you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
Moral fiber and psychic powers. There simply isn't enough transparency in corporations to figure out whether they are acting ethically or not in most cases, unless they do something really reprehensible and a government gets involved and compels transparency, or someone on the inside finally decides that having a job is no longer worth it.
And this line just keeps moving. A few decades ago 14 year olds could star in porn. A few centuries ago, being unmarried by 16 relegated a woman to spinsterhood. How long before it's 21? 30? When it becomes 21 (not entirely unreasonable, given that we already use that as the "drinking age" and the elderly continue to bemoan the lack of maturity in those younger than them while wielding the power to change it) will you think being attracted to 18 year olds is a crime?
The supporter of gay rights said his argument relied on the fallacy of the slippery slope.
The slippery slope is real. No argument should "rely on the fallacy" of it, the argument should stand on its own merits for its own subject. The supporter should have simply stated that polygamy and other relationships are separate issues and should be argued on their own circumstances.
The attraction of consenting males and females is one thing, but there comes a point where some "immutable sexual orientations," such as orientations toward children, are a "problem."
As for this, even if you do have a slippery slope, the whole "consenting" thing is rather like a chasm between the two issues.
Come on. The government pulled a bait and switch with the SSN. It was an account number that was meaningless on every level; hence, we accepted it. Then they turned it into a public handle that is directly attached to your finances, by force. It's not individual speech; it is a scarlet letter applied on your person from without. Privacy is 100% maintainable until coercion enters the picture. The SSN isn't about censorship, it is about government fraud. If the government wasn't trying so hard to screw us with it, it'd be a non-issue.
If you're talking about the American SSN, then this is 100% bullshit. All the federal government does with this number is accept payments and declarations towards your tax, as well as identify you for your eventual social security payment. If someone stole this number from you, as far as the federal government is concerned, the best they could do is pay your taxes for you, the worst is to steal your social security check.
No, when you speak of the they who turned it into a "public handle", you're speaking of the various financial institutions, corporations, and so on who were too lazy to determine a better way of identifying people in the absence of any legal requirement to do so.
You can blame the government for not forcing corporations to come up with their own identifier when capitalism failed to provide a solution, you can blame the government for permitting companies to charge you for services or goods rendered to another person, you can blame the government for allowing credit bureaus to defame you for the actions of another, but you can't blame the government for the SSN (well, unless you're blaming them for taxes and social security in the first place, but that's a completely different matter)
Actually, in the US, the Health Information Privacy and Portability Act (HIPPA) covers this to varying extents, and by varying I mean vague and poorly written.
At one point it was even suggested that calling the name of a patient in the waiting room was a privacy violation and everyone would have to be issued numbers, otherwise other people in the room would be aware that Mr. John Smith was at the urologist and therefore had something wrong with his penis. Other interpretations would prevent the doctors' staff members from looking at the chart ("Sorry Mr. Smith, I see here that we billed you $500 for something but I'm not allowed to see what").
Assuming you mean this, then Common Sense is truly dead, laid to rest in her family plot along side her husband Critical Thinking, and her daughter, Common Decency.
Had she been alive, Common Sense would have dictated that the nuns revise their plans so that their operations could have been carried out from the ground floor and either close the upper floors entirely (gutting the top floor and turning it into a private garden would have been a nice touch), or spend the money on a lift and recoup it by renting out rooms on the upper floors to hard working low income people who would have appreciated reasonable rental costs in NYC.
The main problem is that it give people a "right" to something as opposed to giving them a right to be free of something.
The right to be equal can also be expressed as the right to be free from inequality. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and the idea of allowing the handicapped to participate in society by being employed and engaging in commerce rather than soaking up Medicaid/Medicare and welfare checks must have seemed a good one at the time. I wonder what went so wrong.
It would be interesting to come up with a receipt system that could be used to prove that you voted for whoever you wanted to prove you voted for. For instance, a square card, rotate it 90 degrees and you voted Democratic instead of Republican, or flip it upside down and rotate 180 for third party. As long as you remember which way was up, you'd be able to figure out who you voted for.
Of course, using such a system where the machine gives candidate A 100000 votes and candidate B -5000 votes doesn't help much, since they'll claim you've rotated your vote 90 degrees and cast an imaginary ballot.
