Darn, you beat me to it...so I'll just point out that Tom Tomorrow also contacted the person actually selling the t-shirts (and confirmed with Friedman that that was the person he meant) That person revealed that he has made approximately $10.
>When was the last time you sat down and opened the encyclopedia instead of using the web?
Well, last year, actually, but only because the classroom I was working in didn't have computers:-)
In general, though, there doesn't seem to be much use for them...as you said, Wikipedia seems to have information on just about anything, and google seems to find whatever they miss.
The problem is, you have two different things here.
First, you have the bible, the original inspired word of God... but written down by men, in a form that men could understand. (Thus, 'Adam was created from dust', rather than 'Adam was created from molecules')
Then you have men trying to understand exactly what the bible means. Unfortunately, the church has historically insisted that whatever interpretation of the scriptures they hold is the only valid one.
And if the lawsuit isn't frivolous? Should you refrain from suing an incompetant doctor because if you do you won't be able to get health care in the future?
True enough. When you think about it, Bush and Kerry have pretty similar positions on gay marriage, for example; they're both against it. The only difference is that Kerry feels it's a state issue, while Bush wants to make a national issue of it.
On the bright side, at least by making things divisive, we have a clearly defined choice this year. Whatever your views, this is an election where the outcome will definitely make a difference.
I know plenty of people here can come up with a long list of things our government wastes money on. Furthermore I'll bet'cha we can get over half those involved in the discussion to agree to the slashing of this or that. What say ye pantheon of knowledge?
Unfortunately...
The liberal voters here will say that the tax cuts for millionaires are what we should get rid of.
The conservative voters will say that services for the poor (welfare, etc) are what we should get rid of.
Suppose (and note I'm just pulling these numbers out of a hat, I have no idea what the actual numbers are) that of the 3 main candidates, 25% prefer Dean, 30% prefer Kerry, and 35% prefer Edwards. In a straight election, Edwards wins, right? (Yeah, I know, it maybe should be Clark instead of Dean, whatever)
Now suppose that the Dean and Kerry candidates both prefer Kerry to Edwards. With the staggered elections, when it becomes obvious that Dean is not going to win, his supporters get to vote for whoever they prefer of the remaining candidates. If they all prefer Kerry to Edwards, he wins 55-35 and you end up with the candidate who is acceptable to most of the voters.
Possibly more importantly, the drawn-out primaries keep the candidates in the news and allow them to differentiate themselves, as well as raising interest and thus increasing voter turnout. My understanding is that a record turnout is expected today, even though the candidates haven't spent a lot of time in the super tuesday states, simply because the extended race has a lot of people interested.
Probably, yes. I was just telling one of my students (12th grade) what Super Tuesday means earlier today. A lot of Americans just don't care all that much about politics.
What is the most reliable method for voting? Paper ballots with lines drawn on them? Open source voting software? If you were in charge of developing the voting techniques for the next election, what would you do?
1) A custom OS WILL have bugs. All new software does. Do you want to vote on buggy software?
2) Part of the outcry (at least here) against e-voting is exactly that - that nobody can see the source, which means we have no way of knowing if it's correct, if it has backdoors, etc.
3) Nothing is 100%, expecially when people are involved.
I'd say the difference is that electronic voting has the potential to make vote tampering that much easier and/or harder to track. Especially where there's no paper trail, you really have no choice but to accept whatever number the machine gives you.
Even assuming no fraud (unlikely) the severity of the mistakes varies....a mistake counting paper ballots might result in a small change in the final tally, but a typo in the program could reverse the results of the election.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of using computers to make things easier. (Otherwise, would I be posting to Slashdot?) But if we're going to move to e-voting, the systems need to have the strongest possible security and reliability...and so far, they don't.
With the elections being as close as they have been, shutting down machines in a few heavily [democratic|republican] districts could easily change the results of the election. You may not know exactly what each individual machine has recorded, but it's easy enough to find areas that you can expect to reliably vote for one of the major parties. If you were to get the results from machines in Denver thrown out, for example, who do you think would benefit?
After everything we've heard about Diebold in the past few months - thier ties to Bush, uncertified software, etc - does anyone really trust them to accurately count and record the results of the votes?
Maybe the states that are still using Diebold machines know something I don't, but I really don't see why you'd want to take such a risk with something as important as voting.
I suppose if the comments on it are good, I'll have to try it eventually. At the moment my current emails are only a year old and I'm just relying on Mozilla's filters...which oddly enough have had trouble because I haven't gotten enough spam for them to train on!
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As to my being a GWB supporter, you're half-right. Supported him in 2000. Won't be voting for him in 2004.
Just OOC, what changed your mind?
This is either GW Bush posting this or one of his brain-dead sycophants
Defending Clinton, instead of blaming him for everything? Highly unlikely.
Do you then advocate the abolishment of all taxation? Paying taxes isn't much fun, but I wouldn't want to be without the services they pay for..
Darn, you beat me to it...so I'll just point out that Tom Tomorrow also contacted the person actually selling the t-shirts (and confirmed with Friedman that that was the person he meant) That person revealed that he has made approximately $10.
>When was the last time you sat down and opened the encyclopedia instead of using the web?
