They are using this site to influence the coming elections on Nov. 7. This place has changed from "news for nerds" to "political platform for us editors".
LOL, given that slashdot is generally hostile to the People in Power (if you think the anti-Republican stance now is bad, you should have seen this place back when Clinton was pushing Echelon), if they were really out to "influence the coming elections" they'd have pulled a Fox News and called the guy a Republican instead of a Democrat. Because we all know around here that Republicans are all about destroying our civil liberties.
The simple fact of the matter is that a representative of the government is calling for the arrest of a person for writing a piece of software. And yes, that does mean something.
people are generally not considered to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places.
Except that they do have an expectation of privacy. If I followed a woman around all day in public, I'd be considered a stalker. If people had no expectation of privacy in public, then there would be no such consideration, it would be normal.
Seems like every time the US figures out a way to track/spy on terrorists, the NYT spills the info to the press.
LOL seems like the US has shitty ways of tracking people. "Oh we have his cellphone number, one of these days we'll get around to blowing him up while he's on a call, but propping up our puppet regimes is more important than the safety of Americans" Or the so-called "SWIFT" fiasco, acting as if the government tracking your bank balances was news. Or tracking the source and destination of every call in the US, in the hopes that if they stare at the patterns long enough they'll find terrorists, since they don't actually know of any in the US, or have any particular patterns of terrorist calls to compare them to.
Isn't it funny how after Bush had everyone who disagreed with him on Iraq removed from our intelligence services, we seem to be lacking in intelligence and have to turn to computers to prop it up? But no worries, I'm sure the government's getting a pretty sweet deal on their "terrorist detectors" from Bush's brother's college drinking buddy's sister's cousin's neighbor's dog's groomer's husband's brother's best friend's company. Never mind that it seems to consist of a box with a button and two lights that both read "terrorist", I'm sure it works really well.
But why should this hurt only Denmark in the rankings?
I think you have a pretty valid point. If I was doing the rankings, I'd simply have taken away first place entirely, started at #2, and then added a note about how radical/fundamentalist members of Islam attacking journalists for "disrespecting" their religion even as they actively attack other religions has driven down all of the countries across the board, and how as long as this violent hypocrisy exists, there can be no #1.
You're up against crime labs who stand up under oath in court and lie through their teeth, and somehow, the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting them for perjury.
You're up against prosecutors who rely on things like the public's belief that DNA tests are 100% accurate and that only one person could possibly have "that DNA" when "that DNA" used to be actually just a match against the presence or absense of 16 or so genes... with only 65536 possible combinations (at 16 markers). While new tests can exactly match one DNA sample to another, DNA "fingerprints" as espoused by the government continue to focus only on a limited number of "markers" meaning that dozens, possibly hundreds of people in a large city will share the same "fingerprint".
You're up against district attourneys who think DNA testing is awesome, unless it's used to prove one of their convicts innocent. Clearly if two people raped the woman, and two people's DNA was retrieved, and the convicted person turned out to be neither of them, the woman must have forgotten the third rapist, rather than picked out the wrong person on a lineup.
As the other person said, "good luck with your absolute belief in the state", and may God help us all.
Thats why I suggested issuing them in randomized blocks, rather than just taking all 10000000 and throwing them up in the air;)
100 was an example. There is sort of a scale, at one end is "easy" where blocksize=1 and the person in front of you has yours-1. At the other end is "hard" at blocksize=10000000 and the election officials spend the rest of the week figuring out what numbers were unused. Somewhere in the middle though is blocksize of x where individually invalidating x-1 ballots (last voter used the first ballot from a block) isn't that grueling, it should be sufficiently hard to guess another voter's number. Even if the evil voter knows the blocksize being used, all they would know is that the person in front of them must be one of x-1 numbers. If it can be arranged so that switching blocks can't be observed, then that means the person might be one of 2x-1, since he could have been issued the last ballot from the previous block. Blocksize might have to be chosen based on the community, if its likely that x-1 people might be able to get together and eliminate all of their numbers from the block, they could determine the ID of an outsider, so x should be increased for small towns or close-knit communities or others where someone might try it.
