What would be great is if we could open an actual portal to the Stupid Republican Universe, and boot all the Bush Supporters' asses into the other universe, open another portal to the Stupid Democrat Universe and shove all the Kerry supporters there, and then maybe we would get a President of the United States who isn't a complete and total asshole.
Or at the very least, we could elect Richard Milhous Nixon. That would be a big improvement over both Bush and Kerry.
But personally, I'd be rooting for Michael Badnarik.
It's especially infuriating if you consider that Donald Rumsfeld probably sold these WMDs to Saddam Hussein personally in the early eighties. The US were Saddams best friend when he used his WMDs (compliments of Ronnie Reagan) on his own population in the early eighties and Donald Rumsfeld and other supporters of the neocon movement were involved much more than they would like to admit right now.
I suppose a Libertarian might say that it would be a lot less expensive to just not support fascist dictators rather than to subsidise selling them lots and lots of weapons, including WMDs, and then spending Billions more to invade them because they have traces of the WMDs we gave them.
But then those people would forget how much profit we made selling them those weapons, and even more profit invading them because of it.
Not to mention that if we didn't prop up the biggest threats to our country, our citizens might pay more attention closer to home. Like what assholes most politicians are.
Who would you rather vote for, a person who has endorsements from... the vast right wing conspiracy, or a candidate who has the support of the Communist(s)....
Down with the eeeviil capitalists! Kerry '04!/sarcasm
Hey now!
Don't go dissing the communists!
I worked hard to bring about the relations between us and Communist China!
And now the vast right wing conspiracy is shipping all the jobs to Communist China!
Slave Labor under Communism is the best thing that ever happened to Capitalism!
Three cheers for Communism and what it's done for eeevil Capitalists!
Putting aside minor considerations like the insanity of anihilating ten time the number of people killed in the twins, SQUARED
OK, I was going to comment that I think there are more than 50 thousand people in the middle east. There are a few million Jews in Iran alone and they are a minority there. But still.... gotta do the math.....
50k times 50k is.... (Taking off shoes to count) 2,500,000,000
OK, thats a bit over but I suppose we shouldn't nit pick.
or it could be 5k squared times 10..... 250,000,000
I would guess that's pretty close.
It would have made more sense if you listed France. They also have tons of Muslems in the country. Come on, just between the two of us - you are itching for an excuse to nuke France. Admit it.
I'll admit it. It would be great to nuke France. Death to the French!
(I don't care a bout the Muslim population. I just hate the French!)
Only one problem, France has Nukes too.
That's why Iran and North Korea is desperate to get Nukes. To protect themselves.
Not to say that I like the idea of Iran and North Korea with Nukes. But then I don't like the idea of France having Nukes. (Because it prevents us from wiping them off the face of the earth.)
This just in... Iran discovers new mind trick to fool stupid people.. However I doubt they really want someone that calls them the evil-doers in the White House. Please don't tell me you actually fell for this.
Does this mean that the "9 out of 10" terrorists that are publicly supporting Kerry are really supporting Bush?
I mean think about it?
Why would terrorists support Kerry publically if they really supported him? They probably could have guessed that support for Kerry would really mean support for Bush.
I think this is proof that 9 out of 10 terrorist really want us to vote for Bush.
He was reckless in invading Iraq. But the Iraq invasion was easy. That country was completely demoralized from 12 years of bombings, to say nothing of the Iran/Iraq war beforehand.
But he has no follow-through.
He had no plan about what to do with Iraq after the invasion, to say nothing of an exit strategy.
Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.
And what better way to protect Iran, than to keep the United States fighting in Iraq?
Well, there is the possibility that Iraq could be used as a staging area for an Iran invasion. Two problems with that are that it wouldn't be an effective staging area if they can't get anything approaching stability, and that an Iran invasion would be a lot more significant than invading a country that was completely demoralized by 12 years of bombing, with poor infrastructure, and depleted uranium in saturating the air.
Funny- the Mullahs even have the same arguments as Bush (as in what better way to keep the terrorists busy than to have them fight us in Iraq instead of in New York City?)
One of the potential trageties of the Iraq invasion is that Iran is on the verge of overthrowing their fascist theocracy, and now the religious wackos would probably take over Iraq if we withdrew at this point, and there is no sign of having real democracy in Iraq, only an attempt at a puppet dictatorship, which the Iraqis don't seem to be accepting.
