America and our Democracy are being stolen right out from under us
You mean, kind of like the entire left side of the punditocracy screaming about ABC's "Path to 9/11" docudrama? You know, the one that people were insisting (having not even seen it!) that they change, or pull off the air? Yeah, like that.
Looking back to an election that was pretty much STOLEN (by the Bush brothers and a cousin, just to mention a few), one has to wonder just how it was pulled off
"pretty much stolen"? Is that like being kind of pregnant? Which is it? Are you confusing "didn't turn out the way I wished it would" with "stolen?"
A huge portion of the votes tabulated in Florida were done so on Diebold voting machines.
And no one has indicated, once, that there was anything suspect about the actual results. Plenty wrong with the people actually understanding how to cast a vote, but that's rather a different thing, isn't it.
America and our Democracy are being stolen right out from under us
So, other than just repeating that meme, what's your actual evidence that what you're saying is actually true?. The fact that someone could screw with what a piece of technology can do doesn't mean that's happening. Diebold could also screw with your bank account while you're withdrawing money through one of their ATM's. No question they could. Does this mean they're undermining the economy? What I smell is a frenzied effort to have, in pocket, a handy explanation for why fewer people that some political camps might wish will actually vote they way they're stamping their feet and insisting that they do.
Oh my, well golly, diebold's feelings are much more important than the integrity of our elections.
Um... you notice that this has NOTHING to do with whether Diebold is "demanding" that any jurisdiction, anywhere, actually use their equipment? Did you vote for the people who are now running the election board in your county? What brand of equipment did they choose to use?
Perfect! A flamebait mod for actually reporting what someone said. A perfect example of what this thread is about: it ain't mudslinging if you're just pointing out demonstrable facts. But that's OK, modding down someone who says "both people in that senatorial race have said dumb-ass things" is just pointing out who can, and can't stand the reporting. Heh - elections are fun! Not because of the candidates, but because of the flame mods.
Yeah! Good riddance! I mean, we sure don't want someone who says that women aren't "psychologically equipped" for combat, or says that (in the wake of a story about rampant unmarried pregnancies in the military) that the Naval Academy is "a horny woman's dream," and calls female midshipmen there "thunder thighs"... no, that sort of tone deafness, bias, and assholishness can't be permitted! What? That's all stuff that Allen's opponent, Jim Webb, said while running the DoD? Ah. Well then, no question that Allen is worse, no question at all. Or maybe: some people sometimes say dumb-ass things? You know, like the guy that the Democrats chose to be their presidential candidate implying that only dumb people become soldiers, and taking two days to find a way to spin an apology? I'd say that George Allen hardly has the market cornered on saying something passingly stupid - and his opponent has a history of not only saying crap, but repeating it often enough, and loudly enough, to suggest that it's a real part of his world view.
I find it hilarious that the only examples of "evil" socialism you can come up with happen to be oppressive totalitarian regimes. That's like using Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as proof that capitalism is "evil".
OK then: show me a nice, rosy, socialist system that would still be providing anything like a workable standard of living if it didn't enormously tax the productivity of people who run the engine of the economy by being capitalists. Such countries live off of their capitalist-minded productivity rock stars despite the socialist weight dragging them down. In countries where they try harder to act more like ideal socialists, you get... hordes of angry, unemployed youths burning cars and buses in the Parisian suburbs. Why isn't socialism providing them with a the nice happy living that it's supposed to?
Socialism is a world of workers, in which all who are able have a responsibility is to contribute to society, but in which (unlike in capitalism) you are guaranteed basic livability (not "pavement to your dreams" as per your propaganda) in exchange.
Ah! I see. And if the guarantee is proving a little hard to deliver, that's when millions of starving workers get slaughtered (a, Stalin, what a gem he was - or that fabulous cultural revolution in China - nothing but guarantees, that was!) or the less "able" are packed up into slave labor camps? North Korea, of course, is a worker's paradise, that way.
What is "basic livability," to you? When you walk in New York (to use your example), which people, exactly are you talking about? Those who don't want to live in the offered shelter, eat the offered food, or accept the offered medical care? "Poor," and unworking people in the US live better than most of the world's population.
all who are able have a responsibility is to contribute to society
And those that have a brilliant idea or the drive to work longer hours at a harder task are thus rewarded by... being a slave to a larger percentage of the people that don't? Or do you solve that problem by not allowing a person who'd like to improve his family's life by working harder to embarass the system by actually being more productive and having something to show for it? Why, that would be evil.
Being able to show a local directory in a browser window does not require "embedding in the OS". Take a look at Konqueror or, actaully, any other browser, even IE.
But what if I, as the maker of an O/S, think that I want to use a browser interface for that? One that also knows how to invoke other tools to show directories full of images as thumbnails, or some other trick? Who care what I want?
Should a lawyer or a judge decide which exactl method is the best (or only, or allowed) way to render a list of files, a collection of links, a gallery of images, etc? For that matter, perhaps the O/S shouldn't be allowed to show users any files, all by itself! Why, that would open up the market for third party file-listing-window-widget makers! That's it: the O/S shouldn't be able to interact with the user at all, let alone in any way that might also be useful in other ways.
Just in case I'm being too subtle here: where do you draw the line? No text editors allowed? No native firewalling? Only one set of mouse pointers? No disk compression? Or, all of that's OK, as long as it's Apple doing it, on their own hardware only? I'd really like to meet the judge that you think is better at making such decisions than professional programmers, system administrators, and experienced end users. You, of course, have multiple choices, and can use any other O/S or browser you want. So, who cares whether or not you have to embed a browser - what if you're creating an O/S and you want to? Careful what you wish for: software design by government and trial lawyers is a pretty ugly prospect.
I'm impressed how you took a post emphasizing the move towards wider availability of capital to entrepreneurs as something socialist.
But when a system is not re-arranging capital based on a person's ability to impress investors/lendors on the merits of a business plan and other positive things - and is instead risking capital because, essentially, everyone who asks for it gets it (from where, I wonder?)... well, that's socialized business investment/lending.
He wasn't besmirching military people. He was besmirching the President, who has sole responsibility for getting us stuck in Iraq.
Leaving aside his actual intent, or his famously tone-deaf sense of what will, or will not appeal to the audience he's trying to address... he has to know that he made a major gaffe. He should have known it the moment it came out of his supercilious mouth. If he was a politician worthy of his party's trust as a presidential candidate, he'd have immediately bent over backwards to point out his ommission of the word that (two days later!) decides he should have included, thus completely altering the thrust of his comment - towards his opponent, and away from hundreds of thousands of professional military people. His misunderstanding of how he plays to crowds - friendly, or not so - is pretty amazing. Or not so, considering how he comes by his cash and social circles.
I think I'll go off to Google and look up 'eye rolling' to see what friendly vendors might chime in on an organic supplement I might purchase. And if I get any e-mail from my friends on the subject via my gmail box, I'm sure a slightly more targeted ad will help me out even further.
And, if I forget to pursue this until next month, I think I can be comfortable knowing that since Google knows everything, they'll still be there to help me out.
The CIA make people disappear. Saying that they keep people from being killed is like saying a gun is meant to save lives, or that wars objective is a more perfect peace. Its completely backwards.
Believe it or not, The X-Files was not actually a documentary.
like saying a gun is meant to save lives
Which they do, regularly. Ask anyone who's used one for exactly that purpose.
wars objective is a more perfect peace
Sometimes, you fight a war that someone else has started, the other option being let them have their way with you. That act is to stop a war, or the consequences of having not opposed it. It's really not different than a police officer shooting someone who's about to kill, say, a schoolhouse full of Amish girls. That's the sort of situation where a gun, and a small-scale war would have saved lives, and made a more perfect peace to be sure.
Here we go again - what part of "monopoly" do you people not understand? When you are a money-grubbing monopolistic power with a strangle-hold on an entire industry the rules are different. We don't have to be "fair" to MS, that's not how it works.
So, it's better for lawyers to dictate which is the best user interface in an O/S? How about what the shift key does? Or whether the screen resolution is adjusted with a slider bar or radio buttons? Or whether notepad.exe does, or does not support choosing your printer settings? Or whether the displaying an HTML file is something that a modern desktop should be able to do, natively? Yes, I want the court system, and lawyers getting 30% of some vague settlement, to define all of that for me, please. If you think MS is an actual monopoly, in the sense that the term was applied to Standard Oil or AT&T, you're really, really mistaken (and probably not making much sense to the Mac users, and all those *nix box users out there).
Of course, when MS - also seeing a change in the traditional boundaries - wants to embed a browser in their own OS, and make poking around the local file system feel similar to poking around web sites... that's the battle cry of... Teh Evil!
