I don't get it. You offer up what appears to be some kind of homespun wisdom about doing two things at once to refute an actual scientific study? Why the need to refute this?
I'm not refuting the study. I completely agree that talking on the phone while driving is distracting. What I was disagreeing with was the comparison with talking while reading and writing stuff happening in a football game. Talking while driving is distracting, but not as distracting as what is essentially (to our brains) an impossible task.
Reading, writing, and talking all engage the language processing portions of your brain. Humans are effectively single-processor when it comes to language skills. Long ago, the military/intelligence agencies researched having people listen to two conversations at once (one thruogh each ear) to pick out useful portions of tapped phone calls. They found that it couldn't be done, and was actually less effective than just listening to one conversation. Your brain is just not wired to do two different things at once involving language (though I did have a professor who could write different parts of the same sentence with both hands at once.)
A better example would be another motor activity combined with a cell phone conversation. Talking while cooking, talking while walking, talking while chewing gum (well, maybe not that one). While it is more distracting, it's not as onerous a task as you're making it out to be. You may miss reading some street signs, but the designers of those were smart enough to make the important ones recognizable even if you can't read.
Most real reviews have a wrap up section where they recommend or don't recommend an item. I've had better luck getting actual reviews using the "recommend" keyword instead of "review".
I submitted an "Ask Slashdot" article several months ago asking what good tricks people had come up with for filtering out sales sites on Google. The editors rejected it even though I'm convinced it's something millions of geeks do every day.
You're entering your bills in Quicken, then you're entering them at the bank's online bill pay site, then you're entering into Quicken the fact that you entered them into the bank's site.
If you only pay a few bills a month like most people, it's probably OK. But then you probably don't need software like Quicken to manage your finances. If you have a large number of monthly bills, the double data entry becomes rather time consuming and troublesome (more chances for error).
Divide those two numbers and you see that on average each song has an estimated value of $377,292 for the year. The potential fine for a single copyright infringement is $150,000, or nearly 40% of the average total annual value of a song. For a single infringement.
Yes the more valuable songs are infringed more often. But if you're going to base the maximum potential fine on every song that's on the CD, even the crappy ones, you need to work with the average value. This fine needs to be lowered drastically to put it more in line with reality. Maybe make an exception for more successful songs, but $150,000 per song is ridiculously high.
It sounds like it's preventing people from circumventing patent liability by importing stuff manufacturerd overseas (paid for overseas too if you're creative enough with your accounting). That is, if the "sell" clause wasn't there, Intel could move their fab plants to Taiwan, violate every U.S. patent, Dell/HP/etc could buy the CPUs using Euros, ship them to the U.S., and sell them without incurring any patent liability. If the "use" clause wasn't there, you'd have a situation where foreign mail order firms could legally sell stuff to U.S. citizens that violated U.S. patents, while U.S. mail order firms could not.
Terrorism is attempting to invoke political or social change by terrorizing the population at large. Typically the physical destruction or number of casualties is minimal. They only serve to cause a psychological change in behavior among civilians, usually totally out of proportion to the damage inflicted. That's why it's called terrorism - the goal is terror so if it doesn't terrify the civilian population, then it's failed.
Legitimate military actions are typically geared towards attrition of an enemy's military forces, be it physical (destroying the enemy's ability to fight) or psychological (destroying the enemy's desire to fight). Whether a military attack kills or terrifies the civilian population is usually irrelevant, and arguably undesirable since most countries waging war are also trying to keep it legitimate in the eyes of the rest of the world.
The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon kinda falls in both categories. Clearly the overall goal of 9/11 was to terrify the US population (which it succeeded at). But the attack on the Pentagon was also an attempt to take out some of the senior military officials of the U.S. - clearly a military goal.
It could be multi-modal, but the same idea applies. Below peaks, cutting taxes decreases revenue. Above peaks, cutting taxes increases revenue. (There are other implicit assumtions that others have mentioned, like it being a continuous function. It was really just a simplified explanation to get the point across.)
