This is...truly, a new low. They knew the discussion in the media about the Paris Britney ad was to recall the Harold Ford ad so people could cry racism and make blue collars resist Obama even more. It wasnt a racist ad (though the most demeaning one against any presidential candidate in history), but they knew there would be a discussion asking if it was racist.  But now, we truly see where they were going with the Paris/Britney ad.

I'm not alone in this, Josh Marshall of TPM opines: "Having found most pundits to be incorrigible morons on racial/sexual messaging, McCain decides to push a bit further ..."

With Barack Obama, we likely have the most technologically-savvy candidate for President in the history of the country.   He's revolutionized campaigning and fundraising with his web-based system.    He  even has his own personal iPod playlist.   Google CEO Eric Schmidt and numerous other leaders in the technology sector have endorsed him.  More importantly, Obama has an innovative series of technology policy proposals on his campaign website under the heading, "Technology and Innovation for a New Generation."  

In contrast, John McCain is technologically illiterate and his campaign's web page barely even mentions any technology issues.

From Federal Computer Week:
"The House rejected a bill last week that would have funded the purchase of paper ballots as a backup to electronic voting systems for the upcoming election.

   The bill would have directed the Election Assistance Commission to establish a program to make the grants in time for the November vote."

http://www.fcw.com/...

If Democrats, who lost two presidential elections under questionable e-voting can't pass a bill providing alternative paper ballots to guarantee free and fair elections, then you have to ask "which lobby paid them off?"

Crossposted at http://Politicook.net

A comment the other day jogged my mind to remember my Commodore 64 computer.  How many of you used one years ago?  To jog your mind, it had 64k memory, hence the name.  No graphic interface, no mouse, just a keyboard.

I wish that I had not discarded it, along with the printer and the 1451 (as I recall) single sided floppy (5.25") disk drive.  It would have been better to keep those items in a box for posterity, but what can I say?

I've had an occasional post that implied that McCain was really living in the past (eg, McCain's New Summer of Love Ad) but today's NY Times story really makes it quite explicit

• McCain is learning how to get online and will have it down soon (when its so trivial)!
 
• McCain doesn't do email cause there's no need?

Can you imagine this person might be President of the US in 2009?  And how truly scary that would be?

{UPDATE: A Jedreport video does a great job showing how scary it could be!}

If this has been diaried to death already, just tell me and I'll delete.

but John McCain, by his own words is a computer illiterate.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know about the subject of Today in History and those who do not.

In teaching the history of calculus, including this man is integral, especially if you don't want to believe the old lie, published and pushed by Isaac Newton, that he and he alone is the father of the study.

If you want to study the history of evolutionary thought, you start not with Darwin but with 17th century thinkers like this man.

If you want to get to the core of the Earth's composition, read what this man proposed about it.

If you fancy the idea of a universal language based not on artificial, invented symbols but how people naturally conceive of things, such that language barriers are no longer formidable, check out his characteristica universalis.

I could go on much longer, but there is not time to fully catalog the plenitude of scholarly contributions made by Gottfried Leibniz, who was born on July 1, 1646.

Remember McCain's answer when asked whether he was a Mac or PC guy?

Neither, I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get.

Now picture yourself as McCain's web guy, being forced to defend your boss' self-confessed illiteracy.

Pressed again on McCain's tech savvy, [McCain aide Mark Soohoo] defends his candidate.

"You don't actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country," he says.

"You actually do," former Edwards blogger Tracy Russo responds, suggesting he try to explain Twitter to his grandmother and then ask her how that applies to governing.

"John McCain is aware of the Internet," says Soohoo. "This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues."

So we've established that McCain knows the internet exists. So did my grandmother, for all the good it did her in truly understanding its import and relevance to today's world.

Hello everyone. This is going to be one of my first technical diaries I plan on posting for kicks and stuff. Today's topic is going to be about the seemingly simple math problem that we grew up with, and looking at it in a different light. Namely, realizing that there is more to mathematics than most people understand. The title of this journal insinuated that 1 + 1 does not equal 2, but rather 10 AND 1 (technically, in my first example 2 = 10). I stand firm in that this is, indeed, correct. The issue arises not in faulty math, but lack of context, and by showing this context I plan on giving insight on two ideas that have farther reaching intricacies: non-decimal-based number systems, and the Boolean Algebra.

John McCain, we've learned, is computer illiterate, and not knowledgeable about the internet.  That may concern some people worried about a president who doesn't understand arguably the most fundamental technological development since the invention of the internal combustion engine.  

Fear not.  I was recently briefed by one of McCain's tech advisers, who demonstrated for me some newfangled gizmos a McCain administration would use to keep America the world's leader in technological innovation and application.

John McCain isn't adept at dealing with digitized information, but that doesn't mean he doesn't care about digits and computations.  For instance, to keep track of all the lobbyist money coming to his campaign from corporate special interests and tax dollars going out as favors to the same corporate special interests, his administration would use this nifty technology:

It's often said we live in an information age.  McCain has many technological answers to the problems of dealing with information.

