Of course, they are required by law to turn in all registrations they receive. They are only allowed to flag registrations that they have reason to believe are fraudulent.
To put it simply, if I think that the votes are not counted fairly, which is easy to do with unverifiable voting systems, then there's no reason for me to believe the government has any legitimacy. This is what leads to revolutions.
So, yes, unaccountable systems directly undermine democracy by making it easier for people to believe that the system is corrupt and must be replaced.
That's a great idea. You realize, of course, that people would immediately start adding additional questions and turning away people who don't give the right answer. Two personal favorites are "Who are you going to vote for?" and "What color is your skin?"
The problem with any type of merit based system, is that the "merit" will quickly become subjective to the advantage of the people who get to decide what the "merit" is.
In other words, that's a simple recipe for corruption.
Well, we do know that the Intelligent Design people do have intent to deceive. They pretend it's not Christian Fundamentalism in their books and lesson plans, but it is. They know it and we know it. When they think we're not around they openly acknowledge the fact that it's Christian Fundamentalism with the names changed. It's one of their selling points, even.
However, I think Intelligent Design is more fraud than hoax.
It's not a console for gamers, and thus games for gamers don't come out on it.
Even the low budget PS2 RPG market won't port their games to the Wii, presumably because they don't think they'll sell well to the "non-gamer" people who bought the Wii. The worst thing is, they're probably right.
Here's my PoV. The "Breaking into someone's house" analogies? They are bad. He was invited in, and given his own key. Every student and staff member had access to the file from their normal accounts.
This is more like the school's HR person leaving a file folder of personnel information in the front hall of the school and then having the temerity to charge the person who returns it to the office with identity theft.
I, obviously, disagree. I think the issue here is actually the public support for one candidate. This public support tells his employees without him having to tell them explicitly, who their machine should elect. If the braggart kept his mouth shut, either his employees wouldn't know who he wanted to win the election, or he'd have to actually tell them who to rig it for. Either way you've created a situation where there's a lot more risk involved in actually interfering with the process because he's not allowed to tell his employees at the voting machine company who they should be voting for.
The point isn't to remove partisanship, but to make collusion more difficult and more obvious when it occurs. You want to make it so that if corruption becomes evident the police can lean on the small fry and have them flip on their bosses.
That's just one of the benefits. In practice, requiring strict neutrality from the people who make the systems is not just security theatre.
One of the "reasonable" precautions of "reasonable" people is to reject, out of hand, the machine of anyone who guarantees a victory for one party in an election.
You want to make a voting machine, you keep you political preferences quiet and make sure your employees don't even find out who you plan to vote for. That way there's not even the appearance of favoritism to one side or the other.
How hard is that? It's a failure of the American public that they don't give much of a damn if their political system is corrupt, as long as the corruption favors their side.
Have you ever used those voting cards? They're terrible. The pieces of paper are pre-cut for you, of course, sometimes the cutting machines accidentally pokes out the hole out a little ahead of time. Sometimes the chads get caught on other pieces of paper and tear off. Sometimes they're not cut enough and you have to pull the paper out and hand rip the little buggers off to make sure they're out.
As an example of making a simple system complex, they're a damn good example.
As for anything else, Canada was one of, if not the, largest contributor to World War 1 and World War 2, both per capita and in total. It's not something we spend much time agonizing over, but if you're going to bring the subject up, you'd better know what you're talking about.
Frankly, I understood Obama's comments in a slightly different way than you did. I think his comment was about building a country where everyone has the chance to prosper. Over the last 8 years, the U.S. has been hoarding the wealth in the hands of the wealthiest citizens. The middle and lower classes have been getting poorer each year, while the wealthiest citizens have been getting richer.
That's a terribly inequality right there. Spreading the wealth doesn't necessarily mean taking the money from the rich and giving it to the poor. In fact, most often, it doesn't work very well when you do that. It's about making sure that as many people as possible can prosper. The economic polices enact by Bush, and likely to be followed up on by McCain have utterly failed at that.
In the past 8 years, the economy has been driven mostly by the housing boom, with incredibly weak growth in all other areas of the economy. In fact if you segregate the housing data, there have been several years where the rest of the economy has been in recession.
But I'm guessing those comprise less than 1/3 of our current tax spending.
As for your guess? You're wrong. Welfare and Unemployment comprise a part of the 11.2% of "Unemployment, Welfare, and Other mandatory spending" in the 2008 budget. So that means that almost 90% of the budget is definitely not welfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fy2008spendingbycategory.png
Please educate yourself, before you decide based on no evidence, that 66% of your taxes go to pay for welfare moms. People don't get rich off of welfare, it's a minimal amount of money that often doesn't cover both rent and food.
The lack of proper spelling and grammar detracts from the credibility of the article. I mean, if the author doesn't care enough to fix obvious grammar errors, how can he be trusted to have testing methodology that doesn't contain gross errors?
