Rooker's Soapbox

The President of the United States is chosen according to how many votes each candidate receives in the electoral college. This is why it was so important to learn just who won the state of Florida back in 2000. This system gave us the Presidency of George W Bush instead of Al Gore, despite the fact that more people voted for Al Gore.

There are three systems of counting votes in a presidential election in the United States, two of which vary by state:

1. Winner take all, where the winner of the popular vote in a given state receives every electoral vote. Most states use this system today.
2. District-by-district, where the winner of the popular vote in each congressional district wins only that district’s electoral vote. Maine uses this system.
3. Straight popular vote, which is simply a count of how many people voted for each candidate. Although this number is important, it is the winner of the electoral vote that is elected president.

If you could decide which of these systems were used nation-wide, which election method would you choose to choose the President of the United States?

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Olympia Snowe is the one Republican who so far has voted in favor of any health reform bill. People are starting to wonder why we’re paying her so much attention.

There is an old (and, some say, possibly dirty) trick to getting attention in Washington. If everyone is voting for something, you can generate attention for yourself if you’re the only person to vote against it.

Everyone wants to know why you’re against it. You’re in the papers, they’re talking about you on the radio and you end up on TV to explain yourself. The media never fails to fall for this, even though they realize they’re being had.

On the other side of the coin, if everyone around you (like, say, the entire Republican Party) is voting against something, just imagine how much attention you’ll get if you vote for it.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine. Just google “Olympia Snowe”.

I’m not saying that this is why she voted to move the reform bill out of her committee. For all I know, she might be the one Republican who wants to serve her constituents. Surely there must be at least one of those left in D.C.

Right?

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I learned today that President Obama has flown to Copenhagen on a mission to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to Chicago.

I can’t bring myself to care about the Olympics Games anymore. It has very little to do with sports these days. The whorish catering to the corporate sponsors has grown to such an absurd level that it ruins the entire event for me.

In 2008, NBC refused to broadcast the opening ceremonies live, waiting instead to air them at primetime. NBC also refused to broadcast the most popular events live, again choosing to show them only during primetime, long after everyone already knew the outcome. They flatly refused to stream the popular events on the web, choosing instead to stream only the more obscure and less popular events.

Show up to an event carrying bottled water from Aquafina (made by Pepsi) while Coke is sponsoring the games? They’ll throw you right out of the stadium. That happened in Athens, in 2004.

The Olympic committees always vastly overestimate the legal reach of their trademark on the word “olympic.” For years, the Olympic committees have threatened to sue countless local business owners in every host country for using variations of the word “olympic.” Most of these actions are against people who are clearly trying to capitalize on the interest in the games but, without fail, they always carry it too far.

This hostile behavior is inflicted upon business owners often in cases where their businesses have used the word for several years and have nothing to do with sports. In 1996, when the games were hosted in Atlanta, the owner of a Greek restaurant, the Olympic Cafe in Savannah, Ga, lost a lawsuit with the US Olympic Committee and was forced to rename his business to Olympia Cafe.

I wish good luck to Chicago, but I don’t watch the games anymore, regardless of what city they’re in. The Olympic Games have become the Worldwide Exhibit of Corporate Sponsors and I refuse to have anything to do with that.

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An example of just how irrational Americans can be at times is the Troy Davis case. Davis was convicted in 1991 of murdering police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Ga in 1989. He was sentenced to death. Amazingly, his sentence has not yet been carried out, although it looks like it will happen next month.

There are very real reasons for believing that the wrong man has been convicted of this crime.

Davis was convicted based on the eyewitness testimony of nine people. Seven of those nine people have since recanted, saying that police pressured them into making statements that were untrue. There is also a very real possibility that one of the remaining two witnesses might be the person who actually killed Officer MacPhail.

Four of the jurors who served in the Davis trial believe now that they made the wrong decision, based on bad evidence, and they have written to the Georgia Parole board to say so.

The prosecutor in the Troy Davis case, Spencer Lawton, has been cited in the past for misconduct and for withholding evidence from defendants. A number of Lawton’s convictions have later been overturned, including death penalty cases.