The x-axis denotes tax rate, the y-axis denotes tax revenue.
If we tax at 0%, revenue is $0.
If we tax at 100%, revenue is $A (where A > $0 - this is basically Communism)
If we tax at something in between, let's say 50% for the sake of argument, revenue is $B (where B > A - this is Capitalism).
Ok, now draw a single line connecting those points. Obviously you can't do it with a straight line, it has to be curved. And therein lies the heart of the matter.
If the tax rate is below a certain point, cutting taxes decreases revenue.
If the tax rate is above a certain point, cutting taxes increases revenue.
You cannot argue that cutting taxes always decreases revenue. You cannot argue that cutting taxes always increases revenue. What's arguable is whether we're currently above or below the point where it switches from one to the other.
Back when Social Security was first started, the people of retirement age got a free ride. The hadn't put any money in, but they got money out. Right now, the money you put into SS doesn't sit in some bank account until you retire. It goes to pay today's retirement benefits of people who are already retired. If you try to phase it out, the people getting benefits during the phaseout period get shorted.
That's why it's often called a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes work until the influx of new customers (suckers) drops and can't keep up with the payouts for old members. Once that happens, it rapidly collapses. By phasing out SS, you're reducing the influx of new customers.
Looking at your university is not looking at a random sample of the population. The students admitted to the university were admitted based on non-random criteria unknown to us. As such, you cannot take trends you notice among university students and apply them to the general population. (One potential exception to this is a trends counter to known biases. e.g. if a university has been trying to attract more women to equalize the gender ratio in certain subjects, yet men still dominate that subject.)
In other words, the fact that you're seeing a 50/50 ratio of male to female students at the undergraduate level may be an indication that men and women are equally capable in that subject, and women are being discriminated against at the graduate level. Or it could simply be an indication that the undergraduate school tries to admit students in a 50/50 gender ratio while the graduate school doesn't.
To validate a hypothesis like this, you really need to do a random sample of the entire population. Trying to counter a hypothesis with a non-random subsample is only slightly better than trying to counter a hypothesis with anecdotal evidence.
Correction: EU goverments lend money to Airbus to cover developments costs. When the plane goes into production Airbus will have to pay back every nickle plus intrest.
Unless the plane doesn't make money, in which case the loans will be forgiven. Normally, companies/people have to weigh investment into R&D against the risk of failure. If they bet wrong on a project as big as the A380, they go bankrupt. Risk management is a crucial element of capitalistic efficiency - so much so that the value of risk mitigation in the form of insurance is valued in the trillions of dollars worldwide. Airbus simply doesn't incur any risk - it gets the insurance for free. That's what makes it a subsidy.
It's easy to win if you're playing with the house's money.
Boeing has floated the idea of an increased capacity 747 many times in the past few decades. IIRC the 747's upper deck was originally intended to stretch the entire length of the plane, but they ran into design problems and shorted it to just the front in order to get the plane to market. Every time they've suggested an increased capacity version of the 747 in the A380's capacity range, the airlines have been lukewarm towards the concept. Enough so that Boeing has never gone ahead with it. That Airbus was able to pull off as many many pre-orders as it got tells me that A) Airbus is far more advanced technologically (unlikely), B) they have much better salespeople (possible), or C) the plane is subsidized to the point where an economically unviable plane is commercially feasible (e.g Concorde).
That's not to say the A380 won't succeed. People said the same thing about the 747 before it rolled out - that the market was too small, that nobody would want to ride in a plane that big. And it's gone on to be one of Boeing's most successful planes. But the market for a 500+ capacity plane isn't something Airbus suddenly "discovered." Boeing has been probing it for decades.
Did he know it was Roundup ready, or did he think the plant had naturally developed a partial immunity to Roundup? It's one thing to grant Monsanto a patent for a gene they developed to grant plants resistance to Roundup. It's quite another to grant Monsanto ownership of all genes which grant resistance to Roundup.
