"you're definitely qualified to tell other people how to do their jobs because hey, you're the magical IT" being the response I receive from most Marketing types.
A few hints: we may be in IT, but that doesn't mean we're clueless about Marketing. Some of us have 10 or more years experience in this industry, second degrees in Business Administration or even (gasp!) MBA's, etc., and choose to do IT because we like building stuff rather than selling stuff. That doesn't make us automatically unqualified to comment upon market focus and appropriate venues for reaching sub-markets and so forth!
My problem is when I know more about the product and its market and how to target that market than the Marketing Department does. *THAT* is when I start grumbling about "clueless marketing".
Lazy marketing types are quick to grumble about mumbling engineers etc. But some of us engineers *DO* know marketing -- and get rather infuriated when the marketing types decide to go golfing rather than learn about their product, competing products, the marketplace that their product is to be sold into, and how to reach that marketplace given the product that they have. For some reason, ex-used-car-salesmen who've been jumped up to Marketing seem to think they can sell a complex piece of computer software the same way they sell soap -- i.e., with hype, sex, and tv commercials. And they get upset when us engineers start talking to them about marketing stuff, "go teach grandma to suck eggs" being a typical response.
Not my current company's marketing department -- they're quite eager to hear anything I have to say about the marketplace and how our product line fits into it (though as a perfectionist I sometimes get frustrated with the follow-through, but that's life). Prior to one presentation I was advised by both co-workers and by the project manager to eliminate some of the marketing materials ("they know this stuff", "they'll be insulted by an engineer trying to tell them about marketing stuff", etc). I didn't. Marketing ate it up. But that's very much an exception.
Regarding IT considerations and marketing: I've received pressure in the past to cut corners due to marketing reasons. My general response is, "Having that software for Comdex will do us no good if it gets us a poor reputation for having buggy software," then talk about goodwill and how valuable it is (especially on our balance sheet!). But undoubtedly there are many IT types who do not have that kind of clout.
"The customer is no longer regarded as someone to be served with enlightened self-interest, so as to reap rewards. It's much easier instead to enter into near-conspiratorial relations with other companies"
This is not only credit card processors. This is almost everybody. For example, UUNET, back before they were bought out, used to have a status page at 'nic.uu.net' where you could see the status of service outages. A few years ago they removed that page unless you're a UUNET customer. Problem: My ISP is a UUNET customer, and they have a service outage. Easiest thing to do is (from another Internet provider) go to the UUNET site and see whether it's a UUNET problem or a local ISP problem, and if it's a UUNET problem, when it'll be fixed. Noooo... UUNET no longer allows mere mortals to view such information. Even from my ISP, UUNET says "you gotta be a direct UUNET customer to view this page". Fuck the consumer. Fuck the poor slob sysadmin trying to figure out why his packets aren't getting from point A to point B (it'd sure be nice to see that the route C between point A and point B is flapping and that UUNET knows about it). The marketdroids rule, and the marketdroids say that ordinary people don't need to see that kind of data because ordinary people don't pay the bills.
That's just one example. The world is full of them.
U.S. patent law specifically states that if you even USE an object that is patented (an object that you did not even create), you can be liable for patent violation. See Title 35, Part III, Chapter 28, Sec 271, U.S. code (check at law.cornell.edu for an easy front-end to the U.S. Code).
Also note:
"(b) Whoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer.".
So even a plugin-type architecture where the plugin is downloaded from xiph.org could be considered a violation.
First, a disclaimer: I work for Enhanced Software Technologies, a tape backup software company. Not that it matters, since we don't sell hardware and have no vested interest in any hardware. But I have access to just about every backup device that exists. About consumer A/V products, I have one thing to say: They really aren't that cost-effective (or safe) as a mass storage device.
DDS-4 tapes cost about $20 if you buy them in reasonable quantity. This holds 24 gigabytes native (up to 50 gigabytes compressed). This works out to being a couple bucks less expensive per 10 gigabytes as compared to consumer tapes.
The DDS-4 drive is a bit expensive, but if you want a cheap drive (but more expensive tapes), buy one of the OnStream IDE tape drives (which sell for under $200 thru most discounters, and store 15gb native on a $35 tape). I haven't particularly been impressed by the Onstreams (to me they're the latest incarnation of the late unlamented TR-x technology), but they are still far more reliable than any consumer A/V tape and/or drive.
