Over time they've been migrated with the rest of my data through various 8, 16, and 32 bit PCs, and currently reside on my x86-64 Fedora box. The original hardware is LONG dead. I could probably get them natively off anything going back to my Model 4P, but that would be annoying and require using an RS-232 cable.
That's the key; every time you change storage technologies, you have to move your existing backups to the new one. That helps in a bunch of ways:
1. Media degradation: You're constantly refreshing data to new storage, so the eventual failure of old CDs/tapes/drives/etc is partially mitigated (you still want redundant backups, of course) 2. Obsolescence: Trying to get that old 8" floppy working can be a pain in the ass; you're either hoping the old machine still boots and has some way of transferring the data once it's read, or you're searching for drivers for an 8" drive on a more modern machine. By transferring immediately on upgrade, you skirt most of those issues. 3. A little extra redundancy; if the new storage fails, at least you have copies of a lot of data on the previous generation of hardware.
It's one of those things that you only need to fight with once before it becomes ingrained; I can only go back to c. 1992 in recovering my personal files, because that's when I first went to get an old file and struggled being able to recover it. Since then, copying everything to new storage as it arrives is de rigueur.
Likewise, at the tech places I've worked for the past 10+ years it's been mandatory to copy all old data over to new storage technology as it arrives.
Wrong. It's not usually done at night, its done during the day when people ARE NOT HOME. Theifs want to take your crap, they don't want a confrontation.
I'm pretty sure that when GP said "its also usual done at night (must be done at night to meet some definitions of burglary)" he was discussing burglary as legally defined. By common law, burglary is defined by 5 elements: (1) Breaking and (2) Entering (3) of a residence (4) at night (5) with intent to commit a felony.
Some jurisdictions have relaxed that definition, but traditionally if it's not at night then it isn't burglary; it could be larceny or robbery or simple theft or some other crime. The penalties for burglary were higher (as GP noted), precisely because it involved entering a residence at night which is both more invasive to people's sense of security and more likely to result in personal harm than daytime theft.
Even in jurisdictions where the definition has been relaxed, there are still often higher penalties for burglaries that are of residences, committed at night, or both.
A juror going to Britannica or urbandictionary would be equally disallowed. The issue is that jurors aren't allowed to do research on their own, not which resources were used.
The judge had even been explicitly reminding them of that; from TFA: [Judge] Kaplan reminded her that he had warned the jurors every day during the three-week trial not to do any research on their own.
But programming editors autocomplete symbols for you, so you rarely type the whole thing out. And with all the underscores, it's just as easy to hold the shift key and type.
Programmers are the most likely bunch of people to pop the capslock key off of the keyboard entirely, in my experience.
A couple of the places I've worked at have total PTO days rather than separate vacation and sick days. Instead of starting with 2 weeks vacation to start, you might get 4 weeks PTO. For most employees it works to their benefit in terms of getting more time off, but it disincentivizes taking unscheduled sick days (which tend to be much worse for the employer than scheduled vacation, which can be planned around). Win-win, without a need to hire PIs and such.
Because the first rule is to figure out what on earth is going on--not just in theory, but in fact. Code for the OSI model is ugly, perhaps by necessity (it has to be very fast), but it's code that is very, very easy to get wrong. It involves a lot of interacting pieces working on different levels of abstraction with other players that you don't have code control over.
TCP/IP predates the OSI model and conflicts with it in some areas; discussion of the complexities of code targeting OSI isn't directly applicable to TCP/IP implementations, though many similarities exist.
Indeed, the fact that TCP/IP has fewer layers is often cited as one reason that it succeeded (coding an implementation of TCP/IP therefore being less complex than coding a fully abstracted 7-layer OSI implementation).
It was part of their plan to decode it. They know that social engineering is often a much more effective way of getting at encrypted data than an attack on the algorithm; by pestering the author with a bunch of claptrap, they've already gotten him to reveal part of the plaintext.
