Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Is McCain going to steal the election? The poor performance of uncalibrated electronic voting machines, which can check a different box than you touch if they are intentionally, or accidentally miscalibrated, may lead to voter confusion this year. For example, the following photo shows the actual difference between where you touch, and what candidate registers:

I took it from the following youtube video:

You can read WIDESPREAD TOUCH SCREEN VOTE FLIPPING!! at Daily Kos for an emotional rundown:

It’s been the ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines that have failed, flipping votes from one candidate to another not chosen by the voter. In virtually every instance, it’s been an attempted Democratic vote, that has flipped to a Republican, or been flipped another party (third party candidate).

While this could be dismissed as small, technical error, coupled with ineptitude, it could also be the only part of a conspiracy to keep the Bush legacy in office. The so-called “tip of the iceberg” of the Bush/Republican dynasty. In a way, it’s good that widespread technology is being brought into the public awareness–for too long people have “trusted the system” without realizing how fragile it actually is. Your heat, electricity, transportation, and water are all controlled by computer systems. If those fail (like the election systems appear to be), your basic necessities will no longer be met.

What is a staph infection? What is MRSA? Staph, in layman’s terms, is shorthand for a kind of Gram-positive bacteria known as Staphylococcus (“bunch of grapes” in Greek). These bacteria are fairly limited in range–there are only 31 varieties in the genus, and most are harmless. One of the harmful, but most common, species is Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), which can infect open wounds, leading to toxic shock and death:

Did you know that 500,000 patients in American hospitals contract a staph infection every year? Or that staph infection is in the top four post-op complications?

By itself, a staph infection didn’t used to be serious. In 1943, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by watching it act against a staph colony in a petri dish. A few years later, by 1950 as much as 40% of hospital S. Aureus were resistant to penicillin. By 1960, 80% were. This is the precursor to the modern MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) problem.

MRSA is simply evolved S. Aureus. Over time, in hospital settings, this simple bacteria was exposed to all kinds of antibiotics. Over time, most of them died, but the survivors had a mutation that protected them, which they passed on to their children. Today (well, these numbers are from 2005) 31.8 out of every 100,000 Americans acquire an MRSA infection. This is 94,360 cases and 18,650 deaths nationwide a year, 150% as many deaths as caused by AIDS.

References: Staphylococcus aureus and MRSA

TechCrunch points out that even ex-Bloglines-founder Mark Fletcher twittered that Bloglines sucks:

Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.

According to Michael Arrington, the major problem with Bloglines is that it doesn’t update feeds with any frequency. But that’s not the only thing; the site itself is slow, hard to navigate, and hasn’t been updated in literally years. Here’s the UI that’s been in use since at least 2006:

Ask, please update me to something modern!

The beta design that Bloglines has been cooking up is nearly entirely worthless; it takes a bad design, and essentially reduces the amount of on-screen contrast. It’s also still pretty slow:

Here’s an interesting, funny blooper from their homepage refresh (it looks like Ask, when they bought them, finally figured out the homepage was extremely ugly):

That’s right, the “screenshot” for their mobile bloglines interface is actually of an iPhone checking voicemail? What?? How is that possibly related to an RSS reader’s mobile interface…