They sell software and are a business. As such I expect the same service from Loki as any other business out collecting my cash. I've spent ample money with Loki to expect simple customer service like shipping a released product after having committed to an order, instead I was called a liar in a public forum by their customer service rep. You bet I'm pissed, and if expecting basic customer service and simple delivery makes me a "prick" in your eyes, God help you should you ever decide to start a business.
http://dri.sourceforge.net has preliminary ATI Radeon 3D support in CVS right now. Go here for compilation docs. This will, of course, require XFree86-4.0.2.
Thanks for your direct reply. I seem to remember that you had previously stated that Q3 generated disappointing revenue, which is what I based that presumpton upon. I'm pleased to know that you're planning to continue supporting Linux. I hope I'll be able to play Doom 3 using a Radeon card rather than the Nvidia GeForce, as that's what I plan to buy.
Thanks also for your games -- you don't know how much time I've wasted with your Quake games; entertainment money well spent.
And am planning the purchase of a PS2. Frankly, gaming on Linux is a joke. How much do you wanna bet that ID Software isn't going to release Doom 3 for Linux, or allow a port? I'm doubting it.
I own Terminus, Unreal Tournament, and about ten Loki games. I'm pleased with Vivarious Visions (and actually like Terminus)... but as many already know I'm NOT pleased with Loki, or their attitude towards this customer. So I don't buy their products any longer. Where is Alpha Centauri, or any reasonable explanation for this mess? Why do they continue to accept multiple pre-orders on their web page when they know it will hold up the delivery of other games purchased in the same order to their customers?
I'd love to see gaming take off under Linux, and think the software infrastructure should be in place once XFree-4 w/GLX and MesaGL, Linux-2.4 w/DRI, and a standardized base between distributions comes along. I'm guessing this will really fall into place by Redhat-8.0, which means about a year from now or so. Until then games authors are going to be forging a new Linux market and eating the support costs associated with the various incompatibilities between Linux distributions. Until this happens though I've given up. After buying twelve or so games for Linux in the hope that I could completely wipe out Windows in order to enjoy a few good games I've now come full circle and re-installed a Windows partition in order to game again. It's easier than dealing with this mess. Frankly, I'll be buying a PS2 ASAP (God knows when they'll be on store shelves) and am thinking of dumping PC gaming altogether.
I only saw Sun give out StarOffice, nobody else has or had a competetive office suite available either gratis or licensed under the GPL. Where were those OSS zealots out to undercut Corel with a competetive office suite? Koffice and Gnome office is coming, but it'll be a year or two yet.
No. Corel attempted to sell boxed software to the Linux market while a major competetor undercut them by giving out an office suite for free. Just like Microsoft gave out Internet Explorer for free, but at least Sun didn't tie StarOffice into Linux -- they're just tying it into Gnome.
Corel's mistakes have nothing to do with dot-com maddness, and everything to do with a complete lack of strategy and planning. They have a withering market of law firms who continue to reluctantly buy WordPerfect because they like the product and have a history of templates and macros. Corel foolishly spend money and resources building their own distribution to sell in a saturated market, and then attempted to sell a boxed product for several hundred dollars while a free competitor ate their lunch. And on top of it they didn't provide the channel or technical support for migration to their base market. Can you give me a better example of what not to do?
I don't think that's wholly correct. For one, law offices tend to be very conservative (pardon the pun) about what they install and use. Most of them are based on DOS or Windows and aren't interested in switching for the sake of running Linux.
No argument here. I'm not saying this is an easy or slam dunk strategy, but it is defensible to Corel's board of directors. It would have resolved their reliance on a competitor for the base OS and API, while allowing them as much control over the OS and API as they desire. It also would have provided a highly stable and proven operating platform with plenty of free backend products like web servers, SQL servers, mail servers, yada yada yada. It's a market strategy with which they might have succeeded. With channel partners pushing the platform onto their base market, and a legal industry still heavily dependent on WordPerfect, they might have pulled it off. Though it's pretty clear that they didn't have much chance selling CorelOffice at $100 to $200 a pop with Staroffice just a download away.
I might also argue that they could have saved the Corel Linux development costs and engineering time if they had partnered with Caldera instead. I suggest Caldera because that kind of marketing strategy is right up their alley. It's too bad. Corel employs some good engineers, and they help the Wine project immensely. But their senior management made some bad mistakes, and didn't stay the course on a market strategy which could potentially work, instead focusing on one thing after the next in a fruitless attempt to grab the quick buck. Welcome to bankruptcy, Corel.
Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.
Because computers most certainly haven't gained exponential speed increases over the last 10 years. If that were the case systems would be more than 32 times faster than ten years ago. What we have is a huge increase in marketed clockspeed, but I don't see a significant increase in system performance after Intel separated internal CPU clock speed from the system bus. Do you?
People keep pointing to Moore's Law every time Intel ups the Mhz bar, without considering that Moore was referring to transistor density on the mask and not clock speed. Anyway, in the time Moore formed his "law" there were no pipelined architectures or multiple bus speeds... everything was one clock tick per instruction fetch and one bus speed.
I note that the change from 33Mhz to 66Mhz and 120Mhz 486 and Pentium systems were primarily the result of clock doubling and tippling, and not main bus speed advances. This has been the trend across the '90s, which is why as CPU clock speed increased performance enhancements per release cycle diminished. Yeaaaa, we're about to break the barrier with 2Ghz systems that are no more than two to three times faster than my PPRO-200. Big deal. Disk I/O is not significantly faster -- though transfer speed from disk cache is great (so what), FSB memory bus speed is a bit faster, and the main I/O and expansion bus is twice as fast (33Mhz to 66Mhz).
This is not a significant advancement, which is why I'm still using my Dual PPRO-200 system quite happily.
That was a highly informative post, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Too bad only one moderator decided to +1 it up. What you describe could be done in BSD or Linux with a userland display service communicating to either the video metal or a kernel space frame buffer device, but it would have to be pervasively threaded along with all the application widget libraries, and it would be a completely different protocol and design from X. Actually, it sounds pretty cool.:-) Is it network transparent, and designed to be remote displayable?
Still, as far as a single serial event stream is concerned, I doubt X is any more faster or slower than most others. Though I have to admit, the design you describe (in only a few paragraphs) makes me want to take a closer look at Be, if only to get a basic understanding of it's underlying mechanisms. Given what you wrote, it appears different, and in certain circumstances, more efficient, than X. I'd be particularly interested to read any knowledgeable posts which contradict your post, in terms of efficiency (that is, I believe that what you wrote is technically accurate, but wonder if others contradict you on performance).
Just how does squirting a serialized display protocol across a UNIX domain socket slow down X any worse than GDI (the Windows low level display protocol)? I can't speak for how Be handles display events, but if it serializes its display protcol it's no different.
True: X has some brain damage when it comes to supporting complex shapes in the protocol. And certainly the current crop of free X servers need hardware accelerated alpha channel blending and font/glyph anti-aliasing. But that's not a problem with X inherently, and all these problems can be resolved by adding X protocol extensions.
There were certainly better network display protocol designs before X; NeWS comes to mind. Display Postscript is yet another, though that was released after X. Hardware accelerated anti-aliasing and alpha channel support I believe is slated to ship with XFree-4.0.2. Then the userspace widget libraries will have to support those features, which will probably take another year to sort out. On top of that we'll need better fonts designed, which is really the crux of the problem since the default fonts which ship with X are just terrible. Maybe by then the GnuStep team will have released their Display Ghostscript X extension, which IMO is the best way to go.