Next phase: Stand outside of his apartment with a stereo held overhead Say Anything-style, blasting Achy Breaky Heart. The remainder of the message will fall in days.
B) You're moving the goalposts; you said 100% of hijackers are Muslim. That's so ludicrous as to be indefensible, so you shifted at the start of this last post to looking only at hijackers of American flights from 1980 to today. You listed those and found that you were still wrong, so you moved the goalposts again in the middle of your post to exclude the FedEx flight you found.
Somehow you made a post with a straight face that actually lists a plain hijacked by a non-Muslim American with the intent of carrying out a suicide bombing on US soil, and ended that very post claiming that someone _else_ was ignorant for not believing that 100% of hijackings are carried out by Middle Easterners.
C) Even with the "commercial passenger flights in the US from 1980 to present" criteria, you're still wrong. Delta Flight 334 from Atlanta to New Orleans (with continuing service to Havana) comes to mind.
That aside, your relentless exclusion of everything that doesn't fit your narrative makes no sense. The FedEx flight you mention was hijacked with the intent to carry out a suicide crash--a clear security problem. When Cuban flights are hijacked by men with grenades and flown to Miami (as happened in 2003), or US fighters are scrambled to force a DC-3 down in Key West after 6 men armed with knives take it over (also 2003), that's a threat to national security. When international flights are threatened by shoe bombers or bombs in package areas, that's a threat to US security.
Ignoring non-passenger flights or non-domestic flights is a great way to leave gaping holes in our security perimeter.
You call what I stated irrational, but all you did was take a global statistic (cubans hijack a lot of planes to/from cuba) and used it to rationalized a policy specific to the united states.
You learned just enough to justify your prior position, but not enough to be rational.
This is nonsensical--I didn't advocate any policy, nor did I have a prior position. I actually went and looked at the data post facto, and the results were surprising to me; I didn't have any position on who to search coming into the discussion. Certainly "search the Cubans" wasn't (and isn't) a position I'd advocate.
You claimed that "our enemies" are middle easterners and that searching them exclusively would make a better policy rather than searching everyone equally. Both globally and in the US, middle easterners are not the most common hijackers--in both cases, searching every middle easterner and nobody else (as you proposed) would be a bad policy since it would miss the biggest demographic groups responsible for hijackings.
Even if you limit it to flights originating in the US, there are many more flights hijacked by non-middle-easterners than by middle easterners. I'm not sure exactly what the right way to deal with that is, but your idea (search only a group that is a minority of terrorists) strikes me as a pretty horrible one.
FWIW (which is very little), I think a "search only Cubans" policy is as idiotic as a "search only middle easterners" policy; I brought that ethnicity into the discussion only because there's a bizarre belief that runs through these discussions that Arabs are anywhere near the ethnicity most responsible for American hijackings, when in fact they aren't. For the very little it's worth, my family is part Hispanic and I've spent a decent part of my adult life living in South America, though never in Cuba and none of the family is of Cuban descent.
Lets suppose that there are two airlines. One of which gropes the privates of every middle-easterner and the other randomly gropes the privates of 1 out of every 25 passengers.
Which one will our enemies try to hijack?
As you see it is easier for our enemies, which are mainly middle-easterners, to hijack the one performing random groping.
This is exactly the sort of irrationality that defeats security.
There have been more than twice as many hijackings by Cubans as by Muslims. But Muslims are seen as scarier, so the fear-mongering profiles always seem to focus on them; you never hear people saying that Hispanics should be searched more thoroughly. When we racially profile based on stereotypes and fear, we have a propensity to miss out on the most likely threats.
And yet every single hijacker is a Muslim male. Go figure!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_hijackings lists 171 hijackings. I omitted 2 of them where I couldn't figure out whether the hijacker was likely Muslim or not (a Croatian incident and a Bosnian one); of the remaining 169 incidents, 126 of them were by probable non-Muslims.
To put that in a percentage, about 75% of hijackings are by non-Muslims. The vast majority are by males--I think that only one was by a lone female, though some of the group hijackings may have included women (I wasn't paying attention).
