At 10:37 PM 11/17/00 -0500, jonathan@screaming.org wrote:

I just saw a report on CNN-or-some-such, that the Bush Camp was outraged that they'd seen some Techie "rifling the punchcard ballots" before feeding them into the machine!!!

I would hope that they were only RIFFLING the punchcard ballots, and not RIFLING them :-) Depending on whether you take the latter word to mean shooting holes in them with a rifle or rooting through them to steal the good stuff, different political factions may have been involved....

How many of us here can harken back to the days of punchcards in computing? Did you not, routinely, rifle them prior to feeding them in to the reader, in order to dislodge the "chads"?

No - Keypunches did a fine job of punching out the chads, and chads could be later recycled as football-game confetti. The reason for riffling the decks of cards was to make sure they were all packed loosely enough that the card reader would read each card one at a time, not misfeeding or missing cards because there were two cards stuck together or (worse) one and a half cards stuck together, leading to inaccurate results and a big mess you had to clean out of the card reader.

WTF, I respectfully ask?

Morons will begin raining from the damn sky. Skeet shooting anyone?

Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639