Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Andrew Sullivan via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan shared by 4 people

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him. On core moral issues, where this man knew what the right thing was, and had to pick between good and evil, he chose evil. When he knew that George W. Bush's war in Iraq was a fiasco and catastrophe, and before Donald Rumsfeld quit, McCain endorsed George W. Bush against his fellow Vietnam vet, John McCain in 2004. By that decision, McCain lost any credibility that he can ever put country first. He put party first and his own career first ahead of what he knew was best for the country.

And when the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to condemn and end the torture regime of Bush and Cheney in 2006, McCain again had a clear choice between good and evil, and chose evil.

He capitulated and enshrined torture as the policy of the United States, by allowing the CIA to use techniques as bad as and worse than the torture inflicted on him in Vietnam. He gave the war criminals in the White House retroactive immunity against the prosecution they so richly deserve. The enormity of this moral betrayal, this betrayal of his country's honor, has yet to sink in. But for my part, it now makes much more sense. He is not the man I thought he was.

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.

And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.

Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.

Kevin Purdy via Lifehacker shared by 5 people

More than 100 companies are strutting their stuff at the Demofall '08 and TechCrunch50 conferences out on the West coast this week. At events like this, which involve dozens of beta demonstrations of new products in development, a lot of the items blend together into a white noise of over-hype, but a handful of this week's debuts are intriguing. Let's take a look at 10 of the neatest up-and-coming offerings that aren't yet available—and the tools already available to you that replicate some of their eyebrow-raising tweaks. Photo by TechCrunch50-2008.

10. Rate Surfer

Not to sound like a doting parent here, but Rate Surfer is really a tool of last financial resort. Still, for those carrying balances between multiple credit cards, it can help you put more dollars toward getting back to financial freedom. You give the webapp access to your credit card accounts, and it monitors them for rate changes. If one card's got a better rate than another, it suggests moving your balance over. It may not be the best situation to be in, but Rate Surfer is nothing if not an honest tool for those with a serious credit fix.

9. RealDVD

There are, of course, many, many tools for any system that let you take a commercial DVD and copy it, or put it on your hard drive for as-you-like viewing. Until now, however, no major media player has stepped forward with a consumer-level, legal software package. RealDVD aims to be exactly that—it keeps the DVD's copy protection intact, and adds an iTunes-like layer of its own. At a $30 introductory price, it's still paying a ransom to use your own possessions, but it might make an easy-to-use solution for legal-conscious parents or less-geeky friends.

The alternative: Adam covered this ground when RealDVD was announced earlier this week, offering up a guide to ripping full DVDs without the nasty DRM.

8. Postbox

Aiming to serve as an intelligent index for your inbox, Postbox is a mail client that focuses on auto-sorting emails into topics, rather than just showing what's newest. So if you're part of a team of writers who are, for example, covering the latest browser release, Postbox keeps track of every URL, image, and all the text about that browser are available in a front-and-center tab, while your bills, PR pitches, and other get-to-laters are in discrete topics lists in the lower-right. That's how it looks, anyways, and we're always intrigued by new approaches to email.
The alternative: Taking the reins into your own hands and setting up a system like Inbox Zero or a personalized version, like Gina's Trusted Trio.

7. Popego / Angstro

There are a lot of startups dedicated to hooking into, organizing, or otherwise taking advantage of people signed up to multiple social networks and social media. Most aren't going to help you get much done, but these two deserve some mention, and together might work quite well. Popego looks at what you look at on the web, checks out your social profiles, and recommends web content with adjustable filters. You can see sites that Popego thinks you and your friends enjoy in common, show only videos that you might find interesting, and make other adjustments. For those who use social media mainly as a career-boosting tool, Angstro is perfect—it shows you news and items about the people you follow on Facebook and LinkedIn, not all the stuff they've dashed off and posted. So if one of your clients makes an announced sale, or your old boss suddenly winds up at a company you'd really like to work for, Angstro is the one letting you know. Now, that's some helpful network noise.

6. 2Pad

height="101" class="right" align="right"/>If you only had 10 seconds in an elevator to pitch 2Pad, you'd do well to say it looked a lot like the Gmail-only Xoopit, taking all the photos and videos in your inbox and setting them up in a easy-browse gallery. 2Pad, however, works with Hotmail, AOL, and other webmail services, and offers separate storage and retrieval for varying-price plans.
The alternative: For Gmail users, well, Xoopit.

5. OtherInbox

If you're your own worst enemy when it comes to stemming the high tides of email, OtherInbox can act as a personal levee. The web-based mail client provides you with an email address that you tweak for all the email sign-ups for deals, alerts, notifications, and other bacn you invite. So you'd give Facebook an address of facebook@yourname.otherinbox.com, and OtherInbox's interface separates out all your commercial/non-human email for quick reading, archiving, and deletion.
The alternative: Users of advanced filters and disposable addresses in Gmail or other advanced email systems already have these tools available to them.

