That is a real concern for millions of people (sufferers and families), and virtually no "facts" are known about it. What you would call "bogus," reports that have not gone through the wonderfully-quick process that is anything WHO, are useful.
I don't believe that the WHO certifies all reports on <insert-chronic-illness-here>. Their concern is epidemic and pandemic diseases, as well as regional general health issues. However, the process of peer review is important.
Too many people latch onto an idea that is the "alternative" to the mainstream, and try to justify its veracity solely on that. The doctors who rejected this or that report out of hand are "arrogant," "bureaucratic," "incompetent," or are suppressing alternative info because of a hidden agenda. In contrast, the "alternative medicine" is believed mainly because it gives erroneous hope:
"Sure, 9 out of 10 doctors say your cancer is inoperable, but the Tarot says differently. Rub this crystal on your body, meditate 3 times a day, and say the mantra: 'one-borna-everi-minoot!' That'll be $5000."
There are good doctors and bad doctors, just like there are good and bad programmers, politicians, waiters, et cetera. Bad doctors can have the same good intentions as good doctors, but are acting on erroneous assumptions, and which side of the "alternative" line they fall on is no indication of good or bad. It's entirely possible that in some cases, magnetic insoles, vegetarianism, taoist meditation, Christian prayer, or the latest pseudo-science may be a valid treatment for cancer. It's also possible that chemotherapy or radiation treatment do more harm than good.
This is why medical journals require peer review and repeatable results, and as such can be trusted not to have info that is blatantly false. Does this mean that medical study X, which hasn't been submitted for review, whose results could not be duplicated, or which flies in the face of current knowledge is not true? No, but it isn't any more true than something I made up off the top of my head to sell magnetic rings.
Because web hosting is so cheap and so indiscriminate, the potential for quackery is great. The signal of sane, scientific medical information is easily washed out by the noise of "$5 Viagra" and unproven cures. Even if there were a certifying body, a "TrustE" of the medical world allowing qualifying sites to use their logo, this could be easily spoofed by scam sites. Only a TLD allows the kind of control necessary to ensure proper review.
And does this mean you can't look OUTSIDE of the.health domain for uncertified info? No. All it means is info under.health is accurate, in the opinion of the WHO, or whatever certifying body.
Before you blow all that heavy lucre, check this out. This is the government approved list of electronic equipment recyclers, by state. There aren't many, but I know that in the case of my business, we rid ourself of a roomful of broken monitors, dead printers, but no CPUs, for free via one of the providers on this list.
We're talking 15-20 dead monitors, and 4 or 5 BIG out of warranty HP LaserJets, out of sight, out of mind. They either recycle and resell or dispose of it according to regulations. The provider normally charged $50/trip, but waived this in our case because we gave them a big box of cables and other useful stuff. Beats the hell out of $29.99 a CPU, and we were just happy to see it go.
I sure hope it's not a pointless hoax or vaporware.
How could this sort of hoax be worthless? Whatever gets/bots mucking their pants for some new functionally redundant item that has "geek cred" is good for a laugh. A product with Linux + Transmeta is to SlashBots what the Virgin Mary in a tortilla is to Mexican Roman Catholics;"proof" that the angels are on their side.
Face it, the arguments in favour of this product are all flawed. A small business can't afford a firewall and a router? How cheap do they need it? And if they can afford a small server, they can afford a firewall.
A failsafe solution for any company? Bullshit, if a server crashes hard and you don't already have a failsafe, you're dead. If theoretically the server has crashed hard but still has a functional power supply, you have only bought yourself enough time to bring up a backup firewall box and router inline, so that the server with the card can be brought down and repaired. This is the same net effect as buying a dependable router and having a dedicated firewall box and synchronized backup ready to switch. Either way, you're going to have a few seconds to a few minutes of downtime, and one way you are going around your elbow to get to your nose.
Isolated from host PC software, therefore more secure? Two words: embedded Linux. So when some skriptkinder come up with the latest supersmurf, teardrop, raindrop, DoS or overflow vulnerability in Linux, do you have to ssh into the card, apply a patch, recompile and reboot? Will the company provide a flash utility with timely kernel updates? Why depend on them?
I'm not trying to prove that this is a hoax; that's an easy do. What I'm saying is that this is a stupid idea for a product, and shame on/. editors for biting on it.