Cuba is by far the dominant source of hijackings; 105 of the hijackers were Cubans.
Petr Chelický had Zwingli beat by decades. Of course, Wycliffe got there a century earlier than Petr.
And various other small-p protestant movements go back almost as far as the Catholic Church--Valentinus, Basilides, and others were writing schismatic texts in the 2nd century AD--Valentinus being not just theologically different, but also reformationist in the sense of being opposed to institutional corruption in the Church (e.g. nepotism in the appointment of bishops). A massive schism resulted between the Catholic Church and the early protestant Gnostics. Many reforms in the Church, numerous theological responses*, and even ecumenical councils were responses to early reformers.
Heck, even the Nicene and Apostle's Creeds used by modern Protestant (and Catholic) churches are themselves repudiations of earlier protestant sects--the whole "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten..." creed was an attempt to stamp out early Christian sects with different theological interpretations than those endorsed by Rome.
*e.g. Irenaeus' "Against Heresy" c. 180 AD and "Philosophumena" of Hippolytus (trad. Origen)
It Takes a Thief got the owner's permission before staging the break-ins. If you got someone's permission before attempting to sidejack their account, you'd probably be in the clear. Without it, you're breaking the law.
Any legal resident ot the USA MUST speak, read and write English.
As others have pointed out, you need to learn a minimal amount of English to naturalize. There's no requirement that native-born Americans learn English, though, so for the vast majority of Americans there is no requirement that they read, speak, or write English.
So why should the ballots be printed in Spanish???
There is a federal requirement (section 203 of the Voting Rights Act) that localities with significant non-English-speaking populations either offer ballots in the minority languages or offer bilingual assistance at every polling station.
Currently, 22 of 33 counties in New Mexico are federally required to offer Spanish ballots and/or bilingual assistance (along with several counties that are required to offer Navajo, Pueblo, and Ute language support).
This requirement was last debated fairly recently (in 2006) and seemed to have broad bipartisan support, passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33.
If a state only wants to issue ballots in English, I believe they can
Technically true, but counties with significant non-English speaking populations* would be required to offer bilingual voting assistance at every polling station if they did not offer ballots in those languages (under the federal Voting Rights Act, section 203).
Currently, the majority (22 of 33) of counties in New Mexico are required to either offer Spanish language ballots or blingual assistance. Various counties are required to support the Pueblo, Navajo, and Ute languages as well.
*Any voting area with more than 5% of the population or more than 10,000 people speaking another language, with the exact method of tallying varying on Native American reservations.
Err...exactly why is there a choice to vote in Spanish or English?
Independent of all the other arguments, section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act requires localities with sizable minority language speakers* to either offer ballots in the minority language or offer bilingual assistance.
Currently, 2/3 of the counties in New Mexico are federally required to either offer voting in Spanish or multilingual assistance.
In addition, 9 counties in New Mexico are also required to offer Pueblo language options, 7 counties must support the Navajo language, and San Juan County has to offer Ute-language options.
*Those that that have either 10,000 people or over 5% of their populace as native speakers of another language.
It varies by jurisdiction; there are definitely parts of Louisiana that offer French ballots (or did in 2004). And, of course, that's not related to whether something's an official language. LA has no official language, though French is de facto accorded quasi-official status (e.g. Governor Kathleen Blanco was sworn into office in both English and French).
In general, it's up to the state/locality to determine what language to print the ballot in. However, section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires either in-language ballots or bilingual assistance for cases where either 5% of the population or more than 10,000 people in the jurisdiction speak a primary language other than English (with somewhat stricter requirements for Native American reservations).
I don't know that any parish in Louisiana currently meets those requirements (Allen Parish is required to provide bilingual assistance under 203 but I think that's Native American, not French), which means there's no federal requirement to offer French ballots or assistance; that doesn't stop localities from doing so if they want to, though.
