Most states here have write-ins (there are exceptions, as mentioned in a previous/. story), so rather than "spoiling" your ballot, you can just write in someone else - your high school history teacher, anybody.
Great thing about the system we have, though, is if the system is broken, you can run yourself to try to fix it. Start from the bottom (party caucus, etc.) and keep chugging. And if you run into glass ceilings over lobbying, money, corruption, etc., let people know.
These two things (intelligent, and Bush supporter) being two different issues, of course: one can be intelligent and conservative or intelligent and liberal - it all depends upon one's priorities.
Nope, I was providing a hypothetical. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Actually, I know plenty of Republicans. Most of them aren't very sophisticated politically, but some of them are, and are bright, and simply have different priorities than I have.
I'm glad you apologized for that comment, it took guts - and the brains to realize that you were mistaken (at least in this case).
Yes, the RIAA/MPAA give a lot more money to the Democrats - which I find disgusting on the part of the Democrats. Both parties have their favorite ways of violating our rights - that's why, even though (unlike you) I abhor guns, and even think that some guns should be regulated in some ways, I agree with you (from your other postings) that the 2nd Amendment was a very important thing to keep in the Constitution - when the bootjacks come, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, whether it's in 100 years or a 1000 - it'll happen eventually, every great Republic eventually falls to the tyrants, as Polybius and Thucydides and Tacitus teach us - at least there should be some way of resisting them.
I did finally remember the OpenSecrets URL before seeing your posting, and saw the same thing you did. As I'm sure you realize, the OpenSecrets site is very non-partisan, and is professionally done (the board are both Democrats and Republicans). Either the FEC database is to blame, or Ms. Williams is. Now, if Ms. Williams is, either she did it out of ignorance of the name of her own company (which would surprise me; the CEO of my company gets annoyed when people punctuate the name improperly), or she did it to make her affiliation harder to find. We'll be nice and assume that it was the FEC's fault.
The point here isn't that one company is donating some money to one party - its that there's a pattern of companies associated with elections oversight being affiliated with the Republican Party, and there were a LOT of irregularities in Florida - that's what's bothering Democrats. The reason the Democrats (wrongly, in my opinion) challenged those military absentee ballots is because there was some minor evidence of absentee ballots being tampered with by Republican officials, say one or two of them. Bad reason to toss out large numbers of absentee ballots, especially from folks who are risking their lives defending our country, but no different in detail, aside from the obvious emotional distinction, from Republicans having folks stricken from the rolls, supposedly for no longer being residents, whom they know to be active Democrats (I have independent reason to believe these accusations).
As Cokie Roberts said, though (and she's from a prominent Democratic family), in Florida they don't know how to rig an election properly - in Louisiana, they bury their dead shallow so it's easier to dig them up on election day!!! Election irregularities and corruption have been a multi-partisan problem for a long time. So what I'd do is a. have electronic voting provide human-readable/machine-scannable receipts, so both hand recounts and mechanical recounts can be checked against the electronic voting, and for absentee military ballots, use seals and have officers notarize the seals (rather than using fax machines, etc.) If you've got an officer notarizing a seal, you're no less secret than in many small wards, and you'll be able to do sanity checks on the absentee ballot. But, not having been in the military, I don't know how feasible that would be. But certainly I think disenfranchising the military is the ultimate in stupidity - since the most important decisions the President is going to make will effect them directly, they're the ones whose votes are most important to protect. I don't understand why they're all gung-ho to re-elect this administration, since I think an administration capable of a more balanced and internationalist foreign policy would better serve their interests (in other words, one like the previous two administrations, both Clinton and Bush 41), but that's another story.
Excellent post. I'm not 100% sure about this - maybe one of the Aussies on the list could correct me - but I believe that South Australia was never a "convict colony" in the sense of receiving transported prisoners - I believe it was founded as a colony of free settlers, unlike the older New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (a.k.a., Tasmania). True, convicts with tickets of leave, emancipated convicts, and the children of convicts (as the free settlers insulting callled them, "currency") probably did make up some of the population by that point (besides, plenty of the convicts were there in NSW for either petty crimes motivated by poverty or political crimes) so your point probably isn't damaged, but I thought it important to preserve the historical distinction. See Stuart Macintyre, *A Concise History of Australia*, pp. 80-81; there's probably something in Hughes' *The Fatal Shore*. I think Victoria, which first passed the law (but was beaten to practical use by South Australia) was also established as a free colony, but I couldn't find any support for that in the sources at hand.
