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 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. "

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.

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.

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.

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!

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)

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

"...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 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."

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.

"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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Previous BoingBoing post: Kerry Concedes Link

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

"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)

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!

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
--------------------------------------------

Also, this from the Fantagraphics newsletter:

Clowes will write the film Backyard Resistance for producer Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures. The film will center on a trio of youngsters who made a shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark called Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. Earlier this year, Rudin secured the life rights to the Mississippi trio behind the film -- Chris Strompolos, Eric Zala and Jayson Lamb -- after Vanity Fair published an article about them.

The three began the project while on summer vacation in 1982, finishing it seven years later, shooting on a VHS camcorder and using backwoods Mississippi locales.

"I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

So the wrong candidate has won, and you want to leave the country. Let us consider your options. (...) Perhaps the most elegant solution is to join a country that exists only in one’s own -- or someone else's -- imagination.

"WWADRD?

Dear Friends:

If the shoe was on the other foot, What Would a Dumbass Republican Do?

Get depressed?

Get down?

Feel defeated?

Go away?

Refrain from being an obnoxious pain in the ass, 24/7?

Temper his sense of righteous entitlement?

Mute his howls of indignation?

Question his convictions?

Hell, no!

Here's what a Dumbass Republican would do:

Act like a winner in a world full of deluded losers.

Refuse to let the "facts on the ground" deter his belief in what he's got coming.

Drown out polite civil discourse by braying his unshaken beliefs like a stuck pig.

Refuse to shut the fuck up.

Refuse to go away.

Wrap himself in the flag and impugn the patriotism of any who would question his moral superiority.

Wear a big shit-eating grin that gives the other side just a moment of pause as they lay their heads on their pillows at night.

Have a glint in his eye that says, "I may have a shit-eating grin on my face, but I'm just waiting for an opportunity to slip this knife in."

See this not as a defeat, but as an inconvenient mistake.

Friends, join me.

Do not accept.

Do not waver.

Do not shut up.

Do not give comfort with your distress.

Be an unrelenting irritant.

Be a dumbass.

Right now, attitude is everything.

Together, we can help each other bear the present while shortening the time - and it will come - when we prevail."

iPod Download has been updated to version 1.1, and it works with iTunes again. Get it before Apple uses the law to take away your rights again. 1.4MB DMG Link (via Engadget)

Communication through the use of this software is made possible by the pressing of a single computer button attached to Professor Hawking's wheel chair, this button being his ticket to interact, move around, write and speak.

As his disorder intensifies, he is looking to upgrade the software to combat the disease...

"I am developing this as an open source software so that scientists all over the world can work on this platform and modify it according to specific requirements," he added.

Black Box Voting (.ORG) is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

America: We have permission to say No to unaudited voting. It is our right. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips.

An earlier FOIA is more sensitive, and has not been disclosed here. We will notify you as soon as we can go public with it. Such a request filed in King County, Washington on Sept. 15, following the primary election six weeks ago, uncovered an internal audit log containing a three-hour deletion on election night; “trouble slips” revealing suspicious modem activity; and profound problems with security, including accidental disclosure of critically sensitive remote access information to poll workers, office personnel, and even, in a shocking blunder, to Black Box Voting activists.

UPDATE: The Associated Press now has a story out. Announcement from MPAA head planned for Thursday. Link

MyCampus was specifically set up to develop context-aware mobile services for the university's community. The system runs on PDAs and across 700 WLAN access points located around the university, and it is used daily by 3,000 people to help them study, socialize, plan meals, attend events, shop, and engage in extracurricular activities.

Update: Rob notes a telling difference between freemoblogUK and moblogUK's terms of service:

"freemoblogUK may use, sell and/or share with its affiliates any information provided by you on this website, including your name, e-mail address, usage patterns, and uploaded images and text."

versus moblogUK:

"The last thing we want to do is to take ownership of your images - they're yours to do with as you wish, and if we want to use them, we'll ask you first. However, some people will just take your photos and use them to get rich - it's for this reason that we recommend you protect your images with a license: http://creativecommons.org

Sure you are going to get a basic room, but usually at a low price, and if you throw in free wireless then most people can be happy, at least for a night. Most, not all (check before you go) Holiday Inn's have free wireless in the lobby and some sort of free broadband in the guest rooms. Depending on the Holiday Inn you may run into port blocking, and in general, a good rule of thumb is expect most of these free Internet services to come with some sort of limitations.

Recently, in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game A Tale in the Desert, an uproar erupted after an in-game trader declared that he would not sell to women and then inquired whether one female character was for sale...

Often though, such in-world tension is the result of member behavior many see as antisocial, and player communities frequently get into highly charged discussions -- both on official game forums and on unofficial blogs -- about what to do. In some cases, players threaten legal action against other players or even against the developers.

