Bayosphere

Thank you for saying this!

Since this issue usually provokes a reaction of “But a paper trail will let people sell their vote!” let me debunk that. Using public-private key encryption one can both encrypt the data on the receipt, and sign it with a different key to prove it is an authentic receipt. You encrypt the data on the receipt with one public key, sign it with another. You give one copy of the receipt to the voter, the other goes in a lock-box at the polling place.

These receipts are useless unless you have the private keys to decrypt the receipt and check the signature. The private keys are tightly controlled, available only to an election official and a representative of each party. They are also generated anew for every election. You then use the lock-box full of receipts to audit the electronic counting of results. Any voter can also demand proof that his vote was counted by matching his encrypted receipt with the list of ones on record. But no one besides the voter knows which voter generated which receipt.

This stuff isn’t magic, rocket-science, or even hard to use. You use it every time you visit a “Secure” website to perform a financial transaction.

The more companies like Diebold deny problems and try to buy their way out, the more Americans and their representatives should fear unverified voting. As the old business adage says, “the likelihood that customer concerns are justified is directly proportion to the vigor with with the company rejects their validity.”

Its not the League of Women Voters, or the associations of the disabled, that are wrong but those who persist in the untenable argument that electronic voting somehow has to be more secure – by geometric proportions – than any other voting method currently or recently in use. Electronic voting machines are safer, more accurate and more accessible than any other method we are currently using. That’s the bottom line.

Dave, if you have two systems and one allows you to verify that the count is accurate or not, and the other doesn’t allow you to do so, one is obviously not as safe. The electronic voting machines that are being most widely promoted and used fall into the latter category, although there’s no reason why they inherently should. Correcting that grave error in these machines is hardly trying to make them more secure than other voting methods — it’s trying to make them AS secure and accurate and verfiable, which can only be seen as good for democracy.

“Electronic voting machines are safer, more accurate and more accessible than any other method we are currently using. That’s the bottom line.”

This is an out and out lie. Period.

Dave,

Current US electronic voting systems have no audit capability. That means ONE LINE OF CODE can move 10% of the votes, or however many needed to throw the outcome. This may have already happened in Georgia and Nevada. We just can’t know. The manufacturers refuse to allow the code to be reviewed (protecting their “trade secrets”), even if reviewers are the government officials purchasing the systems and are bound by confidentiality agreements. The system smells rotten. Their “code signature” checks are worthless because there are too many ways to hide easter eggs in black-box code. I mean, if the Australians can do a decent open electronic voting system, why can’t we?

With mechanical voting systems you at least have to hack each polling place; there’s no single black box where one person can throw the whole outcome.

Anyone who knows anything about goo goos [that’s good government groups], knows that they are always more corrupt than any crooked politician.

There does exist an open source electronic voting system, used in Australia for parliamentary elections since 2001:

http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html

Interestingly, they do not support a paper trail since their code is open to audit:

There is no need to print a copy of any votes. The Electoral Act 1992 does not provide for a “paper trail” of electronic votes cast. This is not required as the software for the voting and counting systems has been rigorously tested, independently audited, and published for anyone to see on the internet. In addition, audit trails and security systems will be in place to verify that the software used in production is identical to the tested and a
udited software, and to verify that the data actually counted is the data cast by voters in polling places. This approach is intended to ensure that there will be no way in which electronic votes can be tampered with. The system is intended to be more transparent and secure than the existing paper ballot method.

Our most infamous voting state is having difficulty with its unaditable post-chad election systems:

Voting Machine Software is Flawed (Florida)
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040613/NEWS/406130355/1006/SPORTS

(sorry, I’d have linked to a K-R article if I could find one not requiring registration)

I won’t even get started on the morality of this. I will simply suggest that the well documented quality and security problems of the software industry are not unrelated to age discrimination.

There is nothing like age discrimination laws in India. So you can’t blame IBM or any other company following policies in India or any other country that is different from US. You can’t expect all countries to have the same laws as the US.

Sometimes in the US it is reverse age discrimination specially in the jobs controlled by unions. People with less seniority are let go irrespective if they are more capable than a senior person.

Just check out Indian help wanted ads: www.naukri.com, and see how many of them have an upper years of experience limit that rules most of us out. We hear that it’s a global world and we need to compete, but if you are over 35 in this new world, look out! Age discrimination laws are not an arbitrary US cultural idiosyncrasy, they are a recognition that human intelligence, energy, and ability do not have a short shelf life. Unless you are independently wealthy or planning to die young, you’d better hope that Indian labor practices do NOT become the norm in the new global economy.

B Kumar, of course you can. There is no law that says IBM cannot have more stringent policies than the laws of the country in which it is located. IBM is perfectly free to say “We will not discriminate based on age, even though it is legal.” IBM doesn’t need a law to make its managers wear ties; why should it need a law to make them hire qualified people over 30?

mythago

I don’t argue with that except it shouldn’t make IBM or any other company follow US laws in other countries. If this causes IBM to lose out on valuable talent they will change the law as do other companies, both local and foreign, in India or other country.

