Technology

Mark Blumenthal sets up this Iowa poll perfectly:

On New Year's Eve exactly four years ago, the Des Moines Register released its final poll of Iowa caucus-goers and turned the political world upside down.

While the newspaper's final Iowa Caucus poll of 2011, set to be published Saturday night at 7 p.m. Central Time (8 p.m. Eastern Time), may not confound the conventional wisdom this time, it is among the most eagerly anticipated political polls of the season for good reason. The Register has a hard-earned reputation for accuracy grounded in the fundamentals of survey research: Assume as little as possible about the likely caucus-goers, and let the voters speak for themselves.

So here's the topline (MoE  plus/minus 4 for full four day poll , plus/minus 5.6 for last 2 days):

Mitt Romney tops the latest Des Moines Register Iowa Poll in the closing days before the Iowa caucuses, but Ron Paul and Rick Santorum are poised within striking distance.

The poll, conducted Tuesday through Friday, shows support at 24 percent for Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts; 22 percent for Paul, a Texas congressman; and 15 percent for the surging Rick Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.

But the four-day results don’t reflect just how quickly momentum is shifting in a race that has remained highly fluid for months. If the final two days of polling are considered separately, Santorum rises to second place, with 21 percent, pushing Paul to third, at 18 percent. Romney remains the same, at 24 percent.

“Momentum’s name is Rick Santorum,” said the Register’s pollster, J. Ann Selzer.

And you know what? It's still really close (unless your name is Perry or Gingrich.) Romney's the favorite, but Santorum could win. Why?

Another sign of the race’s volatility: 41 percent of likely caucusgoers say they could still be persuaded to change their minds. That's because they are not sold on Romney, and the 75% non-Romney vote is still looking for a home.

There are three things that make a caucus survey hard to do:

1. getting the voter choices right (basic)
2. figuring out second choices (less relevant for this R caucus, but key for the 2008 D caucus)
3. guesstimating and gaming out who is likely to show - and why

That last one is huge, and with tomorrow's scheduled release of detailed analysis, we might know more.

An AP story earlier today notes this:

This year, polls have consistently shown two dominant themes in the GOP race:

—A tepid response to the GOP field among Republican voters.

Earlier this month, an AP-GfK poll found that amid Gingrich’s rise, Republican dissatisfaction with the lineup of candidates also rose. The wild swings among the anyone-but-Romney crowd have lifted nearly all of the candidates at some point this year, but none has fit the bill exactly.

Republicans don’t actively dislike Romney, with 73 percent saying he’s a strong leader and 81 percent calling him likable. But his best showing in any poll this year remains around 30 percent, and no other candidate has pulled a strong showing among the remaining 70 percent of the party.

—A deep anger among Republicans toward Obama.

Why the deep anger?

Maybe this:

If Romney wins, or if someone else does, it won't change the driving force among Republicans, who are against Obama and not for the nominee.  But ask President Kerry if that's enough to win with.

The highly respected and eagerly awaited Des Moines Register/Selzer poll just came out. It has the top three Romney 24%, Paul 22% and Santorum 15%. That's more or less in line with recent polls. The current TPM Poll Average (pre-DMR...

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

Happy New Year! It's that time (as of now!) for the UK, and since the Slashdot backend operates in Greenwich Mean Time, that seems as good a reason as any to welcome 2012 now instead of local midnight for any of the various U.S. time zones. Everyone has a different take on how to rank the events of the last year; read on below for a few notes on some of the goings on of the past 31,536,000 seconds (give or take). The list is pretty arbitrary, drawn from the thousand-ish stories that hit the Slashdot page in that time; please say in the comments what news hit you the hardest this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What's coming up on Sunday Kos ...