Here's how he plans to stay in close contact with overseas governments and leaders:  

For domestic transfers of information, this is his solution:

McCain won't neglect infrastructure.  He plans on placing his "good friend" Ted Stevens in charge of developing a vast series of these:

McCain expects to put the US at the vanguard of biotech development with these:

McCain would commit America to cutting edge treatment for mental illness:

It's time to wean ourselves off of our over-reliance on gas-guzzling SUVs and large automobiles.  McCain's plan?  Mass transit:

McCain recognizes that our modes of freight transport need to revamping.  He has some wonderful ideas for harnessing previously underutilized sources of energy:

Are you tired of horrible service and delays when you fly?  McCain has an answer to our overburdened air transportation system:

Terrorism, of course, remains a threat; McCain will propose numerous technological responses.  There's this facial recognition technology:

One of the problems exposed by the 9-11 attacks was the inability of the FBI offices and divisions to effectively process and coordinate the analysis of information.  McCain will champion this new method of copying and preparing data for storage:

To see if suspected terrorists are concealing something dangerous, TSA under a McCain administration would have the best in new x-ray technology:

And in the event of an attack, McCain believes it's crucial that our first responders have state of the art equipment, such as this:

Finally, our greatest export is our culture.  As President, McCain would try to foster the continued growth of the creative class.  He would offer tax breaks to moguls like this guy who push the boundaries of cinema:

Spreading images of American life will help improve our image around the world:

And McCain himself will try to model healthy behavior by engaging in his beloved cycling:

John McCain for President: building a bridge to the nineteenth century.

This isn't the story you thought it was. There is a strong streak of geek in it. But read on...

This is about a company that I thought had awesome idea. Simply put, they have an online virtual computer, with everything you expect from a computer.. disk drives, email, browser, office aps. Yes, a browser within a browser. And you can access it from anywhere in the world.

International Herald Tribune

G.ho.st, pronounced "Ghost," is an acronym for Global Hosted Operating System. Its goal is not as lofty as peace, although its founders and employees hope to encourage it, but to create a free, Web-based virtual computer so that users can access their desktop, files and documents from any computer with an Internet connection, not unlike the way e-mail messages are retrieved online.

What's interesting is the inspiration for the name... because ghosts go through walls, and this is a company with staff who communicate by computers because they are on opposite sides of the Wall....

To say that Americans have had a love affair with technology is the most humdrum of cliches. The idea that new technologies will not only make life easier for us, but will help bring us together as a people, is not new theme in American folklore. Long before there was the Web, or the radio, or even a developed telephone network, American philosophers and social critics dreamed of how new technologies might transform us, make us into a community in all of our diversity. In 1892, as a relatively young man, George Herbert Mead, a pragmatic philosopher in the American grain, wrote a letter to his wife’s parents. It’s worth quoting.

crossposted from unbossed

A new study by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and CareerBuilder.com provides new data on motives for sending US jobs abroad (and abroad can mean Canada) as well as which jobs are a likely target.

Have you been BOINC'd yet? Maybe it's time.

Would you like to help cure cancer? Sounds hard, but it's really not. Simply download this program called BOINC, then select a project. I chose Rosetta because it computes the geometry of protein folding for disease research.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/...

The BOINC program is very good at remaining in the background, out of your way. I have seen no performance penalties after running BOINC for the past several days. My computers (3 of them) seem unaffected, except that the processor, when I'm not using it, is calculating cures for cancer.

I like that idea.

Do you have cancer? If not, stick around; eventually, you will. That's what doctors say: If you live long enough, sooner or later you'll come down with some form of cancer.

For a long-time friend of mine, it was sooner. He's about 47, a successful businessman with a wife and a couple kids. Bad time to find out that he's got myeloma, an incurable cancer of the blood plasma cells.

That's how such diseases are described in mushy human terms, but to a molecular biologist, cancer is a lot like a bug in a super complex computer program, one whose code is written in molecules like DNA, RNA and countless proteins. That means the cure to every cancer or disease that you and I will ever suffer is really just a solution to a very complicated problem in geometry.

Barack Obama, in speech after speech, asks us to follow him into a land that many of us had thought we would never see again, one that has lain fallow and empty for so many years that it had begun to seem as something out of a long-faded dream. In his words of hope and his ideals of an America that can be one again, he hearkens us back to the America in which so many of us grew up. It's easy for nostalgia to take over and romanticize it, and I know things were never peaches and cream, but there was a simplicity to things that allowed people to interact more openly with each other back then.

In the quiet community where I grew up, all of us, all generations, hung out in the neighborhoods, dropped in to each other's homes both invited and uninvited, stayed out into the night when it was summer enjoying the warm air. All of us knew our neighbors, almost all of them, by name, and had daily interactions with them. Our parents were friends; we played at each other's homes and we had private places away from adults where we played in the woods or the fields. The sound of the ice cream truck was a special and electric sound. A family night at the drive-in movie was a fantastic adventure. We may romanticize a lot, but we don't need to embellish these things; they were real. But that's not the world I see today.

One of the things I kept hearing regarding the spying into Obama's passport info, was that they fired the CONTRACTOR the first time and then they fired the CONTRACTOR the second time.  The third time the person was reprimanded.  I can't remember hearing if the third person was a contractor.  But I have thought and keep on thinking that we are stupid to allow our essential data pass through the hands of a contractor.

This passport business was the problem of the state department and they got behind in processing passports and rather than hire people they put contractors into the jobs.  Now some reports have said that some contract relations go back 20 years.  I am not sure if those relations were in actual passport processing.

But you add this to the IRS (see below)

Every so often I get a flash from the future.  12 or more years ago I suggested to a friend that also had a PDA that one day these would also include a cell phone.  He's still amazed.  I'm still kicking myself for not investing in RIM but that another story.  Anyway, lots of my flashes turn out to be ridiculous and I promptly forget them.  How about you?  Anyway, here's today's flash from the future: