I never gave the colors much thought. What about blue for Democrats as the states near the oceans vote mostly Democrat? What about red for Republicans as they think they are "red-blooded"? The military always depicts opposing sides as red vs blue. I was Red Team (Opposing Force or OPFOR) during many battle simulations where I managed a large chunk of the North Korean People's Army in the late '90's. The NKPA is a paper army now. It was cheaper for N. Korea to build nuclear weapons than to modernize that 1960's era mechanized army. They would probably run out of fuel in less than two weeks if a war came.

The United States of America is a Federal Republic, not a democracy. Rather than the people directly governing, they choose representatives who govern on their behalf, thus "republic". The rules that govern elections were first established in the Constitution (ratified in 1789) and then amended periodically.

You must be at least 18 years old to vote (by Constitutional Amendment) on the first Tuesday in November of an even numbered year. If you live in a US state, you have 2 Senators, regardless of the state's population size. Each Senator had to be at least 30 years old when they were elected and 1/3 of the total of 100 come up for election every even numbered year. You can directly vote for each of them when their must stand for election every 6 years. Until the late 19th Century(?), Senators were voted in by state legislators.

You live in a single US House of Representatives district. Your Representative had to be at least 25 years old when they were elected and all 438 of them nationwide stand for election every even numbered year. As the population has been shifting towards the Sunbelt, each Census has resulted in more and more Reps coming from Sunbelt states and fewer from states losing population.

You don't vote for President, you essentially "indicate a preference". The President, minimum age of 35, is actually elected by the Electoral College, bunches of political party members who cast their votes around 6 weeks after Election Day. Each state gets a minimum of 3 members, 1 for each Senator and 1 for each member of the House of Representatives, so Wyoming gets 3 and California gets about 54 for a grand total of 538/- electors. Nearly all the states use a winner-take-all approach, so when a presidential candidate receives a majority of the votes from a given state, all of that state's electoral college members are obliged to cast their vote for that candidate when the Electoral College convenes. If one refuses, they are known as a "faithless elector". Two states, Maine and Nebraska(?) use proportional representation for their electors instead of "winner take all". Other states are considering this approach.

Debates endlessly rage about the merits and demerits of this system. For good and ill it has evolved into its current state over the last 222 years. I did not consult any notes, just going from memory here so feel free to chime in...

As for the impact of this system, political scientists have simplified the analysis of Presidential elections by labeling states as either "red", "blue", or "swing" (meaning neither red nor blue). A red state is expected to cast its electoral votes for the Republican candidate, a blue state for the Democratic candidate, and a swing state is up for grabs. Once the single Republican and single Democratic candidate face off after their respective party conventions at which they are formally designated as the candidates, the major focus is on the swing states as they try to win a majority of votes and thus all the electors in each of those states. Many of the "solid red" and "solid blue" states will be nearly ignored other than as sources of funds, volunteers, and other resources. e.g. California has been a reliably "blue" state for many years so the blue and red candidates will only briefly visit it a few times prior to election day. No semi-serious political scientist expects a Republican candidate to win California's electoral votes in 2012. Until another state is added to the Union (still a possibility - I'm lookin' at you Puerto Rico), the winning number is 270 electoral votes. The requirement only to win 270 electoral votes rather than the nationwide popular vote is why a number of candidates have become President without getting at least 50% of the nationwide popular vote (Bush in 2000, Clinton in 1996(?), Clinton in 1992, Kennedy in 1960(?), Wilson in 1912(?), Hayes in 1876, Lincoln in 1860(?). Most of these were caused by third-party candidates splitting the popular vote among more candidates. The two most contested elections were Bush/Gore in 2000 and Hayes/Tilden in 1876, both involving voting irregularities in Florida.

Here is a series of interesting red/blue maps from the 2008 election Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results

Now that you see how binary the system is, you can understand why people often feel they are forced to choose "between the lesser of two evils". Skip the lesser evils, Cthulhu for President 2012. Why vote for a lesser evil?