Exabyte once tried to make an 8mm tape drive that used 8mm camcorder mechanisms and tapes. It was horrendously unreliable, and forever soured many people on Exabyte and on 8mm tape backup in general. Exabyte learned their lesson -- their follow-on (the Mammoth series) and its tapes were engineered from scratch to be digital computer backup devices. It's sad that too few remember such lessons and would be willing to entrust their data again to A/V quality tapes and drives.
Maggie Thatcher and Charles DeGaulle could have been cut out of the same cloth. Even the Iron Maiden did not have balls enough to pull out of NATO.
A friend of mine worked in France for a while. He speaks French fluently (he grew up speaking French in the Cajun part of Louisiana, and while the dialect is rather quaint, it did not take long for him to pick up modern French). He reported that it was extremely hard to get a work permit in France for Americans, and that permenant jobs were almost impossible to obtain, due to French employment rules that make it very difficult to fire permenant workers. He also reports that work conditions in France are much different than in tech jobs in the United States -- while they are much saner, from a standpoint of hours worked and vacation time (lots), they are also much more formal and bureaucratic. None of this wanted to make me work in France.
For most Americans, it probably would be better to look at an English-speaking country anyhow, because we are so poor at foreign languages. Canada in particular will almost instantly grant a work visa to a computer guy with a degree and/or experience.
-E
Also need a paper trail
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
One thing I learned from writing educational administration and accounting systems is that every electronic system must provide a paper trail. That way the results of the system can be independently audited, by hand, if necessary, even if the system has somehow been corrupted or destroyed.
This principle applies to vote accounting systems just as much as it applies to money accounting systems. Otherwise, just as with money accounting systems, the computer records could be (deliberately or otherwise) corrupted with no way to detect the situation. This sort of curruption has occurred many times with the old mechanical 'lever' voting machines, which similarly left no paper trail... those machines were beloved in places like Louisiana and Dade County (Fla.) because you could easily rig them (e.g., fiddle with the innards so that a vote for Bush turned into a vote for Gore, etc.) and there was no paper trail to conduct a recount upon.
Thus I very much support a system where ballots are paper and must be manually marked by voters, but the ballot box (a specialized machine) won't accept invalid ballots (voter has to get that ballot cancelled there, in realtime, and get another one). At a minimum, if we go to the touch-screen type systems, there should be a printer and roll of paper inside the machine that prints the votes as they're confirmed. These rolls of paper could then be used to check whether the computer got glitched or not. But from a checks and balances point of view, the paper ballots are far superior, since they're easier to re-count.
There is a reason why cash registers still have a roll of paper in them tallying things.
The actual balloting apparatus in Florida is under the direct control of the county commissioner of elections. The Sec of State certifies the results, but the Sec of State's office has no direct control over the voting apparatus (they are kept in county warehouses between elections, *NOT* in state warehouses).
This is why different counties use different ballots -- the actual counting apparatus is different. Thus Brevard used the one that looks like a Scan-Tron card, while the folks in Palm Beach got the ones that had holes in them.
Still, the Democratic machine is strong in Florida. Thus if the final vote is certified for Gore, I'll be just as suspicious as if it is certified for Bush. Either way, I don't think we'll ever know who really won. It's almost as bad as the election of 1876 (go read your history books, and tell me about the Hayes Compromise that got Rutherford B. Hayes elected president that year despite his not winning the popular vote... interestingly enough, Florida was a party to that one too!).
Now the question becomes: What happened to those 5 ballot boxes that were mysteriously lost and found in Dade County? And when those ballot boxes are recounted, will we find that they're mostly Gore votes, or mostly Bush votes? Were Daddy and Brother Bush's operatives able to out-war the Dade County Machine's operatives when it comes to rigging an election? Did Jeb's master stroke, putting two holes by Gore/Lieberman (if you punched the wrong hole, you voted for Buchanon), turn the tide?
I think it's sad that we'll probably never know who the people of Florida *REALLY* wanted for President:-(.
I said "we were lucky to have a 12 inch black and white television."
Which was not often.
We did have a television for most of my childhood, but mostly inherited from wealthier relatives ("wealthier" in relative terms -- as in, "you know you're a redneck if you help your wealthiest relative take the wheels off his house."). I thought it was the greatest thing in the world when my grandfather moved a few houses down. He had actual running hot water in his house, as well as air conditioning. (We had neither in our house, this being in Louisiana, where air conditioning is quite appreciated).