1.) problems including "touchy" touch-screen machines -- e.g., machines that "light up" for the wrong candidate in the summary screen; machines failing and polling officials running out out paper ballots, as they did in New Orleans; and Sequoia machines showing a "default" choice that voters must correct;

2.) which states appear to have had the most trouble and how to analyze the reports from the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS);

3.) how to understand the elections data gathered on Election Day in the context of past elections; and

4.) why a paper audit trail may be the best solution for some of the problems that are coming up, especially as we head into vote tallying later this evening.

Overheard in line at my polling place this morning.... "I think all the ones with the white headphones are voting for Kerry."

My short-term memory sucks, so I spent some time over the weekend reading up on obscure ballot measures and scribbling notes on a cheat sheet so I could just walk in, fill in the dots, then leave.

When I showed up at the voting site mid-day, there were no lines -- just bored volunteer pollsters gnawing on pizza crusts, and a few betruckerhatted hipsters brooding over ballots in booths. I filled mine out in a few minutes, then handed it in to an elderly black lady seated behind a card table covered with jolly ranchers and sweet tarts (either voting incentives or Halloween leftovers, or both).

"That was fast!" she said. I told her I'd spent time at home thinking about my choices, and already knew what I'd vote for when I arrived. "That's right, honey," she said. "If people don't know what they want by now, just when do they plan to know?" Link to full-size phonecam snapshot of my polling site in LA's Silverlake neighborhood.
Over on Dan Gillmor's blog, there are dispatches from a less tranquil precinct: Columbus, Ohio. Dan says, "Chris Kelly, a Bay Area lawyer, is one of the Democrats who's traveled to Ohio this week to keep an eye on the Republican ballot-challengers." Link. Dan also shares his first-person account of Bay Area e-voting misinfo and long lines here.

And now, here is CHOW. We consider it the tolling bell of a food revolution. You’ll see that our stories are more entertaining, our photos more realistic (and messier), our reporting deeper, our instructions clearer, and maybe most important, our subjects a lot more far-flung than what food magazine readers are used to seeing.

RU has a blog about the book, too.

Cool book. It offers a fresh historical perspective that covers a lot of ground, but at the same time it’s a pretty easy read.

RU: Yeah, I think it does the job of establishing that there is this stream; a spirit really, that runs through history. Several spirits perhaps. This non-authoritarian, non-conformist, antic, changeable character, or community of characters, keeps coming up throughout human history. Sometimes they show up as artists or anti-artists, sometimes as religions or spiritual path; sometimes as a political revolution or change, sometimes as a scientific movement, sometimes as nihilism. Some seem to contradict others; representing opposite political sides. Or they represent opposite attitudes towards civilization and technological development – that comes up quite a bit. And yet, I think the book shows various memetic lines of transmission that sometimes seem to run in parallel and sometimes seem to criss-cross.

I hope it’s an easy read. It’s my (you’ll pardon the word) most serious book, but I tried to have some fun with it. People are telling me they laughed quite a bit. History books aren’t usually funny, although Jacques Barzun has a pretty good sense of humor. Barzun hugely influenced me in the writing of this book. He’s kind of a conservative guy, a historian, who thinks we’ve gone to far in the pursuit of “emancipation.” But he’s pretty permissive with himself as a writer. He writes with a sort of puckish style that belies his conservatism. I took that as permission to do a bit of what comes natural to me anyway.

How did you come up with the idea?

RU: It was a gift. Really, this came from my coauthor Dan Joy in concert with Timothy Leary. They provided the entire map, Dan particularly. I had to fill most of it in. This was a great process of discovery for me personally.

So it’s got kind of a Learyesque spin on the notion of counterculture. I actually tried to mitigate that somewhat, because I wanted to be sure that it was very inclusive. (It should include people who would never dream of freezing their heads!) But that basic dna – Think For Yourself and Question Åuthority (Leary’s slogan through the ‘80s and ‘90s) – is already pretty inclusive, so it wasn’t difficult.

I think constantly about how it could have been approached differently, and I can think of lots of approaches that would also be valid. I’m sure the most shit that Dan and I will take will be from counterculture types who feel we missed some major point, or didn’t include their pet epoch, or didn’t mention or say enough about this counter-subculture or that one. But I *want* that kind of shit, if it’s intelligent. I expect some passionate objections particularly to my coverage of the late 20th Century. I will be disappointed if there isn’t passionate objection. No authentic counterculture person should be completely satisfied with my take – no ditto-heads. But all ought to be flexible enough to find value in the book, I think, once they get over the fact that I didn’t mention the Radical Faeries or the Zippies or DJ Scrotum or whatever. There was just no way to do justice to every interesting mutant breed in that densely populated century. Maybe we’ll follow up with something more encycleopedic. I’m up for doing that at some point.

You’re pretty critical also of some countercultures. You don’t hold back.

RU: Well, I held back a little, but I didn’t want to just do a cheerleading book. That would have been boring for me. In turn, it would have been boring for the reader. So yeah, I was pretty rough on a few movements -- the ultraleft of the late 1960s for instance. I was part of it. You always hurt the ones you love. But I was honestly appalled when I went back and read the rhetoric of “The Revolution” circa ’69 or ’70. The problem wasn’t with their radicalness but their absurd level of self-importance. This sort-of “We came together as righteous dope-smoking motherfuckers stomping the plastic pig nation under the heels of our wild acid-drenched beatle boots ready to smash Amerikkka with our guns and bombs and rock and roll.” That sort of thing. Well, we were the boomers, you know. Self-impressed.

The book does strike a somewhat more conciliatory, careful, considered tone than most of your other work.

RU: Yeah. I suppose it’s true that some of my stuff doesn’t read too differently from the righteous acid-drenched beatle-booted fascist insect stompers. “Considered” is a good word for it. I was really aware that my assignment wasn’t to rant, but to see deeper into these things, and think a little bit harder about these things, and write a legitimate history… even if it does get whimsical in spots.

I think this is a really great book for straight people. (Not in the gay sense, but in the people who aren’t hip sense.) I want to emphasize this. I feel that I addressed this book to an educated, moderate, middle-class American; “Here’s something that’s worth thinking about Soccer mom”… at least the one’s that like to read and think a bit. At the risk of sounding like too much of a salesman, buy this book for your parents or kids who don’t get it. I just really happen to think that’s true. I can’t wait for my own relatives to insert it into their brains.

I’m frightened that it’s not going to ever reach that audience. I just hope it penetrates somehow.

Earlier you said that you think about different potential approaches. Like what?

RU: I could have harkened back to matrilineal societies much discussed by anthropologists and various feminists, neo-pagans, modern primitives, etcetera. These presumed pre-authoritarian origins as opposed to non-or-anti-authoritarianism within the context of what we call history. Our take is sort of Western, sort of post-enlightenment, although it also slices and dices and scrambles a lot of that basic software. Right now I’m reading a transgender history by Leslie Feinberg that casts back to matriarchy and shamanism and various other “primitive” cultures. I would call that a history of counterculture, of a particular sort. I admire it.

In defense of our approach, I would say only that ours can include the modern primitives, and also include Zen, Sufism, The Troubadours, western anarchism, cyberpunk, punk rock, cubism, Voltaire, ad infinitum. Whereas a modern primitive approach would be just that. And I think it’s been written in different ways by Terence McKenna, by Riane Eisler, and by Feinberg. It’s all good. Let a thousand histories of counterculture bloom!

In theory, the existence of Mini-Man should destroy religion, but I can already hear the fanatics claiming that he has been put on earth by the Devil.

And Stefan Jones sez: "Bounced the news about the Wee Folk off of David Brin. Apparently, he'd already been discussing it with some fans, some of whom were creationists. His comment, which I quite like:"

"I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show. An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator.  Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much more than cowering in a corner, praying that some of our neighbors will go to hell..."

It's on Phoenix, Arizona TV news right now... haven't found any links yet. They are moving polling stations around. School is being canceled (children in buses are being diverted) because the threats are directed at schools with voting. Police say the voices were of two adult males.

Update: Links to news stories: Tucson Citizen, and KOLD (Thanks, Mike Gillis)

In other news: It's a miracle! The first-ever immaculate election. CBN, a Christian TV network run by Satan the 700 Club just called it for Bush. Quoth Pat Robertson, on preliminary exit poll data: "Safe to say Bush is the winner." Those of us in the reality-based community will have to wait a while for results. (Thanks, Sean)

A low-tech election snafu in Pennsylvania, reported by my husband (currently in line waiting to use the backup voting machine): The Kerry lever broke off. I hope this bodes well. Unfortunately, the voter who experienced the problem pulled the lever to cast his vote before asking for assistance, and did not vote in any other races.

With all the bad stuff getting reported, I just wanted to let you all know about my good experience today voting in my second presidential election. I live in Astoria, New York, so I guess no one's trying to mess with the election here.

I work nights and get off around 3 AM. By the time I bike home, it's about 3:30 AM, so I figured I'd just stay up, get to my polling place early and vote when the polls opened. I left the house around 5:25 AM. I was pretty tired.

I got to the polling place and was disappointed to find about 10 people out front. I wanted to be first. So I waited about ten minutes until the school janitor came and opened the doors. We all walked into the gym and I watched as the voting machines were rolled into place and various set-up activities happened.

I stood with a group of people in the front of the gym, where a lady was checking some cards. They didn't look like my card and I was worried. I waited near the end of the line and the lady got to me. I realized that these were all poll workers and said I wasn't one. So I went and waited in the lobby.

