They are perfectly willing to spend millions of dollars on doing recounts, fighting lawsuits, and don't apparently mind that America is becoming ever more cynical about the integrity of our voting system, but they won't spend a little extra money on voting machines? Give me a break.
There are some who clearly favor a lack of accountability, and those people are called criminals. This is far too a matter to put into the hands of politically appointees or bureaucrats trying to appease their political masters. We need a Constitutional Amendment making every single voting place have a paper record. There are NO COMPUTERS that hackers can't hack into. I repeat, if you have a computer, then a hacker can break into your system and it doesn't matter how much security you think you have. The only exception could be someone like the NSA and somehow I doubt the polling places will ever achieve that kind of security. What we need are paper ballots and qualified voting place monitors from all parties involved in an election at that voting place, as well as from non-partisan groups that can make sure the independents aren't being cheated.
Land of the free and home of the brave, but for how much longer if we allow corrupt people to tamper with the voting box?
NASA = $18 billion in corporate welfare for aerospace companies and bureaucrats. A few million more is pocket change. Personally, I'd rather see the FBI spend its time catching terrorists and spies and leave the chasing of Romanian teenage script kiddies to someone else.
The government started out ordering phone companies to finance the cost of government wiretapping. Next they told ISP's they need to finance the cost of government e-mail searches and internet traffic analysis. Now they want companies to pay for keeping data for civil suits. All of this costs money, yet the government thinks it's naturally entitled to another freebie from the private sector using the power of regulations and legislation. The costs will of course be passed on to the end-users of their services. I think it's time for the government to start telling us about the real value of these activities, rather than wrapping itself in the flag and the "Remember 9/11" mantra whenever it wants to pass some new draconian law. How many bad guys have been caught as a result of these new laws? God forbid that you ever try to leave your computer and actually go outside your office to catch criminals. Technology is a useful tool, but sometimes I suspect it's being used as a crutch by some in the government. I think that Al Qaida and the other assorted bad guys out there know by now that anything digital can be intercepted, so try getting out of the house, learning a foreign language, and doing some "old fashioned" work.
Paper is for people stuck in the past. This is a ploy to make money off of people resistant to using new technology. There are many more advantages to using digital data than just saving trees.
I'd rather spend $200 on a graphics card like this than $600 on a console. My money is on Toshiba's HD-DVD being the industry standard, not Blue Ray. $175 for the Wii wouldn't be too bad though. They should just put the Wii on an internal PC card and cut the price $100 if they want to sell more games. Sony is obviously under the delusion that the whole world will wait on PS3 because the Japanese have boycotted the "foreign devil's" Xbox 360. They're wrong. People will be buying some combination of Xbox 360's, Wii's, PC upgrades or new PC's this Christmas, not waiting on the overgrown console and the new betamax of DVD to arrive.
Slashdot Mirror
They are perfectly willing to spend millions of dollars on doing recounts, fighting lawsuits, and don't apparently mind that America is becoming ever more cynical about the integrity of our voting system, but they won't spend a little extra money on voting machines? Give me a break. There are some who clearly favor a lack of accountability, and those people are called criminals. This is far too a matter to put into the hands of politically appointees or bureaucrats trying to appease their political masters. We need a Constitutional Amendment making every single voting place have a paper record. There are NO COMPUTERS that hackers can't hack into. I repeat, if you have a computer, then a hacker can break into your system and it doesn't matter how much security you think you have. The only exception could be someone like the NSA and somehow I doubt the polling places will ever achieve that kind of security. What we need are paper ballots and qualified voting place monitors from all parties involved in an election at that voting place, as well as from non-partisan groups that can make sure the independents aren't being cheated. Land of the free and home of the brave, but for how much longer if we allow corrupt people to tamper with the voting box?
NASA = $18 billion in corporate welfare for aerospace companies and bureaucrats. A few million more is pocket change. Personally, I'd rather see the FBI spend its time catching terrorists and spies and leave the chasing of Romanian teenage script kiddies to someone else.
The government started out ordering phone companies to finance the cost of government wiretapping. Next they told ISP's they need to finance the cost of government e-mail searches and internet traffic analysis. Now they want companies to pay for keeping data for civil suits. All of this costs money, yet the government thinks it's naturally entitled to another freebie from the private sector using the power of regulations and legislation. The costs will of course be passed on to the end-users of their services. I think it's time for the government to start telling us about the real value of these activities, rather than wrapping itself in the flag and the "Remember 9/11" mantra whenever it wants to pass some new draconian law. How many bad guys have been caught as a result of these new laws? God forbid that you ever try to leave your computer and actually go outside your office to catch criminals. Technology is a useful tool, but sometimes I suspect it's being used as a crutch by some in the government. I think that Al Qaida and the other assorted bad guys out there know by now that anything digital can be intercepted, so try getting out of the house, learning a foreign language, and doing some "old fashioned" work.
Paper is for people stuck in the past. This is a ploy to make money off of people resistant to using new technology. There are many more advantages to using digital data than just saving trees.
I'd rather spend $200 on a graphics card like this than $600 on a console. My money is on Toshiba's HD-DVD being the industry standard, not Blue Ray. $175 for the Wii wouldn't be too bad though. They should just put the Wii on an internal PC card and cut the price $100 if they want to sell more games. Sony is obviously under the delusion that the whole world will wait on PS3 because the Japanese have boycotted the "foreign devil's" Xbox 360. They're wrong. People will be buying some combination of Xbox 360's, Wii's, PC upgrades or new PC's this Christmas, not waiting on the overgrown console and the new betamax of DVD to arrive.