the tindog coffeehouse

Ars Technica is reporting that in today’s Pennsylvania Democratic primary “over 85 percent of PA voters will vote on paperless touchscreen machines that are hackable, failure-prone, and fundamentally unauditable.”

They go on to quote numbers from the Bradblog site showing just how widespread the problem is. For example, “51 counties will vote on the infamous iVotronic touchscreen from ES&S. This is the same model that brought us the Florida 13 controversy that ultimately resulted in Florida scrapping touchscreens altogether.”

Worse, Ars points out that House Republicans blocked an attempt earlier in the year to address the problem, and President Bush spoke out against the bill on “fiscal grounds.”

I’ve touched on this issue before, at the time of the New Hampshire primary. What’s really frustrating is how clearly flawed these machines are and yet how reluctant the state and federal governments are to fix the problem. I remember the public outcries in 2000 over the voting mess in Florida, but here we are 8 years later and nothing has changed except for the medium used to cast the vote.

The Consumerist has posted a great explanation of how the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 led to the subprime mortgage disaster we see today.

The act, passed in 1933 in direct response to the factors that led to the Great Depression, provided several reforms, including establishing the FDIC and authorizing the Fed to regulate interest rates in savings accounts. The act also prohibited commercial banks from merging with investment banks. (Wikipedia article here.)

In 1999 the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act was passed, which repealed the prohibition on commercial and investment bank mergers. As a result (per The Consumerist):

Now, on the one side they could sell mortgages to homeowners, and then invent fancy investment structures which they sold on Wall Street. Because they were “covered” on both ends, banks felt free to sell increasingly dicey mortgages, just so long as another sucker was picking up the garbage. This sucker was picking it up because he had a plan to repackage it and sell it to another sucker, and so on. Eventually we end up with no-doc stated income interest-only option-ARM no money down mortgages being repackaged as “sound investments” being sold as “stable assets” for city pension plans to park their money in.

Footnotes: As the comments in the Consumerist post point out, John McCain voted for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, and one of the authors of the bill, Phil Gramm, is McCain’s chief economic adviser. And another commenter (quoting Bloomberg) pointed out that Barack Obama had said that Glass-Steagall should not be restored.

A new study indicates that divorced and single parents are costing U.S. taxpayers about $112 billion a year.

Scafidi’s calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes. The $112 billion estimate includes the cost of federal, state and local government programs, and lost tax revenue at all levels of government.

So it really does take a village to raise a child! (Or at least the village’s taxes.)

As reported on Ars Technica, the National Motorists Association has compiled numerous reports from cities around the country (including Dallas and Lubbock) caught shortening yellow lights below the recommended time limit in cases where those intersections contain red-light cameras. It’s implied that these cities are shortening the yellow lights on purpose as a way to increase traffic violations and therefore increase revenue from tickets issued to red-light runners.

In Dallas:

The city’s second highest revenue producing camera, for example, was located at the intersection of Greenville Avenue and Mockingbird Lane. It issued 9407 tickets worth $705,525 between January 1 and August 31, 2007. At the intersections on Greenville Avenue leading up to the camera intersection, however, yellows are at least 3.5 or 4.0 seconds in duration, but the ticket-producing intersection’s yellow stands at just 3.15 seconds. That is 0.35 seconds shorter than TxDOT’s recommended bare minimum. Dallas likewise installed the cameras at locations with existing short yellow times. A total of twenty-one camera intersections in Dallas had yellow times below TxDOT’s bare minimum recommended amount.

Ironic, then, that Dallas and some other cities are scaling back or discontinuing their red-light cameras because they’re unprofitable. (Maybe they didn’t shorten the yellow lights enough!) Lubbock canceled their right-led cameras altogether after rear-end collisions increased in those intersections. (D’oh!)

Personally, I don’t agree with them. I’m all for public safety, but as you can see, the cameras quickly become more about money than safety. And as the National Motorists Association site pointed out, simply increasing the yellow light duration can decrease violations and therefore decrease collisions. But then that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

This is cool. Or scary. But mainly cool. (As long as it doesn’t take out my DirecTV service.)

Via Gizmodo, the European Space Agency has released images of the approximately 6000 satellites and countless other man-made debris currently in orbit around the earth.

Yes, we knew that there was a lot of crap out there, but not to this extent. According to the ESA, this is really bad news and urgent measures are needed. Explosions in space are not disastrous on their own, but because of the aftermath. One example: a geostationary satellite travels at 6,213 miles per hour. If it explodes, all the debris stays near the orbit, forming a cloud around the Earth within a few days….

As one commenter pointed out, the objects in the images aren’t to scale, so they are a little misleading. But that still doesn’t detract from the danger all this space trash poses to operational satellites or astronauts. (Dangerous or not, though, it is still kinda cool. Right?)

Researchers in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon be operating a new particle accelerator in hopes of finding evidence of the Higgs boson (also referred to as the “God particle”), a subatomic element which may explain how atoms have mass.

Nobel laureate Leon Lederman has dubbed the theoretical boson “the God particle” because its discovery could unify understanding of particle physics and help humans “know the mind of God.”

So, what does it mean if they find evidence of the “God particle”? What if they don’t?

I’m reminded of an old song by Christian band The Choir, “Children of Time”:

Columbus sailed across the sea
To trouble our theology
What goes up still comes down
But where is Heaven when the world is round?
The cosmonauts were first in space
To look for God and find no trace
With a killer cloud of reason for rhyme
The devil enlightens the children of time