Dictionary.com is a search engine into the databases of several very 'official' dictionary companies, like Websters. It returns results no more or less reliable than using the big dead-tree kind of dictionary - it's coming from the same exact source.
Your test is also time consuming, and that's a big problem, as that will translate directly into having to wait for the people in front of you. There's already enough standing in line as it is. You shouldn't make that take even longer.
Also, it seems you don't understand what happened in the Florida elections. The ones complaining about misaligned voting that was hard to read were not the ones using the punchcards. They were the ones using "butterfly ballots". The way those work is that there's a booklet with names, and lines that point to the spine of the booklet. The spine of the booklet has the holes you mark for your vote. The spine is a removable piece that can then be fed into the scanner as a "stick", with the pages removed. The complaint was that often the spaces in the spine to mark the votes actually WERE misaligned from the pages, such that the voter had to guess which hole went with which candidate since the arrows pointed to the spaces between the holes instead of directly at the holes. The reason this happened is that the spine and the booklet are printed as two seperate pieces, and then bound together later. If that binding was sloppily done, then the spine can be misaligned with the page.
The problem you are trying to fix, of voters being too stupid to know how to vote, is an imaginary problem made up by shock-jock pundits.
The problem with telling you who it thinks you voted for is that I can't think of a good way to do that and still maintain privacy. (Nobody else should be able to see whom you voted for.)
And, the other problem is, if it does accept the ballot, and you want to do a do-over, the only way to do so would be to reveal whom you voted for.
There is always a write-in choice for every single race. Unlike a parliamentary system, in the USA the political parties are not *officially* supposed to be part of the recognized government structure at all. (In recent years they have become so, but they're not supposed to be, dammit!) They are independant organizations that decided to put forward candidates, and advertise them, and hope that the public likes them and votes on them. States have guidelines for how to get your candidate's name placed onto the ballot, basically involving a petition. If you get enough signatures, you can put whomever you like on the ballot, with a label indicating who you are. (For example, "Dear state election board, We call ourselves the Democratic Party, and we want the name Russ Feingold to be put on the ballot for Wisconsin Federal Senator. Attached is a list of signatures meeting the requirement for us to make this request, as well as identifying proof that this Russ Feingold is in fact a real person and not somebody we made up as a joke, and that he meets the minimum citizenship requirements to be a Senator.") Anybody could do that, at any time, and *poof*, it would be a political party. What will show up in the ballot for that spot will be a line that looks like:
Russ Feingold
(Democratic Party)
But, just as easily, a group could spring up and send in the same form, but have it say "Hi, We call ourselves the Utterly Fed Up Citizens Brigade, and we want you to put the name Phyllis Blanche, a housewife from Pleasantville, on the ballot. Here's our proof she's real, and here's our list of signatures...."
And the result would be:
Phyllis Blanche
(Utterly Fed Up Citizens Brigade)
And, even more so, even if nobody sent in such a letter for the candidate you like, you can always vote for anybody you like, by writing the name in. Every race has a spot where you can say "other", with a line to write on.
So, someone wanting to protest vote should use that write-in blank to do so.
Or, in other words, you vote for a PERSON, not a Party. The parties simply put the names out in the public through advertising and sponsoring debates.
The large power of the two big parties is mostly a "de-facto" standard rather than a legally enforced one. (And being someone who often votes for a third-party's candidate, it pisses me off that the two party system is becoming more and more legally enforced - such as states saying that political parties must open up their private decision making process to the public, allowing non-members to decide for them whom they will sponsor. This is what turned the "primaries" into an official event. They're not SUPPOSED to be, dammit.
While I understand your intention, your method is complete crap. A punchcard ballot is bad no matter what because errors get introduced AFTER it leaves the voter's hands - chads with bad attachments can fall out from rubbing with other cards in the stack. Corners of cards get stuck into other cards and bend the cards (causing chads to pop out). A clumsy stray finger from a worker handling the stack of cards can punch out chads in the cards. Your method is going to end up disenfranchising people who filled everything out absolutely correctly.
Just don't use punchcards, period. EVER. Thick paper ballots scanned with electronic optical scanners hold up to human handling much, much better.
There is no reason you can't marry the best aspects of both an electronic count and a paper ballot. A paper ballot is the least corruptable record of the vote, and leaves a manual method for disputes to be settled. An electronic count makes less errors that a human count, and can get the final tallies done within a few seconds of the last poll closing.
The system I use when I vote is just like that. You complete a ballot on paper using the provided felt tip pen.
Then YOU, the voter, walk the ballot from the privacy booth over to the scanner machine, and then YOU, the voter, feed your ballot into the machine (either direction - it can tell which way it is and read it rightside up, upside down, top to bottom, or bottom to top).
Then, and this is the important part, the scanner processes your ballot RIGHT AWAY, in less time than you can blink an eye. If the green light lights up, then the machine understood your ballot , tallied it in it's local count, and dropped it into the archival lockbox, and you can leave. If the red light lights up, then the scanner makes it really obvious your ballot wasn't readable because it spits it back out at you instead of putting it into the box. That way you know your ballot is fouled. The poll worker who's watching over people using the scanner will get you a new ballot, destroy the old one, and let you walk back to the privacy booths to try filling it out again.
This solves so many of the stupid problems Florida had:
1 - The voter knows when he leaves, that he leaves with the confidence that his ballot was readable by the machine.
2 - The voter has a chance to correct his unreadable ballot HIMSELF - so there's no need to second-guess what the voter intended. Every ballot that's saved in the lockbox is one that you know is scannable because it already *was* scanned.
