Sorry jeffersonebell - this isn't a personal attack, but more of a general community gripe. I've made spelling mistakes as well, but this is an entirely different word. The more that wrong words and bad spelling is used in online forums, the more people are exposed to those words, the more people will spell the word incorrectly.
Plus, this can make for a real pain in the ass when you're searching for an article title, but can't find it because it was spelled wrong.
I can do the s/sight/cite/ in my head, but other people can't, and most spidering engines won't.
This is one of the concepts behind XP, is that programmers are more efficient when they work normal hours. "XP defines OverTime as the time spent working that makes a programmer less productive in the long term."
Published Sunday, December 3, 2000, in the Miami Herald
IF THE VOTE WERE FLAWLESS...
Gore would have had the edge in glitch-free Florida balloting, based on a Herald analysis
BY ANABELLE de GALE, LILA ARZUA AND CURTIS MORGAN
cmorgan@herald.com
SEE ALSO
Examining Florida's discarded ballots
How the study was done
If no one had ever heard of hanging chads, if the butterfly ballot had never flown, if no voter had bungled in the booth, who would have won Florida and the presidency of the United States?
In a race so tight, it may never be known for certain. But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537.
It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ''the will of the people.''
It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.
Reaction to the analysis, from the two camps locked in an exhausting and tense legal battle, was radically different. The Gore campaign called it ''compelling evidence,'' and the Bush campaign dismissed it as ''statistical voodoo.''
One fundamental flaw, Republicans argued, was an assumption that every voter actually intended to cast a vote in the presidential race. A large majority of ballots in the disputed counties of Palm Beach and Duval didn't even have a dimple on them, said Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew.
''If you want to divine voters' intent when there isn't even a mark on the ballot, you'd do better to hire a palm reader than a statistical analyst,'' he said.
But Stephen Doig, a professor at Arizona State University who crunched the numbers for The Herald, defended the analysis.
For example, he said, even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that 90 percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip the race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore -- about 1,400 votes.
Doig described it as a matter of analyzing extremes. He started his analysis with the assumption that every one of the 185,000 discarded ballots represented an intent to vote in the presidential race. The other extreme, he said, is the Bush contention that none of them should count.
''That extreme is the reality that we have, that Gov. Bush won by a razor-thin 500 votes,'' Doig said. ''I'm no psychic. I don't know what they really intended to do, but I do know that almost anywhere in that margin, Gore wins. You can argue about where in the range it should be.''
Political analysts were mixed on what the numbers mean.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies, said he considered the analysis open to questions.
''That is a reasonable assumption for the purposes of analysis,'' he said. ''For the purposes of politics, it's highly questionable. In most precincts, that may well be true, but in some precincts it may not be, and that's a critical difference.''
Still, Sabato said he found the end result ''perfectly reasonable.''
''What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' he said. ''But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''
And all statistical and anecdotal evidence he'd seen, he said, indicated that Bush probably collected more of those -- the ones that counted.
Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said there were too many variables in the analysis ''to feel comfortable.''
''Inferring what the voters' intent was, I have a real problem with people who can say they can do that,'' she said.
No one, of course, can accurately assess what 185,000 voters intended to do with their discarded ballots, but in purely statistical terms, there are consistent trends.
The Herald determined those trends by examining precinct results from each of the state's 67 counties. Those results showed that statewide, at least 185,000 ballots were discarded, either as undervotes (ballots that for whatever reason didn't record a vote for president) or overvotes (ballots where more than one candidate was selected).
Those ballots then were assigned to a candidate in the same proportion as the candidate had received in each precinct as a whole. Under that analysis, Bush would have received about 78,000, or 42 percent, of the uncounted votes, and Gore would have received more than 103,000, or 56 percent. The remaining 4,000 or so would have gone to the minor candidates.
That assumption of voting patterns is based on a concept long accepted by pollsters -- that the opinions of a small percentage of people can be extrapolated to project the views of a larger group. In this case, however, the projection uses a larger group, generally from 90 to 98 percent of the successful votes in precincts, to project the intent of a few.
The result: Gore ahead by 23,000 votes, a comfortable lead in comparison to the official statistical tossup, though still narrow enough to trigger the state's automatic recount, which kicks in when elections finish closer than one-half of one percent.