• DemFromCT will look thought the details of the Des Moines Register final Iowa poll for clues as to who is likely to actually show up.
• Dante Atkins will speculate about how the third-party group known as Americans Elect could affect the 2012 race.
• In "Arizona Bigotry" Denise Oliver-Velez will discuss the ruling by administrative law judge Lewis Kowal that ethnic studies are illegal.
• Scott Wooledge explains how skyrocketing health care costs became a very personal battle over the holidays.
• After a litany of anti-Romneys have now come and gone, Mitt Romney may well be poised to be the last man standing. Steve Singiser explores the inevitability of Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee, and why the only certainty in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is continued uncertainty.
• Hunter says he's just going to phone something in.
• They all sound the same! Georgia Logothetis will explore the most common political soundbites. Let's hope for some originality from candidates in 2012....
• Mark Sumner begins work on a new novel, and invites you to join in with your own writing project as we spend six months getting to "THE END."

New submitter futuristic writes with a link to Thomas Edison's great-grandson's take on Thomas Edison and the alleged demise of the incandescent light bulb. From the article: "My great grandfather's 100-watt incandescent will be replaced with new energy-efficient versions, including CFLs, LEDs, and — yes — new and improved incandescent bulbs. ... And my great-grandfather wouldn't have it any other way."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Follow me after the jump to see the latest poll average out of Iowa....

Josh Marshall http://talkingpointsmemo.com/joshmarshall.php

PolygamousRanchKid writes "Ford says its new Fusion, which will debut at the North American International Auto Show in a couple weeks, will be the first mainstream midsize sedan in North America to offer a lane departure system. Lane departure systems are aimed at warning drivers, especially drowsy ones, if their vehicles wander out of their lane. A digital camera mounted on the windshield ahead of the rear-view mirror keeps a watch. The system not only causes the steering wheel to vibrate if it senses an unintentional lane departure, it will also steer the car back into the right lane. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes occur every year as a result of drowsy drivers, leading to 1,500 deaths, 71,000 injuries and $12.5 billion in monetary losses." I'd just like to know how hard the AI will fight if it misinterprets a driver's intentional lane change.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ezra Klein has a great column, pointing out that finally Republicans have found voting restrictions they don't like. Rick Perry said the laws were “among the most onerous in the nation,” and possibly even unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich compared their impact to Pearl Harbor. Michele Bachmann, Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum were so intimidated that they simply slunk away without a fight.

Social Security? Obamacare? Dodd-Frank? Nope. Virginia’s ballot-access laws. Of the seven candidates still in serious contention for the Republican nomination for the presidency, only two of them — Mitt Romney and Ron Paul — will be appearing in the Virginia primary on March 6. [...]

But other Republicans — and most of the candidates — have turned their fire on Virginia. Ken Cuccinelli, the state’s attorney general, was particularly unsparing about the access laws. “Virginia won’t be nearly as ‘fought over’ as it should be in the midst of such a wide open nomination contest,” he wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “Our own laws have reduced our relevance. Sad. I hope our new GOP majorities will fix this problem so that neither party confronts it again.”

He hopes, in other words, that Virginia will make it easier for Republican candidates to get on the ballot, so Virginia’s voters are better able to participate in the election. It’s a noble goal, and one many Republicans share. But it runs counter to the efforts Republicans have mounted in dozens of states to make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to participate in the 2012 election.

The point being, of course, that it's not such a noble goal when it's only Republican candidates with ballot access and Republican voters who are eligible to vote for them, as is the case in seven states which have passed strict new voter ID laws, and another 27 states which are trying to pass them.

One of those seven states with new, restrictive laws, is Texas.

The bill, which Perry fast-tracked by designating it as “emergency” legislation, enforces a photo ID requirement that can be met by a concealed handgun permit but not by a student ID from a state university. And under the law, only a Texas citizen who has passed a mandatory training program can register voters.

That would be the same Perry who is now challenging Virginia’s rules. But the differences between the law Perry signed and the law he’s challenging are instructive.

Perry is an experienced politician who has hired a professional staff for the express purpose of navigating the logistical hurdle of ballot access. And he still failed to make the Virginia ballot, despite the fact that the rules were well-known and unchanged since the last election.

In Texas, however, Perry has sharply changed the rules, changed them on people who do not have a staff dedicated to helping them vote, and in fact made it harder for outside groups to send professionals into the state to help potential voters navigate the new law.

Somehow, one suspects Perry wouldn't see the parallel here.

