Krispy Kreme's free doughnut day: "Today only, Krispy Kreme celebrates Doughnut Day by giving away a free doughnut of your choice at all participating retail stores, as we mentioned...(more)"

(Via dealnews - 20 most recent deals..)

Beautiful Photos of Calcutta's other big train station, Howrah (which was always across the bridge for me).

[IP] Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)

-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber <dave@farber.net>
Date: Wednesday, Jun 1, 2005 9:20 am
Subject: [IP] Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)

Begin forwarded message:

From: EEkid@aol.com
Date: May 31, 2005 9:55:00 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)
Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways)
Tuesday, 31 May 2005, 1:10 pm
Article: www.blackboxvoting.org
Diebold Optical Scan Voting System Hacked (3 Ways) - BBV Exclusive

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/ - Source URL

Tallahassee, FL: "Are we having fun yet?"

This is the message that appeared in the window of a county optical scan machine, startling Leon County Information Systems Officer
Thomas James. Visibly shaken, he immediately turned the machine off.

Diebold's opti-scan (paper ballot) voting system uses a curious memory card design, offering penetration by a lone programmer such that standard canvassing procedures cannot detect election manipulation.

The Diebold optical scan system was used in about 800 jurisdictions in 2004. Among them were several hotbeds of controversy: Volusia
County (FL); King County (WA); and the New Hampshire primary election, where machine results differed markedly from hand-counted localities.

New regs: Counting paper ballots forbidden

Most states prohibit elections officials from checking on optical scan tallies by examining the paper ballots. In Washington, Secretary of State Sam Reed declared such spontaneous checkups to be "unauthorized recounts" and prohibited them altogether. New Florida regulations will forbid counting paper ballots, even in recounts, except in highly unusual circumstances. Without paper ballot hand- counts, the hacks demonstrated below show that optical-scan elections can be destroyed in seconds.

A little man living in every ballot box

The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.

The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election.
The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.

The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.

Ion Sancho: Truth and Excellence in Elections

Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho and Information Systems
Officer Thomas James had already implemented security procedures in
Leon County far exceeding the norm in elections management. This testing, done by a team of researchers including Black Box Voting, independent filmmakers, security expert Dr. Herbert Thompson, and special consultant Harri Hursti, was authorized by Mr. Sancho, in an unusual act of openness and courage, to identify any remaining holes in Leon County's election security.

The results of the memory card hack demonstration will assist elections supervisors throughout the U.S., by emphasizing the critical importance of accounting for each and every memory card and protecting access.

Findings:

Computer expert Harri Hursti gained control over Leon County memory cards, which handle the vote-reporting from the precincts. Dr.
Herbert Thompson, a security expert, took control of the Leon County central tabulator by implanting a trojan horse-like script.

Two programmers can become a lone programmer, says Hursti, who has figured out a way to control the entire central tabulator by way of a single memory card swap, and also how to make tampered polling place tapes match tampered central tabulator results. This more complex approach is untested, but based on testing performed May 26, Hursti says he has absolutely no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Three memory card tests demonstrated successful manipulation of election results, and showed that 1990 and 2002 FEC-required safeguards are being violated in the Diebold version 1.94 opti-scan system.

Three memory card hacks

1. An altered memory card (electronic ballot box) was substituted for a real one. The optical scan machine performed seamlessly, issuing a report that looked like the real thing. No checksum captured the change in the executable program Diebold designed into the memory card.

2. A second altered memory card was demonstrated, using a program that was shorter than the original. It still worked, showing that there is also no check for the number of bytes in the program.

3. A third altered memory card was demonstrated with the votes themselves changed, showing that the data block (votes) can be altered without triggering any error message.

How to "Roll over the odometer" in Diebold optical scan machines

Integer overflow checks do not seem to exist in this system, making it possible to stuff the ballot box without triggering any error message. This would be like pre-loading minus 100 votes for Tom and plus 100 votes for Rick (-100+100=ZERO) -- changing the candidate totals without changing the overall number of votes.

A more precise comparison would be this: The odometer on a car rolls over to zero after 999,999. In the Diebold system tested, the rollover to zero happens at 65,536 votes. By pre-loading 65,511 votes for a candidate, after 25 real votes appear (65,511 plus 25 = 65,536) the report "rolls over" so that the candidate's total is ZERO.

This manipulation can be balanced out by preloading votes for candidate "A" at 65,511 and candidate "B" at 25 votes -- producing an articifial 50-vote spread between the candidates, which will not be obvious after the first 25 votes for candidate "A" roll over to zero.
The "negative 25" votes from the odometer rollover counterbalance the "plus 25" votes for the other candidates, making the total number of votes cast at the end of the day exactly equal to the number of voters.

While testing the hack on the Leon County optical scan machine,
Hursti was stunned to find that pre-stuffing the ballot box to "roll over the odometer" produced no error message whatsoever.*

*We did not have the opportunity to scan ballots after stuffing the ballot box. Therefore, the rollover to zero was not tested in Leon
County. This integer overflow capability is discernable in the program itself. We did have the opportunity to test a pre-stuffed ballot box, which showed that pre-loaded ballot boxes do not trigger any error message.

Simple tweaks to pass L&A test and survive zero tape

Though the additional tweaks were not demonstrated at the Leon County elections office, Hursti believes that the integer overflow hack can be covered up on the "zero tape" produced at the beginning of the election. The programming to cover up manipulations during the "logic
& accuracy test" is even simpler, since the program allows you to specify on which reports (and, if you like, date and time of day) the manipulation will affect.

The testing demonstrated, using the actual voting system used in a real elections office, that Diebold programmers developed a system that sacrifices security in favor of dangerously flexible programming, violating FEC standards and calling the actions of ITA testing labs and certifiers into question.

In the case of Leon County, inside access was used to achieve the hacks, but there are numerous ways to introduce the hacks without inside access. Outside access methods will be described in the technical report to be released in mid-June.

Security concerns

Putting an executable program into removable memory card "ballot boxes" -- and then programming the opti-scan chip to call and invoke whatever program is in the live ballot box during the middle of an election -- is a mind-boggling design from a security standpoint.
Combining this idiotic design with a program that doesn't even check to see whether someone has tampered with it constitutes negligence and should result in a product recall.

Counties that purchased the Diebold 1.94 optical scan machines should not pay for any upgraded program; instead, Diebold should be required to recall the faulty program and correct the problem at its own expense.

None of the attacks left any telltale marks, rendering all audits and logs useless, except for hand-counting all the paper ballots.

Is it real? Or is it Memorex?

For example, Election Supervisor Ion Sancho was unable to tell, at first, whether the poll tape printed with manipulated results was the real thing. Only the message at the end of the tape, which read "Is this real? Or is it Memorex?" identified the tape as a tampered version of results.

In another test, Congresswoman Corrine Brown (FL-Dem) was shocked to see the impact of a trojan implanted by Dr. Herbert Thompson. She asked if the program could be manipulated in such a way as to flip every fifth vote.

"No problem," Dr. Thompson replied.

"It IS a problem. It's a PROBLEM!" exclaimed Brown, whose district includes the troubled Volusia County, along with Duval County -- both currently using the Diebold opti-scan system.

This system is also used in Congressman John Conyers' home district, in contentious King County, Washington, and in Lucas County, Ohio
(where six election officials resigned or were suspended after many irregularities were found.)

Diebold optical scans were used in San Diego for its ill-fated mayoral election in Nov. 2004.

- - - - - - - - - - -

Optical scan systems have paper ballots, but election officials are crippled in their ability to hand count these ballots due to restrictive state regulations and budget limitations.

The canvassing (audit) procedure used to certify results from optical scan systems involves comparing the "poll tapes" (cash register-like results receipts) with the printout from the central tabulator. These tests demonstrate that both results can be manipulated easily and quickly.

Minimum requirements to perform this hack:

1. A single specimen memory card from any county using the Diebold
1.94 optical scan series. (These cards were seen scattered on tables in King County, piled in baskets accessible to the public in Georgia, and jumbled on desktops in Volusia county.)

2. A copy of the compiler for the AccuBasic program. (These compilers have been fairly widely distributed by Diebold and its predecessor company, and there are workarounds if no compiler is available.)

3. Modest working language of any one of the higher level computer languages (Pascal, C, Cobol, Basic, Fortran...) along with introductory-level knowledge of assembler or machine language.
(Machine language knowledge needed is less than an advanced refrigerator or TV repairmen needs. The optical scan system is much simpler than modern appliances).

The existence of the executable program in the memory card was discernable from a review of the Diebold memos. The test hacks took just a few hours for Black Box Voting consultants to develop.

Nearly 800 jurisdictions conducted a presidential election on this system. This system is so profoundly hackable that an advanced-level
TV repairman can manipulate votes on it.

Black Box Voting asked Dr. Thompson and Hursti to examine the central tabulator and the optical scan system after becoming concerned that not enough attention had been paid to optical scans, tabulators and remote access.

Thompson and Hursti each found the vulnerabilities for their respective hacks in less than 24 hours.

"Open for Business"

When it comes to this optical-scan system, as Hursti says, "It's not that they left the door open. There is no door. This system is 'open for business.'"

The question now is: How brisk has business been? Based on this new evidence, it is time to sequester and examine the memory cards used with Diebold optical scans in Nov. 2004.

The popularity of tamper-friendly machines that are "open for business" in heavily Democratic areas may explain the lethargy with which Democratic leaders have been approaching voting machine security concerns.

The enthusiasm with which Republicans have endorsed machines with no paper ballots at all indicates that neither party really wants to have intact auditing of elections.

The ease with which a system -- which clearly violates dozens of FEC standards going back to 1990 -- was certified calls into question the honesty, competence, and personal financial transactions of both testing labs and NASED certifiers.

Revamp and update hand-counted paper ballot technology?

Perhaps it is time to revisit the idea of hand-counted paper ballots, printed by machines for legibility, with color-coded choices for quick, easy, accurate sorting and counting. We should also take another look at bringing counting teams in when the polls close, to relieve tired poll workers.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0505/S00381.htm

------------------------------------
Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

I am very very very close to wiping OS X from my machine and installing OpenBSD or linux.

grrrr.

What's the point of a very complicated beautiful operating system for me if it keeps crashing, can't sync with my palm properly, and can't switch between wireless modem and Wifi.

How long is it going to be before a Bagle variant appears that doesn't download from a preset list of URLs, but instead has an embedded trackerless Bittorrent client.

You Windows users are so screwed.

No, You windows users are so going to screw us over...

Interview with the Hitchens Brothers:

Female audience member Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.


CH (smoking heavily): Well, you don't have to stay, do you darling. I'm working here and I'm your guest. OK . This is what I like.


IK Would you just stub that one out?


CH No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.


(Woman walks out)

A glance at a WSJ sitting on a desk, which in turn was reporting on a site ballyhooed using something called blogging pointed me to Backpackit.com.

It feels like a very elegant (elegant == Good) response to the world of CRM apps that want you to customize your workflow to their database design.

Backpackit lets you create bunches of web based to-do lists in a wiki format.

I'm trying it out...

There's something to finding originality on the web in a phrase that has never been used before, at least according to google.

Here's "Forensic UI Design".

Enter Spring

After a week of sogginess in the fifties, it even looks like spring.

Charging the iPod

The airport express works great, considering the USB ports in my laptop are dead.

moral equivalency

I'm sick of all this posturing over the defense of zygotic life. Mr. President, when, I ask of you, will you be dealing with the far larger issue of tangled iPod headphone cords?

Day after day I deal with a tangle of white cords. The productivity lost must be immeasurable.

Come now. Surely at least a Blue Ribbon Commission.

My left hard contact snapped in two before I put it in my eye.

I did not put it in my eye.

grrr.

Where's the cheapest place to get an eye exam in NYC?

Any recommendations on hard contacts?

After cursory research, the Boston XO lenses show ridiculous oxygen permeability - which is good, right?

The Cafe WiFi backlash:

I also just found a (non starbucks) cafe a couple of blocks from me that also seems to have WiFi and a wine list.

