The only way to get the "denier" label is to oppose whatever socialist fascist corporate-kleptocracy solution that has been proposed as the only or final solution to the problem.
I disagree. I've been saying for the last few years now (even here on Slashdot) that while I completely agree with the science behind AGW, all of the solutions are naive and overly optimistic. It is really cute to think that you will get the entire world to agree to stop using the easiest resources available to them. We should be spending money on it, but it should be on predicting and mitigating the effects - trying to prevent it is foolishness. I want to know whether we should, in the next 50-100 years, be putting up seawalls and such or not. How high should this new levy be? Should we bother to rebuild this coastline after the next hurricane? This valley after the next flood?
That said, I hope someone proves me wrong. I've had people disagree with me - and I don't blame them, it's a pessimistic view of human nature. But I've never had the reaction you describe.
The key here is who spends the money. It's not the president.
I'm not convinced. Bush pushed Medicare expansion very heavily. He pushed the Iraq War very heavily. The across-the-board tax cuts were his. In short, his programs and policies cost a lot of money, and he (or congress) did not make any of the offsetting cuts now demanded by the Tea Party. Interestingly, the Tea Party never would have happened without Bush's spending. Or the spending under Bush, if you prefer more congressional blame.
Bush also went for big government. He expanded the federal government into local education. He created the Dept. of Homeland Security. And of course there was the Medicare expansion that I mentioned earlier.
Very odd for a supposedly "conservative" President.
Now, I won't ding Bush too badly for the bailout-derived deficit... but of course I'd have to give Obama the same latitude there. Now compare him to Clinton: Year GDP-US $ billion Federal Deficit-fed $ billion 1990 5800.5 221.03 a 1991 5992.1 269.24 a 1992 6342.3 290.32 a 1993 6667.4 255.05 a 1994 7085.2 203.18 a 1995 7414.7 163.95 a 1996 7838.5 107.43 a 1997 8332.4 21.89 a 1998 8793.5 -69.27 a 1999 9353.5 -125.61 a 2000 9951.5 -236.24 a 2001 10286.2 -128.23 a 2002 10642.3 157.75 a 2003 11142.2 377.59 a 2004 11853.3 412.73 a 2005 12623 318.35 a 2006 13377.2 248.18 a 2007 14028.7 160.71 a 2008 14369.1 458.55 a 2009 13939 1412.69 a 2010 14526.5 1293.49 a 2011 15094 1299.59 a 2012 15601.5 1326.95 b
Legend:
a - actual reported
b - budgeted estimate in US fy13 budget
Clinton gets the blame for 1993-2001. His maximum deficit was 255 billion, his first year. His best year was 2000 with a 236 billion surplus. Now look at those Bush years again...
Now to be totally fair, Clinton did benefit from a tax and cost cutting package that cost Bush I his 2nd term. He also had a nice dot-com bubble at the end there.
Of course, Bush inherited an actual surplus and benefited from a much larger housing bubble.
So yeah, Bush cannot claim to be a fiscal conservative. Republicans have zero claim to that title right now.
It is very difficult to look at the Bush presidency - some of it including control of both houses of congress - and come away with a feeling that the Republicans represent fiscal discipline.
The really sick thing is the first time I remember hearing the mandate as a serious proposal was by some Republicans offering an alternative just after Hillary released her healthcare proposal in the early 90s.
I don't have too much to take issue with in your post, other than I still don't think you have the Republican membership's mindset fairly portrayed. But this got me a chuckle:
Republicans are all too willing to march off a cliff for "glorious leader".
The reason it made me laugh is because in conservative circles, the "left's" infatuation with Obama - especially initially - was often lampooned as disciples following their Christ.
I was trying to show that voter fraud is not party-specific. I made no effort whatsoever to find a Democrat to counterbalance your Republican example, and you won't get that kind of argument from me because I don't have any interest in showing how one party is any better or worse than the other. To me, the two political parties have only vague correlations to any actual ideology. The only place they consistently differ is on the so-called "wedge" issues, which at the end of the day are not the important ones for the nation at-large.
More or less, the Republican party seems to be made up almost entirely of conservatives now.