Ten more minutes passed and at 6 AM the lady let those of us waiting (about 30 now) come in to vote. I walked up to my election district machine, showed my card, had some banter with the workers and a girl behind me, they filled out my card, put it in and I was the first person to vote.

I went in and, let me tell you, I don't know what kind of setup your state has, but New York doesn't have pansy-ass touch screens, punch cards or check boxes. We've got a Big Red Lever! You pull this monster to the right. Then you flip black switches next to your choice. Then, and this is fun because you get to touch the Big Red Lever again, you flip the Big Red Lever back to the left to finish voting.

That Big Red Lever made me feel secure. My vote was entered, I said thank you to the poll workers and headed back to my home at 6:15 AM with a spring in my step and a Big Red Lever in my heart. I'm pretty tired now, but I'm going to stay up tonight and watch the returns and dream tonight of a Big Red Lever.

Want to know what this image is? It's a picture I took with my cellphone-camera of an electronic voting machine screen. I took it today when I went down to vote for the next President of the Unites States in Santa Clara California. The screen says "Vote Save Error #9. Use the Backup Voting Procedure." A news crew was on hand to film Californians using the voting machines. I pointed to this particular screen and said "There's your story - right there. I just took a picture of the screen and plan to share it with 6.4 billion of my closest friends on the Internet tonight. I suggest you do the same." To my astonishment, the cameraman did shoot some footage of the screen, though I don't know what was shown later on television.

Now that I've told you the story behind the picture, I need not mention the maelstrom of thoughts that go through my head whenever I look at it - the picture is testament enough. The next revolution will not be televised. The next revolution will be blogged.

If you intend to cast a paper ballot today, please be ready for an adventure. This morning in Santa Clara, Vickie and I signed in the way we always do and requested paper ballots. Hilarity ensued: attempting to vote on paper caused a flurry of activity: oh-no-you're-not, you-have-to-vote-with-the-machine, what's-your-major-malfunction-mister, and other clucking noises.

There was no "votamatic" machine for paper ballots any longer; we had to enter a plain brown cardboard voting station that looked exactly like a refrigerator carton and mark our ballots with a pen. (Pen not supplied; bring your own.) I was first in line; after marking my ballot I approached the desk and asked the Nice Lady on the end if I should put it into the box. She nodded and smiled at me, so in it went.

Then I turned to look at Vickie and the rest of the line and noticed they all had big pink envelopes to put their ballots into when they were done. A tiny peanut-sized bulb flickered to life inside my brain. I went to the stack and checked, and sure enough: the big pink envelope said PROVISIONAL BALLOT on it. It had several choices to check: you had no ID, you had moved after the registration deadline, or were Otherwise Unclean. The Other Nice Lady--the one who had her act together--was making everybody who voted on paper seal it inside the provisional ballot envelope, even though there was no "I HAVE BEEN REGISTERED VOTER IN THIS PRECINCT SINCE 1987 AND I AM CHOOSING TO VOTE ON PAPER DAMMIT" box to check.

Further hilarity ensued: Vickie is a lawyer with a long history of political activism, so there was much back-and-forth between her and the Other Nice Lady, who then got on the phone with Headquarters and came back with the following ruling: we were all to mark our paper ballots, seal them in pink envelopes, and don't worry about filling out our names and addresses on the envelopes. Somehow--the nebulous theory goes--the election workers will be able to magically detect the paper ballots filled out by properly identified voters and pull them out to be counted tonight.

We left the station feeling VERY unsure that our votes would be counted.

If I was a busy election worker tonight, I'd just grab all those pink envelopes and heave them into the Provisional stack. And if I was the guy at the Provisional Counting Station, I'd have to seriously consider trashing all those envelopes without names and addresses filled in on the form on the outside. That's the point of a provisional ballot envelope, after all: to make it possible for them to verify your right to vote.

Update: Wirehead sez, "I'm in Santa Clara for this election and I got up early to vote, by paper if possible. The EFF isn't blowing smoke -- They aren't asking you if you want paper ballots. There's a single, dunce-cap of a voting area for those who ask for paper and clearly not enough paper ballots. To top it off, there's two stickers -- one for if you voted using an eat-my-vote machine, the other for if you voted with paper."

Update #2: Ben Delong sez, "I'm assuming you're having people with voting issues either call 1-866-OUR-VOTE (Kent probably should have while at the precinct), or make an online report at http://voteproblem.org, Must spread the word!! ;)"

* Animating slime, mud, and blood

* Nanopores detect disease

* Computationally comparing rats, flies, and people

"Gene doping could someday provide extra copies of genes that offer a competitive advantage, such as those that increase muscle mass, blood production, or endurance. The products of gene doping would be proteins similar, if not identical, to the body's versions and would therefore be less detectable in an athlete than are performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids and insulin. Consequently, rules against gene doping might be difficult to enforce."