Because the CIA might want to start sorting through Google's "unthinkable amounts of data" so that they (the CIA) can start "drawing better, more useful conclusions".
That and the whole secretive thing just seems ripe for abuse
Unless the Google people that consult for the agency each come in with a few hundred GB of the google-base in their brains, and have it sucked out using some Star Trek-style bit of tech to dump into the agency's own systems... that's not what we're talking about. Ask around - people in that line of work bring in folks from Oracle, MS, Red Hat, SAP, AT&T... and "content" people, too... stage magicians, novelists, historians, PhDs from every discipline, and more. Much of the time it's just for training and for an outside view of the world. Don't forget that Google sells appliances that run on local networks doing inside search, and they consult on the deployment of those systems.
The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million
How can an article citing Netcraft stats, submitted by a nerd, and approved by a nerd, get this basic concept wrong? The phone I used today was part of the internet. This week, I added half a dozen web sites to an existing box, on an existing single IP address. "The Web" and "The Internet" aren't the same thing. At all.
Think they'd engineer a vast conspiracy of election fraud and not think of that one?
No. I think they wouldn't engineer a vast conspiracy in the first place. Shoddy or poorly maintained equipment, cheap polling place operators/budgets, user error, witless/contextless reporting... all of these things happen all the time, and are what's happening here. No "vast conspiracy" can possibly be kept that secret - it's simply impossible in the setting in question. Why mentally create that image when the simple reality of overused gear, stupid polling place policies, and somewhat biased reporting more than explains what's being talked about?
Making sure everyone has their facts straight is generally not considered a red herring
But bringing up the issue of patches to the machine code as if that were the same as the manufacturer having a hand in placing one candidate's checkbox above or below another is a red herring. And since the issue at hand (mis-aligned old touchscreens) does revolve around which candidated is placed where on a list set up by local election officials, blurring the differnce between those two totally separate activities is indeed herring-mongering.
And the media is concentrating on the botched joke?
No, the media's concentrating on the guy who swears he'd never besmirch military people saying, "get yourself educated so you won't get stuck in Iraq." This is same guy who, despite loving every person who ever wore a uniform (heh!) is famous for his "reminiscent of Ghengis Kahn" speech to a congressional committe. Over completely hearsay anecdotes. Oh well. It doesn't really matter. Even if he didn't mean what he said, his own party knows that it sure sounds like he meant what he said, and are begging him to STFU, avoid any more campaign support stops, etc. There's a little more to it than "the media" concentrating on just how to parse his BS comment. Better to ask how his own idealogical comrades are parsing it - and you can just tell by the un-inviting to public events exactly what they think. He'd really help more by just fading away for the next several days, that's for sure.
How hard would it be to find a few that could be co-opted?
If, by "co-opted," you mean, "smart enough to realize that better in-house search tech helping analysts at the agency is actually a very important thing," then no doubt, yes, they'll find some. The ones that are idealogically opposed to that agency improving its ability to render accurate intel for policy makers will avoid that sort of work - even though doing so is sort of self-destructive. If they'd rather work on better code to more accurately target AdSense ads to the remaining three slashdot users that aren't blocking that bit of javascript, then no doubt they'll have that option, even if they're given the chance to work on the wildly more interesting spooky stuff.
Gee - no chance that one of the largest and smartest pattern-searching, data-mining, quicky-quicky-lightening-fast-search technology operations on the planet might be asked to provide some expertise or operational help to one of the agencies that needs exactly that kind of horsepower to help keep people from being killed?
Of course Google has contact with the CIA. And NRO, and NSA, and DIA, and the FBI, and probably most state-level agencies, as well. It would be shocking, really, if they did not.
And how does Google taking a stand on privacy in any way contradict the vested interest they have in the CIA more effectively sorting through unthinkable amounts of data and drawing better, more useful conclusions? Google is based in the US. When the economy takes a hard hit (as it did following 9/11), Google is hit hard, too. It's perfectly reasonable for them to be both "no evil(tm)" corporate citizens and also help a vital government agency better do what they're supposed to do. You know, the agency that so many people have complained about being unable to effectively sort through lots of information, communicate across agencies, and draw more workable conclusions? How can input from, and influence by Google-type people possibly be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things?
