Okay... I see your point, sort of. But it all sounds really suspect from outside. I'll tell you how it is here in Canada and perhaps you'll understand why I'm so confused.
We have an apolitical Chief Electoral Officer, responsible through the Speaker of the House of Commons (a "Roberts Rules" referee, not an agenda driver, as your House Speaker is) to the Governor General, who is the representative of the British Crown in Canada. This individual, through an apolitical, part-salaried, part-volunteer (especially on election days) staff that makes up Elections Canada, is responsible to see that fair and equitable voting practices are carried out across the whole country. Our system isn't perfect either but ballot and procedure standards are the same across the whole country and we have mechanisms and federally-regulated processes for voting-day registrations, all of which involve checks and balances between the volunteers and representatives from each candidate in each riding (that's "District" in American-ese) and all of which work relatively well, even when a particular election gets controversial enough to result in cascades of last minute registrations.
In light of this, when we see the circus that's gone on now for two straight presidential elections in your country, we're inclined to hold our heads and shake them, trying to get rid of the painful confusion: "How can it be so hard to get right?" I know some of the reasons: most notably the level of local control all your little bailiwicks insist on retaining and the sheer number of individual offices you vote for all at the same time.
But still...
Our exit polls are never as wrong as many of yours were on Election Night '04. Are Americans a different species that things that work with other inhabitants of earth don't work there? I can't imagine that to be the case. I would have thought that we as Canadians, your nearest neighbours should be the most similar to you in voting and polling habits of any others on the planet but all these anomalies show up. The only reasonable conclusion we can come to is that something has gone horribly wrong in your system.
We only hope you fix it before you self-destruct or before some illegitimately elected tyrant in your country plunges us all into disaster by pressing some button or other that we all grew up in fear that his predecssors would push.
And as to the WA gubernatorial race in '04 (pudge mentioned it) -- I agree that it was almost as dirty as the overall presidential vote. Certainly it was as acrimonious.
Okay... I get it on that point. It could just be a coincidence, and a plausible one.
But what about all the other apparent coincidences? Are all of them similarly discountable? The parent poster that I was responding to, in his/her summary dismissal of TFA only deals with one part of it. The lack alongside his/her mocking dismissal is what drove me to post my question in the first place. Okay, so RFK's other policies may be laughable but shouldn't his facts be dealt with in their entirety, and without any ad hominem innuendo and ridicule?
What about all the affidavits about precinct irregularities? What about the numerous judicial reprimands handed to Ohio's Secretary of State? What about the felonious conduct of the Tom Noe? What about the horribly unbalanced allocation of voting machines [that actually work] in urban precincts? This even made the news up here in Canada and made me sure, the day after the election that dirty tricks were used to skew the result.
If you're gonna talk/act as though you were the worldwide guardian of freedom and democracy and don't do your darndest to support freedom and democracy in your own country, you're open to charges of the appearance of hypocrisy if not the hypocrisy itself. I just wanna see you guys get the best election possible, and not necessarily the "best election [partisan] money can buy", the same as I would wish for any other body of voters. I think two presidential elections in a row have gone somewhere else entirely -- and this from someone who doesn't agree politically very much with any of the three chaps who've stood for the office in those two contests.
I'll grant you that a lot of RFK's numbers may be a little inflated, artificial or puffed up. But what about anomalies like rural voters in southern Ohio voting for Bush and against an anti-gay marriage-amendment ballot measure in the state? That doesn't make any sense at all on any criteria that I can figure out. Have you got any hypothesis to explain that?
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is. How could they have been so wrong twice in a row? The compelling paragraph for me was:
?'"Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. "I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats," [emphasis mine] he says. "I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong." In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling."'
not an American, just a neighbour and a confused one at that...ank
...anything but a drinks coaster and in our house we save them for exactly that purpose. It's taken Google this long to decide that some version of AOL is badware (but not deciding what their medium is for yet)? Hmmm... could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of this first real post-dot-gone equity-market darling?
oh i have been a beggar, and will be one again...ank
I was going to include a link but now I can't find it...
