TLC which is normally a Harry Potter news site recently had a "get out and register for the vote" thread. Since it is hard to find posts there after the fact, I've reposted my most recent post to that thread here.

This is it, the last day to register if you haven't yet. This has been a very big year for new registrations. Most of the new registrants are in neighborhoods populated by minorities and low-income people. My impression is that there is quite a bit of interest among the teenagers even, someone thought it was worthwhile to set up a registration table in our High School lunchroom.

According to the polls, Bush and Kerry are in a dead heat. But pollsters only poll people who have voted before. Quite a few middle aged and elderly people apparently have never voted before, lot of disenfransised people in this country, so if all these newlly registered people make it to the official polls, the unofficial polls may be way off.

IMO, the most glaringly wrong feature of the US voting system is the tendency to polarize the electorate. This is because we use a very simple, primitive, first-past-the-post coupled with the Electoral college system. This was state of the art 230 years ago, but it is obsolete now. To understand why we are stuck with the lessor of two evils system, please study up on Duverger's law. Here's the wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law

The movement to reform the basic procedure of our election law probably won't be successful any time soon. but when it happens, we will finally have a system where third parties matter and most people won't see the election as a choice between 2 dudes that aren't in reality very different from each other.

I've been participating in various political threads on slashdot.org, ya know "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". Here's one recent thread: http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/2139227&tid=226. I apologise in advance if the editors think this post is out of place. My intent is to take people to another website if they want to continue the political stuff. IMO, it is no more OT and inappropriate than Melissa's original posting (which I don't mind at all).

that mostly summarizes a lot of my postings here, there, and everywhere lately. I'm mostly interested in long term reform of the voting system, but various fuckups lately, including the Fla debacle in 2000 and the Max Cleland thing here in Georgia are highlighting the need to get everyone thinking about the political system, not just the in group that always votes and usually benefits from keeping the system as it is.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=119723&cid=10115831 I like this comment, it's long, talks about science, creationism, Isaac Newton, and metaphysics, and has lots of links, so it's interesting even if I haven't yet read it all and tried to understand it.

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.

Multicast Imaging for Mac OS X contains numerous interesting links. Here are a few:

http://www.macosxlabs.org/

http://mike.passwall.com/macnc/macosxs.html

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/netboot.html

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=119942&cid=10113275

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

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=86200&cid=7498914

I doubt I'll do this, but it is a nice collection of code fragments for automated internet activities

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/22/1955204&tid=163

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.

Not if Duverger's Law is true. Mr. Duverger observed back in the 1940's that in a winner takes all sort of Electoral System, voters will learn not to waste their votes on candidates that don't have a chance, they will vote for somone who has a chance and, as likely as not, vote against the candidate they like the least. Even though the electorate doesn't like overtly negative compaining by the candidates themselves, pundits and others with a soapbox can attract a lot of interest by defining the issues and the candidates in negative terms.The fact that both candidates are usually decent people with different strengths and priorities tends to get lost in the mud. Failure gets more attention than success even though both are merely evidence which can be examined to determine how they will carry out future situations.

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.

And Philip did it! I didn't list a finger, he put it in a different directory than I would have, but I don't mind, he set it up on Linux sorta like Apple sets things up on X. No plugins, but hey, it works quite well. He also set up a KVM switch so that he won't need to crawl around under the desk everytime he wants to mess with the old box that I gave him to play in. Pretty good kid, all kids should have some sysadmin skills whether they are computer types or not.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/statistics.html
This is quicker to input into than the earthlink "blog". That matters, but there isn't much appearance control, it looks likes everyone else's here, only the "content" is different.

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?

the procedure: I will open a new window to a website, Netflix, this time:

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:

Okay,

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?

I am looking for a simple way to move a link into my journal. If I simply type it in, it is not recognized as a link. http://www.hackingnetflix.com/netflix/ However, while I am on that page, I can right click and select "send page". I am using Mozilla, by the way, an old version, must update soon. This pops open a Compose window. If I select all from there and paste it here, it seems to work.
http://www.hackingnetflix.com/netflix/

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.

this thread

Especially the wiki stuff a page or two down