None of these solutions will have much impact on speeding up the core X protocol. Mostly because on a local system it's pretty damn fast.
Look, as soon as the CYGWIN folks release XFree 4.0 for Windows (which they're about to do), Windows folks will have a high quality free X server available. From there it's a simple jump to Gnome and KDE applications on Windows. That's the migration path.
A large IT shop can't afford to simply dump Windows and move their entire userbase to Linux in one fell swoop. There's training costs to consider, application testing for internal conformity within the organization, plus security and productivity issues. If you're managing several hundred to a thousand desktops you can't afford to segment off a department just to try out a new OS, nor can you afford to just move everyone in enmasse given the potential risks involved; what if it doesn't work? You need a migration path whereby both systems can be tested and either junked in case of failure. Successful IT shops plan for failure otherwise they experience failure.
Microsoft has done a good job at killing off potential migration paths away from Windows by either buying up competitors or squashing them with anti-competitive means. See: Netscape. This is a major threat to Windows because within a year or two it will allow an IT manager the possibility to deploy GNOME and its applications on the desktop and test them without being dependent on their success. Combine this with OpenOffice and Gnome-1.4/2.0 and the Free Software community will have provided a safe migration path off of Windows. Most IT organizations are risk averse, but they're not stupid about unnecessary expense. If they can get away from the Windows tax without affecting productivity, watch the world dump Windows.
Yes, I wrote that article and I stand by what I wrote. Your characterization aside, Loki made a promise to me to resolve an issue I had with an order which they broke. Then they never fixed their web page, allowing others to make the same mistake again and again without even letting their customers know beforehand just what might happen. In a nutshell, if one purchases a pre-release title and in the same order purchases something else (even several titles), because of issues with their distributor whatever else was purchased will get back ordered along with the pre-release until that pre-release ships. This is right off of their web page, with no warning whatsoever. Months later, the problem with their web page still hasn't been fixed, nor has the game in question been released (though I admit that's a separate issue). I note that anyone who ordered other product along with Alpha Centauri five months ago would still not have receieved any product. This is no way to maintain customer friendly relations.
Have you ever experienced problems like this with L.L Bean or Amazon? Neither have I. Welcome to the world of business, where customer service matters.
Loki still hasn't released Alpha Centauri, four months after they claimed it went gold. Anyone who purchased SMAC along with another title(s) still hasn't received their other title(s) because of brain damaged policies with Loki's distributor, Digital River. They've never given an adequate explanation as to why, nor have they attempted to fix their web site to prevent those kinds of purchases in the future.
I bought ten games from Loki, partly because I like the idea of games on Linux, and partly because I wanted some games. But I won't ever buy a product from a company I believe has lied to me. Period.
Supporting 3D hardware under Linux will ease over the next year. The loadable driver modules in XFree 4 is a much better solution to XFree 3's separate X server binaries for various cards, and this will ease the support headaches distributors and games manufacturers have had over the last year. So, please, let's see some other porting companies and multiplatform content creators enter the market. I bought Terminus and have been happy with that game. I'll buy others if I like the demo. There's certainly a hard-core linux community that will buy games right now. Though it's true that the market won't open up until after XFree 4 and 3D support becomes a common component of every distribution.
When the KDE team added V2 RPMs for Redhat-6.x I decided to deploy KDE-2 along with Helix-Gnome for a nearly 200 host desktop rollout. My feeling is that as head SA it's really not my decision to tell people what desktop to use, it's up to them to tell me what desktop they need to be productive; and anyway if I can offer both Helix and KDE-2, well then let the users decide. I really wasn't planning on this since I didn't expect the KDE team to support RH-6.x given how much trouble I had attempting to compile the source tarballs when they announced the first release; I figured it was brokenness in the egcs-2.91 g++ compiler and just gave up.
Boy, am I glad they decided to support RH-6.2, I've been fiddling with it and like the desktop a whole bunch. My users are happy since many of them come from Europe and prefer KDE. The others from America most to prefer Gnome -- now both need not feel slighted.
The only thing I seriously dislike about KDE is the lack of Scheme/Guile bindings to the toolkit... sorry, but I just love Gnome because of that!
I can't believe Adobe is really not moving forward with Frame for Linux. I know several companies in the Cambridge area that are all mostly Linux desktop organizations now, most having migrated from various UNIXen, and were planning on migrating their technical writers over to Linux once Frame shipped proper. Idiots. These guys are NEVER going to use Word for their technical publications, and are now stuck either buying their tech writers Ultra 5's or Windows boxen.
It seems like Adobe has decided to only market their Windows product base while letting their UNIX tools languish. They don't realize that it's the UNIX and Macintosh tools which offer the long term revenue stream; unless they just want to get bought out by MS. Look at how they've killed Display Postscript... I don't think even Sun can buy and integrate DPS into OpenWindows any longer. And clearly Apple couldn't get DPS for Quartz, they had to move to their own internally written DPDF model. Thank God for GnuStep and their GPS X extension; talk about a critical X infrastructure project which gets NO attention.
Hey Adobe, how does it feel to piss off your customers? You bet these guys are going to migrate the hell away from Frame once a real competitor emerges on Linux. The next rev or two of Kword is looking like it could be a real Frame killer under Linux... Adobe, get you head out of your ass and start marketing your products where the customers are!
And ironically, punch cards have a 2%-5% margin of error compared to a.2% error rate for the OptiScan system to which you refer. However, the authors of this FAQ make their point quite clear and provide a reference. I believe that since at least some of them are attourneys, and understand the statute as professionals, they have better credibility than you.
Here is a book called Vote Scam which purports that between the manufacturers of voting equipment and VNS (Voter News Service), just about any election can be rigged. Interestingly, the author points out that all of the voting tabulation equipment is run on proprietary hardware with proprietary software which no one will offer up for public peer review. Does anyone here honestly think that closed source software running inside our voting booths is appropriate given how critical this equipment is to the foundation of our democracy? I don't know if the allegations made in the book are true, but I definately believe we need to lobby congress to pass a law MANDATING that all voting systems be completely transparent and run with open hardware and software in a manner which allows for public peer review. Yup, that means Free Software/Open Source voting booths.
I found this on a post in a kuro5hin.org story which has since been killed. I reposted it in another kuro5hin story and repost it here again. References for these statements are to be found in a link at the end of the FAQ.
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[This draft #4 was prepared by Rich Cowan (rcowan@lesley.edu) with help from Paul Rosenberg, Dan Kohn, Jonathan Prince, Marc Sobel, subscribers to the Red Rock Eater News Service and the electronic mail discussion florida-recount-discuss@egroups.com, and the Yale Law School Student Campaign for a Legal Election, 127 Wall Street New Haven, CT 06511 -- spin@pantheon.yale.edu]
1) Myth: Al Gore has a responsibility to concede the election.
Fact: A 330 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast in Florida is incredibly close! It is roughly equivalent to a 1-vote margin in a city with 40,000 people and 18,000 voters. It is extremely rare for an election this close NOT to be contested for several weeks until a manual recount can take place, with observers from both sides taking part and inspecting ballots. This kind of detailed recount has not yet taken place.
