Landline phone technology has been around for over a hundred years. If a country hasn't installed landlines yet, it isn't because cell phones are killing government incentive to install them. The government already lacked incentive to install them long before cell phones ever arrived. If anything, rudimentary Internet access on cell phones should spur the populace to demand faster Internet access, thus providing a greater incentive for the government to install landlines. People don't know to ask for something they've been missing out on, until they get to experience it first-hand.
Common names are vague, disorganised, and often misleading. Latin names are not.
Latin names can be wrong too. As the OP alluded to, trout were once considered distinct from salmon and char. The fish were categorized into these groups based on morphological and behavioral differences (trout = Salmo, salmon = Oncorhynchus, char = Salvelinus ).
Then DNA testing became available and totally destroyed the well-established taxonomy. Rainbow trout, which for centuries had been the archetypical example of a trout, turned out to be more closely related to the salmons. Atlantic salmon were a trout. Lake trout in the Great Lakes were a char. Click on the above Wikipedia links and you can tell how much damage was done to the taxonomy by comparing the common names to the genus. Rainbow trout (aka steelhead) which were formerly Salmo mykiss are now Oncorhynchus mykiss.
Why do this do this? Profits of course! Charge $18 for a mahi meal and serve them cod or tilapia instead. The average persons taste buds aren't refined enough to know the difference.
Mahi mahi (dolphin fish, but people freak out if you tell them they're eating dolphin) keeps very poorly when chilled or frozen. Pretty much every sample I've tried from the supermarket or in a restaurant is mush compared to fresh caught (they're probably the most beautiful fish in the sea). Frankly, you're probably better off with the cod or tilapia.
I've been kindly asked to leave sushi places before when my "fresh super white tuna from Korea" tasted a lot like farm raised cod, which I rudely pointed out when the waitress asked me if "everything was ok". At least I got a somewhat free meal out of it!
I'm kinda surprised they can pull this off. Albacore (white tuna) looks and tastes nothing like cod. The meat is textured like regular tuna, but has a pale red to light pink color when raw, off-white when cooked. It's never white like cod or tilapia.
It's amazing how much of the popularity (and price) of seafood relies on its cachet rather than its taste. In colonial times, lobster was considered trash and people resented having to eat it too much. Pollock and haddock were considered bycatch in the pursuit of cod. Until the cod fisheries were wiped out and the fishermen needed to find something else to catch. Now the pollack and haddock are the staple foodfishes (if you've ever eaten frozen fish sticks or a fish sandwich, it's probably one of these fish). As halibut declined in numbers, sole and flounder were marketed as replacements.
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The same thing happened to orange roughy and monkfish (both some of the most hideous looking fish you'll ever see), and shark (difficult to prepare because of the high ammonia content in the meat). All were once considered trash and literally shoveled overboard in the pursuit of (at the time) more valuable fish. Now that those more valuable fish have been overfished, the industry spruces up the image of what was formerly considered trash fish to sell to the public.
BTW, what's sold as red snapper often isn't red snapper. Pretty much any of the snappers and frequently any of the rockfishes (aka rock cod) are sold as red snapper. Most of their meat is pretty similar, but there are subtle differences.
Honestly, I don't think it has any bearing in this case. The system isn't used widely except in Korea, and having a date of birth stamped on a passport makes it a moot point. The best argument you could come up with is that when the predominantly non-Asian international gymnastics federation came up with a minimum 16-year age requirement, the Chinese government misunderstood that to mean 16 years old in traditional Asian age, not in Western age. That's a pretty ludicrous argument, and wouldn't explain forged passport dates. The best excuse I've seen is that the web sites where she was listed as 14 y.o. were actually incidents of cheating in Chinese domestic competitions which were only open to those under age 15.
Interesting. You realize that you just made a supportive position for the huge prices of CD's right? I mean, charge a substantial fee up front.
The CD is a distribution medium and costs almost nothing. The substantial fee would be in the commissioning of the performance (maybe someone's party, or a TV broadcast, or a concert). A recording made at that time could be turned into CDs and MP3s and distributed for minimal additional cost.
"Once those costs are paid, they can run off as many prints as they want for almost no cost."
Showing that you do not understand professional photography. It's not like they use WalMart.
