Yep. In fact, patents can literally quantify the value of an idea. The case the founders had in mind is that somebody has an idea, but not necessarily the capital to bring it to fruition. So he brings it to somebody with capital and they buy the patent off of him (or her; the first patent granted to a woman was 1809). Now the patent has a literal dollar value.
The inventor wins because he has money; the capitalist wins because he has a profitable product; the public wins because they get something they want.
Sucks that the concept has become just this side of completely useless (and many here on slashdot would claim that it's well to the other side).
That's right. What the movie doesn't make clear is that it was sped up by a factor of 10,000, because solar panels that size result in only a trivial amount of thrust.
No kidding. One of my key searches is "somewhere in this directory is a piece of code for a variable which is a very common word otherwise".
I think the idea was that Google is so fast you don't need to limit searches to a single directory. In fact I gather that long-term the goal is to eliminate the hierarchical file structure entirely and replace it with searching. At least I think that's Macintosh's goal. There's a lot to be said for eliminating the effort of a priori categorization, but even if it would work (and I'm rather dubious) it's too soon to phase it in. I still have to resort to Microsoft's search tool (which I find incredibly flaky).
Google's never let me down before; everything they've ever come up with impresses me (even if I do still prefer babelfish to Google's collection of language tools.) So maybe the next beta will be worth the effort of having it around.
And the reason I trust google is that they're telling me they're scanning my email. If Yahoo or Microsoft wanted to there's nothing preventing them from doing it, surreptitiously.
I believe Google when they say that all they want to do is target ads at me. If they, or Yahoo or Microsoft, wanted to really invade my privacy it wouldn't require continuously scanning my mail; they'd just read it once by human and learn whatever they want to learn.
Or if the FBI decided it was time to check up on my little... well, you know: there's my mail, all in Google's or MSN's or Yahoo's files, and nobody's privacy policy is going to save my butt.
If I were really concerned about my privacy on email I'd send everything encrypted. Beyond that nobody's privacy policy will help. Meantime, security through obscurity is about my best hope (and I can think of few better ways to get the FBI interested in me than to send everything encrypted).
I know gas explosions are hard to cause. I've been around plenty of ignited gasoline.
Once we were having difficulty getting a fire lit in a wood stove in a cabin we'd rented. It was obvious that the reason was that the flue wasn't drawing, but because the roof was icy we'd hoped for some other solution.
When the guys from the next cabin over came and threw kerosene on the fire and it just lay there we finally gave up and went on the roof to clean the chimney screen.
Yeah, I know it's not entirely relevant: the reason the kerosene was because of the lack of oxygen, not its liquid phase. But it was certainly an object lesson that liquid products don't go up all that easily; even the trivial vacuum of a smoke-filled can was able to douse kerosene flames.
But back on topic, I'm totally with you that alternative energy sources are extremely important. Possibly more important than energy distribution, since we're really good at moving around electricity. But storage is a problem, especially since some alternative energy sources (wind, solar, and to a lesser degree coal and nuclear) are best dumped out in the middle of nowhere.
Any idea whether it's more efficient overall to dump a joule of electricity into a lead-acid battery or to crack water into hydrogen? That's probably not the most relevant question, because there are so many other inefficiencies involved: the effort of pressurizing the hydrogen, the weight of lead-acid batteries vs. the weight of pressurized containers for hydrogen, the loss of long electric lines.
I honestly don't know the answers to these questions, and my cynical self doesn't particularly trust the US President when he tells me hydrogen is the way to go. It would suck big time to invest massive infrastructure in hydrogen distribution and hydrogen-cracking plants only to discover that we should have gone electric all along. There is plenty of research to be done on both sides.
The idea is to crack water with whatever's available: coal, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar. There are upsides and downsides to each.
We will still probably need foreign oil for a while: plastics, medicines, older cars, etc. I've heard that the US could be self-sufficient with a trivial decrease in fuel consumption, but I'm not buying it. But it would take only a small decrease in consumption to put a big hurt on OPEC, which is fine with me.