WHAT did it start? Seriously, come on, tell us all just what the US "started" so that everyone can be very, very careful not to "abandon" it. I'd also like you to explain how you're going to "finish" whatever it is, while you're at it, just to make sure that nobody messes this up while wandering around in the dark. The neocons have no clue what they're doing, and every time they lambast the Democrats for not having a plan, all I'm hearing is "pretty, pretty please tell us what to do because we have no idea anymore".
As far as I can tell, the US went to war to remove Saddam from power, and that's it. There was absolutely no plan for anything else, so if everyone simply packed up and left now, nobody would be "abandoning" anything. Bush could even order a few dozen more "Mission Accomplished" signs and have them ready in time for his party's '08 photo-ops.
Actually, the document linked by the other guy isn't the whole story. Unfortunately, the gov site seems to make heavy use of sessions so I can't link to the results page, but go to http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/ma in and search for "All Documents", "Department of Homeland Security - All", "Any Word" and search for Keyword: "USCBP-2005-0003"
Anything short of an actual house or senate bill is just speculation.
What the fuck?
You obviously don't understand what has happened to our government. Do you think the reason the TSA still allows matches on planes is because the congresspeople are sitting around on their fat asses and haven't gotten around to passing a law to ban matches on planes since Richard Reid tried to set his shoes on fire? No, it's because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to set the law of the land by relegating it to bureaucracies like the FCC, FAA, TSA, and so on. Congress does not pass laws dictating what frequency your 802.11b access point uses, instead they created the FCC and gave them the power to establish "rules" with the force of law but without any of the review that laws are required to have. You do not elect the members of these committees, so the TSA can sit around on their fat asses and ignore the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to allow matches on planes other than to set things on fire while drawing their paychecks from your tax money. After all, what are you going to do about it, vote against them?
In this case, the FULL DOCKET IN PDF FORMAT (which you didn't read since this is straight from the government, not "yet another person's assessment of this so-called proposal") the grandparent linked to shows how the
Office of Regulations and Rulings Bureau of Customs and Border Protection Department of Homeland Security
is using the power granted to it by Congress to create a rule that could cost "from $612 million to $1.9 billion" over 10 years, but is apparently a really good deal because one "incident" could have costs that "exceed $790 million", even though "this rule may not prevent such an incident."
Personally, having read through it myself now, I'm not seeing where this constitutes requiring a "security clearance" any more than the (highly inaccurate and controversial) no-fly list does, except checked an hour in advance instead of at check-in time. The rule states that it affects both domestic and international flights, making discussions about how we currently use passports internationally and find that "okay" a red herring.
It seems to me that the NYT staff either thought that the documents weren't really that dangerous, or they commited treason. Which do you think it is?
Moreover, U.S. officials were warned last week by the International Atomic Energy Association that the information available "could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms." The web site wasn't removed until last night, after the Times began its inquiry.
The President chose to ignore warnings that there were things that should not have been declassified in there. The administration was warned about the nuclear bomb material before the NYT pointed it out and chose to do nothing. So, I guess the documents weren't that dangerous, because it's really difficult for the government to commit treason against itself.
Which makes our country a safer place: a country where mentioning the holes in our security gets you shot, or one where mentioning the holes in our security gets them fixed?
