I lived in the US for five years until a year ago. My experience with PPOs was just as bad as HMOs. Neither was anywhere close to reliable in delivering healthcare.
You'd call a doctor and be told there was a six week waiting list. You'd have to convince the *receptionist* you had a problem that requires more urgent treatment. They'd then typically tell you their urgent care facility was either overloaded or completely closed, and to go to emergency at a hospital. That usually meant a wait of 4-8 hours.
With experiences like this, it wouldn't surprise me if many people in Germany preferred their healthcare system.
If you read the articles (maybe need to follow some of the links) you'll find that there were three copies of tables of votes. One appeared to be used to generate summary reports, and another for detailed reports. I haven't been able to imagine why you'd need more than one copy of the votes in a table - could be an innocent explanation, but it looks pretty suspicious.
I hope your article represents the current IEEE-USA position. I cancelled my IEEE membership about three years ago in protest at their policy at the time - they were campaigning against the number of H-1B holders, rather than the root cause (lack of market power for the temporary workers, which would be addressed by temporary green cards). I asked if I could be an IEEE member living in the USA without paying dues to the IEEE-USA, but the answer was no. Many others did the same.
I've been using the "by carrier pigeon" example for years to try to get junior engineers to think about the difference between transport and protocol. Nice to see I can now quote an RFC number to go with it:-)
The issue is not that the young guys can do more in less (calendar) time - typically the PHBs are not comparing apples to apples. The young guys spend more hours at work for a given amount of calendar time, but that doesn't mean they accomplish more. They may even write more lines of code in that time - but that doesn't mean they accomplish more.
What the average PHB doesn't have a clue how to measure is how effective an engineer is. "Effective" includes doing the right job, doing it efficiently, doing it maintainably, doing it in such a fashion to avoid near-future pitfalls, and enabling others to work effectively at the same time. Effective does not include number of hours worked or number of lines of code written, nor even number of suck-ups to the PHB.
I can tell you from direct experience, the boss typically hasn't a clue how to measure that effectiveness and tends to rely on simple indicators like hours worked and the amount of ego-massaging they receive from their subordinates. They're even quite willingly cheerful to admit those facts. I've seen a near-net-negative producers highly praised because he spends so many hours at work - when most of those hours are spent fixing problems he created in the first place.
If I ever start my own company, I'm going after the older guys who have kept fairly current and really know how to get the job done. Doesn't matter if they cost 50% more than the young guys and will only work 40 hours a week - it's how much they actually get done per buck that counts, and the more experience the more likely they'll do better by this metric.
But then you look at.nl and.au. Both contries make it almost impossible for an American to work there prefering to keep jobs for local citizens.
Welcome to the US citizen's nearest experience of the INS. I've seen both sides - I've worked at companies in Australia that hired foreign nationals, and I'm currently in the US on an H-1B. The labour laws and paperwork and restrictrions for foreign employment in Australia are no worse than those in the US, but I believe permanent residency based on continued employment is easier to obtain.
This is either flame-bait, or you're going to get a big surprise in about 10 years when India takes away half the programming jobs in the US - built partly on the skill of returning H-1B workers.
It's a little known fact that US labour laws require employers to pay overtime to all workers in non-strategic and non-professional corporate positions (i.e. not exercising strategic control within the corporation). Most programming/IT positions are considered not to be professional positions. This law applies even to salaried workers. The SF Chronicle had an article on it a few months ago.
Enforcing this law would go a long way to cleaning up this particular market inefficiency.
In addition to which, all that money they should have been saving will take them a looonnngggg way in a 3rd world country where it is a damn sight cheaper to live.
Which goes to show you haven't been paying too much attention. Living in many parts of the US (particularly the Bay Area) is very expensive, and many H-1B holders are being paid exploitatively low salaries. The combination means you either live like a dog here in order to save some of that salary and hope to take it back home, or you spend your time in the US without saving anything. I've been here almost three years and I'm definitely in the latter category - I have zero savings from my US stay (and not because of any fancy living). I've heard the same from most of my network of H-1B holders.
"Measly" is relative - and in the Bay Area 45-55k per year is quite poor pay for any half decent programmer.
In addition, 45-55k per year in San Francisco is pretty much below the poverty line. I just moved out of a one-bedroom apartment in a nice enough but not terribly upscale neighbourhood and the new tenants are paying $2800/month for it.
An H1B takes about 3 months to obtain. You are not obliged to work for one employer, and can change.
Right, but you have a lot less leverage in (say) salary negotiations, because you can't just go out and find another job straight away. (I've seen H-1B visa transfers in California take 5.5 months to process.) If the job or company starts to really badly suck, you may have to wait that long to get out of it. During that time you may have a very strong desire to leave the job, but doing so means leaving the country (selling your assets at a loss, giving up your apartment, dismantling your US life at considerable expense). I won't even start on the position it puts you in with regard to stock options and AMT.
* An employer can't "send them back". This is a HUGE misconception. Even if the company fires someone, he is legally present with a valid work permit, which normally doesn't expire until a yr or two.
This is not strictly true. Yes, the employer can't directly send one back (and if you go back, the last employer is responsible for moving expenses in some way). However, you have 10 days to have another potential employer submit an H-1B application, or you are no longer legally present. Firstly, think about the salary negotiating position that puts you in (I can tell you all about it from personal experience). Secondly, during that period you are not allowed to work unless it's on a valid H-1B - and if you only have one and have just been laid off, you have no income source. Given that (in California) H-1Bs routinely take over 3 months and may take almost 6 months to come through, how are you supposed to support yourself?
This means that H-1Bs need to have some sort of prescient radar detecting how the job/company is going to be doing over the next 3-6 months, and get out if it looks like it could go bad.
* Inspite of the mass hysteria, employers can't pay anything they want - they have to legally state how much they pay and this has to be approved by the DoL (dept. of labor) BEFORE they grant it.
True, but there are so many ways around paying the "prevailing wage" that it's laughable. For example, there are many common dodges using the DOL survey (which was last published in 1998, has overly broad geographical regions, has overly broad job descriptions, poorly measures specialty or in-demand skills, has little measure of years of experience). I've seen the proposed salaries posted for several H-1B positions, and they're usually a joke.
Yes, in CA it's really that slow (although I hear it's improving), and you have to use the processing centre for your region. I know people for whom the transfer took 5.5 months. Your Nebraska experience has no bearing on how long it may take at a different centre.
Importing the best and brightest is probably the only way for the US to maintain dominance in intellectual business.
There's not a great deal of infrastructure required to build (say) a software business, as the primary raw material is the intelligence of your employees. The average US citizen might be shocked to learn that there are about 5.75 billion people outside the US;-), and that population has about the same intelligence distribution as the US population enjoys! In other words, there are about 23 smart people outside the US for every smart person inside. If they remain there, many of them will end up competing in intellectual businesses with US concerns and given that wages outside the US are significantly lower, they'll eventually compete very effectively. Just look at the size of the software industry in India, for example and think about the wages there.
Bringing as many of the smart people as possible to the US is the only way to mitigate the globalisation effect in the long run.
This is a great idea. I recall that there is a Senator proposing this, but I'm doubtful that it will gain widespread support. Politics in this country (as in Australia, my home country) panders to the lowest common denominator with FUD a particularly effective tactic.
I can just see an opponent of the proposal with a soundbite on TV proclaiming that this will bring hordes of foreigners in to take away US jobs and lower wages. In fact, by giving bargaining power to the foreigners it will increase their wages, and by extension those of their US citizen colleagues - but I don't expect the average TV viewer to hear or understand that point.
Absolutely. I use this as one litmus test to determine whether someone in the H-1B debate is either pushing an agenda (perhaps politically motivated) or trying to solve the "problems" presented.
A couple of years ago when this debate came up, the IEEE-USA campaigned hard against increased visa limits, without looking at the worst aspects of the H-1B system - tying the visa to the employer, and in California taking up to 6 months to get a transfer to another employer. If I wasn't tied to my employer and could change in a couple of weeks, I would have to be paid market rates by my current employer, or they would lose me.