Actually, many of them use Costco. Why pay $20,000 for a commercial-grade digital photo printer when Costco lets you print on theirs for little more than the cost of the paper? Studio and exhibition prints usually require thicker paper and more durable inks, so require a specialized photo lab (which probably uses the same machine). But the Costco prints are fine for most people just wanting to purchase a print. If it weren't, those people wouldn't be scanning and printing the photos on their own.
I think it's going to go the same route as wedding photography. In the old days, the photographer would shoot your wedding for a small fee or even free, but you had to pay like $20-$100 per print for the pictures. When scanners and color printers became widespread, people just started to make their own prints from the proof sheets. For a while the photographers tried to do things like print "SAMPLE" over the proofs. But now most of them have switched business models. They give you the prints (or a CD) at cost or even for free. But they charge you a substantial fee for shooting the wedding.
If you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the old way. The cost to the photographer is not the prints, it's the time, effort, and equipment used at the wedding and in post-processing. Once those costs are paid, they can run off as many prints as they want for almost no cost. So all that's happened is that the cost for the customer is now more closely aligned with the cost for the photographer. I can see the same thing happening with music, where most of the artists' revenue comes from live and commissioned performances. The music itself would be distributed at minimal cost or even for free as advertising for the performances.
Those figures don't include waste storage or decommissioning, which can run up quite a high bill. And of course the generating price depends in uranium ore cost, which could rise quite a lot if everyone turns to nuclear.
The first link I gave included estimated nuclear waste disposal costs. Of course they have it easy since they can just ship most of it to France where it's reprocessed into more fuel. Here in the U.S. we're trying to bury "waste" that still contains 90% of its original energy consequently making it unnecessarily "hot" for an unnecessarily long period of time at unnecessary expense. If we reprocess, we should have enough uranium for thousands of years. Plenty of time to develop cost-effective renewables, if not fusion.
Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis (yes there's also the NIMBY problem but still).
The U.S. is almost alone in not expanding nuclear power (Germany banned it, and consequently buys a lot lot of electricity from France which is 80% nuclear). The U.S. hasn't been building nuclear plants because they take longer to get approved and construct (due to excessive regulatory requirements and lawsuits). So coal plants end up being less risky and requiring less capital investment, so that's what the power companies here build.
Despite the conspiracy theories you're likely to hear about this, the reason why the DMCA sailed through Congress is the same reason it'll sail through Canada's legislative process... media companies are responsible for a nice chunk of GNP (and whatever they call it in Canada)
U.S. GDP in 2007 was $13.6 trillion, so together the RIAA and MPAA comprise 0.35% of the U.S. economy. For comparison, the MP3 player market in the U.S. for 2007 was an estimated $5.4 billion. That's just MP3 players, never mind accessories, home audio systems, headphones, car stereos, etc.
If the general cloud does not also support high-bandwidth content viewing, the pipe providers (cable cos) will grab our throats and shake us down for money.
This is an "already been solved" problem, and even has a dedicated IP address range (224-239.x.x.x). The multicasting solution is the optimal solution for this type of problem - identical information being broadcast "live" to millions or hundreds of millions of locations.
It's even more efficient than Akami or Limelight, which are more suited for on-demand asynchronous streaming applications like pay-per view and web sites. With Akami or Limelight, the ISP has to send the same video stream to every single viewer (though you can ease the burden with some smart routers). With multicasting, the video stream is sent only once along each network route. If a viewer wishes to see the video, they just tap into that one stream. The IOC and subsequently the ISPs went with the less-optimal solution represented by Limelight because they wanted to have more control over the distribution.
There are lots of other neat stats in the two PDFs, including injury rates (nuclear is about the same as hydro, only coal is safer), wind generation is much cheaper in the U.S. (maybe because the U.S. is only building it when it makes economic sense instead of where ever environmentalists want it?), solar costs almost 10x as much as other power sources
It's not just better technique and the new suit. The pool is also designed to reduce waves to help lower times. A lot of the wave dissipation features described in the article have been used in tow tanks (where we tow model ships to measure their drag) for decades.
Compaq did a clean-room implementation of the IBM BIOS. Psystar didn't do a clean-room implementation of OS X.