The only information you get from it, in association with an external verification (website) is that it's an effectively counted vote.
If the website gave only "counted" or "not counted" or "invalid hash", then this isn't such a dangerous idea, then you can only be fired for having not voted at all or having lost your little slip.
Otherwise, the boss would simply collect all the little slips and run them all through the website.
The price of insurance is set by the insurer based on the risks he sees
Theres two ways of attacking your stance: First, based on the fact that you don't want diabetes coverage, you seem to believe your risk of developing diabetes is near zero. Why should the insurance company judge and price your risk any differently? If the risk of having to pay out to you is near zero, then the cost of covering you against that risk is near zero, and therefore any discount you would receive for not being covered against that risk would be near zero.
Second, my original statement remains, and holds true even for vision and dental plans. You are not the only risk the insurance company sees. Say the insurance company sells 100 health plans and one dental plan, if the one dental plan customer ends up costing the insurance company more than they pay, that money is coming out of the health plan pool, and will eventually cause higher prices for everyone, bringing me back to the diabetic plan vs. the non-diabetic plan. There is a cap on how much more the insurance company can charge for diabetic coverage, if being diabetic costs the average person $50 a month, then after $49.99 everyone would drop their diabetic coverage and just pay out of pocket for the insulin, meaning that the insurance company would have to recoup the difference between their charges and the cost of treatment from the policies of healthy people like you.
As of December 2005, forty-six states have some type of laws requiring health insurance coverage to include treatment for diabetes. Most states require coverage of both direct treatment and the costs of diabetes treatment equipment and supplies often used by the patient at home. The states not included are Alabama, Idaho, North Dakota and Ohio.
Funny, you don't seem to understand what the point of insurance is. If you could buy a policy without diabetes coverage, you'd still be paying the same amount because as a 27 yr old healthy person, you aren't paying for your own medical costs, you're paying for everyone else's.
as it leaks too much information about who voted for whom. Keep iterating!
Thats the purpose of identifying yourself to be let into the room, and then be assigned a ballot inside the room, to seperate these. Plus the bonus points at the end for randomizing them, even if I watch over your shoulder as you sign in and read your registration card or whatever, I wouldn't be able to determine your number from mine, only an estimate that yours must be within about 2*size-of-block from mine.
That'd be great, except for having to prove damages. We had a representative of some company write into our paper complaining that more-stringent emissions requirements would destroy their company and that for a particular toxin, even the current level required is "too strict" and cites some numbers indicating that at the current level, only one in a million people will get cancer from their exhaust. How do I sue that company for "increasing my risk of death"? If I'm the unlucky one in a million (our city has 2 million people, so at least I shouldn't die alone), how do I prove that that company's emissions is killing me, as opposed to the other 50000 companies dumping toxins on the ground, in the air, and in the water, and who don't bother to brag about poisoning everyone? Maybe if there was the reverse of a class action lawsuit where I could sue all 50001 companies at once.
It would be different if it were employees or customers that they were killing, because then I could choose not to buy their products or not to work in their factories, but by killing completely unrelated people with their poisons, the people they are poisoning would not have any economic control over them. Thus, this cannot be solved strictly by a free market situation.
Every time this comes up, I propose the same idea, but each time it gets a little more fleshed out. 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. The number indicates both the voting location and the sequence that the cards are issued. If ballots run out, voters are asked to wait while more are printed and delivered. 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 prevents the voter from continuing until he/she figures this step out. Red light if they fail to do it wrong (labelled "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 accidentially bouncing the button).
Easy enough right? Now... 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. 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 ballot box and goes home, proud to have done his civic duty.
Lather, rinse, repeat for thousands of voters. The numbered ballots tell us two things: 1) Are there any missing ballot boxes and 2) are there any extra ballot boxes.
8a. At the end of the day, the election observers record the lowest numbered unused ballot and destroy the remainder. 9. Ballot boxes are delivered to a counting station. 10. Ballots are dumped out, stacked up with the notches aligned, and each stack is counted in total 11. 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. 11a. Run each candidate's bin individually through the counting machine. 11ai. Election observers spot check stacks by flipping like a flipbook and watching to see if the optical pattern being counted changes. 11b. Count write-ins by hand 11c. Run the no-vote stack through the counting machine.... 11d. and make sure the votes add up. 12. Report the total to the next higher up official.