According to the US Constitution and the Laws of Florida, it is the responsibility of officials in Florida to certify the election results. November 17 is the deadline for absentee ballots sent from overseas to arrive. Since the election is close enough in Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico to be affected by absentee ballots, the results in those states cannot be certified before that date.
2) Myth: the number of "spoiled ballots" in Palm Beach County was typical. In a press briefing televised live on all networks on 11/9/00, Karl Rove of the Bush campaign compared the 14,872 invalidated ballots in the 1996 Presidential race to 19,120 ballots for President that were spoiled in this election.
Fact: the Bush campaign was comparing apples and oranges. There were actually 29,702 invalidated ballots this year in Palm Beach County. This is almost twice the number in 1996. "19,120" refers to only those 2000 ballots which were thrown out for voting for two Presidential candidates. The remaining 10,582 ballots had no choice recorded for President.
According to the Palm Beach County elections office (http://www.pbcelections.org), voters this year were not confused at all by the rest of the ballot. For example, less than 1% of U.S. Senate votes were invalidated because of multiple punches, compared with over 4% in the Presidential contest.
3) Myth: The Palm Beach ballot is definitely illegal due to the presence of punch holes to the left of some of the candidates.
Fact: According to the Secretary of State's office, there is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. This view has been contested by hundreds of Florida voters. The final decision on the legality of the ballot is likely to be made in court, as long as this issue could have an effect on the election.
It is possible that the ballot could be ruled illegal on other grounds, such as the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act.
4) Myth: "The more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting tomachine counting." -- Former Sec. of State James Baker, speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign at a press briefing televised by all networks on 11/10/00.
Fact: In 1997, George W. Bush signed into law a bill stating that hand recounts were the preferred method in a close election in Texas. The bill, "HB 330", mandated that representatives of all parties be present to prevent fraud. Laws establishing rights and procedures for handrecounts also exist in Florida (see Title IX, Chapter 102). In fact, the Orlando Sentinel, (orlandosentinel.com) reported that a partial hand count of Presidential ballots this year was ordered by Republicans in Seminole County, where Bush led Gore. This count took place on 11/9 and 11/10, widening Bush's lead by 98 votes. The Bush campaign did not complain about this hand count; nor did it complain about the hand count on 11/11/00 which put Bush slightly ahead of Gore in New Mexico.
There do exist machine voting systems which are fairly accurate, but antiquated punch card systems are notoriously inaccurate. They were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1997 by Secretary of State William Galvin after a Congressional primary that was also "too close to call". The problem is that if the punched-out pieces of cardboard are not completely removed from the punch card, they can obstruct the card reader and the votes will not be counted. A manual recount of such cards can clearly reveal the voter's intentions.
5) Myth: The process is unfair because hand recounts were held only in liberal areas of Florida, where Gore stands to pick up the most votes.
Fact: It is true that a statewide recount would be more fair, and the Bush campaign has every right to request one. According to Florida law, hand recount requests must come from the campaigns, not from the state. To fail to request what is commonly referred to as a "defensive recount" in conservative areas of Florida, they may be making a tactical blunder that will cost them the election.
It is also true that there were voting irregularities in the counties where the Gore campaign requested recounts.
6) Myth: "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3407 votes there. According to the Florida Department of State, 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County are registered to the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, an increase of 110% since the 1996 presidential election" -- Ari Fleischer of the Bush Campaign, 11/9/00. The 2,000 votes received by the Reformparty candidate for Congress indicate that party's strength in Palm Beach County (James Baker on Meet the Press, 11/12/00).
Fact: Of those 16,695 voters, only 337 (2 percent) are in the Reform Party according to Florida state records. The Reform party candidate for Congress, John McGuire, is connected to a more centrist wing of the Reform Party, predating Buchanan's involvement. An analysis of his support indicates that it came largely from reform-minded Ralph Nader voters.
Regarding Buchanan's vote total, the Washington Post reported that his vote percentage in Palm Beach county was four times as high at the polls as in absentee voting. Even Buchanan himself admitted on 11/8/00 on the Today Show that many of his votes actually "belonged to Al Gore". So did his campaign manager, Bay Buchanan.
7) Myth: If Gore (or Bush) ends up winning the popular vote, he really should win the election even if he loses Florida and other states.
Fact: This is not the way the U.S. Constitution is written. The Electoral College decision, imperfect as it may be, is the only one that matters. It may be possible to reform or eliminate the electoral college in the future, so that small states would no longer receive extra electoralvotes out of proportion to their population. But until this change is made by Constitutional amendment, the Electoral College is still the law of the land.
8) Myth: The Cook County, Illinois ballot from the home district of Gore campaign chair Richard Daleyis similar to the "butterfly" ballot used in Palm Beach County (reported by Don Evans, 11/8/00)
Fact: According to the Chicago Daily Herald on11/10/00, the ballots in Chicago which had"facing pages" were referendum questions which only had two punch holes, Yes and No.
9) Myth: The election process in Florida outside of Palm Beach County was fair.
Fact: Actually, thousands of irregularities in over a half-dozen categories have already been reported:
-Ballots ran out in certain precincts according tothe LA Times on 11/10/00.
-Carpools of African-American voters were stopped by police, according to the Los Angeles Times (11/10/00). In some cases, officers demanded to see a "taxi license".
-Polls closed with people still in line in Tampa, according to the Associated Press.
-In Osceola County, ballots did not line up properly, possibly causing Gore voters to have their ballots cast for Harry Browne. Also, Hispanic voters were required to produce two forms of ID when only one is required. (source: Associated Press)
-Dozens, and possibly hundreds, of voters in Broward County were unable to vote because the Supervisor of Elections did not have enough staff to verify changes of address.
-Voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-cons, according to Mother Jones magazine.
-According to Reuters news service (11/8/00), many voters received pencils rather than pens when they voted, in violation of state law.
-According to the Miami Herald, many Haitian-American voters were turned away from precincts where they were voting for the first time (11/10/00)
-According to Feed Magazine, the mayoral candidate whose election in Miami was overturned due to voter fraud, Xavier Suarez, said he was involved in preparing absentee ballots for George W. Bush. (11/9/00)
-According to tompaine.com, CBS's Dan Rather reported a possible computer error in Volusia County, Florida, where James Harris, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, won 9,888 votes. He won 583 in the rest of the state. [11/9/00] County-level results for Florida are available at cnn.com.
-Many African-American first-time voters who registered at motor vehicles offices or in campus voter registration drives did not appear on the voting rolls, according to a hearing conducted by the NAACP and televised on C-SPAN on 11/12/00.
10) Myth: "No evidence of vote fraud, either in the original vote or in the recount, has been presented." -- James Baker, representing the Bush campaign on 11/10/00, in a Florida briefing.
Fact: The election was held just last week, so of course many instances of fraud have not yet been substantiated. Even so, authorities have already uncovered clear evidence of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.
In Pensacola, Florida, Bush supporter Todd Vinson never received the absentee ballot he requested. According to the Associated Press on 11/9/00, it was determined after an investigation that this ballot was received by a third party, filled out with a forged signature, and then sent in. Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, when asked if other absentee ballots might had been intercepted, said, "I agree there may well be many more than just this one".