Shouldn't the comparison be to Psystar doing a clean-room implementation of Apple's hardware? AFAIK Compaq didn't do a clean-room implementation of MS-DOS.
FYI, you can freeze your credit report. That prevents any lender from pulling it, which is usually a required step to open a new account. If you need to open a new account, you can phone in to temporarily unfreeze it for one transaction. There's supposed to be some sort of passcode you use for the unfreeze so the thief can't just call up pretending to be you to unfreeze it. Since you're an ID theft victim, you don't even have to pay the $5 fee for it.
Apparently the pool in Beijing is designed to minimize wave turbulence, thus leading to faster times. I dunno how effective it is at reducing drag for swimmers vs. the Speedo suit, but a lot of the stuff mentioned in the NPR article is stuff we use in tow tanks (where we test model ships for water resistance) to dissipate waves and get more accurate results.
I remember a quote that from somewhere that went something like this: "If you find yourself in a fair fight, its time to re-evaluate your strategy".
I would even posit that a fair fight is the worst possible confrontation in warfare in terms of casualties. If one side is grossly outmatched, it will usually flee or give up before too much damage is done. Worst case it is completely eliminated and a bit more than 50% of the participants are killed or wounded (assuming both sides started with the same number of troops).
OTOH, in a fair fight, worst case close to 100% of the participants will be killed or wounded.
It happens in games too. That level of anguish, empathy, and debate was created in a text-based game. I don't think you can get more disassociated than that. The distinguishing factor would seem to be knowing that there's a real person at the receiving end. Witness the debates over PvP vs. PvM in multiplayer online RPGs.
If something is voided, it means whatever it is exists, but is no longer in effect. If something is nullified, it means that whatever is was no longer exists.
So voiding is like dereferencing a pointer, and nullifying is like releasing memory?
I consider you so emphatically wrong because you say "Let's just drop it", "Get over it". No! That is divisive. You cite a Wikipedia article (heh) on a psychological topic. Perhaps you know a thing or two about dispute resolution as well. Just saying that because you won according to some standard (here: the election went to the team that had a majority of the popular vote; whether or not your team won is irrelevant), the rest of us should shut up -- that's a great way to make a bad situation worse.
I think I see your problem. You apparently have an axe to grind, and it's caused you to jump to premature conclusions about anyone who says something in opposition to your beliefs. You didn't like the 2004 results and are so convinced of its illegitimacy that you must pigeonhole anyone with an opposing opinion into a template you've pre-determined.
FYI, I voted for Gore and Kerry. I was on the losing side in 2004. But I don't mix my political beliefs with my evaluations of the efficacy of a system or the severity of its failures. As systematic failures go, the 2004 election was not a major one. Like when your hydraulic brakes fail but you manage to stop the car using the parking brake. Yes the brake failure is a serious problem and should be addressed. But don't bring up the carnage that could've resulted if you hadn't been able to stop, because it simply didn't happen. The system as a whole fulfilled its greater purpose of stopping the car when you wanted it to stop. So get over the fact that there could have been an accident, and concentrate instead on preventing future hydraulic brake failures.
Please give me more credit than that. Saying "which is fine" is dismissive and by referencing Kohlberg you seem to be trying to imply I'm less mature than you. There's dozens of ways to argue that there's multiple kinds of morality -- why did you choose a source and examples to make it look like you're further along a development trend than I am?
I wasn't being dismissive. I didn't choose a source to make it look like I'm further along a development trend. You seemed to be fixated on the absolute rule of law, so I gave the source merely to demonstrate that there exist lines of reasoning which transcend law. I don't see law as an absolute that must be obeyed. I believe in things like civil disobedience when appropriate. I agree that things generally function better when laws are observed. But I also think those laws and their failures need to be evaluated from a context which transcends the law itself. I think arguing for compliance with the law for the sake of the law is circular reasoning. Compliance should always stem from the rationale which was used to create that law.
And more importantly than that, are you aware that Kohlberg isn't discussing sources of morality, but the nature of the argument? It's entirely possible for me to uphold the law while having a post-conventional stage of development, and it's entirely possible for you to disregard the law and still be at stage four or lower
Of course I'm aware of it. If you've got an alternative line of reasoning for why a failure of the Electoral College is more important than the will of the people, I'd love to hear it. I always love learning new alternative viewpoints. It expands my horizons, makes me see things I may not have considered before.
