Two of the three urgent pleas from Sheila Parks of the Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots in Down the Rabbit Hole With Democracy are against e-voting:
SECOND URGENT PLEA: Please pay attention to those of us who educate, write, investigate, litigate, legislate and talk about the rigging of our elections by all electronic voting machines. The putsch with electronic voting machines is a more devious way of murdering us.
THIRD URGENT PLEA: We need secure hand-counted paper ballots (HCPB) elections now.
miscellanea
- According to italian newspaper Terra, Asbestos continues to kill in Italy. The current toll is 800 victims each year only in Lombardy (the northern region where Milan is) and is expected to rise, since this substance continues to be present in some areas and acts very slowly. A chilling detail of this story is that future death will also happen among people for whom current law doesn’t provide any compensation. As the Terra article puts it “the new law gives the right to claim for compensation to people who were exposed to asbestos in their work.
- According to the Madisonian, astronaut Buzz Aldrin has sued a trading cards manufacturer that used his image and likeness without his permission. The problem is that, apparently, the fight is over photographs that are a) taken more than 40 years ago and b) have probably been in the public domain anyway since the day they were shot, being “a work of the US Government”. Copyright madness doesn’t live just in comics, it also travels in space now.
- File formats are the alphabets of the digital age. Some Universities, or at least some Faculties of some Universities still are so culturally retarded to not deal with this fact. They more or less implicitly require students to use only proprietary file formats to study and graduate. A recent, real world example from Italy is here. Luckily, not all Universities are like that. I found out with great pleasure that the University of Guelph got its requirements for Electronic Thesis formats straight.
- The EU’s rules on data retention, forged to combat terrorism, look to Data Protection Supervisor Peter Hustinx as “the most privacy-invasive instrument ever”. Hustinx added that “There is no proof that the Directive is necessary as it is… We have a difficult balance to manage here: Is it acceptable to impose far-reaching retention schemes with view to a limited number of cases? Whether it makes sense in these cases needs to be analysed.
This happened in February 2011 but I only discovered it this week, when other Italian media resurrected the story, and it’s too good, or too serious, not to give it the greatest possible exposure.
- One year after the BP Deepwater oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Greenpeace needs your help to find out exactly who is to blame for what parts of that disaster: we have around 30,000 pages of memos, reports and even flight records about the worst oil spill in American history… The problem is we simply don’t have time to go through them all. But no one has the manpower to read the fine print.
Albert Uderzo, the artist that together with Renè Goscinny created Asterix in 1959, is an 84 year old gentleman who (so the story goes) recently bought a real military fighter plane and a Pharaoh-like mansion, following the advice from his “plumber” (heck, who’s this guy, SuperMario?). Due to these and similar facts, Asterix’s sister, that is Uderzo’s daughter Sylvie, went to court to have her father declared mentally incompetent and to accuse the plumber to abuse of his influence on Uderzo. That’s what I read on Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. If this were all the story, it would be a tragic or comic family fight, of little actual interest for everybody else.
Ancient Balinese scripts are incised with a sharp knife on both sides of lontar palm leaves that are then blackened with soot. The leaves are held and linked together by a string that passes through the central holes and knotted at the outer ends.
Today, many young people cannot read lontar inscriptions like this:
Today we have technology to make potentially every existing book accessible to vision-impaired people thanks to e-book readers (even if that technology is still badly (un) unsed very often, see these real world examples). There is, however, a refusal to use it in this way: