I got lambasted for using that not-even-close-to-a-word before, and you know, I was wrong to use it. Because it isn't a word. Really. Virii? Where did that even come from? Even if you incorrectly use the common rule and replace the "us" with "i" you get "viri". Where does the extra "i" come from?
Please stop using this bastardization as I did. The last thing English needs is a new complex form of pluralization, the "add random letters for no reason" rule.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying that tax relief for lower income families is useless because they'll only spend the money on retail items that were probably made in China. Contrary to this, tax relief for the rich will help because they will invest it in U.S. companies who will then create more jobs for Americans.
That makes no sense.
If the retailer's products are all coming from China, where do you think the investor's dollars (and the jobs this supposedly creates) are going to go? What stops them from simply investing in foreign markets anyway? At least when you buy retail, you're paying a company with a physical presence in the U.S. and necessitating the need for workers in the retail store, the warehouses, the distribution network, the ship yards, not to mention IT departments which need staff (more jobs) and equipment (more money for the makers, meaning more jobs).
As opposed to a rich guy buying a bunch of low-priced stock, which will create jobs how? My company didn't lay off thousands of people because their stock price was too low. They did it because not enough people were buying their product!
Saying that giving people a tax break so that they can buy products that they wouldn't otherwise buy won't help the economy and create jobs is the most foolish thing I've heard today, and I've been reading/.!
just because john ashcroft wouldn't spy on me by using a jet pack to hover outside my window 24/7 doesn't mean it's fine with me to pass a law saying he could. what happens when he suddenly aquires a jet pack and a lot of free time?
saying it'll be a while until wal-mart is able to track everything I ever buy doesn't convince me at all.
Your comparison of a two objects of different masses but equal momentum isn't very relevent. Kinetic energy is the relevent value to look at.
Basic mechanics: Momentum and energy are both values that are conserved. Momentum is m*v, (kinetic) energy is 0.5*m*(v^2). How do these values change in the impact, and what is the result of those changes?
For the sake of simplicity, pretend the shuttle is sitting still in a vacuum and the foam is the only thing moving. Minus some effects of acceleration at the moment of impact, this isn't so bad an assumption. Anyway, the foam hits the shuttle and imparts some of its momentum, such that the total momentum is the same afterward. 1.7kg*500mph of momentum imparted to the shuttle would result in the shuttle moving at 1.7kg*500mph/(mass of shuttle i'm too lazy to look up but is obviously really freaking huge) = negligible. A tiny amount of movement and spin.
Energy, on the other hand, is 1.7kg * (500mph^2). Energy is also conserved, which means that when the foam hits the shuttle the kinetic energy must be absorbed somehow. Since momentum tells us that the change in kinetic energy of the shuttle is small, then most of the energy is absorbed by the material itself. If the energy is sufficient to break the bonds holding the materials at the point of impact together, then they break. The square law is very important here, as it means a very small object going very fast is much more dangerous than a very big object going very slow. In the case of your example, a 1g spec of dirt at 20,000 mph has the same energy as a 1kg block at 632mph. Now that is something you want to avoid.
This difference in momentum vs kinetic energy is why people don't get knocked over backward when they are shot (by most things). The kinetic energy of a bullet is very high and thus damages your body, but the momentum of the bullet is relatively small, and your much larger mass means there is almost no change in your velocity.
Anyway, the lesson is that anything traveling at 500mph has the potential to be dangerous.
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright. Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work?
No. Who else profits for their entire life from their work? Does a roofer get to collect profits from the roof he rebuilt in 1962 until he dies, or does he keep working? A thousand hours equates to half a year, full time. I wish I could get paid until I died for the work I did in the first six months of this year.
And the "who" that says your copyright should have a limit is the framers of the Constitution. Copyright is a -gift- to you in order to encourage you to produce art. It is not a natural right, in the sense that ideas can be copied infintely, unlike physical objects. You are given that unnatural right as encouragement/reward, but in turn your work will eventually enrich the public domain -- which you undoubtedly benefitted from yourself.
In other words, the one who gets off telling you that there should be a cap on your copyright is the one who gave you the copyright in the first place.
What about my children? What about my grandchildren?
1) Use your royalties to provide them with opportunity so they can make their own money. 2) Don't spend all your royalties, and leave them some cash in your will.
Geeze, I know you're concerned for your children, but why do you think that the six months of work you did means your grandchildren should keep getting checks?
I had essentially the same experience with Ameritech (a Baby Bell of the Mid West). I had Ameritech DSL for a while, but the service sucked and the customer service was attrocious. Not only did it take a month to get service, I caught a manager lying to me about calling my roomate to arrange an installation time. I eventually went with a Covad DSL reseller. Covad had excellent techs and customer support in my opinion, but they still had to use Ameritech's line. Same result: it took a month for Ameritech to come out and do the basic line check that was needed before Covad could do their thing. Covad took a day to do their part -- the tech actually made a detour to our house since he felt bad about Ameritech giving us the runaround. Funny thing is that after that I had not only better QoS, but a higher transfer rate than what Ameritech was offering. Covad then went out of business, right?
The funny thing about this is that these Baby Bells own all the lines because of government regulation. Now they are deregulated, but still own the lines, which has the expected result of producing shit for service -- surprise, monopolies still suck. Being forced to share their lines -- attempting to fix the monopoly with more regulation -- helped, because Covad was able to give me decent DSL for a while. But since the monopolist was still involved in providing the service, they could taint their competitors' service while ensuring it cost more. Funny how that didn't work out so well for the competitors.
I wonder how the class action suit vs Ameritech went?
Would it be so crazy to think that M$ might have gone to SCO and said "Look, you guys are about to go under. How would you like some help?"
SCO Exec: You mean help -not- going under, right?
MS Exec: Yeah, sure... Now go sue IBM.
The MS angle is plausible -- they've done shadier things in the past, and the motive is clear. However it seems as though the potential for backfire is large. MS has found some success spreading FUD about Linux and IP related lawsuits. You only get Fear when their is Uncertainty and Doubt. If the the predicted lawsuit occurs and comes to nothing, then the U and the D are diminished, and thusly the F.
Also, executive greed and a plan to cash out in the company's dying days is certainly enough of an explanation.
Yeah, I remember the first time I installed a 3dfx card and played GL Quake. "Holy shit" I think were my first words, followed soon after by "Holy fucking shit". I'm fairly confident that nothing will ever recreate that experience. Going from 320x200, 256 color with speed-optimized (accuracy de-optimized) software rendering at 15-20 fps to 640x480, 16-bit color with all the goodness of OpenGL (transparency, reflections, good dynamic lighting) at 30+ fps was a revelation. It's probably going to be incremental improvements from here on out, and no mere increment will ever have the sheer impact that the first 3 seconds of glQuake had.
That said, I'm still pretty impressed with the graphical improvement since then. Compare glQuake to... Well, anything very recent that uses pixel and vertex shaders. Quake3 became a lot prettier (and faster) when I switched from a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 3. Newer games look even better (rain and water effects with pixel shaders look great). Add more trangle-processing power for more detail and the ability to have dynamic terrain (like waves in water)... I'd say we're progressing nicely.
No, there's no reason to buy a GF4 if you have a GF3. Maybe a GF5 or whatever ATI has at the time. Skip a couple generations so that your new card really -does- have a noticeable advantage over the old, and you'll be much happier.
You come up with example of example of ballots which are actually free of Gore votes, even if you want them to be....scenarios in which an enraged Republican writing "Gore sucks!" gets counted as a Gore vote.
Wow, you sure have an active imagination. Remember, this isn't being done by a machine, and human beings are perfectly capable of distinguishing "Gore sucks" from "I want to vote for Al Gore for President, please". You invent a secnario where "Gore Sucks" is counted, but it's purely an invention. What scenario are you talking about, one where we use poorly programmed OCR to scan the ballots? Okay, keep imagining that. Regardless, the data is there, the contents of each ballot noted, and based on those ballots that the panelists agreed had clear voter intent, Gore won.
Let the machines do their actual jobs
Right. Let's trust blind stupid computers to figure out that "I want to vote for Gore" is a vote for gore and "Gore sucks" isn't. Please. These are the same computers that can't handle a half-filled oval, and you want them to be held as authoritative.
instead of some party hack with a magnifying glass guessing that that G in the margin means Gore and not George.
Heh. You're trying to refute the conclusions of a study that you know absolutely nothing about. What "party hack" are you talking about? You're just arbitrarily creating the scenario that the re-count was done by a "Democrats for Gore Winning the Election or Death" club who'll count anything as a Gore vote, and then saying that study would be invalid. Well, sure, except it doesn't exist.
Sorry, man. You can keep imagining things that would mean you're right, but reality steadfastly refuses to align itself with what you want to be true.
It's funny. The study, done by NORC was sponsored by a large number of media sources. These sources mostly published "Bush Would Have Won" stories, which in the first line said Bush would have won under a specific recount scenario. They liked to focus on Gore's method, since that adds a nice twist, despite being irrelevent. Usually by the end of the article, they get around to admitting that by using the Florida Court's method of recounting Gore would have won. The irony here is that organizations that clearly wanted to come to a "Bush Wins" conclusion funded a study to prove that and ended up proving the opposite.
Maybe you just didn't read that far. Not your fault, since it is a common enough technique to put the headline that says what you want to say at the top on the front page, and the real story at the very end of the article in section C12.
Besides, if the re-count shows "intent", it is invalid. It should show actual voting.
100% wrong. The Florida Constitution states that the intent of the voter is what matters. You can talk all you want about how only the first time should matter and broken machines that cannot tolerate the slightest bit of deviation should be the authoritative judge of what an "actual vote" is, but you're wrong. The highest law of the state of Florida says so.