And old conservatives at that. Interestingly, the membership of the Democratic party has become so diverse that the party can barely take a stand on anything or come up with a coherent platform. The result has been more demonizing the opposition than anything else. They had 2 full years with complete control of government, and the only thing of note that they did was to enact a partial reform of healthcare that was implemented in such a way as to give the conservative-dominated Supreme Court the final say. I mean, holy shit, if that isn't proof that they have been blowing sunshine up your ass for the last decade, what else do you need? They kept the Bush tax cuts - in fact, they made no move to tax the rich at all and even extended the cuts themselves. They stuck to the original Bush timeline in Iraq and actually sent even more troops to Afghanistan. Immigration... where's that promised reform?
I'm not criticizing these decisions and in fact I agree with many of them, but they vilified Bush so heavily for 8 years and then as soon as they come into complete control over the legislative and executive branches of government they... dusted off and enacted an old Republican health care plan. Yes, the gays can be a bit more open in the military now - and don't get me wrong, that's great... but that issue was only important to a tiny fraction of our population and really has no effect on the readiness or effectiveness of our armed forces.. And I don't want you think that I'm picking on Democrats here... the first thing Bush did was pass a massive increase to Medicaid benefits. Then this "conservative" ran up our national debt like no one before him.
So anyway, you probably disagree with my analysis, and that's fine. I just don't see much of a difference between the two parties except for their talk, so when you indicate that the members of one party are more likely to do this-or-that, I just have to kind of play the skeptic. I personally register for whatever party dominates the area so that I can vote effectively in the primaries. I dream of a third party that siphons off the fed-up moderates. I'm tired of hearing about how Mitt Romney needs to "court" the evangelicals and how Obama is "alienating" his special interest bases.
I sincerely doubt there aren't any Republicans to be found in big cities
In my recent primary in Philly, there were no Republicans on the ballot for certain races. The situation was the same when I lived in NYC. Those are the two biggest cities on the east coast.
Personally, I think "us vs. them" mentality pushed by right wing talk radio and Fox News that has overwhelmed the old Republican party establishment is reponsible.
That's only half of it - you also have MoveOn.org and HuffingtonPost.com, for instance.
If vote fraud is required to win then that's ok because they're just making sure that things come out according to God's plan anyway.
Now you are demonizing people, which is the behavior I was hoping you would reconsider. I know a fair number of people who are all over the whole conservative principles you speak of, but would be horrified at the idea of using voting fraud. They are a pain in the ass for a lot of reasons, but in general honesty is not one of them. In no way does the whole ultra religious thing lead to voting fraud.
Incidentally, the most religious people that I personally know are black Democrats. And yes, they literally believe that God is on their side. And no, they are not out committing voting fraud.
They allow people like Blackwell to get away with obvious vote suppression tactics because despite they supposed disbelief in big government they have an almost pathological need to trust conservative leaders.
Again, Blackwell is not the only player here. People with Republican voter registration were quite literally chased out of Philly voting booths just a few years back. YouTube is full of stuff like this. And while I think the incident was way overblown, we had shenanigans like this very recently. Our Republicans are at it, too. We just don't have as many of those. Note that it doesn't take many people to carry out these tactics. I think the overwhelming majority of members of both parties are honestly trying to do the right thing. The Black Panther incident was a handful of men. The flyers were probably printed and distributed by one or two guys. The incident in the first YouTube video could have been a single poll worker. There is no sense in demonizing the members of a party due to these actions - but you can fault them for defending them.
The Black Panther case is extremely informative from a political standpoint, because while it should be unanimously condemned, Republicans imply that it is typical when it is an anomaly and Democrats deflect and start accusing Republicans of race-baiting and such. Both points of view are completely off-base. A man standing in front of a polling place holding a night stick should absolutely be universally condemned. At the same time, it was an isolated incident and the importance of it should not be used as a political weapon. Where is that point of view reflected in our political discourse?
I guess you are right if the environment they are in is reflective to visible (to them) light.
You are correct that sound is muffled by solid objects pretty well, but aside from man-made dwellings, there aren't a whole lot of totally enclosed spaces in nature - so going around objects is sufficient. But some kind of environment with natural enclosed spaces might indeed discourage sound as a communications medium.
Perhaps they use sign language because predators are too good at following sound.
Yeah, I thought of that - but it seems that most critters make sounds anyway. Lightning bugs seem to be an exception, along with some kinds of sea life. And the glowing that they do would obviously (and does!) attract predators. Many animals use elaborate visual displays - mostly for mating. But most of those animals also make sounds. Even rabbits can make sounds.
Surely some vocalization would occur, though? Light can't pass through or around objects, so sound has an inherent evolutionary advantage. Of course, there is the whole rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and I suppose it is possible for some species "out there" to be communicating with part of the spectrum that passes through solid objects.
And then on the other side of the coin, you have many birds that quite clearly have the required physiology for human-style speech, but haven't evolved the mental faculties.
Look, I don't know how much I can sway you in a message board. I can only hope that you will read your own post after you read this one and change your mind a little bit.
The kind of categorization that you did is exactly what I was talking about. "Democrats" aren't a particular similar group of people. You have hyper-conservative blacks and hispanics together with people who are fighting for a pro-gay agenda. You have pacifists together with union members who believe in violence and intimidation as political tactics. There is a somewhat smaller amount of diversity on the Republican side, but it's still very hard to believe that you can group them all together like you did. People pick political parties because they want to belong to a team - often they are born into the team. This is the very tribalism you decried in your post.
Also, may I suggest that you look into the history of voting fraud. There is and has been no shortage of it in big cities where there aren't any Republicans to be found. Voting fraud is a human tendency, not a Republican or Democratic tendency.
The search is terrible if you only know a part of the word you are searching for. If you search for "sales" it will not match "saleslady", for instance.
Most of the time, you can work around this limitation by searching for the compound and individual word, but some searches become impossible.
Exchange relies on Internet Explorer for the "ajax" part, even to this day. Also, you have the minor issue of needing to run an Exchange server. Gmail required no server on my part, gave me oodles of storage space, completely took away my old habit of meticulously sorting email into folders, and responded almost as well as a real native application. It was amazing at the time.
Also, I'm not sure the frame could handle the weight of Lead Acid to be honest.
Ha! Good point! They sell kits for bugs, so I presumed they'd be OK in a Ghia. But you are right, the batteries are a lot heavier than the little engines that were back there.
So it is reasonable to force citizens to pay for a government issued ID to vote?
I'm not familiar with what they do in other states, but in PA you can get a free ID.
Of course it's not really free since someone has to pay for it, and that is of course you if you pay taxes. I think the justification for making people pay for them individually is that people tend to treat "free" things pretty poorly.
Given that basic fact, any argument for tightening up access to voting must be seen as disinegenuous.
I'd agree, except that we don't include any kind of statistical analysis in tabulating voting results. We really should have a "tie" category so that elections have to be statistically significant. Until we do something like that, every vote counts - even the crooked ones. Close elections can hinge on just a handful of votes.
Another way to put it is that our system currently tolerates zero error in the process - which is ridiculous.
As to the justification of fighting fraud even though it is a small problem, the whole democratic process hinges on a warm, fuzzy feeling of legitimacy in the electorate. Of course, this goes both ways - disenfranchising a big chunk of poor people is just as dangerous as a bunch of middle class people who feel like the system is full of fraud.
Which gets me back to my original point - you should just have a knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of voting reform, but we do because both political parties have set their own interest ahead of the country's, and the red-team/blue-team mentality of 2/3 of the electorate only enables this.
It's all voter suppression. If the kind of Republicans we have in government right now learned of a genuine voter fraud problem, they'd first calculate whether it benefits or hurts them before deciding to do anything.
I agree, but the Democrats do the exact same thing. And because about 2/3 of the voters dutifully follow their team, the political parties can get away with it.
I think we actually agree. I completely agree that the Republicans are pushing so hard for voting reform because it benefits them. I also think, however, that the main reason the Democrats push back is because it hurts them.
Another issue illustrates this in PA at the moment. The Republicans are cutting money and at the same time converting things into block grants. The merits of a grant could be sanely debated, but the cutting of money will without question hurt the poor while we are in a recession. They will (correctly) point out that some of the programs they are de-funding have not been terribly successful. But of COURSE their answer is not to reform the programs or shift the money to programs that HAVE been effective, but to just pull the plug. The Democrats, on the other hand, are going nuts about the cutting of funding to the poor. Nowhere are they attempting to correct the bad programs and they don't even try to address the block grant part of the equation, other than making vague statements about what might happen to the grants in the future.
It all drives me a bit crazy, because if you stripped away the party identity that people have, I don't think most Republicans would want to take vital support away from the poor and I don't think many Democrats would want to keep throwing money at ineffective government programs.
SuperOneClick does it for almost every Android I've tried.
Ah, I don't run Windows. I actually rooted mine by opening the SuperOneClick bat file and entering the commands at the command line. I definitely should have mentioned that in my post.
That'd be the fastest Karmann Ghia ever! LOL... lucky if the frame stays together.
If you did it with lead acid batteries and a DC motor it would probably be cost effective - but it would take a while and the performance would be more classically Karmann Ghia:)
All three largest OS - Windows, OS X and Linux - are pretty much equivalent now.
So this story finally got me motivated to update ClamXAV and scan my drive. It's been running for a couple of hours now, and so far it has found 4 viruses/trojans... Windows viruses:) They are apparently sitting in my Gmail account, which I mirror locally. One of them is a windows screensaver virus of some kind sitting in my Downloads folder.
I'll get back to putting clam on my FreeBSD server as well. My Windows machine is obviously protected (with AVG).
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to get the "denier" label is to oppose whatever socialist fascist corporate-kleptocracy solution that has been proposed as the only or final solution to the problem.
I disagree. I've been saying for the last few years now (even here on Slashdot) that while I completely agree with the science behind AGW, all of the solutions are naive and overly optimistic. It is really cute to think that you will get the entire world to agree to stop using the easiest resources available to them. We should be spending money on it, but it should be on predicting and mitigating the effects - trying to prevent it is foolishness. I want to know whether we should, in the next 50-100 years, be putting up seawalls and such or not. How high should this new levy be? Should we bother to rebuild this coastline after the next hurricane? This valley after the next flood?
That said, I hope someone proves me wrong. I've had people disagree with me - and I don't blame them, it's a pessimistic view of human nature. But I've never had the reaction you describe.
The key here is who spends the money. It's not the president.
I'm not convinced. Bush pushed Medicare expansion very heavily. He pushed the Iraq War very heavily. The across-the-board tax cuts were his. In short, his programs and policies cost a lot of money, and he (or congress) did not make any of the offsetting cuts now demanded by the Tea Party. Interestingly, the Tea Party never would have happened without Bush's spending. Or the spending under Bush, if you prefer more congressional blame.
Bush also went for big government. He expanded the federal government into local education. He created the Dept. of Homeland Security. And of course there was the Medicare expansion that I mentioned earlier.
Very odd for a supposedly "conservative" President.
The really hilarious thing isn't that you cherry-picked data. It's that you linked back to the un-cherry-picked table:
Obama Deficits
FY 2013*: $901 billion
FY 2012*: $1,327 billion
FY 2011: $1,300 billion
FY 2010: $1,293 billion
Bush Deficits
FY 2009: $1,413 billion
FY 2008: $459 billion
FY 2007: $161 billion
Now, I won't ding Bush too badly for the bailout-derived deficit... but of course I'd have to give Obama the same latitude there. Now compare him to Clinton:
Year GDP-US $ billion Federal Deficit-fed $ billion
1990 5800.5 221.03 a
1991 5992.1 269.24 a
1992 6342.3 290.32 a
1993 6667.4 255.05 a
1994 7085.2 203.18 a
1995 7414.7 163.95 a
1996 7838.5 107.43 a
1997 8332.4 21.89 a
1998 8793.5 -69.27 a
1999 9353.5 -125.61 a
2000 9951.5 -236.24 a
2001 10286.2 -128.23 a
2002 10642.3 157.75 a
2003 11142.2 377.59 a
2004 11853.3 412.73 a
2005 12623 318.35 a
2006 13377.2 248.18 a
2007 14028.7 160.71 a
2008 14369.1 458.55 a
2009 13939 1412.69 a
2010 14526.5 1293.49 a
2011 15094 1299.59 a
2012 15601.5 1326.95 b
Legend:
a - actual reported
b - budgeted estimate in US fy13 budget
Clinton gets the blame for 1993-2001. His maximum deficit was 255 billion, his first year. His best year was 2000 with a 236 billion surplus. Now look at those Bush years again...