But I know I heard an interview on radio regarding Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 which didn't require any training at all. The only way to lose it was to have an interview and expect it to render both people's speech in real time. That was a mistake.
From what I can tell, the comparison table here would go something like this:
RFID features longer range and a small uniform, pre-encoded response. (e.g. ID Badge at work)
HP's new chip features shorter range and a larger response, selectable from a large pool of responses, and probably the pool of responses is changeable even after deployment.
As another poster said, the short ranges at which this thing would work will alleviate a lot of people's privacy concerns. Still I gotta say that tagging people is still tagging people.
mooooo...(NOT!)...ank
...so afraid of disorder, we turn it into a God... (Bruce Cockburn, Gospel of Bondage)
Cross-reference both of those made-for-radio essays with Bob Cringely's latest article. It all leads me to believe that the best "solution" to apply to Net Neutrality at this point is more "benign neglect" -- and on top of that, my paranoia operates at such a hair-trigger that I wonder what other intrusive regulations are going to get slid in along with whatever legislation gets put forward and will certainly not be vetoed by the smirking chimp.
Other than your comment about taking off your tinfoil hat, I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Someone apologized on this page for mis-quoting Niemöller but the principle is the same. Chipping people in exchange for the right to work is to succumb to a significant component of was obviously wrong with society in the movie, Gattaca.
Someone, please, shut VeriChip up before the really repressive countries in the world get hold of their technology and decide that it's just one more tool to manage what would otherwise be unruly populations. The good news is that with responsible government, mandatory chipping is still pretty unlikely. But as government gets less responsive...
The discourse is going exactly the way you stated it but it also includes, "Chip yourself so if you forget what your meds are someone else can figure it out for you." "What was a 'chip' again?"
"Just do it, it's for the best." "Oh. Okay."
I don't mind admitting that my knowledge of things legal is distinctly limited. Since I am a Canadian, my knowledge of things American-legal can be taken to be even more limited.
On the other hand, I don't believe I quoted PJ out of context, so if there's a misunderstanding in the story either she (a paralegal) doesn't get it (less likely) or I mis-cited her (possible, but I tried to be careful).
Still, I was already chuckling from one of the other replies to the AnonCow grandparent who said that slashdot doesn't understand things-legal: someone else who won was awarded costs that included his own legal fees. Ah yes, slashdot doesn't understand things legal...
Flamebait? I don't think so. I detected a strong hint of whisky and weaponry there (rye and iron, er..., wry irony... oh never mind, my meds are starting to kick in).
It's all there on groklaw, starting with the players and just go on from there.
Even the lawyers go here, so it's GOING to be more than the pejorative stuff you wanted to go beyond.
cheers...ank
* Every new box pre-installed with Windows $100 * Every new box pre-installed with Office $200 * Having the option of following up an OS upgrade with an Office Upgrade that renders old file formats unreadable: priceless.
Everyone else's position:
* Looking for (and finding) tools to make OpenOffice compatible with any imaginable disabled-persons' enabling tool: probably as little as 10 minutes * Off-sourcing production of a filter to convert current word document files to OpenDoc: a little embarassment * Having government-provided and -required documents in a format that will never be submerged by near-simultaneous OS and Office Tools upgrades: priceless.
The cost to a society of having a monopolist control the format that its documents are published in is as desirable as it would be to have to continue paying the Gutenberg family for the privilege of having your book printed in the 21st century.
Okay, uploading may be illegal, but I was under the opinion that it was "uploading to somebody else's machine" that was illegal. Downloading and leaving stuff on your own boxen where someone else can find it is okay.
Hey, wait a minute... This could mean that participating in a casual torrent (as opposed to a provider-sanctioned one) runs counter to the statute already because in that case your machine _is_ uploading parts of it to someone else's machine.
As to amending the law, I'll bet you're right -- unless we start flooding our MPs with requests to the contrary. The good news is, you don't need a postage stamp to send mail to your MP.
...to say that the lower judge shouldn't have said anything about file sharing being legal or not. Canadian law very clearly institutes a surcharge on recordable media so that the act of downloading is NOT A CRIME.
