UPDATE – I expressed this a little more eloquently in our school newspaper,but not much: Kerry ignored e-voting problems.

I wish that the mainstream Democrats took the e-voting problems seriously… why was Kucinich the only one to take up e-voting as an issue? I wish that the American media covered our e-voting problems better… I still can’t believe that I’ve been on German TV and Japanese TV to talk about the Diebold case, but not American TV! Why do the Germans and Japanese care more about our elections than we do? People in other countries are convinced that our elections are a farce, that we live in a banana republic, and I’m not sure that they’re wrong. Why did ABC call me, and then fail to call me back despite my repeated attempts to reach them before November 2nd? It’s kind of late now, but if the e-voting problems had received more attention before election night, maybe Kerry wouldn’t have conceded so quickly and easily.

Read this Daily KOS article: Which is more credible: exit polls or Diebold? I don’t really believe in a conspiracy theory, but what is disturbing about this situation with the electronic voting machines (with no paper trail) is that we’ll never know whether there was any hanky-panky in Florida and Ohio this year. Even if there is any evidence of election fraud to be found, only conspiracy theorists will be researching it now. If Kerry hadn’t conceded, you could have had serious organizations with serious funding doing serious research. But no mainstream organization is going to bother looking for evidence of fraud if it doesn’t matter because Kerry has already conceded.

I voted Libertarian, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish the Kerry Democrats were better at life.

I got tired of my bookmarks always building up until they reached the point where they were too big to fit in one screen, and then my switching computers or Linux distros and leaving those bookmarks behind, only for them to build up again…

Therefore I got an account on this awesome social bookmarking website, del.icio.us! I like it a lot already, I’ve subscribed to my friend Andy Smith‘s del.icio.us bookmarks.

Incidentally, this is a great experiment in collecting metadata for links, just as the ESP Game attempts to collect metadata for images.

You should pre-order this book, because I’m quoted in it in multiple
chapters:

Freedom of Expression (R) : Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other
Enemies of Creativity
by Kembrew McLeod

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/6kcpj

Specifically:

hey, just an update on the book. it’ll be out in wide distribution
through doubleday/random house on feb 15, and you ended up being
mentioned and quoted three times, in three chapters (ch. 4: free
culture & barbie in a blender; ch. 5: diebold; ch. 6: free software,
etc.)

Kembrew interviewed me during the Knowledge Held Hostage conference, and he seemed pretty cool. He gets bonus points for trademarking “freedom of expression”.

And I get quoted!

Diebold Coughs Up Cash in Copyright Case!

It’s always nice when papers just print your press release verbatim… what disturbs me is the thought that perhaps papers carry verbatim press releases from less scrupulous people and treat them as stories written by reporters.  What does “By IPR”  in this article mean?  Whoever IPR is, I don’t think they wrote the EFF’s press release.  I’m stumped.   It appears that they’ve basically subscribed to the EFF’s press release page, which is awesome, because these issues never receive as much mainstream attention as they ought to.  I guess we must just have an EFF supporter on the newspaper staff in Millinocket, ME.

I’m never sure which blog I should post to about news articles.  This article mentions  and links to FreeCulture.org… should it go on the Free Culture Blog?  It’s about Diebold, should it go on the SCDC livejournal?  I’ve decided that since today’s article mostly consists of an interview with me, and it has a pretty picture of me in Swarthmore’s library, it’s more about me than anything else and should go on my blog.

So check out the latest article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Students win court ruling – along with measure of fame.   Sadly, it’s one of those annoying news sites that requires registration.  Happily, there is a site, bugmenot.com, which, if you type in the URL of the registration page, will provide a username and password to log in with that some kind user has donated, to save you the pain of going through the whole registration process yourself.  Even more happily, there is an BugMeNot extension for Mozilla Firefox that will automatically fill in one of these user/pass combos when it comes across a registration page, which means that you can breeze through thousands of annoying registration-requiring news sites without giving away all your private info (or taking the time to invent a fake identity).  Yet another reason open source software rocks!