I was first certified on MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 and most recently on Windows Server 2XXX so I have been watching "Little Blue" for about 20 years now. (I ran Windows 1.0 on my 8088.) As Robert Metcalfe (3Com founder) recommended in the late '90s during the Department of Justice monopoly case against Microsoft, Bill Gates should have been fired, just as he and so many other company founders had been when their companies passed the early stages where the "Cowboy Entrepreneur" was the ideal CEO. Steve Ballmer was Gates' handpicked successor and has proven just as awful as most such second acts prove to be when the "Great Man" steps aside. Other than Steve Jobs, how many tech company founders stayed on as CEO "forever" leading their firms to greater and greater triumphs? Larry Ellison at Oracle? Rod Canion at Compaq? Scott McNealy? While Bill Gates was visionary about the future in many very accurate ways (smaller devices, triumph of the tablet, ubiquitous computing, intuitive familiar interfaces aka "Windows Everywhere"), he and Ballmer have been utterly incapable of making Microsoft a viable part of that future.

First, the few accomplishments during the long twilight of MSFT: 1 - share of the server market has risen from a few percent to over half. 2 - Xbox and a major share of the enormous gaming market. 3 - Hanging onto the desktop platform and office suite crowns/cash cows.

Now, the long list of failures, many spectacular, which have left Microsoft a profligate spectator while tech has conquered the world using much of the framework Microsoft contributed to so much: 1 - Miniscule share of the ubiquitous computing market: Windows Phone, tablet, and even netbook pieces are abysmally small. 2 - Windows Millenium Edition debuted in 2000 and was a dinosaur that was DOA. Many many heads should have rolled when that was unconscionably foisted on consumers and MSFT shareholders. It was another bloated, pretty version of a product that was perfect for 1998 and out of its league well before 2002. 3 - Windows Vista. Extreme bloat, countless useless, unwanted features, utter unsuitability for corporate use/support; many firms skipped straight from XP to Windows 7 which should have been Vista all along - Win 7 is basically the good version of Vista and even it is not a good tablet or netbook OS, missing massive parts of the market. 4 - MSN - a horror show and black hole for shareholder funds. 5 - Because It's Not Google (BING) - a poor shadow of Google. At least it finally does a decent job of finding Microsoft TechNet articles, something I relied on Google to handle for nearly 10 years. 6 - Live.com - you may not have heard of this, but it is Microsoft's free offering in cloud computing. Naturally it assumes your clients will be Internet Explorer which means Microsoft OS-based platforms, and those in turn are limited to PC's and laptops. Tablet and smartphone users (iPhone, Android, Symbian) - better luck next time; guess you will turn to an alternative. 7 - Microsoft.com - after about the third complete redesign I gave up on finding anything there without Google. Like I said, BING finally has some handle on the site, but it was mostly chaos for about 10 years when the Internet was getting rather important. 8 - The .NET architecture - yet again, Microsoft arrogance assumes its platform to be omnipresent and refuses to play well with others while "others" continue to grow at geometric rates while desktops and laptops remain stagnant in the saturated markets of developed countries. I could go on and on.

Seriously, for the defenders of a company that's biggest accomplishment of the last 10 years was milking two cash cows and finally sharing a bit of the milk with long-suffering investors, you need your investing heads examined. Whether or not MSFT is brilliantly run, it is part of a universe of potential investments and has had remarkably little to offer while many of its competitors have enjoyed far greater success: AAPL, GOOG, ORCL, IBM, and so on. I used to laugh bitterly at Microsoft's ad campaign against the Department of Justice monopoly case that Microsoft "needed the freedom to innovate" ? Monopolistic practices were not innovations and neither was WindowsME, Exchange 2000, Windows PhoneOS, WindowsCE, ad infinitum. Microsoft wanted the freedom to go on knee-capping or swallowing whole their competition while praying some guy in a garage didn't make them irrelevant. The Open Source movement (bunches of guys in garages), Steve Jobs, and Steve Ballmer ended up making Microsoft irrelevant. Young IS people ask me what to learn and ever since I got my first look at Vista I have recommended "anything but Microsoft".

