Live Free or Diebold

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 22:17:18 GMT

Wow some Republicans are signing on. The odour must be starting to rise and they can see that this will not pass the stink test! "The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 has picked up its first Republican co-sponsors. Reps. Tom Davis (R-Va.), Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), and Charles Bass (R-N.H), have indicated that they will sign on as co-sponsors of the bill introduced in the House in May by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.). "I am confident that more Republicans will join me so that together we can pass this legislation and make sure that every vote cast in every future election is counted accurately," Holt said in a statement. Holt's bill is designed to boost voter confidence in the integrity of electronic voting systems by requiring a paper trail of votes wherever e-voting technology is used. For example, a touch-screen voting machine would have to produce a receipt that verifies that the correct vote has been recorded. Receipts also would be used as the paper trail in the event of a computer malfunction or irregularity in an election. The bill also requires a voter verification mechanism for disabled voters who use e-voting machines, bans the use of wireless communication devices to transfer votes from voting machines to election precincts, and forces vendors to open their software code to pubic scrutiny upon request." See also how the tech groups are lining up against these machines including the ACM Seems Kucinich's web sites points at the incriminating memos to, see Dan Gillmores blog

the poesis of trackback

Fri, 10 Oct 2003 03:03:06 GMT

i had this bad experience with trackback in the summer when i started blogging and it was new to Radio. So it is only today that i decided to try to reinstall it. Now i am wondering how and which of all these links get hooked up;) At the moment the creativity of trackback is still rather intense. Waiting for all the servers to sync up makes debugging tedious and highly asynchronous. my goal is to use the Harvard server for the trackback links. At the moment i am testing on RadioU's servers ... but i cannot get RadioU to respond for most of my pages. In particular only the `Home Page' now shows the `trackback' links. And the test links i want to work with are in categories... Perhaps it is because categories use different themes? Or perhaps it is because the RadioU server is never completing its updates? Ok looks like it is the Theme that is the problem. So i will stick to the main blog for testing. So there i see that my links are not being served as trackbacks... So i will stick the trackback link (which finally i could get by going to the main page's copy of the post i am linking to!;-) into the URL's to ping ... autodiscovery does not seem to be working ... have to find out about that later. Still cannot increment that trackback counter for my August 6th entry. The references say i should be seeing a screen with the outgoing ping ... but that was for MoveableType not Radio... And why does the `URLs to Ping' field empty itself when i go back to redit the entry? Does the entry not keep track of where it pings or is there a glitch in my setup? Well it is still not holding onto those `URLs to Ping' ... but pings are going through!! How is one supposed to remember whom one pinged?? i was getting adrErrorString in place of the edit form on my radio home page. Yet in another window i had the form. So i dismissed the bad one and next time i looked at my cited post it had a trackback on it! ... But again how does one know one has pinged another post? Do i need a `trackforward'? Right now RadioComments seems to be down so testing may be out of the question for a while... i get empty trackbackcounts and a time out when i click the trackback link. Working again. Still no `trackforward' refs. The data seems to be there in weblogData.root so i guess one has to figure out how to hack the home page editing form so the `URLs to Ping:' comes preloaded with URLs already Pinged:) Would that mean multiple trackback hits? So far no. All my rev's of this item show up as a single trackback on item 25 OK, leave that aside. Next task is to get the Harvard trackback server to handle the tracking. Need to keep this enterprise somehow vendor independent. But the morass of absolute URL's is truly daunting. Is there anyway in Blogdom to create relative references? Or at least to use DNS names through out ... eg substitute www.myowndomain.com for radio.weblogs.com/0127271 everywhere, consistently? That would go a long ways to vendor independence. Could that be hacked? Hmm i wonder have i poisoned all my trackback links with RadioU values? Would i need to do a `republish all' to clean up the muddle so i do not get some blokes tracking me with RadioU links while i only monitor throught Harvard? Guess i can check some trackback links in unchanged categories to test. Such a simple seeming thing TrackBack, Englebart and Nelson said it should be ... but it is 2003 and it is still pretty fragile. Such is the Poesis of Trackback.

begheiled of god

Live Free or Diebold

the poesis of trackback