Your DIEBOLD Vote Hasn’t Counted For a Decade

Are you a lucky lotto winner? I hope so.  With the recent announcement from the e-Voting champions themselves stating that their e-machines are inherently flawed and that they have been dropping votes for years, the chances of getting your vote through and making it count are as slim as they’ve ever been - but for a change, you’re now painfully aware.

The logic error is present in both types of voting machines made by the company: touchscreens and optical scan systems. These machines are used in 34 states (1,750 jurisdictions). For example, in Ohio’s March primaries, it is known that the machines temporarily lost 1,000 ballots.

The e-Voting machines “contain a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point”.

Clearly the most shameful element of this scandal and recent admission is that Diebold (ahem… now Premier Voting Solutions) has previously denied any malfunction or impropriety in their e-machines, and they have continued to Read the rest of this entry »

The ratings for Friday’s opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics set a record for NBC, capturing a 37.3 Nielsen rating, and watched by an estimated 35 million Americans. Those are huge numbers, and in the words of some analysts, the numbers were “American Idol” level. And why wouldn’t they be? NBC’s oppressive hype virtually ensured that we would rush to our TVs and basically surrender our evenings to the massive spectacle, with all of those commercials and promos for the fall TV season (“Follow what happens to Jim and Pam on September 25!”). In fact, we were probably the only country in the world that did not watch the opening ceremony live.

NBC’s desire to aggressively package all the proceedings into a prime-time slot ensured that we would be (literally) a captive audience. If you were in Canada, however, you would have been awake at 4:30 am –as many did—to watch it all on CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Not the US. We had to deal with 13-hour “delay”.

And, yes, it was a spectacle of lights, fireworks, music and of course, the parade of nations. Everything was perfectly rehearsed and executed with perfect precision: this was China’s moment to shine. As everyone marched with their flags in front of the crowds and an estimated 80 world leaders (including three generations of Bushes), it was a bit hard not to get Read the rest of this entry »

Keeping the power bill low has never been this much fun, and we have a team of Dutch researchers to thank for this breakthrough in renewable energy.

A group of scientists from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have found a way to harness energy from the wind by flying a 10-sq meter kite around.

The kite is attached to a generator, and produces 10 kilowatts of power, which is enough electricity to power 10 family homes. Read the rest of this entry »