush should have been impeached a couple of years ago for lying and manipulating like a bastard.
-FL
well, the republican convention was held in new york, and the democratic one in boston, so when the red sox came out of a three game hole to beat the yankees, that foretold kerry's win.
. . . either presidential candidate.
The only difference between political parties is how they plan to fuck you out of your hard-earned money and squander it on their friends. Anything else you may believe about politics is bullshit.
Do I sound jaded?
Call 1-800-GETBENT
Actually the redskins won the game before they didn't.
The apathy of the electorate, in *not* demanding better candidates from the major parties, has gotten us into a mess. The parties have no interest in *really* fixing things, because a fixed government is one that doesn't need to give handouts. But the handouts are what buys the votes of the uneducated/ignorant/lazy.
I thought football was that game where the ball was only played with the feet. Oh that's right, you think that's called Soccer. So calling them a base ballteam doesn't seem so odd to me. :)
The redsocks just ended a 86 year streak...
Let's get the future Veep school in on this.
There's got to be some sort of sign when the whole freaking state of Florida loses football games on the weekend before an election.
UNC over Miami? I'm sure that's in Revelations somewhere
This is off topic, but I bet the internet is going to see the some of the worst flame wars in history the night of nov 2.
Anyone else looking foward to it?
As a libertarian, Bush really isn't my favorite - but I just can't see why so many people hate him that badly!
Lets face it - inspite off all the bullshit about WMD's and maby there's even some oil/cronyisim - the simple fact is that Bush moved the front lines on the war on terror out of here and over there. As commander and chief, I really thought he did his job, or atleast made more than a half ass try.
And, as for the economy and jobs, I thought he sucked as a libertarian, but considering all the bad crap that happened with the WTC, oil, corporate scandal, and the stock market that was out of his controll - I thought it could have been a lot worse and that he really softened the damage.
Finally, between sales, property, income, and other misc taxes - the avg person pays up to 40% of their life without even knowing it - does anyone really believe that we're suffering so much because we're not soaking the rich enough. Look, if a rich person does something corrupt to become rich - then lets address that, but don't be jealous or greedy just because someone else has money and you don't. Besides, whens the last time you were ever given a job by a poor person, and becises US law only allows the taxing of income, not wealth - so that means that the guy with a billion in the bank won't even notice - but the small buisness man who makes his first mil and creats 10 jobs will get his nuts ripped off and his teeth kicked in. As much as I don't love Bush, I think he's more sympathetic to the latter.
They can tie. The one football game I've ever been to, an Eagles v Ravens game back in 2000 I think was a 13-13 tie. Funny, since I had grown up in Philadelphia and then moved to Baltimore to go to high school.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
It was on James Thrash and he didn't have to be set because he wasn't moving forward. It was just plain bs. Granted the Redskins played like crap most of the game anyways, but the refs made a bad call which was unfortunately unreviewable (I think).
And in American football, they're refs not umps.
And this doesn't belong on slashdot's front page.
Umpires? Mr. Kerry, please stop playing around on slashdot and go campaign or something.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
What do you think?
I'm John Kerry, and I appove this message. I think.
The definition of a democracy is two wolves and one sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Any of you lefties care to show me any single instance of the US government being defined as a democracy in our Constitution? For bonus points, show me where the right to vote in a federal election is guaranteed.
bzzzzt. Time's up. You'll have to keep waiting for your precious Socialist Utopia, cause it ain't gonna happen on Tuesday. Not on my watch.
Love,
Thomas Jefferson
PS: Move to Canada. They have "free" healthcare there. Just remember that you get what you pay for, and TANSTAAFL.
It's mystifying because it's just so specific, but chances aren't half bad that things like this need to become specific just to maintain the pattern.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I've heard a good explanation for these "amazing coincidences".
Say you take a thousand fourtune-tellers(all fakers) and make them predict some future event.
Say five hundred of them get it right. You then ask them to predict something else. You're now down to 250. Wash rinse and repeat a few more times.
You're now down to one guy who's gotten them all right, around 9 more times. Now ask him another question. His odds? No better than the other thousand, but odds are that 1 of the thousand would make it that far.
Pile up enough events, and you'll get "amazing coincidences".
I don't read AC A human right
Lets assume that all two team/player competitions have no predictive powers, and wins half the time. Lets also assume the incumbent wins half the time. Therefore, on average a team will be 'right' half the time. The probability of a team being 'right' 15 times in a row is 0.5^15, or 1 in 32768.
So, what does all this mean? Not a whole lot. Now, I doubt there are that many major teams/players of any sport that have been around long enough to be right that many times. Also, I'm not sure when they decided to track this specific team's ability to 'predict', but if back in 1936 (or even a fair amount later) they stated that this would happen, it would be interesting.
Also, though it may be unlikely to come up with this kind of sports predictor for any specific 50/50 event, there are many important 50/50 events in the world that may happen to have such a predictor. It's pretty meaningless, but some people clearly have fun looking for them.
About the football games though, that's interesting. I honestly didn't know if they could tie or not.
Bush is cheating - and this fraud screws up the natural order of things.
This looks to be reverse cause and effect? The Redskins lost *because* Kerry wins. It makes perfect sense when coupled with Hawking's views on gravitationally depressed chronospaces.
I find this to be intriguing - yet dangerous, as it is not wise to play with local cosmic areola.
Let me be the first to say that we here at the Bush camp concede early to Kerry. It seems clear that due to this unfortunate turn of events that Kerry has won the election. As a side note, we should also point out that with the election already all but decided, you shouldn't burden yourself on election day with voting if it is an inconvenient, especially if you happen to be black, gay, poor, a college student, or a woman. So stay home. Nothing to see here.
I thought it was well known that the official predictor is the wooly bear caterpillar. It's not just for winter prediction any more.
Don't worry about it too much. Most people agree this is the skins' rebuilding decade.
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
It is a funny story but I would say that the coin would more likely land on it's side than any third party win.
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
hey, news flash, you're not going to find the meaning of life encoded in the articles of slashdot ...
*ponders mios's uid*
7+1+5*7+3-4 = 42
Yeah, since this is regular season game, that limit is 1 OT period; it's a sudden death OT (first score wins).
Black Sunday?
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
To believe otherwise is metaphysics.
I hope this helps.
--- Ban humanity.
Umpire -- Primary responsibility to rule on players' equipment, as well as their conduct and actions on scrimmage line.
Since the Red Sox won the World Series, the fabric of the space-time continuum has been disrupted, and things don't happen the way they're supposed to anymore...
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
I think the real question here is, how the hell have the Redskins been rigging the election for the past 60 years?
"I think it's undeniable that letting those embryos go to waste has significant ethical considerations. Gee, we can use this tissue to advance medical science or we can incinerate it. Man, that's a hard decision."
Or a third option. Not creating them in the first place. But then we wouldn't be human if we didn't create slippery slopes every chance we got.
Probably the most insightful comment yet, because it's true!
The problem Democrats have is not so much the WHAT, but the HOW.
The ideal political situation would have had Bush and Gore shaking hands and jointly petitioning Florida for a statewide recount. (Which Bush would have won). Instead Bush declared victory before the election was certfied.
Yes it means Kerry will win, you Kerry supports don't need to go vote stay at home, and don't bother to vote.
I was hoping for a tie...then this pattern theory could really be put to the test...
Seriously, guys & girls. The only thing that matters on election night is (a) the number of votes cast or (b) the number of lawsuits filed within hours contesting same. Whoever wins, wins based on one of these two factors, possibly both. It's our job to make sure that the process is as fair as possible, not to further devalue the process by trying to find a random-chance way of saying it. Real life should, at some point, come into play.
(Insert segue to next argument topic here; suggestion: electronic voting.)
This is just a dupe of his second last column.
May I ask what money you are referring to?
* Do you earn more than $200,000 a year, if you do: welcome back to 1999. Big deal. You just helped our country. If you earn less than that, you keep your tax break.
* Are you referring to premiums for non-privatized health insurance? That's why Kerry supports a cap on insurance payout: $30,000.01 and up is covered by government. This effectively reduces how much you pay for your insurance premium each year. Privatizing health insurance leads to misinformed citizens and patchy plans - backed by companies that could go under any second in the resulting big business competition.
* Are you referring to the war in Iraq which has cost over $120,000,000,000? Are you not concerned that nearly half of your taxes go to the military and fund this war? That's what is being deducted from your paycheck. Vote with your wallet.
Oh g*d... expect policy changes every 15 minutes for the next 4 years. Start the evacuation.
Flip, flop, flip, flop,.. ad nauseum
So 1944 to 2004 is 60 years - 15 elections (excluding this one) - so the odds of the elections going the same way as the Redskin games (if there is no connection between them) is 1 in 32768.
With the vast numbers of unrelated binary-outcome public events happening close to the elections, it should be possible to find plenty of them with seemingly better predictive power than this one...