Betsy Ross

The only problem is sometimes people outprice themselves compared to their skills even in the US without outside competition as they grow older, since lot of the earning power is tied with seniority and yearly increases, promotion etc but the productivity starts going down after you reach 40 in most cases. In that case shouldn’t the salary be revised downward which can’t be currently done in the US because of labor laws. So this forces companies to eliminate positions which they otherwise would like to keep.

Some of the laws that are created to right a wrong cause other problem which are not addressed.

B Kumar: there is no evidence that productivity goes down after 40 except in those jobs that require brute strength or athletic speed, and that’s certainly not IT or any other modern industry (finance, education, research, management, etc.). On the contrary, those are the very jobs where experience should be worth a premium. In the west, the idea of being washed up at 40 is long gone: not only can people not afford to retire, they often don’t even want to. By accusing older people of pricing themselves out of the market, I’m reminded of the Indian argument in favor of offshoring and guestworker visas: “We’re cheaper, so give us your jobs!” Labor-dumping is what India is doing to the western world. There is no universal standard of what constitutes a fair wage, and when India dilutes the labor pool with cheap workers they are simply exporting their own population problem. What to think of a nation whose major economic plan is to deprive the citizens of other nations of their livihoods? And, their press is full of bogus excuses as to why this is ok, and age is one of them. I’ve read endless nonsense about how western people are not reproducing and will need replacements, how we are all getting old (over 40) and can’t work any more, how none of us know any math, science, have any computer skills so we deserve to be replaced – whatever nonsense the Indian press can come up with.

I’ve made a fairly good living, although intellectually deadening, over the past 7 years cleaning up the messes made by “cheap labor” H-1Bs and the “cheap labor conservative” bosses who employ them.

The problem is not the techies, whatever age. There are just too many MBAs in the U.S. who were educated at second-rate schools. They’ve been managing projects with a bottom-line mentality, no focus on quality (or even basic requirements). Get the job done under budget, and they get a raise. Patches and revs and bug fixes come out of somebody else’s budget, so there’s no accountability.

The better schools of management still teach Edward Deming’s 14 points for quality management, the 4th of which can be summarized as “stop awarding low-bid contracts; minimize total cost by working with a single supplier”.

Betsy,

You are making emotional arguments and you seem to have a particular beef about India.

My arguments hold true even if there was no India in the market. I have been in the IT field in the US for the last 15 years and I have seen the younger folk always being better programmers than the over 40 ones. Ever wonder most of the scientific and technological discoveries are made by people under 40 except for rare exceptions, most of the great physics discoveries were made by scientists when they were in the 20’s and early 30’s and who dind’t do anything great after that? Just because we are able to live longer because of medical advances doesn’t mean that our mental faculties for most people begin to diminish after 40. There are always exceptions.

I myself will admit that there are quite a few sharp 25-30 year olds who will beat me in most programming tasks. The only place I have better leverage is where I have certain specilaized business knowledge which I have acquired thru’ years of experience which most younger folks have. If you have that you will be valuable, if not you are toast. So don’t blame others if you are not upto the task.

I guess you are ok if the thir
d world knows its place and just keeps to manufacturing clothes, toys etc at cheap prices so you can have 2500 sq foot homes with a uge walk in closet and fill them up with cheap stuff.

B Kumar: you are the one making emotional arguments. Your allegations about older workers are nothing short of defamation. There is not a shred of evidence that older workers are worth less. All you have to do is be a regular reader of www.economictimes.indiatimes.com to see what India really thinks of the west and western workers. This is the place where we should send our data, our intellectual property, and our jobs? Everyone read and see for yourself.

Betsy:

My arguments stand on its own and I am not defaming older workers, just stating facts. How many people over 40 can get into a top 10 MBA program (the regular MBA, not the weekend/executive MBA)? They may tell you are overqualified, or something else except the real reason because they will get sued.

And if you are getting your news from the Economic times or any of the publications from the IndiaTimes group, I feel sorry for you. Thier flag ship newspaper Times of India is commonly referred to as the Toilet Paper of India, because they sensationalize the news and have a lot of hyberbole except the facts. They are also known to sell the editorial pages and even news for a price. And this story about selling the news was just published in other newspapers including Asiantimes just recently.

Whether a person over 40 can “get into” anything has absolutely no revelance to whether or not they are qualified, whether they could handle the program, and whether or not the program would be wasted on them (it wouldn’t). Other people’s subjective prejudices have nothing to do with the matter. Unless we are talking about athletic prowess we are simply spewing discrimination if we say that we are justified in ruling out older workers simply because of their age.

