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Fair and balanced, too!

March 5, 2004, 6:40 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Free trees, bulbs, shrubs online: overstocks packed by disabled workers. From the Dallas Morning News (reg.req., projo password works, but the whole story is below):

Greg and Cheryl Richter of Lincoln, Neb., will send you trees, shrubs, bulbs and perennials for free if you will pay for the shipping (about $6.95 per tree or plant collection).

Their new project, launched last week, is called Free Trees and Plants.com. Ms. Richter, a freelance garden writer and photographer, obtains some of the millions of unsold plants from growers that are destroyed every year. She works with registered organizations that provide employment for the disabled, who process and package the bare-root material for shipping. Except for shipping and processing, the cost of the project is shouldered by the Richters.

"It's a give-back for the success we've had," explains Mr. Richter. For details, see www.freetreesandplants.com.

This is a very cool idea -- Cheryl Richter is a garden photographer and writer whose photos illustrate the site. The site's slogan is "Through This Project We Provide Free Plants Packaged by Disabled Workers," and the plants are bargains: A dogwood tree, a lilac bush, 10 Dutch Iris or a dozen gladiolus bulbs can be had for the $6.95 fee.

It's a smart site, too, with a good FAQ and a clear, friendly privacy policy.

Updated 3.06: Interesting: "Free Trees and Plants.com is not a nonprofit charity; We do not ask for, or accept, contributions or offer paid memberships. Except for shipping and processing, Free Trees and Plants .com is a self-supporting project."

The Far Side comes to life is another grand photoshopping contest from Worth1000.com, who brought you the oh-so timely Martha's New Digs: Decorating Martha Stewart's Jail Cell contest. (Past contests, and those open now, may be entered from their homepage.)

This Far Side contest is a little different. Rather than having everyone start from the same image,

You are to choose any Far Side cartoon and remake it as a real image. Extra points will be awarded to those who don't use a past cartoon, but choose to go the original route, making an entirely new joke up, but in Gary Larson's signature style.

Dan Gillmor (and his readers) on Martha Stewart: San Jose Mercury News columnist/blogger Dan Gillmor is covering a lot of good issues today, but I like his take on Stewart especially:

I figured at least one juror would hold out for a not guilty, but Martha Stewart's criminal conviction (AP) is a gratifying surprise. Stewart is, in some ways, a scapegoat for the sleaze of the 1990s, but her arrogance did her in just as much as the government's wish to set an example.

She figured her status allowed her to do whatever she pleased -- that the rules were for small fry like you and me. She was wrong.

And, from one of Dan's readers,

Some of the above comments ("if my father called I would have sold too" and "you have no idea what she was thinking") miss a serious point. Martha Stewart used to be a STOCKBROKER. She KNOWS the rules regarding insider trading. She KNOWS that if something is not Generally Known Public Knowledge then it is a crime to trade on that knowledge.

'Whack the penguin' game spawns variations:

In January of 2004, an odd, addictive Flash game started spreading across the internet. It is a version of Home Run Derby where a yeti wielding a club attempts to hit a penguin as far as possible across an icy field. ...

Chris Hilgert, from the Austrian game company Edelweiss Medienwerkstatt, is the inventor of the game, now formally known as Yeti Sports (part 1). This is the official press release from Edelweiss, or what passes for it.

... Dozen of sites have hosted the game, and many soon went offline after using up all of their bandwidth (including this one!).

There are tips on the page on the headline link there, such as,

... Hint: After the penguin begins it's jump, hold down your mouse button and then let go at the exact moment you want to swing to improve your accuracy.

You'll find links to some of the sons of yeti, too. Here's a link to the gory version (lots of blood).

Government in Waiting: It's an interesting idea from Democrat Jesse Taylor Ezra Klein (sorry, Ezra) at pandagon.net -- a shadow cabinet. No women in it, though, which is a dead giveaway that it needs more thought. (Your thought, maybe. see below)

I want to match George Bush's visible cabinet with the one John Kerry would bring. I want the American people to see, soon, exactly what our government would look like. As soon as that's done, they can begin mentally comparing Kerry's potential government with Bush's, a comparison that should come out in our favor. ...

...let's form a real shadow government. Let's have Edwards release statements every time Ashcroft abrogates liberties, let's watch Gephardt give press conferences every time the RNC outsources campaign calling to India, let's see Rand Beers expose the inept counter-terrorism team he left because they weren't making us safer, let's see Rumsfeld's policy of oppositional engagement with "old" Europe and his love of "new" Europe criticized by the man who led Old Europe in freeing New Europe.

I'll play. Over the weekend, imagine who you might like to see in the next cabinet -- anyone of either party. Please email me your list. You can make it Bush2 and change the players or Kerry+ with a whole new set of faces.

Who would you hire?

Updated 3.06: Ministers Without Portfolio (Yet), a similar proposal, was published Thursday as a NYT Op-Ed by Chris Sprigman, identified as a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. (This idea is going two ways in the blogosphere -- one as preferences for these positions, the other sees them as "shadow critics," spokespeople who'd say, "If I were in that job, I'd do this..." Most of us obviously don't know as much about qualified not-so-famous people as those who will actually choose a cabinet. In your choices, please remember that the Secretary of Defense must be a civilian, 10 years away from military service.)

Stern's going down: Old radio guy Lou Josephs is all over Howard Stern's future.

Message in a Bottle Server: "The following sites are run by people who will put your message into a bottle and throw it into the sea (or river)..."

The closest one is in Lynn, Mass., so some of you South County folks might want to check out this link:

Do you live near the sea? click here if you'd like a page set-up to run a 'message in a bottle' service as part of this site

via Liz Donovan

Students ask about the secrets of blogging: J.D. Lasica tells all in this interview. (Well, sort of. You have to blog to get the hang of it.)

March 4, 2004, 7:25 p.m. -- (Last week's weblog)

Search engine blues, Part 2: Jonathon at stretchingthought.com writes,

Your article on paid yahoo results was spot on. However, saying that Google uses paid results is a bit speculative at best. Google is influenced by search engine optimization. However, that is no different than us as people being influenced by persuasive arguments. Ok, so not the same, but needed a bouncing wall.

Point being, Google leveled the playing field. A small company of 1 could compete with a company of 120 by knowing how to properly get links and optimize a web page with the correct search terms. We all play by someone’s rules. Some rules are profitable. Others make for good soap boxes…

Jonathon, I'm all for optimizing one little weblog so it mingles with giants.

And I certainly didn't say people pay Google for results, but from the user's point of view, the top-ranked results in product searches (idea and event searches fare far better) are often useless, frustrating indexes that at best lead to the front pages of sites that usually don't have what you're looking for. At worst, they lead nowhere.

In a user-centered world, the example I used -- a search on pool domes yellow -- should lead me to a page of sites with pool domes, some of which are yellow. Instead, the top result is an index of 20 site links, each with dozens of keywords attached, that comes up because number 18 has the phrase "Polish Yellow Pages" in it! (Shopping Home and Garden Swimming Pools and Spas Domes and Enclosures Polish Yellow Pages - Polska - Poland - Polen) And it's 404 to boot (i.e. "not found on this server).

Garbage.

A phrase search on "yellow pool domes" yields no results. A page would be likely to have "pool domes" followed by a list of available colors. A partial phrase search -- "pool domes" yellow -- brings up (you guessed it!) the Yahoo directory, where the word "yellow" appears in an ad for Yahoo! Yellow Pages.

So I tried a different color -- "pool domes" red -- and the Number One result is yet another index, in which the word red simply does not appear. In the source code, there's a link to the Oklahoma Dirt Band, Red Dirt Country Music. That's where the "red" came from.

Have I torn out all my hair yet? Is anybody happy here? Is the Polish Yellow Pages paying for a link that goes nowhere? Does Google appear hoodwinked? Is anybody served?

Related: Ask Jeeves denounces paid inclusion. News.com reports,

Ask Jeeves will stop accepting advertiser payments for inclusion in its searchable Web database, a move to draw competitive lines between it and Yahoo's new search engine.

Jim Lanzone, vice president of product management for Emeryville, Calif.-based Ask Jeeves, said late Tuesday that after 18 months the Internet search company will cease Index Connect, its paid inclusion program. Paid inclusion allows advertisers to pay fees to have large numbers of Web addresses indexed more regularly in search engines--a service that Yahoo just re-launched and that No. 1 search site Google denounces.

After much testing of paid inclusion the company found that it can negatively sway search results—producing more commercial and irrelevant lists of Web sites, Lanzone said. Ultimately, that hampers the search experience, he said.

"We're never going to mix church and state again," Lanzone said.