This would practically revolutionise both reporting and intelligence operations - there would no longer be any need for external equipment, and you'd really be able to get a view "as if you were there".
Quod vide Tally Isham from William Gibson's Neuromancer, or Angie Mitchell from Count Zero or Mona Lisa Overdrive. But excluding complete immersion, such as the "sim-stim" technology in these books, does television not currently give a sufficient experience "as if you were there?" Are you psychologically ready to smell the gunpowder and fresh blood from the latest conflict in the Middle East? Do you want to feel the concussion and hear the smart-bombs falling in Kosovo in true 3d environmental audio? Be careful what you wish for.
And let's not forget crime. If everyone had these in their eyes, then witness testimony would suddenly become a hell of a lot more reliable.
And yet equally unreliable. It is, after all only a camera, and no more effective than putting cameras everywhere. Not to mention that the current state of technology allows us to edit video seamlessly in post, or even in-line, making video more suspect and less reliable than eyewitness accounts are now. Of course, you can try to imagine watermarking or digital-signing of the video, using a key derived from the witness's DNA, but every lock can be picked, which leaves us right back at square one.
As for two-way implants where information can be added to what you see (an internal HUD), well the applications are enormous. Read Peter F Hamliton's Night's Dawn trilogy for some good ideas of what would be possible...
Again, see Angie Mitchell in Mona Lisa Overdrive. Or the thug in the beginning of Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age for the downside. (Corporate crackers hacked into the feed for his HUD, projecting advertisements in his peripheral vision)
But I'm surprised, Jon. You didn't really bait anyone with strong opinions, so this can't be a troll. As a matter of fact, this is standard/bot technofetishism. You must be k-whoring for another big round of trolling fun. Hint: don't whore on the Book Report stories - nobody reads them anyway.
"Buchanan received 1 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County."
.79% to be more exact. Think that rounding doesn't make a difference?
"Palm Beach County, on the other hand, has a whopping 14,551 members of the Independent Party.
In fact, it has the highest Independent registration in Florida."
Actually, 17,069 registered Independent in Palm Beach County, surpassed by 19,071 in Pinellas. Check the latest official stats. Also from your article:
Palm Beach County gave Buchanan no more support proportionally than any other county with high Independent Party registration.
Dead wrong. As was stated earlier, Pinellas is the only county that surpasses PBC in Independent registration. In Pinellas, Buchanan carried.2542% (a far cry from the 1% mentioned above), as opposed to.7881% in PBC, out of all voters. Proportional to Independent registration, Buchanan got 32.46% in PBC, as opposed to 7.78% in Pinellas. The overall Buchanan vote of the top 10 counties in Independent registration, excluding PBC, is.2091%. So yes, any way you slice it, PBC did give Buchanan more support proportionally than any other county with high independent registration.
Not that it's hard to rebutt these "facts";the "news" site you linked to is nothing but far-right propaganda, one doesn't need to look hard to see that. Fuck having slashdot sites for the government; Government works just fine when you do your own damn research, question authority, and think for your damn self, rather than choosing your "facts" from the endless continuum of opinionated media.
Point well made. The National Review isn't exactly an unbiased source, but it will be interesting to see how this plays in the media.
As to the Harry Browne stats, I've been using ABCNews poll reports, which only give stats by county for Bush, Gore, Nader, and Buchanan, and the state senate seats. The Florida Department of Elections has results here, but I'm still waiting for it to load so I don't know if it has the info you want.
Check your sources. They may have reported this on NPR, but it is the Republican "opinion" on this. I heard it on Crossfire from some Republican congressman from Florida. There was no attribution, and more importantly, Buchanan was not ON the Florida ballot in 1996 (See my comment here.)
I originally posted this on the general discussion of the election the other day. Since it may have got lost in the sea of noise, I'm going to repost it and add to it:
I believe there is a legitimate concern with the controversy concerning the ballot in Palm Beach County. The ballots there were printed such that out of the three ballot punchholes next to the Democratic ticket section, the topmost represented a vote for Buchanan, and the second represented Gore. In spite of the arrow pointing to the correct hole for Gore, this confused many voters who asked poll workers which hole was the right one. The poll workers could not give a definite answer either way, and did not have any other authority to check with.
As a result, Buchanan had more votes in PBC (3407) than in any other county in Florida. This is strange because Gore carried Palm Beach county easily, 64%-36%. The next highest votes for Buchanan by county is Pinellas (1100), which also had the highest turnout for Nader, and was won by Gore, 52%-48%.
