His whole argument is based on the idea that a "War on Terror" can be won. How do you win a war against a thing? The simple fact is that the longer we prosecute this 'war' the more people we will motivate to attack back using terrorist tactics, such as suicide bombing, sniping, truck bombing, hit and run, road side bombs.
Think about it. If your home town were occupied by Iraqis, or Mexicans, or even West Virginians, and they conducted door to door raids, bombed out whole cities, imprisoned thousands without charge, tortured your brother, destroyed your infrastructure, left you with 2-6 hours of electricity per day for a few years on end, wouldn't you fight back using whatever tools you had?
This war, as defined, cannot be won. If we redefine it for what it really is: a war to establish political and military dominance in the key oil producing part of the world during the next several decades of declining oil production, then sure we can pull it off. But at what cost?
Wouldn't it be nice it they could come home now? They can't we'll be staying at those 14 permanent bases and the worlds largest embassy for many years to come. After all we do have to make sure all that oil is used for the maximum profits of our oil companies.
I remember back before there were 1 million USERS on the internet. Then came AOL, and it's been downhill ever since.
Actually that's not fair. The internet has become the ultimate knowledge resource that I believed, back then, that it could be, except with banner ads and pop-ups.
Way back then I could read sci.physics or rec.arts.drwho as fast as my 2400 buad modem could download the text. Who could possibly need a 9600 baud modem? No one can actually read THAT fast!
In other words: If diebold can't manage to secure their source code from theft then how the fuck can they be trusted to secure your vote from theft.
Wrong question. They cannot be trusted. They themselves are the most likely culprit in stolen elections. These machines do not have security flaws, they have election stealing features.
When you put a memory card of the type that votes are stored on, into the slot the frist thing that any of these machines do is to check the card for a particular type of file with a proprietary programing language, and it RUNS the program. Add this to the fact that audit log entries are not uniquely numbered and that a hundreds of such cards are plugged into the tabulator on election night...
I'm a simple mechanical engineer, and the implications are not lost on me. You put a program on the card that moves votes from candiate X and Y to candidate Z until candidate Z has 51.5% of the votes. Then erase any entries of the alteration from the audit log. Finally the program deletes itself. The election is fixed. There is no way to prove it. Even if there are paper ballots to be recounted, they almost NEVER are, there are massive red tape roadblocks preventing it. For instance paper ballots were not ever counted in Ohio in '04. The 'recount' was simply a process of asking the central tabulator what the total was again.
I'm going on the record right now with my prediction. This year California will be targeted to be fixed. It is the state with the most House seats up for grabs, so it is the place to fix if the republicans intend to keep the House.
But every sane person in the world already has Internet zone security level set to High so who is gonna be affected by this?
Education on computer security issues does not follow directly from sanity. There are plenty of perfectly sane people who wouldn't know an "internet zone security level" if you smacked upside the head with it.
The reason that computer security matters is not to safeguard MY pc from attack it's to safeguard the computers of idiots from attack so we don't have multitudes of zombie networks being controlled by organized crime.
The problem with cluster bombs is that for EVERY one that is dropped, between 10% and 30% of the bomblets DO NOT DETONATE. These bomblets are left behind and are likely to detonate when they are disturbed. So the site of a cluster bomb attack is littered with what are essentially anti-personnel mines. The bomblets tend to be brightly colored and about the size of a tennis ball. A high poportion of victims of these left behind bomblets are children.
Unfortunately these weapons are not completely banned. They should be. It is still legal under the laws of war to use them against military targets. In my opinion the use of a weapon that you know will leave behind a legacy of further deaths to civilians is an abomination. DU is another weapon of this sort that comes to mind.
August 17, 18 & 19, 2006 - Spamhaus implements a blacklisting "jihad" on any ip addresses and networks it can find even remotely associated with e360. The listings created at this time include SBL26394, SBL45581, SBL45582, SBL45583, SBL45584, SBL45585, SBL45586, SBL45587, SBL45648, SBL45649, SBL45651, SBL45652 and SBL45685. Spamhaus includes references to 'Atriks' and 'Brian Haberstroh', ROSKO-listed entities, in an effort to continue defaming e360 even though the listed networks are not associated with these entities in any way whatsoever. Spamhaus adds a plethora of new misinformation into their blacklists by including several networks that have never been used for commercial email, those that have never been under control of e360 and networks that were only used for double-confirmed email messages, Spamhaus' stated compliance standard. Spamhaus even listed Mr. Linhardt's ip address associated with his cable modem connection as his home office!