Here's the Ask Jeeves test: pool domes yellow

The result shows a clearly marked section at the top, the Featured Sponsor (Yellow Pages again) and another of Sponsored Web Results. The plain Web Results section contains pages that clearly sell... yellow pool domes.

Thanks for writing, Jonathon. Without you I wouldn't have known to use Ask Jeeves to find specific items.
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Veep poll: Our unscientific but one-vote per-user poll at this moment shows Sen. John Edwards, N.C. 35.0%, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, N.Y. 25.6%, Rep. Dick Gephardt, Mo. 10.3%, Gov. Bill Richardson, N.M. 10.3%, Sen. Bob Graham, Fla. 4.9%, Former Sen. Max Cleland, Ga. 4.0%. The poll is still open, if you want to chime in.

For the "weird running mates" series: Could Kerry Pick McCain for VP? at Slate and Vice President Bill Clinton? in the N.Y. Times.

If you're not totally burned out on politics now, John Kerry took his campaign to ever-so-symbolic Florida yesterday, according to the Tampa Tribune:

"Surrounded by members of firefighter and law enforcement unions in Orlando, , the Democrat charged that the Republican president hasn't lived up to pledges made after the Sept. 11 attacks to bolster border security, police and fire protection."

Meanwhile, President Bush's campaign kicked off on a sour note: NYT: Bush Campaign Defends Use of 9/11 in TV Ads

The International Association of Fire Fighters Union, which was meeting today in Bal Harbour, Fla., approved a resolution asking the Bush campaign to pull the advertisements, the union's spokesman, Jeff Zack, told The Associated Press. The resolution also urges Bush to "apologize to the families of firefighters killed on 9/11 for demeaning the memory of their loved ones in an attempt to curry support for his re-election."

Finally, The Candidate: A landslide for Kerry. But can he now unseat Bush? at The Independent (U.K.) This view of our process from the heart of the previous big empire is unsettling.
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Livio De Marchi:
Everything in the house is sculpted of wood, with an exterior, and some furniture, that looks like books.
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McDonald's does penance: 15 random $1 million prizes: The Globe reports,

Starting (Friday), McDonald's will be giving away $1 million prizes to 15 random customers who walk into their restaurants. Chances are you've heard zilch about this contest. Why?

Perhaps that is because McDonald's agreed to offer this $15 million Instant Prize Giveaway to settle a long-running class-action lawsuit. In 2001, the company was tarred by the so-called Simon Marketing scandal, when FBI investigators revealed that employees of Los Angeles-based Simon had stolen millions of dollars in prizes for such McDonald's contests as "Monopoly" and "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" ...

via Romenesko's Obscure Store
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Losing Control of Your TV: The latest anti-piracy move will prevent you from making high-quality copies of broadcast TV programs. And the new "broadcast flag" technology enables all manner of other restrictions. At MIT Tech Review.
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March 3, 2004, 6:40 p.m.

My experience as an Election Judge in Baltimore County: Following up on yesterday's item that led with Aviel Rubin, one of the authors of the Johns Hopkins study Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, serving as an election judge in Lutherville, Md., here's Rubin's account of his day. It's all interesting, but here are the relevant revelations from the front lines:

During breaks, I decided to educate Marie and Joy about the security problems of electronic voting machines. Amazingly, they really started to get it. They confessed that they had been ready to fight me, and that there was great animosity towards me, but that, in their words, I wasn't "such a bad guy after all". At the same time, I started realizing that some of the attacks described in our initial paper were actually quite unrealistic, at least in a precinct with judges who worked as hard as ours did and who were as vigilant. At the same time, I found that I had underestimated some of the threats before. I think that being an election judge was the best thing I could have possibly done to learn about the real security of elections.

In our paper, we described how the smartcards used by these machines had no cryptography on them, and we made the widely criticized claim that a teenager in a garage could manufacture smartcards and use them to vote 20 times. I now believe that this particular attack is not a real threat -- at least not in the primary I worked today. We had 9 judges and 5 machines. Whenever a voter took what seemed to be too long, we always had a judge ask them if they needed help, or if something was wrong. Also, the machines make a loud clicking sound when the smartcard is ejected, and we almost always had a judge standing there waiting to collect the card and give the voter a sticker, as they are ushered out.

