It's Cheap, It's Easy, It's Winners And Losers the 2012 Elections Edition

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What can I say?  I'm swamped with getting more NaNoWriMo done...

Losers: I mentioned them in an earlier post.  The elite pundit class - especially the conservative ones who came to power during the Reagan administration 30 years ago - really got their butts kicked for publicly anointing their preferred candidate Romney when the stats said otherwise, and even going out of their way to mock the statisticians who focused more on polling results and provable trends.

Winners: Nate Silver and every other statistician who worked on the numbers, stuck to the arithmetic, and proved themselves far more accurate than the pundits who preferred "narrative" and "gut instinct" over facts.  Arithmetic, bitches.

Next, the guy making xkcd will chart with unnerving accuracy the flow of Karl Rove's tears.

Winner: the Word of the Year, thanks to Bill Clinton and Nate Silver.  Arithmetic.

Loser: Karl Rove. The "genius" for the Republicans, the man responsible for coming up with a winning strategy to get George W. into the White House, exposed by his own network on Election Night being completely out-of-touch YET AGAIN. Why Rove keeps getting treated as a genius is beyond me: his game-plan of playing to the base and do just the bare minimum to get enough independent voters to side with you (the "50-plus-one" plan) is half-lazy, half-reckless, and it relies too much on luck and a broken electoral system. Outside of 2004, when Rove tricked the Democratic leadership to back a weak candidate in Kerry (vulnerable to attacks on his military record and pro-Iraq War vote), this guy really didn't win anything (if it weren't for the Butterfly Ballot in Palm Beach County, Gore would have won Florida and the 2000 election). Rove's one true skill seems to be bluffing. Too bad Obama's a better game-player than Rove, eh?

Losers: The vote suppressors. In battleground states where the Republicans held control of the state legislatures and governorships, there were clear and open attempts to suppress minority, poor, and college-age voters in a blatant and coordinated effort to weaken the turnout of Obama's voting base.  Like Pennsylvania.  Like Ohio, repeatedly by a Sec of State John Husted who kept defying the demands of the courts (if anyone needs to see jail time over this, it's Husted).  Like Florida, where Rick "Yes, I HATE This Guy" Scott tried to slash the voter rolls claiming non-existent fraud, and cut back on early voting days in an effort to cut back voter turnout in key counties like Dade and Broward.  Good news is, it looks post-election that their efforts were for naught.  In fact, by pushing so hard so publicly to disenfranchise voters across the nation, it seemed to have the effect of getting even more minority voters and college-age voters out to vote... more voters 2012 than there were in 2008.

Winners: Obama's ground game crew.  Every volunteer, every campaign office organizer, every person who manned the phones and canvassed the neighborhoods and registered the voters.  This was the antidote to the vote suppression efforts.  If the Republicans wanted to suppress the vote: make sure there were enough registered voters to overwhelm any suppression.  If the Republicans wanted to cut back on voting hours and early voting days: get more people to vote with absentee ballots that get around the restrictions.  If long lines were gonna form up at the precincts: make sure the voters know that they have the right to stay in line even past closing hours.  It worked.

Losers: Every Republican candidate who wanted to ban abortion and dismissed rape as an issue, especially the Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.  They got their asses handed to them and kept the Senate safe for the Democratic Party.  As a side observation, a major Florida amendment ballot tried to limit abortion access to where the only exception allowed was "the health of the mother".  Yes, the ballot DID NOT have an exception to rape/incest, which happen to be very popular exceptions for a vast majority of Americans (even the ones who profess being pro-life: even they know how serious the problem rape and incest are).  Result: the ballot went down to defeat by a solid majority.  Lesson to the GOP: DO NOT DISMISS RAPE AS A SERIOUS ISSUE.

Losers: Rick Scott.  Thanks to his voter suppression efforts, our state was even more ill-prepared for the election turnout than in 2000, making us more a laughing stock than we were back then.  Also, 8 of the 11 amendment ballots he and his legislative buddies pushed onto the election suffered major rejections, especially the amendment that tried to Court-Pack the state judicial system to make it more partisan (the amendments that passed were three tax exemption ballots for veterans, widows of veterans and first responders, and low-income seniors: I argued against them mainly because of their origins, the revenue cuts may prove minor given how these changes benefit a slight minority of the populus).  Better still, the effort to get three State Court Justices voted off the bench - a clear attempt at forcing vacancies that Scott could fill with cronies - came back with all three judges getting 3/4ths of the vote to RETAIN, a huge slap in the face to Scott.
In short: BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The big talk I'm hearing right now is how to kick Scott out of office in 2014 when he comes up for re-election.  If the state Republicans had any sense, they'd look at Scott's poor polling and run a viable primary candidate to kick him out before the whole state does...

Winners: Marriage equality advocates and Pot Legalization advocates.  Two states (almost three, I think one state is still counting ballots) voted in FAVOR of gay marriage rights, while one more state voted down a ballot that would have overturned a legislative pro-gay law.  Two states voted to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, a huge salvo in the fight to end a broken and ineffective War on Drugs.

Winners: Women.  Women candidates won elective office in huge numbers across the nation at both the state and federal level.  Lemme double check, but I think nine women won Senate seats this election, a huge uptick in gender representation in the Upper House of Congress.  Guess what, pundits?  There was a War on Women, and the women fought back.

Losers: Senate Republicans.  Not only did they fail dramatically to garner a slim hold of that wing of Congress - which would have combined with their solid hold of the House - but they lost major leadership from either retirement (Kyl, indy Senator Lieberman) or losing to more liberal Democratic candidates (Scott Brown losing to Elizabeth Warren).  The incoming Democratic Senate make-up is going to be more liberal than ever before, and more than likely to weaken if not eliminate the Cloture rule (and by extension the filibuster), the biggest weapon the Senate GOP had in obstructing Obama's policy agendas.

Winner: Me.  The blog traffic to my site bounced from single-digits to the hundreds thanks to my article on the Florida 2012 amendment ballots.  Especially a huge crowd of viewers conducting search terms from Japan.  Wow.  Now, if I can get you new viewers to consider the fine possibility of buying my ebooks...  wait, don't go!  Sniff, it gets so lonely here...

Loser: Well, yeah, had to mention him sooner or later.  Hi, Mitt.

Winner: Barack Obama.


And now, with his Anger Translator Luther:

Luther: "“I mean, you know how much money they spent trying to get rid of this? Millions, son! I said millions!"

Losers: Speaking of those millions, the billionaires who shipped tens of not hundreds of millions of dollars into unregulated SuperPACs in an effort to make Obama a One-Termer.  What you all get for your value, dawgs?  NOTHING!  ALL THAT MONEY WASTED BWHAHAHAHA!

Instead of being afraid of how Citizens United may make it easier for the wealthy to win elections - which 2012 proved the opposite - there needs to be a genuine investigation into what happened with all that money that got funneled into Karl Rove's and others' SuperPACs.  There seems to be a lot of waste happening there: not many ads made, almost no ground game like how Obama organized, a great number of reports of how the people "managing" the SuperPACs walked off with huge salaries and bonuses they paid themselves...  I'm serious.  Campaigning has turned into a BILLION-DOLLAR industry and there's little oversight: it's the perfect scam for con artists...

Winners: every person in Dade and Broward Counties who stood in line for 7,8, God love 'em probably 10 hours on Election Night.  The Obama campaign made sure the word got out that the law ensures any person standing in line at the Closing time (7 pm EST) had the right to stay in line and get their vote in, no matter how late it got past that.  This is democracy in action.  While it was a damn shame they had to wait so long, God Bless Them for doing so.  And next time, let's make it easier on them to get their votes in and counted.

Did I miss anyone?

What Romney Didn't Want: A View Into Presidential Character

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I've wanted to write for a long time about the Presidential Character.  And the recent revelations about Mitt Romney's failed 2012 campaign is a good time to do it.