Thanks. The reference works fine, as long as you account for the fact that/. adds a space to long references. Try this one, which is what I typed (without the interpolated space due to/code). There are a huge number of trolls in any political discussion, of every persuasion. I find it interesting, though, that I was accused of lying by someone who obviously didn't read my post all the way through.
Yeah, you tried real hard there, buddy. First, you did read the part of my post where I pointed out that the name of the company is mis-spelled in the database - every time. Second, you didn't notice that/. added a space to the link, did you? So you say I lie? No, I don't lie - you just don't READ!!!
In this case, it is not (at least, not officially, but let's give her the benefit of the doubt on this one) company money, it is personal money. However, yes, companies do give money, lots of it.
Those percentages are an artifact of the sample - people from New York City who summer in Florida. Do you know what the votes were like in New York City in the 2000 presidential election? 1,633,525 for the Democrats, 375,792 for the Republicans (I'm counting the party votes, not the individual votes - see the official report here, specifically here - because we don't know how the New York Daily News would have categorized votes for "conservative" and "liberal" in their study - it's interesting that those numbers show a much closer split, 25,130 Conservative [Bush] versus 29,386 Liberal [Gore]) out of a total of 2,283,261, for total percentages of 71.5 percent Democrat, 16.5 percent Republican (if you include the Liberal numbers with the Democrat, you get 72.8%, and if you include the Conservative numbers with the Republican, 17.6%). For a sample size of 46,000 out of 2.3 million, those numbers are pretty similar.
Note, too, that it gives the percentages of people that are registered in both states - 46,000
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
- but not of people it thinks VOTED in both states - 1,000 at worst:
But the newspaper found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
That 1,000 is not a good sample of the 48,000, because their motivations are different. The difference between those two numbers is the difference beween neglect and deliberate fraud. The 48,000 are simply registered in two states - since registrations usually aren't "closed" - you usually don't call the town you're moving out of and ask them to take you off the voter rolls - they could very well be people who registered to vote in Florida, and voted in Florida, when they got down there, and registered to vote in New York, and voted in New York - in a different election - when they got up there. You can't apply the "neglect" numbers to make an argument about which party is more likely to commit intentional voter fraud.
Since the percentages almost exactly reflect their sample, the study tells us nothing about Democratic versus Republican voter fraud. Indeed, the newspaper study (from an historically conservative newspaper), at least as it is characterized by the Reuters article, looks as though it deliberately limited its sample to New York City in order to come out with a result that would embarrass the Democratic Party. Now you'll probably say "well, they chose New York City because it's a New York paper and that's what their readership would care about." Ahh, but you see, the Reuters article cited the percentages, but didn't contextualize them by citing the overall voter percentages of their sample - a classic tactic of those who want to lie with statistics. So either the Reuters article is representing what the New York Daily News reported, or they left out the context, and thereby distorted what the New York Daily News reported.
Note that this took me 6 minutes to work out, using Google and your posting. I'm sure that the New York Daily News author, or the author of the Reuters article, could have done the same thing. I wish I knew whether they did or not.
Ah, but the point is, if they vote for the "wrong" candidate, Omega will see that, and discretely discard their votes before they are transmitted to the polling place. So you see, this is quite possibly as bad as an absentee ballot not being counted. The fact that the motive force behind it is the party you support, while the previous incident was due to the party you don't support, is irrelevant.