In general, multiple voting attacks during the election are not likely to work in a precinct such as the one where I worked. Every hour or so, we counted all of the voter authorization cards (different from the smartcards), which were in an envelope taped to the machine, and compared them to the number of votes counted by the machine so far. I believe that if any voter somehow managed to vote multiple times, that it would be detected within an hour. I have no idea what we would do in that situation. In fact, I think we'd have a serious problem on our hands, but at least we would know it.

Every hour, we also counted the totals on the machines and compared them to the totals in the registration roster that we used to check people in. I was amazed at the number of countings and pieces of paper that we shuffled throughout the day in what was billed as a paperless electronic election.

There were also some security issues that I found to be much worse than I expected. All of the tallies are kept on PCMCIA cards. At the end of the election, each of those cards is loaded onto one machine, designated as the zero machine. (I found it interesting that Diebold numbered the machines 0 through n-1, disproving my notion that they don't have anyone on board who knows anything about Computer Science.) The zero machine is then connected to a modem, and the tallies are sent to a central place, where they are incorporated with the tallies of other precincts. In our case, the phone line was not working properly, so we went to the backup plan. The zero machine combined all the tallies from the PCMCIA cards that were loaded one at a time onto the machine. It then printed out the final tallies. One copy of that went onto the outside door of the building where there were talliers and poll watchers eagerly waiting. The other was put into a pouch with all of the PCMCIA cards, each wrapped in a printed tally of the machine to which it corresponds, and that pouch was driven by the two head judges to the board of elections office.

The security risk I saw was that Diebold had designated which machine would be the zero machine, and at one point, all of the vote tallies were loaded onto that one machine in memory. That would be the perfect point to completely change the tallies. There is no need to attack all of the machines at a precinct if someone could tamper with the zero machine. In fact, even when the modem is used, it is only the zero machine that makes the call. In the code we examined, that phone call is not protected correctly with cryptography. Perhaps that has been fixed. I was glad to see that the administrator PIN actually used in the election was not the 1111 that we used in our training, and that we had seen in the code.

One thing absolutely amazed me. With very few exceptions, the voters really LOVED the machines. They raved about them to us judges. The most common comment was "That was so easy." I can see why people take so much offense at the notion that the machines are completely insecure. Given my role today, I just smiled and nodded. I was not about to tell voters that the machines they had just voted on were so insecure. I was curious that voters did not seem to question how their votes were recorded. The voter verifiability that I find so precious did not seem to be on the minds of these voters.

It was on the mind of a California voter, though:
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Did I vote? Blogger Brian Dear of Brianstorms wonders,

I went to the polling place. I used a Diebold machine.

But I have no idea if I actually voted nor do I know if my vote actually was counted.

The happy-go-lucky local San Diego TV news reported tonight very nonchalantly that roughly 25% of the voting machines DIDN'T WORK when the polls opened this morning. Why? DIEBOLD and MICROSOFT WINDOWS SOFTWARE PROBLEMS. ...

...THIS IS NOT ABOUT TOUCH SCREENS.

It's very much about what happens to your vote *after* it is processed by the touch screen terminal. Where does it go? What machines does it pass through? What evidence is there that my vote was even counted? I took my little card out of the Diebold machine when I was done voting, stood in the center of the neighbor's garage polling place, waved the card around to all the polling people, none of whom seemed to care. Finally got someone's attention, and she took the card. I have no idea what she did with it. I did not see her run the card through a reader or other machine, and she gave me nothing but the sticker. ...

(The sticker read, "I VOTED TOUCH SCREEN," which isn't quite English.)

Poll workers grapple with electronic voting glitches is the AP wrapup:

The Baltimore Sun reports, Touch-screen gets a mixed Md. response: New ballot technology called easier by some, but suffers breakdowns:

The Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland, which offers this report,

VerifiedVoting.org has a page of reports, There are more reports at BlackBoxVoting.com, where you'll also find Bev Harris's book, with the same name as the site, in its entirety. Bev Harris found (or was leaked) internal memos Diebold left on an open server detailing problems with its machines.

The potential danger to our voting system does not come from child hackers, but from political dirty tricks: Check out the Top 10 Ways to Rig a Voting Machine at Harris's site.

Related: The Voter Confidence Act would require a voter-verifiable audit trail on every voting system. Lots more at that link.
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Who for Veep? We're running a poll here. It'll pop up. (Although I block unrequested popups, I can bring one up if I click the link. If you can't, here's an alternate link to a page with the same poll on it.)
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GasPriceWatch uses volunteer spotters to check prices at the pump nationwide. (Volunteer here)

Today the high is at a Thrifty (!) station in Chula Vista, Calif. -- $2.39 a gallon -- and the low, $1.43, is in Yorktown, Va. National average is $1.77.