The IEEE-USA weren't interested in this aspect of the problem, so I resigned my membership in protest and wrote a letter to the board explaining my position.
IMHO, much of the commentary in the press suffers from the same shallow thinking and short-sightedness - but most of you are smart enough to figure that out for yourselves;-)
Actually, the INS requires that one pays at least the prevailing wage - I actually thought it was 5% over, but I may be wrong.
In practice, there are lots of ways around that.
For example, in Silicon Valley where I work on an H-1B, it's quite common for companies to use the OLS (sp?) survey from 1998 for the North Western US region. There are at least three reasons why that fails to capture prevailing wages - it's 2 years old, the job categories in the survey are fairly broad and don't capture demand for specific skills and wages in the Valley are a lot higher than in most of the rest of the region. I suspect also that the survey doesn't take into account years of experience either (a common ommission used by HR departments to argue that they're paying you what everyone else gets paid...)
I've seen several salaries in the H-1B notice (that was required to be posted in the workplace for a few weeks during the H-1B application process) that were significantly under market rates, and yet significantly higher than the survey, and thus satisfactory to the INS.
If US citizens really care about wage pressure for foreign workers, the best thing they can do is to lobby for real enforcement (and visa portability, but that's another issue). If H-1B workers actually cost more than locals, who do you think the employer would prefer? Us H-1B slaves would also be a lot happier:-)
What *evidence* for a miracle would be sufficient?
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I think there are some hidden mutually exclusive assumptions being lumped together here.
What actually constitutes valid evidence for a miracle? Most would probably say "something that I can't explain any other way". That's fine, except that way back in history there were plenty of natural events that could not be explained any other way, and therefore could be considered miracles. (See Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote about sufficiently advanced technology..., and while you're at it see any really good illusionist.)
Others might say "Something I can't conceive of ever being explained any other way", but that does little to change the argument.
Still others say "Something that's so highly improbable that I can't believe it happened by chance". This is a very popular argument, but poor understanding of probability. We have Lotto winners every week, but we don't attribute the winning to miraculous causes (although the winners themselves might;-)
Scientists have a particular problem with the "miraculous", because they study essentially only what can be observed and reproduced. By definition, miraculous events are outside of that domain. Ergo, scientists have very little they can do within the scientific framework to convince themselves that something is miraculous.
So, given credible "evidence of a miracle", how would you determine whether it was something perfectly natural but way beyond current understanding, or something truly miraculous (outside the scope of scientific study because it doesn't follow scientific laws, and hence can't be tested for or independently reproduced)?
In the end, perhaps it comes down to faith - your axioms or assumptions that lead you to believe it's one or the other...
The ITU procedure requires a statistical "filtering" of the responses to eliminate listeners who didn't understand the instructions or who couldn't reliably distinguish processed from original sound. From more than 30 respondents we ended up with usable scores from 16 listeners...
And in this sample group, they only found half who could statistically tell the difference between the original CD and compressed data.
This conclusion cannot be drawn from the original quote. You cannot tell how many of the unusable responses were due to those who couldn't follow instructions, and those who couldn't tell the difference.
You may be right about "golden ears" being very rare, and MP3 being indistinguishable from CD. Then again, you may be wrong. This particular quote neither supports nor invalidates your argument.
IANAL, so take this post with a grain of salt until a real lawyer can comment on your specific situation.
This doesn't sound like my understanding of the patent. They have a claim on the compression/decompresion algorithm, not the output. A set of bytes is not patentable even if there is some special format to them, as far as I understand. The process of producing those bytes is, at least under US patent law. If they are trying to licence the output, they are probably overstepping their patent claim. In other words, it shouldn't be your problem if you obtained the GIFs from someone who claimed to be licenced to produce them for you, because you bought the sequence of bytes, not the use of the algorithm.
Of course, the small Web site operators may prefer to pay the GIF extortion tax rather than try to prove this point in court at much greater expense...
Re: I want my DigiCash
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I worked for DigiCash up until it went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, so I know a little about it;-) This post is personal opinion - I do not speak for the company.
To the best of my knowledge, all of the non-US DigiCash systems are still successfully up and running. Mark Twain was running a US trial for a long period of time but pulled out a year or so ago, which is why there is no current US presence.
