Gore’s endorsement of Dean tomorrow should be the Tipper, um, Tipping Point. I believe Dean now will win Iowa and will be unstoppable, short of a major gaffe or scandal, of course.

Please keep in mind that I have never once been right about anything in politics.

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Robert Cringely writes:

Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited.

Why was the feature left out of voting machines? Cringely promises us the answer next week.

(Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the link.)

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According to Scott Kirsner’s column in the Boston Globe today (the link breaks tomorrow):

1. What percentage of personal computers get recycled when we’re done with them?

2. What percentage of cell phones are recycled?

Scott writes that you can recycle your cell phone by dropping it off at Staples who will hand it off to a company that will resell it in a less affluent part of the world; Staples will also donate $2-$25 to the Sierra Club. Or, he says, you can go to CollectiveGood to find the name of a nonprofit that would like you to send them your old phone.

To see the answers (presumably specific to the US), use your mouse to select the areas between the X’s.

X———— 11% ———-X
X——- under 1% ——-X

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Can you find the car?

Does this help??

Can you find the candidate?

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Wizbang, a blog started by Kevin Aylward in April, is running a “Best Weblogs” contest — wouldn’t you if your last name were “Award” with an extra YL added? — that, through a set of spelling errors and typos, nominates Joho as best overall blog. I assume they meant “Best All-Over Blog.”

On the other hand, Joho is 20th out of 20 (11 votes as opposed to Little Green Footballs at #1 with 2,435 and kottke.org at #2 with 1,972) , so there is some justice. You are allowed to vote once a day until December 15.

And good news! They let a woman onto the list of best overall blogs! Congratulations, Megnut! To be fair (i.e., to try something new), there is a category for Best Female Authored Blog. No, there isn’t one for Best Male Authored Blog, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, I’m darn proud of Joho’s humiliating showing.

Shelley corrects me. There are two women-written blogs in the Best Overall category. Thanks, and apologies to Michele at A Small Victory.

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…I’m not a member and I’m getting a bunch of hits referred from that site. Care to tell me what they’re saying about this blog over there? Need I don my asbestos underwear?

Aw, what the heck. I’m putting ’em on anyway. They just feel so safe and scratchy…

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I love Samantha Shapiro’s NY Times magazine article on the Dean phenomenon. It gets a lot of the enthusiasm — and the lovely absurdity enthusiasm engenders — right. For example:

There are now 900 unofficial Dean groups. Some of the activities undertaken on behalf of Dean qualify as recognizable politics: people hand out fliers at farmer’s markets or attend local Democratic Party meetings. Others take steps of their own invention: they cover their pajamas with stickers that say ”Howard Dean Has a Posse” and wear them to an art opening, or they organize a squadron to do ”Yoga for Dean.” They compose original songs in honor of Dean. (About two dozen people have done that; another man wrote a set of 23 limericks.) They marry each other wearing Dean paraphernalia. Overweight supporters create Web pages documenting, in daily dispatches, their efforts to lose 100 pounds in time for Dean’s election. … I saw a middle-aged man at a garden party in New Hampshire preface a question to Dean by saying he was associated with Howards for Howard. Dean nodded, as if the man had said he was with the AARP.

And this is crucial:

…they say the point is to give people something to believe in, and to connect those people to one another. The point is to get them out of their houses and bring them together at barbecues, rallies and voting booths. …
Dean supporters do not drive 200 miles through 10 inches of snow — as John Crabtree, 39, and Craig Fleming, 41, did to attend the November Dean meet-up in Fargo, N.D. — to see a political candidate or a representative of his staff. They drive that far to see each other.

And this is right, too:

At the headquarters of most political campaigns, there’s a familiar organizational structure: a group of junior employees carrying out a plan devised by a bunch of senior advisers. The Dean headquarters feels different: a thin veneer of Official Adults barely hovers above a 24-hour hive of intense, mostly youthful devotion. When the adults leave, usually around 10 p.m., the aisles between cubicles are still cluttered with scooters and dogs; when they return in the morning, balancing just-microwaved cinnamon buns and coffee, they climb over pale legs poking out from beneath their desks and shoo sleeping volunteers off their office couches.

It seems to me that the Dean blog is getting better about including negative news. For example, the blog reports that Dean has a slight lead in South Carolina but also reports that the poll says Bush would beat all the leading Democrats in head-to-head matches 8-18%. I like the fact the blog doesn’t bother pointing out that Dean, along with Clark, is one of the 8%’ers.

And the blog prominently links to The Club for Growth site where you can see the TV ad they’re running that claims that Dean wants to raise taxes by about $2,000 on every man, woman, child and dog in America. In typical fashion, the Dean campaign immediately used the attack ad to prompt supporters to raise money for an ad to counter it … and within a couple of days, raised $85,000 more than the $200,000 needed.

I don’t expect a candidate’s blog to be the best aggregator of news about the candidate. But frankness is good.

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It was a good thing I took the train – the Acela – from NYC to Boston last night not only because trains are one of the few modes of transportation that are actually enjoyable, but also because the snow storm felled the airports.

But …

Pitney-Bowes sprang for the extra $50 for first class, so I tried it. Conclusion: Save your money. I couldn’t see any physical difference in the first class car except that it was conspicuously filthy. Yes, they give you a mediocre meal. Yes, you get free liquor, but you’d have to drink a lot more than I do to make it worthwhile.

You do, of course, get to hobnob with the superior class of people who travel first. Why, I was seated between a Wall Street tycoon who peppered his witty conversation with valuable trading tips and a Raja who kept us entertained with mystical feats of prestidigitation.

(Ok, actually, I sat across from a guy who worked for ABC and was jacked into his iPod for the entire trip lest he have to acknowledge the existence of his fellow travelers.)

My point isn’t to whine that oooh I wasn’t sufficiently pampered, poor poor me. I’m just saying that there’s nothing in Amtrak’s first class car to be envious about.

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I’m off to NYC – let’s hear it for Amtrak! – to give a talk to customers of Pitney-Bowes about why documents aren’t really containers of information. Why would we ever think that they were? Perhaps because we’ve viewed ourselves as containers of information. Plus, we’ve recently managed to informationalize all of business. But, you know what? Information isn’t really the lifeblood of business. Lifeblood is the lifeblood of business.

Of course, I’ll probably rewrite the whole thing on the train ride down.

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eWeek (dec. 1) has an excellent article by Peter Galli that summarizes a paper by Eben Moglen, a professor at Columbia U Law School, that describes the logical cleft stick SCO’s law suit has placed the company in.

I’m sure not to get this right, but the basic contradiction Moglen sees in SCO’s position stems from (1) SCO’s proclaiming that Linux contains material copyrighted by SCO while (2) simultaneously suing IBM for donating to the Linux kernel materials covered by non-disclosure agreements with SCO. Further (3) SCO distributes Linux under the GPL. According to Moglen, (3) means that SCO has already published its trade secrets and thus must lose against IBM. If SCO argues that the GPL isn’t valid, then SCO has been distributing Linux contributions to which it doesn’t own the copyright.

Further, SCO is violating the GPL (section 6) by adding terms to the license, which means (according to section 4) that it loses the right to distribute the works. Therefore (IBM rightly claims, according to Moglen), SCO is infringing on IBM’s copyrights by distributing IBM’s kernel contributions.

Concludes Moglen:

Not only the facts but also the law are now fundamentally against SCO’s increasingly desperate position.

Please don’t ask me to explain any of the above. I’ve already forgotten what I meant when I wrote it and I never really understood it anyway.

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