3 - The tallying is fast because the scanner machine keeps it's own sub-tally as it goes. When the polls close, all that needs to be done is to sum up the subtotals from each scanning machine.
4 - When a voter uses a write-in blank, the ballot is marked specially in a way that flags it for human counting later, and is sorted in such a fashion that these ballots are easy to find in the pile.
5 - A paper record is preserved as well as an electronic one.
6 - The ballot is so simple that I can't see how a touchscreen interface could be any simpler.
7 - To double-check the integrety of the scanner machines, a random selection of a few of them is audited every time, with it's subtotal compared against a human count of the ballots that passed through it. If these spot checks show suspicious discrepency, then the whole vote is human-counted, and investigation into the problem will begin, or at least that's what I'm told. (So far this process has not uncovered discrepency, except in a few cases where it's understandable why the human count and the machine count differ - like a stray mark that a human considered a double vote, but it wasn't dark enough for the scanner to see it.)
repeat of the 2000 Florida fiasco with guys holding ballots up to the light
Only if you wait until after the voter has left the building to catch the bad ballots. If the voter feeds the ballot into the machine himself, then he'll be standing RIGHT THERE when the machine issues its error beep and says the ballot is indecipherable. Thus he knows he needs to ditch the bad ballot and try again. This is precisely how the system in the community I vote in works, by the way.
When you finish filling out the ballot with the felt tip pen provided (it works on an optical scan of the ballot to see where you put your line next to the candidate - each candidate has an arrowhead and arrow tail pointing at it, but with empty whitespace between them. You complete the picture of the arrow by drawing a line from tail to head, and it's these horizontal lines that the scanner looks for). Anyway, the point is that YOU, walk it over to the scanner machine, and YOU feed it into the slot, and YOU watch the machine take your ballot, and pop up a green light if it could understand it, or a red light and a beep if it cannot. If you get it rejected, it's blatantly obvious to you, right there, that it's rejected because instead of dropping the ballot into the lockbox for archiving, it regugitates it back at you, the voter. Maybe it was a bad scan and you can try again. But if you try more than twice and it doesn't work, then a poll worker (who is watching the people using the scanner) will hand you a new, fresh ballot and destroy the old one (while you watch, the worker tears the ballot, while averting eyes to avoid seeing who you voted for.) You can then walk back to one of the privacy booths and try again with the fresh ballot.
How do I know this? I deliberately voted a bogus vote one year, in a minor election for some local positions where there were only two positions up for election, and they were positions I wasn't informed about (so I felt it would be wrong to make a vote on them). The only reason I showed up was to vote on a referrendum. Anyway, I decided to use this chance to test the system. I filled out a ballot where I tried to vote for both candidates in one of the minor positions.
I went through the process as explained above, and when it was done, whispered to the poll worker that I did it on purpose as a test of the system, because as a voter, I didn't trust it. I came away happily surprised, and I really think this sort of system would have fixed all those problems in Florida, without needing a fancy touchscreen computer.
And the system is also quite fast. When you fill out the ballot right, it takes something like one second to feed it to the scanner and get a green light, so it's just a quick stop on your way out of the room.
The Wisconsin (where this is used) vote in the 2000 election was almost as close as the Florida vote, but there was no need for a recount (partly because it wasn't enough electoral votes to matter, and partly because there was a general consensus that the system was good enough that the first count was probably right on target. We've had recounts before where the recount was only different by less than 50 votes or so, and those were a matter of misplaced ballots rather than errors in the tallying.)
I really think the show went downhill ever since that episode where Sam leapt forward in time into the life of a starship captain on the Earth's first deep exploration vessel. I mean, Come On! It was an interesting premise but they've been milking it for over a year now, an I still keep waiting for that guy to show up with his neon PDA and take him to the next leap.
It's almost impossible to teach history without also teaching the history of religion. After all, the Protestant Reformation is one of the most signifigant historical movements in Western Europe.
Unfortunately it's *also* almost impossible for a teacher with strong religious beliefs to teach the history of religion (to children) without also promoting one religion over another. I know that our school system deliberately avoided the subject for this reason. Once in college, things got very different, and religion was discussed whenever it was part of the history. I think one big difference is that a college instructor teaching college students is a situation of adults teaching adults, and thus there's a lot more tolerance for dissenting opinion - you can completely disagree with the instructor and still get a good grade provided your disagreement is articulated well, and proves that you do know the material (even if you don't agree with it).
If I was being tested on historical events of the Protestant Reformation, and knew that it was begun in Germany by Martin Luther, and I knew what his specific list of complaints tacked to the church door was, but at the same time I expressed such a sentiment as "I don't see why he didn't just throw the whole thing away instead of trying to save it", then I could still get a full grade for that, even if it offends the instructor a bit - because I still proved I knew the historical facts.
That kind of room for dissent isn't as common in a grade-school or high-school classroom. Maybe it SHOULD be more common, but as a culture we Americans tend to be more coddling of our teenagers than most other cultures, and as a result we end up with teenagers that we don't trust to make their own decisions until they get a little older.
It's interesting to note that while the K-12 education in the US is well below international standards, the university-level education is still really good, and sought-after by foreign students. I think the big jump from coddling to responsiblity that an American Teenager goes through when moving to college is part of the reason for this. There's a lot less sugar-coating of things in the classes because the students are perceived as being able to handle the truth now.
One episode of Junkyard Wars (Scrapheap Challenge its original UK title) was to make the teams BUILD a monowheel and race it.