However, you will be pleased to hear that the DigiCash IP was sold to a startup who appear very interested in making it a ubiquitous and successful product, and IMHO it sounds like they have the execution skill to back up the vision. Keep an eye out for it:)
Feminists ranting about models implicitly take a position that "if I cannot be as beautiful as that model, then that model has no right to be beautiful at all, or at the very least she should hide her beauty and not annoy me by reminding me of my imperfections".
With all due respect, I think the statement above is a simplistic and tenuous generalisation. I believe most feminists would not be comfortable with the "implicit position" you assign to them. I would imagine most would say that their ranting is mostly at the presentation of the tweaked images of models as if they were the real thing, and/or the implicit value placed on "beauty" rather than the other aspects of women, and the follow-on effects of that in society and personal relationships.
When you have people (especially impressionable young people) viewing these images and comparing to their own image in the mirror, the implicit assumption is that those images are "reality" and attainable. They are not - as any half-decent amateur photographer, or anyone who's played with Photoshop for 5 minutes will know. Failing that, take your closest "normal looking" female friend to a glamour photographer and be prepared to be surprised at the images that result. The image in the mirror is very rarely anything like the image on the page or screen - even for those "supermodels".
If feminist ranting about models is based on this sort of reasoning, I think it's perfectly defensible. Their argument is firstly more about the disingenous presentation as reality than about the "fact" that the models in question are more beautiful on some measure than the feminist in question. It is secondly about the whole beauty-as-measure-of-worth thing that is implied (or perceived to be implied) by the whole model/glamour/beauty business.
David Chaum's ideas can be used to prevent the state from proving a ballot is mine... but since I know my own "blinding" factor (at least for a while, even if the software immediately discards it) I can prove how I voted. I suspect all cryptographic protocols will have the same problem.
I'm not a cryptographic expert, but I worked at DigiCash for a while (founded by David Chaum). One of the cryptographers there was Berry Schoenmakers. He either invented a new voting protocol or extended David's ideas - unfortunately I can't recall which. Check out DigiCash voting protocols for further details. I don't think your assertion is correct, but we'd really need Berry to provide an authoritative answer.
I also believe Berry's implementation was trialled in a recent Dutch election, but I don't have any corroboration.
Outside of the question about cryptographic protocols, this also suggests that any off-site voting, with the possible exception of official "floating" precincts which visit the invalid, may be unconstitutional. With electronic ballots it is certainly within the realm of possibility that some organizations will have "election parties" with incredible social pressure for everyone to publicly vote in the "correct" manner.
If this gets to be a problem, then laws will be written to prevent this behaviour. Current law has never had to deal with this issue. Saying that we should not use the technology because the law hadn't anticipated a potential abuse is not very useful - most technologies in common use today had the same property at their time of introduction. Update the laws - don't ban innovation.
On a personal level, one can always vote _before_ heading to the mandatory voting party. If your vote is already cast, any further attempt to cast a (socially coerced) vote will fail.
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Funny someone should mention the Best Democracy Money Can Buy Or check out the author's website
Funny someone should mention the Or check out the author's website
I lived in the US for five years until a year ago. My experience with PPOs was just as bad as HMOs. Neither was anywhere close to reliable in delivering healthcare.
You'd call a doctor and be told there was a six week waiting list. You'd have to convince the *receptionist* you had a problem that requires more urgent treatment. They'd then typically tell you their urgent care facility was either overloaded or completely closed, and to go to emergency at a hospital. That usually meant a wait of 4-8 hours.
With experiences like this, it wouldn't surprise me if many people in Germany preferred their healthcare system.
If you read the articles (maybe need to follow some of the links) you'll find that there were three copies of tables of votes. One appeared to be used to generate summary reports, and another for detailed reports. I haven't been able to imagine why you'd need more than one copy of the votes in a table - could be an innocent explanation, but it looks pretty suspicious.
I hope your article represents the current IEEE-USA position. I cancelled my IEEE membership about three years ago in protest at their policy at the time - they were campaigning against the number of H-1B holders, rather than the root cause (lack of market power for the temporary workers, which would be addressed by temporary green cards). I asked if I could be an IEEE member living in the USA without paying dues to the IEEE-USA, but the answer was no. Many others did the same.
