I regularly freelance for projects where we have one template programmer, one middleware programmer (me), and one DBA. With the same team, we've tried projects with stored procedures and without. In general we've moved away from sprocs.
The first time we tried sprocs, we basically treated them as functions. I would pass in a bunch of arguments (db column contents) to sprocs that would insert a new Activity, for instance. This got old very fast. It was much faster for me to write the business object that would insert itself from the middleware layer, than it was to wait for the DBA to create the sproc, after which I would have to create a middleware layer to the sproc anyway. It also didn't make financial sense for the client, because DBA's usually charge a higher hourly rate than middleware programmers.
The other sprocs were ones where I would supply several search criteria to a sproc (basically portions of a where clause), where he would assemble it into a sql query and then return the result set back to me. That was a bit more useful, but ended up kind of silly too, because it wasn't efficient to involve the DBA in actual application logic - we kept on having to go back to him whenever someone wanted to add a new dropdown to the search form.
If you're been an intermediate programmer, you've painted yourself in the hellacious corner of trying to dynamically generate a sql query that may or may not join across multiple tables. It ended up being a lot easier for the DBA to simply create a view for each family of search queries. Then I'd assemble the sql query on the middleware layer. Easy then, because I'd never have to worry about dynamic joins - the view would already have the joins, and I'd only be querying against the single view. And if there was a query change, I wouldn't have to involve him unless is actually required adding new columns to the view.
Right now the complexity of our projects don't require the remaining cases where a sproc would really make a huge positive difference. One such case would be a multi-step atomic transaction where we were worried about performance. A sproc would be perfect for that. But in general you can do just fine with inserting into tables and selecting from views without having to deal with the cost of having a significant amount of your project in sprocs.
Finally, an important tiebreaker between having logic in sprocs and in middleware is a pragmatic one - system resources. If you're making a lot of changes, you're going to be dealing with source code management - trunks, branches, and multiple staging installations. It's much easier to do this with your code repository than your database. With ost companies I've worked with, it's a lot easier to set up a new vhost for a code installation than it is to set up a third oracle installation. If you have a lot of quick changes to make, it's easier to make them in the codebase.
Beyond that though, it really depends on the team. If we had a full-time DBA rather than our 10-hour/week guy, and a less competent middleware programmer than myself, and a project with more fixed requirements, then we might defer more to sprocs. But our DBA is swamped, our projects tend to have ever-changing scopes, and I'm quite comfortable with MVC and keeping the control layer thin, to be able to respond quickly to the scope changes without having to majorly rework business objects on the model layer. It works well for us - and these are for large scale bank intranets, not simple little webapp one-offs.
Many people that know too many buzzwords think that "the business object layer" by definition MEANS the database and sprocs. It doesn't have to. It can just as easily mean the Model layer of an MVC middleware layer. With my work style, it's faster to leave it there and then use the database for storage and data-level calculations that can be embedded in the queries themselves.
I knew a whole bunch of Dean supporters. They were anything but radical. As a general rule they were very passionate and motivated political moderates. They knew Dean's politics and supported them - supporting the Afghanistan war, his position on guns (leave it up to the states), and being a fiscal conservative (historically an "old republican" position). Any form of marketing, whether internet or traditional media, can serve as a magnifying glass, but what the internet enabled was the greater level of political collaboration. The problem was that since it was young, it didn't scale. With more mature technology, the scaling could have been there to let millions of people work on important but interesting political tasks, all loosely connected to a common goal.
the 2x2 matrix is often just a glorified illustration of the ability to recognize false choices. It's not so much inspiring that an executive would whip out a 2x2 matrix after many months of corporate strategy meetings, as it is depressing that so much time was wasted beforehand.
Any time you feel a conflict, it is because there are two (or more) elements warring against each other. Sometimes it's just a matter of realizing that we've told ourselves that we can only have one or the other, and discovering that we can instead say "both", which is what the upper right areas of these little matrices are about. Most of us don't need months of corporate meetings to recognize that.
false choices... dichotomies... double-binds... 2x2 matrices... all related.
