McCain and Biden have both been around a long time, and are known factors, and thus boring. So after watching too many speeches that were so vague that either side could have read them, I decided a Q&A between Obama and Palin could be very interesting.

Obama: What did you think of my acceptance speech, where I spoke of my vision for America based on my "belief that I am my brother's keeper"? (1)
Palin: I can't say that appeals to me, thinking of Americans living in 2 by 3 meter shacks, and living off only a dollar a day.

Palin: You are only 40 something, and the Junior Senator of Illinois, do you really think you have the experience to be President?
Obama: You too are only 40 something, and the Governor of Alaska, but do you really think a woman should even be considered for vice-president? (2)

Obama: I heard you're a NRA member, could you show me how to load a gun? Just kidding, I don't believe in the 2cd Amendment.
Palin: I read your voting record, could you tell me how you could possibly support infanticide? Just kidding, I couldn't even consider feticide. (3)

(1) Yes, Obama actually used that metaphor in his nomination acceptance speech, August 28th 2008.
(2) Obama didn't even have the courtesy to vet Hillary Clinton as a possible vice-president, ouch.
(3) Palin's 5th child, in the womb, was diagnosed with Downs Syndrome, but she kept him anyway.

I noticed a while ago that my spam filter was 100% accurate on all plain-text emails. Spammers are now forced to use obfuscation techniques like embedded images and HTML. It seems to me that this provides an easy way of totally eliminating spam:

1. Bounce anything that is not from a whitelisted sender and contains an non-plain-text MIME section.
2. Auto-whitelist anyone I send a mail to.

This means that anyone I email is free to send me whatever they want. Anyone can still contact me, but they are restricted to sending me plain text for the first email, until I reply to them.

Of course, spammers could start sending out messages saying 'I tried to send you some spam but your filter blocked it, please email me.' These will be caught in grey-traps for 8 hours, and by the end of the 8 hours there's a very good chance that the email will have been caught and the sender added to an RBL.

I'll probably try implementing this when I have time, but if anyone has time before me then please do and let me know how well it works.

While some may consider defending the integrity of our democratic vote to be a racist act, that label hasn't discouraged one 67 year old grandmother from speaking out and making a difference. Jane Balogh, in the Federal Way, Washington area, single-handedly began a campaign of letter writing and phone calls to elected officials, in order to bring attention to just how easy voter fraud has become.

As a result of her efforts, officials were able to identify and foil a single case of a dog registered to vote. An Australian shepherd-terrier mix to be exact, that had signed all required forms with his own paw print, and had gotten an absentee-ballot to mail in. To ensure that no good deed goes unpunished, grandma was charged $240 for court costs, sentenced to 10 hours of community-service, and at the courts urging, pay an attorney $1000 to represent her.

The article fails to mention if the dog was registered Democrat or Republican, so for those of you that require that information to determine if this voter fraud situation, was ethical or not, I'm sorry.

The IRS has announced the continuation of its very popular plan of tax exemptions for hybrid cars. Traditionally, poor people whom travel by walking, biking, or bus, have been unable to help the environment because they cannot afford a hybrid car with insurance, gas, and maintenance. But now, with help from the IRS, they will be able to subsidize those rich enough to afford hybrid cars. Tax breaks for the rich, and the poor can help save the environment, it's a win-win situation.

Low Voter Turn Out == Higher Quality
Get Out The Vote campaigns are disingenuous at best, and voter fraud at worst. In fact, countries should take pride in having a low voter turn out, because that means they have a more concentrated percentage of concerned citizens, that are doing the voting. Think of the quality difference of Slashdot stories on the firehose (all 100%) when compared to the choosen few on the frontpage (1%).
"Don't even get me started on the frickin' Firehose." - Captain Splendid

Coercion vs Choice
Countries with near 100% voter turn-out often have widespread ballot-stuffing (hollow appearance of choice), or use threats of violence (coerced choice) to maintain their hold on power, but in a free country you have free choice, and that includes choosing not to vote.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." - Rush