I've been using the "by carrier pigeon" example for years to try to get junior engineers to think about the difference between transport and protocol. Nice to see I can now quote an RFC number to go with it :-)
What the average PHB doesn't have a clue how to measure is how effective an engineer is. "Effective" includes doing the right job, doing it efficiently, doing it maintainably, doing it in such a fashion to avoid near-future pitfalls, and enabling others to work effectively at the same time. Effective does not include number of hours worked or number of lines of code written, nor even number of suck-ups to the PHB.
I can tell you from direct experience, the boss typically hasn't a clue how to measure that effectiveness and tends to rely on simple indicators like hours worked and the amount of ego-massaging they receive from their subordinates. They're even quite willingly cheerful to admit those facts. I've seen a near-net-negative producers highly praised because he spends so many hours at work - when most of those hours are spent fixing problems he created in the first place.
If I ever start my own company, I'm going after the older guys who have kept fairly current and really know how to get the job done. Doesn't matter if they cost 50% more than the young guys and will only work 40 hours a week - it's how much they actually get done per buck that counts, and the more experience the more likely they'll do better by this metric.
Welcome to the US citizen's nearest experience of the INS. I've seen both sides - I've worked at companies in Australia that hired foreign nationals, and I'm currently in the US on an H-1B. The labour laws and paperwork and restrictrions for foreign employment in Australia are no worse than those in the US, but I believe permanent residency based on continued employment is easier to obtain.
This is either flame-bait, or you're going to get a big surprise in about 10 years when India takes away half the programming jobs in the US - built partly on the skill of returning H-1B workers.
Enforcing this law would go a long way to cleaning up this particular market inefficiency.
Which goes to show you haven't been paying too much attention. Living in many parts of the US (particularly the Bay Area) is very expensive, and many H-1B holders are being paid exploitatively low salaries. The combination means you either live like a dog here in order to save some of that salary and hope to take it back home, or you spend your time in the US without saving anything. I've been here almost three years and I'm definitely in the latter category - I have zero savings from my US stay (and not because of any fancy living). I've heard the same from most of my network of H-1B holders.
In addition, 45-55k per year in San Francisco is pretty much below the poverty line. I just moved out of a one-bedroom apartment in a nice enough but not terribly upscale neighbourhood and the new tenants are paying $2800/month for it.
Right, but you have a lot less leverage in (say) salary negotiations, because you can't just go out and find another job straight away. (I've seen H-1B visa transfers in California take 5.5 months to process.) If the job or company starts to really badly suck, you may have to wait that long to get out of it. During that time you may have a very strong desire to leave the job, but doing so means leaving the country (selling your assets at a loss, giving up your apartment, dismantling your US life at considerable expense). I won't even start on the position it puts you in with regard to stock options and AMT.
* An employer can't "send them back". This is a HUGE misconception. Even if the company fires someone, he is legally present with a valid work permit, which normally doesn't expire until a yr or two.
This is not strictly true. Yes, the employer can't directly send one back (and if you go back, the last employer is responsible for moving expenses in some way). However, you have 10 days to have another potential employer submit an H-1B application, or you are no longer legally present. Firstly, think about the salary negotiating position that puts you in (I can tell you all about it from personal experience). Secondly, during that period you are not allowed to work unless it's on a valid H-1B - and if you only have one and have just been laid off, you have no income source. Given that (in California) H-1Bs routinely take over 3 months and may take almost 6 months to come through, how are you supposed to support yourself?
This means that H-1Bs need to have some sort of prescient radar detecting how the job/company is going to be doing over the next 3-6 months, and get out if it looks like it could go bad.
* Inspite of the mass hysteria, employers can't pay anything they want - they have to legally state how much they pay and this has to be approved by the DoL (dept. of labor) BEFORE they grant it.
