before this particular petition, the state had found that these petitions did not fall under the Public records Act.

When was this? What was the petition number?

So, the people who signed this petition had reason to believe that their identities would not become general knowledge.

Sure, if you ignore the fact that they are signing them in public places, in broad daylight, in plain view of the general public, on a piece of paper left on a table for the next few hours, which will also be seen by as many as 30 or more subsequent signers (as well as people who read the petition but don't sign it), and which at the end of the day will be collected by a non-regulated or bonded private employee or volunteer who will hold onto them until eventually handing them into the private citizens running the group, and which will be in either private, non-government, non-regulated, non-bound peoples' hands until they are finally turned into the state -- IF the group ends up with enough signatures to bother doing so -- and even becoming remotely elegible for government-enforced secrecy, barring any laws that promote transparent government.

So yeah, other than all of that, it was done in complete guaranteed secrecy!

those who oppose your position are willing to use intimidation tactics (which is the case with this petition).

Telling people you are a homophobe is an intimidation tactic? Or do you have nighmares of imaginary mobs of men in dresses and misapplied lipstick painting your house pink in the middle of the night?

MPD.

In point of fact, the process normally used by the state in this case is to take a sample of the signatures and verify those. According to the Sec of State this has been as small as 3%. Supposedly it depends on the proportion of signatures submitted over signatures required but the exact math is not disclosed. Normally they do not perform exhaustive verification.

And frankly, even when they do, they are extremely permissive about accepting signatures almost to the point of irrelevancy.

I was going to take on your trolling directly, but then i realized it was much more amusing, and telling, that you use a (bad) childhood analogy to illustrate the thought process of your supporters.

Violence is defined as "exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse", so that's how I would not characterize a sign saying "bigots live here" as violence.

Isolated incidents do not a concerted effort make. We have these things called police which you pay for with your tax dollars which is what we as a society have provided to handle just these sorts of occasions. And we have well-defined laws that divide actions into actually damaging, and things that you may not like but aren't criminally or unfairly damaging which you are left to accept as natural consequence of life.

What you're doing here is stereotyping gay people (and pro-gay people) based on three isolated incidents out of hundreds of thousands of petition signers. Which, frankly, considering your established position on groups of people that are not like you, it's not at all surprising.

PS, this written criticism of your logic, misappropriation, and prejudice should not be construed as "violence".

Yes. It's programmer's fault that they write applications that make poor assumptions about names -- not the people who design software requirements who are neither programmers nor usually very worldly.

Perhaps we should have a list of "assumptions people make about developers"!
* Developers get to design their own software.
* Developers get to have some say in how their software is designed.
* Developers at least can prevent really stupid things from being put in the software they write.
* Developers aren't smart enough to know that outliers are inevitable.
* Developers aren't smart enough to know that of course there are people with punctuation, extra words and spaces, even letters that no one has seen before.
* Developers wouldn't rather code just one column to hold an identifier rather than two.

For some time now I've noticed that the My Location radius in Google Maps for Android gets much smaller when you are in signal range of an open wireless access point. (Assuming you don't have GPS on.) Android / Maps seems to use three different RF methods of location. 1, cell towers, 2, WiFi APs, 3, GPS. (Turn off WiFi and a medium radius will revert to the typical .5-2km cell tower radius.)

There is an interesting side effect to this. I moved last November and naturally took my WiFi access point with me. I kept the same router config, and same broadband service (and probably even same external gateway -- it was about 2 mi away). When I am at home, and I use My Location on my G1, it shows me at my old house. That was a dead giveaway that Google was storing location info of WiFi points -- and in this case, returning a stale location.

So it's okay for the federal government to swoop in and take over privately owned data lines and equipment nodes because it's a common public data infrastructure.... but its NOT okay for the federal government to swoop in and say that these data lines and equipment nodes have to provide the public with equal access to other lines and nodes?

Thanks so much... Where do I get off this runaway train?

It beats the hell out of XP and that's good enough for me. Thank you, Ubuntu, you've made two aging/underpowered machines suddenly useful again.

Just think, the original SIM cards were as big as the piece of plastic you now punch them out of.
The common SIM we use today is properly called Mini-SIM.
SIMs use the same technology as smart cards (which every European credit card now is*), so they were originally the same size... no doubt this was back when mobile phones were the size of bricks or worse.

* We had a French foreign exchange student a few months ago, she tried to use her credit card at a gift shop, and couldn't figure out what she was supposed to do with it as there was no smart card reader. The swipe-and-sign method was completely foreign to her (literally!) just as the chip-and-pin method is foreign (and unavailable) to us. It was enlightening.

First off, the "proof of concept" does not prove that you can do AJAX without the J. It presents a very simple use of the "target" attribute to the <a> tag that has been around since, oh, 1995 or 6 (with real frames, to be fair, but thats academic. Iframes were only invented because paper-obsessed layout & design types didn't like the frame bars).

What it does prove, and it's a valid point, that there is plenty of page automation you can do without dependency on J or X. These days, because of the maddeningly and increasingly high-level focus of web development, a web programming shop will immediately reach for the AJAX hammer to hit even the simplest nails, instead of using the most efficient tool for the job.

Before AJAX we had DHTML, before DHTML there was cross-frame scripting, and before that there was client pull and server push. We do nearly all of these things now with AJAX and as a result, simple tasks are developed as unnecessarily complicated monstrosities.

It's time for the address space hogs to give back to the Internet! Go through your IP blocks and see if there are any you can spare. Free .com addys for one month for each Class B reclaimed!

Seriously... IBM, DEC (?), BBN, GE, Boeing, DuPont, Prudential, Bell North (?), Ford, the US Post Office, Eli Lilly, Halliburton... do they really need their own Class A's all to themselves? Some having more than one? Uh, not likely.

http://xkcd.com/195/ (anyone know of a more up to date version?)

incorrectly identifies svchost.exe, a critical Windows executable, as a virus

While it's fair to say that svchost.exe -- the FILE -- is a "critical executable", that is completely different from saying that svchost.exe -- the PROGRAM instance -- is always critical.

The very annoying thing is that svchost.exe doesn't do anything of its own, really, except run other programs. Sometimes that other program is really essential (like core Microsoft IPC services), sometimes that other program is necessary for one of your computer's devices to work, and yet other times that program is something like Yahoo Toolbar. Or worse: adware, spyware,or a trojan.

Shame that XP never thought you would need a way to know exactly what that svchost.exe instance was actually doing. I know I've forced a reboot unintentially by trying to kill unnecessary processes, and happened to kill that one joker's-card svchost.exe process that was running an essential core service. (Meanwhile you can kill explorer.exe, the core of the UI, and simply restart it to get it back. Go figure.)

Right now I have 7 svchost.exe processes on my XP system. I've no idea what any of them are actually doing. They have memory spaces anywhere from 200KB to 18MB, and open filehandles anywhere from 100 to 2,000. I would like to think I could determine which ones were legitimate and necessary and which ones were just idle crap taking up resources, or worse.

And are you also proud of how you save money by paying only the minimum balance on your credit cards each month?

Tivo monthly subscription is $13. Add in one multi-stream cablecard from Comcast for $1.50 and you come in at $14.50 a month. That's less than $16.95 in my math.

that was already how they determined processor speed: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/cpu/char/mfg_Rating.htm

could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comments written

It's a word! It's a claim! No, it's FreeSpeechMan!

Whatever will we do when Iceland is overrun with people with the power to say whatever they want?

Freedom Of Speech -- It's Scary!