Except the Democrats no longer care about gun control, and haven't actually cared about it for almost a decade. And the Supreme Court decision gives them a way to cleanly and officially remove it from the equation.
All Obama has to do, the second it comes up, is state that he will follow the Supreme Court decision and not pass whatever laws there's a flap about.
See, the problem for your theory is that being pro-gun-control on the left has never been as important as being anti-gun-control on the right. There is, indeed, a large group of people who will not vote for pro-gun-control people...and there's not really any opposite to that group on the left.
Promising to crack down on guns is just a way for Democrats to look 'tough on crime' when Republicans inevitably accuse them of being weak on crime...but that almost certainly isn't going to be an issue this election, so they can just ignore guns until they actually become an issue in and of themselves, and then state whatever position they want.
It might cost him some inner-city votes...but probably not. And the NRA types who actually honestly care about civil rights, and were worried on that one issue, pretty much have to vote for the Democrats for all other civil rights issues.
As for Biden's previous position...the nice thing about the VP slot is that positive positions made in the past help the candidate, whereas in positions the presidential candidate doesn't like, he can just override the VP's candidate. (Obama: Joe Biden and I have had a long talk about gun control, and while I have not convinced him of my position, he has agreed that, under me, he would vote in a manner consistent with my position.)
No kidding. Phishers do not bother to use SSL at all.
Talking about people being protected by them by browser warnings for broken certs is like talking about having the signature of the secretary of the treasure on money to keep it from being counterfeited.
The only mechanical voting machine I've ever seen indicated each individual race had a vote cast. I.e, when you flipped down a lever in a column, it indicated a lever was down in that column.
However, what you are describing is a specific flaw, in a specific type of machine, and could be fixed in a dozen ways.
In fact, I'm still having trouble grasping how this could even work in the first place. You're saying that a lever being a fraction of an inch up will make it not work? I'm not seeing how that makes any sense at all. A pencil lead in the innards of the machine, yes, but one at the switch? Don't they click into place?
I can't even find a description of the weakness you're talking about. This just sounds like either some really badly-designed machine, or some sort of urban legend.
Suppose Eve, the attacker and a registered voter, dislikes candidate A. She shows up to the polls early with a piece of pencil lead in her pocket. She inserts the lead into an appropriate gap under candidate A's lever. While this doesn't interfere with the apparent operation of the lever, it actually prevents the mechanical operation that counts the vote. Future voters will think they're voting for A, but in fact are voting for nobody. As the pencil lead is soft, it will not last the whole day before it crumbles into dust and the machine returns to working order.
Such an attack would not be possible...all mechanical voting machines have to indicate that a vote was registered, simply because otherwise people could just vote as many times as they want.
And hence it's not a some simple lever that people pull down once and walk off. That's not how they work. The machine indicates your selection on each candidate. I don't doubt you could break a mechanical voting machine, possibly even breaking in a specific manner that makes people unable to vote for someone and able to vote for someone else, but it would be noticeably broken when people tried to vote for that person.
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
Except that you can detect their modification by testing them.
Electronic voting machines could have their modification triggered in dozens of undetectable ways. They do run the clock forward, and do a bunch of votes on it, so it's not going to switch on a specific time, but it could easily be triggered by specific ballot, or pushing the screen in a weird spot, or anything. And then, at the end, copy the correct software into place and wipe itself.
I'm not a huge fan of mechanical voting machines, but they at least either work all the time, or fail to work all the time. If you push a button 1000 times and it counts to 1000 in a test, you can be sure, mechanically, that's correct.
Yes, in theory, there could be some sort of clever linkage built into the machine as a backdoor, same as in an electronic voting machine, but they also do a quick visual inspection of the machinery before the voting.
Whereas there's no way to detect that in a computer:
a) The 'software certification' demonstrably not work. There is too much access to the machine, there are repeated instances of last-minute updates that demonstrate that no one takes it seriously, and poll workers have no idea how to check that.
b) Even if we could prove the software actually running was the right software, that does not exclude very clever backdoors that are actually in the certified code. Although at least we could track them down later...but they could easily be hidden as bugs, and unless there was some evidence they were actually triggered, what do we do?
c) Even if we know the software is perfect, and is actually what is on the machine...these things run Windows and the rest of the machine doesn't have to be certified. All you have to do is combine a 'rootkit' and a game 'trainer' and rewrite memory addresses. (Of course, is ignoring the fact that half such machines run Access, and that's easy enough to modify anyway.)
Dude, Everquest is nowhere near the valley. There aren't really any computer games that are.
The fact people complained that it looked unnatural doesn't mean it was in the valley, it just means their rendering sucked.
And zombies are not related to the valley at all. If there are actual people walking around in makeup, those are actual people. They might look horrible, but they sure as hell look like 'real people'.
Also, no one said the other side of the valley is 'cute' and I have no idea where you got that. The other side just doesn't look real at all, it looks like a cartoon, and thus we have no problem with it.
You want to apply some scientific standards to the unnatural valley, go ahead, but you should probably learn what the heck it is first. Nothing that is actually human can ever be in the valley. (Unless it's go through quite a lot of computer processing.)
Corpses don't have anything to do with the uncanny valley, and neither do mounted animals.
Those actually are the things they look like, they're just unmoving versions of them. It's not CGI fur or a computer generated face.
Any revulsion anyone feels is due to their deadness, not the fact they look like what they actually are. (In fact, it is often remarked that dead people just look like they're sleeping.)
Same thing with pictures. A picture of a real thing looks like...a picture of a real thing. We do not have uncanny valley issues with pictures.
Arguable, we do have such a valley when we are born, but we lose that about 2 or 3, when we realize that pictures are not the actual thing and people do not live in the TV.
Incidentally, the 'face recognizance' part of our brain is probably why both domestic cats' and dogs' faces proportionally match human faces much better than their wild relatives. We like them more when they do, so those are the ones that we are more likely to take care of.