Lather, rinse, repeat for all of the stacks.
Why is this superior? First off, let's look at the actual counting: The counting machine doesn't k
Eh, even without government mandates, the insurance companies are in a position to dictate whatever terms they please. "Volunteering" to not have insurance is like volunteering to go out of business, unless your company has billions of dollars, or you establish shell corporations for the purpose of screwing people over and getting away with it.
required by the state to carry coverage for things that I do not want.
What state is this, and what exactly are they mandating that you don't want?
That has to be the stupidest article I've ever seen. I have no idea why Nature ever ran that piece of junk.
what does "0.9% of the food ingredients" mean in terms of genes? Or, put another way, how to translate the gross generic definition of "ingredient" into something making sense at the molecular level?
It doesn't mean anything at the "molecular level". If you have a bag of cornmeal and 0.5% of the corn contained in that bag was genetically modified (whether 0.0001% of the genes came from a fish or 99.9% of them came from a cow) then the law says you don't have to label that bag as GM food. If you have an ear of corn, it was either genetically modified or not. Arguing over calling an ear of corn "partially" modified is like taking a Jaguar hood ornament, gluing it to the front of a Honda, and arguing over whether you should sell the result as an S Type. And no, I don't believe GM food will cause me to grow a third arm or something. That doesn't make this particular argument any less drool-inducingly stupid.
I had to take a step because of the law.
You'd have had to take the step without the law anyways. Blaming the law for you having a higher standard than the majority of the public is also stupid. So lets say there were no laws: either the company would not put any label on it, in which case you (or someone you trusted) would have to call anyway, or they'd put the exact same zero trans fat label on there, in which case you (or someone you trusted) would have to call anyway. Nothing changes, and the company saves a whopping 0.0003 cents per package on the ink.
Pretty well written. The thing to do next is for everyone to quit going "lol correlation!=causation!1!!eleventyone" and start looking for reasons why this happened. Could there be something about spending the first few years of your life watching weird looking brightly colored people babble at you from inside a flat box that causes children to not relate correctly to real humans? Or maybe children who are already autistic drive their parents crazy but settle down when placed in front of colorful people babbling at them from inside a box?
What point would it prove though? It's not a technical issue, one way isn't measurably faster or more efficient than the other.
If the "consistent application look" people make the port, then the "consistent OS look" people refuse to use it. If the "consistent OS look" people make the port, then the "consistent application look" won't accept it.
They made it so when you enter something really long into a cell it automatically overlaps the cells next to it, and so it would print that way.
Congratulations. All that, and you just found the one feature where some idiots who can't be bothered to use the right tool for the job screwed Excel up for everyone else.
maybe Mac developers are just not interested in that kind of development?
Or maybe its because the people who think that an application should always look exactly the same so as not to confuse a user who is switching between platforms and the people who think mac applications must all look special just for them are always at each other's throats?
And how do you propose that I go about doing that? Without a trial to back me up, anything I told you would be "biased hearsay".
I suspect the problem here is that we have warring ideologies. In my mind, giving a legislator money should be bribery whether a corporation forms a PAC, donates money from the corporate coffers to the PAC who then donates money to whoever the corporation's leaders wanted to in the first place, or whether it's just the CEO paying $100,000 out of pocket and getting a dinner with DeLay in return ("Corporate checks are acceptable" too). And hey, if the anti-pirate ideologues can call copyright infringement theft despite the fact that both copyright infringement and theft have specific legal definitions, why can't I call this bribery?
The citizenship (what about Intel's employees in India? I suppose they're citizens of India, but they don't receive American free speech rights) of members of a corporation doesn't change the fact that when Intel pays some representative a million dollars in order to receive a favor, it is coming out of the pocket of the corporation as a whole, and not a particular human citizen's pocket.