Update: The Washington Post also mentioned our suit, in a difficult to link to page called Electronic Voting: the latest news.  Look for us under “October 13, The Philadelphia Inquirer profiled Nelson Pavlosky”…

Is there any better place to toot my own horn than on my blog?  Until I find a better place to exercise my bragging rights, check out this 3m25s clip from NPR’s All Things Considered about our victory in the Diebold case.  I get to say about 3 sentences, but they are fun sentences 🙂  It’s very flattering to share airtime with Wendy Seltzer from the EFF, John Zittrain from Harvard, etc…. I’m not worthy!  I’m not worthy!  Seriously, all of the credit for this victory goes to our lawyers, especially Jennifer Granick and Cindy Cohn, they rock the house.  If you see them, tell them that I gave them mad props.

Here’s where I flip out and jump up and down and scream, “hell yeah!!”  I’ll post something more coherent later after I’m done partying and I’ve read the decision.
* http://eff.org/
* http://eff.org/news/archives/2004_09.php#001961
* PDF of court decision

The video of my high school physics musical is now online, available on the Internet Archive.  I will try to put it on campus webspace somewhere, but I don’t know if that will be possible since it is half a gig in size.  When Dan Crosta’s media server project comes through, I’ll probably be able to put it on that.

Also, if you are my friend, and you are an artist, I need help making graphics for a powerpoint presentation I’d like to give at the first SCDC meeting on Thursday at 10pm.  I know that this is a bit much to ask, and if you could help but you can’t meet that deadline, that’s helpful as well, since this presentation will be used by other FreeCulture.org groups on other campuses when they launch their local clubs.  If you are not an artist, but you have a friend who is, please talk them into helping us out!   Perhaps a good way to get artists interested in us is to show them our National Barbie-in-a-blender Day project that we did over the summer, which is all about how artistic freedom is threatened by overly restrictive copyright law.,

I finally got my hands on my old Linux desktop again now that I’ve returned from San Francisco.  I’m trying to clean it out so that I can wipe it and reinstall Linux, because all of the old installations on it are borked to a greater or lesser degree.  I’m currently using the most functional one, a Knoppix/Debian installation which works fine except that you have to manually type “pump” after starting up in order to get on the internet, and apt-get seems to have self-destructed.  The inability to install new programs using apt-get is a deal-breaker, so I have to wipe and reinstall, b/c I’m not enough of a guru to fix apt-get once it’s borked.  I like clean installations anyway, crap always builds up on your computer and it’s so refreshing to throw out all the stuff you don’t need.  I’m just SCP-ing all of my stuff to an account on another server while I make the transition.

One thing I found was a couple notes from like February, which included a link that I meant to blog which I never got around to doing.  Kevin at Werblog makes a very interesting point about the free culture debate, the problem of both sides treating the other side as evil radicals.  He also uses the abbreviation FCM for Free Culture Movement, which I haven’t seen before.

There is also this awesome project, FutureMe.org, which lets you send an e-mail to your future self.  Interestingly enough, it takes into account that you may not have the same e-mail in the far future, so you can manage your account so that your “future e-mail” is always current 😉  I know I used this once, but I can’t remember what e-mail I used… presumably it was my Swat e-mail account, I must have known that I would have that until the end of my senior year.

In my notes I also came across the contact info of random reporters from the Diebold case, drafts of SCDC propaganda, thoughts about getting business cards (I really need a business card!), random quotes that I liked to use in my AIM profile, and scattered to-do lists that I’ve forgotten about.  What else is lurking in my old computer?  Stay tuned.

Anyone who reads Real Live Preacher‘s post on homosexuality and the bible should be able to agree that the Bible is at least very open to interpretation on the subject.  I think it  demonstrates that sacrificing cattle should be a higher priority on the Christian agenda than banning gay marriage.

I found this in the comments to Wil Wheaton’s blog post about how the push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage is part of a general “divide and conquer” strategy on the part of conservatives.  I’m not sure about that, but some Republicans are pretty sleazy, especially the ones in the White House, and the FMA definitely does reek of “separate but equal” and the breakdown of the separation of church and state… Hello, this country is not composed entirely of Christians, nor should it be, that would be rather boring.  And it would probably be a pretty disgusting country if it were composed entirely of Christians who believe that their point of view should be enforced on everyone else.

Someone in the comments said that the separation of church and state means that the church shouldn’t have legislative control, not that religious beliefs should be absent from the laws, and when I google for “separation of church and state”, the third hit is noapathy.org’s The Myth of Separation of Church and State, which is a tract written along similar lines. my thoughts on the subject