"The natural world is what created the art, much more than I did. I was just there to observe it," said Coe-Sullivan.

New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.

There is no down side to removing the modems. Simply drive the vote cartridges from each polling place in to the central vote-counting location by car, instead of transmitting by modem. "Turning off" the modems may not be sufficient. Disconnect the central vote counting server from all modems, INCLUDING PHONE LINES, not just Internet.

A widely published investigative journalist was tackled, punched and arrested Sunday afternoon by a Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy who tried to confiscate his camera outside the elections supervisor's headquarters. About 600 people were standing in line waiting to vote early when James S. Henry was charged with disorderly conduct for taking photos of waiting voters about 3:30 p.m. outside the main elections office on Military Trail near West Palm Beach.

The archives show that Aubrey Meadcroft's simple query to the Inland Revenue's librarian sparked years of research, including a close study of the personal files of William Pitt the younger, the late 18th and early 19th century prime minister who introduced income tax...

It was long and complicated and dated back to the first division of the fiscal year in medieval times, which meant sheriffs who collected the king's income carried less money at one time, making their journeys safer.

The year was later split into quarters, with the end of one accounting period fixed as the Christian feast day of Annunciation, March 25.

When the calendar was reformed to take out mistakes inherent in the previous Roman system, 11 days were "wiped", putting Annunciation on April 5.

Around 80 years later, in 1832, this was named as the end of the entire tax year as it was the closest quarterly date to the Government's Budget, its annual statement of income and spending.

There's a Gmail exploit that allows an attacker to steal your Gmail cookie, which thereafter identifies them as you to the system, even if you change your password. This seems like a huge problem for Google, above and beyond the actual security breach. Remember that Gmail uses the same unlimited lifetime Google cookie. The data in that cookie is, presumably, extremely valuable for their tracking efforts, and I'd guess that this will be difficult for them to fix in a way that maintains that.

Luminifer writes:

The site's been updated with links to info about the exploit already being fixed - and also, the fact that the gmail cookie and the google cookie are two different cookies (doesn't the gmail cookie expire after 2 weeks, and then only if you check the 2 week box? I may be wrong on this one.).

Jon Stewart Telling Us To Get out there and VOTE!

A two part interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace
(where he explains that Fox has a four person panel now that has to decide unanimously before a winner can be declared.)

Kerry and Bush respond to Bin Laden's new tape

Cheney, Chelsea, Bruce and Arnold On The Campaign Trail

A voting report from Ed Helms and Stephen Colbert

• Election observers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) reported today that the problem, which some voting officials initially attributed to fluke "voter error," is evidently widespread and may even be relatively common with touch-screen machines. Incorrectly recorded votes make up roughly 20 percent of the e-voting problems reported through the Election Incident Reporting System...
• According to the Local 6 news station in Florida, about 13,000 ballots were put in jeopardy today because of a bad memory card in an optical-scan voting machine. When the error was discovered, representatives from both parties were notified and the ballots were removed from the site and placed in a vault. Now, it's up to the canvassing board to decide how to recount the ballots.
• Tips for voting, "Make sure you've cast your ballot! The last step is to touch a box on the touch-screen to cast your vote. Some voters have forgotten to do this. Depending on local procedures and how well they are followed, poll workers may finish casting your vote for you, or they may cancel your vote. If you make sure to finish the voting process, you can make sure your vote will be stored and counted."

As anyone who has used a wedding photographer or taken their children for portraits can attest, consumers hire photographers to capture their precious life moments with the expectation that the resulting photographs belong to them. While photographers may seek permission from consumers to use a particularly good picture to hang in their storefront window or place in their portfolio, the current law requires photographers to first obtain the commissioning party's authorization...

[U]nbounded by any limitations in the law, photographers might sell such photos as stock photography.

Moreover, a change in the law would literally force consumers to track down their photographer (or the photographer's heirs) in order to obtain permission to use their own archived pictures.

Cool crap they hath wrought: Tom rounds up the tasty visualisations of his posting frequency, verbal tics, and the way that switching from Blogger to Movable Type changed his posting style in a long post today. How cool.

Our first batch of analysis comes from Cal Henderson who has basically used the data at his disposal to take the piss out of me. A few weeks ago I got a bit moody with Matt Jones after he complained that I was starting every post I was writing with the word "So..." (here's the grump in question). So what has Cal done? He's established the horrible truth of the situation - here's a graph of how many posts I've started with the word "So" over time... As you can see - a startling indictment and as Cal said to me on AIM, "evidence that you're getting worse".

If Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door isn't the most adorable game available for the Nintendo GameCube, it's at least the most adorable game involving blood sport and demonology. If you have a low tolerance for cuteness, you're going to need a Hazmat suit and a complete collection of Cure albums to get you through it...