And what about multinational corporations who have their headquarters outside of the US, and do not even qualify for American citizenship? Why are they given the free speech right to bribe government?
Even if you're willing to state that corporations are citizens (and IIRC the ruling merely classified them as people, they'll still need to study and take the oath before becoming a citizen), petitioning the government and bribing the government are two different things.
was that this number was supposed to be private to the individual assigned it.
WRONG, and that's why this is a problem. The SSN was designed to identify you to the government for tax purposes. Everyone who reported your money to the government needs it: your employer, your bank, mortage officers, loan officers, casinos and so on and so forth. Someone stole your SSN? Oh noes! They can pay your taxes for you! The horror!
It wasn't until other companies decided that they could use the SSN to identify you to them despite the fact that many, many people have access to these numbers that this became a problem.
The solution is for the credit agencies to start feeling the bite. When lenders get a credit report from the agency that says that the crook they're dealing with isn't who the agency said they were, they should sic lawyers on the credit agencies when they end up with bad loans. A change in laws to force lenders to deal with the consequences of fucking up instead of allowing them to pursue the real person when they didn't bother to actually find out who they're giving money to will help also. Once this is in effect, the credit agencies will start to compete again, and improve based on accuracy. Lenders, too, will make sure the person receiving their money is who they say they are. I'm confident that captialism can come up with a solution for this one on it's own, we just have to stop protecting the lenders and credit agencies from their own stupidity so that Darwin can take care of the rest.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Wow, accusing a guy of antisemitism? I think the ad hominem attacks are hitting a new low here. If you can't argue with him, just shut up, eh? Tell you what. You explain how our exploding debt, peeking into every single person's shopping list and phone call, and massive concentration of power at the federal level are "normal" conservative ideals, and I'll back down on that.
it's just the 1st amendment's right to petition the government
As for your "first amendment rights" to bribe congressmen, please show me where in the constitution that corporations are citizens of the country and receive these rights? Bush doesn't believe non-citizens receive those rights, though that kind of hypocrisy is par for the course for government.
If they want to petition their representatives, they can do it the same way I do, by having their employees write them a letter and tell them that if they don't vote a certain way on a certain issue, they're not going to vote for that congressperson (except that I have to write my letters myself, since I don't have employees).
Slashdot Mirror
They are using this site to influence the coming elections on Nov. 7. This place has changed from "news for nerds" to "political platform for us editors".
LOL, given that slashdot is generally hostile to the People in Power (if you think the anti-Republican stance now is bad, you should have seen this place back when Clinton was pushing Echelon), if they were really out to "influence the coming elections" they'd have pulled a Fox News and called the guy a Republican instead of a Democrat. Because we all know around here that Republicans are all about destroying our civil liberties.
The simple fact of the matter is that a representative of the government is calling for the arrest of a person for writing a piece of software. And yes, that does mean something.
people are generally not considered to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public places.
Except that they do have an expectation of privacy. If I followed a woman around all day in public, I'd be considered a stalker. If people had no expectation of privacy in public, then there would be no such consideration, it would be normal.
Or that they're susceptible to the types of election fraud that the Republicans have been caught doing over and over?
Trying to pretend one side or the other is lily-white is stupid, we should use a system that is immune to anything that either side might try.
Seems like every time the US figures out a way to track/spy on terrorists, the NYT spills the info to the press.
LOL seems like the US has shitty ways of tracking people. "Oh we have his cellphone number, one of these days we'll get around to blowing him up while he's on a call, but propping up our puppet regimes is more important than the safety of Americans" Or the so-called "SWIFT" fiasco, acting as if the government tracking your bank balances was news. Or tracking the source and destination of every call in the US, in the hopes that if they stare at the patterns long enough they'll find terrorists, since they don't actually know of any in the US, or have any particular patterns of terrorist calls to compare them to.
Isn't it funny how after Bush had everyone who disagreed with him on Iraq removed from our intelligence services, we seem to be lacking in intelligence and have to turn to computers to prop it up? But no worries, I'm sure the government's getting a pretty sweet deal on their "terrorist detectors" from Bush's brother's college drinking buddy's sister's cousin's neighbor's dog's groomer's husband's brother's best friend's company. Never mind that it seems to consist of a box with a button and two lights that both read "terrorist", I'm sure it works really well.