The only vote total that matters is electoral votes, and Gore came up short since he did not win enough states to get the right amount. It has always been that way. If you want to change it, fine, but ignorance of this basic Constitutional process is no excuse.
How about ignorance of cause and effect, like that the college is selected by the popular vote. Man, what a nothing argument.
That particular recount is worse than rolling the dice: it is an invalid total because it includes imaginary votes divined from "voter intent" instead of actual ballot usage.
Right. Because if the voter wrote down "Gore", circled "Gore", or half-filled the "Gore" oval and no others, then there's no way to determine what they possibly could have wanted! Only a machine or someone who is being deliberately stupid would think that the mostly-but-not-all-filled oval next to Gore on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wasn't a Gore vote.
Talk about imaginary. You're imagining that because a voting machine didn't count it as Gore, it couldn't have been a Gore vote, all so that you can say counting those votes is "imagining". Yeah, I guess three independent panelists studying the ballots all "imagined" the word "Gore" written on it.
That would be a valid comparison, except that Bush got more actual votes in Florida.
No, he got more counted votes. The re-count data clearly shows that more people intended to vote for Gore. But good thing the Supreme Court stopped the drug tes- I mean re-count.
He'd have been given it if had actually won the election, which he did not.
Though he did get the most votes. Weird, I thought that getting the most votes meant winning. Guess I didn't count on the Supreme Court Factor.
And obviously I'm talking about bringing forth the evidence of the fraud and disenfranchisement in the election, after Bush had been declared winner. No way was Bush going to be removed from office and Gore put in his place.
No. The Court just decided that a national election would not be destroyed by the loser "rolling the dice" over and over again on a close margin until he finally won one (at which point he'd take victory and deny additional recounts
Actually, you're wrong. The Supreme Court ruling stated exactly what I said it did -- that further recounts would damage Bush's legitimacy, and thus should be stopped.
And it's funny you should call a full state-wide hand recount (what the Florida court ordered and was stopped by the U.S. court) "rolling the dice". I guess that's to differentiate it from the much less chancy fixing of ballot machines and preventing several orders of magnitude more Dems from voting than Bush's margin of "victory".
Yes. He was indeed a sore loser for speaking after he had lost.
Yeah, and Carl Lewis was a sore loser for taking the gold from Ben Johnson. He lost fair and square, if you don't count the cheating!
A "mass of unrefuted evidence" that the Democrats in general, and Gore in particular, have simply ignored?!?
I think not.
Well, think again.
Obviously Gore wasn't going to be given the White House no matter what happened. The Court decided it was more important to not damage Pres. Elect Bush's presidency than to determine if he actually won. The media grabbed that and ran, telling us that we were relieved that it was finally decided. Gore was already being called a sore loser for even speaking after the winner had been decided.
What exactly could he hope to gain by pressing the issue? He and his party would be lambasted as being sore losers, trying to undermine Bush's presidency with false claims, damaging the stability of the nation, or whatever else. The Dems would be seen as the party that wouldn't forget the election and get down to the business of running the country. Gore got more votes, but the race -was- incredibly close. There are plenty of fence-sitters who could be driven to the GOP by such unsportsman-like behavior. Turning away future votes to argue about past ones isn't a winning political strategy.
That was pre-9/11. Post-9/11, it is even more unlikely (fantastically improbable) that the Dems will bring this issue forward by themselves.
Besides, it's not like the Dems want to shake up the system too much either.
So the Dems not campaigning to get the issue back in the spotlight should not be construed to mean that the evidence isn't there.
Bush won all the counts of votes, even the one Gore demanded.
But not the one the Florida Supreme Court demanded. Who cares what Gore wanted? He's just a candidate. He should no more get to decide how the votes are counted than Bush. The Florida Court is the one that has to interpret the law. Under Florida law, what matters is the will of the voter, not what a machine thinks is the will of the voter. Thus the complete recount was ordered, then stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court. Under that stopped count, Gore won. By stopping that count, the U.S. Court gave Bush the election. So he won by court order, not by winning the votes.
The only way to get Gore to win is to count ballots without Gore votes and imagine that Gore votes are on them (the so called "undercount")
Not ballots without Gore votes. Ballots that were not counted (by a machine) as having a Gore vote. There's a substantial difference. When the voter circles "Gore", or writes down "Gore", or puts a big check mark next to "Gore", it's pretty freeping obvious what the voter wanted, even if the machine didn't think so. But you seem to believe that if the machine didn't find a Gore vote, the voter did not want to vote for Gore. Is that just something you choose to believe because it fits with your other beliefs, or are you aware of some amazing advances in AI that were applied to these voting machines such that they could determine human intent better than humans?
An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote.
When the voter circles the word "Al Gore" on the ballot, it's pretty damn obvious what they intended, even if the machine wasn't happy. So no, an undervote is an attempt to determine if the voter's intention was clear (in many cases it was) despite the machine failing to count it.
