I felt like walking when I let a pedestrian cross the road, then drove a couple miles and he walked past. After a day of maxing my driving abilities just staying on the road and avoiding weird, out of control drivers, I'm thinking a new Dodge pickup truck sounds like a good thing, just like a hot chocolate does these chilly days. This comes after spending what seemed like hours and hours reading license plate sayings and bumperstickers.
I hold some respect for this snow induced highway ice. Heading southbound on 405 at 1 mph, wondering why northbound traffic disappeared, and a cop drives the wrong way down the empty highway, makes one wonder. Until you see someone get out of their car with a hammer and chop at the ice behind their rear tire. I stopped and slide sideways within inches of the car beside me, yet managed to get straightened when the traffic gave room. I saw easily more than 200 cars and buses off the road. Heading down the mild hill explained why Northbound traffic was stopped. They couldn't drive up! These conditions persisted in various ways from Bellingham clear to Renton.
Ok, now why did I say Dodge truck? For me, the choice is clear :)
1. Ford may be an ok truck, but the radio ads make it clear. The dealers call in so often dedicating a whole 30 seconds or more to how they need to move all those vehicles off the lot! If they are so bad, why sell them to the public? Jeepers. I want something that is going to serve me well, not that just needs to moved off the lot!
2. Chevy trucks are for boys.
3. The latest model Toyotas are too cute with curvy Japanese lines.
4. Men are not allowed to drive Hummers. They are for women with furs.
5. Honda must have something, but the Oddessy makes them unreal.
6. The Chevy HHR armored car needs more window area for visibility, from my experience.
7. The PT cruiser is for display only. I could see having one on my desk at work.
8. You have to be nearing retirement from your bread truck job to afford a new stock Mustang. It's cool just because it's "got the old look".
9. I don't hold an opinion on SUV's. They are unnatractive.
If I had to buy a truck today it would be a new Dodge. They get the job done and they're comfy.
Nonetheless, as soon as winter's over, the truck fantasy will vanish, and I will return to my pursuit of class over clumsy with BMW or Audi.
Comments inevitable.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Monday, November 13, 2006
Should eagles be flying?
Eagles are a great disburtance to our aircraft's natural habitat. They shouldn't be aloud to fly anymore! Get eagles out of the air! They are a danger to us and our families and could drop out of the sky on us any moment. Ban eagles. We need you, Rick Larsen! You've been working tirelessly to save Whatcom county from pipeline tragedy's, now we need you to reduce the number of eagles roaming the skies completely unmonitored.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Does your vote count?
Not if you vote for the wrong candidate. I mailed in my absentee ballot Tuesday evening as I know many, many other people did as well. How are those absentee ballots counted OVERNIGHT so that Wendesday morning there are conclusive winners in one parties favor? Why immediately annouce Cantwell's and Larsen's "win" as if all votes are counted? They were reported as winners - that the election was over and wrapped up.
Ok, it's time for...
*Elections Cover-up*
*The concise excerpts from media articles below reveal major problems with the elections process. *This is not a partisan matter. Fair elections are crucial to all who support democracy. *Few have compiled this information in a way that truly educates the public on the great risk of using electronic voting machines.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CNN News, 9/20/06
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20
Voting Machines Put U.S. Democracy at Risk
Electronic voting machines...time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots. In a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears: "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
New York Times,/ 9/5/06
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
A recent government report http://bocc.cuyahogacounty.us/GSC/pdf/esi_cuyahoga_final.pdf details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.
*MSNBC/Associated Press, 9/13/06
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/
Princeton Prof Hacks E-vote Machine
A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel...to claims that electronic voting machines...are vulnerable to hacking. In a paper http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. They designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.
USA Today//Associated Press, 7/13/06
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-13-evoting_x.htm
Electronic Voting Machines Under Legal Attack
Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/Full%20Report.pdf
...that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge." Lowell Finley http://www.voteraction.org/teambios.html: "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent."
*/Washington Post/, 6/28/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451.html
A Single Person Could Swing an Election
A team of cybersecurity experts [concluded] that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the [election] outcome.
*/New York Times,/ 5/30/06
Block the Vote*
States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. New rules for maintaining voter rolls...are likely to throw off many eligible voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives.
