So there's a 9.5 hour difference in time here between the surveillance and the most likely source/destination of any potentially useful intel. Now, maybe my math is wrong and perhaps my sense of how terrorists operate is rooted too deeply in TV shows like Homeland, but here's the problem with closing at 4:30PM or 9PM, either one: They're closed when the terrorists are awake.
So they're spying on their own citizens, fellow Canadians, but they're LITERALLY asleep at the wheel during the hours when any ACTUAL terrorists are likely to pass information through their network. Brilliant! Fucking brilliant!
I gotta say, as an American this makes me feel better. I mean, at least there's a itsy bitsy teeny tiny chance that the NSA's program MIGHT catch SOME useful intel since, yanno, they're at least fucking awake. Our system may be pure, unaldutured evil, but at least it has a CHANCE of working.
I still believe that having robots do things for us isn't a bad thing. I WANT robot drivers. Have you SEEN how absolutely AWFUL a HUMAN driver is? Even people who drive 300 laps per day in the exact same circle (NASCAR) frequently have wrecks that kill them! For something so readily predictable, that's disgraceful. A robot would never make such a catastrophic error when the task is doing the exact same thing over and over and over...
Cars aside, I don't think allowing robots to replace manufacturing jobs is bad either. I want a future like WALL-E minus the pollution. Think about it: aside from the pollution, WALL-E's future is pretty damn Utopian.
Of course, I also want to eventually be able to upload my mind into a robot chassis and live forever, so if nothing else I want to see advanced AIs because any system capable of running a sufficiently advanced AI should be capable of emulating a human brain with the right modifications.
Seriously though, this isn't all bad news. Some of this is awesome.
I code, but only PHP (I can read C, JAVA, a few others, but can't go beyond a "hello world" without a quick reference close at hand) so my ability to contribute patches is minimal. However, I have contributed 20+ WINE compatibility reports, at least 3 Apache bug reports, and I wrote the manual entry for a utility I used because man kept telling me it wasn't found - then I found out it was just missing from my system and the existing man page was much better.
So yes, I contribute. And yes, even I hate Unity. I suppose in a way it is living up to its name, though - Unity has a way of unifying everyone in their desire to return to GNOME 2, i.e. what just plain worked, period.
Though really, they should just put Linux on these. My motto is "if it's good enough for NASA and a wristwatch, it's good enough for anything." Especially since you can install it on a dishwasher. Not all THAT different from a coke machine, really.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this asshat deserves jail either, but none of you see the issue here?
Let me give you a hint. You see that part AFTER his line break? Yeah, that second half? That's pretty god damn offensive. I mean, I'm not in the military, I have no family in the military, and I'm not even British (I'm from Alabama, heh) but even I find that second half offensive.
Now that isn't to say I think this dipshit should go to jail for it. On the contrary, they should conscript his ass into the SAS and drop him in the middle of Kabul with nothing but a sidearm with 2 bullets and a helmet camera and tell him "You have 1 hour to make it to the airport or we leave your ass here. Good luck." That way the punishment fits the crime AND we get some good TV out of it. Win-win.
But in any case, while I agree that this isn't jail-worthy, let's all have some context here. We can all agree that killing innocent civilians is as much, and maybe even more, of a tragedy than the death of soldiers. However, when you make it this personal, like he did in the second half of his post, you go from something that makes good sense to insensitive prick pretty quickly. This is almost as offensive as a facebook post can possibly be, folks.
I agree with the decision to not pull the video here in the US, but there is one other thing to think about when trying to understand why Youtube did this elsewhere, and I think it's a key point that often gets lost upon those of us who live in places with no (or at least minimal) censorship.
The people of Egypt have censorship, as do the citizens of Libya, and frankly most of the middle east. It is widespread, it is pervasive, and it is absolute. This means that, by definition, any video that is allowed to air in these countries and originates from them has a certain implicit amount of government approval. This isn't to say that, in some "looser" censorship states, objectionable material isn't occasionally allowed to be released, but it is rare.