So a popular, powerful politician avoids doing the right thing because, well, it might make him unpopular.

Gee, where have I heard this before?

What do you expect Hill to say? She’s a known advocate for higher taxes.

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/8215678.htm?1c

“The Legislature’s nonpartisan (sic) analyst, Elizabeth Hill, said in a January analysis that Schwarzenegger’s $99 billion budget proposal would leave the state with a $6 billion deficit by summer 2006. The analysis encouraged lawmakers to consider raising taxes — something opposed by Schwarzenegger.”

Yes, the governor “missed an opportunity” to *raise taxes*. No, the Democrats won’t support any more spending cuts.

There’s no substance here. Just ranting against a Republican by a tax & spend liberal, by a public official whose brief is to be nonpartisan!

Sure, franken. Tax-and-spend=bad, borrow-and-spend=good. What spending cuts has Arnold proposed? It seems all he’s done is promise a bunch of constituency groups that if they took a cut this year, they’d get more next year. That’s not fiscal responsibility, and it’s NOT the Democrat’s fault. You can’t blame Democrats for a Republican’s budget proposal.

“You can’t blame Democrats for a Republican’s budget proposal.”

Of course you can.

Arnold has proposed what he knows he can get, and aims to use the proposition process to get the rest. (stay tuned).

Any other strategy would ensure that crazed Left Democrats of Sacramento would announce “it’s dead on arrival”.

Just make massive cuts in CA budget. If there is no money don’t spend. If you want to spend, tax the people. It is that simple. Either the state hurts for money or they take from the people’s wallets in either income taxes, or better yet fees, raise gas, education, and other user fees. If you use services pay for them.

Dan-

The voters are the ones to blame here. We have enacted countless laws through the initiative process that limit what the legislature can do. We have mandated spending on all sorts of things, while at the same time we have not allowed an increase in taxes to cover that spending (I’m mainly talking about Prop. 13 here.) We have enacted a three-strikes and mandatory minimum laws that have been greatly increasing our prison population, but we are unwilling to pay for new prisons.

And we have a bigger problem than just a budget deficit, we are using up our capital goods in the state. There isn’t a city in the state that can afford to do major road work, so the roads are slowly deteriorating. Same goes for water and power and any other capital good we expect the government to take care of for us. That is an expense that nobody ever thinks of but will be far more costly in the future than financing the State’s debt. It is cheaper to maintain our capital goods than it will be to rebuild them in the future.

If Californians want something to change with the State’s budget we need to be willing to do it at the ballot box. We need to be willing to pay for the things we want from the government or cut back what we are asking for.

I think Swartznegger should raise taxes on newspapers. They are as responsible as the legislature for the budget mess. They are obvious advocates of raising taxes and write sob stories about any cut that’s proposed. So do it to them.

I happen to believe that solving the budget problem requires a forensic examination into where changes were made to the budget after Davis took office. There was no justification for spending bubble-revenue including whatever tax cuts contributed to the problem. It doesn’t have to be reinstating the car tax but some taxes should be increased to offset its loss, less any increases in fees and taxes enacted in the interim. The rest should be done on the spending side and in making choices among competing interests, the public should know what changes exceeded the growth of revenues from the last Wilson budget to the current one. Show us the money… and where it went.

It sounds like what happened is that during the economic boom, the legislature and governor allocated all the extra tax revenue to permanent programs, instead of saving it or using it for capital improvements. So now these are line-item expenses in the annual budget with their own constituencies, who jump up and yell “You can’t balance the budget on the backs of (name of special interest group)” whenever someone proposes actually trying to balance the budget.

I think what we really need is for people to understand that the a balanced budget means expenditures can’t exceed revenue, so either programs get cut or taxes go up (or both). This should be obvious but a lot of people seem oblivious to it.

“This should be obvious but a lot of people seem oblivious to it.”

Yes, and for a very good reason.

It’s easier to play the “Dem vs. Rep” game than it is to work.

Work is such a drag. Let’s call each other some more names, and hope all these awfully complicated problems will just go away.

Dan unloads another raspberry. Partisan snipping thinly veiled by lousy legislative analysis — and obliviousness to factors driving real financial markets.

Moody’s has just upgraded California!

Three cheers for strong Republican leadership!

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1896&u=/nm/20040521/us_nm/economy_california_rating_dc_1&printer=1

Why are online bill-paying services so expensive? It seems as if the going rate is about $1/transaction, about the same as it was five years ago. Why should I pay $1 to save myself 37 cents in postage?

The economics of this is all backwards. Surely it’s much more expensive for a vendor (and their bank) to process a paper check. If anything, they should be providing incentives for me to handle my payments electronically. And individually, they do: I can go to the SBC site and pay my SBC bill electronically for no charge. I can pay my credit card bill electronically by going to their site, etc. But if I want to handle all my transactions in the same place, I have to pay through the nose. Why is this? Why isn’t there an incentive for the vendors to absorb the third-party costs for such transactions, as there is with credit card purchases at point-of-sale?