Is it really that big of a stretch to say that if a small change occurs over a small period of time, then if you multiply the time factor by a billion, you would experience larger changes? That seems totally obvious to me. Is there any known mechanism for limiting the extent of the changes? What constitutes a large change vs a small change?
I really don't see the distinction.
You should. Microevolution can have two sources: genetic variation, or mutation. The oft-cited case of light-colored moths changing to dark-colored moths due to pollution darkening tree bark is genetic variation. Dark-colored moths already existed prior to pollution - the genes for it were already present in the gene pool. All that happened was the environment favored one genetic variation over the other, changing the relative frequency of those genes in the population. I don't think anyone questions genetic variation. But you can vary the frequency of genes in the gene pool forever, and you'll never develop new species.
Macro-evolution can only come from mutation - the creation of new genes that weren't previously present in the gene pool. The best example of mutation is probably the annoying cold virus that comes up with a new, hithertoo never seen variant every year. Or bacteria which are beginning to develop resistance to our antibiotics faster than we can make new ones. The question then is does this happen quickly enough and often enough in a beneficial manner to allow the development of all the species we see today?
There's evidence that points to the answer being "yes," but it's a far cry from "proof" as with genetic variation. The attitude of most biologists I've met seems to be: A) Macro-evolution exists, B) There is no other mechanism by which we could come into being (i.e. there is no god), C) We exist. Therefore quite obviously that's proof that macro-evolution is the process by which we exist. That conclusion may be likely, and it may even be true, but that reasoning is hardly proof. Remember, Occam's razor only tells you which answer is more probable, it doesn't tell you which answer is right.
In science, correlation studies which find trends or possible links are a dime a dozen. High school students do them for science fair probjects all the time. Causation studies which prove a mechanism by which something occurs are much, much harder to pull off. We give Nobel prizes for them.
Probably because it's not insightful. Actually, I take that back. It does give insight, just not where you think it does. Mind you I think the stickers were a dumb idea. But any objective person could immediately see that a textbook paid for by public monies that's legally required reading is not at all analagous to a book purchased in private and read voluntarily. That you failed to notice this rather obvious difference gives insight into your lack of objectivity on the topic.
Objectivity and rational thinking mean you have to appraise each situation presented to you on its own merits. You cannot pigeonhole comparisons into categories you've already pre-judged (e.g. evolution good, creationism bad). If you do that, you make the same logical errors you so often accuse the other side of making.
That picture was shot from a plane. Terraserver uses both satellite and aerial photographs. The satellite photos are typically about 25m-2m resolution. Aerial photos are used for higher resolutions.
If you do the math, the theoretical resolving limit for a 2.4m mirror (Hubble's size, which is about the same as the KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites since they're all launched from the space shuttle) works out to about 5cm in the visible spectrum at a 90 mile altitude. That's under optimal conditions. They might be able to see if you're wearing a watch, but there's no way they can read the time unless the government has figured out some way to bypass the laws of physics.
I find this remark highly dubious. I have CDRs ( cheap 0.05 cent no-name ones) that i burt over 5 years ago that I still regularly use. And I most certianly have *not* taken good care of them - half of them don't even have cases, I just toss them in a drawer.
The degredation is in single bit errors. Because of the error correction coding on CDs, you can collect quite a number of bit errors and the CD will still work perfectly. But when it does go bad, it's sudden and unrecoverable (well, that sector is unrecoverable). The study the previous poster was referring to measured bit error degredation without error correction. Your anecdotal account is with error correction.
Well, it is *your* data. If *you* want to keep it then *you* copy it. Seeing how relatively trivial it is to spend a few hours every few years doing some backup, when compared to printing photos to hard copy, I really don't see any merit to this argument whatsoever.
It's trivial for the typical digicam user who just takes snapshots. A professional photographer can easily amass 100 GB of photos in a couple weeks. So "spending a few hours every few years doing a backup" simply isn't viable. The ones I know who take it seriously save a copy to external hard drive, burn two DVDs, and re-read/re-burn DVDs that have aged more than one year. It's an enormous hassle that's often discussed on the photo forums. I don't think printing out photos is the answer, but a storage medium that was pretty much guaranteed to last 10-20 years would help tremendously.
By your logic a person using violence to defend himself from a mugging is worse than a mugger. The mugger picked the victim at random. The victim however is targeting a specific individual, and thus by your reasoning is worse than the mugger in principle.
That a spammer's attack is spread out over millions of individuals is irrelevant. That's like trying to say it's wrong to steal $100,000 from one bank, but it's ok to steal $10 from 10,000 banks. You've still stolen $100,000 and that's what you should be punished for. If a spammer sends out 10 million spams, and it takes each recipient 0.1 seconds to deal with that spam, the spammer has still cost the recipients 278 hours of productivity. That's 7 weeks of work at 40 hours a week. Saying it's distributed over millions of people is just trying to hide the scope of the problem.
Re:The freezer trick does work though
on
Creative Data Loss
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What I read is that as the drive gets older, some of the parts "settle" and develop some slack or biasing. That causes the read/write heads to not be positioned exactly as they were when the data was originally written. Usually this misalignment isn't enough to matter. But if the alignment is off by enough, it can't read the data anymore. Freezing the drive contracts some of the parts and may put things back into alignment.
Whatever the reason, it really does work in some cases. I had a drive die while I was in the process of backing it up (IBM click 'o death). I'd just about written it off but tried putting it into the freezer overnight. It worked and I was able to read data off of it. Sort of. It still generated read errors, but with enough retries it eventually got data which matched the CRC and went on to reading the next sector. Unfortunately, it only worked for about 5 minutes before the drive heated enough for it to stop working.
So I tossed the drive in the refrigerator until Winter. Once we got into a nice cold spell, I opened the window to the computer room and let the temperature drop to about freezing. I put the drive into an old spare computer I had. Fired up the computer and started copying. A week later, I'd recovered all the data I needed.
Mind you, I'd be delighted if Bush's election were invalidated due to widescale voting fraud. But you need to be very careful about this stuff. The two obvious things I see from those graphs are:
1. Where are the rest of the states? Including only states where the data support your accusation is a way to manipulate (and thus invalidate) statistical data.
2. Why is it broken up by state when paper or electronic ballots are determined precinct by precinct? Ideally you'd find where the exit polls were done and correlate with actual votes from those precincts.
Without these two points addressed, all you have are data suggesting more investigation is necessary, not evidence of fraud. (And even after you get that data, you have to control for other factors that could cause the discrepancy you're seeing. It's not easy to make the jump from statistical suspicion to statistical evidence.)
(Note: Americans are dumb is not an acceptable answer.)
It may be unnacceptable, but its true.
If you want a more acceptable one (by your terms): Good guys finish last.
It's sad to see those who purport to support democracy be this dismissive of it when its results don't agree with them.
Just 12 years ago, the Republicans were the ones without the Presidency, and with minorities in the House and Senate. When democracy wasn't going their way, they didn't waste time bitching and moaning about the liberals in power and the people who voted for them. They worked their butts off to figure out a way to convince voters to vote for them, and democratically win the Presidency and majorities in Congress. And succeeded.
For some reason the left seems incapable of doing the same thing, preferring instead to wallow in self-pity, and foisting hate speech (the very kind of hate speech they purport to be against) upon those who didn't vote for the left, and taking cheap shots at those in power.
None of those things will get you back in power in a democracy. In fact, they're more likely to keep you out of power. Like it or not, the problem is you, not the public. Your message needs to be retooled, extreme stances need to be softened, and the imsulting rhetoric needs to die down in order to attract the swing voters in the center. A lot of the moderate and disillusioned conservative voters I met didn't want to vote for Bush, but they wanted to vote for Kerry even less.
