Obruo

I expect the worst out of reviewers, I knew a few who legitimately evaluated the games the way they played and basically they got ripped apart and the company threatened to pull advertising revenue from the magazine unless they retracted the review, etc. So I *know* there is a lot of dirty behind the scenes buyouts out there going on. However… don’t try to put the fault on the reviewer or people offended by people passing it off as truth. This gem at wired by Michael Ansaldo tries to fault Hexus for publishing emails about Alienware telling them in writing point blank “We won’t send you hardware anymore because you didn’t give us a good review, guarantee a good review and we’ll send you hardware.” Gee, do you think he may suddenly feel a bit guilty about taking payoffs in the past for good reviews? The original article by Hexus is published here. If you’d like to see alienware back peddle a bit, read more on the last page…

… but mangles the delivery and pretty much sounds like he is insulting the troops. Pot meet Kettle, neh?

On going coverage at CNN

Additional Coverage at NYTimes

I don’t have a particularly high opinion of either Bush or Kerry. Good to see both are still name calling and mudslinging though, because you know, that truly shows the quality of character for our choices last election. My step-son has more respect towards people he doesn’t like… and he’s 8.

Was reading the news this morning waiting for philodoxdreams to come home and saw this little tidbit:

Among the findings in one report prepared by the Cuyahoga Election Review Panel:

• Due to poor chain of custody for supplies and equipment, 812 voter-access cards (which voters place in touch-screen machines to cast their ballot) were lost, along with 215 card encoders, which program the voter-access cards. Three hundred thirteen keys to the voting machines’ memory-card compartments, where votes are stored, also went missing.
• Officials set up two user accounts on the computer running vote-tabulation software, then assigned one password to both accounts and allowed multiple people to use them, thwarting any effort to identify individuals who might access and alter the system. Sixty Board of Election employees took touch-screen machines home a weekend before the election to test a procedure for transmitting data on election night.
• The election board hired 69 taxis to transport observers to precincts to collect memory cards and paper rolls on election night. But many cab drivers ended up gathering the materials themselves, and about half the cabs returned to the warehouse with election data, but no observer.
• In at least 79 precincts the number of voters who signed the poll books didn’t match the number of ballots cast. At least eight precincts had more ballots cast than registered voters. Because some polling places served several precincts, some of the discrepancies are explained by voters being directed to the wrong machines, an error that did not result in uncounted votes. But even when investigators tallied ballots and signatures for all precincts in a polling place, 15 locations still had mismatches. In one case investigators found 342 more voters than ballots.

Copied from Wired News: Ohio Election Portends Trouble… Yah that raises my confidence in the validity of our whole election system.