4. MessageSling

MessageSling wants to replace your plain vanilla voicemail with a web-archived, SMS-alert-ready, voice-to-text email forwarding system. Signing up and switching is ingeniously easy—just type in a forward-enabling string on your phone—and the results look pretty neat, although the voice-to-text functions aren't explained fully at this point.
The alternative: As noted by our commenters this morning, also-free service YouMail offers many of the same features, with a slicker interface and personalized greetings.

3. Fitbit

The makers of Fitbit have their hearts in the right place—for many of us, keeping track of exercise and daily physical activity is just another task that makes getting in shape seem a chore, on the order of paying quarterly tax estimates or organizing receipts. The Fitbit is a small, wireless, rechargeable device that can be worn on your pants, shirt, wrist, or undergarments, and tracks how far you walked, how many calories were burned, and even your sleep patterns. From the screenshots, it looks like a data geek's dream, but time will tell if the tracker is comfortable enough to fit into people's lifestyles.
The alternative: If you're an iPod owner, and not all that interested in tracking your non-workout time, the Nike+iPod combo is a cheaper solution. The newest line of iPods actually have Nike+ receivers built in, so the chip alone only runs you $20.

2. Snipd

The idea of "web clipping"—running through web pages, grabbing text or entire pages as you go, organizing them later—isn't very new. Snipd, however, brings a cross-platform, anywhere-you've-got-a-browser bookmarklet into the game. Of course you can search through all that text later, and organize your clippings into different job buckets, but what really might help is that, for the time being, bookmarklet tools like this are really helpful in extension-less browsers like Google Chrome.
The alternative: Setting yourself up with Google Notebook, which integrates nicely into Google Bookmarks and can serve as its own helper for Getting Things Done.
Check out a video of Snipd in action below:

1. UsableLogin

This password-aggregating service hews closely to the secure password system our lead editor proposed two years ago: One password you can remember, modified for every web site login by a system you can understand. UsableLogin automates the second part of that equation—you type in a passcode, and it adds bits of cryptographic data to it for each site. The system appears to work through an extension, so time will tell if it ends up being a Firefox-only novelty or a great idea in password security.

What product on this list are you most interested to try out for yourself? Let us know in the comments.

"by Rabie"

Hutch Carpenter via I'm Not Actually a Geek shared by 5 people

"Her Silent Silhouette"

(author unknown) via KurzweilAI.net Accelerating Intelligence News shared by 5 people

A lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life. The protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now. (Source: http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/biologists-on-t.html)

Bernard Lunn via ReadWriteWeb shared by 5 people

The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.

Although we will make some generalizations about CIOs in this post, we recognize that there is a huge continuum from progressive to traditional.

Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. Most see that Social Media technology has positive potential. But they do have legitimate concerns. Specifically, social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries:

1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app. The viral nature of adoption is a concern for people who have to ensure that the lights are on and the trains run on time. If you are asking people to do serious business on your service, you have to be solid on the reliability and performance scores.

2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped. It is virtually impossible to stop an employee, either foolishly or maliciously, sending digital data that should not be sent. Just make sure that your service does not make this worse and has some reasonable controls.

3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards. Without integration you cannot answer the next one. Building adapters is tedious work. But once you have a library of them, they become a barrier to entry.

4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.

5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. It is also a legitimate concern that if you give a lot of powerful social media tools to people who don't know how to use them wisely, there will be a lot of collateral damage. Like physicians you need to show that your service will "do no harm".

These are all negative, objection issues. Clearly there needs to be a compelling positive reason. We will focus on that in a future post. First step is making sure these objections don't stop you on the way in.

If you want to listen directly to one CIO who is thinking hard about this, see this podcast by Intel CIO John "JJ" Johnson on social media in the enterprise.

What have you experienced? As a vendor, have you found and handled these or other issues? As a customer, have Social Media start-ups shown a good understanding of these issues? What other issues are critical?

Josh Marshall via Talking Points Memo shared by 4 people

One of the interesting aspects of this campaign is watching the scales fall from the eyes of many of John McCain's closest admirers among the veteran DC press corps. I'm not talking about the freaks on Fox News or any of the sycophants at the AP. I'm talking about, let's say, the better sort of reporters and commentators in the 45 to 65 age bracket. To the extent that the press was McCain's base (and in many though now sillier respects it still is) this was the base of the base. And talking to a number of them I can understand why that was, at least in the sense of the person he was then presenting himself as.

But over the last ... maybe six weeks, in various conversations with these folks, the change is palpable. Whether it will make any difference in the tone of coverage in the dominant media I do not know. But it is sinking in.

All politicians stretch the truth, massage it into the best fit with their message. But, let's face it, John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies. Not just exaggerations or half truths but the sort of straight up, up-is-down mind-blowers we've become so accustomed to from the current occupants of the White House. And today McCain comes out with this rancid, race-baiting ad based on another lie. Willie Horton looks mild by comparison. (And remember, President George H.W. Bush never ran the Willie Horton ad himself. It was an outside group. He wasn't willing to degrade himself that far.) As TPM Reader JM said below, at least Horton actually was released on a furlough. This is ugly stuff. And this is an ugly person. There's clearly no level of sleaze this guy won't stoop to to win this election.

And let's be frank. He might win it. This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one's control -- not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.