This is reminisicent of the whole ATM thing. When ATMs were first installed, we were told that we’d all benefit because they would save lots of money which they’d pass on in the form of low fees. But then they started charging, in some cases $3 or more, to use an ATM. Greedy.

It’s clear why certain electronic conveniences (such as cash cards) have been much more successful in Europe and elsewhere than in America. Our companies are too damn greedy. Why should they expect to get $1 just for moving some money from one bank account to another, an electronic event which costs them nothing?

Sunday’s Meet The Press episode told me two things:

The Bush Administration will stop at nothing to lie and manipulate the American people

Colin Powell made a terrible mistake in deciding to serve the Bush Administration. His hard-earned integrity slowly deteriorates as he serves as Secretary of State.

Sunday’s Meet The Press episode told me two things:

The Bush Administration will stop at nothing to lie and manipulate the American people

Colin Powell made a terrible mistake in deciding to serve the Bush Administration. His hard-earned integrity slowly deteriorates as he serves as Secretary of State.

Yawn. It taught me that Tim Russert is so full of angst that his own network isn’t promoting his book that he’ll rail against the Secretary of State when Russert’s own staff let the interview go into overtime, taking the satellite time from other networks, and Powell’s aide stepped in to move on to the next interview.

wahoofive asks: “Why are online bill-paying services so expensive?” Because people are willing to pay that much. I don’t use them because I don’t see why I should pay more in order to save money for everyone else involved.

you should revolt!

i’m in dallas (moved from los angeles in 1993) and get free quicken bill-paying with my bank, and have for years (i recall paying $6/month when i first moved here). if the bank started to charge me, i’d retaliate by either switching back to free paper checks, or move my account elsewhere. i suspect that’s not what they want, so … free checking and free ATMs are standard fare.

last time i paid an ATM fee was during a roadtrip to mississippi (`nuff said).

-g

I’m right with you, NonMoose, but it seems to me that since they’d save money, they have economic motivation to get me to switch. Where’s the invisible hand of Adam Smith? Gene, are banks competing on that feature in Dallas? No bank here in the Bay Area is advertising free bill-paying services, although one advertises no ATM fees.

Mind if I plug some of my recent work about tech/social issues?

“Jew Watch”, Google, and Search Engine Optimization
http://sethf.com/anticensorware/google/jew-watch.php
Abstract: This report examines issues surrounding the high ranking of an anti-semitic website, “JewWatch.com”, for searches on the word” Jew”. The search results present complex issues of unintended consequences and social dilemmas.

And

Nitke v. Ashcroft : Seth Finkelstein expert witness report
http://sethf.com/nitke/ashcroft.php
“A provider of content via the Internet cannot reasonably be expected to know the location of readers, if the context is one in which location would lead to a denial of the ability to read the content.”

Hey Dan: RE your future Prius

Don’t know if you saw this article. Sounds liek some unhappy campers.

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,63413,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

A man walks into a bar and trips over a string laying on the ground, and now the string is all twisted and coming apart at the ends.

The bartender sees the string on the floor and says “Hey! Haven’t I seen you here before and told you not to come in?”

To which the string replies “Oh no! I’m a frayed knot!”

I’m wondering what America would be like had it returned to strict isolationism after World WAR II ended?

I would like to think that America would be a land of unequaled economic wealth, a happy population that long-ago solved racial problems because it would have had the money to fix American poverty.

It would be an America with citizens that could walk down the streets of any nation in the world and be greeted in kindness for staying neutral like much of the world does.

We wouldn’t be torn apart by the activities of the outside world, indeed many places of strife may not exist in the world had America stayed out of other nations problems. If America had not help create problems within the borders of other countries there might be peace in the Middle East.

Yes, I often wonder what such an America would have been like with tens of thousands of Americans that would have lived instead of dying for causes that were none of our business.

Don

I realize that I am a blowhard with not a lot of intelligent things to say. But someone has to represent the right on this libby board.

Media off the mark with Rumsfeld potshots:

http://www.suntimes.com/output/osullivan/cst-edt-osul18.html#

Al’s,

Your purpose is to derail any attempt at meaningful posit-and-discuss by asserting partisanship.

Why don’t you start your own blog rather than hijack Dan’s?

I hope this is an OK place for this. This is something I sent to Dan awhile ago, and he thought he might post something about this for discussion.
I haven’t seen any posts about it, so I figured I’d put it here in the open thread.

—–
I am self-employed, and make nearly my entire living from delivering services/products by using Open Source Software.

I think that I am not alone and probably signify the beginnings of a trend in IT.

I think IT people have become accustomed to being employed by large
companies, because that’s where IT technologies started.