They list stations, but don't have spotters checking prices, in Rhode Island, so you might want to pitch in. The closest station with a price is a Shell on South Ave. in Attleboro, Mass., at $1.65.
via Brianstorms
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Cincinnati power lines set to carry broadband Internet access: From the Cincinnati Enquirer,

A unit of Cinergy Corp. today will become the nation's first electric utility to offer high-speed Internet service to customers via its power lines, turning every electrical outlet in homes or offices into a Web connection. ...

Cinergy thinks that BPL has a couple of advantages over competitors. It doesn't require a cable or phone line, and can be operated from anyplace where there's an electric wall outlet. Upload and download speeds are the same, unlike DSL and cable modem service - whose upload speeds are slower than download speeds. ...

Cinergy and Current plan to offer several levels of service starting at 1 megabit a second at $29.95 a month. Road Runner locally costs $44.95 a month for download speeds of up to 3 megabits; Cincinnati Bell's Zoomtown costs $41.95 a month for the same speed. They both offer signup discounts.

This is an elegant solution to getting broadband to nearly everyone with an electrical outlet.
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Air America: The N.Y. Post reports,

The long talked-about liberal talk radio network has finally found an affiliate in New York - WLIB (1190 AM), The Post has learned.

Air America, as the network will be known, is also expected to announce that outspoken comedian Janeane Garofalo will join pit-bull humorist Al Franken in its line-up.

The left-leaning network is backed mainly by well-heeled Democrats who want a counter-balance to conservative powerhouses like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

The network could be up and running later this month or early April.

The lineup so far:

Franken is expected to air at noon and go toe-to-toe with Rush Limbaugh, who has a 15 million-listener head start.

South Florida liberal Randi Rhodes will follow Franken and be up against Sean Hannity (WABC), Bill O'Reilly and Bob Grant (both on WOR) in New York.

Garofalo is the network's choice for 8 to 11 p.m., Post sources say. Robert Kennedy, Jr. will host a weekend slot.

Related: The Junk Science of George W. Bush. I'm late with this, but it's by environmentalist RFK Jr., in The Nation.
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Find that strip: The Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search: C.H.E.S.S.! The database contains all 3150 Calvin and Hobbes strips published with complete references to the books and pages they're published on. Limited to 10 strips a day.
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Gene Wolf's rules for writers: The SciFi author offers thoughts such as,

Understand your characters. No one is a villain to him/herself. No one is clinically sane if you know them well enough.

(I didn't know so many writers made rules. See Elmore Leonard's rules, from Monday. If this keeps up, I'm gonna have to see if I have any rules.)
via Cory Doctorow
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Stare at the image and when you close your eyes, a vision will appear on your eyelids. (via Patrick Blake)
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March 2, 2004

E-voting: Who'd want to hack this election? Some early reports are trickling in of difficulties with electronic voting machines, but who'd want to hack this election -- "Script Kiddies for John Edwards"?

In Maryland, where the first reports critical of Diebold voting system emerged from Johns Hopkins University (Analysis of an Electronic Voting System), one of the authors of the study, Aviel Rubin, served as an election judge in Lutherville. The Baltimore Sun reports (Voting-machine critic will be the judge today),

When the polls open at 7 a.m., he will be there to assist Super Tuesday voters with the new Diebold AccuVote-TS touch-screen machines, helping them navigate the ATM-like devices that his research shows are vulnerable to subversions by hackers ranging from casting multiple ballots to vote-switching. ...

... Rubin, 36, said he volunteered to serve as an election judge because he cares about democracy and has been accused by critics of not having experience with voting procedures.

"I thought I would be able to learn more about the process and have a better way to evaluate the security of the system," said Rubin, technical director of Hopkins' Information Security Institute.

While he had a few quibbles about training and type size,

... Rubin said he believes the primary election isn't exciting enough to provide much incentive for a hacker to tamper with the results. "We might have a flawless Super Tuesday," he said.. ..."I think in the general election these machines will be a big juicy target."

Meanwhile, in Solano County, Calif., the Fairfield Daily Republic reports, Diebold and county too cozy, critics say:

Some voting rights activists are questioning whether Solano County is acting properly by letting a Diebold employee speak on the Registrar of Voters' behalf.