The people at the CIA are just people. Google can afford very, very smart people that the agency can only get as consultants, or as hires that aren't worried about what they make. Farming out some high-end IT expertise to an entity that has an enormous profit incentive - in other venues - to be very good at it and competitively innovative is simply good policy.
You are aware that one of the complaints about Diebold systems in 2004 was that they pushed out software updates to some areas right before the election, right?
Right before the election, and still without any ability to correlate a given machine to the district in which it would be actually used, and before the machine was loaded with the slate of candidates. Unless Diebold's also working on time travel technology - which I think they'd use a little more creatively than by mis-aligning displays on old, refurbished, and over-used displays - that's a total red herring.
A computer science professor from Maryland has researched the issue and has not found a single instance where a Democratic vote was recorded when a Republican was selected on screen. Random chance would say the error would swing both ways...
A computer science professor studied - as a statistical sample - two anecdotes that were reported by newspaper in Florida, YESTERDAY?
Hey Kim, why don't you send a few folks down to Florida to see what's going on then come back and say those words with a straight face
Which words will the people from Florida be saying? How about: there were some heavily used machines with out of synch touch screens, and as soon as poll operating officials saw the problem, those machines were taken out of use. Something like that, perhaps? Or do you have evidence that a voter who pointed out the problem with the display was told "too bad" and that they had to live with the machine's display registration problem. No? I see.
Unfortunately, from the sound of things, their role will only be involved in voter intimidation or access to polling places.
So, since you have heard the "sound of things" and how 800 federal agents are out intimidating voters, perhaps you can point to an example of that? Just one? No? I see.
If people wonder, sometimes, why a lot of the leftier side of the demographic doesn't seem to get elected, or sounds particularly shrill while talking about the process, you've just provided a grand example. By the way, you can purchase commercial-size rolls of aluminum foil really cheap at Costco.
Slashdot Mirror
America and our Democracy are being stolen right out from under us
You mean, kind of like the entire left side of the punditocracy screaming about ABC's "Path to 9/11" docudrama? You know, the one that people were insisting (having not even seen it!) that they change, or pull off the air? Yeah, like that.
Looking back to an election that was pretty much STOLEN (by the Bush brothers and a cousin, just to mention a few), one has to wonder just how it was pulled off
"pretty much stolen"? Is that like being kind of pregnant? Which is it? Are you confusing "didn't turn out the way I wished it would" with "stolen?"
Or do you mean "stolen" as in "trying to fake up thousands of democratic-leaning votes?
A huge portion of the votes tabulated in Florida were done so on Diebold voting machines.
And no one has indicated, once, that there was anything suspect about the actual results. Plenty wrong with the people actually understanding how to cast a vote, but that's rather a different thing, isn't it.
America and our Democracy are being stolen right out from under us
So, other than just repeating that meme, what's your actual evidence that what you're saying is actually true?. The fact that someone could screw with what a piece of technology can do doesn't mean that's happening. Diebold could also screw with your bank account while you're withdrawing money through one of their ATM's. No question they could. Does this mean they're undermining the economy? What I smell is a frenzied effort to have, in pocket, a handy explanation for why fewer people that some political camps might wish will actually vote they way they're stamping their feet and insisting that they do.
Oh my, well golly, diebold's feelings are much more important than the integrity of our elections.
Um... you notice that this has NOTHING to do with whether Diebold is "demanding" that any jurisdiction, anywhere, actually use their equipment? Did you vote for the people who are now running the election board in your county? What brand of equipment did they choose to use?
Perfect! A flamebait mod for actually reporting what someone said. A perfect example of what this thread is about: it ain't mudslinging if you're just pointing out demonstrable facts. But that's OK, modding down someone who says "both people in that senatorial race have said dumb-ass things" is just pointing out who can, and can't stand the reporting. Heh - elections are fun! Not because of the candidates, but because of the flame mods.
It starts at the top, and all the way down they are rotten
Whew! It's a good thing that the democrat's leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, is clean as a whistle . Not counting good old fashioned $90k-in-the-freezer bribe-taking by a congressional democrat, or president who hands out pardons in exchange for cashflow or sells access in exchange for illegal donations from China , it seems that high-end real estate transactions are a favorite pastime for the traditional representatives of the poor working slobs of the country. *cough Hillary*
Sayonara assholes...
