While the generation of the "purge list" did have a legal basis - namely, that ex-felons were ineligible to vote - the process of generating the list was an enormous debacle.
ChoicePoint/DBT originally produced a list of about 8000 voters to remove from the electoral rolls. Katherine Harris got back to them and told them to widen the net - by omitting a few data integrity requirements, such as middle names, dates of birth, and dates and details of their convictions - and assured ChoicePoint that they needn't worry about the number of false positives in the list. This increased the size of the list to about 58,000 voters, more than half of whom were African-Americans.
When the fraud was officially investigated, ChoicePoint admitted to a false-positive rate of up to 15%, which was already far in excess of Bush's lead in the Florida poll. Later, an independent investigation showed an error rate of more than 90% - some 55,000 voters, some 30,000 of whom were black.
The USCCR was unable to identify a single voter that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list.
It's surprising how many people don't know this when it's actually very well documented; in fact, the story broke long before the election actually took place. My suggestion to the doubters is to watch Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, a very thorough documentary on the topic.
Hunger is caused in large part by issues other than innate defects in Nature's gifts, but many of those are issues that are not going to be solved any time soon.
There are 800 million people in the world without adequate food supplies. There are many more besides this who simply don't eat sufficiently because they can't afford it. On top of this, more than 2000 million currently live without potable water supplies.
GM food isn't going to help them. In fact, GM has a lot less to do with solving hunger and curing disease than it does with wank issues like intellectual property and exploiting poor people. Ignorant pro-GM stalwarts like to think that poor people shouldn't complain about not being able to save patented seeds if they're getting a steady supply of food for once, but what they don't say is that they cede control of their very lives to large foreign companies who don't even know how safe their food is to eat. They also like to think that this is not happening in the developed world, but they don't want to talk about the price of medicine in the US or the consequences of not being required to label GM foods, or why these two ideas are potentially dangerous.
Herein lies the "well-balanced discussion" linked in the parent post. This article is an ad, pure and simple, and the supposed balance comes from the mention that there may be adverse side effects of consuming GM food - although we haven't seen any yet. The economic and political issues at play in GM circles are completely ignored.
You can be fundamentalistic about this or you can be realistic.
As the parent post demonstrates, being neither fundamentalist nor realistic is also possible.
If this were in fact true, (and it's not), there would be massive evidence of this, and it would have been brought out years ago, or at the very least this last election cycle. There is no proof of what you say because it didn't happen that way.
CBS didn't "fabricate documents". What they did wrong was cite the Killian memos, and debate was immediately restricted to whether the memos were authentic - whether the typewriter used a proportionally-spaced font, why the font looks suspiciously like Times New Roman, and so on. In a style truly reminiscent of O.J. Simpson's trial, if the Killian memos could not be authenticated, then the whole story was a beat-up.
As ever, everyone ignores the core truths of the story: that George W. Bush is a draft-dodger, that his father's contacts got him into one of the cushiest jobs in the National Guard, and that he disappeared prematurely from his duty. You don't see anyone disputing any of these - at least, without trying to change the subject, as I mentioned above. CBS' Independent Review Panel wrote that Mary Mapes, producer of 60 Minutes, "ignored information that cast doubt on the story" - obviously false, since the story has been around for years without any attempt to debunk it.
Interestingly, the CBS panel consists of just two people, both of whom have deep and long-running ties to the Republican party. Dick Thornburgh, formerly George H. W. Bush's Attorney General, was the guy responsible for burying the Exxon Valdez story; while Louis Boccardi, formerly CEO of the Associated Press, was resposible for burying the story of Oliver North's dealing with Iran (a story that, coincidentally, originally surfaced from the AP itself). By now, the real issue here should make a lot of sense.
You don't give a damn about fair journalism, you just don't want anyone talking about views you don't agree with.
The wide adoption of SD (which means Secure Digital, and not SanDisk) is the next step towards putting DRM control around our data.
This is totally incorrect. If you're referring to the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), they gave up on DRM about four years ago when their watermarking scheme was ruthlessly cracked. The group has been totally inactive since May 2001.
Nowadays, lots of devices use Secure Digital cards, but mostly because of the "cool" factor: they're a lot smaller than Compact Flash cards, and the capacity of SD cards isn't that far behind that of CF cards. I was looking at a couple of MP3 players that use SD cards, and none of them had DRM at all. Just copy your MP3 files to your SD card, whack it in your player, and hit Play.
Hence, the schism that Secure Digital really means DRM does have a historical basis, but it has little relevance today. The idea that using SD cards in modern devices will smite your with a plague of DRM is just rubbish. For the purposes of keeping digital photos or music, SD is storage, and nothing more.
I, for one, welcome what Jesus would do to Natalie Portman's in Soviet Russia, where all your imagined beowulf cluster are belong to old people in South Korea and are run Netcraft-confirmed DeadBSD... you insensitive clod!