Williams, Patricia A Ms.. OMEGA TECNOLOGIES INCORPORATED/PRES VA 600 03/04/2003 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Williams, Patricia A Ms.. OMEGA TECNOLOGIES INCORPORATED/PRES VA 1,250 04/29/2003 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Williams, Patricia A Ms.. Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres VA 1,000 06/27/2003 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Williams, Patricia A Ms.. Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres VA 1,250 06/30/2003 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Williams, Patricia A Ms.. Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres VA 1,250 07/30/2003 NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Note that it's all soft money - none directly to the candidate. That's a sign of an insider. There is nothing listed at Campaign Finance.com for her for any other election or candidate. Note, too, that I had to do some hunting to find this - in the database, the company name is mis-spelled "TECNOLOGIES" each time (rather strange, that). Nothing listed for '00, even though the company was founded in '91. If you go to the website, you'll see that it is not a big company, but is officially a "minority, woman-owned, small disadvantaged business." http://www.omega-its.com/about.htm If you had read even the summary carefully, let alone the editorial, you would have noticed that she's part of an advisory board - one usually doesn't do that for opposing parties.
I can't in the 10 minutes I've chosen to dedicate to research this particular one manage to find evidence that Ms. Williams is on the Business Advisory Board, but here's a description of that board:
What is the Business Advisory Council? The Business Advisory Council is a small, prestigious group of conservative businessmen and women, who have joined with the NRCC to advocate a progressive, conservative, pro-business agenda. The Business Advisory Council allows for these individuals to pool their expertise and know-how to to bring some common business sense to Washington.
(I have to admit that I find the use of the term "progressive, conservative" hilarious, as they are by both their dictionary definitions and their historical ideological meanings antonyms.)
The Supreme Court does not repeal, they nullify, IIRC (IANAL).
Re:the legal theory is right in the us code
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Would one of the mods who modded me up please mod up this response as "informative"?
I'm not 100% sure that this is the scenario that the authors of title 35 had in mind, but that doesn't do anything to answer to "nudicle's" point. That is precisely the sort of thing that would make room for such a suit.
If it really is a matter of EVERY observation staring at 1420 MHz and then drifting, it's probably some kind of artifact - after all, otherwise whoever is sending out the signal (even if it is terrestrial) would have to know when the telescope started looking in that direction.
Anybody else notice that the quote cited by parent under "uncertainty" presupposes that OS customers would be lawsuit targets of patents? Under what legal theory do you sue the customer of an infringing product? If the customer has customized the product is what I guess is the legal theory behind this statement - in other words, if you have the source code of an application you're using and you modify it and re-release your changes into the world, you'd be liable for patent claims against that code. Gives both the SCO lawsuits and Microsoft's own recent patent hunger a whole new sinister meaning - if you're not a Microsoft customer, you'll be a Microsoft/SCO/other "patent"-holder target. Upping the ante from BSA, I guess.
If the originating ip address matches your ISP, there's a good chance, though as others here have said, most of the time, these bounces are from spam that uses one address from its mailing list for the "TO" header and another for the "FROM" header.
NEVER run Windows without solid anti-virus. If something on your machine is interfering with the anti-virus, fix your machine until anti-virus runs. If your anti-virus interferes with something else, don't run that something else. Seriously. It's that dangerous. Being used for spamming is the least of your potential problems.
Most SETI research, as I understand it, is based upon the assumption that any signal would be a signal intended to catch the attention of a civilization with our limitations - thus the attention to the Hydrogen Alpha line, etc.
We're looking for what we know how to find, with the awareness that there will likely be civilizations that communicate in ways that we don't understand or even recognize, or that don't communicate at all, or that may confuse us utterly if we ever figure out that they even exist. In fact, we are looking basically for someone who is looking to be found by people just like us.
Hopefully, as we conceive of new ways to communicate, we'll start looking for those as well.
So then it would be ok with you if an easy listening band that did mostly according music came out with albums calling themselves "The Beat Alls"? Because THAT'S what MST3K is suing over.
Slashdot Mirror
Most states here have write-ins (there are exceptions, as mentioned in a previous /. story), so rather than "spoiling" your ballot, you can just write in someone else - your high school history teacher, anybody.
Great thing about the system we have, though, is if the system is broken, you can run yourself to try to fix it. Start from the bottom (party caucus, etc.) and keep chugging. And if you run into glass ceilings over lobbying, money, corruption, etc., let people know.
My biggest complaint about talk radio left and right is that there are rarely any new ideas discussed. Mimics the political process I guess.
Insightful +1
(Hey, no one with mod points was going to do it . . .)
