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Play Palin in the Oval Office

Take your eyes off the stock ticker, it’s too painful… let’s play instead.

Click the pic to play – you can hover above and click various objects… but whatever you do, don’t click the red phone!

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The World According to Americans

A little laugh before Debate Night – rediscovered on Dennis Howlett’s re-launched Dinglebum.

P.S. Apologies for the obsolete map.  It clearly should have been updated to indicate Afghanistan as our neighbors.  Oh, and let’s not forget about Czechoslovakia. smile_yawn

Update (11/27/09): Wow, a year later this is still going around….

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Breaking: McCain Upgrades VP Candidate

This just in: Senator McCain traded in Sarah Palin for an equally qualified newer model:

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Killing Two Birds with One $700B Stone

A hilarious “bailout” plan -  no, I haven’t made it up:

Twitter.com

I’m sorta liking the idea of selling Alaska to the Russians for $700B. Kills 2 birds with one stone.

10:14 AM September 26, 2008 from Identica

Favorite reply to cgerrish

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Cliff Gerrish

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The War in Georgia

\War in Georgia\

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What a Friday

But no worries, here comes the iPhone 3G. smile_omg

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OnlinePrimary: a Showcase of Naivete

Somebody wake me up: I can’t believe that anybody, especially ReadWriteWeb would buy this:  OlinePrimary.us,  an effort to to provide a simple, Internet-based system to demonstrate how the US presidential primaries, and later the elections can be handled easily:

“I don’t understand why the straightforward process of casting and tallying votes should require special-purpose machines costing tens of thousands of dollars each, from companies so suspect of fraud and incompetence that they have to change their names (as Diebold Election Systems recently did) to hide from the shame.”

Richard at ReadWriteWeb is somewhat doubtful himself, noting:

In my tests, OnlinePrimary turned out to be a basic website form and still a little buggy (an SQL error popped up after I entered my selections)

Richard, it’s really not about the bugs; it’s the very concept itself.  Anyone can create a webform to collect data – it does not demonstrate anything.  The issue with electronic voting is not how to capture data.  I am by far not an expert, but I think the critical issues all boil down to these points:

  • Identification / Verification of who votes (did not ask for any)
  • How many times can you vote (I just voted twice)
  • Can your vote be tampered with (sure…)

Plain and simple.  Not so plain and simple to resolve. And this simple webform does not attempt to address any of these issues.  This is what we ended up with at an event with much smaller scale… I’m sure you as co-host of the Crunchies also experienced some issues… would the Presidential elections invite a thousand times more fraud attempts?

Update (2/5): Not that there’s much verification in real life, either…

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Election Humor

Techmeme’s political sister-site, Memeorandum is full of speculation on how the New Hampshire polls could be so wrong. As usual, conspiracy theories abound, amongst them speculation on the role Diebold’s voting machines  played in the results.  I’m not joining the speculation, nor can I completely ignore it; after all, we’re hearing about voting machine problems all the time, several states decertified them… but I simply don’t have enough facts to take sides in this debate (although I wrote about the issue in the past)  That said, a little laugh does not hurt … and you have to admit these posters are just hilarious:

 

There’s more where they come from: Diebold Variations, (c)2004-06 Rand Careaga/salamander.eps.

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2.0 in Argentina

Vinnie talks about The Web 2.0 Confusion Cycle. There’s a 2.0 of everything.. we’re used to Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0… next week there’s a Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. But if you think that’s stretching it, wait … here’s the Sex 2.0 Conference.

So, in the spirit of “everything 2.0”, I claim Evita 2.0, before someone else does:smile_wink

First lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner swept to victory in Argentina’s presidential vote on Sunday to become the first woman elected to lead the country, television exit polls showed. (Reuters)

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VP Cheney: Invading Baghdad Would Create Quagmire

I’ve never thought I would agree with Dick Cheney in anything, but in this video he is right:

Too bad he said that in 1994 …