I kinda stopped caring about mobile phone design and features a year or so ago. Don't know why, but my interest just crashed. But Nokia's forthcoming 7280 has piqued it again -- it's virtually the first genuinely novel phone design ideas I've seen in a long time.

The 7280 is a tiny phone intended for use as a "club phone" -- when you get home from work, you take the SIM out of your bulky camera/calendar/smartphone and stick it in this tiny little keypad-less (voice-activated) twig of a phone with a small built-in camera and go out on the town. It's just the right size for a night out on the town, and has just the right features for a lightweight communications context like being out barhopping. Link (via Wired Magazine)

Dave Pentecost is one of a number of volunteer filmmakers who worked with Michael Moore to document election day conditions at polling sites throughout Ohio. Background on the project in a previous BoingBoing post: Link.

Dave sends BoingBoing this short movie comprised of excerpts from footage they captured on November 2, 2004. Much of it was apparently edited on laptops in the back of a bus. He says:

"Our thanks to People for the American Way and Election Protection. My apologies to the Jayhawks for not clearing the music first. (I'm still waiting to hear back, their rights person is in transit, I'll do it next week). The decision to go ahead was mine. This was shot by a dedicated group of 20 volunteer filmmakers, but any faults in the editing or focus of this video are my responsibility. The organizers of the trip will release a longer selection of statements by voters who had problems voting.

This is not leaked Michael Moore footage. As far as we know he has no plans to make a film with it. This was created by the Ohio volunteers on their own and the material belongs to them. Anyone wishing to use the original footage will be able to license it from the individuals who shot it. We are saddened by the voting problems we saw and hope that releasing this short video will add to the conversation on election reform. "

One BoingBoing reader suggests the short be known as Fahrenheit 59MB. Video (in 3 MB, 20MB, and 59MB streams and downloads): Link 1, Link 2, Link 3.
(Hosting thanks: internetvetsfortruth.org and Sean Bonner + Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for the shrinkage, cowicide).

Canada is strongly considering ratifying the 1996 WIPO "Internet Treaties." These are the treaties that caused the USA to implement the loathsome Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and they've wrought untold damage around the world. What will this mean for Canada? Well for starters, the Globe and Mail notes that a notice-and-takedown regime is inevitable:

In what is bound to be a controversial element, the committee recommended that Internet service providers (ISPs) must be held liable for copyrighted material that goes through their systems. To be exempt from that liability, the ISPs must show they are acting as true "intermediaries," without actual or constructive knowledge of the content.

ISPs should be required to comply with a "notice and takedown" system against subscribers who violate copyright laws.

Boing Boing's incomparable sysadmin, Ken Snider, a Canadian geek, wrote:

It is *extremely* important to me that our government not bow to CIRA. I have high hopes that the current minority gov't means they won't deal with this anytime soon, but I *want* to get the message out to every damned MP I can get my hands on. The problem is, I don't have any *specific* information on these provisions. I was hoping you would, or at least, could point me in the right direction (or even champion the cause with me! Woo!).

It's *critically* important to me that Canada doesn't follow the US in this process. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to make the reasons *why* this is a shitty idea known, I just need some help making my points clear and concise, as well as containing the appropriate amount of "politik" that they'll make a difference.

So, Ken, here're some answers for you.

Copyright is a system for regulating technology -- it regulates technologies used to make and distribute copies. We have lots of technology regulation in the world: there are rules that govern the operation of automobiles and rules that govern the marketing of electrical appliances. This isn't per se wrong.

But when the 20 horsepower locomotive was invented, the blacksmiths weren't able to successfully lobby to have 80 horseshoes welded to each engine, despite the rule that said that every "horse" used for transport needed four shoes. When you invent a railroad, you need railroad-rules for it, not horse-and-buggy rules. The facts that the railroad doesn't need shoes, or oats, or curry-combs don't reflect bugs in railroading: they are the feautres of railroading.

The Internet has one overarching feature that makes it superior to the technologies that preceded it: it can copy arbitrary blobs of data from one place to another at virtually no cost, in virutally no time, with virtually no control. This is not a bug. This is what the Internet is supposed to do.

It was really foresighted in 1996 for WIPO to sit down to update copyright law to suit the Internet. They recognised that the Internet was a fundamentally different thing from the technologies that came before it, and of course, a new technology needs new rules and regulation.

But WIPO got it horribly wrong. The approach that WIPO took to regulating the net was to create a set of rules that tried to make the Internet act more like radio, or TV, or photocopiers -- like all the things that it had already made rules for. The WIPO approach treated the ease of copying on the net as a bug, and set out to fix it.

Notice-and-takedown is an area where WIPO got it drastically, terribly wrong.

If you own a restaurant, you're not responsible for policing your customers to ensure that none of them are carrying stolen bank-loot. If someone burst in and pointed at the guy at the back table and said, "He's wearing my hat!" no one would blame you if you didn't wrestle the hat away from him and give it back to the accuser.

But under notice-and-takedown, this is what we ask of our ISPs. If you allow users to host stuff, you're responsible for what they host. If they put an infringing file on your server, you're required to know what they've put online, and you'll share in their punishment if you fail to block them from posting infringing material.

Now what is and isn't a copyright infringement isn't anything like a clearcut issue. ISPs aren't equipped to evaluate what's infringing and what isn't -- hell, even Supreme Court judges have a hard time figuring it out. Operating a server doesn't qualify you to understand and evaluate copyright law.

So there's a get-out-of-jail in notice-and-takedown. If you respond to accusations of infringement by taking your customers' materials offline quickly, you won't share in their liability. Now, given the kinds of penalties available to rights-holders for online infringment (in the US, it's $150,000 per infringement!), it's not surprising that most ISPs avail themself of this "safe harbour," removing stuff whenever a complaint comes in.

But a complaint isn't proof -- someone who rings up your ISP and says, "That file infringes on my rights" is like the guy who busts into a restaurant and shouts, "That guy is wearing my hat!" There's no way for an ISP to evaluate whether he's genuinely aggreived, whether he's nursing a grudge, whether he's just a nut. In the US, nuts, grudge-nursers and flakes all use notice-and-takedown to censor the Internet and get material removed.

Usually rights-holders will counter that this can be addressed through something called "counter-notification," where an ISP that's removed something is given the right to contact its customer and say, "This guy says you infringed his copyright. If you disagree, let us know and we'll put your file back online and you two can sort it out in court."

But in practice, counter-notification is a rare beast. Most ISPs just do the math and decide that sending a single counter-notification letter will cost them more in lawyer-hours than the customer in question will ever make for them. They just invoke the termination clause in nearly every ISP contract and shut down the account.