This is the context in which Troy Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
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I don’t know who coined the phrase “question everything” but that is how I approach life. That is my motto.

If someone is claiming to have new information about something, I don’t just accept their claim at face value. I want to know where they got their information and why they think it means what they are claiming. I ask myself if it makes any sense, if the source of the information is credible and if there are other sources of information to back it up.
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I want to start this with a disclaimer. I am not writing this to scold anyone that I follow or to ask them to change how they use Twitter. This rant is aimed squarely and solely at the people at Twitter Inc.
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I have reached a roadblock in my use of Twitter. I cannot follow any more people who interest me. In fact, the more interesting a person is, the less useful Twitter becomes if I follow that person. This strange and seemingly contradictory situation is entirely Twitter’s fault.

Twitter treats messages that begin with @username as being addressed to that user and so most other followers won’t see them. Up until May, you had three options in how to deal with those messages from the people you follow. You could choose to see all of them, only the ones addressed to other people you follow or only the ones addressed directly to you.

If you were using Twitter in May of this year, you probably remember the controversial @reply change. Twitter Inc. found it necessary to change Twitter.com so as to remove the ability of people to see @replies from people they followed that were addressed to people they did not follow. It was causing a large strain on their network and the option simply had to go. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Unfortunately, Twitter also removed the option to not see the @replies addressed to other people you do follow. When one person I follow says something to another person I follow, I see that conversation in my own stream, even though the message wasn’t addressed to me.
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The answer is no.

Since he asked for it right at the bottom of this article (read it because I’m not summarizing it here), this is an email I just sent to Robert Cringely.

What’s more important: privacy & anonymity or identity & responsibility?

Why don’t we compare the pros and cons?
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I hate it when someone uses the phrase “I have nothing to hide.”

That is a fantastically stupid thing to say. It is one of those seemingly clever, snarky little quips that sounds like it almost means something. It is what someone says when they have lost the argument but are not honest enough to admit it.

The statement is a strawman. It is only vaguely related to the debate at hand and is used in order to change the subject. Rather than an honest debate over privacy, now there is a veiled accusation that perhaps you have done something embarrassing and don’t want anyone to know about it.

It is similar to a violation of Godwin’s law – it derails the debate and everyone involved forgets the fact that no real argument has been made against privacy.
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The following is an altered version a column written last year by Simon Singh for The Guardian. In his column, Singh called out many practitioners of Chiropractic therapy for making claims that he says are unsupported by medical science. In response, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) filed a libel lawsuit against Singh.

In most civilized nations, anyone suing for libel must prove that they were, in fact, libeled. Unfortunately, UK law is hopelessly backwards in this area. In an ignorant reversal of common sense, you are required in the UK to prove that you have not libeled the plaintiff.

That has proven to be an excellent method of silencing legitimate criticism in the UK. Singh’s fight against this baseless lawsuit has become a cause celebre for skeptic and science bloggers around the world.

It seems that bloggers are republishing this column everywhere today. Since Singh’s cause is one in which I believe, I will republish it too. This site has free hosting and I have no idea how WordPress.com would react to a complaint, so I’m sticking to a slightly-modified version which omits the specific wording to which the BCA objects.

The original, unedited version of this column can be found at Respectful Insolence.

You also should read this great article by Ben Goldacre: An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers.

(h/t Skepchicks)
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The Internet Is Serious Business

Customers of AT&T DSL and U-Verse internet services throughout the United States began to notice Sunday evening that they were cut off from parts of the popular website 4chan.org. In particular, the /r9k/ and the infamous /b/ image boards could not be accessed.

The regions affected were largely in the West, Midwest, parts of Connecticut and Texas. No reports of blockage were reported in other parts of the United States.

AT&T later confirmed to CentralGadget.com that they were blocking portions of the site but did not disclose why they were doing it. Full access to the site was restored at around 1:50AM Eastern Monday morning.

As the news of this event bounced back and forth across the unblocked parts of 4chan, Twitter, IRC chat channels, message boards, blogs and at least three different wiki sites, a clear consensus emerged regarding what AT&T’s reasons might have been for blocking 4chan: censorship.
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