Numbers of Florida voters pushing out the wrong cardboard chads for example.
www.sjbaker.org
"The election would then be thrown into complete chaos."
A tie might mean that Congress would decide (no ties allowed in the election). Especially interesting since I think that it is the *outgoing* Congress, so Kerry and Edwards (and possibly Cheney) might conceivably get to vote. Or there could be other tiebreakers (maybe it would go back the home game before that).
Ties are relatively rare in professional football. Maybe once every two or three seasons. We may never know.
Real eh?
Florida recount study: Bush still wins
... and furthermore
There is another way of looking at this sort of thing which I have never seen the sceptic, (as opposed to the skeptic), consider. I'll try to present the idea in this highly simplified manner. .
What if. .
The universe we live in works like a fractal equation? --Think of such an equation represented graphically, like the fractal art which became popular during the nineties. Now consider that you and I, and all our world, everything there is, may all be interconnected, living parts of such an equation.
With me so far? Okay. .
Now say there is a very tiny observer and that he lives as one portion of that fractal graphic. His life and actions are all built into the essence of the graphic. This tiny observer can look across space at another portion of the same graphic, far, far on the other side of the medium in which the fractal graphic exists, (say a computer screen). The portion he is observing on the other side of the screen bears no outward resemblance to the portion he happens to be part of. Further, because he is so very small in comparison to the size of the image as a whole, the fact that the portion he is part of and the portion he is observing on the other side of the screen are in fact connected, is not obvious to him. Indeed, thinks he is looking at a completely unrelated object.
However, because both portions of the image were generated from the same fractal equation, it stands to reason that information can be derived about the portion the observer is standing on by measuring the characteristics of the portion he is looking at.
Now, I don't know anything much about baseball, but the idea outlined above does raise some interesting possibilities, doesn't it?
Also interesting, I find, is that every hard-core sceptic I have ever discussed this subject with, (astrology in particular), has judged the subject very harshly without ever having fully exploring the subject being judged. --Nothing beyond laughing at paper place-mats in Chinese resturauntes or looking at the nonsense astrology section in the lifestyles section of the daily newspaper. These are certainly not proper representatives of a very deeply annotated subject which takes rather a lot of work to properly grasp. I have NEVER met a single harsh judge who has really looked that the subject. Not a single one.
This behavior in itself, (that of making strong judgments based on little or no research), runs counter to the very tenets of the scientific analytical process which is often touted as being the reason such systems cannot exist. Indeed, this paradoxical behavior appears to me to be based on a high degree of blind faith. --Which, according to everything I have learned on the subject, is a faith very much misplaced.
But that's old news to anybody who knows about this stuff. The truly fascinating and immediate question raised by all of this, is why do so many people have such strong automatic responses to the subject, (as evidenced by the various negative responses to this very
Something to chew on. --Or reject out of hand, depending on whether you spell with a 'C' or a 'K'.
-FL
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. This idea of predicting the election is silly. About like watching those signs at the roulette table listing the past numbers and seeing 5 reds come up in a row. You just know that the next number to come up has to be black. No such thing. The last roll has nothing to do with the current roll.
:)
If you want a predictor try this out:
http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_Pres04_WTA.cfm
And if you want put $50.00 on number 35 for me. It is a sure winner.
I know a few people that feel that this election may result in wide spread violence in the streets. In effect a civil war. So far there has been nothing very civil about this election. Just look at the replys to this item. People are split with few people undecided.
Have to say the article is not a bad troll just before the election. The editors might want to watch that in the next couple of days. I am sure there will be more troll arcticles like this. Would be nice to be able to moderate the main article instead of just the replys.
there were zero recounts in most counties. the recounts gore wanted were never completed, not a single time.
David Hume said it best: Cause and effect is bullshit. I'm paraphrasing, of.
Vote on the third?
?-|||-----x<*))))><
But Boston Red Sox has just broken their urban legend (they won). I don't know what might happen with this urban legend.
it does not matter who you vote for, we are all doomed!
photoplankton
If I participated in moderation I'd of modded it funny
The redsox had the "curse" since 1918 it's now broken time to throw this falicy out with it.
Go responsible leadership.
Down with half stated goals.
REAL penguins build their own kernels and binaries!
They both are a combination of socialist, fascist, and communist. Not that we a better candidate could get anything done. It's like the oil prices. The US has not built many refineries for thirty years, and people are suprised by the high oil prices. It's like energy cost. The US has not built any new nuclear reactors, yet people wonder why their electric bill is high. Good grief wake up people. Unless you want to become a tree hugging minimalist your screwed for at least 30 years no matter who you pick. Where is my dam flying car already?
"... a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.
Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
Nader has been hit-and-miss, getting on only 35 state ballots, and the Libertarian Party's Michael Badnarik is on 48. On top of this, the Badnarik campaign has just launched aggressive advertising in four swing states, aimed at fiscal conservatives.
One of them is Arizona, where Nader is not on the ballot. And Libertarians, who have a tendency to attract conservatives, are polling higher all the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if Bush & Co. decided on a major offensive Monday:
It's certainly interesting that a huge number of fresh troops just arrived in preparation for just that.
Would it work against the administration to do this? Polls say no.
Obviously, I'm not sure if they'd be that daring, but if they are, you heard it here first (if they're not, this comment, like most conspiracy theories, will just lapse into oblivion).
Why, right here. And you're right. The Dems are Socialist, Bush is a Fascist. So I voted Libertarian.
...Democrats can safely stay home Tuesday...
dailykos has the details. The GOP doesnt like to lose.
ourvote.com has a site up and a hotline ready. See also: my earlier post on fraud and corruption in American politics.
I care who wins, but I care more about winning legally and properly. I care about every vote being counted. I wish more of my fellow countrymen felt the same way.
Karl Rove must've been out with a pulled hamstring.
I want to remind the rather large group of you that promised to move to Canada if Bush is re-elected that you should be packing and the rest of us expect you to pretty much be gone by the end of the week. That is all. Thank you. Turn off the lights before you leave.
What did Bush ever do to you?
Of course as a cheesehead I am very happy the Packers won, but I am not counting on that to hand Kerry the election. Fortunately, there is another game that will decide it... it is called the election 'ground game'. In this game, armies of volunteers knock on doors, talk to their neighbors, drop off flyers, and give rides to the polls. It is grass roots politics at its finest.
The republicans seem to be finally getting into the ground game this year. Compared to previous elections, their ground team this year is very impressive. Unfortunately for them, the democratic and Kerry supporting groups are fielding a force that is probably four or five times larger. I've been talking to campaign veterans that have been doing this for over 30 years, and they describe the current groundswell of grasroots activism in support of Kerry with words like 'unprecedented' and 'staggering'.
It is also interesting to see the differences in how to ground game is run by both sides. The republican effort is pretty much all the RNC. It is top down, hierarchical, very organized. There are great many dedicated volunteers, but their actions are very cordinated by the campaign.
On the Kerry side, however, it is much more bottom up. There is a huge swath of liberal leaning non-profits and newly created ad-hoc citizen groups all doing their own part. The DNC itself is very experienced at the ground game and just by itself can put up a good fight against the RNC effort. Add all those third party groups to the mix, like MoveOn.org, ACT, the NAACP, the Seria Club, and newcomers like The League of Pissed of Voters... and you begin to see what the Republicans are up against.
Lets put it all in perspective for a moment. Gore was trailing in the polls by up to five points but ended up winning the popular vote due to unexpectedly high democratic turnout. Kerry is now polling about even with Bush, even ahead in some polls, going into the election. All indications are that the Democratic turnout will break records this year. To me, that looks like a Kerry win.
The Bolachek Journals
If they do tie, does that mean they both go into office? God help us!
It is very easy to tell if your ATM withdrawal/deposit went through, by simply calling the bank/going on-line/waiting for your monthly statement. If there was any hint of a impropriety, the bank would drop Diebold like a hot rock (banks rely on their own reputation of trustworthiness in order to be successful).
There is no way to check if your vote was recorded, let alone tallied correctly. The unelected civil servants who run the elections don't give a Tinker's Damn whether your vote went through or not; they just care about their yearly rating and doing just enough to not get written up. The cherry on top of the cupcake is the fact that the average politician is incapable of understanding the technical issues and operational risks behind e-voting, so you won't get any help from that corner.
Yeah, right.
"...The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past 35 years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently "causing" them to produce non-random patterns. A description of the technical implementation is given under procedures. ..."
"...Continuous streams of data are sent over the internet to be archived and correlated with events that may evoke a world-wide consciousness. Examples that appear to have done so include both peaceful gatherings and disasters: a few minutes around midnight on any New Years Eve, the first hour of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, the Papal visit to Israel, a variety of global meditations, several major earthquakes, and September 11 2001...."
Princeton Global Consciousness Project
Kind of freaky.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Here's the deal with the stadiums. Yeah, it was really windy on saturday here..
Here's a copy of the NOTAM (Notice to airmen) from saturday which applies to Michigan Stadium (and also other large seating stadiums).