The analysis also confirmed that the voters in Democratic precincts had a far greater chance of having their ballots rejected. Only one of every 40 ballots was rejected in precincts Bush won, while one of every 27 ballots was rejected in precincts Gore won.
In addition, Doig, a former Herald research editor who now holds the Knight chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism specializing in computer-assisted reporting, found a number of other interesting trends:
* Voting machinery played a large role in rejections.
Of the 51 precincts in which more than 20 percent of ballots were rejected, 45 of them used punch cards -- 88 percent. Of the 336 precincts in which more than 10 percent were tossed out, 277 used punch cards -- 78 percent.
The overall rejection rate for the 43 counties using optical systems was 1.4 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 24 punch-card counties was 3.9 percent. That means that voters in punch-card counties, which included urban Democratic strongholds such as Broward and Palm Beach counties, were nearly three times as likely to have their ballots rejected as those in optical counties.
* In dozens of Florida precincts, at least one out of every four ballots were discarded as having no vote or too many votes for president.
* Nearly half of Gore's margin, more than 11,000 extra votes, would come from Palm Beach County alone. The other counties that would give him more than 1,000 new votes are Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval and Pinellas. Of those, Bush carried only Duval in the official tabulation.
* Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages, had 31 percent of the uncounted ballots, but only 12 percent of the total votes cast.
* Only 11 percent of precincts statewide recorded no discarded ballots.
* Only one county would actually switch preferences for president -- tiny Madison, which officially went to Bush, but would have gone to Gore under The Herald's projections. More than 10 percent of Madison's 4,000-plus ballots were rejected.
QUESTION OF FAIRNESS
The analysis provides some evidence to bolster the Bush camp's claim that recounting some counties but not others is unfair to the Texas governor. For example, the analysis shows that if discarded ballots were to be reconsidered in Collier County, which Bush won, Bush might pick up about 1,000 net votes. Bush might also gain about 600 net votes in Lee County and about 500 net votes in Nassau County.
In all, the analysis shows Bush gaining in 43 counties. But many of those counties are rural and have relatively low numbers of votes, and the gains would be quickly eclipsed by the numbers Gore might pick up in the 23 mostly urban counties where the analysis shows he would show a net gain.
In only one county does the analysis show that neither candidate would gain on his rival. That is Volusia County, where the ballots already have undergone a controversial manual recount.
REFLECTION OF VOTE
Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for the vice president's campaign, said the results bolstered Gore's contention that the official results did not fairly and accurately reflect the vote.
''The outcome of the presidential election rests on determining the will of the voters of Florida, and this new evidence makes it extremely hard for the Bush forces to ignore the people's will,'' he said.
Eskew, the spokesman for the Texas governor, flatly rejected it as ''hocus-pocus'' and ''an utterly unfounded scientific process.''
In addition to mistakenly assuming that voters handing in undervotes intended to vote, he said, the analysis also ignores the notion that many of the double-punched ballots may have been ''protest votes,'' intentionally spoiled.
''That is a deeply flawed model that suggests statistical voodoo,'' he said.
There are, however, ways of analyzing the data that attempt to account for the possibility of protest votes and deliberate nonparticipation in the presidential balloting. Even so, Gore hypothetically still would have collected enough votes to change the election's outcome.
Historically, about 2 percent of votes in presidential races don't count -- most often because voters skipped the race or their marks weren't recorded by counting machines. Florida's rejection rate this year, however, was around 3 percent.
The analysis tested even higher percentages of nonvotes, ranging from 10 to 90 percent of the 185,000 discarded ballots. In each instance, Gore still earned more votes.
The analysis also attempted to discard all undervotes as intentional nonvotes, counting only overvotes. That analysis was hampered by the fact that 37 counties did not differentiate in their reports between ballots discarded as undervotes and those discarded as overvotes.
But based on results from the 30 counties that did, 43 percent of the uncounted votes were undervotes. If that pattern held statewide and every undervote were tossed out, ignoring the entire chad issue, Gore still would have a 13,000-vote margin.
Assuming the overvotes are protests and counting just the undervotes leads to a similar result.