Their designs were based on the rider being inside the wheel. Picture a round cage with a seat. The seat is off-center so that it is near the bottom of the inside of the wheel. Thus the rider's weight is not in the center of mass (this is deliberate). When you accellerate the wheel, the torque swings the inner cage forward, making the rider's swing to the front, and when you apply the brake, the rider is swung backward. This is nicely stable because this is slightly countered by the tendency of the rider to get "left behind" when the vehicle accellerates, or get "thrown" to the front when it decellerates.
One effect of this is that the maximum amount of accelleration or decelleration force is mostly a function of the rider's mass. If the vehicle is accellerating, then the rider is perpetually "falling" from the front down to the bottom, and this "falling" force translates into the Newtonian equal and opposite reaction" against the engine spinning the wheel. (Without this, the wheel might stay put on the pavement while the inner cage spins around.) So, the fatter the rider, the more push the vehicle can have (but, of course, the more push it *needs*, so I don't know if this is really helpful or not).
Anyway, it was a cool episode right up to the moment they started actually trying to race the vehicles. Then it was comically SLOW. I think the teams actually made good vehicles, but they didn't have the driver skill to use them, and so they were too frightened to make them go. I suspect it was something akin to trying to use a unicycle.
The vehicle is steered by the leaning of the driver, and it balances a bit like a unicycle.
Is prayer in school okay as long as no one is required to participate? I tend to think it should be allowed, but that is probably a slippery slope.
It depends on how it's "delivered". Should a student be allowed to pray in a classroom? Sure (unless she's doing it loudly so that it disrupts others nearby - but in that case it's not a matter of relgious freedom, but of a kid being quiet in class when she's supposed to be quiet in class.) Should a kid be allowed to read from a bible in class? Sure (again, it should follow all the same rules that reading from any other book would follow - it shoud only be disallowed if it was being done in lieu of reading the lesson material. During an open reading time (during which any student could pull out a novel and read if he'd like), then it should be perfectly allowed.)
But, when it moves to a more "official" venue, like being read aloud over the PA system, then I have a big problem with it.
And I can remember one example from when I was in the ninth grade (back in the 80's), where my teacher for a modern literture class had us write an essay question comparing the One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest main character (the book we had just read), and his twelve followers from the asylum, with the story of Jesus and his 12 disciples. Not being brought up as a Christian, I was only vaguely familiar in a cursory way with the Jesus story (which was not part of that class's curriculum), so I couldn't really answer the question and just made up some bogus answer and got it marked wrong (The teacher was fair enough to allow any sort of take on the answer, pro or con, but the point was to prove that you had read and understood the book and could extrapolate from it - the problem is that the question contained the assumption that Of COURSE everyone in the class would already be well versed enough in the story of Jesus and the disciples to be able to discuss the comparasin intelligently.)
I was really confused, and went up to ask the teacher afterward, "I know who Jesus is, but I don't know what his disciples are (which I pronounced "dis-ih-please", not having ever seen the word in print before, only having heard it verbally I didn't make the connection that that spelling was the word I'd heard before.)."
I told her I was not Christian, and so only knew a little bit about the story, and I thought the question was really unfair. I knew the book we'd read for the class, but that wasn't enough to answer the question.
The question remained marked wrong, which turned the test grade from an A to a B. At the time I wasn't assertive enough to push the point, and I just accepted the grade rather than piss off a teacher, but I really should have pushed the point and rose a big stink over it if that's what it took. This was my GRADE after all.
And yes, this was in a public school.
How about the current pledge?
While rolling it back to it's pre-McCarthy-era form would be nice, I'd be happier if its use in schools was removed altogether because the "under god" part of it is only a small part of the problem. When person is but a child, that's too early to be asking him for a patriotic pledge of nationalistic loyalty. And making such a thing official in schools feels VERY wrong. It's mandatory patriotism - just like in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
It should have been obvious from context that I was speaking just of the vote in which Feingold was an actual participant, which was in the Senate. Kucinich was a dissenter in a completely different vote altogether (the one before the House).
And on an update, his opponents *are* using this against him in this upcoming election it turns out. Russ Darrow (check it in google), a car dealership mogul, is running as a Rebuplican against Feingold, and his ads specifically mentioned Feingold's PATRIOT act vote, calling him an unpatriotic coward for it. The ad was so offensive that even John McCain, a member of his OWN party from a totally different state, made a public statement telling him to lay off and stop making that claim. (The gist of McCain's message was that he'd worked with Feingold before, and his impression of Feingold was that while he might be mistaken (from a Republican point of view) on a lot of things, he isn't afraid to stand on a principle, has often been at odds with his own party, and so he's most definately not a coward. And that his vote against the PATRIOT act, while disagreed with by McCain and Darrow, was based on motives that Feingold at least *beleived* to be for the betterment of the country. - So call him mistaken, or call him naive, but don't call him unpatriotic or cowardly, that's just not fair.)
I gotta say, I'm impressed with McCain's integrety in this. It takes guts to chide someone "on your side" when they use an unfair argument.
I agree that re-creating shows doesn't work often (All in the Family being one of the few exceptions), but mapping video formats is about verbatim copies of shows, not new shows, with new footage made from scratch, based on overseas shows. British Comedy does well in the US (but not British serious shows), and US Comedy does well in Britain (The Simpsons comes to mind). But that's an entirey different sort of thing from remaking a show based on an overseas show.
I don't think they are trying to completely prevent the information from getting through. I think they know that's a lost cause. What they're probably trying for is to DETECT, rather than prevent, the tendency of some people to keep trying to visit certain sites. "Hey, this guy's been visiting the WRONG sites a lot, I think it's time we pay SPECIAL attention to him..."
