Wired.com has an interesting wiki article describing what you can do if you are an American and get turned away at the polling place because you are not on their list:
Federal law requires states to allow voters to cast a provisional ballot if a voter claims he registered before the state's registration deadline and is eligible to vote -- that is, that the voter is a U.S. citizen, 18 years or older and is not a convicted felon (in states that don't allow felons to vote).
The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights found that "countless" numbers of eligible voters were disenfranchised in the 2000 election because poll workers did not allow them to vote on provisional ballots. So it's important for voters to understand their rights and insist on them at the poll, experts say.
Sister Cecilia Gaudette, who last voted for President Eisenhower in 1952, has registered to vote and says she will vote for Democrat Barack Obama.
Although hard of hearing, she keeps herself informed by reading newspapers and watching TV (...).
Asked about her hopes for the US under an Obama presidency, she says: "Peace abroad. (...)"
She could well be the oldest person to vote in that election. I find it impressive how much she still cares about politics, at an age few will ever reach.
In response to yesterday's vice presidential debate, Aden Renkai came up with the following, fabulous litte flow chart that describes pretty well how it went down from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's point of view--in fact, probably better than I could describe it with words... "Darn right!"
Critics say, she was doing pretty well, and it seems, her constant references to her family made a good impression too. However, considering the expectations towards her had been lowered to a mere "do no harm", her real merit was in not costing McCain the presidency on the spot. That makes it almost forgivable that instead of answering the moderator's questions, she went back to energy politics over and over again (we get it, you would like to drill for more American oil). Almost.
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Biden (or O'Biden, as Palin called him once), on the other hand, didn't say many surprising things either, as he decided not to address Palin (not to lose "hockey moms'" votes across the country), and instead fought against his absent adversary McCain. More interesting than what he was saying though was his signature grin: I couldn't help but wonder, where did I see that before?
Later, it struck me: Joe Biden, much like Ronald Reagan a few decades earlier, was an actor before he entered the world of politics. His only, but famous role:
The winking Palin, by the way, led to a lot of amusement in the lecture hall I watched the debate in: It was grotesque that she behaved so similar to her Saturday Night Live parody (that has recently virally bubbled up on the internet):
The question is, who is whose parody? Palin - Fey or vice versa?
Hillary runs Windows 2003, for example, while Guiliani trusts his website to a CentOS+Apache install. An exception seem to be Barrack Obama and C. Todd, who are the only ones to run FreeBSD on their webservers.
The percentage difference between Linux/Apache (48%) and Windows/IIS (43%), seems to reflect the Internet not too badly (which is about 50% Apache vs. 35% IIS), but when you look at the two parties, there is a much more clear bias:
It’s fascinating to me that the Dems are predominantly Open Source… except for Hillary Clinton and the Republicans are predominantly Microsoft with the exception of Ron Paul, Jim Gilmore, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney.
I wonder what makes Republican candidates go so strongly for closed source products, but I'll leave this up to your speculations ;) .
When I look at the hosting companies, I don't recognize many names -- only one came to sight: Republican candidate Jim Gilmore gets his Linux box from 1&1 Internet, Inc., a subsidiary of 1 und 1, one of Germany's largest internet companies who have big facilities in my university town Karlsruhe. /me waves from here.
Will this knowledge influence where the average geek's makes their cross on the ballot? Probably (or rather, hopefully) not. Yet it is interesting to see what technologies the candidates trust into. Now I'd only like to find out which browser they are using. But this will likely remain unresolved forever...
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