Unfortunately, elections have been rigged in the USA, off and on, for over 200 years. There are dozens of historically documented examples, and hundreds of examples of statistically unlikely and numerically impossible (more votes than voters) elections.
Example: On March 30, 1855, US Senator David Rice Atchison led 5,000 Missourians into Kansas. They seized control of all polling places at gunpoint, cast tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for pro-slavery candidates, and elected a pro-slavery legislature. Senator Rice stated that he would "kill every god damned abolitionist in the district" if necessary. The pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce not only recognized the rigged elections, but when native Kansans held a second election to elect their own "shadow legislature" Pierce declared the winners to be criminal insurrectionists. Eventually Pierce went so far as to have federal troops raze the town of Lawrence, Kansas, in an attempt to prevent free and fair voting.
If you would prefer a post-Civil War example, you need look only so far as the 2000 Florida presidential election. Despite being retroactively legalized by the US Supreme Court, the election is widely believed to have been rigged; questions remain about the culpability of Kathleen Harris and DBT, among other issues. There is absolutely no doubt that Gore received more legal votes than Bush, and the University of Chicago study convincingly proved that any fair count would have given the Presidency to Al Gore.
Anecdotally, a statistician once told me Ohio and Pennsylvania appear to have been rigged in the last presidential election, but the Republicans were smart enough to rig a state they would not have otherwise won, and the Democrats were dumb enough to rig a state they already had sewed up. Sometimes it seems like the two major parties are "Evil" and "Incompetence".
Keep in mind there's no evidence of any national conspiracy to rig a vote (unless you count the Diebold whistle-blowers, which I don't). Election rigging historically happens at local levels, mostly at individual polling places or in districts, and occasionally at the state level. Now that voting machines without audit trails are being mandated, we're only just getting to the point where a truly national election fraud is even possible. It's hard to believe it won't happen, though, given human nature - purposely building systems that can be exploited generally gives rise to exploitation.
Disclaimer: I was in a blast bay at Morton Thiokol's small motor division when Challenger exploded, helping US President Ronald Reagan provide cruise missile technology to a bunch of Wahhabist Islamists from the Saudi ruling family who were looking for a vehicle for nuclear warheads from Chechnya.
...those deaths were because some idiotic bureaucrat couldn't be bothered to listen to qualified engineers. Far as I am concerned that guy should be 1) sued by the families for wrongful death and 2) tried for involuntary manslaughter.
The Morton Salt boys had bought out Thiokol Chemical Corporation. The Thiokol engineers said "Don't launch" and the NASA bigwigs said "Yo, Morton drones, make those guys shut up!".
So who's at fault? Was it the Morton boys? Their underlings at Thiokol? Was it NASA? Or was it the White House, who told NASA the bird had to fly? Was it Reagan, who had a speech planned for the occasion, and was at least nominally in charge at the White House? Do you really think you can know the answer?
PS: if you've got that one, please let me know about the Kennedy assassination, too - I've never really believed Arlen Spector's "magic bullet" version.
If anything, Einstein taught us that everything is relative. Including your so-called "facts".
We already knew that before Einstein. He added an exception to the rule, which is the observable speed of light in a vacuum.
And that's why everybody else calls it "The theory of Relativity" but Big Al himself called it "The theory of Invariants". He postulated that other invariants might exist, but the speed of light in a vacuum was the only one he believed he could prove to be real.
If both parties don't start working together eventually the american people will kick all the lazy bastards in congress out.
Voting machines have effectively eliminated any pretense of public control over government. Your choices are limited to the corporate-approved labels on the buttons.
And no matter what buttons you push, the tallies from the voting machines will say what the controllers of the voting machines want them to say. You have no way to check the validity of those tallies so they are incredibly unlikely to be valid - there's too much power at stake for such an obvious control point to be left uncorrupted.
Lately some states don't even bother to count write-in ballots any more, and most of them are looking into removing the write-in option from their machines.