:-)
Well, last year, actually, but only because the classroom I was working in didn't have computers
In general, though, there doesn't seem to be much use for them...as you said, Wikipedia seems to have information on just about anything, and google seems to find whatever they miss.
Well, I was trying to avoid a flame war...but I can't deny that you are unquestionably correct :-)
Seeing as Christians believe in a plural god (father, son, hold ghost) why would the plural form bother them?
The problem is, you have two different things here.
First, you have the bible, the original inspired word of God... but written down by men, in a form that men could understand. (Thus, 'Adam was created from dust', rather than 'Adam was created from molecules')
Then you have men trying to understand exactly what the bible means. Unfortunately, the church has historically insisted that whatever interpretation of the scriptures they hold is the only valid one.
And if the lawsuit isn't frivolous? Should you refrain from suing an incompetant doctor because if you do you won't be able to get health care in the future?
Are you telling me that Lexmark printer cartridges are actually CHEAPER than Xeron cartridges?!?
True enough. When you think about it, Bush and Kerry have pretty similar positions on gay marriage, for example; they're both against it. The only difference is that Kerry feels it's a state issue, while Bush wants to make a national issue of it.
On the bright side, at least by making things divisive, we have a clearly defined choice this year. Whatever your views, this is an election where the outcome will definitely make a difference.
I know plenty of people here can come up with a long list of things our government wastes money on. Furthermore I'll bet'cha we can get over half those involved in the discussion to agree to the slashing of this or that. What say ye pantheon of knowledge?
Unfortunately...
The liberal voters here will say that the tax cuts for millionaires are what we should get rid of.
The conservative voters will say that services for the poor (welfare, etc) are what we should get rid of.
Neither side will agree with the other.
It has its advantages, though.
Suppose (and note I'm just pulling these numbers out of a hat, I have no idea what the actual numbers are) that of the 3 main candidates, 25% prefer Dean, 30% prefer Kerry, and 35% prefer Edwards. In a straight election, Edwards wins, right? (Yeah, I know, it maybe should be Clark instead of Dean, whatever)
Now suppose that the Dean and Kerry candidates both prefer Kerry to Edwards. With the staggered elections, when it becomes obvious that Dean is not going to win, his supporters get to vote for whoever they prefer of the remaining candidates. If they all prefer Kerry to Edwards, he wins 55-35 and you end up with the candidate who is acceptable to most of the voters.
Possibly more importantly, the drawn-out primaries keep the candidates in the news and allow them to differentiate themselves, as well as raising interest and thus increasing voter turnout. My understanding is that a record turnout is expected today, even though the candidates haven't spent a lot of time in the super tuesday states, simply because the extended race has a lot of people interested.
Probably, yes. I was just telling one of my students (12th grade) what Super Tuesday means earlier today. A lot of Americans just don't care all that much about politics.
You're right, it does sounds like technobabble.
Well, I guess it keeps people from altering the program after the chip is created. (Unless they switch chips, of course)
Everyone here has an opinion on e-voting, so...
What is the most reliable method for voting? Paper ballots with lines drawn on them? Open source voting software? If you were in charge of developing the voting techniques for the next election, what would you do?
>Well the simple solution is tamper tape on top of tamper tape. ;)
:-)
This could get recursive really fast..
1) A custom OS WILL have bugs. All new software does. Do you want to vote on buggy software?
2) Part of the outcry (at least here) against e-voting is exactly that - that nobody can see the source, which means we have no way of knowing if it's correct, if it has backdoors, etc.
3) Nothing is 100%, expecially when people are involved.
True, true.
I'd say the difference is that electronic voting has the potential to make vote tampering that much easier and/or harder to track. Especially where there's no paper trail, you really have no choice but to accept whatever number the machine gives you.
Even assuming no fraud (unlikely) the severity of the mistakes varies....a mistake counting paper ballots might result in a small change in the final tally, but a typo in the program could reverse the results of the election.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all in favor of using computers to make things easier. (Otherwise, would I be posting to Slashdot?) But if we're going to move to e-voting, the systems need to have the strongest possible security and reliability...and so far, they don't.
Going a few links into that site, we find a list of how each person voted on roll call votes at http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2004/index.asp
(ironically enough, the list is as tallied by the electronic voting machine)
With the elections being as close as they have been, shutting down machines in a few heavily [democratic|republican] districts could easily change the results of the election. You may not know exactly what each individual machine has recorded, but it's easy enough to find areas that you can expect to reliably vote for one of the major parties. If you were to get the results from machines in Denver thrown out, for example, who do you think would benefit?
After everything we've heard about Diebold in the past few months - thier ties to Bush, uncertified software, etc - does anyone really trust them to accurately count and record the results of the votes?
Maybe the states that are still using Diebold machines know something I don't, but I really don't see why you'd want to take such a risk with something as important as voting.
I don't know how you'd draw in traffic, except to say that Google's AdWords might be useful.
Maybe he could post about it on Slashdot?
I suppose if the comments on it are good, I'll have to try it eventually. At the moment my current emails are only a year old and I'm just relying on Mozilla's filters...which oddly enough have had trouble because I haven't gotten enough spam for them to train on!