3/1862 (PREVIOUSLY MISSING TEXT) PART 1 OF 2 SPECIAL NOTICE. THIS NOTICE MODIFIES FLIGHT RESTRICTIONS PREVIOUSLY ISSUED IN FDC NOTAM 2/0199 TO COMPLY WITH STATUTORY MANDATES DETAILED IN SECTION 352 OF PUBLIC LAW 108-7. EFFECTIVE 0303061100 UTC (0600 LOCAL 03/06/03) UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. PURSUANT TO 14 CFR SECTION 99.7, SPECIAL SECURITY INSTRUCTIONS, COMMENCING ONE HOUR BEFORE THE SCHEDULED TIME OF THE EVENT UNTIL ONE HOUR AFTER THE END OF THE EVENT, ALL AIRCRAFT AND PARACHUTE OPERATIONS ARE PROHIBITED AT AND BELOW 3,000 FEET AGL WITHIN A THREE NAUTICAL MILE RADIUS OF ANY STADIUM HAVING A SEATING CAPACITY OF 30,000 OR MORE PEOPLE IN WHICH A MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE, NCAA DIVISION ONE FOOTBALL, OR MAJOR MOTOR SPEEDWAY EVENT IS OCCURING. ALL PREVIOUSLY ISSUED WAIVERS TO FDC NOTAM 2/0199 ARE RESCINDED. THOSE WHO MEET ANY OF THE FOLLOWING CRITERIA MAY REAPPLY FOR A WAIVER TO THESE RESTRICTIONS: (A) FOR OPERATIONAL PURPOSES OF AN EVENT, STADIUM, OR OTHER VENUE, INCLUDING (IN THE CASE OF A SPORTI NG EVENT) THE TRANSPORT OF EQUIPMENT OR PARTS, TEAM MEMBERS, OFFICIALS OF THE GOVERNING BODY, THE IMMEDIATE FAMILY MEMBERS AND GUESTS OF SUCH TEAMS, AND OFFICIALS TO AND FROM THE EVENT, STADIUM, OR OTH ER VENUE, END PART 1 OF 2 WIE UNTIL UFN
PART 2 OF 2 SPECIAL NOTICE. (B) FOR BROADCAST COVERAGE FOR ANY BROADCAST RIGHTS HOLDER, (C) FOR SAFETY AND SECURITY PURPOSES OF THE EVENT, STADIUM, OR OTHER VENUE. THIS RESTRICTION DOES NOT APPLY TO; (A) THOSE AIRCRAFT AUTHORIZED BY ATC FOR OPERATIONAL OR SAFETY PURPOSES INCLUDING AIRCRAFT ARRIVING OR DEPARTING FROM AN AIRPORT USING STANDARD AIR TRAFFIC PROCEDURES; (B) DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, LAW ENFORCEMENT, OR AEROMEDICAL FLIGHT OPERATIONS THAT ARE IN CONTACT WITH ATC. STADIUM SITE LOCATIONS AND INFORMATION REGARDING WAIVER APPLICATIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH SECTION 352 OF PUBLIC LAW 108-7 CAN BE OBTAINED FROM THE FAA WEBSITE AT HTTP://WWW.FAA.GOV/ATS/ATA/WAIVER OR BY CALLING 571-227-1322. PART 2 OF 2 WIE UNTIL UFN
Lesseee, what nonsense has been stepped on this year (steppers listed in parens)?
Curse of the Canadiens: Nobody who beats the Montreal Canadiens in the NHL playoffs wins the Stanley Cup. (Tampa Bay Lightning)
Curse of the Babe: The Red Sox will never win a World Series after trading Babe Ruth in 1920. (The "BoSox" win 8 straight to dispatch the two best teams in baseball to win the WS)
Curse of the Swamp: University of Georgia has lost 13 of the last 14 annual football games against rival University of Florida. (UGA wins 31-24)
Sun always shines on Sunshine State football: The "big three" Florida football programs (U. of Florida, Florida State U., U. of Miami) are too good to all lose on the same day. (all three lose for the first time since 1978, courtesy U. North Carolina, U. Maryland, U. Georgia)
So given the above silliness that has been stepped on this year, I wouldn't bank on this Redskins thing. Besides, if it doesn't hold, consider it a silver lining to have dismissed a bit of nonsense.
Boogedy, Boogedy!
So, whatever happened to that OTHER great presidential superstition, specifically the Zero Factor? Where any president whose term starts in a year ending in zero is assassinated or has an attempted assassination on them?
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
The results of this election might as well be determined based on the outcome of this football game considering the questionable integrity of the electronic voting technology involved. I mean really, the CEO of Diebold publically stating that he's committed to helping deliver electoral votes to the president should be a good sign that Bush is going to win, one way or the other. Is it really that much of a surprise that there isn't a paper trail at all? Who needs to deal with those pesky recounts? Four more wars!
My Pres Votes (Seriously): 1992: Perot 1996: Bob Dole 2000: Libertarian I think it was Harry Brown 2004: No One I'm Moving Away From Big Government Soon I usually vote libertarian if a candidate exists except for president in my first two presidential elections.
Bush is ahead in halloween mask sales. That and the Bin Laden / Putin endorsement might cancel out the game.
... that might mean the rapture.
The Red Sox, however
Too late and, temporarily, bipartisan for a slashdot post.
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
Is that people whine about spelling so much. Seriously folks, get off it. Every browser I've ever used does not have a spell checker. Also a great many people, even computer people (myself included), cannot type without looking at the keyboard, and thus can't see mistakes. Further, many people have a learning deficiency that makes spelling difficult for them (dyslexia would be one, but there are others). Finally, even people who have no problems otherwise, still make spelling mistakes.
This is all not to mention the numerous posters for whom English isn't their first language.
So really, shut the fuck up about spelling on an informal Internet forum already. People screw up here, and as it's quite informal, aren't going to go get it copy edited to make sure everything is correct.
The fallicy/fallacy is an easy one to make. It's not a word you type that often, so most people are guessing on spelling. Now, most American accents pronounce the second syllable as though the vowel was an i, not an a. Thus when one is guessing at the spelling, fallicy is a reasonable guess.
I mean really, the spelling and grammar nazis here need to just can it. It doesn't make you look intelligent, just petty. If the only thing you can attack is the form of someone's post, not the content, it means you have no real argument.
the man has a well documented history of going after corruption regardless of all his fellow senators and everyone else in washington telling him it would ammount to political suicide. beginning with Kerry's uncovering of what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, he and his staff spearheaded investigations that went straight to the white house -- a dangerous place for a senator to point their finger, to say the least.
I never realized how much I enjoy trolling on Slashdot until I actually started doing it. Oh yeah- fuck the geeks.
When you're trying to mass-troll, the 2 minute limit really sucks balls.
Also, if you keep hitting submit, it's interesting how the "Preview Comment" and "Post Comment" table items keep moving to the left and right a few MMs between each press of submit.
Long live useless trolling. BTW, I've been drinking. Happy Halloween
Luser
Note that Boston just won the World Series in Busch stadium.
So what does this lead me to believe? That it's a sign that I'll be partying come Tuesday, too! I hope Kerry pulls it out!
Dear USA,
We've decided to step in to fix a problem you seem to be having.
Unfortunately, the election of your President impacts many of us greatly. While it has been a source of considerable amusement to us in the past, recently we have become less tolerant of the outcomes it has produced.
Starting today, here is the amended process whereby a US president gets elected:
- US citizens get together to elect a US Presidential *candidate*. Your current options: Bush, Kerry, various others nobody cares about. Method: Toss a coin, spin a bottle, use the results of a sporting event nobody cares about. We don't care, so knock yourselves out
- candidate is put forward to the rest of the world to decide whether he/she/it is suitable. Their current options: winner of Bush/Kerry, "go find someone else". Method: secured regulated ballot process, as used in nearly all Western countries for many years without problems. Feel free to read up on it some time if you're interested
- results announced: "go find someone else"
- repeat approx 300 million times, or until point is made...
WE REALLY LIKE YOU AMERICANS, BOTH INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY. SURE, YOU DRESS FUNNY AND MAKE US LAUGH WHEN YOU'RE IN INTERNATIONAL VENUES, BUT YOU'RE REALLY NICE PEOPLE REGARDLESS AND WE LOVE HAVING YOU ALONG FOR THE RIDE. ON TOP OF THAT, YOU'VE GOT SOME OF THE REALLY SMART PEOPLE IN THE WORLD LIVING IN YOUR COUNTRY. HOWEVER, WHAT CRAZY SYSTEM LETS YOU IGNORE THE REALLY GOOD PEOPLE AND SPIN OUT SUCH LEADERSHIP CANDIDATES AS YOU MANAGE TO COME UP WITH?
Ahem, sorry about that. Anyway, please understand that these changes take place immediately, no correspondence will be entered into, yada, yada, yada.
