...when's the first annual KDE Draft? Is this going to be on ESPN? I can see it now:
"Live from the illustrious Caesar's Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, it's the 2001 KDE League Draft. Each team has fifteen minutes to make its first selection. The draft order was selected from a hat. TrollTech is on the clock."
[thirteen minute pause for effect, airtime filled by Mel Kiper talking about coder's skills in the 40-line dash]
"TrollTech selects Matthias Ettrich, library coder from Oslo, Norway."
[cheers from the crowd] --
Nah. Turns out others have noted that the story doesn't cover stuff for visible light. Guess geeks are damned to make failures like this all the time, eh? =) [Thank God for good genetics--I have better than 20:20 vision.] --
Piss off. If you don't like Slashdot, go start your own weblog. If it bothers you that Slashdot readers and intellects in general are so disproportionately progressive, perhaps you ought to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself why that is. This is one you'll have to figure out for yourself.
I'll ignore the personal slam here. It's hard to get frustrated with anything posted by an AC, especially one apparently unable to recognize sarcasm and humor when applied to an unfunny situation.
Hell, I want the Electoral College gone--I ran a long "Ask Slashdot" that was rejected that would probably be prudent to read now--and that would put the candidate I didn't want in, Gore, into office. Fine by me--I have a vote, just like everyone else. I don't expect you to agree with me--if you did, I'd worry about you. I'd rather have Gore elected by popular vote than the current maelstrom we have today. But I follow the Constitution, even as I work to have it changed.
My goodness! When I saw "Florida Court Overturns...", I though Slashdot was continuing its devolution into: "Slashdot: Election News for Leftist Neds. Ballot Stuffing that matters." --
This is the fault of the Democrats! They've controlled Congress so long that they've had access to the schools--and now our kids can't read!
Oh, wait, it was the old folks that couldn't read. So it's the Republicans' fault, because they've kept down Medicare benefits for so long!
[I'll politely note that you can have a rant tag in XML, which makes me really want to convert all my sites to XML for that purpose--have a random-effects generator that changes what happens to stuff in rant tags, etc. Heh.]
Seriously, it wasn't highly wonderful of a ballot, but the ballot I voted on wasn't exactly clear from the first glance, either. Yet I took the bloody time to sit down and figure out the ballot, so I voted for the people and issues I wanted to see approved.
If nothing else, this is an indictment of our careless society.
I think a lot of it will end up depending on where the money to pay you came from. If it's purely from state coffers or donations, then it's the school's decision--as well as the donors--to decide how closely to hold the code. As far as stuff run on grants, those decisions are usually written into the grant paperwork. --
I wake up. I look at the clock. I decide I really do feel like crap and I'll stay in bed a while [the luxury of a college student]. I watch CNN [why? too lazy to change channel] babble on about the election. I see that turnout is already appearing to be fairly high.
I finally get my lazy ass up. I rummage around for my voter registration card. I can't find it. GAH!
I pick up the phone and call the City Clerk. Phone's off the hook. GAH!
I drive around my neighborhood, looking for my voting precinct. I pass it unknowingly--no big sign.
I grab something to eat and drive over to school to drop off in my office over at SGA. I am ribbed for not having voted yet [it's around 11:00 a.m.]. I smile, nod, and say, "I'm trying to figure out where the hell I vote." Our secretary, who lives close to me, tells me where she voted.
I travel to said place. I wait in line. I step up to the clerk. Guess what--wrong place! I walk over to another poll worker; she can't get through to the clerk's office, either. She tells me she thinks it's one of three churches--all on the same road, of course.
I climb back in my truck and drive back down my road. I pass churches slowly. I got honked at and given the fingers by drivers. I smile and nod and wave. I finally see the church--and it's one I'd passed.
I pull in, wait in another line, cast my ballot, look confusedly at the various amendments on Alabama's constitution, vote some yes and some no to piss off the people who look at these things--egads, Alabama needs a constitutional convention!--and cast my vote for W. He's the best of my choices, but I wish I had other choices.
I walk up to the ballot counter. My ballot won't read. Undaunted, I recheck my ballot and re-enter it. Finally, it goes in. I was #864 at that precinct today. I'm amazed--that was around 11:30, before the Huntsville lunch rush will hit.
I drive back to campus. I come back to my office. I ask people if they're going to vote. One says voting is stupid. I nearly unload all of my frustration on him.
Well, I've voted. I have a right to bitch now. Even if Gore wins, I have that right--because I'll go get a new "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush" sticker to slap on my truck.
What the hell, no one elected in US election years ending in zeroes ever holds office for long, save for Ron Reagan.
My best friend just left the same contractor I work for to go work for the U.S. Army. While he was slowly slogging through grad school in engineering management, he now has enough time to really pursue his Ph.D. in EM at our alma mater. They're paying for it, and they'll give him a paid year off to work on his Ph.D. stuff. Cool. --
After Congress moved to raise the President's salary to $500k and the VP's to somewhere in that territory, the federal salary structure finally got some relief. Federal law says you can't make more than the VP, and he's been making $175k. COLA's [Cost Of Living Adjustments] for the Supreme Court and some members of Congress were pushing the salary structure to the breaking point.
