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you said "what we need is more competition". How do you think this is going to happen?

Here's the problem: our country's broadband infrastructure is owned and operated by a couple of corporations who own all the pipes to people's homes. I don't have a problem with corporations building out infrastructure and seeking to make a very lucrative buck off of it. This is what they do. This is free enterprise. Free enterprise is a good thing. Making money is a good thing. However, and understandably enough, local governments just handed them out permits to dig in our streets to lay their pipes without any attempt to negotiate a future "pipe-sharing" plan with supporting infrastructure for competing businesses to offer content/services/data over those pipes, after they'd recouped their costs and made profits to the tune of $X amount, or after Y years of sole operation and ownership. At the time, we didn't really think in terms of data. Fair enough.

We are at a turning point in history, where we now have the ability to change this.

Contrary to what the incumbents would have us believe, municipality-driven broadband infrastructure would, in my opinion, become the ultimate enabler of free enterprise from the private sector in data, media, and communication SERVICES.

Municipality-driven WiFi is just ONE step in an overall encouraging direction.

Municipality-built broadband infrastructures, beyond providing the ability for said municipality to provide very basic connectivity for free or cheap to its constituents, also provides an opportunity to welcome the private sector to compete on an equal footing. The infrastructure must simply be allowed to evolve to allow for mostly automated ways to "share the pipe".

A WiFi system can be easily extended to enable such sharing. So could a fiber-optic network.

Consider today's "sharing" alternatives in the DSL field: it's bleak. My only real DSL alternative is my local Telco, Verizon. Thankfully, I'm able to get service from EarthLink at about the same price point as Verizon, and instead of getting mere connectivity with the insanely useless MSN premium package, i get stuff i actually find useful, such as Mac OS X Address Book synching with my earthlink online address book, which is tied into the challenge-response-based spam filtering. But here's the problem though, while EarthLink is competing on services, it can't compete with Verizon on speed, because they're only able to resell Verizon's DSL connectivity to me, and from what i've heard, we ain't looking at a big margin here.

I want hundreds of EarthLink's competing on both speed and services.

In the case of Muni WiFi, I could for example get free basic connectivity throttled at lower speeds from the City, with no-other services, and justify spending money with fine services such as knowspam.net to protect myself from spam, flickr.com for photo sharing, TypePad for blogging, Rojo.com for news reading, Prodigem.com for Torrents creating/seeding, .Mac for reliable WEBDAV hosting, some packaged-deal from EarthLink, and/or hundreds of cheap services which may be useful TO ME. There's a lot of innovation on the Internet, many of those innovators are struggling to find sustainable revenue models.

Such a broadband scene will also open the doors to triple-play packages: data, media, communications over a single pipe. Many competitors, the best few ones would win, the customer wins.

Right now, in my area, Verizon and Adelphia are the big winners. I, as a consumer, am not. As far as i'm concerned, these fsckers have no business offering internet services, what the fuck do they know abo

The posters talking about a repeat of the .com bubble are simply not paying attention. The business press and venture capitalists are interested because working business models are finally emerging for a small number of worthwhile blogs. Sony is paying $25,000 a month to sponsor Lifehacker, the latest Gawker blog. Meanwhile, Google is touting Weblogs Inc. as the poster child for AdSense revenue at a presentation for stock analysts. This is real revenue. Yes, many blogs are flooding the Internet with crapola. But some of the better blogs are providing useful news and information and building niche audiences that advertisers will pay to reach.

This website has a neat video of dancing robots on it. It obviously doesn't carry the same implications
that a low-energy walking robot does, but the motor control and balance gyros and the what-have-you
needed for this act are still pretty impressive.

Video

Source page

I hear he uses a Mac

I can rebut even your cherry-picked examples.

The first was that he lied about saying that by 2048 SSN would be bankrupht if not changed.

Yes, it is a lie. In 2048, Social Security is scheduled to be in deficit - paying out more than it's taking in, but still able to pay almost 80% of scheduled benefits without additional funding. Those 80% of benefits are higher, in real terms, than Social Security is paying today.

