Russel Brand: Wow.

People all over my social media feeds have been posting this Russel Brand interview all day long. I ignored it for a while, because I've always been generally quite dismissive of Russel Brand. After the first three minutes, my perspective changed.

First, I wish I was that articulate and passionate about anything.  Second, he's right about voting - what is the point?

If Politicians Had to Debug Laws Like Software, They'd Fix the Bugs | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

In the spring, members of Congress set off to fly home for a holiday—and ran into mammoth lines at the airports. Why were things so bad? Because of airport furloughs caused by the “sequester.”

Critics warned that the sequester would cause hardship throughout the country, but congress-folk didn’t care — until they had to share in the pain. When they discovered that the sequester was eating into their vacation time, they rushed back to the Capitol and passed a law restoring funding to airports, working so fast that part of the bill was handwritten.

In short, when congress has to eat their own dogfood, they get shit done.

I like the idea from the comments, that the laws should be commented, just as code is commented.

Is the GOP stealing Ohio?

Funny business going on in Ohio, beginning suspiciously close to the 2012 Presidential Election. At the behest of Secretary of State Jon Husted (R), an unverified software patch was installed on electronic voting tabulation machines in 39 counties to "assist counties and to help them simplify the process by which they report the results to our system."

Re. a sketchy election result from Georgia in 2002:

No one will likely ever be able to prove that the November 2002 election was rigged, but that infamous software “patch,” along with the anomalous election results from 100 percent unverifiable voting systems (which are still in use today across the state of Georgia and in many other states) has cast an everlasting cloud of suspicion over that election.

The more I read, the more this is making me queasy. Even assuming there's nothing nefarious going on here, it's still highly suspect that they waited to install this uncertified patch on these machines only days before the 2012 election.

Source: http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/ohio_republicans_sneak_risky_software_onto_voting_machines/