I went to college because the student loans were being guaranteed by the government. I did get grants for the first couple of years, but then Ronald Reagan phased the grants almost out of existence to the point where they didn't even pay for my textbooks. No big deal, I have no problem with paying back the money I borrowed, it was a wise investment. I went to the cheapest public university in my state, since I knew I was going to have to pay every cent back. But without the government guarantee for the loan (which amounts to a government subsidy), I couldn't have gone to college. And this country would have been without at least one damn good engineer (I was chief architect and project lead for EST's upcoming enterprise product). In other words, that investment in people was a good investment on the part of this society too.
The suckiest thing about being poor is a combination of the dirt (no hot water, remember?), the smell (no air conditioning, in Louisiana, remember?), and the cockroaches. And getting sick. I was lucky to live in Louisiana. We had state-run hospitals and clinics for the indigent, unlike states such as Texas (where if you got sick, you either got well by yourself or died, my brother lost his eyesight because of Texas), but it was still an all-day wait in dirty, overcrowded facilities to be treated by young medical students who were only barely supervised by real doctors. It sucked. Especially for people with serious illnesses -- if, for example you needed some sort of serious surgery, the best they could do was ask a neighboring private hospital if they could "borrow" an operating room and equipment, otherwise you died. I'm lucky. I lived, though I'm missing a chunk out of my left foot that would be there if I'd had the luck to be born to rich parents. My brother wasn't so lucky. Between the Texas doctors refusing to treat him, traipsing home to his home town, then the wait to borrow an operating arena from a neighboring Catholic hospital, he lost his eyesight.
Being poor sucks. The fact that you think it doesn't tells me that you have never been poor. Yes, America's poor have it better than those in Mogadishu. But that doesn't mean it sucks any less.
Oh -- my father ran a shop during the day, then worked as a hotel maintenance man at night. My mother sold cosmetics and cookingware door-to-door. Just in case you were wondering if they were some kind of welfare whores (In Louisiana? Yeah, right!). Family finances finally took a turn for the better when my mother managed to get a Kiwanis scholarship to nursing school thanks to the help of one of her customers. That happy result, however, did not happen until I was nearly out of high school.
Though I did take a run by the Canadian immigration site to see what it would take. Turns out I have enough points (profession, education, etc.) that it'd be almost a given:-).
Bush has it for sure because his daddy's old buddies at the CIA certainly wouldn't allow daddy's kid to lose. That's why the Florida race was projected for Gore, then suddenly got switched to Bush. Bush Sr's old CIA operatives got to the voting machines in West Florida in time to switch the values (no graveyards needed if you can just switch the totals on the tote sheets!).
(Sorry about that, was working on the plot for a paranoid novel and it just came out:-).
I was poor for the first 25 years of my life. I made the bad "choice" to be born to poor parents. Then I made the bad "choice" to get an education.
What's this BULLSHIT about the poor having 52" color tv's? We were lucky to have a 12" black and white when I was growing up.
What's this BULLSHIT about how I should have paid my way through college on a $3.35 an hour job at Pizza Hut (let's see, I would have had to work *ONLY* 90 hours a week to pay the tuition, room, and board at the rather inexpensive public university that I attended), rather than relying upon student loans and the occasional grant? I'm still paying off those student loans, BTW, but I don't mind because it was a worthwhile investment... but without the government guarantee for those loans, *NOBODY* would have loaned me the money up-front for that investment.
Anybody who believes that being poor means being lazy has never been poor. It's a pain in the butt, usually involving 60 hour weeks sunk deep into the mud in a driving rain digging trenches to lay conduit or other such manual labor for a grand total of $3.50 an hour (what I made in that job in 1985). Later, when I taught in an inner city school, I had trouble getting parents to come to my class not because they were lazy, but because most of them were working two or three jobs trying to pay the rent on the tar-paper hovels that they lived in.
You are ignorant. The problem is, you don't even know it, and think you know it all. I knew it all too, when I was 13 years old. I grew up.
I may now be in the top income tax bracket, but you better believe I damn sure don't forget being poor. It sucked. Too bad I can't make sure you get a taste of what it's like.
All voters are required to have a mailing address (for obvious reasons). Sample ballots are mailed out to all voters before all elections. If the mail bounces, the voter is removed from the list of eligible voters. Theoretically.
Of course, since the people who mail the sample ballots are the same people who are being elected by those ballots, who knows?
Most Americans think that Harry Browne is too whacked. They're all for eliminating the income tax etc., but when it comes to eliminating Social Security and other such pork, it comes down to "I want my pork!".
Then there's Harry's irritating refusal to play the "political game" -- refusing to accept matching funds etc. It makes him look like a flake.