If it becomes a crime, it'll be because Canadian legislators forgot what they did last time, perhaps stimulated by some nameless freebies we'll never know about.
For now, this is over, but if the amnesiac Commons goes back on its own word, the ball game will start all over again. arggghhhh...ank
Other Hofstadter titles, like Metamagical Themas, are also worth looking at, but none more than "Le Ton Beau de Marot", especially... no I'll leave them unmentioned. There are so many facets that come up to surprise one so sweetly that to mention any of them will be to diminish the reader's pleasures of discovery.
I can't claim to be pi-lingual but it's a fun concept...ank
I have read the article and I wish to make two criticisms of it. Then I wish to point out the absolute lack of well-reasoned dialogue on this point.
1. benna writes:
The premise of Intelligent Design is that the universe is so unimaginably complex and perfect that it must have been created by an intelligent designer.
Anyone catch the "gotcha"? What ID proponent is going to say that the universe is so "unimaginably... perfect"? This is a classic but cloaked "argumentum ad hominem - abusive": make ID'ers look like extremists so it's "obvious" to everyone that they're stupid before they even look at what is actually being said.
2. benna also cites a lack of ID articles in peer-reviewed journals as evidence that nobody in the "real" scientific community believes in ID.
This is a trifle circular. The tools used by those who oppose theistic explanations for the world (including ID) include belittling, caricaturizing, marginalizing, black-listing, not to mention monopolizing money and prestige to the exclusion of all other options from serious consideration. Faced with the scientistic forces arrayed these bodies of ideas, is it any wonder that nobody who wants to be taken seriously later will give articles with an ID point of view serious attention? This is less about ideas "winning or losing" in the scientific marketplace and more about ideas being sand-bagged and informally kept from being heard in that marketplace.
If you don't believe this possible, look at what happened in a slightly different field to Immanuel Velikovsky when what he said didn't line up with accepted scientific orthodoxy in the fields Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos speak to -- whether or not you accept the contents of his books as reasonable alternative explanations.
As to my subject line: it seems that very few people can make a dispassionate, deal-with-the-facts comment on this subject either in favour of or in opposition to Intelligent Design. It struck me that there are more than one kind of fundamentalism and many slashdotters who would sooner die than be called fundamentalists merely suffer from fundamentalism in a different direction.
but not very surprising either. I will say he does stay on-message time after time in his life.
He's become a Software-Baggins: it's now possible to predict perfectly what he will say in answer to any question without the burden of asking him in the first place.
This is the core of my concerns about using Mono. The tiger is inviting us all into the cage, waiting for the gate to slam shut: signal for the beginning of the feast.
Additionally, if "Anonymous Coward" could provide some names, then this wouldn't be just score:0 but 5:Informative.
Vancouver BC has a climate only slightly cooler than Seattle, WA.
Victoria BC is often warmer than Vancouver, though also often windier. It also thinks it's still part of Britain -- forgivable as their climate resembles that of Sussex pretty closely. If you like the west coast of Washington and Oregon, southwestern BC would be a comfy place for you.
Someone sent a link around at work from some website in Iceland that I can no longer locate. It was mostly a collection of mostly Ann Coulter snippets. I found it amazing that such a personage got any regular air time. Up here she'd be interviewed once by Arthur Black (not realizing that she was considered a source for light Saturday morning humour) and forgotten about. You want real insight and political commentary? Try Allan Gregg vs. Chantal Hebert!
Apolitically but mandatorily funded public media (like the CBC or the BBC -- which George Orwell wrongly feared) might improve your news landscape down there. It's not perfect either, but it's the biggest thing I've missed every time I travel in America (which gets less and less every year).
Probably only those who were -born- in one of the "axis of evil" countries, since a passport does reveal birthplace.
Someone praised Canada for back-bone a couple posts back. Dream on. Most of our federal political parties want to go along with that inflammatory ineffective missile defense system in the face of a population that's mostly split between those who oppose it and those who have no clear opinion.