This is why notice-and-takedown is a near-perfect tool for censorship. Don't like what your critics have to say? Just sent a takedown notice and poof, it's gone! The Scientologists love this tactic -- they even get Google to remove links to sites that are critical of their "church" by asserting copyright infringement. Have a look at the truly chilling annals of ChillingEffects, which gathers up takedown notices and other nastygrams. The takedown notice is the favourite tool of the crank, the censor, and the bully.

Even when applied to genuine copyrighted works, takedown is dangerous to the point of unusability: the Business Software Alliance, MPAA, and RIAA send out automatically generated takedowns by the thousands, using software that does half-assed pattern-matching on files available on the net and then sending off letters to universities, ISPs and other entites demanding the takedown of book reports about Harry Potter, Linux distributions with the same names as movies, and academic work by professors with the same name as musicians.

What's more, notice-and-takedown is almost always accompanied by systems for peircing Internet users' anonymity: if you want to find out your stalking victim's new address and number, you need only find the message-board where she's posting about her troubles and write to the ISP as an infringed-upon rightsholder, demanding her info.

If Canada wants to "solve" the problems of the Internet, it should be looking to find "Internet-native" solutions. Canada's Internet laws should treat copying as a feature, not a bug. It should empirically evaluate which sectors are negatively impacted by file-sharing (mounting evidence suggests that almost none of the entertainment industry's woes can be blamed on the net) and then solve those industries' problems with blanket licenses and other tools that don't seek to regulate copying, something that's impossible to do without breaking the Internet.

Solutions that approach the Internet as a problem are no solutions at all.

Write to your MP, write to the Ministers -- This Slashdot poster collects the contact info for numerous government officials who are involved with this. Keep Canada's Internet free. Link (Thanks, Ken and Ian!)

Update: This post drew a lot of attention from Canadian activists and would-be activists. If you want to save Canada from the WIPO Internet treaties, a good place to start is the always-excellent Digital-Copyright.ca. On top of that, Will Pate has set up a petition to Parliament on this.

Amazing anaecdote from Peter Briggs, the author of the screenplay for Alien Versus Predator.

I wrote "A vs P" originally - oh, God...did you hear that? I actually said "A vs P". I hate that thing...it's like "T2" or "LXG"! Anyway, I wrote it on an Amstrad computer, which was about one step above a Univac Room Filler. In '92 I swapped to an Apple Mac, which I've used ever since. And I ended up losing the Amstrad disk, which was some weird, unreadable proprietary brand anyway. It wasn't until whoever it was transcribed it and pirated it onto the web years later, that I was able to cut-and-paste it into Final Draft and have an electronic copy again. So, thank-you, Internet Leaker, wherever you were!

Link (via Wired Magazine)

Wonderful, funny list of break-up lines grounded in different philosophical schools.

The Teleologist: We aren't meant for each other. (P.K.)
The Deontologist: We aren't right for each other. (P.K.)
The Consequentialist: We aren't optimal for each other. (P.K.)
The Solipsist: It's not you, it's me. (P.K.)
The Empiricist: I think we should see other people. (P.K.)
The Rationalist: I'm not a priority to you any more. (P.K.)
The Rationalist, v 2.0: I've been doing some thinking... (Paul Audi)
The Rationalist, v. 3.0: If you can't see your faults, there's nothing more I can say. (P.K.)
The Content Externalist: Ever since we moved, you've changed. (Paul Audi)

Link (via Monochrom)

I Lost My Frog starts with a found-object, a hand-drawn flier written by a small child who is trying to recover his frog, named "Hopkin Green Frog," with Art-Linkletter-perfect infantalisms like "PS: I'll find my frog/Who took my frog/Who found my frog."

Interweb hipsters used this as a jumping-off point and photoshopped a series of images depicting the search for the lost Hopkin Green Frog, and the results are incredibly funny and even a little touching. Like an "All Your Base" for a lost pet. Link

RCA has released its "Astro" TV, which is styled to look like a classic 1950s set, save that it is built around a flat-panel LCD modern CRT. Expect to see a lot more of this as LCDs get cheaper and more available: remember when FM-radio-on-a-chip costs fell to approximately zero and the market was flooded with FM radios built into pens, sunglasses, and novelty baseballs and pencil-sharpeners? Modestly-sized LCDs are certain to follow suit in the next year or two. Link (via Red Ferret Review)

Updated: Andrew point out that "Both the Red Ferret and Brookstone links to the Astro say it is a 13" CRT. Of course, CRTs are even cheaper (at the moment)..." D'oh. My apologies!

Futurismic has published a new story by Michael Canfield called "Is You Is/Is You Ain't?" They've published some great fiction up until now, but this is truly a cut above. It's the story of a kind-of-hyper-Gary-Coleman, a baby-sized adult actor whose aging is retarded so that he can play the NinjaBaby, a popular infant action star. Satirical and hilarious, this is the best story in Futurismic's publishing history (I've just recommended it to the Science Fiction Writers of America for consideration in next year's Nebula award), and it grabs you right from the first paragraph:

I got my first break as stunt-double for the top goodie on Super Comix Babies. For the third season the producers cast me in a recurring role. Before the series ended its seven-year run, one or two scripts even revolved around my character. You always remember your first job fondly, I guess, but the public remembers me — if at all — for my own series: NinjaBaby. Two films spun-off from it — New York NinjaBaby and NinjaBaby II: Back to the Womb — made good money at the time. Back to the Womb is still considered important for the first use of an in-vitro actor, Tommy Baker, who played me in flashback sequences. Tommy came to a bad end; it’s a tough business. Good friends burned-out early: drugs, depression, suicide. I’m luckier than most. NinjaBaby fans tell me the movies sacrificed the grace notes that made the series a classic. I don’t know. I can tell you that when we produced the original series, we called it shit.

Link (Thanks, Jeremy!)

This month's Wired has a stunning article by James Surowiecki about the failing currency of brands as a form of intangible corporate asset. This is a timely piece because the rhetoric of branding has been used to make unprecedented incursions against privacy, competition and speech.

It used to be that trademarks were intended to protect "consumers" (that's us) from being tricked into buying goods under false pretenses. If it said "Coca-Cola" on the can, there had better be Coke inside, and not Pepsi or Crazy-Bob's-Discount-House-of-Soda brand. When a competitor of Coke's shipped a bottle of stuff that was misleadingly packaged or labelled, Coke's authority to sue its competition derived from its need to protect us, not its bottom line. It didn't get to sue because it owned Coca-Cola, but because it was acting as a proxy for its customers, who were being decieved by con-artists who mislabelled their goods.