God, what a bunch of horrible advice. Questioner, your only mistake here was asking advice of the slashdot crowd. When they are telling you that you are arrogant, they are saying that they are insecure. I know a lot of non-geek friends, and they are free with compliments and never seem to feel the urge to take someone down a peg, and it's because they are well-adjusted human beings.
Fact is, if you're entering college and you're good at linux, you're pretty damn smart.
You've got a great thinking style. I think that folks like you *appear* to be breadth-first thinkers instead of depth-first thinkers only because you're continually scanning to find the thing that will fascinate you in the long term. You just haven't found it yet. That's ok, you're young.
So get yourself into college, delay declaring your major as long as possible, and take electives. Scan, scan, scan.
What's nice about someone who gets fascinated about things is that eventually things will fall in line. Life is like compound interest that way - you continually make little deposits in the bank, that all seem insignificant by themselves, and then one day, wham, you realize you've hit critical mass and you start getting a significant return on your earlier investments.
So follow your nose, or your gut, or whatever. Do what interests you even if it doesn't make any sense. If it is fascinating and requires effort (and isn't sitting on your ass watching tv), it'll end up being worthwhile even if you can't identify exactly how at first.
In a related effort, START MAXING OUR YOUR IRA. NOW. If you don't need to work, work enough to earn your $3k/year and put it all in your Roth. No matter how stupid it seems now, you will consider yourself a frigging genius in ten years. Any reason not to do so will seem completely stupid and selfish in ten years. I'm telling you, starting now and maxing out only for ten years will probably get you MORE money than starting in ten years and doing it for the rest of your life.
I freelance professionally with both perl and php. I like them both. Perl is my first language. I find that it's easier for me to use php when I'm using techniques I already know, and it's easier for me to use perl when I'm learning new techniques. php has a way of penalizing you for experimenting, it's kind of inscrutable in terms of doing what you'd expect. Perl is great that way. But when you know exactly what you're doing, php is cleaner.
If you're the kind of coder that has an urge to make things complicated, then perl is better. But I find that as I get more experienced and senior level, that I aim more towards making my code as simple and elegant as possible. I aim towards frameworks rather than applications with a lot of anticipated features. You want the application layer (in MVC terms, the control layer) to be as thin as possible. I find that I rarely need to even do things like subclass other classes. A lot of highly competent but inexperienced programmers tend to overengineer things, make too many layers of interface, use too much API, write utilities to write other utilities, get stuck in meta-land. It's like the people that declare that they can't use anything that can't do multiple inheritance. It's silly.
All you need to do is just get the job done without coding yourself into a box. Design, design, design. Architecture, architecture, architecture. You can make six figures with a solid understanding of MVC. The language choice doesn't really matter all that much. You'd be surprised how much syntax I don't have memorized. You'd be surprised how little code I write. And I can still get a lot better - I'm only started to work with Class::DBI. I'm only starting to work with php 5.
When you have two parties that have been around for a while in a two party system, it's *going* to approach 50-50. You can't avoid it. Both are tied to their bases and reach towards the center to attain the magic 50 point. If one party underperforms, they react by being less extreme and reaching towards the center more. If they reach too far, they lose their base. 50/50 means the parties know their constituency and the people know their parties.
Third parties try to flip the paradigm and appeal to large cross-sections, which honestly could work, but the problem is the two-party system of the Electoral College ensures that they either have to build enough support to actually win the election in one election, or they risk hurting the people by disenfranchising them away from the likelihood of being accurately represented. (Definition: if there's another candidate that the population prefers overall, on a head-to-head basis, to the candidate that actually won, then the population has been disenfranchised.)
The best way to ensure that there are better choices for voters are to remove the cost of having multiple candidates. This means removing the Electoral College, counting nationwide using a system like Condorcet, and optionally including per-state weightings to protect regional interests in the way the E.C. tries to (but performs horribly at).