But now, it’s rather easy for large companies to move their jobs overseas.
Now that IT technologies are more mature, executives know they can get
some return from moving common development tasks overseas.

In the US though, we excel at many things including entrepreneurship.
And Open Source, greatly lowers the “barrier-to-entry”.

The lowering of the “barrier-to-entry” is not being heralded in any
publications that I read. Publications tend to focus on things like,
“Linux is free. Companies can save $$$”. That’s missing the biggest
impact.

So, if you know IT technologies (and savvy/self-directed enough to figure
things out on your own), then you can create wonderful new ideas that a
large behemouth company may not be pursuing.

And, possibly, we may see a big economic gain in the future from IT people
being unemployed. Some will pick up Open Source tools, and try to make
something out of not having a job.

Personally, my thinking is “Do I want to spend thousands of dollars to get
software for development for a risky idea?” Or do I say, “Hey, I have lots
of time on my hands, I’ll just figure out how to work with this Open
Source stuff!” There’s other reasons too, but I think that’s a big one.

I see some very qualified people getting laid off, and I think there will
be some adjustment to people not relying on large companies to provide a
living.

I would love to see an article that can tease out information out there to
support this trend. I think the article would be a good candidate for
being posted on slashdot too, which I’ve also tried to get this topic
discussed but get lost in the noise.

I wrote this rather quickly, so I hope my points are clear enough.
I’ve corresponded to you in the past when you wrote about open source. I
think my testament to this trend is that I’m still here.

http://www.linuxjava.net/howto/webapp/

I thought this article from http://www.military.com/ deserved a wider audience. This is a site devoted to the Services on a professional level and the writer is a Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Sanders_051704,00.html

Its a look in the mirror piece.

I am curious how the academies that Jerry Brown set up a few years ago in Oakland are doing. Are the test scores and gruduation rates better? Do they still exist?

I tried looking for updated information and only came up with info. announcing they were being started a couple of years ago.

Ray

A social issue that has been hidden is the long term unemployed. What can be done to make it so a company would prefer to hire someone who has been unemployed for a while, or at a lower paying job. Such as a former manager of mine taking a job at target because he is over forty, and can’t find a job in his field. Tax break perhaps? I have seen very qualified people, especially over age 40, who have a very hard time after losing a job finding a new one. Age discrimination is a problem in our youth worshipping society, unfortunately.

Or is the answer just expand the Forty Plus network, such as http://www.fortyoc.org 😉

wahoofive:

The invisible hand of Adam Smith was treated like the visible hand of Luca Brasi in “The Godfather”. And then the rest of Smith was treated like the rest of Brasi. What we today call the “free market” is such a bastardized abomination that Smith himself would be compelled to ask “Weren’t ANY of you paying attention to what I said?”

I suspect Jesus would do the same upon a return to Earth.

Russert is a wuss…a laydown too often and too easy to the fluff and BS of the GOP.

Allthough she is the (expletive appropriate…) gutter_____ of corporate sludge as news and earning every bit of the value they seek for her 15 million a year, the hardest assed interview on tv or elsewhere hands down is ….Katy Couric.

I know …never thought I would say so and do despise the format of banal crap she dominates, that said …disinformation and mfg. consent aside…having hated her as I did …I went with no cable a year stuck on one channel….watch her, it is true. There is no quarter given to squiggle or parse or mince or blow smoke. Laugh if you want but name one better. Someone like this is needed on the sunday gabs…But then Joe Biden sounds like the smartest man on the Hill today so maybe we who still prefer basis and context to frame our newsreading seem just as deluded to them. Best crock of dooty out today…

read the tripe Safire spouits in NYT today?
How can he hold a job with such bleeting.

Nice to have an entirely open thread once in a while. Good idea.

There was an article in the Scotsman recently, here, detailing human rights abuses including torture by Arafat and the PLO that I think deserves wider notice. Apparently an organization, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG), has been receiving funding from the Europeans and others as long as it focuses on Israeli abuses. But as soon as it began reporting on Palestinian actions the funding mysteriously dried up. Curious.

There may be many reasons to support candidates for President other than George W. Bush. So why do anti-Bush zealots go illogical?

The ‘Bush lied about WMD’ Tango: http://blogs.rny.com/sbw/stories/storyReader$131

Considering that he published the exploit before notifying the vendor (which he never did) he’s no different that the people creating exploits like Beagle and Sassar.

Good job linking someone advocating and providing instructions on how to hack a commercial software service. Very tech savvy of you…

From the blogrolling.com news blog:

===

This morning at roughly 9:05am EST, Brent Ashley brought a security vulnerability to our attention. The issue was escalated to our on call developer who crafted a hot-patch and fixed the problem by roughly 9:54am EST.