STANDARDS CRUCIAL
That analysis underscores, however, the importance of the debate over the standards for judging ballots with dimpled chads, swinging door chads and other variations.
For example, if the undervotes are counted using the experience of Broward's manual recount, where approximately 20 percent of the undervote ballots yielded a vote, Gore's net statewide total rises by about 1,500 -- enough to overcome Bush's 537-vote official margin.
But if the standard used is the much stricter one that prevailed in Palm Beach County, where only 5 percent of the undervote ballots yielded votes, Gore's statewide net gain would be about 390 votes, not enough to overcome Bush's lead.
That, however, is the only scenario in which Gore would not overtake Bush. Overall, the analysis suggests generally that Gore's gains would top Bush's, a challenge to assertions by the Bush camp that the Texas governor would prevail in a statewide recount.
Republicans and some analysts didn't think the results were strong enough to stand up.
ANALYSIS REVIEWED
MacManus, the USF political scientist, echoed Eskew's concerns about protest and apathetic votes. She also said there were such wide variances in the size and the social and economic mix of precincts that it would be too difficult to extrapolate accurate results.
''In polls, you're used to a margin of error,'' she said. ''Here, there's no room for margins of error.''
Others saw more validity in the analysis.
''You can always raise criticisms. You can never know for sure,'' said Alan Agresti, a professor of statistics at the University of Florida who reviewed the methodology. ''But I think when you do it at a very fine level like this, at the precinct level, it's very interesting, a good projection of what could have happened.''
Jim Kane, an independent pollster based in Fort Lauderdale, agreed that the analysis contained many uncertainties. But he also said, ''I'm not shocked that Gore would have won.''
In fact, Kane, Agresti and Doig agreed that the formula probably was conservative, awarding Bush too large a share of the pie. The biggest problems with rejected ballots were in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods statewide -- areas that voted heavily Democratic. That could suggest that the same group, which included a larger percentage of first-time and less educated voters, might have made similar errors in all precincts.
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, also found the numbers persuasive.
''It's perfectly scientific, if it's presented in a sense as the most massive statewide poll in Florida,'' he said. ''Sure, it's fun and games, but it says something about what would have happened if everybody knew how to vote.''
Check your facts. The report you're most likely referring to was on an
individual county - the entire state
Of course, their article has been taken down (from only 3 days ago), and
replaced with one of Jeb standing tall about to make his "state of the
state" address.
So I grabbed the
cached page from Google, and it says that Al Gore won by a "slim
23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified
victor by the wispy margin of 537."
for some reason, slashdot won't render this link either - it's as though this report was meant to be buried... I'll just paste the text in below, and it will be archived in slashdot forever...
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.herald.co m/content/archive/news/elect2000/decision/104268.h tm
The reason that frat-head is in office is because the
good-old boy network
got involved along every step of the way - including the supreme court.
This simply means that the "commander-in-thief" will be handing out our 1.6 trillion dollars to protect himself from a bruised ego with more sites like:
this is not a troll comment, I'm serious. In life, there is plenty of activity, and depending on what you choose to do, there can be plenty of plot and storyline.
If game designers want to make games more realistic, then they won't give away the details to a murder quite so easily. Instead, they would create an environment where interacting with your randomly occuring bot-peers, (or other real-life people) would be the only way to get more goods/info/whatever to accomplish your goals. This is why Quake is so addictive, you don't always know about the troll hiding under the bridge. If I wanted a game that I could memorize and play blind-folded, I'd break out my NES again.
let me clarify on my previous statement - to the bozos who were alarmed by my posting:
I didn't want their creepy fingers prying into my files - allow me to add that these were my own personal files, and copies of remote CVS repositories. I destroyed nothing that was of any value to the employer, they were going to wipe the drive and install NT anyways.
Just don't mention "rm -rf" when you're near the microphone...
Hah - I actually tried this the day I left my former employer. It was only my desktop workstation, but I didn't want their creepy fingers prying into my files, so I did su -l, rm -rf / - the command returned an error claiming I didn't have a lock on a certain process, and it couldn't complete the command.
If I hadn't been lazy, it would have been nice to code up some wipe tool that was used in Cryptonomicon...
to make it one better...
a set worker accidentally spilled hot grits on the beowulfed cray machine that was embedding encrypted DeCSS code into the 3-d rendering of Natalie Portman in the Episode II love scenes with Anakin...
I once heard ESR say in regards of controlling your business "if you own a piece of software that is
crucial to running your business, and you don't control that software,
you don't control your business."
...this just in: we've spoken Miguel de Icaza personally who has denied this vicuous hoax. Reportedly, Helix will continue to be the name, they didn't really mean it.
translation: the slashdot audience hates the name, we can just claim it a hoax and keep the old name.... keep thinking of a better one.
Or, is this just to compete with Xaero - upon startx the little monkey will do a backflip and shoot you with his rail gun....
Yes - NASA doesn't want to lose their funding due to broadcasting pornographic ship's logs. They can cover this up just long enough to conduct the necessary experiments, then when the FOIA kicks in to open the door, they have the whole thing wrapped up and in video stores.
PS: Yes, we drive big trucks now (F-150), and I'd never own a small car, even if it were given to me!
hmm, so you're trying to solve the problem through escalation. Do you believe that your accident was made worse because the other driver was in a SUV? Now you're just placing 2 more large vehicles on the road which increases the chances that people in small cars get killed instead of maimed.
When will Jeep Cherokee owners start switching to something bigger because they're afraid of being hit by a suburban or a semi?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree highly on this.
Sorry jeffersonebell - this isn't a personal attack, but more of a general community gripe. I've made spelling mistakes as well, but this is an entirely different word. The more that wrong words and bad spelling is used in online forums, the more people are exposed to those words, the more people will spell the word incorrectly.
Plus, this can make for a real pain in the ass when you're searching for an article title, but can't find it because it was spelled wrong.
I can do the s/sight/cite/ in my head, but other people can't, and most spidering engines won't.
You forgot their biggest ally.
If you add the Zend optimization engine, it's even faster if you're doing alot of loops and such.
Yeah, I like Zend too, but there are other PHP caches available as well, such as:
Haven't played with them myself, but I've heard plenty of good things about APC.
This is one of the concepts behind XP, is that programmers are more efficient when they work normal hours. "XP defines OverTime as the time spent working that makes a programmer less productive in the long term."
See also: OverTime
You missed it - they already made a movie out of it.... :)
Published Sunday, December 3, 2000, in the Miami Herald
IF THE VOTE WERE FLAWLESS...
Gore would have had the edge in glitch-free Florida balloting, based on a Herald analysis
BY ANABELLE de GALE, LILA ARZUA AND CURTIS MORGAN
cmorgan@herald.com
SEE ALSO
Examining Florida's discarded ballots
How the study was done
If no one had ever heard of hanging chads, if the butterfly ballot had never flown, if no voter had bungled in the booth, who would have won Florida and the presidency of the United States?
In a race so tight, it may never be known for certain. But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537.
It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ''the will of the people.''
It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.
Reaction to the analysis, from the two camps locked in an exhausting and tense legal battle, was radically different. The Gore campaign called it ''compelling evidence,'' and the Bush campaign dismissed it as ''statistical voodoo.''
One fundamental flaw, Republicans argued, was an assumption that every voter actually intended to cast a vote in the presidential race. A large majority of ballots in the disputed counties of Palm Beach and Duval didn't even have a dimple on them, said Bush spokesman Tucker Eskew.
''If you want to divine voters' intent when there isn't even a mark on the ballot, you'd do better to hire a palm reader than a statistical analyst,'' he said.
But Stephen Doig, a professor at Arizona State University who crunched the numbers for The Herald, defended the analysis.
For example, he said, even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that 90 percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip the race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore -- about 1,400 votes.
Doig described it as a matter of analyzing extremes. He started his analysis with the assumption that every one of the 185,000 discarded ballots represented an intent to vote in the presidential race. The other extreme, he said, is the Bush contention that none of them should count.
''That extreme is the reality that we have, that Gov. Bush won by a razor-thin 500 votes,'' Doig said. ''I'm no psychic. I don't know what they really intended to do, but I do know that almost anywhere in that margin, Gore wins. You can argue about where in the range it should be.''
