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 Friday, March 12, 2004
I hope we hear more about this. A woman does not get a C-section, one child is still-born and she is charged with murder. But if she died on the operating table, what then? What kind of country are we in that an adult can be offered the choice of surgery or murder charges? Read more at Body and Soul and Eschaton. 2:49:33 PM 
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Electronic Voting Follies, Continued. Mercury News: Campaign launched to ban digital ballots. Two California legislators kicked off a campaign Thursday to ban the use of touch-screen voting machines in the upcoming presidential election. Citing problems that prevented polls from opening on time in three counties during last week's primary election, state Sens. Don Perata, D-Oakland, and Ross Johnson, R-Irvine, asked Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to decertify the ATM-like machines.LA Times (reg req): Ballot Glitch May Affect Race. Although Orange County election officials have said they don't believe mistakes with electronic ballots last week affected the outcomes of any races, one low-profile contest is now separated by just five votes — leading one candidate to suggest that no one will ever know who really won. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Digital voting could really screw up this election. 1:49:50 PM
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Bush Insults Kerry's Intelligence - The president's latest attack is even more dishonest than the last. By Fred Kaplan [Daypop Top 40]
It is getting so anything that comes out of Bush's mouth about Kerry is grossly distorted if not outright wrong. Offering up a 1% decrease in a budget is not gutting. Republican senators were doing the same thing. Why? Because the government agency in question had sequestered over $1 billion that was unspent. This body had taken a huge amount of money from the people and had not spent it. Why should they be given more? Common sense would say that they should have their budget reduced until they had spet this horde of money. This was actually passed by a Republican Congress. And this is gutted. A Senator actually taking a reasoned, bipartisan and common sense approach to fiscal responsibility almost a decade ago and our current President uses it in negative ads. How stupid do they think people are? (Actually, this Adminstration thinks people are pretty stupid and have demonstrated this contempt many times.) 1:30:27 PM
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Do Diebold Machines Already Have Printers Inside?. A few months ago, we wrote about Diebold's admitted plan that if they were forced by government officials to add printers to their machines they would do so at a ridiculously high price in order to profit as much as possible. Now, the latest Robert Cringely column is claiming that Diebold's voting machines already have a printer inside, but it's rarely used. Cringely claims the printer is there to satisfy a law that says these machines need to print a receipt - but that Diebold has convinced everyone that the rule means each machine needs to print a single receipt of the day's results, not a receipt for each vote. The guy who alerted Cringely to the printer suggests that with a fairly cheap ($30 or so) modification, the printer could be used to produce voter verifiable receipts. Of course, there would also need to be a software change, but it might still be tough to justify hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to change each machine.
[Techdirt]
If true it surely demonstrates how Diebold is one of the greatest dangers to our democracy. Letting such a company control our votes is opening us up to widespread voting fraud. Will we have to call in Jimmy Carter to supervise the vote? 12:39:39 PM
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'Dangerous' Patent Removed from Database?. Bruce Schneier, in an e-mail, writes:In October 1962, the U.S. Patent Office granted patent 3,060,165 regarding
the use of ricin as a biological weapon. Published patents are, of course, publicly available. That's the point.
All US patents are available from the USPTO website: "full-text since 1976, full-page images since 1790." However, for some reason, this particular patent is no longer in the database:
Clicking on "Images" only produces a "Patent not found" image.
The patent is still available in foreign databases, so it seems like a rather futile exercise if the removal was due to concerns about knowledge of WMDs.
This hiding of public information is just the sort of thing we need to fight against. If the bad guys can get a copy of the patent without any trouble, how is this helping? [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
This administration seems to feel that it is better to keep its own citizens in the dark rather than its enemies. The latter can still get access to this patent. Probably has "Secret" plastered all over it. Another case of closing the barn door too late. 44 years too late! Very dumb. 12:53:17 AM
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Microsoft, SCO and Anti-Linux Campaign. Business Week: SCO's Suit: A Match Made in Redmond? For months, rumors have swirled around the Web alleging that Microsoft helped finance a small Utah software company's suit against IBM and two corporations that use Linux software. BusinessWeek has learned that Microsoft (MSFT ) did not put up the money, but did play matchmaker for SCO Group (SCOX ) and BayStar Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund which made a $50 million investment in SCO last October. If this is true, the European Union's antitrust people, as well as state attorneys general in the U.S., should look hard into what seems like blatantly anti-competitive conduct by a company that has been found to have broken the law by abusing its monopoly. (The U.S. Justice Department is Microsoft's bed partner, so don't look for any response from Washington.)
At the very least, people should be put under oath to answer some questions.
UPDATE: Andrew Orlowski is shocked, shocked by the news. Good points. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Another case where MS should get its knuckles rapped quite hard. 12:51:25 AM
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Signs of Intelligence: Snopes takes on the Dr. Laura letter. A little background on the infamous open letter about Old
Testament law and homosexuality.
I'm sure that a great many morons.org readers have seen this
letter, purportedly to Dr. Laura Schlessinger, that is a
satirical refutation of using ancient Levitical law to condemn
homosexuality today. The myth-busting website Snopes, seeing
a... [morons.org headlines]
CHeck out the letter at Snopes. It covers a lot of things that are in the Bible and what we should do about them, since we are supposed to follow what the Bible says, right? It demonstrates that people pick and chose all the time what to follow in the Bible and what to ignore. What is different this time? 12:47:15 AM
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Relevant to the trade embargo question. In yesterday's CNN.com, Elise Labott reported that the Bush administration plans to tighten the trade embargo against Syria. But despite the new stringency, "Washington will not object to the export of communications equipment related to Internet and cell phone use -- 'to allow for the free flow of ideas.' " Labott quoted an unnamed US official: "We don't want to have the Syrian people get their news in a vacuum." (PS: It's OK for cell phones to enter Syria, even though they can be used by drug dealers and terrorists, but not OK for scientific papers to leave Syria, at least edited by Americans, even though they will benefit everyone.) (Thanks to George Spafford.) [Open Access News]
It continues to be a Looking-Glass world. 12:04:18 AM
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Fallows provides a detailed account of how well researched pre-war plans for a post-war Iraq were cast aside. One of the major drivers of this is Rumsfeld's belief in uncertainty:
The limits of future knowledge, Feith said, were of special importance to Rumsfeld, "who is death to predictions." "His big strategic theme is uncertainty," Feith said. "The need to deal strategically with uncertainty. The inability to predict the future. The limits on our knowledge and the limits on our intelligence."
Uncertainty is different from risk in that there is no mathematical predication that can be made based on historical behavior. However, in Rumsfeld's mind, it seems that a belief in uncertainty only applies to negative outcomes and not upside opportunities (ie. don't prepare because we don't know what the outcome will be):
In the immediate run-up to the war the Administration still insisted that the costs were unforeseeable. "Fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground," Paul Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on February 27, with combat less than three weeks away.
The way military planning accounts for uncertainty is to build contingencies. While the precise risk can't be calculated, broad categories of uncertainties can be anticipated and contingencies can be built around them. That requires lots more resources than the core plan requires. In business the logic is exactly the opposite. If you fund every contingency based on unquantifiable uncertainty, you will lose money. This, in combination with the heavy emphasis on corporate mercenaries currently in place, leads me to conclude that "business" logic is at the core of Rumsfeld's transformational military. [John Robb's Weblog]
The lack of a plan is still a plan. Of course, it means you can never be wrong. At least in theory since we can now all see that not having a post-war plan was a horrible plan, one that is exacting a huge cost in lives and money. It should now exact a huge cost in this Administration, one that results in the loss of their jobs. 12:00:58 AM
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