If you hadn't noticed, the general federal budget is in deficit now. Is the US "bankrupt"? No. Hence, a lie.

Second, let's look at just one of Bush's WMD statements from the site, about the 'mobile weapons laboratories': "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

This is clearly false, and David Kay's report has debunked it. It was widely considered false at the time, or at least very suspect. (Who mixes biological weapons in canvas-sided trailers?)

At some point, you are caught in Reagan's bind - do you plead to incompetence or dishonesty? If Bush was simply wrong about every single one of those statements, and wasn't lying, he needs to be institutionalized for his safety and hours.

(Making a 180 degree flip when you're caught in a lie does not nullify the original lie.)

Source: Wi-Fi Networking News, February 1, 2005

Glenn Fleishman has done a neat job of identifying some of the leading groups and individuals that are trying to stop U.S. municipalities from setting up wireless internet systems, such as the Heartland Institute and the New Millennium Research Council, "a sock puppet for the incumbent telecommunications interests" that don't want municipalities to compete with their own private, for-profit services. According to tech columnist Dan Gillmor , the anti-WiFi campaign is yet another example of the "ongoing scandal" of "lack of transparency in the world of opinion-making. ... What we have today is a system of opinion laundering, where powerful interests try to create public support for their side of issues without disclosing the hidden agendas."

I just paid a visit to Asbestos Blog. Quite a few slashdotters have been there and left their insightful comments.

For those who care, it was generated using typepad and has a single pixel gif to track visitors.

I just paid a visit to Asbestos Blog. Quite a few slashdotters have been there and left their insightful comments.

For those who care, it was generated using typepad and has a single pixel gif to track visitors.

Well, it's clear that in some cases they CANT go "gold" with a product, because they wouldn't be able to charge for it (and it's unclear what the business model would be).

Besides, they're making LOTS of dough, creating new products, and keeping their customers happy... it's that good enough?

Any of those three articles gets into the actual legal issues raised better than TFA, probably because they can't make money by flimflamming you.

There's a guy over a mip's scan having a similar debate (mip.typepad.com)http://mip.typepad.com/ . He's looking for people to provide a little insight as to whether it'll truly be revolutionary or not. What I said over there was that my main concern is that IBM might be pulling a PS/2. The PS/2 has a powerful distributed architecture capable of impressive performance, but alas it is also baroque and Sony did not supply an array of finished tools to harness all that power. The result is that a lot of games just poked along graphics-wise, coming nowhere near the potential of the hardware.

So what does IBM's SDK look like? Developer hand-holding will make or break this approach.

Good point. I wonder if the law professor quoted in the article would like to tell the RIAA that people who invest time and money going to concerts and buying records should have control over what a record company does with the music? Or for that matter, let her tell Paramount that Star Trek fans who have invested time and money watching the show, reading the books and collecting the action figures should have legal recourse when the show gets cancelled. Don't even get me started on Battlestar Galactica. Cylons are clones? Starbuck is a woman??? You'll be hearing from my lawyers!

For those interested, Associate Law Professor Beth Noveck's blog is here.

Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)

Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.

Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.

Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .

Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....

I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)

For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..

Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .

:-)

Vera Nazarian

Not has much as in Indonesia where they're about to imprison couples who kiss in public...

Phase one: default on the General Fund's debt to the Social Security Trust Fund in order to make room in the budget (sort of) to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Phase two: Once that's done, Social Security doesn't have nearly enough revenue to cover currently promised benefits. The White House wants to resolve this through some unspecified level of benefit cuts. The idea is that promised benefits will now be brought into line with the (reduced) quantity of funds available. From here on out, Social Security's accounts will be balanced in a cash flow sense. The amount of money paid out each year will be equal to the amount of FICA collected.

Phase three: we divert one third of our payroll taxes into something resembling an account under the Thrift Savings Plan. Once we choose to do this, Social Security's cash flow will be messed up. Four percentage points of our wage income that were supposed to be going to pay grandma's Social Security benefits are now sitting in our private account. As a result, the government will need to borrow some money to pay grandma's benefits. The administration believes that that money can be borrowed at a 3 percent rate of interest. When we retire, our guaranteed benefits -- already substantially cut during phase two -- will be cut a second time. The size of this cut will be equivalent to the value of our total contribution to our private account, plus 3 percent interest per year. Thus, once we retire, we will have access to all of the money in our private account, but our guaranteed benefits will have been cut twice. Our little brother, meanwhile, who didn't put money into his private account, will only have his benefits cut once.

If that's too complex, try this:
Instead of saying that 4 percentage points of my FICA were diverted into a private account and then the government borrows an equivalent amount of money in order to pay grandma's benefits, say that...

1) All of my FICA goes to pay for grandma

2) The government lends me an amount of money equal to 4 percentage points of my FICA.

3) When I retire, I get the money in my private account, but I need to repay all those loans with an interest rate of 3 percent.

4) In addition to my private account (with the loan repaid) I then get to collect (reduced) guaranteed benefits.

My apologies to Matt Yglesias, from whom this analysis was stolen with minor reforming.

What's the deal with the PDF-format anyway? The document is 17 pages of Powerpoint-like slides. I'm sure some nice, simple HTML could have displayed that much more quickly.

Boy, that's for sure. And you're not the only one who thinks so; see Jeff Jarvis' and Doc Searls' rants on the subject, which prompted a response from ChangeThis' founder, Seth Godin:

I hear you. But I think the comparison is not apt. The right comparison is to compare our PDFs to books.

Books are not searchable. They cost money to reproduce. You can't print multiple copies and Google searches them even less well than they search PDFs.

You don't hear anyone whining about books...

Anyway, we use PDFs because they're a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better.

Maybe he should have just gone all the way and printed them as books, then?

While Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft continue to develop "search relevance technologies", someone out there needs to develop and bring to market a cognitive search engine that can actually understand the content of a page

The problem with bringing a cognitive search engine to market is that no-one has invented a cognitive anything, let alone a useful search engine. Cyc has been around for a long time, and has been used in search engine tasks, and hasn't done much. That should tell you how successful that kind of approach is. I assure you that the big 3 of search would bring out cognitive search if they could. Meanwhile, information retrieval hueristics with no pretensions to intelligence continue to do the job in a surprisingly robust way.

and i think you forgot to add and a pony too.

Anyone know if they plan on fixing the memory leak in Firefox 1.0? I've even used this fix, and Firefox continues to gobble up memory. I don't use tabs, but multiple windows.

Apparently, you're one of the lucky few who have not had problems with their iPod.

Google "iPod Problems" and you find 4,080,000 references on Google:

iPOd Problems via Google

This one seemed to be representative of how many people feel about the iPod: Where We Are Bound: iPod problems Admit it: you are a slave to fashion

Consider yourself lucky that you haven't experienced the battery problems, scratchy audio due to faulty headphone jacks, locked-up/frozen iPods, etc.

Your individual experience does not constitute the rest of the world.

--ScottKin

Therefore it isn't much of a surprise than standalone PDA's are dying when my current pda/phone combo is nearly the same size as a Nokia 7610 and comes with a decent input method (which always was the killer issue with using a standard phone pad to enter details), sends and receieves phone calls/sms/mms and works as a PocketPC with a large base of useful applications. A Nokia simply doesn't cut it and the SonyEricsson P9xx is only discounted because it's syncing with Outlook isn't particulary great (especially with the categorisation of tasks and notes).

A friend of mine is selling his iPaq after getting a Blackberry from work. Sure it doesn't have a NES emulator, PocketScumm and a few other of the niceties - but it does everything he needs.

I'm going to really hate having to give this back.

But "AutoCAD" and "AutoCAD LT" are different animals. LT lacks (Auto)LISP and "3D", but maybe I'm out of touch with the most recent software crippling that Autodesk is providing.

I think the Australian dollar is similar in exchange to the Canadian, so multiply the US price by about 1.3 to compare.

From an Australian CAD vendor, AutoCAD LT 2005 at AUS$1995 (special price).

Batch plotting with AutoCAD LT

Sticker shock for Brits

But "AutoCAD" and "AutoCAD LT" are different animals. LT lacks (Auto)LISP and "3D", but maybe I'm out of touch with the most recent software crippling that Autodesk is providing.

I think the Australian dollar is similar in exchange to the Canadian, so multiply the US price by about 1.3 to compare.

From an Australian CAD vendor, AutoCAD LT 2005 at AUS$1995 (special price).

Batch plotting with AutoCAD LT

Sticker shock for Brits

Only if it comes with a pony.

Well, lets see... Who is it that actually LIVES in nature, grows the food you eat and mines the resources for your daily living. Who breathes fresh air and toils to make an honest living?

You do know that food production and mining in the US are inherently and inescapably unprofitable when in direct competition with other regions in the world and survive only by the subsidies given to you by those "city slickers", don't you? A little gratitude to them for preserving your way of life would be in order I think.

Actually they have an 8000 square foot server room in waterloo full of "master servers", not to mention the server room in the UK servicing their EU customers. Clicky the linky to get an idea how it works.

http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/01/canada _challeng.html

RIM has a substantial investment in the back-end infrastructure that makes the BlackBerry service function, and it does indeed reside outside the US. This infrastructure constitutes largely the part of BlackBerry that infringes on the patent, and that is why the Canadian government is stepping in. US courts have applied patent laws on patent infringement that takes place beyond their borders. And that is just plain wrong.

This has nothing to do with the Blackberry Product itself though. Here's a good synopsis of the system in question and why the US patent shouldn't necessarily have effect. http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/01/canada _challeng.html

I use Nokia Lifeblog - it allows you to post to blogging accounts like Typepad. It's a free download for a trial version and you acn import files off your hard disk so you don't even need a Nokia phone!

Frank Magazine, RIP, called those clowns "Bingo Callers". the label fits.

The government, even a faux-"Compassionate Conservative" government, will likely be forced to provide a safety net to prevent the US from becoming "catfood nation".

The existence of that safety net will encourage the companies who are supposed to manage our investments to cheat and swindle Americans. By steering their money into bad investments, for kickbacks (as Edward Jones was recently caught doing), or churning their accounts with undesired short-term trades, or who knows what.

So the government will end up needing a safety net anyway, and it will probably be one instituted in a hurry, badly planned, and badly provided for.

Bill Gross's new startup Snap.com has a great new advertising model that solves the click fraud program.

They offer traditonal online advertising options such as charging for the number of times a listing is displayed, and a pay-per-click model (That Gross originally pioneered with Overture).

Snap's big contribution to online advertising is "Pay-Per-Action". They track a user's click-stream from their search engine, to the site, and track a user's movements there. So a bookseller can agree to pay 2% of sales for leads from Snap. Or Friendster could agree to pay $.25 per new subscriber.

This has two big advantages over PPC. It 100% eliminates click fraud. It also eliminates risk to the merchant, there's no more wondering what percentage of PPC visitors will convert to sales.

More on Snap.com at my blog IAmAdamSmith

Our team at online travel startup TripInvite.com plan to start a "Pay per Action" campaign after we launch later this month. Other travel sites signed with Snap are paying about 2 to 3% right now.

I should also have included some relevant links to Internet based news sources bookmarked in Safari:

Slashdot of course.
CNN of course.
NYTimes for the writing and quality of reporting.
BBC for the big mainstream non American news perspective.
Kevin Sites for on the ground reporting in Iraq.
Dan Gillmor for news grassroots news.
CBS for financial info.
CNET for tech news.
Global Security for political defense news.
Google for a good news accumulator.
Cryptome because John manages to pull some pretty damned interesting articles out.
NPR of course. Don't forget to donate.
Reuters because they have the news.
Washington Post for beltway news.
Wall St. Journal for more financial news.
NPR Marketplace for more financial news.
CBS for mainstream US news.
Technocrat for real science oriented geek news, like Slashdot only with less noise.
Oh, yeah and
Macsurfer for a Macintosh community oriented news accumulator.

It appears from browsing the rest of his site that this guy is Italian and has a weak grasp of English. FWIW, he has apparently appeared on several different Italian television shows whilst discussing P2P. And he's not too harsh on the eyes, either.

While I agree that this translation sucks, don't ride him so hard on his poor English skills.

If his is so bad, click here to write your own.

Look! I found some outrage!

http://consilience.typepad.com/teachers_lounge/200 5/01/historycurrent_.html

Yes, it was on his site. In direct contrast to a blog that was paid by the Thune campaign (see article) without any disclosure whatsoever.

<sarcasm>But then, Sen. Thune is a Republican, and IOKIYAR (It's OK If You're A Republican)</sarcasm>

So wait... you think that state budgets get all of their money from federal tax dollars? Hate to break it you, but it doesn't work that way. Sure, state budgets get some federal money. Let's look at some numbers...

I do hope that less than 1/3 of the population uses marijuana, as it's illegal.

Yes, because everyone who has half a brain and can think critically knows how dangerous marijuana can be, and that the government would never make illegal something that wasn't dangerous. They're fully acquainted with what should be illegal and what shouldn't.

Is it me, or is HTML like the PERFECT language of sarcasm?? :)

I doubt that a domestic agency would go to that kind of risk with an amateur like this guy. More likely they'll make him cooperate with any ongoing investigations as a condition of his plea and testify against any new defendants at trial. The better term is "snitch," or more politely "cooperating witness."

In fact, if you RTFA you'd find he hasn't even accepted the plea offer yet, but probably will given that he's facing a ton of jail time.

The same source also offers an explanation for the secrecy surrounding the case: the Secret Service, the source says, has offered to put the hacker to work, pleading him out to a single felony, then enlisting him to catch other computer criminals in the same manner in which he himself was caught. The source says that Jacobsen, facing the prospect of prison time, is favorably considering the offer.

My guess is that http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_p olicy/2005/01/scotus_speaks_e.html Booker/FanFan will delay any sentencing in this case (and many other federal criminal cases).

Checking out the responses, it looks noone watched "Unscrewed with Martin Sargent".

It was a segment on his show, but it really was more about 'oh look, i found this supermodels website, here's some pix' than 'girls in technology'. I don't have high expectations. The funny thing is, I'm a cableone subscriber (pity me) and I got their "plus package" solely for TechTV. Looks like I'll be dropping that soon.

Also, did anyone notice DanHuard's little blog post about TSS having fake calls is now gone? He's emptied his blog for some reason.

If you take California or New York City and treat them as a separate country, the rate of broadband access would be quite competitive with the others.

Show me the website of someone offering 24MB/1MB DSL in New York. This guy gets that in Tokyo. Show me the website of a company providing VDSL to a New York apartment for $50 a month like you can get in South Korea.

I'm sure its nothing to fret about, after all 11th place is respectable for a country that didn't even bother to show up.

What you stole was the revenue the artist expected from the additional copy of their work that's now in your hands.

One more time, using nice, short words that you'll be sure to understand: Your "stolen revenue" argument is only valid when the person who committed the copyright infringement would have purchased the item legitimately if it hadn't been available to copy illegally. A substantial percentage of the time, this is not the case: if the work weren't easily available in the form of an illegal copy, the person would not have spent the money to buy a legal copy. See, for example, this (PDF), this, and this .

In short, an instance of copyright infringement does not always equal a lost sale.

"Any given week I'm sure one fellow sold 20 or 30 CDs at five bucks a pop."

He takes the risk, and will get caught for it eventually, because the greed will overtake common sense. Also there is a different scale of charges to have copywritten material and selling it.

But, for example, I'm mildly interested in how bad 'Battlefield Earth' actually was, so I download it. Watch, cringing, then delete it. There's no outside perceived difference between me and the other guy.

I don't have a problem with that per se, society will level, either by producing a model that can take into account the fact you can feel mugged after leaving a bad movie (especially if you're going to have to sign an NDA not to SMS friends on how bad it was) or by sueing the population into a frenzy of rioting, or something in between. Someone somewhere will always consider me a heathen or evil. Hell, my love for pork chops marks me down for the Taliban. The basic point is I don't care about the game of moral twister that an industry that promotes "Sizzla's" brand of homophobia should squeal about freedom of speech in one breath, then thump the book of the law when they think they're losing out. F*** 'em.

The main problem is that the profits of the companies that are claiming to government that they're hurting are rising pretty steadily. Can you plot a similar line for any other industry on the planet? Again, F*** them.

I have _every_ sympathy for artists that make 70c off their albums. I would personally be honoured to pay the artists direct and get around the advertising budget, A&R, marketing expense accounts and the like. I like the product because I like the product, not because I watch the Saturday rotation, or radio has drilled it into my head. I'm a music fan...my tastes have been honed by nights at home, lucky finds of rarities on market stalls, and swapping...yes...swapping tapes with friends. The music industry cannot _fathom_ or control this level of viral marketing, and you can be sure as damn that there isn't a lot of money in it, but the secondary effect is that the back catalogues of the greats are selling across generations and ARE still selling despite the fact that the industry has _destroyed_ the retail market through greed.

So F*** them in their ear.

"At the call center where last I 9-5'd"

Pay well, did it? A little supplement to the income has greased human evolution since time immemorial, and black markets have been around for quite a while. And nothing scares people like finding out that _everyone_ has dealt with a black market at sometime or another, and the scale of it. The digital content people have found out, and it's scaring them. The majority don't realise that it's been the status-quo since the year dot.

In fact, all of this roughly parallels what happened with the printing press when it arrived, but you don't see anyone shouting that down because some people lost cash. In fact, you could argue that without early print piracy, modern literacy wouldn't be at the stage it is now.

"I would be indignant about the pirates SELLING this stuff"

I am, which is why I would never charge anyone for a copy I made for them of anything. I'm not entirely morally bankrupt, but given the examples of moral behaviour by governments, rich individuals and people around me, I'm not going to be preached at over a couple of CDs, especially given that this is a minority worried about pr

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000490026252/
http://techdigestuk.typepad.com/tech_digest/2005/0 1/meet_robosapien.html

vnunet's CES blog has some photos. Yes, you can see Bill Gates waking up next to an Apple Powerbook.

For categories http://www.typepad.com/ is your best bet, although it's a minimum of $5 a month.

For free my reccomendation would be Blogger. LJ if your looking to be part of an enclosed community.

A study of tagging on del.icio.us .. "A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community"

$1,000 as the initial charge for such infections, with further costs/damages being added afterwards seems quite nice. The idea of having Marc Morganstern, Mitch Bainwol and Dan Glickman all fined $1,000 per compromised machine, plus inflated damages and incarcerated whilst waiting for an ever-delayed trial à la Mitnick seems quite amusing.

They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")

You mean, like, instead of holding up our buddy Howard "YEEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!" Dean (who, according to Dave Barry, is most famous for "making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork"), they could have mentioned, oh, I dunno...

The people who broke Rathergate, maybe? A marketing guy in DC who dug up a forensics document expert or Charles Johnson and his famous reproduction of the faked memos?

How about Glenn Reynolds? Or Moulitsas Zúniga? Who really rallied the troops this election season?

Howard Dean??

What about some of the many Iraqi blogs - written by, you know, people on the ground, as it were? How about Spirit of America's Arabic blogging tool, and the bloggers who took the the challenge to raise money for it?

There's a lot more going on out there than ABC is reporting.

To make matters worse, they're intentionally working to keep ballots from servicemen and women on active duty from being counted. And it seems there's more than the 129 vote margin out there being surpressed.
This Marine in particular is pissed about his vote not being counted.

Democrats scream their mantra of "count every vote"...until it looks like it will cost them an election.

Kim pushes an Infocard Project that would enable any variation of identity management, from centralised servers to federation of entreprise servers or peer-to-peer systems. Whether such grand vision will make it into future Microsoft products is indeed anyone's guess...