*/Newsweek,/ 5/29/06
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek
Will Your Vote Count in 2006?*
A report http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/BBVreportIIunredacted.pdf by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines [and] found unheralded vulnerabilities. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that...could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. It's even possible...to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems.
*/Wall Street Journal/, 5/12/06 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114739688261250925-q5rh2ocioxu6mgjmS6bZPCZL0HY_20060610.html, Reversing Course on Electronic Voting*
Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. In Indiana, an ES&S [major voting machine supplier] employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unauthorized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.
*/New York Times,/ 5/12/06
New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems*
Officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives...about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines. "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Diebold issued a warning...saying that it had found a "theoretical security vulnerability." A professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University...after studying the latest problem [said] "I almost had a heart attack."
*/Washington Post/, 3/26/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500805.html
Election Whistle-Blower Stymied by Vendors*
Ion Sancho is...elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. Last year, [he] helped show that electronic voting machines...would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection. Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for his whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the voting machines the county needs.The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Finnish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines. Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit more such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines.
*/New York Times/, 9/12/04
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1252728000&en=dda9313c18e02663&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
On the Voting Machine Makers' Tab*
Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Officials from Georgia, California and Texas argued that voter-verifiable paper trails...are impractical. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software [ES&S] and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. The list goes on.
*MSNBC/AP, 8/23/04
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5762054/from/RL.4
Secretive Testing Firms Certify Nation's Vote Count Machines*
The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology.
*/New York Times,/ 1/31/04
http://www.WantToKnow.info/040131nytimes
How to Hack an Election*
Maryland hired a computer security firm http://www.raba.com/press/TA_Report_AccuVote.pdf to test its new machines. Paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. Diebold...rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release http://www.companyboardroom.com/releasetext.asp?ticker=dbd&coid=106584&client=cb&release=489744 with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively.
Ok, it's time for...
*Elections Cover-up*
*The concise excerpts from media articles below reveal major problems with the elections process. *This is not a partisan matter. Fair elections are crucial to all who support democracy. *Few have compiled this information in a way that truly educates the public on the great risk of using electronic voting machines.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CNN News, 9/20/06
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/19/Dobbs.Sept20
Voting Machines Put U.S. Democracy at Risk
Electronic voting machines...time and again have been demonstrated to be extremely vulnerable to tampering and error. During the 2004 presidential election, one voting machine...added nearly 3,900 additional votes. Officials caught the machine's error because only 638 voters cast presidential ballots. In a heavily populated district, can we really be sure the votes will be counted correctly? A 2005 Government Accountability Office report http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05956.pdf on electronic voting confirmed the worst fears: "There is evidence that some of these concerns have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes."
New York Times,/ 9/5/06
In Search of Accurate Vote Totals
A recent government report http://bocc.cuyahogacounty.us/GSC/pdf/esi_cuyahoga_final.pdf details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election. Cuyahoga County...recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record. Investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.
*MSNBC/Associated Press, 9/13/06
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14825465/
Princeton Prof Hacks E-vote Machine
A Princeton University computer science professor added new fuel...to claims that electronic voting machines...are vulnerable to hacking. In a paper http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting posted on the university's Web site, Edward Felten and two graduate students described how they had tested a Diebold AccuVote-TS machine they obtained, found ways to quickly upload malicious programs and even developed a computer virus able to spread such programs between machines. They designed software capable of modifying all records, audit logs and counters kept by the voting machine, ensuring that a careful forensic examination would find nothing wrong.
USA Today//Associated Press, 7/13/06
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-07-13-evoting_x.htm
Electronic Voting Machines Under Legal Attack
Lawsuits have been filed in at least nine states, alleging that the machines are wide open to computer hackers. New York University's Brennan Center for Justice released a one-year study http://www.brennancenter.org/programs/downloads/Full%20Report.pdf
...that determined that the three most popular types of U.S. voting machines "pose a real danger" to election integrity. More than 120 security threats were identified, including wireless machines that could be hacked "by virtually any member of the public with some (computer) knowledge." Lowell Finley http://www.voteraction.org/teambios.html: "We had dozens of affidavits from voters in New Mexico who said they touched one candidate's name, but the machine picked the opponent."