Were there any actual problems with hydrogen leaks?
The advantage of hydrogen is that although it does ignite more easily, it also dissipates more easily. And since it's much lighter than air it tends to dissipate up rather than out, so the worst damage might occur up above a traffic accident.
It sounds like it might depend on the kind of fault that occurs. A puncture will tend to spray a stream of ignitable death, whereas a rupture might dissipate into a hot-but-not-deadly ball.
I don't know how this plays in actual practice. Presumably your father does. If he wouldn't say that hydrogen is safer, would he say it's "as safe"? There are so many advantages to hydrogen (the key one for me being that it doesn't require sending money to totalitarian regimes) that I'd like to see it tried.
Even if it reduces our imports only 25%, since oil is their only product it would have a serious negative effect on their economies. I certainly can't guarantee that destabilizing those countries would have good effects rather than bad ones, but they upset me so much that I'm willing to try.
Is this the same Indiana Jones who'd tear the tunic off a centuries-old corpse to make a torch rather than go to the effort of going back up for a flashlight?
I adore the movies (well, the first and third) but I've always thought he was a lousy archeologist?
There have certainly been times when accepted science was wrong and some maverick was right. Galileo comes to mind, as do Newton and Einstein.
But for every Galileo, there are a thousand nutballs who are convinced that Science is holding them back to defend its orthodoxy. No matter how carefully you explain the flaws and inconsistencies in their theory, they'll insist you've been blinded or are perhaps conspiring against them. They are often completely ignorant of current practice, insisting that to come to the right answer you must necessarily come from Outside the System. If you disagree you must be Oppressing Them, and that like Galileo they will be proven right after they're dead.
It must drive practicing scientists insane, especially the physicists, who are probably deluged with papers proving Einstein wrong with math no more complicated than algebra.
I'm not saying that there is no more room in science for revolutionaries and mavericks. Accepted theory in any field is well known to be incomplete at least, and possibly wrong. But it's time-consuming to reply to people who have no training in the field. The best revolutionaries come from inside, not from outside, because they have the language with which to explain to their colleagues what the new theory means.
Yeah, you could be right. You could be Galileo; you could have a completely new theory that upsets everything I believe in. But the odds are against you.
I've always wanted to build a dead-man-switch email system. Something that pings you every week to see if you're still alive, and if you don't respond it sends emails. Something to protect you if you're blackmailing somebody, or let your boss know what you really think of him now that you're beyond retribution. Or maybe just a sappy final love letter to your wife. That sort of thing.
But boy would you have to build safeguards into that. "Uh, sorry, I never meant to admit my homosexual attraction to you, but see I went on vacation and forgot about the deadman switch..."
Does the executive branch get to claim unilaterally from claiming that the investigation is ongoing, or does some judge get to investigate that claim? If not, is there any check on the executive branch's ability to make that claim for anything they choose to seize?
I left my elitist card at home; I'm genuinely curious.
As far as I can tell from RTFA, this is just the government's response to the motion; a judge still gets to rule. Yes?
Really? I suppose it might be true. But where I live (Washington, DC) we've got country, Latino, Black, classic rock, rap+R&B, soft rock, oldies, jazz, bluegrass, clasical, and only a couple of Clear Channel stations. (As well as WHFS, which is intermittently alternative but often just top 40.)
Perhaps one wants a better diversity of rock/pop styles. Certainly those stations which are Clear Channel-owned are massively generic. But we seem to have pretty good diversity of styles.
There are other styles that can't be found reliably: techno, house, industrial (which all sound the same to me anyway). It's lacking a really good alternative station (which is odd since there are several major universities here.) But I find that "alternative" and "indie" have about the same meaning as "third party" used to in politics: everybody wants something different from the mainstream but don't sufficiently agree with each other to put forth a single serious alternative.
It's often beem said on Slashdot that the real reason for the decline is the decline of the quality of the music. That's possibly true, but I'd like to know how a reliable study could report on it objectively.