Working in a tight labor market [Huntsville, AL] with a high-tech workforce, I've seen federal salaries jumping a bit in an effort to grab people from the private sector. The pay's not what you'd get on the outside, of course, but the job security's usually pretty good. Also, as a contractor employee, I can tell you that the Federal guys rarely put in more than 40 per. Wouldn't that be nice.
Well, this is a nice little self-selected opinion poll. It would be great to have/. run a poll similar to this one asking people if they voted, and then who they voted for if they did. You'll find that there are many willing participants who don't make it out on Election Day. Sad, but true. --
...because if George W. gets elected, he's big oil, and we can have him send Bruce Willis and his leatherneck oil riggers up there to drop a nuke in it and kick its ass. Failing that, we'll find a bunch of old geezers who know how to take apart that there Apollo booster. Mebbe we can get John Glenn up there--he's old enough to remember how all this crap works.
Failing all that, though, "Surf's up, dude!"
TOTKChief, who can't view Armageddon without screaming, "You bloody fscking idiots, you can't throttle a solid rocket like that, and you damn sure can't re-light the bastard!"
You know, back in '92, I thought the GOP might be in trouble. Perot's Reform Party was hitting the far-right and populist issues pretty well. The GOP was without a place to stand--the RP had taken their extreme positions, the ones they always use to define themselves in one of the elections.
Look at '96: that was a far-right GOP running for President. This year, Bush is a populist-rhetoric President: "I believe in people, not government."
The Reform Party, if they'd then gotten several candidates in statewide offices and into Congress in '94, would have been a juggernaut and replaced the GOP. But they didn't, and in '94, the GOP released the Contract of America, which took back both flanks of the party with reckless abandon.
As a result, the RP was a laugher in '96.
Now we have Nader, who seems to be out-flanking [heh, I almost typed "out-flaking"] the Democrats. He has the far-left environmentalists, and he has some populist appeal from those frustrated with the Democrats' move to the right. Nader won't win this election, but he might set the Greens up for a move in the next twelve years.
We'll see such a move only if the Greens follow up with getting a lot of people to run for Congress in '02 and statewide offices for the next year. Then run another solid, personable candidate in '04 for POTUS, lose again, and see if you're at 15% or so. If so, let all hell break lose--because the Democrats can be had, just as the GOP could be had eight years ago.
My, my, a lot of invective here. I know a response won't probably make much difference to you, but it might to some lonely, undecided/. reader. So here goes:
Ralph Nader does not evade questions and spout insultingly obvious attacks on opponents in order to deflect attention from himself.
Nader is not a politician. He's a consumer rights advocate who happens to be running for President. You speak later of Bush being "unfit for office". What makes Nader fit for it? What positions has he held in government? Has he ever dealt with a legislative body controlled by the other party? Has he ever served a day in the military? What is his knowledge of foreign policy?
People talk about not knowing enough about the two we've got--the biggest argument for a two-party system is that two choices are about all we're able to handle. If we had three, six, or ten parties with significant polling, we'd never get past the main party platform and spin they have. The information overload on just the two is bad enough.
This is not to knock third parties. They are vitally necessary to American government. They smack down one party when the two are growing together. In about forty years, one of the two parties will go away. It will probably be the Democrats, since they keep moving to the right. The American Left will probably rise again.
This is the man whose rhetoric consistently appeals to shortsighted wealthy WASPs, with his emphasis on his tax cut, and his Christian posturing.
I ask, what's shortsighted about raising the bar for the minimum gross annual adjusted income you have to bring in to pay taxes, or about making that lowest tax bracket be 10% instead of the 15% it is now? Little, if you ask me. Under Bush's tax cut, I don't think I'll pay taxes next year, because I'm going to school and working part time. I won't mind the refund check.
As for the "Christian posturing", yeah, it's there. The man is someone that has faith. Is that so bad?
This is the man who has little experience, has no noteworthy accomplishments, and has had a free ride through life in the old boy's club.
Yeah, Gore has had a really easy life, too. Hard life growing up in D.C. and going to private school. Hard life starting both divinity school and law school at Vanderbilt and finishing neither. [Did you know, by the way, that Bush has an MBA from Harvard? They don't pass those out to just anyone.]
How can you profess to want electoral reform and then support Bush?
I am a student of American political history. I recognize that the third party just kills one of the two major ones, then becomes a major party itself. Americans want simple, easily-identifiable choices. This is a country that runs about 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, and 20% in the middle. You shoot for that middle. Right now, that middle is pretty conservative. Thirty years ago, it wasn't.
What's wrong with the system right now is the money. PAC's are abusive. "Soft" and "hard" money are ludicrous. Simply allow only personal donations--with no limits--and require full disclosure of all donations. You fail to disclose, you are disqualified. Simple. Fair. Honest. There will be big and small donors lined up on both sides, and since the media will have access to all the records, sniffing out favoritism will be rather easy.
His speeches consist of prememorized responses that he utters regardless of whether it really addresses the question. He is a cardboard man, a straw dummy with a "republican agenda" recording on repeat behind that oh-so-sincere-and-heartful face. His posturing in speeches of "well I don't know much about that but I've got a good heart" makes me sick.