No, I mean ballots that never did have Gore votes. These are only "turned into" Gore votes by altering what is really on the ballot
Okay, for those few ballots, you're right. For the -rest- of the ballots, it's about recognizing what is actually on the ballot when it is obvious what the voter intended. If you count that, which, by the way, is what Florida law requires (determining the true intention of the voter), then Gore won.
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
I haven't heard of this, how it happens, and on what scale. Feel free to provide links, since despite what some might think, I'll shit on anyone who tries to steal an election. You may note that the ones that actually steal an election, and a Presidential one at that, get the Three Alarm Chili version.:)
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
"Never blame on malice what can be blamed on stupidity" are wise words. But let's see... The government of Florida switches from a few-thousand-dollar contract to a million dollar contract with DBT Online to handle the list. Which included verifying the accuracy of the list. Which was clearly never done. Incompetence? Plausible. But when they are then told to -reduce- the accuracy of the name matching between their database and the Florida voter database (but still 100% on matching race!), I start to suspect a little more than incompetence.
No, Gore lost even that. He only wins statewide if you count ballots without Gore votes on them:
You mean votes that weren't originally counted as having a Gore vote on them. The analysis of the ballots indicate that many of them were actually Gore votes. And the Florida court ruled that all legal votes, including undervotes, should be included in the recount. Under this "every vote counts" system, Gore won.
The blacks denied voting were Haitians and Cubans, and they were largely Republican votes.
Sure. When the Governor asked the private company paid millions to handle the database to be -less- accurate in determining whether someone was on the list, it was to disenfranchise largely Republican Haitan and Cuban votes.
That's an interesting conspiracy theory. You're suggesting they -didn't- want Bush to win? Why would Jeb do that? You're suggesting that Pres. Bush's campaign manager, who coincidentaly was in charge of the Florida election, was actually working against her boss? That's just strange.
In fact, when the votes were counted after the fact, Gore lost even this unnecessary count he asked the Supreme Court for.
No, that's what CNN and other media sources concluded by deciding how the recount would have occured. Under Gore's proposed recount scheme, he lost. Under the full recount scheme ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- you know, counting all the votes, like we're a Democracy or something -- he won. That's what the data shows. Gore won. But CNN said the opposite. Huh.
Whatever, as if it has to be a private company doing the polling, and whats to say the code does not send the data directly, encrypted to a key generated by the goverenment, to the government? In that event the data couldnt be tampered with.
Except by the government.
And since when has the government been MORE credible than the private sector? They have had just as many scandals, if not more.
It was also unfairly counted because anything that had an "improperly" punched chad was disgarded, which tended be more Bush votes discarded.
Where do you get that? The data from NORC indicates that vastly more Gore votes weren't counted. Under certain recounting schemes (including ironically the one Gore's lawyers wanted to use) Bush would have won. Under the full-state recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court but stopped by the feds, Gore would have won. CNN lied to you.
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Doubting Electronic Voting
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Sheep isn't a verb.
And when 50,000 largely black, largely Democrat voters are denied their legal right to vote because they were falsely accused of being felons by a computerized list that was inaccurate to begin with and encouraged to be more so by the Florida government, then saying an election was stolen isn't flamebait.
Ok then, what shall we do in 10 years when OpenOffice is the de-facto standard and it comes pre-installed on every machine and has 99% of the market. In that case OpenOffice's price will almost certainly "stifle competition." What shall we do then?
Create a new piece of office software that reads the de-facto standard OpenOffice format perfectly, eliminating any practical need to keep using OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is Free Software.
If it hadn't been for the fact that Microsoft started wielding their market share in ways that made their customers uncomfortable no one would be interested in OpenOffice in the slightest. In this case the market is working just fine all by itself.
Wait... So the OS monopolist abuses that monopoly to gain a monoploy in office software. It then gouges the customers for years, increasing the price of their product while the price of everything else in the computing world goes down. They produce incremental improvements that do little other than generate files older versions can't read to dissuade anyone from staying with older versions. They continue to tighten the screws and introduce ever more onerous licensing terms, funding their ventures to monopolize even more markets they wouldn't have even been able to think about if there was competition in their main market. Would-be competitors can't even give their software away because they don't read the monopolist's secret file format perfectly. The lock-in is so tight that it takes a couple more cranks on the screwdriver before the customer winces and says "gee, maybe we should think about using something else".
And you say this is an example of the market working just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I got lambasted for using that not-even-close-to-a-word before, and you know, I was wrong to use it. Because it isn't a word. Really. Virii? Where did that even come from? Even if you incorrectly use the common rule and replace the "us" with "i" you get "viri". Where does the extra "i" come from?
Please stop using this bastardization as I did. The last thing English needs is a new complex form of pluralization, the "add random letters for no reason" rule.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying that tax relief for lower income families is useless because they'll only spend the money on retail items that were probably made in China. Contrary to this, tax relief for the rich will help because they will invest it in U.S. companies who will then create more jobs for Americans.