Which is also why domestic cats 'meow'. All cats can make a wild variety of noises, a lot more than people suspect, and probably all of them could make that noise, but only domestic cats do, and they do it because we've, over the generations, naturally selected for it because it mimics a sound that human babies make, which we were originally selected for because parents who pay attention to that noise have less dead offspring.
However, I'm not sure this is the most important example in modern politics, and I'm not entirely sure that this is specific to any one group.
Well, no, groups always try to disown people they previously supported when those people fail. But they usually don't disown the philosophies, because they usually don't have members that operate exactly opposite their philosophy.
I.e., the Democrats couldn't distance themselves from the failure of 'liberal' thought because they actually have objective standards of what that is, and objectively judge the behaviors of people in their party by them.
The problem is that the Republicans have, in essence, disowned everyone. Conservativism cannot fail, it can only be failed. I forget who said that, but it's true. All failure is due to people's (quite correctly pointed out) failure to actually implement conservativism, but that's simply because the whole damn party doesn't implement it.
Or, in other words, in a world with choices between a, b and c, the left picks 'a', and is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, whereas the right picks b but says they pick c. So every time b blows up in their face, they can say 'Oh, we meant to pick c. That guy that picked b wasn't really one of us.'.
And it's not the most important example in modern politics. The best example is probably communism. You go find an American Communist, and talk to them, and they will tell you that the absolutely failure of all communist regimes isn't due to communism, it's due to the fact that none of them were 'really' communism.
Communism, and conservativism, are apparently just impossible to implement correctly. Over and over people keep trying, and they're always corrupted by people everyone trusted, no matter how much those people were operating in opposition to the fundamental philosophy. American Communists at least have the excuse in that it was a bunch of other people trying to implement it, whereas conservativism keeps failing to be implemented correctly by the same political party. Often the exact same people
For some reason this considered a defense of those philosophies, instead of what any rational person would conclude: A political philosophy that cannot ever be implemented correctly is even dumber than one that just sometimes fails. It doesn't matter if it would be hugs and puppies if it was put into practice if it can't be put into practice.
Yes, now that the party discipline has fallen apart thanks to Bush.
The fact that none of them qualified as 'real conservatives' is just as telling as the fact that Bush did 'qualify' when he ran...namely, it tells us that no one, not even voters, has the slightest clue what that means. And that there isn't any such thing.
All 'conservative' means is you're a successful Republican, or a Republican during a successful time. Sadly, it appears a certain Republican is so unsuccessful that his lack of success has become contagious, and random Republicans standing too close to Bush have been infected with FAIL, which in turn means, instantly, they were not and never were conservatives.
Tada, it's like magic. Or like that quantum physics thing where if you don't measure something, it's indeterminate, but once you measure it, it is, and always was, that specific thing. Like Schrodinger cat is both dead and alive until you open the box, at which point it has always been dead or alive.
Except here it's 'failure' instead of measurement, and the result always comes out 'not conservative'. Which is why Reagan is conservative until you point at his policies and force people to admit he wasn't...he never failed, so never got 'measured'.
You'll notice that McCain was apparently a conservative in 2000, and in 1992 for that matter, despite being significantly to the left of where he is now. As had Romney.
Or, perhaps, another way of looking at it is that Republicans are conservative until other Republicans vote them off the island, which usually happens only after something goes wrong...but they've just recently panicked and starting voting everyone except themselves off the island.
And I just know someone's going to respond to this with exactly what 'conservativism' is. I did not argue that conservativism did not exist. I argued that, as used in politics, 'conservative' is a way to refer to 'successful Republicans', period, and has no meaning outside that. Outside politics, it might, indeed, refer to some consistent political philosophy, I dunno.
Ah, but no one votes for the Democrats in order for them to be sold down the river by the media companies.
In other words, the Democrats have a platform that is not in conflict with itself. Or, rather, their actual platform has that in it...and no one who wants it there votes for them. The reasons that people vote for them are no in conflict. They often fall short, very short, of those reasons, but people don't for them for half a dozen conflicting things that are all 'conservative'.
I.e., while they might suggest driving cross country to New York from LA, and only make it to Houston, and sometimes go to Alaska instead, the Republicans want to drive from LA to Florida and Alaska and fly to Hawaii, all at the same same time. The Democrats just FAIL, the Republicans have impossible goals to start with.
Failure, especially failure by 'buying candidates', you can fix by actually voting in primaries. There's a reason the slogan at DailyKos is More and Better Democrats. Conflicting goals can't actually be 'fixed', because there are people trying to 'unfix' them into goals that you don't want.
Which is ironic, because the Democrats are actually the results of two political theories merging into one party: Progressivism and Liberalism. Progressivism wants to solve social problems using the government, and liberalism is what you just called 'classic liberalism', concerned about the rights of man. (Which does not, despite what the libertarians like to be pretend, include the right not to be taxed.)
But, in ironies of ironies, they get along pretty well, whereas the Republicans are the 'Democrats except' party...they'd be Democrats except for one single issue. I know at least three people who the sole reason they voted for Bush was abortion. (I live in Georgia, the one not at war with Russia.) And these 'one single issues' are often at odds with each other, which is why you get silliness like 'compassionate conservativism'.
You do not have to pay for quite a lot of stuff from the cable company. A lot of those channels are free if you have a sat dish.
What you are paying for is the cable company to receive them and retransmit them to your house. As the cable company, quite obviously, makes no money from any content on those channels, it's hard to see whether or not there are commercials on them would matter in the slightest to them.
If we were only spending the money needed to defend ourselves, we wouldn't need to nearly outspend the rest of the world put together.
Bzzzzzt, thank you for playing. We do not 'nearly' outspend the rest of the world put together.:)
We do outspend the rest of the world put together, thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan putting us over the edge.