Political analysts were mixed on what the numbers mean.
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies, said he considered the analysis open to questions.
''That is a reasonable assumption for the purposes of analysis,'' he said. ''For the purposes of politics, it's highly questionable. In most precincts, that may well be true, but in some precincts it may not be, and that's a critical difference.''
Still, Sabato said he found the end result ''perfectly reasonable.''
''What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' he said. ''But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''
And all statistical and anecdotal evidence he'd seen, he said, indicated that Bush probably collected more of those -- the ones that counted.
Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, said there were too many variables in the analysis ''to feel comfortable.''
''Inferring what the voters' intent was, I have a real problem with people who can say they can do that,'' she said.
No one, of course, can accurately assess what 185,000 voters intended to do with their discarded ballots, but in purely statistical terms, there are consistent trends.
The Herald determined those trends by examining precinct results from each of the state's 67 counties. Those results showed that statewide, at least 185,000 ballots were discarded, either as undervotes (ballots that for whatever reason didn't record a vote for president) or overvotes (ballots where more than one candidate was selected).
Those ballots then were assigned to a candidate in the same proportion as the candidate had received in each precinct as a whole. Under that analysis, Bush would have received about 78,000, or 42 percent, of the uncounted votes, and Gore would have received more than 103,000, or 56 percent. The remaining 4,000 or so would have gone to the minor candidates.
That assumption of voting patterns is based on a concept long accepted by pollsters -- that the opinions of a small percentage of people can be extrapolated to project the views of a larger group. In this case, however, the projection uses a larger group, generally from 90 to 98 percent of the successful votes in precincts, to project the intent of a few.
The result: Gore ahead by 23,000 votes, a comfortable lead in comparison to the official statistical tossup, though still narrow enough to trigger the state's automatic recount, which kicks in when elections finish closer than one-half of one percent.
The analysis also confirmed that the voters in Democratic precincts had a far greater chance of having their ballots rejected. Only one of every 40 ballots was rejected in precincts Bush won, while one of every 27 ballots was rejected in precincts Gore won.
In addition, Doig, a former Herald research editor who now holds the Knight chair at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism specializing in computer-assisted reporting, found a number of other interesting trends:
* Voting machinery played a large role in rejections.
Of the 51 precincts in which more than 20 percent of ballots were rejected, 45 of them used punch cards -- 88 percent. Of the 336 precincts in which more than 10 percent were tossed out, 277 used punch cards -- 78 percent.
The overall rejection rate for the 43 counties using optical systems was 1.4 percent. The overall rejection rate for the 24 punch-card counties was 3.9 percent. That means that voters in punch-card counties, which included urban Democratic strongholds such as Broward and Palm Beach counties, were nearly three times as likely to have their ballots rejected as those in optical counties.
* In dozens of Florida precincts, at least one out of every four ballots were discarded as having no vote or too many votes for president.
* Nearly half of Gore's margin, more than 11,000 extra votes, would come from Palm Beach County alone. The other counties that would give him more than 1,000 new votes are Broward, Miami-Dade, Duval and Pinellas. Of those, Bush carried only Duval in the official tabulation.
* Palm Beach, home of the infamous butterfly ballot, and Duval, where candidates' names were spread across two pages, had 31 percent of the uncounted ballots, but only 12 percent of the total votes cast.
* Only 11 percent of precincts statewide recorded no discarded ballots.
* Only one county would actually switch preferences for president -- tiny Madison, which officially went to Bush, but would have gone to Gore under The Herald's projections. More than 10 percent of Madison's 4,000-plus ballots were rejected.
QUESTION OF FAIRNESS
The analysis provides some evidence to bolster the Bush camp's claim that recounting some counties but not others is unfair to the Texas governor. For example, the analysis shows that if discarded ballots were to be reconsidered in Collier County, which Bush won, Bush might pick up about 1,000 net votes. Bush might also gain about 600 net votes in Lee County and about 500 net votes in Nassau County.
In all, the analysis shows Bush gaining in 43 counties. But many of those counties are rural and have relatively low numbers of votes, and the gains would be quickly eclipsed by the numbers Gore might pick up in the 23 mostly urban counties where the analysis shows he would show a net gain.
