Our company has two sites (SF and LA) and one has almost entirely cubicles and very few offices (SF). The other has mostly offices and very few cubicles (LA). The productivity of the SF office is higher in my department, and while there are many reasons for this,
Because the LA office has to hire people who are willing to live in LA. Duh.
most people in SF will tell you the open plan design keeps the whole team moving forward faster. In fact, we have people who are supposed to have offices who refuse to move out of the cubicles because they like them better.
An uncrowded open plan with people who like each other can work okay, obviously... but that syndrome of having people who are turning down hardwalls might raise some questions about the management. I was working in one place where some people wanted to be moved out of their hardwalls because they felt like that was the only way they could be informed about what was going on: management wasn't terribly talkative, and if you couldn't evaesdrop on what they were up to you might not know.
I've had mixed results when asking for help in the gentoo forums, and I have found that the wording and the tone of how you ask questions is very important.
Exactly. It's important to whine a lot, and talk about how awful the software is,
and how there's absolutely no way anyone could possibly get it to work right.
Then you'll get a lot of people crawling out of the woodwork to rub your nose
in how stupid you are, because obviously it works like this.
Digital Research then had to blow off IBM when it came calling to them for an operating systems for the original IBM PC.
pcubbage wrote:
Gary Kihdal DID do a deal with IBM and did publish CP/M for the PC. It took a while
Yes, it "took a while", in fact it took too long for it to matter. IBM released the
PC with PC-DOS (essentially, MS-DOS), CP/M happened later -- and if IBM was willing
to ship boxes with CP/M pre-installed, that's news to me, I didn't hear about anything like that
at the time.
I think you guys are both repeating things that only have elements of the truth
to them, and I don't think all of the facts here are known, this is a real historical
puzzle here.
Try reading the wikipedia article, it doesn't look too bad:
Gary Kildall"
Some points that might be of interest (largely from memory):
Gary Kildal''s Digital Research was the established player in operating systems for small
microprocessor-based machines, with the CP/M product. There were also Apple IIs around
(gaining some respectability because of Visicalc, the first
spreadsheet), and a scattering of Apple II imitators, but not too
much else.
Kildall was clearly a West Coast-style uber-geek. His original name for his company was
"Intergalactic Digital Research"
When a division at IBM decided to put out a machine like this, they did approach Digital Research
to inquire about getting CP/M ported to it
Note; that this was not IBM's first attempt at doing something like a PC, there was an earlier product
that flopped, (the 5050 perhaps?). This was a very closed box, however, the IBM PC was a more open product
friendly to third-party hardware and software.
As I heard some conference pundit put it once "When they did it their way they failed, when they did
it our way they suceeded.
The funny thing is, when Apple started doing it "their way" with the Mac, everyone loved it
Many stories are told about this meeting between Kildall and IBM that suggest some kind of
cultural conflict between the suits and the post-hippee -- I don't know how true they are.
Many details you hear are off, e.g. "Kildall just fobbed them off on his wife" -- but his wife
was the company business manager, and she often handled the details of contracts.
IBM then talked to Bill Gates, whese claim to fame in those
days was Microsoft Basic.
This is a really bizarre move for them to make,
in my opinion, and I've never heard a good explanation for
it.
The wikipedia article claims Gates was already working
on the Basic ROM for the IBM PC.
My understanding is that Gates was pretty well
connected (I think his Mom was on IBM's board of directors).
I've heard an odd rumor about Kildall sleeping around
with the wife of someone at IBM -- take that for what it's
worth (probably nothing), I offer it as evidence that a lot
of us see a puzzle here that needs explaining.
The wikipedia article makes it sound like Gates himself
was the source of some of the tales about Kildall blowing
off IBM to go flying his airplane. Maybe Gates felt the
need to explain something?
Gates took on the job, in spite of having no experience in
the business of writing Operating Systems, and went out and
bought an OS cheap from Tim Patterson of Seattle Engineering --
$20,000? $50,000? You hear different numbers.
This was Q-DOS, aka "Quick and Dirty DOS".
Q-DOS was in fact a CP/M variant: it was based on code
pirated from Gary Kildall.