That meant that Coke's trademarks couldn't be used to go after anyone except competitors and then only when they were deceiving the public. If I started the Coca-Cola Brake and Lube Shop and there was no likelihood that a customer of mine would spend his money at my premises because they thought the fine quality of Coca-Cola Beverages would be reflected in my workmanship, then I was OK.

It also meant that if I made a product like Coca-Cola (say, Pepsi Cola), I could use the word "cola" to signify that if you like Coke, you should try Pepsi. Trademark didn't protect Coke from Pepsi's proudly announcing that they had goods that were similar to Coke's. A court actually found that "cola" was a generic term ad that Coca-Cola couldn't stop other "cola" makers from using it.

But as time went by, trademarks stopped being about us and started being the embodiment of brands (which, as Surowiecki points out, are on the wane and were probably never as important as we thought to begin with).

This meant that trademarks weren't just things that helped the public know what they were buying -- they are a kind of pseudo-property. Pseudo-property that could be defended on the basis that it "belongs" to a company, who need to be protected from having the value of their marks "diluted" or "tarnished."

So now you have Visa going after eVisa.com -- a company that helps you get travel visas -- and Air Canada going after shareholders who used the Air Canada logo on communications about problems with Air Canada management. Disney's one of the worst, of course, going after daycares that paint Mickey on the walls -- even though there's not an instant's danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronizing it. Most recently, of course, some of Nintendo's lawyers got a wild hair up their ass because someone mentioned some game titles on a profile-page on a porn/community site and freaked out because the association might damage their brand.

All these new and exciting uses of trademarks -- shutting up critics, blocking new entrants into the market, and controlling the speech of private individuals -- are justified by the importance of brands.

But if brands just aren't that valuable, maybe it's time to rethink this stuff. I'm all for trademark laws that punish people who defraud me by misrepresenting their goods -- but trademarks used to create and maintain a market position just mean that it's harder for the "consumer" (that's me) to find out about competitive offerings and failings in goods and services. That kind of "right" doesn't do me any good at all.

Undoubtedly, there are strong brands that can still command a premium. In one recent survey by Landor Associates, 99.5 percent of people said they'd be willing to pay more for a Sony. But the size of that premium is smaller than ever. Five years ago, Sony charged 44 percent more for its DVD players than the average manufacturer. Today, Sony DVD players cost just 16 percent more than the average. And yet, even though the price of Sony's most expensive DVD player fell 60 percent between 1999 and 2003, CyberHome, maker of absurdly cheap DVD players, has knocked off Sony to become the biggest DVD-machine seller in America. Similarly, in the fashion industry, a stronghold of brand identity and obsession, prices fell an average of 9 percent between 2001 and 2003. At least part of the reason is the uptick in private-label sales, which now account for almost half the market. The rise of retailers like Zara and H&M, which make their own cheap but nice designer knockoffs, and the emergence of a high-low aesthetic (in which top designers no longer dictate taste) have weakened the power of fashion brands and fragmented the industry into myriad small ones. Sure, superbrands like Louis Vuitton and Prada can still command a heft price premium. But they're increasingly the exception...

Look at Nokia. In 2002, it had the sixth-most-valuable brand in the world, valued by the consultancy Interbrand at $30 billion. But the very next year, Nokia made a simple mistake: It didn't produce the clamshell-design cell phones that customers wanted. Did consumers stick around because of their deep emotional investment in Nokia? Not a chance. They jumped ship, and the company's sales tumbled. As a result, Nokia lost $6 billion in equity. How about Krispy Kreme? In 2003, Fortune called the doughnut maker America's "hottest brand." Then came what might prove to be the hottest name of 2004: Atkins..

The truth is, we've always overestimated the power of branding while underestimating consumers' ability to recognize quality. When brands first became important in the US a century ago, it was because particular products - Pillsbury flour or Morton salt - offered far more reliability and quality than no-name goods.

Link (via Kottke)

UPDATED: The problem is fixed. Sort of. I wiped the drive, reinstalled 10.3, and the problem has vanished. Thank you to all of the kind readers who offered assistance, especially John Rochester who gave me a crash course in log files.

ORIGINAL POST: I've been experiencing a strange problem on my PowerBook G4/1.33 running OS X version 10.3.5. WindowServer spins up my hard drive constantly, every few seconds for a second or so at a time, even when idle. In fact, if I'm doing a task, it seems to stop. It's driving me crazy (er, crazier). Here's a sample of my WindowServer log:

Nov 05 19:30:45 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Nov 05 19:30:45 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Nov 05 19:31:04 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area
Nov 05 19:31:04 [181] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXRemoveTrackingArea : Invalid tracking area

At MacOSXHints, I found this thread and this other thread, but no real solution. I'm also at a disadvantage because my Unix knowledge is essentially non-existent. I'd be very grateful if someone could please help me. Please email me directly to david (at) pesco.net. Thanks!

This gallery of death-masks -- castings taken from the phizzes of famous corpses -- is completely captivating, if a little poorly presented (captions on the thumbnail pages would really help!). One of the coolest things I own is my casting from a death mask of Vincent Price, bought from legendary make-up artist Tom Savini. Pictured here, the death mask of Sir Isaac Newton, (one of the) inventor(s) of calculus. Link (via Making Light)
Update: Teresa notes "The absence of captions and a working index was the reason I listed so many of them as separate links. If you were to link to me at that post, rather than at the main Making Light URL, your readers could also make use of my list.

Michael Wolf put on a photographic exhibit featuring Chinese toy-factory workers and installed it in a gallery whose walls were crawling with over 10,000 Made-in-China toys. Link

My friend, Steve Silberman, who has written probably 15 of my favorite 20 stories in Wired, wrote this fantastic essay about being an American gay married man. He sez: "With all the current speculation about gay marriage sinking the election for Kerry, it occurred to me that no one was hearing from gay people who have actually gotten married. The entire debate was turning on abstractions. So I wrote this as a reality check."

Our Traditional Non-Traditional Wedding

As I read through the post-mortems of the 2004 election speculating about whether the gay marriage issue cost John Kerry his presidency -- with many Democrats supporting this view -- I have the disoriented feeling of reading about my sweet, ordinary life with Keith distorted through funhouse mirrors. When writer Bill Bennett places gay marriage in opposition to "ethical values" and a "decent society," as he did in the National Review the day after the election, does he mean us? Apparently so. By now, the concept of marriages like ours has been twisted into such an abstract threat to so many otherwise fine and compassionate people -- and so divorced from the humble blessing of two souls caring deeply for one another -- it's time for a national reality check.