He's a very intelligent Bush supporter.
These two things (intelligent, and Bush supporter) being two different issues, of course: one can be intelligent and conservative or intelligent and liberal - it all depends upon one's priorities.
I think it's a joke mod. Anyway, it's a running joke - even Joswiak himself has made the joke that they hired him to get the best of both names.
Nope, I was providing a hypothetical. Sorry if that wasn't clear. Actually, I know plenty of Republicans. Most of them aren't very sophisticated politically, but some of them are, and are bright, and simply have different priorities than I have.
I'm glad you apologized for that comment, it took guts - and the brains to realize that you were mistaken (at least in this case).
Yes, the RIAA/MPAA give a lot more money to the Democrats - which I find disgusting on the part of the Democrats. Both parties have their favorite ways of violating our rights - that's why, even though (unlike you) I abhor guns, and even think that some guns should be regulated in some ways, I agree with you (from your other postings) that the 2nd Amendment was a very important thing to keep in the Constitution - when the bootjacks come, whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, whether it's in 100 years or a 1000 - it'll happen eventually, every great Republic eventually falls to the tyrants, as Polybius and Thucydides and Tacitus teach us - at least there should be some way of resisting them.
I did finally remember the OpenSecrets URL before seeing your posting, and saw the same thing you did. As I'm sure you realize, the OpenSecrets site is very non-partisan, and is professionally done (the board are both Democrats and Republicans). Either the FEC database is to blame, or Ms. Williams is. Now, if Ms. Williams is, either she did it out of ignorance of the name of her own company (which would surprise me; the CEO of my company gets annoyed when people punctuate the name improperly), or she did it to make her affiliation harder to find. We'll be nice and assume that it was the FEC's fault.
The point here isn't that one company is donating some money to one party - its that there's a pattern of companies associated with elections oversight being affiliated with the Republican Party, and there were a LOT of irregularities in Florida - that's what's bothering Democrats. The reason the Democrats (wrongly, in my opinion) challenged those military absentee ballots is because there was some minor evidence of absentee ballots being tampered with by Republican officials, say one or two of them. Bad reason to toss out large numbers of absentee ballots, especially from folks who are risking their lives defending our country, but no different in detail, aside from the obvious emotional distinction, from Republicans having folks stricken from the rolls, supposedly for no longer being residents, whom they know to be active Democrats (I have independent reason to believe these accusations).
As Cokie Roberts said, though (and she's from a prominent Democratic family), in Florida they don't know how to rig an election properly - in Louisiana, they bury their dead shallow so it's easier to dig them up on election day!!! Election irregularities and corruption have been a multi-partisan problem for a long time. So what I'd do is a. have electronic voting provide human-readable/machine-scannable receipts, so both hand recounts and mechanical recounts can be checked against the electronic voting, and for absentee military ballots, use seals and have officers notarize the seals (rather than using fax machines, etc.) If you've got an officer notarizing a seal, you're no less secret than in many small wards, and you'll be able to do sanity checks on the absentee ballot. But, not having been in the military, I don't know how feasible that would be. But certainly I think disenfranchising the military is the ultimate in stupidity - since the most important decisions the President is going to make will effect them directly, they're the ones whose votes are most important to protect. I don't understand why they're all gung-ho to re-elect this administration, since I think an administration capable of a more balanced and internationalist foreign policy would better serve their interests (in other words, one like the previous two administrations, both Clinton and Bush 41), but that's another story.
Excellent post. I'm not 100% sure about this - maybe one of the Aussies on the list could correct me - but I believe that South Australia was never a "convict colony" in the sense of receiving transported prisoners - I believe it was founded as a colony of free settlers, unlike the older New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (a.k.a., Tasmania). True, convicts with tickets of leave, emancipated convicts, and the children of convicts (as the free settlers insulting callled them, "currency") probably did make up some of the population by that point (besides, plenty of the convicts were there in NSW for either petty crimes motivated by poverty or political crimes) so your point probably isn't damaged, but I thought it important to preserve the historical distinction. See Stuart Macintyre, *A Concise History of Australia*, pp. 80-81; there's probably something in Hughes' *The Fatal Shore*. I think Victoria, which first passed the law (but was beaten to practical use by South Australia) was also established as a free colony, but I couldn't find any support for that in the sources at hand.