This was later proved in a court case, as I understand it,
but G
Actually, this ties in with the decline of science and engineering candidates, and programs, in this country. I deal in the real world.
Yeah, me too.
I don't give a damn about ideology, belief systems, even social morés actually.
But then, that's one of the reasons I do care about ideology and so on... but then, what I
actually wanted to comment on was this:
The anti-nuclear wing of the environmental movement isn't rational (you should have heard one of them attempt to explain alpha radiation).
I took a look at Helen Caldicott's latest book recently, and it appears that she's
claiming that nuclear power is all a sham because mining the nuclear fuel and constructing the plants and so on actually
requires burning loads of carbon emitting fossil fuel.
I ask you, even without looking into the numbers on that -- imagine saying the equivalent of that to
someone with a scheme to put photovaltaics on rooftops. What would you expect them to say?
Answer: "That's only true at the moment, once we have this alternate energy source in place
we'll be able to construct more of it using just the alternate energy."
Instead of getting rid of the greenhouse gases, we are going to continue to literally mask the problem. Why not just solve the base problem?
Because we know how to do this. Getting rid of already extant greenhouse gases is going to be a much trickier problem. I've heard an awful lot of moaning and doom-and-glooming over global warming, and precious little in the way of actual solutions. Especially the type of solutions that are implementable. Telling everyone to stop driving their cars and stop using electricity generated from greenhouse-producing generators is about as effective as telling the tides not to come in.
Nuclear power exists. The United States uses it for 20% of it's electric power, France uses it for most of their electric power. It's not some odd ball "alternate energy" source that doesn't really generate enough to matter: there isn't any reason in principle that it couldn't replace the 50% of our power that we still generate with coal power. Except of course, for some doom-and-gloom moaning about how it's evil, evil, evil.
Not that I have any thing in principle against "amelioration" schemes, either...
80% of the vote was counted by two firms, Diebold and ES&S. They're run by two brothers. There is no need to postulate a massive team of conspirators operating invisibly -- the system is centralized, it's suceptible to centralized attacks (not to mention internal corruption).
The system is not centralized. The equipment is programmed and operated and the votes tallied by the individual election commissions that purchase and deploy the equipment. They set up their own smart card collection routines, use their own networks to round of the results from each machine, etc. There is no evil Castle Diebold through which every municipality's voting data is passed on its way to the state capital or county office building where the information is consolidated for a given jurisdiction.
More accurately, there is no way for us to tell if there's an "evil Castle", because the software is locked up in a silo.
The accounts of mysterious visits from Diebold employees, however, does suggest that they may need physical access to the
machines to apply Patches of Evil -- if so, that makes the required conspiracy larger, and makes it's operations a bit more clumsy -- which may help explain why there didn't seem to be any widespread Republican fraud in 2006.
In any case, your arguments that such a conspiracy is implausible runs up against the evidence that it happened, in the only place such evidence can
exist: the exit-poll data. The patterns in the exit-poll discrepancies for 2004 correlate with the use of voting machines, the presence of Republican governors, and the importance of the race. Attempts at explaining them away don't hold up -- the pros favored the "reluctant Bush respondant" hypothesis, but if you actually look at the data it seems like the Kerry voters were a little more reluctant than the Bush. And if you look at the
over-all numbers, it does appear that there were 8 million more Bush voters than you can account for with the exit-polls.
I've also heard Mark Crispin Miller refer to census data that looks suspicious -- going by the percentage of folks who say that they voted,
there's supposed to be a 10 million vote difference that favored Bush.
So, sorry if this seems a little hard to deal with, but yeah, it does seem that the United States has had an excecutive branch of dubious legality for
the last 6 years.
This ACORN business is interesting, but one more time, if anyone's paying attention: What does it have to do with this subject?
Okay, one more time here's the "ScentCone" version of the ACORN workers story:
This year. This election. Here's a more-or-less random from the first page of Google results, but it shows the way to the local news coverage. Thousands of questionable registrations. The people involved were doing it systematically, but the group for which they were working ("ACORN") has been confronted over this stuff for the past several elections. Needless to say, they were shocked - SHOCKED! - that it would be happening, again, as they work to sign up more voters in dem-friendly urban areas. Shocked!