We're leaving the Republic stage and entering the Imperial era. If we keep following the classical pattern, the next step is civil war, although hopefully long after you and I are both dead.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," [Rove] continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actorsâ¦and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Your ISP can see which websites you visit, how long you spend there, how often you visit the site and what time of day you go there. It will be easy enough to build a profile on a user with just this information.
Nonsense! I don't use any protocols but SSH, as far as they know. And I never connect to anything but a boring corporate server in a clean room they don't have access to.
I recognize the letters LKCL anywhere. DCE/RPC over SMB and LKCL are etched in my brain even though I probably last looked at it 7-8 years ago. Thank you for that one.
Yeah, ditto. Reverse engineering the NT crypto handshake was non-trivial. Glad to hear Luke's still active!
Nice! Mine was labeled "Rozhdyestvo Photonic Emitter" in a very officious font, large enough to read through the smoked glass.
My boss is a native Russian speaker, and Rozhdyestvo is a latinization of ÐоÐÐÐÑÑÐо, which means Christmas. So I literally labeled it "Christmas lights".
My boss was the only one who ever noticed, which was exactly what I intended. She laughed her ass off.
You probably could wire a whole fucking Christmas tree lighting to the system and they still would be hard-pressed to notice something happening when it is turned on.
I actually did mount a piece of pegboard in an equipment rack with a smoked glass door and put christmas lights in the holes. I used the kind of lights that have a controller box for running patterns, and set it on "random", and left it running for about five years.
People with suits and ties would just stare at that thing in awe. My boss used to do her dog'n'pony shows standing in front of it.
Most Eastern US states use some form of riparian law, which is what you are referring to. Groundwater is public property and may not be owned by individuals, although ownership and regulatory powers are split by the high and low water marks (local cops have police rights between those two points in some cases, go figure). In my state I personally can own the land under my creek because it's not a navigable watercourse, my property line extends completely past it, and I'm living in one of the original 13 colonies. I cannot own the water itself and I cannot appreciably change the character of the water except by using it to nourish animals living physically on my land or by harnessing it for industrial power (which changes the speed and temperature by withdrawing energy). I can dump blood in it if I want, but not enough to turn it red or make it taste funny on anyone else's property.
However, most Western US states are decidedly NOT using Eastern-style riparian law, and people literally murder each other over ownership of "water rights" - which are assigned on a first-come first-serve basis by the government, in a way that is intended to favor wealthy landowners and large corporations, because in the USA capital investment is required to efficiently exploit scarce resources, and water is a scarce resource in the western US. In the West you absolutely can withdraw water and use it up if you own the right to do so by "prior apportionment".
Honestly, it's not really a big deal to install some romex and a 240VAC outlet.
There are youtube videos and other resources on the web that will teach any able-bodied person with an IQ above that of breadfruit how to do it without being harmed or endangered. No electrician required.
Different sets of rules for different folks ain't in anyone's interests.
That's right! That's why men should get regular pregnancy tests, and that's why bald people should shampoo daily, and that's why blind people shouldn't be allowed to have seeing eye dogs. Any recognition of differences is imposition of inequality! Fight the power! WHEELCHAIRS FOR EVERYONE!
If you root your google TV (thus voiding the warranty, at least in the Logitech Revue where it required soldering to root the box) you can trivially hack around this problem.
Once the box is rooted, you just change the flash player ID. Then Hulu and their droogies can no longer can tell you aren't a Windows PC running IE, so you aren't blocked.
Refusing to actually understand and abide by the Open Source value proposition is what sunk previous versions of Google TV. If logitech had an "SSH login enable" checkbox on the revue (the way they do on the Squeezebox, which is an awesome linux-based platform) end users would just solve the problem for them, free of cost and free of legal liability for the vendors, and Hulu would have to suck it up.
You do have a point, and I'm no friend of Madison Avenue, but you're oversimplifying by ignoring economies of scale and other factors.
