• Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked – by Henry Jenkins
• Bush Relatives for Kerry – Because blood is thinner than oil!
• Why We Cannot Endorse President Bush For Re-Election
  

  We find ourselves in a position unimaginable four years ago when we strongly endorsed for president a fiscal conservative and “moderate man of mainstream convictions” who promised to wield military muscle only as a last resort and to resist the lure of “nation building.”

• AP: Report Finds Lavish Spending at TSA
• BlogsAndPolitics – This is an attempt at generating a comprehensive timeline of when weblogs had a significant impact on politics. For now, I’m focusing on American politics, but feel free to add information (in the International section) of how weblog commentary and breaking stories authored by webloggers have changed the political discourse in other countries.

I like the newly blatantly politicized blog that William Gibson is keeping these days. I suppose it must be hard to be a person of conscience and sit by without trying to do something.

If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I’d certainly owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan’s presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icey driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket.

Bush Supporters Still Believe Iraq Had WMD or Major Program, Supported al Qaeda

• Agree with Kerry Supporters Bush Administration Still Saying This is the Case
• Agree US Should Not Have Gone to War if No WMD or Support for al Qaeda
• Bush Supporters Misperceive World Public as Not Opposed to Iraq War, Favoring Bush Reelection

For more analysis, including a good chart summarizing the numbers, see Kevin Drum’s blog.

I watched Going Upriver ($13.29 @ DeepDiscountDVD) tonight. I feel a lot better about Kerry. Watching him as a young war veteran, handling himself in the way he did in the situation he was in is rather astounding.

• Eisenhower’s son endorses Kerry (via)
  

  “The fact is that today’s ‘Republican’ Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word ‘Republican’ has always been synonymous with the word ‘responsibility,’ which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms.

• Music Lab – ostensibly a test music tastes. Mostly craprock, but some decent punkish stuff. I wonder what it’s really testing? (willingness to click through mod_jk errors?)
• Cat Experiment – makes me want to buy a kitten and try it out (apparently that would be inhumane or something. nm)
• Voices of Iraq – 150 DV cams distributed to Iraqi citizens. Great idea. Hmm, this is showing on campus next Tuesday. Who’s getting me in there?
• Slurm on OS X – a realtime ncurses network monitor, like nload, but for OS X. (for local monitoring, I use MenuMeters). see: Slurm, Wormulon
• GEORGE W. BUSH – THE GREATEST PRESIDENT SINCE GENERAL PATTON!! – heheh
• Transparency and sponsorship in the blogosphere – Marc on pro-blogging

The, Sinclair, the.

• More at Media Matters for America
• Boycott Sinclair Broadcast Group – time to put Sinclair to bed (see Advertiser DB)
• Google News: sinclair kerry

The rebound is based on their deciding to only “show clips” from the attack documentary. My question: are they going to run Going Upriver (ahem, EasyNews members, attention) clips as well? Also, are they going to dedicate an hour or two to discuss Bush’s Vietnam experience (I think not).

I’m not sure Lessig would want to be Attorney General (although following up Ashcroft, it would be hard impossible to do worse), but FCC chairman, now that would be interesting.

Imagine a FCC that doesn’t spend its time regulating what you can and can’t say on the airwaves. A FCC that actually cares about having open, unfettered spectrum for the people, since they actually own it, instead of auctioning off every last megahertz to the highest bidder. Imagine a FCC where TiVo doesn’t have to ask first before they create a new feature.

• /. – Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor – if you’re a writer, heck if you’re a reader, you’ll want to read this. Score:5 Insightful, Score:5 Interesting, Score:5 Funny
  

  In order to set her straight, I had to let her know that the reason she’d never heard of me was because I was famous.

• “Bush’s Big Joke” — A Video of Atrocities – this got passed around a couple months past. Considering how many people have died for this, it was in horrible taste then, and is even worse now. George W Bush, you’re an asshole.
• Garrett’s F-Spot UI design notes – OSS w/ good UI? What’s this?
• One of the most interesting changes in the last five years is that Microsoft has become a depressing place to work. – Gates keeps lamenting
  that talented people are losing interest in IT, and has recently been
  stumping
  for the field. But what if he’s got a dark window on the IT world not
  because software is failing to attract bright developers, but
  because Microsoft is failing to attract bright developers?

• Firefox Advocacy Ad Campaign Overview & FAQ – contribute over $30 and get your name in the NYTimes ad – ingenious – over 2,500 names already!
• The Inflation Calculator – try comparing 1990 to 2003 and watch your jaw drop
• Emulating Prototyping of DOM Objects in Internet Explorer – In Mozilla all DOM objects are native Javascript objects, which means we can easily use prototypes to add methods and properties to all instances of a DOM class at once. This is very useful as it allows us to easily extend the functionality of DOM objects. Unfortuantly there isn’t such an easy way to do this in IE, but we can emulate it by using behaviors and extending the document.createElement method. (Paul’s back. A smart company would simply give fistfuls of cash to him now, before he graduates.)
• Matt’s featured in a Business Week article about registration – hey stupid publishers, why don’t you take a hint from community sites like Metafilter and actually offer something of value for signing up? See Holovaty’s comments. Lawrence, Kansas gets it. You’d think Los Angeles, Washington DC, or New York might
• GmailStatus – another useless piece of blinkery for your menubar
• Six Apart Professional Network – this is not a paid placement, but rather as a public service for your edification. Where Anil posts good stuff (say, unlike the barren desert wasteland that is the 6A front page)
• Metadata for the Masses – peterme writes about freetagging. Here’s something I posted at the beginning of this year, and a still stand by it:
  

  Kurt, I agree that analytics will be an importance
  force-multiplier for assisting tagging. Automated clustering, emergent
  taxonomies, and network scaling w/ collaborative filtering, webs of
  trust will all factor in. As will good interfaces (personally, I find
  navigating long, nested contextual menus a PITA).

  We’re seeing a lot of areas converging right now. It’s all quite exciting.

  some other intersting MSR stuff:
  http://research.microsoft.com/~jplatt/
  http://research.microsoft.com/research/downloads/

  A few disparate (but related) links that may be of interest:
  http://users.bestweb.net/~sowa/peirce/ontometa.htm
  http://facetmap.com/
  http://www.iuiconf.org/pastiui.html
  http://www.idlewords.com/pages/emerging_tech_talk.htm
  http://collaboratory.planetwork.net/linktank_whitepaper
  http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002564.html
  http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers.html
  http://www.nuclearelephant.com/projects/dspam/dobly.html
  http://web.umr.edu/~tauritzd/art/
  http://bonsai.ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~mdehoon/software/cluster/software.htm

Sorry for the unresponsiveness this morning. Some assholes have been leeching some large files very aggressively, which ended up maxing out the number of active connections now that I’m limiting bandwidth.