In fact, spending on Iraq and Afghanistan alone beats every other country in the world. Twice. I.e, if you average that in half for two wars, we're spending more on each war than then the second most expensive military in the world, France, spends for their entire military.
If the government wants there to be 'fair', unmoderated forums...well, um...nothing's stopping them from building a web site. People might think this is silly, but that's partially what the National Mall in Washington is for, so it's not like it's without precedent.
They could even organize it by having different forums for each branch of the government, each executive department, and each proposed congressional bill. And the entire US code. Make each comment require a captcha to cut down on spamming. (I don't think that would infringe on 1st amendment rights, at least if they handicap-accessible it.) Expire each comment after a week. Let people register an ID when registering to vote, or post anonymously or pseudononymously. Do not keep logs. Tada, it's the National Mall, online, although much better organized.
But, no, that would be too logical.
You know, to a certain extent, what you're talking about already happens...except it happens at the level of the forums themselves, instead of within a forum. No one can stop anyone else from making a blog that says whatever they want.
Actually, that happens in real life, too. The right to free speech means I can give a press conference at my house..and you don't have the right to run in and interrupt it.
You can, of course, hold your own press conference, and if I do it somewhere outside my control, you can interrupt me...and it is a valid point that nowhere on the internet is 'outside someone's control', but the obvious solution, as I said, if this is actually a problem, is for the government to build such a place, not set rules about what happens in my house.
There were no voices saying that the previous Republican majority wasn't conservative until after the government failed miserably at everything it tried to do.
That, honestly, is the real difference between the parties. The Republicans are always 'conservative' until they inevitably fail, at which point they've never been conservative.
That's worse than the 'no true scotsman' fallacy. That fallacy, for those who don't know, is when you say 'No true X has the characteristics of Y', and then, when someone finds an X that does indeed have Y, you assert that this X isn't really an X...it's an exception, or a bad example for some reason, and shouldn't be considered an X.
But, with 'conservatives', it's like we've started that fallacy and have managed to eliminate half the population of Scotland, and not found a single one yet. It's like the claim here is 'no true Scotsman is from Scotland' or something, and we've had to discard Every. Single. Scotman we've run across.
The one that hasn't been kicked out of the party, Ronald Reagan, is still a 'conservative' because he didn't fail, despite not actually following any of the characteristics of 'conservativism'.
Meanwhile, Democrats do get called on their behavior. They are constantly accused of being too far to the right by, well, the whole damn internet. The actions they do that are inconsistent with the left are criticized at the time, not later, when they've failed horrible and everyone's looking for a reason to that it isn't their fault.
Just ask Joseph Lieberman. He got kicked out of the damn party. Not for failure, not retroactively, but because he votes like a Republican, period.
Erm...states can't gerrymander anything to affect their electoral college, unless they allocate the votes by district.
Which California does not, and that actually hasn't even been proposed or implemented anywhere. Current proportional allocation proposals takes the entire state vote and divides that among the electors, not assigns it by district.
While I'd argue that doing it by Congressional district (and having the majority of the state pick the two votes that correspond to Senators) would be a good idea (Assuming ungerrymandered districts), that is not, and has never, actually been done in any state ever, to my knowledge.
The Dems were never very organized to start with. Will Rogers has a quote about that.
The problem is that, while quite a lot of Dems and a Repubs are really in their party for a single issue, the Republicans' single issues conflict with each other, and the Democrats' do not. You can't be a theocrat and a libertarian at the same time, or in favor of small government and unending war, or anti-immigration and pro-big-business...
And those are just examples where the wheels have recently come off. There are actually a few more that should hit soon.
For example, the small government people and the unending war people have a near trifecta incompatibility with the right-wing environmentalists, who are rapidly showing up from the religious right (Apparently, some of them have noticed humans are supposed to be the stewards of the earth.) All three of them disagree with the other two.
They're pretty much limited to small time scammers who go around and personally scam people.
I'm less worried about those. While it is a cliche, it is true that it's much harder to con an honest man, and thus most of the face-to-face scammers come up with scams that would be illegal to participate in if they were legit. Or at least most 'long cons' are.
They do this because people are a lot more likely to be secretive, and a lot less likely to report the crime afterwards, if they believe their actions are illegal or at least somewhat gray.
The only online scam of this nature is the Nigerian advanced-fee fraud, and that's actually a face-to-face fraud that's happened to make its way online. And while it operates via spam, it actually operates rather different...they send out the spam in low enough volume that it's not noticeable as spam, so they can keep their return email open, and basically it's entirely personal past that point.
Most online scams, OTOH, are fake or forged storefronts that take your money or login for something that would be entirely legal, and just run with it. People who are victimized by them are honest people.
The point is there is going to be a delay between when the customer can hear everything that's going on, and when I'll be able to get to the pause button.
And you completely ignored the obvious solution, the one I actually was talking about when I said 'two mute buttons' which is to mute your telephone microphone, and only unmute it after you mute the other audio. If people appear on the phone line without any input from you, I am rather baffled as to how you currently operate without a mute button.
This, of course, requires you to be able to a) purchase a phone that has a headset input, and b) purchase a headset with a mute button, (Or purchase a phone and headset in one.) and as you are probably incapable of finding the door in and out of the room you are in and so are currently building a complicated series of ladders and slides out the window for 'convenience', who knows how long that could take.
The far more expensive computer which I already own, which will be wasting power while I'm at work regardless, and has more up-time than the viagra mascot? If you're not going to be helpful you could at least not assume I'm retarded.
I dunno, you clearly are somewhat retarded, when your problem could be solved by a) getting a phone that supported a standard headset, and b) installing a mute switch on your PC audio and mic input, and c) mixing the PC audio and phone audio together before your headset, and d) being smart enough to mute and unmute them in the correct order.
Here's a free clue for you: No VoIP setup is going to pause your other apps when unmuting your mic. They only do that when they answer the phone, and you have a weird setup where that doesn't apply. So, at best, you'd have to hit a button to pause whatever, hoping you can remember whatever keystroke it is for whatever you're doing, and then another button to unmute the audio.