And if Iraq went to a Shiite theocracy, then they would probably become allies with Iran, dispite the Iran/Iraq war, and that might give the Mullahs in Iran enough leverage to stay in power, and so long secular democracy which they had stolen from them 50 years ago, and had almost recovered.
Given the right wing extremists like Norquist that are behind the 'open' debates front organization, it would be interesting to know why Slashdot carries their water so often.
Taking wisdom from people's signatures. (And I cant find the exact quote right now.)
The problem with Libertarianism isn't I must be Free, but that other jerk must be free as well.
Personally, I think that is an OK price to pay.
If you hear both the "extremist wackos" and the "progressives" then people in favor of open debates hope that the most sensible viewpoints will prevail.
The other thing is that this country is stuck in stagnation. The Republicans and Democrats don't talk about the real issues. And the mainstream media is owned by the same people who own the Republicrat politicians.
At the very least it would get more "regular everyday" people to start asking more questions.
It is a good idea no matter who is endorsing it.
If you are on the ballot in enough states to get you elected, you deserve to be in the debates. We should be electing the best man for the job, not the most electable man for the job. Why do you think we keep getting worse and worse choices for President.
I imagine a lot of people would prefer to see me back in the white house.
the even got that traditionally Democratic demographic, the deceased-American vote.
It is wrong for legitimate voters to be disenfranchised. Having your vote essentially cancelled out by a dead man voting the other way is just as much disenfranchisement. In some ways it is worse since it is only rarely caught. The living disenfranchised voter will raise a stink, assuming the corpse is properly buried it won't - and the voters whose votes were essentially cancelled out never know.
I don't know.
It sounds like you are descriminating against deceased-Americans. I for one believe that the living-impaired should have a right to vote.
Maybe they were thinking of that one episode of the X Files where the evil AI calls up Scully's computer, and it is so powerful that it can even turn it on by remote.
What if p2p software has turned into an Evil Artificial Intelegence?
What will we do? We're Doomed!
Only the Government can save us now!
Quick, everyone, give up your civil liberties before it's too late.
Iwouldn't call the distinction trivial. Voters are not consumers, how can you consume democracy ?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
If voting is anonymous it cannot be completely auditable and secure. The same can be said about paper ballots;
I suppose that depends on your definition of completely auditable and secure. Not to mention that if it isn't anonymous, it isn't secure. (But I'm not going to get into the value of anonymous voting here. Others have already explained that to death.)
I suppose we should define anonymous. If it is not anonymous, that means that votes can be uniquely identified.
Under old fashioned paper ballots, this would be difficult. People vote a specific voting places. I suppose the easiest way to do it would be to check for fingerprints. I don't see how we could prevent that, but I imagine there would be a little difficulty, and a lot of expense.
With computer voting it would be easy to implement if you were required to log into the machine with a unique access code or something.
Under both methods there is some lack of "anonymity" because while votes are not uniquely identified, they do at least show trends as to how each precinct, or at least county, voted.
I infered at first that you meant that having redundant paper ballots would risk our anonymity. Regardless of if that was your point, others might make it. Well, for starters there is a big difference between redundant paper ballots and receits. Receits you would take home and would be ineffective for auditing purposes as not everyone would return their receit in a recount, to say nothing of forged receits.
But having a paper audit trail doesn't neccessarily even mean redundant paper ballots. You could just have an old fashioned printer that uses the continuous ream of paper. The machine prints out the votes as they are cast. Some companies and I believe the military still use this as an audit trail, as you can't tear out part of the paper without it being noticed. The way this could endanger anonymity would be if you knew who used which machines, and in what order. But a polling place could be settup to use one printer for all the machines.
Still, individual ballots that could be shuffled might better protect anonymity. But for the truely paranoid there are still fingerprints.
But if we had good voting software we could use encyrption and digital signatures that would ensure mathematically that each individual vote could be verified, without uniquely identifying the voter.
Black hats are not known for subtlety when trying to send a political message. If they had been tampering, the poll would have shown that of 100 experts sampled, 293027571% thought it was insecure.
If any blackhats are planning on sending a political message in November, may I suggest that I might make a very good president.
What data or insider knowledge does Joe Public have about how this wouldn't be secure? I think they assume its simplified and therefore more secure.
I think it is following the myth that computers don't make mistakes.
In this more modern age when the majority of the population has regular exposer to computers in one way or another (Home, Office, or at least ATMs) that they would know better. Especially when most of them use MS products.
Maybe they assume that the software used in the electronic voting machines will be better than what they use at home?