Yours truly,
God (no, NOT yours, and not yours either. In fact you were all wrong, and what the hell made you think I'd give a stuff about you tiny little humans anyway?)
Remember to get out and vote for Dubya on Nov. 3rd.
All of these polls (and especially the superstitions) are a crock of shit.
Isn't Bush supposed to be done in by an assasins bullet?
I mean, the 0 year "curse" has been responsible for the deaths of US Presidents longer than the Redskin election "prophecy" has been around.
So I'd say the 0 year curse trumps the Redskin Prophecy and I see you one war before 2006.
One can hope we can inspire enough counter spin to get a sea of blue, the likes of which will counter a lot of the spin (read:LIES) out there in the final week.
Kerry's gonna win 28-14?
The vote would go to the House of Representatives, and Kerry and Edwards are both senators, and Cheney's vote would be in the Senate if it were to be necessary. None of those three would get to vote.
http://www.nbc.com/The_West_Wing/episode_guide/2.h tml
Besides, the Redskins had to lose today. I'm wearing my good socks.
Does this imply more people voting for Bush/against Kerry won't have the same effect?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Now's your chance. Come up with some weird prediction method, the more looney the better.
If you are wrong, no-one will care.
If you are right, you can get a spot on a talk show and be feted as the next market statistics guru!
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
To get our congressmen and senators to get rid of the stupid electoral college so everyone's vote counts for something - instead of just counting for something in the states their candidate wins in =/
And it looked exactly like the number "7". When that happens it means a few things:
1) Democrats become president
2) My penis grows 48 inches (cool, eh?)
3) I meet a girl with an 8 foot deep vagina (and this time she doesn't moo)
4) My ferrari needs new brake pads
5) I've been looking at my own poop again
So please, everyone look at the poop that makes you think happy thoughts. We'll get together and compare notes REAL SOON.
PS: "The Sky Is Fallin'" by Queens Of The Stoneage is a really great song after hearing it 10 times for some reason.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
So would you ban fertility clinics? 'Cos they create lots of embryos, most of which don't end up implanted in a woman's uterus.
mmmmm ketchup. although I prefer del monte
What you describe is a break against religious moral and not an ETHICAL decision. Using stem cell for something other than what the "great plan of God" is against religious moral. On the other hand, ethic does not burden itself with "religious moral" but about what is right to do within a society. Proof : if you erase the religious moral from the debat, by going in a more religious relaxed society (and do not mistake it US society at large is really religious strict, just look at how easily have people censor some book or other stuff but that is another debat) then the religious moral argument DISAPPEAR and stem cell research becomes "authorised" or ethical for the purpose of curing illness. If it was only a question of ethic then every western society would in mass have blocked stem cell research. But it is not the fact, even western traditional catholic countries have authorised it (France / Italy ?). Now those country have imposed a ban on stem cell research for OTHER purpose (reproduction, Cosmetic etc...).
Now about the real ethical question : Is it ethic to let go a mass of cell go to waste , and be incinerated, when it could be used to search for cures against illness that would heal people with sever neural injury ? No it is not have already decided many country the other side of the pond.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
[What's even more fascinating] Is that people whine about spelling so much.
Maybe because not making the effort to use proper spelling and grammar demonstrates a lack of respect for the reader? Nobody's perfect, but even without a spell checker you can catch the vast majority of your errors by just re-reading your post, and if you don't know the spelling of a word, there's a handy thing called a dictionary (there are even online dictionaries) to help you out. I'll agree that criticizing another's errors is generally uncalled for, but the nature of Slashdot (an "informal Internet forum", as you put it) doesn't mitigate the impression your post makes on readers--especially given the emphasis many people here seem to put on proper spelling and grammar.
Just a thought . . .
If you search hard enough, perhaps even with a search engine, you can always find some oddball coincidence that coincides with which party wins the presidential election. So what?
It reminds me of all those great psychics who predicted the last 18 earthquakes. Ya, but they forgot to tell you that they also predicted the last 1800 that never happened.
I watch Brit Hume on Fox News
He won by about 200 votes according to a joint recount by several major papers, any way the votes would have been counted. Perhaps you're citing a different recount.
However, many people are so worked up over this election and the results of the last one that I believe we'll see the highest percentage of young voters in a long time. Most younger voters lean more towards the left.
Channel One, which has never failed in predicting elections, had Bush up by 10. Also, Weekly Reader had Bush winning, and they have never been wrong either.
You should never assume which way a demographic will vote. Bush is even up among blacks by twice the amount he was in 2000.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Nobody is trying to sneak into Sweden.
I realize this is just a mud slinging match at this point, but as a matter of fact, Sweden has quite high immigration, including plenty who try (and succeed) sneaking into the country.
I personally went the other direction and left Sweden for California. Long story...
How much money did these guy spend on the campaigns? How much money does it cost to fix baseball games these days?
Yeah I can believe the psychological impact on the electorate alone would be enough to swing the election to Kerry.
So now the question is, how does Kerry get all those cynical young guys to join the military to go off to the middle east and fight for USrael? Its not like they have fresh-off-the-farm guys like my father to volunteer for overseas conflicts anymore. Most of the GI generation's boomer children got economically sterilized so there isn't a pool of naive dutiful kids to sucker with Disney animations of pompous Muslim clerics goose stepping around.
They'll have to do something really dramatic to get them excited about fighting for "their country".
I know! How about killing a school full of children? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Seastead this.
To which the Bush camp must surely say, "Why, just look at what happened to Boston's curse! Not only did they beat the Yankees, but went on to win the World Series, free to dominate baseball for the next four years, invade enemy team locker rooms preemptively with baseball bats to take away the opponents' ability to fight them on the field, and attack cities that are known to harbor and aid other teams."
= 9J =
Actually, you're incorrect.
The Bush administration nixed federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
Adult stem cell research is still fully sponsored by the federal government and the Bush administration.
Private funding for embryonic stem cell research is still legal as well.
Actually, this makes sense. If you needed stem cell therapy in the future, wouldn't you want to use adult stem cells harvested from yourself, rather than stem cells harvested from an embryo that has a stranger's DNA?
if you wanted Redskins to win to guarentee the Bush Win, well then, the cat is in the bag and you have nothing to worry about. Have a drink. Have a few more. Throw a great several day party. :)
Today, my name is evil George
Hmmm...This week it's pulling sticks out of my ass. Last week it was shitting bricks. I really need to change my diet.
Some of the objectionable actions they made note of include:
- Ordered massive changes to a section on global warming in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2003 Report on the Environment. Eventually, the entire section was dropped.
- Replaced a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fact sheet on proper condom use with a warning emphasizing condom failure rates.
- Ignored advice from top Department of Energy nuclear materials experts who cautioned that aluminum tubes being imported by Iraq weren't suitable for use to make nuclear weapons.
- Established political litmus tests for scientific advisory boards. In one case, public health experts were removed from a CDC lead paint advisory panel and replaced with researchers who had financial ties to the lead industry.
- Suppressed a U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist's finding that potentially harmful bacteria float in the air surrounding large hog farms.
- Excluded scientists who've received federal grants from regulatory advisory panels while permitting the appointment of scientists from regulated industries.
To me this is fear of science - fear that scientific inquiry will derail Bush's political agenda, which is largely driven by religious fundamentalists and big business interests.Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
How bad has it become when people actually take chance and a bunch of useless idiots tossing a ball around seriously! I see this as an indicator of the state of how we view football statistics as the modern reading of entrails, tea-leaves, bumps on the head, etc.
Tyler: You don't know where ive been, Lou. YOU DONT KNOW WHERE IVE BEEN!!
NO , public vote in the US is worthless and just for show. You dont live in a democracy where its the public who decide who gets to be leader ( sorry Bush is not a real president in my eyes ) of your country.
Its the college electoral vote that decided and will again decide who is your President and they voted for Bush last time and probably will too this time too , any moron who cant see that one when 85% of the population voted for Gore is a moron of an Etats-Unians.
Real American live in a democracy thats why your country is called United States "OF America" , you live in a republic.
Really now how many omens do you need?
Four, or my name isn't Damian.
I predict Bush will beat the odds.
http://spellchecker.mozdev.org/
It has been around for a while and was recently accepted into the Mozilla trunk. Don't think it's just a cheap hack.
Alternatively, quick search turned this up for IE. With the right design, something as simple as a spell check should be quick and painless. Some IM clients even have a live spell check built in which can be of great use. Nothing can beat the live spell checker for helping you pick up on your own problem words. Or do what I recently did and parse through the last five years of IRC chat logs to find your most common mistakes. That was ugly, let me tell you! I can't make the rest of the world love my crappy spelling so fixing it is all I've got. But at least after doing that I felt a little better about myself.
But seriously, learn how to type ;)
With the Bush gang proven willing to steal elections (Florida 2000), their backers in position to declare the electronic voting results to be whatever they want (Dibold, no audit trails etc.) and a result that is likely to be close enough that poll-fixing will tip the result it seems probable that Kerry will win but Bush will remain in office.