Which is obviously much much easier than just having two big mute buttons on your desk, and completely muting your computer audio, despite the application, before unmuting your mic.
Actually, there are apps that will let you assign global keystrokes to mute audio, or you can just rely on your app pausing...so what you actually need is a phone with a headset plug, an adapter to turn that into a 'normal', two-plug headset, and a stereo 'splitter' backwards that merges in your computer audio, and a computer headset with a mute button. It's entirely possible you have the first and last of those already.
Yeah, duh. Really. No software solution is going to pause all possible sound generating applications.
Except you don't need a 'DJ mixer', and you don't need to wire anything into your phone. At least not for what he wanted.
He, and I know this sounds weird, apparently takes the phone off the hook and it stays off the hook, connected to his business. Presumably there's something that says 'incoming call' on the audio.
What he actually needs is a switch that disables the microphone when the second audio channel is being mixed into his headphones.
He could probably fake this with a cheap A/V switcher, one with RCA video. Hook the computer audio to one side, and take the audio output and splice it into the headset before it's plugged into the phone. (They have adapters for that.)
Then hook the mic from the headset into the other video input, and plug the video output into the phone. (Notice I did that backwards. Some want the signal to only go one direction, and have filters and the signal goes from the microphone to the phone. This would be annoying if we were switching between multiple mics, but we aren't.)
Or he can by a button-switchable KVM with audio connections. That does exactly the same thing, but the plugs are in the right format, although it's a bit more expensive. It's possible that someone out there is producing an audio-only switcher.
Alternately, and much cheaper, he can just buy two inline mute buttons for those two things, and mix the computer audio after that point. And always be sure to disable the computer audio before enabling the microphone, and vis versa.
It's entirely possible his headset already has a mute button for the mic, so all he's have to find is one of those for the computer. You can buy them at Radio Shack for a few dollars. It's a tiny fraction more work than a single switch, but seriously.
Alternately, he can buy a TDTP (Triple pole, double throw) switch, or a 'DTDP' that is set up to handle stereo audio channels, and wire it himself. (Some people might assume he could disconnect the ground instead of the stereo channels, but that will probably not work.)
Honestly, this question is incredibly dumb. Diverting the audio through a computer serves no purpose. VOIP apps cannot pause all sound applications, and, more to the point, are unlikely to be willing to leave the phone off the hook all the time and the mic off, and only pause apps when the mic is on. Almost all of them pause apps when the phone is answered, and that's all.
Oh, but I'm sure the right will bring up dead voting Democratic, like that's happened anywhere outside of Chicago or in the last three decades.
Or that organization that was stupidly paid by the Democrats X dollars per person they registered to vote, so some of the employees decided to fake some registrations, which surely was a sign of some attempt at voter fraud despite those registrations not making past obvious checks and absolutely no evidence anyone intended to show up and vote those.
No, it is sure that the Democrats are 'as bad' as the Republicans, because of a single incredibly corrupt town decades ago and some imagery 'attempts' at cheating that couldn't have worked. This, of course, is equal to fraudulent robocalls, and passing laws allowing them to 'challenge' at the ballot box. And the ID check. For some reason I have to show ID when voting. Why is that, exactly? Has there actually been a documented instance of people showing up to cast ballots for other people? No. But there are plenty of old people and poor people who don't have ID, and guess how they vote?
Oh, and let's not forget all the precinct laws that operate on space. You have a precinct for X voters, and a precinct for X square miles, whichever comes first. So now that I live in a rural area, I'm a precinct that serves maybe 300 registered voters, and literally do not wait in line at all. When I lived in an offshoot of Atlanta, I waited in line for 4 hours for the 2000 election. There were quite possibly more voters in front of me than even existed for the whole precinct where I am now. (And, of course, the majority of them were black.)
I'm sure all this is just craaazy coincidence, because everyone knows both the parties are identically bad.
Well, people, start paying attention. They're not. Looking at the policies, looking at people polled on the polices, and the United States population exists in a bell curve, with most of the citizen's opinion hovering in the middle.
The problem is that 'middle' is slightly to the left of the Democrats position. I'm not kidding in the slightest. You want to know why McCain is getting no traction in this election, that's it. Well, that and Bush, but honestly, Bush just broke the image of the system...there's a reason it can't get put back together. The Republican party has moved so far to the right, and the Democrats have followed so far, that when people actually wake up from their trance (Thanks to Bush) and look around, they notice they're absurdly far to the left. McCain lists Obama's votes to prove how he's the 'most liberal Senator', and people nod at them.
But, no, both parties are 'equally bad', and everyone fails to notice they are 'equally bad' policy wise because they are too far to the right. And they certainly aren't 'equally bad' legally...the last four Republican presidents committed impeachable crimes in office. (Watergate for Nixon, Iran/Contra for Reagan and Bush 1, and I don't need to list them for Bush 2 if you've been slightly awake.) Clinton, OTOH, was pursued for years and we know what his sole instance of wrongdoing turned out to be. And Carter and JFK didn't appear to violate any laws I can think of. (It's possible JFK would have also been impeached if his affairs came out, but I honestly think impeachment should be reserved for crimes committed in office by the office, not the person, unless the president decides to run around being a serial killer as a hobby.)
The only logical way to stop this is to vote for the party on the left, and vote in primaries for people on the left. That will fix the policies, and it will eventually cripple the wrongdoing ability.
This post got a little more ranty and political than I intended, and I'm sure it will be modded down into oblivion, but whatever. I'm sick of people running around acting like both parties are identical. They're 'identical' because of dirty tricks and apathy resulting in the Republican repeatedly winning when they logi
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Except the Democrats no longer care about gun control, and haven't actually cared about it for almost a decade. And the Supreme Court decision gives them a way to cleanly and officially remove it from the equation.