This is certainly the FUN way to make such exquisite cameras. As for the Fuji 3D, does it still function at all if one lens is broken or does it just lose 3D?

I included the 2 squishy cameras capturing 3-D images on the front of my skull that feed inverted data into my optical connector where it is then passed to the "central processor". The central processor then inverts the data to a useful format and records it in my photographic memory. Replicating these cameras faithfully would cost billyuns and billyuns of dollar$.

I think you are right about the navel-gazing tendencies (bellybuttons, not warships). I'm working in the academic discipline of Management Information Systems and many academics don't quite know what to make of it. They ask, "Is it really the same as the discipline of Management? What is meant by Information?" While they go on mulling over these issues, our graduates get jobs as programmers, analysts, and consultants while the Management majors scratch for whatever jobs they can find. Computer skillz seem to be in demand while knowledge of management theories isn't so much. Buy hey, at least their discipline is completely respected in academic circles. I know we aren't as crazy smart as the demi-gods of Computer Science, but we seem to do okay in business without four semesters of calculus and assorted matrix algebra madness. Different strokes for different folks. Show some heart, give a philosopher a piece of pizza so he can spin out a few more dumb questions to people with work that needs to get done even if they aren't a million percent sure why they are doing it.

Astute as always! melikamp, my old friend, so nice to hear from you! How goes the reconnaissance? Any word from Zaphod? Are we taking this place over or will it be obliterated for a new space travel thoroughfare?

Precisely.

Funny, rdwulfe, I have had my eye on you in your Florida digs for four years now. Soon you should be large enough to feed myself and the 11,216 spawn currently growing in the crest atop my hyper-developed cranium. Of course, you alone will not be enough nutrition to sustain all of us for more than 6 Mercurian days.

I am a highly evolved alien living among the humans. While I will admit to a mild addiction to Slashdot and Drudgereport (some days these are very similar), I don't play computer games or watch television. I literally have no time for either as I am so busy watching the humans and pondering all the different recipes that would make them tasty. Not to mention that as an alien, I haven't figured out how to make much money and can't afford cable or satellite TV. I tried "bunny ears" for a while, but they quit working last Spring and I haven't missed the TV much. When I did watch it, I just kept seeing fellow aliens (Nadya Suleman, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, Sheyla Hershey, et al.) entertaining the humans.

This theory that aliens are highly evolved and addicted to electronic entertainment is backwards because we know better than to end up sitting in Plato's Cave staring at flickering images when there is a marvelous world waiting to be viewed and humans, fattened in caves while watching flickering images, waiting to be devoured.

I guess so. Personally, I shove them away when that tongue first comes out, so they never get to my ears, but I have seen it happen to little children. If your theory is correct, then I would think that dogs would go after any bare skin they could get to given the olfactory nature of their mindset. I just found it interesting that the claims adjuster had handled plenty of similar situations before. A quick search got me this: The Dog Ate My Hearing Aids and a quote from this piece:

"I was at the audiologists a week after the distressing incident when I got an answer to the question that had been bugging me. Why had he chosen my bionic aids for a doggy treat?

"Feedback," said my audiologist.

"I'm sorry?" I replied.

"You probably didn't turn them off properly, so they whistled and the dog got attracted to them."

When Grandpa left his hearing aid (only 1 of his 2) on the window sill in our spare bedroom, our dog chewed it up. Our USAA homeowners insurance policy covered the entire cost of the replacement hearing aid. When I spoke with the claims representative at USAA, they said this happens all the time as dogs are drawn to the high pitched sounds emitted by hearing aids. Grandpa was disappointed as the new hearing aid was much better than the remaining old one the dog didn't chew up. I have had USAA for 22 years now and they have been great in every claim we have had. Note that membership is now open to ALL veterans of the US military whereas until recently it was only senior soldiers and officers and their immediate descendants. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF DOG.