Future Compliant, June 11, 2008: Electoral College, Vaccines, and Linux

The big future issue in the US these days is of course the very, very near future of the presidential elections in November. Now that we've got our candidates, one of who will make a great president and the other of whom is John McCainJohn McCain, the pundits, reporters, coffee shop wags, and everyone else is wondering if Obama can really win. Lots of people hope he does but have some niggling feeling that maybe he can't. They think that very backwards looking, non-future compliant factors like racism and xenophobia will make it impossible for him to win. Put another way they just don't think this country is ready to elect a black man as president. I disagree, although I'm sure those kinds of small-minded jerks are out there. But he doesn't need every single vote to win, and most of those types were never gonna vote for him anyway. The truth is, he doesn't even need most of the votes. All he needs is 270 electoral votes.

And that's where this really cool electoral vote counting interactive map comes in really handy (hat tip to Talking Points Memo). It allows you to play prognosticating pundit and do some looking into the future of your own. The map comes pre-set with the solid red and solid blue leaning states already marked out and the swing states yellow. You can click on them to change from yellow to red to blue and the map automatically adds up the electoral votes for you down at the bottom. Viewed this way, coupled with Obama's strong showing in soe swing states like Virginia and Colorado where Democrats haven't won in years, and the picture looks pretty grim for John McCain. If he loses any single one of the mid-sized states that Bush narrowly carried in 2004, then he's screwed. If Obama holds Kerry's states and wins some combination of Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia he wins. And there are lots of other ways for him to win too. So spend some quality time with this lovely map, and plug in your poll results as they come in. All I'm saying is, change is gonna come.

Since I'm on a roll here with the unavoidable mixture of technology and politics, lets move on to another much more scientific and yet (unfortunately) almost as politically charged topic: vaccines. There's been quite a movement afoot of late attributing all sorts of supposed horrors that come with vaccination. Jenn McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim CarreyJim Carrey have been spearheading a new Green Our Vaccines movement that is just a thinly veiled attempt to ban vaccines entirely based on a lack of understanding of how chemistry really works and what the real health issues are. With politicians like Robert F Kennedy Jr. stepping in on this one and many of the candidates, including McCain and, to a lesser but not make me happe level, Obama, giving lip service to this fabricated issue. This Time magazine online article does a good job of preventing the science and cutting though a lot of the BS.

Now here's something to make a writer of hacker-inspired fiction green with envy: Cory Doctorow's great new young adult novel, Little Brother, includes a number of scenes featuring his protagonists using a hyper-secure, privacy-centric version of Linux called Paranoid Linux. Well, lo and behold, someone has gone out and started a Paranoid Linux group devoted to making just such a distribution a reality. I really hope they follow through, as this is a great idea and just the kind of thing Linux is perfect for. If they're especially smart, they'll shoot for making it as user friendly as possible and try and bring these kinds of privacy tools into the hands of users who're hooked on something like Ubuntu or the EeePC Xandros distro - they're basing it on Debian it seems, so hopefully that'll be the case.

Did any of that talk about distributions make any sense to you at all? If it didn't, then maybe you need to work on your own future compliance and look into switching over to Linux. Go ahead and try it out, especially if you've got an older computer lying around or something. I'm at about 90% Linux for all my computing needs, although I'll admit, it sometimes takes some work arounds, mostly in the hardware department. My old printer is the one thing keeping me tied to a windows based machine, but I hardly ever print, so it's not that big a deal at all. But don't take my word for it. Someone else has kindly provided the world (including you!) with 25 Reasons to Convert to Linux. So, what're you waiting for? Check it out.