That's damn near every politician I've met. They have a message. We're in a sound bite culture, and we rememebr sound bites. We remember "invented the Internet"--and that's completely out of context! In an era of increasing complexity, we desire simplicity.
I guarantee that any politician who gave a specific answer to any debate question--where he'd start and what all she'd do--would put those people to sleep. I know I put people to sleep here at UAH's SGA on giving them a long but full answer. People want "yes", "no", or "I'll get back to you on that".
Gore would be a competent choice for the continuation of moderate policy that caters to the largest common denominator on most respects.
Large government solutions are moderate policy? Gore's an LBJ Democrat.
But for a candidate you can believe in, Nader truly is the only one with any balls. His website has so much more clearly stated, non-obfuscated, non-pandering platform information compared to the big two.
I actually belive in Bush for what he says that he's going to do. Nader has a simple platform, and that scares me. Politics is a highly complicated business. Each decision--foreign or domestic--affects all others. Simple, five-sentence solutions work fine as principles, but that's not how you govern.
And his pro-choice, anti-death penalty stance is so *right* for anyone who objectively reasons out the pros and cons of both situations.
Not for me, they're not. I have given a long, hard thought to both. I am personally pro-life--vehemently so--but I recognize that the majority of Americans don't feel the same way. While I'm personally opposed to the death penalty, it does, in some ways, serve to hold a society in check.
But that's just me. I had my idealistic time. I'm into pragmatism nowadays.
The day may come. But I'm not so sure it will. Virtually nobody but a political junkie will do the research themselves, and this introduces intermediaries and, IMO, a vast potential for error.
The potential for intermediaries is indeed vast. We witness it with the media--and I'm not going to go on some Rush Limbaugh-esque kick about the "liberal news media". Even in the age of 24/7 cable news channels, airtime is a scarcity. On the Web, the only scarcity is the time of the individual to take the time and sit down and inform themselves.
If campaign finance reform came out to have all candidates list all donors, who would bother to look at it? Not many, I wager. Most folks probably don't read what their local paper publishes--if they publish it at all. I'm one of those weird people that does, but I've always loved politics.
If there's anything the Information Age has shown us, it's that time is indeed a commodity. If greater political information comes out, you'll then have people who will make money in providing a service about that information. Yes, there will be spin. There's always spin--whether you're at a bar talking about the city council with a buddy, or whether you're in the voting booth. Spin is spin is spin, and spin is in.
Consider the Shrub's popularity; as far as I can see, it partially rests on the media's failure (in the general sense, obviously there are exceptions) to really look the guy over. Bush has declared certain subjects "out of bounds" (since when do the candidates write the rules?).
The candidates have always written the rules. The politicians always have--read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff to show the unwillingness of the media [what Wolfe labels "The Victorian Gent"] to show the full truth.
There are plenty of things that are out of bounds with Gore, too--most of the focus in his candidacy has been on his service as Veep. Fine, but one holder of the office called it "a warm pitcher of spit". I'd rather look more into what Gore did in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate than what he did in the West Wing.
For example, the NRA has several letters from Gore's offices in Congress requesting that they support him in their regular "legislative review" that they provide members. Makes sense when you're in Congress from a gun-totin' state like Tennessee, but when you're a "liberal democrat" in the Executive Branch, the NRA is eeeeeevil. Stuff like that.
The entire focus of the Gore candidacy has been over the last eight years--except for his babbling about his relationship with Tipper [all well and good to love your wife] and his service in 'Nam [like any politico's kid can talk much about that!]. Past that, zippo, zero, zilch, nada, other than the "Internet initiative", which has only served in me making a good joke on/.
Al Gore is famous for "having claimed to invent the internet", and even a lot of the techno-savvy here seem to believe that (which is why it's no longer funny, not even as a joke). Yet the Shrub clearly claimed credit for laws he did not sign and even tried to veto (in the second debate), works off of anti-intellectualist sentiment (aw, Gore kept pushing Bush for answers, what a meanie), and so forth. Does the media bother to tear into Shrub for that?
Nope. That story didn't have much legs. Why? When you're the CEO, you get to take credit for all the decisions made by your subordinates, even when you hated them. It's pretty well akin to Clinton's stance on the welfare reform bill he hated until the 1994 Republican Revolution pushed him back to the center of American politics.
(Note: I'm not saying anything about your preference here, I'm making a point about the dissection of candidates)
It wouldn't matter if you did, although people's willingness to make fun of Bush's name does disturb me whilst they're making serious, salient points. I could take the obvious and start calling him AlGore or Bore, but I won't. I do have some respect for the guy and what he's done in Congress. I think he's sucked as a veep and is one of those people that's better served in Congress instead of the Executive Branch.
The problem is, no matter how savvy and info-hungry some of us are, the vast majority don't care that much. They won't do their research, they'll rely on the media (however little they say they trust them... go on, how many out there know the details behind the things I've mentioned here?) There hasn't been *nearly* enough scrutiny of the right sort on the Shrub; whether that's due to media mendacity or just a sort of accident is in a way beside the point, because not everybody can keep up with all the info out there.