IANAL
Naturally the e360 website cannot be totally trusted for veracity regarding this case, but spamhaus does't seem to be behaving rationally. In fact the above described actions seems to reek of revenge.
e360 is alleging defamation. Spamhaus should have come to court and said, "our list includes IPs that fit the following criteria. Here are our records that show that the IP in question met the criteria, our clients make a decision to block emails based on that list. This is why it is in the public interest for this information to be known." If e360 did in fact meet the criteria no defamation would have taken place, and the case would be dismissed. Once this precident was established spamhaus could counter-sue any other such frivolous legal attacks. Of course if spamhaus really did mistakenly list e360, as e360 claims, then scew 'em. They shouldn't have been such pricks about the whole thing. In order to responsibly administer a list like spamhaus it seems you would need to be very thorough about record keeping and documentation. If you aren't you DESERVE to be sued.
note on defense against a defamation claim from wikipedia:
Truth
Libel is studied in forensics. In many, though not all, legal systems, statements presented as fact must be false to be defamatory. Proving to be true is often the best defense against a prosecution for libel. Statements of opinion which cannot be proven true or false will likely need to apply some other kind of defense. The use of the defence of justification however has dangers. If the defendant libels the plaintiff and then runs the defence of truth and fails he may be said to have aggravated the harm.
In some systems, however, truth alone is not a defense.[citation needed] It is also necessary in these cases to show that there is a well founded public interest in the specific information being widely known, and this may be the case even for public figures.
Public interest is not "that which the public is interested in".[citation needed]
The most effecitive lies are usually mixed in with lots of truth. They are much harder to spot that way. A bit of truth that the listener hears may convince them that the lie, which they may know less about, is in fact true. Therefore a google-truthiness rating of 89% could be given to a very deceptive and manipulative comment.
Personally I think the president, hell all elected officials should have to swear a binding oath (as part of the oath of office) that in their official capacity they will tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That way when we find out that they were blowing smoke up our ass about weapons of mass destruction we can impeach the thugs for perjury.
There is a big difference between getting screwed because you didn't do your research, and screwing someone by deliberately witholding or falsifying information. I don't know if this was traded on an exchange before Newscorp bought it. IF it was and IF he is telling the truth the SEC could get involved... If not there may still be a case that some stockholders were defrauded.
"I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual replacing the old subchaper entitled PHYSICAL PLAN/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUPACTIVITES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time for "pool" activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g.. coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single one-time exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom tissure strategy...."
Since this would be a great device for launching payloads to... well... anywhere on the planet, then I would guess that the most likely group that would want to target this would be us (assuming it was built in another country). The good ole USA would not tolerate an rail-gun that might fall into the hands of the turrurists!
On another note, can you imagine the sound of a sonic boom made by a Mach 23 projectile? Blooooody Hell!
Anyway it seems to me like the real challenge would be to prevent the projectile from tearing itself to pieces in flight. You'd want it to be inherently stable. For instance if the center of pressure from the drag is behind the center of gravity the drag will tend to keep it going in a straight line. Unfortunately much of the drag will be concentrated at the very tip where the shock is generated and will cause the projectile to tend towards tumbling out of control.
Of course the ballots in the box are the truest count of the vote. That goes without saying. Unfortunately many of these voting machines don't actually have ballots in a box, they have electrons in a chip.
Exit pollsters stand outside the polling place and ask people who they voted for. In Ohio and New Mexico in 2004 many precincts had exit polling data that matched VERY closely with the officical result, while in other precincts the data was the polling data was skewed in a particular. Each time these 'errors' occured the advantage went to Bush. I would say that these very suspicious results were not proof of wrong doing but they are more than enough to merit real investigation. The way to insure a good election is to conduct an audit of a statistically significant # of the precincts, if you find a mistake, you widen the audit. Of course an audit can only occur if there is a physical record to comapre with the computer result.
Remember these machines are not flawed, the problems aren't bugs or security holes, they are features. The diebold macines, including the voting machines and the central tabulator automatically look for code and execute it automatically. You can read a detailed analysis in the Hursti Report (google it). It is very disturbing.