"I find it extremely unethical that anyone would stand in the way of potentially finding cures for many diseases. That is, essentially, what you do when you stand in the way of embryonic stem cell research."
Would you stand in the way of using Joseph Mengele's research if you knew it was the only way you'd stay alive?
See that's the funny thing about using "people's lives" as the yardstick for doing what's right, and what's wrong. There is no wrong, for all can in one fashion or another be justified in the name of "saving lives".
So what's a few million dying in a concentration camp, if it cures billion's across the planet? The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few.
"When your "ethics" put the value of cells doomed to die anyway above those that are living, I would call that egregiously unethical."
Concentration camp prisioners=="cells"
In other words, as the economy grows faster, the average distance from the ground to the bottom of the typical woman's skirt rises, revealing more and more leg.
Then what explains the full-length black dresses worn by women living in major petroleum exporting countries?
The rest of the World doesn't give a fsck about baseball (except a few Americanophiles in Japan and Cuba).
But I can assure you the rest of the World gives a fsck about the US presidential election, because their life is affected by it even though they don't have any influence on it.
And they sure as hell root for Kerry.
Let us not forget that the Boston Red Sox actually won the world series in a sweep and everyone said they would never ever win a world series again.
Yes, but only because the Swedish border with Mexico is so heavily guarded.
FWIW other developed nations have a problem with illegal immigrants, in Australia it's even an election issue - and they're an island continent!
The US is one of the few (only?) developed nations to directly share a border with a 3rd world nation, that is the reason there are so many people trying to sneak in.
A tie might mean that Congress would decide (no ties allowed in the election). Especially interesting since I think that it is the *outgoing* Congress, so Kerry and Edwards (and possibly Cheney) might conceivably get to vote. Or there could be other tiebreakers (maybe it would go back the home game before that).
RTFC (Read the F Constitution). In the case of no candidate winning a mayority of the votes (and a plurality doesn't count) the NEW house gets to choose the president and the NEW senate gets to choose the VP. I'm not sure if Kerry or Edwards get a vote, or what would happen if the vote gets tied in the senate again (since normally the VP casts the deciding votes). But it is possible that we could end up with a Bush/Edwards presidency.
OK, now we understand how the US president gets picked:
- it's not by popular vote
- it's not by the 30% who actually vote
- it's not by the 15% who haven't been brainwashed by Faux News.
- it's not be the electoral college
- it's not by the Florida state secretary
- it's not by the spineless Democrats who act as if the Republicans played fair.
- it's not by the Florida supreme court
- it's not by the US supreme court
- it's not by the Republicans who suppress the
votes from the poor and the non-white
It's by a fscking baseball game!
If you happen to be a Redskins fan in this thread and have never been to www.extremeskins.com you better check it out.
I've seen a picture of that while browsing at -1!
Hitler called, and he said "You should just let it go. Life is too short."
Lick my butt and suck on my balls!!
So there are 9 choices the boston red sox have predicted.
.
I wonder if the number of times I masturbated last year % 3 predicts the outcome
Or the number of times I masturbated last year % 5
Or the number of times I masturbated last year % 7
Or the number of times I masturbated last year % 11
. .
I'm sure there are all kinds of random variable that have nothing, or almost nothing to do, with a chance as large as 1/512 that predict the election.
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
This behavior in itself, (that of making strong judgments based on little or no research), runs counter to the very tenets of the scientific analytical process which is often touted as being the reason such systems cannot exist. Indeed, this paradoxical behavior appears to me to be based on a high degree of blind faith. --Which, according to everything I have learned on the subject, is a faith very much misplaced.
The reason why scientific people respond in such a manner is because such thinking undermines the very point and thesis of science itself. For instance, if my experiment can be tangentially connected to/affected by the arbitrary pattern of lights formed in the sky above a particular location on a particular planet hurtling through space (which is what astrology, for instance, is), why even bother experimenting?
Furthermore, even if the universe were constructed in such a way, how could we even begin to understand it or prove that it does? It would be similar to trying to experiment for the existence of God. Science is limited to the physical world, and most mindful scientists are very careful not to interject scientific theories on what are really meta-physical questions.
-Grym
As the parent said, think before you vote.
Time to go vote yourself into another war, america?
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Once again, we the people of the world, are confusing the law of probability and the law of averages. What we have here is a string of 1s on the 0 or 1 random binary generator. Just because the average is .5 doesn't mean long strings of 1's don't happen.
The fact that the redskins have "predicted" the presidential election for the last 60 years is nothing more then an interesting coincidence and has no more basis in reality then saying it raining on election day somewhere had the same effect (And if you look you'll find such a place I'm sure).
I was once told that if there are 30 million license plates in a state, the odds of seeing a certain license plate are one in 30 million. Since the license plate I was looking at on the car ahead of me was distinct I was experiencing a one in 30 million event, just like everyone else driving down the road with a car ahead of them.
Its not hard to bend statistics people.
Spell checker for Firefox (open source)
Spell checker for Opera (open source)
Spell checker for Internet Explorer ($15)
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Elder Bush wins the election of 2004 either way.
Everyone repeat after me... Correlation does not prove causality... correlation does not prove causality.
People seem to forget that Clinton had NATO bomb Serbia and Kosovo.
http://cubalan.net.nz.nyud.net:8090/kiwibank/P1010 006.JPG
more more
Man, I have been a reader of slashdot.org since it opened and I always read, just never post. But I can't believe all the liberal pinko commies on the board... Where are all the republicans?
Certainly slashdotters are too intelligent to buy into this line of thinking. If not, then why not trade voting for a football game every four years and save everyone a lot of grief.
For the record, I think all of your choices are poor. None of the candidates is worth a warm bucket of spit.
"Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right..." -- Stuck In The Middle With You by Stealers Wheel
...On one of the last plays of the game the Redskins scored to take the lead. AFTER the play had been completed a flag was quietly tossed in the backfield. A flag that was thrown for absolutely no visible reason - look for yourself. That flag effectively ended the game for Washington. We're not talking about a "bad call" we're talking about a call on a game winning play after the fact that was fabricated. Could it be that professional football has lowered itself to the level of the media at large and indeed the frenzied and violently vocal anti-bush lemmings? You decide...
I used to fear clowns...but I'm discovering that chimps are far, far, worse.
It appears that many of the /. readers still think Gore "won" the 2000 election by winning the popular vote. If Bush wins this election but loses the Electoral College, will you be crying and whining just as loudly for the next 4 years? I didn't think so.
PS. I'm not voting for Bush and didn't in 2000.
It's a statistical tie right now, right? Undecided voters (about 5% of the population right now) tend to vote against the incumbent. Newly registered voters, who aren't being polled very much for some reason, are overwhemingly Kerry supporters. I'd be surprised if Shrub breaks 220 electoral votes.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Jerry Rice's Catches and the Niners' games where they scored at least once among many others.. I think this could be another one of those streaks coming to an end very soon..
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
Given how well he did do against Green Bay, I think it will be close but Bush will pull it out. If Washington won, Bush would shut out Kerry like Regan did to Mondale in 1984. Kerry surely deserves to be shut out like that but I think the Dem's have bought too many people with the $8 billion+ campaign. Certain big businesses own Kerry. Look at his contributors sometime.
Maybe Osama Bin-Laden gets caught, WMD's are found in Iraq, Arafat dies today and peace is achieved in the middle east. How is that for a November surprise?
I certainly don't recall anywhere near the amount of derision coming from the rest of the world during Clinton's stint as president. Even during the sex scandal the rest of the world was at most a mildly amused spectator.
George Bush as president is such a mind bogglingly funny idea it almost defies parody.
While it may be easier to "tear down than build up" it seems it only takes money and connections to build a cretin into a president.
You are right in a way though, while the US talks to the world as if it is God's gift to the planet the rest of the world will certainly enjoy poking fun at it. Disdain and disrespect for those who hold themselves as better than you is not just natural, it's probably healthy too.
That doesn't just go for the US. In most western democracies I've been to there has been a healthy lack of respect for those in power. It's part of keeping the bastards honest. Sadly it seems, at least from afar, that too many Americans take criticism of their president as an affront to the country itself rather than an indication he might not be doing a good enough job for your country.
At the end of the day though those that are pointing out that your emporer has no clothes are right, he's a moron plain and simple.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The Virgina Republican Party has filed a lawsuit contesting the final score of the Washington Redskins game, stating that several of the Green Bay players were illegally enrolled in the NFL
rilly kicked some patriot butt:-):-):-) so does that presage another new englander butt-kicking???
it does not matter who gets elected president, the US Govt. are going to continue doing what it been doing for years and that is smoke & mirror politics , voodoo economics = being the whore & lapdog for big businesses, and taxing the hell out of the little people for all they can possibly milk out of em...
If Kerry wins I bet you will say in 4 years "well, I didn't know how bad he could be." That is what Marylanders said when they elected Shaeffer, then Glendenning, then all the stuff we SHOULD have known came out.