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I'm not refuting the study. I completely agree that talking on the phone while driving is distracting. What I was disagreeing with was the comparison with talking while reading and writing stuff happening in a football game. Talking while driving is distracting, but not as distracting as what is essentially (to our brains) an impossible task.
Not only that, they sell the different color cartridges separately. If there's an anti-DMCA inkjet printer manufacturer out there, it's Canon.
A better example would be another motor activity combined with a cell phone conversation. Talking while cooking, talking while walking, talking while chewing gum (well, maybe not that one). While it is more distracting, it's not as onerous a task as you're making it out to be. You may miss reading some street signs, but the designers of those were smart enough to make the important ones recognizable even if you can't read.
Most real reviews have a wrap up section where they recommend or don't recommend an item. I've had better luck getting actual reviews using the "recommend" keyword instead of "review". I submitted an "Ask Slashdot" article several months ago asking what good tricks people had come up with for filtering out sales sites on Google. The editors rejected it even though I'm convinced it's something millions of geeks do every day.
If you only pay a few bills a month like most people, it's probably OK. But then you probably don't need software like Quicken to manage your finances. If you have a large number of monthly bills, the double data entry becomes rather time consuming and troublesome (more chances for error).
Divide those two numbers and you see that on average each song has an estimated value of $377,292 for the year. The potential fine for a single copyright infringement is $150,000, or nearly 40% of the average total annual value of a song. For a single infringement.
Yes the more valuable songs are infringed more often. But if you're going to base the maximum potential fine on every song that's on the CD, even the crappy ones, you need to work with the average value. This fine needs to be lowered drastically to put it more in line with reality. Maybe make an exception for more successful songs, but $150,000 per song is ridiculously high.
It sounds like it's preventing people from circumventing patent liability by importing stuff manufacturerd overseas (paid for overseas too if you're creative enough with your accounting). That is, if the "sell" clause wasn't there, Intel could move their fab plants to Taiwan, violate every U.S. patent, Dell/HP/etc could buy the CPUs using Euros, ship them to the U.S., and sell them without incurring any patent liability. If the "use" clause wasn't there, you'd have a situation where foreign mail order firms could legally sell stuff to U.S. citizens that violated U.S. patents, while U.S. mail order firms could not.
Legitimate military actions are typically geared towards attrition of an enemy's military forces, be it physical (destroying the enemy's ability to fight) or psychological (destroying the enemy's desire to fight). Whether a military attack kills or terrifies the civilian population is usually irrelevant, and arguably undesirable since most countries waging war are also trying to keep it legitimate in the eyes of the rest of the world.
The 9/11 attack on the Pentagon kinda falls in both categories. Clearly the overall goal of 9/11 was to terrify the US population (which it succeeded at). But the attack on the Pentagon was also an attempt to take out some of the senior military officials of the U.S. - clearly a military goal.
In math it's considered one of the fundamental principles of Calculus.
It could be multi-modal, but the same idea applies. Below peaks, cutting taxes decreases revenue. Above peaks, cutting taxes increases revenue. (There are other implicit assumtions that others have mentioned, like it being a continuous function. It was really just a simplified explanation to get the point across.)
If we tax at 0%, revenue is $0.
If we tax at 100%, revenue is $A (where A > $0 - this is basically Communism)
If we tax at something in between, let's say 50% for the sake of argument, revenue is $B (where B > A - this is Capitalism).
Ok, now draw a single line connecting those points. Obviously you can't do it with a straight line, it has to be curved. And therein lies the heart of the matter.
If the tax rate is below a certain point, cutting taxes decreases revenue.
If the tax rate is above a certain point, cutting taxes increases revenue.
You cannot argue that cutting taxes always decreases revenue. You cannot argue that cutting taxes always increases revenue. What's arguable is whether we're currently above or below the point where it switches from one to the other.