But if you actually read some news stories on the subject, you find things like this:
ACORN officials in Kansas City said they turned in the four people who were indicted.
"We're very happy that they were indicted," said Claudie Harris with ACORN.
Harris said ACORN workers are paid by the hour and not by the number of voter registration cards they turn in.
"When you fraudulently defraud this, that gives us a bad name and what we're trying to do a bad name," Harris said.
ACORN officials said the four indicted have been fired.
So, we're talking about four people working for ACORN, and ACORN themselves turned them in.
And I still haven't seen any references to previous problems with ACORN.
Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?
This year. This election. Here's a more-or-less random from the
first page of Google results, but it shows the way to the local
news coverage. Thousands of questionable registrations. The
people involved were doing it systematically, but the group for
which they were working ("ACORN") has been confronted over this
stuff for the past several elections.
Yeah, okay, I hadn't heard about this story -- it looks the news broke
in the last week or so. But once again: what does this have to
do with anything I was saying?
You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?
Gee, do you think that maybe the long-standing tradition of
ambushing people as they leave polling places and finding the
willing ones with time on their hands that will answer the polls
may not be keeping up with the hyper-focused to-the-household
campaigning, the huge shift to absentee balloting, and a more
divisive than ever media-fueled distortion of reported opinions?
Oh okay, so you're one of the "exit polls suck (when they tell us
what we don't want to hear)" crowd.
(Oh, duh, "absentee ballots"! I bet Edison/Mitofsky haven't
heard of those. Better call them.)
Or that perhaps the exit polling consortium, which is funded
collectively by a handful of media outlets, may be conducting
their questioning with workers that tend to reflect the biases
shown over and over to be present in the media companies they
represent?
Actually no, I haven't thought that, because (1) it doesn't at all
resemble the behavior of the Edison & Mitofsky firm -- they
apologized for "getting it wrong", and pushed for the "reluctant
Bush respondant" theory (without any evidence to support it, and
some to contradict it); (2) at this point, accusing the media of
"liberal bias" is completely insane.
If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?
Oh, I don't know... like maybe a shred of evidence, perhaps?
Specifically, what type of evidence? Exit poll
discrepancies are no good in your book -- those are only
meaningful in places like the Ukraine, of course.
Do you have any idea the number of people and the scope of the
conspiracy that would be required to introduce millions of
phantom votes in a general election? Millions?
80% of the vote was counted by two firms, Diebold and ES&S.
They're run by two brothers. There is no need to postulate
a massive team of conspirators operating invisibly -- the
system is centralized, it's suceptible to centralized attacks
(not to mention internal corruption).
On the other hand, the more conventional voter fraud techniques
really are pretty obvious, for example the tricks used in Ohio,
e.g. shorting Democratic districts on voter machines, making it
harder for people to vote there. The thing is, it didn't
particularly matter that it was obvious, they just went
"oh gee, we made a few mistakes here", and the
Republican-controlled congress declined to investigate.
magically creating millions of votes out of nowhere
Really! Millions. Do tell! (as opposed to just making stuff up, now)
I have an idea, try following the link that I posted.
a lot of the voter fraud exploits the Republicans were using in 2004 involved trying to disenfanchise the downtrodden (e.g. ex-convicts, black people, etc).
If, by "ex-cons" you mean "felons," then you should understand that allowing them to vote is election fraud. Until the law changes in most places, activists trying to get felons somehow into a voting booth are the ones committing the crime.
The rules vary from place to place. In some places, the idea is that once you've "paid your debt to society" you're a full citizen again...
e.g. there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to prevent Martha Stewart from voting.
One of the intimidation tactics I've heard about involved sending impressive-looking messages to ex-cons
telling them they weren't allowed to vote, when actually they were.
And, "black people?" By what mechansism are you finding voter registration to be tied to race?
The obvious one is to go by neighborhoods.
If that's your focus, how would you explain the (primarily dem) activists who just got busted for producing thousands and thousands of completely fictional registrations in predominantly urban areas like Kansas City and St. Louis? The same people registered multiple times, dead people registered, and completely fictional people with fake SSNs, etc?
Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?
And in any case, this is a non-sequitor. Why would I need to explain it? What does it have to do with what I was saying?
All registered in districts aimed at boosting votes against more conservative candidates. "Millions" of fraudulant votes? Come on. That would stick out like a sore thumb,
You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?
If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?
Karl Rove, was looking at 68 polls a week and he had "THE" math to show that Republicans would hold onto both houses.
Polls work less well when the administration convinces people it isn't safe to publicly be against the administration. How many polled people were afraid to tell the truth?
You're really confused, here. If you were following the polls at all, (e.g. by watching Tannenbaum's site, you would expect pretty much what we got: a close race for the Senate, and a Democratic win in the House. Karl Rove was publically
anouncing that this was all wrong, that the Republicans were going to win both, no problem.
This had people like myself who were already feeling paranoid (with good reason, in my opinion) wondering what the hell
was going on.
Nobody in the US wants coal-fired power plants, but they don't want the price of electricity to double.
Close, but I think it would be more correct to say that they don't want coal-plants and can't
bear the thought that they were wrong about nuclear plants.
But even that's not quite right, it's more like they want to reduce emissions of "green house gases"
and think they can do that somehow by switching to electric vehicles, when really that'll make the problem worse if they don't replace the coal plants with something else, but they don't exactly understand that half of their electricity is coming from coal plants, and that coal power is an astoundingly nasty 18th century technology (even if you don't factor in "global warming" concerns) --
And maybe they should've started working on solar power sats thirty years ago when
we were telling them to, but hey, what do a bunch of techie-nerds know about anything, eh?
Um, except in the previous election (here, I'm referring to the US), when it was the Republicans' ability to create a high turnout that was credited with much of their election success.
Actually, the Republicans appear to have won the 2004 election by magically creating millions of votes out of nowhere... it's probably not the best example for the point you're trying to make:
The exit polls were right -- Freeman and Mittledorf.
And in general, it's a pretty well-accepted truism that high-turnouts in the US favor the Democrats -- ir appears that conservatives are better about getting their act together to fill in forms, which is not necessarily something for the Democrats to be proud of. Though on the other hand, if you're inclined to think of the Democrats as the party of the little guys, that appears to be pretty accurate -- a lot of the voter fraud exploits the Republicans were using in 2004 involved trying to disenfanchise the downtrodden (e.g. ex-convicts, black people, etc).
They wanted "sustainability", for example, but not higher fuel prices, affordable homes for their children but not new housing developments in their town or village.
He has a point here, of course (though I don't see what the internet has to do
with this). If you look at the referrenda in California state, the voters are
up to their old tricks of approving bond issues and turning down tax increases.
Does this mean that we'll get some decent radio stations back? Clear Channel effectively ruined the radio for me, NPR being the only remaining reason to turn it on.
Well, for me that would be Democracy Now!,
which you can may be able to hear broadcast somewhere, depending on where you live,
e.g. KPFA, in the SF Bay Area, and WBAI
in the New York area. In general, the Pacifica stations do a decent job of
"alternative" broadcasting, provided you don't mind the almost exclusively
left-wing focus.
Also, there are many, many small college stations (and other non-coms) scattered
around, usually located at the bottom of the dial. They also all have internet
streams these days:
I may give it a try. I have to admit to not being a Heinlein fan. I read "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Glory Road." I put down "Friday." I studied him in a class about the philosophy of scifi/fantasy. I have problems with authors that for lack of a better way of putting it - don't treat women well, or when they try to, do it badly. Oddly I ended up sticking with female authors for a long time, well past a point that I should have moved on.
You might be interested in reading "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" and "The Rolling Stones". Both of these have some strong
female characters, one very young, and the other very old: one of the original feminist critiques of Heinlein
(back in the days before "Friday") was that his pubescent women were totally brainless stereotypes, though if they
were younger or older than that, they could be intelligent, interesting characters.
The smoking gun on that, as I remember it, is "The Door Into Summer", where we see a young girl turn into an
adult woman by way of a time travel gimmick of a sort -- she appears to have had a lobotomy in the intervening
years.