Firstly, exit polls are usually accurate to within a couple of percentage points. A three-point swing (in the differential) between the exit poll and the final tally is very unlikely but not unthinkable. Ohio swung by 6 points, Florida by 8, North Carolina by 12, New Hampshire by 15, Pennsylvania by 18.
Secondly, of the swing states mentioned above, all of them use electronic voting machines, many of which have no audit trail, and regarding which many obvious flaws were reported. Why anyone would trust a counting machine that can't count is beyond me.
Thirdly, all of those swings favoured the Republicans. The Democrats won four of those five exit polls (North Carolina was 49-51), two of those states changed sides in the final count - by the merest chance, Florida and Ohio.
The election was won fair and square, and despite the efforts of Democrats in Florida 2000 to steal the election from Bush, it wasn't close enough to try it again in 2004.
That's rich. How was it not close enough for the Dems to "steal" it but not so disparate that the GOP couldn't actually "steal" it without anyone noticing?
As with 2000, the Democrats probably got the most votes this time around as well, and again had no chance of getting a fair count of them. Your ignorance of what happened in Florida in 2000 is stark, but not astounding. In 2004, we're seeing it all over again, but in more and various places. You should watch the Flash movie in my sig, as it has links to much more info.
The Democrats won, but the Republicans cheated, and everybody else loses. Deal with that.
There are a couple of things that are wrong with your argument.
Firstly, the EULA is not made visible when, and where, you buy the software - that is, you really should be able to read it when it is time for money to change hands. It's one thing for you to say that an informed buyer can read the EULA on the web before buying, but it's another thing entirely to ignore that a large proportion of buyers are not that informed.
Secondly, if you buy the software from a retail store, you have a pretty poor chance of getting a decent return/refund policy. There aren't many stores near me that have a good return/refund policy for computer software, so even if you decide not to use it, you can't get your money back.
Thirdly, if you buy the software from an OEM, you often don't see the agreement at all - the distributor agrees to include the manufacturer's product - and yet, you are a party to that contract, since you are buying and using the software. In that scenario, at least, the user cannot be a party to the EULA, rendering the agreement worthless.
I know I haven't provided a solid legal basis for claiming that EULAs are dodgy at best, but I can't be bothered looking it up in more detail. The point is that if you don't have a chance to agree or disagree to a contract, on whatever grounds, that contract simply cannot legally oblige you in any way.
If you read the article cited above from tompaine.com, you might disregard it as anti-Republican propaganda... until you note the author, Greg Palast.
Perhaps some of you would recognise this name, especially if you've been following the allegations of electoral fraud in the last two US presidential elections. I recognise the name from reading this article.
(If you can't be bothered reading about this, you can this Flash movie instead, or watch the start of Fahrenheit 9/11.)
As for the links in the parent post, those exit polls are just scary. From this, we know that (1) Ohio was a close result, (2) Diebold is based in Ohio, (3) Diebold is pro-Republican, (4) Diebold counted the Ohio electoral votes (essentially), and (5) at least six states that used electronic voting machines showed massive red swings against predominantly blue exit polls.
Will the US public still fall for Bush's claims to the legitimacy of his presidency? It depends if people do anything about it or not. Personally, I think that Katherine Harris, Jeb and George Bush, and the entire Diebold staff should all be thrown in jail for what happened in 2000, which amounts to nothing short of fraud - but hey, that's just me, right?
Australians disillusioned by the mass media - which, really, should be all of us - still get the occasional bit of decent journalism. Seemingly, this always comes from ABC and SBS, our two government-owned broadcasters, who work much harder and are notably more neutral than the three commercial networks. For their hard work, they get regularly rewarded with budget cuts and investigations into anti-government bias.
Fortunately, we still get Media Watch every Monday. It's arguably not quite the same since Stuart Littlemore QC stopped presenting the show, but it's still essential viewing. Their web site also has a streaming feed of each episode.
What does this have to do with Today Tonight? A few years ago, Today Tonight reported that they attempted to interview Christopher Skase, a businessman who fled Australia for Mallorca in Spain, but could not even approach his house by car because of constant police barricades. A keen viewer, having recognised that they were actually driving around Barcelone, wrote to Media Watch, who then blew the story open. Those of us who had previously doubted Today Tonight's credibility, and found this irrefutable and rather hilarious proof, still refer to them as Barcelona Tonight.
(Recent) history has shown that things like this just do not work.
That depends what the "wars" are trying to achieve.
If they're about reducing the threat of terrorism, the spread of illicit drugs and the black market, then you're right and they don't work at all.
On the other hand, if they're about manipulating the public opinion with official doublespeak and a distinct lack of factual logical basis, I reckon they've worked pretty well. Just not for you.