Coffeeshop Turns off Wi-Fi on Weekends: "

It's too early to say whether it's a trend, but Victrola Coffee & Art in Seattle shuts down its free Wi-Fi on Saturday and Sunday: I spoke to co-owner and co-founder Jen Strongin today after a colleague tipped me to the fact that this lovely, single-shop coffee establishment had decided to experiment with taking back its culture by turning off the Wi-Fi juice on weekends.

Strongin said that the five-year-old cafe added free Wi-Fi when it seemed their customers wanted it a couple of years ago. It initially brought in more people, she said, but over the past year 'we noticed a significant change in the environment of the cafe.' Before Wi-Fi, 'People talked to each other, strangers met each other,' she said. Solitary activities might involve reading and writing, but it was part of the milieu. 'Those people co-existed with people having conversations,' said Strongin.

But 'over the past year it seems that nobody talks to each other any more,' she said. On the weekends, 80 to 90 percent of tables and chairs are taken up by people using computers. Many laptop users occupy two or more seats by themselves, as well. Victrola isn't on the way to anywhere; it's in the middle of a vibrant stretch of shops and restaurants on Capitol Hill's 15th Ave. It's exactly the kind of place that you want to sit down in, not just breeze through.

Worse than just the sheer number of laptop users, Strongin noted, is that many of these patrons will camp six to eight hours--and not buy anything. This seemed astounding to me, but she said that it was typical, not unusual. The staff doesn't want to have to enforce the cafe's unspoken policy of making a purchase to use the space (and the Wi-Fi), and on the occasions that they approach a non-buyer about a purchase asking, 'Can I get you a beverage?' the squatter often becomes defensive, explains they've bought a lot in the past or just the day before.

'It's just really really difficult. We've had so many heated debates about it. We want people to linger at the cafe. We're not a fast-food coffeeshop. We want people to feel comfortable staying here as long as they please,' Strongin said.

They've gone two weekends with no Wi-Fi, and so far, they're pleased with the results. The staff 'loves it,' she said, and regular customers are 'coming up to us and thanking us.' They have received a few nasty emails. But Strongin said that last Sunday was one of the best revenue days they've had on the weekends in a while. 'It was kind of a bold move.'

Strongin says that Victrola isn't interested in charging for Wi-Fi as a tool to limit or moderate use, and still thinks that free Wi-Fi is a great amenity that they can offer their customers at the right time. They have no plans to remove it entirely.

But, she said, 'I don't like going into a cafe, any cafe, including my own, and just seeing a sea of laptops and people not interacting.'

"

(Via Wi-Fi Networking News.)

Democratic Foreign Policy.

I forgot if Clark had an e at the end of his name today.

So sad...

The benefit of a liberal arts education.

Slashdot bans its own rss feed

A note on "unmarried and had no children" in the obituaries of gay men who have partners.

Rasputina at Southpaw, Wednesday

So we saw Rasputina tonight at Southpaw in Brooklyn, a venue comparable in tenor to venerable Blind Pig. (I also saw a Pig being carried across Union St in Brooklyn tonight, but that's another story.)

The concept of rock with cellos is a good one. Adding a witty front girl with cowboy boots and a headband with a feather sticking out Indian style, better.

Then you add a sidekick cellist in dreads and make lots of "Oh Look at Me, I'm anti-Bush" comments and you start to lose me a little.

It was quite an energetic show (coming nowhere near that of Amy Ray) but still fun. We had a lovely medley (sp?) thrown at us (more medleys please...) and also a very nice cover of Barracuda immediately preceded by the promise to go classical now, by which they indicated was playing music with class, such that class might rub off on the audience.

As if playing cellos already isn't classy enough.

Zing.

Power Outage in Moscow

In an event harkening back to Soviet Russia, there is currently a
massive power outage in Moscow, causing major disruptions to Russian
internet traffic.

A poster on slashdot points out that luckily for all of you, http://
bride.ru is still up.

Cheney has a Posse

I'd like to take this opportunity to entirely concur with my now distant colleague Antonia on this matter:

Woof woof, it's sausage time!

Speaking of sausage, I discovered a quaint little Hungarian Meat Market (take that as you will) between 84th & 80th on 2nd Ave. I saw some sausage there (take that as you will) that quite poignantly reminded me of the sausage from Budapest Duty Free so brazenly confiscated by US Customs at JFK...


[Edit: The day finally arrived when my roommate chastised me on spelling. Lordy lordy. Thanks. (problem now corrected.]

There's a very very good article here on Law Professor Lawrence Lessig and the American Boychoir School.

Laura Bush is traipsing through the middle east congratulating despots on their support of democracy.

Anybody who had any problems with Hillary Clinton while her husband was in office should step back and get some context...

The exercise of power to destroy a church.

It is exactly as I had expected.

Most Excellent

For the second time in ten years, I have read the term consilience in a book.

This makes me happy.

Catblogging

Catblogging
Originally uploaded by satmandu.

The new firefox alphas have the code name of "Deer Park".

Hmmmm. I'm seeing some Nugent cross promotion here...

sage words on episode 3 from a slashdot thread

However, to look at this and see that as the overriding point of the trilogy is to miss the point: the one critical mistake that could've averted Anakin's fall and the empire's rise. He didn't use a condom. If Padme/Anakin had used proper birth control, Luke/Leia wouldn't have been born but more importantly Anakin would have lost his biggest motivation to go to the dark side.


So remember kids, for the sake of the galaxy, use proper contraception.

By the way, if you haven't seen it already, Episode three really is
That Good.

theatre shenanigans

It takes serious chutzah to claim that since you were "at the theatre two hours early" you can, alone, hold ten seats for people who aren't at the theatre yet - especially at a showing for SW, a showing that has a huge line before the purported showtime.

Respectfully Denied.

Kevin Smith on Star Wars.

Technocracy: "

Found by Atticus:

"

(Via Warrenellis.com.)

Interview with a former housemate.

Killer Quote: " そうです。僕がアイデアを出しました。表紙は実際にスタックを足場にしたオーバーフロー攻撃を行っている様子です。この本の中でも詳しく説明しています。"

The Military is broken.