/.!
That makes no sense.
If the retailer's products are all coming from China, where do you think the investor's dollars (and the jobs this supposedly creates) are going to go? What stops them from simply investing in foreign markets anyway? At least when you buy retail, you're paying a company with a physical presence in the U.S. and necessitating the need for workers in the retail store, the warehouses, the distribution network, the ship yards, not to mention IT departments which need staff (more jobs) and equipment (more money for the makers, meaning more jobs).
As opposed to a rich guy buying a bunch of low-priced stock, which will create jobs how? My company didn't lay off thousands of people because their stock price was too low. They did it because not enough people were buying their product!
Saying that giving people a tax break so that they can buy products that they wouldn't otherwise buy won't help the economy and create jobs is the most foolish thing I've heard today, and I've been reading
just because john ashcroft wouldn't spy on me by using a jet pack to hover outside my window 24/7 doesn't mean it's fine with me to pass a law saying he could. what happens when he suddenly aquires a jet pack and a lot of free time?
saying it'll be a while until wal-mart is able to track everything I ever buy doesn't convince me at all.
So on perpendicular paths, the time windows for a bird being hit by the shuttle is miniscule,
True, but improbable things do happen.
Your comparison of a two objects of different masses but equal momentum isn't very relevent. Kinetic energy is the relevent value to look at.
Basic mechanics: Momentum and energy are both values that are conserved. Momentum is m*v, (kinetic) energy is 0.5*m*(v^2). How do these values change in the impact, and what is the result of those changes?
For the sake of simplicity, pretend the shuttle is sitting still in a vacuum and the foam is the only thing moving. Minus some effects of acceleration at the moment of impact, this isn't so bad an assumption. Anyway, the foam hits the shuttle and imparts some of its momentum, such that the total momentum is the same afterward. 1.7kg*500mph of momentum imparted to the shuttle would result in the shuttle moving at 1.7kg*500mph/(mass of shuttle i'm too lazy to look up but is obviously really freaking huge) = negligible. A tiny amount of movement and spin.
Energy, on the other hand, is 1.7kg * (500mph^2). Energy is also conserved, which means that when the foam hits the shuttle the kinetic energy must be absorbed somehow. Since momentum tells us that the change in kinetic energy of the shuttle is small, then most of the energy is absorbed by the material itself. If the energy is sufficient to break the bonds holding the materials at the point of impact together, then they break. The square law is very important here, as it means a very small object going very fast is much more dangerous than a very big object going very slow. In the case of your example, a 1g spec of dirt at 20,000 mph has the same energy as a 1kg block at 632mph. Now that is something you want to avoid.
This difference in momentum vs kinetic energy is why people don't get knocked over backward when they are shot (by most things). The kinetic energy of a bullet is very high and thus damages your body, but the momentum of the bullet is relatively small, and your much larger mass means there is almost no change in your velocity.
Anyway, the lesson is that anything traveling at 500mph has the potential to be dangerous.
If this were a study in genetics, their next product would be born with webbed feet and flippers.
Creating the perfect PDA for busy SCUBA divers!
I wonder if you can get GSM service at 100 meters...
Speaking as one who has literally put thousands of hours into writing a book, I have to ask where you get off telling me that there should be a hard cap on the limit of my copyright. Don't I have the right to profit for the rest of my life from my work?
No. Who else profits for their entire life from their work? Does a roofer get to collect profits from the roof he rebuilt in 1962 until he dies, or does he keep working? A thousand hours equates to half a year, full time. I wish I could get paid until I died for the work I did in the first six months of this year.
And the "who" that says your copyright should have a limit is the framers of the Constitution. Copyright is a -gift- to you in order to encourage you to produce art. It is not a natural right, in the sense that ideas can be copied infintely, unlike physical objects. You are given that unnatural right as encouragement/reward, but in turn your work will eventually enrich the public domain -- which you undoubtedly benefitted from yourself.
In other words, the one who gets off telling you that there should be a cap on your copyright is the one who gave you the copyright in the first place.
What about my children? What about my grandchildren?
1) Use your royalties to provide them with opportunity so they can make their own money.
2) Don't spend all your royalties, and leave them some cash in your will.
Geeze, I know you're concerned for your children, but why do you think that the six months of work you did means your grandchildren should keep getting checks?
Consider yourself simultaneously applauded and slapped for that.
I had essentially the same experience with Ameritech (a Baby Bell of the Mid West). I had Ameritech DSL for a while, but the service sucked and the customer service was attrocious. Not only did it take a month to get service, I caught a manager lying to me about calling my roomate to arrange an installation time. I eventually went with a Covad DSL reseller. Covad had excellent techs and customer support in my opinion, but they still had to use Ameritech's line. Same result: it took a month for Ameritech to come out and do the basic line check that was needed before Covad could do their thing. Covad took a day to do their part -- the tech actually made a detour to our house since he felt bad about Ameritech giving us the runaround. Funny thing is that after that I had not only better QoS, but a higher transfer rate than what Ameritech was offering. Covad then went out of business, right?