... no, that sort of tone deafness, bias, and assholishness can't be permitted! What? That's all stuff that Allen's opponent, Jim Webb, said while running the DoD? Ah. Well then, no question that Allen is worse, no question at all. Or maybe: some people sometimes say dumb-ass things? You know, like the guy that the Democrats chose to be their presidential candidate implying that only dumb people become soldiers, and taking two days to find a way to spin an apology? I'd say that George Allen hardly has the market cornered on saying something passingly stupid - and his opponent has a history of not only saying crap, but repeating it often enough, and loudly enough, to suggest that it's a real part of his world view.
Yeah! Good riddance! I mean, we sure don't want someone who says that women aren't "psychologically equipped" for combat, or says that (in the wake of a story about rampant unmarried pregnancies in the military) that the Naval Academy is "a horny woman's dream," and calls female midshipmen there "thunder thighs"
I find it hilarious that the only examples of "evil" socialism you can come up with happen to be oppressive totalitarian regimes. That's like using Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as proof that capitalism is "evil".
OK then: show me a nice, rosy, socialist system that would still be providing anything like a workable standard of living if it didn't enormously tax the productivity of people who run the engine of the economy by being capitalists. Such countries live off of their capitalist-minded productivity rock stars despite the socialist weight dragging them down. In countries where they try harder to act more like ideal socialists, you get... hordes of angry, unemployed youths burning cars and buses in the Parisian suburbs. Why isn't socialism providing them with a the nice happy living that it's supposed to?
Socialism is a world of workers, in which all who are able have a responsibility is to contribute to society, but in which (unlike in capitalism) you are guaranteed basic livability (not "pavement to your dreams" as per your propaganda) in exchange.
Ah! I see. And if the guarantee is proving a little hard to deliver, that's when millions of starving workers get slaughtered (a, Stalin, what a gem he was - or that fabulous cultural revolution in China - nothing but guarantees, that was!) or the less "able" are packed up into slave labor camps? North Korea, of course, is a worker's paradise, that way.
What is "basic livability," to you? When you walk in New York (to use your example), which people, exactly are you talking about? Those who don't want to live in the offered shelter, eat the offered food, or accept the offered medical care? "Poor," and unworking people in the US live better than most of the world's population.
all who are able have a responsibility is to contribute to society
And those that have a brilliant idea or the drive to work longer hours at a harder task are thus rewarded by... being a slave to a larger percentage of the people that don't? Or do you solve that problem by not allowing a person who'd like to improve his family's life by working harder to embarass the system by actually being more productive and having something to show for it? Why, that would be evil.
Being able to show a local directory in a browser window does not require "embedding in the OS". Take a look at Konqueror or, actaully, any other browser, even IE.
But what if I, as the maker of an O/S, think that I want to use a browser interface for that? One that also knows how to invoke other tools to show directories full of images as thumbnails, or some other trick? Who care what I want?
Should a lawyer or a judge decide which exactl method is the best (or only, or allowed) way to render a list of files, a collection of links, a gallery of images, etc? For that matter, perhaps the O/S shouldn't be allowed to show users any files, all by itself! Why, that would open up the market for third party file-listing-window-widget makers! That's it: the O/S shouldn't be able to interact with the user at all, let alone in any way that might also be useful in other ways.
Just in case I'm being too subtle here: where do you draw the line? No text editors allowed? No native firewalling? Only one set of mouse pointers? No disk compression? Or, all of that's OK, as long as it's Apple doing it, on their own hardware only? I'd really like to meet the judge that you think is better at making such decisions than professional programmers, system administrators, and experienced end users. You, of course, have multiple choices, and can use any other O/S or browser you want. So, who cares whether or not you have to embed a browser - what if you're creating an O/S and you want to? Careful what you wish for: software design by government and trial lawyers is a pretty ugly prospect.
I'm impressed how you took a post emphasizing the move towards wider availability of capital to entrepreneurs as something socialist.
But when a system is not re-arranging capital based on a person's ability to impress investors/lendors on the merits of a business plan and other positive things - and is instead risking capital because, essentially, everyone who asks for it gets it (from where, I wonder?)... well, that's socialized business investment/lending.
He wasn't besmirching military people. He was besmirching the President, who has sole responsibility for getting us stuck in Iraq.