In only one county does the analysis show that neither candidate would gain on his rival. That is Volusia County, where the ballots already have undergone a controversial manual recount.
REFLECTION OF VOTE
Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for the vice president's campaign, said the results bolstered Gore's contention that the official results did not fairly and accurately reflect the vote.
''The outcome of the presidential election rests on determining the will of the voters of Florida, and this new evidence makes it extremely hard for the Bush forces to ignore the people's will,'' he said.
Eskew, the spokesman for the Texas governor, flatly rejected it as ''hocus-pocus'' and ''an utterly unfounded scientific process.''
In addition to mistakenly assuming that voters handing in undervotes intended to vote, he said, the analysis also ignores the notion that many of the double-punched ballots may have been ''protest votes,'' intentionally spoiled.
''That is a deeply flawed model that suggests statistical voodoo,'' he said.
There are, however, ways of analyzing the data that attempt to account for the possibility of protest votes and deliberate nonparticipation in the presidential balloting. Even so, Gore hypothetically still would have collected enough votes to change the election's outcome.
Historically, about 2 percent of votes in presidential races don't count -- most often because voters skipped the race or their marks weren't recorded by counting machines. Florida's rejection rate this year, however, was around 3 percent.
The analysis tested even higher percentages of nonvotes, ranging from 10 to 90 percent of the 185,000 discarded ballots. In each instance, Gore still earned more votes.
The analysis also attempted to discard all undervotes as intentional nonvotes, counting only overvotes. That analysis was hampered by the fact that 37 counties did not differentiate in their reports between ballots discarded as undervotes and those discarded as overvotes.
But based on results from the 30 counties that did, 43 percent of the uncounted votes were undervotes. If that pattern held statewide and every undervote were tossed out, ignoring the entire chad issue, Gore still would have a 13,000-vote margin.
Assuming the overvotes are protests and counting just the undervotes leads to a similar result.
STANDARDS CRUCIAL
That analysis underscores, however, the importance of the debate over the standards for judging ballots with dimpled chads, swinging door chads and other variations.
For example, if the undervotes are counted using the experience of Broward's manual recount, where approximately 20 percent of the undervote ballots yielded a vote, Gore's net statewide total rises by about 1,500 -- enough to overcome Bush's 537-vote official margin.
But if the standard used is the much stricter one that prevailed in Palm Beach County, where only 5 percent of the undervote ballots yielded votes, Gore's statewide net gain would be about 390 votes, not enough to overcome Bush's lead.
That, however, is the only scenario in which Gore would not overtake Bush. Overall, the analysis suggests generally that Gore's gains would top Bush's, a challenge to assertions by the Bush camp that the Texas governor would prevail in a statewide recount.
Republicans and some analysts didn't think the results were strong enough to stand up.
ANALYSIS REVIEWED
MacManus, the USF political scientist, echoed Eskew's concerns about protest and apathetic votes. She also said there were such wide variances in the size and the social and economic mix of precincts that it would be too difficult to extrapolate accurate results.
''In polls, you're used to a margin of error,'' she said. ''Here, there's no room for margins of error.''
Others saw more validity in the analysis.
''You can always raise criticisms. You can never know for sure,'' said Alan Agresti, a professor of statistics at the University of Florida who reviewed the methodology. ''But I think when you do it at a very fine level like this, at the precinct level, it's very interesting, a good projection of what could have happened.''
Jim Kane, an independent pollster based in Fort Lauderdale, agreed that the analysis contained many uncertainties. But he also said, ''I'm not shocked that Gore would have won.''
In fact, Kane, Agresti and Doig agreed that the formula probably was conservative, awarding Bush too large a share of the pie. The biggest problems with rejected ballots were in low-income, mostly minority neighborhoods statewide -- areas that voted heavily Democratic. That could suggest that the same group, which included a larger percentage of first-time and less educated voters, might have made similar errors in all precincts.
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, also found the numbers persuasive.
''It's perfectly scientific, if it's presented in a sense as the most massive statewide poll in Florida,'' he said. ''Sure, it's fun and games, but it says something about what would have happened if everybody knew how to vote.''