Much media attention on the issue of voter fraud has been focused on Wisconsin where cigarettes were offered to homeless people who were casting absentee ballots, presumably for Gore. The Gore campaign claims the cigarettes were not used to "buy" votes. On Monday 10/13, the London Times reported a suspected pro-Bush vote fraud operation in Miami involving over 10,000 ballots.
11) Myth: It is highly unusual for judges to intervene after an election. Since the designer of a disputed ballot in Florida is a member of the party contesting the election, a legal challenge is impossible.
Fact: The most fundamental right of a democratic society is the the right to vote, and to have one's vote correctly counted. The legal system exists to ensure that people's rights are not violated. Whether the person committing a violation is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect how that violation should be treated.
Elections are ultimately struggles for political power so it should not be surprising that disputes are often resolved in court. Of course judges can be biased. That is why they must explain their decisions and why bad arguments can be overturned on appeal.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998, in connection with a disputed Volusia County election, that if there is "substantial noncompliance" with election laws and a "reasonable doubt" about whether election results "expressed the will of the voters" then a judge must "void the contested election, even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing." (source: Wall St. Journal, 10/10/00). The Journal indicated that there was little legal precedent for a revote in just one area where an election occurred. It would be more likely for a court to order a new election or to overturn the result.
These issues have arisen in other states as well. In a Massachusetts Democratic primary in 1996 for the US House, the election was so close after recounts that a judge had to make the final decision after examining some of the ballots that were incompletely punched, to determine the intention of the voter. The law clearly dictated that it was the will of the voter that mattered, and the candidate who was behind, William Delahunt, went on to win the final election. Call the Capitol Switchboard if you have any doubts at 202-225-3121.
12) Myth: Richard Nixon's party in 1960 did the honorable thing in not contesting the results of the election.
Fact: According to a column in the Los Angeles Times, 11/10/00, "on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thurston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party's national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, NewJersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called "field checks" in eight of those 11 battlegrounds. In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of aChicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois." Recounts continued into December, but did not succeed in overturning the result of the election.
13) Myth: "Governor Bush is still the winner, subject only to counting the overseas ballots, which traditionally have favored the Republican candidates" -- James Baker, Press Briefing, 11/10/00
Fact: The number of yet-to-be-counted overseas military ballots is likely to be in the range of 500 to 2000, based on the 1996 election in which there were 2,300 oversees absentee ballots overall, with roughly 60% of them coming from people enlisted in the military. According to CNN [11/10/00], the military overseas ballots that arrived before the election were already counted.
The biggest difference from 1996 is that Clinton -- who avoided the draft -- was running against Dole, a decorated military veteran.
In 2000 George W. Bush -- who avoided service in Vietnam and actually lost flying privileges in the Texas Air National Guard -- is running against Al Gore, a veteran who served in Vietnam.
It is just as possible that Gore will gain a few hundred votes from veterans as the other way around. It is also possible that the Gore ticket will pick up votes from Democratic diplomatic appointees, or temporary residents and dual citizens of Israel.
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Motherjones suggests The United States needs International Election Observers like any other Banana Republic. Given that the Republican districts in Florida primarily used OptiScan systems which show significantly less error than the Punch Card Systems used in primarily Democrat area such as Palm Beach county, one wonders if this was just one of many approaches used to skew election results. There have been many accusations from Florida regarding voting irregularities, from a previous Republican mayoral candidate who had a an election overturned from absentee ballot fraud who was involved in an "Get out the vote" absentee ballot vote drive, to a large number of allegations regarding voter intimidation and outright fraud. Welcome to the United States, where we citizens don't have the right to vote unless we agree with the decision of our power brokers.
This is an argument between those who favor strict process and legal rule making versus those who believe that the constitution protects all citizen's voting rights.
A good example of this was St. Louis Missouri, where long lines of voters were turned away at the voting booths after the polls closed. This was after a local judge had ruled that the polls should remain open until after voters had their chance to cast their ballot. However, attorneys for the Bush/Cheney team appealed this decision in Federal court and got the polls closed while voters waited in line.
So, here we are. Choosing between strict rules, such as parsing what the meaning of "is", is versus trying to do the right thing, which I define as giving EVERY registered voter their opportunity to vote.
Bush/Cheney should welcome voters, even those who may vote against them. Why? Because their status as elected officials are now on the line. If they win this election after having turned away voters and misrepresented ballots with a confusing selection process, our very voting process is in jeopardy. And that is a real constitutional crisis.
OK, I'm not a Gore supporter. Frankly, I voted Nader, but don't think that my vote for Nader translates to a vote for Gore by default. It doesn't.
That said, this looks really fishy. Gore easily won the exit polls in Florida, which is why the Major networks declared a Gore victory in Florida early on. Bush then gave a short press conference refusing to concede Florida and then the networks placed the state back in the unknown column.
I've never seen anything like it. Given Jebb Bush, George's brother, as governor in Florida and the disparity between exit polls and the ballot count I really do suspect electoral fraud. It's happened before... many suspect that Kennedy stole the election from Nixon in 1960 because of some strange returns in Chicago... so I'm not saying this to denounce Republicans (as Democrats have been accused of this as well in the past).
The really big irony here is that Gore has won the popular vote, so if Bush does win Florida we'll have an electoral/popular vote split just as the pundits predicated might happen. Though I know of no pundits that predicted a Gore popular win, Bush electoral win. Very weird.
Yup, you heard it here. This Green Massachusetts liberal voted Libertarian because Ten Kennedy is a dufus. He didn't deserve to win that election, but he won by default. Still, I'm glad Howell won some votes. I voted Nader in the general election and have promised myself I'll vote for Greens, Independants, and Libertarians in that order... screw the Democrats and Republicans.
So what if X-Ray lasers or other pulse laser toys can destroy a warhead in space? How the hell are you going to target hundreds of decoy warheads all coming in at once with this technology? Decoys and real warheads look the same in orbit; it's not possible to tell them apart until they enter the atmophere. And at that point: TOO LATE, better bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. SDI is NOT the solution to weapons of mass destruction... fixing broken policy is. BTW: how is SDI going to prevent a terrorist from walking a nuke into the US in their briefcase? What about biological weapons? I would argue they are far more dangerous than nukes at this point.
Don't just consider if one aspect of the technology works... consider the whole policy and whether the entire system meets it's stated goals. SDI FAILS under that presumption.
I've read Greider's Secrets of the Temple as well as other books covering the Federal Reserve and money supply. You're correct in that what you cite does indeed refer to Fed policy, though I completely disagree with your conclusions. Nor do I think that either Grieder (or Friedman for that matter) would consider moving back to the Gold or Silver standard a rational course. Friedman argued for pegging interest rates based on arbitrary M2 levels throughout the economy, not for the Gold standard.
That said, I think the Troll moderation was completely off base. If I see it come around in Meta Moderation I'll vote "Unfair"... hope someone else does too. We need more informed debate on/., and moderators who can't tell the difference should have their privs yanked.
Slashdot Mirror
They sell software and are a business. As such I expect the same service from Loki as any other business out collecting my cash. I've spent ample money with Loki to expect simple customer service like shipping a released product after having committed to an order, instead I was called a liar in a public forum by their customer service rep. You bet I'm pissed, and if expecting basic customer service and simple delivery makes me a "prick" in your eyes, God help you should you ever decide to start a business.