===

The right thing to do in such a situation is to notify us and give us a chance to fix the bug. If you ever find a security flaw in any Tucows product, you can drop me a line at jdevilla@tucows.com. It’s part of my job to handle things like this. I’ll make sure the appropriate alarms are sounded, action is taken and even pull strings to make sure that we send you some kind of gift of gratitude.

The wrong thing to do is to point out the flaw to the world, tell people how to exploit it and even make creative suggestions. That’s just anti-community behaviour.

Joey deVilla
Technical Community Development Coordinator
Tucows, Inc.

You’re running Movable Type here, right, Dan? As it happens, I know a fresh and incredibly severe MT exploit. Would you like it on my blog? Shall I post it on one of the security email lists that you don’t subscribe to, but every single cracker does?

I understand the urge to publish, I feel it myself. Even just to hint. But while I’d enjoy the momentary fame, I don’t think people getting hosed would be that happy about my full exposure.

Do you back up your MT installation? Often?

Dan, if it were a Windows bug, what would you do?

You cry foul when the Pentagon tries to minimize coverage of embrassing events. Yet you agree with those who try to minimize publication of software bugs?

Regardless how fast anyone fixes bugs, it takes time for administrators to upgrade their software. Bugs are bugs. It shouldn’t matter whose fault it is – bugs and security holes are not acceptable.

If lawsuits are the only way to make cars safer, then humiliation may be the only way to force software developers more proactive. It shouldn’t a race to see who can fix bugs faster, it should be about not having any in the first place!

I write software. I also have to use a lot of crap. That is why I take these things very seriously.

By Sinclair’s logic, the names of the dead at the Vietnam memorial should be taped over. It’s beginning to play like the reaction to that war: any opposition to the President’s decisions about the war are portrayed as anti-GI and unpatriotic. The irony of politicians and camp followers attempting to suppress the free expression of dissent in the name of patriotism always seems to be lost on them.

Personally, I can’t think of a better way of supporting combat troops than to keep them alive. The U.S. has made some bad decisions, and we have magnified their impact by stubborness and CYA political posturing.

We’ve got a firm grip on the tiger’s tail, and all the spinning and posturing apparently hasn’t impressed the tiger at all. I’m sure cutting deals with Saddam’s generals to put them in charge of suppressing the population will be portrayed as a noble act, just as Vietnamization was marketed as an honorable way to get us out thirty years ago.

For those who call on us to encourage needless suffering as an act of political orthodoxy and civic virtue, I suggest they enlist for combat arms and join in the fun. It isn’t fair for the grunts to get all the glory…the joy of earning Purple Hearts should be shared by the war enthusiasts.

AS with all first amendment protected sources, the Sinclair stations alone can decide what to proadcast and what not to broadcast (within the law, of course) on their airways. ABC cannot tell them what to air, and neither can you. Or would you prefer that AP and Reuters be able to dictate which of their stories the Merc will carry?

As usual, it’s biased politics when you don’t agree with the position.

I don’t know what Ted is doing: it’s not journalism and it’s not entertainment. Someday Ted may buy his own media outlet where he can broadcast himself 24 x 7.

Pfew

It’s sad when people like Jorgen say that honoring the men and women who died for our country is “partisan politics”.

There those slimey Liberals go again, insisting on honering our war dead. Don’t forget the *MOST* unpatriotic and selfish act of all was that of the Soldiers that *ALLOWED* themselves to be killed. Yes, we forget about how they swore to protect our country and now look at them… Dead and making the administration look bad. I’m proud that our President refuses to acknowledge these evil malingering war dead by even attending a single funeral. Yes, we *SHOULD* hide their dishoner by not showing their flag draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base.

Jorgen, I guess unless we define journalist to equate to publicist, what Koppel is doing is classic journalism: taking a newsworthy topic and helping our nation understand the impact of decisions made by our elected officials.

There is an entire generation of Americans who have never experienced a war…the “war” in Panama and the “war” in Grenada offered little in the way of real impact on the vast majority of people. Gulf War I was so low on casualties that we didn’t really understand what a real war can mean. The focus on deaths in the media ignores the horror of non-fatal wounds, but we don’t see the litters coming back, or the shattered bodies of veterans in our military hospitals on TV.

It doesn’t trivialize the deaths of the relatively few solders of the past 28 years to say that American hasn’t experienced a national sense of loss. Without that knowledge, how can citizens gauge for themselves whether the cost was justified?

9/11 was such a monstrous act of mass terrorism that we celebrated the lives and mourned the deaths of the victims without really understanding why they died…and those names were repeated many times and many places with politicians of both parties scrambling to be associated with them. What Ted Koppel is doing is worthwhile.

“ABC cannot tell them what to air, and neither can you.”

Actually, according to the First Amendment you profess to respect, we can. It’s the government that can’t tell them what to air.

Oh, and ABC might well, depending on what their contracts say.

Dan, buy your own network of broadcast stations and go wild.