(Don't bills have to pass BOTH houses? So isn't it possible that Feingold was the lone dissenter in the senate, while Kucinick was the lone dissenter in the House of Representatives?)
I'm a 'third party' swing voter (meaning I haven't found a party I can entirely agree with enough to become a card-carrying member - No, don't go posting a link to the Libertarians as if I've never heard of them. I have, and I don't agree with them enough to support them, although they do resonate with me on some issues and I have voted for their candidate on several occasions.)
Anyway, the point is that I often ignore the Republican vs Democrat issues, knowing full well that I'm voting for neither one, and that on the issues that matter most to me, they aren't that different from each other.
But I've been a major fan of Feingold ever since the Communications Decency Act (part 1). He voted that down (even though it was just a rider on a larger telecom bill), for a number of good reasons he cited in his statement about his vote. Most importantly he said it was wrong to enact laws that define stricter standards of free speech for new mediums as opposed to existing ones. Why is it that things a newspaper can get away with in print should be disallowed for an individual to say online? The fact that the new medium of the internet is quicker, more open, and turns everyone into a publisher, shouldn't be a reason to get stricter on it - just the opposite, really." Feingold was the ONLY SENATOR to oppose the bill. The ONLY ONE. The vote was 98 in favor, 1 abstain, and 1 against. Feingold was that single voice against it (and the supreme court ruling that declared it unconstitutional afterward vindicates his stance.)
That took courage. That took guts. I became a big fan of his on that day and started paying more attention to his voting record. I don't agree with every vote, but the ones that are really important, on issues where congress was trying to move the country to a more totalitarian format, Good Ole Russ was there as the (usually) lone dissenter - saying that no issue is more important than the freedoms of our citizens down the road, that selling away our future rights to take care of an temporary problem is not good policy, even when that temporary problem is something as big and momentous as a major terrorist act killing thousands.
He was also the lone dissenter in the Patriot Act. Again, a very brave thing to do given that opponents can use that to paint him as a traitor, and they probably will try that tactic.
I've sent him a letter (on dead trees, since that tends to get more notice), stating that as long as he keeps it up with this kind of stance against selling out freedom to gain temporary security, that he will continue to have my vote (Yes, I live in Wisconsin so I can do that). The letter also stated that I don't agree with him on lots of his other votes, and that I am not a Democrat, but that no issue is more important today than this one, and so the fact that he's the only one in office with the guts to stand up to these bills means he has won me as an ardent supporter. (And I closed with the famous Ben Franklin quote about giving up freedom for safety and deserving neither.)
I was pleasantly surprised to get a snail-mail reply to this letter, and some of the things in the text of the reply make it clear that it was not just a form letter, as it made explicit references to the fact that I said I am not a member of his party but support him anyway. It was not written by him, but by a staffer (and it was honest enough to say so explicitly), but the gist of it was that the senator had received a lot of similar letters in response to his patriot act vote, too many to answer them all in person, but that the senator's standard response to all such letters was to let people know that he does plan to continue this trend of voting, no matter the consequences.
My comment was not about "should people invest in Sun", as you seem to imply. It was a direct refutation of the claim that the only responsibility a company has is to make profit for shareholders. In my opinion, those shareholders who invested ONLY because they want the money and who don't actually care what actions the company takes to get it deserve no sympathy - those shareholders can rot for all I care.
An interesting irony is that the USA, with its explicitly secular government, contains a more religious population than countries like the UK, which has an official State Church. There's a group called "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State", which contains a strange mixture of both the ardently faithful believers, and the ardently stubborn nonbelievers such as me. The idea is that coming from these two totally different directions, there is still a common cause: They want church and state seperate becuase they want to keep their religion untainted by politics. We (nonbelivers of various stripes including agnostics and atheists) want them seperate so that we don't end up being forced to participate in a religion we don't believe. (Actually, that's a good reason for a believer to be in favor of keeping them seperate too - you don't have a guarantee that your particular religion will be the one the government tries to promote in the future - it could be promoting an opposing one).
I'm tolerant of religion except in the case where it tries to apply its laws outside of its congregation. As long as a religion only affects those that willingly adhere to it, it can do whatever it likes and I have no right to complain. And as long as church and state are seperate, there's a good chance it will stay that way (where a religion's rules only affect its own adherants.)
(It does get a little ugly, though, in the case of children. An adult refusing medical treatment for religious reasons is well within his rights to do so, but a parent making that decision for his child is a trickier situation. I can see both sides of this argument have good points and I'm not sure where I would stand.)
Your statements are true but irrelevent, since they are apparently attacking your imaginary version of my stace instead of my actual stance. Investing in stocks so that a company can do well (and earn you money) is not a "fanclub". On the other hand, simply trying to buy low and sell high, and not give a ratt's ass what the company actually does, leads to stock market crashes, as you end up buying stocks based on how much you think other people will want those stocks later, not based on what their ownership really represents in the real physical world. An economy based purely on public perceptions like that will fall eventually.
Okay, let me spell it out for the hard of thinking like yourself: I don't like that the government ATTEMPTS to treat them as individuals when it's not physically possible to do so fairly across the board. They get all the rights of the individual but cannot be subjected to all the responsibilities of the individual.
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Your silly predjudice is noted.
Your point is ignored.
Dictionary.com is a search engine into the databases of several very 'official' dictionary companies, like Websters. It returns results no more or less reliable than using the big dead-tree kind of dictionary - it's coming from the same exact source.
Only the test needs to be "hard".