Jo Murray, who owns a public relations firm in the Bay Area, was hired by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems to showcase the company's Accu-Vote TSx touch-screen voting machines. Solano County is using the machines for the first time today.

Although she initially identified herself as Diebold representative, in later interviews Murray asked to be called a spokesperson for the Registrar of Voters office. Her local voicemail number says she is "Jo Murray with the Solano County Registrar of Voters."

How cozy is too cozy?

Doug MacDonald of the local Community Labor Alliance has been bothered by the relationship between Diebold and the Registrar of Voters office.

"It concerns me," MacDonald said. "We're seeing the privatization of our own government."

Kim Alexander, director of the California Voters Project who has criticized paperless voting, has heard of other California counties who were handing off reporters' questions to Diebold representatives.

"I think that counties that have adopted electronic voting systems have recognized that they're something that need to be 'sold' to the public," Alexander said. "But at what point do you draw the line?"

In Miami, the Herald reported last week, Florida shuns paper backup of computer ballots.

TALLAHASSEE - It is ''extremely unlikely'' that Florida voters in November will be able to check their machine-vote ballots against a paper printout before leaving the polls, the head of the state's election process told the Legislature on Wednesday.

But the official, Secretary of State Glenda Hood, insisted that voters have every reason to remain confident in electronic voting machines, despite rising worries across the nation that such machines are susceptible to computer hackers who could possibly alter the outcome of an election.

''Florida is no longer haunted by those ghosts of 2000,'' Hood said, referring to the state's infamous chad-filled recount. ``We have every confidence that the machines we have certified are secure against tampering.''

But,

University of Iowa Associate Professor Douglas Jones, former chairman of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems, told The Herald in a phone interview Wednesday that touch-screen machines destroy all proof of original voter intent.

''The best you can view them as is hearsay,'' Jones said. ``The machine says what the vote was.''

Here's an early AP report on early problems, and Instapundit is pulling glitch reports together.

More tomorrow, no doubt.
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Here's your chance to pick a presidential nominee: Nope, that was not the election headline anywhere today. Newspapers uniformly chose to tell voters, as the Providence Journal did, "Kerry looks to sweep Edwards out of the race" and "Kerry expected to take Mass., R.I. primaries."

It sounds as though the voting already happened, and we missed it. No wonder turnout is low.

The real voting seems to go on by telephone, weeks earlier, among a scientifically selected sample of 500 likely voters -- some of whom are muttering "none of your business" while they tell you what they think you want to hear, or what they think is safe to say (in case the pollster, who knows your name, goes to your church). Or you might even guess, so you don't seem stupid, if you haven't really been paying attention.

But nobody called me.

I don't know why the press needs to tell us who's going to win before we vote. It might convince people their votes don't matter.
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Water Once Filled Mars Opportunity Rover Landing Site: Space.com has a lot. The big questions aren't answered yet: Is there more down deep? When did the water leave, and how? If it was a habitable place, when, and what happened to it? Stay tuned...
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Why Matt Drudge is bad for online journalism: From The Guardian (U.K.):

Thanks to people like Drudge, the internet is turning into a gigantic gossip laundering operation for cowardly print hacks. Heard a juicy rumour about a presidential candidate? Know it's probably total rubbish but want to print it anyway? No problem! Just leak it to Drudge, wait for him to print it and then run it in your own pages as an "internet rumour". Job done.

Related: Drudge is linking right now to this: "SPEECH: Drudge Cautions Against 'Bleaching' The News..." but I can't get into the link, which is overloaded and in a "Subscribers" directory, which may keep it away from you and me. I won't even try to guess what whiter news is.
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J.D. Lasica: Yahoo abandons honest search. The senior editor at Online Journalism Review rewrites the Times headline that says, "Yahoo to Charge for Guaranteeing a Spot on Its Index."

Yahoo said yesterday that it would start charging companies that want to ensure that their Web sites are included in its Web index from which research results are selected.

The practice, called "paid inclusion," has long been a part of many search engines including Microsoft's MSN search function and Ask Jeeves. But Google, which last year surged ahead of Yahoo to become the No. 1 site for searching on the Internet, disdains the practice as misleading.

Last month, Yahoo replaced Google, which had operated Yahoo's search engine, with its own technology to index billions of Web pages. Yahoo says it hopes to include every site on the Internet it can find in that index at no charge. But sites that pay for Yahoo's new program can guarantee that they are included in the index.