The funny thing about this is that these Baby Bells own all the lines because of government regulation. Now they are deregulated, but still own the lines, which has the expected result of producing shit for service -- surprise, monopolies still suck. Being forced to share their lines -- attempting to fix the monopoly with more regulation -- helped, because Covad was able to give me decent DSL for a while. But since the monopolist was still involved in providing the service, they could taint their competitors' service while ensuring it cost more. Funny how that didn't work out so well for the competitors.
I wonder how the class action suit vs Ameritech went?
Would it be so crazy to think that M$ might have gone to SCO and said "Look, you guys are about to go under. How would you like some help?"
SCO Exec: You mean help -not- going under, right?
MS Exec: Yeah, sure... Now go sue IBM.
The MS angle is plausible -- they've done shadier things in the past, and the motive is clear. However it seems as though the potential for backfire is large. MS has found some success spreading FUD about Linux and IP related lawsuits. You only get Fear when their is Uncertainty and Doubt. If the the predicted lawsuit occurs and comes to nothing, then the U and the D are diminished, and thusly the F.
Also, executive greed and a plan to cash out in the company's dying days is certainly enough of an explanation.
Yeah, I remember the first time I installed a 3dfx card and played GL Quake. "Holy shit" I think were my first words, followed soon after by "Holy fucking shit". I'm fairly confident that nothing will ever recreate that experience. Going from 320x200, 256 color with speed-optimized (accuracy de-optimized) software rendering at 15-20 fps to 640x480, 16-bit color with all the goodness of OpenGL (transparency, reflections, good dynamic lighting) at 30+ fps was a revelation. It's probably going to be incremental improvements from here on out, and no mere increment will ever have the sheer impact that the first 3 seconds of glQuake had.
That said, I'm still pretty impressed with the graphical improvement since then. Compare glQuake to... Well, anything very recent that uses pixel and vertex shaders. Quake3 became a lot prettier (and faster) when I switched from a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 3. Newer games look even better (rain and water effects with pixel shaders look great). Add more trangle-processing power for more detail and the ability to have dynamic terrain (like waves in water)... I'd say we're progressing nicely.
No, there's no reason to buy a GF4 if you have a GF3. Maybe a GF5 or whatever ATI has at the time. Skip a couple generations so that your new card really -does- have a noticeable advantage over the old, and you'll be much happier.
You come up with example of example of ballots which are actually free of Gore votes, even if you want them to be....scenarios in which an enraged Republican writing "Gore sucks!" gets counted as a Gore vote.
Wow, you sure have an active imagination. Remember, this isn't being done by a machine, and human beings are perfectly capable of distinguishing "Gore sucks" from "I want to vote for Al Gore for President, please". You invent a secnario where "Gore Sucks" is counted, but it's purely an invention. What scenario are you talking about, one where we use poorly programmed OCR to scan the ballots? Okay, keep imagining that. Regardless, the data is there, the contents of each ballot noted, and based on those ballots that the panelists agreed had clear voter intent, Gore won.
Let the machines do their actual jobs
Right. Let's trust blind stupid computers to figure out that "I want to vote for Gore" is a vote for gore and "Gore sucks" isn't. Please. These are the same computers that can't handle a half-filled oval, and you want them to be held as authoritative.
instead of some party hack with a magnifying glass guessing that that G in the margin means Gore and not George.
Heh. You're trying to refute the conclusions of a study that you know absolutely nothing about. What "party hack" are you talking about? You're just arbitrarily creating the scenario that the re-count was done by a "Democrats for Gore Winning the Election or Death" club who'll count anything as a Gore vote, and then saying that study would be invalid. Well, sure, except it doesn't exist.
Sorry, man. You can keep imagining things that would mean you're right, but reality steadfastly refuses to align itself with what you want to be true.
It's funny. The study, done by NORC was sponsored by a large number of media sources. These sources mostly published "Bush Would Have Won" stories, which in the first line said Bush would have won under a specific recount scenario. They liked to focus on Gore's method, since that adds a nice twist, despite being irrelevent. Usually by the end of the article, they get around to admitting that by using the Florida Court's method of recounting Gore would have won. The irony here is that organizations that clearly wanted to come to a "Bush Wins" conclusion funded a study to prove that and ended up proving the opposite.
Maybe you just didn't read that far. Not your fault, since it is a common enough technique to put the headline that says what you want to say at the top on the front page, and the real story at the very end of the article in section C12.
Besides, if the re-count shows "intent", it is invalid. It should show actual voting.
100% wrong. The Florida Constitution states that the intent of the voter is what matters. You can talk all you want about how only the first time should matter and broken machines that cannot tolerate the slightest bit of deviation should be the authoritative judge of what an "actual vote" is, but you're wrong. The highest law of the state of Florida says so.
