“You can’t always get to a sink to wash your hands,” said Anne Ryun, wife of Representative Jim Ryun, Republican of Kansas. Apparently, the great and the good find meeting the electorate dangerous, dirty work.
Ever since 2000 the American voting system has been under intense scrutiny. Those who have examined it frequently file pessimistic reports, though the core allegation – that some aspects of the system have been deliberately designed to prevent segments of the population from freely exercising its right to vote – are nothing new. See, for [...]
I welcome any excuse to stem Blackberry mania, especially when it makes (some) sense. Sadly, the Dutch haven’t quite explained their reasoning, though. The truth is that no email solution guarantees “end-to-end” encryption, unless S/MIME or PGP is used. Quite why the Blackberry should be worse than other clients is not explained. Of course, being [...]
If I’m going to be asked to pay higher taxes, be made to feel bad for flying, have my life as a motorist made more difficult, and so forth, it ought to be on the basis of good science. In fact my actions as an individual may well have nothing to do with global warming. [...]
Faced with the problem of gun crime in schools, Americans could ban people from owning firearms. Or they could issue bullet proof textbooks, and give the kids a fighting chance.
If only we gathered enough information we’d be able to spot terrorists, right? The great fallacy in all of this – thankfully – is that terrorism is very, very rare. So rare, in fact, that I really doubt that it is possible to successfully create a system that will statistically spot terrorists accurately based on [...]
For the moment, it seems that Apple has dropped the Trusted Computing module from their motherboards. While the OSS and libertarian crowd on the ‘net may cheer, this decision closes one avenue through which computers might have been be kept safe from malicious software and, for those of us who are not so paranoid, is [...]
The Speaker of the House of Commons seems to have blotted his copybook. His fumbling attempt to shield Blair from answering a question that is difficult for both him and the Labour Party looks partisan. It is, of course, a distinctly British conceit that a Speaker, taken from the ranks of people who have spent [...]