All Obama has to do, the second it comes up, is state that he will follow the Supreme Court decision and not pass whatever laws there's a flap about.
See, the problem for your theory is that being pro-gun-control on the left has never been as important as being anti-gun-control on the right. There is, indeed, a large group of people who will not vote for pro-gun-control people...and there's not really any opposite to that group on the left.
Promising to crack down on guns is just a way for Democrats to look 'tough on crime' when Republicans inevitably accuse them of being weak on crime...but that almost certainly isn't going to be an issue this election, so they can just ignore guns until they actually become an issue in and of themselves, and then state whatever position they want.
It might cost him some inner-city votes...but probably not. And the NRA types who actually honestly care about civil rights, and were worried on that one issue, pretty much have to vote for the Democrats for all other civil rights issues.
As for Biden's previous position...the nice thing about the VP slot is that positive positions made in the past help the candidate, whereas in positions the presidential candidate doesn't like, he can just override the VP's candidate. (Obama: Joe Biden and I have had a long talk about gun control, and while I have not convinced him of my position, he has agreed that, under me, he would vote in a manner consistent with my position.)
No kidding. Phishers do not bother to use SSL at all.
Talking about people being protected by them by browser warnings for broken certs is like talking about having the signature of the secretary of the treasure on money to keep it from being counterfeited.
The only mechanical voting machine I've ever seen indicated each individual race had a vote cast. I.e, when you flipped down a lever in a column, it indicated a lever was down in that column.
However, what you are describing is a specific flaw, in a specific type of machine, and could be fixed in a dozen ways.
In fact, I'm still having trouble grasping how this could even work in the first place. You're saying that a lever being a fraction of an inch up will make it not work? I'm not seeing how that makes any sense at all. A pencil lead in the innards of the machine, yes, but one at the switch? Don't they click into place?
I can't even find a description of the weakness you're talking about. This just sounds like either some really badly-designed machine, or some sort of urban legend.
Suppose Eve, the attacker and a registered voter, dislikes candidate A. She shows up to the polls early with a piece of pencil lead in her pocket. She inserts the lead into an appropriate gap under candidate A's lever. While this doesn't interfere with the apparent operation of the lever, it actually prevents the mechanical operation that counts the vote. Future voters will think they're voting for A, but in fact are voting for nobody. As the pencil lead is soft, it will not last the whole day before it crumbles into dust and the machine returns to working order.
Such an attack would not be possible...all mechanical voting machines have to indicate that a vote was registered, simply because otherwise people could just vote as many times as they want.
And hence it's not a some simple lever that people pull down once and walk off. That's not how they work. The machine indicates your selection on each candidate. I don't doubt you could break a mechanical voting machine, possibly even breaking in a specific manner that makes people unable to vote for someone and able to vote for someone else, but it would be noticeably broken when people tried to vote for that person.
Incidentally, the mechanical lever systems bear the same major problem as electronic voting systems: they can be undetectably modified.
Except that you can detect their modification by testing them.
Electronic voting machines could have their modification triggered in dozens of undetectable ways. They do run the clock forward, and do a bunch of votes on it, so it's not going to switch on a specific time, but it could easily be triggered by specific ballot, or pushing the screen in a weird spot, or anything. And then, at the end, copy the correct software into place and wipe itself.
I'm not a huge fan of mechanical voting machines, but they at least either work all the time, or fail to work all the time. If you push a button 1000 times and it counts to 1000 in a test, you can be sure, mechanically, that's correct.
Yes, in theory, there could be some sort of clever linkage built into the machine as a backdoor, same as in an electronic voting machine, but they also do a quick visual inspection of the machinery before the voting.
Whereas there's no way to detect that in a computer:
a) The 'software certification' demonstrably not work. There is too much access to the machine, there are repeated instances of last-minute updates that demonstrate that no one takes it seriously, and poll workers have no idea how to check that.
b) Even if we could prove the software actually running was the right software, that does not exclude very clever backdoors that are actually in the certified code. Although at least we could track them down later...but they could easily be hidden as bugs, and unless there was some evidence they were actually triggered, what do we do?
c) Even if we know the software is perfect, and is actually what is on the machine...these things run Windows and the rest of the machine doesn't have to be certified. All you have to do is combine a 'rootkit' and a game 'trainer' and rewrite memory addresses. (Of course, is ignoring the fact that half such machines run Access, and that's easy enough to modify anyway.)
Dude, Everquest is nowhere near the valley. There aren't really any computer games that are.
The fact people complained that it looked unnatural doesn't mean it was in the valley, it just means their rendering sucked.
And zombies are not related to the valley at all. If there are actual people walking around in makeup, those are actual people. They might look horrible, but they sure as hell look like 'real people'.
Also, no one said the other side of the valley is 'cute' and I have no idea where you got that. The other side just doesn't look real at all, it looks like a cartoon, and thus we have no problem with it.
You want to apply some scientific standards to the unnatural valley, go ahead, but you should probably learn what the heck it is first. Nothing that is actually human can ever be in the valley. (Unless it's go through quite a lot of computer processing.)
And even then no one is going to mistake a frame of The Incredibles for a real people.
Corpses don't have anything to do with the uncanny valley, and neither do mounted animals.
Those actually are the things they look like, they're just unmoving versions of them. It's not CGI fur or a computer generated face.
Any revulsion anyone feels is due to their deadness, not the fact they look like what they actually are. (In fact, it is often remarked that dead people just look like they're sleeping.)
Same thing with pictures. A picture of a real thing looks like...a picture of a real thing. We do not have uncanny valley issues with pictures.
Arguable, we do have such a valley when we are born, but we lose that about 2 or 3, when we realize that pictures are not the actual thing and people do not live in the TV.
Incidentally, the 'face recognizance' part of our brain is probably why both domestic cats' and dogs' faces proportionally match human faces much better than their wild relatives. We like them more when they do, so those are the ones that we are more likely to take care of.