Then there's the sneaking suspicion that the Libertarians would eliminate consumer protection laws (laws that make fraud etc. a crime), while keeping laws that favor business. The law currently gives corporations very favorable treatment -- they are allowed to deduct things from their taxes that ordinary citizens aren't allowed to deduct (that is why, despite billions in income, Cisco and Microsoft paid not one dime in income tax last year), the owners of these mega-corporations are given special protection against being sued for the actions of the business that they own, etc. Some of these are a matter of good public policy -- without the limited liability, corporations would have a hard time finding shareholders. Still, these do represent special treatment for corporations, and most consumers are suspicious about attempts to take away current special treatment for consumers (such as fraud laws, antitrust laws, etc.).
Interestingly, federal prosecuters never seem to go after people who deliver the vote for whoever's in power.
Note that the last Chicago scandals came about because the vote was delivered for a Democratic candidate, and a Republican won the presidency.
'Nuff said. Local pols who deliver the vote never get indicted. I'm from Louisiana, which is as notoriously corrupt as Chicago, and I've seen that happen time after time... otherwise half the pols in Louisiana would be behind bars.
Your easy dismissal tells me that you live in a state with a history of "clean" elections. I grew up in one of the most corrupt states in the country, Louisiana, where the graveyards are famous for voting on election day, and have no difficulty accepting that electronic voting machines can be rigged as easily as the prior mechanical voting machines (which Louisiana still uses, BTW, probably because the good ole' boys who vote the cemetaries can't agree on a new voting machine that each side could equally easily rig).
Harry Harrison wrote a novel, The Stainless Steel Rat For President. The description of how to compromise electronic voting machines in that novel is naturally somewhat simplistic (the novel was written years ago, after all, when computerized voting machines were still science fiction), but the general principle still applies.
As you mention, no one vendor has a monopoly. Some states don't even do electronic voting (such as Louisiana, with its mechanical voting machines). Thus it's unlikely that anybody is capable of outright stealing a national election (a local or state election is a different story). On the other hand, for elections that are extremely close, one corrupt precinct can mean the difference between defeat or victory (just read about LBJ and the case of the "lost" ballot box -- that's right, Richard Nixon wasn't the first corrupt president we had, and this nation has a long history of corrupt elections that people prefer to ignore).
I read that web site too. I found it disturbing. I also found that Harry Harrison was prescient -- in one of his Stainless Steel Rat novels (The Stainless Steel Rat For President), he describes how to steal an election using widespread corruption of the electronic voting machine apparatus.
But then, Harry Harrison was always prescient. Too bad nobody ever chalked him up as being anything other than another libertarian kook.
For those of you who think it's farfetched -- obviously you never lived in Cook County (Il.) where the graveyards still turn out every election to vote for Mayor Dailey (the father, not the son:-), or in Louisiana, where the graveyards are famous for their high turnout... the description of how the mechanical voting machines (which Louisiana still uses) are doctored, went a long way towards explaining certain chapters in Louisiana history (though to be fair it's harder to doctor the mechanical voting machines than it is to stuff the ballot box, remember how LBJ got elected to Congress with the mysterious "lost box"?).
The 14th Amendment pretty clearly states that the right to vote may be taken away for "rebellion or other crimes". It also states that the state's representation in the House of Representatives must be reduced proportionately.
Of course, at that time they were primarily concerned about ex-Confederates voting themselves back into power (thus the reference to "rebellion" -- that amendment was passed in 1866). It's unclear whether the framers of that amendment intended it to be applied to drunk drivers, people with a few joints of Mary Jane in their possession, or other such dangerous criminals. Still, without an amendment to the Constitution that explicitly states that the right to vote may not be deprived of any citizen for any reason, those states who do strip convicted felons of the voting rights have the Constitution on their side.
I live in the central city. My area has had water and sewage service for over 50 years. I resent having to pay taxes to extend water and sewage services and widen the roads to "Horizon VIsta Hills Yuppy Snout House Community" so that some yuppies can get a three-car garage to park their Ford Valdez in (you know the one, that comes with its own oil tanker and won't fit in a regular garage?). Why should I be taxed money to extend services to these yuppies? Yet with the current system of development that's often what happens -- very few communities charge impact fees to recover the costs of extending services to these yuppie havens.
I don't think we need to tax "sprawl", but I do think it's reasonable to expect people to pay their fair share of the road to their front door. My area of town has had paved roads for over 70 years. Why should I pay to widen the road to Yuppie Hideaway Grande Mesa Estates? I'm not ever going there (I don't associate with people who would buy a Ford Valdez). Let the freeloading scum pay for their own bleepin' roads!