I think "Friday" was an attempt at dealing with that criticism, how sucessfully I leave it up to you to judge.
I also might point you at "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", his last novel, and in my opinion the best of
his later novels: not a bad job of doing a female character, if you ask me, though obviously "YMMV".
Heinlein, due to his period and experiences, had come to believe that (radical) Feminism, and its goals, ideals and plans, had become worse(for women) than Misogyny and prejudice.
In _Expanded Universe_, Heinlein proposes various ways he thinks the voting system might be
improved, and one of his suggestions is that possibly only mothers should be allowed to
vote, because they automatically have an investment in the future.
Is that a feminist idea? A sexist idea?
Really, I think Heinlein tended to be totally off the map in his political
and social attitudes -- it's one of the reasons the flame wars about his
work tends to be so intense.
More like a Helium atom, isn't it? I always remember it having two crossed orbits.
Those cafe press designs look pretty terrible, actually -- I would guess they added more orbits (orbitals?
no point in being fussy about scientific details here) to avoid some sort of infringement in the
original design.
I might've been interested in this work if it had been written by anyone except
Spider Robinson -- Robinson has never been much more than "readable", if you ask
me, and his attitude toward Heinlein has never been anything other than a mindless,
gushing cheerleader.
Bruce Sterling could've pulled this off, probably... But not Robinson.
In any case, if you'd like to read the greatest Heinlein novel not written by Heinlein,
you should look up the Alexi Panshin book "Rite of Passage". One of the few examples
of someone writing a Heinlein Juvenile that's at all successful (and certainly many others have tried).
The plot involves a culture that lives on large scale space ships, but has a custom where it's teenagers must
under going a survival exercise on a planet's surface as the "Rite of Passage" of the
title.
As for you folks who just don't get Heinlein, well, Heinlein can be problematic for
a number of reasons -- his later work is much different than his earlier,
his political opinions are controversial (in part, because they're so unusual it's
hard for people to even understand what they are), and in
general his style may seem a bit dated -- but there's no question that he was a totally
brilliant, ground-breaking, science fiction writer, second only to H.G. Wells.
The last time this subject came up I wrote up some recommendations for people new to Heinlein...
those are on the web here: HEINLEIN.
Of the later Heinlein books, I actually think the last ("To Sail Beyond the Sunset") is the strongest...
he's starting to get down to the real issues, not just writing up libertine fantasies:
TO_SAIL_BEYOND.
Now try taking GCC away, and see what you're left with. There are a couple of Free C compilers that could possibly be used, but I'm less sure about FORTRAN, C++, Objective-C, and the other languages supported by GCC. Now take GDB away too, and try developing Free Software.
It might be possible to build a Free Software system without any GNU software, but it would be really, really hard. Building one without Linux is trivial.
More to the point though, RMS came up with the idea for the GPL.
Someone else might've cloned this-or-that piece of software,
but the GPL is pure Stallman.
You have a pretty faced popular guy who gets acclaimed as the hero, and a snarling rough-edged guy behind the
scenes who is the real hero.
This is actually a pretty common pattern... the establishment likes to have a friendly face they can latch on
to when confronted by a social movement that isn't going to go away.
For example, it's always seemed to me that Martin Luther King and Malcom X were playing
a gigantic game of good cop/bad cop... Malcom's main job was to scare people into MLK's arms.
The one and only thing you can possibly deny is that maybe those two points weren't put together to steal the 2004 election -- except that there is that nasty little problem of explaining away the peculiarly large exit-poll discrepancies that correlated with the use of those voting machines.
Except that there is no exit poll discrepancies. The highest discrepancy I've seen for any of the contested states in the 2004 election is a difference of 5% between the exit-poll result and the final result. Well within the margin of error.
What's more, the conspiracy nutcases, as always, have chosen to latch on to the exit polls that best match their theory of voter fraud. Selection bias, yada yada. Take Ohio for example; Slate's exit polls actually show a result closer to the end results (2%) than for states with papertrails. (link [slate.com])
Freeman and Bleifuss work with the Edison/Mitofsky data, for the NEP polls. Slate is a pip-squeak in comparison. (And you're accusing them of "selecting" their polls?)