It looks like there was no attempt to do some obvious longitudinal correlation. Once you've determined that Ubuntu is running slower in later releases, the next step is to check equivalent releases of Centos (or Fedora) and SUSE and see if it's an issue which appears in other major Linux distributions.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that the increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics, and the decreasing cooperation among the different political parties, is in a significant part due to the decline of traditional, professionally edited, media.
In a word: doubtful.
The "increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics" is just a pandering tactic that conservative groups have found works well with their base voters. They use it because their audience is receptive to the angry tone, the flawed arguments, and when their base is angry at everyone else, they refuse to listen to anyone else and thus are locked into the conservative wedge.
It's actually the result of decades of work to convince people that taxes are an unmitigated evil and that poor people are inherently evil because they're poor. After all, if God didn't hate them, they'd be rich, therefore all (or at least most) poor people are lazy and selfish and deserve to be poor.
It's really just the same old, same old. Pick a group, make it your enemy and then beat the drums of war to mobilize your people to action.
This election season it's a little worse than normal because the Republicans are getting desperate. McCain is losing in all the polls. That, of course, leads them to use even more extreme tactics to try to drum up more hatred. If McCain were to win, this pattern would continue until a Republican candidate lost in a big way. If McCain loses, and it's not a one state-loss margin, then the tone of politics will most likely change. The acrimony people will have been proven to be fallible (again) and their replacements will have to think up new tactics to sway voters.
The economy was only "running" because the government was running huge deficits and interest rates were held abnormally low. The last 8 years should have been some of the best economic years that the U.S. have ever seen with that type of stimulus input.
Even worse, Bush had more "executive experience" when he was elected than all 4 candidates this time around, and I think we all know how that turned out...
Slashdot Mirror
How exactly do you have an income over $164,550 (the minimum for the 33% tax bracket) while at the same time not having "a 6 figure income"?
Your comment just doesn't make any sense.
Of course, they are required by law to turn in all registrations they receive. They are only allowed to flag registrations that they have reason to believe are fraudulent.
To put it simply, if I think that the votes are not counted fairly, which is easy to do with unverifiable voting systems, then there's no reason for me to believe the government has any legitimacy. This is what leads to revolutions.
So, yes, unaccountable systems directly undermine democracy by making it easier for people to believe that the system is corrupt and must be replaced.
That's a great idea. You realize, of course, that people would immediately start adding additional questions and turning away people who don't give the right answer. Two personal favorites are "Who are you going to vote for?" and "What color is your skin?"
The problem with any type of merit based system, is that the "merit" will quickly become subjective to the advantage of the people who get to decide what the "merit" is.
In other words, that's a simple recipe for corruption.
Well, we do know that the Intelligent Design people do have intent to deceive. They pretend it's not Christian Fundamentalism in their books and lesson plans, but it is. They know it and we know it. When they think we're not around they openly acknowledge the fact that it's Christian Fundamentalism with the names changed. It's one of their selling points, even.
However, I think Intelligent Design is more fraud than hoax.
The Wii problem is much, much simpler:
It's not a console for gamers, and thus games for gamers don't come out on it.
Even the low budget PS2 RPG market won't port their games to the Wii, presumably because they don't think they'll sell well to the "non-gamer" people who bought the Wii. The worst thing is, they're probably right.
Here's my PoV. The "Breaking into someone's house" analogies? They are bad. He was invited in, and given his own key. Every student and staff member had access to the file from their normal accounts.
This is more like the school's HR person leaving a file folder of personnel information in the front hall of the school and then having the temerity to charge the person who returns it to the office with identity theft.
Exactly how is that "advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods"?
Or are you unaware of what Socialism is?
Ok, how does that fit into the fact that the error was demonstrated to and filmed by a camera crew?
Is the media part of the "elect Obama by any means possible conspiracy" now? Is everyone who disagrees with you part of this conspiracy?
I, obviously, disagree. I think the issue here is actually the public support for one candidate. This public support tells his employees without him having to tell them explicitly, who their machine should elect. If the braggart kept his mouth shut, either his employees wouldn't know who he wanted to win the election, or he'd have to actually tell them who to rig it for. Either way you've created a situation where there's a lot more risk involved in actually interfering with the process because he's not allowed to tell his employees at the voting machine company who they should be voting for.
The point isn't to remove partisanship, but to make collusion more difficult and more obvious when it occurs. You want to make it so that if corruption becomes evident the police can lean on the small fry and have them flip on their bosses.
That's just one of the benefits. In practice, requiring strict neutrality from the people who make the systems is not just security theatre.
One of the "reasonable" precautions of "reasonable" people is to reject, out of hand, the machine of anyone who guarantees a victory for one party in an election.