Yes, the rich *DO* benefit more from having good roads, stable banks, and non-corrupt governments. If you don't believe me, go to Somalia and ask any rich person you find. Uh, can't find any? Right.
The fact of the matter is that government enforcement of property rights benefits those who have more property, more than it benefits those who do not have property. Which is as it should be, since the whole goal is to increase the wealth of the nation, and the wealth of the nation is increased by people increasing the amount wealth (property) that they own and/or produce. So yes, the wealthy *DO* benefit more from government. If armed thugs took all my property, I'd shrug and buy a new futon and laptop and be back up and running the next day. If armed thugs seized the Microsoft campus, billions of dollars of wealth would disappear.
TO summarize:
Government protection of property benefits the wealthy more than it benefits the poor.
Thus the wealthy should pay a percentage of their property to the government as proper recompense for that fact, since yes, they ARE receiving more services there than the poor receive.
Let me get this straight. You decry the current system of taxation because it "unfairly taxes the rich". Yet Microsoft and Cisco, both multi-billion dollar companies with billions of dollars in the bank, paid exactly $0 (ZERO) in income tax to the federal government last year.
You can bet that Bill Gates did not pay huge amounts of money in taxes either, because, like most Microsoft employees, he takes much of his compensation in the form of stock options, and stock capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than the "unfair" rates charged to me on my income (I'm in the highest tax bracket, but my income is less than 1% of Bill Gates's).
The current system of taxation is unfair to whom? Certainly not to Cisco or Microsoft or Bill Gates or anybody who is truly rich.
Meanwhile, local retirees are up in arms because their property taxes have been raised to the point where their homes, which they worked hard for all their lives to buy, are about to be taken away from them. At the same time, local developers continue to line up for multi-million dollar subsidies from government, ranging from stadiums to "redevelopment" projects. So let's see... today's system of taxation is unfair to the guys lining up at the government teat?
Let's see. The rich get a much larger share of their income from stock market gains. This is taxed at a lower rate than money I earn by working my tail off. Because tech workers get paid well I already am in the highest tax bracket. How on earth could the rich be paying MORE, as a percentage of their income, than I am?
Sounds to me like somebody's pulling statistics out of his ass...
Slashdot Mirror
A few hints: we may be in IT, but that doesn't mean we're clueless about Marketing. Some of us have 10 or more years experience in this industry, second degrees in Business Administration or even (gasp!) MBA's, etc., and choose to do IT because we like building stuff rather than selling stuff. That doesn't make us automatically unqualified to comment upon market focus and appropriate venues for reaching sub-markets and so forth!
-E
Lazy marketing types are quick to grumble about mumbling engineers etc. But some of us engineers *DO* know marketing -- and get rather infuriated when the marketing types decide to go golfing rather than learn about their product, competing products, the marketplace that their product is to be sold into, and how to reach that marketplace given the product that they have. For some reason, ex-used-car-salesmen who've been jumped up to Marketing seem to think they can sell a complex piece of computer software the same way they sell soap -- i.e., with hype, sex, and tv commercials. And they get upset when us engineers start talking to them about marketing stuff, "go teach grandma to suck eggs" being a typical response.
Not my current company's marketing department -- they're quite eager to hear anything I have to say about the marketplace and how our product line fits into it (though as a perfectionist I sometimes get frustrated with the follow-through, but that's life). Prior to one presentation I was advised by both co-workers and by the project manager to eliminate some of the marketing materials ("they know this stuff", "they'll be insulted by an engineer trying to tell them about marketing stuff", etc). I didn't. Marketing ate it up. But that's very much an exception.
Regarding IT considerations and marketing: I've received pressure in the past to cut corners due to marketing reasons. My general response is, "Having that software for Comdex will do us no good if it gets us a poor reputation for having buggy software," then talk about goodwill and how valuable it is (especially on our balance sheet!). But undoubtedly there are many IT types who do not have that kind of clout.
-E
This is not only credit card processors. This is almost everybody. For example, UUNET, back before they were bought out, used to have a status page at 'nic.uu.net' where you could see the status of service outages. A few years ago they removed that page unless you're a UUNET customer. Problem: My ISP is a UUNET customer, and they have a service outage. Easiest thing to do is (from another Internet provider) go to the UUNET site and see whether it's a UUNET problem or a local ISP problem, and if it's a UUNET problem, when it'll be fixed. Noooo... UUNET no longer allows mere mortals to view such information. Even from my ISP, UUNET says "you gotta be a direct UUNET customer to view this page". Fuck the consumer. Fuck the poor slob sysadmin trying to figure out why his packets aren't getting from point A to point B (it'd sure be nice to see that the route C between point A and point B is flapping and that UUNET knows about it). The marketdroids rule, and the marketdroids say that ordinary people don't need to see that kind of data because ordinary people don't pay the bills.