If Kerry gets in, God help us! The UN will have much more of a say in our country and we can look forward to Hilary being on the Supreme court (not a good thing). In short it will be the beginning of the end of life as we know it, Komrade. Thought police will be around to pick you up soon. Think people, Lincoln was a Republican, Eisenhower (Republican) and GHW Bush (Republican) appointed the ONLY black Supreme court Justices (the last one the Dems fought hard to stop, even coming up with a BS charge of "sexual harrasment", a crime that didn't even exist at the time and a crime Clinton got away with), Eisenhower sent in troops to desegrigate schools. The Dem's have opposed all that stuff.
You seem to having the whole CO2 thing backwards. We first had a causal explanation how CO2 could lead to global warming (i.e., the greenhouse effect). I hope you're not questioning that this causal effect actually works in small scale -- an actual greenhouse -- as there seems to be quite a few greenhouses that use it to keep warm. Note that this is quite different from the game in question here, where the causative link still needs to be established.
The causal explanation on a global scale was first forwarded in in the late 19th century by Swedish chemist and 1903 Nobel Laureate Svante Arrhenius, largely as an attempt to explain ice ages. At the time his peers largely rejected his theory. So the hypothesis is about a century old, and the data on which the correlations are based is also a century old. You might want to try another example to make your point, because although there is still ground to question the validity of the greenhouse effect on a global scale (does the effect scale up?), there is currently more evidence (both statistical and causative) that points to the existence than to the non-existence of the effect. It's definitely not absolutely certain that it is the case, but probable enough to try to reduce CO2 emissions.
Everyone repeat after me... It's a fucking joke... It's a fucking joke...
Democrats only like voting rights when it's in their favor....
You think you are so superior, that if your candidate loses, it's not because the other candidate won more electoral votes, it's because other people are so much stupider than you, you know it all, and you know better than everyone else what is best for them. Even if Kerry were to make a better president than Bush, you think making it so by doing something illegal.
I know your post was tongue in cheek, but I also know that humor comes from reality, and that that thought was in your mind, and I also know that many liberals actually do feel that way. The worst part is they don't understand why it's wrong.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Any other year I'd say this is true but looks like Bush will win, The RedSox fouled up everything this year.
yeah but the red sox won the world series...
all bets are off this year.
ôó
What is this... "football" you speak of? Perhaps a new distro?
Was an interesting book... don't know that I got a lot of useful information out of it, but it basically says what you are saying.
Millionaires (those with a net worth of $1 million or more) tend not to waste money. People driving BMWs and Mercedes actually, typically, make much less.
There are anecdotal cases either way (my wife used to ask if she could have a Mercedes... I said "yes, buy we'd have to live in it"), but most marginally wealthy people got that way from being thrifty.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Actually, it means that if you are going to vote for Bush, then you are voting for a loser. (which goes without saying) So you had better change your vote to Kerry, so you can say that you voted for a winner.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Actually, my wife will be working her first election, tomorrow. She's VITALLY interested in the process, and cares that it work correctly. Her father worked the elections, years ago. (In this light, the question we asked ourselves yesterday was, "Why did it take her this long to sign up to work an election?") For that matter, my mother used to work the elections, too. As far as I can tell, most of the election workers are locals, ordinary people, hired for the day, and share that motivation with my wife.
Aside from the part of your post denigrating the poll workers, I have to agree with you. Fortunately in our precinct, we have optical readers and use 'fill in the circle' ballots. I didn't realize how lucky we were until the Diebold fiasco started brewing in the past year or two.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The truly fascinating and immediate question raised by all of this, is why do so many people have such strong automatic responses to the subject, (as evidenced by the various negative responses to this very /. article), and how does this affect society and the role of the human participant in that society?
I imagine it's because we have overwhelming evidence that this is not how the universe works, and we've seen no evidence to support this type of universe model.
The "shrub" moniker, on the other hand, is a real side-splitter.
The whole problem with stupidly (or evilly) designed e-voting machines is that there is no possibility of a recount. There is no audit trail (e.g. printed ballots in addition to electronic counts). There are no physically stable counters. For example, Viriginia used pinball counters before going to WinVote. India uses battery backed counters in sealed tamper proof enclosures controlled by a few hundred lines of public assembly code.
there were zero recounts in most counties. the recounts gore wanted were never completed, not a single time.
In your world, that may be true.
In this case the win isn't foretelling, it's the fact that the win was controversial.
If tied at the end of regulation and no one scores in overtime, then a regular season NFL game is declared tied. In the playoffs they keep going until someone scores.
Litterally millions of VW Bug sized flying saucers stream out of previously hidden holes in the North and South Poles. All communications sattelites owned by the varous networks, cable companies and directv types are taken over. We see George, Dick, John and John being maneuvered against their will by three foot tall munchkins wielding spears with blue glowing tips. All the presidential candidates look ragged, their clothes are torn, and John Kerry has a black eye. Dick Cheney trips over his untied shoelace, and is promptly prodded by one of the spears. The spears must be similar to cattle prods, for sparks fly from the tip, and Dick Cheney jumps three feet into the air grabbing his ass. When he lands, he gives the spear wielding munchkin an evil sideways glance. Soon we see him pop a pill, and hold his chest. Is he dying of a heart attack?
ZZZZAP! "Frikken A you little..." from the cameraman who pans right and down. We are looking into the face of one of the munchkins. The munchkin is making rapid fire high pitched purring sounds and brandishing the glowing spear at the flummoxed cameraman. The furless creature sounds almost exactly like an Ewok - a pissed off Ewok. A few Zaps from the spear, and the camera is soon pointing to the left of the candidates. On red throne with gold trim sits Ralph Nader. He seems to have put on alot of weight, and has four or five days growth of beard. He is wearing a red suit with white trim.
"Is this thing working? Testing testing 1 2 3.. Erhem.. ", the technical glitches having been smoothed out, Nader's voice takes on a soothing tone, "My fellow Earthicans, although, as you can see, our little friends here are now in complete control of the Earth, ( camera pans briefly to the kneeling candidates ) and resistance is futile, let me assure you that you have nothing to fear. Although your human biomass has taken too large a fraction of the planet's life carrying capacity, the human species will not be allowed to destroy itself. A full one tenth of you will remain uneaten."
Just then Ralph Nader seems to grow even fatter. The buttons of his red coat burst, and the world sees a huge gaping maw open in his gut. One by one, the terrified candidates are pushed into Ralph Nader's gut to be devowered. Their shreaks and cries pierce the night. "Waste not want not." Says Nader.
Nader: "These wildlife control measures could have been avoided if you had only chosen to elect me president. I'm not sore about it though. You poplars are yummy to the tummy."
Many of my family is of Irish American descent, and many of them fund the IRA. They call them patriots, I say they stopped being patriots when they started using terrorist style activities to try and win their way. Bombs being placed in subways are not patriotic acts. A patriot fights for freedom in a country he loves, not attack the innocent people who is trying to free from oppression. OTOH, America, strangely enough, is founded on terrorism. We celebrate our proud heritage of performing terrorist attacks on English soldiers. It all depends on who wins the way which side ends up being "evil" to history. George Orwell would be proud.
I'm not saying the terrorist attacks are right, hell no. No one can say that. But Americans tend to believe what they want to. They tend to see everything with blinders on. We tend to act like we are the only people who have ever gotten terrorized, and that we are the great glowing good that will save the world from evil. But really, we are just scared little children, looking for someone to blame so we can beat them up and feel better when the world is safe again. I guess this sort of thing was easier when we had one big evil to blame all of our ills on. But after communist Russia fell, we had no one to blame anymore about the state of the world but ourselves. And Americans hate to look in the mirror, for we are fat and greedy, and it shines through like a beacon of pain.
click me
You know what? Sometimes people just want to have fun. Party pooper.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I only support legally cast ballots. If a person doesn't have the right to vote then their vote shouldn't be counted (i.e. non-US citizens, people who aren't residents of the state where the election is held, unregistered residents, and felons in many states.) That also goes for people who can't even fill out the freaking ballot.
Now that you KNOW Kerry is going to win, all of you Kerry supporters can now relax; as a matter of fact, there is no longer any reason for you to even show up and vote!
"Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." -- Tony Snow
At least Nashville has the opportunity to make it happen, until they chose to name the team for the state.
As a Wisconsinite - and being in a swing states, we're being pummelled with ads and visits from Kerry and Bush that it's impossible to get away from it for 10 minutes.
It's gotten so bad, that one TV station stopped taking ads from all political campaigns because they were running out of spots for their long-time advertisers.
Making the campaign about a poorly played football game was a nice break from the nonsense and seriousness of the campaign.
But none of it means I don't read the papers and that I don't plan to vote.
man: "well, i believe i'll vote for a third party candidate"
kang: "ha ha ha, go ahead, throw your vote away!"