Hypothetical example: Widget company makes 15 quatloos per widget sold. Widget company invests in advertising that costs 150,000 zuleks (17 quatloos to the zulek, as everybody knows). Sales increase by 400%, increased income allows factory to expand, cost of widget production goes down, price is reduced and now the customer pays less but the maker nets 18 quatloos a widget. Everybody wins as long as widgets are a new product on the market - if they aren't, then the the sales created by advertising are actually sales lost by some other maker, who retaliates with advertising of their own, and then everybody loses.
See? It's not so simple as "all advertising == evil". It's just that most advertising is bad, and regulatory capture in the western world by corporations has assured that it's not going to get any better.
I have an HDTV as a second monitor, without the cable connection, and therefore, minus commercials. Why anyone would buy a computer geared towards watching commercials is anyone's guess. Maybe they will be giving them away?
The original value proposition was you got free content in exchange for screening commercial messages in your home. Pretty much the same as Gmail, really. It can be a very successful business model when imaginatively applied - for example, you can get soap companies to pay for women's theatre or get a local grocer to pay for music broadcasts.
But eventually the middlemen got greedy and started charging for providing high quality signal to the home... thus the birth of Comcast and other cable companies. You pay a minimum of three times, now - first for provider installation (one time charge), then for signal (monthly), then for content (by viewing commercials). In some cases, four times, because you also rent an access box. In some cases, five times, because your commercial-laden channel has additional access charges (hello, HBO!) or because you like PBS so you voluntarily pay them.
The Internet (and wide availability of free or low-cost wireless Internet access) may be pushing media back to its roots - where the middlemen sell eyeballs to advertisers, and content creators are motivated by a desire to make art more than by a desire for riches, and common people can access culture and art without making multiple payoffs to a bunch of sleazy gatekeepers.
Maybe you've got it backwards... if the people who read tech sites are forced to read about SOPA all day instead of reading about the latest golly gee whiz iCrap, maybe those sites would be educating the most teachable people.
Put it on a mainstream news site, and maybe their typical viewers will just knock over their drool buckets searching for a keyboard they haven't used since the mouse was invented.
I dunno. I don't interact with the normals very much, they see my leet tatts and pet laser shark and it always scares them away.
Slashdot Mirror
VAX/VMS.
Unfortunately, elections have been rigged in the USA, off and on, for over 200 years. There are dozens of historically documented examples, and hundreds of examples of statistically unlikely and numerically impossible (more votes than voters) elections.
Example: On March 30, 1855, US Senator David Rice Atchison led 5,000 Missourians into Kansas. They seized control of all polling places at gunpoint, cast tens of thousands of fraudulent votes for pro-slavery candidates, and elected a pro-slavery legislature. Senator Rice stated that he would "kill every god damned abolitionist in the district" if necessary. The pro-slavery President Franklin Pierce not only recognized the rigged elections, but when native Kansans held a second election to elect their own "shadow legislature" Pierce declared the winners to be criminal insurrectionists. Eventually Pierce went so far as to have federal troops raze the town of Lawrence, Kansas, in an attempt to prevent free and fair voting.
If you would prefer a post-Civil War example, you need look only so far as the 2000 Florida presidential election. Despite being retroactively legalized by the US Supreme Court, the election is widely believed to have been rigged; questions remain about the culpability of Kathleen Harris and DBT, among other issues. There is absolutely no doubt that Gore received more legal votes than Bush, and the University of Chicago study convincingly proved that any fair count would have given the Presidency to Al Gore.
Anecdotally, a statistician once told me Ohio and Pennsylvania appear to have been rigged in the last presidential election, but the Republicans were smart enough to rig a state they would not have otherwise won, and the Democrats were dumb enough to rig a state they already had sewed up. Sometimes it seems like the two major parties are "Evil" and "Incompetence".
Keep in mind there's no evidence of any national conspiracy to rig a vote (unless you count the Diebold whistle-blowers, which I don't). Election rigging historically happens at local levels, mostly at individual polling places or in districts, and occasionally at the state level. Now that voting machines without audit trails are being mandated, we're only just getting to the point where a truly national election fraud is even possible. It's hard to believe it won't happen, though, given human nature - purposely building systems that can be exploited generally gives rise to exploitation.