And as for the general accuracy of exit-polls, well, suffice to say it's usually not all that good.. (link [mysterypollster.com])
Ah yes, the usual mysterpollster link. Allow me to reiterate that you should look at Freeman and Bliefuss. The NEP exit-polls have historically been pretty good.
Are you fucking INSANE?!
This is the typical bullshit that the parent was talking about!
Really? I missed that.
EVERYTHING IS A PLOT! THAT SLASHDOT POST WAS A REPUBLICAN PLOT!!!!
Dude, man. Calm down. Just tell yourself "it's only slashdot". Could be I read you folks wrong, after all we're all a bunch of crazed paranoids here.
So just relax.
(And I promise not to tell your boss how easy it was to spot you.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because the LA office has to hire people who are willing to live in LA. Duh.
An uncrowded open plan with people who like each other can work okay, obviously... but that syndrome of having people who are turning down hardwalls might raise some questions about the management. I was working in one place where some people wanted to be moved out of their hardwalls because they felt like that was the only way they could be informed about what was going on: management wasn't terribly talkative, and if you couldn't evaesdrop on what they were up to you might not know.
Liquid nitrogen is only 77K. No where near cold enough.
Exactly. It's important to whine a lot, and talk about how awful the software is, and how there's absolutely no way anyone could possibly get it to work right.
Then you'll get a lot of people crawling out of the woodwork to rub your nose in how stupid you are, because obviously it works like this.
pcubbage wrote:
Yes, it "took a while", in fact it took too long for it to matter. IBM released the PC with PC-DOS (essentially, MS-DOS), CP/M happened later -- and if IBM was willing to ship boxes with CP/M pre-installed, that's news to me, I didn't hear about anything like that at the time.
I think you guys are both repeating things that only have elements of the truth to them, and I don't think all of the facts here are known, this is a real historical puzzle here. Try reading the wikipedia article, it doesn't look too bad: Gary Kildall"
Some points that might be of interest (largely from memory):
Yeah, me too.
But then, that's one of the reasons I do care about ideology and so on... but then, what I actually wanted to comment on was this:
I took a look at Helen Caldicott's latest book recently, and it appears that she's claiming that nuclear power is all a sham because mining the nuclear fuel and constructing the plants and so on actually requires burning loads of carbon emitting fossil fuel.
I ask you, even without looking into the numbers on that -- imagine saying the equivalent of that to someone with a scheme to put photovaltaics on rooftops. What would you expect them to say? Answer: "That's only true at the moment, once we have this alternate energy source in place we'll be able to construct more of it using just the alternate energy."
Nuclear power exists. The United States uses it for 20% of it's electric power, France uses it for most of their electric power. It's not some odd ball "alternate energy" source that doesn't really generate enough to matter: there isn't any reason in principle that it couldn't replace the 50% of our power that we still generate with coal power. Except of course, for some doom-and-gloom moaning about how it's evil, evil, evil.
Not that I have any thing in principle against "amelioration" schemes, either...
More accurately, there is no way for us to tell if there's an "evil Castle", because the software is locked up in a silo. The accounts of mysterious visits from Diebold employees, however, does suggest that they may need physical access to the machines to apply Patches of Evil -- if so, that makes the required conspiracy larger, and makes it's operations a bit more clumsy -- which may help explain why there didn't seem to be any widespread Republican fraud in 2006.
In any case, your arguments that such a conspiracy is implausible runs up against the evidence that it happened, in the only place such evidence can exist: the exit-poll data. The patterns in the exit-poll discrepancies for 2004 correlate with the use of voting machines, the presence of Republican governors, and the importance of the race. Attempts at explaining them away don't hold up -- the pros favored the "reluctant Bush respondant" hypothesis, but if you actually look at the data it seems like the Kerry voters were a little more reluctant than the Bush. And if you look at the over-all numbers, it does appear that there were 8 million more Bush voters than you can account for with the exit-polls.
I've also heard Mark Crispin Miller refer to census data that looks suspicious -- going by the percentage of folks who say that they voted, there's supposed to be a 10 million vote difference that favored Bush.