First, he brings up the stupid false argument against a paper trail by equating a paper trail with voter receipts. The paper trail everyone advocates is where the precinct *keeps* the paper ballot. There's no receipt that the voter walks out with.
Second, if this HAVA thing is all based on a creative reading of the act, "Well, they said auditable but they don't really MEAN it", why can't someone just sue? This is just the sort of the thing that Supreme Court is made for, to smack down Congress when they write a stupid law.
Honestly, this seems like an example of the brain outthinking itself. The point isn't simply to have bulletproof scamproof voting. It's also to convince the VOTER that it's scamproof. If a grandmother needs to understand one-time pads in order to be assured that the vote can't be rigged, there's a problem. She'll be thinking, "I fold the whatsit on the whosit and saw what I did, and then I gave half of it to them and they ripped it up in front of me for god knows what reason, and who knows where the hell that vote went."
These voting scientists that advocate a paper trail don't advocate paper receipts. They advocate paper copies that are also turned in at the precinct. Not the same thing.
And beware of the whole "rebuttal" about vote-trading. Critics deliberately misrepresent the "paper trail" thing and say that it can be used for vote-trading scams. The real truth is that that only happens if the "paper trail" is a receipt that the voter keeps. The voting scientists, on the other hand, advocate a paper trail that is turned in at the precinct so they can be manually recounted later. This is what HR 2239 advocates as well. This kind of paper trail is NOT susceptible to vote-trading. It is a very, very good bill.
I've already gotten a reply from David Wu in Portland OR that he will support this bill.
All right, I know it's popular to knock down anything that isn't clearly scientific. But there's something about the skepticism about John Edward that doesn't seem very scientific itself.
Aren't you supposed to actually try to knock down the hypothesis rather than simply point out alternate explanations of how it could be faking? I mean, sure, going to a room of bereaved people and saying generalities and waiting for responses while you get more specific could definitely be cold reading or a con. But pointing out that possibility doesn't mean that it isn't psychic.
Most skeptics come back with their belief that "psychic mumbo-jumbo" is ridiculous, so of course it couldn't be. But there's a word for that reasoning, and that is "tautology". Using your belief that psychic mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous to prove that psychic mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous. It doesn't actually disprove psychic activity though.
Most skepticism seems centered on pointing out alternate explanations. Which is fine, I appreciate the perspective. But it all too common takes a bizarre left turn just before the conclusion; they seem to think it means they've disproved the claim. They haven't; all they've done is introduced doubt. That can be good, valuable, healthy, but it's not the same as debunking.
Yeah, I call bullshit. There have been a couple of occasions where the Dean campaign hired firms to handle email outreach, where the agreement was for them *not* to spam, where the firms broke the agreement, and where the Dean campaign severed ties with the firms. I personally have been on their mailing list from the beginning and followed their instructions to specify I wanted no email about donating, and I haven't gotten one since. This campaign is acting with a hell of a lot more integrity about campaign donations than you'd expect from a campaign.
I really like writing in vi also, but my problem is that I also want to be able to view my writing (based for the web) in html or pdf, etc. In the past my solution was to write in LaTeX, because the formatting commands didn't take up a lot of room compared to the text itself. But right now the thought of doing that exhausts me. What I really want is something where I can make a style template that is then invisible, and then continue to write in vi. Is there a way to do this? Maybe one of the LaTeX wysiwig editors has a vi mode where you can do all the typing and editing with vi/vim commands?
How about a class action lawsuit against that plaintiff that got $12,500? His suit led directly to register.com needing to raise their fees by $10 . His actions hurt a large group of people.
Can anyone explain exactly what chain voting is? I saw something about having someone go in with a ballot, turn in that one, and then come out with the one they were issued, but I don't see what the point is.
An electronic machine *with* paper trail, along with random spot-checks of recounting the paper ballots, should be immune to this, right?
