Interesting...but ultimately stupid.

The article only mentioned companies that allegedly donated money to the Bush campaign.

It did not mention when a company donated money to Gore and/or Kerry.

Do you mean to tell me that ONLY Bush got money from major companies and that neither Gore nor Kerry did.

I will look it up, but I am certain that GE ALSO gave money to Gore and/or Bush.

For that bit of biased "journalistic" BS I am forced to raise the BS flag.

:bsflag:

Do you have any evidence, not just wild guesses, that supports your contention that..."You will not hear anything on NBC that puts your interests ahead of the interests of General Electric or any of their affiliates."

Or do you have any evidence that NBC or MSNBC or any NBC related company ever put the kabash on an anti-GE story?

Where is the evidence?

Show me the evidence!

I thought you had some training in logical fallacies, etc, so I assume that you are playing.

If stupid is the issue here you certainly are perpetuating it. I mentioned that I didn't find the site or the article to be credible but it has enough info to lead anyone who is interested to search on their own. I also mention in the tag line to every one of my posts that I am not in the business of "spoon feeding" anyone. So in response I can only say, MEOW, twist.

I saw the movie Good Night and Good Luck recently. It would be interested to anyone who likes media, propaganda, politics, etc.

I am calling BS on the article, not necessarily on your posting it.

Movies are not a substitute for actual history and/or facts.

But I assume that you already knew that.

The DVD has a commentary and they talk about the scenes that could not be reconstructed and had to be rewritten from conjecture. The movie is about the McCarthy era and people often were paranoid and secretive.

The commentary does not say much about the slant they give to the story. Naturally, it does have a slant.

The main reason I brought it up is that the movie also addresses the role, the responsibilities and the sponsorship, of the media. It is an entertaining way to get some new ideas about a relatively dull subject.

You are right to call me on this one, picky as it is. That statement is too absolute. "You will not often...." or "You will not likely..." would be more accurate.

It is a widely believed misconception that listening to the news media will make people well-informed. An example is the story of the stalled legislation regarding transparency in government. How much coverage has it gotten? It is one of the most significant changes in government in recent times and is curiously absent in the press.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=transparency+legislation

http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=2075639

The legislation which the senator from Alaska secretly blocked?

Yup, it might not be easy, but possible. I would imagine that any program goes through vigorous testing by a third party to find any sort of mistake. Plus, I would think whoever paid for the program would want the source, after all they paid for it.

So, just to be clear for us non-programmer types. One guy doesn't write the whole program. It gets checked by several other folks (all of whom would have to be in on ascam if one existed). Moreover, whomever buys the program gets the source code and can at any time (and probably does) have independent third party people go over what they've got. Especially if it's sensitive or there is some question of security or impropriety.

Do I have that basically right?

Thats pretty much it, if things were done right, but unless a person was involved with it, cannot say for sure. People make mistakes, and if a non-technical person was involved in the decision making, there may be things they neglect due to lack of knowledge.

My comments were what I would do, but I do programming. I would also guess that there must be some sort of guidelines on how these machines are supposed to work. I personally believe that very little facts are out there and a lot of people make stuff up and it gets passed around. But I would HOPE that there are safeguards in place. Nothing in uncrackable, but on what scale?

The one thing you mentioned that I didn't was the fact that it would probably take more than one person to do the coding, and probably more in on the secret. If something like this happened, how many people could keep a secret for 6 years?

A few years ago a programmer was hired to write a progam to steal PIN numbers from a fake ATM machine. He wasn't in on it but figured out the crime and rolled over. And this was 1 guy with 1 machine. How would some stranger know what political affiliation the programmer had and how/what was he willing to do for his party? It didn't sound like he was going to get any big money. Greed explains a lot, but not in this case.

That's why I tend to dismiss the conspiracy theories related to electronic voting. They almost always involve some type of implausable mechanism to actually occur and never mention other types of fraud.

In speaking of other types of fraud, I found this story to be interesting and this site to be of value regarding voter fraud. It is the organization cited in the article above that showed more fraud on the part of Democrats during the 2004 election than Republicans.

Dang!!! Just one more degree of separation and I could logically conclude that Kevin Bacon did, indeed, rig the election!!

more on the subject of elections
 

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/09/just_try_voting_here.html

so, is it bad that my state makes the top 11...three times?

ok i came across an ariticle on the Digg...reguarding stealing the election...

now some of you are thinking that it probably just some dumb blogger with some images......


this one is from princeton university


http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/