World Intellectual Property Organization – whatever name you give yourselves, you’re nothing but power-sanctioned daylight robbers.

Read my post on the latest WIPO misdeeds and EFF’s legal fight for JibJab’s right to call this music their music at WhatchaRockin?com.

As a wise songstress once said, “If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. Defend your constitutionally-protected rights. No one else will do it for you.”

Read The Nation article on one computer geek’s quest for testing the statistically-improbable output of ballot scanning machines manufactured by Diebold. Kerry’s New Hampshire win was obvious, lending the state’s votes nicely to the study.

“What [Ida Briggs, Michigan computer geek, using statistics] found were striking anomalies … In general, [snip] the “Diebold precincts” showed larger and more frequent deviations from expected voting trends than precincts relying strictly on hand counts, and even than those using an optical-scan counting system from another manufacturer.

“In the era of contracted-out services, companies like Diebold are given unusual amounts of liberty to be self-policing. The problems emerge later, if at all. Diebold has faced intense scrutiny and criticism over malfunctions in its touch-screen voting machines, but it steadfastly insists that its optical scanners have proven reliable during years of use … Respected analysts have found numerous bugs in Diebold’s system codes, and complain that the company has failed to release its most recent revisions, preventing an independent verification of improvements.”

This is, so far, the funniest – and if it’s real, the scariest – thing I’ve ever read.

(Let’s see: not ok to kill unborn babies, ok to murder grown adults in cold blood. Abortion wrong – unchecked capital punishment and outright war on “lesser” mortals a-ok. Got it.)

Rolf says: “This is really really interesting. Well, at least to me, being the statistics freak I am. Attached are screen dumps showing election results by county for the whole country. On two, dot size is proportional to the margin by which that county went Bush (red) or Kerry (blue). Look at TX – one Kerry dot isolated in Austin. Then a bunch of small ones in the Rio Grande Valley, and El Paso. Look at Louisiana – only New Orleans. Look at Georgia – only Atlanta region. Also attached are popular vote results by county, and then by population.”

electionresults.jpg
electionresults_counties.jpg
electionresults_population.jpg
electionresultstxandsouth.jpg

This analysis is pretty cool, because it tells me the following: thanks to the electoral college, a vote from Wyoming is 3 times that of one in Wisconsin because of their population deficit. Therefore, if more people in rural and underpopulated areas continue to vote for Far-Right Republicans, the electoral vote will always go in their favor. Great.

Yeah, yeah, I know he won the popular vote, too. But, only by a smidgen. Shut up, Jack.