Escapable Logic

The site, Escapable Logic, presents another blueprint for how people and technologies are creating things that have not been seen before. Read about the campaign in a box. or how to raise $1 billion dollars for Dean. Or Minimalism. Its author, Britt Blaser, is demonstrating just what can happen to a complex political campaign when new tools allow ordinary people to self-organize. What is amazing is that, to a large extent, the Dean campaign is not fighting this. to me, that says more about them than any number of speeches. The next year will be interesting.  11:56:27 PM    

'... To Dare Mighty Things ...'

Indicative of his skill as a writer, this is one of the best political tracts I have read in years. He describes the horrible effects that wedge politics have brought to this country. He writes of things that ALL of us who call ourselves Americans want. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

It was nice to read this article because it fits my own arc. My political views have become more and more left over the last few years. Partly because the neocons have moved the center so far to the right and partly because of the response of this Adminstrations deprecations of things I find important. In many ways I have been closer to moderate Republicans than liberal Democrats but I am far away from conservative Republicans.

I'd vote for a Teddy Roosevelt in a moment. Colin Powell held my attention before his turn as Secretary of State demonstrated his abeyance to the neocons. I am starting to believe that this election cycle will be a pivotal one in American History, say like 1968. I don't know what will happen but anyone who waits until the party's conventions next year to get interested will miss something really important.  11:34:17 PM    

Four arrested over Najaf bombing. Four men - two of them foreigners - are held in Najaf, as the death toll from the car bomb rises towards 100. [BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition]

I wonder if the two foreigner's could be Saudis? In the short term this could be bad for the US. This sector of Iraq has been relatively quiet but now there are increasing numbers of extremists. In addition, people are upset that the US did not protect their leaders. While an impossible job, we can not protect everyone, it follows the plan of the instaigators of the bombing. We see FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) all the time in the high tech arena, but governments and insurgents have used them for centuries.  5:13:54 PM    

Dell sinks to a new low (who even knew it was possible?).

Dell Takes Click-Wrap 'Agreements' to New Low. Ian Goldberg and Kat Hanna: Dell's Software License Policy. I'm just bewildered that Dell corporate policy is that users need... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

As I said in my comment on Dan's post this is utterly disgusting but entirely typical of the contempt I think Dell has for it's customers.  I really hope Dan follows up on this.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

A wonderful Catch-22. You have to agree that you have read the licensing agreements for the software on your Dell computer before you can use it. But you can not even see the software, much less agree until you start the computer. So to see the software, you have to lie and state that you have read software agreements that you have not. I wonder what sorts of legal ramifications there are for a company that requires you to perjure yourself in order to use their product. I wonder if all the licensing agreements become null and void. That would be proper justice.  5:06:11 PM    

Caesar's Wife and All That. CAESAR'S WIFE AND ALL THAT....The head of Diebold, a company that makes voting machines, is apparently a diehard Republican:Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold Inc., this week sent out letters to central Ohio Republicans asking them to raise $10,000 in donations... [CalPundit]

Sounds kind of ominous when the CEO of a company trying to sell voting machines and the software that will run on it to say that he is working on delivering the votes to the Republicans ;-) But not having a paper trail is what scares me most about software voting. I just can not take the word of the CEOs. How do they know that their programmers haven't inserted things? Who really vets all their software? The little bit that has gotten out into the public have been shown to be flawed. What happens when we can no longer trust our electoral system? (Yes, I know some people believe that this already happened in 2000).  4:20:58 PM    

Whither the Shuttle?. WHITHER THE SHUTTLE?....The LA Times has a good story about the shuttle report today. It makes a couple of points that I think have been overlooked in the rush to condemn NASA's "broken culture." First, there's the problem with the... [CalPundit]

FIxing a culture is one of those MBA-type statements. See, it was not your fault as a CEO. There was just a bad culture. It was there before you got there but you'll do your best to change it

The comment that you an engineering project can developed 'cheap, fast or good but no more than 2 out of the 3' is right on. The Shuttle is supposed to somehow be all 3. I loved the Congressman who commentedd that he was glad it was a culture thing and not spending. As if Congress had a good management culture!

Check out Homer Hickham's comments. His boyhood was popularized in the movie October Sky and is one of the old guard engineers. His point that the Shuttle is fatally flawed is well taken. The decision to create the Shuttle had been a major reason for the stagnation we have seen in manned flight. Nothing to the moon in 25 years. Mars is closer than it has been in recored history and nothing. The Shuttle is not lowering the price of space travel and the expected life of these crafts really ended years ago. yet they still fly and we have no other alternative. Bad decisions have huge, longterm consequences. We discover this more and more each day.  4:02:56 PM