Disclaimer: I was in a blast bay at Morton Thiokol's small motor division when Challenger exploded, helping US President Ronald Reagan provide cruise missile technology to a bunch of Wahhabist Islamists from the Saudi ruling family who were looking for a vehicle for nuclear warheads from Chechnya.
The Morton Salt boys had bought out Thiokol Chemical Corporation. The Thiokol engineers said "Don't launch" and the NASA bigwigs said "Yo, Morton drones, make those guys shut up!".
So who's at fault? Was it the Morton boys? Their underlings at Thiokol? Was it NASA? Or was it the White House, who told NASA the bird had to fly? Was it Reagan, who had a speech planned for the occasion, and was at least nominally in charge at the White House? Do you really think you can know the answer?
PS: if you've got that one, please let me know about the Kennedy assassination, too - I've never really believed Arlen Spector's "magic bullet" version.
We already knew that before Einstein. He added an exception to the rule, which is the observable speed of light in a vacuum.
And that's why everybody else calls it "The theory of Relativity" but Big Al himself called it "The theory of Invariants". He postulated that other invariants might exist, but the speed of light in a vacuum was the only one he believed he could prove to be real.
Voting machines have effectively eliminated any pretense of public control over government. Your choices are limited to the corporate-approved labels on the buttons.
And no matter what buttons you push, the tallies from the voting machines will say what the controllers of the voting machines want them to say. You have no way to check the validity of those tallies so they are incredibly unlikely to be valid - there's too much power at stake for such an obvious control point to be left uncorrupted.
Lately some states don't even bother to count write-in ballots any more, and most of them are looking into removing the write-in option from their machines.
We're leaving the Republic stage and entering the Imperial era. If we keep following the classical pattern, the next step is civil war, although hopefully long after you and I are both dead.
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," [Rove] continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actorsâ¦and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
So, essentially it's only a problem if you are a human being, or constantly interact with human beings.
Nonsense! I don't use any protocols but SSH, as far as they know. And I never connect to anything but a boring corporate server in a clean room they don't have access to.
Yeah, ditto. Reverse engineering the NT crypto handshake was non-trivial. Glad to hear Luke's still active!
Sure, and I could have cured him too, with my sooper magick science.
Such claims are easily made, and best ignored.
Nice! Mine was labeled "Rozhdyestvo Photonic Emitter" in a very officious font, large enough to read through the smoked glass.
My boss is a native Russian speaker, and Rozhdyestvo is a latinization of ÐоÐÐÐÑÑÐо, which means Christmas. So I literally labeled it "Christmas lights".
My boss was the only one who ever noticed, which was exactly what I intended. She laughed her ass off.
I actually did mount a piece of pegboard in an equipment rack with a smoked glass door and put christmas lights in the holes. I used the kind of lights that have a controller box for running patterns, and set it on "random", and left it running for about five years.
People with suits and ties would just stare at that thing in awe. My boss used to do her dog'n'pony shows standing in front of it.
Most Eastern US states use some form of riparian law, which is what you are referring to. Groundwater is public property and may not be owned by individuals, although ownership and regulatory powers are split by the high and low water marks (local cops have police rights between those two points in some cases, go figure). In my state I personally can own the land under my creek because it's not a navigable watercourse, my property line extends completely past it, and I'm living in one of the original 13 colonies. I cannot own the water itself and I cannot appreciably change the character of the water except by using it to nourish animals living physically on my land or by harnessing it for industrial power (which changes the speed and temperature by withdrawing energy). I can dump blood in it if I want, but not enough to turn it red or make it taste funny on anyone else's property.
However, most Western US states are decidedly NOT using Eastern-style riparian law, and people literally murder each other over ownership of "water rights" - which are assigned on a first-come first-serve basis by the government, in a way that is intended to favor wealthy landowners and large corporations, because in the USA capital investment is required to efficiently exploit scarce resources, and water is a scarce resource in the western US. In the West you absolutely can withdraw water and use it up if you own the right to do so by "prior apportionment".