Maybe not speak (i.e. technically mute (You Insensitive Anonymous Clod)), but citizens should be able to read English (by braille if nothing else). The states are required to provide K-12 education (of which English is a required subject for all 13 years).
English is not a required subject in all jurisdictions. Whether to make it so or not is up to the state or local government, and there are often strong political reasons not to--for instance, while the overwhelming majority of Navajo speak English there is still a minority who do not. There's no political will to impose English on the remaining population.
As a practical matter (regardless of the actual law), many areas of the US that are not natively English speaking do not provide significant English-language instructions (e.g. parts of French-speaking Maine and Louisiana, German-speaking Pennsylvania, native-speaking Alaska, Chamorro-speaking Guam, Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico--and, of course, various other Native American communities).
In some of those (e.g. parts of German-speaking Pennsylvania) religious freedom issues would seem to legally trump government education requirements, in addition to the de facto reality.
That being said, there shouldn't need to be an "English" option when it comes to voting. you can (in theory, anyway) only vote if you are are a citizen or here legally. I can't imagine either case being true without being able to speak English well enough to vote.
It's a big and diverse country. I grew up in Maine; there are certainly folks in Madawaska and elsewhere who speak only French, in communities that have done so since before the USA existed--many of whom fought against the British to help found our country. There are non-English-speaking Americans living in parts of Cajun Louisiana, German-speaking Pennsylvania, and Hawaiian-speaking Hawaii--not to mention the many US citizens born in Guam, Puerto Rico, and other US territories. And, of course, those few Native Americans remaining who don't speak English.
New Mexico in particular is an area where Spanish has been spoken since prior to the existence of the US; it's not a case of immigration at all. Indeed, New Mexican Spanish (spoken in much of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico) differs from other Spanish in many ways, starting at the most basic--in continental and Mexican Spanish, "I am" is said "Yo soy". New Mexican Spanish maintains the 16th-century form "Yo seigo". Many other features of New Mexican Spanish are unique to that region.
New Mexican Spanish also has many Native American loan words (as well as English borrowings). It is, in many ways, a uniquely American language.
If you are foreign born, and want to pass the tests to become a naturalized US citizen, you most certainly do have to show by test a proficiency in English.
That has nothing to do with an official language and does not apply to the vast majority of citizens (who are born here, not naturalized).
Heck, our first native-born president--Martin van Buren--was also a native Dutch speaker.
New Mexico in particular is an area where Spanish has been spoken since prior to the existence of the US; it's not a case of immigration at all. Indeed, New Mexican Spanish (spoken in much of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico) differs from other Spanish in many ways, starting at the most basic--in continental and Mexican Spanish, "I am" is said "Yo soy". New Mexican Spanish maintains the 16th-century form "Yo seigo". Many other features of New Mexican Spanish are unique to that region.
New Mexican Spanish also has many Native American loan words (as well as English borrowings). It is, in many ways, a uniquely American language.
It's also far from the only part of the US where English is not the predominant tongue and not all citizens speak it; I grew in Maine, and many of the northern cities (e.g. Madawaska) are primarily French speaking and have been so for centuries. Many residents speak no English. Puerto Rico is obviously primarily Spanish speaking, parts of Pennsylvanian Amish country speak a variant of German (which was also widespread in the midwest until the 1950s), there are still a handful of Cajun French-speaking Louisianan communities where English is not heard, etc.
The two oldest cities on US territory (St Augustine and San Juan) are originally Spanish-speaking and maintain Spanish-speaking populations to this day.
In point of fact the current law is that, for for-profit firms, the board's responsibility is to maximize value to shareholders.
Unless they're in Revlon mode, the board's first legal responsibility is to act in accordance with the articles of incorporation (which may or may not prioritize shareholder value above other corporate goals).