Thanks. The reference works fine, as long as you account for the fact that /. adds a space to long references. Try this one, which is what I typed (without the interpolated space due to /code). There are a huge number of trolls in any political discussion, of every persuasion. I find it interesting, though, that I was accused of lying by someone who obviously didn't read my post all the way through.
Yeah, you tried real hard there, buddy. First, you did read the part of my post where I pointed out that the name of the company is mis-spelled in the database - every time. Second, you didn't notice that /. added a space to the link, did you? So you say I lie? No, I don't lie - you just don't READ!!!
In this case, it is not (at least, not officially, but let's give her the benefit of the doubt on this one) company money, it is personal money. However, yes, companies do give money, lots of it.
Those percentages are an artifact of the sample - people from New York City who summer in Florida. Do you know what the votes were like in New York City in the 2000 presidential election? 1,633,525 for the Democrats, 375,792 for the Republicans (I'm counting the party votes, not the individual votes - see the official report here, specifically here - because we don't know how the New York Daily News would have categorized votes for "conservative" and "liberal" in their study - it's interesting that those numbers show a much closer split, 25,130 Conservative [Bush] versus 29,386 Liberal [Gore]) out of a total of 2,283,261, for total percentages of 71.5 percent Democrat, 16.5 percent Republican (if you include the Liberal numbers with the Democrat, you get 72.8%, and if you include the Conservative numbers with the Republican, 17.6%). For a sample size of 46,000 out of 2.3 million, those numbers are pretty similar.
Note, too, that it gives the percentages of people that are registered in both states - 46,000
Of the 46,000 registered in both states, 68 percent are Democrats, 12 percent are Republicans and 16 percent didn't align themselves with a party, the newspaper reported on Sunday.
- but not of people it thinks VOTED in both states - 1,000 at worst:
But the newspaper found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
That 1,000 is not a good sample of the 48,000, because their motivations are different. The difference between those two numbers is the difference beween neglect and deliberate fraud. The 48,000 are simply registered in two states - since registrations usually aren't "closed" - you usually don't call the town you're moving out of and ask them to take you off the voter rolls - they could very well be people who registered to vote in Florida, and voted in Florida, when they got down there, and registered to vote in New York, and voted in New York - in a different election - when they got up there. You can't apply the "neglect" numbers to make an argument about which party is more likely to commit intentional voter fraud.
Since the percentages almost exactly reflect their sample, the study tells us nothing about Democratic versus Republican voter fraud. Indeed, the newspaper study (from an historically conservative newspaper), at least as it is characterized by the Reuters article, looks as though it deliberately limited its sample to New York City in order to come out with a result that would embarrass the Democratic Party. Now you'll probably say "well, they chose New York City because it's a New York paper and that's what their readership would care about." Ahh, but you see, the Reuters article cited the percentages, but didn't contextualize them by citing the overall voter percentages of their sample - a classic tactic of those who want to lie with statistics. So either the Reuters article is representing what the New York Daily News reported, or they left out the context, and thereby distorted what the New York Daily News reported.
Note that this took me 6 minutes to work out, using Google and your posting. I'm sure that the New York Daily News author, or the author of the Reuters article, could have done the same thing. I wish I knew whether they did or not.
Ah, but the point is, if they vote for the "wrong" candidate, Omega will see that, and discretely discard their votes before they are transmitted to the polling place. So you see, this is quite possibly as bad as an absentee ballot not being counted. The fact that the motive force behind it is the party you support, while the previous incident was due to the party you don't support, is irrelevant.
Here's the data:
o &c ycle=04&criteria=OMEGA+TECNOLOGIES+INCORPORATED%2F PRES
.
.L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
.L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
.L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
.L REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
.com for her for any other election or candidate. Note, too, that I had to do some hunting to find this - in the database, the company name is mis-spelled "TECNOLOGIES" each time (rather strange, that). Nothing listed for '00, even though the company was founded in '91. If you go to the website, you'll see that it is not a big company, but is officially a "minority, woman-owned, small disadvantaged business." http://www.omega-its.com/about.htm If you had read even the summary carefully, let alone the editorial, you would have noticed that she's part of an advisory board - one usually doesn't do that for opposing parties.
http://www.campaignmoney.com/finance.asp?type=i
Williams, Patricia A Ms.