0. The voter completes whatever identification/registration/whatever steps required before being allowed into the actual voting room where... 1. The voter receives a numbered (in an OCR friendly font, see below) blank ballot and is directed to the voting booth (voter will have already identified himself to a different person outside, so there should be no loss of privacy due to the number). The number indicates the voting location as well as a semi-random sequence number. (Ballots would be printed in randomized blocks of 100 or so, so the first ballots would be 59,14,33,92...etc, then after the first 100 would come 102,148,192,.... etc). The ballot card is otherwise blank, and is large enough to hold all of the issues on the ballot. 2. The voter inserts the ballot into the electronic voting machine until a green light comes on. Diagrams illustrate the right way to do this, a notch in one corner of the ballot card prevents the voter from continuing until he/she figures this step out. Red light if they fail to do it right (labeled "WRONG" for the colorblind, buzzer for the blind though they will probably have someone load the ballot for them) to prevent them from trying to jam it in harder. 3. The machine displays the ballot in the selected font size or reads the ballot to the blind user. 3a. Each race is displayed separately with the candidates below it in a column. (or "For" and "Against" for appropriate referendums, etc.) 3b. The user selects a candidate using up and down buttons, then presses the "Vote" button to select that. 3c. Their choice is now highlighted on the screen (and read to them). 3d. The user presses the "Next" button to move to the next race. Or presses the "Finished Voting" to indicate that they will will not vote in the remaining races. Loop to 3a until there are no more races or the user presses Finished Voting. 4. A list of races and the selected candidates appears, the user can move up or down and see each race (have it read to them) and if they wish to change their mind, they can press the "Vote" button to return to that race and change their vote (See 3). User presses "Finished Voting" again to indicate that they are done (5 second delay required to prevent accidentally bouncing the button). 5. The ballot card is fed through the machine's printer and printed in rows, with each row containing one race. Columns are the name of the race, the selection for that race, and a pattern designed for optical recognition. Each option has a unique code consisting of the code for that race plus a code for the candidate (to prevent misaligned scans) as well as codes for "no vote" and "write-in". 6. Voter fills in any write-in positions in pen (rather than having to dial in names or whatever). 7. Voter reads the ballot card, and if there is a mistake, the voter presents the ballot to the site overseers who 7a. Record the ballot number as destroyed and then 7b. Destroy the ballot and issue a new one. Go back to 2. 8. Voter places ballot in one of several ballot boxes and goes home, proud to have done his civic duty 9. At the end of the day, the election observers invalidate the remaining ballots from the opened batch (see 7), then record the lowest unused ballot batch of 100 and destroy the remainder. 10. Ballot boxes are delivered to a counting station. 11. Ballots are dumped out, stacked up with the notches aligned, and each stack is counted in total 12. The counted stack is then fed through an optical sorter set to sort the possible options for the first race into bins, one bin per candidate, one bin for all write-ins, one bin for no-votes. 12a. Run each candidate's bin individually through the counting machine. 12ai. Election observers spot che
So, what level are you comfortable setting "clever enough" at? Clever enough to be able to operate an improperly calibrated touchscreen that appears to select random people? Maybe we can have intelligence tests administered, or perhaps only people with PhDs can vote?
So far comments are "it was only one screen, big deal" but with things like "Yet another frustrated voter who complained of difficulties selecting a Democrat was told that the machine she was using had been troublesome.", why are we getting up to "yet another"? Why was the "troublesome" device not retired and replaced with a functioning one? If it was just a calibration issue, why was it not calibrated in the first place, or recalibrated if it really did just "slip" over the course of the voting (losing calibration in less than a day?!)? The Register asks why they're allowed to "play" with the settings, I'm asking why they were allowed to but didn't.
Plus, considering that it's Florida, User Error is a good bet.
Thats the ticket, let's just joke about Florida! That way we don't have to deal with things like making voting actually secure and idiotproof, we can just have people like you do the job of turning our elections into a joke!
who the hell is going to actually have the Sirius tuned to a populated frequency?
People who don't give a shit, those who are just assholes, and people who have no clue. The world is full of all three. I frequently run into people broadcasting over the station I like listening to at the upper end of the spectrum at stoplights on the way to work (maybe all the same person, my schedule is pretty regular), perhaps they had a device that let them pick any frequency so they set it to the one that they usually listen to just to save them the effort of pressing an extra button. Maybe they don't know that the guy in the next car over is trying to listen to the traffic report and can't get it because of them, maybe they do and they don't care, or maybe they picked the frequency for the fun of fucking things up for everyone else.
I get interruptions at stoplights on the way to work, and the station I listen to is up around the 104 end of the scale, people just assume that nobody else can hear what they're playing and don't bother to pick an unused frequency.
WiFi-based communications, or EDGE-network communications.
Both of which only work because there are radio frequencies assigned to them. Sure, it would be nice if everyone could do what they want and be trusted to not fuck it up for everyone else, but I think such an arrangement would last for about 30 seconds, and then the CEO of some wireless access company would realize that he can make a shitload of money by flooding the airspace with noise on the frequencies most often used by their competitors (like the omnipresent "linksys"). I know you've made power projections and how much it would cost to do that, but you don't have to jam the signal completely, just make existing wireless technology slow and unreliable by setting up access-point like devices designed to listen for "enemy" access points and send signals to desynchronize connections, while selling your "reliable" service and "advanced" networking gear at a premium. Of course, it would devolve into a war where nobody wins, but at least we'd finally find out whether RF signals strong enough to melt chocolate bars cause cancer or not.
That didn't stop them in the moments leading up to their nuke test.
