So Webb "won". How
Anyway right now, in between paroxysms of orgasmic glee, the america-hating liberal blogs are reporting that on CSPAN, a bunch of conservatives are talking about abandoning the Republican party. Ostensibly they're going to form a neocon/evangelical (dominionist?) party? I dunno. But between the greens and these guys, American politics could get truly interesting again.
Ah, voting. Such a lovely little pastime.
I love elections. I lived and breathed elections for quite some time; I was involved in the first-principles design, construction, development, and deployment of the first Votronic, one of the first (if not the first?) touch-screen digital voting machine. (Our model is, as far as I know, no longer in use in any precinct).
And every election, I get stuck in this infinite loop of yes/no on "have they been tampered with???". (By "they" I mean, "machines in general, esp. in critical races where tampering is alleged").
The biggest 2 cons to "are the machines tampered" are, in my humble but correct opinion:
1. Why has no one caught them/how are they (the tamperers) keeping it secret? and
2. Has tampering succeeded every time? And if not, see #1.
That's really what it comes down to. Forget about EVERYTHING ELSE anyone has ever said about hotel mini-bar keys and paper trails and all that.
Let's get real, here. People are bad at keeping secrets. You're telling me, just because Diebold has so far hidden the source code, that it's a grand sweeping conspiracy? No one ever got drunk and tried to impress a chick? And the hacked code NEVER FAILED ONCE?
I think, really, that's what it comes down to. Having covered the ground over and over, I keep wondering, "How can they KEEP pulling this off without getting busted?". And I keep coming up bupkis.
To work, it has to be the most flawless plan, ever, OR, everyone who thinks - doggedly and deeply - that the vote IS being hacked is just busy writing missives on web sites and not really doing the hard work of finding out the info.
So that's really it. There you go, a freebie. Stop worrying about hotel minibar keys, and start trying to someone with loose lips.
Explaining to customers "no you CANNOT have a fully ADA-accessible site, that's entirely spinny-flash things", or explaining to blind people "sorry but they specifically want the site to LOOK a certain way and, well, you know".
We've been through this TWICE already. It's painful.
And of course, for both sites, there was absolutely no evidence anyone with a screenreader had ever hit the site ONCE, but they're gov't, so, gotta do it.
(SMM == "Spend My Money")
Ok so I'm still stuck on which console to buy... but in the mean time, tell me what kind of hand-held system I want to buy to play dopey video games. PSP? DS?
Parameters: Recommendation must include at least 1 game. Do not say, "XYZ cuz it gots better gamez yo". Gimme some hits.
Boss: BLAH BLAH BLAH why aren't you done yet what are you doing all day, arguing with people on slashdot BLAH BLAH BLAH
Me: Scarlett Johanssen sex tape rumor on wwtdd.com
Boss: I'll be in my office (door closes)
Seriously. I think we ought to see about making this happen. I can't seem to find anyone else worth voting for in '08. So, fuck it, let's reanimate Goldwater.
rarely does Slashdot introduce anything worth noticing, but I must say, the tags are making me smile.
In particular, the tags itsatrap and asshole.
I like the tags, enough that I would consider tossing a couple bucks at
Hey, look, new Zend Framework preview release! I wonder if it still sucks.
(Downloads)
(Writes some code)
Yeah, still sucks.
Once again, "open source" product concentrates heavily on pet itches and gee-wizzery, instead of doing the grunt work like, "make it easy to have the same app be switchable from dev to production without server-wide configuration or writing lots of extra, possibly fragile code".
Seriously, asshats. CakePHP does this; I can take the same app and deploy it from dev to prod without any serious work
In other news, I hate every last one of you.
Watched some vid on C&L where Col. Gravel Voice disagrees with Hannity, by being pro-Webb and dismissing Allen as a "football player". Hannity pouted a little.
I actually do like Webb a little. He's sorta growing on me. I think my primary opposition to Webb is that, in order to get back to the pre-hijacking era of the Republican Party, he has to get in bed with post-hijacking Democrats.
Fuck we need a viable third party.
I've been listening to Bad Religion all morning and so I'm a little testy.