That's why it's often called a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi schemes work until the influx of new customers (suckers) drops and can't keep up with the payouts for old members. Once that happens, it rapidly collapses. By phasing out SS, you're reducing the influx of new customers.
In other words, the fact that you're seeing a 50/50 ratio of male to female students at the undergraduate level may be an indication that men and women are equally capable in that subject, and women are being discriminated against at the graduate level. Or it could simply be an indication that the undergraduate school tries to admit students in a 50/50 gender ratio while the graduate school doesn't.
To validate a hypothesis like this, you really need to do a random sample of the entire population. Trying to counter a hypothesis with a non-random subsample is only slightly better than trying to counter a hypothesis with anecdotal evidence.
Unless the plane doesn't make money, in which case the loans will be forgiven. Normally, companies/people have to weigh investment into R&D against the risk of failure. If they bet wrong on a project as big as the A380, they go bankrupt. Risk management is a crucial element of capitalistic efficiency - so much so that the value of risk mitigation in the form of insurance is valued in the trillions of dollars worldwide. Airbus simply doesn't incur any risk - it gets the insurance for free. That's what makes it a subsidy.
It's easy to win if you're playing with the house's money.
The A380 *is* far more advanced.
Airbus the company, not the plane. I hardly think an enlarged B747 would be made using 1960s design and technology.
That's not to say the A380 won't succeed. People said the same thing about the 747 before it rolled out - that the market was too small, that nobody would want to ride in a plane that big. And it's gone on to be one of Boeing's most successful planes. But the market for a 500+ capacity plane isn't something Airbus suddenly "discovered." Boeing has been probing it for decades.
Did he know it was Roundup ready, or did he think the plant had naturally developed a partial immunity to Roundup? It's one thing to grant Monsanto a patent for a gene they developed to grant plants resistance to Roundup. It's quite another to grant Monsanto ownership of all genes which grant resistance to Roundup.
I really don't see the distinction.
You should. Microevolution can have two sources: genetic variation, or mutation. The oft-cited case of light-colored moths changing to dark-colored moths due to pollution darkening tree bark is genetic variation. Dark-colored moths already existed prior to pollution - the genes for it were already present in the gene pool. All that happened was the environment favored one genetic variation over the other, changing the relative frequency of those genes in the population. I don't think anyone questions genetic variation. But you can vary the frequency of genes in the gene pool forever, and you'll never develop new species.
Macro-evolution can only come from mutation - the creation of new genes that weren't previously present in the gene pool. The best example of mutation is probably the annoying cold virus that comes up with a new, hithertoo never seen variant every year. Or bacteria which are beginning to develop resistance to our antibiotics faster than we can make new ones. The question then is does this happen quickly enough and often enough in a beneficial manner to allow the development of all the species we see today?
There's evidence that points to the answer being "yes," but it's a far cry from "proof" as with genetic variation. The attitude of most biologists I've met seems to be: A) Macro-evolution exists, B) There is no other mechanism by which we could come into being (i.e. there is no god), C) We exist. Therefore quite obviously that's proof that macro-evolution is the process by which we exist. That conclusion may be likely, and it may even be true, but that reasoning is hardly proof. Remember, Occam's razor only tells you which answer is more probable, it doesn't tell you which answer is right.
In science, correlation studies which find trends or possible links are a dime a dozen. High school students do them for science fair probjects all the time. Causation studies which prove a mechanism by which something occurs are much, much harder to pull off. We give Nobel prizes for them.
Objectivity and rational thinking mean you have to appraise each situation presented to you on its own merits. You cannot pigeonhole comparisons into categories you've already pre-judged (e.g. evolution good, creationism bad). If you do that, you make the same logical errors you so often accuse the other side of making.
If you do the math, the theoretical resolving limit for a 2.4m mirror (Hubble's size, which is about the same as the KH-11 and KH-12 spy satellites since they're all launched from the space shuttle) works out to about 5cm in the visible spectrum at a 90 mile altitude. That's under optimal conditions. They might be able to see if you're wearing a watch, but there's no way they can read the time unless the government has figured out some way to bypass the laws of physics.