That said, a large amount of this rage is a result not so much of the video itself, as a misunderstanding by many people that the video was somehow sponsored by the US government. To a US citizen, the very idea is crazy - and even more so after seeing the thing. (Even atomic-era PSAs had better production value than this drivel...) However, in countries where censorship is pervasive, the mere fact that one can view a video at all carries with it an implicit level of, if not endorsement, at least acknowledgement that the media in question is considered to be non-objectionable.
This is really the crux of the problem, and in a way, it says more about the governments of the countries where the outrage erupted than anything else. The fact that friendly foreign nationals are being murdered in cold blood on what is supposed to be sovereign US territory is less a statement about the video or even the asswipes who made it, and more a statement about the dangers of censorship itself. That is, once it becomes "the norm" then anything that remains uncensored has an automatic "seal of approval" in the minds of viewers. This makes it considerably worse when a would-be censored video slips by and winds up in the wild.
In short, the concept of having no censorship at all is so foreign to these people, they were left with no plausible alternative (mentally) except to assume that the mere existence of the video meant it was sanctioned by the host country's government. That's the true problem here.
First, a correction: there were 4 killed, not 3. This is the price we pay for get-the-story-before-the-other-guy journalism.
Second, not only were the attacks apparently committed by a totally separate group from the protesters, it was pre-planned in advance for quite a while (based on past attacks and how relatively sophisticated this was, 2-3 months of prep is a fair guess here) so the fact that they just happened to coincide with the protest is becoming more and more coincidental by the hour.
That said, I do wish people would stop trying to place the blame on one specific religion. Islam isn't the problem. Neither is Christianity or Judaism. The problem is religion itself. When you live your entire life, from your speech to your clothing to your day-to-day actions and even police your own thoughts for irrational reasons, it should be no surprise that some of those "believers" take it too far. When your words, actions, etc. are based on nothing butt logic and reason, violence cannot ensue because, by its very nature, violence is never the most logical or rational solution.
So...is this Islam's fault? No. Is this something that reflects badly on a religion of otherwise mostly nice, kind people? Absolutely! However, if, rather than making decisions based upon the threat of eternal damnation, we did whatever we did in life because it just MAKES SENSE, I'm willing to bet this sort of thing would never happen at all. So really, the fact that a religion is mostly peaceful - ANY religion - doesn't excuse the fact that religions are by their very nature irrational, and thus, their followers are always going to be predisposed to irrational conduct.
Not going to add much to the debate here except to state that, much to my own chagrin (I'm a Democrat, mostly) Mike Rogers is a senator from Alabama, not Michigan. I'd let this go uncorrected, except that I am myself from Alabama, and I wouldn't wish having this village idiot as a senator on my worst enemy. Certainly nobody I know in Michigan deserves it.
I have never understood the EA loginc on this, but if I have learned anything from Skyrim (yeah Bethesda has a shitty legal department but they still make awesome games...) it's that Modding moves units. There is NEVER ANY INSTANCE WHAT-SO-EVER where it doesnt't magke good, sound business sense to enable modding on your games.
And yet, for whatever unknown, illogical reason, EA continues to go above and beyond to ensure that they can sell DLC (often already on the disc) whilst putting even more effort into ensuring that unpaid volunteers cannot sink ample time into improving their product for them.
And yeah, this isn't just EA, but there's a reason I'm using them here: they remain the worst offender.
Anyone else notice this could be a back-door method to block The Pirate Bay in the US? They have porn, some of it illegal in the US, and require no age verification (only a user account.)
Sounds suspiciously like hollywood is willing to weaken IP laws if it takes down BitTorrent. After all, the vast majority of trackers also have a porn category and thus almost all of them would end up under such a filter.
Personally, I am a single athiest. I am also an American citizen. Last but not least, I am a fucking nerd. Take away my porn and you might as well take away citizenship.