You've been modded insightful, but you're plain wrong. The game has very high stakes and so it has strict rules. It must be played by the rules -- even if today we think the rules are not right any more. If that's the case, we can change the rules until they reflect our current standards, but you can't say: "Well, the rules weren't followed properly, but we got the result I think is more proper, so we ignore the rules".
Interesting that you so emphatically consider me to be wrong. I don't consider you to be wrong. Morality can be based on many principles which yield different conclusions.
You're arguing from the basis of the rule of law, which is fine. You're saying that U.S. society has a contractual agreement which obligates us to abide by the results of the Electoral College, which is true. However, in this case the outcome of that contractual agreement is ambiguous. Allegations of vote fraud have been raised, although never proven, which call into question the results of that contract. What do we do?
I'm arguing on a more abstract level - from the basis of the purpose of those laws. I'm saying the only reason that contractual agreement exists is to create a system which tries to measure the will of the public in an election. Since the outcome of that contract is ambiguous, we can fall back to the more abstract goal - measuring the will of the public - to determine how we should proceed.
Since the controversial result of the rule of law (the Electoral vote) and the more abstract measure of the will of the public (the popular vote) coincide in this case, there is no conflict. Bush won in 2004, and it was the will of the public. Get over it. If there was voting fraud, then let's track it down and fix it. But it wasn't a major failure of the system because the will of the public was carried out, as the system intended.
This is in marked contrast to the 2000 election. In that case Bush lost the popular vote, but was catapulted to the Presidency on the basis of a controversial Electoral College vote. In that case, we had a potential conflict between the rule of law and the will of the public. If voting fraud affected that election, it would have represented a major failure of the system because the will of the public would have been thwarted. So that election deserved much greater scrutiny.
Even if you took away all of Bush's votes in Ohio (almost 3 million, or 4.6% of his total), he still would have defeated Kerry in the national popular vote. So ultimately, this controversy over Ohio doesn't really change who should have won the 2004 Presidency - if there were irregularities which gave Ohio to Bush, it merely had the effect of making the Electoral vote match the popular vote. Quite different from the situation in 2000 where Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral vote based on a controversial count in Florida. So any partisanship in the controversy over Ohio really doesn't matter - the will of the people won out. Let's just drop it and instead focus on the braindead design of the machines and possible criminal behavior by the CEO of Diebold.
Apparently one-time use credit card numbers don't protect you either. I'd been wondering how a thief managed to charge something to my replacement credit card after I'd reported the old one stolen and had it canceled. If a merchant makes a manual (instead of electronic) claim with the credit card vendor, it will go through even if the credit card numbers are expired, the amount is over the limit, or you've been issued a card with new numbers. You can of course dispute the charge, but you have to spot the fraudulent charge first in order to dispute it. The only way to protect yourself from this type of fraud is to close the account, which is the same thing as not having a credit card.
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Landline phone technology has been around for over a hundred years. If a country hasn't installed landlines yet, it isn't because cell phones are killing government incentive to install them. The government already lacked incentive to install them long before cell phones ever arrived. If anything, rudimentary Internet access on cell phones should spur the populace to demand faster Internet access, thus providing a greater incentive for the government to install landlines. People don't know to ask for something they've been missing out on, until they get to experience it first-hand.
Latin names can be wrong too. As the OP alluded to, trout were once considered distinct from salmon and char. The fish were categorized into these groups based on morphological and behavioral differences (trout = Salmo, salmon = Oncorhynchus, char = Salvelinus ).
Then DNA testing became available and totally destroyed the well-established taxonomy. Rainbow trout, which for centuries had been the archetypical example of a trout, turned out to be more closely related to the salmons. Atlantic salmon were a trout. Lake trout in the Great Lakes were a char. Click on the above Wikipedia links and you can tell how much damage was done to the taxonomy by comparing the common names to the genus. Rainbow trout (aka steelhead) which were formerly Salmo mykiss are now Oncorhynchus mykiss.