Your test is also time consuming, and that's a big problem, as that will translate directly into having to wait for the people in front of you. There's already enough standing in line as it is. You shouldn't make that take even longer.
Also, it seems you don't understand what happened in the Florida elections. The ones complaining about misaligned voting that was hard to read were not the ones using the punchcards. They were the ones using "butterfly ballots". The way those work is that there's a booklet with names, and lines that point to the spine of the booklet. The spine of the booklet has the holes you mark for your vote. The spine is a removable piece that can then be fed into the scanner as a "stick", with the pages removed. The complaint was that often the spaces in the spine to mark the votes actually WERE misaligned from the pages, such that the voter had to guess which hole went with which candidate since the arrows pointed to the spaces between the holes instead of directly at the holes. The reason this happened is that the spine and the booklet are printed as two seperate pieces, and then bound together later. If that binding was sloppily done, then the spine can be misaligned with the page.
The problem you are trying to fix, of voters being too stupid to know how to vote, is an imaginary problem made up by shock-jock pundits.
The problem with telling you who it thinks you voted for is that I can't think of a good way to do that and still maintain privacy. (Nobody else should be able to see whom you voted for.)
And, the other problem is, if it does accept the ballot, and you want to do a do-over, the only way to do so would be to reveal whom you voted for.
There is always a write-in choice for every single race. Unlike a parliamentary system, in the USA the political parties are not *officially* supposed to be part of the recognized government structure at all. (In recent years they have become so, but they're not supposed to be, dammit!) They are independant organizations that decided to put forward candidates, and advertise them, and hope that the public likes them and votes on them. States have guidelines for how to get your candidate's name placed onto the ballot, basically involving a petition. If you get enough signatures, you can put whomever you like on the ballot, with a label indicating who you are. (For example, "Dear state election board, We call ourselves the Democratic Party, and we want the name Russ Feingold to be put on the ballot for Wisconsin Federal Senator. Attached is a list of signatures meeting the requirement for us to make this request, as well as identifying proof that this Russ Feingold is in fact a real person and not somebody we made up as a joke, and that he meets the minimum citizenship requirements to be a Senator.") Anybody could do that, at any time, and *poof*, it would be a political party. What will show up in the ballot for that spot will be a line that looks like:
Russ Feingold
(Democratic Party)
But, just as easily, a group could spring up and send in the same form, but have it say "Hi, We call ourselves the Utterly Fed Up Citizens Brigade, and we want you to put the name Phyllis Blanche, a housewife from Pleasantville, on the ballot. Here's our proof she's real, and here's our list of signatures...."
And the result would be:
Phyllis Blanche
(Utterly Fed Up Citizens Brigade)
And, even more so, even if nobody sent in such a letter for the candidate you like, you can always vote for anybody you like, by writing the name in. Every race has a spot where you can say "other", with a line to write on.
So, someone wanting to protest vote should use that write-in blank to do so.
Or, in other words, you vote for a PERSON, not a Party. The parties simply put the names out in the public through advertising and sponsoring debates.
The large power of the two big parties is mostly a "de-facto" standard rather than a legally enforced one. (And being someone who often votes for a third-party's candidate, it pisses me off that the two party system is becoming more and more legally enforced - such as states saying that political parties must open up their private decision making process to the public, allowing non-members to decide for them whom they will sponsor. This is what turned the "primaries" into an official event. They're not SUPPOSED to be, dammit.
While I understand your intention, your method is complete crap. A punchcard ballot is bad no matter what because errors get introduced AFTER it leaves the voter's hands - chads with bad attachments can fall out from rubbing with other cards in the stack. Corners of cards get stuck into other cards and bend the cards (causing chads to pop out). A clumsy stray finger from a worker handling the stack of cards can punch out chads in the cards. Your method is going to end up disenfranchising people who filled everything out absolutely correctly.
Just don't use punchcards, period. EVER. Thick paper ballots scanned with electronic optical scanners hold up to human handling much, much better.
There is no reason you can't marry the best aspects of both an electronic count and a paper ballot. A paper ballot is the least corruptable record of the vote, and leaves a manual method for disputes to be settled. An electronic count makes less errors that a human count, and can get the final tallies done within a few seconds of the last poll closing.
The system I use when I vote is just like that. You complete a ballot on paper using the provided felt tip pen.
Then YOU, the voter, walk the ballot from the privacy booth over to the scanner machine, and then YOU, the voter, feed your ballot into the machine (either direction - it can tell which way it is and read it rightside up, upside down, top to bottom, or bottom to top).
Then, and this is the important part, the scanner processes your ballot RIGHT AWAY, in less time than you can blink an eye. If the green light lights up, then the machine understood your ballot , tallied it in it's local count, and dropped it into the archival lockbox, and you can leave. If the red light lights up, then the scanner makes it really obvious your ballot wasn't readable because it spits it back out at you instead of putting it into the box. That way you know your ballot is fouled. The poll worker who's watching over people using the scanner will get you a new ballot, destroy the old one, and let you walk back to the privacy booths to try filling it out again.
This solves so many of the stupid problems Florida had:
1 - The voter knows when he leaves, that he leaves with the confidence that his ballot was readable by the machine.
2 - The voter has a chance to correct his unreadable ballot HIMSELF - so there's no need to second-guess what the voter intended. Every ballot that's saved in the lockbox is one that you know is scannable because it already *was* scanned.
3 - The tallying is fast because the scanner machine keeps it's own sub-tally as it goes. When the polls close, all that needs to be done is to sum up the subtotals from each scanning machine.