But why should this hurt only Denmark in the rankings?
I think you have a pretty valid point. If I was doing the rankings, I'd simply have taken away first place entirely, started at #2, and then added a note about how radical/fundamentalist members of Islam attacking journalists for "disrespecting" their religion even as they actively attack other religions has driven down all of the countries across the board, and how as long as this violent hypocrisy exists, there can be no #1.
You're up against crime labs who stand up under oath in court and lie through their teeth, and somehow, the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting them for perjury.
You're up against prosecutors who rely on things like the public's belief that DNA tests are 100% accurate and that only one person could possibly have "that DNA" when "that DNA" used to be actually just a match against the presence or absense of 16 or so genes... with only 65536 possible combinations (at 16 markers). While new tests can exactly match one DNA sample to another, DNA "fingerprints" as espoused by the government continue to focus only on a limited number of "markers" meaning that dozens, possibly hundreds of people in a large city will share the same "fingerprint".
You're up against district attourneys who think DNA testing is awesome, unless it's used to prove one of their convicts innocent. Clearly if two people raped the woman, and two people's DNA was retrieved, and the convicted person turned out to be neither of them, the woman must have forgotten the third rapist, rather than picked out the wrong person on a lineup.
As the other person said, "good luck with your absolute belief in the state", and may God help us all.
make auditing harder, it wouldn't be impossible.
;)
Thats why I suggested issuing them in randomized blocks, rather than just taking all 10000000 and throwing them up in the air
100 was an example. There is sort of a scale, at one end is "easy" where blocksize=1 and the person in front of you has yours-1. At the other end is "hard" at blocksize=10000000 and the election officials spend the rest of the week figuring out what numbers were unused. Somewhere in the middle though is blocksize of x where individually invalidating x-1 ballots (last voter used the first ballot from a block) isn't that grueling, it should be sufficiently hard to guess another voter's number. Even if the evil voter knows the blocksize being used, all they would know is that the person in front of them must be one of x-1 numbers. If it can be arranged so that switching blocks can't be observed, then that means the person might be one of 2x-1, since he could have been issued the last ballot from the previous block. Blocksize might have to be chosen based on the community, if its likely that x-1 people might be able to get together and eliminate all of their numbers from the block, they could determine the ID of an outsider, so x should be increased for small towns or close-knit communities or others where someone might try it.
The only information you get from it, in association with an external verification (website) is that it's an effectively counted vote.
If the website gave only "counted" or "not counted" or "invalid hash", then this isn't such a dangerous idea, then you can only be fired for having not voted at all or having lost your little slip.
Otherwise, the boss would simply collect all the little slips and run them all through the website.
The price of insurance is set by the insurer based on the risks he sees
Theres two ways of attacking your stance:
First, based on the fact that you don't want diabetes coverage, you seem to believe your risk of developing diabetes is near zero. Why should the insurance company judge and price your risk any differently? If the risk of having to pay out to you is near zero, then the cost of covering you against that risk is near zero, and therefore any discount you would receive for not being covered against that risk would be near zero.
Second, my original statement remains, and holds true even for vision and dental plans. You are not the only risk the insurance company sees. Say the insurance company sells 100 health plans and one dental plan, if the one dental plan customer ends up costing the insurance company more than they pay, that money is coming out of the health plan pool, and will eventually cause higher prices for everyone, bringing me back to the diabetic plan vs. the non-diabetic plan. There is a cap on how much more the insurance company can charge for diabetic coverage, if being diabetic costs the average person $50 a month, then after $49.99 everyone would drop their diabetic coverage and just pay out of pocket for the insulin, meaning that the insurance company would have to recoup the difference between their charges and the cost of treatment from the policies of healthy people like you.
As of December 2005, forty-six states have some type of laws requiring health insurance coverage to include treatment for diabetes. Most states require coverage of both direct treatment and the costs of diabetes treatment equipment and supplies often used by the patient at home. The states not included are Alabama, Idaho, North Dakota and Ohio.