That's just one example. The world is full of them.
-E
Also note:
"(b) Whoever actively induces infringement of a patent shall be liable as an infringer.".
So even a plugin-type architecture where the plugin is downloaded from xiph.org could be considered a violation.
-E
DDS-4 tapes cost about $20 if you buy them in reasonable quantity. This holds 24 gigabytes native (up to 50 gigabytes compressed). This works out to being a couple bucks less expensive per 10 gigabytes as compared to consumer tapes.
The DDS-4 drive is a bit expensive, but if you want a cheap drive (but more expensive tapes), buy one of the OnStream IDE tape drives (which sell for under $200 thru most discounters, and store 15gb native on a $35 tape). I haven't particularly been impressed by the Onstreams (to me they're the latest incarnation of the late unlamented TR-x technology), but they are still far more reliable than any consumer A/V tape and/or drive.
Exabyte once tried to make an 8mm tape drive that used 8mm camcorder mechanisms and tapes. It was horrendously unreliable, and forever soured many people on Exabyte and on 8mm tape backup in general. Exabyte learned their lesson -- their follow-on (the Mammoth series) and its tapes were engineered from scratch to be digital computer backup devices. It's sad that too few remember such lessons and would be willing to entrust their data again to A/V quality tapes and drives.
-Eric
A friend of mine worked in France for a while. He speaks French fluently (he grew up speaking French in the Cajun part of Louisiana, and while the dialect is rather quaint, it did not take long for him to pick up modern French). He reported that it was extremely hard to get a work permit in France for Americans, and that permenant jobs were almost impossible to obtain, due to French employment rules that make it very difficult to fire permenant workers. He also reports that work conditions in France are much different than in tech jobs in the United States -- while they are much saner, from a standpoint of hours worked and vacation time (lots), they are also much more formal and bureaucratic. None of this wanted to make me work in France.
For most Americans, it probably would be better to look at an English-speaking country anyhow, because we are so poor at foreign languages. Canada in particular will almost instantly grant a work visa to a computer guy with a degree and/or experience.
-E
This principle applies to vote accounting systems just as much as it applies to money accounting systems. Otherwise, just as with money accounting systems, the computer records could be (deliberately or otherwise) corrupted with no way to detect the situation. This sort of curruption has occurred many times with the old mechanical 'lever' voting machines, which similarly left no paper trail... those machines were beloved in places like Louisiana and Dade County (Fla.) because you could easily rig them (e.g., fiddle with the innards so that a vote for Bush turned into a vote for Gore, etc.) and there was no paper trail to conduct a recount upon.
Thus I very much support a system where ballots are paper and must be manually marked by voters, but the ballot box (a specialized machine) won't accept invalid ballots (voter has to get that ballot cancelled there, in realtime, and get another one). At a minimum, if we go to the touch-screen type systems, there should be a printer and roll of paper inside the machine that prints the votes as they're confirmed. These rolls of paper could then be used to check whether the computer got glitched or not. But from a checks and balances point of view, the paper ballots are far superior, since they're easier to re-count.
There is a reason why cash registers still have a roll of paper in them tallying things.
-E
This is why different counties use different ballots -- the actual counting apparatus is different. Thus Brevard used the one that looks like a Scan-Tron card, while the folks in Palm Beach got the ones that had holes in them.
Still, the Democratic machine is strong in Florida. Thus if the final vote is certified for Gore, I'll be just as suspicious as if it is certified for Bush. Either way, I don't think we'll ever know who really won. It's almost as bad as the election of 1876 (go read your history books, and tell me about the Hayes Compromise that got Rutherford B. Hayes elected president that year despite his not winning the popular vote... interestingly enough, Florida was a party to that one too!).
For more info:
- ABC News Story
-EI think it's sad that we'll probably never know who the people of Florida *REALLY* wanted for President :-(.
-E
Which was not often.
We did have a television for most of my childhood, but mostly inherited from wealthier relatives ("wealthier" in relative terms -- as in, "you know you're a redneck if you help your wealthiest relative take the wheels off his house."). I thought it was the greatest thing in the world when my grandfather moved a few houses down. He had actual running hot water in his house, as well as air conditioning. (We had neither in our house, this being in Louisiana, where air conditioning is quite appreciated).