The degredation is in single bit errors. Because of the error correction coding on CDs, you can collect quite a number of bit errors and the CD will still work perfectly. But when it does go bad, it's sudden and unrecoverable (well, that sector is unrecoverable). The study the previous poster was referring to measured bit error degredation without error correction. Your anecdotal account is with error correction.
Well, it is *your* data. If *you* want to keep it then *you* copy it. Seeing how relatively trivial it is to spend a few hours every few years doing some backup, when compared to printing photos to hard copy, I really don't see any merit to this argument whatsoever.
It's trivial for the typical digicam user who just takes snapshots. A professional photographer can easily amass 100 GB of photos in a couple weeks. So "spending a few hours every few years doing a backup" simply isn't viable. The ones I know who take it seriously save a copy to external hard drive, burn two DVDs, and re-read/re-burn DVDs that have aged more than one year. It's an enormous hassle that's often discussed on the photo forums. I don't think printing out photos is the answer, but a storage medium that was pretty much guaranteed to last 10-20 years would help tremendously.
That a spammer's attack is spread out over millions of individuals is irrelevant. That's like trying to say it's wrong to steal $100,000 from one bank, but it's ok to steal $10 from 10,000 banks. You've still stolen $100,000 and that's what you should be punished for. If a spammer sends out 10 million spams, and it takes each recipient 0.1 seconds to deal with that spam, the spammer has still cost the recipients 278 hours of productivity. That's 7 weeks of work at 40 hours a week. Saying it's distributed over millions of people is just trying to hide the scope of the problem.
Whatever the reason, it really does work in some cases. I had a drive die while I was in the process of backing it up (IBM click 'o death). I'd just about written it off but tried putting it into the freezer overnight. It worked and I was able to read data off of it. Sort of. It still generated read errors, but with enough retries it eventually got data which matched the CRC and went on to reading the next sector. Unfortunately, it only worked for about 5 minutes before the drive heated enough for it to stop working.
So I tossed the drive in the refrigerator until Winter. Once we got into a nice cold spell, I opened the window to the computer room and let the temperature drop to about freezing. I put the drive into an old spare computer I had. Fired up the computer and started copying. A week later, I'd recovered all the data I needed.
1. Where are the rest of the states? Including only states where the data support your accusation is a way to manipulate (and thus invalidate) statistical data.
2. Why is it broken up by state when paper or electronic ballots are determined precinct by precinct? Ideally you'd find where the exit polls were done and correlate with actual votes from those precincts.
Without these two points addressed, all you have are data suggesting more investigation is necessary, not evidence of fraud. (And even after you get that data, you have to control for other factors that could cause the discrepancy you're seeing. It's not easy to make the jump from statistical suspicion to statistical evidence.)
It may be unnacceptable, but its true.
If you want a more acceptable one (by your terms): Good guys finish last.
It's sad to see those who purport to support democracy be this dismissive of it when its results don't agree with them.
Just 12 years ago, the Republicans were the ones without the Presidency, and with minorities in the House and Senate. When democracy wasn't going their way, they didn't waste time bitching and moaning about the liberals in power and the people who voted for them. They worked their butts off to figure out a way to convince voters to vote for them, and democratically win the Presidency and majorities in Congress. And succeeded.
For some reason the left seems incapable of doing the same thing, preferring instead to wallow in self-pity, and foisting hate speech (the very kind of hate speech they purport to be against) upon those who didn't vote for the left, and taking cheap shots at those in power.
None of those things will get you back in power in a democracy. In fact, they're more likely to keep you out of power. Like it or not, the problem is you, not the public. Your message needs to be retooled, extreme stances need to be softened, and the imsulting rhetoric needs to die down in order to attract the swing voters in the center. A lot of the moderate and disillusioned conservative voters I met didn't want to vote for Bush, but they wanted to vote for Kerry even less.