is it just me, or is the ENTIRE FREAKING INTERNET DOWN?

how i am supposed to blog without receiving my talking points from josh marshall?

also, is it just me again, or is this the SCARIEST POST EVER?:

If the Kerry does win, the mainstream media will have gotten him elected with their biased coverage and they will pay for it more than they could imagine. And it will be the blogosphere and you, our supporters, who will make them pay. Our strength will grow incremently with a Kerry victory in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media. Yes, we too have "plans."

um, what exactly is roger l. simon going to do? blog the media to death? write another terrible detective thriller with the "MSM" as the villain?

check out some of the freaky comments on the thread:

"Bush will win.

And Our strength will grow incremently in terms of influence and even economic power. And both will be at the expense of the mainstream media, no matter what."

cue EVIL CACKLING.

via gizmodo (original source unknown)

VA 52 - 47 in bush's favor

from sullivan

not that i really expected otherwise...but i had a faint dream.

so, i voted. it was nothing extraordinary. we drove to arlington, went to our various elementary schools, stood in line for 1.5 hours, voted, and then i got a bagel. i feel good about doing it, but i don't feel INCREDIBLY PROUD or special or anything. voting is an easy thing to do, and everyone should do it, and not take it for granted. my brother and some friends drove up from charlottesville to vote. people are standing 4-5+ hours in line to vote. people voted by absentee ballot, then went to other states to help people there vote who might not be able to otherwise. as a single voter, i don't feel incredibly proud, but seeing what's going on in aggregate, i am pretty freaking amazed.

we're going to an election viewing party tonight somewhere near the cathedral, and depending on which way the election goes, i'll be drunk, or i'll be really drunk. as it is, i currently am so nervous that i feel like i'm going to throw up. let's hope that passes.

I'm standing in line waiting to vote right now. Why is the A-K line moving so much faster? Some sort of conspiracy to disenfranchise those of us from the righteous half of the alphabet? I'll have to ask Charles and Catherine; they're probably in on it. While I'm figuring that out, I might as well mention the other source of electoral fraud that's been on my mind.

One of the things I saw in California was what I considered a mildly silly presentation at Stanford by a guy named Jason Tester. He calls himself an "archaeologist of the future," but the traditional, even-less-credible name for his job is "futurist."

Tester has put together a number of speculative objects pertaining to the intersection of democracy and technology -- you can find most of his presentation at accelerateddemocracy.net. It's worth a look.

The guy's design and fabrication skills are inarguably impressive. The ideas, though, would be amazingly, catastrophically bad for democracy. To his credit, Mr. Tester knows and admits this at the start of his presentation. Still, you kind of end up wondering what the point is.

However, a question from the audience brought things back to reality: what about cameraphones in the voting booth? People can now take a snapshot of the screen or ballot, proving how they voted. Buying votes is consequently made that much more attractive, since buyers can know they're getting their money's worth. When you consider the potential for social networks to facilitate massive, small-scale vote buying you have to start worrying about something like a distributed digital conspiracy -- with individual violators being too numerous and their infractions too small for the government to do anything about it. It'd be filesharing all over again, with token prosecutions doing nothing to stop endless waves of young, self-righteous criminals.

It occurred to me that this is a problem that touchscreen voting can actually solve (as opposed to create). LCD panels emit polarized light. I won't bore you with physics 101, but if you remember that class, you know that you could put a polarizing filter over a camera, point it at a voting machine and see everything but what's on the screen. Make the program randomize the position of the buttons representing each candidate, and you can have a video feed of what each person is doing behind the screen without revealing how they're voting.

Okay, so maybe the solution currently in front of me -- low screens concealing the machine and voter's torso, and little else -- works as well as the cameras and is much cheaper. But is it as cool? Clearly not.