Wikipedia has a somewhat half-assed discussion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights#United_States
Sorry about the run-on sentences.
Honestly, it's not really a big deal to install some romex and a 240VAC outlet.
There are youtube videos and other resources on the web that will teach any able-bodied person with an IQ above that of breadfruit how to do it without being harmed or endangered. No electrician required.
That's right! That's why men should get regular pregnancy tests, and that's why bald people should shampoo daily, and that's why blind people shouldn't be allowed to have seeing eye dogs. Any recognition of differences is imposition of inequality! Fight the power! WHEELCHAIRS FOR EVERYONE!
I imagine they are leaky, inflexible and get splinters in your hands.
I've been using it all day with no issues, no black pages.
Maybe it knows I've already called my congresscritters? Jeepers!
(Or maybe it's because I don't run javascript by default)
You misspelled "fatherland".
'Zactly my point. When llogitech closed off their GoogleTV box they ruined the product for your mom.
They don't understand what they are selling, and how to make it profitable.
If you root your google TV (thus voiding the warranty, at least in the Logitech Revue where it required soldering to root the box) you can trivially hack around this problem.
Once the box is rooted, you just change the flash player ID. Then Hulu and their droogies can no longer can tell you aren't a Windows PC running IE, so you aren't blocked.
Refusing to actually understand and abide by the Open Source value proposition is what sunk previous versions of Google TV. If logitech had an "SSH login enable" checkbox on the revue (the way they do on the Squeezebox, which is an awesome linux-based platform) end users would just solve the problem for them, free of cost and free of legal liability for the vendors, and Hulu would have to suck it up.
It's like you actually understand the issues and read the linked articles or something.
So there's no ads at all, as long as you ignore the five minutes of ads? Just like PBS!
^_^
You do have a point, and I'm no friend of Madison Avenue, but you're oversimplifying by ignoring economies of scale and other factors.
Hypothetical example: Widget company makes 15 quatloos per widget sold. Widget company invests in advertising that costs 150,000 zuleks (17 quatloos to the zulek, as everybody knows). Sales increase by 400%, increased income allows factory to expand, cost of widget production goes down, price is reduced and now the customer pays less but the maker nets 18 quatloos a widget. Everybody wins as long as widgets are a new product on the market - if they aren't, then the the sales created by advertising are actually sales lost by some other maker, who retaliates with advertising of their own, and then everybody loses.
See? It's not so simple as "all advertising == evil". It's just that most advertising is bad, and regulatory capture in the western world by corporations has assured that it's not going to get any better.
http://www.google.com/search?q=cripple+fight
The original value proposition was you got free content in exchange for screening commercial messages in your home. Pretty much the same as Gmail, really. It can be a very successful business model when imaginatively applied - for example, you can get soap companies to pay for women's theatre or get a local grocer to pay for music broadcasts.
But eventually the middlemen got greedy and started charging for providing high quality signal to the home... thus the birth of Comcast and other cable companies. You pay a minimum of three times, now - first for provider installation (one time charge), then for signal (monthly), then for content (by viewing commercials). In some cases, four times, because you also rent an access box. In some cases, five times, because your commercial-laden channel has additional access charges (hello, HBO!) or because you like PBS so you voluntarily pay them.
The Internet (and wide availability of free or low-cost wireless Internet access) may be pushing media back to its roots - where the middlemen sell eyeballs to advertisers, and content creators are motivated by a desire to make art more than by a desire for riches, and common people can access culture and art without making multiple payoffs to a bunch of sleazy gatekeepers.
Maybe you've got it backwards... if the people who read tech sites are forced to read about SOPA all day instead of reading about the latest golly gee whiz iCrap, maybe those sites would be educating the most teachable people.
Put it on a mainstream news site, and maybe their typical viewers will just knock over their drool buckets searching for a keyboard they haven't used since the mouse was invented.
I dunno. I don't interact with the normals very much, they see my leet tatts and pet laser shark and it always scares them away.