Which is also why domestic cats 'meow'. All cats can make a wild variety of noises, a lot more than people suspect, and probably all of them could make that noise, but only domestic cats do, and they do it because we've, over the generations, naturally selected for it because it mimics a sound that human babies make, which we were originally selected for because parents who pay attention to that noise have less dead offspring.
However, I'm not sure this is the most important example in modern politics, and I'm not entirely sure that this is specific to any one group.
Well, no, groups always try to disown people they previously supported when those people fail. But they usually don't disown the philosophies, because they usually don't have members that operate exactly opposite their philosophy.
I.e., the Democrats couldn't distance themselves from the failure of 'liberal' thought because they actually have objective standards of what that is, and objectively judge the behaviors of people in their party by them.
The problem is that the Republicans have, in essence, disowned everyone. Conservativism cannot fail, it can only be failed. I forget who said that, but it's true. All failure is due to people's (quite correctly pointed out) failure to actually implement conservativism, but that's simply because the whole damn party doesn't implement it.
Or, in other words, in a world with choices between a, b and c, the left picks 'a', and is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, whereas the right picks b but says they pick c. So every time b blows up in their face, they can say 'Oh, we meant to pick c. That guy that picked b wasn't really one of us.'.
And it's not the most important example in modern politics. The best example is probably communism. You go find an American Communist, and talk to them, and they will tell you that the absolutely failure of all communist regimes isn't due to communism, it's due to the fact that none of them were 'really' communism.
Communism, and conservativism, are apparently just impossible to implement correctly. Over and over people keep trying, and they're always corrupted by people everyone trusted, no matter how much those people were operating in opposition to the fundamental philosophy. American Communists at least have the excuse in that it was a bunch of other people trying to implement it, whereas conservativism keeps failing to be implemented correctly by the same political party. Often the exact same people
For some reason this considered a defense of those philosophies, instead of what any rational person would conclude: A political philosophy that cannot ever be implemented correctly is even dumber than one that just sometimes fails. It doesn't matter if it would be hugs and puppies if it was put into practice if it can't be put into practice.
Yes, now that the party discipline has fallen apart thanks to Bush.
The fact that none of them qualified as 'real conservatives' is just as telling as the fact that Bush did 'qualify' when he ran...namely, it tells us that no one, not even voters, has the slightest clue what that means. And that there isn't any such thing.
All 'conservative' means is you're a successful Republican, or a Republican during a successful time. Sadly, it appears a certain Republican is so unsuccessful that his lack of success has become contagious, and random Republicans standing too close to Bush have been infected with FAIL, which in turn means, instantly, they were not and never were conservatives.
Tada, it's like magic. Or like that quantum physics thing where if you don't measure something, it's indeterminate, but once you measure it, it is, and always was, that specific thing. Like Schrodinger cat is both dead and alive until you open the box, at which point it has always been dead or alive.
Except here it's 'failure' instead of measurement, and the result always comes out 'not conservative'. Which is why Reagan is conservative until you point at his policies and force people to admit he wasn't...he never failed, so never got 'measured'.
You'll notice that McCain was apparently a conservative in 2000, and in 1992 for that matter, despite being significantly to the left of where he is now. As had Romney.
Or, perhaps, another way of looking at it is that Republicans are conservative until other Republicans vote them off the island, which usually happens only after something goes wrong...but they've just recently panicked and starting voting everyone except themselves off the island.
And I just know someone's going to respond to this with exactly what 'conservativism' is. I did not argue that conservativism did not exist. I argued that, as used in politics, 'conservative' is a way to refer to 'successful Republicans', period, and has no meaning outside that. Outside politics, it might, indeed, refer to some consistent political philosophy, I dunno.
Ah, but no one votes for the Democrats in order for them to be sold down the river by the media companies.
In other words, the Democrats have a platform that is not in conflict with itself. Or, rather, their actual platform has that in it...and no one who wants it there votes for them. The reasons that people vote for them are no in conflict. They often fall short, very short, of those reasons, but people don't for them for half a dozen conflicting things that are all 'conservative'.
I.e., while they might suggest driving cross country to New York from LA, and only make it to Houston, and sometimes go to Alaska instead, the Republicans want to drive from LA to Florida and Alaska and fly to Hawaii, all at the same same time. The Democrats just FAIL, the Republicans have impossible goals to start with.
Failure, especially failure by 'buying candidates', you can fix by actually voting in primaries. There's a reason the slogan at DailyKos is More and Better Democrats. Conflicting goals can't actually be 'fixed', because there are people trying to 'unfix' them into goals that you don't want.
Which is ironic, because the Democrats are actually the results of two political theories merging into one party: Progressivism and Liberalism. Progressivism wants to solve social problems using the government, and liberalism is what you just called 'classic liberalism', concerned about the rights of man. (Which does not, despite what the libertarians like to be pretend, include the right not to be taxed.)
But, in ironies of ironies, they get along pretty well, whereas the Republicans are the 'Democrats except' party...they'd be Democrats except for one single issue. I know at least three people who the sole reason they voted for Bush was abortion. (I live in Georgia, the one not at war with Russia.) And these 'one single issues' are often at odds with each other, which is why you get silliness like 'compassionate conservativism'.
You do not have to pay for quite a lot of stuff from the cable company. A lot of those channels are free if you have a sat dish.
What you are paying for is the cable company to receive them and retransmit them to your house. As the cable company, quite obviously, makes no money from any content on those channels, it's hard to see whether or not there are commercials on them would matter in the slightest to them.
I dare you to name a single Republican position that's supported by more than 60% of the population.
If we were only spending the money needed to defend ourselves, we wouldn't need to nearly outspend the rest of the world put together.
Bzzzzzt, thank you for playing. We do not 'nearly' outspend the rest of the world put together. :)
We do outspend the rest of the world put together, thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan putting us over the edge.
