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Today's reading recommendation #1. Extracts: HOW THEY STOLE THE 2006 MID-TERM ELECTION by Greg Palast, for The Guardian (UK), Monday November 6, 2006 Here's how the 2006 mid-term election was stolen. Note the past tense. And I'm not kidding. And shoot me for saying this, but it won't be stolen by jerking with the touch-screen machines (though they'll do their nasty part). While progressives panic over the viral spread of suspect computer black boxes, the Karl Rove-bots have been tunneling into the vote vaults through entirely different means. For six years now, our investigations team, at first on assignment for BBC TV and the Guardian, has been digging into the nitty-gritty of the gaming of US elections. We've found that November 7, 2006 is a day that will live in infamy. Four and a half million votes have been shoplifted. Here's how they'll do it, in three easy steps: Theft #1: Registrations gone with the wind On January 1, 2006, while America slept off New Year's Eve hangovers, a new federal law crept out of the swamps that has devoured 1.9 million votes, overwhelmingly those of African-Americans and Hispanics. The vote-snatching statute is a cankerous codicil slipped into the 2002 Help America Vote Act — strategically timed to go into effect in this mid-term year. It requires every state to reject new would-be voters whose identity can't be verified against a state verification database. Sounds arcane and not too threatening. But look at the numbers and you won't feel so fine. About 24.3 million Americans attempt to register or re-register each year. The New York University Law School's Brennan Center told me that, under the new law, Republican Secretaries of State began the year by blocking about one in three new voters. How? To begin with, Mr. Bush's Social Security Administration has failed to verify 47% of registrants. After appeals and new attempts to register, US Elections Assistance Agency statistics indicate 1.9 million would-be voters will still find themselves barred from the ballot on Tuesday. [....]        ( ----> more) Read More

Today's reading recommendation #2. Extracts: Steal Back Your Vote Published by Greg Palast November 6th, 2006 in his blog A lot of advice we're getting from our progressive friends is to take photos of your ballot and silly stuff like that. Well, that's all about how to complain after they steal it. I have a better idea: Win, don't whine. The regime's sneak attack via vote suppression [see, "How They Stole the Mid-Term Election"] will only net them about 4.5 million votes. You should be able to beat that blindfolded. As that will cost about 5% of the vote. That means you can't win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. If you can't get the 55% you need for regime change, then you're just a bunch of crybaby pussycats who don't deserve to take charge. #1: Vote Early, Vote Often Vote today — at early voting stations — so you can spend tomorrow bringing out others to vote. Also, if you're challenged, you've got another day to bring in more ID or scream bloody murder to your county elections board about your missing registration. #2: Gang Vote Arrive with five! Never go bowling, make love or vote alone. And volunteer at get-out-the-vote operations. It's worth it just for the stale donuts, cold coffee and hot democracy. #3: Tell Them to Take Their Provisional Ballot and... If they try to hand you a "provisional ballot," scream bloody murder. If there's a problem with your ID or registration, demand adjudication from a poll monitor, come back with proper ID, or demand appeal to the county supervisor of elections. But don't just walk away. If it's provisional or nothing, take it — then return for the count to defend it. [....]        ( ----> more) Read More

Current predictions for new U.S. Senate and Congress after tomorrow's (Tuesday) elections, based on some polls: Only 33 out of 100 Senate seats are up for election, but all 435 Congress ("House") seats are. (Click graphic for more details.) Read More

The Ubuntu Summit at Google in the US is now underway. The Googleplex is huge and we are only in one of the smaller buildings on the campus. Of course this is America and everything is huge, we shared a salad between three people yesterday and still didn't finish it. Read More

Based on past experience we can project the KDE 3.5.6 tagging about 1 month from now. So, today I put a freeze on any new features in the KDE PIM Features Branch -- the stuff I have been babbling about non-stop of late. We can still test bug fixes in this branch. But we need to put our efforts into finishing off and polishing the existing new goodies (KMail templates, custom tagging, TOFU, HTML signatures, ...). And negotiate with the developers over which of the goodies we will move into the 3.5 branch for the 3.5.6 release. And hope that the translators don't mind the new strings. Read More

In a small poll (or sorta), Albert asks what kind of values are better in the zoom combobox for oKular. IMO, zoom is best represented by either: a slider with major ticks in almost logarithmic scale, going from 10% to (wishful thinking) 10000%, with a spinbox or constrained textedit next to it to show the slider value and allow manual editing a zoom out button and a zoom in button (with the classical icons and obeying bidirectional gui guidelines) with a constrained textedit inbetween. Once again, zoom buttons should increase/decrease zoom value almost logarithmically (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000% etc.) IN order for these widgets to take lesser space on toolbars, they can be actually hidden and popped up from an unique zoom button ("lens" icon). AmiPro was doing this stuff perfectly 15 years ago. Read More

Thanks to Christian we have a bunch of clean-ups in the way KMail's addressee and recipient editors work. This new code will probably be fast-tracked[1] into the 3.5 branch, but for now we have it only in the features branch for testing. So, please do test. Read More

Let me introduce: I reviewed the wishlists of kpat after fixing all bugs reported to bugs.kde.org. Now 112032 - showing if a solution is possible found my interest. Not exactly for freecell (which I master quite well after all these years kpat QA), but it's surely interesting for games less likely to win. When I was at my sister's home she played (middle) Spider@XP in the evening and it stroke me why a game should be so popular where the chances to win was so low (we mastered to win 15% - neither paying it much attention nor having a lot of experience). So my idea when seeing the bug was to write a solver that can solve not just freecell but also spider. Read More

There's been quite a flurry in the blogosphere in the last couple of days over this and it's clear that a lot of people aren't really looking at this from the right angle. Read More

The recent Novell/Microsoft agreement purports to give what they call 'Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developers' the rights to use unspecified Microsoft patents. The terms are given in this Community Commitments - Microsoft & Novell Interoperability Collaboration. They define a 'hobbyist' as this: Read More