So, sorry if this seems a little hard to deal with, but yeah, it does seem that the United States has had an excecutive branch of dubious legality for the last 6 years.
This ACORN business is interesting, but one more time, if anyone's paying attention: What does it have to do with this subject?
But if you actually read some news stories on the subject, you find things like this:
So, we're talking about four people working for ACORN, and ACORN themselves turned them in. And I still haven't seen any references to previous problems with ACORN.
Yeah, okay, I hadn't heard about this story -- it looks the news broke in the last week or so. But once again: what does this have to do with anything I was saying?
Oh okay, so you're one of the "exit polls suck (when they tell us what we don't want to hear)" crowd.
(Oh, duh, "absentee ballots"! I bet Edison/Mitofsky haven't heard of those. Better call them.)
Actually no, I haven't thought that, because (1) it doesn't at all resemble the behavior of the Edison & Mitofsky firm -- they apologized for "getting it wrong", and pushed for the "reluctant Bush respondant" theory (without any evidence to support it, and some to contradict it); (2) at this point, accusing the media of "liberal bias" is completely insane.
Specifically, what type of evidence? Exit poll discrepancies are no good in your book -- those are only meaningful in places like the Ukraine, of course.
80% of the vote was counted by two firms, Diebold and ES&S. They're run by two brothers. There is no need to postulate a massive team of conspirators operating invisibly -- the system is centralized, it's suceptible to centralized attacks (not to mention internal corruption).
On the other hand, the more conventional voter fraud techniques really are pretty obvious, for example the tricks used in Ohio, e.g. shorting Democratic districts on voter machines, making it harder for people to vote there. The thing is, it didn't particularly matter that it was obvious, they just went "oh gee, we made a few mistakes here", and the Republican-controlled congress declined to investigate.
The rules vary from place to place. In some places, the idea is that once you've "paid your debt to society" you're a full citizen again... e.g. there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to prevent Martha Stewart from voting.
One of the intimidation tactics I've heard about involved sending impressive-looking messages to ex-cons telling them they weren't allowed to vote, when actually they were.
The obvious one is to go by neighborhoods.
Sounds like ancient history to me, have you got some evidence of something like this happening in the last decade or two?
And in any case, this is a non-sequitor. Why would I need to explain it? What does it have to do with what I was saying?
You mean it might show up as a widespread pattern of exit poll discrepancies?
If that's not what you mean, how else would it stick out like a "sore thumb"?
You're really confused, here. If you were following the polls at all, (e.g. by watching Tannenbaum's site, you would expect pretty much what we got: a close race for the Senate, and a Democratic win in the House. Karl Rove was publically anouncing that this was all wrong, that the Republicans were going to win both, no problem.
This had people like myself who were already feeling paranoid (with good reason, in my opinion) wondering what the hell was going on.
Close, but I think it would be more correct to say that they don't want coal-plants and can't bear the thought that they were wrong about nuclear plants.
But even that's not quite right, it's more like they want to reduce emissions of "green house gases" and think they can do that somehow by switching to electric vehicles, when really that'll make the problem worse if they don't replace the coal plants with something else, but they don't exactly understand that half of their electricity is coming from coal plants, and that coal power is an astoundingly nasty 18th century technology (even if you don't factor in "global warming" concerns) --
And maybe they should've started working on solar power sats thirty years ago when we were telling them to, but hey, what do a bunch of techie-nerds know about anything, eh?
But perhaps I digress.
Actually, the Republicans appear to have won the 2004 election by magically creating millions of votes out of nowhere... it's probably not the best example for the point you're trying to make: The exit polls were right -- Freeman and Mittledorf.
And in general, it's a pretty well-accepted truism that high-turnouts in the US favor the Democrats -- ir appears that conservatives are better about getting their act together to fill in forms, which is not necessarily something for the Democrats to be proud of. Though on the other hand, if you're inclined to think of the Democrats as the party of the little guys, that appears to be pretty accurate -- a lot of the voter fraud exploits the Republicans were using in 2004 involved trying to disenfanchise the downtrodden (e.g. ex-convicts, black people, etc).