Indeed. But isn't choice supposed to be good? Isn't information supposed to be free? That's what I get from reading/. and viewing distro-wars and KDE/GNOME firefights from the sidelines.
The amount of information to be absorbed these days is phenomenal. I've taken several months in making my choice. I was open to Gore, but the more I looked into his record, the more I realized that he has molded his politics to the times. Bush's service career is shorter, but he ran on four principles when running for Gov. in '94, and he achieved all four in part, some stunningly so. So much of what the Clinton-Gore Administration wanted hasn't happened. As Bush is fond of saying, "They've had their chance."
...but he's a politician. Should we expect any more? The current system puts up a lot of shields. I hope that this election does a lot to knock those shields down--killing the Electoral College, removing campaign finance limits on contributions, killing PAC's, requiring complete donor lists--and I think it will.
The biggest sea change you're going to see in politics is that it will start to become more real to the average Joe Six-Pack out there. Why? In this age of better information and faster access to that information, our politicians will be as naked as frogs for dissection in biology. That's a good thing--we'll be able to see what makes them tick and vote accordingly.
Hmmm, as I'm viewing this (admittedly early on), it's Gore #1, Bush #2, Nader #3. Given the/. demographics, I'm not surprised that Gore is doing better than Bush. But I'm surprised that Bush has Nader by 5%; guess there are a lot of Bush voters out there, like me, who don't feel like they need to stir up trouble by putting their votes in their.sig. =) Hell, I'm an independent, and there are many Dem's I'd vote for over Bush, but Al ain't one of 'em. --
The best way to put it is: If you don't care about the government, then the government won't care about you.
Persactly. I know I tend to the UAH students who bother me about things. I only have so many hours in my day to do my job as SGA VP, so I take care of as many gripes as I can and let the rest fall to the side. Most politicians, I think, are the same way--in other words, like most of us.
Try working in a field--like, say, aerospace--that highly depends on government spending. You'll really learn to care about politics.
The biggest problem with this will be solar cell degradation. After the cells are excited so many times, they just don't excite to the same levels anymore. [Insert your jokes about the same old pr0n here.] There is a way to prevent some of this, but since I'm doing a little on-the-side, patentable research on it, I'm not posting it on/. =) --
Microsoft's source codes are the most coveted in the multibillion-dollar industry. With access to them, competitors could write programs and challenge Microsoft's products. Hackers also could use the codes to identify software flaws, making break-ins and virus-writing easier. Microsoft has shared parts of its source code with partners, but it has kept the vast majority of the data secret.
You know, I read this and thought, "If the DoJ really wanted to stop the MSFT monopoly, why not force them to open their source?"
As Executive Vice-President of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Student Government Association (*waves to all the UAH/.ers*), I'd give you this to-do list:
See if the Lehigh SGA pays for speakers' fees and travel. Many do. If yours doesn't, give me an email address for the appropriate jacka$$ and I'll send them a sweet letter about how defraying the cost of (your speaker here) coming to speak will improve your university, blah blah blah.
Bother the appropriate departments. Faculty are there to help. Drop by the EE department and tell Dr. Stephen Kowell howdy, and tell him how much UAH misses him. He'll freak.
See if the local honors college or whatever will be willing to fund some stuff. They're cool about things like that--especially if there are enough open source revolutionaries that are in the HC. (UAH: check).
Lastly, after you have a package together, start talking with speakers. If you can do some up-front planning for them--and if you know where they live, try to work out a basic itinerary (not only for budgetary planning, but to show them that, by God, you want them to come), and you'll probably lay a big enough guilt trip that they'll come running.
Death Penalty in Tejas (WAS Re:Bush scares me)
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Should You Vote?
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· Score: 2
Have any of y'all looked to see Tejas's laws on the death penalty? The Governor has little, if anything, to do with 'em. It's not like most states, where the governor can commute the sentence. --
Another reason to vote: kill the electoral college
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Should You Vote?
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· Score: 2
After reading through most of the other replies, I'm finding a lot of electoral college hatred. I understand that. I don't like it myself--I was born in Tennessee (not much EC impact), grew up in Texas and Ohio (are you kidding?), and moved to Mississippi. Hell, in '92, there might as well not have been an election for me. I don't think I saw a single paid political advertisement for Bush or Clinton that wasn't on a national news program.
Now I live in Alabama, which has two more EC votes than does Missisippi. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. I still have yet to see Bush or Gore next to a bunch of enraptured, smiling children. I kinda miss seeing election commercials.
So, if you're pissed with the electoral college, why don't you pester your local Congresscritter? In looking at the Electoral College, you have to win 11 states to win. Don't believe me? Check out Jim Howard's EC Calculator. They are: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia or Virginia. Win those, and you have 270--enough to win.
The EC was a filtering mechanism. In this Information Age, do we need a filter? Nope. Remember, the original U.S. Constitution had the state legislatures electing Senators. Amendement XVII changed that. The Constitution can be changed again to reflect the desires of the people. It takes just 37 states. There are only 12 in the above list?