Mahi mahi (dolphin fish, but people freak out if you tell them they're eating dolphin) keeps very poorly when chilled or frozen. Pretty much every sample I've tried from the supermarket or in a restaurant is mush compared to fresh caught (they're probably the most beautiful fish in the sea). Frankly, you're probably better off with the cod or tilapia.
I'm kinda surprised they can pull this off. Albacore (white tuna) looks and tastes nothing like cod. The meat is textured like regular tuna, but has a pale red to light pink color when raw, off-white when cooked. It's never white like cod or tilapia.
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The same thing happened to orange roughy and monkfish (both some of the most hideous looking fish you'll ever see), and shark (difficult to prepare because of the high ammonia content in the meat). All were once considered trash and literally shoveled overboard in the pursuit of (at the time) more valuable fish. Now that those more valuable fish have been overfished, the industry spruces up the image of what was formerly considered trash fish to sell to the public.
BTW, what's sold as red snapper often isn't red snapper. Pretty much any of the snappers and frequently any of the rockfishes (aka rock cod) are sold as red snapper. Most of their meat is pretty similar, but there are subtle differences.
Honestly, I don't think it has any bearing in this case. The system isn't used widely except in Korea, and having a date of birth stamped on a passport makes it a moot point. The best argument you could come up with is that when the predominantly non-Asian international gymnastics federation came up with a minimum 16-year age requirement, the Chinese government misunderstood that to mean 16 years old in traditional Asian age, not in Western age. That's a pretty ludicrous argument, and wouldn't explain forged passport dates. The best excuse I've seen is that the web sites where she was listed as 14 y.o. were actually incidents of cheating in Chinese domestic competitions which were only open to those under age 15.
There's more to it than that. You start at 1, and increment every New Year. So someone who's 14 in Western age could be 16 in traditional age.
The CD is a distribution medium and costs almost nothing. The substantial fee would be in the commissioning of the performance (maybe someone's party, or a TV broadcast, or a concert). A recording made at that time could be turned into CDs and MP3s and distributed for minimal additional cost.
Actually, many of them use Costco. Why pay $20,000 for a commercial-grade digital photo printer when Costco lets you print on theirs for little more than the cost of the paper? Studio and exhibition prints usually require thicker paper and more durable inks, so require a specialized photo lab (which probably uses the same machine). But the Costco prints are fine for most people just wanting to purchase a print. If it weren't, those people wouldn't be scanning and printing the photos on their own.
I think it's going to go the same route as wedding photography. In the old days, the photographer would shoot your wedding for a small fee or even free, but you had to pay like $20-$100 per print for the pictures. When scanners and color printers became widespread, people just started to make their own prints from the proof sheets. For a while the photographers tried to do things like print "SAMPLE" over the proofs. But now most of them have switched business models. They give you the prints (or a CD) at cost or even for free. But they charge you a substantial fee for shooting the wedding.
If you think about it, it makes a lot more sense than the old way. The cost to the photographer is not the prints, it's the time, effort, and equipment used at the wedding and in post-processing. Once those costs are paid, they can run off as many prints as they want for almost no cost. So all that's happened is that the cost for the customer is now more closely aligned with the cost for the photographer. I can see the same thing happening with music, where most of the artists' revenue comes from live and commissioned performances. The music itself would be distributed at minimal cost or even for free as advertising for the performances.
The first link I gave included estimated nuclear waste disposal costs. Of course they have it easy since they can just ship most of it to France where it's reprocessed into more fuel. Here in the U.S. we're trying to bury "waste" that still contains 90% of its original energy consequently making it unnecessarily "hot" for an unnecessarily long period of time at unnecessary expense. If we reprocess, we should have enough uranium for thousands of years. Plenty of time to develop cost-effective renewables, if not fusion.
The U.S. is almost alone in not expanding nuclear power (Germany banned it, and consequently buys a lot lot of electricity from France which is 80% nuclear). The U.S. hasn't been building nuclear plants because they take longer to get approved and construct (due to excessive regulatory requirements and lawsuits). So coal plants end up being less risky and requiring less capital investment, so that's what the power companies here build.
Despite the conspiracy theories you're likely to hear about this, the reason why the DMCA sailed through Congress is the same reason it'll sail through Canada's legislative process... media companies are responsible for a nice chunk of GNP (and whatever they call it in Canada)
That's not really true.
