Here's Stranger helpdesk wizard Brian, forever enshrined on 18th Avenue.

Post links to your favorite Seattle Street View finds in the comments.

So... the whole MAC vs. PC thing? Totally played out? With Apple now making fun of Microsoft's ads which make fun of Apple's ad that make fun of Microsoft, yeah, pretty much played. And now New York's musical-theater/stage-combat/blood-and-gore-special-effects geeks deliver a final, fatal blow.

It goes on about, oh, three minutes longer than it needed to. And at the end? Are they MAC and PC zombies or what?

Researchers at UCSB have demonstrated how ridiculously easy it is to compromise voting machines from Sequoia Voting Systems, which are currently used in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Boring yet terrifying video, in two parts:

Sequoia recently intimidated New Jersey into not giving one of their machines to respected Princeton researcher Ed Felten for testing. They naturally claim intellectual property rights and all kinds of other horseshit in their quest to destroy the foundation of our government, which is itself, of course, also entirely complicit in this mess.

For a bit of contrast, here's a page from Australia's Capital Territory Election Commision's site, which gives complete public access to their open-source voting software.

In one sentence, they explain why they're smart and we're dumb:

The software for the electronic voting and counting system was built using Linux open source software, which was chosen specifically for this electoral system to ensure that election software is open and transparent and could be made available to scrutineers, candidates and other participants in the electoral process.

I'm don't think there's a pill strong enough to make me feel better about this one.

Your slow-page-loading days are over. Some time ago, because I have an iPhone and very little patience, I created an iPhone-optimized interface for Slog. Some time later, Nick improved it and then the other day New Nick made one for Line Out. Now, in a fit of selflessness and doing-my-job, I'm sharing it with the world. I hope that it makes you as happy as it has me.

I'm very happy, ask anyone.

Don't have an iPhone? Well, this might work just fine in your mobile "browser," but I can't promise anything. Please let us know how it goes if you try it. I attempted to test it in Windows Mobile, but I don't associate with Windows Mobile users, and attempts to get Microsoft's emulators working proved predictably annoying, and then I got hungry. YMMV!

click for larger version

Someone needs to figure out how to make this a real issue while not sounding like a conspiracy theorist, BEFORE an election. The validity of the vote is really the only political issue that matters, no? How many software glitches have you experienced today? Me? Probably about 30. Be very afraid.

Customers are still outraged:

...I'm watching Star Trek Voyager, and I'm at the end of season 2. Season 2 disk 6 was supposed be shipped today as of last night, but it's gone "poof" and they are shipping season 2 disk 7. I had to go back and add disk 6 back up at the top.

I'm just glad this didn't happen when I was watching DS9.

Amen to that. Videos should arrive on Saturday, which means: Tonight you should go to your local friendly neighborhood video store.

". . . during the presale of the G1, T-mobile customers can pick up the phone for $150. This is where it gets interesting, we’re not seeing any prices for new activations during the presale, so this could mean that only current T-mobile customers can pick up the G1 during the presale. Other customers interested in the G1 may have to wait until beginning/mid October before a national public launch."

This is clearly not going to be another iPhone. The device looks downright clunky next to Apple's phone:

But it could be significantly cheaper. Will that be enough to make a difference? And should I get one?

Answers are not clear as this time. Try again later.

Apparently, there's a poll you can take to help decide what the camera will look like here. There's probably no way to make it look like this:

Two thoughts:

1: I'm surprised that it took them this long to make this.

and

2: This will make absolutely none of these people happy.

I wish I had as many followers as Hitler.

Tap into your imagination, flex your literary muscle—and don't forget to stretch your thumbs. Simply submit your Great American Story, txt-style. Create your masterpiece of 1500 words (one text message at a time) and incorporate ALL 11 NEWTREE chocolate names: PLEASURE, VIGOR, RENEW, REFRESH, FORGIVENESS, SEXY, BLUSH, TRANQUILITY, COCOON, REJOICE and CRAVE.

Forgiveness in a wrapper! The end is nigh.

So far it's flown to a maximum altitude of six feet, but the developer promises to personally take it up to 500 feet before he starts selling them for $100,000 next year. He's also reported to be trying to come to terms with the fact that, "at some point, somebody is going to have a very bad experience.”

Watch the video. You can see where he gets a little too close to a tree and the branches get sucked into the rotors.

I imagine that, like the Segway, these will be initially used by law enforcement, which will be awesome, right?

In other futuristic transportation news, the owner of the #6 Tesla Roadster crashed his $109,000 car shortly after taking delivery of the much anticipated all-carbon electric speedster. No one was injured.

Andrew Farah, who worked on the GM EV1 electric car—which GM mysteriously smashed to smithereens, inspiring this conspiracy-theorizing documentary—is now chief engineer for the Chevrolet Volt.

There's a good, long article about him and the project over on the Atlantic Monthly:

Farah had been fiercely committed to the EV1, and he was not about to relive the disappointment.

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’ve been on programs like this before. They’re not real.”

“No,” came the reply. “This one is real.” Farah asked to talk to other senior executives, and they concurred. So, in the spring of last year, he took one of the hardest jobs at GM, and became the Volt’s chief engineer.

And how, I ask over coffee early one February morning in Detroit, is it going? It is 6 a.m., and Farah, who is 47 and has angular features and prominent black glasses, is rushing to make a 7 a.m. meeting. The car, he says, is 10 weeks behind the original schedule. Any more slippage, and the 2010 deadline will be history. Even if no more time is lost, he will have only eight weeks to test the underbody, the car’s structural base.

Is that enough time? He answers indirectly. In some cars, he says, testing the underbody can take a year.

GM, he tells me, is taking an industrial organization designed to grind out incremental improvements and repurposing it for a technological leap. “I spend 20 percent of my time being a psychologist and counselor,” he says. “I tell people, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of risk. And, yes, that’s OK.’

“It’s not a program for the faint of heart.”

India’s largest automaker Tata Motors is set to start producing the world’s first commercial air-powered vehicle. The Air Car, developed by ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre for Luxembourg-based MDI, uses compressed air, as opposed to the gas-and-oxygen explosions of internal-combustion models, to push its engine’s pistons. Some 6000 zero-emissions Air Cars are scheduled to hit Indian streets in August of 2008.

The Air Car, called the MiniCAT could cost around Rs. 3,50,000 ($ 8177) in India and would have a range of around 300 km between refuels.

The cost of a refill would be about Rs. 85 ($ 2). Tata motors also plans to launch the world’s cheapest car, Tata Nano priced famously at One lakh rupees by October.

It's no flying car, but it does make a MINI Cooper look like a gas-guzzling SUV, and that's futuristic enough for me.

Via.

Hitachi recently announced that in 2010 they plan to unveil a 5TB hard drive. This led them to note that, "By 2010, just two disks will suffice to provide the same storage capacity as the human brain."

Of course, nobody knows exactly how much memory the human brain actually holds—the method Hitachi uses has something to do with counting synapses, which is maybe too linear—but somebody on Digg points out that Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation had a 5 terabyte capacity memory in his brain, which can only mean one thing: line up for your androids now, kids. And prepare to run in fear when they turn on you.