Music tastes are extremely subjective. If anything, the objective measures would tend to suggest that the music is getting better, in the sense that it's been focus-grouped to death. Somebody out there is saying, "Yes, we like it. We like it so much we want to copy it off the Internet or from a friend's CD."
It seems likely that in fact the focus-grouping and hit-promoting have lowered the quality of the music to a least common denominator, but I'd love to know how this industry report went about measuring that. In the end that measurement will describe how the music changes from here. The executives who make the decisions aren't artists and don't use artistic judgment to decide what to produce. They look at numbers and poll likely group members to see what will sell. They know that people will only buy what they like, so I'd love to know what measure of "like" they're using for this study that's different from the ones they're already using.
Somehow that doesn't seem like a problem. Hundreds of CDs are released a year. If 90% are shit, that means there are dozens available which might be worth listening to.
The world is full of people, and it doesn't seem wrong to have less than 10% of music aimed at me.
Agreed. The point of my post was not that coal power is da shiznit, but that those who were worried about the risks of nuclear power weren't totally off-base, as the top-level poster implied.
I'd love to see this sort of decision made on a dispassionate basis by experts on the risks and rewards of all approaches. Yeah, right. (You'll have to forgive my cynicism; there's been a national election between my original post and now.)
Ya might want to listen to the reviews before deciding whether or not to see it. Yeah, the first two sucked, but the second one was better than the first. And this is the one with all the tie-ins to Ep IV, which for my money was still the best of the lot.
And the special effects will be a lot prettier if you see 'em on a big screen with the good sound.
So let it come out, listen to your friends, and then decide. Cuz it would suck to miss out on a good movie just because you want to stick it to Lucas.
I wish I were a Republican troll; if I were I wouldn't be so damn depressed today.
No, I was merely pointing out that there were many people who felt that from their point of view, a vote for Kerry was a vote for gay marriage. I disagree with them, but that's not the point. The point was that Kerry seems to have lost, neither fairly nor squarely but at least the polling machines and the exit polls seem to agree that he lost for real.
For one thing, many people believed that John Kerry supported gay marriage, perhaps due to stunts like this one, where a phone campaign said Kerry supported gay marriage. (The stunt is ugly not only because it was wrong on Kerry's position, but also because the phone call implied it was coming from a pro-Kerry camp.)
Ugly politicking aside, Kerry does support civil unions, which many people are against anyway, since it would support government sanctioning of homosexuality in their minds. He comes from a state where gay marriage is legal, and he has never spoken particularly against that.
So if you're homophobic, Bush was definitely your man. If you were pro-gay-marriage, you'd have to go look over at the Libertarians. Kerry was somewhere in between, with his civil unions.
Totally agreed; the real issue is that they just don't like gay people. But that's the real basis of moralty: people's gut instincts as to what is right and wrong.
As you say, there is a progression in this country towards more freedom for more people. It takes time for attitudes to change. Polls say that the 18-24 year old are far, far more likely to support gay marriage than their parents are, and their parents. So by the time today's children are running the country we may well see homosexuality, and their right to marry, accepted as a matter of course.
But somehow "be patient" feels hollow; all of my friends (gay and straight) will be dead by then.
Playing devil's advocate, what makes you trust the machines they used to count those big paper ballots? Or are they really doing it by hand?
The advantage of paper ballots is that they _can_ be recounted; it's harder to mess with a physical artifact. But 2000 demonstrated a lot of disadvantages: overvoting, undervoting, misvoting. One the (Diebold) machine I used, it presented a screen at the end which said (effectively): You voted for John Kerry, Steny Hoyer, and Barbara Mikulski. Right?
What happened after that I can't really say, and I'm plenty dubious (though here in Maryland the polls were far enough apart that they'd have to be fools to try to steal it here; it would be obvious).
For me the real advantage of paper ballots is that I don't have to wait in line forever for one. We can all do them in parallel. I waited 90 minutes to vote yesterday (for all the good it did me).
Uh, the fact that the Bible-believing 50+% of Americans find homosexuality immoral. I disagree with them, completely and utterly and totally, but their moral code says that condoning homosexuality would be immoral, and that sanctioning a marriage between them would be condoning their behavior.
