Journal Journal: Science, creationism, Isaac Newton, metaphysics and Harry?
I've been pasting a lot of links here lately and I'm not sure if I'll ever come back and visit, I'd like to.
I've been pasting a lot of links here lately and I'm not sure if I'll ever come back and visit, I'd like to.
at some point, I'm going to need to write my scholarly essay on the evils of electronic voting and mail it out as letters to the editors, letters to the representatives and senators, letters to my friends, etc.
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=219
is politics, I believe
I doubt I'll do this, but it is a nice collection of code fragments for automated internet activities
good article to revisit, it has info and comments about open Linux documents and the Fedora project
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/08/18/2041215&tid=137 is about the Semper WiFi as is this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/19/1344242&tid=193
We in Georgia had our primary last Tuesday and I put that indecipherable plastic card into that mysterious atm with the windozy looking graphical user interface. Did I really vote? I'll never know. There was certainly nothing about the experience to make me feel that I had. Where was my vote? On the card? In the machine? There was no paper trail and no receipt, no visual indication that my vote had registered anywhere and was available for recount if desired. I had no ballot in my hand to look at and confirm the chads were neatly punched out so that daylight could be seen through all the correct holes. Worse of all, there wasn't the familiar big wooden box with the padlock and the slot for me to drop my ballot into when I was ready to make it final.
I will try to address only the psycological issues here. Goodness knows we've already heard plenty about the integrity of the Diebold Corp and the ineptitude of the elderly Georgia poll worders who had never turned on a computer before, especially one that gives no status messages while booting up. All the cheery news about Diebold and the poll workers is enough to make me psycologically uncomfortable before I even see the machine.
So now it's my turn. The nice man has a small selection of debit cards apread in front of him on a table, he grabs one seemingly at random and sends me off to the next available machine. When I'm done, I hand the seemingly unchanged card back to him and he lays it back on the table available for reuse. What is the purpose of the card? Is it just a key? Does it contain my vote and the votes of the people who used it before me? I hope not since it seems so unsecure there in front of him and even more unsecure during the interval when I had a little bit of time to be alone with it in the booth. I wonder what would have happened if I pocketed the card and gave him an expired credit card painted to resemble it? The fact that I didn't need to think very hard to come up with that question isn't reassuring even though the designers probably though of it, too. I'm sure if I thought about it I could come up with even more, but the fact that this insecure card triggers this line of thinking in the first place is undesirable. Making the voter feel comfortable without insisting that he trust so much from so many people just isn't wise.
This isn't done, I know the card probably didn't nned to be secure. Maybe, I should just have faith that there isn't anything vital on it, that's it's simply some sort of key. But, then there's the machine, which has the audacity to have the look and feel of the most insecure OS in popular use on the planet. I don't trust Microsoft enough to use it's products at home, why should I use it to vote? Why couldn't I use any application I'd like to create a packet of voting information conforming to some open standard? Does it really matter what kind of machine and software I use to create my electronic ballot? I buy stuff online all the time and do various secure interactions with my bank, broker, and insurance company routinely. Why must the state use such an unuaually different system? The more a product deviates from normal, the more likely it will have a problem that isn't well understood.
I'm still not done, but I think I should save and refill my cup.
So what choice does the voter have? With each candidate defined by the opposition in extremist terms, a voter with a superficial understanding of the candidates will most likely be attracted to the candidate who seems the least extreme. The incentive is for the candidate to prove that he is closer to the middle than his opponent.
Thanks to a bad combination of a bipolar political system that causes basic terms such as conservative and liberal to be defined by the opposition and a profit oriented news industry that prefers sensational negativism to objectivity, many people have difficulty understanding what conservatives, liberals, and others really do believe.
How's that for an opening sentence? My goal is to come up with a good explanation for newbies to the American political system to understand what needs to be understood to have an intelligent discussion. Many people have different definitions for these terms and political discussions get unpleasant and unproductive rather easily.
Comments are encouraged. I'm not really interested in having a political discussion here, but if it happens, we can fork the thread. I'm mostly interested in coming up with a very simple, short, concise, unambiguous paragraph for explaining this terminology.
Citeseer looks useful. I'm not sure what the scope is, might just be computer algorithms, but every idea can get turned into an algorithm on it's way to being using, can't it?
in Netflix, right click, "Send Page"
in newly created compose window, right click on "Select All"
in Compose window, select Insert -HTML, box opens up
in insert HTML box, select all
in the journal entry box, paste:
in Compose window, select Insert -HTML, box opens up
in insert HTML box, select all
in the journal entry box, paste:
http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display
Does this look right?
an appealing feature of this is that I can email journal items from other systems to myself. Yeah, this reminds me of mblogging, but hey, that depends on someone else to make it work.
Especially the wiki stuff a page or two down
What I'm looking for is some basic information about the easiest way to copy a link into a journal with the greatest of ease.
I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943