It’s nice to see some moderate and conservative influence beginning to temper the worst extremes of the far Left “news” operations of the major networks.

It’s an outrage that so-called ‘campaign finance reforms’ have never addressed the problem of political advocacy by the broadcast media elites.

To clamp down of spending cash raised, whether from ordinary Americans or special interests, but to leave the ‘major media’ free to lambaste conservatives and, in this case, the War on Terror — with no restraint on their spending (in this case, TV time valued easily in the millions) — reveals ‘campaign finance reform’ for what it is:

THE PRESERVATION OF AN OLIGOPOLY OF LIBERAL MEDIA ELITES, shaping if not controlling the public agenda at their pleasure.

Al, a restraint on the spending of media outlets will not solve anything. Think positive, not negative.

Buy your own network of broadcast stations and go wild. You can be outraged all day long. 🙂

Jimmy

Ted is just acting out a stunt. He – and ABC – are not honoring the dead. Sadly, this is political activism.

Perhaps Ted will next read the names of the unborn children killed through abortion in the last year. That would a stunt. That would be political activism.

Another month until Memorial Day. If you want to fake it, honor the dead on that day. This is just too transparent.

So, Mr. franken, can you please give me your definition of liberal? There is no country in the world that has a better conservative propaganda machine than the United States media. Newspapers in Thailand are more liberal than in the United States.

Joergen, I’m sorry you feel that honoring our dead men and women of the armed forces is something we should not do, or something that only phoneys do (there’s, apparently, that conservative habit of projection again) — personally, I believe that these people should get some notice and we should feel bad about them. But then I don’t think Bush should’ve shot down raising their death benefits (a relatively measly $3000) just after he sent them into a war. That’s just me, that’s the way I am; I think they are of worth, even if the cause they were sent to fight for was a lie — you obviously feel differently about their worth.

I’m what you would probably call a liberal: in fact, I’m a socialist. But one of the principles that I’ve always regarded as important is that, no matter whether you agree with a government’s decision to go to war, you remember and honour the dead servicemen and women. Even if the cause they’re fighting for is a dishonourble one, that doesn’t make them any less courageous.
And remembering the dead doesn’t mean remembering them only AFTER the shooting stops. It means honouring them from the moment they sacrifice their lives. It means knowing their names, knowing about their lives, knowing that there are men and women out there who are prepared to die for their countries – even when that country asks them to do so for the wrong reasons.
To refuse to air the names of the dead is to attempt to sweep their lives under the carpet. No matter whether you think the war is just or not, that’s wrong.
If I were in favour of this war, I would still want their names read out, because to do otherwise is both dishonourable to their memories, and a weaselish attempt to hide the fundamental truth that war – just or not – always has consequences. We should always remember those consequences, and especially those who have to pay them.

Are some of you arguing that Sinclair’s act, like the prohibition on pictures of flag-draped coffins, isn’t a cynical and calculated political act?

The current flow of coffins is a profound embarrassment to the President, since the occupants inconveniently died after his somewhat premature “mission accomplished” crowing. But they did die for their country as surely as if in the victorious phase 1 of the Iraqui debacle; it’s a shame that the conservatives feel obligated to diminish the importance of their sacrifice now.

Our nation must understand the real cost of our decisions, both in dollars and in deaths, and the efforts of the administration to screen these until after the election are shameful. The current administration wrote the check and these soldiers backed it. McCain spoke for many of us. It’s Sinclair who dishonors our dead, not Koppel.

I’m surprised that no one mentioned the fact that the Newshour on PBS has been showing the pictures, names and ranks of the war dead “as soon as pictures and their names become available” since the very beginning.

Is this because “It’s just PBS, those whiny leftists?” Perhaps it’s that it’s easy to ignore those last minutes of silence. Perhaps it’s because they come only in dribs and drabs, 1, 2, or 10 at once.

Why did people, including the President complain about the Dover AFB pictures? http://www.thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/gallery.htm Anyone who has looked at the site could see there was no enumeration, no editorializing accompanying the information, except on the lead-in cover page where the webmaster describes the process he had to go through to get them and that was only the total number of pictures. No help is given to identify whether any two pictures describe the same or different events, that is up to the individual viewer to decipher. Perhaps the families are haunted by the notion that any ONE of those caskets COULD be Horace’s or Johnny’s or Julia’s. I don’t think that one of those families has the right to avoid that discomfort to deny the comfort of those who also lost loved ones to see the honor and dignity and care taken as their loved ones traveled home to them.

Nobody is dragging bodies out of caskets to display the horrors inflicted upon them for political purpose. Indeed this one of the mitigating factors is insidious on its own. The caskets are as anonymous as could be. There is little sense, except that which we can project upon them that they carry the remains of individual human beings whose lives ended early because of decisions, right or wrong, made by others. Others who have an obligation and resposibility to measure the cost versus the benefits to the rest of society. Responsibility comes from acquiesence as well as deliberation.

