This.
Former Virginia Governor's Comment On Science At Convention Lights Up Twitter
Reposted from Wired
It didn't ignite the crowd at the Pepsi Center in Denver Tuesday night in the same way as Hillary Clinton's speech did, but the 2008 Democratic National Convention keynoter of former Virginia Governor Mark Warner lit up the micro-blogging service Twitter as its geek community celebrated a throwaway line in Warner's speech.
Warner, a former Capitol Hill staffer for senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and telecommunications entrepreneur, focused his speech on creating an environment that keeps America competitive in the global economy.
In a one-liner, he quipped: "Just think about this: In four months, we will have an administration that actually believes in science!"
It was as if Warner were acknowledging a constituency that feels as if the Bush administration had thrown a Harry Potter invisible cloak over it for the past eight years. Many members of that online constituency poked their heads out from under the cloak on Twitter.
"In four months, we'll have an administration that actually believes in science. lol, but YEAH!" tweeted kmcg.
"My fav from 2nite: 'Just think about this: in six months we will have an administration that actually believes in science'-Mark Warner; YES!" agreed tujaded.
Those were just two of a slew of comments on Twitter reacting to Warner's remark. Here's a quick summary:
- jlangenbeck: "Warner's speech was fantastic. We have to fund and tech to save this nation and remain competitive,"
- epolitics: "Diggin' me some Mark Warner. Science! (poetry in motion)"
- dagsalot: "I'm a big fan of former Gov. Mark Warner right now. 'Think, in 4 months, we could have a presidency that believes in science!' It'd be nice!"
- twitterdoug: "Best line of Warner's speech so far -- In four months we will have an administration that believes in science."
During his talk, Warner also pointed to the importance of broadband rollout, education and job training to keep jobs from migrating to India, referring to his own efforts as governor to revive small towns in Virginia.
"We delivered broadband to the most remote areas of our state, because if you can send a job to Bangalore, India, you can sure as heck send one to Danville, Virginia, and to Flint, Michigan, and to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and to Peoria, Illinois," he said. "In a global economy, you shouldn't have to leave your hometown to find a world-class job."
The Democrats have made broadband rollout part of their party platform, and both Obama and Warner have expressed support for net neutrality.
Mozilla Labs' Ubiquity: Firefox becomes Quicksilver
Lots of talk today across the web about Mozilla Labs' new project, Ubiquity.
If You Want To Create a Mashup, Just Ask Your Browser. Mozilla Labs Launches Ubiquity
Ubiquity prototype lets users take command of Firefox
Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On
This blog has a nice writeup: Ubiquity In Depth
Quoted from Ars Technica:
Mozilla Labs has released the first working prototype of Ubiquity, a natural-language command-based shell for the Firefox web browser. Although the Ubiquity project is still in early stages of development and the software still has some serious bugs, it already offers some useful functionality and exudes an enormous amount of potential.The Ubiquity prototype, which is implemented as a Firefox extension, offers an unobtrusive and extensible command interface that enables users to interact with the browser and a number of remote web services. The user can launch the Ubiquity command interface with a configurable keyboard shortcut and then type in an instruction. The command interface has an autocompletion mechanism which attempts to guess the rest of the user's command string and then displays available results.
The command interface is conceptually similar to desktop launcher tools like Enso, Quicksilver, and GNOME-Do. Unlike those tools, it places a strong emphasis on web content manipulation and web services. In many ways, it's like an interactive mash-up system. Ubiquity can respond to user instructions in several different ways. It can directly alter the contents of a web page, it can manipulate the browser interface, it can load a page in a new tab, and it can display output in a notification pop-up.
New commands can be implemented natively in JavaScript, so it is trivially easy to extend the system and bring it new capabilities. The developers have even created a simple Ubiquity command editor that allows users to input new command implementations directly into the browser. Mozilla provides a detailed tutorial that explains how some of default Ubiquity commands were implemented. It is even possible to use popular third-party JavaScript libraries like JQuery to simplify development of new commands. The Ubiquity developers aim to eventually create a tool that can automatically convert Ubiquity commands into full Firefox extensions.