Leaving aside his actual intent, or his famously tone-deaf sense of what will, or will not appeal to the audience he's trying to address... he has to know that he made a major gaffe. He should have known it the moment it came out of his supercilious mouth. If he was a politician worthy of his party's trust as a presidential candidate, he'd have immediately bent over backwards to point out his ommission of the word that (two days later!) decides he should have included, thus completely altering the thrust of his comment - towards his opponent, and away from hundreds of thousands of professional military people. His misunderstanding of how he plays to crowds - friendly, or not so - is pretty amazing. Or not so, considering how he comes by his cash and social circles.
I think I'll go off to Google and look up 'eye rolling' to see what friendly vendors might chime in on an organic supplement I might purchase. And if I get any e-mail from my friends on the subject via my gmail box, I'm sure a slightly more targeted ad will help me out even further.
And, if I forget to pursue this until next month, I think I can be comfortable knowing that since Google knows everything, they'll still be there to help me out.
*eyes roll all the way around, back to slashdot*
Doesn't matter! Sue Microsoft! Investigate!
The CIA make people disappear. Saying that they keep people from being killed is like saying a gun is meant to save lives, or that wars objective is a more perfect peace. Its completely backwards.
Believe it or not, The X-Files was not actually a documentary.
like saying a gun is meant to save lives
Which they do, regularly. Ask anyone who's used one for exactly that purpose.
wars objective is a more perfect peace
Sometimes, you fight a war that someone else has started, the other option being let them have their way with you. That act is to stop a war, or the consequences of having not opposed it. It's really not different than a police officer shooting someone who's about to kill, say, a schoolhouse full of Amish girls. That's the sort of situation where a gun, and a small-scale war would have saved lives, and made a more perfect peace to be sure.
Here we go again - what part of "monopoly" do you people not understand? When you are a money-grubbing monopolistic power with a strangle-hold on an entire industry the rules are different. We don't have to be "fair" to MS, that's not how it works.
So, it's better for lawyers to dictate which is the best user interface in an O/S? How about what the shift key does? Or whether the screen resolution is adjusted with a slider bar or radio buttons? Or whether notepad.exe does, or does not support choosing your printer settings? Or whether the displaying an HTML file is something that a modern desktop should be able to do, natively? Yes, I want the court system, and lawyers getting 30% of some vague settlement, to define all of that for me, please. If you think MS is an actual monopoly, in the sense that the term was applied to Standard Oil or AT&T, you're really, really mistaken (and probably not making much sense to the Mac users, and all those *nix box users out there).
a simple battle cry: 'One interface, not two!'
Of course, when MS - also seeing a change in the traditional boundaries - wants to embed a browser in their own OS, and make poking around the local file system feel similar to poking around web sites... that's the battle cry of... Teh Evil!
*sigh*
Because the CIA might want to start sorting through Google's "unthinkable amounts of data" so that they (the CIA) can start "drawing better, more useful conclusions".
That and the whole secretive thing just seems ripe for abuse
Unless the Google people that consult for the agency each come in with a few hundred GB of the google-base in their brains, and have it sucked out using some Star Trek-style bit of tech to dump into the agency's own systems... that's not what we're talking about. Ask around - people in that line of work bring in folks from Oracle, MS, Red Hat, SAP, AT&T... and "content" people, too... stage magicians, novelists, historians, PhDs from every discipline, and more. Much of the time it's just for training and for an outside view of the world. Don't forget that Google sells appliances that run on local networks doing inside search, and they consult on the deployment of those systems.
The Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million
How can an article citing Netcraft stats, submitted by a nerd, and approved by a nerd, get this basic concept wrong? The phone I used today was part of the internet. This week, I added half a dozen web sites to an existing box, on an existing single IP address. "The Web" and "The Internet" aren't the same thing. At all.
Think they'd engineer a vast conspiracy of election fraud and not think of that one?
... all of these things happen all the time, and are what's happening here. No "vast conspiracy" can possibly be kept that secret - it's simply impossible in the setting in question. Why mentally create that image when the simple reality of overused gear, stupid polling place policies, and somewhat biased reporting more than explains what's being talked about?
No. I think they wouldn't engineer a vast conspiracy in the first place. Shoddy or poorly maintained equipment, cheap polling place operators/budgets, user error, witless/contextless reporting
Making sure everyone has their facts straight is generally not considered a red herring
But bringing up the issue of patches to the machine code as if that were the same as the manufacturer having a hand in placing one candidate's checkbox above or below another is a red herring. And since the issue at hand (mis-aligned old touchscreens) does revolve around which candidated is placed where on a list set up by local election officials, blurring the differnce between those two totally separate activities is indeed herring-mongering.
