If you watched the Presidential Debate last night you might have noticed John McCain’s mention of a $3 million earmark, supported by Barack Obama, for an Overhead Projector.

“He [Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”

Now, I know the projector he’s talking about. The old one, in need of replacing, is pictured above. In fact, I’ve seen many a sky show at the Adler Planetarium as a youth and it helped ignite my excitement for the larger world around us. The galactic vistas and interstellar reaches projected on that dome were more inspiring than you’d think possible with a collection of Zeiss steel and glass. Unfortunately, this projector is over 40 years old - its nebulae have grown dim. It’s time for a replacement. What price would you put on reaching untold millions of children over another 40 years? I think $3 million out of the Federal Budget is a bargain. Click here to read the Huffington Post’s take on the AP debunking of McCain’s “Overhead Projector” as well as a statement from the Adler Planetarium itself.

From the article:

Hackers have released source code that allows the “backup” of RFID-protected passports, although the tool can potentially be used to create fake or cloned documents.

The Hacker’s Choice, a non-commercial group of computer security experts, has released a video showing a cloned passport being approved by a security scanner at a Dutch airport. When the reader scans the passport it is revealed to belong to one Elvis Aaron Presley, complete with picture.

Read more here.

Read a blog post about it here.

Listen to Kevin Mitnick explain what happened when he was recently stopped by Feds coming back from a trip to Columbia.

In the original CNET story they list the contents of his bag which are pretty remarkable:

“In his luggage, they found a MacBook Pro, a Dell XPS M1210 laptop, an Asus 900 mini-laptop, three or four hard drives, numerous USB storage devices, some Bluetooth dongles, three iPhones, and four Nokia cell phones (with different SIM cards for different countries).

They also found a lock-picking kit and an HID proximity card spoofer that can be used to snag data stored on physical access cards by swiping it in front of them. The data can then be used to enter locked doors without having to make a forged access card. Mitnick says he used the device in a demonstration about security in his speech in Bogota, but that the customs agents’ eyes lit up when they saw it, thinking it was a credit card reader.”

What’s he up to anyway?

The Chatanooga Free Press is reporting that a grand jury ended its session this morning without indicting University of Tennessee student David Kernell, who is suspected of hacking Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account. Although it seems ‘hacking’ is a bit hyperbolic in this context as most people know now he did some real fast and loose social engineering to have access to Semen Sucking Sarah’s work around against public disclosure.

Bruce Sterling, SF writer extraordinaire, recently gave an insightful and funny keynote address to the Austin Game Developers Conference regarding the state of gaming in the year 2043:

Hello, thanks for having me into your event today, and thanks for that intro. Though there is a problem with that, I am not Bruce Sterling. He couldn’t make it, he sent me instead.

The reason he couldn’t make it is that in 2043, Bruce is 89. Dr. Sterling is too frail to get into a time machine to talk to game devs, so he called on me to do it. I am one of his grad students. I volunteered, sort of, to journey back in time using some of our new technical methods. It wasn’t exactly easy, and I am here and fully briefed.

Before I get started about computer entertainment 35 years from today, even though that is a very interesting topic and I am writing my thesis about it, I think I should level with you. I should tell you a few things first confidentially.

Me, you don’t know much about. You don’t even know my name. All you need to know is that I am a time traveler. Bruce Sterling, he’s a contemporary of yours, you might be disappointed he’s not here. But you wouldn’t really want this 90 year old guy making public appearances, you see. He used to write a lot of SF about biotech and life extension techniques, and in the 2040s we have some that stuff, not the lame crap he made up, not science fiction, but stuff that is real, real like Rogaine and Viagra. And Bruce was an early adopter of that stuff.

Bruce Sterling was one of the first guys to jump on that untested radical stuff. So he is kind of the bug-ridden alpha rollout guy, which is why he is 89 though he never took care of himself. So our life extension stuff is high end tech, and it does work, especially skin and hair which turned out to be the easy parts.

read the whole transcript here.

The Vikings made an agreement a few months ago to try and keep politics out of the blog. That agreement has already failed and, frankly, I now think this election is too fucking important to try and pretend it’s not relevant to write about given the opportunity.

It’s my very strong feeling that, for Obama to lose this election, would truly spell the end of my engagement in the process of this country and my hope that it can ever be restored to any kind of functional civility. A loss by the Obama camp, in my mind, would be evidence beyond refute that the American people are vile, bottom-feeding, morons who would deserve the president and vice president they get.

But as of today, September 17th, 2008, I don’t believe that. I still have hope for America. I still think it’s populous is smart enough to smell a rat (I’ll be it slow to admitting it) and passionate enough to demand change when it desperately needs it. I still think the average American has it within them to make a healthy and informed decision about their country’s politics and I believe it’s the responsibility of every above-average American (that’s you fuckers!) to inform them.

This is no small election. This is not something to plead apathy towards. The fight is not finished and I know we can win. Let’s skewer these neo-con cocksuckers who distort, destroy, and invert every good instinct of humanity - from love of fellow human, to love of country, to intelligence, compassion, spirit, and true grit - and let’s hang their snide, cynical, hate-filled and dickless hides from every flag pole, just below them old stars n’ bars (hurumph).

I want to be proud to be an American again as there is so much to be proud of. I am tired of these puny little cunts taking so much of what is great to feed their agenda of so much that is foul, deceitful, fearful and ignorant. Make no bones about it, there are plenty of dumb, hateful, inbred, dipshit Americans out there, but I do not believe they are the majority and I do not believe their broken souls that materialize in mushroom clouds of marmot-hustling blood-orgies and mongoloid turd-kings deserve the opportunity to steer this country or this world any longer. Fuck those people. Fuck them for good.

Wow and to think this post was actually supposed to point to a couple good articles comparing the two candidates health care initiative. Yowser.

LOOK OUT!! Here comes the big scary federal government! They’re tracking all your data! They’re listening in on your phone calls! They’re hiding in your underpants!! Big Brother is tracking your every move! Watch out for THEM!!

Or maybe they have their heads so far up their asses that they’re wasting $500 million building a searchable database that doesn’t work.

This isn’t the first time the feds have spent millions on software they ultimately threw out. Ever heard of the FBI’s Virtual Case File System? They spent many years and $170 million just to end up scrapping the whole thing.

How does someone get in on government software contracts? Apparently you can charge millions but never have to deliver working software.

I think the important thing to take away from this is that there’s little reason to be as paranoid as you are. Yes I am talking to you, and yes I can see you.

This is awesome! Thanks to forum member ElishaGray for turning us onto it on the forum. Siphoning off the power from the mall is a brilliant way to sidestep issues of energy consumption as red flag. I’m curious how they got discovered.

Here’s a glass raised to American Ingenuity!