True, but there are so many ways around paying the "prevailing wage" that it's laughable. For example, there are many common dodges using the DOL survey (which was last published in 1998, has overly broad geographical regions, has overly broad job descriptions, poorly measures specialty or in-demand skills, has little measure of years of experience). I've seen the proposed salaries posted for several H-1B positions, and they're usually a joke.
Yes, in CA it's really that slow (although I hear it's improving), and you have to use the processing centre for your region. I know people for whom the transfer took 5.5 months. Your Nebraska experience has no bearing on how long it may take at a different centre.
There's not a great deal of infrastructure required to build (say) a software business, as the primary raw material is the intelligence of your employees. The average US citizen might be shocked to learn that there are about 5.75 billion people outside the US ;-), and that population has about the same intelligence distribution as the US population enjoys! In other words, there are about 23 smart people outside the US for every smart person inside. If they remain there, many of them will end up competing in intellectual businesses with US concerns and given that wages outside the US are significantly lower, they'll eventually compete very effectively. Just look at the size of the software industry in India, for example and think about the wages there.
Bringing as many of the smart people as possible to the US is the only way to mitigate the globalisation effect in the long run.
I can just see an opponent of the proposal with a soundbite on TV proclaiming that this will bring hordes of foreigners in to take away US jobs and lower wages. In fact, by giving bargaining power to the foreigners it will increase their wages, and by extension those of their US citizen colleagues - but I don't expect the average TV viewer to hear or understand that point.
I find it interesting that stories abound of people who receive their green card and go out and get dramatically more pay...
A couple of years ago when this debate came up, the IEEE-USA campaigned hard against increased visa limits, without looking at the worst aspects of the H-1B system - tying the visa to the employer, and in California taking up to 6 months to get a transfer to another employer. If I wasn't tied to my employer and could change in a couple of weeks, I would have to be paid market rates by my current employer, or they would lose me. The IEEE-USA weren't interested in this aspect of the problem, so I resigned my membership in protest and wrote a letter to the board explaining my position.
IMHO, much of the commentary in the press suffers from the same shallow thinking and short-sightedness - but most of you are smart enough to figure that out for yourselves ;-)
In practice, there are lots of ways around that. For example, in Silicon Valley where I work on an H-1B, it's quite common for companies to use the OLS (sp?) survey from 1998 for the North Western US region. There are at least three reasons why that fails to capture prevailing wages - it's 2 years old, the job categories in the survey are fairly broad and don't capture demand for specific skills and wages in the Valley are a lot higher than in most of the rest of the region. I suspect also that the survey doesn't take into account years of experience either (a common ommission used by HR departments to argue that they're paying you what everyone else gets paid...)
I've seen several salaries in the H-1B notice (that was required to be posted in the workplace for a few weeks during the H-1B application process) that were significantly under market rates, and yet significantly higher than the survey, and thus satisfactory to the INS.
If US citizens really care about wage pressure for foreign workers, the best thing they can do is to lobby for real enforcement (and visa portability, but that's another issue). If H-1B workers actually cost more than locals, who do you think the employer would prefer? Us H-1B slaves would also be a lot happier :-)
What actually constitutes valid evidence for a miracle? Most would probably say "something that I can't explain any other way". That's fine, except that way back in history there were plenty of natural events that could not be explained any other way, and therefore could be considered miracles. (See Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote about sufficiently advanced technology..., and while you're at it see any really good illusionist.)
Others might say "Something I can't conceive of ever being explained any other way", but that does little to change the argument.
Still others say "Something that's so highly improbable that I can't believe it happened by chance". This is a very popular argument, but poor understanding of probability. We have Lotto winners every week, but we don't attribute the winning to miraculous causes (although the winners themselves might ;-)
Scientists have a particular problem with the "miraculous", because they study essentially only what can be observed and reproduced. By definition, miraculous events are outside of that domain. Ergo, scientists have very little they can do within the scientific framework to convince themselves that something is miraculous.
So, given credible "evidence of a miracle", how would you determine whether it was something perfectly natural but way beyond current understanding, or something truly miraculous (outside the scope of scientific study because it doesn't follow scientific laws, and hence can't be tested for or independently reproduced)?
In the end, perhaps it comes down to faith - your axioms or assumptions that lead you to believe it's one or the other...