In other news, the exercise bike tried to kill me yesterday (there's a bug in its heart-rate-vs-resistance calculation, I can prove it!), there was some sort of domestic altercation in my neighborhood (2nd in 3 years), I am getting closer to picking new tat art, and I hate Best Buy more than anything else in the world right now. Oh and I'd probably go on that "male contraception" thing from the front page, but between bullshit Jesus-freakery and the morons at BC/BS, I'd probably have to eat hot coals to get a scrip for it. They still won't give me a vasectomy, I'm only 33. ("But doctor, there's too many people in the world, and my wife wants to keep her tats/tits/ass intact for the rest of her life, we'll adopt if we need a little bundle of joy" doesn't seem to work. Perhaps they don't understand just how vain my wife is.)
Reporters sans frontières is organizing a 24-hour online demonstration against Internet censorship, starting next Tuesday, 7th of November, 11am Parisian time (that's 10am UTC and 5am EST for the Anglo-Americans out there).
You connect to their server and, if I understand the press release correctly, try and Slashdot sites belonging to oppressive governments. Or however else clicking can 'help to change the "Internet Black Holes" map and help to combat censorship'. I sure do hope they have enough server capacity themselves to withstand a Slashdot effect, but if not, someone will probably summarize what's going on in time.
With governments everywhere using terrorism as an excuse to crack down on civil liberty (China, United States, and starting November, Indonesia), it is up to the concerned among us to speak up while we still can. Make your voice heard!
Please rape me.
UPDATE: OR, wait, do you rape the cat? Or, shit, do you rape the meat? I don't understand who I'm supposed to rape, here.
Good lord, is it just me, or is George Allen's stupid face just so eminently punchable? He just irritates the fuck out of me.
I had a thought the other day, that the single best way to fix politics is require every candidate to campaign on a single statement: say, 250 words max, and you cannot mention your competitor.
can you even IMAGINE what politics would be like if every candidate had to carefully elaborate their POSITION ON ISSUES, and not run a series of spin-and-attack ads?
No celeb endorsements. No moving imagery. 250 words; about double the length of this post, at of this sentence.
I honestly can't think of any candidate running now who is really worthy of the job: right, left, center, they're all fucking worthless.
Even when I agree with them... it's becoming like they're "pre-tainted". OK, yeah, today, maybe I do actually agree with Webb on some issues. But I ask you, how long before he's a broken man, beholden to either special interests or The Party, required to support things I *don't* agree with in order to get some token legislation passed?
(This is why I don't like to vote Republican right now: As a member of the libertarian fringe/wing of the right, and extremely socially liberal - i like to think of it as 'pro-liberty' - the interference of the American Taliban in constraining individual liberty for the glory of the invisible man in the sky angers me)
Anyway, they're all worthless fuckheads. If elected, I would dissolve the government, and demand a reboot. No one currently in office can be re-elected; it's time to try again. For every fat-fuck-Kennedy, there's a douche-bag-Frist. I can't even distinguish them any more. It's an asshole who works (as in, "does the job for which they are paid") about 90 days a year. The rest of the time it's convincing the idiots they're good for another 90 days.
Can you imagine what america would look like, if we rebooted? Got rid of "But clinton
If people had to simply and carefully represent their positions, and then live up to their promises?
The next time anyone says to me that I'm part of the "pro-treason left", I will reply:
"I am also part of the pro-Second-Amendment left", and promptly shoot them in the face.
This story about a Wal-Mart protest is interesting to me.
At face value, it is the BIG EVIL WAL-MART against poor, brown people. You can almost hear the management in Bentonville rubbing their hands and saying, "muh-ah-ah-ah". The new practices are "inhuman".
But let's read a little more into it. While never stated explicitly in the article, it seems a pretty fair bet this has "efficiency consultant" written all over it.
From a certain point of view, it is inhuman: human factors are often quite inefficient, and thus these sorts of people don't consider them. But it's not malicious. To wit:
Problem: Managers spend N hours per shift tracking down and accounting for late or absent employees.
Problem: Habitually tardy or absent employees can often go unnoticed in reviews, and thus continue to tax management and store resources.
Solution: Require employees to call an 800 number, which records their absence or late arrival, so this information can be tracked by the Big Giant Head in Bentonville; repeat offenders can be dismissed with cause.
Problem: Managers spend N hours per week juggling schedules, accommodating employee changes (often at the last minute), and regularly make mistakes in terms of coverage required for busy shifts, holidays, and the like.
Solution: Centralize scheduling.
And so on.
It just seems so
I can't say I would *like* these policies, but to apply the Snidely Whiplash Factor to them - upper management in Bentonville saying, "How we can REALLY fuck over the brown people!" - seems oddly out of place.
The best way to accelerate a Macintoy is at 9.8 meters per second per second.
