Comic for Friday, July 7th, 2006

Posted: 7:35 am, Friday, July 7th

I swear this entire messy storyline is going somewhere, guys, honest.

That Michigan blog did their Penn State preview (their being the royal they, since it's one dude), and since the Irish play Penn State also, I figured I'd link to it. Note once again that this guy can't admit that Michigan actually was outplayed by anyone last year - which they were, five times, according to the final scoreboard and probably at least four times on the field.

Hilarious story from the Daily News about Hillary's opponents. The one seems completely unhinged.

Two things I found yesterday from the Freakonomics blog... The first is Warren Buffet saying that the free market fails poor people, which is a nice counter-argument to Reaganomics (as if you need one to that greed-driven system). The second is about the lack of financial windfall that the World Cup brought the German sex industry, but the main reason I'm linking to it is the last paragraph that claims that there is always a winner and a loser in soccer. Um, no. There's actually a lot of draws. But I'm assuming the finalist side of Italy considered their draw with America as a loss, so I guess, yeah, there's always a winner and a loser. And while we're on the subject of the World Cup, at least the Brits don't carry a grudge at all.

The state of Ohio elections is really just embarrassing. If you told me that this Strickland guy came down with the same “mystery illness” that Viktor Yushchenko had leading up to his election, it would not shock me in the slightest. The legality of those computerized voting machines is appalling.

Friggin' nightmare of a flag-based minor-league uni for the Fourth, right here in 2.0's hometown.

This link to Gawker is mostly approval of the redesign, actually, but I was amazed by the Post’s cover. Rupert must be upset at Lay for creating the impression that power-hungry arch-conservatives are assholes.

Speaking of Rupert, I didn’t know he owned MySpace! And he doesn’t only own it, he’s also a customer. (It’s fake, but, hell, close enough and it gets me out of having to wade through that shit today.)

bullfrog

I think the author of that Ohio election needs to take a journalism course or something. He makes several outrageous claims that are backed up by irrelevent facts or no facts at all.

Regarding the Ohio voter ID law:

"at worst it was another baldly partisan maneuver, because the 12 percent of the adult population without driver's licenses, the most readily available form of government ID, tend to be poor, elderly or both, and thus likely to lean Democrat."

Ok, but the Ohio voter ID law also allows one to use a utility bill or bank statement as a form of ID.

Regarding electronic polling machines:

"Poll workers may find it easy to show voters how to use the machines when they're working, but if anything goes wrong workers are likely to be several orders of magnitude more clueless about fixing the problem."

Why? Because computers are scary black boxes? It would be nice if you told us why they would be more clueless. Do the machines come without instruction manuals? Is there no technical support available? Are the poll workers not given any training?

And to this day, I have yet to see a valid argument for requiring a paper trail for electronic voting machines. For a manual recount? Why? That introduces an extra level of human error that didn't exist in the first place, making the recount more likely to be wrong. Part of the reason for having electronic voting is to eliminate the need for recounts. For auditing purposes? If the machine is screwed up, what good is a printout going to do? It will simply tell you if the printer is working correctly. There are better electronic mechanisms for auditing (which are probably not being used either, but that's beside the point).

Anyway, I'm not trying to defend Ohio in any way. The political aspects of Ohio elections are clearly messed up. I just hate it when an author injects so much bias into an "article."

Yeah, there was an article in Harper's several months back that was a lot better, and had some of those pesky 'facts' you mention to back up their argument. Unfortunately, Harper's doesn't put their content online, so this is what we got.

I guess the logic behind the paper trail would be kind of like a receipt or something, so you can prove that the voting machine let you vote for who you actually tried to vote for. But you're right, all it's really going to do is tell you the printer works.

And, to lighten things, the most glaring proof that the writer's research was faulty - he calls it Ohio State University. C'mon, guy - it's The Ohio State University. A-duh.

Not only does Rupert own Myspace, but when he took over he added a clause in the user agreement that basically made ANYTHING that was posted the intellectual policy of Myspace. Someone noticed it - I think it was Jeffrey Rowland of Overcompensating/Wigu - and raised such a fuss that they had to remove it. Like Nick Krall said while talking to a teenaged girl while on the Booker Show: 'You're not on Myspace? Then how will the sexual preditors find you?'

Zero

not policy. property. Intellectual property. Duh on me.

Z

Yeah, I was wondering what the implications of his ownership re: bands putting their music up on MySpace were.

Every time I go out looking for the MySpace nightmare, and I wind up at some 14-year old's profile, I feel dirty.

I'm totally enjoying the "entire messy storyline", by the way. On the other hand... Are they tossing away Coors bottles? For shame!

I should've had Pete's dialogue in the last panel be, "I thought she just had some funky lip balm on." Drat.

I thought the argument for a paper printout was kind of like getting a receipt so you could be sure that the machine did what you said. It's not for the recount, it's for you. Alternately, I've heard it proposed that the machine merely prints out a correct ballot, and you verify it and put it in a box to vote.

In any case, I'm having fun with this story line; I'm not sure I care if it 'goes anywhere'. :)

Tin foil moment-- if we jump on the bandwagon regarding computerized polling stations as things wired to return votes for the politician who ponies up the most money, then whose to say those same computers can't print out a reciept that says I voted for X while counting the vote for Y. And if there is a disagreement later, the county clerk certainly isn't going to say, "Okay, folks, go ahead and bring back all those receipts that you got at the polling place and we'll just count those." I agree with those above in saying that a paper receipt only tells you that the printer works.

It's very hard for me to keep the tinfoil haberdashery in the closet when I'm discussing the Diebold machines.

My St. Michael's Laundry number was 60687. Just wanted to share.

60316, I'm pretty certain.

Another work week ends for me. Somehow, despite clocking in at two full days, two half days and a day off, this one managed to really drag. My condolences to anyone still stuck at the office - why not boot up IE and play Oregon Trail on the Virtual Apple? Go ahead, you know your boss has already left.

http://www.virtualapple.org/