In other news:

• Meteor Blades had this week's must-read take down of Heritage "scholar" Hans Van Spokovsky's assertion that nearly 90,000 disenfranchised voters in South Carolina is an "insignificant" number and calling the Justice Department's blocking of the law that would take away their votes "racial paranoia." The shorter version: Spakovsky's claims are bullshit. Suppression of the votes of vulnerable citizens—the poor, the elderly, students, historically discriminated against people of color—is an ongoing, relentless campaign of right wingers. If one thing doesn't work, they try another. Attorney Gen. Holder has justifiably slipped a stick into their spokes. It's no surprise to hear them squealing about it.
• Last fall, a secret donor stepped in just before the election to bankroll the effort to suppress the vote in Maine, donating $250,000 to fight against the restoration of same-day voter registration to the state. We now know who was behind that donation, and it's the usual suspects. [T]he entire $250,000 worth of late money came from a single source: the American Justice Partnership.

  The AJP is a conservative legal organization based not in Maine, but in Michigan. On their website, the group states they are fighting against “the scheming George Soros money machine” which is “trying to sabotage your right to vote,” a claim apparently made without a hint of irony. Though the AJP doesn’t disclose where its funding comes from, the Bangor Daily News notes that it has partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the past, a group that has been instrumental in the proliferation of voter ID laws across the country.

• Another elderly woman in Tennessee has lost her vote because of new voter ID restrictions the state has enacted. We've heard about 96-year-old Dorothy Cooper and 91-year-old Virginia Lasater. Now they're joined by 93-year-old Thelma Mitchell, who has no birth certificate, and who had even been accused by a DMV worker of being an illegal immigrant because she couldn't produce it. To really put the cherry on top, Mitchell has an old state employee ID, that the state is now rejecting. She has that ID because she cleaned the state capitol building for 30 years.

President Obama (Wikimedia Commons)

The National Journal reports:

President Obama signed on Saturday the defense authorization bill, formally ending weeks of heated debate in Congress and intense lobbying by the administration to strip controversial provisions requiring the transfer of some terror suspects to military custody.

"I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists," Obama said in a statement accompanying his signature.

Full text of the signing statement below the fold.

An anonymous reader writes "I'm trying to help a school put their classes online in the way most minimally invasive to the teachers. A few environmental considerations: They don't always have live internet in the classroom, or I'd just run to Skype. I'm hoping to make it as much one-touch start/stop as possible to start recording, stop recording, and upload to a server. I'd like to believe others here have already done something similar, so if a package or process worked for you, that would be great to hear. Not sure what if it's all PowerPoint lectures, or if they actually use a whiteboard, and if so what the best camera would be to use (on a school budget!)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No visible frozen donkey wheel in Upolu, Independent Samoa. (Kronocide/Wikicommons)

• Consider purchasing a Daily Kos subscription for yourself or a friend. Learn more about the community and how to subscribe right here.
• Somoa time travels. Samoa crossed the International Dateline. The island-nation skipped December 30, jumping from December 29 straight to December 31. The move brings Samoa onto the same calendar page as its local trading partners.
• The change will necessitate a 49-hour Shabbat for Jews on Somoa.
• Joe King will no longer be selling his homophobic, AIDS-mocking calendar through Amazon and Barnes and Noble sites, GLAAD reports.
• Anu Partanen at The Atlantic tips us off to What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success. The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.
• Politics takes a progressive turn in Jamaica, as Portia Simpson Miller leads the People’s National Party to become the new Prime Minister.
• Former GOP City Chair in New Jersey, young naked boys, video camera, arrest, the usual.
• Indiana State Sen. Vaneta Becker, (R-Evansville) wants to fine you $25 if you sing the "Star Spangled Banner" badly in the Hoosier state. No. Really.
• American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson got an nasty earful from fans when she tweeted support for Ron Paul. Her album sales spiked from #38 to #7 on Amazon. Call it a draw.
• Holy censorship! Fan boys and girls are irked that both comic book publishers DC and Marvel support the diabolical SOPA bill. To the Batcave!
• Still no word if the bazillion terabytes of pirated stuff downloaded to Congressional IP addresses included any Kelly Clarkson albums.
• Ron Paul's ascension in Iowa puts the Religious Right into full meltdown mode that a "real traditional values Republican" will not prevail in the Hawkeye state.
  