Now to be totally fair, Clinton did benefit from a tax and cost cutting package that cost Bush I his 2nd term. He also had a nice dot-com bubble at the end there.
Of course, Bush inherited an actual surplus and benefited from a much larger housing bubble.
So yeah, Bush cannot claim to be a fiscal conservative. Republicans have zero claim to that title right now.
It is very difficult to look at the Bush presidency - some of it including control of both houses of congress - and come away with a feeling that the Republicans represent fiscal discipline.
The really sick thing is the first time I remember hearing the mandate as a serious proposal was by some Republicans offering an alternative just after Hillary released her healthcare proposal in the early 90s.
Warped world, that Washington.
I don't have too much to take issue with in your post, other than I still don't think you have the Republican membership's mindset fairly portrayed. But this got me a chuckle:
Republicans are all too willing to march off a cliff for "glorious leader".
The reason it made me laugh is because in conservative circles, the "left's" infatuation with Obama - especially initially - was often lampooned as disciples following their Christ.
I say you are both right :)
Isn't that essentially what sound is?
not affiliated with the Democrats in any way
I was trying to show that voter fraud is not party-specific. I made no effort whatsoever to find a Democrat to counterbalance your Republican example, and you won't get that kind of argument from me because I don't have any interest in showing how one party is any better or worse than the other. To me, the two political parties have only vague correlations to any actual ideology. The only place they consistently differ is on the so-called "wedge" issues, which at the end of the day are not the important ones for the nation at-large.
More or less, the Republican party seems to be made up almost entirely of conservatives now.
And old conservatives at that. Interestingly, the membership of the Democratic party has become so diverse that the party can barely take a stand on anything or come up with a coherent platform. The result has been more demonizing the opposition than anything else. They had 2 full years with complete control of government, and the only thing of note that they did was to enact a partial reform of healthcare that was implemented in such a way as to give the conservative-dominated Supreme Court the final say. I mean, holy shit, if that isn't proof that they have been blowing sunshine up your ass for the last decade, what else do you need? They kept the Bush tax cuts - in fact, they made no move to tax the rich at all and even extended the cuts themselves. They stuck to the original Bush timeline in Iraq and actually sent even more troops to Afghanistan. Immigration... where's that promised reform?
I'm not criticizing these decisions and in fact I agree with many of them, but they vilified Bush so heavily for 8 years and then as soon as they come into complete control over the legislative and executive branches of government they... dusted off and enacted an old Republican health care plan. Yes, the gays can be a bit more open in the military now - and don't get me wrong, that's great... but that issue was only important to a tiny fraction of our population and really has no effect on the readiness or effectiveness of our armed forces.. And I don't want you think that I'm picking on Democrats here... the first thing Bush did was pass a massive increase to Medicaid benefits. Then this "conservative" ran up our national debt like no one before him.
So anyway, you probably disagree with my analysis, and that's fine. I just don't see much of a difference between the two parties except for their talk, so when you indicate that the members of one party are more likely to do this-or-that, I just have to kind of play the skeptic. I personally register for whatever party dominates the area so that I can vote effectively in the primaries. I dream of a third party that siphons off the fed-up moderates. I'm tired of hearing about how Mitt Romney needs to "court" the evangelicals and how Obama is "alienating" his special interest bases.
I sincerely doubt there aren't any Republicans to be found in big cities
In my recent primary in Philly, there were no Republicans on the ballot for certain races. The situation was the same when I lived in NYC. Those are the two biggest cities on the east coast.