The bill I mentioned also requires random sampling (spot-checking) of the paper ballots to make sure that the paper results match the electronic results. This is a good bill, it needs more support.
Don't just complain, act: There is a bill in Congress introduced by Rush Holt, D-NJ. It is called "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003". It is H.R. 2239. It currently has 29 cosponsors and needs more support. The Summary page is here. The press page is here. Congress is in session again now. Contact your Congressperson and demand they support this bill. It would require a voter-verifiable paper trail.
In real life, it's been tested and the barrier is that voters hate the fact that if they vote for their first and second choice rather than just their first choice, they could help their second choice beat their first choice.
Condorcet doesn't have that problem.
Condorcet and IRV are identical to voters; it's just the counting method that is different.
Bleah. I realize this question is for her, but I've always hated this question. It's either slanted or ignorant. The simple truth is that $5,000 for someone who makes 200k just isn't worth as much to someone who makes 20k. The wealthiest SHOULD pay the highest percentage of their income in taxes, and the truth is that in many cases they actually DON'T.
A lot of people aren't thinking this through. They aren't saying they can extract DNA from an image, fax, photograph, or digitization of a fingerprint. They're saying they can extract DNA from the fingerprint itself, because of residue left from the actual finger. This isn't high-tech palmreading.
I hate that fucking quote. Rather, I don't, but the ONLY TIME IT IS EVER USED is for completely stupid contexts that cheapen the impact of the quote. It was used against me once, in an argument about policy in a pointless little committee. The implication is that if you disagree with whoever says it, you're basically enabling Hitler to commit genocide. Pisses me off. As if arguing for open source voting would have prevented World War II. Idiotic.
Slashdot Mirror
I regularly freelance for projects where we have one template programmer, one middleware programmer (me), and one DBA. With the same team, we've tried projects with stored procedures and without. In general we've moved away from sprocs.
The first time we tried sprocs, we basically treated them as functions. I would pass in a bunch of arguments (db column contents) to sprocs that would insert a new Activity, for instance. This got old very fast. It was much faster for me to write the business object that would insert itself from the middleware layer, than it was to wait for the DBA to create the sproc, after which I would have to create a middleware layer to the sproc anyway. It also didn't make financial sense for the client, because DBA's usually charge a higher hourly rate than middleware programmers.
The other sprocs were ones where I would supply several search criteria to a sproc (basically portions of a where clause), where he would assemble it into a sql query and then return the result set back to me. That was a bit more useful, but ended up kind of silly too, because it wasn't efficient to involve the DBA in actual application logic - we kept on having to go back to him whenever someone wanted to add a new dropdown to the search form.
If you're been an intermediate programmer, you've painted yourself in the hellacious corner of trying to dynamically generate a sql query that may or may not join across multiple tables. It ended up being a lot easier for the DBA to simply create a view for each family of search queries. Then I'd assemble the sql query on the middleware layer. Easy then, because I'd never have to worry about dynamic joins - the view would already have the joins, and I'd only be querying against the single view. And if there was a query change, I wouldn't have to involve him unless is actually required adding new columns to the view.
Right now the complexity of our projects don't require the remaining cases where a sproc would really make a huge positive difference. One such case would be a multi-step atomic transaction where we were worried about performance. A sproc would be perfect for that. But in general you can do just fine with inserting into tables and selecting from views without having to deal with the cost of having a significant amount of your project in sprocs.
Finally, an important tiebreaker between having logic in sprocs and in middleware is a pragmatic one - system resources. If you're making a lot of changes, you're going to be dealing with source code management - trunks, branches, and multiple staging installations. It's much easier to do this with your code repository than your database. With ost companies I've worked with, it's a lot easier to set up a new vhost for a code installation than it is to set up a third oracle installation. If you have a lot of quick changes to make, it's easier to make them in the codebase.