The mix dusts off the conventions of both RPGs and platformers and makes them feel shiny and fresh. The battles, for example, are turn-based, but pressing a button at the right time can allow your team to do extra damage. Pressing it again with perfect timing adds a flourish to your attacks, impressing the audience and giving you more power for special moves. These touches keep even cakewalk battles from being a dull exercise in menu selection.

-Arafat's fall
-A Red Sox Moment For Rob
-An Interview with poll taker John Zogby (with some good news :-)
-AN EXCELLENT PIECE where Stewart skillfully uses the Shrub's own words against him (shrubisms.mov)
-A film documenting attitudes toward the election in a small town
-Stephen Colbert's "This Week In God"
-Lewis Black on "the undecideds" (a.k.a. "the idiots")
-Another voting fiasco preview highlighting the Repubs strategy on voter fraud (The Mary Poppins' etc. I mentioned in an earlier post.)
-An interview with Jesse Jackson

It turns out that Apple's system for disabling the plugin uses a blacklist of disallowed iTunes additions in the iTunes binary. If you open the binary in a hexadecimal editor, like HexEdit, you can find the area where Apple has inserted the string "iPod Download" in its blacklist and simply replace the text with something else (in fact, I think you could probably just change one character) and your iTunes's original functionality will be restored. Link (Thanks, Laurent, Rob, and Brent!)

But what of the musically creative? They need not suffer in silence any longer: Lacunae has just floated "NaSoAlMo" -- the national solo album month, for "brave souls who are up for it will write and record an entire solo album in the course of its 30 days."

Q. So, for the purposes of NaSoAlMo, what exactly is a solo album?

A. An album of music you have written, played and recorded entirely by yourself*. The shortest inarguably awesome album I can think of offhand that a lot of people have heard is the first Ramones album, which is 29:09 long, so your solo album must be at least that long. Beyond that, its form and content are up to you.

*Since Ramones includes a cover of "Let's Dance," your NaSoAlMo album may, if you wish, include one cover of somebody else's song.

Update: album in a single day. It's really not that hard! There's over a 150 of them already."

Bush is not winning the war on terror because he does not understand it. He has used the rise of al-Qaeda as a pretext for settling Washington's scores with old enemies like Saddam. This projection of main American force so far has paid no dividends whatsoever, in increased US security or stability in the world. It has not even made money for US companies, with the possible exception of Halliburton (and even it claims it has been hurt by bad Iraq publicity).

The most frightening thing of all is that the Project for a New American Century group, which has made an internal coup in the Bush administration, ultimately has its sights on China. They want to surround, besiege and break up Communist China, as they imagine the US did to the Soviet Union. In many ways, the Bush administration uses North Korea as a proxy for China, saying things about Pyongyang they really would like to say about Beijing. In fact, China is currently increasingly tied to the US-led world economic order and has every impetus to cooperate with the US on most issues. The Chinese take in $80 billion a year more from the US than we make from them. Picking a fight with Beijing, which is a very attractive option for the American Right, would be disastrous.

The Bush administration is full of revolutionaries. They are shaking up the world by military force. They are playing a role familiar in modern history, pioneered by Napoleon Bonaparte, of using overwhelming military superiority to establish new forms of hegemony by appealing to desires for change among neighboring publics. Bonaparte promised the Italians liberty on the French model, but in fact reduced the Italians to a series of French puppet regimes and then he looted the country. So far Bush's Iraq looks increasingly like Bonaparte's Italy in these regards.

[The poll] found Massachusetts Senator John Kerry leading President Bush 55% to 40% among 18-29 year-old likely voters in their first joint Rock the Vote Mobile political poll, conducted exclusively on mobile phones October 27 through 30, 2004. Independent Ralph Nader received 1.6%, while 4% remain undecided in the survey of 6,039 likely voters. The poll is centered on subscribers to the Rock the Vote Mobile (RTVMO) platform, a joint initiative of Rock the Vote and Motorola Inc.

BB reader Robert Stratton says, "I find it unfathomable that the Rock The Vote Mobile portal asked about people voting for Messrs.Bush, Kerry, or Nader, but didn't include Michael Badnarik the Libertarian candidate. For the record, Mr. Badnarik happens to be on the ballot in more states than Mr. Nader. Just a caution lest we draw too much from sloppily constructed SMS polls."

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch—mostly Autumn Gold and Big Max, as I thought he would find the Atlantic Giants tacky. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.

He also made a frightening association -- because intellectual property theft can be so lucrative, he said, it "risks becoming a potential source of financing for terrorists." He did not cite specific examples of a link between the two.

Technologists and copyright reform advocates like Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig say that's cause for concern.

On today's edition of the NPR program "Day to Day", I speak with Lessig -- and government officials like LA Mayor James Hahn and California congressman Xavier Becerra --about the new "war on piracy" being waged by federal, state, and local agencies in partnership with entertainment industry groups such as the RIAA and MPAA.