When I'm talking Presidential Character, I'm looking at the definitions created by political scientist James David Barber who developed the four types of Character based on Active/Passive and Positive/Negative traits: Active-Positive, Active-Negative, Passive-Positive, and Passive-Negative.

As a good example, look to the first four Presidents:
George Washington was, believe it or not, Passive-Negative.  P-Ns only become Presidents because of a sense of duty, not any desire for the office.  They're wary of executive power, and not thrilled with political negotiating.
John Adams was Active-Negative.  A-Ns are aggressive, uncompromising, unhappy both personally and professionally, but do relish a good amount of executive authority and do seek accomplishments to fulfill.
Thomas Jefferson was Active-Positive.  Optimistic, forward-thinking, capable of overreach, reveling in the ceremonial aspects of the Presidency, A-Ps are just as aggressive as A-Ns but more capable of compromise and reaching goals.
James Madison was Passive-Positive.  P-Ps are optimistic and friendly, but unfocused, more akin to being a caretaker letting the People's Business do its own thing.  Things can happen during their tenure but more often the Passive-Positive President is not leading the charge.

There is no bad precedent: Negative or Passive are not bad traits per se.  It all depends on the timing:  Washington was perfect as a Passive-Negative because as the first President under the Constitution it was up to him to define the limits and powers of the office.  By being that self-controlling, he stabilized government and gave it time to settle down.  An Active-Positive at that time could have led to chaos and constant in-fighting against the Congress: an Active-Negative could have made himself dictator out frustration.  On the other hand, Madison as Passive-Positive happened at a bad time: the War of 1812 happened under his watch, something an Active-Negative could have avoided, or an Active-Positive could have managed to greater success.  Passive-Positives could be successful during tenures of great upheaval: sometimes through luck, but most times because such passivity actually makes them flexible and capable of making sound deals with Congress or foreign nations. To that, look at Ronald Reagan: He campaigned as a radical anti-government conservative but in office his P-P nature made him amenable to government's effectiveness, which lead him to revoke his anti-tax stances and eventually pursue ground-breaking treaties with the Soviet Union.

That said, Active-Negatives tend to be very bad for the nation over the long haul: SEE Hoover, Herbert; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Nixon, Richard; Cheney, Dick (I would contend that Dubya himself was a Passive-Positive, allowing an Active-Negative like his Veep Cheney far too much power in his administration).

So what does this all have to do with Mitt Romney, the Man Who Will Never Be President?

Because his circle of insiders - his son Tagg, for example - are now claiming after his 2012 election debacle that Mitt Romney never wanted to be President anyway.

At first glance this looks, walks, and quacks like a case of Sour Grapes: he lost something of "value", so now they're claiming he never wanted it.  But the more you look at it, the more you see how this can fit into the Presidential Character grid that Barber devised.

I wanted to write about Romney's character - or lack of one - a few months back when I wanted to discuss this Presidential Character idea then.  I wanted to point out that Romney's constant flip-flopping on the issues made it impossible to determine just where on the charts he fit.  But then I realized he had a constant - his ever-fixed mark of the massive tax cut - and realized Mitt fit on the chart after all.

Mitt Romney, if he had won the Presidency, was going to be a Passive-Negative.

To refer back to Charles Pierce's Esquire article:

Willard Romney didn't want to be president. Willard Romney expected to be president, and that was his real undoing...
It has been years, probably, since Willard had to go to all the emotional fuss and bother of actually wanting something. If there was something that caught his eye -- a slow-moving company's fat pension fund, a nice house in La Jolla, the governor's office in Massachusetts -- there would be a deal to be struck and whatever it was that should be his would be his. This is not a man who tolerates disappointment well, not because he burns with ambition and avarice -- although he profited for years from very effective simulacrums of ambition and avarice --but, rather, because he rarely has experienced disappointment in his life. He does not want. He expects.

That fits the P-N psyche pretty well.  Passive-Negatives run out of a sense of duty or obligation.  For Romney, it has to do with the legacy of being George Romney's son: his father was an active political figure, running for all the right reasons (George Romney fit well to the Active-Positive if only he had bested Nixon in 1968).  It has to do with Romney being a major political figure within the Mormon church, an Americanized religious off-shoot of Christianity still looking for a President to validate the church's success.
The big difference keeping Mitt from qualifying for Active-Negative was all of Mitt's flip-flopping.  A-Ns, if anything, do have a core set of values outside of political ambitions: even Nixon for all his paranoia and loathing had his limits.  Romney's lack of core values - he honestly did not care one whit about abortion, or war, or poverty, or employment, or governance, or people in general - made him oh so very Passive in that regard. (And at least Passive-Positives are well-liked.  Passive-Negatives?  Unless you're George Washington or Ike, who both earned respect enough to be liked, you're sh-t out of luck).
And what would that have meant?
Think George W. Bush's passive nature in office: he kow-towed to the "experts" in his administration, especially Cheney who quickly pushed his own secret agendas on the nation's energy policies, the nation's economic policies, and then the nation's war policies when 9/11 happened.  But at least against that, Dubya still had some semblance of leadership: he showed pragmatic concern for the GOP to pursue a moderate immigration policy (the Far Right refused), and he pushed for tolerance for Muslims and other faiths at a time the neocon's obsession with waging holy war in the Middle East led to a lot of bad feelings among the Far Right.  And at least during his first two years, before Cheney sunk his hooks further in, Dubya allowed more sensible figures in his Cabinet (Powell at State, O'Neill at Treasury) to craft policy.  Look to Powell's (and Condi Rice's) handling of the Spy Plane incident with China.
Mitt Romney would have filled his administration with the pushiest, meanest set of political hacks - hello, neocons - that dotted the edges of the Dubya administration.  He would have had to: the Far Right in the Republican Party would have insisted on their due, and Romney would accept it because Romney wouldn't have cared who was in charge at State or Defense or anywhere else in his Cabinet.
The Character of any President matters based on the times we as a nation are in.  We are still mired (2012) in a jobless recession requiring serious government intervention and jobs stimulus.  We are still mired in one ground war - Afghanistan - and still trying to clean up the messes of the other - Iraq - while at the same time juggling the political instability of the entire Middle East.  We're in the times where an Active-Positive President would be the most value.  Even an Active-Negative (as long as the Negativity was channeled elsewhere, say, resolving the professional hockey lockout) wouldn't be that damaging.  But a Passive-Negative?
Mitt Romney would have wrecked the United States.
In a way, it's a good thing Mitt really didn't want the Presidency.  He could have ended up being the first President to have been successfully impeached out of office (Nixon resigned, and both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton stayed in office).
P.S.  That said, how does Barack Obama rate on Presidential Character?
He fits the Active-Positive chart: the reason he lacks more success in an era that needs an A-P President is due to an obstructive Congress.
In the meantime, I seriously recommend James David Barber's text Presidental Character: Predicting Performance In the White House (4th Ed), 2008, ISBN 978-0205652594. 

It's a New Year. I Need Resolutions.

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I hereby resolve for this year of Common Era Two Thousand and Thirteen that I will do everything in my power to increase traffic to this blog site.

Shouldn't be too hard.  I've finally paid notice to the statistical trends on my blog and found out that my most popular entry has been the Iran Day Six article.  And that was because it had pictures that came up in search engines under "funny" "Iran" "pictures".

Shouldn't be too hard to do that, either.  I got a bunch of captioned photos already on my I Can Has account:




also
also wik




Gonna have to make more of them by hand, though.  I Can Has website dumped their political funny caption maker.  Sigh...

Another way I can uptick the blog traffic is to do a regular series of articles.  I'm thinking of writing up entries on Presidential Character - the personality tracker developed by James David Barber - much like I did pointing out what Character a President Romney could have been.  It'll be tricky coming up with Character profiles for a lot of the One-Termers of the 19th Century... but I'm damn sure Millard Fillmore is gonna be a doozy when I get some research on him done!