On slightly different note, Kenneth Blackwell (Sec. State in Ohio) was going to destroy all of the physical ballots from '04, but was stopped by a court order.
"I do hope you guys change your minds and decide to report the holes to us and take away $500 per vulnerability instead of using them for botnets," Ruderman said.
The two hackers laughed off the comment. "It is a double-edged sword, but what we're doing is really for the greater good of the Internet, we're setting up communication networks for black hats," Wbeelsoi said.
The hackers claim to have 30 exploits that they do not intend to disclose to mozilla. Then Wbeelsoi says he intends to use the exploits maliciously, "we're setting up communication networks for black hats." The public bragging is plenty to establish probably cause. The second statement shows clear intent to break the law. There is no reason why these people should not be arrested and a warrant issued for all of their computers. At the very least they should be investigated, and when they sell the exploit to the russian or israeli mafia for big bucks then these boys could spend some hard time.
Everyone is stuck on the recharging because 900kW is a LOT of JUICE!
Say you have a house and all of the following is on at the same time:
10 100W bulbs
1 400 W computer
1 750 W microwave
1 1kW washer/dryer
and through in another kW for good measure
that house is sucking 3.15Kw
if you had a whole neighborhood of about 260 houses all running the same appliances that would be an equivalant load to charging one car. Obviously the grid isn't designed for lots of people to be charging their cars like that so these would have to be charged at special charging stations.
Are you really going to trust Joe Schmoe to attach the power line to his car that will carry 900kW? Each of these electric "gas" stations would need its own damn substation to keep its bank of ultracapacitors charged during the busy commute hours.
The difference is that an official ballot IS the vote. It's a legal document containing a person's vote. A reciept has no particular legal standing. If an audit is conducted and the paper ballots disagree with the computer tabulation then the ballot clearly takes precidence. If all you have is a printed out receipt the answer is not clear at all.
Paper ballots are an absolute MUST. Without them the ONLY record of a vote is on a chunk of flash memory or a hard drive. It's just bits. But a paper ballot (notice I'm saying ballot not reciept) is only the first step. Many states and counties conduct no auditing at all!!! Some have laws that put significant barriers in the way of auditing! In order to trust an election regardless of the device used to vote you have to conduct an audit of a statistically significant group of precincts. If ANY irregularity is found you have to expand the audit. Audits must be conducted in the open and precinct level data including breakouts for vote type (regular, absentee, provisional) must be made available to the public.
Slashdotters are supposed to be technically competent... How many of you know that the Diebold machines have a code interpreter using the propriitory accu-basic language that automatcially looks for and runs code on any inserted memory card. These cards are where vote data is stored and transported. Accubasic documentation is not terribly hard to find and card writers are commercially available. So when voting is done the cards are transported to a central tabulator. The cards are inserted. ANY accubasic code is executed. The votes are uploaded and tabulated. If this doesn't scare you what would? In my opinion these machines are not vulnerable to exploitation, they are DESIGNED to be exploited. Diebold audit logs are not sequentially numbered so altering the audit log is no more difficult than deleting unwanted entries.
don't believe me? google the Hursti report or look for it on the blackboxvoting.org website.
Remember that Gonzales is the man who authored this administration's policy saying that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to our current crop of war prisoners. This is the man who authored the administration's policy that redefined torture to exclude many acts which previously were considered torture. When you hear George Bush say "We do not torture" he is using the new definition that excludes waterboarding, sticking sterile needles under fingernails, mock executions...
We all know that this isn't about child porn. It's about access to data. It's about having a tool to eliminate political opponents. Scott Ridder, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and outspoken opponent of the run up to the war was accused of having child porn. The accusation was utterly baseless, but it served to eliminate him from the debate at the key moment. These people hate our freedom, and they have become very good at taking it away.
A democrat house and senate can hold hearings and investigations. A democrat house and senate can impeach and try these thugs for their crimes. Please, please, please go to the polls in November and vote these so called republicans OUT. The choice is clear, we can have a police / surveillance state, or we can have a faint glimmer of hope.
I'm reading the Silmarillion right now for the first time, and I think it is nothing short of astonishing. In some ways it is a far greater achievement than the Lord of the Rings.
I'm a bit of an amature scholar of celtic mythology and I have read translations of works ranging from the Tain Bo Cuailnge and the Mabinogion to the Triads of Britain and the Historia Regum Britanniae.