Personally, I think "us vs. them" mentality pushed by right wing talk radio and Fox News that has overwhelmed the old Republican party establishment is reponsible.
That's only half of it - you also have MoveOn.org and HuffingtonPost.com, for instance.
If vote fraud is required to win then that's ok because they're just making sure that things come out according to God's plan anyway.
Now you are demonizing people, which is the behavior I was hoping you would reconsider. I know a fair number of people who are all over the whole conservative principles you speak of, but would be horrified at the idea of using voting fraud. They are a pain in the ass for a lot of reasons, but in general honesty is not one of them. In no way does the whole ultra religious thing lead to voting fraud.
Incidentally, the most religious people that I personally know are black Democrats. And yes, they literally believe that God is on their side. And no, they are not out committing voting fraud.
They allow people like Blackwell to get away with obvious vote suppression tactics because despite they supposed disbelief in big government they have an almost pathological need to trust conservative leaders.
Again, Blackwell is not the only player here. People with Republican voter registration were quite literally chased out of Philly voting booths just a few years back. YouTube is full of stuff like this. And while I think the incident was way overblown, we had shenanigans like this very recently. Our Republicans are at it, too. We just don't have as many of those. Note that it doesn't take many people to carry out these tactics. I think the overwhelming majority of members of both parties are honestly trying to do the right thing. The Black Panther incident was a handful of men. The flyers were probably printed and distributed by one or two guys. The incident in the first YouTube video could have been a single poll worker. There is no sense in demonizing the members of a party due to these actions - but you can fault them for defending them.
The Black Panther case is extremely informative from a political standpoint, because while it should be unanimously condemned, Republicans imply that it is typical when it is an anomaly and Democrats deflect and start accusing Republicans of race-baiting and such. Both points of view are completely off-base. A man standing in front of a polling place holding a night stick should absolutely be universally condemned. At the same time, it was an isolated incident and the importance of it should not be used as a political weapon. Where is that point of view reflected in our political discourse?
I guess you are right if the environment they are in is reflective to visible (to them) light.
You are correct that sound is muffled by solid objects pretty well, but aside from man-made dwellings, there aren't a whole lot of totally enclosed spaces in nature - so going around objects is sufficient. But some kind of environment with natural enclosed spaces might indeed discourage sound as a communications medium.
Perhaps they use sign language because predators are too good at following sound.
Yeah, I thought of that - but it seems that most critters make sounds anyway. Lightning bugs seem to be an exception, along with some kinds of sea life. And the glowing that they do would obviously (and does!) attract predators. Many animals use elaborate visual displays - mostly for mating. But most of those animals also make sounds. Even rabbits can make sounds.
Surely some vocalization would occur, though? Light can't pass through or around objects, so sound has an inherent evolutionary advantage. Of course, there is the whole rest of the electromagnetic spectrum, and I suppose it is possible for some species "out there" to be communicating with part of the spectrum that passes through solid objects.
Got to change them all to get actual speech.
And then on the other side of the coin, you have many birds that quite clearly have the required physiology for human-style speech, but haven't evolved the mental faculties.
Look, I don't know how much I can sway you in a message board. I can only hope that you will read your own post after you read this one and change your mind a little bit.
The kind of categorization that you did is exactly what I was talking about. "Democrats" aren't a particular similar group of people. You have hyper-conservative blacks and hispanics together with people who are fighting for a pro-gay agenda. You have pacifists together with union members who believe in violence and intimidation as political tactics. There is a somewhat smaller amount of diversity on the Republican side, but it's still very hard to believe that you can group them all together like you did. People pick political parties because they want to belong to a team - often they are born into the team. This is the very tribalism you decried in your post.
Also, may I suggest that you look into the history of voting fraud. There is and has been no shortage of it in big cities where there aren't any Republicans to be found. Voting fraud is a human tendency, not a Republican or Democratic tendency.
The search is terrible if you only know a part of the word you are searching for. If you search for "sales" it will not match "saleslady", for instance.
Most of the time, you can work around this limitation by searching for the compound and individual word, but some searches become impossible.