The only vote total that matters is electoral votes, and Gore came up short since he did not win enough states to get the right amount. It has always been that way. If you want to change it, fine, but ignorance of this basic Constitutional process is no excuse.
How about ignorance of cause and effect, like that the college is selected by the popular vote. Man, what a nothing argument.
That particular recount is worse than rolling the dice: it is an invalid total because it includes imaginary votes divined from "voter intent" instead of actual ballot usage.
Right. Because if the voter wrote down "Gore", circled "Gore", or half-filled the "Gore" oval and no others, then there's no way to determine what they possibly could have wanted! Only a machine or someone who is being deliberately stupid would think that the mostly-but-not-all-filled oval next to Gore on an otherwise blank sheet of paper wasn't a Gore vote.
Talk about imaginary. You're imagining that because a voting machine didn't count it as Gore, it couldn't have been a Gore vote, all so that you can say counting those votes is "imagining". Yeah, I guess three independent panelists studying the ballots all "imagined" the word "Gore" written on it.
That would be a valid comparison, except that Bush got more actual votes in Florida.
No, he got more counted votes. The re-count data clearly shows that more people intended to vote for Gore. But good thing the Supreme Court stopped the drug tes- I mean re-count.
He'd have been given it if had actually won the election, which he did not.
Though he did get the most votes. Weird, I thought that getting the most votes meant winning. Guess I didn't count on the Supreme Court Factor.
And obviously I'm talking about bringing forth the evidence of the fraud and disenfranchisement in the election, after Bush had been declared winner. No way was Bush going to be removed from office and Gore put in his place.
No. The Court just decided that a national election would not be destroyed by the loser "rolling the dice" over and over again on a close margin until he finally won one (at which point he'd take victory and deny additional recounts
Actually, you're wrong. The Supreme Court ruling stated exactly what I said it did -- that further recounts would damage Bush's legitimacy, and thus should be stopped.
And it's funny you should call a full state-wide hand recount (what the Florida court ordered and was stopped by the U.S. court) "rolling the dice". I guess that's to differentiate it from the much less chancy fixing of ballot machines and preventing several orders of magnitude more Dems from voting than Bush's margin of "victory".
Yes. He was indeed a sore loser for speaking after he had lost.
Yeah, and Carl Lewis was a sore loser for taking the gold from Ben Johnson. He lost fair and square, if you don't count the cheating!
A "mass of unrefuted evidence" that the Democrats in general, and Gore in particular, have simply ignored?!?
I think not.
Well, think again.
Obviously Gore wasn't going to be given the White House no matter what happened. The Court decided it was more important to not damage Pres. Elect Bush's presidency than to determine if he actually won. The media grabbed that and ran, telling us that we were relieved that it was finally decided. Gore was already being called a sore loser for even speaking after the winner had been decided.
What exactly could he hope to gain by pressing the issue? He and his party would be lambasted as being sore losers, trying to undermine Bush's presidency with false claims, damaging the stability of the nation, or whatever else. The Dems would be seen as the party that wouldn't forget the election and get down to the business of running the country. Gore got more votes, but the race -was- incredibly close. There are plenty of fence-sitters who could be driven to the GOP by such unsportsman-like behavior. Turning away future votes to argue about past ones isn't a winning political strategy.
That was pre-9/11. Post-9/11, it is even more unlikely (fantastically improbable) that the Dems will bring this issue forward by themselves.
Besides, it's not like the Dems want to shake up the system too much either.
So the Dems not campaigning to get the issue back in the spotlight should not be construed to mean that the evidence isn't there.
Bush won all the counts of votes, even the one Gore demanded.
But not the one the Florida Supreme Court demanded. Who cares what Gore wanted? He's just a candidate. He should no more get to decide how the votes are counted than Bush. The Florida Court is the one that has to interpret the law. Under Florida law, what matters is the will of the voter, not what a machine thinks is the will of the voter. Thus the complete recount was ordered, then stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court. Under that stopped count, Gore won. By stopping that count, the U.S. Court gave Bush the election. So he won by court order, not by winning the votes.
The only way to get Gore to win is to count ballots without Gore votes and imagine that Gore votes are on them (the so called "undercount")
Not ballots without Gore votes. Ballots that were not counted (by a machine) as having a Gore vote. There's a substantial difference. When the voter circles "Gore", or writes down "Gore", or puts a big check mark next to "Gore", it's pretty freeping obvious what the voter wanted, even if the machine didn't think so. But you seem to believe that if the machine didn't find a Gore vote, the voter did not want to vote for Gore. Is that just something you choose to believe because it fits with your other beliefs, or are you aware of some amazing advances in AI that were applied to these voting machines such that they could determine human intent better than humans?
An undervote is an attempt to turn a ballot without a vote into a vote.
When the voter circles the word "Al Gore" on the ballot, it's pretty damn obvious what they intended, even if the machine wasn't happy. So no, an undervote is an attempt to determine if the voter's intention was clear (in many cases it was) despite the machine failing to count it.