Tolkien created one of the only works of fiction that captures the structure and feel of these complied ancient texts. That's not to say that it has a tight narrative structure or is easy to read. It was not intended to be. The LOTR is structurally very much like the 12th century Aurthurian romances (which were really the earliest novels.) It is a relatively linear quest narrative. The Silmarillion, on the other hand, attempts and succeeds in emulating a very different and older form of literature.
To suggest that the Silmarillion is mearly a collection of notes complied by a hack is only a display of misunderstanding. For instance, the collection of stories we know today as the Red Branch saga are a bunch of smaller stories collected around a central narrative. How Cuchullain got his name, Cuchullain and Emer, The Wasting Sickness of Cuchullain, etc. all provide back story to the Tain bo Cuailnge (the cattle raid of Cooley.) Just like the early chapters in the Silmarillion setup the central narrative of the Silmarills. Tolkien wrote these stories over the course of his adult life. Like other works of ancient mythology it was compliled later by someone other than the original author.
If you liked the Silmarillion for more than the fact that it was backstory to the LOTR, the I would highly recommened these works of real mythology:
The Thomas Kinsella translation of The Tain,
The Jeffery Ganz translation of the Mabinogion,
Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men, and
The Seamus Heany translation of Beowulf.
It's the rest of having to pay to treat all of you wheezing, lard-butt, diabetic, couch potatoes that is putting such a drag on our economy. Year after year the cost of providing health insurance to employees goes up. This year 3%, last year 25%, the year before 12%... In 2001 our company had a great year. We all got bonuses and raises. In 2004, and 2005 we had equally good years except now healthcare costs ate up all the extra money. No bonuses, no raises. In fact since 2001 we've only given 2 paltry "cost of living" increases that have covered less than half of the actual incresed cost of living.
So in a very real way diabetic, smoking, lard-butts (DSLB) are the reason that my standard of living is actually going down each year. Before you cry "troll!!" It is not entirely the fault of the DSLBs. The libertarian in me says the obesity epidemic is caused by DSLB's individual choices on a daily basis. The anarchist in me says that corporate capitalism has learned how to exploit our own biology to sell us more profitable food. Diet soda's actually stimulate hunger and are frequently packaged with greasy potato chips. Carbohydrates, sugars, fats, all cause pleasurable chemical reactions in you that encourage you to go out and buy more carbs, sugar, and fat, which in turn makes you sick.
So is our sucky ecomony (which they keep telling me is so strong) the fault of bad personal decisions or evil corporate greed? Yes.
You think other newspapers and media outlets aren't vetted for content? Give me a break. You can't offend the advertisers! You can't criticise Israel. Don't ask tough questions about anything national security realted or you might seem unpatriotic! I swear the white house press corps didn't ask a single challenging question between September 2000 and May 2004. The CSM has provided consistently solid reporting on all kinds of topics and frequently they print stories that are ignored by the other media altogether. Sure they'll never print something critical about the Christian Science church but I don't give a rats @ss about that. It's nice to have a different perspective. A perspective that hasn't been vetted by the church of the almighty dollar. If you want to see real journalism as good as the CSM you won't find it in the US, you'll have to try the Guardian UK, the Sydney Morning Herald, Haaretz, or the Toronto Sun.
Slashdot Mirror
Big surprise another democrat war monger!
His whole argument is based on the idea that a "War on Terror" can be won. How do you win a war against a thing? The simple fact is that the longer we prosecute this 'war' the more people we will motivate to attack back using terrorist tactics, such as suicide bombing, sniping, truck bombing, hit and run, road side bombs.
Think about it. If your home town were occupied by Iraqis, or Mexicans, or even West Virginians, and they conducted door to door raids, bombed out whole cities, imprisoned thousands without charge, tortured your brother, destroyed your infrastructure, left you with 2-6 hours of electricity per day for a few years on end, wouldn't you fight back using whatever tools you had?
This war, as defined, cannot be won. If we redefine it for what it really is: a war to establish political and military dominance in the key oil producing part of the world during the next several decades of declining oil production, then sure we can pull it off. But at what cost?
Wouldn't it be nice it they could come home now? They can't we'll be staying at those 14 permanent bases and the worlds largest embassy for many years to come. After all we do have to make sure all that oil is used for the maximum profits of our oil companies.
I remember back before there were 1 million USERS on the internet. Then came AOL, and it's been downhill ever since.