 Keith and I are not political activists. His family has traditionally voted Republican, and his parents voted for Bush in the recent election. Until recently, Keith's father was the mayor of a small town in the Midwest; the first time I met him, he took me aside and said, "I know that you are very special to Keith, so that means you are very special to us." There was such simple, human, Midwestern forthrightness in that statement. No banner-waving, no Biblical injunctions, no soapboxing. Just a clear and compassionate message: We love our son and trust his ability to make the most personal decision of all.

 Keith and I didn't get married to commit a pioneering act of civil disobedience, to "redefine marriage" as President Bush claimed during his campaign, or to outrage the religious right. We took our vows because getting hitched seemed like the sane next step of our commitment. We figured the best way to defend the sanctity of marriage was to have one and live up to the promises we made to one another.

Link

IBM's BlueGene/L has knocked NEC's Earth Simulator off its post as the fastest supercomputer in the world. The machine, under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, hit 70.72 teraflops, double that of the previous champ. BlueGeneL was designed for the United States' Stockpile Stewardship Program to help scientists understand the aging of nuclear weapons. From New Scientist:

"...BlueGene/L may come to dominate the Top500 list for some time. It has been designed to include an unprecedented number of different processing units - 65,536 in all - and is expected to reach a staggering 360 teraflops when completed."

The Top500 Supercomputer Sites rankings are based on the LINPACK Benchmark that tests "the performance of a dedicated system in solving a dense system of linear equations." Link

Male fish, that is. National Geographic reports that male bass in the Potomac River are producing eggs. Seventy-nine percent of the male smallmouth bass examined by scientists show both testicular and ovarian tissue.

"The findings have perplexed the government scientists, who suspect a little-understood class of emerging contaminants. The contaminants include natural hormones excreted by humans and livestock as well as hormone-mimicking synthetic chemicals. The chemicals appear to confuse the endocrine systems of fish, essentially fooling males into producing female cells."

Link

In USA Today:

Voters nationwide reported some 1,100 problems with electronic voting machines on Tuesday, including trouble choosing their intended candidates.

The e-voting glitches reported to the Election Protection Coalition, an umbrella group of volunteer poll monitors that set up a telephone hotline, included malfunctions blamed on everything from power outages to incompetent poll workers.

But there were also several dozen voters in six states — particularly Democrats in Florida — who said the wrong candidates appeared on their touch-screen machine's checkout screen, the coalition said.

In many cases, voters said they intended to select John Kerry but when the computer asked them to verify the choice it showed them instead opting for President Bush, the group said.

Link (thanks, mmmm, via)

Interesting article about the effect that the increased average weight of US citizens has had on jet fuel use.

"American's growing waistlines are hurting the bottom lines of airlines as extra pounds on passengers cause a drag on planes."

"Through the 1990s, the average weight of Americans increased by 10 pounds, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

"The extra weight caused airlines to spend $275 million to burn 350 million more gallons of fuel in 2000 to carry the additional weight".

Link (Thanks, Chris!)

Join me and a bunch of other writers for a live reading this Sunday November 7, 2004 in LA! Participants include Scott O’Connor (Among Wolves), Sean Carswell (Barney's Crew), Rachel Resnick (Go West Young F*cked-Up Chick), and host Jim Ruland (McSweeney's, LazyMick, and a forthcoming novel which is going to kick ass) for a night of irreverent readings in the heart of Chinatown.

The Mountain is located at 475 Gin Ling Way (pedestrian walkway off Hill St.). Call 213-625-7500 for details. Fun starts at 7, readings at 8, effigy burning at midnight, bring extra garments to rend.

Ernest Miller says:

It was a major victory earlier this year when a Federal Appeals Court upheld the Grokster decision, basically clearing P2P filesharing software providers from liability for the copyright infringements of their users. The MPAA and RIAA want the Supreme Court to overturn the decision and have submitted a petition for a writ of certiorari. The State Attorneys General are considering supporting the petition for cert, but perhaps many of them can be dissuaded. You have to call your State AG today, before 5pm.

Link

Over 4,500 votes vanished in one North Carolina county due to a data storage error. Whoops! Democracy buffer overrun.

Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state. Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. "If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes," said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost.

Jack Gerbel, president and owner of Dublin, California-based UniLect, said Thursday that the county's elections board was given incorrect information. There is no way to retrieve the missing data, he said. "That is the situation and it's definitely terrible," he said.

Link (Thanks, craig)

mySociety is a charitable project that gets grants to build cool, Democracy-hacking software that will follow on the astonishing UK activist projects like FaxYourMP and TheyWorkForYou. They've just gotten a buttload of money and they want to hire a kick-ass PHP developer to build their next s33krit project (which I have been fortunate enough to see and am very very excited about!).

mySociety - is a new project from the community which built FaxYourMP.com and TheyWorkForYou.com. It is overseen by registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy and builds web sites and services that deliver simple, tangible benefits to civil society at very low cost per person helped. It brings Britain's grassroots civic software community together with public and voluntary sectors to get useful sites built, and to teach through demonstration.

Since September 2003 a small core team has been working to clarify and codify the project's aims and to establish and structure an organization to support it. In parallel, an open public competition for project ideas was launched and this was used to pick our five launch projects.

Now, with an appropriate legal structure identified, our first projects under development, and initial funding secured, mySociety is looking to contract a PHP developer with exceptional user interface design skills.

Link (Thanks, Tom!)

Update: Tom sez, "We're not building a successor to TheyWorkForYou - after all, it's barely finished yet! Yhe money is not for TWFY, at all - they are different legal entities with different people in charge. They're fully voluntary, wheras we're combinging core developers with volunteer labour to try and get the best of both worlds."

BoingBoing reader Joe says:

A computer glitch in a Columbus, Ohio precinct gives Bush an extra 3,893 votes. Makes you wonder what other mistakes the computer made that we haven't found.

I'm a computer programmer and quality assurance tester for a software company in Cleveland, so I know a thing or two about computer glitches. Where there's one glitch that's obvious, there are about 10 others that slip by unnoticed until it's too late.

Link to AP story, via Akron Beacon Journal

The UK's Office of Communications (Ofcom) is publicly toying with the idea of funding a "public service publisher" (PSP) to complement the BBC's role as a public service broadcaster. The idea of a PSP is to publicly fund an entity that publishes books, games, interactive material and other "published" items that are commissioned from British creators and that reflect and deliver British values. It's a brilliant idea, and one that's ripe for Creative Commons licenses -- the specs say that "Content distributed by the PSP must be widely available throughout the UK, with at least near-universal availability." Sounds like open content to me! 184K PDF Link to the call for bids, Link to the Ofcom web-page for the project (via Wonderland)

Low-powered electrical currents applied to the scalp immediately improve language skills.

