sj's Longest Now [v.1]

In Toronto this weekend. Three cheers for Canada… and Quebec. Welcome back, Boston!

…you know it, baby.  iPods are eternal.

Some thoughts, sights, sounds from the non-campaign trail; Zephyr, Rospars, and more.  Kucinich!  Springer.

Wireless Transmission of Power Now Possible! …and not a century too soon.

Heading into NYC (or trying), I ended up waiting around with others getting on the chinatown bus yesterday.  W all *thought* we’d get on, that is.  The 12:40 departure from NY arrived after 22:30 in Bos, and most other buses and lines were cancelled.  Amtrak arrivals were delayed up to 1:30, too.  And today!  Well, we’ll just see.

The quotes from Soros in this Wash.Post article about his recent $5M pledge to MoveOn.org are remarkable.  And I love what the RNC [irked that Soros has vocally singled out Bush as a danger to the world] has to say about it :

“It’s incredibly ironic that George Soros is trying to create a more open society by using an unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, shadowy, soft-money group to do it,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Christine Iverson said. “George Soros has purchased the Democratic Party.”

Now that Soros has pledged to give more in the months to come, one imagines other worthy organizations will step up to the plate.

Really, really crazy. Let me start with my favorite recent quote, from one of Clark’s volunteer staffers, as reported in one of the homepublished draftclark2004 articles (emphasis mine):

“I trust Wes. Wes has served 34 years. This is not something to be the culmination of a political ideal or dream. This is a continuation of a desire to serve our states,” said Ingram, who had to pause as he began to choke up.

On the sane side, he has a 100-year visition that is far better balanced than the 20-year visions by our very own 2020dems.

	http://www.clark04.com/vision.php

Here’s what the Eastern Interconnect looks like, extending into tiny parts of Wyoming and Texas.  Small pie charts resting on the lines indicate what percent of total capacity the lines are carrying.  Lines carrying over 60% are flagged with blown-up pie charts (Note that some lines near  NYC are carrying over 100% of capacity… but the page doesn’t seem to update).

And here are the specs for a high-voltage circuit breaker.  I guess it’s not so easy to route huge surges into the ground without melting down key equipment…

Aaron Brown on the scary prospect of using Diebold electronic voting machines in the upcoming recall election in Berkeley:

Berkeley uses the Diebold Accuvote DRE machine. Somehow the source code to these machines leaked onto the Internet… several well-respected security researchers took a look at it, and found it riddled with flaws. Without any access to the code, voters could vote multiple times, view partial election results, or even close the polling station. Poll workers could do far more damage. And the machine doesn’t authenticate the remote server when reporting results, meaning that an ISP on the path between the voting machine and the backend vote tabulator could manipulate ballots, results, etc. 

Pretty damn scary.

After Rubin’s paper came out, Diebold wrote a hasty hand-waving rebuttal, and then spent some time publicly ridiculing the academics who wrote the paper, hoping to mollify their clients.  As a result, they produced some incredible propaganda which includes, among other gems (emphasis mine):

It was most unusual to find the industry leader [Diebold] being discredited by a couple of Johns Hopkins University graduate students… [in] a report that directly contradicts information provided by Robyn M. Downs, elections administrator of Prince George’s County, Md., for a story on her implementation of electronic voting….  We believe Ms. Downs. Like most Black people in high-profile jobs, she is not in a position to make mistakes and survive.

I guess that settles it then.