In fact, spending on Iraq and Afghanistan alone beats every other country in the world. Twice. I.e, if you average that in half for two wars, we're spending more on each war than then the second most expensive military in the world, France, spends for their entire military.
That sounds more like a problem with Digg than somewhere else.
See, that's sorta damn stupid.
If the government wants there to be 'fair', unmoderated forums...well, um...nothing's stopping them from building a web site. People might think this is silly, but that's partially what the National Mall in Washington is for, so it's not like it's without precedent.
They could even organize it by having different forums for each branch of the government, each executive department, and each proposed congressional bill. And the entire US code. Make each comment require a captcha to cut down on spamming. (I don't think that would infringe on 1st amendment rights, at least if they handicap-accessible it.) Expire each comment after a week. Let people register an ID when registering to vote, or post anonymously or pseudononymously. Do not keep logs. Tada, it's the National Mall, online, although much better organized.
But, no, that would be too logical.
You know, to a certain extent, what you're talking about already happens...except it happens at the level of the forums themselves, instead of within a forum. No one can stop anyone else from making a blog that says whatever they want.
Actually, that happens in real life, too. The right to free speech means I can give a press conference at my house..and you don't have the right to run in and interrupt it.
You can, of course, hold your own press conference, and if I do it somewhere outside my control, you can interrupt me...and it is a valid point that nowhere on the internet is 'outside someone's control', but the obvious solution, as I said, if this is actually a problem, is for the government to build such a place, not set rules about what happens in my house.
There were no voices saying that the previous Republican majority wasn't conservative until after the government failed miserably at everything it tried to do.
That, honestly, is the real difference between the parties. The Republicans are always 'conservative' until they inevitably fail, at which point they've never been conservative.
That's worse than the 'no true scotsman' fallacy. That fallacy, for those who don't know, is when you say 'No true X has the characteristics of Y', and then, when someone finds an X that does indeed have Y, you assert that this X isn't really an X...it's an exception, or a bad example for some reason, and shouldn't be considered an X.
But, with 'conservatives', it's like we've started that fallacy and have managed to eliminate half the population of Scotland, and not found a single one yet. It's like the claim here is 'no true Scotsman is from Scotland' or something, and we've had to discard Every. Single. Scotman we've run across.
The one that hasn't been kicked out of the party, Ronald Reagan, is still a 'conservative' because he didn't fail, despite not actually following any of the characteristics of 'conservativism'.
Meanwhile, Democrats do get called on their behavior. They are constantly accused of being too far to the right by, well, the whole damn internet. The actions they do that are inconsistent with the left are criticized at the time, not later, when they've failed horrible and everyone's looking for a reason to that it isn't their fault.
Just ask Joseph Lieberman. He got kicked out of the damn party. Not for failure, not retroactively, but because he votes like a Republican, period.
Erm...states can't gerrymander anything to affect their electoral college, unless they allocate the votes by district.
Which California does not, and that actually hasn't even been proposed or implemented anywhere. Current proportional allocation proposals takes the entire state vote and divides that among the electors, not assigns it by district.
While I'd argue that doing it by Congressional district (and having the majority of the state pick the two votes that correspond to Senators) would be a good idea (Assuming ungerrymandered districts), that is not, and has never, actually been done in any state ever, to my knowledge.
The Dems were never very organized to start with. Will Rogers has a quote about that.
The problem is that, while quite a lot of Dems and a Repubs are really in their party for a single issue, the Republicans' single issues conflict with each other, and the Democrats' do not. You can't be a theocrat and a libertarian at the same time, or in favor of small government and unending war, or anti-immigration and pro-big-business...
And those are just examples where the wheels have recently come off. There are actually a few more that should hit soon. For example, the small government people and the unending war people have a near trifecta incompatibility with the right-wing environmentalists, who are rapidly showing up from the religious right (Apparently, some of them have noticed humans are supposed to be the stewards of the earth.) All three of them disagree with the other two.
They're pretty much limited to small time scammers who go around and personally scam people.
I'm less worried about those. While it is a cliche, it is true that it's much harder to con an honest man, and thus most of the face-to-face scammers come up with scams that would be illegal to participate in if they were legit. Or at least most 'long cons' are.
They do this because people are a lot more likely to be secretive, and a lot less likely to report the crime afterwards, if they believe their actions are illegal or at least somewhat gray.
The only online scam of this nature is the Nigerian advanced-fee fraud, and that's actually a face-to-face fraud that's happened to make its way online. And while it operates via spam, it actually operates rather different...they send out the spam in low enough volume that it's not noticeable as spam, so they can keep their return email open, and basically it's entirely personal past that point.
Most online scams, OTOH, are fake or forged storefronts that take your money or login for something that would be entirely legal, and just run with it. People who are victimized by them are honest people.
The point is there is going to be a delay between when the customer can hear everything that's going on, and when I'll be able to get to the pause button.
And you completely ignored the obvious solution, the one I actually was talking about when I said 'two mute buttons' which is to mute your telephone microphone, and only unmute it after you mute the other audio. If people appear on the phone line without any input from you, I am rather baffled as to how you currently operate without a mute button.
This, of course, requires you to be able to a) purchase a phone that has a headset input, and b) purchase a headset with a mute button, (Or purchase a phone and headset in one.) and as you are probably incapable of finding the door in and out of the room you are in and so are currently building a complicated series of ladders and slides out the window for 'convenience', who knows how long that could take.
The far more expensive computer which I already own, which will be wasting power while I'm at work regardless, and has more up-time than the viagra mascot? If you're not going to be helpful you could at least not assume I'm retarded.
I dunno, you clearly are somewhat retarded, when your problem could be solved by a) getting a phone that supported a standard headset, and b) installing a mute switch on your PC audio and mic input, and c) mixing the PC audio and phone audio together before your headset, and d) being smart enough to mute and unmute them in the correct order.