A current of two thousandths of an ampere (a fraction of that needed to power a digital watch) applied for 20 minutes is enough to produce a significant improvement, according to data presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in San Diego. And apart from an itchy sensation around the scalp electrode, subjects in the trials reported no side-effects...

Iyer says more work needs to be done to explain the effect, but she speculates that the current changes the electrical properties of brain cells in the prefrontal cortex, the brain region through which it passes. She believes that the cells fire off signals more easily after the current has gone by. That would make the brain area, a region involved in word generation, generally more active, she suggests.

Link (via Oblomovka)

The Hindu reviews Sarnath Banerjee's book Corridor, billed as "the first graphic novel of India." Look terrific.

Corridor meanders through the lives of a bunch of confused urban youngsters — Digital Dutta, the north Kolkata man torn between Karl Marx and H1-B Visa; Brighu, a compulsive collector and a contemporary version of Ibn Batuta; Shintu, newly married and searching for the ultimate aphrodisiac; and D.V.D. Murthy, a malodorous forensic expert with a penchant for Keats. They are all visitors to the second-hand bookstore of Jehangir Rangoonwalla in a corridor in Connaught Place. Rangoonwalla tells one of his phirang, vipasana-learning customers that he received enlightenment ("that it all comes down to chewing your food well") in an elevator in Nariman Point. Past all seekings, he has reached a state where he considers his bookshop the centre of the universe, from where he doles out not only books, but also tea and wisdom in generous doses.

Link (Thanks, Avi!)

Sestka is a Czech vendor of whimsical clocks made from found objects. There are some real beauties in this gallery, but my pick is this one, with kissing couple figurines and a miniature lamppost mounted at 8 o'clock. Link (Thanks, Jakub!)

Hidden Doors manufactures and installs custom secret doors disguised as swinging and revolving bookcases. Someday, I want to live in a house where every extrance is one of these. Link (site doesn't work in Mozilla) (via Fark)

Britain's national ID card is back from the grave, and the government here is ploughing ahead at speed to make this an expensive, privacy-compromising reality. If you've lived in the UK for the past six months (or more), and you don't want to be issued a Soviet-style "internal passport," get to this site now and spend ten seconds filling in the No2ID petition. This may be your last chance.

We, the undersigned residents of the United Kingdom, petition the Prime Minister and the government to immediately cease all further development of, and legislation for, national identity cards and the National Identity Register.

We believe the proposals constitute an attack on individual rights and freedoms. We believe they will lead to institutional discrimination and to unfair and unlawful denial of benefits and services. We believe the proposals will lead to an increase in state control and surveillance over the individual, and that they will create an unacceptable imposition on every citizen. We believe the proposals are unlawful under the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights that guarantee every person the fundamental right to privacy.

We believe the identity proposals will lead to an endemic loss of privacy and freedoms. We believe they will present dangers to marginalised, disenfranchised and disadvantaged people. We also believe that an identity scheme will imperil the relations between citizen and state.

Furthermore, we believe that even if these principled concerns had been fully addressed, that the government's proposals would still constitute an enormous waste of financial resources and would achieve little or no tangible benefits.

For these reasons we urge the government to fully abandon the proposals.

Link (Thanks, Phil!)

Sanrio have launched a Hello Kitty massively multiplayer online game. The cuteness factor here is fantastic -- somewhere between genuinely and sickeningly fascinating:

Hello Kitty World will allow thousands of players to live and participate in Hello Kitty's magical and cute online world. You will be able to roam the streets of Kitty Kingdom, XO Federation, and Melody-land. Enjoy the beautiful landscape and architecture of Puroland or Badtzcity and participate in numerous puzzles, story lines, or adventures lead by the worldwide community of Hello Kitty World subscribers. You can even have a successful career, open different shops, earn and spend Sanrio Dollars in your bank, buy a house, and trade with other players around the vast game world.

Other than hundreds of choices for you to build your dream house and lovely player characters, Hello Kitty World players will also be able to raise pets and teach them special tricks and skills. Players will be able to cooperate and interact with other players to overcome a joint quest or challenge other friends to a friendly duel.

You will be able to make new friends through special in-game telepathy as well as interact with other gamers through a variety of community channels and forums. Share the exciting world of Hello Kitty World and spread the message of love with both your old friends and the new ones you have just met in the Hello Kitty World.

Link (via Plasticcbag)

Lisa Rein has posted three clips "from the November 3 Daily Show: "Jon covers Kerry's concession, Bush's relishing in his glory, and Stephen Colbert's commentary on it all." Link

My friend wrote this. It's very funny, mainly because it's true.

MY MODEST PROPOSAL: THE U.S.A.R. 
By C. B. Shapiro 

I feel bad for the Red States. 

Yes, they won the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and most of the state houses.  But they still can't have the country they really want because the last few Blue States won't roll over.  So I am making a simple proposal:

Secession.  Divorce.  Splitsville.

Personally, I think we made a huge mistake not letting them go when we had the chance back in 1862.  Well, no time like the present to correct an old mistake.

Then, they would finally be free to have the kind of society they've always wanted; church and state can be fused so they build the kind of theocracy they've dreamt of, with Jesus at the helm.  Then the new USAR (United States of America Red) can ban books, repeal civil rights, persecute gays and have all the wars they like. They want prayer in schools?   More power to them.  They can ban abortion and post the Ten Commandments in every federal building in their country.  Bring back slavery, if they want.  We'll be free to live with our like-minded countrymen who believe in science, modernism, tolerance, religion as a personal choice, and truly want limited government intrusion in our personal lives.  Why should each side be driven mad by the other any more, decade after decade?

Call the Culture War a tie and everyone go home.

Of course, we in the U.S.A.B. get the Gross Domestic Product, businesses and universities of California, New York, Massachussetts -- basically the whole Northeast and Northwest (plus Illinois and Michigan if they want to come along).  They get Wal-Mart and Duke and most of the Nascar tracks.  But they can feel free to import movies, TV shows, financial services, and defense technology.  We'll import country music, bibles and Confederate flags.

The two countries will by necessity have open immigration policy: anyone who feels they are living in the wrong country can just move across the border, no questions asked.