Beyond that though, it really depends on the team. If we had a full-time DBA rather than our 10-hour/week guy, and a less competent middleware programmer than myself, and a project with more fixed requirements, then we might defer more to sprocs. But our DBA is swamped, our projects tend to have ever-changing scopes, and I'm quite comfortable with MVC and keeping the control layer thin, to be able to respond quickly to the scope changes without having to majorly rework business objects on the model layer. It works well for us - and these are for large scale bank intranets, not simple little webapp one-offs.
Many people that know too many buzzwords think that "the business object layer" by definition MEANS the database and sprocs. It doesn't have to. It can just as easily mean the Model layer of an MVC middleware layer. With my work style, it's faster to leave it there and then use the database for storage and data-level calculations that can be embedded in the queries themselves.
I knew a whole bunch of Dean supporters. They were anything but radical. As a general rule they were very passionate and motivated political moderates. They knew Dean's politics and supported them - supporting the Afghanistan war, his position on guns (leave it up to the states), and being a fiscal conservative (historically an "old republican" position). Any form of marketing, whether internet or traditional media, can serve as a magnifying glass, but what the internet enabled was the greater level of political collaboration. The problem was that since it was young, it didn't scale. With more mature technology, the scaling could have been there to let millions of people work on important but interesting political tasks, all loosely connected to a common goal.
the 2x2 matrix is often just a glorified illustration of the ability to recognize false choices. It's not so much inspiring that an executive would whip out a 2x2 matrix after many months of corporate strategy meetings, as it is depressing that so much time was wasted beforehand.
Any time you feel a conflict, it is because there are two (or more) elements warring against each other. Sometimes it's just a matter of realizing that we've told ourselves that we can only have one or the other, and discovering that we can instead say "both", which is what the upper right areas of these little matrices are about. Most of us don't need months of corporate meetings to recognize that.
false choices... dichotomies... double-binds... 2x2 matrices... all related.
God, what a bunch of horrible advice. Questioner, your only mistake here was asking advice of the slashdot crowd. When they are telling you that you are arrogant, they are saying that they are insecure. I know a lot of non-geek friends, and they are free with compliments and never seem to feel the urge to take someone down a peg, and it's because they are well-adjusted human beings.
Fact is, if you're entering college and you're good at linux, you're pretty damn smart.
You've got a great thinking style. I think that folks like you *appear* to be breadth-first thinkers instead of depth-first thinkers only because you're continually scanning to find the thing that will fascinate you in the long term. You just haven't found it yet. That's ok, you're young.
So get yourself into college, delay declaring your major as long as possible, and take electives. Scan, scan, scan.
What's nice about someone who gets fascinated about things is that eventually things will fall in line. Life is like compound interest that way - you continually make little deposits in the bank, that all seem insignificant by themselves, and then one day, wham, you realize you've hit critical mass and you start getting a significant return on your earlier investments.
So follow your nose, or your gut, or whatever. Do what interests you even if it doesn't make any sense. If it is fascinating and requires effort (and isn't sitting on your ass watching tv), it'll end up being worthwhile even if you can't identify exactly how at first.
In a related effort, START MAXING OUR YOUR IRA. NOW. If you don't need to work, work enough to earn your $3k/year and put it all in your Roth. No matter how stupid it seems now, you will consider yourself a frigging genius in ten years. Any reason not to do so will seem completely stupid and selfish in ten years. I'm telling you, starting now and maxing out only for ten years will probably get you MORE money than starting in ten years and doing it for the rest of your life.
What was it?
I freelance professionally with both perl and php. I like them both. Perl is my first language. I find that it's easier for me to use php when I'm using techniques I already know, and it's easier for me to use perl when I'm learning new techniques. php has a way of penalizing you for experimenting, it's kind of inscrutable in terms of doing what you'd expect. Perl is great that way. But when you know exactly what you're doing, php is cleaner.