I wonder how much of the general population realizes that these machines are running Windows XP?
This isn't just a matter of deliberate voter fraud, what about machines crashing? What percentage of voting machines can we expect to crash and lose all their data?
I wonder if we could trick MS and Diebold to start using the slogan: "Diebold Voting Machines: Because you want the reliability that you've come to expect from Microsoft."
Web sites must employ technology to block viewers from outside their home countries, so U.S. Web surfers won't benefit from the BBC's live coverage.
How will they assure that every country in the world will obey the blackout for the USA?
We talk about spammers just moving to another country if we outlaw spam here. Well, in that case most people dislike spam so it has an easy answer, block email from spamming countries.
But while spam is a push medium, this live coverage would be a pull medium. It is only people who want it that will be attempting to "illegally" view the live coverage. If they can't stop spammers, who we collectively want to block, how can they stop people who collectively want to view?
Not even the Great Firewall of China is able to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing subversive materials.
Proxies is the obvious answer but it might not even be neccessary.
Slashdot Mirror
And that, Sir, is why Bush is so hot to get a Missile Defense System into production
He's wants to be able to first-strike-with-impunity on anybody
So, does that mean it is actually a good thing that the Missile Defense System is a big expensive fraud?
Besides all those lost tax dollars that is?
What would be great is if we could open an actual portal to the Stupid Republican Universe, and boot all the Bush Supporters' asses into the other universe, open another portal to the Stupid Democrat Universe and shove all the Kerry supporters there, and then maybe we would get a President of the United States who isn't a complete and total asshole.
Or at the very least, we could elect Richard Milhous Nixon.
That would be a big improvement over both Bush and Kerry.
But personally, I'd be rooting for Michael Badnarik.
(From the website linked)
Polls show 75% of Iraqis want a democracy.
Wow!
That's quite a shocking statistic!
I thought that everyone in the middle east hated Democracy just like they hate Freedom.
It is really great that they want democracy.
Too bad that instead they are going to get another puppet dictator just like Saddam Hussein.
(Insert Maniacal Laughter Here)
It's especially infuriating if you consider that Donald Rumsfeld probably sold these WMDs to Saddam Hussein personally in the early eighties. The US were Saddams best friend when he used his WMDs (compliments of Ronnie Reagan) on his own population in the early eighties and Donald Rumsfeld and other supporters of the neocon movement were involved much more than they would like to admit right now.
I suppose a Libertarian might say that it would be a lot less expensive to just not support fascist dictators rather than to subsidise selling them lots and lots of weapons, including WMDs, and then spending Billions more to invade them because they have traces of the WMDs we gave them.
But then those people would forget how much profit we made selling them those weapons, and even more profit invading them because of it.
Not to mention that if we didn't prop up the biggest threats to our country, our citizens might pay more attention closer to home. Like what assholes most politicians are.
Who would you rather vote for, a person who has endorsements from ... the vast right wing conspiracy, or a candidate who has the support of the Communist(s)....
/sarcasm
Down with the eeeviil capitalists! Kerry '04!
Hey now!
Don't go dissing the communists!
I worked hard to bring about the relations between us and Communist China!
And now the vast right wing conspiracy is shipping all the jobs to Communist China!
Slave Labor under Communism is the best thing that ever happened to Capitalism!
Three cheers for Communism and what it's done for eeevil Capitalists!
Putting aside minor considerations like the insanity of anihilating ten time the number of people killed in the twins, SQUARED
OK, I was going to comment that I think there are more than 50 thousand people in the middle east. There are a few million Jews in Iran alone and they are a minority there. But still.... gotta do the math.....
50k times 50k is.... (Taking off shoes to count)
2,500,000,000
OK, thats a bit over but I suppose we shouldn't nit pick.
or it could be 5k squared times 10.....
250,000,000
I would guess that's pretty close.
It would have made more sense if you listed France. They also have tons of Muslems in the country. Come on, just between the two of us - you are itching for an excuse to nuke France. Admit it.
I'll admit it.
It would be great to nuke France.
Death to the French!
(I don't care a bout the Muslim population. I just hate the French!)
Only one problem, France has Nukes too.
That's why Iran and North Korea is desperate to get Nukes.
To protect themselves.
Not to say that I like the idea of Iran and North Korea with Nukes.
But then I don't like the idea of France having Nukes.
(Because it prevents us from wiping them off the face of the earth.)