The value of RIAA members' shipments (not sales) in 2007 was $10.37 billion.
The value of MPAA members' U.S. domestic box office and home video sales in 2007 was $37.44 billion ($40.92 per person box office + $118.39 per person home video times 235 million adults).
U.S. GDP in 2007 was $13.6 trillion, so together the RIAA and MPAA comprise 0.35% of the U.S. economy. For comparison, the MP3 player market in the U.S. for 2007 was an estimated $5.4 billion. That's just MP3 players, never mind accessories, home audio systems, headphones, car stereos, etc.
If they were a Fortune 500 companies, the MPAA's movie-related sales would come in at #62, and the RIAA's members would come in at #256. They wield so much power because they make a disproportionately high amount of campaign donations.
This is an "already been solved" problem, and even has a dedicated IP address range (224-239.x.x.x). The multicasting solution is the optimal solution for this type of problem - identical information being broadcast "live" to millions or hundreds of millions of locations.
It's even more efficient than Akami or Limelight, which are more suited for on-demand asynchronous streaming applications like pay-per view and web sites. With Akami or Limelight, the ISP has to send the same video stream to every single viewer (though you can ease the burden with some smart routers). With multicasting, the video stream is sent only once along each network route. If a viewer wishes to see the video, they just tap into that one stream. The IOC and subsequently the ISPs went with the less-optimal solution represented by Limelight because they wanted to have more control over the distribution.
In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
Nuclear power is the cheapest power source, cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, cheaper than hydro and wind, much cheaper than solar.
Swedish power company's power generation costs
IEA survey on electricity generation costs (PDF, page 46 fig 3.10, page 57, fig 4.6 and 4.7)
Nuclear is also the safest in terms of fatalities per MWh generated (yes, even including Chernobyl).
Stats on all significant power generation accidents 1969-1996 (PDF, page 240, fig 7.2.6)
There are lots of other neat stats in the two PDFs, including injury rates (nuclear is about the same as hydro, only coal is safer), wind generation is much cheaper in the U.S. (maybe because the U.S. is only building it when it makes economic sense instead of where ever environmentalists want it?), solar costs almost 10x as much as other power sources
It's not just better technique and the new suit. The pool is also designed to reduce waves to help lower times. A lot of the wave dissipation features described in the article have been used in tow tanks (where we tow model ships to measure their drag) for decades.
Those temperature points depend on the salinity of your water, and whatever the atmospheric pressure happens to be that day at your current altitude.
Shouldn't the comparison be to Psystar doing a clean-room implementation of Apple's hardware? AFAIK Compaq didn't do a clean-room implementation of MS-DOS.
FYI, you can freeze your credit report. That prevents any lender from pulling it, which is usually a required step to open a new account. If you need to open a new account, you can phone in to temporarily unfreeze it for one transaction. There's supposed to be some sort of passcode you use for the unfreeze so the thief can't just call up pretending to be you to unfreeze it. Since you're an ID theft victim, you don't even have to pay the $5 fee for it.
Apparently the pool in Beijing is designed to minimize wave turbulence, thus leading to faster times. I dunno how effective it is at reducing drag for swimmers vs. the Speedo suit, but a lot of the stuff mentioned in the NPR article is stuff we use in tow tanks (where we test model ships for water resistance) to dissipate waves and get more accurate results.
CBC also did a lot less commentating, which IMHO really let me sit back and enjoy the spectacle more. Those NBC commentators just never shut up.
OTOH, NBC had better camera angles many times.
I would even posit that a fair fight is the worst possible confrontation in warfare in terms of casualties. If one side is grossly outmatched, it will usually flee or give up before too much damage is done. Worst case it is completely eliminated and a bit more than 50% of the participants are killed or wounded (assuming both sides started with the same number of troops).
OTOH, in a fair fight, worst case close to 100% of the participants will be killed or wounded.
It happens in games too. That level of anguish, empathy, and debate was created in a text-based game. I don't think you can get more disassociated than that. The distinguishing factor would seem to be knowing that there's a real person at the receiving end. Witness the debates over PvP vs. PvM in multiplayer online RPGs.
So voiding is like dereferencing a pointer, and nullifying is like releasing memory?
