Monthly Archives: September 2004

films to see before you vote

It is the nature of the net that just about the time you think, “there ought to be …,” there is. Here‘s a site with a collection of films relevant to the election. It would be better were there more that were clearly from the other side. Ideas? Continue reading

Posted in presidential politics | 15 Comments

Ranked Choice Voting: the democratic cure to Naderitis

Here’s a demo of San Francisco’s implementation of Ranked Choice Voting — permitting people to vote for their first choice in an election, but then allowing their preferences to count if the first choice loses. As many have observed, this would make it easier for people to vote for their first choice (e.g., a 3d party candidate certain to lose), without having that vote increase the likelihood that their third (or 100th) choice wins. Continue reading

Posted in good code | 25 Comments

can this really be true: diabolic diebold

I’ve never really bought the conspiracy story surrounding the Diebold voting machine stuff. I’ve been happy that the issue has been raised (and even happier that the battle about copyright that Diebold’s effort at censoring criticism created also created the Free Culture movement at Swarthmore, and now spreading).
But if this story is true, I will have to rethink my view. As reported at Blackboxvoting:

By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.

Is this really true? Continue reading

Posted in bad code | 14 Comments

help the British think about free software?

The UK Parliamentary Office on Science and Technology is preparing a POST note on ‘Open Source’. (No, I didn’t know what a POST note is exactly either, but check it out here.) The author is looking for helpful comments. I’ve created a temporary email address for David Berry. You can send him comments at that address for a week. Continue reading

Posted in good law | 1 Comment

five deferments or two tours of duty

Finally, the Kerry campaign gets some passion in response to the attacks. Continue reading

Posted in presidential politics | 41 Comments

the declaration of independence, the constitution, and now this: yet another inspiration from philadelphia

Philadelphia is considering adding WiFi boxes to all street lights, making the whole city WiFi alive. What I like best about this idea is how the link to street lights suggests how we should think about this resource:
(1) Is it free? No, just as street lighting costs money, it will cost money to put Wifi boxes on street lighting.
(2) Is it free. Yes, like lighted streets, and air conditioned city hall, you won’t have to pay to enjoy the resource.
(3) So it is free and not free: yes, as all great public resources are.
And as with all great public resources, this will benefit Philadelphia in ways we cannot begin to imagine. Let the city provide a platform, and watch the entrepreneurs find a million ways to make it valuable. Did anyone have any clue about all the ways the GPS would be used once Ronald Reagan set it free? Continue reading

Posted in good code | 14 Comments

thanks

Thanks to Congressman Boucher, Judge Posner and Professor Wu for keeping the blog alive in August. We’re putting together a page to make it easy to link to guest blogger threads. I was not surprised to see how great all three as bloggers are — perhaps this will inspire them into blogspace. I’ll follow up in the next weeks with some comments on each. Continue reading

Posted in eye | 3 Comments