Most likely its because their nuke test was a colossal failure and everyone knows it. Kim pissed off a lot of powerful people, not only on our side, but their side as well, by trying this stunt and rather than proving that they have nukes as an incentive to not invade them, they've got nothing and in getting nothing they gave everyone an incentive to invade them.
So now he's really, really sorry. Bush will establish sanctions on them just like Clinton did and Kim will continue to work on nuclear weapons in secret just like he did when Clinton did it.
If Bush and the Republicans hadn't had such a hardon for dicking around with their guns and not wasted our resources and support on Iraq, at this point we probably could have taken North Korea down with a bit of diplomacy and brute force, the way wars are supposed to be run: Convince China to take in the Koreans (at least temporarily), and then pamphlet bomb North Korea with a simple message: "go to China and live, stay or cross the DMZ and die", send in some snipers to help convince the military to not hamper the civilians, then start marching the DMZ north a few weeks later. When we get to the top and have killed everyone in our path, we convince China to return the Koreans (or let them keep them... it's not like anyone really should be living in most of that region), convince South Korea to reunite families, and everyone in the area to support whatever new nation the people remaining come up with if South Korea doesn't want to unite.
European countries and the U.N. were scamming the Food for Oil program...
HAHAHAHAHA right. The countries' armies came out and seized all of the commercial oil companies and forced them at tankpoint to sell oil to Iraq for insane profits.
Nice try. BTW, American oil companies were in on it too.
If they honestly correct mistakes in the media, that would actually be nice. If they're just another tool to get propaganda to us, this is yet another sickening political move.
I'd make a gentlemanly wager that it won't bother trying to fix Fox News's repeated assertions that Foley is a democrat.
After that other woman got sued for complaining on the internet and lost $11 million dollars, perhaps its best for the person asking that he/she didn't say.
Sucks for the rest of us who would be warned away from whatever scummy registrar this is, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Fox News? Is that you?
you may act unethically, however doing so will cause a large number of people or organisations with more moral fiber to cease doing business with you.
Moral fiber and psychic powers. There simply isn't enough transparency in corporations to figure out whether they are acting ethically or not in most cases, unless they do something really reprehensible and a government gets involved and compels transparency, or someone on the inside finally decides that having a job is no longer worth it.
but I have to draw the line somewhere
And this line just keeps moving. A few decades ago 14 year olds could star in porn. A few centuries ago, being unmarried by 16 relegated a woman to spinsterhood. How long before it's 21? 30? When it becomes 21 (not entirely unreasonable, given that we already use that as the "drinking age" and the elderly continue to bemoan the lack of maturity in those younger than them while wielding the power to change it) will you think being attracted to 18 year olds is a crime?
The supporter of gay rights said his argument relied on the fallacy of the slippery slope.
The slippery slope is real. No argument should "rely on the fallacy" of it, the argument should stand on its own merits for its own subject. The supporter should have simply stated that polygamy and other relationships are separate issues and should be argued on their own circumstances.
The attraction of consenting males and females is one thing, but there comes a point where some "immutable sexual orientations," such as orientations toward children, are a "problem."
As for this, even if you do have a slippery slope, the whole "consenting" thing is rather like a chasm between the two issues.
Come on. The government pulled a bait and switch with the SSN. It was an account number that was meaningless on every level; hence, we accepted it. Then they turned it into a public handle that is directly attached to your finances, by force. It's not individual speech; it is a scarlet letter applied on your person from without. Privacy is 100% maintainable until coercion enters the picture. The SSN isn't about censorship, it is about government fraud. If the government wasn't trying so hard to screw us with it, it'd be a non-issue.
If you're talking about the American SSN, then this is 100% bullshit. All the federal government does with this number is accept payments and declarations towards your tax, as well as identify you for your eventual social security payment. If someone stole this number from you, as far as the federal government is concerned, the best they could do is pay your taxes for you, the worst is to steal your social security check.
No, when you speak of the they who turned it into a "public handle", you're speaking of the various financial institutions, corporations, and so on who were too lazy to determine a better way of identifying people in the absence of any legal requirement to do so.
You can blame the government for not forcing corporations to come up with their own identifier when capitalism failed to provide a solution, you can blame the government for permitting companies to charge you for services or goods rendered to another person, you can blame the government for allowing credit bureaus to defame you for the actions of another, but you can't blame the government for the SSN (well, unless you're blaming them for taxes and social security in the first place, but that's a completely different matter)
Actually, in the US, the Health Information Privacy and Portability Act (HIPPA) covers this to varying extents, and by varying I mean vague and poorly written.