I think I see your problem. You apparently have an axe to grind, and it's caused you to jump to premature conclusions about anyone who says something in opposition to your beliefs. You didn't like the 2004 results and are so convinced of its illegitimacy that you must pigeonhole anyone with an opposing opinion into a template you've pre-determined.
FYI, I voted for Gore and Kerry. I was on the losing side in 2004. But I don't mix my political beliefs with my evaluations of the efficacy of a system or the severity of its failures. As systematic failures go, the 2004 election was not a major one. Like when your hydraulic brakes fail but you manage to stop the car using the parking brake. Yes the brake failure is a serious problem and should be addressed. But don't bring up the carnage that could've resulted if you hadn't been able to stop, because it simply didn't happen. The system as a whole fulfilled its greater purpose of stopping the car when you wanted it to stop. So get over the fact that there could have been an accident, and concentrate instead on preventing future hydraulic brake failures.
I wasn't being dismissive. I didn't choose a source to make it look like I'm further along a development trend. You seemed to be fixated on the absolute rule of law, so I gave the source merely to demonstrate that there exist lines of reasoning which transcend law. I don't see law as an absolute that must be obeyed. I believe in things like civil disobedience when appropriate. I agree that things generally function better when laws are observed. But I also think those laws and their failures need to be evaluated from a context which transcends the law itself. I think arguing for compliance with the law for the sake of the law is circular reasoning. Compliance should always stem from the rationale which was used to create that law.
Of course I'm aware of it. If you've got an alternative line of reasoning for why a failure of the Electoral College is more important than the will of the people, I'd love to hear it. I always love learning new alternative viewpoints. It expands my horizons, makes me see things I may not have considered before.
Interesting that you so emphatically consider me to be wrong. I don't consider you to be wrong. Morality can be based on many principles which yield different conclusions.
You're arguing from the basis of the rule of law, which is fine. You're saying that U.S. society has a contractual agreement which obligates us to abide by the results of the Electoral College, which is true. However, in this case the outcome of that contractual agreement is ambiguous. Allegations of vote fraud have been raised, although never proven, which call into question the results of that contract. What do we do?
I'm arguing on a more abstract level - from the basis of the purpose of those laws. I'm saying the only reason that contractual agreement exists is to create a system which tries to measure the will of the public in an election. Since the outcome of that contract is ambiguous, we can fall back to the more abstract goal - measuring the will of the public - to determine how we should proceed.
Since the controversial result of the rule of law (the Electoral vote) and the more abstract measure of the will of the public (the popular vote) coincide in this case, there is no conflict. Bush won in 2004, and it was the will of the public. Get over it. If there was voting fraud, then let's track it down and fix it. But it wasn't a major failure of the system because the will of the public was carried out, as the system intended.
This is in marked contrast to the 2000 election. In that case Bush lost the popular vote, but was catapulted to the Presidency on the basis of a controversial Electoral College vote. In that case, we had a potential conflict between the rule of law and the will of the public. If voting fraud affected that election, it would have represented a major failure of the system because the will of the public would have been thwarted. So that election deserved much greater scrutiny.
Even if you took away all of Bush's votes in Ohio (almost 3 million, or 4.6% of his total), he still would have defeated Kerry in the national popular vote. So ultimately, this controversy over Ohio doesn't really change who should have won the 2004 Presidency - if there were irregularities which gave Ohio to Bush, it merely had the effect of making the Electoral vote match the popular vote. Quite different from the situation in 2000 where Bush lost the popular vote but won the Electoral vote based on a controversial count in Florida. So any partisanship in the controversy over Ohio really doesn't matter - the will of the people won out. Let's just drop it and instead focus on the braindead design of the machines and possible criminal behavior by the CEO of Diebold.
Apparently one-time use credit card numbers don't protect you either. I'd been wondering how a thief managed to charge something to my replacement credit card after I'd reported the old one stolen and had it canceled. If a merchant makes a manual (instead of electronic) claim with the credit card vendor, it will go through even if the credit card numbers are expired, the amount is over the limit, or you've been issued a card with new numbers. You can of course dispute the charge, but you have to spot the fraudulent charge first in order to dispute it. The only way to protect yourself from this type of fraud is to close the account, which is the same thing as not having a credit card.