Morals are pretty tricky things; they are what you say they are. I don't have to like it but I do have to accept as a fact that many people have moral codes I find abhorrent.
Please, don't exaggerate. I'm depressed enough about the election as it is.
There wasn't "no reason". Hussein was clearly a homicidal maniac who oppressed the bejeezus out of some of his people. He clearly wanted WMDs, and would likely have used them if he could get them. Nor did he make it clear that he didn't have them; he acted very suspiciously with respect to the inspectors. The war ended a set of sanctions which were killing thousands of children while still permitting Saddam to make billions selling oil on the black market.
Sufficient reasons? No, not hardly. Clearly the evidence was exaggerated to press the case. Clearly the war has been handled badly. But to say that there was absolutely no reason is to oversimplify a complex world nearly as badly as a certain world leader with a vegetable-themed name.
Now if you'll pardon me I'll go back to planning which country I'm going to escape to.
I woudln't say I have "no idea". The machines give roughly the same answers as the exit polls. That's a crude measure, but it implies that there wasn't widespread fraud.
Could it be that the machines were programmed to swing.5% of the votes to Bush in order to put him over the top in any Florida-like situation without anybody noticing? Sure, and for that reason I'd love to see an audit. Hell, I'd love to see a paper trail.
There could well have been machine fraud, but the exit polling suggests even if there was it was unlikely to change the result. Fraud would be a massive scandal, more than enough to unseat the President, which would be somewhat ironic because according to several other measures he won that election without it.
I wish I had some mod points for you, but instead I'll just have to second you. The national results pretty well match the exit polling results, and the national polls for the past few days. Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
I still wish that there were some way of doing a recount, even though it doesn't appear to be necessary in this case. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if there were shennanigans; I've heard of various ugly games played to influence voters. But here it seems that the Deibold machines did their jobs. I stil don't trust them but I'm not going to dispute the results.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. In fact, patents can literally quantify the value of an idea. The case the founders had in mind is that somebody has an idea, but not necessarily the capital to bring it to fruition. So he brings it to somebody with capital and they buy the patent off of him (or her; the first patent granted to a woman was 1809). Now the patent has a literal dollar value.
The inventor wins because he has money; the capitalist wins because he has a profitable product; the public wins because they get something they want.
Sucks that the concept has become just this side of completely useless (and many here on slashdot would claim that it's well to the other side).
That's right. What the movie doesn't make clear is that it was sped up by a factor of 10,000, because solar panels that size result in only a trivial amount of thrust.
No kidding. One of my key searches is "somewhere in this directory is a piece of code for a variable which is a very common word otherwise".
I think the idea was that Google is so fast you don't need to limit searches to a single directory. In fact I gather that long-term the goal is to eliminate the hierarchical file structure entirely and replace it with searching. At least I think that's Macintosh's goal. There's a lot to be said for eliminating the effort of a priori categorization, but even if it would work (and I'm rather dubious) it's too soon to phase it in. I still have to resort to Microsoft's search tool (which I find incredibly flaky).
Google's never let me down before; everything they've ever come up with impresses me (even if I do still prefer babelfish to Google's collection of language tools.) So maybe the next beta will be worth the effort of having it around.
And the reason I trust google is that they're telling me they're scanning my email. If Yahoo or Microsoft wanted to there's nothing preventing them from doing it, surreptitiously.
I believe Google when they say that all they want to do is target ads at me. If they, or Yahoo or Microsoft, wanted to really invade my privacy it wouldn't require continuously scanning my mail; they'd just read it once by human and learn whatever they want to learn.
Or if the FBI decided it was time to check up on my little... well, you know: there's my mail, all in Google's or MSN's or Yahoo's files, and nobody's privacy policy is going to save my butt.
If I were really concerned about my privacy on email I'd send everything encrypted. Beyond that nobody's privacy policy will help. Meantime, security through obscurity is about my best hope (and I can think of few better ways to get the FBI interested in me than to send everything encrypted).