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That's the key; every time you change storage technologies, you have to move your existing backups to the new one. That helps in a bunch of ways:
1. Media degradation: You're constantly refreshing data to new storage, so the eventual failure of old CDs/tapes/drives/etc is partially mitigated (you still want redundant backups, of course)
2. Obsolescence: Trying to get that old 8" floppy working can be a pain in the ass; you're either hoping the old machine still boots and has some way of transferring the data once it's read, or you're searching for drivers for an 8" drive on a more modern machine. By transferring immediately on upgrade, you skirt most of those issues.
3. A little extra redundancy; if the new storage fails, at least you have copies of a lot of data on the previous generation of hardware.
It's one of those things that you only need to fight with once before it becomes ingrained; I can only go back to c. 1992 in recovering my personal files, because that's when I first went to get an old file and struggled being able to recover it. Since then, copying everything to new storage as it arrives is de rigueur.
Likewise, at the tech places I've worked for the past 10+ years it's been mandatory to copy all old data over to new storage technology as it arrives.
Wrong. It's not usually done at night, its done during the day when people ARE NOT HOME. Theifs want to take your crap, they don't want a confrontation.
I'm pretty sure that when GP said "its also usual done at night (must be done at night to meet some definitions of burglary)" he was discussing burglary as legally defined. By common law, burglary is defined by 5 elements: (1) Breaking and (2) Entering (3) of a residence (4) at night (5) with intent to commit a felony.
Some jurisdictions have relaxed that definition, but traditionally if it's not at night then it isn't burglary; it could be larceny or robbery or simple theft or some other crime. The penalties for burglary were higher (as GP noted), precisely because it involved entering a residence at night which is both more invasive to people's sense of security and more likely to result in personal harm than daytime theft.
Even in jurisdictions where the definition has been relaxed, there are still often higher penalties for burglaries that are of residences, committed at night, or both.
A juror going to Britannica or urbandictionary would be equally disallowed. The issue is that jurors aren't allowed to do research on their own, not which resources were used.
The judge had even been explicitly reminding them of that; from TFA:
[Judge] Kaplan reminded her that he had warned the jurors every day during the three-week trial not to do any research on their own.
It has nothing to do with IDEs. Emacs did this just fine in the late 1980s, and vim's handled it for the past 15 years or so.
That covers both editors a programmer might use. ;)
But programming editors autocomplete symbols for you, so you rarely type the whole thing out. And with all the underscores, it's just as easy to hold the shift key and type.
Programmers are the most likely bunch of people to pop the capslock key off of the keyboard entirely, in my experience.
A couple of the places I've worked at have total PTO days rather than separate vacation and sick days. Instead of starting with 2 weeks vacation to start, you might get 4 weeks PTO. For most employees it works to their benefit in terms of getting more time off, but it disincentivizes taking unscheduled sick days (which tend to be much worse for the employer than scheduled vacation, which can be planned around). Win-win, without a need to hire PIs and such.
Because the first rule is to figure out what on earth is going on--not just in theory, but in fact. Code for the OSI model is ugly, perhaps by necessity (it has to be very fast), but it's code that is very, very easy to get wrong. It involves a lot of interacting pieces working on different levels of abstraction with other players that you don't have code control over.
TCP/IP predates the OSI model and conflicts with it in some areas; discussion of the complexities of code targeting OSI isn't directly applicable to TCP/IP implementations, though many similarities exist.
Indeed, the fact that TCP/IP has fewer layers is often cited as one reason that it succeeded (coding an implementation of TCP/IP therefore being less complex than coding a fully abstracted 7-layer OSI implementation).
It was part of their plan to decode it. They know that social engineering is often a much more effective way of getting at encrypted data than an attack on the algorithm; by pestering the author with a bunch of claptrap, they've already gotten him to reveal part of the plaintext.
Next phase: Stand outside of his apartment with a stereo held overhead Say Anything-style, blasting Achy Breaky Heart. The remainder of the message will fall in days.
A) The numbers were generated by going to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_hijackings and going through every hijacking, counting how many were by Muslims. It's about 75% by non-Muslims.
