Florida: where electoral law is optional

NYT: Again, Election Confusion for the Florida Secretary of State. Seems that the state of Florida, who have already given us the HarkenHalliburton presidency, continue to blaze a trail in creative interpretation of electoral law. It seems that Katherine Harris (yes, former Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris, who was so insistent during the recount controversy in 2000 about sticking to the letter of the electoral law) is running for Congress, but hasn’t figured out how Florida electoral law applies to her. By violating Florida’s “resign to run” law, she’s landed herself in a bit of a mess.

I like the commentary from the Florida Democratic Party:

“She doesn’t know election law,” said Bob Poe, head of the Florida Democratic Party. “She couldn’t even resign properly.”

Tip of the hat to Greg, whose blog is rapidly becoming required political reading, for the pointer.

Moving to Mac OS X: What’s taking so long?

MacDevCenter: Jaguar: Time to Stop Pussyfooting Around. Derrick Story takes on a touchy point: the masses of Mac OS 9 (and 8???) users who still haven’t upgraded to Mac OS X. My dad is one of those users; he has a first generation beige G3 and less than 128 MB of RAM. While I would love to spend the time implementing one of the hacks that would allow him to run OS X, I can’t recommend it unless he ups the RAM at least.

Derrick says, “If you would have told me a year ago that we would have an OS as good as 10.1, plus all of these vital applications, and only a 20 percent conversion rate, I would have told you that you just don’t know the Mac community.”

Unfortunately we don’t know the whole story. How much of the remaining 80% is like my dad–stuck on old hardware without the discretionary cash to move to something more powerful? And it’s not just retirees, either; think about how underfunded your local school district is. Do you think their Macs are able to run OS X?

I want my family’s Macs to run OS X, because then I can write software for them. (By choice, all my Mac development has required features only available starting in OS X 10.1, such as XML-RPC and SOAP calls.) But I don’t have the discretionary income to upgrade all their hardware.
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