I know gas explosions are hard to cause. I've been around plenty of ignited gasoline.
Once we were having difficulty getting a fire lit in a wood stove in a cabin we'd rented. It was obvious that the reason was that the flue wasn't drawing, but because the roof was icy we'd hoped for some other solution.
When the guys from the next cabin over came and threw kerosene on the fire and it just lay there we finally gave up and went on the roof to clean the chimney screen.
Yeah, I know it's not entirely relevant: the reason the kerosene was because of the lack of oxygen, not its liquid phase. But it was certainly an object lesson that liquid products don't go up all that easily; even the trivial vacuum of a smoke-filled can was able to douse kerosene flames.
But back on topic, I'm totally with you that alternative energy sources are extremely important. Possibly more important than energy distribution, since we're really good at moving around electricity. But storage is a problem, especially since some alternative energy sources (wind, solar, and to a lesser degree coal and nuclear) are best dumped out in the middle of nowhere.
Any idea whether it's more efficient overall to dump a joule of electricity into a lead-acid battery or to crack water into hydrogen? That's probably not the most relevant question, because there are so many other inefficiencies involved: the effort of pressurizing the hydrogen, the weight of lead-acid batteries vs. the weight of pressurized containers for hydrogen, the loss of long electric lines.
I honestly don't know the answers to these questions, and my cynical self doesn't particularly trust the US President when he tells me hydrogen is the way to go. It would suck big time to invest massive infrastructure in hydrogen distribution and hydrogen-cracking plants only to discover that we should have gone electric all along. There is plenty of research to be done on both sides.
The idea is to crack water with whatever's available: coal, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar. There are upsides and downsides to each.
We will still probably need foreign oil for a while: plastics, medicines, older cars, etc. I've heard that the US could be self-sufficient with a trivial decrease in fuel consumption, but I'm not buying it. But it would take only a small decrease in consumption to put a big hurt on OPEC, which is fine with me.
Were there any actual problems with hydrogen leaks?
The advantage of hydrogen is that although it does ignite more easily, it also dissipates more easily. And since it's much lighter than air it tends to dissipate up rather than out, so the worst damage might occur up above a traffic accident.
It sounds like it might depend on the kind of fault that occurs. A puncture will tend to spray a stream of ignitable death, whereas a rupture might dissipate into a hot-but-not-deadly ball.
I don't know how this plays in actual practice. Presumably your father does. If he wouldn't say that hydrogen is safer, would he say it's "as safe"? There are so many advantages to hydrogen (the key one for me being that it doesn't require sending money to totalitarian regimes) that I'd like to see it tried.
Even if it reduces our imports only 25%, since oil is their only product it would have a serious negative effect on their economies. I certainly can't guarantee that destabilizing those countries would have good effects rather than bad ones, but they upset me so much that I'm willing to try.
Is this the same Indiana Jones who'd tear the tunic off a centuries-old corpse to make a torch rather than go to the effort of going back up for a flashlight?
I adore the movies (well, the first and third) but I've always thought he was a lousy archeologist?
There have certainly been times when accepted science was wrong and some maverick was right. Galileo comes to mind, as do Newton and Einstein.
But for every Galileo, there are a thousand nutballs who are convinced that Science is holding them back to defend its orthodoxy. No matter how carefully you explain the flaws and inconsistencies in their theory, they'll insist you've been blinded or are perhaps conspiring against them. They are often completely ignorant of current practice, insisting that to come to the right answer you must necessarily come from Outside the System. If you disagree you must be Oppressing Them, and that like Galileo they will be proven right after they're dead.
It must drive practicing scientists insane, especially the physicists, who are probably deluged with papers proving Einstein wrong with math no more complicated than algebra.
I'm not saying that there is no more room in science for revolutionaries and mavericks. Accepted theory in any field is well known to be incomplete at least, and possibly wrong. But it's time-consuming to reply to people who have no training in the field. The best revolutionaries come from inside, not from outside, because they have the language with which to explain to their colleagues what the new theory means.