4 - When a voter uses a write-in blank, the ballot is marked specially in a way that flags it for human counting later, and is sorted in such a fashion that these ballots are easy to find in the pile.
5 - A paper record is preserved as well as an electronic one.
6 - The ballot is so simple that I can't see how a touchscreen interface could be any simpler.
7 - To double-check the integrety of the scanner machines, a random selection of a few of them is audited every time, with it's subtotal compared against a human count of the ballots that passed through it. If these spot checks show suspicious discrepency, then the whole vote is human-counted, and investigation into the problem will begin, or at least that's what I'm told. (So far this process has not uncovered discrepency, except in a few cases where it's understandable why the human count and the machine count differ - like a stray mark that a human considered a double vote, but it wasn't dark enough for the scanner to see it.)
repeat of the 2000 Florida fiasco with guys holding ballots up to the light
Only if you wait until after the voter has left the building to catch the bad ballots. If the voter feeds the ballot into the machine himself, then he'll be standing RIGHT THERE when the machine issues its error beep and says the ballot is indecipherable. Thus he knows he needs to ditch the bad ballot and try again. This is precisely how the system in the community I vote in works, by the way.
When you finish filling out the ballot with the felt tip pen provided (it works on an optical scan of the ballot to see where you put your line next to the candidate - each candidate has an arrowhead and arrow tail pointing at it, but with empty whitespace between them. You complete the picture of the arrow by drawing a line from tail to head, and it's these horizontal lines that the scanner looks for). Anyway, the point is that YOU, walk it over to the scanner machine, and YOU feed it into the slot, and YOU watch the machine take your ballot, and pop up a green light if it could understand it, or a red light and a beep if it cannot. If you get it rejected, it's blatantly obvious to you, right there, that it's rejected because instead of dropping the ballot into the lockbox for archiving, it regugitates it back at you, the voter. Maybe it was a bad scan and you can try again. But if you try more than twice and it doesn't work, then a poll worker (who is watching the people using the scanner) will hand you a new, fresh ballot and destroy the old one (while you watch, the worker tears the ballot, while averting eyes to avoid seeing who you voted for.) You can then walk back to one of the privacy booths and try again with the fresh ballot.
How do I know this? I deliberately voted a bogus vote one year, in a minor election for some local positions where there were only two positions up for election, and they were positions I wasn't informed about (so I felt it would be wrong to make a vote on them). The only reason I showed up was to vote on a referrendum. Anyway, I decided to use this chance to test the system. I filled out a ballot where I tried to vote for both candidates in one of the minor positions.
I went through the process as explained above, and when it was done, whispered to the poll worker that I did it on purpose as a test of the system, because as a voter, I didn't trust it. I came away happily surprised, and I really think this sort of system would have fixed all those problems in Florida, without needing a fancy touchscreen computer.
And the system is also quite fast. When you fill out the ballot right, it takes something like one second to feed it to the scanner and get a green light, so it's just a quick stop on your way out of the room.
The Wisconsin (where this is used) vote in the 2000 election was almost as close as the Florida vote, but there was no need for a recount (partly because it wasn't enough electoral votes to matter, and partly because there was a general consensus that the system was good enough that the first count was probably right on target. We've had recounts before where the recount was only different by less than 50 votes or so, and those were a matter of misplaced ballots rather than errors in the tallying.)
I really think the show went downhill ever since that episode where Sam leapt forward in time into the life of a starship captain on the Earth's first deep exploration vessel. I mean, Come On! It was an interesting premise but they've been milking it for over a year now, an I still keep waiting for that guy to show up with his neon PDA and take him to the next leap.
It's almost impossible to teach history without also teaching the history of religion. After all, the Protestant Reformation is one of the most signifigant historical movements in Western Europe.
Unfortunately it's *also* almost impossible for a teacher with strong religious beliefs to teach the history of religion (to children) without also promoting one religion over another. I know that our school system deliberately avoided the subject for this reason. Once in college, things got very different, and religion was discussed whenever it was part of the history. I think one big difference is that a college instructor teaching college students is a situation of adults teaching adults, and thus there's a lot more tolerance for dissenting opinion - you can completely disagree with the instructor and still get a good grade provided your disagreement is articulated well, and proves that you do know the material (even if you don't agree with it).
If I was being tested on historical events of the Protestant Reformation, and knew that it was begun in Germany by Martin Luther, and I knew what his specific list of complaints tacked to the church door was, but at the same time I expressed such a sentiment as "I don't see why he didn't just throw the whole thing away instead of trying to save it", then I could still get a full grade for that, even if it offends the instructor a bit - because I still proved I knew the historical facts.
That kind of room for dissent isn't as common in a grade-school or high-school classroom. Maybe it SHOULD be more common, but as a culture we Americans tend to be more coddling of our teenagers than most other cultures, and as a result we end up with teenagers that we don't trust to make their own decisions until they get a little older.
It's interesting to note that while the K-12 education in the US is well below international standards, the university-level education is still really good, and sought-after by foreign students. I think the big jump from coddling to responsiblity that an American Teenager goes through when moving to college is part of the reason for this. There's a lot less sugar-coating of things in the classes because the students are perceived as being able to handle the truth now.
One episode of Junkyard Wars (Scrapheap Challenge its original UK title) was to make the teams BUILD a monowheel and race it.
Their designs were based on the rider being inside the wheel. Picture a round cage with a seat. The seat is off-center so that it is near the bottom of the inside of the wheel. Thus the rider's weight is not in the center of mass (this is deliberate). When you accellerate the wheel, the torque swings the inner cage forward, making the rider's swing to the front, and when you apply the brake, the rider is swung backward. This is nicely stable because this is slightly countered by the tendency of the rider to get "left behind" when the vehicle accellerates, or get "thrown" to the front when it decellerates.
