For Iraq veterans: our gratitude is a poor substitute for taking the time to understand

Charles Anderson served in Iraq, but he doesn't want to be thanked. I did nothing in Iraq I consider honorable. I was a scared kid riding into a battle I didn't understand. Our convoys streamed past thousands of starving children and people needing medical attention. Our tanks fired into villages…

Continue ReadingFor Iraq veterans: our gratitude is a poor substitute for taking the time to understand

Freethinker quotes of the day

I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation: “The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.” -- Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762 FFRF is a site that…

Continue ReadingFreethinker quotes of the day

Bush refuses to answer whether he held any meeting regarding Bin Laden for 9 months after Clinton left office

Here’s the video. Lots of heat and no light.  That seems to be Bush's strategy these days.  He gets himself all bent out of shape over a question that was not asked. I’ll translate the gibberish you hear out of Bush’s mouth: “Did I hold any such meetings? No.” What…

Continue ReadingBush refuses to answer whether he held any meeting regarding Bin Laden for 9 months after Clinton left office

Focus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

All forms of birth control are immoral, according to many Christian conservatives.  We’ve previously written about this absurd position here and here. The Chicago Tribune recently reported on a formal conservative effort to prohibit all forms of birth control: Emboldened by the anti-abortion movement's success in restricting access to abortion, an increasingly vocal…

Continue ReadingFocus of religious organization: Ban all birth control

How to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.

Assume you were the president of a company that made a lot of money selling the electronic voting machines used by 10% of U.S. voters.  Assume also that a Princeton professor and two young grad students ran their own security analysis of your voting machines and determined the following:

  • The physical lock of your voting machines can be picked in 10 seconds.
  • Your voting machines can then easily be infected with a computer virus, since they are general-purpose computers running specialized election software.
  • It only takes about one minute to infect one of your machines using a single memory card.
  • The virus can easily be spread among numerous voting machines by innocent users updating the software with a memory card.
  • Virus software can easily make all of the diagnostic and double-checking software in your machines illusory and meaningless, therefore dangerous.
  • The infected machine can be made to spit out (electronically or on paper) any faked election result, regardless of the voting conducted on the machines.
  • Your machine, which is already in use in some jurisdictions, thus has serious design flaws.

If you want to see a video showing how incredibly easy it is to infect a Diebold machine, click here.  Warning: Don’t watch this video just before going to bed.  You’ll be too angry and it will keep you up.

Since many states are relying on your machine for the integrity of upcoming elections, you (as president of Diebold) would doubtless write something like this to the three guys at …

Share

Continue ReadingHow to steal votes and cover your tracks: why Diebold’s AccuVote-TS Voting Machine is unsafe for democracy.