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
In the Florida case (and New Mexico and a few others), it was clear that given the level of inaccuracy (dimpled chads, confusing ballots, people turned down at the voting booth, people too stupid to vote according to their intentions, machine trouble, counting troubles), the votes themselves were not reliable enough to use as a decision. In such a situation recounting does not solve the issue, only another election round can.
A) No (large American) war in 1994 B) No (large American) election in 1994 Perhaps you meant... Heck, I have no idea what you meant.
Hmmm, the most active article on Slashdot is about football and politics. It doesn't seem like "news for nerds" anymore, it seems more like "news for dorks".
A real nerd doesn't care about politics, since its run by all the popular rich guys that made fun of us all through school.
Sleep is for the Weak
GB wins in Washington.
GB. Green Bay?
GB. George Bush?
Friends don't let friends vote Dumb-o-crat.
Kenny P.
Visualize Whirled P.'s
If Bush won it would be a bad omen for his last 4 years, if Kerry won it would mean next election would be even more dumbed down - millions of people would be watching the Redskins to see the result, and political journalists and news stations would actually be basing their predictions on it. Then there would be some kind of scandel over who got paid to take a fall. All I can say is GO GREENBAY! DOWN WITH BOOSH W00T!
However, this really doesnt fill me with confidence:
"Oh, yeah, he's going to win. It's guaranteed," said Packers safety Darren Sharper, a Kerry supporter. "I don't have to vote now. Don't even have to go to the polls. Saved me a trip."
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The apathy of the electorate, in *not* demanding better candidates from the major parties, has gotten us into a mess.
yes. The fact that the Republicrats only have to play to the center means you must have an uninspired candidate with uninspired ideas. Gotta play to the middle.
Want democratic reform in the USA? Switch to Instant Runoff Voting. Keep the electoral college (to appease the american-democracy-is-religion masses) and Watch the Sparks Fly.
The parties have no interest in *really* fixing things, because a fixed government is..
A fixed or 'constant' or 'unchanging' Government isnt much of a Democracy. The Republicrats conspire to exclude all opposition. You yanks are in a terrible rut, and breaking the Republicrat Logjam could be an terrific "american democracy is great" bi-partisan opportunity for substantive democratic reform.... it has to come from the rank-file of each base.
one that doesn't need to give handouts. But the handouts are what buys the votes of the uneducated/ignorant/lazy.
This is ignorant nonsense. This is pure anti-gummint trash. Are you suggesting that your entire system is corrupted by simple gummint-citizen payola? I think this underestimates the issue by a order of magnitude.
This might also mean that your the pot calling the uneducated/ignorant/lazy-kettle black..? Youve reduced the problem to such simplicity because it reenforces your worldview. Its a trap.
no doubt many americans are superstitious and the redskins election game statistic has received a decent amount of news exposure. so will the republicans give up and skip the polls in lieu of an imminent loss? or will this invoke a rally to lead them to victory?
In the case of no candidate winning a mayority of the votes (and a plurality doesn't count) the NEW house gets to choose the president and the NEW senate gets to choose the VP. I'm not sure if Kerry or Edwards get a vote, or what would happen if the vote gets tied in the senate again (since normally the VP casts the deciding votes). But it is possible that we could end up with a Bush/Edwards presidency.
New Senate means new Senate. Neither Kerry nor Edwards are running for Senate this time so neither would vote. Another interesting thing is that in the House each state gets only one vote, e.g. all 53 Californian representatives vote among themselves and submit that as their vote, etc. That means some states (with split delegations) might have to abstain. According to CNN (sorry, no link) this could result in the Vice President chosen by the Senate becoming 'Acting President' if the House is tied. President Cheney? President Edwards? It's possible!!
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
When you consider how the Skins game ended (with a questionable call taking away a Portis TD that would have won it for the skins), that would translate to a questionable legal decision deciding the election. That part is almost sure to happen, given all the shysters, I mean lawyers both sides have hired.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Do you want this guy for another 4 years? http://static.vidvote.com/movies/bushuncensored.mo v/
Football teams are the surest predicter of everything. So if you believe in Kerry just stay home, it is in the bag. Kerry/Edwards so much crap it takes two Johns.
...the Redsox won the World Series, breaking the "curse of the Bambino" so maybe this is a year of things not happening like they always do.
but it is also a ridiculous means of
acertaining the outcome of an election.
Jeb Bush guaranteed W would win Florida
in 2000 (and now again in 2004). Diebold's
CEO has guaranteed that W will win Ohio
in 2004. Between these assertions, and
the VOA-RNC voter registration fiascos
that have been playing out in multiple
states, I would put my money on a Bush
"win" (by any means necessary). It isn't
for nothing that the TX GOP (and Hassert)
made a complete mockery of redistricting.
I suspect, however, that a Bush "win" will
have some serious political and legal
blowback, not unlike RM Nixon's troubles.
I will look forward to seeing the whole
GOP neo-con band of thugs tried before
the ICC for war crimes, and tried in the
USA for derelection of duty and treason.
The 2004 election will not be over until
the last bullet isi recounted ad nauseum.
I, for one, welcome our new UN election
monitor overlords.
See Piers Anthony's horrible drek^W^Wscience fiction novel Politician, the third book in the "Bio of a Space Tyrant" series.
you know what... if everyone has to read the whole freaking thread before voting nobody would turn up... But I am going to vote for Bush if I pee blood on Nov 2.
oops! I forgot I am not American! Stupid Bush! Boring Kerry!
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65473,00 .html
polls of cell phone users tend overwhelmingly to show a kerry victory. Gallup,cnn etcetera call old white women who are home all day and bored enough to talk to a pollster. Evidently they can't decide between the choices. But factor in people like myself and my roommate (and according to the CEA, there's 8 mil of of us), who use only cells and skype, and you have a kerry landslide.
As a scientist, I must say "no", on the grounds that this is the poster child of a Clustering Illusion(driven by Wishful Thinking). Mathematically speaking, that is the statistical problem that occours when you plot a small dataset against another small dataset and try to regress a line out of it.
-- Just another unsolicited opinion... from the Peanut Gallery.
Personally, I'd be happy if Kerry would just release his record, which he still hasn't, and even admits to not releasing:
"Brokaw: Someone has analyzed the President's military aptitude tests and yours, and concluded that he has a higher IQ than you do.
Kerry: That's great. More power. I don't know how they've done it, because my record is not public. So I don't know where you're getting that from."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6354942/
And the reason for that appears to be that he didn't get an honorable discharge from the military:
http://www.nysun.com/article/4040
He could clear all this up by signing that form 180, which is has never done.
And why? Because he has everything to hide.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
and the yankee's lost while up 3-0 in a 7 game championchip series. never in the history of basebal has a team come back down 3-0, but the Sox did. Those are just facts from histories and not predictors.
While I wouldn't fall of my chair if Bush wins, I do think synchronity and other magickal phenomena are interesting and can sometimes be useful.
(My personal epistemology has a feyerabendian slant.)
> Does this imply more people voting for Bush/against Kerry won't have the same effect?
His statement is dead on, and works both sides of the aisle. The more people get out and vote, the less likely either side is to be able to game the results. Fraud is easy when half of your electorate stays home on election day. The bigger the numbers, the harder it is to fudge "just enough" to change the result in either direction.
So, the more people that get out and vote for any candidate, the less likely cheating can affect the election. So get off your butt (if you're an American voter) tomorrow.
Virg
I was _at_ the game.
The defense seemed to be really feeding off the crowd energy.
It's just an observation as a fan, not some sort of twisted allegory about the Bush administration or the DoD or some stupid shit like that. Yes, I know what article this thread is attached to... but if I was going to make some sort joke or political tie in I would have come right out and said it.
Get a clue.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While it is amusing that the redskins win/losses have mirrored the presidential election, I think this year will prove it for what it is... BS.
Much like the 'curse' was lifted from the RedSox, this year the redskins presidential election parallel will be broken.
So what will be the next Redskin presidential parallel... The Redskins will predict the presidential election except if the redsox win?
JD
Yugoslavia was not a threat to us and never could've been.
No but the fallout over Kosovo and Bosnia was very much a threat to us and Europe as a whole. Think of the consequences of a civil war that could have spilled into Macedonia and dragged Greece and Turkey into it. Two NATO members that have (historically) been ready to beat the snot out of each other over any number of issues. Were you ready for a Greco->Turkish war?
Then think about the fact that WW1 got it's start in the Balkens over Serb/Croat disputes. It was very much in our interest to prevent all of that from happening. Kind of funny that all of the Republicans who criticized that war weren't called unpatriotic like the Democrats that dared to speak out against Iraq.
This just goes to show the neo-cons cannot handle the truth. When presented the truth, neo-cons sream and stick their fingers in their ears and pretend the truth doesn't exist.
The videotapes exist and show the explosives were there in the bunkers at Al QaQWaa when the 101st Airfborne Division went there. The seals from the international inspection agency were intact.
Modding me down for stating the truth will not change the fact that Bush allowed those explosives to be looted after the invasion of Iraq.