One effect of this is that the maximum amount of accelleration or decelleration force is mostly a function of the rider's mass. If the vehicle is accellerating, then the rider is perpetually "falling" from the front down to the bottom, and this "falling" force translates into the Newtonian
equal and opposite reaction" against the engine spinning the wheel. (Without this, the wheel might stay put on the pavement while the inner cage spins around.) So, the fatter the rider, the more push the vehicle can have (but, of course, the more push it *needs*, so I don't know if this is really helpful or not).
Anyway, it was a cool episode right up to the moment they started actually trying to race the vehicles. Then it was comically SLOW. I think the teams actually made good vehicles, but they didn't have the driver skill to use them, and so they were too frightened to make them go. I suspect it was something akin to trying to use a unicycle.
The vehicle is steered by the leaning of the driver, and it balances a bit like a unicycle.
I apologise for confusing you by keeping things on topic.
Is prayer in school okay as long as no one is required to participate? I tend to think it should be allowed, but that is probably a slippery slope.
It depends on how it's "delivered". Should a student be allowed to pray in a classroom? Sure (unless she's doing it loudly so that it disrupts others nearby - but in that case it's not a matter of relgious freedom, but of a kid being quiet in class when she's supposed to be quiet in class.) Should a kid be allowed to read from a bible in class? Sure (again, it should follow all the same rules that reading from any other book would follow - it shoud only be disallowed if it was being done in lieu of reading the lesson material. During an open reading time (during which any student could pull out a novel and read if he'd like), then it should be perfectly allowed.)
But, when it moves to a more "official" venue, like being read aloud over the PA system, then I have a big problem with it.
And I can remember one example from when I was in the ninth grade (back in the 80's), where my teacher for a modern literture class had us write an essay question comparing the One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest main character (the book we had just read), and his twelve followers from the asylum, with the story of Jesus and his 12 disciples. Not being brought up as a Christian, I was only vaguely familiar in a cursory way with the Jesus story (which was not part of that class's curriculum), so I couldn't really answer the question and just made up some bogus answer and got it marked wrong (The teacher was fair enough to allow any sort of take on the answer, pro or con, but the point was to prove that you had read and understood the book and could extrapolate from it - the problem is that the question contained the assumption that Of COURSE everyone in the class would already be well versed enough in the story of Jesus and the disciples to be able to discuss the comparasin intelligently.)
I was really confused, and went up to ask the teacher afterward, "I know who Jesus is, but I don't know what his disciples are (which I pronounced "dis-ih-please", not having ever seen the word in print before, only having heard it verbally I didn't make the connection that that spelling was the word I'd heard before.)."
I told her I was not Christian, and so only knew a little bit about the story, and I thought the question was really unfair. I knew the book we'd read for the class, but that wasn't enough to answer the question.
The question remained marked wrong, which turned the test grade from an A to a B. At the time I wasn't assertive enough to push the point, and I just accepted the grade rather than piss off a teacher, but I really should have pushed the point and rose a big stink over it if that's what it took. This was my GRADE after all.
And yes, this was in a public school.
How about the current pledge?
While rolling it back to it's pre-McCarthy-era form would be nice, I'd be happier if its use in schools was removed altogether because the "under god" part of it is only a small part of the problem. When person is but a child, that's too early to be asking him for a patriotic pledge of nationalistic loyalty. And making such a thing official in schools feels VERY wrong. It's mandatory patriotism - just like in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia.
It should have been obvious from context that I was speaking just of the vote in which Feingold was an actual participant, which was in the Senate. Kucinich was a dissenter in a completely different vote altogether (the one before the House).
And on an update, his opponents *are* using this against him in this upcoming election it turns out. Russ Darrow (check it in google), a car dealership mogul, is running as a Rebuplican against Feingold, and his ads specifically mentioned Feingold's PATRIOT act vote, calling him an unpatriotic coward for it. The ad was so offensive that even John McCain, a member of his OWN party from a totally different state, made a public statement telling him to lay off and stop making that claim. (The gist of McCain's message was that he'd worked with Feingold before, and his impression of Feingold was that while he might be mistaken (from a Republican point of view) on a lot of things, he isn't afraid to stand on a principle, has often been at odds with his own party, and so he's most definately not a coward. And that his vote against the PATRIOT act, while disagreed with by McCain and Darrow, was based on motives that Feingold at least *beleived* to be for the betterment of the country. - So call him mistaken, or call him naive, but don't call him unpatriotic or cowardly, that's just not fair.)
I gotta say, I'm impressed with McCain's integrety in this. It takes guts to chide someone "on your side" when they use an unfair argument.
I agree that re-creating shows doesn't work often (All in the Family being one of the few exceptions), but mapping video formats is about verbatim copies of shows, not new shows, with new footage made from scratch, based on overseas shows. British Comedy does well in the US (but not British serious shows), and US Comedy does well in Britain (The Simpsons comes to mind). But that's an entirey different sort of thing from remaking a show based on an overseas show.
Surveilence != Censorship. Yeah, they're both wrong, but they are different types of wrong - like copyright infringment and stealing.
I don't think they are trying to completely prevent the information from getting through. I think they know that's a lost cause. What they're probably trying for is to DETECT, rather than prevent, the tendency of some people to keep trying to visit certain sites. "Hey, this guy's been visiting the WRONG sites a lot, I think it's time we pay SPECIAL attention to him..."