Ah, yes, but the Audi 5000 "sudden acceleration" was caused by drivers who stepped on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. P. J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores has the full story, which is cited in numerous articles on the Web.
We really don't know who actually won Florida, it depends on how you count 'em. The rules in place made Bush the winner. Some people just can't deal with it.
By "some people", are you referring to the 55,000 Florida voters who were illegally barred from voting, the one million voters whose votes were never counted?
I think HotJava was just a proof of concept anyway. They certainly never made it into anything really useful.
This is only half-correct. As a stand-alone browser, HotJava is dead. As a proof of concept, it was ahead of its time, but it's been done to death now.
On the other hand, as a technological basis for Swing's HTML rendering/editing components, it's still around in much the same form as it always was. I know it's not up to much, feature-wise or quality-wise, but if you need HTML rendering in Swing, you can display it in just about any visual component, and you don't need to write any code to do it. Now, that is useful.
Slashdot Mirror
ChoicePoint/DBT originally produced a list of about 8000 voters to remove from the electoral rolls. Katherine Harris got back to them and told them to widen the net - by omitting a few data integrity requirements, such as middle names, dates of birth, and dates and details of their convictions - and assured ChoicePoint that they needn't worry about the number of false positives in the list. This increased the size of the list to about 58,000 voters, more than half of whom were African-Americans.
When the fraud was officially investigated, ChoicePoint admitted to a false-positive rate of up to 15%, which was already far in excess of Bush's lead in the Florida poll. Later, an independent investigation showed an error rate of more than 90% - some 55,000 voters, some 30,000 of whom were black.
This is a flat-out lie. Read some first-hand accounts of voter disenfranchisement for yourselves. Voters were erroneously scrubbed from the electoral roll, were not adequately notified in advance, tried to vote anyway and were turned away - simple as that.It's surprising how many people don't know this when it's actually very well documented; in fact, the story broke long before the election actually took place. My suggestion to the doubters is to watch Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election , a very thorough documentary on the topic.
Maybe they can make a Post-It portrait of the Thnikkaman next. Oh, the things that man does...
I'm guessing you don't read Xbox forums...
GM food isn't going to help them. In fact, GM has a lot less to do with solving hunger and curing disease than it does with wank issues like intellectual property and exploiting poor people. Ignorant pro-GM stalwarts like to think that poor people shouldn't complain about not being able to save patented seeds if they're getting a steady supply of food for once, but what they don't say is that they cede control of their very lives to large foreign companies who don't even know how safe their food is to eat. They also like to think that this is not happening in the developed world, but they don't want to talk about the price of medicine in the US or the consequences of not being required to label GM foods, or why these two ideas are potentially dangerous.
Herein lies the "well-balanced discussion" linked in the parent post. This article is an ad, pure and simple, and the supposed balance comes from the mention that there may be adverse side effects of consuming GM food - although we haven't seen any yet. The economic and political issues at play in GM circles are completely ignored.
As the parent post demonstrates, being neither fundamentalist nor realistic is also possible.Actually, it looks more like a shut-and-shut case...
Oh, look, here's the review of the CBS investigation (PDF).
Oh, look, here's an article from 1999 about Dubya dodging the draft.
Oh, look, here's another one.
... so which part of what I wrote isn't true?
As ever, everyone ignores the core truths of the story: that George W. Bush is a draft-dodger, that his father's contacts got him into one of the cushiest jobs in the National Guard, and that he disappeared prematurely from his duty. You don't see anyone disputing any of these - at least, without trying to change the subject, as I mentioned above. CBS' Independent Review Panel wrote that Mary Mapes, producer of 60 Minutes, "ignored information that cast doubt on the story" - obviously false, since the story has been around for years without any attempt to debunk it.
Interestingly, the CBS panel consists of just two people, both of whom have deep and long-running ties to the Republican party. Dick Thornburgh, formerly George H. W. Bush's Attorney General, was the guy responsible for burying the Exxon Valdez story; while Louis Boccardi, formerly CEO of the Associated Press, was resposible for burying the story of Oliver North's dealing with Iran (a story that, coincidentally, originally surfaced from the AP itself). By now, the real issue here should make a lot of sense.
Whatever. If you actually gave a damn about fair journalism yourself, you should talk to this guy.In one of the halves, it would have to kick off from the centre circle. How would it get back into the goal square?
Nowadays, lots of devices use Secure Digital cards, but mostly because of the "cool" factor: they're a lot smaller than Compact Flash cards, and the capacity of SD cards isn't that far behind that of CF cards. I was looking at a couple of MP3 players that use SD cards, and none of them had DRM at all. Just copy your MP3 files to your SD card, whack it in your player, and hit Play.
Hence, the schism that Secure Digital really means DRM does have a historical basis, but it has little relevance today. The idea that using SD cards in modern devices will smite your with a plague of DRM is just rubbish. For the purposes of keeping digital photos or music, SD is storage, and nothing more.