One of the commands that particularly impressed me performs in-place translation of selected text blocks. The user selects a bit of text, initiates the Ubiquity command system, and then begins typing the word "translate" to select the translation command. Ubiquity will use a remote translation web service to automatically detect the language of the selected text, translate it into English, and display a preview of the English translation in the Ubiquity results listing. When the user hits enter to complete the command, the foreign text in the page itself will be replaced inline with the English translation.
Ubiquity offers some very compelling functionality in its current state, but it still has a lot of limitations. The biggest weakness is its lack of support for pipelines. Modularity and support for combinatorial command chains are the greatest strengths of the conventional Linux command-line shells. Ubiquity would be far more powerful if it provided a way to supply the output of one command as the input to a subsequent command.Ubiquity is largely an experiment in user interaction, but it is likely that some of its functionality will eventually be streamlined directly into the Firefox browser itself. One potential integration vector is the Firefox AwesomeBar, a rich autocompletion system that matches user input against fragments of URLs and page titles and offers the best results based on how frequently a page is visited and how long ago it was last viewed. Many enthusiastic fans of the AwesomeBar have speculated that the system could be expanded to encapsulate more functionality and potentially even a full command system. Perhaps the AwesomeBar could converge with the search box and the Ubiquity command system to form a next-generation Firefox UberBar.
One of the principal developers of the Ubiquity extension is Aza Raskin, the founder of Humanized and son of the celebrated Macintosh luminary Jef Raskin. Aza and several of his colleagues from Humanized were hired by Mozilla earlier this year to work on experimental projects that could shape the future of the web. I've had the pleasure of meeting Aza at several open-source software community events and I've always been immensely impressed by his excellent presentations on software usability. He has bold ideas and very intriguing solutions to seemingly intractable usability problems.
Aza advocates creating software that conforms to the Taoist notion of Wu Wei, which is to "act without doing." The Ubiquity extension, which clearly builds on the experiences that the Humanized developers cultivated while creating Enso, is a profoundly elegant articulation of that Taoist concept.
Young Obama Supporter "Owns" Clintons 4 McCain Spokesperson At Convention;
Amazing what calm intelligence can do to make someone else look retarded.
For McCain, It’s All About Ohio
All this hand-wringing over the national poll numbers is misplaced. Watch the swing state numbers, and especially, watch Ohio.
Like every other junkie, I've been checking 538 every day, but I noticed something for the first time yesterday: based on their models, McSame has less than a 1% chance of winning the election without winning Ohio.
That's right -- it's practically impossible for McSame to lose Ohio and win the election.
Why?
The simple fact is, there's just not that many big red states. If you put Ohio in the blue column, McSame has to pull an upset in Michigan, where he currently trails by 7 while simultaneously holding Obama off in Virginia (where he's down 1), Nevada (up 2), Montana (down 3) and Colorado (down 2).
Failing that, he'd have to cobble together a whole series of upsets, like New Mexico (where he's down 5), Minnesota (down 7) and Iowa (down 5). But even then, that would also mean that McSame would have to win just about every state where Obama's pushing him -- states like Colorado, Nevada, Montana, North Dakota, Missouri, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.
There's a handy electoral college map simulator here. See for yourself.
The whole thing's going to come down to Ohio, again. It's a big union state that gave Bush the election by about 100,000 votes in 2004. Rove's secret weapon that year was a same-sex marriage ban initiative which helped drive social conservative turnout, and tipped the scales to Bush and the GOP.
Ohio had serious buyer's remorse, because in 2006, they promptly kicked out every major Republican office holder in the state and elected a Democratic governor and senator.
Latest polls show Obama with a 2-point lead. If you live in Ohio, you know what to do.
Article courtesy of FireDogLake.