At one point it was even suggested that calling the name of a patient in the waiting room was a privacy violation and everyone would have to be issued numbers, otherwise other people in the room would be aware that Mr. John Smith was at the urologist and therefore had something wrong with his penis. Other interpretations would prevent the doctors' staff members from looking at the chart ("Sorry Mr. Smith, I see here that we billed you $500 for something but I'm not allowed to see what").
The Death of Common Sense
Assuming you mean this, then Common Sense is truly dead, laid to rest in her family plot along side her husband Critical Thinking, and her daughter, Common Decency.
Had she been alive, Common Sense would have dictated that the nuns revise their plans so that their operations could have been carried out from the ground floor and either close the upper floors entirely (gutting the top floor and turning it into a private garden would have been a nice touch), or spend the money on a lift and recoup it by renting out rooms on the upper floors to hard working low income people who would have appreciated reasonable rental costs in NYC.
The main problem is that it give people a "right" to something as opposed to giving them a right to be free of something.
The right to be equal can also be expressed as the right to be free from inequality. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and the idea of allowing the handicapped to participate in society by being employed and engaging in commerce rather than soaking up Medicaid/Medicare and welfare checks must have seemed a good one at the time. I wonder what went so wrong.
It would be interesting to come up with a receipt system that could be used to prove that you voted for whoever you wanted to prove you voted for. For instance, a square card, rotate it 90 degrees and you voted Democratic instead of Republican, or flip it upside down and rotate 180 for third party. As long as you remember which way was up, you'd be able to figure out who you voted for.
Of course, using such a system where the machine gives candidate A 100000 votes and candidate B -5000 votes doesn't help much, since they'll claim you've rotated your vote 90 degrees and cast an imaginary ballot.
whether or not the U.S. abandons what it started
WHAT did it start? Seriously, come on, tell us all just what the US "started" so that everyone can be very, very careful not to "abandon" it. I'd also like you to explain how you're going to "finish" whatever it is, while you're at it, just to make sure that nobody messes this up while wandering around in the dark. The neocons have no clue what they're doing, and every time they lambast the Democrats for not having a plan, all I'm hearing is "pretty, pretty please tell us what to do because we have no idea anymore".
As far as I can tell, the US went to war to remove Saddam from power, and that's it. There was absolutely no plan for anything else, so if everyone simply packed up and left now, nobody would be "abandoning" anything. Bush could even order a few dozen more "Mission Accomplished" signs and have them ready in time for his party's '08 photo-ops.
If the database is hacked, my SIN & email address (from which my real name can't be generated) is in somebody else's hands. So what?
They use it to sign up as you somewhere else and start saying something wrong. The police get you.
Actually, the document linked by the other guy isn't the whole story. Unfortunately, the gov site seems to make heavy use of sessions so I can't link to the results page, but go to http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/component/ma in and search for "All Documents", "Department of Homeland Security - All", "Any Word" and search for Keyword: "USCBP-2005-0003"
e r?objectId=090000648019da96&disposition=attachment &contentType=pdf
Then, click on the Docket ID of USCBP-2005-0003 to switch to the Docket View, you can see the original proposal is
http://www.regulations.gov/fdmspublic/ContentView
The original proposal uses the "clearance" language that seems to have started this.
What the fuck?
You obviously don't understand what has happened to our government. Do you think the reason the TSA still allows matches on planes is because the congresspeople are sitting around on their fat asses and haven't gotten around to passing a law to ban matches on planes since Richard Reid tried to set his shoes on fire? No, it's because Congress has abdicated its responsibility to set the law of the land by relegating it to bureaucracies like the FCC, FAA, TSA, and so on. Congress does not pass laws dictating what frequency your 802.11b access point uses, instead they created the FCC and gave them the power to establish "rules" with the force of law but without any of the review that laws are required to have. You do not elect the members of these committees, so the TSA can sit around on their fat asses and ignore the fact that there is no reason whatsoever to allow matches on planes other than to set things on fire while drawing their paychecks from your tax money. After all, what are you going to do about it, vote against them?
