I think that if Americans knew that Kerry would have given up before the fight was even over, he would have received much fewer votes than he did. This is the exact reason why he didn't win... Americans don't want a sissy. Obviously what's happened over the past four years doesn't matter too much to Kerry if he would give up so easily. Ahh, well, at least the Americans have stamped the last four years with approval and filed it away. Of course this is assuming that there was no corrupt e-voting machines (which we'll never know)...

My only suggestion... buy property now, before bush declares war on abortions, scientific research, and gays.

(hmm... is it just a coincidence that some of the worlds biggest terrorists (putin, sharon, bin laden) support bush?)

November 1st and it was almost snowing up at SFU this morning. A fraction of a degree cooler and it would've been. Just on the edge of snow, where it was about 75% rain, 25% slush.

It's gonna be a good year for the ski hills at this rate.

Well I've managed to hold of on US politics so far, but that must now come to an end.

The concept of e-voting is simple. Heck, I could probably write an e-voting application in about 20 lines of python code (with comments). Security would be an issue, but with something so simple it shouldn't be to hard to implement. The way that the US e-voting companies have implemented e-voting is far from simple. And as if the programmers who wrote the 10's of thousands of lines of code in the software weren't incompetent enough, the e-voting companies being used have extremely close ties to the republicans.

One e-voting company, who's machines will be in the most use on Tuesday, Diebold, has already proven to us that their machines don't work. They were used in California for some state elections about a year ago... it is now against the law to use diebold machines in California. Thousands of votes were lost, some counties had thousands of votes more than there were registered voters. And to top off all the bad programming, the CEO of Diebold is a Republican fund-raiser, to paraphrase:

"I will do everything I can to bring Ohio's electoral votes to Bush''.

No conflicts of interest here... move along now. But wait, there's more. There are two e-voting companies being used in this election and those machines will count an estimated 80% of all votes in the election. Well, those two companies are Diebold and ES&S. Interestingly enough, the owners of the two companies are brothers.

I was watching 60 minutes the other night (part of it was about e-voting), and part of the interview with Conny McCormack (she runs the e-voting machines in LA) went as follows:

"The Palm Beach supervisor’s position was, 'Well, when you push this button, the computer will recount.' Well, it just retabulates and spits out in a nanosecond what it said the nanosecond before. There is no recount. There’s no physical evidence to recount."

"You're essentially running the same data through the same software on the same computer, you’re gonna get the same answer every time," says Pelley.

"You are gonna get the same answer every time," says McCormack.

Is that a recount? "Oh, I think it's a recount. And you know, do people really want to get a different answer? What we saw four years in Florida was a recount that was done, where people got a different answer, chad fell out and the numbers were different," says McCormack.

Which is why you need a paper trail. At least until the e-voting machines proven themselves. These same people also claim that there is no proof that their e-voting has problems. And the problems that they do have are because of user error. Never mind that all the machines in entire counties just crashed and couldn't be used.

Students at Yale recently published a paper titled Tiny Systematic Vote Manipulations Can Swing Elections in which they demonstrate how altering only a single vote per machine would have changed the electoral college outcome of the 2000 election and that changing only two votes/machine would have flipped the results for four states.

Note that these machines are so vulnerable that a chimpanzee has been trained to successfully alter the votes in these voting machines. When Avi Rubin, a professor at John Hopkins got a hold of some leaked code he found countless flaws and bugs that could quite easily devistate an election. Diebold claims that the code is old and has since been fixed. Regardless, after looking at the code, it became clear to Rubin that Diebold and their programmers have no grasp of security. No one could ever know if these bugs have been fixed and security enhanced, since government officials aren't even allowed view to the codebase!

Well at least one thing's for sure, e-voting is going to make this election all the more interesting. Perhaps America will even see the first U.S. president to ever reside as president for two consecutive terms without being elected once.

Ok, so I posted some information about calories on my "healthy living" blog if you're interested.

I've also put a link to it on the right hand menu so that you can see my progress easier... because I'm certain that you're interested... right?

There was a pretty good lunar eclipse tonight. Supposedly the best one that there will be until 2007. However, it was a perfectly clear night here in vancouver, making it an even more rare occasion. If you missed it for whatever reasons, don't fret, cause you can relive the experience (except without all of the coldness) at my lunar eclipse photo gallery, containing photos from (almost) start to finish.

As well as being a cool sight to see, it was also a perfect opportunity to test out the capabilities of my new camera. I took about 75 photos, on that album are 28 ones that turned out (and weren't duplicates).

Enjoy!