Link to archived audio for today's program, Link to NPR Day to Day home. Noah Shachtman suggests an alternate headline: Link

Here's a one-minute mashup with "Peacocks Walked," a track from the Cartwright/Oppenheim album "A Mumbai of the Mind," which is itself a jazz interpretation of some Ferlinghetti poems.

"We are living in the dark age which is called (Kalyug), and during this time miracles would happen all over the world, so no one should be surprised," she said.

Doctors say that the psychological makeup of the patient - expectations, self-image and the ability to cope with a drastically changed appearance - is critical to the success of transplants.

Conflict about these and other issues has always been part of the transplant frontier. But the face, because it is so tied to identity, generates a particularly emotional reaction.

"It's jolting in a certain sense because it's such a personal thing," Dr. Stuart Youngner, chairman of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, said in an interview. "It's you more than your kidneys are you. The face and eyes are windows into the soul, the person."

Now Andrew's slides and the audio of his talk are online under a Creative Commons license -- have a listen. Link

The point is that Apple is devoting time, money, and lawyer- and engineer-hours to breaking your iPod and selling it to you as a "fix."

Imagine if your mobile phone manufacturer enlisted your car maker into ensuring that you didn't use a third-party charger with your cigarette lighter, but instead bought the official, expensive licensed charger. Every time you take your car in for warranty-mandated service, the manufacturer's representative rips out your lighter and puts a new one in that locks out your charger. And when the agent is done, he smiles and tells you he's "updated" your car.

Does the fact that you can go out and find a new third-party charger that works with the new lighter mitigate in the car-maker's favor? Wouldn't you be pissed off that your car-maker was selling you out to the phone company, treating you as a mark to be sucked dry by whatever vendor it decided to do a deal with?

That's what Apple's done here. The music industry has concluded that it can maximize its profits by restricting what you do with your music, and it's signed Apple up to see to it that even if you figure out how to do more that Apple will do its best to take that feature away from you.

In any event, there are many tools to help get your music off your iPod. Here's a link to Open Pod, the one that I've decided on. It's a GPL-licensed tool and looks like it works well. Link (Thanks, Jeff!)

Update: How to un-cripple your copy of iTunes 4.7

Update: Here's a higher quality video in .torrent form, courtesy of Mike Graham. Thanks, Mike!

The Diebold Voting Machine is programmed with cheats, bugs and easter eggs, which you can discover and read about by playing around with it. It demonstrates and simulates some alarming problems with real world electronic voting machines, with many surprising effects and subtle interactions:

Baxter the Chimpanzee Erases the Voting Log. When you put the voting machine into debug mode and clear the votes, you will see a dialog with the hillarious picture and story of Baxter the Chimpanzee. In your web browser, you can watch the funny monkey movie showing Baxter erasing the voting log! Now your Sims can monkey around with the electronic Dumbold Voting Machines, go bananas hacking the system, fling poo and corrupt the election results just like the pros!

BoingBoing reader Kmr. Tupko in Poland says,

"Lawrence Lessig is present on the web in limited number of images that we've all become familar with -- there's Lessig by the columns, and several of Lessig behind a computer. They've become visual icons. But when I recently googled for Lessig photos, I found these: an entire image directory of this guy posing in these -- cult by now, apparently -- Lessig-like poses. It's like one of those contests, where they say, 'show the contents of your bag/purse,' except here one person just took it upon himself to 'strike a Lessig.' Very creative commons, remix spirit."

Link to a directory of photos showing some guy in Japan "Striking a Lessig." And lo, a meme is born.

"I was watching TV, and there all of a sudden was my song, my guitar playing, my voice coming out of the speakers," said the 56-year-old [John] Hall, still a working musician. Hall wrote "Still the One" with his then-wife, Johanna D. Hall. The two as well as surviving members of the band are supporters of Democratic Sen. John Kerry and don't want their work used to promote Bush's re-election, Hall said.

"I'm not just some guy that's stoned out and happened to write a song, and even if I were, it would still be a problem, because you should always ask permission to use the work," Hall said.

Update: BoingBoing reader Brian Carnell points us to a news article which says the Bush campaign claims to have acquired permission from a third-party licensing company.

"Out of deference to Mr. Hall's views, the song will no longer be played," Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign's licensing company used to provide music for events."

Link to site with 622KB MP3 download. Link to Andy Zebrowitz' website. (Um. thanks, I guess, Brett Taylor)

UPDATE: Ferlinghettified beatnik remix here -- Link

Fallen is a machinima music video created in Star Wars Galaxies about a tragic romance between a female Imperial officer and a male Rebel fighter using the song "Fallen" by Delirium. It has just won the Star Wars Galaxies Fan Film Fest 2004.