On second thought, scratch that. I've been meaning to become Canadian for a while now. After all, 14 cents per CD-R is a small price to pay for healthcare and unfiltered internet.
The same reason why the fillabuster hasn't been done away with - it's to counter another imbalance with imbalance. EOs exist because, despite being paid extremely well to do their job, Congress doesn't like their job (their job is to PASS LAWS, nothing else). They prefer to fillabuster everything to make Obama sound bad, and this is a problem that was done away with under Regan, but the republicans re-enstated it under Clinton.
EOs have been around since the country started but were seldom used until dubya. Now both dubya and Obama have abused the process - though for different reasons. Dubya did it because he was an impatient little shit. Obama is doing it because Congress refuses to vote on ANYTHING AT ALL until after the election (and probably afterwards, too.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not really an Obama fan. I'm voting for him just because he's better than Romney, but I still want a genuine liberal to run for President.
But yeah, that's why. It does seem to break the whole checks-and-balances system, except that it's really just a response to a broken check that Congress shouldn't have. Once we outlaw the fillabuster and require that Congress vote on everything quickly, I'm all for outlawing EOs too.
One day we will have a computer that is small, portable, and capable of emulating the human brain with 100% efficiency.
When this day comes, we have to assume we will either have already, or will soon thereafter develop the ability to map a fully developed human brain, and between these two technologies, the inevitable will happen - humans will BECOME robots.
This has myriad benefits. Instant communication across the galaxy, with 100% privacy control. The ability to share emotions directly, not just language. The ability to disconnect our minds from our form. Bored being a biped? Fine, upload yourself into a rocket or airplane or submarine body and go exploring. We won't need homes. We won't need food. Nor sleep. Nor even air. As long as we can get within proximity of a star to recharge our batteries, we're golden. And when we feel like being around others? Simply connect to the central server and commune with everyone else in existence because we have finally achieved the ULTIMATE form of humanity - raw data.
So yes, we need robot rights, because one day I intend to be one, and I'll be damned if I'm going to wind up as some meatbag's bitch.
My mom was a district court judge in 1999. In 2000, she had to run for election (she was appointed to fill a vacant term by the governor.) As a friend of the outgoing probate judge - who tallied all the votes from the machines in an excel spreadsheet on his personal laptop (not even kidding) - she was able to get him to show her the exact voting results, precinct-by-precinct when she lost by only 0.4% of the vote. The results are frightening.
According to both state and federal election law, if a ballot is marked with a straight party vote at the top - for example, Republican or Democrat - and then the voter checks the box for a single candidate of the opposing party farther down the ballot, that is a spoiled ballot, and the machine is supposed to reject the ballot, after which a poll worker is supposed to walk over and explain that you must manually check each candidate individually in order to vote a split ticket. This did not occur.
After learning this, my mother had the newly sworn in replacement probate judge pull a random sampling of 1,000 ballots and count them. Out of these, 486 had checked the box for republican at the top, and then checked my mother's name farther down the ballot. These ballots, despite clearly being a vote cast for my mother, were counted as votes fer her republican opponent. The 486 votes from this sampling along accounted for over 0.7% of the total vote - enough to cost her the election. Needless to say, her true margin of victory was probably well over 20%. Sadly, with the bush/gore fiasco in full swing, no decent election law attorneys were available, and my mother basically gave up.
On her watch, in a single year, she cleared a 13,000+ case backlog, with many cases dating back as far as 1986. Out of over 17,000 total rulings, she was appealed 3 times, and her ruling was upheld on appeal all 3 times. To date, she remains the best judge in the history of the state. Her replacement was court ordered to both drug and alcohol abuse treatment just 2 years before his election. On the day of his sentencing, having been fired from his law firm, he read a 2 page statement where he stated under oath that he was "not fit to practice law." We learned this only 2 days before the election, and believing that nobody in their right mind would vote against someone with my mother's record, we elected not to release the information (which was public record anyway, if the local paper had been interested to begin with.) Out of his first 9 scheduled court days, he locked himself in his office and refused to come out because he couldn't face a courtroom full of people.