OMEGA TECNOLOGIES INCORPORATED/PRES
VA
600
03/04/2003
NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CONGRESSIONAL COMMITTEE - REPUBLICAN
Williams, Patricia A Ms.
OMEGA TECNOLOGIES INCORPORATED/PRES
VA
1,250
04/29/2003
NATIONA
Williams, Patricia A Ms.
Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres
VA
1,000
06/27/2003
NATIONA
Williams, Patricia A Ms.
Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres
VA
1,250
06/30/2003
NATIONA
Williams, Patricia A Ms.
Omega Tecnologies Incorporated/Pres
VA
1,250
07/30/2003
NATIONA
Note that it's all soft money - none directly to the candidate. That's a sign of an insider. There is nothing listed at Campaign Finance
I can't in the 10 minutes I've chosen to dedicate to research this particular one manage to find evidence that Ms. Williams is on the Business Advisory Board, but here's a description of that board:
What is the Business Advisory Council?
The Business Advisory Council is a small, prestigious group of conservative businessmen and women, who have joined with the NRCC to advocate a progressive, conservative, pro-business agenda. The Business Advisory Council allows for these individuals to pool their expertise and know-how to to bring some common business sense to Washington.
(I have to admit that I find the use of the term "progressive, conservative" hilarious, as they are by both their dictionary definitions and their historical ideological meanings antonyms.)
The Supreme Court does not repeal, they nullify, IIRC (IANAL).
Would one of the mods who modded me up please mod up this response as "informative"?
I'm not 100% sure that this is the scenario that the authors of title 35 had in mind, but that doesn't do anything to answer to "nudicle's" point. That is precisely the sort of thing that would make room for such a suit.
On the x86 platform. They also make cards for the PPC platform. So better to say "but only for users of closed platforms."
If it really is a matter of EVERY observation staring at 1420 MHz and then drifting, it's probably some kind of artifact - after all, otherwise whoever is sending out the signal (even if it is terrestrial) would have to know when the telescope started looking in that direction.
Anybody else notice that the quote cited by parent under "uncertainty" presupposes that OS customers would be lawsuit targets of patents? Under what legal theory do you sue the customer of an infringing product? If the customer has customized the product is what I guess is the legal theory behind this statement - in other words, if you have the source code of an application you're using and you modify it and re-release your changes into the world, you'd be liable for patent claims against that code. Gives both the SCO lawsuits and Microsoft's own recent patent hunger a whole new sinister meaning - if you're not a Microsoft customer, you'll be a Microsoft/SCO/other "patent"-holder target. Upping the ante from BSA, I guess.
If the originating ip address matches your ISP, there's a good chance, though as others here have said, most of the time, these bounces are from spam that uses one address from its mailing list for the "TO" header and another for the "FROM" header.
NEVER run Windows without solid anti-virus. If something on your machine is interfering with the anti-virus, fix your machine until anti-virus runs. If your anti-virus interferes with something else, don't run that something else. Seriously. It's that dangerous. Being used for spamming is the least of your potential problems.
Probably the most successful troll I've ever seen, at least as far as putting readers on an emotional rollercoaster.
Actually, my understanding is that they are doing exactly the opposite - looking for intentional beacons.
Most SETI research, as I understand it, is based upon the assumption that any signal would be a signal intended to catch the attention of a civilization with our limitations - thus the attention to the Hydrogen Alpha line, etc.
We're looking for what we know how to find, with the awareness that there will likely be civilizations that communicate in ways that we don't understand or even recognize, or that don't communicate at all, or that may confuse us utterly if we ever figure out that they even exist. In fact, we are looking basically for someone who is looking to be found by people just like us.
Hopefully, as we conceive of new ways to communicate, we'll start looking for those as well.
So then it would be ok with you if an easy listening band that did mostly according music came out with albums calling themselves "The Beat Alls"? Because THAT'S what MST3K is suing over.