Far as the Air Force is concerned I'm a generator mechanic, and they aren't interested in having me do anything else. When I get out I've got four free years of college coming to me in Illinois, that'd be when I'd get started.
I trust that if I do not receive the requisite number of $20 bills, there is actually something I can do about it. I can look at my ATM receipt and count the bills and go "Oh, I was supposed to get $100, but instead I got $80", and I can go into the bank and say "You were supposed to give me $100 from my account, but I only received $80", and so on. There are avenues open to me with an ATM that are not with a voting machine.
India outsourcing to the United States? That's, um, actually pretty funny. And good news also, since I'd like to go into a Computer Science related field, but was wary of it previously as I already have an AAS in Electrical-Mechanical Engineering courtesy of the Air Force, and it didn't seem like there was a lot of money or jobs in Computer Science anymore. If that trend is changing, I might give CompSci another look when I get out, but I'm leaning more towards Computer Forensics then IT at the moment.
I trust technology to let me send emails around the workcenter, I trust it to let me play games on my home system, and I trust it to let me write up form and documents and such, related to work. However, I have had more then enough problems with all of those, with corrupted documents, computer troubles related to gaming, problems with the email servers, and so forth, that I do not trust a computer implicitly to save my life or run an election. Computers are great tools, but they are not perfect tools. I frakking love technology, but that doesn't mean I implicitly support it. I also work with technology enough to realize that it is possible to get a computer to do whatever you want it to, if you know what you're doing. That means I've got little to no trust in the reliability of electronic voting machines and vote counting machines, and nobody else should either.
Is tracking who goes where so you can jail American citizens indefinitely for taking a visit to an unapproved country and not reporting to the Party beforehand what the purpose of their visit was a bad thing? Yep! Let's jail all the Muslims, everybody with darker skin, and anyone whose been to a primarily Muslim nation within the last twenty years. Then we can check their backgrounds, just to be sure. Or do you not love America?
I play WoW because, as someone in the military, I make friends and then have to move hundreds or thousands of miles away. With WoW, we not only keep in touch, but we can kill stuff and run around together while keeping in touch. Also, we get to rehash the old IRL in-jokes and confuse the rest of the guild. "Hey look, it's the five minute druid! Too late."
Problem I've been having is that I was a lvl 60 before my wife really started playing, and she hates pvp, instance runs, and groups of more then her and me. Also, with all the experience and playtime I have, I tend to be real fast-moving, and there's a lot of stuff I have ingrained into me that I take for granted, but she's still learning. The difference discourages her, even though I try to reassure her that I had a terrible time when I was getting started (I picked the wrong class, for one), and that even now I still makes mistakes. She takes dying a little too hard. Another problem is that she wants to level our characters up together, which means I have to cut back on the XP I get, even when we're questing together, to keep there from being too great a discrepancy.
So, there can be problems, and we've found that while we both love playing, we're almost happier playing separate from each other.
If the general public has a hard time filling in a circle on a paper (which is how I vote, I'm in the military so I vote absentee), they will have a much harder time using a computer. The self-verification process of a computer is the problem, because the self-verifying process is what's corrupted and prone to hacking. Check out the simple easy sample paper ballot I designed. It's pretty close to what I use when I vote. If somebody can't figure that out, they don't need to be voting.
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g238/jabbausaf/b allot.jpg
So if we're relying on auditing the paper ballots to confirm the accuracy of the electronic vote, why are we using an electronic vote? We'll only use the paper ballots in the event of a problem with the electronic voting? The whole goal of electronic vote hacking is that you do it in such a way that there isn't a problem evident. Additionally, what do you think would happen if somebody got three different vote results, one number from the voting machine, another different number from the vote counter, and a third number from the paper ballot? You wouldn't know if you had all the paper ballots, especially if the number for the paper ballots was less then that of both the counter machine and the voting machine. Chances are that the whole precinct would be thrown out, and if you know it's a precinct that consistently votes dominantly one party or the other, that'd be a perfect way to get rid of a big chunk of opposing votes.
Done right, the biggest benefit of the electronic voting machine is that it totally eliminates ambiguity. No double votes, no half votes, no having to guess at voter intent.
Done correctly, paper voting is the exact same way. I've taken a LOT of multiple choice tests where I haven't had any question of how to use the test.
Glad I found this out before wasting money on the card game.
If I want a good CCG based on an MMORPG, I've got more then a few bad ass City of Heroes decks, with Statesman and Pyrxiah and so forth. That stuff was actually a good deal.
But there is no way you can take on an, say an APC, full of soldiers with automatic weapons and body armor, without anti-personnel explosive or chemical weapons. Or fortifications.