Cheers,
--Maynard
http://dri.sourceforge.net has preliminary ATI Radeon 3D support in CVS right now. Go here for compilation docs. This will, of course, require XFree86-4.0.2.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Thanks for your direct reply. I seem to remember that you had previously stated that Q3 generated disappointing revenue, which is what I based that presumpton upon. I'm pleased to know that you're planning to continue supporting Linux. I hope I'll be able to play Doom 3 using a Radeon card rather than the Nvidia GeForce, as that's what I plan to buy.
Thanks also for your games -- you don't know how much time I've wasted with your Quake games; entertainment money well spent.
Cheers,
--Maynard
And am planning the purchase of a PS2. Frankly, gaming on Linux is a joke. How much do you wanna bet that ID Software isn't going to release Doom 3 for Linux, or allow a port? I'm doubting it.
I own Terminus, Unreal Tournament, and about ten Loki games. I'm pleased with Vivarious Visions (and actually like Terminus)... but as many already know I'm NOT pleased with Loki, or their attitude towards this customer. So I don't buy their products any longer. Where is Alpha Centauri, or any reasonable explanation for this mess? Why do they continue to accept multiple pre-orders on their web page when they know it will hold up the delivery of other games purchased in the same order to their customers?
I'd love to see gaming take off under Linux, and think the software infrastructure should be in place once XFree-4 w/GLX and MesaGL, Linux-2.4 w/DRI, and a standardized base between distributions comes along. I'm guessing this will really fall into place by Redhat-8.0, which means about a year from now or so. Until then games authors are going to be forging a new Linux market and eating the support costs associated with the various incompatibilities between Linux distributions. Until this happens though I've given up. After buying twelve or so games for Linux in the hope that I could completely wipe out Windows in order to enjoy a few good games I've now come full circle and re-installed a Windows partition in order to game again. It's easier than dealing with this mess. Frankly, I'll be buying a PS2 ASAP (God knows when they'll be on store shelves) and am thinking of dumping PC gaming altogether.
Cheers!
--Maynard
I only saw Sun give out StarOffice, nobody else has or had a competetive office suite available either gratis or licensed under the GPL. Where were those OSS zealots out to undercut Corel with a competetive office suite? Koffice and Gnome office is coming, but it'll be a year or two yet.
No. Corel attempted to sell boxed software to the Linux market while a major competetor undercut them by giving out an office suite for free. Just like Microsoft gave out Internet Explorer for free, but at least Sun didn't tie StarOffice into Linux -- they're just tying it into Gnome.
Corel's mistakes have nothing to do with dot-com maddness, and everything to do with a complete lack of strategy and planning. They have a withering market of law firms who continue to reluctantly buy WordPerfect because they like the product and have a history of templates and macros. Corel foolishly spend money and resources building their own distribution to sell in a saturated market, and then attempted to sell a boxed product for several hundred dollars while a free competitor ate their lunch. And on top of it they didn't provide the channel or technical support for migration to their base market. Can you give me a better example of what not to do?
--Maynard
I might also argue that they could have saved the Corel Linux development costs and engineering time if they had partnered with Caldera instead. I suggest Caldera because that kind of marketing strategy is right up their alley. It's too bad. Corel employs some good engineers, and they help the Wine project immensely. But their senior management made some bad mistakes, and didn't stay the course on a market strategy which could potentially work, instead focusing on one thing after the next in a fruitless attempt to grab the quick buck. Welcome to bankruptcy, Corel.
--Maynard
Many may argue, rightly or wrongly, that it was a terrible mistake for Corel to enter the Linux market. Personally, I think it was a good move at the wrong time. They attempted to enter the market with a product line that was under competition from free products, and predictably got horribly beaten within the Linux community.
But it was still a good idea. If they had stayed the course and shifted their base market of law firms over to Linux, they would have saved their base the unnecessary costs of Windows, while at the same time preventing Microsoft from pulling the OS API rug out from under them once they become a serious threat to MSOffice again. The shift to Linux was nothing more than self defense for Corel... they never should have attempted to sell a shrink wrapped box set of Linux and Corel Office. They should have sold the system through partners straight to law firms, and provided the technical support to back it up.
But Corel has been rudderless for far too long. They've attempted a Java office suite which went nowhere. And now, they attempted to enter the Linux market rather than use Linux to shift their own market to their own turf, and now they're back to square one. What a shame, since WordPerfect is still a damn good wordprocessor.
--Maynard
Because computers most certainly haven't gained exponential speed increases over the last 10 years. If that were the case systems would be more than 32 times faster than ten years ago. What we have is a huge increase in marketed clockspeed, but I don't see a significant increase in system performance after Intel separated internal CPU clock speed from the system bus. Do you?
--Maynard
People keep pointing to Moore's Law every time Intel ups the Mhz bar, without considering that Moore was referring to transistor density on the mask and not clock speed. Anyway, in the time Moore formed his "law" there were no pipelined architectures or multiple bus speeds... everything was one clock tick per instruction fetch and one bus speed.
I note that the change from 33Mhz to 66Mhz and 120Mhz 486 and Pentium systems were primarily the result of clock doubling and tippling, and not main bus speed advances. This has been the trend across the '90s, which is why as CPU clock speed increased performance enhancements per release cycle diminished. Yeaaaa, we're about to break the barrier with 2Ghz systems that are no more than two to three times faster than my PPRO-200. Big deal. Disk I/O is not significantly faster -- though transfer speed from disk cache is great (so what), FSB memory bus speed is a bit faster, and the main I/O and expansion bus is twice as fast (33Mhz to 66Mhz).
This is not a significant advancement, which is why I'm still using my Dual PPRO-200 system quite happily.
--Maynard
That was a highly informative post, Mr. Anonymous Coward. Too bad only one moderator decided to +1 it up. What you describe could be done in BSD or Linux with a userland display service communicating to either the video metal or a kernel space frame buffer device, but it would have to be pervasively threaded along with all the application widget libraries, and it would be a completely different protocol and design from X. Actually, it sounds pretty cool. :-) Is it network transparent, and designed to be remote displayable?
Still, as far as a single serial event stream is concerned, I doubt X is any more faster or slower than most others. Though I have to admit, the design you describe (in only a few paragraphs) makes me want to take a closer look at Be, if only to get a basic understanding of it's underlying mechanisms. Given what you wrote, it appears different, and in certain circumstances, more efficient, than X. I'd be particularly interested to read any knowledgeable posts which contradict your post, in terms of efficiency (that is, I believe that what you wrote is technically accurate, but wonder if others contradict you on performance).
Thanks again for your reply.
--Maynad
Just how does squirting a serialized display protocol across a UNIX domain socket slow down X any worse than GDI (the Windows low level display protocol)? I can't speak for how Be handles display events, but if it serializes its display protcol it's no different.
True: X has some brain damage when it comes to supporting complex shapes in the protocol. And certainly the current crop of free X servers need hardware accelerated alpha channel blending and font/glyph anti-aliasing. But that's not a problem with X inherently, and all these problems can be resolved by adding X protocol extensions.
There were certainly better network display protocol designs before X; NeWS comes to mind. Display Postscript is yet another, though that was released after X. Hardware accelerated anti-aliasing and alpha channel support I believe is slated to ship with XFree-4.0.2. Then the userspace widget libraries will have to support those features, which will probably take another year to sort out. On top of that we'll need better fonts designed, which is really the crux of the problem since the default fonts which ship with X are just terrible. Maybe by then the GnuStep team will have released their Display Ghostscript X extension, which IMO is the best way to go.