Also, see other posts about "new movies" with "new ideas".
And yeah, Pixar. But these intelligent chimps already decided not to keep distributing Pixar's product. I'll bet the re-sign bonus would break Disney's reserves.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay... I see your point, sort of. But it all sounds really suspect from outside. I'll tell you how it is here in Canada and perhaps you'll understand why I'm so confused.
We have an apolitical Chief Electoral Officer, responsible through the Speaker of the House of Commons (a "Roberts Rules" referee, not an agenda driver, as your House Speaker is) to the Governor General, who is the representative of the British Crown in Canada. This individual, through an apolitical, part-salaried, part-volunteer (especially on election days) staff that makes up Elections Canada, is responsible to see that fair and equitable voting practices are carried out across the whole country. Our system isn't perfect either but ballot and procedure standards are the same across the whole country and we have mechanisms and federally-regulated processes for voting-day registrations, all of which involve checks and balances between the volunteers and representatives from each candidate in each riding (that's "District" in American-ese) and all of which work relatively well, even when a particular election gets controversial enough to result in cascades of last minute registrations.
In light of this, when we see the circus that's gone on now for two straight presidential elections in your country, we're inclined to hold our heads and shake them, trying to get rid of the painful confusion: "How can it be so hard to get right?" I know some of the reasons: most notably the level of local control all your little bailiwicks insist on retaining and the sheer number of individual offices you vote for all at the same time.
But still...
Our exit polls are never as wrong as many of yours were on Election Night '04. Are Americans a different species that things that work with other inhabitants of earth don't work there? I can't imagine that to be the case. I would have thought that we as Canadians, your nearest neighbours should be the most similar to you in voting and polling habits of any others on the planet but all these anomalies show up. The only reasonable conclusion we can come to is that something has gone horribly wrong in your system.
We only hope you fix it before you self-destruct or before some illegitimately elected tyrant in your country plunges us all into disaster by pressing some button or other that we all grew up in fear that his predecssors would push.
And as to the WA gubernatorial race in '04 (pudge mentioned it) -- I agree that it was almost as dirty as the overall presidential vote. Certainly it was as acrimonious.
cheers...ank
Cool. Just asking questions. Thanks for the substantive response...ank
Okay... I get it on that point. It could just be a coincidence, and a plausible one.
But what about all the other apparent coincidences? Are all of them similarly discountable? The parent poster that I was responding to, in his/her summary dismissal of TFA only deals with one part of it. The lack alongside his/her mocking dismissal is what drove me to post my question in the first place. Okay, so RFK's other policies may be laughable but shouldn't his facts be dealt with in their entirety, and without any ad hominem innuendo and ridicule?
What about all the affidavits about precinct irregularities?
What about the numerous judicial reprimands handed to Ohio's Secretary of State?
What about the felonious conduct of the Tom Noe?
What about the horribly unbalanced allocation of voting machines [that actually work] in urban precincts? This even made the news up here in Canada and made me sure, the day after the election that dirty tricks were used to skew the result.
If you're gonna talk/act as though you were the worldwide guardian of freedom and democracy and don't do your darndest to support freedom and democracy in your own country, you're open to charges of the appearance of hypocrisy if not the hypocrisy itself. I just wanna see you guys get the best election possible, and not necessarily the "best election [partisan] money can buy", the same as I would wish for any other body of voters. I think two presidential elections in a row have gone somewhere else entirely -- and this from someone who doesn't agree politically very much with any of the three chaps who've stood for the office in those two contests.
cheers...ank
And there's still the central claim that exit polls are the gold standard in every other country about how honest and fair an election is. How could they have been so wrong twice in a row? The compelling paragraph for me was:
?'"Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. "I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats," [emphasis mine] he says. "I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong." In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling."'
not an American, just a neighbour and a confused one at that...ank
...anything but a drinks coaster and in our house we save them for exactly that purpose. It's taken Google this long to decide that some version of AOL is badware (but not deciding what their medium is for yet)? Hmmm... could this be a sign of the beginning of the end of this first real post-dot-gone equity-market darling?
oh i have been a beggar, and will be one again...ank
But I know I heard an interview on radio regarding Dragon Naturally Speaking version 9 which didn't require any training at all. The only way to lose it was to have an interview and expect it to render both people's speech in real time. That was a mistake.
cheers...ank
RFID features longer range and a small uniform, pre-encoded response. (e.g. ID Badge at work) HP's new chip features shorter range and a larger response, selectable from a large pool of responses, and probably the pool of responses is changeable even after deployment.