Which is why you don't take on an APC if you don't have the weapons needed for it. That's the basis of asymetric and guerilla warfare. The biggest lesson from the Iraq insurgency, a lesson which was taught by Sun Tzu hundreds of years ago, is that you do not attack your enemy at his strongest point, but at his weakest.
Better find a plot of BLM property and build a bunker and a moat.
Wrong. Find an apartment complex in a crowded city. Safety in numbers. "Here we see the importance of not being seen" and all that.
Plus, during a home invasion, you have a higher chance of you or a family member getting shot in cross-fire, or due to an assailant obtaining one of the many weapons from its storage location or an overpowered family member.
Not if you live alone. Or if you're smart and you have a plan beforehand. And you keep the gun on the other side from where an assailant will come from. Simple tactics. I have one door into my apartment, if I was going to use a handgun for defense I'd have it next to the bed, on the other side from the door.
Between my military training and my study of guerilla and unconventional warfare, I'm unconvinced that a civilian uprising in the US would be doomed to failure, and I'm relatively certain that, if it came down to the wire and the balloon went up, I could make a decent accounting of myself. There's ways around the technology.
As a student of American history, I realize that there are times in our past where things have been as bad as some of the things now are. The difference, I would argue, is that what we've got right now is all the isolated problems from American history, and they're all happening again, at once, and we were supposed to have gotten past all them at this point. Not only that, but back for those old problems, even with the old problems, we were still far and away better then anywhere else. That's not the case anymore. There's countries out there with better health care, better opportunities, better education, better civil rights, better diplomacy, better economy, and the list goes on. America is not the best country anymore. It may still be marginally the big dog, it may still be marginally the most powerful in terms of it's military (which I'm a part of), but in a side by side comparison there's a lot of better places.
Slashdot Mirror
Now we can enjoy the benefits of a merger of two sources of cliche'd derivative crap.
Far as the Air Force is concerned I'm a generator mechanic, and they aren't interested in having me do anything else. When I get out I've got four free years of college coming to me in Illinois, that'd be when I'd get started.
It's not hard to understand, that's why I don't trust electronic voting machines.
I trust that if I do not receive the requisite number of $20 bills, there is actually something I can do about it. I can look at my ATM receipt and count the bills and go "Oh, I was supposed to get $100, but instead I got $80", and I can go into the bank and say "You were supposed to give me $100 from my account, but I only received $80", and so on. There are avenues open to me with an ATM that are not with a voting machine.
India outsourcing to the United States? That's, um, actually pretty funny. And good news also, since I'd like to go into a Computer Science related field, but was wary of it previously as I already have an AAS in Electrical-Mechanical Engineering courtesy of the Air Force, and it didn't seem like there was a lot of money or jobs in Computer Science anymore. If that trend is changing, I might give CompSci another look when I get out, but I'm leaning more towards Computer Forensics then IT at the moment.
I trust technology to let me send emails around the workcenter, I trust it to let me play games on my home system, and I trust it to let me write up form and documents and such, related to work. However, I have had more then enough problems with all of those, with corrupted documents, computer troubles related to gaming, problems with the email servers, and so forth, that I do not trust a computer implicitly to save my life or run an election. Computers are great tools, but they are not perfect tools. I frakking love technology, but that doesn't mean I implicitly support it. I also work with technology enough to realize that it is possible to get a computer to do whatever you want it to, if you know what you're doing. That means I've got little to no trust in the reliability of electronic voting machines and vote counting machines, and nobody else should either.
Is tracking who goes where so you can jail American citizens indefinitely for taking a visit to an unapproved country and not reporting to the Party beforehand what the purpose of their visit was a bad thing? Yep!
Let's jail all the Muslims, everybody with darker skin, and anyone whose been to a primarily Muslim nation within the last twenty years. Then we can check their backgrounds, just to be sure. Or do you not love America?
Iran does have a lot of Uranium. See here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/mines .htm
I play WoW because, as someone in the military, I make friends and then have to move hundreds or thousands of miles away. With WoW, we not only keep in touch, but we can kill stuff and run around together while keeping in touch. Also, we get to rehash the old IRL in-jokes and confuse the rest of the guild.
"Hey look, it's the five minute druid! Too late."