"Nigerian scammers now appear to be using webdate.com to troll for victims to save 'damsels' in distress. I've posted one damsel's emails leading to the pitch." Excerpt:

# "Hi dear i have added you to my chat friend right now i left an offline for you, hope to catch you on later lol benny and one more thing your physic i like it kool keep it up, lol."

# "Hi its nice to hear from you. Well i into sales of aretifacts and it carried me far and wide but this is my first visit to africa. I am currently in nigeria and its a lovely place. Well i have not visited china before would love to some day and dont worry when i come back i will tell you all about africa when we go out for dinner. Well is nice to hear from you. Lol."

# "Thanks for writing back. I am glad you did. Well i dont know where to start. Well i sold my paintings to a client and he has refused to pay up i have not seen him since the last 3 days i contacted the local police here and they cant seem to find him. I dont have enough money to pay for my hotel bills and settle my agent. Please i want your assistance. I need 450 dollars to add to the money i have so i can payup clear my name and come back home this week, thanks for your kind assistance. Lol benny."

"Is it just me, or does Nigeria sound like the bar in House of Games? Does David Mamet live there? Is it near Mos Eisley Spaceport?" Link

[We've launched] a new group blog on e-voting, from a group of leading experts on e-voting technology. Members thus far include David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach. The site's goal is to provide one-stop shopping for e-voting news and analysis, to the public and the press, on election day and thereafter.

It is probably possible to create cats that do not produce the most common protein allergen, says Thomas Platts-Mills, director of the Asthma and Allergic Disease Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, US. But he adds that cats produce many more allergens, and that blocking production of the protein could damage the cat's health.

Moreover, Allerca's claims that a technique called RNA-induced gene silencing can work in cats are "unfounded", says Greg Hannon at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York state, and author of the book RNAi: A Guide to Gene Silencing. So far the technique has been used only in mice.

Buffer Enterprises, Inc. now offers a cash bonus to those who report a corroborated unauthorized use [resulting in an actual recovery] of the "Let's Get Ready to Rumble,"(R) "Get Ready To Rumble"(R) or "Ready to Rumble"(R) servicemarked phrases ,any paraphrasing of these marks (including "Get Ready To Crumble,"(R) "Are Your Ready To Rumble?"(TM) "Let's Get Ready To Gamble"(TM)), or use of Michael Buffer's famous rendition of his copyrighted "Let's Get Ready To Rumble" recording. This bonus system applies to viable reports [resulting in an actual recovery] of unauthorized use of our servicemarks, copyrights or related rights in or upon TV, radio, the internet, print or in connection with unlicensed products or services such as T-shirts, toys, posters, or other merchandise.

The panelists took turns reading from their book, America: The Book. It's amazing how much coverage this book gets on C-SPAN. But these guys are not normal book authors, and they're not there to push the book. They're there to destroy TV as we know it.

I believe that Stewart and company are trying to revolutionize television by tearing down its conventional standards and practices. First, dress inappropriately, like a slacker. Stewart's starting to dress like Bill Murray in the early scenes of Stripes. Second, resort to language that's simply not said on television, certainly not C-SPAN. Speak as many four-letter words as possible, so the television audience members marvel in the fact that there are no bleeps like there are on The Daily Show, only occasional and entirely useless on-screen warnings that this program contains bad language. Duh!

Prediction: Stewart and company are going to get C-SPAN in big trouble, and somebody's going to try to fine or indict C-SPAN for breaking FCC rules. You watch: some congressman is going to take this one for a ride, and sick the FCC on them but good.

ALLERCA will produce the world's first hypoallergenic cats, and we expect the birth of these first special kittens in early 2007.

The cat allergen is a potent protein secreted by the cat’s skin and salivary glands. Removal of the allergen will not harm the cats in any way. The resulting hypoallergenic cats will improve the health and quality of life for millions of cat-allergy sufferers.

While some breeds of cats have been promoted as having less allergen than others, scientists that have tested this hypothesis have shown that all cats, regardless of breed, produce allergen. Allerca will produce the first cats that will not affect human allergies.

The first breed of hypoallergenic cat produced will be the British Shorthair, known to be friendly, playful and affectionate. Other popular breeds will follow soon.

All presentations must include working demonstrations, ideally accompanied by source code. Presenters must be done by one of the active developers of the code in question. We emphasize that demonstrations be of *working* code...

Program Committee:
* Jeremy Bornstein, AtomShockwave Corp., USA
* Bram Cohen, BitTorrent, USA
* Jered Floyd, Permabit, USA
* Ian Goldberg, Zero-Knowledge Systems, CA
* Dan Kaminsky, Avaya, USA
* Klaus Kursawe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, BE
* Ben Laurie, A.L. Digital Ltd., UK
* David Molnar, University of California, Berkeley, USA
* Jonathan Moore, Mosuki, USA
* Len Sassaman, Nomen Abditum Services, USA