Funny, you don't seem to understand what the point of insurance is. If you could buy a policy without diabetes coverage, you'd still be paying the same amount because as a 27 yr old healthy person, you aren't paying for your own medical costs, you're paying for everyone else's.
as it leaks too much information about who voted for whom. Keep iterating!
Thats the purpose of identifying yourself to be let into the room, and then be assigned a ballot inside the room, to seperate these. Plus the bonus points at the end for randomizing them, even if I watch over your shoulder as you sign in and read your registration card or whatever, I wouldn't be able to determine your number from mine, only an estimate that yours must be within about 2*size-of-block from mine.
Pollution is - or ought to be - a tort.
That'd be great, except for having to prove damages. We had a representative of some company write into our paper complaining that more-stringent emissions requirements would destroy their company and that for a particular toxin, even the current level required is "too strict" and cites some numbers indicating that at the current level, only one in a million people will get cancer from their exhaust. How do I sue that company for "increasing my risk of death"? If I'm the unlucky one in a million (our city has 2 million people, so at least I shouldn't die alone), how do I prove that that company's emissions is killing me, as opposed to the other 50000 companies dumping toxins on the ground, in the air, and in the water, and who don't bother to brag about poisoning everyone? Maybe if there was the reverse of a class action lawsuit where I could sue all 50001 companies at once.
It would be different if it were employees or customers that they were killing, because then I could choose not to buy their products or not to work in their factories, but by killing completely unrelated people with their poisons, the people they are poisoning would not have any economic control over them. Thus, this cannot be solved strictly by a free market situation.
Every time this comes up, I propose the same idea, but each time it gets a little more fleshed out.
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. The number indicates both the voting location and the sequence that the cards are issued. If ballots run out, voters are asked to wait while more are printed and delivered.
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 prevents the voter from continuing until he/she figures this step out. Red light if they fail to do it wrong (labelled "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 accidentially bouncing the button).
Easy enough right? Now...
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.
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 ballot box and goes home, proud to have done his civic duty.
Lather, rinse, repeat for thousands of voters. The numbered ballots tell us two things: 1) Are there any missing ballot boxes and 2) are there any extra ballot boxes.
8a. At the end of the day, the election observers record the lowest numbered unused ballot and destroy the remainder.
9. Ballot boxes are delivered to a counting station.
10. Ballots are dumped out, stacked up with the notches aligned, and each stack is counted in total
11. 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.
11a. Run each candidate's bin individually through the counting machine.
11ai. Election observers spot check stacks by flipping like a flipbook and watching to see if the optical pattern being counted changes.
11b. Count write-ins by hand
11c. Run the no-vote stack through the counting machine....
11d. and make sure the votes add up.
12. Report the total to the next higher up official.
Lather, rinse, repeat for all of the stacks.
Why is this superior? First off, let's look at the actual counting: The counting machine doesn't k
Eh, even without government mandates, the insurance companies are in a position to dictate whatever terms they please. "Volunteering" to not have insurance is like volunteering to go out of business, unless your company has billions of dollars, or you establish shell corporations for the purpose of screwing people over and getting away with it.
required by the state to carry coverage for things that I do not want.
What state is this, and what exactly are they mandating that you don't want?
I had to take a step because of the law.
You'd have had to take the step without the law anyways. Blaming the law for you having a higher standard than the majority of the public is also stupid. So lets say there were no laws: either the company would not put any label on it, in which case you (or someone you trusted) would have to call anyway, or they'd put the exact same zero trans fat label on there, in which case you (or someone you trusted) would have to call anyway. Nothing changes, and the company saves a whopping 0.0003 cents per package on the ink.
Pretty well written. The thing to do next is for everyone to quit going "lol correlation!=causation!1!!eleventyone" and start looking for reasons why this happened. Could there be something about spending the first few years of your life watching weird looking brightly colored people babble at you from inside a flat box that causes children to not relate correctly to real humans? Or maybe children who are already autistic drive their parents crazy but settle down when placed in front of colorful people babbling at them from inside a box?