Just wait, I'll start heading toward my point now. Pinellas and Palm Beach represent the highest combined turnout of Nader/Buchanan voters by number, followed by Hillsborough (which neighbors Pinellas), Broward, Dade, Brevard, and Sarasota. These represent the highest population counties in Florida. Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough had the top 5 voter turnout, respectively. In four of these counties, Buchanan voters represent.1-.25% of total votes, and ~10% of combined Nader/Buchanan voters. However, in PBC Buchanan gets.8% of the total vote, and raked in 38% of the combined, alternative vote.
This sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm sure someone with a degree in statistics could prove my point. Why would PBC have SO MANY Buchanan voters if it is decidedly liberal? Why would it buck the trend set by counties of similar makeup and population? If one adjusts the Buchanan vote in PBC to correlate with the statewide average and the averages in other counties, One could assume that the total number of Gore votes miscast for Buchanan is ~2500.
I'm not saying that this is enough to win FL decisively for Gore, but if the final count and recount gives Bush the state with less than this margin, it will be a hotly contested point for years to come.
Addendum: I heard some republican flak on Crossfire claiming that Buchanan got 3000 votes in PBC in 1996 as well. If this were true, I would concede that the ballot confusion might not be the cause of these results. However, Buchanan wasn't ON the ballot in 1996. According to the FEC, Buchanan was not on the ballot in Florida, and must have got less overall than James Edward Harris's(?) 13 votes for president. According to this calendar from the 1996 election, he never specifically visited Palm Beach county in 1996. (He visited Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, and Orlando in one trip.)
I've been googling steadily while writing this, and I can't find any further evidence of strong Pat Buchanan support in PBC, in 1996 or 2000. I am continuing statistical analysis on the county data as I type this. I want to look at the dramatic difference between PBC's Buchanan support and the rest of Florida, and see if any other states have counties which have this much of a flip flop.
I wholeheartedly concur. This whole "free is better, at any cost" philosophy doesn't stand up under scrutiny. I think a good analogy for your argument is those Communist Party members in the former USSR who spouted the most anti-capitalist rhetoric and forced the practices of "pure communism" on the populace, all the while raking in profits via bribery and the black market.
The neo-hippies are all technofetishists. Free love, free speech, free software! Never mind the Malaysian who assembled their PalmPilot*, or stitched their trendy but uniquely individual, overpriced clothing can't afford a chicken nugget, much less a PC to run this free software on. It's ideology without substance.
-- *I know, PalmPilots are assembled in the US. If you can think of a better example of a technofetish device, insert it here.
I don't know if this made national news, but the counts slowed down towards the end in Florida because they could not find various ballot boxes; the person delivering them to the counting place got lost, etc.
There is a local Sheriff's Office deputy at each polling place whose responsibility it is to make sure the boxes get to the counting places. If all it takes is paying off some fat dumb cop, the fraud is simple. Stop the boxes on the way to the counters, get an expert to open them, eyeball the ballots, remove or add as necessary, and seal the boxes like nothing happened. Any security measure can be broken.
Also, the mail in ballots can be fixed by having a confederate in some key USPS hubs, nabbing anything that looks like a ballot from the mail sorters. Again, an expert opens, changes as necessary, and seals it. In a race like this, just a few could make the difference.
I believe there is a legitimate concern with the controversy concerning the ballot in Palm Beach County. The ballots there were printed such that out of the three ballot punchholes next to the Democratic ticket section, the topmost represented a vote for Buchanan, and the second represented Gore. In spite of the arrow pointing to the correct hole for Gore, this confused many voters who asked poll workers which hole was the right one. The poll workers could not give a definite answer either way, and did not have any other authority to check with.
As a result, Buchanan had more votes in PBC (3407) than in any other county in Florida. This is strange because Gore carried Palm Beach county easily, 64%-36%. The next highest votes for Buchanan by county is Pinellas (1100), which also had the highest turnout for Nader, and was won by Gore, 52%-48%.
Just wait, I'll start heading toward my point now. Pinellas and Palm Beach represent the highest combined turnout of Nader/Buchanan voters by number, followed by Hillsborough (which neighbors Pinellas), Broward, Dade, Brevard, and Sarasota. These represent the highest population counties in Florida. Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough had the top 5 voter turnout, respectively. In four of these counties, Buchanan voters represent.1-.25% of total votes, and ~10% of combined Nader/Buchanan voters. However, in PBC Buchanan gets.8% of the total vote, and raked in 38% of the combined, alternative vote.
This sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm sure someone with a degree in statistics could prove my point. Why would PBC have SO MANY Buchanan voters if it is decidedly liberal? Why would it buck the trend set by counties of similar makeup and population? If one adjusts the Buchanan vote in PBC to correlate with the statewide average and the averages in other counties, One could assume that the total number of Gore votes miscast for Buchanan is ~2500.
I'm not saying that this is enough to win FL decisively for Gore, but if the final count and recount gives Bush the state with less than this margin, it will be a hotly contested point for years to come.
And those ballots are coming in via ship or plane from overseas. Does it not seem plausible that those ballots might end up "lost", invalidated due to tampering during shipping, or somehow turn into an improbable upset in favor of Gore? It wouldn't surprise me if it were a common dirty trick of this and every incumbent administration to intercept these and other absentee ballots and hold them as an "ace in the hole" in case of a close election.
When I originally found ESR's page blocked, I submitted a change request to Websense anonymously to have it removed from the "hacking" category. Since you mentioned it, I checked it again and www.tuxedo.org is no longer categorized, and thus not blocked by Websense. In other words, they are open to reason. FAIR is still blocked, however.
To attempt to answer your question, I know Websense and Bess will return pages identifying the program, explaining that the site has been blocked and in some cases why it was blocked. If you are not getting a specific notification of what software blocked your attempt, the censorware must be in some sort of stealth mode, or else you're perceiving some other network phenomenon as Censorware. There are hundreds available, from what I understand, so it may be impossible to divine which one you have from what it blocks. Maybe just try asking?
only reason LucasFilm is buddying up with them, is because it pops a little cash into their pocket. They're profiting from works they didn't create.
Umm, I believe that's AtomFilms' whole business model, and it doesn't bother any of the indie filmmakers submitting stuff to them. It isn't wrong for LucasFilms' to accept a tiny profit for putting the "OFFICIAL" rubberstamp on it.
If a submission is rejected OR accepted, put it up elsewhere! Don't give LucasFilm money they don't deserve! I'm willing to bet the creators of the parodies and/or documentaries won't see a dime of that ad revenue. Sure, their work is online, but you don't need AtomFilms/LucasFilm for that.
READ-THE-FUCKING-ARTICLE. They (LucasFilms) are not hunting down or trying to restrict in any way unauthorized Star Wars parodies on the web, and this is not implied in any word of the article. They (LucasFilms) are sponsoring and judging a Star Wars parody contest on AtomFilms, and are generously providing original sound effect files from the films. They are also getting a piece of ad revenue from traffic generated by this contest. Your rights under the law to spoof, satire, and parody to your hearts content are still protected. This is still Amerikkka the Free.
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
READ-THE-FUCKING-ARTICLE. They (LucasFilms) are not hunting down or trying to restrict in any way unauthorized Star Wars parodies on the web, and this is not implied in any word of the article. They (LucasFilms) are sponsoring and judging a Star Wars parody contest on AtomFilms, and are generously providing original sound effect files from the films. They are also getting a piece of ad revenue from traffic generated by this contest. Your rights under the law to spoof, satire, and parody to your hearts content are still protected. This is still Amerikkka the Free.
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
READ-THE-FUCKING-ARTICLE. They (LucasFilms) are not hunting down or trying to restrict in any way unauthorized Star Wars parodies on the web, and this is not implied in any word of the article. They (LucasFilms) are sponsoring and judging a Star Wars parody contest on AtomFilms, and are generously providing original sound effect files from the films. They are also getting a piece of ad revenue from traffic generated by this contest. Your rights under the law to spoof, satire, and parody to your hearts content are still protected. This is still Amerikkka the Free.
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
They never asked for permission. That was a parody of the Budweiser ads using a copyrighted AP photograph. So, while it would be fair use if they used Budweiser trademarks or some derivation thereof, it remains to be proven in court whether it is fair use of the AP photograph.
Since I don't believe there was an actual court case, the makers of the parody were never found guilty of copyright infringement. All they did was cave in to a cease & desist from a heavy-handed corporate lawyer, so the truth of the matter was never proven.