You want to make a voting machine, you keep you political preferences quiet and make sure your employees don't even find out who you plan to vote for. That way there's not even the appearance of favoritism to one side or the other.
How hard is that? It's a failure of the American public that they don't give much of a damn if their political system is corrupt, as long as the corruption favors their side.
Have you ever used those voting cards? They're terrible. The pieces of paper are pre-cut for you, of course, sometimes the cutting machines accidentally pokes out the hole out a little ahead of time. Sometimes the chads get caught on other pieces of paper and tear off. Sometimes they're not cut enough and you have to pull the paper out and hand rip the little buggers off to make sure they're out.
As an example of making a simple system complex, they're a damn good example.
It means that you should use single quoted strings.
How, exactly, is Obama a socialist?
What about the part where John McCain and Sarah Palin are insulated from people who haven't been pre-approved for contact?
I mean how can you respect a man who has to make sure that everyone he talks to shares his opinions first?
...
We didn't exactly need defense from Iraq.
As for anything else, Canada was one of, if not the, largest contributor to World War 1 and World War 2, both per capita and in total. It's not something we spend much time agonizing over, but if you're going to bring the subject up, you'd better know what you're talking about.
Actually, it's more like 50%.
Frankly, I understood Obama's comments in a slightly different way than you did. I think his comment was about building a country where everyone has the chance to prosper. Over the last 8 years, the U.S. has been hoarding the wealth in the hands of the wealthiest citizens. The middle and lower classes have been getting poorer each year, while the wealthiest citizens have been getting richer.
That's a terribly inequality right there. Spreading the wealth doesn't necessarily mean taking the money from the rich and giving it to the poor. In fact, most often, it doesn't work very well when you do that. It's about making sure that as many people as possible can prosper. The economic polices enact by Bush, and likely to be followed up on by McCain have utterly failed at that.
In the past 8 years, the economy has been driven mostly by the housing boom, with incredibly weak growth in all other areas of the economy. In fact if you segregate the housing data, there have been several years where the rest of the economy has been in recession.
But I'm guessing those comprise less than 1/3 of our current tax spending.
As for your guess? You're wrong. Welfare and Unemployment comprise a part of the 11.2% of "Unemployment, Welfare, and Other mandatory spending" in the 2008 budget. So that means that almost 90% of the budget is definitely not welfare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fy2008spendingbycategory.png
You can look up the details on the wikipedia page here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_federal_budget
Please educate yourself, before you decide based on no evidence, that 66% of your taxes go to pay for welfare moms. People don't get rich off of welfare, it's a minimal amount of money that often doesn't cover both rent and food.
So? Your contention is that you can not make a good living or prosper under the current taxation laws?
Why?
For me, impossible it is, to tell you, whether thinking of his, or speaking of his, broken is.
The lack of proper spelling and grammar detracts from the credibility of the article. I mean, if the author doesn't care enough to fix obvious grammar errors, how can he be trusted to have testing methodology that doesn't contain gross errors?
It looks like there was no attempt to do some obvious longitudinal correlation. Once you've determined that Ubuntu is running slower in later releases, the next step is to check equivalent releases of Centos (or Fedora) and SUSE and see if it's an issue which appears in other major Linux distributions.
I would not be surprised if it turned out that the increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics, and the decreasing cooperation among the different political parties, is in a significant part due to the decline of traditional, professionally edited, media.
In a word: doubtful.
The "increasingly acrimonious tone of modern politics" is just a pandering tactic that conservative groups have found works well with their base voters. They use it because their audience is receptive to the angry tone, the flawed arguments, and when their base is angry at everyone else, they refuse to listen to anyone else and thus are locked into the conservative wedge.
It's actually the result of decades of work to convince people that taxes are an unmitigated evil and that poor people are inherently evil because they're poor. After all, if God didn't hate them, they'd be rich, therefore all (or at least most) poor people are lazy and selfish and deserve to be poor.
It's really just the same old, same old. Pick a group, make it your enemy and then beat the drums of war to mobilize your people to action.
This election season it's a little worse than normal because the Republicans are getting desperate. McCain is losing in all the polls. That, of course, leads them to use even more extreme tactics to try to drum up more hatred. If McCain were to win, this pattern would continue until a Republican candidate lost in a big way. If McCain loses, and it's not a one state-loss margin, then the tone of politics will most likely change. The acrimony people will have been proven to be fallible (again) and their replacements will have to think up new tactics to sway voters.
Especially according to Cheney!
It made me laugh when I found who was in charge of picking a VP candidate for Bush.
The economy? Seriously?
The economy was only "running" because the government was running huge deficits and interest rates were held abnormally low. The last 8 years should have been some of the best economic years that the U.S. have ever seen with that type of stimulus input.
Even worse, Bush had more "executive experience" when he was elected than all 4 candidates this time around, and I think we all know how that turned out...