I went to college because the student loans were being guaranteed by the government. I did get grants for the first couple of years, but then Ronald Reagan phased the grants almost out of existence to the point where they didn't even pay for my textbooks. No big deal, I have no problem with paying back the money I borrowed, it was a wise investment. I went to the cheapest public university in my state, since I knew I was going to have to pay every cent back. But without the government guarantee for the loan (which amounts to a government subsidy), I couldn't have gone to college. And this country would have been without at least one damn good engineer (I was chief architect and project lead for EST's upcoming enterprise product). In other words, that investment in people was a good investment on the part of this society too.
The suckiest thing about being poor is a combination of the dirt (no hot water, remember?), the smell (no air conditioning, in Louisiana, remember?), and the cockroaches. And getting sick. I was lucky to live in Louisiana. We had state-run hospitals and clinics for the indigent, unlike states such as Texas (where if you got sick, you either got well by yourself or died, my brother lost his eyesight because of Texas), but it was still an all-day wait in dirty, overcrowded facilities to be treated by young medical students who were only barely supervised by real doctors. It sucked. Especially for people with serious illnesses -- if, for example you needed some sort of serious surgery, the best they could do was ask a neighboring private hospital if they could "borrow" an operating room and equipment, otherwise you died. I'm lucky. I lived, though I'm missing a chunk out of my left foot that would be there if I'd had the luck to be born to rich parents. My brother wasn't so lucky. Between the Texas doctors refusing to treat him, traipsing home to his home town, then the wait to borrow an operating arena from a neighboring Catholic hospital, he lost his eyesight.
Being poor sucks. The fact that you think it doesn't tells me that you have never been poor. Yes, America's poor have it better than those in Mogadishu. But that doesn't mean it sucks any less.
Oh -- my father ran a shop during the day, then worked as a hotel maintenance man at night. My mother sold cosmetics and cookingware door-to-door. Just in case you were wondering if they were some kind of welfare whores (In Louisiana? Yeah, right!). Family finances finally took a turn for the better when my mother managed to get a Kiwanis scholarship to nursing school thanks to the help of one of her customers. That happy result, however, did not happen until I was nearly out of high school.
-E
Though I did take a run by the Canadian immigration site to see what it would take. Turns out I have enough points (profession, education, etc.) that it'd be almost a given :-).
-E
(Sorry about that, was working on the plot for a paranoid novel and it just came out :-).
-E
What's this BULLSHIT about the poor having 52" color tv's? We were lucky to have a 12" black and white when I was growing up.
What's this BULLSHIT about how I should have paid my way through college on a $3.35 an hour job at Pizza Hut (let's see, I would have had to work *ONLY* 90 hours a week to pay the tuition, room, and board at the rather inexpensive public university that I attended), rather than relying upon student loans and the occasional grant? I'm still paying off those student loans, BTW, but I don't mind because it was a worthwhile investment... but without the government guarantee for those loans, *NOBODY* would have loaned me the money up-front for that investment.
Anybody who believes that being poor means being lazy has never been poor. It's a pain in the butt, usually involving 60 hour weeks sunk deep into the mud in a driving rain digging trenches to lay conduit or other such manual labor for a grand total of $3.50 an hour (what I made in that job in 1985). Later, when I taught in an inner city school, I had trouble getting parents to come to my class not because they were lazy, but because most of them were working two or three jobs trying to pay the rent on the tar-paper hovels that they lived in.
You are ignorant. The problem is, you don't even know it, and think you know it all. I knew it all too, when I was 13 years old. I grew up.
I may now be in the top income tax bracket, but you better believe I damn sure don't forget being poor. It sucked. Too bad I can't make sure you get a taste of what it's like.
-E
Of course, since the people who mail the sample ballots are the same people who are being elected by those ballots, who knows?
-E
Then there's Harry's irritating refusal to play the "political game" -- refusing to accept matching funds etc. It makes him look like a flake.
Then there's the sneaking suspicion that the Libertarians would eliminate consumer protection laws (laws that make fraud etc. a crime), while keeping laws that favor business. The law currently gives corporations very favorable treatment -- they are allowed to deduct things from their taxes that ordinary citizens aren't allowed to deduct (that is why, despite billions in income, Cisco and Microsoft paid not one dime in income tax last year), the owners of these mega-corporations are given special protection against being sued for the actions of the business that they own, etc. Some of these are a matter of good public policy -- without the limited liability, corporations would have a hard time finding shareholders. Still, these do represent special treatment for corporations, and most consumers are suspicious about attempts to take away current special treatment for consumers (such as fraud laws, antitrust laws, etc.).
