From Lloyd Grove in The Daily News :

The Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign has just issued a helpful “Frequently Asked Questions” memo to its New York fund-raisers:

Question: “Can I use my personal aircraft for campaign business?”

Answer: “No, you may not use your personal aircraft for campaign business. Corporate aircraft may be used, but only if each person boarding the plane pays the equivalent of a first-class airplane ticket.”

Q: “Can I have a fund-raising cocktail party for my friends at a private club or hotel and pay for the party?”

A: “No. You may have them come to your house and treat them up to $1,000 in expenses per adult in the household without it counting against your $2,000 contribution limit.”

Q: “Can I use my executive assistant to help with my fund-raising activities?”

A: “Any person can volunteer to help. Employees may volunteer a maximum of 1 (one) hour per week during working hours and an unlimited amount outside of the office.”/

Thanks for the link goes to the Dean Blog where it looks like they’re going to come awfully close to raising $15 million dollars this quarter, from about 175,000 contributors, hardly any of whom own their own aircraft.

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I went to the gym today for the first time in over 18 months. I used to go before my kids got up, but now I blog instead. As a direct result, I’ve put on decades of blogfat, giving a new meaning to “blogroll.” Since I have all of the stick-to-it-ness of a thrice-used postage stamp, I expect that my new regimen will fail. And since I am a vegetarian, I can’t lose weight the low-carb way. (Alternative title for this entry: Blogging turns you into a carnivore.)

Damn you, blog!

Here are some items more important than that:

Howard Dean has come out with a truly cool set of Internet initiatives, which I blogged about below.

Wesley Clark’s campaign blog is up.

Dave Winer writes about The Rule of Links.

Steve Saltire has a new blog.

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The Dean campaign has just announced:

1. Open source group-support software developed by an independent bunch of folks.

2. A Net Advisory Net to help come up with policy options for the Dean campaign and administration.

3. A statement of Internet principles.

I’ve set up a discussion board to talk about the principles.

I’m excited about this. It’s a fantastic slate of advisors, people who actually understand how the Net works and have worked to maintain its true value. More advisors on this and other topics will be announced later. (Yeah, I’m on the NAN but I don’t count.)

The principles are a starting point for the conversation and are intended to leave plenty of room for disagreements over implementation. They acknowledge the End-to-End nature of the Internet and are consistent with the main point of the World of Ends thang Doc and I posted a few months ago. This is the first presidential campaign that really gets the Internet and will do right by it.

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The American Library Association celebrates Read Banned Books Week by listing the books most frequently challenged authors in 2002 and the 100 most challenged from 1990-2002.

The most challenged books of 2002:

Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling, for its focus on wizardry and magic.
Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for being sexually explicit, using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
“The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier (the “Most Challenged” book of 1998), for using offensive language and being unsuited to age group.
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, for sexual content, racism, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.
“Taming the Star Runner” by S.E. Hinton, for offensive language.
“Captain Underpants” by Dav Pilkey, for insensitivity and being unsuited to age group, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority.
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain, for racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
“Bridge to Terabithia” by Katherine Paterson, for offensive language, sexual content and Occult/Satanism.
“Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor, for insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
“Julie of the Wolves” by Jean Craighead George, for sexual content, offensive language, violence and being unsuited to age group.

The most distressing thing is that the home page of the ALA shows how politicized the freedom to read has become.

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Every day, my comment boards are spammed, sometimes with vile messages. Every day I waste my time manually deleting them and then rebuilding this entire site.

Anyone have a suggestion? I’m using MovableType.

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Salon has an article by Farhad Manjoo recounting how the venerable IEEE’s committee on electronic voting standards went off the rails:

Is the voting equipment industry trying to silence its opponents in a standards group that has traditionally been committed to openness? That’s hard to say definitively … People have been given conflicting and confusing instructions on how to join the group; some members appear to have been accorded preferential treatment; the committee’s leaders have used some technically legal but not very nice parliamentary procedures to prevent opponents from expressing their views; and when critics of the industry have managed to make comments, they appear to have been summarily ignored.

…But some members of the committee are reluctant to put all of the blame on voting industry officials. One person who asked not to be identified said that advocates for strong security systems in voting machines seemed reluctant to work with others in the group and were only interested in pushing a “political agenda.”

Here’s a page (by David Dill) that clearly explains the e-voting issue and what a “voter-verifiable” process might look like: the voter gets to see the paper record of her vote before she presses the electronic plunger to record it.

And here’s an EFF petition.

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From Jim Warren:

A leading County Elections Official, Warren Slocum of San Mateo County, California, has become increasingly concerned about the integrity of some elections systems widely used throughout the United States for local, state and federal elections. His concerns include their lack of complete audit trails and the secret, “proprietary” software used in some of these major voting systems, which dominate more and more of elections technology used in this nation’s public elections.

To publicize the issues, concerns, dangers and solutions, he has begun the first blog devoted to VERIFIABLE voting technology.

This issue is either going to crack open soon or it’s going to become the Black Helicopters of the lefties…

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Dan recounts how our site, WordPirate, got pointlessly hacked. Dan uses the ugly event to remind us of what’s best about the Web.

Over at the official Dean blog, when the comment boards get trolled, people give to the Troll Defense Account. The more people troll, the more money gets donated to the campaign. Cool idea. Bottom up, of course.

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Dave, at the BloggerCon blog, says the Web is about trust. He says:

Jakob Nielsen drew a dichotomy that explains it, the dark side of the Web that sucks in traffic and doesn’t let go, and the light side that distributes flow, trusting that if I send you somewhere good you’ll come back to me for more.