You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Start now. Pester your Congresscritter.
...if you don't vote, you shouldn't bitch about what your elected officials do.
Why?
If you vote, and another guy wins, you can say, "I didn't vote for him...I'm not responsible for his actions." If you did vote for her, and you don't like her actions, you can say, "I voted for her, and I don't like what she's doing." But if you don't vote, you pretty much said that "I don't care". If you're too apathetic to vote, why should you complain about the political process?
I'll tell you all that I'm voting for Bush. My reason isn't that I can't stand Al Gore (I really can't stand him), and it isn't that I don't think a third party candidate can win, so I won't "waste my vote" (in any election, no vote is wasted, even a vote for Mickey Mouse). No, it's because, of all the candidates, I agree most with Bush's stated positions on things that I care about.
Does this mean I agree with everything he says? Nope. I never agree with everything anyone says, much less what any politician says. I should know--I'm into politics myself. But I have taken a look at all the candidates and their platforms--including running through BetterVote.com's BetterMatch survey. When I ran through it, I agreed about 80% of the time with Bush--and several third-party candidates were well above 50% with me. That's fine.
I encourage every American/.er to get out and vote. If you vote, your voice is heard in that one very special way. If you're dissatisfied with both of the major parties, find some third party candidate that you most agree with, and vote with them.
Why?
Politicians will look at what will get them elected. Hell, I looked at it in last year's SGA election, and I'm already looking at it for next year's SGA election. (Note to all UAH/.ers: yeah, I'm running again.) There are certain issues that are highly important to our citizenry, and politicians will work hardest on those issues. That's how you earn people's trust in politics--you listen to their problems and work for a soultion.
Politics is the process of compromise and the art of the possible. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, folks, and if you want some lubrication, start squeaking. You can start 11/07/2000.
Slashdot Mirror
...when's the first annual KDE Draft? Is this going to be on ESPN? I can see it now: "Live from the illustrious Caesar's Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, it's the 2001 KDE League Draft. Each team has fifteen minutes to make its first selection. The draft order was selected from a hat. TrollTech is on the clock." [thirteen minute pause for effect, airtime filled by Mel Kiper talking about coder's skills in the 40-line dash] "TrollTech selects Matthias Ettrich, library coder from Oslo, Norway." [cheers from the crowd]
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Nah. Turns out others have noted that the story doesn't cover stuff for visible light. Guess geeks are damned to make failures like this all the time, eh? =) [Thank God for good genetics--I have better than 20:20 vision.]
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I'll ignore the personal slam here. It's hard to get frustrated with anything posted by an AC, especially one apparently unable to recognize sarcasm and humor when applied to an unfunny situation.
Hell, I want the Electoral College gone--I ran a long "Ask Slashdot" that was rejected that would probably be prudent to read now--and that would put the candidate I didn't want in, Gore, into office. Fine by me--I have a vote, just like everyone else. I don't expect you to agree with me--if you did, I'd worry about you. I'd rather have Gore elected by popular vote than the current maelstrom we have today. But I follow the Constitution, even as I work to have it changed.
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My goodness! When I saw "Florida Court Overturns...", I though Slashdot was continuing its devolution into: "Slashdot: Election News for Leftist Neds. Ballot Stuffing that matters."
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This is the fault of the Democrats! They've controlled Congress so long that they've had access to the schools--and now our kids can't read!
Oh, wait, it was the old folks that couldn't read. So it's the Republicans' fault, because they've kept down Medicare benefits for so long!
[I'll politely note that you can have a rant tag in XML, which makes me really want to convert all my sites to XML for that purpose--have a random-effects generator that changes what happens to stuff in rant tags, etc. Heh.]
Seriously, it wasn't highly wonderful of a ballot, but the ballot I voted on wasn't exactly clear from the first glance, either. Yet I took the bloody time to sit down and figure out the ballot, so I voted for the people and issues I wanted to see approved.
If nothing else, this is an indictment of our careless society.
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I think a lot of it will end up depending on where the money to pay you came from. If it's purely from state coffers or donations, then it's the school's decision--as well as the donors--to decide how closely to hold the code. As far as stuff run on grants, those decisions are usually written into the grant paperwork.
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Does this mean that /. will now run my long "Ask Slashdot" about killing the Electoral College?
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I wake up. I look at the clock. I decide I really do feel like crap and I'll stay in bed a while [the luxury of a college student]. I watch CNN [why? too lazy to change channel] babble on about the election. I see that turnout is already appearing to be fairly high.
I finally get my lazy ass up. I rummage around for my voter registration card. I can't find it. GAH!
I pick up the phone and call the City Clerk. Phone's off the hook. GAH!
I drive around my neighborhood, looking for my voting precinct. I pass it unknowingly--no big sign.
I grab something to eat and drive over to school to drop off in my office over at SGA. I am ribbed for not having voted yet [it's around 11:00 a.m.]. I smile, nod, and say, "I'm trying to figure out where the hell I vote." Our secretary, who lives close to me, tells me where she voted.
I travel to said place. I wait in line. I step up to the clerk. Guess what--wrong place! I walk over to another poll worker; she can't get through to the clerk's office, either. She tells me she thinks it's one of three churches--all on the same road, of course.