-E
Note that the last Chicago scandals came about because the vote was delivered for a Democratic candidate, and a Republican won the presidency.
'Nuff said. Local pols who deliver the vote never get indicted. I'm from Louisiana, which is as notoriously corrupt as Chicago, and I've seen that happen time after time... otherwise half the pols in Louisiana would be behind bars.
-E
Harry Harrison wrote a novel, The Stainless Steel Rat For President. The description of how to compromise electronic voting machines in that novel is naturally somewhat simplistic (the novel was written years ago, after all, when computerized voting machines were still science fiction), but the general principle still applies.
As you mention, no one vendor has a monopoly. Some states don't even do electronic voting (such as Louisiana, with its mechanical voting machines). Thus it's unlikely that anybody is capable of outright stealing a national election (a local or state election is a different story). On the other hand, for elections that are extremely close, one corrupt precinct can mean the difference between defeat or victory (just read about LBJ and the case of the "lost" ballot box -- that's right, Richard Nixon wasn't the first corrupt president we had, and this nation has a long history of corrupt elections that people prefer to ignore).
-E
But then, Harry Harrison was always prescient. Too bad nobody ever chalked him up as being anything other than another libertarian kook.
For those of you who think it's farfetched -- obviously you never lived in Cook County (Il.) where the graveyards still turn out every election to vote for Mayor Dailey (the father, not the son :-), or in Louisiana, where the graveyards are famous for their high turnout... the description of how the mechanical voting machines (which Louisiana still uses) are doctored, went a long way towards explaining certain chapters in Louisiana history (though to be fair it's harder to doctor the mechanical voting machines than it is to stuff the ballot box, remember how LBJ got elected to Congress with the mysterious "lost box"?).
-E
Of course, at that time they were primarily concerned about ex-Confederates voting themselves back into power (thus the reference to "rebellion" -- that amendment was passed in 1866). It's unclear whether the framers of that amendment intended it to be applied to drunk drivers, people with a few joints of Mary Jane in their possession, or other such dangerous criminals. Still, without an amendment to the Constitution that explicitly states that the right to vote may not be deprived of any citizen for any reason, those states who do strip convicted felons of the voting rights have the Constitution on their side.
-E
I don't think we need to tax "sprawl", but I do think it's reasonable to expect people to pay their fair share of the road to their front door. My area of town has had paved roads for over 70 years. Why should I pay to widen the road to Yuppie Hideaway Grande Mesa Estates? I'm not ever going there (I don't associate with people who would buy a Ford Valdez). Let the freeloading scum pay for their own bleepin' roads!
-E
The fact of the matter is that government enforcement of property rights benefits those who have more property, more than it benefits those who do not have property. Which is as it should be, since the whole goal is to increase the wealth of the nation, and the wealth of the nation is increased by people increasing the amount wealth (property) that they own and/or produce. So yes, the wealthy *DO* benefit more from government. If armed thugs took all my property, I'd shrug and buy a new futon and laptop and be back up and running the next day. If armed thugs seized the Microsoft campus, billions of dollars of wealth would disappear.
TO summarize:
Government protection of property benefits the wealthy more than it benefits the poor.
Thus the wealthy should pay a percentage of their property to the government as proper recompense for that fact, since yes, they ARE receiving more services there than the poor receive.
Simple, eh?
-E
You can bet that Bill Gates did not pay huge amounts of money in taxes either, because, like most Microsoft employees, he takes much of his compensation in the form of stock options, and stock capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate than the "unfair" rates charged to me on my income (I'm in the highest tax bracket, but my income is less than 1% of Bill Gates's).
The current system of taxation is unfair to whom? Certainly not to Cisco or Microsoft or Bill Gates or anybody who is truly rich.
Meanwhile, local retirees are up in arms because their property taxes have been raised to the point where their homes, which they worked hard for all their lives to buy, are about to be taken away from them. At the same time, local developers continue to line up for multi-million dollar subsidies from government, ranging from stadiums to "redevelopment" projects. So let's see... today's system of taxation is unfair to the guys lining up at the government teat?
Yeah, right.
-E
Sounds to me like somebody's pulling statistics out of his ass...
-E
Hmm. 1824, 1876, and 1888 are mentioned as examples of when this happened. It also gives a good explanation of how and why it happens.
-E