Actually that's not fair. The internet has become the ultimate knowledge resource that I believed, back then, that it could be, except with banner ads and pop-ups.
Way back then I could read sci.physics or rec.arts.drwho as fast as my 2400 buad modem could download the text. Who could possibly need a 9600 baud modem? No one can actually read THAT fast!
Forgetabout CSS and standards, forgetabout interface design, bloatware, and other techno-BS...
I wanna know what IE7 has done to improve the internet pr0n experience.
e360 Slashdotted!! (eom)
Education on computer security issues does not follow directly from sanity. There are plenty of perfectly sane people who wouldn't know an "internet zone security level" if you smacked upside the head with it.
The reason that computer security matters is not to safeguard MY pc from attack it's to safeguard the computers of idiots from attack so we don't have multitudes of zombie networks being controlled by organized crime.
The problem with cluster bombs is that for EVERY one that is dropped, between 10% and 30% of the bomblets DO NOT DETONATE. These bomblets are left behind and are likely to detonate when they are disturbed. So the site of a cluster bomb attack is littered with what are essentially anti-personnel mines. The bomblets tend to be brightly colored and about the size of a tennis ball. A high poportion of victims of these left behind bomblets are children. Unfortunately these weapons are not completely banned. They should be. It is still legal under the laws of war to use them against military targets. In my opinion the use of a weapon that you know will leave behind a legacy of further deaths to civilians is an abomination. DU is another weapon of this sort that comes to mind.
Huge apologies for this typo, I did NOT intend to defame anyone by suggesting sex acts. OOOOPS!
Thank you. Come again!
Naturally the e360 website cannot be totally trusted for veracity regarding this case, but spamhaus does't seem to be behaving rationally. In fact the above described actions seems to reek of revenge.
e360 is alleging defamation. Spamhaus should have come to court and said, "our list includes IPs that fit the following criteria. Here are our records that show that the IP in question met the criteria, our clients make a decision to block emails based on that list. This is why it is in the public interest for this information to be known." If e360 did in fact meet the criteria no defamation would have taken place, and the case would be dismissed. Once this precident was established spamhaus could counter-sue any other such frivolous legal attacks. Of course if spamhaus really did mistakenly list e360, as e360 claims, then scew 'em. They shouldn't have been such pricks about the whole thing. In order to responsibly administer a list like spamhaus it seems you would need to be very thorough about record keeping and documentation. If you aren't you DESERVE to be sued.
note on defense against a defamation claim from wikipedia:
well, best may be the wrong word...
The most effecitive lies are usually mixed in with lots of truth. They are much harder to spot that way. A bit of truth that the listener hears may convince them that the lie, which they may know less about, is in fact true. Therefore a google-truthiness rating of 89% could be given to a very deceptive and manipulative comment.
Personally I think the president, hell all elected officials should have to swear a binding oath (as part of the oath of office) that in their official capacity they will tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That way when we find out that they were blowing smoke up our ass about weapons of mass destruction we can impeach the thugs for perjury.
There is a big difference between getting screwed because you didn't do your research, and screwing someone by deliberately witholding or falsifying information. I don't know if this was traded on an exchange before Newscorp bought it. IF it was and IF he is telling the truth the SEC could get involved... If not there may still be a case that some stockholders were defrauded.
"I've been asked to distribute the new regulations regarding office pool displays. The enclosed memo is a new subchapter of the EBGOC Procedure Manual replacing the old subchaper entitled PHYSICAL PLAN/CALIFORNIA/LOS ANGELES/BUILDINGS/OFFICE AREAS/PHYSICAL LAYOUT REGULATIONS/EMPLOYEE INPUT/GROUPACTIVITES.
The old subchapter was a flat prohibition on the use of office space or time for "pool" activities of any kind, whether permanent (e.g.. coffee pool) or one-time (e.g., birthday parties).
This prohibition still applies, but a single one-time exception has now been made for any office that wishes to pursue a joint bathroom tissure strategy...."
Since this would be a great device for launching payloads to... well... anywhere on the planet, then I would guess that the most likely group that would want to target this would be us (assuming it was built in another country). The good ole USA would not tolerate an rail-gun that might fall into the hands of the turrurists!
On another note, can you imagine the sound of a sonic boom made by a Mach 23 projectile? Blooooody Hell!