*/Washington Post/, 6/28/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/27/AR2006062701451.html
A Single Person Could Swing an Election
A team of cybersecurity experts [concluded] that it would take only one person, with a sophisticated technical knowledge and timely access to the software that runs the voting machines, to change the [election] outcome.
*/New York Times,/ 5/30/06
Block the Vote*
States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. New rules for maintaining voter rolls...are likely to throw off many eligible voters. Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives.
*/Newsweek,/ 5/29/06
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12888600/site/newsweek
Will Your Vote Count in 2006?*
A report http://www.bbvdocs.org/reports/BBVreportIIunredacted.pdf by Finnish security expert Harri Hursti analyzed Diebold voting machines [and] found unheralded vulnerabilities. Experts are calling them the most serious voting-machine flaws ever. It requires only a few minutes of pre-election access to a Diebold machine to open the machine and insert a PC card that...could reprogram the machine to give control to the violator. It's even possible...to trick authorized technicians into thinking that everything is working fine, an illusion you couldn't pull off with pre-electronic systems.
*/Wall Street Journal/, 5/12/06 http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB114739688261250925-q5rh2ocioxu6mgjmS6bZPCZL0HY_20060610.html, Reversing Course on Electronic Voting*
Some advocates of a 2002 law mandating upgrades of the nation's voting machinery now worry the overhaul is making things worse. Proponents of the Help America Vote Act are filing lawsuits to block some state and election officials' efforts to comply with the act. In Indiana, an ES&S [major voting machine supplier] employee alerted local-election officials that another ES&S worker had installed unauthorized software on the machines before the election. That and other disputes led to a multimillion-dollar settlement.
*/New York Times,/ 5/12/06
New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems*
Officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives...about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines. "It's the most severe security flaw ever discovered in a voting system," said Michael I. Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. Diebold issued a warning...saying that it had found a "theoretical security vulnerability." A professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University...after studying the latest problem [said] "I almost had a heart attack."
*/Washington Post/, 3/26/06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032500805.html
Election Whistle-Blower Stymied by Vendors*
Ion Sancho is...elections supervisor in Leon County, Fla. Last year, [he] helped show that electronic voting machines...would allow election workers to alter vote counts without detection. Sancho may be paying an unexpected price for his whistle-blowing: None of the state-approved companies here will sell him the voting machines the county needs.The trouble began last year when Sancho allowed a Finnish computer scientist to test Leon County's Diebold voting machines. Diebold will not sell to Sancho without assurances that he will not permit more such tests, which the company considers a reckless use of the machines.
*/New York Times/, 9/12/04
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1252728000&en=dda9313c18e02663&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
On the Voting Machine Makers' Tab*
Some of electronic voting's loudest defenders have been state and local election officials. Many of those same officials have financial ties to voting machine companies. Officials from Georgia, California and Texas argued that voter-verifiable paper trails...are impractical. Former secretaries of state from Florida and Georgia have signed on as lobbyists for Election Systems and Software [ES&S] and Diebold Election Systems. When Bill Jones left office as California's secretary of state in 2003, he quickly became a consultant to Sequoia Voting Systems. His assistant secretary of state took a full-time job there. The list goes on.
*MSNBC/AP, 8/23/04
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5762054/from/RL.4
Secretive Testing Firms Certify Nation's Vote Count Machines*
The three companies that certify the nation's voting technologies operate in secrecy, and refuse to discuss flaws in the machines. Federal regulators have virtually no oversight over testing of the technology.
*/New York Times,/ 1/31/04
http://www.WantToKnow.info/040131nytimes
How to Hack an Election*
Maryland hired a computer security firm http://www.raba.com/press/TA_Report_AccuVote.pdf to test its new machines. Paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. Diebold...rushed to issue a self-congratulatory press release http://www.companyboardroom.com/releasetext.asp?ticker=dbd&coid=106584&client=cb&release=489744 with the headline "Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment." The study's authors were shocked to see their findings spun so positively.
gotta love the Democrats
OLD VERSION: The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, theant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible
MODERN VERSION:The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. CBS, NBC, ABC & CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and every body cries when they sing, "It's Not Easy Being Green."Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome." Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake. Ted Kennedy & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Dan Rather that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call foran immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share. Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper Act,"retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government. Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients. The ant loses the case. The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Vote Republican
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