  Now that Paul's presidential campaign appears to be picking up steam, Religious Right activists are no longer simply dismissing Paul but are actively attacking him, with people like Bryan Fischer saying Paul is a renegade who should not be allowed to participate in GOP debates and Matt Barber writing columns about how "Ron Paul is dangerous."

  Apparently, in Iowa, not just any old crazy will do, you have to be just the right kind of crazy to satisfy this crowd.
• Rick Santorum may be just the right crazy. He explains to the AP how liberals caused (his) Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and laments the striking down of sodomy laws. "We have laws in states, like the one at the Supreme Court right now, that has sodomy laws and they were there for a purpose." It's Santorum's job creation plan to station more (non-union) sex police in your bedroom.
• Related: add Lawrence vs. Texas to the long list of things Rick Perry can't remember.
• Newt Gingrich convened an emergency conference call with the Kingpins of the Religious Right. The master scheme is to shore up conservative religious support in Iowa for the adulterous candidate who has had as many religions as he's had wives (three).
• Alec MacGillis at The New Republic peeks behind the campaign trail curtain and declares Newt Gingrich, The King of the World. The plan is, in anticipation of the impending Gingrich monarchy, the 112th Congress will to vote to repeal the Affordable Health Care for America Act in the lame duck session of 2011. Also, Dodd-Frank, and Sarbanes-Oxley: And then the day after I'm sworn in, have them brought down, so you can literally sign the veto of ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley on the 21st or 22nd of January. That would set a momentum of change.
  
• The New York Times takes a look at the homes of the 2012 GOP hopefuls. Gingrich's 5,206-square-foot stone mansionette may seem big for a middle class American, but remember, his home must accommodate both Calista's Tiffany jewelry collection and Newt's freakishly large head simultaneously. New York designer Thad Hayes weighs in: “I hate to call them McMansions — it gives McDonald’s a bad name."
• New Hampshire is expected to vote in January on whether to bring the fun and games of Proposition 8 to New England.
• Check this out this stylish infographic chart from The Big Picture that purports to explain why Americans pay through the nose for the same drugs Canadians get cheaper.
• Just nine more hours to add to your favorite cause or candidate's final 2011 quarter fundraising totals.

smitty777 writes "Forbes is running an intriguing story on a new 'Superphone' under development by the folks at Microsoft. According to this leaked MS roadmap document, the plan is to build the Apollo-based phone in the 4th quarter of 2012. FTA: 'In the end, however, none of this matters. Microsoft's "peek into the future" is barely a glimpse into what the company may or may not have planned for 2012. While the "superphone" bullet is worth noting, it is not the confirmation of a revolutionary new product. At best, it indicates that Microsoft wishes to compete with Apple by offering a product that is, well, super.' It's also interesting that Sony and AT&T also appear to be working on superphones of their own."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Below the fold you'll find the nominations for Best Hate Mail of the Year, based on your votes in Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.

So what was the most deliciously frothy hate mail of 2011? You decide, below the fold!

jones_supa writes "Ville 'viznut' Heikkilä presents us with an interesting project. 'As demonstrated by the video, IBNIZ (Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo) is a virtual machine and a programming language that generates video and audio from very short strings of code. Technically, it is a two-stack machine somewhat similar to Forth, but with the major exception that the stack is cyclical and also used at an output buffer.' The main goal of IBNIZ is to provide a new platform for the demoscene. Something that would have the potential to displace MS-DOS as the primary platform for sub-256-byte productions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I published my end-of-year think piece, The Un-Internet, about an hour ago by posting it to my linkblog. Which, among other places, flows to Twitter. Which is down.

This has blunted the impact. No retweets, no kudos, no condemnation!

Proves the point of the piece so damned well.

We're way too dependent on the Un-Internet., which behaves somewhat like the Internet, but has chokepoints that can cut off the flow. The whole point of the Internet, from the point of view of the US Govt, was that it couldn't be cut off this way.

I like to say that RSS doesn't have a fail whale.

