DECEMBER 12, 2000
Remember what happened three years ago today? Remember the event which is still discussed among constitution and Supreme Court scholars in grave tones, and is still considered a sort of B.C./A.D. moment in American legal history?

Merry X-mas, GOP!

And then, of course, read Bugliosi's book:

The Betrayal of America

There's a big discrepancy between the way Americans view the legislative and executive branches and the way they view Supreme Court justices. Some find it difficult to believe that a Supreme Court justice's decisions could be politically motivated. Some still have a hard time believing this about Bush v. Gore. And some people believe in creationism, too.

Sharia law to be enforced in Canada?

AmericanDaily.com - Canada Allowing Sharia Barbaric Laws? - Warner Todd Huston: There was an interesting story in the Canadian press recently. It seems that some in the Muslim community there have every intention of instituting insane Sharia style laws to govern its own community within Canada itself. They seem to feel it perfectly reasonable to ignore an entire country’s laws and custom and institute one not only foreign to their adopted country’s sensibilities but one wholly antithetical to them. A convention of Muslim leaders has “elected” a 30 man council called a Darul-Qada intended to be called the Islamic Institute of Civil Justice (Canada). It has been called “the latest step in a long struggle to have Islamic law recognized in Canada”, by the Law Times News. ...Jihadwatch also reported that secular Canadian courts may have no jurisdiction in matters handled by the Darul-Qada. They report, "once an arbitrator decides cases, it is final and binding. The parties can go to the local secular Canadian court asking that it be enforced. The court has no discretion in the matter."

In response to this trend, I hereby announce the official launch of my new project, titled "Boycott Earth." This project, spearheaded by me, will involve the construction of large biospheres and rocketships with the intention of establishing humanist colonies on the moon and in orbit, where we can pose no threat to the delicate religious communities on the delusional space-raft called "Earth." A sign-up sheet will be passed around at the next regular meeting of your local Homo-Atheist Conspiracy chapter.

Here's an interesting article from "I, Cringely" analyzing the impending failure of electronic voting systems. The most common technical objection to electronic voting is their closed, proprietary business model in which the machines' design details are not open open to public scrutiny. Cringely adds that electronic voting is doomed simply based on the failure statistics of major IT development projects. They are simply trying to do too much too fast. The old model for solving important problems was to throw nearly unlimited money at one or more private companies. They would come back after a while with the solution. That may have worked fine for the development of spy satellites and stealth bombers, but for major software development it just doesn't seem to be enough. Particularly when issues of security are involved. Cringely writes:

PBS | I, Cringely . Archived Column: ...in 2000, only 28 percent of software projects could be classed as complete successes (meaning they were executed on time and on budget), while 23 percent failed outright (meaning that they were abandoned).... According to the Standish Group, more than $275 billion will be spent on software development this year, covering about 250,000 projects. That means that if the recent success and failure percentages apply, $63 billion in development costs will go down the toilet in 2003 alone. What does this have to do with voting machines? It says that this whole idea of changing by 2004 the way every American votes was probably doomed from the beginning. Whether political motivations were involved or not, the odds were always against this thing coming in on schedule or on budget. ...In the case of this voting fiasco, there was a wonderful confluence of events. There was a vague product requirement coming from an agency that doesn't really understand technology (the U.S. Congress), foisting a system on other government agencies that may not have asked for it. There was a relatively small time frame for development and a lot of money. Finally, the government did not allow for even the notion of failure. By 2004, darn it, we'd all have touch screen voting. Oh, and there are only three vendors, all of whom have precisely the same motivation (to make as much money as possible) and understanding (that Congress would buy its way out of technical trouble if it had to). This gave the vendors every reason to put their third string people on the project because doing so would mean more profit, not less.