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So that’s the 2004 Florida ballot (full pdf ballot link down below) in certain counties. Why can’t they just stick with FILL IN THE BLANK next to the name of your candidate? Florida, Florida, Florida… Complete the arrow? What is this, a coloring book? K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid), is a nice slogan, one which Florida should follow. I can’t wait for the backlash of people being confused and wondering if their vote counts or if they did it right. There’s tons of senior citizens in Florida, I doubt they want to be completing any arrows. Florida is gonna screw shit up again, just you watch. You’ve already done it once, couldn’t you guys figure out a simple ballot 4 years later? Chads, schmads… Might be the first presidential election where we see lawsuits, fitting, eh?

I’m all for any US citizens voting, no matter what their native language, but c’mon, shouldn’t the ballot come in English only? If you can’t
understand English or read it, you shouldn’t be voting. Yes, there are tons of Spanish-speaking folk around, but what about other languages? Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian? Why not them too?

On a side note, Electoral-Vote.com is noting that John Kerry may have enough electoral votes to win the election, based on the latest poll results. According to them, he currently has 271 electoral votes to Bush’s 257, with Minnesota (ya feelin’ Minnesota?) being the only Tied state right now. The great white north may decide the election…

[Thanks lowmazda for the image]

Full pdf of Florida ballot

Crazy that a company as big as eBay can nearly double its net profits over the previous year in this economy. But it continues to grow by leaps and bounds, as no competitors have even made a dent in recent years in the auction foray. Still, how about fixing the site so you don’t need weekly updates on your site and Paypal’s, eBay? Some people are actually up on Friday early morning, wanting to bid and pay for random junk they buy (you know who you are). I’d also like to know what kind of retailers have $1 million in sales per minute, that seems incredibly high, unless you’re talking about Dell having a $750 off $1500 deal again.
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Executives at eBay Inc. apologized to frustrated customers who were frozen out of the online auction giant’s payment transaction service, which experienced at least five days of intermittent outages earlier this month. The mea culpas came as eBay reported sizzling net income, nearly doubling from the previous year, as revenue also soared.

Estimates vary widely, but large online retailers may lose anywhere from $1 million per hour to $1 million per minute when Web sites go down. For instance, a 20-minute outage at Seattle-based Amazon.com in November 2000 deleted roughly 20,000 product orders and $500,000 in revenue, according to investment firm Thomas Weisel Partners.

I think this report is hogwash. Besides, what kinda person would let a marketing research firm analyze the contents of their hard drive? Besides some kind of spyware possibly, that they don’t know about. Granted, there is more AAC and WMA file content than before, but that number was near zero a few years ago. And how the hell do people that rip CDs to WMA and AAC get confused and think they are ripping to MP3? Hello, file extension! Interestingly enough, 7% wanted WMA support when choosing a music player, but yet, I’m not even sure I know anyone that has more than an album full of WMA or AAC tracks. MP3 is still here to stay, mainly because the alternatives, like WMA and AAC, just don’t cut it and aren’t widespread.
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“People are still getting MP3s and putting them on hard drives but are deleting them at a rate faster than they’re acquiring them,” said Isaac Josephson, a researcher at NPD MusicWatch Digital. “People tend to think that downloads are more disposable than rips (copies from a CD), and currently, the lion’s share (of MP3s) are downloads.”

About 20 percent of people in the study said MP3 support was important to them when selecting a portable media device, while just 7 percent said support for Microsoft’s WMA was important. Close to zero percent said AAC, the file format supported by Apple’s iPod and iTunes, was essential to them.

MSN Link