B) You're moving the goalposts; you said 100% of hijackers are Muslim. That's so ludicrous as to be indefensible, so you shifted at the start of this last post to looking only at hijackers of American flights from 1980 to today. You listed those and found that you were still wrong, so you moved the goalposts again in the middle of your post to exclude the FedEx flight you found.
Somehow you made a post with a straight face that actually lists a plain hijacked by a non-Muslim American with the intent of carrying out a suicide bombing on US soil, and ended that very post claiming that someone _else_ was ignorant for not believing that 100% of hijackings are carried out by Middle Easterners.
C) Even with the "commercial passenger flights in the US from 1980 to present" criteria, you're still wrong. Delta Flight 334 from Atlanta to New Orleans (with continuing service to Havana) comes to mind.
That aside, your relentless exclusion of everything that doesn't fit your narrative makes no sense. The FedEx flight you mention was hijacked with the intent to carry out a suicide crash--a clear security problem. When Cuban flights are hijacked by men with grenades and flown to Miami (as happened in 2003), or US fighters are scrambled to force a DC-3 down in Key West after 6 men armed with knives take it over (also 2003), that's a threat to national security. When international flights are threatened by shoe bombers or bombs in package areas, that's a threat to US security.
Ignoring non-passenger flights or non-domestic flights is a great way to leave gaping holes in our security perimeter.
Please.
You call what I stated irrational, but all you did was take a global statistic (cubans hijack a lot of planes to/from cuba) and used it to rationalized a policy specific to the united states.
You learned just enough to justify your prior position, but not enough to be rational.
This is nonsensical--I didn't advocate any policy, nor did I have a prior position. I actually went and looked at the data post facto, and the results were surprising to me; I didn't have any position on who to search coming into the discussion. Certainly "search the Cubans" wasn't (and isn't) a position I'd advocate.
You claimed that "our enemies" are middle easterners and that searching them exclusively would make a better policy rather than searching everyone equally. Both globally and in the US, middle easterners are not the most common hijackers--in both cases, searching every middle easterner and nobody else (as you proposed) would be a bad policy since it would miss the biggest demographic groups responsible for hijackings.
Even if you limit it to flights originating in the US, there are many more flights hijacked by non-middle-easterners than by middle easterners. I'm not sure exactly what the right way to deal with that is, but your idea (search only a group that is a minority of terrorists) strikes me as a pretty horrible one.
FWIW (which is very little), I think a "search only Cubans" policy is as idiotic as a "search only middle easterners" policy; I brought that ethnicity into the discussion only because there's a bizarre belief that runs through these discussions that Arabs are anywhere near the ethnicity most responsible for American hijackings, when in fact they aren't. For the very little it's worth, my family is part Hispanic and I've spent a decent part of my adult life living in South America, though never in Cuba and none of the family is of Cuban descent.
Lets suppose that there are two airlines. One of which gropes the privates of every middle-easterner and the other randomly gropes the privates of 1 out of every 25 passengers.
Which one will our enemies try to hijack?
As you see it is easier for our enemies, which are mainly middle-easterners, to hijack the one performing random groping.
This is exactly the sort of irrationality that defeats security.
There have been more than twice as many hijackings by Cubans as by Muslims. But Muslims are seen as scarier, so the fear-mongering profiles always seem to focus on them; you never hear people saying that Hispanics should be searched more thoroughly. When we racially profile based on stereotypes and fear, we have a propensity to miss out on the most likely threats.
And yet every single hijacker is a Muslim male. Go figure!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Airliner_hijackings lists 171 hijackings. I omitted 2 of them where I couldn't figure out whether the hijacker was likely Muslim or not (a Croatian incident and a Bosnian one); of the remaining 169 incidents, 126 of them were by probable non-Muslims.
To put that in a percentage, about 75% of hijackings are by non-Muslims. The vast majority are by males--I think that only one was by a lone female, though some of the group hijackings may have included women (I wasn't paying attention).
Cuba is by far the dominant source of hijackings; 105 of the hijackers were Cubans.
Petr Chelický had Zwingli beat by decades. Of course, Wycliffe got there a century earlier than Petr.