... and the Pumping Lemma.
(Did I forget anything?)
49,517,601,571,415,210,995,964,968,960 bytes? You'll never fill that up.
Good to see George W. Bush partaking in the Internets.
I'll bite.
Firstly, exit polls are usually accurate to within a couple of percentage points. A three-point swing (in the differential) between the exit poll and the final tally is very unlikely but not unthinkable. Ohio swung by 6 points, Florida by 8, North Carolina by 12, New Hampshire by 15, Pennsylvania by 18.
Secondly, of the swing states mentioned above, all of them use electronic voting machines, many of which have no audit trail, and regarding which many obvious flaws were reported. Why anyone would trust a counting machine that can't count is beyond me.
Thirdly, all of those swings favoured the Republicans. The Democrats won four of those five exit polls (North Carolina was 49-51), two of those states changed sides in the final count - by the merest chance, Florida and Ohio.
That's rich. How was it not close enough for the Dems to "steal" it but not so disparate that the GOP couldn't actually "steal" it without anyone noticing?
As with 2000, the Democrats probably got the most votes this time around as well, and again had no chance of getting a fair count of them. Your ignorance of what happened in Florida in 2000 is stark, but not astounding. In 2004, we're seeing it all over again, but in more and various places. You should watch the Flash movie in my sig, as it has links to much more info.
The Democrats won, but the Republicans cheated, and everybody else loses. Deal with that.
Firstly, the EULA is not made visible when, and where, you buy the software - that is, you really should be able to read it when it is time for money to change hands. It's one thing for you to say that an informed buyer can read the EULA on the web before buying, but it's another thing entirely to ignore that a large proportion of buyers are not that informed.
Secondly, if you buy the software from a retail store, you have a pretty poor chance of getting a decent return/refund policy. There aren't many stores near me that have a good return/refund policy for computer software, so even if you decide not to use it, you can't get your money back.
Thirdly, if you buy the software from an OEM, you often don't see the agreement at all - the distributor agrees to include the manufacturer's product - and yet, you are a party to that contract, since you are buying and using the software. In that scenario, at least, the user cannot be a party to the EULA, rendering the agreement worthless.
I know I haven't provided a solid legal basis for claiming that EULAs are dodgy at best, but I can't be bothered looking it up in more detail. The point is that if you don't have a chance to agree or disagree to a contract, on whatever grounds, that contract simply cannot legally oblige you in any way.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are two beautiful but identical snowflakes."
This should answer your question.
Perhaps some of you would recognise this name, especially if you've been following the allegations of electoral fraud in the last two US presidential elections. I recognise the name from reading this article.
(If you can't be bothered reading about this, you can this Flash movie instead, or watch the start of Fahrenheit 9/11.)
As for the links in the parent post, those exit polls are just scary. From this, we know that (1) Ohio was a close result, (2) Diebold is based in Ohio, (3) Diebold is pro-Republican, (4) Diebold counted the Ohio electoral votes (essentially), and (5) at least six states that used electronic voting machines showed massive red swings against predominantly blue exit polls.
Will the US public still fall for Bush's claims to the legitimacy of his presidency? It depends if people do anything about it or not. Personally, I think that Katherine Harris, Jeb and George Bush, and the entire Diebold staff should all be thrown in jail for what happened in 2000, which amounts to nothing short of fraud - but hey, that's just me, right?
This is possibly the worst moderation I have ever read on Slashdot. There's nothing even the least bit insightful about this.
Fortunately, we still get Media Watch every Monday. It's arguably not quite the same since Stuart Littlemore QC stopped presenting the show, but it's still essential viewing. Their web site also has a streaming feed of each episode.
What does this have to do with Today Tonight? A few years ago, Today Tonight reported that they attempted to interview Christopher Skase, a businessman who fled Australia for Mallorca in Spain, but could not even approach his house by car because of constant police barricades. A keen viewer, having recognised that they were actually driving around Barcelone, wrote to Media Watch, who then blew the story open. Those of us who had previously doubted Today Tonight's credibility, and found this irrefutable and rather hilarious proof, still refer to them as Barcelona Tonight.
If they're about reducing the threat of terrorism, the spread of illicit drugs and the black market, then you're right and they don't work at all.
On the other hand, if they're about manipulating the public opinion with official doublespeak and a distinct lack of factual logical basis, I reckon they've worked pretty well. Just not for you.
Ah, yes, but the Audi 5000 "sudden acceleration" was caused by drivers who stepped on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake pedal. P. J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores has the full story, which is cited in numerous articles on the Web.
On the other hand, as a technological basis for Swing's HTML rendering/editing components, it's still around in much the same form as it always was. I know it's not up to much, feature-wise or quality-wise, but if you need HTML rendering in Swing, you can display it in just about any visual component, and you don't need to write any code to do it. Now, that is useful.