Also, my other New Year's resolution: get some writing done and e-published!

See ya.

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GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back

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• GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back
• Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal
• Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets
• Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces
• Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash
• iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection
• Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control
• Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy
• Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists
• UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report
• Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks
• Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review
• Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently
• Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout
• Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed
• There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button
• Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth
• Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart
• Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn
• Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit
• Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear
• Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016'
• Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe
• Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment
• Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami
• More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip
• What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set
• So many devices, so little policy
• Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys
• Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy
• Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us
• Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm
• Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time
• WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week
• Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning
• Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android
• Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab'
• Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review
• Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant
• Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL
• iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority
• UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward
• AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers
• McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search
• Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen
• Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles
• Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'
• Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty
• NZ software giants join patent bill protest
• E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'

GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:13 PM PDT 'There is no single simple issue to fix' Open source bigwigs like Alan Cox, Miguel De Icaza, and Linus Torvalds can bicker all they want, says GNOME hacker Michael Meeks, but changing developer culture won't do a thing to attract more consumers to the Linux desktop.…

Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT Court rules $9,250 per track is constitutionally fair Nearly five years after being found guilty of file-sharing in the media industry's first jury trial on the issue, Minnesotan mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset is back where she started after the appeals court upheld the original verdict.…

Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:49 PM PDT Can't beat 'em, join 'em IDF 2012  Intel wants to turn laptops and even desktops into tablets in order to reverse the decline in the personal computer market. To that end, it unwrapped two form-factors it will be promoting to get tablet-hungry consumers back buying PCs.…

Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:25 PM PDT Offers a million bucks for the best 'perceptual computing' idea IDF 2012  Intel wants computers to be as smart as humans in how they understand voices and gestures – and it's offering $1m to the best idea that can help achieve that goal.…

Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:18 PM PDT Chip giant to keep Win8 touch bandwagon rolling IDF 2012  Intel has been pumping money into the touchscreen component business in order to encourage the production of panels of 13in and up to make sure there are enough of them for vendors to build all the touch-enabled Windows 8 notebooks Intel hopes World+Dog will want.…

iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:07 PM PDT America to get rich selling Foxconn gizmos to itself! Strange, terrible, yet curiously inevitable news today - the day before iPhone 5 day. Analysis based on figures from hefty Wall Street brains appears to show that the Jesus Phone is set to account for a large chunk - perhaps the majority - of US economic activity within a matter of decades.…

Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:33 AM PDT SP1 beta increases InTune integration Redmond's been talking about how System Center will be at the heart of its reboot of the Windows franchise for months now, and now it has released the beta of its first service pack.…

Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:53 AM PDT Just a little router trouble, that's all Domain registrar GoDaddy has commented on the daylong DNS outage that downed many of its customers' websites on Monday, saying that not only was a hacker not responsible, but that the service interruption wasn't the result of a DDoS attack at all.…

Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:24 AM PDT More breaking news on the conflict in Syria Pro-Syrian government hacktivists have cracked the mobile update service of al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news network.…

UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:24 AM PDT Not good enough for government work. Cutting Japanese IT group Fujitsu is among several companies that have been "blacklisted" by the UK Government, claims the Financial Times.…

Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:02 AM PDT Warg hauled back to Sweden for copyright cooler stint Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a co-founder of download haven The Pirate Bay, is back in Sweden - and now faces allegations of playing a role in an attack on the country's taxmen and IT consultancy biz Logica.…

Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:28 AM PDT Passes the Google test and then some First look  There was birthday cake aplenty at Viewsonic's 25th anniversary event in London today that also saw the introduction of three new products covering an innovative range of display options.…

Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:06 AM PDT No, not Nokia engineers. Well, not this time Microsoft has pledged software and expertise in a battle to save the world's most endangered species - and we don't mean Nokia engineers.…

Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:42 AM PDT Bury command server deep in the onion Security researchers have discovered a botnet that uses the Tor anonymiser network to hide its command nodes.…

Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:18 AM PDT Fondling fandroids say slab needs hard reset Reports are filtering in that some Google Nexus 7 tablets slow to a crawl once the memory starts filling up, and require a hard reset to bring them back to the admirable speed expected of Google's flagship hardware.…

There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:01 AM PDT Keep calm and download these handy tools Comment  The disappearance of the Start button in Microsoft's new Windows has proved unsettling for users. "I want Start. Start I say," said an early tester in a post entitled "Worst 60 minutes in my entire life".…

Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:29 AM PDT Govt-backed bank may pump bioscience, tech sectors Blighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning.…

Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:00 AM PDT Linux moneybags funds Um Bongo's cloudy file system Billionaire Linux kingpin Mark Shuttleworth has injected $1m into storage startup Inktank to bring the team's distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.…

Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:42 AM PDT Now, Brits, tell us everything about your motors Google is now offering to compare car insurance prices for Brits following the company's acquisition of BeatThatQuote.…

Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:24 AM PDT Stuffs wallet with Sony and BlackBerry cash Privately owned music services pioneer Omnifone boasted its first ever annual profit this morning. The company provides a platform for streaming services including that of Sony (Music Unlimited) and RIM (BBM Music) and operates in 28 markets. Omnifone was founded in 2003 and launched its first service, MusicStation, in 2007. It has notched up several firsts, including the first cloud streaming service and the first licensed scan-and-match service.…

Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:01 AM PDT Tiled phone, not PC, could put Redmond on top Open ... and Shut  Windows Phone 8 might spell the beginning of a climb to relevance for a desktop vendor breaking out its latest PC operating system at almost the same time.…

Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:44 AM PDT Public-facing services to coin it, predicts IDC Some $100bn will be slurped up by public IT cloud services by 2016, according to the crystal-ball gazers at IDC.…

Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:26 AM PDT Operation Elveden nets another suspect A 31-year-old prison officer was arrested at his home in Northampton this morning as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into alleged bungs to cops. The probe is related to the Met's ongoing phone-hacking inquiry.…

Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:17 AM PDT Would destroy the economy, though Windy professors in the States have produced research in which they say that massive use of wind power would not, as had been thought, damage the planet's atmosphere and cause undesirable climate changes. They also argue that it would be "practical" to obtain half the energy required by the human race using wind turbines.…

Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:02 AM PDT EE rises to promise 16 cities next-gen mobe broadband Everything Everywhere is no more: long live EE and 4G. The mobile operator now gets to watch its children, Orange and T-Mobile, starve to death as they're denied access to the 4G feast.…

More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:43 AM PDT Rumour mill in overdrive for 7in tablet Rumours that Apple will launch an "iPad mini" at its unveiling event tomorrow intensified today after more pictures of cases leaked online and retailers started advertising screen protectors for a 7in slab.…

What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:14 AM PDT Bletchley Park flogs custom board in honour of code-breaker He may not have made it onto the £10 banknote, but the face of WWII code-breaking hero Alan Turing now adorns the back of the silly money that's boxed into a new custom Monopoly set.…

So many devices, so little policy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:45 AM PDT So what are you waiting for? Live event  Every one of your users has a computer at home, maybe a laptop, definitely a phone, and likes to log in from someone else's computer from time to time. They're carrying your data around, but often not your security policy.…

Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:44 AM PDT From little seeds giant oaks shipments grow It has been a while since Taiwanese server and PC maker Acer has made some noise in the server racket, but the company is plodding along after planting its seeds on United States soil in February 2011 with a revamping of its Xeon-based servers.…

Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:28 AM PDT Amateur ballooning rivals meet for head-to-head showdown Pics  The friendly rivalry between Brit and Oz amateur High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) enthusiasts hit new heights over the weekend when the two nations went head-to-head in a stratospheric clash of high-altitude titans.…

Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:58 AM PDT Hybrid racker needs VC cash Hybrid flash and disk drive array start-up Nimble Storage has been given $40.7m in venture capital funding to boost sales, marketing and engineering.…

Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:42 AM PDT Increased use of council ICT services putting the squeeze on managers A report from the public sector IT directors' group Socitm has identified four ongoing priorities for ICT managers in the wake of continuing austerity.…

Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:19 AM PDT 'Dear ICO, sue us ... We're sick of you and this ridiculous cookie law' UK businesses should actively involve themselves in the debate over changes to EU law if they want to avoid problems stemming from the way those laws are drafted, an expert has advised.…

WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:02 AM PDT Thinner, 'extreme' capacities promised Western Digital will face investors on Thursday and tell them what the world's new number-one disk drive supplier is going to do to stay at the top.…

Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:33 AM PDT Windows passwords exposure confusion AuthenTec, the security firm that's the target of an $356m acquisition by Apple, has denied reports that possible cryptographic weaknesses in its fingerprint scanner software pose a risk to the security of laptops.…

Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:30 AM PDT There's only one way to settle this...FIGHT! Not content with dominating the massive Chinese e-commerce market, local hero Alibaba now wants to chase Android into the sea by making its cloud-based Aliyun mobile operating system China's preferred smartphone OS.…

Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:11 AM PDT Give the people what they want - ASAP Microsoft has urged developers to "lead the land grab" by developing Windows 8 apps ASAP.…

Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:00 AM PDT Magnetic keyblet combo, anyone? Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word 'merde' echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn't given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.…

Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:47 PM PDT Electronics giant's woes continue as CLW turns the knife South Korean electronics behemoth Samsung has been hit by fresh allegations of impropriety at one of its manufacturing plants in China, this time involving purported sexual discrimination in its hiring policy.…

Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:05 PM PDT Regulator insists ad placements can misled and deceive Australia's High Court, from which no appeal is possible, will this week hear a case in which Google stands accused of intentionally deceiving and misleading consumers by automatically placing ads according to advertisers' requested keywords.…

iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority Posted: 10 Sep 2012 09:28 PM PDT American Airlines allowed to use in-cockpit fondleslabs "in all phases of flight" Being asked to switch off your electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases of a flight now looks even more anachronistic, after American Airlines announced it has been given permission to let its pilots use iPads in the cockpit "in all phases of flight".…

UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward Posted: 10 Sep 2012 08:50 PM PDT There's a good boy... The UK economy is set to get a much needed boost on Tuesday when Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei announces an expected £1.2bn investment including hundreds of jobs.…

AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers Posted: 10 Sep 2012 06:56 PM PDT Stretches Freedom interconnect fabric out to storage SeaMicro is not longer an independent company, but you would not have guessed that if you were dropped in from outer space to attend the launch of the new SM15000 microserver in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Advanced Micro Devices may own SeaMicro, but the company went out of its way to support the latest "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor from rival Intel as well as its own forthcoming "Piledriver" Opteron processor as new compute nodes in a new SeaMicro chassis.…

McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:50 PM PDT Malwaria activissima In McAfee's latest survey of the celebrity searches most likely to lead to malware infection, Emma Watson – perhaps best known as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films – has taken the top spot, knocking off model Heidi Klum from last year's most-likely-to-infect honors.…

Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:34 PM PDT DIY instructions await the brave or foolish A hacker named Gef has rigged up his Raspberry Pi to use a Kindle e-reader as its monitor.…

Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:22 PM PDT Experimental builds for phones with ARMv6 chips The Mozilla Foundation would like to see its Firefox browser running on more mobile phones. But since almost no handsets ship with Firefox pre-installed, that means getting the software onto more of the phones that are already out there – even if they use older hardware.…

Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:38 PM PDT Knows when its best to call, text, or just leave her alone IDF 2012  Intel Labs is working on a technology that uses what it calls "contextual awareness" to advise you of the best method to use when contacting others.…

Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:16 PM PDT What would Heisenberg's position be? A group of Canadian PhD researchers claim to have obtained information beyond the "Heisenberg limit" using a technique called "weak measurement".…

NZ software giants join patent bill protest Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:45 PM PDT Petitioning against patent trolls Updated: govt says "no"  New Zealand's largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws.…

E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:14 PM PDT BlueToad clears FBI of device data collection It seems both Apple and the FBI were telling the truth: the Apple UDIDs published last week didn't come from either organization, with an American e-publisher posting a statement that the data was stolen from its systems.…

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How to Roll Up My Sleeve Like a Greaser

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• How to Roll Up My Sleeve Like a Greaser
• How to Make Cantaloupe Ripen Faster
• Starting Up Apache & MySQL
• How to Get Rid of the Sour Taste in My Stew
• How to Print on Glossy Paper
• How Do I Run Two Apps at Once in Windows 8?
• How Do I Get to the Control Panel in Windows 8?
• How Do I Get to the Start Screen in Windows 8?
• How Do I Log In to Windows 8 Using a Picture Password?
• How Do I Shut Down Windows 8?

How to Roll Up My Sleeve Like a Greaser Posted: Greasers are known for many things, including the really specific way in which they roll up their shirt sleeves. Roll up your sleeve like a greaser with help from a fashion professional in this free video clip.

How to Make Cantaloupe Ripen Faster Posted: Making cantaloupe ripen faster is something you can do by giving your fruit just a little bit of a boost. Make cantaloupe ripen faster with help from a farm to table chef in this free video clip.

Starting Up Apache & MySQL Posted: Staring up Apache and MySQL shouldn't take more than a few quick moments of your time. Learn about starting up Apache and MySQL with help from a graphic designer and Web developer in this free video clip.

How to Get Rid of the Sour Taste in My Stew Posted: You can get rid of the sour taste in your stew by making a few key adjustments to your recipe. Get rid of the sour taste in your stew with help from a chef instructor and executive pastry chef in this free video clip.

How to Print on Glossy Paper Posted: Printing on glossy paper always requires you to follow a few basic, easy to manage steps. Print on glossy paper with help from a photography professional in this free video clip.

How Do I Run Two Apps at Once in Windows 8? Posted: Running two apps at once in Windows 8 is very easy and can really help increase your productivity. Run two apps at once in Windows 8 with help from your friends at eHow Tech in this free video clip.

How Do I Get to the Control Panel in Windows 8? Posted: The Control Panel is a folder containing various applications that lets you adjust the way your computer operates. Get to the Control Panel in Windows 8 with help from your friends at eHow Tech in this free video clip.

How Do I Get to the Start Screen in Windows 8? Posted: You can get to the "Start" screen in Windows 8 with just a few key clicks of your mouse. Get to the "Start" screen in Windows 8 with help from your friends at eHow Tech in this free video clip.

How Do I Log In to Windows 8 Using a Picture Password? Posted: Logging in to Windows 8 using a picture password is a great way to bring a whole new level of security to your computer. Log in to Windows 8 using a picture password with help from your friends at eHow Tech in this free video clip.

How Do I Shut Down Windows 8? Posted: Shutting down your computer in Windows 8 is something you can do in just a couple of seconds. Find out how to shut down Windows 8 with help from your friends at eHow Tech in this free video clip.

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Killing The Gerrymander

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Not a huge fan of the gerrymander.


Because it does these three things:
1) promotes one political party over the other by crafting "safe" congressional districts where registered voters are a majority/plurality over opposing parties, with such safe districts that incumbent officials can rarely be removed from office through honest vote;
2) distorts honest representation of communities by dividing them up and sharing them out to outlying, more sparsely populated areas that could now overwhelm that portion of a large community;
3) simple unfairness: a state could have one party with a larger registered voter base but - thanks to gerrymandering - the smaller party can retain control of local and congressional offices... and worse carve out supermajority control of state-level offices disproportionate to actual representation.  This could allow the more extreme positions of that minority party to pass legislation harmful (at least spiteful) to the actual majority of state residents who would oppose such laws.

Basically, gerrymanders create wasted votes.

First Problem is... the parties in power don't really want to see gerrymandering go away.  Let us be honest here: this IS one of the few times that claiming "both sides do it" is accurate (ask Florida Democrats, ask Illinois Republicans).

