My own personal Joe, Sentenza, and Tuco, if you will…
The good news: the president of Diebold resigned after enough problems with the ethics of his company, his products, and his personal business dealings. I maintain that if people are hell-bent on electronic voting (and I personally am hell-bent against it), the system should be transparent and open-source so that anyone can both verify that it is correct and formulate improvements to the system.
The bad news: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran claims that the Holocaust never happened. This is significantly less forgivable than claiming that Israel is a blot in the middle of the Arab world that should be wiped off it. It makes my blood boil to hear people say things like this. I might be able to understand the claims if the Holocaust had happened centuries ago, but some of the people who were in it are still alive today! Is President Ahmadinejad actually trying to claim that my grandfather did not get shipped to France to fight the Nazis? Is he claiming that 20 million Russians did not actually die in some fictional “World War,” and have merely been hiding in their basements lo these past sixty years? He certainly seems to be purporting that everything from Kristallnacht to Auschwitz is an elaborate hoax. Argh!
The ugly news: I have 3 tests to take, a 10-page paper to write, 4 assignments to grade (with 20-ish people turning in each one), 7-ish ACM problems to code up, and 3 more grad school apps that need to be finished this week. I wish I could say I’m almost home, but I’m not.