This just in... Iran discovers new mind trick to fool stupid people.. However I doubt they really want someone that calls them the evil-doers in the White House. Please don't tell me you actually fell for this.
Does this mean that the "9 out of 10" terrorists that are publicly supporting Kerry are really supporting Bush?
I mean think about it?
Why would terrorists support Kerry publically if they really supported him?
They probably could have guessed that support for Kerry would really mean support for Bush.
I think this is proof that 9 out of 10 terrorist really want us to vote for Bush.
He was reckless in invading Iraq.
But the Iraq invasion was easy. That country was completely demoralized from 12 years of bombings, to say nothing of the Iran/Iraq war beforehand.
But he has no follow-through.
He had no plan about what to do with Iraq after the invasion, to say nothing of an exit strategy.
He really should have considered the words of his father.
And what better way to protect Iran, than to keep the United States fighting in Iraq?
Well, there is the possibility that Iraq could be used as a staging area for an Iran invasion.
Two problems with that are that it wouldn't be an effective staging area if they can't get anything approaching stability, and that an Iran invasion would be a lot more significant than invading a country that was completely demoralized by 12 years of bombing, with poor infrastructure, and depleted uranium in saturating the air.
Funny- the Mullahs even have the same arguments as Bush (as in what better way to keep the terrorists busy than to have them fight us in Iraq instead of in New York City?)
One of the potential trageties of the Iraq invasion is that Iran is on the verge of overthrowing their fascist theocracy, and now the religious wackos would probably take over Iraq if we withdrew at this point, and there is no sign of having real democracy in Iraq, only an attempt at a puppet dictatorship, which the Iraqis don't seem to be accepting.
And if Iraq went to a Shiite theocracy, then they would probably become allies with Iran, dispite the Iran/Iraq war, and that might give the Mullahs in Iran enough leverage to stay in power, and so long secular democracy which they had stolen from them 50 years ago, and had almost recovered.
Given the right wing extremists like Norquist that are behind the 'open' debates front organization, it would be interesting to know why Slashdot carries their water so often.
Taking wisdom from people's signatures. (And I cant find the exact quote right now.)
The problem with Libertarianism isn't I must be Free, but that other jerk must be free as well.
Personally, I think that is an OK price to pay.
If you hear both the "extremist wackos" and the "progressives" then people in favor of open debates hope that the most sensible viewpoints will prevail.
The other thing is that this country is stuck in stagnation. The Republicans and Democrats don't talk about the real issues. And the mainstream media is owned by the same people who own the Republicrat politicians.
At the very least it would get more "regular everyday" people to start asking more questions.
It is a good idea no matter who is endorsing it.
If you are on the ballot in enough states to get you elected, you deserve to be in the debates. We should be electing the best man for the job, not the most electable man for the job. Why do you think we keep getting worse and worse choices for President.
I imagine a lot of people would prefer to see me back in the white house.
So the state reserves the right to spy, but nobody else can do it. How is this gonna fit in with anti-terrorism laws I wonder?
That is not only top secret information, but a forbidden question.
Expect a visit from Homeland Security shortly.
Also, I wonder how close corps like the RIAA really are with the FBI, CIA etc. I wouldn't be surprised if favours are done...
Who do you think really runs this country.
And the RIAA has already declared file sharers to be terrorists.
the even got that traditionally Democratic demographic, the deceased-American vote.
It is wrong for legitimate voters to be disenfranchised. Having your vote essentially cancelled out by a dead man voting the other way is just as much disenfranchisement. In some ways it is worse since it is only rarely caught. The living disenfranchised voter will raise a stink, assuming the corpse is properly buried it won't - and the voters whose votes were essentially cancelled out never know.
I don't know.
It sounds like you are descriminating against deceased-Americans.
I for one believe that the living-impaired should have a right to vote.
But maybe that's just me.
Why wait for the DVD release when there are bit torrents already out there and Michael Moore has already given personal approval to use it?
OK, I suppose it will be even more effective in October in terms of the election.
But isn't this something that works better durring the summer, and/or warm weather?
It is just fun to stay up late watching a movie outdoors in the summer.
It's a real shame that drive in theatures have gone away.
Also consider that both parties are becoming more and more evil.
Do you think that I was as evil as George W Bush?
Heck, do you think I was as evil as John Kerry?
It is time for a real change. Vote Nixon 2004!
I'm much less evil that the politicians of the 21st Century.
I trust you won't be repeating such bullshit lines again.
When you are talking politics, it is all bullshit.