If you're the kind of coder that has an urge to make things complicated, then perl is better. But I find that as I get more experienced and senior level, that I aim more towards making my code as simple and elegant as possible. I aim towards frameworks rather than applications with a lot of anticipated features. You want the application layer (in MVC terms, the control layer) to be as thin as possible. I find that I rarely need to even do things like subclass other classes. A lot of highly competent but inexperienced programmers tend to overengineer things, make too many layers of interface, use too much API, write utilities to write other utilities, get stuck in meta-land. It's like the people that declare that they can't use anything that can't do multiple inheritance. It's silly.
All you need to do is just get the job done without coding yourself into a box. Design, design, design. Architecture, architecture, architecture. You can make six figures with a solid understanding of MVC. The language choice doesn't really matter all that much. You'd be surprised how much syntax I don't have memorized. You'd be surprised how little code I write. And I can still get a lot better - I'm only started to work with Class::DBI. I'm only starting to work with php 5.
When you have two parties that have been around for a while in a two party system, it's *going* to approach 50-50. You can't avoid it. Both are tied to their bases and reach towards the center to attain the magic 50 point. If one party underperforms, they react by being less extreme and reaching towards the center more. If they reach too far, they lose their base. 50/50 means the parties know their constituency and the people know their parties.
Third parties try to flip the paradigm and appeal to large cross-sections, which honestly could work, but the problem is the two-party system of the Electoral College ensures that they either have to build enough support to actually win the election in one election, or they risk hurting the people by disenfranchising them away from the likelihood of being accurately represented. (Definition: if there's another candidate that the population prefers overall, on a head-to-head basis, to the candidate that actually won, then the population has been disenfranchised.)
The best way to ensure that there are better choices for voters are to remove the cost of having multiple candidates. This means removing the Electoral College, counting nationwide using a system like Condorcet, and optionally including per-state weightings to protect regional interests in the way the E.C. tries to (but performs horribly at).
deserts wouldn't work because of the water requirement. but there's lots of acreage in the ocean.
First, he brings up the stupid false argument against a paper trail by equating a paper trail with voter receipts. The paper trail everyone advocates is where the precinct *keeps* the paper ballot. There's no receipt that the voter walks out with.
Second, if this HAVA thing is all based on a creative reading of the act, "Well, they said auditable but they don't really MEAN it", why can't someone just sue? This is just the sort of the thing that Supreme Court is made for, to smack down Congress when they write a stupid law.
Honestly, this seems like an example of the brain outthinking itself. The point isn't simply to have bulletproof scamproof voting. It's also to convince the VOTER that it's scamproof. If a grandmother needs to understand one-time pads in order to be assured that the vote can't be rigged, there's a problem. She'll be thinking, "I fold the whatsit on the whosit and saw what I did, and then I gave half of it to them and they ripped it up in front of me for god knows what reason, and who knows where the hell that vote went."
These voting scientists that advocate a paper trail don't advocate paper receipts. They advocate paper copies that are also turned in at the precinct. Not the same thing.
And beware of the whole "rebuttal" about vote-trading. Critics deliberately misrepresent the "paper trail" thing and say that it can be used for vote-trading scams. The real truth is that that only happens if the "paper trail" is a receipt that the voter keeps. The voting scientists, on the other hand, advocate a paper trail that is turned in at the precinct so they can be manually recounted later. This is what HR 2239 advocates as well. This kind of paper trail is NOT susceptible to vote-trading. It is a very, very good bill.
I've already gotten a reply from David Wu in Portland OR that he will support this bill.
All right, I know it's popular to knock down anything that isn't clearly scientific. But there's something about the skepticism about John Edward that doesn't seem very scientific itself.
Aren't you supposed to actually try to knock down the hypothesis rather than simply point out alternate explanations of how it could be faking? I mean, sure, going to a room of bereaved people and saying generalities and waiting for responses while you get more specific could definitely be cold reading or a con. But pointing out that possibility doesn't mean that it isn't psychic.