I blame the commander in chief, but more than that, I am (again) ashamed.

I can't remember the last time I turned on the Caps Lock key on purpose.

My favorite Tiger feature: "My favorite Tiger feature is that I can turn off the caps lock key. Yes!



I hit that key several times a day accidentally, and it just drives me nuts. I never actually use it for anything—it’s just an annoyance.



No longer!







In case you haven’t run across it, here’s how to turn it off.



1. Open System Preferences.



2. Click on Keyboard & Mouse.



3. At the bottom of the Keyboard tab is a ‘Modifier Keys...’ button. Click it.



4. A sheet appears that lets you remap caps lock (and other keys). Choose ‘No Action’ from the popup menu, then click OK.



It is a thing of beauty."

(Via inessential.com.)

Time for a new monitor

Let's see what the options are...

The Eighties All Over Again

I was told on my way down into the subway station this morning:

"May the force be with you."

[IP] Economics vs. spam

-----Original Message-----
From: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>
Date: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 6:18 pm
Subject: [IP] Economics vs. spam

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject: Re: [IP] Economics vs. spam
Author: "James H. Morris" <james.morris@cmu.edu>
Date: 17th May 2005 5:12:24 pm

Advertising is Flirtation

I liked the van Alstyn and Loder paper on how to fight spam. It is actually being used by a start-up, Vanquish.com. I've sampled their software and it works as a challenge response system, at least.

Based on the premise that a message can have value to both the sender and receiver, they present an elegant argument to show that even a perfect filter is not a good idea. Economists say that these unilateral solutions are bad because they decrease net social welfare, and they look for mechanisms that promote the transmission and reading of those messages where the sum of the value to sender and receiver is positive. To do so, they recommend the obvious: exchange money to pay the partner who is reluctant to communicate. This works fine when you're paying the sender, but paying the receiver is more dubious.

Alladvantage.com tried this scheme in the 90's and failed miserably.

Apparently economists don't frequent singles bars -- notwithstanding the bar scene in "A Beautiful Mind" in which John Nash discovers Nash equilibriums. Paying someone to read an ad doesn't work anymore than offering a woman $5 to talk with you does. You can pay for her drink, but don't offer to pay her. Either she is offended; or, worse, she takes the money and blows you off. Van Alstyn embellishes this scheme by suggesting you escrow the $5 and she take it only if she doesn't like your line. This seems unproductive, too.

The point is: advertisements are not one-time "information transactions"; they are inducements to learn more and eventually pay for something far more expensive than the ad. They are flirtations; and, as any frequenter of singles scenes knows, where and how you flirt is very important because you are signaling about the kind of relationship you seek. Thus, it is much better to simply buy her a drink, include a quarter in a junk mailing, or throw money away in some other visible way. It makes you look generous, encouraging interest.

Advertisers don't want to force their material on unwilling readers. Nobody wants to show ads the reader no interest in. So if he know that an item was ultimately not interesting, he wouldn't send it.

The essence of communication is that A tells B something B didn't know. Thus the sender/receiver relationship is very non-symmetric. First, the sender knows precisely what the information is and why he would like someone to read it. He also is economically motivated, either to take money for information or pay for advertising. The receiver, of course, doesn't know what the information is. She might pay for it if she expects it to be valuable, but is reluctant to read information for payment. More precisely, if she does read it simply for payment; the sender is unlikely to receive what he ultimately wants. Economists called this adverse selection.

But let's not ignore the economists' main point: the arms race between spammers and browsers is wasteful because it leaves social welfare on the table. We need to find ways to get more of those messages through. Bundling is a better approach than direct payments.

Magazines are a way of bundling information in a way that accomplishes this. The magazine pays authors for content that might interest the readers and it charges advertisers. The reader pays the magazine, presumably for the content; but maybe also for the ads that come along.

What is the the value of an item in a magazine to the writer and reader? The crucial measure is reading time, how long the reader spends looking at the item. It reflects the cost to the reader, her time, but also the value to the sender, how much attention he's getting. Of course, the ultimate value to an advertiser is the profit on something the reader buys; but reading time should be correlate

The new idea here is that the value to both the sender and receiver increases with reading time.

Whether something is content, advertising, editorial, op-ed, or a letter to the editor, is really just a question of labelling the author properly so that the reader can judge the content. The value of an article to the sender rises with the level of rhetoric; i.e. the degree to which the reader is persuaded to do something. But it is not a zero-sum game. Maybe I'd be happier with a penis enlargement. :-)
James H. Morris
Professor of Computer Science
Dean, Carnegie Mellon West
412 609-5000 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm -------------------------------------

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/

Musical recommendations

I need people to suggest some Woody Guthrie Albums.

I'm still at a stage where I can't tell Guthrie apart from Dylan.

This needs to be remedied as soon as possible.

Open source political data analysis: 2004 Election Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible

Note that I worked with Edison in the last election.

-----Original Message-----
From: "David Farber" <dave@farber.net>

Date: Sunday, May 15, 2005 10:35 am
Subject: [IP] Open source political data analysis: 2004 Election Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible

_______________ Forward Header _______________
Subject: Open source political data analysis: 2004 Election Hypotheses of FraudRemain Credible
Author: Peter Jones <peter@redesignresearch.com>
Date: 14th May 2005 12:19:04 pm
Dave - This is what you might call open source political analysis. But what's needed is open access to the public data that we as citizens have paid for! This team - four statisticians and a political scientist -
collaborated remotely much of this year on analyzing the 2004 presidential election exit poll data. It's the strongest study of its kind I've seen.
They have run multiple simulations with sensitivity analysis to assess the
Edison/Mitofsky hypotheses about Democratic vs. Republican exit poll responders, and definitively reject their hypothesis. They statistically support that the most plausible explanation supported by simulation was a significant vote "shift" from Kerry to Bush.

They emphasize that: "Simulations are only used in the absence of detailed source data. Edison/Mitofsky could help us resolve the lingering questions about exit poll discrepancies by releasing the data to enable us to directly measure - rather than infer - precinct level variance between poll results and official vote tallies." Link to report at bottom of post.
Press contact in press release.