Websense has one. Of course, Websense's ratings are based on a human being actually setting eyes on the site and categorizing it, so they won't have an entry for your page or domain until they come across it.
Also, there is a possibility that it would be legal to decrypt the filter companies lists and set up an all inclusive check service. If you recall, back here we talked about the Library of Congress recommendation on the DMCA, which stated that there should be two exemptions to the DMCA anti-decryption sections:
Compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications
Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsoleteness
IANAL, but this seems like it should be precedent in favor of the defendant in lawsuits stemming from creating this sort of index site.
But I can't read the article. Peacefire.org is categorized by Websense as being an activism site. My employer has decided to block political activism sites just as much as porn or gambling. I don't blame them though; strong activism can be just as offensive in a work environment.
However, Websense is guilty of generalizing in their categorization. ESR's home page is categorized as "hacking." When I checked it later from another location, it appears that there is nothing even marginally illegal on ESR's page or linked to by it, but it does have the word "hacking" in there somewhere, albeit in the old-school context of "clever programming."
I have seen other generalizations in categorizing, including Freedom and Accuracy in Reporting, and ironically the Bill of Rights being blocked as "activism." This is a form of soft censorship, in that Websense dodges the accusation since the decision to block is on the part of the administrator, and the administrator dodging the blame because they did not make the categorization, and it's an all-or-none deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Too many people latch onto an idea that is the "alternative" to the mainstream, and try to justify its veracity solely on that. The doctors who rejected this or that report out of hand are "arrogant," "bureaucratic," "incompetent," or are suppressing alternative info because of a hidden agenda. In contrast, the "alternative medicine" is believed mainly because it gives erroneous hope:
"Sure, 9 out of 10 doctors say your cancer is inoperable, but the Tarot says differently. Rub this crystal on your body, meditate 3 times a day, and say the mantra: 'one-borna-everi-minoot!' That'll be $5000."
There are good doctors and bad doctors, just like there are good and bad programmers, politicians, waiters, et cetera. Bad doctors can have the same good intentions as good doctors, but are acting on erroneous assumptions, and which side of the "alternative" line they fall on is no indication of good or bad. It's entirely possible that in some cases, magnetic insoles, vegetarianism, taoist meditation, Christian prayer, or the latest pseudo-science may be a valid treatment for cancer. It's also possible that chemotherapy or radiation treatment do more harm than good.
This is why medical journals require peer review and repeatable results, and as such can be trusted not to have info that is blatantly false. Does this mean that medical study X, which hasn't been submitted for review, whose results could not be duplicated, or which flies in the face of current knowledge is not true? No, but it isn't any more true than something I made up off the top of my head to sell magnetic rings.
Because web hosting is so cheap and so indiscriminate, the potential for quackery is great. The signal of sane, scientific medical information is easily washed out by the noise of "$5 Viagra" and unproven cures. Even if there were a certifying body, a "TrustE" of the medical world allowing qualifying sites to use their logo, this could be easily spoofed by scam sites. Only a TLD allows the kind of control necessary to ensure proper review.
And does this mean you can't look OUTSIDE of the .health domain for uncertified info? No. All it means is info under .health is accurate, in the opinion of the WHO, or whatever certifying body.
Thank you.
We're talking 15-20 dead monitors, and 4 or 5 BIG out of warranty HP LaserJets, out of sight, out of mind. They either recycle and resell or dispose of it according to regulations. The provider normally charged $50/trip, but waived this in our case because we gave them a big box of cables and other useful stuff. Beats the hell out of $29.99 a CPU, and we were just happy to see it go.
Face it, the arguments in favour of this product are all flawed. A small business can't afford a firewall and a router? How cheap do they need it? And if they can afford a small server, they can afford a firewall.
A failsafe solution for any company? Bullshit, if a server crashes hard and you don't already have a failsafe, you're dead. If theoretically the server has crashed hard but still has a functional power supply, you have only bought yourself enough time to bring up a backup firewall box and router inline, so that the server with the card can be brought down and repaired. This is the same net effect as buying a dependable router and having a dedicated firewall box and synchronized backup ready to switch. Either way, you're going to have a few seconds to a few minutes of downtime, and one way you are going around your elbow to get to your nose.
