CDR: Re: Aces high (long reply)

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Fri Nov 17 22:27:35 PST 2000


At 10:37 PM 11/17/00 -0500, jonathan at 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 at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639






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