Peter Jones http://redesignresearch.com
>From the Abstract:
New evidence from mathematical simulations conclusively shows that any constant mean exit poll response bias hypothesis such as the "reluctant Bush responder" (rBr) hypothesis is not consistent with the pattern shown by the
Edison/Mitofsky exit polling data. Other explanations are required to explain the Edison/Mitofsky pattern of exit poll discrepancies and overall response rates.

US Count Votes' simulations have demonstrated that exit poll patterns in the
November 2004 presidential election could be produced by an exit poll response bias distribution with constant mean if accompanied by shifting of votes cast for Kerry to Bush; or alternatively, the patterns could be caused by a differential pattern of exit poll response bias that would require further explanation.
FROM THE PRESS RELEASE

2004 Presidential Election: Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible; New
Scientific Study Released

kathy@uscountvotes.org electionarchive.org

The persistence of credible hypotheses of election fraud, six months after the election, underscores the fragility of the U.S. electoral system. US
Count Votes continues its systematic statistical study of the discrepancy between the Edison-Mitofsky exit polls and November's reported presidential election results.

Miami, FL. - Ron Baiman, Ph.D. of US Count Votes and the Institute of
Government and Public Affairs of Chicago, will release the new results at the meeting of the American Association of Political Opinion Researchers today, Saturday at a 2:15 p.m. Press Conference in the Hotel Fontainebleau Hilton Resort lobby, 4441 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL
33140.

Mitofsky, of the Edison/Mitofsky group who released an analysis on January
19th of their November 2nd exit poll that had predicted a strong win for Kerry, will also be in attendance at the AAPOR conference.

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) today has released a new report, demonstrating that data from the Edison/Mitofsky analysis is consistent with the hypothesis of a corrupted vote count, and inconsistent with the competing idea that Bush voters were under-sampled in the poll. Using numerical modeling techniques to simulate the effect of polling bias, NEDA scientists are able to reproduce signature patterns in the Edison/Mitofsky data by incorporating a general shift in the official vote tally in the model.

Most telling is the fact that the highest participation rates and the peak disparity between poll and official returns both occurred in precincts where
Bush made his strongest showing. This feature of the data is inconsistent with the Edison/Mitofsky assumption that polling bias was responsible for the gap.

For the complete report, see http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-polls/USCV_exit_poll_simulations .pdf
This paper follows an earlier study released on March 31, 2005, by a group of statisticians for the National Election Data Archive Project, Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies.

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

My Kitchen has a monolith

Two Sofas, up an average of four floors each, coffee tables, and moving two people from two different apartments to two other apartments, while one person is still packing up to move from one of the moved into apartments.

That and thank you Craigslist.

overheard while moving today

"We need bigger friends."

Did you blow a capacitor?

The White Stripes playing with Tesla Coils is hot.

Full Circle

The last show ended, as the first show started, with laughter.

As Antonia packed, I found myself watching the last episode of Star
Trek: Enterprise, as long ago I had also, along with her, watched the
first episode, back in Ann Arbor.

Back then, we laughed at the theme song, so ... weak.

Now, we were forced to laugh at the audacity, the sheer mediocrity,
nay, the utter disaster that was the last episode of a once promising
show.

My sadness was less with the end of the show than with the poorness
of the script. My conception of a series finale is an episode that
can bring some sense of closure, with an opening for future character
development. In short, leaving open the possibility of that
proverbial 21st chapter that science fiction shows are leaning
towards these days, the motion picture sequel.

Instead, the script writers settled for a play within a play device
that not only killed off principal characters, but also in a spirit
of true hollowness, merely referenced the possibility of great
moments. A show chastened by the reality of its cancellation,
ignominiously slinking off of televion without exit with dignity. The actors deserved better.

For the first time in memory, there will not be new episodes of Star
Trek coloring the horizon. Orson Scott Card puts it best. Sigh.

B & S news...

Unsuitable for children

(Via Click opera.)

Graduating Friends at NYU Law and their Sundry Related Ilk

This after Sarah & Vince's going away dinner at the Thai Spice on University Pl.

Also, blogger photo blogging is busted.

Back to flickr...

Oh Cruel Fates!

Antonia just received Black Adder on DVD, and her movers come on
Monday morning to take her stuff.

Word of the Day

Nebbish

Thanks Antonia's Mom! (via Antonia...)

Minesweeper Widget for Tiger.

Please don't hurt me.

google ad fun on gmail

Just imagine what kind of message could have resulted in this correlation. Thanks Caitlin.

gmail ad:
Wild dogs no match for the man from Yass
Armidale Express - May 3, 2005 - WILD dogs have nowhere to run or hide as a targetted trapping ...

Germans Dominate Robot Soccer

You had to see this coming...

The first biological rationalization for homosexuality I have seen (and this is embarrassing.. I found it in the nyt.)

Gay men have fewer children, meaning that in Darwinian terms, any genetic variant that promotes homosexuality should be quickly eliminated from the population. Dr. Hamer believes that such genes may nevertheless persist because, although in men they reduce the number of descendants, in women they act to increase fertility.

Best description of Neil Gaiman ever:

“the world is made out of stories, mine’s a nice cup of tea”

Allen used the phrase "Not Guff" in conversation correctly this morning.

I feel so proud.

This child will have superpowers.

Dog cared for baby: "David Pescovitz:
A stray nursing dog in Nairobi, Kenya discovered an abandoned baby in a plastic bag and carried her back to its other puppies. It's not clear how many days the dog took care of the infant before she was found. From the Associated Press:

The stray dog carried the infant across a busy road and a barbed wire fence in a poor neighborhood near the Ngong Forests in the capital, Nairobi, Stephen Thoya told the independent Daily Nation newspaper....


But the 3.3 kilogram (7.28 pounds) infant 'is doing well, responding to treatment, she is stable ... she is on antibiotics,' Gakuo told The Associated Press. Workers at the hospital are calling the child Angel, she said.