In this case, the FULL DOCKET IN PDF FORMAT (which you didn't read since this is straight from the government, not "yet another person's assessment of this so-called proposal") the grandparent linked to shows how the is using the power granted to it by Congress to create a rule that could cost "from $612 million to $1.9 billion" over 10 years, but is apparently a really good deal because one "incident" could have costs that "exceed $790 million", even though "this rule may not prevent such an incident."
Personally, having read through it myself now, I'm not seeing where this constitutes requiring a "security clearance" any more than the (highly inaccurate and controversial) no-fly list does, except checked an hour in advance instead of at check-in time. The rule states that it affects both domestic and international flights, making discussions about how we currently use passports internationally and find that "okay" a red herring.
Which makes our country a safer place: a country where mentioning the holes in our security gets you shot, or one where mentioning the holes in our security gets them fixed?
I've been posting something along these lines for a long time here, and I think it's finally reaching a point where I've gotten a lot of feedback from random slashdotters, but I'd like to see what Dr. Thompson thinks of the idea.
0. The voter completes whatever identification/registration/whatever steps required before being allowed into the actual voting room where...
1. The voter receives a numbered (in an OCR friendly font, see below) blank ballot and is directed to the voting booth (voter will have already identified himself to a different person outside, so there should be no loss of privacy due to the number). The number indicates the voting location as well as a semi-random sequence number. (Ballots would be printed in randomized blocks of 100 or so, so the first ballots would be 59,14,33,92...etc, then after the first 100 would come 102,148,192,.... etc). The ballot card is otherwise blank, and is large enough to hold all of the issues on the ballot.
2. The voter inserts the ballot into the electronic voting machine until a green light comes on. Diagrams illustrate the right way to do this, a notch in one corner of the ballot card prevents the voter from continuing until he/she figures this step out. Red light if they fail to do it right (labeled "WRONG" for the colorblind, buzzer for the blind though they will probably have someone load the ballot for them) to prevent them from trying to jam it in harder.
3. The machine displays the ballot in the selected font size or reads the ballot to the blind user.
3a. Each race is displayed separately with the candidates below it in a column. (or "For" and "Against" for appropriate referendums, etc.)
3b. The user selects a candidate using up and down buttons, then presses the "Vote" button to select that.
3c. Their choice is now highlighted on the screen (and read to them).
3d. The user presses the "Next" button to move to the next race. Or presses the "Finished Voting" to indicate that they will will not vote in the remaining races. Loop to 3a until there are no more races or the user presses Finished Voting.
4. A list of races and the selected candidates appears, the user can move up or down and see each race (have it read to them) and if they wish to change their mind, they can press the "Vote" button to return to that race and change their vote (See 3). User presses "Finished Voting" again to indicate that they are done (5 second delay required to prevent accidentally bouncing the button).
5. The ballot card is fed through the machine's printer and printed in rows, with each row containing one race. Columns are the name of the race, the selection for that race, and a pattern designed for optical recognition. Each option has a unique code consisting of the code for that race plus a code for the candidate (to prevent misaligned scans) as well as codes for "no vote" and "write-in".
6. Voter fills in any write-in positions in pen (rather than having to dial in names or whatever).
7. Voter reads the ballot card, and if there is a mistake, the voter presents the ballot to the site overseers who
7a. Record the ballot number as destroyed and then
7b. Destroy the ballot and issue a new one. Go back to 2.
8. Voter places ballot in one of several ballot boxes and goes home, proud to have done his civic duty
9. At the end of the day, the election observers invalidate the remaining ballots from the opened batch (see 7), then record the lowest unused ballot batch of 100 and destroy the remainder.
10. Ballot boxes are delivered to a counting station.
11. Ballots are dumped out, stacked up with the notches aligned, and each stack is counted in total
12. The counted stack is then fed through an optical sorter set to sort the possible options for the first race into bins, one bin per candidate, one bin for all write-ins, one bin for no-votes.
12a. Run each candidate's bin individually through the counting machine.
12ai. Election observers spot che
It forces the illegal immigrants to pony up the $20 for a cheap phony.
So, what level are you comfortable setting "clever enough" at? Clever enough to be able to operate an improperly calibrated touchscreen that appears to select random people? Maybe we can have intelligence tests administered, or perhaps only people with PhDs can vote?