Yeah, you could be right. You could be Galileo; you could have a completely new theory that upsets everything I believe in. But the odds are against you.
I've always wanted to build a dead-man-switch email system. Something that pings you every week to see if you're still alive, and if you don't respond it sends emails. Something to protect you if you're blackmailing somebody, or let your boss know what you really think of him now that you're beyond retribution. Or maybe just a sappy final love letter to your wife. That sort of thing.
But boy would you have to build safeguards into that. "Uh, sorry, I never meant to admit my homosexual attraction to you, but see I went on vacation and forgot about the deadman switch..."
Does the executive branch get to claim unilaterally from claiming that the investigation is ongoing, or does some judge get to investigate that claim? If not, is there any check on the executive branch's ability to make that claim for anything they choose to seize?
I left my elitist card at home; I'm genuinely curious.
As far as I can tell from RTFA, this is just the government's response to the motion; a judge still gets to rule. Yes?
Really? I suppose it might be true. But where I live (Washington, DC) we've got country, Latino, Black, classic rock, rap+R&B, soft rock, oldies, jazz, bluegrass, clasical, and only a couple of Clear Channel stations. (As well as WHFS, which is intermittently alternative but often just top 40.)
Perhaps one wants a better diversity of rock/pop styles. Certainly those stations which are Clear Channel-owned are massively generic. But we seem to have pretty good diversity of styles.
There are other styles that can't be found reliably: techno, house, industrial (which all sound the same to me anyway). It's lacking a really good alternative station (which is odd since there are several major universities here.) But I find that "alternative" and "indie" have about the same meaning as "third party" used to in politics: everybody wants something different from the mainstream but don't sufficiently agree with each other to put forth a single serious alternative.
It's often beem said on Slashdot that the real reason for the decline is the decline of the quality of the music. That's possibly true, but I'd like to know how a reliable study could report on it objectively.
Music tastes are extremely subjective. If anything, the objective measures would tend to suggest that the music is getting better, in the sense that it's been focus-grouped to death. Somebody out there is saying, "Yes, we like it. We like it so much we want to copy it off the Internet or from a friend's CD."
It seems likely that in fact the focus-grouping and hit-promoting have lowered the quality of the music to a least common denominator, but I'd love to know how this industry report went about measuring that. In the end that measurement will describe how the music changes from here. The executives who make the decisions aren't artists and don't use artistic judgment to decide what to produce. They look at numbers and poll likely group members to see what will sell. They know that people will only buy what they like, so I'd love to know what measure of "like" they're using for this study that's different from the ones they're already using.
Somehow that doesn't seem like a problem. Hundreds of CDs are released a year. If 90% are shit, that means there are dozens available which might be worth listening to.
The world is full of people, and it doesn't seem wrong to have less than 10% of music aimed at me.
Agreed. The point of my post was not that coal power is da shiznit, but that those who were worried about the risks of nuclear power weren't totally off-base, as the top-level poster implied.
I'd love to see this sort of decision made on a dispassionate basis by experts on the risks and rewards of all approaches. Yeah, right. (You'll have to forgive my cynicism; there's been a national election between my original post and now.)
Ya might want to listen to the reviews before deciding whether or not to see it. Yeah, the first two sucked, but the second one was better than the first. And this is the one with all the tie-ins to Ep IV, which for my money was still the best of the lot.
And the special effects will be a lot prettier if you see 'em on a big screen with the good sound.
So let it come out, listen to your friends, and then decide. Cuz it would suck to miss out on a good movie just because you want to stick it to Lucas.
That's your fault for not giving up after Highlander 2 like the rest of us.
I wish I were a Republican troll; if I were I wouldn't be so damn depressed today.
No, I was merely pointing out that there were many people who felt that from their point of view, a vote for Kerry was a vote for gay marriage. I disagree with them, but that's not the point. The point was that Kerry seems to have lost, neither fairly nor squarely but at least the polling machines and the exit polls seem to agree that he lost for real.