Isolated from host PC software, therefore more secure? Two words: embedded Linux. So when some skriptkinder come up with the latest supersmurf, teardrop, raindrop, DoS or overflow vulnerability in Linux, do you have to ssh into the card, apply a patch, recompile and reboot? Will the company provide a flash utility with timely kernel updates? Why depend on them?
I'm not trying to prove that this is a hoax; that's an easy do. What I'm saying is that this is a stupid idea for a product, and shame on /. editors for biting on it.
But I'm surprised, Jon. You didn't really bait anyone with strong opinions, so this can't be a troll. As a matter of fact, this is standard /bot technofetishism. You must be k-whoring for another big round of trolling fun. Hint: don't whore on the Book Report stories - nobody reads them anyway.
Not that it's hard to rebutt these "facts";the "news" site you linked to is nothing but far-right propaganda, one doesn't need to look hard to see that. Fuck having slashdot sites for the government; Government works just fine when you do your own damn research, question authority, and think for your damn self, rather than choosing your "facts" from the endless continuum of opinionated media.
As to the Harry Browne stats, I've been using ABCNews poll reports, which only give stats by county for Bush, Gore, Nader, and Buchanan, and the state senate seats. The Florida Department of Elections has results here, but I'm still waiting for it to load so I don't know if it has the info you want.
Check your sources. They may have reported this on NPR, but it is the Republican "opinion" on this. I heard it on Crossfire from some Republican congressman from Florida. There was no attribution, and more importantly, Buchanan was not ON the Florida ballot in 1996 (See my comment here.)
I believe there is a legitimate concern with the controversy concerning the ballot in Palm Beach County. The ballots there were printed such that out of the three ballot punchholes next to the Democratic ticket section, the topmost represented a vote for Buchanan, and the second represented Gore. In spite of the arrow pointing to the correct hole for Gore, this confused many voters who asked poll workers which hole was the right one. The poll workers could not give a definite answer either way, and did not have any other authority to check with.
As a result, Buchanan had more votes in PBC (3407) than in any other county in Florida. This is strange because Gore carried Palm Beach county easily, 64%-36%. The next highest votes for Buchanan by county is Pinellas (1100), which also had the highest turnout for Nader, and was won by Gore, 52%-48%.
Just wait, I'll start heading toward my point now. Pinellas and Palm Beach represent the highest combined turnout of Nader/Buchanan voters by number, followed by Hillsborough (which neighbors Pinellas), Broward, Dade, Brevard, and Sarasota. These represent the highest population counties in Florida. Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough had the top 5 voter turnout, respectively. In four of these counties, Buchanan voters represent .1-.25% of total votes, and ~10% of combined Nader/Buchanan voters. However, in PBC Buchanan gets .8% of the total vote, and raked in 38% of the combined, alternative vote.
This sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm sure someone with a degree in statistics could prove my point. Why would PBC have SO MANY Buchanan voters if it is decidedly liberal? Why would it buck the trend set by counties of similar makeup and population? If one adjusts the Buchanan vote in PBC to correlate with the statewide average and the averages in other counties, One could assume that the total number of Gore votes miscast for Buchanan is ~2500.
I'm not saying that this is enough to win FL decisively for Gore, but if the final count and recount gives Bush the state with less than this margin, it will be a hotly contested point for years to come.
Addendum: I heard some republican flak on Crossfire claiming that Buchanan got 3000 votes in PBC in 1996 as well. If this were true, I would concede that the ballot confusion might not be the cause of these results. However, Buchanan wasn't ON the ballot in 1996. According to the FEC, Buchanan was not on the ballot in Florida, and must have got less overall than James Edward Harris's(?) 13 votes for president. According to this calendar from the 1996 election, he never specifically visited Palm Beach county in 1996. (He visited Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, and Orlando in one trip.)
I've been googling steadily while writing this, and I can't find any further evidence of strong Pat Buchanan support in PBC, in 1996 or 2000. I am continuing statistical analysis on the county data as I type this. I want to look at the dramatic difference between PBC's Buchanan support and the rest of Florida, and see if any other states have counties which have this much of a flip flop.
The neo-hippies are all technofetishists. Free love, free speech, free software! Never mind the Malaysian who assembled their PalmPilot*, or stitched their trendy but uniquely individual, overpriced clothing can't afford a chicken nugget, much less a PC to run this free software on. It's ideology without substance.
--
*I know, PalmPilots are assembled in the US. If you can think of a better example of a technofetish device, insert it here.