A sense of shame or denial is where I believe these objections come from with those without a direct personal relation to the dead. Why is it different in this case? Why is it, when the names of those who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001 were read aloud at the places where they were murdered, that it was not dishonoring to them? Is it the place? Should ABC have sent Ted Koppel to Iraq to read out their names at the sites of their deaths? Or would that be too personal, too sensational?

I believe that part of the reason stems from the fact that those people did not die as a result of some decision made by those who opposed the reading or the pictures. There is a feeling of guilt-by-association. Nobody forced those people to get on the planes, to show up for work or to charge up the stairs. They had a duty. No one blames the passengers on the planes for not taking over when they thought they were getting a free trip to Cuba. Fred’s statement above was a bit over the top, but it hints at the kernel of what I’m talking about. Are the soldiers somehow to blame for your guilty feelings or negligent?

A lot of straw men up there, and the floor’s getting kind of messy so I’ll wrap it up. Those who agreed with the war, and I was one, cannot let these people who did their duty be anonymized into numbers. Tha
t works for the generals and staff who have to fight a war with assets. When those who are killed and not killed come home they should then again become the fathers, sisters, sons and daughters that they left as. One small way to do so is to give them back their names and identities. Those killed cannot reclaim them without our help.

Sinclair serves in the Guard. Do you Owen?

What right do you have to question his patriotism?

(Sorry, but it was too easy to borrow from the nauseating rhetoric of John “F” Kerry).

Going to war is obviously sometimes necessary, but all the time involves huge costs on all sides. Keeping this in mind, cheers to Nightline for reminding us of this.

Do you serve in the National Guard, al’s? Or the Reserves?

Dan,

I heard the interview and was impressed. I like the idea of being able to comment on the chapters or ideas as you write successive drafts. I’m intrigued by the process because it’s interactive. (I didn’t find it easy to access the book from here, though. I look later when I have more time.)

There is one thing I’d like to impress on you: There is a historic “Paradigm Shift” taking place and virtually every journalist is reporting from an outmoded mechanistic, linear, “materialist” point of view. There is a more accurate model of the universe available to inform your thinking, since quantum physics informs us that there’is no “material” in the material universe. The new model is often called a holarchic or holotropic model.

Are you able to adapt, or are you going to be scooped (and made irrelevent) on this by another more flexible writer? From what I heard on the interiew, you may be open enough to make the shift. You are at ground zero for this shift and local thinkers like Fritjof Capra and others would probably be delighted to assist you in making the transition.

Dan,

I heard the interview and was impressed. I like the idea of being able to comment on the chapters or ideas as you write successive drafts. I’m intrigued by the process because it’s interactive. (I didn’t find it easy to access the book from here, though. I look later when I have more time.)

There is one thing I’d like to impress on you: There is a historic “Paradigm Shift” taking place and virtually every journalist is reporting from an outmoded mechanistic, linear, “materialist” point of view. There is a more accurate model of the universe available to inform your thinking, since quantum physics informs us that there’is no “material” in the material universe. The new model is often called a holarchic or holotropic model.

Are you able to adapt, or are you going to be scooped (and made irrelevent) on this by another more flexible writer? From what I heard on the interiew, you may be open enough to make the shift. You are at ground zero for this shift and local thinkers like Fritjof Capra and others would probably be delighted to assist you in making the transition.

The US in general may not have much media
corruption, but here in Silly Valley, we
have got the Mercury News.

One minor, amusing thing is how the “best
places to work” list appears to be sold to
the highest bidder. How come they always
seem to have layoffs after making the list?

Less amusing is the fact that the Mercury is
acting as a corporate shill in favor of all
kinds of outsourcing and immigration scams
which threaten to prevent any US citizens
from ever working in high tech again. Their
cheerful anecdotes about this problem, and
their constant stories about how the recession
is now over (so don’t worry about H1-B) are
almost certainly being written by lobbyists
for the ITAA, with the reporters providing a
spell check.

I wonder is they get paid in cash, or in
stock options.

-dave chapman

One of the advantages of getting your information from the mainstream media rather than the blogosphere is that the mainstream media has well-established standards involving the nature of evidence that is required to support assertions. This is needed both to fulfill our ethical obligations and to avoid getting sued for libel.

Dave Chapman asserts, without evidence, that Mercury-News journalists are paid for what they write. That’s the type of allegation that, without evidence to back it up, might result in a libel suit against me were I to have made it – a wonderful way in which the law provides a helpful check against journalistic excess. I wonder, Dave, if you could provide some evidence to back up your rather strong allegation?

Dan, have you never attached a flamboyant word to a mudane article’s headline?

Dan, have you never attached a flamboyant word to a mudane article’s headline?