...because the news media has already announced that the entire election will be decided in Ohio and Florida, so the rest of us might as well stay home.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Actually, he earned a bachelor's degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. So yes, he did graduate.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
NO MORE BUSHES!
than the fact that the 19 of the 20 counties with voting irregularities were run by Democrats and the 20th by an independant.
No more factual of an issue than using a football game to predict an election.
The only difference is that certain people needed something to blame and a conspiracy makes them feel better about it.
Besides, Florida's voting actually was less problemsome than Georgia's. Yup, the rate of issues was lower in Florida than many other states. However Florida was easier to tip using the courts. I fully expect this election to be no different, if a state has a difference low enough to affect the overall election I fully expect certain parties to be out in force in an attempt to claim voter fraud or similar.
Voter fraud only became an issue when it no longer worked.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Given that the Red Sox won the world series, I think this might be the year to break such trends....If only the Cubs could have won too...
Anyone lacking his connections who had the same discipline and academic record as The Shrub would likely have been expelled from Yale.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The nature of reality is only worth examining if it happens to agree with pre-defined models? --And studiously ignored if it does not? That's not science.
There is nothing arbitrary about the lights in the sky. There is nothing arbitrary at all in the universe. All events happen as a result of other events which are subect to the rules of nature, which in turn means that all events can be understood and with sufficient data and study, predicted. This is one of the prime tenets of science.
The truth of the matter is that astrology works. The study of patterns which seem unrelated to a subject can in fact provide information about that subject. When the evidence is examined, (as it so very rarely is by those who claim to be scientists), this truth cannot be realistically denied or negated through conventional rationalizations.
This is not something to be scared of. It simply means that the universe is complex and that we do not understand it fully. I don't think anybody here would disagree with that.
Magic does not exist. All things can be measured and understood. Magic only exists for those who choose not to look under rocks.
I disagree. After all, what is the 'physical world'? Particle science is all about pulling the physical world apart to see how it works. When pulled apart far enough, physicality -very literally- ceases altogether so that further study must rely heavily on mathematics. Indeed, Mathematics is a science which exists independent of all physicality.
Many scientists come and go, but those who have left their mark on humanity and whose names we remember and revere were those who drew their inspiration from meta-physical questions, who allowed their minds to explore beyond the limits of the purely physical.
Fear creates limitation.
-FL
You're absolutely right, he did graduate from Ivy League universities given the chances that apparently neither you or I deserve. Did he get that chance fairly? No. Is he a hypocrite? Yes.
First Andover, then Yale, then Harvard, then the Whitehouse. Anyone who doesn't believe that the aristocratic power of Legacy exists has his head in the sand.
= 9J =
The "right to vote" isn't guaranteed by the Constitution. And no the 15th Amendment doesn't guarantee a person the right to vote. It states that if the state chooses to hold an election then the people have a right to vote in that election. States are not obligated by the Constitution to hold Presidential elections and if no election is held then there is no right to vote. If a state wants to change it's constitution to say that there will be a coin flip instead of an election to decide who gets that state's electoral votes then they can.
But it is! And, the joke gets better!
You have a powerful imagination.
My own explorations suggest, however, that the opposite is true.
Simple logic tells us. .
All events happening now are the result of previous events, and those previous events are the result of events before them. The nature of Cause and Effect suggest that everything in existence can be mapped backwards like this.
If one accepts a 'Big Bang' theory, wherein all matter in the universe is derived from a single, infinitely small point, then all matter and all patterns share an ultimate, common beginning. --Which means that all matter, energy and motion is through Cause and Effect, fundamentally and irrevocably linked.
The stars above your head are of the same system of which you are also a part. This means that it must logically be possible to derive information about you by looking at the stars. --Because, in a very real sense, looking at the stars is the SAME as looking at you. The fact that our limited perspective does not make this connection obvious does not also make it untrue.
-FL
For an election, we still have to vote.. so Kerry supporters all still have to go to the polls. What it REALLY means is that the Repubs have no chance, and should make their time (don't bother voting, Texas... you have no chance to survive :)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Sweet.. I can't wait to yell "Get over it!" to some republicans. :)
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Well, the church has become the whore of babylon, so I guess you're right.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
It means 6 more years of terrorist fear mongering, all without attacks on the mainland U.S.
So why didn't they just recount the whole state?
ESPN also show the replays of the call in question and the replays proved the ref was right and the player had not set properly in the formation and was properly penalized for it. That's what ESPN's NFL analysts said.
Looks like you're the one missing obvious clues... like the replays.
You silly... Everybody knows a third party candidate wins whenever the Washington Generals beat the Globetrotters.
Actually, the Globetrotters now play most of their games against a team called the New York Nationals. So the Washington Generals are never going to...
Oh.
I see what you're saying.
What Would Jesus Do
(for a Klondike bar)?
Once the Redskins stop working as a predictor, we can analyze TV snow until we find the precise time & location for God's voice to emanate across the ether. Maybe it'll come on the Red channel. Curve fit until it works.
Do you have ANY idea what's in the No Child Left Behind Act?
Basically, they force the schools to administer standardized tests. If the students do not meet the "standards", they LOSE FUNDING. If a school isn't doing well for whatever reason, their funding will be CUT? Not to mention that this includes ALL children in the schools, INCLUDING learning disorders, mentally handicapped, etc, etc. YES, these kids ARE included in the test averages.
These tests also lead to teachers to only cover material that is on the exams, to be sure that the kids can pass so they can recieve funding.
Also, the people who write the standards test write them to collect data about what is and isn't being taught, and they are constantly being updated. If the majority of children are answering a specific question correctly, then it becomes useless for data collection and that question will be changed. This means that the tests get harder and harder, while funding gets lower and lower.
I know more than you drink.
Well, the guys running the show at the game didn't show the replay. I missed that coverage. ::shrugs::
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I heard that kids usually vote for the incubant in a presidential race because they like familiarity. They are already familiar with Bush as president, so they want to vote for him. It wouldn't surprise me if children mostly wanted Clinton to win in 1996.
I'm curious about which candidates children supported during the 2000 election. Gore was well-known as the Vice-President, but Bush was a fairly well-known name, due to the previous president Bush.
Shame on you people!
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
Too plausible. A third party candidate will win whenever the Detroit Lions win the Superbowl.
"I think so, Brain, but 'instant karma' always gets so lumpy." - Pinky
"Decepticons FOREVER!!!" - Ravage
Sorry, we are nerds. Nerds don't believe in fortune telling. Junk this news!
It never ceases to crack me up when the same people who get all squirmy over Bush being a Christian (despite all of Kerry's speeches about how vital one's faith is to how one governs) will say "see? SEE? The Redskins! The Redskins!"
Well, you can't argue with consistency
I relise we should have brought along a cleric or something for such a situation, but...
I'm sorry but we're just going to have to split your gear up among the party and I guess you'll get in on the next campaign.
Look... You have to tear up your character sheet. It's the rules. Crying isn't going to change that...
Tell you what... Why don't you run upstairs and see if there's Mountain Dew in the fridge?
By the way, I've never voted for a presidential candidate that didn't win. I'm ashamed to admit that I voted for Clinton once.
FOUR MORE YEARS
Ops, I shuld have usd the prevuwe but in.
I said this last year, after the game sixes in the LCS. if the cubs and the sox had made it to the world series, the world would have to end just prior to the last out, because both teams couldn't lose.
However with just the sox getting there, all you have to worry about now is a chicago-chicago world series. 1907 vs.1917
(go cubbies!)
of course this year, after game three, I was pretty certain that the sox would collapse and lose the series in seven because that would have been the most painful way to go about it. After all they had just done it to the yankees.
[recovering red-sox-fan]
has anyone figured out a correlation between strike years in pro sports and the elections?
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
The results are in, Bush won, 4 more years.
the only recounts were in heavily-Gore counties.. Miami-Dade, Volusia, (i forget the other 1-2?). Statistically speaking (using my rough statistical knowledge) They were more likely to find mis-counted votes for the Gore column than the Bush column simply because the overwhelming majority of votes in those counties were for Gore. So Gore was trying to engineer the result of the recount. There was no provision in the Florida law for the WINNER to request a recount of the remaining counties, so the first recount while possibly legal (I'm not sure if he was allowed to select specific counties, but he did so someone thought it was OK) was definately manipulative and unethical.
You are however incorrect.. The first recount was completed and was also a bush win. The second recount, not provided for by the law was then undertaken and the deadline for certifying the results was approached (and passed i think) which is when the supreme court stepped in and called a stop to the second and illegal recount.
A third recount was later started by the various press organizations. Bush won that one as well.
And speaking to which ones Gore wanted, There were several counties where voting irregularities were alleged, but Gore only requested a recount in one of them. the remaining counties requested for recount by Gore were not so alleged and had different ballots (scantron type) anyway.
You're the one who doesn't understand that posting AC automatically gets a zero rating...