Ultimately, why should I have to convince my fellow countrymen that Darwin may have had a point and that the word “liberal” is not equivalent to “godless communist?”  And why should they be forced to live in a country with morally corrupt non-believers?  I'll stay in the messy, free-thinking U.S.A.B.  And to the U.S.A.R. I say…

God bless you all, and see you at the U.N

MIT researchers have developed a voice-controlled aircraft guidance system that enables a pilot in one plane to control a nearby unmanned air vehicle by talking to it. From the press release:

"The system allows the pilot to interface with the UAV at a high level--not just 'turn right, turn left' but 'fly to this region and perform this task,'" said Mario Valenti, a flight controls engineer for Boeing who is on leave to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. "The pilot essentially treats the UAV as a wingman," said Valenti, comparing the UAV to a companion pilot in a fighter-plane squadron.

Link

Tuesday was a tough night for those of us who hoped to wake up with a new American president instead of a one-way ticket to The Republic of Jesusistan. As state after state on TV network maps filled with red, despairing leftie friends IMd and SMSed to say they were hitting the cheap chardonnay -- and hard. They weren't alone in the disappointment, or the drink. Me, I've been sober for more than a decade, so I drowned my sorrows in -- well, tea.

True, boxed wine can be a comforting mistress. But if these aren't sobering times, I don't know what is. And I believe that now more than ever, the ability to form complete sentences is a powerful political statement.

Many BoingBoing readers put down their meds long enough in to share personal anecdotes from voting day, and the day after. Some dropped science on us. Others offered t-shirts, creative visualization, MP3 playlists and forward-thinking proposals. Reader E. Whale says:

With all the new reports of lost or miscounted ballots, now is the time to make sure it doesn't happen again. The Open Voting Consortium is a combination of open source coding and election reform effort, and they're looking to get 111 members by 11/11. Contribute code, time, money, or whatever you can -- if we start now, maybe we'll really, truly fix things for next time. Link.

Reader aacool said,

I just thought I'd let you know I was tracking Internet Load on Election Day, Nov 2, 2004 and blogging on this topic. Since this election was so closely blogged and involved many more Internet-aware voters than ever before, I felt this issue was interesting. Link.

Molly wrote in to say,

As a Texan, I'd like to repeat the words of Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks and say that I'm embarrassed to that Bush is from Texas. And yes, the country really is stupid, and that's why an incompetent criminal has been re-elected. I got a very clear picture of his base constituency when having a discussion over lunch with some co-workers about our favorite children's shows. I was commenting on how much I liked Sesame Street, and one woman (a very vocal Christian conservative) said, "Oooh.. Sesame Street is too tolerant for me". To my horror, several other women nodded their heads in agreement. I guess I didn't even think there was such a thing as too tolerant.

Responding to this, reader Jim Moskowitz says:

I was startled at that email you quoted from "Molly" about a conversation where several people agreed that Sesame Street was 'too tolerant', and I went looking for evidence that that phrase is a propagating meme. Yep, it is. Here's a brief interview about it from earlier this year, on [evangelical Christian network CBN News]: Link to A Christian Author's Push for Radical Intolerance. Warning: contains unsettling ideas and the what-is-he-insinuating sentence "I don't want you to go and shoot people with both barrels of Christianity."

William Gibson blogs today:

My friend Steve Brown reports that the most popular new t-shirt at his local liberal arts college says "I'LL BET YOU VOTE *NEXT* TIME, HIPPY!" Second terms, historically, are not cakewalks. And absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power, this very moment, is patiently eroding the membranes containing the coming year's inevitable debacles and scandals. Unless you don't believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely, how can that be otherwise? Peace.

(Special thanks to everyone who wrote in, including those of you whose political opinions differ. Thanks for the links, Blamanj, Mikelite, Chris Brown, Jeff Warren, Jon West, Fingers, and Shea. )

Previous BoingBoing post: Kerry Concedes Link

Harper's Magazine contributing editor Greg Palast argues that election management in Ohio was hopelessly b0rked, and that the state was unfairly and inaccurately declared a win for Bush. Snip from editor's intro to his latest feature, on Tompaine.com:

Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided -- known as “spoilage” in election jargon -- because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Drawing on what happened in Florida and studies of elections past, Palast argues that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots. So far there's no indication that Palast's hypothesis will be tested because only the provisional ballots are being counted.

And snip from Palast's story:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

Link

UPDATED

As posted here on BoingBoing yesterday morning, the MPAA is expected to announce details today involving 200 or more lawsuits against individuals accused of sharing copyrighted movie files online. "Hundreds of lawsuits a month" are anticipated to come out of the extended campaign. Defamer has an update:

New MPAA Head Pirate Hunter in Charge Dan Glickman will announce the opening volley of lawsuits later today. Quick, everyone uninstall BitTorrent and throw your computers into the nearest body of water to avoid their wrath! At least Glickman seems to be paying lip-service to a somewhat less bloodthirsty approach than his predecessor, Jack Valenti. [snip from news story]

Glickman said "a holistic approach" was needed to combat piracy, including educational efforts, criminal prosecution and lawsuits against infringers. "You need the stick and you need the carrot both," he said. "You can't just have one without the other."

Glickman took a reflective pause before explaining, "See, the way it works is we dangle the carrot, then when a file-sharer reaches for the it, we wiggle the stick so they know what we're packing, We ask them, 'Are you sure you want to do that? Didn't you see the stick?' And if they insist on going for the carrot, we beat them to death with the stick, you know, just until we can see a little brain through the skull. That's why you need the stick and the carrot both. It's really hard to kill someone with a carrot."

Link. No confirmation yet on whether or not the "holistic approach" will involve (a) cramming acupuncture needles into suspected pirates' WLAN routers, (b) pouring homeopathic tinctures all over their keyboards, or (c) killing them softly with tofurkey.

The LA Times notes that Disney may not participate:

At least five of the seven big studios that belong to the MPAA have agreed to join the effort, which could generate hundreds of lawsuits a month. Among the potential holdouts is Walt Disney Co., according to one person familiar with the association's plans.

Link to LA Times article (reg required)

UPDATE: The other shoe drops. Link to MPAA's formal announcement of filesharer lawsuits, which took place earlier today at UCLA.

A Japanese company is making 4,000-5,000-Yen Disney-branded USB thumb-drives. Link (via Engadget)

Our friend Doug Rushkoff is the correspondent on a new Frontline program about the ways marketers influence people. Doug wrote an excellent book on the same subject, called Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say. The show airs on November 9; check your local listings for times.

FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multibillion-dollar "persuasion industries" of advertising and public relations and how marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Through sophisticated market research methods to better understand consumers and by turning to the little-understood techniques of public relations to make sure their messages come from sources we trust, marketers are crafting messages that resonate with an increasingly cynical public. In this documentary essay, correspondent Douglas Rushkoff (correspondent for FRONTLINE's "The Merchants of Cool") also explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves and how the techniques of the persuasion industries have migrated to politics, shaping the way our leaders formulate policy, influence public opinion, make decisions, and stay in power.