Link"

(Via Boing Boing.)

The phrase "revisionist mythology" has such a nice decadent, collegiate charm to it.

The Sequel to Dan Simmon's Ilium comes out in July. The First chapter is up.

Bob Cringely points out that Apple's long term strategy hinges on the ability of iTunes to be the dominant content delivery and management platform.

If you've used iTunes and felt the same vendor lock-in chills you get when using an Exchange server, your thinking along the right lines.

iTunes leverages several technologies already available separately, and bundles them all into a sweet smelling irresistible package. The users buy in, and then realize that there are no competitors that offer all of the capabilities, such as syncing with iPods and leveraging song metadata.

Alternatives NEED to be created before Apple owns this field. The fear is that once Apple gets enough of a grip on the market, it will start implementing far more egregious DRM on portable video and audio, not just because it can, but because it is ingratiating to the MPAA/RIAA flacks.

Not only that, but the leading music player app being so closely tied to one product does limit you to using apple music players. Gatekeepers are bad in any industry, and we don't want one in the portable music player market, the online music distribution market, or the movie distribution market.

Considering Apple's past behavior, I don't think we should give them a chance.

Mira Nair is filming an adaptation of The Namesake, one of my all time absofuckinglutely favorite books.

The lead who plays Ashoke Ganguli is none other than Kal Penn of another of mmy favorite movies: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle!

And he has a filming blog...

sunday cloudy sunday

mail to blogger attachment test.

So Google announced Blogger Mobile, which lets you send pictures from your phone to blogger, like flickr, if your phone can send pictures using MMS or email using your phone's provider email address. If you have your phone setup to send mail through your own ISP's mail server (such as Umich, gmail) to avoid the silly message surcharge that the phone providers are trying to make money off of (though it usually requires a data plan on your phone) then send mail through Mail-to-Blogger, which now supports picture attachments, which get stored on gooogle's picasa/hello servers.

So I can say now "Look Ma! No Flickr!"

found at the 34th St BDFV platform

If you see a suspicious package leave it for the cleaners at Coney Island - it is garbage.

The Exterminator unexpectedly buzzed this afternoon, on the first saturday of the month. We hectically ran around and cleaned up the food lying around before we let him in, afraid, as if our mothers were knocking, of being chastised for our slovenliness.

Wikipedia is the logical successor to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I say this having spent a good hour and a half on it today.

[Ed. May8/2005: This has been pointed out. Slate beat me to it.]

AP Photo from Iraq

Tue May 3, 7:34 PM ET
Picture released by the U.S. Army Tuesday, May 3, 2005 shows a U.S.
Army soldier comforting a child fatally wounded in a car bomb blast
in Mosul, 360 km (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May
2, 2005. 15 Iraqis were wounded in the combined suicide bomb attack.
(AP Photo/U.S. Army)

Today is Yom HaShoah. It showed up on my Palm's calendar this morning, and it wasn't hard to figure out what it was.

And in my lifetime, we've already been through the genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

How about some of that old fashioned imperial intervention folks?

British Election Day.
Cinco De Mayo.
National Prayer Day
Spring Fevah.

Am I missing anything?

Does one need an excuse to get in contact with people you haven't spoken to in many years? Are the above reasons sufficient?

State of Affairs

sigh.

tactics tactics comrade

I had to restrain myself from using the word "retrospect" in the
common context when sending an email to Dantz (the creators of the
Retrospect software) tech support today.

"In retrospect..."

oy.

Batman Begins

The trailer is pretty. And it is made by the director of memento.

Highlights of the slashdot thread:

Direct link to the full screen trailer.

Ninja reference:

Batman can kill anyone he wants! Batman cuts off heads ALL the time and doesn't even think twice about it. This guy is so crazy and awesome that he flips out ALL the time. I heard that there was this time he was eating at a diner. And when some dude dropped a spoon Batman killed the whole town. My friend Mark said that he saw Batman totally uppercut some kid just because the kid opened a window.

And that's what I call REAL Ultimate Power!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you don't believe that Batman has REAL Ultimate Power you better get a life right now or he will chop your head off!!! It's an easy choice, if you ask me.

American psycho reference:

I live in stately Wayne Manor. My name is Bruce Wayne. I'm 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then apply an herb mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Bruce Wayne, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. Only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our life styles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

Shana refers me to these amazing sites:

A simple search with the terms "***** *******" led me to a site with some of the
most beautiful urban and architectural decay images I have seen.


Here: http://b.f11.org/

And Here: http://buffaloexploration.com/index.htm


Don't know why or how I landed, or if, indeed, I have.

Guess the search terms.

Scientists create animals that are part-human. Or Flowers for Algernon.

Mice with human brains

In January, an informal ethics committee at Stanford University endorsed a proposal to create mice with brains nearly completely made of human brain cells. Stem cell scientist Irving Weissman said his experiment could provide unparalleled insight into how the human brain develops and how degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s progress.

Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who chaired the ethics committee, said the board was satisfied that the size and shape of the mouse brain would prevent the human cells from creating any traits of humanity. Just in case, Greely said, the committee recommended closely monitoring the mice’s behavior and immediately killing any that display human-like behavior.

My feeling on this is that if you kill a being that displays human-like behaviour, you're committing murder. The Turing test should be applied here.

No let me rephrase that. If you kill a sentient being, you are committing murder. A mouse with human brain cells that happens to show signs of sentience would be fascinating, and the bar will probably be far lower for people getting pissed off if you're killing animals with human brain cells.

But I'm not against the research.

"Demonic in nature.": "

A Michigan appellate court in Howard v. Family Independence Agency has ruled that a state agency did not violate a social worker's First Amendment rights when it fired her for trying to perform an exorcism instead of calling 911 after a client had a seizure. While visiting a client, the client had a seizure, which Michelle Howard, a religious woman, decided was 'demonic in nature.' She prayed over the client and anointed her with water. The court ruled that she 'was not terminated for merely praying at the office,' but for violating agency rules."

(Via jwz.)