Funny Exception To The Rule
Australia is an exception with their mandatory turn-out laws (not mandatory vote), which can be explained by the fact that they are down-under. It also explains why, when it's winter here, that it's summer down-under, and why their toilets drain water clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. (Corilis Effect) Not to mention they look kind of tough, so it's probably not wise telling them what to do.
"Where does an Aussie croc crash? Anywhere he wants to." - Mate

As I'm writing this, the front page has an Idle story about Mexicans getting chips implanted because abductions are up over 40%. Is this funny because many abductees are never seen again (the subject matter), or is it funny to /. editors because it's happening to Mexicans?

Earlier I submitted this story, of the National Federation of the Blind asking for help, along with an article about developing technical solutions, and along with an article about growing government involvement. But I see it just ended up rewritten by Samzenpus to be a joke in Slashdots new Idle section. (our offtopic humor/meme/viral video/pictures section)

Here is an example of something that is actually funny, without being racist or belittling the blind. Polish actors hired to stand in line for iPhones. It's not funny because of Poland, but because the subject matter is about a company that hired actors, to pretend to stand in line, in order to manufacture hype, for an already over-priced product. So, is this Slashdot:Idle section really a good idea?

In Poland, the mobile operator Orange has admitted to hiring actors to stand in line (picture and video) and talk to passers-by in order to hype the launch of the iPhone 3G. Some offered to sell their place for 100-300 zlotys (30-90 euros, 45-135 dollars). Wojciech Jabczynski, a spokesman for Telekomunikacja Polska said "It was a marketing move. We thought it was a pretty interesting strategy,"

Microsoft is making sizable technological contributions to the upcoming Democrat and Republican National Conventions. (August 25-28 and September 1-4 respectively) Both parties will take advantage of Microsoft software and services for online collaboration, document management, instant messaging, email, scheduling, and web conferencing, as well as Microsoft Surface Computing to deliver local information about transportation, restaurants, and hotels, as well as media of the current and past conventions.

For virtual attendees, the Democrat convention site is providing a progressive web experience (high definition Silverlight video , Digital Rights Management), while the Republican convention site is providing a more conservative web experience (low definition Flash video , downloadable MP3 audio). It would be going too far to say that Microsoft has a monopoly on the election process, but one could confidently say that the next President will have made judicious use of Microsoft technology.

The California Senate recently approved a bill to fund a committee, and enhance the states $15.2-billion shortfall, that will study making those quiet electric cars... noisy.

As concerns over high gas prices, pollution, and conservation rise, so does the number of hybrids and electric cars on public streets. While these vehicles consume less resources, they also produce less noise, which for the most part is great, but at low speeds some are virtually silent thus making them a hazard to others sharing the road. Headlights and running lights are used to make oneself seen, similarly sound solutions are being called for and developed to make oneself heard. If vehicle manufactures don't proactively institute a solution themselves, then governments may form various commitees that will then each pass a different set of standards for each of their respective jurisdictions.

After the Fairness Doctrine wall was torn down in the 1980s, free speech and outlets for it have flourished, providing people with more options for getting information than anytime in history. But some politicians have been reminiscing about the good old days when news only had a limited number of portals, and those few could have their license threatened if they displeased the wrong politician. While some news organizations have been willing to keep silent in exchange for staying in business, others like FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell have been willing to speak out.

"I think it won't be called the Fairness Doctrine by folks who are promoting it. I think it will be called something else, and I think it'll be intertwined into the Net Neutrality debate." also "if you have government dictating content policy, which by the way is a big 1st Amendment problem, then whoever is in charge of government is going to determine what is fair." and "will websites, will bloggers have to give equal time, or equal space on their website to opposing views rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that." closing with "Stay tuned for 09 and 2010." video interview (2:04)

Ground temperatures exceeding 800 degrees (C? F? HOT!) are being recorded at the Los Padres Forest in Ventura County, California. Geologists are uncertain why, but a popular theory is that hydrocarbons in some form (petroleum, gas, coal) are being exposed to air through cracks formed in dry ground. (Fuel + Oxygen + Heat = Fire Triangle) The last thing California needs are forest fires from below, after so recently fighting off forest fires from lightning above, so firefighters are closely monitoring the area.