There is a local Sheriff's Office deputy at each polling place whose responsibility it is to make sure the boxes get to the counting places. If all it takes is paying off some fat dumb cop, the fraud is simple. Stop the boxes on the way to the counters, get an expert to open them, eyeball the ballots, remove or add as necessary, and seal the boxes like nothing happened. Any security measure can be broken.
Also, the mail in ballots can be fixed by having a confederate in some key USPS hubs, nabbing anything that looks like a ballot from the mail sorters. Again, an expert opens, changes as necessary, and seals it. In a race like this, just a few could make the difference.
As a result, Buchanan had more votes in PBC (3407) than in any other county in Florida. This is strange because Gore carried Palm Beach county easily, 64%-36%. The next highest votes for Buchanan by county is Pinellas (1100), which also had the highest turnout for Nader, and was won by Gore, 52%-48%.
Just wait, I'll start heading toward my point now. Pinellas and Palm Beach represent the highest combined turnout of Nader/Buchanan voters by number, followed by Hillsborough (which neighbors Pinellas), Broward, Dade, Brevard, and Sarasota. These represent the highest population counties in Florida. Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough had the top 5 voter turnout, respectively. In four of these counties, Buchanan voters represent .1-.25% of total votes, and ~10% of combined Nader/Buchanan voters. However, in PBC Buchanan gets .8% of the total vote, and raked in 38% of the combined, alternative vote.
This sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm sure someone with a degree in statistics could prove my point. Why would PBC have SO MANY Buchanan voters if it is decidedly liberal? Why would it buck the trend set by counties of similar makeup and population? If one adjusts the Buchanan vote in PBC to correlate with the statewide average and the averages in other counties, One could assume that the total number of Gore votes miscast for Buchanan is ~2500.
I'm not saying that this is enough to win FL decisively for Gore, but if the final count and recount gives Bush the state with less than this margin, it will be a hotly contested point for years to come.
And those ballots are coming in via ship or plane from overseas. Does it not seem plausible that those ballots might end up "lost", invalidated due to tampering during shipping, or somehow turn into an improbable upset in favor of Gore? It wouldn't surprise me if it were a common dirty trick of this and every incumbent administration to intercept these and other absentee ballots and hold them as an "ace in the hole" in case of a close election.
I may her fuck her before and after, but she ain't escaping the beating.
It does matter that we now have a CORPSE in the Senate. Welcome to the twilight zone. I feel sorry for the senators sitting around him.
My girlfriend voted Nader. This is in Florida. I'm going to beat the shit out of her.
He's got less than 80,000 votes to go, and Democratic volunteers are printing up the ballots as fast as they can!
To attempt to answer your question, I know Websense and Bess will return pages identifying the program, explaining that the site has been blocked and in some cases why it was blocked. If you are not getting a specific notification of what software blocked your attempt, the censorware must be in some sort of stealth mode, or else you're perceiving some other network phenomenon as Censorware. There are hundreds available, from what I understand, so it may be impossible to divine which one you have from what it blocks. Maybe just try asking?
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
We now return you to your scheduled paranoid ranting.
Since I don't believe there was an actual court case, the makers of the parody were never found guilty of copyright infringement. All they did was cave in to a cease & desist from a heavy-handed corporate lawyer, so the truth of the matter was never proven.
Also, there is a possibility that it would be legal to decrypt the filter companies lists and set up an all inclusive check service. If you recall, back here we talked about the Library of Congress recommendation on the DMCA, which stated that there should be two exemptions to the DMCA anti-decryption sections:
- Compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications
-
Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsoleteness
IANAL, but this seems like it should be precedent in favor of the defendant in lawsuits stemming from creating this sort of index site.Oh, and by the way, Websense does not block any of the major candidates websites, at least by my tests.
However, Websense is guilty of generalizing in their categorization. ESR's home page is categorized as "hacking." When I checked it later from another location, it appears that there is nothing even marginally illegal on ESR's page or linked to by it, but it does have the word "hacking" in there somewhere, albeit in the old-school context of "clever programming."
I have seen other generalizations in categorizing, including Freedom and Accuracy in Reporting, and ironically the Bill of Rights being blocked as "activism." This is a form of soft censorship, in that Websense dodges the accusation since the decision to block is on the part of the administrator, and the administrator dodging the blame because they did not make the categorization, and it's an all-or-none deal.