For one thing, many people believed that John Kerry supported gay marriage, perhaps due to stunts like this one, where a phone campaign said Kerry supported gay marriage. (The stunt is ugly not only because it was wrong on Kerry's position, but also because the phone call implied it was coming from a pro-Kerry camp.)
Ugly politicking aside, Kerry does support civil unions, which many people are against anyway, since it would support government sanctioning of homosexuality in their minds. He comes from a state where gay marriage is legal, and he has never spoken particularly against that.
So if you're homophobic, Bush was definitely your man. If you were pro-gay-marriage, you'd have to go look over at the Libertarians. Kerry was somewhere in between, with his civil unions.
Totally agreed; the real issue is that they just don't like gay people. But that's the real basis of moralty: people's gut instincts as to what is right and wrong.
As you say, there is a progression in this country towards more freedom for more people. It takes time for attitudes to change. Polls say that the 18-24 year old are far, far more likely to support gay marriage than their parents are, and their parents. So by the time today's children are running the country we may well see homosexuality, and their right to marry, accepted as a matter of course.
But somehow "be patient" feels hollow; all of my friends (gay and straight) will be dead by then.
Playing devil's advocate, what makes you trust the machines they used to count those big paper ballots? Or are they really doing it by hand?
The advantage of paper ballots is that they _can_ be recounted; it's harder to mess with a physical artifact. But 2000 demonstrated a lot of disadvantages: overvoting, undervoting, misvoting. One the (Diebold) machine I used, it presented a screen at the end which said (effectively): You voted for John Kerry, Steny Hoyer, and Barbara Mikulski. Right?
What happened after that I can't really say, and I'm plenty dubious (though here in Maryland the polls were far enough apart that they'd have to be fools to try to steal it here; it would be obvious).
For me the real advantage of paper ballots is that I don't have to wait in line forever for one. We can all do them in parallel. I waited 90 minutes to vote yesterday (for all the good it did me).
Uh, the fact that the Bible-believing 50+% of Americans find homosexuality immoral. I disagree with them, completely and utterly and totally, but their moral code says that condoning homosexuality would be immoral, and that sanctioning a marriage between them would be condoning their behavior.
Morals are pretty tricky things; they are what you say they are. I don't have to like it but I do have to accept as a fact that many people have moral codes I find abhorrent.
Please, don't exaggerate. I'm depressed enough about the election as it is.
There wasn't "no reason". Hussein was clearly a homicidal maniac who oppressed the bejeezus out of some of his people. He clearly wanted WMDs, and would likely have used them if he could get them. Nor did he make it clear that he didn't have them; he acted very suspiciously with respect to the inspectors. The war ended a set of sanctions which were killing thousands of children while still permitting Saddam to make billions selling oil on the black market.
Sufficient reasons? No, not hardly. Clearly the evidence was exaggerated to press the case. Clearly the war has been handled badly. But to say that there was absolutely no reason is to oversimplify a complex world nearly as badly as a certain world leader with a vegetable-themed name.
Now if you'll pardon me I'll go back to planning which country I'm going to escape to.
I woudln't say I have "no idea". The machines give roughly the same answers as the exit polls. That's a crude measure, but it implies that there wasn't widespread fraud.
.5% of the votes to Bush in order to put him over the top in any Florida-like situation without anybody noticing? Sure, and for that reason I'd love to see an audit. Hell, I'd love to see a paper trail.
Could it be that the machines were programmed to swing
There could well have been machine fraud, but the exit polling suggests even if there was it was unlikely to change the result. Fraud would be a massive scandal, more than enough to unseat the President, which would be somewhat ironic because according to several other measures he won that election without it.
I wish I had some mod points for you, but instead I'll just have to second you. The national results pretty well match the exit polling results, and the national polls for the past few days. Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
I still wish that there were some way of doing a recount, even though it doesn't appear to be necessary in this case. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if there were shennanigans; I've heard of various ugly games played to influence voters. But here it seems that the Deibold machines did their jobs. I stil don't trust them but I'm not going to dispute the results.