I climb back in my truck and drive back down my road. I pass churches slowly. I got honked at and given the fingers by drivers. I smile and nod and wave. I finally see the church--and it's one I'd passed.
I pull in, wait in another line, cast my ballot, look confusedly at the various amendments on Alabama's constitution, vote some yes and some no to piss off the people who look at these things--egads, Alabama needs a constitutional convention!--and cast my vote for W. He's the best of my choices, but I wish I had other choices.
I walk up to the ballot counter. My ballot won't read. Undaunted, I recheck my ballot and re-enter it. Finally, it goes in. I was #864 at that precinct today. I'm amazed--that was around 11:30, before the Huntsville lunch rush will hit.
I drive back to campus. I come back to my office. I ask people if they're going to vote. One says voting is stupid. I nearly unload all of my frustration on him.
Well, I've voted. I have a right to bitch now. Even if Gore wins, I have that right--because I'll go get a new "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush" sticker to slap on my truck.
What the hell, no one elected in US election years ending in zeroes ever holds office for long, save for Ron Reagan.
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My best friend just left the same contractor I work for to go work for the U.S. Army. While he was slowly slogging through grad school in engineering management, he now has enough time to really pursue his Ph.D. in EM at our alma mater. They're paying for it, and they'll give him a paid year off to work on his Ph.D. stuff. Cool.
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After Congress moved to raise the President's salary to $500k and the VP's to somewhere in that territory, the federal salary structure finally got some relief. Federal law says you can't make more than the VP, and he's been making $175k. COLA's [Cost Of Living Adjustments] for the Supreme Court and some members of Congress were pushing the salary structure to the breaking point.
Working in a tight labor market [Huntsville, AL] with a high-tech workforce, I've seen federal salaries jumping a bit in an effort to grab people from the private sector. The pay's not what you'd get on the outside, of course, but the job security's usually pretty good. Also, as a contractor employee, I can tell you that the Federal guys rarely put in more than 40 per. Wouldn't that be nice.
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Well, this is a nice little self-selected opinion poll. It would be great to have /. run a poll similar to this one asking people if they voted, and then who they voted for if they did. You'll find that there are many willing participants who don't make it out on Election Day. Sad, but true.
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...because if George W. gets elected, he's big oil, and we can have him send Bruce Willis and his leatherneck oil riggers up there to drop a nuke in it and kick its ass. Failing that, we'll find a bunch of old geezers who know how to take apart that there Apollo booster. Mebbe we can get John Glenn up there--he's old enough to remember how all this crap works.
Failing all that, though, "Surf's up, dude!"
TOTKChief, who can't view Armageddon without screaming, "You bloody fscking idiots, you can't throttle a solid rocket like that, and you damn sure can't re-light the bastard!"
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You know, back in '92, I thought the GOP might be in trouble. Perot's Reform Party was hitting the far-right and populist issues pretty well. The GOP was without a place to stand--the RP had taken their extreme positions, the ones they always use to define themselves in one of the elections.
Look at '96: that was a far-right GOP running for President. This year, Bush is a populist-rhetoric President: "I believe in people, not government."
The Reform Party, if they'd then gotten several candidates in statewide offices and into Congress in '94, would have been a juggernaut and replaced the GOP. But they didn't, and in '94, the GOP released the Contract of America, which took back both flanks of the party with reckless abandon.
As a result, the RP was a laugher in '96.
Now we have Nader, who seems to be out-flanking [heh, I almost typed "out-flaking"] the Democrats. He has the far-left environmentalists, and he has some populist appeal from those frustrated with the Democrats' move to the right. Nader won't win this election, but he might set the Greens up for a move in the next twelve years.
We'll see such a move only if the Greens follow up with getting a lot of people to run for Congress in '02 and statewide offices for the next year. Then run another solid, personable candidate in '04 for POTUS, lose again, and see if you're at 15% or so. If so, let all hell break lose--because the Democrats can be had, just as the GOP could be had eight years ago.
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My, my, a lot of invective here. I know a response won't probably make much difference to you, but it might to some lonely, undecided /. reader. So here goes:
Nader is not a politician. He's a consumer rights advocate who happens to be running for President. You speak later of Bush being "unfit for office". What makes Nader fit for it? What positions has he held in government? Has he ever dealt with a legislative body controlled by the other party? Has he ever served a day in the military? What is his knowledge of foreign policy?
People talk about not knowing enough about the two we've got--the biggest argument for a two-party system is that two choices are about all we're able to handle. If we had three, six, or ten parties with significant polling, we'd never get past the main party platform and spin they have. The information overload on just the two is bad enough.
This is not to knock third parties. They are vitally necessary to American government. They smack down one party when the two are growing together. In about forty years, one of the two parties will go away. It will probably be the Democrats, since they keep moving to the right. The American Left will probably rise again.
I ask, what's shortsighted about raising the bar for the minimum gross annual adjusted income you have to bring in to pay taxes, or about making that lowest tax bracket be 10% instead of the 15% it is now? Little, if you ask me. Under Bush's tax cut, I don't think I'll pay taxes next year, because I'm going to school and working part time. I won't mind the refund check.