Here's a free clue for you: No VoIP setup is going to pause your other apps when unmuting your mic. They only do that when they answer the phone, and you have a weird setup where that doesn't apply. So, at best, you'd have to hit a button to pause whatever, hoping you can remember whatever keystroke it is for whatever you're doing, and then another button to unmute the audio.
Which is obviously much much easier than just having two big mute buttons on your desk, and completely muting your computer audio, despite the application, before unmuting your mic.
Actually, there are apps that will let you assign global keystrokes to mute audio, or you can just rely on your app pausing...so what you actually need is a phone with a headset plug, an adapter to turn that into a 'normal', two-plug headset, and a stereo 'splitter' backwards that merges in your computer audio, and a computer headset with a mute button. It's entirely possible you have the first and last of those already.
Yeah, duh. Really. No software solution is going to pause all possible sound generating applications.
Except you don't need a 'DJ mixer', and you don't need to wire anything into your phone. At least not for what he wanted.
He, and I know this sounds weird, apparently takes the phone off the hook and it stays off the hook, connected to his business. Presumably there's something that says 'incoming call' on the audio.
What he actually needs is a switch that disables the microphone when the second audio channel is being mixed into his headphones.
He could probably fake this with a cheap A/V switcher, one with RCA video. Hook the computer audio to one side, and take the audio output and splice it into the headset before it's plugged into the phone. (They have adapters for that.)
Then hook the mic from the headset into the other video input, and plug the video output into the phone. (Notice I did that backwards. Some want the signal to only go one direction, and have filters and the signal goes from the microphone to the phone. This would be annoying if we were switching between multiple mics, but we aren't.)
Or he can by a button-switchable KVM with audio connections. That does exactly the same thing, but the plugs are in the right format, although it's a bit more expensive. It's possible that someone out there is producing an audio-only switcher.
Alternately, and much cheaper, he can just buy two inline mute buttons for those two things, and mix the computer audio after that point. And always be sure to disable the computer audio before enabling the microphone, and vis versa.
It's entirely possible his headset already has a mute button for the mic, so all he's have to find is one of those for the computer. You can buy them at Radio Shack for a few dollars. It's a tiny fraction more work than a single switch, but seriously.
Alternately, he can buy a TDTP (Triple pole, double throw) switch, or a 'DTDP' that is set up to handle stereo audio channels, and wire it himself. (Some people might assume he could disconnect the ground instead of the stereo channels, but that will probably not work.)
Honestly, this question is incredibly dumb. Diverting the audio through a computer serves no purpose. VOIP apps cannot pause all sound applications, and, more to the point, are unlikely to be willing to leave the phone off the hook all the time and the mic off, and only pause apps when the mic is on. Almost all of them pause apps when the phone is answered, and that's all.
Oh, but I'm sure the right will bring up dead voting Democratic, like that's happened anywhere outside of Chicago or in the last three decades.
Or that organization that was stupidly paid by the Democrats X dollars per person they registered to vote, so some of the employees decided to fake some registrations, which surely was a sign of some attempt at voter fraud despite those registrations not making past obvious checks and absolutely no evidence anyone intended to show up and vote those.
No, it is sure that the Democrats are 'as bad' as the Republicans, because of a single incredibly corrupt town decades ago and some imagery 'attempts' at cheating that couldn't have worked. This, of course, is equal to fraudulent robocalls, and passing laws allowing them to 'challenge' at the ballot box. And the ID check. For some reason I have to show ID when voting. Why is that, exactly? Has there actually been a documented instance of people showing up to cast ballots for other people? No. But there are plenty of old people and poor people who don't have ID, and guess how they vote?
Oh, and let's not forget all the precinct laws that operate on space. You have a precinct for X voters, and a precinct for X square miles, whichever comes first. So now that I live in a rural area, I'm a precinct that serves maybe 300 registered voters, and literally do not wait in line at all. When I lived in an offshoot of Atlanta, I waited in line for 4 hours for the 2000 election. There were quite possibly more voters in front of me than even existed for the whole precinct where I am now. (And, of course, the majority of them were black.)
I'm sure all this is just craaazy coincidence, because everyone knows both the parties are identically bad.
Well, people, start paying attention. They're not. Looking at the policies, looking at people polled on the polices, and the United States population exists in a bell curve, with most of the citizen's opinion hovering in the middle.
The problem is that 'middle' is slightly to the left of the Democrats position. I'm not kidding in the slightest. You want to know why McCain is getting no traction in this election, that's it. Well, that and Bush, but honestly, Bush just broke the image of the system...there's a reason it can't get put back together. The Republican party has moved so far to the right, and the Democrats have followed so far, that when people actually wake up from their trance (Thanks to Bush) and look around, they notice they're absurdly far to the left. McCain lists Obama's votes to prove how he's the 'most liberal Senator', and people nod at them.
But, no, both parties are 'equally bad', and everyone fails to notice they are 'equally bad' policy wise because they are too far to the right. And they certainly aren't 'equally bad' legally...the last four Republican presidents committed impeachable crimes in office. (Watergate for Nixon, Iran/Contra for Reagan and Bush 1, and I don't need to list them for Bush 2 if you've been slightly awake.) Clinton, OTOH, was pursued for years and we know what his sole instance of wrongdoing turned out to be. And Carter and JFK didn't appear to violate any laws I can think of. (It's possible JFK would have also been impeached if his affairs came out, but I honestly think impeachment should be reserved for crimes committed in office by the office, not the person, unless the president decides to run around being a serial killer as a hobby.)
The only logical way to stop this is to vote for the party on the left, and vote in primaries for people on the left. That will fix the policies, and it will eventually cripple the wrongdoing ability.
This post got a little more ranty and political than I intended, and I'm sure it will be modded down into oblivion, but whatever. I'm sick of people running around acting like both parties are identical. They're 'identical' because of dirty tricks and apathy resulting in the Republican repeatedly winning when they logi