] The Department of State has notified elections
] supervisors that touchscreen ballots don't have to be
] included during manual recounts because there is no
] question about how voters intended to vote.

Yeah, definitely.

Herald.com: Miami & Ft. Lauderdale News, Weather, Dolphins & More

inignoct wrote:
] ] This proposed amendment, regardless of what Bush or its
] ] backers say, would impose a complete ban, at all levels
] ] of government, on same-sex marriages. While Bush claims
] ] it's necessary to handcuff "activist judges", the
] ] amendment would prevent the will of the people -- in the
] ] form of state legislatures -- from providing those
] ] benefits if they so chose.
]
] [ Preposterous. And the best part? The majority of people
] will support it. Interestingly, the numbers for 18-29 year
] olds are almost exactly the reverse of the overall numbers.
] This is an ongoing problem with politics. The young permit
] the old to set the agenda, meaning we'll have to go back and
] change it all in 20 years. Granted, the baby-boomer situation
] is going to put the young at a numerical disadvantage, but
] still, apathy is not your friend. -k]

Ryan-- I might add, despite claims otherwise, the proposed language would, in fact, ban all legal indications of marriage for homosexuals as well. So, civil unions would also not really be allowed.

RE: Daily Kos || Bush backs gay marriage amendment

] My mother is insane. Like, one of those ladies you see on
] the local news insane. Since it's inevitably going to
] come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at
] least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been
] meaning to make this thread for about the last year, but
] the longer I waited the more interesting the situation
] became. Also, I'm incredibly lazy. Case in point, these
] pictures are about three weeks old. Anyway, lets take a
] tour of our house.

This is truly amazing. Guy catalogs his mothers addiction to ebay. There is very little of this house not covered in stuff. Worth a look.

The Awful Forums - My mother is insane (~5M of photos)

] The Massachusetts high court ruled Wednesday that only
] full, equal marriage rights for gay couples -- rather
] than civil unions -- would be constitutional, erasing any
] doubts that the nation's first same-sex marriages could
] take place in the state beginning in mid-May.
]
]
] The court issued the opinion in response to a request
] from the state Senate about whether Vermont-style civil
] unions, which convey the state benefits of marriage --
] but not the title -- would meet constitutional muster.
]
]
] "The history of our nation has demonstrated that separate
] is seldom, if ever, equal," the four justices who ruled
] in favor of gay marriage wrote in the advisory opinion. A
] bill that would allow for civil unions, but falls short
] of marriage, makes for "unconstitutional, inferior, and
] discriminatory status for same-sex couples."

CNN.com - Massachusetts high court: Same-sex couples entitled to marry - Feb. 4, 2004

] Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy's name is too common, a new
] father decided, so the self-described engineering geek
] took a software approach to naming his newborn son.
]
] Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife, Jamie, into naming
] their son Jon Blake Cusack 2.0.

simply stunning.

CNN.com - Engineering geek names son version 2.0 - Feb. 1, 2004

] Eight security experts held a Red Team exercise on
] January 19, using a GEMS server and six AccuVote-TS
] terminals, replicating an election scenario with no prior
] knowledge of source code. As suggested by the earlier,
] Hopkins report, the team quickly guessed the hardcoded
] passwords to administrator and voter smart cards. At a
] cost of less than $750, they were able to reset voter
] cards to allow multiple votes with the same card and
] suggested similar abuses with forged supervisor and voter
] cards. All 32,000 statewide terminal locks are identical,
] and the team picked them in less than 10 seconds,
] allowing physical access to the PCMCIA bay, which
] contains cards for the modem and the ballot definitions
] and results. These cards could be tampered with,
] destroyed, or stolen for their valuable data. Attaching a
] keyboard to the terminals allowed resetting of all
] counters in the PCMCIA bay without an administrator card
] needed.
]
] The server was missing over 15 Microsoft security
] updates, and the team was able to use the flaws used by
] the "Blaster" worm. By using insecure USB ports or more
] secure CD drives, the team was able to modify results and
] databases

LawMeme - Voting Machines Compromised in Election Simulation

] Idiom Studio
] Governor Howard Dean, M.D
] Iowa Caucus Speech

This site features videos of the now-infamous Dean speech in Iowa, but from the perspective of the crowd. Lend some context which the media stripped out in order to sensationalize it.

Dean Iowa Speech

] "DeCSS has been available on hundreds if not thousands of
] websites for 4 years now," said EFF Legal Director Cindy
] Cohn. "We're pleased that the DVD CCA has finally stopped
] attempting to deny the obvious: DeCSS is not a secret."

It's about freaking time. Once it gets to a certain point, the cat is out of the bag and there is nothing you can do to return it to the status of trade secret. Hence why you must take reasonable efforts to protect, catch it early, prosecute the first person A LOT , and try to seal the whole thing down with a protective order. And on those accounts, the DVD-CCA sucked it. Of course, with this having happened, really all it will do it push them to put the next standard out and screw us all again into buying new technology. Not like current dvd players will last longer than five years anyway.

EFF: DVD Descrambling Code Not a Trade Secret

] After his dismal fourth-place showing in Iowa, Richard
] Gephardt has decided to call off his quest for the White
] House. What's going to happen to the millions of dollars
] still in Gephardt's campaign war chest?

Good explanation of a question that I had asked myself.

Who Gets Gephardt's Cash? - Where war chests go when campaigns fold. By Brendan I. Koerner

] Will he report that bankruptcies are at a record high,
] that more women this year will declare bankruptcy than
] will graduate from college? That Americans owe 15 times
] more on their credit cards than they did 25 years ago?

absurd.

Blog for America : The State of the Union can and will be greater | January 20, 2004