Link

There's now a fence surrounding a 19th century statue of journalist Victor Noir at his tomb in Paris's Pere Lachaise cemetery. From the BBC News:

It is said that a woman who kisses the lips of the prostrate statue and slips a flower into the upturned top hat will find a husband by the end of the year.

The new sign warns: "Any damage caused by graffiti or indecent rubbing will be prosecuted."

Link

The New York Times has an interesting article about pocket-size digital projectors that could someday attach to cell phones or laptops. As with most mobile technology, the problem is power. Still, several prototypes have been developed.

Lasers rather than L.E.D.'s are the basis for a hand-held projector in development at Light Blue Optics, a company in Cambridge, England. "We want a device that you can download films to, press a button and see a huge screen projection," said Adrian Cable, director of the company.

The large projections are produced holographically. "These are not the three-dimensional holographic projections of Princess Leia in 'Star Wars,' " Dr. Cable said, but instead two-dimensional ones produced by an optical process different from standard projection.

Link

The Vatican has published a pamphlet called "It's a Sin Not to Do It," in which the Church sanctions masturbation for married women, and urges Catholics to get laid more in general. In an unrelated story, Italy and many other Catholic nations are experiencing negative population growth.

Forty years ago, the Vatican published a notorious set of guidelines for courting Catholics that outlawed even French kissing before marriage.

The pages of It's A Sin Not To Do It, however, feature a frank interview with Cardinal Ersilio Tonini in which he emphasises that "the Church is not an enemy of the flesh". He argues that Vatican doctrine has always defended the "nobility of sexuality", which is regarded by the Church as a "treasure" of humanity.

Another chapter likely to raise eyebrows unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse.

Link (Thanks, Leigh!)

Following on yesterday's entry on the best WiFi-enabled hotels, HotelChatter today brings us an entry on the worst WiFi hotels... They've limited the field to Namerica, which really cuts back on the competition, if you ask me. Europe is full of hotels that offer wireless at between $30 and $50 a day, and require you to go to the front desk and buy a scratch-off card in order to get a login for the service, and are often sold out of the cards. Jesus, Euro-hotel-WiFi just sucks for the most part.

Marriott offers WiFi in their lobbies and common areas. Oh yeah, one catch, if you want access through Marriott's STSN WiFi deal you have to pay ~$3.95 for the first minute and anywhere from .25 cents to $1 for each additional minute (charges vary from Marriott to Marriott). In the immortal words of John McEnroe..."You can not be serious!". Honestly, this charge seems steep. We bet there are psychic hotlines that charge less per minute. Marriott is charging for a service that aches to be free, but it gets worse.

To add insult to injury, if you do scrap together the $4.95 for five minutes online you will not only have to race through your online activities in an attempt to beat the clock, but you will also have to contend with pop up navigation, and a terribly non intuitive interface. Oh yeah, and if you want to use the hardwired broadband line in your guest room, you will have to pony up more cash.

Link (Thanks, Mark!)

This charity haunted house was built by a cadre of leet ball00n hax0rs who built it entirely out of thousands and thousands of balloons. The site's a little hard to navigate and a little thin on background, but damn, there are some amazing pieces here -- well worth poking around.

Link (Thanks, Gregg!)

This quilt was made out of 1.5" squares laid atop a pattern generated by laying a game screencap over a grid Paint Shop Pro 8. This kind of nerd folk-art is amazing: I wonder if Nintendo watches for this kind of thing in order to get ideas for future schwag? I would so buy one of these: hell, I'd buy FIVE and give 'em as Xmas gifts. Link (via Waxy)

Great Globe and Mail tech report on "10 things the Chinese do far better than we do." Some are pretty namerican-centric (cellphones) and others don't take account of the fact that privacy is less of a concern in a totalitarian state (RFID-based transit cards), but overall this is a fascinating piece full of great ideas that someone should market in the west.

In Tianjin, a city of 13 million people, traffic lights display red or green signals in a rectangle that rhythmically shrinks down as the time remaining evaporates. In Beijing, some traffic lights offer a countdown clock for both green and red signals.

During a red light, you know whether you have time to check that map; on a green light, you know whether to start braking a block away -- or to stomp on the accelerator, as though you were a Toronto or Montreal driver. (That's probably why Montreal has a few lights with countdown seconds for pedestrians.)

Link (via Kottke)

BoingBoing reader Dave Pentecost was a member of filmmaker Michael Moore's "video the vote" witness team in Cleveland, Ohio. Multiple teams working with Moore covered various US cities, shooting documentary footage of conditions at polling sites and keeping an eye/lens out for voting irregularities or harrasment incidents. Dave had planned to send some short video clips to BoingBoing for us to host and stream as they were shot on election day (with bandwidth help from other friends of BoingBoing). That didn't happen in real time as we'd hoped -- but here's Dave's first-person testimony of what he shot, heard, and saw in Ohio:

Slowness in getting tapes back from the field prevented my getting any video posted on Election day. It was also just chaotic enough that the video crews didn't know the importance of what they had witnessed and recorded. The general impression was that we were seeing more confusion and incompetence at the polls than actual manipulation or intimidation. But just around the time the polls were about to close, there was a report of Republican challengers and police at one site. A video team and our lead producer headed over to see.

The first report said that there were five challengers at a polling station where they were only allowed two. Our team had to stay outside and record statements from voters and the Democratic challenger, who told a peculiar story. Remember, these were all black neighborhoods.

Sometime around noon, eight white people showed up, claiming to be GOP operatives but refusing to show any ID. They said they were there to see the Republican challenger, but no one knew who they were referring to. Several of them came into the polling station and set up shop looking at people's documents and making notes in clipboards. When a couple of them came outside and someone asked them what they were doing, they said they were just delivering sandwiches, and that they had to go. But the same dark blue PT Cruiser had been seen driving around several different polling stations.

Our crew taped two of the people beginning to cross the street to the polling place, then noticing the crew and quickly turn around and go back to their car. They also drove up next to them in the parking lot and when they got out to try to talk to them, they sped off.

I had a glimpse of some of this footage last night when the crews came back, exhausted, wet and cold. Everyone was ready to go to a small party at the house of a local Democratic judge to watch the returns. I left the reel digitizing into my laptop and went off for the evening. At that point I had only seen a few other clips of voters who had been told they weren't on the list , were sent to another polling site, and often not offered a provisional ballot.