As another poster said, the short ranges at which this thing would work will alleviate a lot of people's privacy concerns. Still I gotta say that tagging people is still tagging people.
mooooo...(NOT!)...ank
...so afraid of disorder, we turn it into a God... (Bruce Cockburn, Gospel of Bondage)
Cross-reference both of those made-for-radio essays with Bob Cringely's latest article. It all leads me to believe that the best "solution" to apply to Net Neutrality at this point is more "benign neglect" -- and on top of that, my paranoia operates at such a hair-trigger that I wonder what other intrusive regulations are going to get slid in along with whatever legislation gets put forward and will certainly not be vetoed by the smirking chimp.
Someone apologized on this page for mis-quoting Niemöller but the principle is the same. Chipping people in exchange for the right to work is to succumb to a significant component of was obviously wrong with society in the movie, Gattaca.
Someone, please, shut VeriChip up before the really repressive countries in the world get hold of their technology and decide that it's just one more tool to manage what would otherwise be unruly populations. The good news is that with responsible government, mandatory chipping is still pretty unlikely. But as government gets less responsive...
The discourse is going exactly the way you stated it but it also includes,
"Chip yourself so if you forget what your meds are someone else can figure it out for you."
"What was a 'chip' again?"
"Just do it, it's for the best."
"Oh. Okay."
cheers...ank
I don't mind admitting that my knowledge of things legal is distinctly limited. Since I am a Canadian, my knowledge of things American-legal can be taken to be even more limited.
...ank
On the other hand, I don't believe I quoted PJ out of context, so if there's a misunderstanding in the story either she (a paralegal) doesn't get it (less likely) or I mis-cited her (possible, but I tried to be careful).
Still, I was already chuckling from one of the other replies to the AnonCow grandparent who said that slashdot doesn't understand things-legal: someone else who won was awarded costs that included his own legal fees. Ah yes, slashdot doesn't understand things legal...
There's irony everywhere!
Flamebait? I don't think so. I detected a strong hint of whisky and weaponry there (rye and iron, er..., wry irony... oh never mind, my meds are starting to kick in).
cheers...ank
It's all there on groklaw, starting with the players and just go on from there. Even the lawyers go here, so it's GOING to be more than the pejorative stuff you wanted to go beyond. cheers...ank
Microsoft's position:
* Every new box pre-installed with Windows $100
* Every new box pre-installed with Office $200
* Having the option of following up an OS upgrade with an Office Upgrade that renders old file formats unreadable: priceless.
Everyone else's position:
* Looking for (and finding) tools to make OpenOffice compatible with any imaginable disabled-persons' enabling tool: probably as little as 10 minutes
* Off-sourcing production of a filter to convert current word document files to OpenDoc: a little embarassment
* Having government-provided and -required documents in a format that will never be submerged by near-simultaneous OS and Office Tools upgrades: priceless.
The cost to a society of having a monopolist control the format that its documents are published in is as desirable as it would be to have to continue paying the Gutenberg family for the privilege of having your book printed in the 21st century.
nuff said...ank
Gotta check it out. People are trying to join the League of Long-Haired smellies left, right and centre.
Most amusing titles claimed by various members so far include Colonel Panic and Seargeant at Under-arms
cheers...ank
Sounds like an "I am earlier than thou!" war to me...ank
Okay, uploading may be illegal, but I was under the opinion that it was "uploading to somebody else's machine" that was illegal. Downloading and leaving stuff on your own boxen where someone else can find it is okay.