Exchange relies on Internet Explorer for the "ajax" part, even to this day. Also, you have the minor issue of needing to run an Exchange server. Gmail required no server on my part, gave me oodles of storage space, completely took away my old habit of meticulously sorting email into folders, and responded almost as well as a real native application. It was amazing at the time.
Hotmail was just plain ol' webmail - none of the ajax goodness that made Gmail so much more like a desktop client.
Also, I'm not sure the frame could handle the weight of Lead Acid to be honest.
Ha! Good point! They sell kits for bugs, so I presumed they'd be OK in a Ghia. But you are right, the batteries are a lot heavier than the little engines that were back there.
My main use of Google is Gmail, which is the first webmail client that was worthwhile as a main interface. That seemed pretty innovative at the time.
So it is reasonable to force citizens to pay for a government issued ID to vote?
I'm not familiar with what they do in other states, but in PA you can get a free ID.
Of course it's not really free since someone has to pay for it, and that is of course you if you pay taxes. I think the justification for making people pay for them individually is that people tend to treat "free" things pretty poorly.
Given that basic fact, any argument for tightening up access to voting must be seen as disinegenuous.
I'd agree, except that we don't include any kind of statistical analysis in tabulating voting results. We really should have a "tie" category so that elections have to be statistically significant. Until we do something like that, every vote counts - even the crooked ones. Close elections can hinge on just a handful of votes.
Another way to put it is that our system currently tolerates zero error in the process - which is ridiculous.
As to the justification of fighting fraud even though it is a small problem, the whole democratic process hinges on a warm, fuzzy feeling of legitimacy in the electorate. Of course, this goes both ways - disenfranchising a big chunk of poor people is just as dangerous as a bunch of middle class people who feel like the system is full of fraud.
Which gets me back to my original point - you should just have a knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of voting reform, but we do because both political parties have set their own interest ahead of the country's, and the red-team/blue-team mentality of 2/3 of the electorate only enables this.
It's all voter suppression. If the kind of Republicans we have in government right now learned of a genuine voter fraud problem, they'd first calculate whether it benefits or hurts them before deciding to do anything.
I agree, but the Democrats do the exact same thing. And because about 2/3 of the voters dutifully follow their team, the political parties can get away with it.
I think we actually agree. I completely agree that the Republicans are pushing so hard for voting reform because it benefits them. I also think, however, that the main reason the Democrats push back is because it hurts them.
Another issue illustrates this in PA at the moment. The Republicans are cutting money and at the same time converting things into block grants. The merits of a grant could be sanely debated, but the cutting of money will without question hurt the poor while we are in a recession. They will (correctly) point out that some of the programs they are de-funding have not been terribly successful. But of COURSE their answer is not to reform the programs or shift the money to programs that HAVE been effective, but to just pull the plug. The Democrats, on the other hand, are going nuts about the cutting of funding to the poor. Nowhere are they attempting to correct the bad programs and they don't even try to address the block grant part of the equation, other than making vague statements about what might happen to the grants in the future.
It all drives me a bit crazy, because if you stripped away the party identity that people have, I don't think most Republicans would want to take vital support away from the poor and I don't think many Democrats would want to keep throwing money at ineffective government programs.
SuperOneClick does it for almost every Android I've tried.
Ah, I don't run Windows. I actually rooted mine by opening the SuperOneClick bat file and entering the commands at the command line. I definitely should have mentioned that in my post.
That'd be the fastest Karmann Ghia ever! LOL... lucky if the frame stays together.
If you did it with lead acid batteries and a DC motor it would probably be cost effective - but it would take a while and the performance would be more classically Karmann Ghia :)
All three largest OS - Windows, OS X and Linux - are pretty much equivalent now.
So this story finally got me motivated to update ClamXAV and scan my drive. It's been running for a couple of hours now, and so far it has found 4 viruses/trojans... Windows viruses :) They are apparently sitting in my Gmail account, which I mirror locally. One of them is a windows screensaver virus of some kind sitting in my Downloads folder.
I'll get back to putting clam on my FreeBSD server as well. My Windows machine is obviously protected (with AVG).