Anyway it seems to me like the real challenge would be to prevent the projectile from tearing itself to pieces in flight. You'd want it to be inherently stable. For instance if the center of pressure from the drag is behind the center of gravity the drag will tend to keep it going in a straight line. Unfortunately much of the drag will be concentrated at the very tip where the shock is generated and will cause the projectile to tend towards tumbling out of control.
Of course the ballots in the box are the truest count of the vote. That goes without saying. Unfortunately many of these voting machines don't actually have ballots in a box, they have electrons in a chip.
Exit pollsters stand outside the polling place and ask people who they voted for. In Ohio and New Mexico in 2004 many precincts had exit polling data that matched VERY closely with the officical result, while in other precincts the data was the polling data was skewed in a particular. Each time these 'errors' occured the advantage went to Bush. I would say that these very suspicious results were not proof of wrong doing but they are more than enough to merit real investigation. The way to insure a good election is to conduct an audit of a statistically significant # of the precincts, if you find a mistake, you widen the audit. Of course an audit can only occur if there is a physical record to comapre with the computer result.
Remember these machines are not flawed, the problems aren't bugs or security holes, they are features. The diebold macines, including the voting machines and the central tabulator automatically look for code and execute it automatically. You can read a detailed analysis in the Hursti Report (google it). It is very disturbing.
On slightly different note, Kenneth Blackwell (Sec. State in Ohio) was going to destroy all of the physical ballots from '04, but was stopped by a court order.
The hackers claim to have 30 exploits that they do not intend to disclose to mozilla. Then Wbeelsoi says he intends to use the exploits maliciously, "we're setting up communication networks for black hats." The public bragging is plenty to establish probably cause. The second statement shows clear intent to break the law. There is no reason why these people should not be arrested and a warrant issued for all of their computers. At the very least they should be investigated, and when they sell the exploit to the russian or israeli mafia for big bucks then these boys could spend some hard time.
Everyone is stuck on the recharging because 900kW is a LOT of JUICE!
Say you have a house and all of the following is on at the same time:
10 100W bulbs
1 400 W computer
1 750 W microwave
1 1kW washer/dryer
and through in another kW for good measure
that house is sucking 3.15Kw
if you had a whole neighborhood of about 260 houses all running the same appliances that would be an equivalant load to charging one car. Obviously the grid isn't designed for lots of people to be charging their cars like that so these would have to be charged at special charging stations.
Are you really going to trust Joe Schmoe to attach the power line to his car that will carry 900kW? Each of these electric "gas" stations would need its own damn substation to keep its bank of ultracapacitors charged during the busy commute hours.
The difference is that an official ballot IS the vote. It's a legal document containing a person's vote. A reciept has no particular legal standing. If an audit is conducted and the paper ballots disagree with the computer tabulation then the ballot clearly takes precidence. If all you have is a printed out receipt the answer is not clear at all.
Paper ballots are an absolute MUST. Without them the ONLY record of a vote is on a chunk of flash memory or a hard drive. It's just bits. But a paper ballot (notice I'm saying ballot not reciept) is only the first step. Many states and counties conduct no auditing at all!!! Some have laws that put significant barriers in the way of auditing! In order to trust an election regardless of the device used to vote you have to conduct an audit of a statistically significant group of precincts. If ANY irregularity is found you have to expand the audit. Audits must be conducted in the open and precinct level data including breakouts for vote type (regular, absentee, provisional) must be made available to the public.
Slashdotters are supposed to be technically competent... How many of you know that the Diebold machines have a code interpreter using the propriitory accu-basic language that automatcially looks for and runs code on any inserted memory card. These cards are where vote data is stored and transported. Accubasic documentation is not terribly hard to find and card writers are commercially available. So when voting is done the cards are transported to a central tabulator. The cards are inserted. ANY accubasic code is executed. The votes are uploaded and tabulated. If this doesn't scare you what would? In my opinion these machines are not vulnerable to exploitation, they are DESIGNED to be exploited. Diebold audit logs are not sequentially numbered so altering the audit log is no more difficult than deleting unwanted entries.
don't believe me? google the Hursti report or look for it on the blackboxvoting.org website.
Remember that Gonzales is the man who authored this administration's policy saying that the Geneva Conventions don't apply to our current crop of war prisoners. This is the man who authored the administration's policy that redefined torture to exclude many acts which previously were considered torture. When you hear George Bush say "We do not torture" he is using the new definition that excludes waterboarding, sticking sterile needles under fingernails, mock executions...