Most skeptics come back with their belief that "psychic mumbo-jumbo" is ridiculous, so of course it couldn't be. But there's a word for that reasoning, and that is "tautology". Using your belief that psychic mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous to prove that psychic mumbo-jumbo is ridiculous. It doesn't actually disprove psychic activity though.
Most skepticism seems centered on pointing out alternate explanations. Which is fine, I appreciate the perspective. But it all too common takes a bizarre left turn just before the conclusion; they seem to think it means they've disproved the claim. They haven't; all they've done is introduced doubt. That can be good, valuable, healthy, but it's not the same as debunking.
I've read through the comments looking for the most highly recommended PVR and here's what I come up with so far:
Most Tivos are Series 2 instead of Series 1, which means a lot less flexibility
There are DirecTivos for cheap but they require a DirecTV subscription
You can build your own and install MythTV (free) or Sage ($$).
There's also ReplayTV which last I heard is pretty good.
What others are there that are good buys?
Yeah, I call bullshit. There have been a couple of occasions where the Dean campaign hired firms to handle email outreach, where the agreement was for them *not* to spam, where the firms broke the agreement, and where the Dean campaign severed ties with the firms. I personally have been on their mailing list from the beginning and followed their instructions to specify I wanted no email about donating, and I haven't gotten one since. This campaign is acting with a hell of a lot more integrity about campaign donations than you'd expect from a campaign.
I really like writing in vi also, but my problem is that I also want to be able to view my writing (based for the web) in html or pdf, etc. In the past my solution was to write in LaTeX, because the formatting commands didn't take up a lot of room compared to the text itself. But right now the thought of doing that exhausts me. What I really want is something where I can make a style template that is then invisible, and then continue to write in vi. Is there a way to do this? Maybe one of the LaTeX wysiwig editors has a vi mode where you can do all the typing and editing with vi/vim commands?
How about a class action lawsuit against that plaintiff that got $12,500? His suit led directly to register.com needing to raise their fees by $10 . His actions hurt a large group of people.
Can anyone explain exactly what chain voting is? I saw something about having someone go in with a ballot, turn in that one, and then come out with the one they were issued, but I don't see what the point is.
An electronic machine *with* paper trail, along with random spot-checks of recounting the paper ballots, should be immune to this, right?
The bill I mentioned also requires random sampling (spot-checking) of the paper ballots to make sure that the paper results match the electronic results. This is a good bill, it needs more support.
Don't just complain, act: There is a bill in Congress introduced by Rush Holt, D-NJ. It is called "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003". It is H.R. 2239. It currently has 29 cosponsors and needs more support. The Summary page is here. The press page is here. Congress is in session again now. Contact your Congressperson and demand they support this bill. It would require a voter-verifiable paper trail.
In real life, it's been tested and the barrier is that voters hate the fact that if they vote for their first and second choice rather than just their first choice, they could help their second choice beat their first choice.
Condorcet doesn't have that problem.
Condorcet and IRV are identical to voters; it's just the counting method that is different.
Bleah. I realize this question is for her, but I've always hated this question. It's either slanted or ignorant. The simple truth is that $5,000 for someone who makes 200k just isn't worth as much to someone who makes 20k. The wealthiest SHOULD pay the highest percentage of their income in taxes, and the truth is that in many cases they actually DON'T.
jesus christ. all right, I'm not one to flame spelling, but you are the laziest typer I've ever seen.
A lot of people aren't thinking this through. They aren't saying they can extract DNA from an image, fax, photograph, or digitization of a fingerprint. They're saying they can extract DNA from the fingerprint itself, because of residue left from the actual finger. This isn't high-tech palmreading.
I hate that fucking quote. Rather, I don't, but the ONLY TIME IT IS EVER USED is for completely stupid contexts that cheapen the impact of the quote. It was used against me once, in an argument about policy in a pointless little committee. The implication is that if you disagree with whoever says it, you're basically enabling Hitler to commit genocide. Pisses me off. As if arguing for open source voting would have prevented World War II. Idiotic.