Do we really want corporate America influencing Our educational system?
Have you ever heard about Channel One?
I wouldn't be surprised if in the future someone gets suspended for wearing a "bit torrent" t-shirt on anti-piracy day or something...
Sillier things have happened.
Maybe they were thinking of that one episode of the X Files where the evil AI calls up Scully's computer, and it is so powerful that it can even turn it on by remote.
What if p2p software has turned into an Evil Artificial Intelegence?
What will we do?
We're Doomed!
Only the Government can save us now!
Quick, everyone, give up your civil liberties before it's too late.
Iwouldn't call the distinction trivial. Voters are not consumers, how can you consume democracy ?
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
You are number 6.
In the United States of American We are number 1.
We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!
USA! USA! USA!
Whose side are you on?
It will take a police state to stop innovation and technology
(Insert Maniacal Laughter Here)
If voting is anonymous it cannot be completely auditable and secure. The same can be said about paper ballots;
I suppose that depends on your definition of completely auditable and secure.
Not to mention that if it isn't anonymous, it isn't secure.
(But I'm not going to get into the value of anonymous voting here. Others have already explained that to death.)
I suppose we should define anonymous.
If it is not anonymous, that means that votes can be uniquely identified.
Under old fashioned paper ballots, this would be difficult. People vote a specific voting places. I suppose the easiest way to do it would be to check for fingerprints. I don't see how we could prevent that, but I imagine there would be a little difficulty, and a lot of expense.
With computer voting it would be easy to implement if you were required to log into the machine with a unique access code or something.
Under both methods there is some lack of "anonymity" because while votes are not uniquely identified, they do at least show trends as to how each precinct, or at least county, voted.
I infered at first that you meant that having redundant paper ballots would risk our anonymity. Regardless of if that was your point, others might make it. Well, for starters there is a big difference between redundant paper ballots and receits. Receits you would take home and would be ineffective for auditing purposes as not everyone would return their receit in a recount, to say nothing of forged receits.
But having a paper audit trail doesn't neccessarily even mean redundant paper ballots. You could just have an old fashioned printer that uses the continuous ream of paper. The machine prints out the votes as they are cast. Some companies and I believe the military still use this as an audit trail, as you can't tear out part of the paper without it being noticed. The way this could endanger anonymity would be if you knew who used which machines, and in what order. But a polling place could be settup to use one printer for all the machines.
Still, individual ballots that could be shuffled might better protect anonymity. But for the truely paranoid there are still fingerprints.
But if we had good voting software we could use encyrption and digital signatures that would ensure mathematically that each individual vote could be verified, without uniquely identifying the voter.
Is why elections officials are so adamantly opposed to a paper trail?
Never mind that!
Come look at the shiny new touch screen voting machine.
Isn't technology cool?
It will solve all our problems.
Did you have a question?
Black hats are not known for subtlety when trying to send a political message. If they had been tampering, the poll would have shown that of 100 experts sampled, 293027571% thought it was insecure.
If any blackhats are planning on sending a political message in November, may I suggest that I might make a very good president.
Now more than ever.
What data or insider knowledge does Joe Public have about how this wouldn't be secure? I think they assume its simplified and therefore more secure.
I think it is following the myth that computers don't make mistakes.
In this more modern age when the majority of the population has regular exposer to computers in one way or another (Home, Office, or at least ATMs) that they would know better. Especially when most of them use MS products.
Maybe they assume that the software used in the electronic voting machines will be better than what they use at home?
I wonder how much of the general population realizes that these machines are running Windows XP?
This isn't just a matter of deliberate voter fraud, what about machines crashing? What percentage of voting machines can we expect to crash and lose all their data?
I wonder if we could trick MS and Diebold to start using the slogan: "Diebold Voting Machines: Because you want the reliability that you've come to expect from Microsoft."
Web sites must employ technology to block viewers from outside their home countries, so U.S. Web surfers won't benefit from the BBC's live coverage.
How will they assure that every country in the world will obey the blackout for the USA?
We talk about spammers just moving to another country if we outlaw spam here. Well, in that case most people dislike spam so it has an easy answer, block email from spamming countries.
But while spam is a push medium, this live coverage would be a pull medium. It is only people who want it that will be attempting to "illegally" view the live coverage. If they can't stop spammers, who we collectively want to block, how can they stop people who collectively want to view?
Not even the Great Firewall of China is able to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing subversive materials.
Proxies is the obvious answer but it might not even be neccessary.