We all know that this isn't about child porn. It's about access to data. It's about having a tool to eliminate political opponents. Scott Ridder, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and outspoken opponent of the run up to the war was accused of having child porn. The accusation was utterly baseless, but it served to eliminate him from the debate at the key moment. These people hate our freedom, and they have become very good at taking it away.
A democrat house and senate can hold hearings and investigations. A democrat house and senate can impeach and try these thugs for their crimes. Please, please, please go to the polls in November and vote these so called republicans OUT. The choice is clear, we can have a police / surveillance state, or we can have a faint glimmer of hope.
I'm reading the Silmarillion right now for the first time, and I think it is nothing short of astonishing. In some ways it is a far greater achievement than the Lord of the Rings.
I'm a bit of an amature scholar of celtic mythology and I have read translations of works ranging from the Tain Bo Cuailnge and the Mabinogion to the Triads of Britain and the Historia Regum Britanniae.
Tolkien created one of the only works of fiction that captures the structure and feel of these complied ancient texts. That's not to say that it has a tight narrative structure or is easy to read. It was not intended to be. The LOTR is structurally very much like the 12th century Aurthurian romances (which were really the earliest novels.) It is a relatively linear quest narrative. The Silmarillion, on the other hand, attempts and succeeds in emulating a very different and older form of literature.
To suggest that the Silmarillion is mearly a collection of notes complied by a hack is only a display of misunderstanding. For instance, the collection of stories we know today as the Red Branch saga are a bunch of smaller stories collected around a central narrative. How Cuchullain got his name, Cuchullain and Emer, The Wasting Sickness of Cuchullain, etc. all provide back story to the Tain bo Cuailnge (the cattle raid of Cooley.) Just like the early chapters in the Silmarillion setup the central narrative of the Silmarills. Tolkien wrote these stories over the course of his adult life. Like other works of ancient mythology it was compliled later by someone other than the original author.
If you liked the Silmarillion for more than the fact that it was backstory to the LOTR, the I would highly recommened these works of real mythology:
The Thomas Kinsella translation of The Tain,
The Jeffery Ganz translation of the Mabinogion,
Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men, and
The Seamus Heany translation of Beowulf.
Wrong boyo!
It's the rest of having to pay to treat all of you wheezing, lard-butt, diabetic, couch potatoes that is putting such a drag on our economy. Year after year the cost of providing health insurance to employees goes up. This year 3%, last year 25%, the year before 12%... In 2001 our company had a great year. We all got bonuses and raises. In 2004, and 2005 we had equally good years except now healthcare costs ate up all the extra money. No bonuses, no raises. In fact since 2001 we've only given 2 paltry "cost of living" increases that have covered less than half of the actual incresed cost of living.
So in a very real way diabetic, smoking, lard-butts (DSLB) are the reason that my standard of living is actually going down each year. Before you cry "troll!!" It is not entirely the fault of the DSLBs. The libertarian in me says the obesity epidemic is caused by DSLB's individual choices on a daily basis. The anarchist in me says that corporate capitalism has learned how to exploit our own biology to sell us more profitable food. Diet soda's actually stimulate hunger and are frequently packaged with greasy potato chips. Carbohydrates, sugars, fats, all cause pleasurable chemical reactions in you that encourage you to go out and buy more carbs, sugar, and fat, which in turn makes you sick.
So is our sucky ecomony (which they keep telling me is so strong) the fault of bad personal decisions or evil corporate greed? Yes.
You think other newspapers and media outlets aren't vetted for content? Give me a break. You can't offend the advertisers! You can't criticise Israel. Don't ask tough questions about anything national security realted or you might seem unpatriotic! I swear the white house press corps didn't ask a single challenging question between September 2000 and May 2004. The CSM has provided consistently solid reporting on all kinds of topics and frequently they print stories that are ignored by the other media altogether. Sure they'll never print something critical about the Christian Science church but I don't give a rats @ss about that. It's nice to have a different perspective. A perspective that hasn't been vetted by the church of the almighty dollar. If you want to see real journalism as good as the CSM you won't find it in the US, you'll have to try the Guardian UK, the Sydney Morning Herald, Haaretz, or the Toronto Sun.