And various other small-p protestant movements go back almost as far as the Catholic Church--Valentinus, Basilides, and others were writing schismatic texts in the 2nd century AD--Valentinus being not just theologically different, but also reformationist in the sense of being opposed to institutional corruption in the Church (e.g. nepotism in the appointment of bishops). A massive schism resulted between the Catholic Church and the early protestant Gnostics. Many reforms in the Church, numerous theological responses*, and even ecumenical councils were responses to early reformers.
Heck, even the Nicene and Apostle's Creeds used by modern Protestant (and Catholic) churches are themselves repudiations of earlier protestant sects--the whole "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the begotten of God the Father, the Only-begotten..." creed was an attempt to stamp out early Christian sects with different theological interpretations than those endorsed by Rome.
*e.g. Irenaeus' "Against Heresy" c. 180 AD and "Philosophumena" of Hippolytus (trad. Origen)
It Takes a Thief got the owner's permission before staging the break-ins. If you got someone's permission before attempting to sidejack their account, you'd probably be in the clear. Without it, you're breaking the law.
D'oh, my bad. This is Nevada, not New Mexico. But Clark County is also on the list of counties required to offer Spanish-language support.
And of course this is Nevada, not New Mexico. But Clark County is also on the list of counties required to offer Spanish-language support.
And of course this is Nevada, not New Mexico. But Clark County is also on the list of counties required to offer Spanish-language support.
Any legal resident ot the USA MUST speak, read and write English.
As others have pointed out, you need to learn a minimal amount of English to naturalize. There's no requirement that native-born Americans learn English, though, so for the vast majority of Americans there is no requirement that they read, speak, or write English.
So why should the ballots be printed in Spanish???
There is a federal requirement (section 203 of the Voting Rights Act) that localities with significant non-English-speaking populations either offer ballots in the minority languages or offer bilingual assistance at every polling station.
Currently, 22 of 33 counties in New Mexico are federally required to offer Spanish ballots and/or bilingual assistance (along with several counties that are required to offer Navajo, Pueblo, and Ute language support).
This requirement was last debated fairly recently (in 2006) and seemed to have broad bipartisan support, passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33.
If a state only wants to issue ballots in English, I believe they can
Technically true, but counties with significant non-English speaking populations* would be required to offer bilingual voting assistance at every polling station if they did not offer ballots in those languages (under the federal Voting Rights Act, section 203).
Currently, the majority (22 of 33) of counties in New Mexico are required to either offer Spanish language ballots or blingual assistance. Various counties are required to support the Pueblo, Navajo, and Ute languages as well.
*Any voting area with more than 5% of the population or more than 10,000 people speaking another language, with the exact method of tallying varying on Native American reservations.
Err...exactly why is there a choice to vote in Spanish or English?
Independent of all the other arguments, section 203 of the federal Voting Rights Act requires localities with sizable minority language speakers* to either offer ballots in the minority language or offer bilingual assistance.
Currently, 2/3 of the counties in New Mexico are federally required to either offer voting in Spanish or multilingual assistance.
In addition, 9 counties in New Mexico are also required to offer Pueblo language options, 7 counties must support the Navajo language, and San Juan County has to offer Ute-language options.
*Those that that have either 10,000 people or over 5% of their populace as native speakers of another language.
It varies by jurisdiction; there are definitely parts of Louisiana that offer French ballots (or did in 2004). And, of course, that's not related to whether something's an official language. LA has no official language, though French is de facto accorded quasi-official status (e.g. Governor Kathleen Blanco was sworn into office in both English and French).
In general, it's up to the state/locality to determine what language to print the ballot in. However, section 203 of the Voting Rights Act requires either in-language ballots or bilingual assistance for cases where either 5% of the population or more than 10,000 people in the jurisdiction speak a primary language other than English (with somewhat stricter requirements for Native American reservations).