Second Problem is... how the hell can it be stopped?  The carving out of districts has to happen: democratic/republican government has to allow regions - cities, metropolises, counties - to provide local representation.  Each representative required to stand for a certain number of the populus, and done so at equal numbers so that one official does not represent a handful while another represents a vast number.  So districts have to get made.  But the people tasked to map them out are still people: biased and favored at best, corrupt at worst.

Some solutions are in place in various states, with hope that they can reduce if not end the threat of the gerrymander altogether.  Some states have non-partisan independent committees assigned the task of mapping out redesigned districts every Census count (10 years), and to do so without party consideration.  Other states - like here in Florida - passed state amendment laws forcing the state legislature (most state gov'ts control the process) to draw districts with strict limits - only by population density, must be reasonably shaped (rectangular as much as possible), etc. - to reduce the most blatant aspects of gerrymandering (the stretching out a district in bizarre shapes to provide the "safety" of that district).

But even these options have their limits and flaws: the Republican-held Florida legislature was still able to figure out how to carve out enough safe districts under the new rules to keep a solid GOP majority in both state houses, despite the fact there are more registered Democrats in this state.  So clearly, more needs to be done to kill the gerrymander.

Some ideas I've been mulling:

Increasing the number of representatives to Congress/state offices.  I've scoffed before at this idea of making more seats in the U.S. House to make Congress more responsive to the voters.  But now I think the guy who suggested this - professor Larry Sabato - might be right.  Not so much the need to drop the number of people represented from roughly 650,000 per district down to a more manageable 150,000... but because increasing the number of districts makes it harder to shape them into gerrymandered districts.
Look at it like this: Florida's got 27 Congressional districts right now.  Say we doubled that number to 54... and still requiring that districts have to be carved out based above all on population density as the state amendments require.  It makes it suddenly a lot easier for urban, densely populated areas to get more districts; and makes it a LOT harder to carve out those districts to share with the sparsely populated areas.  Ergo, fewer gerrymanders.

The cap on the number of representatives at 435 total isn't set in stone: it was capped back in 1929... back when the U.S. population was 123 million... we've nearly tripled that by now at 330 million for 2010.  An argument can be made that the cap set 100 years ago is no longer feasible and should go up.  Trick is, by how much?  There are only so many office spaces in D.C. to go around...

I would argue for a change in base representation, where the smallest populated states get one representative and that's it.  I'd suggest bumping that up to two representatives for the smallest states, just to give every state some diversity in representation.  Then I'd take that divided number of the fifth-least-populated state (currently South Dakota at 824 thousand or so) and use that (412,000 or so) as a basis for district drawing for all other states (dividing Wyoming as the least-populated would have given us district sizes at 284,000 which might be going too small).

Let's do the math for the most-populated state (California, 37,692,000 or so) with that 412,000: we get 92 representatives compared to the current 53.  It's not that huge a boost (close to double the current, yes, but not over).  For Texas (25,675,000) they get 62, over the 32 current.  By the way this is tracking out, it looks like a 42 percent increase of representatives per state.  Not sure how it will total up in the House, but I figure it's an extra 182 seats, minimum.  Can we afford/handle a 618-seat House?

Creating more districts does make sense as well at the state level... except in New Hampshire, they have 400 members for a state population of 1.3 million.  Florida's got 25 million residents, at least our house numbers (120) seem more sensible although a slight increase to say 150 reps is doable. 

Another option might be to create a Lottery system of randomly dividing up the registered voters per seat.  Get rid of districts for a state, change it over to just seating at Congress, and then allow for the technology to randomly assign a House seat per voter.  Your neighbor may end up voting for a candidate for Seat 12 while you get to vote on who gets Seat 24.  And your friend down the street gets Seat 5 while her neighbor gets Seat 7.  No-one gets to say who gets assigned to a Seat vote.  No favors.

This has the advantage of getting rid of "safe" districts altogether.  It also forces the two parties to run candidates for EVERY seat rather than selectively put their energies into those "safe" districts.  It also prevents parties from putting up candidates who might be extreme enough for that "safe" district - hi, Steve King of Iowa! - but who can end up being toxic for statewide voters as a whole (note the lack of super-crazy Senators: yes, most are partisan but even the most partisan of them aren't as wingnut as some of their House counterparts).  But the disadvantages are huge: this does have the effect of eliminating genuine community representation.  Local issues - trade vs. tourism, for example - will diminish as state issues dominate.  And there runs the ever higher risk of rigged lottery disbursement of voters.

Those are pretty much the two ideas I've got going.  If anyone else has sensible suggestions, please leave a comment here on this blog.  (again, if the Blogger system is NOT favorable to your login needs, let me know through other means such as my direct email, thanks) 

Also, if anyone else out there is coming to this blog via the Iran Day Six entry I wrote 3+ years ago... why are you still linking to that article?  Is it the pictures I have on that entry?  Is it the article itself?  I'm still getting steady traffic thanks to that one article, I'd like to know why...

What Romney Didn't Want: A View Into Presidential Character

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I've wanted to write for a long time about the Presidential Character.  And the recent revelations about Mitt Romney's failed 2012 campaign is a good time to do it.

When I'm talking Presidential Character, I'm looking at the definitions created by political scientist James David Barber who developed the four types of Character based on Active/Passive and Positive/Negative traits: Active-Positive, Active-Negative, Passive-Positive, and Passive-Negative.

As a good example, look to the first four Presidents:
George Washington was, believe it or not, Passive-Negative.  P-Ns only become Presidents because of a sense of duty, not any desire for the office.  They're wary of executive power, and not thrilled with political negotiating.
John Adams was Active-Negative.  A-Ns are aggressive, uncompromising, unhappy both personally and professionally, but do relish a good amount of executive authority and do seek accomplishments to fulfill.
Thomas Jefferson was Active-Positive.  Optimistic, forward-thinking, capable of overreach, reveling in the ceremonial aspects of the Presidency, A-Ps are just as aggressive as A-Ns but more capable of compromise and reaching goals.
James Madison was Passive-Positive.  P-Ps are optimistic and friendly, but unfocused, more akin to being a caretaker letting the People's Business do its own thing.  Things can happen during their tenure but more often the Passive-Positive President is not leading the charge.

There is no bad precedent: Negative or Passive are not bad traits per se.  It all depends on the timing:  Washington was perfect as a Passive-Negative because as the first President under the Constitution it was up to him to define the limits and powers of the office.  By being that self-controlling, he stabilized government and gave it time to settle down.  An Active-Positive at that time could have led to chaos and constant in-fighting against the Congress: an Active-Negative could have made himself dictator out frustration.  On the other hand, Madison as Passive-Positive happened at a bad time: the War of 1812 happened under his watch, something an Active-Negative could have avoided, or an Active-Positive could have managed to greater success.  Passive-Positives could be successful during tenures of great upheaval: sometimes through luck, but most times because such passivity actually makes them flexible and capable of making sound deals with Congress or foreign nations. To that, look at Ronald Reagan: He campaigned as a radical anti-government conservative but in office his P-P nature made him amenable to government's effectiveness, which lead him to revoke his anti-tax stances and eventually pursue ground-breaking treaties with the Soviet Union.

That said, Active-Negatives tend to be very bad for the nation over the long haul: SEE Hoover, Herbert; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Nixon, Richard; Cheney, Dick (I would contend that Dubya himself was a Passive-Positive, allowing an Active-Negative like his Veep Cheney far too much power in his administration).

So what does this all have to do with Mitt Romney, the Man Who Will Never Be President?

Because his circle of insiders - his son Tagg, for example - are now claiming after his 2012 election debacle that Mitt Romney never wanted to be President anyway.

At first glance this looks, walks, and quacks like a case of Sour Grapes: he lost something of "value", so now they're claiming he never wanted it.  But the more you look at it, the more you see how this can fit into the Presidential Character grid that Barber devised.