None of these solutions will have much impact on speeding up the core X protocol. Mostly because on a local system it's pretty damn fast.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Look, as soon as the CYGWIN folks release XFree 4.0 for Windows (which they're about to do), Windows folks will have a high quality free X server available. From there it's a simple jump to Gnome and KDE applications on Windows. That's the migration path.
A large IT shop can't afford to simply dump Windows and move their entire userbase to Linux in one fell swoop. There's training costs to consider, application testing for internal conformity within the organization, plus security and productivity issues. If you're managing several hundred to a thousand desktops you can't afford to segment off a department just to try out a new OS, nor can you afford to just move everyone in enmasse given the potential risks involved; what if it doesn't work? You need a migration path whereby both systems can be tested and either junked in case of failure. Successful IT shops plan for failure otherwise they experience failure.
Microsoft has done a good job at killing off potential migration paths away from Windows by either buying up competitors or squashing them with anti-competitive means. See: Netscape. This is a major threat to Windows because within a year or two it will allow an IT manager the possibility to deploy GNOME and its applications on the desktop and test them without being dependent on their success. Combine this with OpenOffice and Gnome-1.4/2.0 and the Free Software community will have provided a safe migration path off of Windows. Most IT organizations are risk averse, but they're not stupid about unnecessary expense. If they can get away from the Windows tax without affecting productivity, watch the world dump Windows.
Cheers,
J. Maynard Gelinas
Yes, I wrote that article and I stand by what I wrote. Your characterization aside, Loki made a promise to me to resolve an issue I had with an order which they broke. Then they never fixed their web page, allowing others to make the same mistake again and again without even letting their customers know beforehand just what might happen. In a nutshell, if one purchases a pre-release title and in the same order purchases something else (even several titles), because of issues with their distributor whatever else was purchased will get back ordered along with the pre-release until that pre-release ships. This is right off of their web page, with no warning whatsoever. Months later, the problem with their web page still hasn't been fixed, nor has the game in question been released (though I admit that's a separate issue). I note that anyone who ordered other product along with Alpha Centauri five months ago would still not have receieved any product. This is no way to maintain customer friendly relations.
Have you ever experienced problems like this with L.L Bean or Amazon? Neither have I. Welcome to the world of business, where customer service matters.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Loki still hasn't released Alpha Centauri, four months after they claimed it went gold. Anyone who purchased SMAC along with another title(s) still hasn't received their other title(s) because of brain damaged policies with Loki's distributor, Digital River. They've never given an adequate explanation as to why, nor have they attempted to fix their web site to prevent those kinds of purchases in the future.
I bought ten games from Loki, partly because I like the idea of games on Linux, and partly because I wanted some games. But I won't ever buy a product from a company I believe has lied to me. Period.
Supporting 3D hardware under Linux will ease over the next year. The loadable driver modules in XFree 4 is a much better solution to XFree 3's separate X server binaries for various cards, and this will ease the support headaches distributors and games manufacturers have had over the last year. So, please, let's see some other porting companies and multiplatform content creators enter the market. I bought Terminus and have been happy with that game. I'll buy others if I like the demo. There's certainly a hard-core linux community that will buy games right now. Though it's true that the market won't open up until after XFree 4 and 3D support becomes a common component of every distribution.
J. Maynard Gelinas
When the KDE team added V2 RPMs for Redhat-6.x I decided to deploy KDE-2 along with Helix-Gnome for a nearly 200 host desktop rollout. My feeling is that as head SA it's really not my decision to tell people what desktop to use, it's up to them to tell me what desktop they need to be productive; and anyway if I can offer both Helix and KDE-2, well then let the users decide. I really wasn't planning on this since I didn't expect the KDE team to support RH-6.x given how much trouble I had attempting to compile the source tarballs when they announced the first release; I figured it was brokenness in the egcs-2.91 g++ compiler and just gave up.
Boy, am I glad they decided to support RH-6.2, I've been fiddling with it and like the desktop a whole bunch. My users are happy since many of them come from Europe and prefer KDE. The others from America most to prefer Gnome -- now both need not feel slighted.
The only thing I seriously dislike about KDE is the lack of Scheme/Guile bindings to the toolkit... sorry, but I just love Gnome because of that!
Cheers,
--Maynard
I can't believe Adobe is really not moving forward with Frame for Linux. I know several companies in the Cambridge area that are all mostly Linux desktop organizations now, most having migrated from various UNIXen, and were planning on migrating their technical writers over to Linux once Frame shipped proper. Idiots. These guys are NEVER going to use Word for their technical publications, and are now stuck either buying their tech writers Ultra 5's or Windows boxen.
It seems like Adobe has decided to only market their Windows product base while letting their UNIX tools languish. They don't realize that it's the UNIX and Macintosh tools which offer the long term revenue stream; unless they just want to get bought out by MS. Look at how they've killed Display Postscript... I don't think even Sun can buy and integrate DPS into OpenWindows any longer. And clearly Apple couldn't get DPS for Quartz, they had to move to their own internally written DPDF model. Thank God for GnuStep and their GPS X extension; talk about a critical X infrastructure project which gets NO attention.
Hey Adobe, how does it feel to piss off your customers? You bet these guys are going to migrate the hell away from Frame once a real competitor emerges on Linux. The next rev or two of Kword is looking like it could be a real Frame killer under Linux... Adobe, get you head out of your ass and start marketing your products where the customers are!
Jeesh.
--Maynard
And ironically, punch cards have a 2%-5% margin of error compared to a .2% error rate for the OptiScan system to which you refer. However, the authors of this FAQ make their point quite clear and provide a reference. I believe that since at least some of them are attourneys, and understand the statute as professionals, they have better credibility than you.
Here is a book called Vote Scam which purports that between the manufacturers of voting equipment and VNS (Voter News Service), just about any election can be rigged. Interestingly, the author points out that all of the voting tabulation equipment is run on proprietary hardware with proprietary software which no one will offer up for public peer review. Does anyone here honestly think that closed source software running inside our voting booths is appropriate given how critical this equipment is to the foundation of our democracy? I don't know if the allegations made in the book are true, but I definately believe we need to lobby congress to pass a law MANDATING that all voting systems be completely transparent and run with open hardware and software in a manner which allows for public peer review. Yup, that means Free Software/Open Source voting booths.
I found this on a post in a kuro5hin.org story which has since been killed. I reposted it in another kuro5hin story and repost it here again. References for these statements are to be found in a link at the end of the FAQ.
/pe ople/pagre/13-myths.html
.edu/people/pagre/myth-references.html
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[This draft #4 was prepared by Rich Cowan (rcowan@lesley.edu) with help from Paul Rosenberg, Dan Kohn, Jonathan Prince, Marc Sobel, subscribers to the Red Rock Eater News Service and the electronic mail discussion florida-recount-discuss@egroups.com, and the Yale Law School Student Campaign for a Legal Election, 127 Wall Street New Haven, CT 06511 -- spin@pantheon.yale.edu]
1) Myth: Al Gore has a responsibility to concede the election.