I don't know that any parish in Louisiana currently meets those requirements (Allen Parish is required to provide bilingual assistance under 203 but I think that's Native American, not French), which means there's no federal requirement to offer French ballots or assistance; that doesn't stop localities from doing so if they want to, though.
Maybe not speak (i.e. technically mute (You Insensitive Anonymous Clod)), but citizens should be able to read English (by braille if nothing else). The states are required to provide K-12 education (of which English is a required subject for all 13 years).
English is not a required subject in all jurisdictions. Whether to make it so or not is up to the state or local government, and there are often strong political reasons not to--for instance, while the overwhelming majority of Navajo speak English there is still a minority who do not. There's no political will to impose English on the remaining population.
As a practical matter (regardless of the actual law), many areas of the US that are not natively English speaking do not provide significant English-language instructions (e.g. parts of French-speaking Maine and Louisiana, German-speaking Pennsylvania, native-speaking Alaska, Chamorro-speaking Guam, Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico--and, of course, various other Native American communities).
In some of those (e.g. parts of German-speaking Pennsylvania) religious freedom issues would seem to legally trump government education requirements, in addition to the de facto reality.
That being said, there shouldn't need to be an "English" option when it comes to voting. you can (in theory, anyway) only vote if you are are a citizen or here legally. I can't imagine either case being true without being able to speak English well enough to vote.
It's a big and diverse country. I grew up in Maine; there are certainly folks in Madawaska and elsewhere who speak only French, in communities that have done so since before the USA existed--many of whom fought against the British to help found our country. There are non-English-speaking Americans living in parts of Cajun Louisiana, German-speaking Pennsylvania, and Hawaiian-speaking Hawaii--not to mention the many US citizens born in Guam, Puerto Rico, and other US territories. And, of course, those few Native Americans remaining who don't speak English.
New Mexico in particular is an area where Spanish has been spoken since prior to the existence of the US; it's not a case of immigration at all. Indeed, New Mexican Spanish (spoken in much of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico) differs from other Spanish in many ways, starting at the most basic--in continental and Mexican Spanish, "I am" is said "Yo soy". New Mexican Spanish maintains the 16th-century form "Yo seigo". Many other features of New Mexican Spanish are unique to that region.
New Mexican Spanish also has many Native American loan words (as well as English borrowings). It is, in many ways, a uniquely American language.
You might want to check in Immigration.
If you are foreign born, and want to pass the tests to become a naturalized US citizen, you most certainly do have to show by test a proficiency in English.
That has nothing to do with an official language and does not apply to the vast majority of citizens (who are born here, not naturalized).
Heck, our first native-born president--Martin van Buren--was also a native Dutch speaker.
New Mexico in particular is an area where Spanish has been spoken since prior to the existence of the US; it's not a case of immigration at all. Indeed, New Mexican Spanish (spoken in much of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico) differs from other Spanish in many ways, starting at the most basic--in continental and Mexican Spanish, "I am" is said "Yo soy". New Mexican Spanish maintains the 16th-century form "Yo seigo". Many other features of New Mexican Spanish are unique to that region.
New Mexican Spanish also has many Native American loan words (as well as English borrowings). It is, in many ways, a uniquely American language.
It's also far from the only part of the US where English is not the predominant tongue and not all citizens speak it; I grew in Maine, and many of the northern cities (e.g. Madawaska) are primarily French speaking and have been so for centuries. Many residents speak no English. Puerto Rico is obviously primarily Spanish speaking, parts of Pennsylvanian Amish country speak a variant of German (which was also widespread in the midwest until the 1950s), there are still a handful of Cajun French-speaking Louisianan communities where English is not heard, etc.
The two oldest cities on US territory (St Augustine and San Juan) are originally Spanish-speaking and maintain Spanish-speaking populations to this day.
In point of fact the current law is that, for for-profit firms, the board's responsibility is to maximize value to shareholders.
Unless they're in Revlon mode, the board's first legal responsibility is to act in accordance with the articles of incorporation (which may or may not prioritize shareholder value above other corporate goals).