Today on the bus ride back to New York, what we had recorded began to come into focus. The filmmakers logged their tapes and found the most interesting material There were interviews with voters who were amazingly calm after the ordeal of trying to vote and getting sent back and forth when their names were not found on the lists. Young couples where only one would be on the list, when they had registered at the same time. Elderly people who were sent from place to place and then not offered provisional ballots. People who had normal ballots put into the provisional ballot box and vice versa. Voters who had received confusing or misleading information by mail or phone. People who had not been offered the required 2 more chances if they messed up the first ballot, and were instead given a provisional ballot. Some who were told that the provisional ballot would not be counted (who knows yet whether that will come to pass).

And one crew had been at the "PT Cruiser Gang" location earlier in the day and had gone into the voting room. They didn't know who the white guys with clipboards were, but they didn't like their looks and shot about ten minutes of footage of them. These were not blue-suited Republicans. They were twenty-somethings with short haircuts wearing black crewneck or turtle neck sweaters. One stood at a table examining voter documents with a severe look, while holding his pen in a "stabbing" grip and clicking the button repeatedly in a strange menacing way. His two male friends carried clipboards and wandered around, looking over people's shoulders. They talked to each other or to people outside with cell phones, and a short haired blonde woman came in to confer. When our team went outside they got a great shot of the PT Cruiser - a pullout from the license plate.

What to make of all this? Well, the expected army of challengers didn't show up, at least where we were - polling places that had been determined to be at risk, and had many Election Protection voluteers in addition to our teams. We have the distinct impression that a campaign of purging the rolls and discouraging the voters had been in place. As far as provisional ballots go, the people manning the polling stations were at best poorly instructed (a policy of passive negligence on its own) or could not be bothered. At worst they were part of a cleverly altered system that denied people the vote whether they were recently registered or had been voting in that same location for over 30 years.

The PT Cruiser Gang? Freelancers having some fun? Deniable operatives? Who knows. But the tape of these incidents that I put together on the bus is going to the Democratic National Committee as well as Michael Moore's group. In another era it would probably go to the Justice Department. We are also trying to see if some television outlet is interested (Nightline?) and we hope it will spark some action in voting reform and will get the Dems to tackle these issues and others before the next presidential election.

I wish I could convey the feeling on the bus today as we left Cuyahoga County while the bad news came flooding in. There was a nightmarish moment when we got calls from the Dems and Michael Moore's people (I assume - I was in a black funk, editing with my headphones on) asking if we had enough evidence for a lawsuit. Was it all on our shoulders whether Kerry conceded or not? Was there a lawyer among us to even begin to answer that question? Could I tell anything from the collection of impressions I was assembling on my laptop? This could not be happening. Fortunately for our sanity (and perhaps for the nation's), we soon heard that all the provisional ballots of Ohio would not make the difference. And what about all the votes that were lost when not offered the provisional ballot? When people gave up on running from place to place in the rain, looking for their name on a list? We'll never know.

A word about our Video the Vote team. You heard 1200? There were 20 of us in Cleveland. Yes, Michael Moore paid for our bus and hotel rooms.

But we are not acolytes. We are a diverse group of young and older filmmakers with our own interests and agendas, who volunteered our time, skills and equipment to try to make a difference. The tape we shot belongs to each filmmaker, with the agreement to make it available as this develops. We were astonished by the dedication of all the other Election Protection volunteers, and by the deep desire to vote shown by everyone we met. And we are impressed by the potential of a "Rapid Media Response Team" - maybe we'll get a chance to do it again some time, with better communications and closer access to bandwidth, so the editor (me) and feedpoint won't be clear across town.

And a word about the tapes. Once I've gotten some sleep I will post a short edit of the PT Cruiser Gang. We'll see what happens with the rest - moving testimonials by folks who just wanted to exercise their right to participate in the process. Now I can catch up on back posts in Boing Boing and get on with life in these times.

Dave, thank you.

Reader Jeff Culver in Seattle says:

"I was thinking today about how the 'red v. blue' states graphic is really misleading considering the slim margins that the candidates won some of those states by, so I sat down and created the map that's attached. In the dozens of hours I've been watching the news I haven't seen one like it, but thought that you and the BoingBoing readers might find it interesting. I think it definitely portrays our fellow states far differently than the extreme way we've been seeing to date."

Link to full-size image. Nod also to Siege, who also thought of this months ago and posted a similar graphic on his blog at Nerve (subscription-only access, and I can't find the link to his post, sorry).

BoingBoing reader Bill says,

"In contrast to your purple map, USA Today has published a country map broken down by county that shows where each party won. It's an even more depressing sea of red than the full US map, but clearly shows how the city folk liked the Dems and the rural folk liked the Reps this time around. Population difference is slight, land area difference is huge."

Link

Also: see this county-by-county "purple map", which extends the idea in greater detail: Link (thanks to Eric Lechner and Michael Leuchtenburg, also spotted today on kottke)

Following up an this earlier BoingBoing post: The Associated Press and Variety (sub required) report more details on an announcement expected from the MPAA tomorrow regarding lawsuits against hundreds of movie fileswappers. The anticipated move would be significant because movie studios -- unlike the recording industry -- have not yet taken large-scale legal action against individuals.

Some guy came across my account of moving to Rarotonga, and he sent me this email:

From: XXXXXX
Subject: rarotonga
Date: November 3, 2004 2:13:45 AM PST
To: mark@well.com

Hello.
I am looking at the possibility of moving to rarotonga and I have a few questions about stonefish I wonder if you can give me some information...

1. how many stonefish are there in rarotonga?

2. how many people have you seen get hurt from this fish?

3. of these, how many people died?

4. I've read conflicting reports on the internet about the lethality of this type of fish, some sites say you die in 15 minutes and have zero chances of survival, some say there are only 3 ambiguous reported cases, what is your experience about this?

5. I've read that there is no antidote in rarotonga, perhaps the information is outdated; do you have the antivenom now and if so do all hotels have it or is there only one place to get it?

6. Isn't there a project to exterminate all stonefish on the island?

7. What technique do you use to keep these fish away from the shore?

8. what percentage of stone fish actually hide under the sand waiting for someone to step on it?

9. what kind of necrosis have you seen deriving from stonefish puncture? was there ever a need for extensive removal of tissue?

thanks for your time!

Funny spam.

From: "Mia Wang"
Date: November 3, 2004 9:28:10 AM EST
To: Taylor
Subject: Bush Gets Re-elected
Reply-To: "Mia Wang"

With 4 more years of Bush coming you need some prozac. Get it here.

Trust me, it'll make you feel better.

ST0P
Don't those singers dislike playing carelessly?
Did Roy love working on the top of the mountain?
I didn't dislike cooking at home.
tomorrow i will wash my hair and go to the salon
--------------------------------------------

(Thanks, John!)