So far comments are "it was only one screen, big deal" but with things like "Yet another frustrated voter who complained of difficulties selecting a Democrat was told that the machine she was using had been troublesome.", why are we getting up to "yet another"? Why was the "troublesome" device not retired and replaced with a functioning one? If it was just a calibration issue, why was it not calibrated in the first place, or recalibrated if it really did just "slip" over the course of the voting (losing calibration in less than a day?!)? The Register asks why they're allowed to "play" with the settings, I'm asking why they were allowed to but didn't.
Plus, considering that it's Florida, User Error is a good bet.
Thats the ticket, let's just joke about Florida! That way we don't have to deal with things like making voting actually secure and idiotproof, we can just have people like you do the job of turning our elections into a joke!
who the hell is going to actually have the Sirius tuned to a populated frequency?
People who don't give a shit, those who are just assholes, and people who have no clue. The world is full of all three. I frequently run into people broadcasting over the station I like listening to at the upper end of the spectrum at stoplights on the way to work (maybe all the same person, my schedule is pretty regular), perhaps they had a device that let them pick any frequency so they set it to the one that they usually listen to just to save them the effort of pressing an extra button. Maybe they don't know that the guy in the next car over is trying to listen to the traffic report and can't get it because of them, maybe they do and they don't care, or maybe they picked the frequency for the fun of fucking things up for everyone else.
I get interruptions at stoplights on the way to work, and the station I listen to is up around the 104 end of the scale, people just assume that nobody else can hear what they're playing and don't bother to pick an unused frequency.
WiFi-based communications, or EDGE-network communications.
Both of which only work because there are radio frequencies assigned to them. Sure, it would be nice if everyone could do what they want and be trusted to not fuck it up for everyone else, but I think such an arrangement would last for about 30 seconds, and then the CEO of some wireless access company would realize that he can make a shitload of money by flooding the airspace with noise on the frequencies most often used by their competitors (like the omnipresent "linksys"). I know you've made power projections and how much it would cost to do that, but you don't have to jam the signal completely, just make existing wireless technology slow and unreliable by setting up access-point like devices designed to listen for "enemy" access points and send signals to desynchronize connections, while selling your "reliable" service and "advanced" networking gear at a premium. Of course, it would devolve into a war where nobody wins, but at least we'd finally find out whether RF signals strong enough to melt chocolate bars cause cancer or not.
and without their money
When was Google's last public offering of new shares? How many GOOG stockholders actually paid google for their stock?
The fact that they kind of need food?
That didn't stop them in the moments leading up to their nuke test.
Most likely its because their nuke test was a colossal failure and everyone knows it. Kim pissed off a lot of powerful people, not only on our side, but their side as well, by trying this stunt and rather than proving that they have nukes as an incentive to not invade them, they've got nothing and in getting nothing they gave everyone an incentive to invade them.
So now he's really, really sorry. Bush will establish sanctions on them just like Clinton did and Kim will continue to work on nuclear weapons in secret just like he did when Clinton did it.
If Bush and the Republicans hadn't had such a hardon for dicking around with their guns and not wasted our resources and support on Iraq, at this point we probably could have taken North Korea down with a bit of diplomacy and brute force, the way wars are supposed to be run: Convince China to take in the Koreans (at least temporarily), and then pamphlet bomb North Korea with a simple message: "go to China and live, stay or cross the DMZ and die", send in some snipers to help convince the military to not hamper the civilians, then start marching the DMZ north a few weeks later. When we get to the top and have killed everyone in our path, we convince China to return the Koreans (or let them keep them... it's not like anyone really should be living in most of that region), convince South Korea to reunite families, and everyone in the area to support whatever new nation the people remaining come up with if South Korea doesn't want to unite.
European countries and the U.N. were scamming the Food for Oil program...
HAHAHAHAHA right. The countries' armies came out and seized all of the commercial oil companies and forced them at tankpoint to sell oil to Iraq for insane profits.
Nice try. BTW, American oil companies were in on it too.
If they honestly correct mistakes in the media, that would actually be nice.
If they're just another tool to get propaganda to us, this is yet another sickening political move.
I'd make a gentlemanly wager that it won't bother trying to fix Fox News's repeated assertions that Foley is a democrat.
I only wish he could run for 3 terms. Given the war on terror he would be justified.
Is that so? Is that the only justification you seek? The only reason he should be allowed to run again?
After that other woman got sued for complaining on the internet and lost $11 million dollars, perhaps its best for the person asking that he/she didn't say.
Sucks for the rest of us who would be warned away from whatever scummy registrar this is, though.