What point would it prove though? It's not a technical issue, one way isn't measurably faster or more efficient than the other.
If the "consistent application look" people make the port, then the "consistent OS look" people refuse to use it. If the "consistent OS look" people make the port, then the "consistent application look" won't accept it.
They made it so when you enter something really long into a cell it automatically overlaps the cells next to it, and so it would print that way.
Congratulations. All that, and you just found the one feature where some idiots who can't be bothered to use the right tool for the job screwed Excel up for everyone else.
maybe Mac developers are just not interested in that kind of development?
Or maybe its because the people who think that an application should always look exactly the same so as not to confuse a user who is switching between platforms and the people who think mac applications must all look special just for them are always at each other's throats?
And how do you propose that I go about doing that? Without a trial to back me up, anything I told you would be "biased hearsay".
I suspect the problem here is that we have warring ideologies. In my mind, giving a legislator money should be bribery whether a corporation forms a PAC, donates money from the corporate coffers to the PAC who then donates money to whoever the corporation's leaders wanted to in the first place, or whether it's just the CEO paying $100,000 out of pocket and getting a dinner with DeLay in return ("Corporate checks are acceptable" too). And hey, if the anti-pirate ideologues can call copyright infringement theft despite the fact that both copyright infringement and theft have specific legal definitions, why can't I call this bribery?
Haha "retard", that's a new one.
The citizenship (what about Intel's employees in India? I suppose they're citizens of India, but they don't receive American free speech rights) of members of a corporation doesn't change the fact that when Intel pays some representative a million dollars in order to receive a favor, it is coming out of the pocket of the corporation as a whole, and not a particular human citizen's pocket.
And what about multinational corporations who have their headquarters outside of the US, and do not even qualify for American citizenship? Why are they given the free speech right to bribe government?
So it's like Xenosaga I except only 10 hours long instead of 20?
Even if you're willing to state that corporations are citizens (and IIRC the ruling merely classified them as people, they'll still need to study and take the oath before becoming a citizen), petitioning the government and bribing the government are two different things.
was that this number was supposed to be private to the individual assigned it.
WRONG, and that's why this is a problem. The SSN was designed to identify you to the government for tax purposes. Everyone who reported your money to the government needs it: your employer, your bank, mortage officers, loan officers, casinos and so on and so forth. Someone stole your SSN? Oh noes! They can pay your taxes for you! The horror!
It wasn't until other companies decided that they could use the SSN to identify you to them despite the fact that many, many people have access to these numbers that this became a problem.
The solution is for the credit agencies to start feeling the bite. When lenders get a credit report from the agency that says that the crook they're dealing with isn't who the agency said they were, they should sic lawyers on the credit agencies when they end up with bad loans. A change in laws to force lenders to deal with the consequences of fucking up instead of allowing them to pursue the real person when they didn't bother to actually find out who they're giving money to will help also. Once this is in effect, the credit agencies will start to compete again, and improve based on accuracy. Lenders, too, will make sure the person receiving their money is who they say they are. I'm confident that captialism can come up with a solution for this one on it's own, we just have to stop protecting the lenders and credit agencies from their own stupidity so that Darwin can take care of the rest.
Just because you don't agree with the JEWS (that's what you mean by neocon, right - you totally give yourself away there), it doesn't mean there is anything corrupt about it.
Wow, accusing a guy of antisemitism? I think the ad hominem attacks are hitting a new low here. If you can't argue with him, just shut up, eh? Tell you what. You explain how our exploding debt, peeking into every single person's shopping list and phone call, and massive concentration of power at the federal level are "normal" conservative ideals, and I'll back down on that.
it's just the 1st amendment's right to petition the government
As for your "first amendment rights" to bribe congressmen, please show me where in the constitution that corporations are citizens of the country and receive these rights? Bush doesn't believe non-citizens receive those rights, though that kind of hypocrisy is par for the course for government.
If they want to petition their representatives, they can do it the same way I do, by having their employees write them a letter and tell them that if they don't vote a certain way on a certain issue, they're not going to vote for that congressperson (except that I have to write my letters myself, since I don't have employees).