As for the "Christian posturing", yeah, it's there. The man is someone that has faith. Is that so bad?
Yeah, Gore has had a really easy life, too. Hard life growing up in D.C. and going to private school. Hard life starting both divinity school and law school at Vanderbilt and finishing neither. [Did you know, by the way, that Bush has an MBA from Harvard? They don't pass those out to just anyone.]
I am a student of American political history. I recognize that the third party just kills one of the two major ones, then becomes a major party itself. Americans want simple, easily-identifiable choices. This is a country that runs about 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, and 20% in the middle. You shoot for that middle. Right now, that middle is pretty conservative. Thirty years ago, it wasn't.
What's wrong with the system right now is the money. PAC's are abusive. "Soft" and "hard" money are ludicrous. Simply allow only personal donations--with no limits--and require full disclosure of all donations. You fail to disclose, you are disqualified. Simple. Fair. Honest. There will be big and small donors lined up on both sides, and since the media will have access to all the records, sniffing out favoritism will be rather easy.
That's damn near every politician I've met. They have a message. We're in a sound bite culture, and we rememebr sound bites. We remember "invented the Internet"--and that's completely out of context! In an era of increasing complexity, we desire simplicity.
I guarantee that any politician who gave a specific answer to any debate question--where he'd start and what all she'd do--would put those people to sleep. I know I put people to sleep here at UAH's SGA on giving them a long but full answer. People want "yes", "no", or "I'll get back to you on that".
Large government solutions are moderate policy? Gore's an LBJ Democrat.
I actually belive in Bush for what he says that he's going to do. Nader has a simple platform, and that scares me. Politics is a highly complicated business. Each decision--foreign or domestic--affects all others. Simple, five-sentence solutions work fine as principles, but that's not how you govern.
Not for me, they're not. I have given a long, hard thought to both. I am personally pro-life--vehemently so--but I recognize that the majority of Americans don't feel the same way. While I'm personally opposed to the death penalty, it does, in some ways, serve to hold a society in check.
But that's just me. I had my idealistic time. I'm into pragmatism nowadays.
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The potential for intermediaries is indeed vast. We witness it with the media--and I'm not going to go on some Rush Limbaugh-esque kick about the "liberal news media". Even in the age of 24/7 cable news channels, airtime is a scarcity. On the Web, the only scarcity is the time of the individual to take the time and sit down and inform themselves.
If campaign finance reform came out to have all candidates list all donors, who would bother to look at it? Not many, I wager. Most folks probably don't read what their local paper publishes--if they publish it at all. I'm one of those weird people that does, but I've always loved politics.
If there's anything the Information Age has shown us, it's that time is indeed a commodity. If greater political information comes out, you'll then have people who will make money in providing a service about that information. Yes, there will be spin. There's always spin--whether you're at a bar talking about the city council with a buddy, or whether you're in the voting booth. Spin is spin is spin, and spin is in.
The candidates have always written the rules. The politicians always have--read Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff to show the unwillingness of the media [what Wolfe labels "The Victorian Gent"] to show the full truth.
There are plenty of things that are out of bounds with Gore, too--most of the focus in his candidacy has been on his service as Veep. Fine, but one holder of the office called it "a warm pitcher of spit". I'd rather look more into what Gore did in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate than what he did in the West Wing.
For example, the NRA has several letters from Gore's offices in Congress requesting that they support him in their regular "legislative review" that they provide members. Makes sense when you're in Congress from a gun-totin' state like Tennessee, but when you're a "liberal democrat" in the Executive Branch, the NRA is eeeeeevil. Stuff like that.
The entire focus of the Gore candidacy has been over the last eight years--except for his babbling about his relationship with Tipper [all well and good to love your wife] and his service in 'Nam [like any politico's kid can talk much about that!]. Past that, zippo, zero, zilch, nada, other than the "Internet initiative", which has only served in me making a good joke on /.
Nope. That story didn't have much legs. Why? When you're the CEO, you get to take credit for all the decisions made by your subordinates, even when you hated them. It's pretty well akin to Clinton's stance on the welfare reform bill he hated until the 1994 Republican Revolution pushed him back to the center of American politics.
It wouldn't matter if you did, although people's willingness to make fun of Bush's name does disturb me whilst they're making serious, salient points. I could take the obvious and start calling him AlGore or Bore, but I won't. I do have some respect for the guy and what he's done in Congress. I think he's sucked as a veep and is one of those people that's better served in Congress instead of the Executive Branch.
Indeed. But isn't choice supposed to be good? Isn't information supposed to be free? That's what I get from reading /. and viewing distro-wars and KDE/GNOME firefights from the sidelines.
The amount of information to be absorbed these days is phenomenal. I've taken several months in making my choice. I was open to Gore, but the more I looked into his record, the more I realized that he has molded his politics to the times. Bush's service career is shorter, but he ran on four principles when running for Gov. in '94, and he achieved all four in part, some stunningly so. So much of what the Clinton-Gore Administration wanted hasn't happened. As Bush is fond of saying, "They've had their chance."