It's at times like this that it doesn't seem so cute.

Update: Shortly after posting this, our URL-shortener server went down. House-of-cards.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Real View v 20-20 Technologies, it was held that the actual copyright infringement damages for a single unauthorized download of a computer program was the lost license fee that would have been charged. The judge, in the District Court of Massachusetts, granted remittitur, reducing the jury's verdict from $1,370,590.00 to $4200 unless the plaintiff seeks a new trial. Something tells me the plaintiff will seek a new trial."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(click for larger image)

Kevin Fishburne writes "After years of work, creator Benoît Minisini and friends are just in time for New Year's celebrations with the first stable release of GAMBAS 3. Per their web site, 'Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic (but it is NOT a clone !).' GAMBAS is component-based, so check out the list for an idea of what you can do with it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every year, when I have it together, I name someone blogger of the year.

It's always a person, never an organization -- because that's essential imho to being a blogger. To think of a tech pub like the NY Times or TechCrunch as a blogger is to miss the point. And anyone who is edited, in any way, is not a blogger. Because once you accept editing, you've allowed another mind into the writing. You're no longer finding out what someone thinks. It's not quite as clear.

Not to say one is better than the other. Just different.

Now, for past bloggers -- they continue to impress, in different ways of course because they're individuals. That's what made them such excellent bloggers in the first place!

They are: Joel Spolsky, Jay Rosen, NakedJen, Julian Assange.

This year's BOTY is...

In a minute.

First, let me say who I thought of, and why I think he may well be my choice for BOTY next year.

Richard Stallman.

It came as a surprise to me that Stallman is a blogger. Somehow I tripped across his feed. Added it to my river, and since then have been very impressed. Stallman is, in every way, what I think of as a Natural Born Blogger. His impulse is to share. And he has an opinion. And he states it, concisely and with irony and humor. It's really good stuff.

And the thing I like about it most is that it is so concise.

Twitter has made this a value we appreciate, and that's something to thank Twitter for. With conciseness as an established practice, we're heading into a new kind of blogging. What I call a linkblog.

That's why I think Stallman might be a great choice next year, if things turn out as I think they will. I think enough of us will be linkblogging outside the silos to make it interesting. If this happens it will make new kinds of aggregators possible. New news flows. Because freedom has been bottled up in the silos for too long. Too much have we waited for them to innovate in ways that don't cause more money to flow to them. Over time the low-hanging fruit becomes riper and riper. Eventually a strong wind willl come and blow it all to the ground. That's what I look forward to. It didn't happen in 2011, so the linkblog isn't the trend, yet. Maybe it will happen in 2012.

But in 2011, the most value for me was with bloggers who continue to make a strong personal investment in the web outside the silos.

So I was looking for someone who had something to say, and who beat the drum regularly. Someone who said things in clear language that was accessible to large numbers of people. And who said things we really need to hear. Things to think about, to consider, to be reminded of.

Someone who leads and inspires.

I think you're going to be surprised at my choice.

Seth Godin.

His blogging meets all these criteria and more. I never know what's coming from his corner of the world, but I know when I read it I'm going to have something to think about. Whether I agree or not. All good bloggers do that, push you in a new direction. Change the world by changing minds.

Godin doesn't force his ideas on us. He presents them as part of a smorgasboard of thought that's available in any quantity you like. There's no programming involved. He draws you back to him by the quality of his provocation. He's really the best at what he does, and what he does is important.

So bravo Seth Godin!

Thank you for all the blogging, and please keep us well-supplied with lots of new ideas and ways of looking at things.

I published my end-of-year think piece, The Un-Internet, about an hour ago by posting it to my linkblog. Which, among other places, flows to Twitter. Which is down.

This has blunted the impact. No retweets, no kudos, no condemnation!

Proves the point of the piece so damned well.

We're way too dependent on the Un-Internet., which behaves somewhat like the Internet, but has chokepoints that can cut off the flow. The whole point of the Internet, from the point of view of the US Govt, was that it couldn't be cut off this way.

I like to say that RSS doesn't have a fail whale.

It's at times like this that it doesn't seem so cute.