And the media is concentrating on the botched joke?
No, the media's concentrating on the guy who swears he'd never besmirch military people saying, "get yourself educated so you won't get stuck in Iraq." This is same guy who, despite loving every person who ever wore a uniform (heh!) is famous for his "reminiscent of Ghengis Kahn" speech to a congressional committe. Over completely hearsay anecdotes. Oh well. It doesn't really matter. Even if he didn't mean what he said, his own party knows that it sure sounds like he meant what he said, and are begging him to STFU, avoid any more campaign support stops, etc. There's a little more to it than "the media" concentrating on just how to parse his BS comment. Better to ask how his own idealogical comrades are parsing it - and you can just tell by the un-inviting to public events exactly what they think. He'd really help more by just fading away for the next several days, that's for sure.
How hard would it be to find a few that could be co-opted?
If, by "co-opted," you mean, "smart enough to realize that better in-house search tech helping analysts at the agency is actually a very important thing," then no doubt, yes, they'll find some. The ones that are idealogically opposed to that agency improving its ability to render accurate intel for policy makers will avoid that sort of work - even though doing so is sort of self-destructive. If they'd rather work on better code to more accurately target AdSense ads to the remaining three slashdot users that aren't blocking that bit of javascript, then no doubt they'll have that option, even if they're given the chance to work on the wildly more interesting spooky stuff.
Gee - no chance that one of the largest and smartest pattern-searching, data-mining, quicky-quicky-lightening-fast-search technology operations on the planet might be asked to provide some expertise or operational help to one of the agencies that needs exactly that kind of horsepower to help keep people from being killed?
Of course Google has contact with the CIA. And NRO, and NSA, and DIA, and the FBI, and probably most state-level agencies, as well. It would be shocking, really, if they did not.
And how does Google taking a stand on privacy in any way contradict the vested interest they have in the CIA more effectively sorting through unthinkable amounts of data and drawing better, more useful conclusions? Google is based in the US. When the economy takes a hard hit (as it did following 9/11), Google is hit hard, too. It's perfectly reasonable for them to be both "no evil(tm)" corporate citizens and also help a vital government agency better do what they're supposed to do. You know, the agency that so many people have complained about being unable to effectively sort through lots of information, communicate across agencies, and draw more workable conclusions? How can input from, and influence by Google-type people possibly be a bad thing, in the grand scheme of things?
The people at the CIA are just people. Google can afford very, very smart people that the agency can only get as consultants, or as hires that aren't worried about what they make. Farming out some high-end IT expertise to an entity that has an enormous profit incentive - in other venues - to be very good at it and competitively innovative is simply good policy.
You are aware that one of the complaints about Diebold systems in 2004 was that they pushed out software updates to some areas right before the election, right?
Right before the election, and still without any ability to correlate a given machine to the district in which it would be actually used, and before the machine was loaded with the slate of candidates. Unless Diebold's also working on time travel technology - which I think they'd use a little more creatively than by mis-aligning displays on old, refurbished, and over-used displays - that's a total red herring.
A computer science professor from Maryland has researched the issue and has not found a single instance where a Democratic vote was recorded when a Republican was selected on screen. Random chance would say the error would swing both ways...
A computer science professor studied - as a statistical sample - two anecdotes that were reported by newspaper in Florida, YESTERDAY?
Hey Kim, why don't you send a few folks down to Florida to see what's going on then come back and say those words with a straight face
Which words will the people from Florida be saying? How about: there were some heavily used machines with out of synch touch screens, and as soon as poll operating officials saw the problem, those machines were taken out of use. Something like that, perhaps? Or do you have evidence that a voter who pointed out the problem with the display was told "too bad" and that they had to live with the machine's display registration problem. No? I see.
Unfortunately, from the sound of things, their role will only be involved in voter intimidation or access to polling places.
So, since you have heard the "sound of things" and how 800 federal agents are out intimidating voters, perhaps you can point to an example of that? Just one? No? I see.
If people wonder, sometimes, why a lot of the leftier side of the demographic doesn't seem to get elected, or sounds particularly shrill while talking about the process, you've just provided a grand example. By the way, you can purchase commercial-size rolls of aluminum foil really cheap at Costco.