Wesley Clark supports a Constitutional amendment to ban flag burning. Honestly, this all but eliminates any chance that I would vote for him in the primary.

Since the 2000 Presidential election, people have been talking about ways to create a less error prone voting system. Most computer security experts seem to agree (and it seemed obvious to me from the beginning) that one indispensible component of an easy-to-use electronic voting system would be a physical audit trail of who voted for which candidates. Anyone in the copyright industry can tell you that bits are easier to manipulate than atoms. Unfortunately, the people in charge of creating these systems have ignored this common sense requirement, and as has been documented by Black Box Voting, may even be actively working against conducting a fair vote.

• Federal Computer Week: Jury still out on e-voting
• Text of the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, introduced by Rush Holt (D-NJ). Holt’s web site describes the bill here. Basically it mandates that a paper trail of votes be created.
• Online petition demanding the inclusion of a paper trail in the voting process.
• Wired News article describing the current flawed voting machines.
• Verified Voting, a political organization started by Stanford computer science professor David Dill to pressure politicians on this issue. (See the how to help page in particular.)

What frustrates me most about the insecure voting machines is that this is an information technology problem, and the US leads the world in information technology. I don’t understand why these machines aren’t designed by people who actually have a clue about what a secure and verifiable system looks like. I also think that the voting machines should contain only open source software so that smart people can verify that the voting process isn’t rigged or flawed, but I don’t have much hope of that happening.

There’s more talk of Sun joining the Eclipse project, but apparently they’ll only do so if they’re allowed to ruin Eclipse in the process. “No thanks,” is the answer that I hope for.

The Slacktivist has a good post up about the real meaning of the parable of the good Samaritan that those of us who attended Sunday school as children were exposed to regularly. For what it’s worth, whoever taught it to us at my church did correctly interpret the parable.

Juan Cole has a summary the depressing news from Iraq over the past day or so. A shorter summary: a US soldier opened fire on a car entering the US headquarters in Baghdad. Unfortunately, the passenger in the car was a member of the IGC showing up for a meeting. Insurgents blew up 16 Italian peacekeepers in Nasiriyah.

Food for thought.

Did you know that we’ve spent about $20 billion over the last 10 years or so to militarize our border with Mexico? And that doing so has had an effect exactly the opposite of the one that we expected? I didn’t either. What amazes me more than any political position is the willingness to cling to that position even if its effect is exactly the opposite of the one hoped for. Hence the war on drugs, the war on immigrants, and to be fair, certain entitlement programs as well. If I could have one wish, it would be that our policy would be more focused on outcomes rather than ideology. Oh, and that people would realize that doing something that works (even if it runs counter to “common sense”) is better than doing something because it feels like it should work.

For future reference: Struts vs. WebWork. Technical differences aside, at least half of the job descriptions for J2EE jobs I see mention Struts, I’ve never seen a single one that mentions WebWork.

George Soros, my favorite tycoon after Warren Buffett, had this to say about unseathing Bush:

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush? He said, “If someone guaranteed it.”

Making Light: Ghosts of the Great War, 2003