Fact: A 330 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast in Florida is incredibly close! It is roughly equivalent to a 1-vote margin in a city with 40,000 people and 18,000 voters. It is extremely rare for an election this close NOT to be contested for several weeks until a manual recount can take place, with observers from both sides taking part and inspecting ballots. This kind of detailed recount has not yet taken place.
According to the US Constitution and the Laws of Florida, it is the responsibility of officials in Florida to certify the election results. November 17 is the deadline for absentee ballots sent from overseas to arrive. Since the election is close enough in Florida, Oregon, and New Mexico to be affected by absentee ballots, the results in those states cannot be certified before that date.
2) Myth: the number of "spoiled ballots" in Palm Beach County was typical. In a press briefing televised live on all networks on 11/9/00, Karl Rove of the Bush campaign compared the 14,872 invalidated ballots in the 1996 Presidential race to 19,120 ballots for President that were spoiled in this election.
Fact: the Bush campaign was comparing apples and oranges. There were actually 29,702 invalidated ballots this year in Palm Beach County. This is almost twice the number in 1996. "19,120" refers to only those 2000 ballots which were thrown out for voting for two Presidential candidates. The remaining 10,582 ballots had no choice recorded for President.
According to the Palm Beach County elections office (http://www.pbcelections.org), voters this year were not confused at all by the rest of the ballot. For example, less than 1% of U.S. Senate votes were invalidated because of multiple punches, compared with over 4% in the Presidential contest.
3) Myth: The Palm Beach ballot is definitely illegal due to the presence of punch holes to the left of some of the candidates.
Fact: According to the Secretary of State's office, there is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. This view has been contested by hundreds of Florida voters. The final decision on the legality of the ballot is likely to be made in court, as long as this issue could have an effect on the election.
It is possible that the ballot could be ruled illegal on other grounds, such as the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act or the Americans With Disabilities Act.
4) Myth: "The more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting tomachine counting." -- Former Sec. of State James Baker, speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign at a press briefing televised by all networks on 11/10/00.
Fact: In 1997, George W. Bush signed into law a bill stating that hand recounts were the preferred method in a close election in Texas. The bill, "HB 330", mandated that representatives of all parties be present to prevent fraud. Laws establishing rights and procedures for handrecounts also exist in Florida (see Title IX, Chapter 102). In fact, the Orlando Sentinel, (orlandosentinel.com) reported that a partial hand count of Presidential ballots this year was ordered by Republicans in Seminole County, where Bush led Gore. This count took place on 11/9 and 11/10, widening Bush's lead by 98 votes. The Bush campaign did not complain about this hand count; nor did it complain about the hand count on 11/11/00 which put Bush slightly ahead of Gore in New Mexico.
There do exist machine voting systems which are fairly accurate, but antiquated punch card systems are notoriously inaccurate. They were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1997 by Secretary of State William Galvin after a Congressional primary that was also "too close to call". The problem is that if the punched-out pieces of cardboard are not completely removed from the punch card, they can obstruct the card reader and the votes will not be counted. A manual recount of such cards can clearly reveal the voter's intentions.
5) Myth: The process is unfair because hand recounts were held only in liberal areas of Florida, where Gore stands to pick up the most votes.
Fact: It is true that a statewide recount would be more fair, and the Bush campaign has every right to request one. According to Florida law, hand recount requests must come from the campaigns, not from the state. To fail to request what is commonly referred to as a "defensive recount" in conservative areas of Florida, they may be making a tactical blunder that will cost them the election.
It is also true that there were voting irregularities in the counties where the Gore campaign requested recounts.
6) Myth: "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3407 votes there. According to the Florida Department of State, 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County are registered to the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, an increase of 110% since the 1996 presidential election" -- Ari Fleischer of the Bush Campaign, 11/9/00. The 2,000 votes received by the Reformparty candidate for Congress indicate that party's strength in Palm Beach County (James Baker on Meet the Press, 11/12/00).
Fact: Of those 16,695 voters, only 337 (2 percent) are in the Reform Party according to Florida state records. The Reform party candidate for Congress, John McGuire, is connected to a more centrist wing of the Reform Party, predating Buchanan's involvement. An analysis of his support indicates that it came largely from reform-minded Ralph Nader voters.
Regarding Buchanan's vote total, the Washington Post reported that his vote percentage in Palm Beach county was four times as high at the polls as in absentee voting. Even Buchanan himself admitted on 11/8/00 on the Today Show that many of his votes actually "belonged to Al Gore". So did his campaign manager, Bay Buchanan.
7) Myth: If Gore (or Bush) ends up winning the popular vote, he really should win the election even if he loses Florida and other states.
Fact: This is not the way the U.S. Constitution is written. The Electoral College decision, imperfect as it may be, is the only one that matters. It may be possible to reform or eliminate the electoral college in the future, so that small states would no longer receive extra electoralvotes out of proportion to their population. But until this change is made by Constitutional amendment, the Electoral College is still the law of the land.
8) Myth: The Cook County, Illinois ballot from the home district of Gore campaign chair Richard Daleyis similar to the "butterfly" ballot used in Palm Beach County (reported by Don Evans, 11/8/00)
Fact: According to the Chicago Daily Herald on11/10/00, the ballots in Chicago which had"facing pages" were referendum questions which only had two punch holes, Yes and No.
9) Myth: The election process in Florida outside of Palm Beach County was fair.
Fact: Actually, thousands of irregularities in over a half-dozen categories have already been reported:
-Ballots ran out in certain precincts according tothe LA Times on 11/10/00.
-Carpools of African-American voters were stopped by police, according to the Los Angeles Times (11/10/00). In some cases, officers demanded to see a "taxi license".
-Polls closed with people still in line in Tampa, according to the Associated Press.
-In Osceola County, ballots did not line up properly, possibly causing Gore voters to have their ballots cast for Harry Browne. Also, Hispanic voters were required to produce two forms of ID when only one is required. (source: Associated Press)
-Dozens, and possibly hundreds, of voters in Broward County were unable to vote because the Supervisor of Elections did not have enough staff to verify changes of address.
-Voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-cons, according to Mother Jones magazine.
-According to Reuters news service (11/8/00), many voters received pencils rather than pens when they voted, in violation of state law.
-According to the Miami Herald, many Haitian-American voters were turned away from precincts where they were voting for the first time (11/10/00)
-According to Feed Magazine, the mayoral candidate whose election in Miami was overturned due to voter fraud, Xavier Suarez, said he was involved in preparing absentee ballots for George W. Bush. (11/9/00)
-According to tompaine.com, CBS's Dan Rather reported a possible computer error in Volusia County, Florida, where James Harris, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, won 9,888 votes. He won 583 in the rest of the state. [11/9/00] County-level results for Florida are available at cnn.com.
-Many African-American first-time voters who registered at motor vehicles offices or in campus voter registration drives did not appear on the voting rolls, according to a hearing conducted by the NAACP and televised on C-SPAN on 11/12/00.
10) Myth: "No evidence of vote fraud, either in the original vote or in the recount, has been presented." -- James Baker, representing the Bush campaign on 11/10/00, in a Florida briefing.
Fact: The election was held just last week, so of course many instances of fraud have not yet been substantiated. Even so, authorities have already uncovered clear evidence of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.