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Maybe Gore's not replied yet because he invented /. and considers that Taco will help him out.
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...but he's a politician. Should we expect any more? The current system puts up a lot of shields. I hope that this election does a lot to knock those shields down--killing the Electoral College, removing campaign finance limits on contributions, killing PAC's, requiring complete donor lists--and I think it will.
The biggest sea change you're going to see in politics is that it will start to become more real to the average Joe Six-Pack out there. Why? In this age of better information and faster access to that information, our politicians will be as naked as frogs for dissection in biology. That's a good thing--we'll be able to see what makes them tick and vote accordingly.
Yet I'm voting for Bush.
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Hmmm, as I'm viewing this (admittedly early on), it's Gore #1, Bush #2, Nader #3. Given the /. demographics, I'm not surprised that Gore is doing better than Bush. But I'm surprised that Bush has Nader by 5%; guess there are a lot of Bush voters out there, like me, who don't feel like they need to stir up trouble by putting their votes in their .sig. =) Hell, I'm an independent, and there are many Dem's I'd vote for over Bush, but Al ain't one of 'em.
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Persactly. I know I tend to the UAH students who bother me about things. I only have so many hours in my day to do my job as SGA VP, so I take care of as many gripes as I can and let the rest fall to the side. Most politicians, I think, are the same way--in other words, like most of us.
Try working in a field--like, say, aerospace--that highly depends on government spending. You'll really learn to care about politics.
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The biggest problem with this will be solar cell degradation. After the cells are excited so many times, they just don't excite to the same levels anymore. [Insert your jokes about the same old pr0n here.] There is a way to prevent some of this, but since I'm doing a little on-the-side, patentable research on it, I'm not posting it on /. =)
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From the article:
You know, I read this and thought, "If the DoJ really wanted to stop the MSFT monopoly, why not force them to open their source?"
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As Executive Vice-President of the University of Alabama in Huntsville's Student Government Association (*waves to all the UAH /.ers*), I'd give you this to-do list:
Remember, just ask a poor, tired SGA EVP if ya need some help.
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Have any of y'all looked to see Tejas's laws on the death penalty? The Governor has little, if anything, to do with 'em. It's not like most states, where the governor can commute the sentence.
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After reading through most of the other replies, I'm finding a lot of electoral college hatred. I understand that. I don't like it myself--I was born in Tennessee (not much EC impact), grew up in Texas and Ohio (are you kidding?), and moved to Mississippi. Hell, in '92, there might as well not have been an election for me. I don't think I saw a single paid political advertisement for Bush or Clinton that wasn't on a national news program.
Now I live in Alabama, which has two more EC votes than does Missisippi. Whoop-de-freaking-doo. I still have yet to see Bush or Gore next to a bunch of enraptured, smiling children. I kinda miss seeing election commercials.
So, if you're pissed with the electoral college, why don't you pester your local Congresscritter? In looking at the Electoral College, you have to win 11 states to win. Don't believe me? Check out Jim Howard's EC Calculator. They are: California, New York, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Georgia or Virginia. Win those, and you have 270--enough to win.
The EC was a filtering mechanism. In this Information Age, do we need a filter? Nope. Remember, the original U.S. Constitution had the state legislatures electing Senators. Amendement XVII changed that. The Constitution can be changed again to reflect the desires of the people. It takes just 37 states. There are only 12 in the above list?
You say you want a revolution? Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Start now. Pester your Congresscritter.
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...if you don't vote, you shouldn't bitch about what your elected officials do.
Why?
If you vote, and another guy wins, you can say, "I didn't vote for him...I'm not responsible for his actions." If you did vote for her, and you don't like her actions, you can say, "I voted for her, and I don't like what she's doing." But if you don't vote, you pretty much said that "I don't care". If you're too apathetic to vote, why should you complain about the political process?
I'll tell you all that I'm voting for Bush. My reason isn't that I can't stand Al Gore (I really can't stand him), and it isn't that I don't think a third party candidate can win, so I won't "waste my vote" (in any election, no vote is wasted, even a vote for Mickey Mouse). No, it's because, of all the candidates, I agree most with Bush's stated positions on things that I care about.
Does this mean I agree with everything he says? Nope. I never agree with everything anyone says, much less what any politician says. I should know--I'm into politics myself. But I have taken a look at all the candidates and their platforms--including running through BetterVote.com's BetterMatch survey. When I ran through it, I agreed about 80% of the time with Bush--and several third-party candidates were well above 50% with me. That's fine.
I encourage every American /.er to get out and vote. If you vote, your voice is heard in that one very special way. If you're dissatisfied with both of the major parties, find some third party candidate that you most agree with, and vote with them.
Why?
Politicians will look at what will get them elected. Hell, I looked at it in last year's SGA election, and I'm already looking at it for next year's SGA election. (Note to all UAH /.ers: yeah, I'm running again.) There are certain issues that are highly important to our citizenry, and politicians will work hardest on those issues. That's how you earn people's trust in politics--you listen to their problems and work for a soultion.
Politics is the process of compromise and the art of the possible. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, folks, and if you want some lubrication, start squeaking. You can start 11/07/2000.
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