God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large: "

I've been thinking about transubstantiation, the belief of many branches of Christianity that when you take communion, the bread and wine transform physically into the flesh and blood of Christ. According to the Catholic Church as late as 1965, this is literally true, not just symbolism: the flesh is present, the bread is gone.

So let's run some numbers.

1. The Roman Catholic Church says that there are around 1.1 billion baptised Catholics in the world today.

2. The current world population is 6.3 billion (17% Catholic.)

3. The world population in A.D. 1930 was around 1 billion.

4. The world population in A.D. 1 was around 300 million.

5. If we assume an average lifespan of 50 years (which is probably low, since the curve is so steep at the modern end) that gives us 40 non-overlapping 'generations'. So if we put 1, 2, and 6 in the last three buckets, and .4 in every previous bucket, that gives 23 billion as a guess at how many people have been alive during the last two thousand years. (I'm not sure this is a valid generalization to make; do you have a better guess?)

6. I'm not sure how quickly Christianity grew, but let's guess that 12% of all those people were Christian, of a variety that believed in transubstantiation. (I think this is probably a reasonable guess because Christianity was very widespread by the 10th century or so, and by the numbers above, 83% of the population came after that.)

7. How often do these folks take the Eucharist, on average? Hard to guess, let's say once a year.

8. By my measure, one 'sip' is 1/4 fl. oz.

9. One serving of Ritz crackers is 5 crackers at 100 grams, or 20 grams per cracker.

10. An adult male contains about six quarts of blood.

11. The current average weight for an American male is 180 pounds, but Americans are fatties and people used to be smaller, so let's call the two-millenium average 120 pounds.

Which gives us:

	23,000,000,000	people
x	12	%
x	1	communion
x	2000	years
=	5,520,000,000,000	servings
x	0.25	fl. oz.
=	10,781,250,000	gallons of blood
x	20	grams
=	243,390,340,000	pounds of flesh
=	121,695,170	tons of flesh

So how big is Jesus?

If you conservatively assume that these are the End Times and that Jesus will soon be completely consumed (a detail that I do not believe is a part of mainstream Christian dogma), then he weighs two billion times more than you, and contains fourteen billion times as much blood. (2,028,252,833x and 14,375,000,000x).

By comparison, the largest living animal on Earth is the Blue Whale, at a paltry 150 tons (a mere 2,500× bigger than you). It is believed that the largest dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus, weighed only 90 tons.

However, perhaps Jesus, like Wolverine, has amazing regenerative powers (in which case, it's surprising it took him three days to return from the dead. But maybe he was just taking a little time-out.)

I wish I could find figures on how much skin people shed. I've heard that most household dust is made of people, but I haven't found any numbers. He would be very much larger indeed if we were to assume that all this consumed flesh and blood was non-essential.

"

(Via jwz.)

Soylent Rice is People: "

Human gene in rice:

Japanese researchers have inserted a gene from the human liver into rice to enable it to digest pesticides and industrial chemicals. The gene makes an enzyme, code-named CPY2B6, which is particularly good at breaking down harmful chemicals in the body.

Present GM crops are modified with genes from bacteria to make them tolerate herbicides, so that they are not harmed when fields are sprayed to kill weeds. But most of them are only able to deal with a single herbicide, which means that it has to be used over and over again, allowing weeds to build up resistance to it.

But the researchers at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, have found that adding the human touch gave the rice immunity to 13 different herbicides. This would mean that weeds could be kept down by constantly changing the chemicals used.

"

(Via jwz.)

The Warren Variations.

Trailers on TCM rock.

Forgive me for calling this hope.

What the Republicans Could Learn from Hayek: "

I was talking to someone tonight about whether there is a unifying theme to the Republican setbacks of this winter and spring -- Social Security, the Bolton nomination, and DeLay, to name the three biggies. I don't want to make more than should be made of things that are very much in media res, but I think the answer is simple and predictable: A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than 'government sucks,' they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday.

"

(Via The Decembrist.)

Also, Con Listings.

There's a new study linking low levels of Hydrogen sulfide (80ppm) to induced, completely reversible torpor in mice.

The mice enter a hibernation state, reducing their oxygen intake by 90%.

Absolutely amazing. If this scales up to humans, we could see a radical change in the way surgery is done, as well as long distance space flight. Imagine inducing hibernation in the case of a heart attack or stroke until you can get to a hospital.

The Adobe Macromedia acquisition, unorwellianized.

The BBC has put up a page in Bengali.

They've even included a font to be installed. I'm very impressed. They are actually using a Unicode font, instead of that Netscape era embedded font crap that is being used by papers like the Anandabazar Patrika, which doesn't work in Firefox, or at all on the mac.

Amy Ray in concert

At the Bowery Ballroom, last night.

Solid Rock.

Crappy pic.

Exactly what I was thinking.

Blog Hoax Goes Mainstream: "

Tonight's episode of CSI: Miami ('Killer Date') must have been filmed before the 'toothing is a hoax' story broke. The show's plot featured toothing, the now possibly-debunked cultural and sexual phenomenon toothing, wherein persons used Bluetooth-enabled cell phones to engage in random sexual encounters.

On the show, a CSI's badge went missing, and he had to explain to his co-workers and internal affairs that he was unable call the girl he was with the previous night (who might know something about the missing badge) because he met her through 'toothing.' 'Toothing?' another CSI responded (I'm paraphrasing here), 'you mean random anonymous sex?'

He knew her only by her screenname--'up4anything'--through which they try to track her using some ridiculous mis-representation of the real technology. Using a soldering iron and several small screwdrivers, and accompanied by some exciting techno-rock, a nerd in a lab coat attached a '2.4 gigahertz antenna' to his phone, 'increasing the range to one mile' and he engaged in some wardriving (or, er, toothdriving?) around the streets of Miami to find the girl again.

Amazingly, the show concluded without resorting to reference to the other obvious tidbit of current events involving mobile phones... although it did end with the toothing-CSI entering a shrink's office... I guess all that engaging in a fictitious activity finally got to him?

"

(Via bIPlog at boalt.org.)

Forgive me for reposting from boingboing, but this kept me amused for several minutes.

Apparently, men link more than women.

Here's the "science":

...To you and me, a link is just a link. To a guy, however, a link is something special, a part of himself. The most,um, important part of himself.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated 60 years ago this week.

Lethal Injection's humaneness is a joke.

What is the theme music to NBC's The Office?

I think it would make an excellent ring tone...

The reason we work is to have the money to buy into advanced nipponese culture.

Washlets and Denki Poto and having several thousand and a plumber to spare, oh my!

Rock.

Freaking Awesome:

The next time the NY State Legislature takes forever to do something (which will be next time), consider this: The Idaho Legislature has passed a resolution commending the vision of indie sleeper film Napoleon Dynamite and what it stands for. Seriously. See the resolution here, but here are some highlights of the reasons:

- WHEREAS, the friendship between Napoleon and Pedro has furthered multiethnic relationships

- WHEREAS, Rico and Kip's Tupperware sales and Deb's keychains and glamour shots promote entrepreneurism and self-sufficiency in Idaho's small towns

- WHEREAS, Kip's relationship with LaFawnduh is a tribute to e-commerce and Idaho's technology-driven industry

- WHEREAS, Napoleon's tetherball dexterity emphasizes the importance of physical education in Idaho public schools

- WHEREAS, any members of the House of Representatives or the Senate of the Legislature of the State of Idaho who choose to vote 'Nay' on this concurrent resolution are 'FREAKIN' IDIOTS!' and run the risk of having the 'Worst Day of Their Lives!'

Gothamist wonders if the children of the various legislative members lobbied their parents to put this bill into action. Anyway, Napoleon Dynamite is on DVD. Jon Heder, aka Napoleon (unrecognizable in real life with his fashionably shaggy haircut), was Punk'd - can no one stop Ashton? And while Idaho is great, NYC was voted the best city for indie filmmaking.

[Via waxy and Dan Dickinson

(Via Gothamist.)

We had Fuse on in the background, and noticed a band that sounded a lot like New Order called The Killers.

So after downloading the album Hot Fuss, we looked to see when they were playing around us.

Ticketmistress gave us no information aside from a link to a concert in Scotland this summer.

Of course, it is sold out.

The lineup is most excellent.

Rick James is running for City Council.

Hilarity Ensuing.

< geekalert />

Funniest joke I don't understand today:

Pinky: Was machen wir heute abend?

Brain: Was wir jeden abend machen, wir übernehmen die Weltherrschaft. Aber heute installieren wir nebenbei IBM Workplace!

From the comments here.

Notes on OS X Tiger for geeks:

HFS+ aware rsync, cp & mv commands, so no more mangled resource forks... maybe.

Access Control List (ACL) support - which should be interesting to look at and compare with the acl implementations on xfs, ext3, ntfs & afs. The linux ext3 acl implementation is known to be slow due to the way that acls are stored on the filesystem. The Server page seems to indicate that NTFS acls are supported, which would be quite nice.

The Tiger Server sub pages have not been updated yet, but here are the notable features promised:

Portable Home Directories (dropped from OS X Panther) - which should be equivalent to the Windows Server offline files feature (when it works) that is used for syncing My Documents with a server. Question: Is Apple going to pass this off as a backup mechanism? Will this use rsync?

Postfix mail server with spamassassin & ClamAV (open source antivirus solution) built in. I've already configured several clients with this already using instructions widely available, but there is always the worry of an upcoming apple update screwing it all up. A built in solution should be easier to administer.

The new version of Directory Services supports "NT Domain Services". If this means domain groups are finally going to be supported, this would be a good thing. This along with the NT Migration tool should make it quite easy to migrate clients with NT 4 PDCs to OS X.

Built in Jabber server. Yay! Jabber chat throughout your organization. More importantly, iChat now supports connecting to Jabber servers.

Built in Blog server. I'm not sure which one they are using, maybe wordpress. Regardless, this is a good thing, as hosting your own blog decentralizes the whole blogger/livejournal hosting centralization mess.

Come on people, how about snapshot capabilities in OS X? I want to implement Volume Shadow Copies for backups on Macs...

popemon.

I Hate PalmOS on the Treo650.

It is about as stable as OS 8.5.

It really is that bad. Crashes left and right. Data Corruption.

If palm hadn't implemented backups, I would be quite incensed right now.

Somebody give me a linux treo.

Please.

Also, Caitlin visited last night.

I need more Sake.

Echoes of Science Fiction:

Subvocal Speech Recognition is here.

Harlan Ellison's screenplay for I, Robot, which I reread this evening, mentions the use of miniaturized radios with headphones to play rock music by brazilian aborigines - doubtlessly echoes of a future iTunes advertisement.

For the Record (again) , Dulles Sucks. Getting to the Independence Air terminal is pretty bad, with the strange giant elevated buses between terminals, but the United Express commuter plane terminal takes the cake as nothing more (or is that less) than a converted warehouse, with what passes for concourses as open air hallways of corrugated metal, very chic in a retro third world circa 1970 yet not quite socialist realism somebody please shoot the designer sort of way.

All this talk of regulating nanotech is making me hungry.

I want a bacon double cheeseburger with an extra dollop of grey goo, to go, so I can cruise and eat in my muscle Von Neumann machine.

I want to say somebody wake me up when there's a linux compatible version of cablecard hardware that will let me use MythTV with the scrambled basic channels they have in Manhattan. (The Cable Company Provided DVR only has a 80Gb drive, and at this point, it means four days worth of video - which isn't enough.)

Need I mention that the cable company's hardware does not make it easy to record a show to dvd?

I did notice season 1 of Galactica on a torrent site earlier... That might make up for the DVR recording over Galactica with episodes of Gilmore Girls, the Simpsons, and STNG.

grrr.

I just want a DVR that gives me the ability to do what I want, and not be stuck in stupid business models.

It's amazing how well the leftovers from Shana's Creamed Spinach come out of their Calphalon pot after a week and a half.

Just peels off, really.

I'm sorry if I have mentioned this before, but the Ghostbusters theme song in List Format.

Ron Jeremy is on Livejournal.

Oh the memories of my visit in 1999.