I wanted to write about Romney's character - or lack of one - a few months back when I wanted to discuss this Presidential Character idea then.  I wanted to point out that Romney's constant flip-flopping on the issues made it impossible to determine just where on the charts he fit.  But then I realized he had a constant - his ever-fixed mark of the massive tax cut - and realized Mitt fit on the chart after all.

Mitt Romney, if he had won the Presidency, was going to be a Passive-Negative.

To refer back to Charles Pierce's Esquire article:

Willard Romney didn't want to be president. Willard Romney expected to be president, and that was his real undoing...
It has been years, probably, since Willard had to go to all the emotional fuss and bother of actually wanting something. If there was something that caught his eye -- a slow-moving company's fat pension fund, a nice house in La Jolla, the governor's office in Massachusetts -- there would be a deal to be struck and whatever it was that should be his would be his. This is not a man who tolerates disappointment well, not because he burns with ambition and avarice -- although he profited for years from very effective simulacrums of ambition and avarice --but, rather, because he rarely has experienced disappointment in his life. He does not want. He expects.

That fits the P-N psyche pretty well.  Passive-Negatives run out of a sense of duty or obligation.  For Romney, it has to do with the legacy of being George Romney's son: his father was an active political figure, running for all the right reasons (George Romney fit well to the Active-Positive if only he had bested Nixon in 1968).  It has to do with Romney being a major political figure within the Mormon church, an Americanized religious off-shoot of Christianity still looking for a President to validate the church's success.
The big difference keeping Mitt from qualifying for Active-Negative was all of Mitt's flip-flopping.  A-Ns, if anything, do have a core set of values outside of political ambitions: even Nixon for all his paranoia and loathing had his limits.  Romney's lack of core values - he honestly did not care one whit about abortion, or war, or poverty, or employment, or governance, or people in general - made him oh so very Passive in that regard. (And at least Passive-Positives are well-liked.  Passive-Negatives?  Unless you're George Washington or Ike, who both earned respect enough to be liked, you're sh-t out of luck).
And what would that have meant?
Think George W. Bush's passive nature in office: he kow-towed to the "experts" in his administration, especially Cheney who quickly pushed his own secret agendas on the nation's energy policies, the nation's economic policies, and then the nation's war policies when 9/11 happened.  But at least against that, Dubya still had some semblance of leadership: he showed pragmatic concern for the GOP to pursue a moderate immigration policy (the Far Right refused), and he pushed for tolerance for Muslims and other faiths at a time the neocon's obsession with waging holy war in the Middle East led to a lot of bad feelings among the Far Right.  And at least during his first two years, before Cheney sunk his hooks further in, Dubya allowed more sensible figures in his Cabinet (Powell at State, O'Neill at Treasury) to craft policy.  Look to Powell's (and Condi Rice's) handling of the Spy Plane incident with China.
Mitt Romney would have filled his administration with the pushiest, meanest set of political hacks - hello, neocons - that dotted the edges of the Dubya administration.  He would have had to: the Far Right in the Republican Party would have insisted on their due, and Romney would accept it because Romney wouldn't have cared who was in charge at State or Defense or anywhere else in his Cabinet.
The Character of any President matters based on the times we as a nation are in.  We are still mired (2012) in a jobless recession requiring serious government intervention and jobs stimulus.  We are still mired in one ground war - Afghanistan - and still trying to clean up the messes of the other - Iraq - while at the same time juggling the political instability of the entire Middle East.  We're in the times where an Active-Positive President would be the most value.  Even an Active-Negative (as long as the Negativity was channeled elsewhere, say, resolving the professional hockey lockout) wouldn't be that damaging.  But a Passive-Negative?
Mitt Romney would have wrecked the United States.
In a way, it's a good thing Mitt really didn't want the Presidency.  He could have ended up being the first President to have been successfully impeached out of office (Nixon resigned, and both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton stayed in office).
P.S.  That said, how does Barack Obama rate on Presidential Character?
He fits the Active-Positive chart: the reason he lacks more success in an era that needs an A-P President is due to an obstructive Congress.
In the meantime, I seriously recommend James David Barber's text Presidental Character: Predicting Performance In the White House (4th Ed), 2008, ISBN 978-0205652594. 

It's a New Year. I Need Resolutions.

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I hereby resolve for this year of Common Era Two Thousand and Thirteen that I will do everything in my power to increase traffic to this blog site.

Shouldn't be too hard.  I've finally paid notice to the statistical trends on my blog and found out that my most popular entry has been the Iran Day Six article.  And that was because it had pictures that came up in search engines under "funny" "Iran" "pictures".

Shouldn't be too hard to do that, either.  I got a bunch of captioned photos already on my I Can Has account:




also
also wik




Gonna have to make more of them by hand, though.  I Can Has website dumped their political funny caption maker.  Sigh...

Another way I can uptick the blog traffic is to do a regular series of articles.  I'm thinking of writing up entries on Presidential Character - the personality tracker developed by James David Barber - much like I did pointing out what Character a President Romney could have been.  It'll be tricky coming up with Character profiles for a lot of the One-Termers of the 19th Century... but I'm damn sure Millard Fillmore is gonna be a doozy when I get some research on him done!

Also, my other New Year's resolution: get some writing done and e-published!

See ya.

A Follow-Up About Utopianism (Apparently That Is a Word Now)

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I wrote awhile back about my disdain for libertarianism - and isms in general - due to my studies of utopian literature my freshman college year.

Now here I see in Salon.com that contributor Michael Lind shares the same disdain for utopian thought, and how he sees the current Far Right as unhinged as the Far Left of the 60s-70s were:

In that environment, what attracted me in my college years to conservatism was its hostility to utopianism, to the attempt to remake society according to some abstract theory. This was a theme shared by the older generation of “vital center” liberals like Arthur Schlesinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as well as conservatives like Bill Buckley. Their distrust of doctrinaires using power to achieve utopia on earth was inspired not just by thinkers like Edmund Burke but even more by the examples of Hitler’s genocidal racist utopia and the mass murders and famines that accompanied Stalin’s and Mao’s attempts to use terror to remake society. The vital-center liberals (some of whom became early neoconservatives) disagreed with those further to the right, the “paleoconservatives,” over whether Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society were examples of sensible reform to save the system, as the paleoliberals/ neoconservatives believed, or mild versions of collectivist utopian madness, the view of many traditional conservatives...
By the 1990s, the communist movement had collapsed as a global secular religion, even though a few relic communist tyrannies survived in China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. The few remaining Marxist radicals in the Western world were mostly English professors hunting for classism and imperialism in the novels of Jane Austen. Nature abhors a vacuum, and as utopianism died out on the left, it found a new home to the right of center. The last generation in the U.S. has seen three forms of demented right-wing utopianism: religious, military and economic.
The religious utopianism was that of the Protestant religious right, which grew in influence in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s... The religious right faded as a force by the early 21st century, largely because of the growing secularization of younger Americans. The next wave of utopianism was military. The older generation of neoconservatives had been New Deal liberals who had grown cautious and skeptical about the ability of public policy to remake American society. In contrast, the younger generation of neoconservatives — some of them literal heirs of the older generation, such as Irving Kristol’s son William Kristol — were wildly optimistic about the ability of the American military to remake foreign societies. Their utopian project of a “new American century” and a “global democratic revolution” exported by force of arms collided with reality in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first decade of the century... As the neoconservative utopia faded, it was followed in turn by the libertarian utopia... Ron Paul went from being a marginal figure to a folk hero for young people in search of gurus, and the works of mid-20th-century prophets of the free market like Ayn Rand and Friedrich von Hayek enjoyed a revival. The libertarian utopia peaked in 2010, around the same time as the Tea Party movement, which helped the Republicans to regain the House of Representatives. To judge by the elections of 2012, in which more Americans cast votes for Democrats for the gerrymandered House as well as in Senate and presidential elections, the public has turned against free market utopians like Paul Ryan...