Problem I've been having is that I was a lvl 60 before my wife really started playing, and she hates pvp, instance runs, and groups of more then her and me. Also, with all the experience and playtime I have, I tend to be real fast-moving, and there's a lot of stuff I have ingrained into me that I take for granted, but she's still learning. The difference discourages her, even though I try to reassure her that I had a terrible time when I was getting started (I picked the wrong class, for one), and that even now I still makes mistakes. She takes dying a little too hard. Another problem is that she wants to level our characters up together, which means I have to cut back on the XP I get, even when we're questing together, to keep there from being too great a discrepancy.
So, there can be problems, and we've found that while we both love playing, we're almost happier playing separate from each other.
www.netdragons.com is more fun. I need to get back into that actually.
If the general public has a hard time filling in a circle on a paper (which is how I vote, I'm in the military so I vote absentee), they will have a much harder time using a computer. The self-verification process of a computer is the problem, because the self-verifying process is what's corrupted and prone to hacking. Check out the simple easy sample paper ballot I designed. It's pretty close to what I use when I vote. If somebody can't figure that out, they don't need to be voting.b allot.jpg
http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g238/jabbausaf/
So if we're relying on auditing the paper ballots to confirm the accuracy of the electronic vote, why are we using an electronic vote? We'll only use the paper ballots in the event of a problem with the electronic voting? The whole goal of electronic vote hacking is that you do it in such a way that there isn't a problem evident. Additionally, what do you think would happen if somebody got three different vote results, one number from the voting machine, another different number from the vote counter, and a third number from the paper ballot? You wouldn't know if you had all the paper ballots, especially if the number for the paper ballots was less then that of both the counter machine and the voting machine. Chances are that the whole precinct would be thrown out, and if you know it's a precinct that consistently votes dominantly one party or the other, that'd be a perfect way to get rid of a big chunk of opposing votes.
Done correctly, paper voting is the exact same way. I've taken a LOT of multiple choice tests where I haven't had any question of how to use the test.
Glad I found this out before wasting money on the card game. If I want a good CCG based on an MMORPG, I've got more then a few bad ass City of Heroes decks, with Statesman and Pyrxiah and so forth. That stuff was actually a good deal.
Which is why you don't take on an APC if you don't have the weapons needed for it. That's the basis of asymetric and guerilla warfare. The biggest lesson from the Iraq insurgency, a lesson which was taught by Sun Tzu hundreds of years ago, is that you do not attack your enemy at his strongest point, but at his weakest.
Wrong. Find an apartment complex in a crowded city. Safety in numbers. "Here we see the importance of not being seen" and all that.
Not if you live alone. Or if you're smart and you have a plan beforehand. And you keep the gun on the other side from where an assailant will come from. Simple tactics. I have one door into my apartment, if I was going to use a handgun for defense I'd have it next to the bed, on the other side from the door.
Any problem can be solved if you plan.
http://www.impactguns.com/store/ak47.html Shazaam
m =59440718 Now you too can be Vassily Zaitsev!
And if sniping is more your style, http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/ViewItem.asp?Ite
Maybe you'd rather have a grenade launcher? http://www.impactguns.com/store/dd.html
Between my military training and my study of guerilla and unconventional warfare, I'm unconvinced that a civilian uprising in the US would be doomed to failure, and I'm relatively certain that, if it came down to the wire and the balloon went up, I could make a decent accounting of myself. There's ways around the technology.
As a student of American history, I realize that there are times in our past where things have been as bad as some of the things now are. The difference, I would argue, is that what we've got right now is all the isolated problems from American history, and they're all happening again, at once, and we were supposed to have gotten past all them at this point. Not only that, but back for those old problems, even with the old problems, we were still far and away better then anywhere else. That's not the case anymore. There's countries out there with better health care, better opportunities, better education, better civil rights, better diplomacy, better economy, and the list goes on. America is not the best country anymore. It may still be marginally the big dog, it may still be marginally the most powerful in terms of it's military (which I'm a part of), but in a side by side comparison there's a lot of better places.
They never saw the asteroid coming.
All wars now finished, rebuilding sucks.
First Contact. Confusion made it Last.
The Universe: Banging beginning, explosive finish.
He realized whose face it was.
The mother's voice is strangely sibilant.
Klingon cuisine was not for me.
Plenty of water, but massive monsters.
Annie get your gun... too late.
Helps to be married to a nurse, and to be a trained and experienced diesel generator technician. Nowhere in the world we can't work.
You made me picture "The Postman", when that army is sitting around in the quarry watching Sound of Music. Damn you! I'd forgotten!
On the one hand, that's pretty screwed up. On the other hand, that's still pretty screwed up, but I really really wish I had one. Loved the Watchmen.
That sounds an awful lot like when FOX went from cool to suck. Now they've gone from suck to blow.
Your pet rock is a genius. The only winning move is not to play.