In Pensacola, Florida, Bush supporter Todd Vinson never received the absentee ballot he requested. According to the Associated Press on 11/9/00, it was determined after an investigation that this ballot was received by a third party, filled out with a forged signature, and then sent in. Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, when asked if other absentee ballots might had been intercepted, said, "I agree there may well be many more than just this one".
Much media attention on the issue of voter fraud has been focused on Wisconsin where cigarettes were offered to homeless people who were casting absentee ballots, presumably for Gore. The Gore campaign claims the cigarettes were not used to "buy" votes. On Monday 10/13, the London Times reported a suspected pro-Bush vote fraud operation in Miami involving over 10,000 ballots.
11) Myth: It is highly unusual for judges to intervene after an election. Since the designer of a disputed ballot in Florida is a member of the party contesting the election, a legal challenge is impossible.
Fact: The most fundamental right of a democratic society is the the right to vote, and to have one's vote correctly counted. The legal system exists to ensure that people's rights are not violated. Whether the person committing a violation is a Democrat or a Republican does not affect how that violation should be treated.
Elections are ultimately struggles for political power so it should not be surprising that disputes are often resolved in court. Of course judges can be biased. That is why they must explain their decisions and why bad arguments can be overturned on appeal.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998, in connection with a disputed Volusia County election, that if there is "substantial noncompliance" with election laws and a "reasonable doubt" about whether election results "expressed the will of the voters" then a judge must "void the contested election, even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing." (source: Wall St. Journal, 10/10/00). The Journal indicated that there was little legal precedent for a revote in just one area where an election occurred. It would be more likely for a court to order a new election or to overturn the result.
These issues have arisen in other states as well. In a Massachusetts Democratic primary in 1996 for the US House, the election was so close after recounts that a judge had to make the final decision after examining some of the ballots that were incompletely punched, to determine the intention of the voter. The law clearly dictated that it was the will of the voter that mattered, and the candidate who was behind, William Delahunt, went on to win the final election. Call the Capitol Switchboard if you have any doubts at 202-225-3121.
12) Myth: Richard Nixon's party in 1960 did the honorable thing in not contesting the results of the election.
Fact: According to a column in the Los Angeles Times, 11/10/00, "on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thurston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party's national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, NewJersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called "field checks" in eight of those 11 battlegrounds. In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of aChicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois." Recounts continued into December, but did not succeed in overturning the result of the election.
13) Myth: "Governor Bush is still the winner, subject only to counting the overseas ballots, which traditionally have favored the Republican candidates" -- James Baker, Press Briefing, 11/10/00
Fact: The number of yet-to-be-counted overseas military ballots is likely to be in the range of 500 to 2000, based on the 1996 election in which there were 2,300 oversees absentee ballots overall, with roughly 60% of them coming from people enlisted in the military. According to CNN [11/10/00], the military overseas ballots that arrived before the election were already counted.
The biggest difference from 1996 is that Clinton -- who avoided the draft -- was running against Dole, a decorated military veteran.
In 2000 George W. Bush -- who avoided service in Vietnam and actually lost flying privileges in the Texas Air National Guard -- is running against Al Gore, a veteran who served in Vietnam.
It is just as possible that Gore will gain a few hundred votes from veterans as the other way around. It is also possible that the Gore ticket will pick up votes from Democratic diplomatic appointees, or temporary residents and dual citizens of Israel.
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Jacob Everist
jeverist@fairtunes.com
http://tropus.sourceforge.net
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Motherjones suggests The United States needs International Election Observers like any other Banana Republic. Given that the Republican districts in Florida primarily used OptiScan systems which show significantly less error than the Punch Card Systems used in primarily Democrat area such as Palm Beach county, one wonders if this was just one of many approaches used to skew election results. There have been many accusations from Florida regarding voting irregularities, from a previous Republican mayoral candidate who had a an election overturned from absentee ballot fraud who was involved in an "Get out the vote" absentee ballot vote drive, to a large number of allegations regarding voter intimidation and outright fraud. Welcome to the United States, where we citizens don't have the right to vote unless we agree with the decision of our power brokers.
This just disgusts me.
This is an argument between those who favor strict process and legal rule making versus those who believe that the constitution protects all citizen's voting rights.
A good example of this was St. Louis Missouri, where long lines of voters were turned away at the voting booths after the polls closed. This was after a local judge had ruled that the polls should remain open until after voters had their chance to cast their ballot. However, attorneys for the Bush/Cheney team appealed this decision in Federal court and got the polls closed while voters waited in line.
So, here we are. Choosing between strict rules, such as parsing what the meaning of "is", is versus trying to do the right thing, which I define as giving EVERY registered voter their opportunity to vote.
Bush/Cheney should welcome voters, even those who may vote against them. Why? Because their status as elected officials are now on the line. If they win this election after having turned away voters and misrepresented ballots with a confusing selection process, our very voting process is in jeopardy. And that is a real constitutional crisis.
OK, I'm not a Gore supporter. Frankly, I voted Nader, but don't think that my vote for Nader translates to a vote for Gore by default. It doesn't.
That said, this looks really fishy. Gore easily won the exit polls in Florida, which is why the Major networks declared a Gore victory in Florida early on. Bush then gave a short press conference refusing to concede Florida and then the networks placed the state back in the unknown column.
I've never seen anything like it. Given Jebb Bush, George's brother, as governor in Florida and the disparity between exit polls and the ballot count I really do suspect electoral fraud. It's happened before... many suspect that Kennedy stole the election from Nixon in 1960 because of some strange returns in Chicago... so I'm not saying this to denounce Republicans (as Democrats have been accused of this as well in the past).
The really big irony here is that Gore has won the popular vote, so if Bush does win Florida we'll have an electoral/popular vote split just as the pundits predicated might happen. Though I know of no pundits that predicted a Gore popular win, Bush electoral win. Very weird.
Yup, you heard it here. This Green Massachusetts liberal voted Libertarian because Ten Kennedy is a dufus. He didn't deserve to win that election, but he won by default. Still, I'm glad Howell won some votes. I voted Nader in the general election and have promised myself I'll vote for Greens, Independants, and Libertarians in that order... screw the Democrats and Republicans.
So what if X-Ray lasers or other pulse laser toys can destroy a warhead in space? How the hell are you going to target hundreds of decoy warheads all coming in at once with this technology? Decoys and real warheads look the same in orbit; it's not possible to tell them apart until they enter the atmophere. And at that point: TOO LATE, better bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. SDI is NOT the solution to weapons of mass destruction... fixing broken policy is. BTW: how is SDI going to prevent a terrorist from walking a nuke into the US in their briefcase? What about biological weapons? I would argue they are far more dangerous than nukes at this point.
Don't just consider if one aspect of the technology works... consider the whole policy and whether the entire system meets it's stated goals. SDI FAILS under that presumption.
I've read Greider's Secrets of the Temple as well as other books covering the Federal Reserve and money supply. You're correct in that what you cite does indeed refer to Fed policy, though I completely disagree with your conclusions. Nor do I think that either Grieder (or Friedman for that matter) would consider moving back to the Gold or Silver standard a rational course. Friedman argued for pegging interest rates based on arbitrary M2 levels throughout the economy, not for the Gold standard.
/., and moderators who can't tell the difference should have their privs yanked.
That said, I think the Troll moderation was completely off base. If I see it come around in Meta Moderation I'll vote "Unfair"... hope someone else does too. We need more informed debate on