Once they are in the country (as they were), it's the FBI's job, be they citizens or foreigners.
(Don't bills have to pass BOTH houses? So isn't it possible that Feingold was the lone dissenter in the senate, while Kucinick was the lone dissenter in the House of Representatives?)
I'm a 'third party' swing voter (meaning I haven't found a party I can entirely agree with enough to become a card-carrying member - No, don't go posting a link to the Libertarians as if I've never heard of them. I have, and I don't agree with them enough to support them, although they do resonate with me on some issues and I have voted for their candidate on several occasions.)
Anyway, the point is that I often ignore the Republican vs Democrat issues, knowing full well that I'm voting for neither one, and that on the issues that matter most to me, they aren't that different from each other.
But I've been a major fan of Feingold ever since the Communications Decency Act (part 1). He voted that down (even though it was just a rider on a larger telecom bill), for a number of good reasons he cited in his statement about his vote. Most importantly he said it was wrong to enact laws that define stricter standards of free speech for new mediums as opposed to existing ones. Why is it that things a newspaper can get away with in print should be disallowed for an individual to say online? The fact that the new medium of the internet is quicker, more open, and turns everyone into a publisher, shouldn't be a reason to get stricter on it - just the opposite, really." Feingold was the ONLY SENATOR to oppose the bill. The ONLY ONE. The vote was 98 in favor, 1 abstain, and 1 against. Feingold was that single voice against it (and the supreme court ruling that declared it unconstitutional afterward vindicates his stance.)
That took courage. That took guts. I became a big fan of his on that day and started paying more attention to his voting record. I don't agree with every vote, but the ones that are really important, on issues where congress was trying to move the country to a more totalitarian format, Good Ole Russ was there as the (usually) lone dissenter - saying that no issue is more important than the freedoms of our citizens down the road, that selling away our future rights to take care of an temporary problem is not good policy, even when that temporary problem is something as big and momentous as a major terrorist act killing thousands.
He was also the lone dissenter in the Patriot Act. Again, a very brave thing to do given that opponents can use that to paint him as a traitor, and they probably will try that tactic.
I've sent him a letter (on dead trees, since that tends to get more notice), stating that as long as he keeps it up with this kind of stance against selling out freedom to gain temporary security, that he will continue to have my vote (Yes, I live in Wisconsin so I can do that). The letter also stated that I don't agree with him on lots of his other votes, and that I am not a Democrat, but that no issue is more important today than this one, and so the fact that he's the only one in office with the guts to stand up to these bills means he has won me as an ardent supporter. (And I closed with the famous Ben Franklin quote about giving up freedom for safety and deserving neither.)
I was pleasantly surprised to get a snail-mail reply to this letter, and some of the things in the text of the reply make it clear that it was not just a form letter, as it made explicit references to the fact that I said I am not a member of his party but support him anyway. It was not written by him, but by a staffer (and it was honest enough to say so explicitly), but the gist of it was that the senator had received a lot of similar letters in response to his patriot act vote, too many to answer them all in person, but that the senator's standard response to all such letters was to let people know that he does plan to continue this trend of voting, no matter the consequences.
the last major terrorist attack would not be 9/11
That's also true in THIS world - the one that has actually occurred. Bali. Madrid. Y'ever heard of those places?
My comment was not about "should people invest in Sun", as you seem to imply. It was a direct refutation of the claim that the only responsibility a company has is to make profit for shareholders. In my opinion, those shareholders who invested ONLY because they want the money and who don't actually care what actions the company takes to get it deserve no sympathy - those shareholders can rot for all I care.
It's been an interesting discussion.
An interesting irony is that the USA, with its explicitly secular government, contains a more religious population than countries like the UK, which has an official State Church. There's a group called "Americans United for the Separation of Church and State", which contains a strange mixture of both the ardently faithful believers, and the ardently stubborn nonbelievers such as me. The idea is that coming from these two totally different directions, there is still a common cause: They want church and state seperate becuase they want to keep their religion untainted by politics. We (nonbelivers of various stripes including agnostics and atheists) want them seperate so that we don't end up being forced to participate in a religion we don't believe. (Actually, that's a good reason for a believer to be in favor of keeping them seperate too - you don't have a guarantee that your particular religion will be the one the government tries to promote in the future - it could be promoting an opposing one).
I'm tolerant of religion except in the case where it tries to apply its laws outside of its congregation. As long as a religion only affects those that willingly adhere to it, it can do whatever it likes and I have no right to complain. And as long as church and state are seperate, there's a good chance it will stay that way (where a religion's rules only affect its own adherants.)
(It does get a little ugly, though, in the case of children. An adult refusing medical treatment for religious reasons is well within his rights to do so, but a parent making that decision for his child is a trickier situation. I can see both sides of this argument have good points and I'm not sure where I would stand.)
Your statements are true but irrelevent, since they are apparently attacking your imaginary version of my stace instead of my actual stance. Investing in stocks so that a company can do well (and earn you money) is not a "fanclub". On the other hand, simply trying to buy low and sell high, and not give a ratt's ass what the company actually does, leads to stock market crashes, as you end up buying stocks based on how much you think other people will want those stocks later, not based on what their ownership really represents in the real physical world. An economy based purely on public perceptions like that will fall eventually.
Okay, let me spell it out for the hard of thinking like yourself: I don't like that the government ATTEMPTS to treat them as individuals when it's not physically possible to do so fairly across the board. They get all the rights of the individual but cannot be subjected to all the responsibilities of the individual.