No, I mean ballots that never did have Gore votes. These are only "turned into" Gore votes by altering what is really on the ballot
Okay, for those few ballots, you're right. For the -rest- of the ballots, it's about recognizing what is actually on the ballot when it is obvious what the voter intended. If you count that, which, by the way, is what Florida law requires (determining the true intention of the voter), then Gore won.
So you're wrong.
As long as you're willing to say the same for 50,000 immigrant (legal or otherwise) non-citizen voters, also largely Democrat, who cannot vote, but sometimes do vote, then we're cool.
:)
I haven't heard of this, how it happens, and on what scale. Feel free to provide links, since despite what some might think, I'll shit on anyone who tries to steal an election. You may note that the ones that actually steal an election, and a Presidential one at that, get the Three Alarm Chili version.
(Clarification: Even if I take your 50,000 figure at face value, I don't think the inaccuracies in the list were deliberately engineered. Likewise, neither do I think the problem of aliens voting is deliberately engineered on any widespread scale. I consider both of these to be "error", not "corruption".)
"Never blame on malice what can be blamed on stupidity" are wise words. But let's see... The government of Florida switches from a few-thousand-dollar contract to a million dollar contract with DBT Online to handle the list. Which included verifying the accuracy of the list. Which was clearly never done. Incompetence? Plausible. But when they are then told to -reduce- the accuracy of the name matching between their database and the Florida voter database (but still 100% on matching race!), I start to suspect a little more than incompetence.
No, Gore lost even that. He only wins statewide if you count ballots without Gore votes on them:
You mean votes that weren't originally counted as having a Gore vote on them. The analysis of the ballots indicate that many of them were actually Gore votes. And the Florida court ruled that all legal votes, including undervotes, should be included in the recount. Under this "every vote counts" system, Gore won.
The blacks denied voting were Haitians and Cubans, and they were largely Republican votes.
Sure. When the Governor asked the private company paid millions to handle the database to be -less- accurate in determining whether someone was on the list, it was to disenfranchise largely Republican Haitan and Cuban votes.
That's an interesting conspiracy theory. You're suggesting they -didn't- want Bush to win? Why would Jeb do that? You're suggesting that Pres. Bush's campaign manager, who coincidentaly was in charge of the Florida election, was actually working against her boss? That's just strange.
In fact, when the votes were counted after the fact, Gore lost even this unnecessary count he asked the Supreme Court for.
No, that's what CNN and other media sources concluded by deciding how the recount would have occured. Under Gore's proposed recount scheme, he lost. Under the full recount scheme ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- you know, counting all the votes, like we're a Democracy or something -- he won. That's what the data shows. Gore won. But CNN said the opposite. Huh.
Whatever, as if it has to be a private company doing the polling, and whats to say the code does not send the data directly, encrypted to a key generated by the goverenment, to the government? In that event the data couldnt be tampered with.
Except by the government.
And since when has the government been MORE credible than the private sector? They have had just as many scandals, if not more.
You said it.
It was also unfairly counted because anything that had an "improperly" punched chad was disgarded, which tended be more Bush votes discarded.
Where do you get that? The data from NORC indicates that vastly more Gore votes weren't counted. Under certain recounting schemes (including ironically the one Gore's lawyers wanted to use) Bush would have won. Under the full-state recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court but stopped by the feds, Gore would have won. CNN lied to you.
Here's NORC.
Sheep isn't a verb.
And when 50,000 largely black, largely Democrat voters are denied their legal right to vote because they were falsely accused of being felons by a computerized list that was inaccurate to begin with and encouraged to be more so by the Florida government, then saying an election was stolen isn't flamebait.
Well, it is, but who said the truth can't be flamebait?
Ok then, what shall we do in 10 years when OpenOffice is the de-facto standard and it comes pre-installed on every machine and has 99% of the market. In that case OpenOffice's price will almost certainly "stifle competition." What shall we do then?
Create a new piece of office software that reads the de-facto standard OpenOffice format perfectly, eliminating any practical need to keep using OpenOffice, because OpenOffice is Free Software.
If it hadn't been for the fact that Microsoft started wielding their market share in ways that made their customers uncomfortable no one would be interested in OpenOffice in the slightest. In this case the market is working just fine all by itself.
Wait... So the OS monopolist abuses that monopoly to gain a monoploy in office software. It then gouges the customers for years, increasing the price of their product while the price of everything else in the computing world goes down. They produce incremental improvements that do little other than generate files older versions can't read to dissuade anyone from staying with older versions. They continue to tighten the screws and introduce ever more onerous licensing terms, funding their ventures to monopolize even more markets they wouldn't have even been able to think about if there was competition in their main market. Would-be competitors can't even give their software away because they don't read the monopolist's secret file format perfectly. The lock-in is so tight that it takes a couple more cranks on the screwdriver before the customer winces and says "gee, maybe we should think about using something else".
And you say this is an example of the market working just fine.
I'm stunned.