My current contract at the university expires a week on Monday. It's been fun. I've been employed to set up a History of Computing Collection - a chance to indulge one of my hobbies for a bit after finishing my PhD and relaxing after the immense stress of writing a book and a thesis (in more or less unrelated areas) at the same time.

Now I'm back to freelance writing and spare-time hacking. If anyone wants to employ me for a bit, let me know...

A couple of weeks ago, one of the hard drives in a FreeBSD box of mine died. This was mildly inconvenient, but since it was one of a RAID-1 array, not totally catastrophic. It seems to be the season for drives dying, because the disk in my MacBook Pro just died this evening.

The machine had been being a bit slow and randomly pausing for a while for no apparent reason. I now realise that the random pauses were caused by I/O errors causing userspace processes to block waiting for kernel locks to be released. Ho hum.

Over the last month, I've been becoming progressively more concerned about how long it had been since my last backup (October 2007!) and last weekend I finally got around to running a full backup of my home directory. As such, I haven't lost very much. Most of the work I did in the last week is in svn and the grant proposal I've been working on was rescued just before the drive died completely. I lost a paper I was working on and some emails and chat logs, but nothing particularly important.

I think my next laptop is going to be solid state. Mechanical storage is more trouble than it's worth.

I'm not a huge fan of the GPL. While I agree with the FSF on most things, I can't help feeling that the GPL shows a certain lack of faith in the whole idea - if the open source development model is so much more efficient, and Free Software is so much more valuable, then why do they need such a mass of legalese to protect them?

From a more pragmatic standpoint, the GPL is about the most incompatible Free Software license around. If you write GPL code, you can't use it in a BSD, Apache, X11, MIT, or Mozilla licensed project.

I was fairly happy with the LGPL until recently, however. It is a bit more restrictive than I'd have liked, but as long as you dynamically link to it it doesn't taint your own code. This is a story about the pain caused when lawyers get in the way of writing code.

It turns out that the LGPL, as it stood, wasn't restrictive enough for the FSF's ideology. You can't have freedom without a lot of restrictions (apparently) and so they added a load more to the venerable LGPL 2.1, and created the new, improved, twice as restrictive, LGPL 3.0, and encouraged all GNU projects to upgrade.

One such project, which I'm directly involved with, GNUstep, did so. Then we started having problems. It turns out there's this other license that has a clause stating that it may not be used with any conditions that are not in the license itself. This is the (GNU) GPL. Version 2 of the GNU GPL is incompatible with version 3 of the GNU LGPL, and since it's viral you can't even link code under the two licenses.

That's okay though, right? The FSF has been telling everyone that they should use the 'or later versions' clause when they use the GPL, just in case they want to make it more restrictive in the future. And everyone's done that, right? Well, it turns out, xpdf didn't. And the xpdf code was extracted to form the Poppler library. And the Poppler library, in turn, was wrapped in PopplerKit, an Objective-C framework for rendering PDFs. And so, by the transitive property, all of these GNUstep apps were GPL 2. Which is incompatible with LGPL 3. Which meant that suddenly they couldn't use the latest GNUstep. By the way, PopplerKit isn't the only GPL2-only library used by GNUstep apps.

This is a bit of a problem. So big, in fact, that Debian decided not to carry the latest GNUstep, because it would have meant dropping a load of GNUstep applications from the next release. The eventual outcome? GNUstep has reverted to LGPL2.

This isn't an unusual situation, by the way. A number of big libraries, such as GNU libc (an abomination that needs to die, but for technical, not legal reasons) is having the same problem - the FSF wants to 'upgrade' it to LGPL version 3, but that will mean any Linux distro that ships the new glibc will not be able to ship any GPL 2 apps.

And people wonder why I prefer the BSD license family.