It's rare for me to double-post in a day, but see Lind's article reminded me of what I wrote, and I enjoy the justification of a shared viewpoint.  ;-)

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GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back

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• GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back
• Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal
• Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets
• Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces
• Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash
• iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection
• Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control
• Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy
• Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists
• UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report
• Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks
• Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review
• Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently
• Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout
• Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed
• There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button
• Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth
• Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart
• Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn
• Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit
• Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear
• Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016'
• Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe
• Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment
• Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami
• More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip
• What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set
• So many devices, so little policy
• Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys
• Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy
• Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us
• Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm
• Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time
• WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week
• Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning
• Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android
• Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab'
• Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review
• Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant
• Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL
• iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority
• UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward
• AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers
• McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search
• Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen
• Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles
• Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to'
• Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty
• NZ software giants join patent bill protest
• E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours'

GNOME hacker: Culture isn't holding desktop Linux back Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:13 PM PDT 'There is no single simple issue to fix' Open source bigwigs like Alan Cox, Miguel De Icaza, and Linus Torvalds can bicker all they want, says GNOME hacker Michael Meeks, but changing developer culture won't do a thing to attract more consumers to the Linux desktop.…

Thomas-Rasset faces $220,000 file-sharing bill after losing appeal Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT Court rules $9,250 per track is constitutionally fair Nearly five years after being found guilty of file-sharing in the media industry's first jury trial on the issue, Minnesotan mother of four Jammie Thomas-Rasset is back where she started after the appeals court upheld the original verdict.…

Intel to turn Ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops into giant tablets Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:49 PM PDT Can't beat 'em, join 'em IDF 2012  Intel wants to turn laptops and even desktops into tablets in order to reverse the decline in the personal computer market. To that end, it unwrapped two form-factors it will be promoting to get tablet-hungry consumers back buying PCs.…

Intel demos next-generation voice and gesture interfaces Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:25 PM PDT Offers a million bucks for the best 'perceptual computing' idea IDF 2012  Intel wants computers to be as smart as humans in how they understand voices and gestures – and it's offering $1m to the best idea that can help achieve that goal.…

Touch tech firms tap Intel for factory cash Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:18 PM PDT Chip giant to keep Win8 touch bandwagon rolling IDF 2012  Intel has been pumping money into the touchscreen component business in order to encourage the production of panels of 13in and up to make sure there are enough of them for vendors to build all the touch-enabled Windows 8 notebooks Intel hopes World+Dog will want.…

iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:07 PM PDT America to get rich selling Foxconn gizmos to itself! Strange, terrible, yet curiously inevitable news today - the day before iPhone 5 day. Analysis based on figures from hefty Wall Street brains appears to show that the Jesus Phone is set to account for a large chunk - perhaps the majority - of US economic activity within a matter of decades.…

Microsoft betas System Center service pack for unified control Posted: 11 Sep 2012 11:33 AM PDT SP1 beta increases InTune integration Redmond's been talking about how System Center will be at the heart of its reboot of the Windows franchise for months now, and now it has released the beta of its first service pack.…

Day-long outage 'not a hack,' claims GoDaddy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:53 AM PDT Just a little router trouble, that's all Domain registrar GoDaddy has commented on the daylong DNS outage that downed many of its customers' websites on Monday, saying that not only was a hacker not responsible, but that the service interruption wasn't the result of a DDoS attack at all.…

Al-Jazeera's mobe news feed hijacked by pro-Assad hacktivists Posted: 11 Sep 2012 10:24 AM PDT More breaking news on the conflict in Syria Pro-Syrian government hacktivists have cracked the mobile update service of al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news network.…

UK.gov blacklists Fujitsu from future contracts - report Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:24 AM PDT Not good enough for government work. Cutting Japanese IT group Fujitsu is among several companies that have been "blacklisted" by the UK Government, claims the Financial Times.…

Pirate Bay co-founder named in probe into Logica, tax office hacks Posted: 11 Sep 2012 09:02 AM PDT Warg hauled back to Sweden for copyright cooler stint Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a co-founder of download haven The Pirate Bay, is back in Sweden - and now faces allegations of playing a role in an attack on the country's taxmen and IT consultancy biz Logica.…

Viewsonic 22in Android 'tablet' hands-on review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:28 AM PDT Passes the Google test and then some First look  There was birthday cake aplenty at Viewsonic's 25th anniversary event in London today that also saw the introduction of three new products covering an innovative range of display options.…

Who'll save the 100 most endangered species? Microsoft, apparently Posted: 11 Sep 2012 08:06 AM PDT No, not Nokia engineers. Well, not this time Microsoft has pledged software and expertise in a battle to save the world's most endangered species - and we don't mean Nokia engineers.…

Zombie PC herders issue commands from Tor hideout Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:42 AM PDT Bury command server deep in the onion Security researchers have discovered a botnet that uses the Tor anonymiser network to hide its command nodes.…

Google's Nexus 7 tabs 'can't perform' if flash RAM crammed Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:18 AM PDT Fondling fandroids say slab needs hard reset Reports are filtering in that some Google Nexus 7 tablets slow to a crawl once the memory starts filling up, and require a hard reset to bring them back to the admirable speed expected of Google's flagship hardware.…

There is life after the death of Microsoft’s Windows 8 Start button Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:01 AM PDT Keep calm and download these handy tools Comment  The disappearance of the Start button in Microsoft's new Windows has proved unsettling for users. "I want Start. Start I say," said an early tester in a post entitled "Worst 60 minutes in my entire life".…

Cable offers to shower UK biz in taxpayer gold to stimulate growth Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:29 AM PDT Govt-backed bank may pump bioscience, tech sectors Blighty's Business Secretary Vince Cable pulled back the curtains on his new biz investment bank this morning.…

Shuttleworth drops one million cluster bucks on Ceph upstart Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:00 AM PDT Linux moneybags funds Um Bongo's cloudy file system Billionaire Linux kingpin Mark Shuttleworth has injected $1m into storage startup Inktank to bring the team's distributed file system Ceph to cloud computing.…

Google skids car insurance comparison engine onto rivals' lawn Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:42 AM PDT Now, Brits, tell us everything about your motors Google is now offering to compare car insurance prices for Brits following the company's acquisition of BeatThatQuote.…

Backroom music streamer Omnifone palms first profit Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:24 AM PDT Stuffs wallet with Sony and BlackBerry cash Privately owned music services pioneer Omnifone boasted its first ever annual profit this morning. The company provides a platform for streaming services including that of Sony (Music Unlimited) and RIM (BBM Music) and operates in 28 markets. Omnifone was founded in 2003 and launched its first service, MusicStation, in 2007. It has notched up several firsts, including the first cloud streaming service and the first licensed scan-and-match service.…

Windows 8? Nah: Win Phone 8 should give Apple the fear Posted: 11 Sep 2012 05:01 AM PDT Tiled phone, not PC, could put Redmond on top Open ... and Shut  Windows Phone 8 might spell the beginning of a climb to relevance for a desktop vendor breaking out its latest PC operating system at almost the same time.…

Laugh all you want at 'the cloud' - it'll be worth '$100bn by 2016' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:44 AM PDT Public-facing services to coin it, predicts IDC Some $100bn will be slurped up by public IT cloud services by 2016, according to the crystal-ball gazers at IDC.…

Phone-hack saga: Prison officer cuffed in cop bung probe Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:26 AM PDT Operation Elveden nets another suspect A 31-year-old prison officer was arrested at his home in Northampton this morning as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into alleged bungs to cops. The probe is related to the Met's ongoing phone-hacking inquiry.…

Profs: Massive use of wind turbines WON'T destroy the environment Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:17 AM PDT Would destroy the economy, though Windy professors in the States have produced research in which they say that massive use of wind power would not, as had been thought, damage the planet's atmosphere and cause undesirable climate changes. They also argue that it would be "practical" to obtain half the energy required by the human race using wind turbines.…

Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami Posted: 11 Sep 2012 04:02 AM PDT EE rises to promise 16 cities next-gen mobe broadband Everything Everywhere is no more: long live EE and 4G. The mobile operator now gets to watch its children, Orange and T-Mobile, starve to death as they're denied access to the 4G feast.…

More 'iPad Mini' tat pics leak ahead of Apple's big unzip Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:43 AM PDT Rumour mill in overdrive for 7in tablet Rumours that Apple will launch an "iPad mini" at its unveiling event tomorrow intensified today after more pictures of cases leaked online and retailers started advertising screen protectors for a 7in slab.…

What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:14 AM PDT Bletchley Park flogs custom board in honour of code-breaker He may not have made it onto the £10 banknote, but the face of WWII code-breaking hero Alan Turing now adorns the back of the silly money that's boxed into a new custom Monopoly set.…

So many devices, so little policy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:45 AM PDT So what are you waiting for? Live event  Every one of your users has a computer at home, maybe a laptop, definitely a phone, and likes to log in from someone else's computer from time to time. They're carrying your data around, but often not your security policy.…

Acer racks up Xeon E5s, picks fight with US server bad boys Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:44 AM PDT From little seeds giant oaks shipments grow It has been a while since Taiwanese server and PC maker Acer has made some noise in the server racket, but the company is plodding along after planting its seeds on United States soil in February 2011 with a revamping of its Xeon-based servers.…

Blighty battles Oz for stratospheric supremacy Posted: 11 Sep 2012 02:28 AM PDT Amateur ballooning rivals meet for head-to-head showdown Pics  The friendly rivalry between Brit and Oz amateur High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) enthusiasts hit new heights over the weekend when the two nations went head-to-head in a stratospheric clash of high-altitude titans.…

Array biz Nimble: Quick, lob us $40m before storage giants wallop us Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:58 AM PDT Hybrid racker needs VC cash Hybrid flash and disk drive array start-up Nimble Storage has been given $40.7m in venture capital funding to boost sales, marketing and engineering.…

Gov IT bods must shield their budgets from gov's knife – Socitm Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:42 AM PDT Increased use of council ICT services putting the squeeze on managers A report from the public sector IT directors' group Socitm has identified four ongoing priorities for ICT managers in the wake of continuing austerity.…

Want to avoid another cookie law mess? Talk to EU bods next time Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:19 AM PDT 'Dear ICO, sue us ... We're sick of you and this ridiculous cookie law' UK businesses should actively involve themselves in the debate over changes to EU law if they want to avoid problems stemming from the way those laws are drafted, an expert has advised.…

WD to parade flash-disk mutant for Wall St moneybags this week Posted: 11 Sep 2012 01:02 AM PDT Thinner, 'extreme' capacities promised Western Digital will face investors on Thursday and tell them what the world's new number-one disk drive supplier is going to do to stay at the top.…

Apple's soon-to-be-slurped securo firm shrugs off crypto warning Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:33 AM PDT Windows passwords exposure confusion AuthenTec, the security firm that's the target of an $356m acquisition by Apple, has denied reports that possible cryptographic weaknesses in its fingerprint scanner software pose a risk to the security of laptops.…

Ambitious Alibaba wants to take on Android Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:30 AM PDT There's only one way to settle this...FIGHT! Not content with dominating the massive Chinese e-commerce market, local hero Alibaba now wants to chase Android into the sea by making its cloud-based Aliyun mobile operating system China's preferred smartphone OS.…

Microsoft urges devs to 'lead Windows 8 app land grab' Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:11 AM PDT Give the people what they want - ASAP Microsoft has urged developers to "lead the land grab" by developing Windows 8 apps ASAP.…

Archos 101 XS 10.1in Android tablet review Posted: 11 Sep 2012 12:00 AM PDT Magnetic keyblet combo, anyone? Archos has built a decent business making budget Android tablets, so I suspect the word 'merde' echoed loudly around the Igny HQ when Google pulled the rug asunder with its low Nexus 7 pricing. Archos hasn't given up though and has now released a new device pitched as a budget alternative to the Asus Transformer Pad.…

Samsung accused of sex discrimination in China plant Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:47 PM PDT Electronics giant's woes continue as CLW turns the knife South Korean electronics behemoth Samsung has been hit by fresh allegations of impropriety at one of its manufacturing plants in China, this time involving purported sexual discrimination in its hiring policy.…

Oz court to test AdWords' WHOLE BUSINESS MODEL Posted: 10 Sep 2012 10:05 PM PDT Regulator insists ad placements can misled and deceive Australia's High Court, from which no appeal is possible, will this week hear a case in which Google stands accused of intentionally deceiving and misleading consumers by automatically placing ads according to advertisers' requested keywords.…

iPad no flight risk says Federal Aviation Authority Posted: 10 Sep 2012 09:28 PM PDT American Airlines allowed to use in-cockpit fondleslabs "in all phases of flight" Being asked to switch off your electronic devices during the takeoff and landing phases of a flight now looks even more anachronistic, after American Airlines announced it has been given permission to let its pilots use iPads in the cockpit "in all phases of flight".…

UK's loyalty set for £1.2bn Huawei reward Posted: 10 Sep 2012 08:50 PM PDT There's a good boy... The UK economy is set to get a much needed boost on Tuesday when Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei announces an expected £1.2bn investment including hundreds of jobs.…

AMD previews Piledriver, Ivy Bridge SeaMicro microservers Posted: 10 Sep 2012 06:56 PM PDT Stretches Freedom interconnect fabric out to storage SeaMicro is not longer an independent company, but you would not have guessed that if you were dropped in from outer space to attend the launch of the new SM15000 microserver in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Advanced Micro Devices may own SeaMicro, but the company went out of its way to support the latest "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor from rival Intel as well as its own forthcoming "Piledriver" Opteron processor as new compute nodes in a new SeaMicro chassis.…

McAfee: Emma Watson riskiest celebrity search Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:50 PM PDT Malwaria activissima In McAfee's latest survey of the celebrity searches most likely to lead to malware infection, Emma Watson – perhaps best known as Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films – has taken the top spot, knocking off model Heidi Klum from last year's most-likely-to-infect honors.…

Hacker uses Kindle as Raspberry Pi screen Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:34 PM PDT DIY instructions await the brave or foolish A hacker named Gef has rigged up his Raspberry Pi to use a Kindle e-reader as its monitor.…

Firefox support extended to older Android mobiles Posted: 10 Sep 2012 05:22 PM PDT Experimental builds for phones with ARMv6 chips The Mozilla Foundation would like to see its Firefox browser running on more mobile phones. But since almost no handsets ship with Firefox pre-installed, that means getting the software onto more of the phones that are already out there – even if they use older hardware.…

Intel contextual awareness: 'We know what your wife is up to' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:38 PM PDT Knows when its best to call, text, or just leave her alone IDF 2012  Intel Labs is working on a technology that uses what it calls "contextual awareness" to advise you of the best method to use when contacting others.…

Scientists provide a measure of uncertainty Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:16 PM PDT What would Heisenberg's position be? A group of Canadian PhD researchers claim to have obtained information beyond the "Heisenberg limit" using a technique called "weak measurement".…

NZ software giants join patent bill protest Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:45 PM PDT Petitioning against patent trolls Updated: govt says "no"  New Zealand's largest software exporters, Jade and Orion Healthcare, have lined up with the NZ Open Source Society, InternetNZ, and local industry lobby NZRise to ask the government to revise its proposed patent laws.…

E-publisher 'fesses up: 'Apple UDIDs were ours' Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:14 PM PDT BlueToad clears FBI of device data collection It seems both Apple and the FBI were telling the truth: the Apple UDIDs published last week didn't come from either organization, with an American e-publisher posting a statement that the data was stolen from its systems.…

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