"It's unethical." J.D. writes. "When people go to a search engine, they expect honest results, not paid propaganda. The article I wrote for OJR in 2001, Search engines and editorial integrity, is still apropos."

When I'm looking for something, I usually don't want the information provided by the highest bidder, but that's what I seem to get, even with Google, due to indexes that probably have paid rankings. If you don't know what I mean, put this into Google:

pool domes yellow

These were just words that came to mind. The top three listings are below. All are indexes. And one of them is ... Yahoo.

Swimming Pool and Spa Domes and Enclosures
www.search-co.com/Home_and_Garden/Swimming_Pools_and_Spas/ Domes_and_Enclosures/ - 16k - Cached - Similar pages

Yahoo! Directory Pool, Spa, and Hot Tub Covers and Liners
dir.yahoo.com/.../Home_and_Garden/Pools__Spas__and_Hot_Tubs/ Supplies_and_Equipment/Covers_and_Liners/ - 21k - Cached - Similar pages

b2bYellowpages.com search for Dome
www.b2byellowpages.com/search/ search.cgi?textfield=Dome - 31k - Cached - Similar pages

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News video of '69 events: Also from J.D.:

Wow, this is nice. Charles Andres, a group manager at Sun Microsystems, put together a page of network news clips taken during the tumultuous year of 1968, including rare videotape footage of the CBS Evening News on April 4, the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, and ABC News coverage of the Democratic National Convention from Aug 28, 1968, the night of the largest riots, the fight over the Vietnam War plank and Vice Presidents Humphrey's nomination.

All you need is love -- I mean, all you need is Quicktime.

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March 1, 2004, 6:10 p.m.

Tuesday is Primary Day in Rhode Island. Go vote (here's where) -- it'll make you feel part of what will unfold for the rest of the year.

NFL wants later times, dates: More cold weather football is coming, if the NFL gets its way. USA Today reports,

Although changes could be a few years away, NFL fans shouldn't get too comfortable on their couches.

In the next TV contract for 2006, February might be a month with more playoff games. And fans could have an extra hour of Sunday leisure. ...

Other proposals the NFL has floated to the networks:

• Move back starting times for Sunday afternoon games on Fox and CBS an hour to 2 and 5 p.m. ET. A similar move in playoff games has resulted in higher ratings. CBS would probably be against the plan because it would further delay "60 Minutes," the network's highly successful news program.

• Drop the AFC/NFC delineations on Sunday afternoon games. Fox and CBS would alternately choose games when the schedule is determined in April.

• Move back the start of the season one to two weeks, with the goal of moving some of the playoffs into the February TV ratings sweeps period.

• Move ABC's Monday Night Football to Thursday. That probably won't happen as MNF's ratings improved last year and NBC and CBS have traditionally had stronger counter programming on Thursday.

• Add a fifth TV package of games, possibly on Thursday nights. TNT, HBO and Fox/Comcast figure to be interested in a new package that might be valued at $500 million to $800 million a year. If the NFL obtains 3% to 5% increases in the present packages, it likely would not pursue an extra TV partner.

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Job Losses Pit CNN's Dobbs Against Old Pals: The Wall Street Journal reports,

CNN anchor Lou Dobbs is on a crusade -- and oddly, his target is the U.S. business establishment. Nearly every night for the past year, in a campaign he calls "Exporting America," Mr. Dobbs has railed against companies that move jobs to low-wage countries.

On recent broadcasts of "Lou Dobbs Tonight," he has called for President Bush to fire a top economic adviser who said outsourcing U.S. service jobs is probably good for the economy, and lauded Congress for considering legislation to limit government work from being sent overseas. On his section of CNN's Web site, Mr. Dobbs has compiled a list of more than 200 companies that he says are "either sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers." ...

... Mr. Dobbs acknowledges that his anti-outsourcing campaign has sparked complaints from some traditional allies. "I've had one or two CEOs suggest that I'm a communist," he says. James K. Glassman, a conservative commentator who sparred with Mr. Dobbs on the air earlier this month, has launched an anti-Dobbs campaign on his Web site. And in India, an economist calls the growing political backlash in the U.S. against outsourcing the "Lou Dobbs effect."

Related: Number of Mass Layoffs Rose Sharply in January. The Washington Post reports,

More than 2,400 employers across the country reported laying off 50 or more workers in January, the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.

Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher. A total of 239,454 workers lost their jobs in the January layoffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, based on unemployment insurance claims filed with state employment agencies. Among them were 17,544 temporary workers. ...

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Elmore Leonard’s ten rules for fiction writers. These are good. If you still want to write a novel, go look.
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Confused by gay marriage? Join the politicians: From the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News,

If the debate is about an amendment against same-sex marriage, the tone shifts. It feels less like giving gays something and more about fiddling with a sacred national document, or changing it to restrict rights instead of to protect them.

That is friendlier ground for Democrats. Gays and lesbians have not yet persuaded a majority of Americans that they should be granted the right to marry, but they have persuaded most that they should not be singled out for discrimination.

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Pfizer Gives Up Testing Viagra on Women: The bottom line:

Indeed, getting a woman to connect arousal and desire, Dr. Legato said, requires exquisite timing on a man's part and a fair amount of coaxing. "What we need to do is find a pill for engendering the perception of intimacy," she said.

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Justice Scalia Gets Cheney Case Recusal Request: Reuters reports this afternoon,

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday it referred to Justice Antonin Scalia a request that he remove himself from a case about Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force because their recent duck-hunting trip raised questions about his impartiality.

The Sierra Club environmental group, which sued Cheney for the task force papers, filed a motion last week asking that Scalia disqualify himself from the case because the January trip had created "an appearance of impropriety."

It said Scalia's removal would "restore public confidence in the integrity of our nation's highest court."

The justices said in a brief order, "In accordance with its historic practice, the court refers the motion to recuse in this case to Justice Scalia." It was not clear when Scalia would respond to the request.

He has defended his decision to go on the trip and said his impartiality could not be reasonably questioned.

According to the motion, Scalia and his daughter were Cheney's guests on Air Force Two on a Jan. 5 flight to Louisiana. Cheney and Scalia were guests of the president of an energy services company on a duck-hunting vacation.

Cheney is being sued by the Sierra Club and another group. They want him to release documents about White House contacts with the energy industry in 2001. The vice president has appealed to the Supreme Court a ruling ordering him to produce the documents.

In mid-December, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Cheney's appeal. Oral arguments are expected in April.

Related: Justice Scalia and Mr. Cheney. From a NYT editorial yesterday,

Justice Antonin Scalia went duck hunting with Vice President Dick Cheney in January, just weeks after the Supreme Court accepted an important case involving Mr. Cheney. There were widespread calls on Justice Scalia to recuse himself, which he refused. Now it turns out that Justice Scalia accepted free air travel from Mr. Cheney, making the case for recusal far stronger. And there are reports of questionable contacts between Justice Scalia and another person with a case before him. In the interest of justice, and of the court's reputation, Justice Scalia should step aside in Mr. Cheney's case.

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E-voting or 'Bust' in California: From the conservative publication Newsmax

California's headlong rush into electronic voting met a judge last week who apparently doesn't give much weight to a mountain of expert evidence against the use of machines still vulnerable to malfunction.

From lack of convincing protections against software and hardware tampering, to impacts of standard computer tasks like upgrades, preventive virus scanning and an almost constant need for the installation of patches and service packs, it would appear that touch-screen voting machines are less than ready for prime time.

Judge Raymond M. Cadei of the Sacramento Superior Court was appointed by former Gov. Gray Davis in May 2002. On Wednesday, Feb. 18, Cadei refused to order new security measures for touch-screen machines scheduled to be installed in San Diego and several other counties for the March 2 election.

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, "Citizens from four counties requested a temporary restraining order in Sacramento County Superior Court. They asked that up to 18 counties using machines made by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems add more safeguards to protect them against hackers." Cadei said no. ...

It's important that the security of our voting systems be a bipartisan issue. It's encouraging to see this coming from the right.
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It's Time To Get Beneath The Wheels: Rant of the year -- and it's only March 1. Brad Zeller starts off like this,

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. We're all depressed, impotent, socially awkward, afraid of and allergic to everything. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing the jobs that are breaking their balls and corroding their souls; they can't afford to lose the health insurance that pays for their anti-depressants, Viagra, and weekly visits to the therapist. A dollar will buy you a double cheeseburger, a cup of crappy convenience store coffee, and a pull of the slot machine at one of the million senior citizens centers masquerading as gambling casinos. ...

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by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com

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