Yup. Links are the stuff of the Web and every link is a little - little - act of selflessness: “Here’s someplace else you might find interesting, so go away from my site. Go! Scoot!” Businesses obsessed with “sticky eyeballs” are the last ones to figure this out. And the first presidential candidate to figure this out is Howard Dean.

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MSNBC reports that the CIA has asked for an investigation of who in the White House - in order to retaliate against the former ambassador who debunked the White House’s lie about Saddam seeking Nigerian uranium. - leaked the fact that the ambassador’s wife was an active CIA agent.

Man, you don’t want to piss off the CIA…

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I haven’t seen it, but people who have say that the Paul Krugman webcast at Berkeley yesterday was hard-hitting and worth watching.

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Happy 5764!

We Jews get to throw away our sins today. We have to ask forgiveness of those we’ve wronged. (If they don’t accept our apology after we’ve offered it sincerely three times, it’s on them.) More important, we have to make amends.

I don’t think we can blog away our sins, but if I mistreated you in this blog this past year, I am truly sorry. Let me know and I will try to make it right and will try not to do it again.

BTW, if you’re going to start a cult, “To heal the world” wouldn’t be such a bad mission. Feel free to use it, but make sure you express it as follows:

“Tikkun Olam” © copyright 3761 BCE, The Jews

Don’t think our lawyers won’t come after you. And believe you me, we have lawyers.

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Here’s a PDF of a report that argues that:

The presence of this single, dominant operating system in the hands of nearly all end users is inherently dangerous. The increased migration of that same operating system into the server world increases the danger even more.

Dan Gillmor cites a Washington Post story that one of the contributors to the story was sacked and that CIO Magazine refused to rent its subscriber list to the group that sponsored the report once the magazine saw the contents, which the magazine deemed “too one-sided.” This feels like the implicit power of Big Advertisers at work. [Disclosure: I'm a columnist for Darwin, a "companion site" of CIO.com.]

Anyway, the report is worth skimming/reading.

Meanwhile, at Darwin, Jonathan Zittrain has a superb article on what’s wrong with copyright law. Here’s a bit of it:

For example, bars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, so long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs of no more than 55 inches diagonally for their patrons to watch, so long as there is only one TV per room. The radio can be played through no more than six loudspeakers, with a limit of four per room. That is, unless the restaurant in question is run by “a governmental body or a nonprofit agricultural or horticultural organization, in the course of an annual agricultural or horticultural fair or exhibition conducted by such body or organization.” Then it’s OK to use more speakers.

and

We are in the midst of a cultural war over copyright, in which the salvos show the complete disconnect between the colliding copyright regimes of statute and practicality, law and life. A formal report by a commission chartered by the British Patent and Trademark Office suggests, without a trace of self-consciousness, that we encourage schoolchildren to include the (c) symbol on all their homework. The Business Software Alliance, a commercial software industry group, just unveiled playitcybersafe.com, a website for kids to inculcate the values of Title 17 over those of consumer praxis. There a kid can play Piracy Deepfreeze, becoming a crusading, well, ferret. “Stop the pirates from freezing the city! Throw your ball into the pirates and their stolen software before they hit the ground.”

and

The cost of making no change at all must also be soberly assessed, all the more so because the Internet heralds such a staggering potential for the rapid transformation and evolution of ideas. This is not about the crass ripping-off of CD tracks but about a possible Jazz Age of creation enabled by technology.

IMO, it’s a must read.

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Jeneane apparently ran into me in a Publix (whatever that is) when I was actually in a different time zone. So, apparently I am now not only getting psychic flashes about earthquakes but am astrally projecting myself without my knowledge.

Since Jeneane and I have never met the 3D way - I look forward to the day - it makes me wonder how she identified me. Was it the duck-like waddle? The weasel eyes that are so close-set that they look crossed beneath my glasses? The stench of half-digested Milky Ways? Jeneane, do me a favor and don’t tell me! Thank you.

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I woke up a few minutes after 6 this morning because I was having a dream that was interrupted by a strong, physical sense that the earth beneath me had swayed a few feet. It was a distinct enough sensation that I woke wondering if it had had a physical cause, the way sometimes you’ll incorporate the sound of a car passing by as the gurgle of digestive juices as you’re trapped in your mother’s lower intestinal tract. (You’ve all had that dream, right?)

I got up, checked the computer and found out that just a few minutes before, there had been a force 8 earthquake in Japan.

Back in the day, when I was teaching logic or philosophy of science I’d take my students through an exercise. How many times in your life have you had a dream involving a plane crash? Take that as a percentage of the number of dreams in a single night within the population of the US above the age of 5. On any day in which a plane is reported to have crashed, that’s how many Americans will be tempted to believe that they foresaw it in their dreams.

Ah, coincidence. What can’t it do?!

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Jerry Michalski has a piece in RedHerring about why the explicitness of social networks such as Friendster get in their way. So true. And a theme — the price of explicitness — that’s looming larger and larger in my own thinking about stuff. That and confusing clarity with truth. A

Ambiguity sort of rulz!

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The TTI Vanguard conference I was at for the past two days is a configuration of elements I hadn’t seen before. And it worked well.

You’ve got the guaranteed presence of celebrity technologists because the Advisory Board consists of genuine luminaries. And because it’s a persistent body, their interactions had depth.

You’ve got carefully selected speakers almost all of whom combined domain expertise with presentation skills. (Leaving me out of it, of course.)