He has a point here, of course (though I don't see what the internet has to do with this). If you look at the referrenda in California state, the voters are up to their old tricks of approving bond issues and turning down tax increases.
Well, for me that would be Democracy Now!, which you can may be able to hear broadcast somewhere, depending on where you live, e.g. KPFA, in the SF Bay Area, and WBAI in the New York area. In general, the Pacifica stations do a decent job of "alternative" broadcasting, provided you don't mind the almost exclusively left-wing focus.
Also, there are many, many small college stations (and other non-coms) scattered around, usually located at the bottom of the dial. They also all have internet streams these days:
(Whatever happened to Sharkbait?)
Some of us still have 8-track minds.
You might be interested in reading "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" and "The Rolling Stones". Both of these have some strong female characters, one very young, and the other very old: one of the original feminist critiques of Heinlein (back in the days before "Friday") was that his pubescent women were totally brainless stereotypes, though if they were younger or older than that, they could be intelligent, interesting characters.
The smoking gun on that, as I remember it, is "The Door Into Summer", where we see a young girl turn into an adult woman by way of a time travel gimmick of a sort -- she appears to have had a lobotomy in the intervening years.
I think "Friday" was an attempt at dealing with that criticism, how sucessfully I leave it up to you to judge.
I also might point you at "To Sail Beyond the Sunset", his last novel, and in my opinion the best of his later novels: not a bad job of doing a female character, if you ask me, though obviously "YMMV".
In _Expanded Universe_, Heinlein proposes various ways he thinks the voting system might be improved, and one of his suggestions is that possibly only mothers should be allowed to vote, because they automatically have an investment in the future.
Is that a feminist idea? A sexist idea?
Really, I think Heinlein tended to be totally off the map in his political and social attitudes -- it's one of the reasons the flame wars about his work tends to be so intense.
Those cafe press designs look pretty terrible, actually -- I would guess they added more orbits (orbitals? no point in being fussy about scientific details here) to avoid some sort of infringement in the original design.
Bruce Sterling could've pulled this off, probably... But not Robinson.
In any case, if you'd like to read the greatest Heinlein novel not written by Heinlein, you should look up the Alexi Panshin book "Rite of Passage". One of the few examples of someone writing a Heinlein Juvenile that's at all successful (and certainly many others have tried). The plot involves a culture that lives on large scale space ships, but has a custom where it's teenagers must under going a survival exercise on a planet's surface as the "Rite of Passage" of the title.
As for you folks who just don't get Heinlein, well, Heinlein can be problematic for a number of reasons -- his later work is much different than his earlier, his political opinions are controversial (in part, because they're so unusual it's hard for people to even understand what they are), and in general his style may seem a bit dated -- but there's no question that he was a totally brilliant, ground-breaking, science fiction writer, second only to H.G. Wells.
The last time this subject came up I wrote up some recommendations for people new to Heinlein... those are on the web here: HEINLEIN.
Of the later Heinlein books, I actually think the last ("To Sail Beyond the Sunset") is the strongest... he's starting to get down to the real issues, not just writing up libertine fantasies: TO_SAIL_BEYOND.
More to the point though, RMS came up with the idea for the GPL. Someone else might've cloned this-or-that piece of software, but the GPL is pure Stallman.
This is actually a pretty common pattern... the establishment likes to have a friendly face they can latch on to when confronted by a social movement that isn't going to go away.
For example, it's always seemed to me that Martin Luther King and Malcom X were playing a gigantic game of good cop/bad cop... Malcom's main job was to scare people into MLK's arms.
This just sounds completely wrong. Trying reading the Freeman and Bliefuss book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?
Freeman and Bleifuss work with the Edison/Mitofsky data, for the NEP polls. Slate is a pip-squeak in comparison. (And you're accusing them of "selecting" their polls?)
Ah yes, the usual mysterpollster link. Allow me to reiterate that you should look at Freeman and Bliefuss. The NEP exit-polls have historically been pretty good.
Really? I missed that.
Dude, man. Calm down. Just tell yourself "it's only slashdot". Could be I read you folks wrong, after all we're all a bunch of crazed paranoids here. So just relax.
(And I promise not to tell your boss how easy it was to spot you.)