And in this sample group, they only found half who could statistically tell the difference between the original CD and compressed data.
This conclusion cannot be drawn from the original quote. You cannot tell how many of the unusable responses were due to those who couldn't follow instructions, and those who couldn't tell the difference.
You may be right about "golden ears" being very rare, and MP3 being indistinguishable from CD. Then again, you may be wrong. This particular quote neither supports nor invalidates your argument.
This doesn't sound like my understanding of the patent. They have a claim on the compression/decompresion algorithm, not the output. A set of bytes is not patentable even if there is some special format to them, as far as I understand. The process of producing those bytes is, at least under US patent law. If they are trying to licence the output, they are probably overstepping their patent claim. In other words, it shouldn't be your problem if you obtained the GIFs from someone who claimed to be licenced to produce them for you, because you bought the sequence of bytes, not the use of the algorithm.
Of course, the small Web site operators may prefer to pay the GIF extortion tax rather than try to prove this point in court at much greater expense...
To the best of my knowledge, all of the non-US DigiCash systems are still successfully up and running. Mark Twain was running a US trial for a long period of time but pulled out a year or so ago, which is why there is no current US presence.
However, you will be pleased to hear that the DigiCash IP was sold to a startup who appear very interested in making it a ubiquitous and successful product, and IMHO it sounds like they have the execution skill to back up the vision. Keep an eye out for it :)
Feminists ranting about models implicitly take a position that "if I cannot be as beautiful as that model, then that model has no right to be beautiful at all, or at the very least she should hide her beauty and not annoy me by reminding me of my imperfections".
With all due respect, I think the statement above is a simplistic and tenuous generalisation. I believe most feminists would not be comfortable with the "implicit position" you assign to them. I would imagine most would say that their ranting is mostly at the presentation of the tweaked images of models as if they were the real thing, and/or the implicit value placed on "beauty" rather than the other aspects of women, and the follow-on effects of that in society and personal relationships.
When you have people (especially impressionable young people) viewing these images and comparing to their own image in the mirror, the implicit assumption is that those images are "reality" and attainable. They are not - as any half-decent amateur photographer, or anyone who's played with Photoshop for 5 minutes will know. Failing that, take your closest "normal looking" female friend to a glamour photographer and be prepared to be surprised at the images that result. The image in the mirror is very rarely anything like the image on the page or screen - even for those "supermodels".
If feminist ranting about models is based on this sort of reasoning, I think it's perfectly defensible. Their argument is firstly more about the disingenous presentation as reality than about the "fact" that the models in question are more beautiful on some measure than the feminist in question. It is secondly about the whole beauty-as-measure-of-worth thing that is implied (or perceived to be implied) by the whole model/glamour/beauty business.
David Chaum's ideas can be used to prevent the state from proving a ballot is mine... but since I know my own "blinding" factor (at least for a while, even if the software immediately discards it) I can prove how I voted. I suspect all cryptographic protocols will have the same problem.
I'm not a cryptographic expert, but I worked at DigiCash for a while (founded by David Chaum). One of the cryptographers there was Berry Schoenmakers. He either invented a new voting protocol or extended David's ideas - unfortunately I can't recall which. Check out DigiCash voting protocols for further details. I don't think your assertion is correct, but we'd really need Berry to provide an authoritative answer.
I also believe Berry's implementation was trialled in a recent Dutch election, but I don't have any corroboration.
Outside of the question about cryptographic protocols, this also suggests that any off-site voting, with the possible exception of official "floating" precincts which visit the invalid, may be unconstitutional. With electronic ballots it is certainly within the realm of possibility that some organizations will have "election parties" with incredible social pressure for everyone to publicly vote in the "correct" manner.
If this gets to be a problem, then laws will be written to prevent this behaviour. Current law has never had to deal with this issue. Saying that we should not use the technology because the law hadn't anticipated a potential abuse is not very useful - most technologies in common use today had the same property at their time of introduction. Update the laws - don't ban innovation.
On a personal level, one can always vote _before_ heading to the mandatory voting party. If your vote is already cast, any further attempt to cast a (socially coerced) vote will fail.