Chilly

For some reason, this got the "whose my favorite player? Mr. Derrick Brooks" commercial stuck in my head.

Since when has experience governing ever really been a requirement to be President?

His defense was tired, getting scored on, and if the Chargers got the ball in overtime, they would have won. Shanahan had more trust in his offense to get the 2 point conversion than his defense to stop the Chargers in OT, thus he called the 2 pointer.

RAH RAH RAH ANGER RAGE OVER EHARING WORDS THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND RAWR

Ugh. Could they work anymore crappy drama into the show? Spoilers: The serious line of the night is "Death changes everything"? House just walks in and knows the answer? It's like they aren't concerned with reality anymore. Couple more episodes, and I'm out.

iTunes... now with more bloat!

Ah, so you're advocating voting for a 3rd party candidate.

lol, I was thinking the same thing.

Speaking of which, how ridiculous is this article? OMG, the WSJ now has EMAIL CAPABILITIES, PROFILES, and COMMENTING ON STORIES! SO WEB 2.0! SCRATCH THAT, MAKE IT 3.0!

lol political statements on youtube

McCain created the blackberry lol.

Yeah, the whole newspaper industry is going down the tubes. Ironically, it is also a series of tubes which is causing it.

Sarcasm detector broken?

No, because that's New Jersey. The NJ polls have been getting very mixed results. There have been five polls since the start of September. Two of the polls (Quinnipac and Marist) were within the MOE at Obama +3, while three others were right at the average for New Jersey since March or so (+6, +8, +9 for Obama). Remember as well that the polls being released were in the field last week, so they include McCain's post-convention bounce. If you look at the polls from last year at this time, they had a similar tightening of the race, and then we saw what happened: Kerry +6.8

I'm sure they have a large enough budget for a couple of copy editors, being a hugely known website and all. I had sure heard of them before his post.

It isn't, especially without being able to examine the cross tabs of the poll. Was it influenced by any biases? Was it a result that was outside of the confidence range? Was there computing error? To trust the results of a poll such as this, you really need more than just one...

One poll aint enough to say anything about anything.

Papa bear.

The problem is it goes much further than just throttling traffic during times when it actually needs to be. Comcast is known for consolidating multiple head ends into one, and then not upgrading that one head end, causing massive overselling of bandwidth. As a result, they've implemented QoS controls to avoid having to upgrade their network like a normal ISP. They also like to leave their throttling on during non-peak times (p2p traffic shaping at 4am? lol). I should note that I'm not opposed to QoS models or fair queuing algorithms, I think that during peak times it's quite necessary depending on bandwidth saturation (I use a rudimentary QoS implementation at home myself since my two roommates like to use bit torrent heavily at times). However, there are technological solutions to being able to detect network load and then implementing throttling based upon the bandwidth being used at that point in time. Unfortunately, it seems like we're moving more toward the Canadian model of ISPs, where Rogers and Bell use DPI to throttle anything that is non-http traffic. Hopefully ipv6 will get adopted soon, so DPI isn't such an easy thing to do anymore.

I guess I'm confused. I keep seeing this argument that McCain is "out of touch" with computers and that he "doesn't know what is going on", but the only proof ever offered is that he personally doesn't really use computers, and then I'm told that his personal computer skills don't matter. In my view, saying McCain is "out of touch" or "doesn't know what is going on", while it might be personally true for them, is dishonest. Both Obama and McCain will have to rely on scores of advisors across all issues, people that are experts (unlike them). Portraying McCain as "out of touch" strikes me as essentially a marketing gimmick and part of the "silly season" that Obama was talking about. An intellectually honest approach (that wouldn't win elections) would have been to explain why net neutrality is important, and why it is better than a less regulated internet.

Seems like a pretty one-sided and inaccurate view from an Obama supporter. If McCain and his campaign honestly thought technology didn't matter, would they devote as much site space to it as Obama? I think McCain's technology policy is wrong, but I don't think it is due to McCain not caring about technology or claiming "technology doesn't matter" (Why in the hell would the chairman of the FCC argue that technology doesn't matter? It makes no sense). Rather, I disagree with Powell on a number of issues (net neutrality, censorship, etc), but on others I agree with him. I think it is fairly naive to think that the McCain campaign doesn't understand or look at the issues if Powell is an advisor. He's been one of the figures leading the charge on lots and lots of technology issues.

Yes, I know; I have seen his page (and previously said that I prefer a lot of Obama's technology policy to McCain's, though not all of it).

Perhaps I am missing something; can you give an example? I don't believe that McCain wouldn't understand the ramifications of being told the entire financial sector was brought to a stand still because he doesn't know how to use the internet. What you are essentially arguing here, from what I understand, is two-fold (if I'm wrong, please correct me): - The internet has fundamentally changed the global political scene - Not understanding how to use the internet prevents someone from having a correct view of the world I would argue against that first point. The fundamentals of international relations hasn't changed due to the internet. If you're a subscriber to the Realism school of IR, the fundamentals might be something like this: Likewise, the root causes of terrorism haven't changed either due to the internet. As such, I would argue that the second point is invalid. Now I absolutely agree with you that the government needs to understand these things; it's pretty hard to fight a war, defend yourself, etc., when you don't understand the technology that is being used. However, these aren't strategies that the POTUS is involved in (at least, they better not be - no way in hell do I want the President making day-to-day strategic decisions in fighting a war on that scale). The internet has changed how people communicate and how quickly things happen, but it hasn't changed the motivations or rationale behind those actions.

How is McCain not being "technologically-savvy" going to inhibit his ability to be President? How is the post of President so technologically different from being a Senator that it is suddenly a requirement for the job?

Both of these arguments bring up a question: What is the President going to be deciding on where a "rudimentary grasp on technology" as Johnny Coli puts it is going to make a difference? For instance, one of the big technology issues right now, in my view, is net neutrality. Most people, including internet users, just aren't all that concerned or informed about net neutrality. Using the internet doesn't suddenly qualify someone with knowledge about net neutrality. What about internet taxation policy? Would knowing how to buy something on the internet change that?