Hey, wait a minute... This could mean that participating in a casual torrent (as opposed to a provider-sanctioned one) runs counter to the statute already because in that case your machine _is_ uploading parts of it to someone else's machine.
As to amending the law, I'll bet you're right -- unless we start flooding our MPs with requests to the contrary. The good news is, you don't need a postage stamp to send mail to your MP.
what a tangled web...ank
...to say that the lower judge shouldn't have said anything about file sharing being legal or not. Canadian law very clearly institutes a surcharge on recordable media so that the act of downloading is NOT A CRIME.
If it becomes a crime, it'll be because Canadian legislators forgot what they did last time, perhaps stimulated by some nameless freebies we'll never know about.
For now, this is over, but if the amnesiac Commons goes back on its own word, the ball game will start all over again. arggghhhh...ank
I can't claim to be pi-lingual but it's a fun concept...ank
I have read the article and I wish to make two criticisms of it. Then I wish to point out the absolute lack of well-reasoned dialogue on this point.
1. benna writes:
Anyone catch the "gotcha"? What ID proponent is going to say that the universe is so "unimaginably... perfect"? This is a classic but cloaked "argumentum ad hominem - abusive": make ID'ers look like extremists so it's "obvious" to everyone that they're stupid before they even look at what is actually being said.2. benna also cites a lack of ID articles in peer-reviewed journals as evidence that nobody in the "real" scientific community believes in ID.
This is a trifle circular. The tools used by those who oppose theistic explanations for the world (including ID) include belittling, caricaturizing, marginalizing, black-listing, not to mention monopolizing money and prestige to the exclusion of all other options from serious consideration. Faced with the scientistic forces arrayed these bodies of ideas, is it any wonder that nobody who wants to be taken seriously later will give articles with an ID point of view serious attention? This is less about ideas "winning or losing" in the scientific marketplace and more about ideas being sand-bagged and informally kept from being heard in that marketplace.
If you don't believe this possible, look at what happened in a slightly different field to Immanuel Velikovsky when what he said didn't line up with accepted scientific orthodoxy in the fields Worlds in Collision and Ages in Chaos speak to -- whether or not you accept the contents of his books as reasonable alternative explanations.
As to my subject line: it seems that very few people can make a dispassionate, deal-with-the-facts comment on this subject either in favour of or in opposition to Intelligent Design. It struck me that there are more than one kind of fundamentalism and many slashdotters who would sooner die than be called fundamentalists merely suffer from fundamentalism in a different direction.
cheers...ank
but not very surprising either. I will say he does stay on-message time after time in his life.
He's become a Software-Baggins: it's now possible to predict perfectly what he will say in answer to any question without the burden of asking him in the first place.
Hey! It's better than a Sackville-Baggins...ank
This is the core of my concerns about using Mono. The tiger is inviting us all into the cage, waiting for the gate to slam shut: signal for the beginning of the feast.
Additionally, if "Anonymous Coward" could provide some names, then this wouldn't be just score:0 but 5:Informative.
cheers...ank
Vancouver BC has a climate only slightly cooler than Seattle, WA.
Victoria BC is often warmer than Vancouver, though also often windier. It also thinks it's still part of Britain -- forgivable as their climate resembles that of Sussex pretty closely. If you like the west coast of Washington and Oregon, southwestern BC would be a comfy place for you.
cheers...ank
Apolitically but mandatorily funded public media (like the CBC or the BBC -- which George Orwell wrongly feared) might improve your news landscape down there. It's not perfect either, but it's the biggest thing I've missed every time I travel in America (which gets less and less every year).
cheers...ank
Probably only those who were -born- in one of the "axis of evil" countries, since a passport does reveal birthplace.
Someone praised Canada for back-bone a couple posts back. Dream on. Most of our federal political parties want to go along with that inflammatory ineffective missile defense system in the face of a population that's mostly split between those who oppose it and those who have no clear opinion.
cheers...ank
Also, see other posts about "new movies" with "new ideas".
And yeah, Pixar. But these intelligent chimps already decided not to keep distributing Pixar's product. I'll bet the re-sign bonus would break Disney's reserves.
cheers...ank