He has since recovered and does a pretty decent job running a fair courtroom. He does not keep as efficient of a schedule as my mother did, but he does seem to genuinely apply the law in a fair manner. Of course, it took him the better part of 6 years to get to that point. The fact remains that my mother won that election, and due to the lack of either oversight or understanding - and maybe both - of electronic voting systems, the citizens of our county were worse off for it.
Just want to add one footnote to the EFF's argument here. I am a certified paralegal and I work in a law firm. We handle civil corporate litigation mostly, a few big cases for small companies, and we typically pay for deposition transcripts "out of pocket" and often hold the bag on them for 2-3 months waiting on our clients to pay us.
That said, the EFF is quite correct - even full-day 8+ hour depositions rarely run over $1,000. Granted, the deposition itself is an extra expense, and clients must pay for attorney's travel time (though we usually have them at our office to save our clients money, actually.) But the transcript itself is seldom over $1,000. If Righthaven has been paying Mr. Mangano over $2,000 a month, then yes, $1,000 for a transcript is a perfectly reasonable expense to expect them to pay.
He is a 49 year old truck driver and a friend of mine. He has a 17 year old daughter, who is a fan of Justin Beiber. After LEGALLY purchasing a song by Beiber on iTunes, she discovered that some fat cat studio executive had determined that she should not be able to convert the song she just LEGALLY PURCHASED into a ringtone for her phone. As a result, she then pirated a copy of the SAME SONG SHE JUST BOUGHT so that she could make it into a ringtone, and after doing so, deleted the pirated song.
Unfortunately, she did all of this on a company laptop that belonged to the trucking company Steve was working for at the time. They got an ISP letter about the pirated song, and Steve got fired. Fortunately, he now hauls race cars making almost 19 times as much PER MILE as his previous job and now has 2 computers of his own, including one for his daughter.
So yes, piracy has cost a truck driver his job. Is this what the MPAA intended? Obviously not. But eh, you weren't very specific Mike. What did I win?
First let me say I agree that this is an excellent step in the right direction.
Now back in the real world...the problem is that any corporation with at least 50,000 employees can now DIRECTLY write their own laws. I'm not sure how many, if any companies in Finland have this many people (I would assume there must be at least a hand full), but honestly they could probably get by with 30,000 employees plus family members.
At least the old system required this be done through expensive lobbyists. Now the process of company written laws can be opened up directly to the companies
But yeah, the tiny little non-cynical optimist in me loves this idea.
Number of people who have committed terrorist acts, both foreign and domestic, including in war zones such as Iraq, since 2001: less than 8,000. Note that this is a very GENEROUS estimate, based on the Pentagon's PR data. Internal DOD data (posed on Wikileaks) puts this closer to 3,000.
Number of people who's private information, as a result of being stored in a "secure government database" has been leaked to the public as a result of Anon and Wikileaks alone: over 80,000. This is from a single hack alone, actually, of which there have been several dozen since 2006.
Sorry, but no, you can NOT have access to this data, because you can NOT be trusted to keep it secure. If that means 50% more terrorists get through, fine, I live in middle-of-nowhere, Alabama and don't give a flying shit if 5 civilians in a metropolitan area die at the hands of a raging lunatic. I can live with that. What I cannot live with is me, those 5 poor bastards, and the other 357,000,000+ Americans being subjected to the police-state-of-the-month so that we MIGHT, MAYBE, POSSIBLY, KINDA, SORTA stop the raging lunatic from doing what he's probably gonna do, and get away with, regardless. What is private is PRIVATE and I do NOT trust the government (and the lowest bidder) to keep it that way, even if they do try to.
In the words of Benjamin Franklin (yanno, one of those "founding fathers" people keep throwing around so much) "He who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither." I don't know about the rest of the witless-idiot American public, but I would NEVER sacrifice my rights, my fellow citizen's rights, nor the lives of over 5,000 soldiers, just so I could save a few dozen civilians who, frankly, if they'd pay more attention to the world around them instead of burying their nose in their iPhone, could've probably saved themselves.
On the post: Cybersecurity Never Sleeps, Except In Canada
Closing at 4...or
Current time in Kabul: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=113
So there's a 9.5 hour difference in time here between the surveillance and the most likely source/destination of any potentially useful intel. Now, maybe my math is wrong and perhaps my sense of how terrorists operate is rooted too deeply in TV shows like Homeland, but here's the problem with closing at 4:30PM or 9PM, either one: They're closed when the terrorists are awake.
So they're spying on their own citizens, fellow Canadians, but they're LITERALLY asleep at the wheel during the hours when any ACTUAL terrorists are likely to pass information through their network. Brilliant! Fucking brilliant!
I gotta say, as an American this makes me feel better. I mean, at least there's a itsy bitsy teeny tiny chance that the NSA's program MIGHT catch SOME useful intel since, yanno, they're at least fucking awake. Our system may be pure, unaldutured evil, but at least it has a CHANCE of working.
On the post: DailyDirt: Computers Becoming More Like Us
This isn't all bad
Cars aside, I don't think allowing robots to replace manufacturing jobs is bad either. I want a future like WALL-E minus the pollution. Think about it: aside from the pollution, WALL-E's future is pretty damn Utopian.
Of course, I also want to eventually be able to upload my mind into a robot chassis and live forever, so if nothing else I want to see advanced AIs because any system capable of running a sufficiently advanced AI should be capable of emulating a human brain with the right modifications.
Seriously though, this isn't all bad news. Some of this is awesome.
On the post: Ubuntu Users To Get To Vote With Their Wallets In Support Of New Features
Re:
So yes, I contribute. And yes, even I hate Unity. I suppose in a way it is living up to its name, though - Unity has a way of unifying everyone in their desire to return to GNOME 2, i.e. what just plain worked, period.
On the post: Bug In Kobo's Online Store Offers Up Random eBook Prices [Update]
Well obviously...
Dude, these are Canadians. Only Americans would try the "feature, not a bug" trick.
And I say this is an American myself. Eh, nobody's perfect.
On the post: DailyDirt: Smarter Soda Machines
Blue Screen of Death?
Though really, they should just put Linux on these. My motto is "if it's good enough for NASA and a wristwatch, it's good enough for anything." Especially since you can install it on a dishwasher. Not all THAT different from a coke machine, really.
On the post: Iran's Latest Aggressive Censorship Plan: Block All Audio & Video Files
Somewhere in Iran...
Interrogator: "So you typed 9GB of commands in 2 hours?"
Suspect: "Of course!"
Interrogator "Um...well..."
Because sometimes, the alibi is as ridiculous as the charge.
On the post: UK Student Charged For 'Grossly Offensive' Facebook Post
Really?
Let me give you a hint. You see that part AFTER his line break? Yeah, that second half? That's pretty god damn offensive. I mean, I'm not in the military, I have no family in the military, and I'm not even British (I'm from Alabama, heh) but even I find that second half offensive.
Now that isn't to say I think this dipshit should go to jail for it. On the contrary, they should conscript his ass into the SAS and drop him in the middle of Kabul with nothing but a sidearm with 2 bullets and a helmet camera and tell him "You have 1 hour to make it to the airport or we leave your ass here. Good luck." That way the punishment fits the crime AND we get some good TV out of it. Win-win.
But in any case, while I agree that this isn't jail-worthy, let's all have some context here. We can all agree that killing innocent civilians is as much, and maybe even more, of a tragedy than the death of soldiers. However, when you make it this personal, like he did in the second half of his post, you go from something that makes good sense to insensitive prick pretty quickly. This is almost as offensive as a facebook post can possibly be, folks.
On the post: White House Goes Too Far In Asking Google To Pull Controversial Video
I agree with not pulling it, but...
The people of Egypt have censorship, as do the citizens of Libya, and frankly most of the middle east. It is widespread, it is pervasive, and it is absolute. This means that, by definition, any video that is allowed to air in these countries and originates from them has a certain implicit amount of government approval. This isn't to say that, in some "looser" censorship states, objectionable material isn't occasionally allowed to be released, but it is rare.
That said, a large amount of this rage is a result not so much of the video itself, as a misunderstanding by many people that the video was somehow sponsored by the US government. To a US citizen, the very idea is crazy - and even more so after seeing the thing. (Even atomic-era PSAs had better production value than this drivel...) However, in countries where censorship is pervasive, the mere fact that one can view a video at all carries with it an implicit level of, if not endorsement, at least acknowledgement that the media in question is considered to be non-objectionable.
This is really the crux of the problem, and in a way, it says more about the governments of the countries where the outrage erupted than anything else. The fact that friendly foreign nationals are being murdered in cold blood on what is supposed to be sovereign US territory is less a statement about the video or even the asswipes who made it, and more a statement about the dangers of censorship itself. That is, once it becomes "the norm" then anything that remains uncensored has an automatic "seal of approval" in the minds of viewers. This makes it considerably worse when a would-be censored video slips by and winds up in the wild.
In short, the concept of having no censorship at all is so foreign to these people, they were left with no plausible alternative (mentally) except to assume that the mere existence of the video meant it was sanctioned by the host country's government. That's the true problem here.
On the post: YouTube Restricts Access To Anti-Islam Movie Trailer In Egypt And Libya
Two things
Second, not only were the attacks apparently committed by a totally separate group from the protesters, it was pre-planned in advance for quite a while (based on past attacks and how relatively sophisticated this was, 2-3 months of prep is a fair guess here) so the fact that they just happened to coincide with the protest is becoming more and more coincidental by the hour.
That said, I do wish people would stop trying to place the blame on one specific religion. Islam isn't the problem. Neither is Christianity or Judaism. The problem is religion itself. When you live your entire life, from your speech to your clothing to your day-to-day actions and even police your own thoughts for irrational reasons, it should be no surprise that some of those "believers" take it too far. When your words, actions, etc. are based on nothing butt logic and reason, violence cannot ensue because, by its very nature, violence is never the most logical or rational solution.
So...is this Islam's fault? No. Is this something that reflects badly on a religion of otherwise mostly nice, kind people? Absolutely! However, if, rather than making decisions based upon the threat of eternal damnation, we did whatever we did in life because it just MAKES SENSE, I'm willing to bet this sort of thing would never happen at all. So really, the fact that a religion is mostly peaceful - ANY religion - doesn't excuse the fact that religions are by their very nature irrational, and thus, their followers are always going to be predisposed to irrational conduct.
On the post: House Approves Bill To Spy On Americans By Misrepresenting Or Lying About What's In The Bill
Mike Rogers
On the post: 'Amnesia' Is Selling So Well, The Developers Have Forgotten All About Piracy
Modding > DLC
And yet, for whatever unknown, illogical reason, EA continues to go above and beyond to ensure that they can sell DLC (often already on the disc) whilst putting even more effort into ensuring that unpaid volunteers cannot sink ample time into improving their product for them.
And yeah, this isn't just EA, but there's a reason I'm using them here: they remain the worst offender.
On the post: Far Beyond Filtering: Is The GOP Looking To Shut Down Porn Producers?
Blocking TPB
Sounds suspiciously like hollywood is willing to weaken IP laws if it takes down BitTorrent. After all, the vast majority of trackers also have a porn category and thus almost all of them would end up under such a filter.
Personally, I am a single athiest. I am also an American citizen. Last but not least, I am a fucking nerd. Take away my porn and you might as well take away citizenship.
On second thought, scratch that. I've been meaning to become Canadian for a while now. After all, 14 cents per CD-R is a small price to pay for healthcare and unfiltered internet.
On the post: White House Preparing Executive Order As A Stand-In For CISPA
Re: executive order
EOs have been around since the country started but were seldom used until dubya. Now both dubya and Obama have abused the process - though for different reasons. Dubya did it because he was an impatient little shit. Obama is doing it because Congress refuses to vote on ANYTHING AT ALL until after the election (and probably afterwards, too.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm not really an Obama fan. I'm voting for him just because he's better than Romney, but I still want a genuine liberal to run for President.
But yeah, that's why. It does seem to break the whole checks-and-balances system, except that it's really just a response to a broken check that Congress shouldn't have. Once we outlaw the fillabuster and require that Congress vote on everything quickly, I'm all for outlawing EOs too.
On the post: Should Robots Get Rights?
Yes, because...
When this day comes, we have to assume we will either have already, or will soon thereafter develop the ability to map a fully developed human brain, and between these two technologies, the inevitable will happen - humans will BECOME robots.
This has myriad benefits. Instant communication across the galaxy, with 100% privacy control. The ability to share emotions directly, not just language. The ability to disconnect our minds from our form. Bored being a biped? Fine, upload yourself into a rocket or airplane or submarine body and go exploring. We won't need homes. We won't need food. Nor sleep. Nor even air. As long as we can get within proximity of a star to recharge our batteries, we're golden. And when we feel like being around others? Simply connect to the central server and commune with everyone else in existence because we have finally achieved the ULTIMATE form of humanity - raw data.
So yes, we need robot rights, because one day I intend to be one, and I'll be damned if I'm going to wind up as some meatbag's bitch.
On the post: Hackable Irish E-Voting Machines That Cost 54 Million Euros Sold For Scrap: 9 Euros A Piece
First Hand Experience
My mom was a district court judge in 1999. In 2000, she had to run for election (she was appointed to fill a vacant term by the governor.) As a friend of the outgoing probate judge - who tallied all the votes from the machines in an excel spreadsheet on his personal laptop (not even kidding) - she was able to get him to show her the exact voting results, precinct-by-precinct when she lost by only 0.4% of the vote. The results are frightening.
According to both state and federal election law, if a ballot is marked with a straight party vote at the top - for example, Republican or Democrat - and then the voter checks the box for a single candidate of the opposing party farther down the ballot, that is a spoiled ballot, and the machine is supposed to reject the ballot, after which a poll worker is supposed to walk over and explain that you must manually check each candidate individually in order to vote a split ticket. This did not occur.
After learning this, my mother had the newly sworn in replacement probate judge pull a random sampling of 1,000 ballots and count them. Out of these, 486 had checked the box for republican at the top, and then checked my mother's name farther down the ballot. These ballots, despite clearly being a vote cast for my mother, were counted as votes fer her republican opponent. The 486 votes from this sampling along accounted for over 0.7% of the total vote - enough to cost her the election. Needless to say, her true margin of victory was probably well over 20%. Sadly, with the bush/gore fiasco in full swing, no decent election law attorneys were available, and my mother basically gave up.
On her watch, in a single year, she cleared a 13,000+ case backlog, with many cases dating back as far as 1986. Out of over 17,000 total rulings, she was appealed 3 times, and her ruling was upheld on appeal all 3 times. To date, she remains the best judge in the history of the state. Her replacement was court ordered to both drug and alcohol abuse treatment just 2 years before his election. On the day of his sentencing, having been fired from his law firm, he read a 2 page statement where he stated under oath that he was "not fit to practice law." We learned this only 2 days before the election, and believing that nobody in their right mind would vote against someone with my mother's record, we elected not to release the information (which was public record anyway, if the local paper had been interested to begin with.) Out of his first 9 scheduled court days, he locked himself in his office and refused to come out because he couldn't face a courtroom full of people.
He has since recovered and does a pretty decent job running a fair courtroom. He does not keep as efficient of a schedule as my mother did, but he does seem to genuinely apply the law in a fair manner. Of course, it took him the better part of 6 years to get to that point. The fact remains that my mother won that election, and due to the lack of either oversight or understanding - and maybe both - of electronic voting systems, the citizens of our county were worse off for it.
On the post: HBO Decides It Still Isn't Difficult Enough To Watch HBO Shows
While we're here
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Yep
On the post: EFF Slams Righthaven CEO For Pretending He Can Ignore Court Orders
Dollars
That said, the EFF is quite correct - even full-day 8+ hour depositions rarely run over $1,000. Granted, the deposition itself is an extra expense, and clients must pay for attorney's travel time (though we usually have them at our office to save our clients money, actually.) But the transcript itself is seldom over $1,000. If Righthaven has been paying Mr. Mangano over $2,000 a month, then yes, $1,000 for a transcript is a perfectly reasonable expense to expect them to pay.
On the post: Wanted: The Truck Driver Who Lost His Job Due To File Sharing
His name is Steve
Unfortunately, she did all of this on a company laptop that belonged to the trucking company Steve was working for at the time. They got an ISP letter about the pirated song, and Steve got fired. Fortunately, he now hauls race cars making almost 19 times as much PER MILE as his previous job and now has 2 computers of his own, including one for his daughter.
So yes, piracy has cost a truck driver his job. Is this what the MPAA intended? Obviously not. But eh, you weren't very specific Mike. What did I win?
On the post: Finnish Act Lets The Public Send Bills To Parliament, Volunteer Group Makes It Easy
Removing the Middleman
Now back in the real world...the problem is that any corporation with at least 50,000 employees can now DIRECTLY write their own laws. I'm not sure how many, if any companies in Finland have this many people (I would assume there must be at least a hand full), but honestly they could probably get by with 30,000 employees plus family members.
At least the old system required this be done through expensive lobbyists. Now the process of company written laws can be opened up directly to the companies
But yeah, the tiny little non-cynical optimist in me loves this idea.
On the post: Court Confirms Police Don't Need A Warrant To Do A Limited Search Of A Mobile Phone
No. Fucking No. Just No.
Number of people who have committed terrorist acts, both foreign and domestic, including in war zones such as Iraq, since 2001: less than 8,000. Note that this is a very GENEROUS estimate, based on the Pentagon's PR data. Internal DOD data (posed on Wikileaks) puts this closer to 3,000.
Number of people who's private information, as a result of being stored in a "secure government database" has been leaked to the public as a result of Anon and Wikileaks alone: over 80,000. This is from a single hack alone, actually, of which there have been several dozen since 2006.
Sorry, but no, you can NOT have access to this data, because you can NOT be trusted to keep it secure. If that means 50% more terrorists get through, fine, I live in middle-of-nowhere, Alabama and don't give a flying shit if 5 civilians in a metropolitan area die at the hands of a raging lunatic. I can live with that. What I cannot live with is me, those 5 poor bastards, and the other 357,000,000+ Americans being subjected to the police-state-of-the-month so that we MIGHT, MAYBE, POSSIBLY, KINDA, SORTA stop the raging lunatic from doing what he's probably gonna do, and get away with, regardless. What is private is PRIVATE and I do NOT trust the government (and the lowest bidder) to keep it that way, even if they do try to.
In the words of Benjamin Franklin (yanno, one of those "founding fathers" people keep throwing around so much) "He who would sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither." I don't know about the rest of the witless-idiot American public, but I would NEVER sacrifice my rights, my fellow citizen's rights, nor the lives of over 5,000 soldiers, just so I could save a few dozen civilians who, frankly, if they'd pay more attention to the world around them instead of burying their nose in their iPhone, could've probably saved themselves.
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