Check your facts. The report you're most likely referring to was on an individual county - the entire state
Of course, their article has been taken down (from only 3 days ago), and replaced with one of Jeb standing tall about to make his "state of the state" address.
So I grabbed the cached page from Google, and it says that Al Gore won by a "slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537."
for some reason, slashdot won't render this link either - it's as though this report was meant to be buried... I'll just paste the text in below, and it will be archived in slashdot forever... http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.herald.co m/content/archive/news/elect2000/decision/104268.h tm
The reason that frat-head is in office is because the good-old boy network got involved along every step of the way - including the supreme court.
Isn't that a similar story to how the Pentium 4 is Slower Than Its Predecessor?
Gee - this upgrade every year thing just doesn't seem to be working out for these monopolistic companies...
If this thing is *so* damn cool, then why is he your ex? ;)
This simply means that the "commander-in-thief" will be handing out our 1.6 trillion dollars to protect himself from a bruised ego with more sites like:
Perhaps I'll go out and get domains like: bush-has-no.info, bush-is-a-wannabe.pro, etc.
that's where random lightning strikes come into play... stir things up and make them more interesting...
this is not a troll comment, I'm serious. In life, there is plenty of activity, and depending on what you choose to do, there can be plenty of plot and storyline.
If game designers want to make games more realistic, then they won't give away the details to a murder quite so easily. Instead, they would create an environment where interacting with your randomly occuring bot-peers, (or other real-life people) would be the only way to get more goods/info/whatever to accomplish your goals. This is why Quake is so addictive, you don't always know about the troll hiding under the bridge. If I wanted a game that I could memorize and play blind-folded, I'd break out my NES again.
it will mean that hannibal will be able to replicate his favorite dish...
From this last picture taken before landing, you can see that some sentient being intentionally commandeered the spacecraft's controls.
This is probably to blind us from realizing that it's re-launching to invade packed with micro-organisms intent on feasting on human flesh
A little "Dewey defeats Truman" anyone?
I wonder what clock speed the HAL 9000 ran at?
let me clarify on my previous statement - to the bozos who were alarmed by my posting:
I didn't want their creepy fingers prying into my files - allow me to add that these were my own personal files, and copies of remote CVS repositories. I destroyed nothing that was of any value to the employer, they were going to wipe the drive and install NT anyways.
Just don't mention "rm -rf" when you're near the microphone ...
Hah - I actually tried this the day I left my former employer. It was only my desktop workstation, but I didn't want their creepy fingers prying into my files, so I did su -l, rm -rf / - the command returned an error claiming I didn't have a lock on a certain process, and it couldn't complete the command.
If I hadn't been lazy, it would have been nice to code up some wipe tool that was used in Cryptonomicon...
to make it one better...
a set worker accidentally spilled hot grits on the beowulfed cray machine that was embedding encrypted DeCSS code into the 3-d rendering of Natalie Portman in the Episode II love scenes with Anakin...
I once heard ESR say in regards of controlling your business "if you own a piece of software that is crucial to running your business, and you don't control that software, you don't control your business."
Hmm - well, it seems as HGTTG the movie came out about 4 years before Ender's Game the book, but that second date may be a little misleading.
...this just in: we've spoken Miguel de Icaza personally who has denied this vicuous hoax. Reportedly, Helix will continue to be the name, they didn't really mean it.
translation: the slashdot audience hates the name, we can just claim it a hoax and keep the old name.... keep thinking of a better one.
Or, is this just to compete with Xaero - upon startx the little monkey will do a backflip and shoot you with his rail gun....
is sex
Yes - NASA doesn't want to lose their funding due to broadcasting pornographic ship's logs. They can cover this up just long enough to conduct the necessary experiments, then when the FOIA kicks in to open the door, they have the whole thing wrapped up and in video stores.
Gee, the story seems much more like it's derived straight from Brazil.
PS: Yes, we drive big trucks now (F-150), and I'd never own a small car, even if it were given to me!
hmm, so you're trying to solve the problem through escalation. Do you believe that your accident was made worse because the other driver was in a SUV? Now you're just placing 2 more large vehicles on the road which increases the chances that people in small cars get killed instead of maimed.
When will Jeep Cherokee owners start switching to something bigger because they're afraid of being hit by a suburban or a semi?