Here’s wishing you the best that the holiday season can offer.

From [MacWorld UK](http://www.macworld.co.uk/:) “Writing in his blog, Business Week reporter Arik Hesseldahl talks about a recent HP analysts meeting.

He sat behind four analysts from Soleil-Cross Research, three of which were using MacBooks.

‘Now if you’ve never been to a meeting full of Wall Street financial analysts, let me tell you this: seeing a Mac in the room is a rare thing,’ he writes in his entry, which is called ‘Who says Macs aren’t used in business?’.”

I’m telling you, the writing is on the wall. Apple has successfully, and subtly change the question from **why?*’ to ‘*why not?**. You get a Mac, and it runs Windows too? No risk, right? Let’s say you get one and hate it…. set it to boot into Windows. BUT, let’s say you love it, and now you’re a convert. Brilliant.

From [CNN.com](http://www.cnn.com:) “And I hope you’ll celebrate the Christmas season by offending someone. If you’re Jewish, how about a hearty ‘Happy Hanukkah’ to a good Christian? If they’re offended you’ve revealed a fool, not such a good Christian and someone you shouldn’t waste your expression of good will upon. But get ready for a few robust ‘Merry Christmas’ calls to be thrown your way as well.”

**Definitely!**

From [arstechnica.com: ArsTechnica]

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company’s internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that’s only a remote, highly theoretical possibility…In this article, I’m going to show you how to steal an election.

This makes me want to cry. This is a very detailed article that will make you wonder in the elections in a couple of weeks if the winner really is the winner. Here’s the most disturbing part:

###Diebold AccuVote TS specs

Processor	118 MHz Hitachi SH3
Storage	16MB RAM, 32MB on-board Flash, 128K EPROM, Removable Flash PCMCIA card
I/O	Keyboard, modem (PCMCIA), IrDA, headphone jack
Firmware	Custom Diebold firmware
Operating system	**Windows CE 3.0**
Application software	Custom Diebold system software
Display	Touchscreen, thermal roll printer (for printing a zero tape and final vote tallies)

God help us all. We’ll run an election on the world’s most insecure operating system. Yikes! What were they thinking. At least if they chose Linux, they’d be able to inspect the code that’s going into the machines. Now, we’re trusting [[M$]] with the future of our country.

From [CNET News.com](http://news.com.com/:) “In News.com survey of which 2006 campaign sites followed standards most closely, Libertarians topped the charts.”

Would you expect anything else?

From [CNN.com](http://www.cnn.com/?eref=rss_topstories:) “An international police liaison officer was killed and four soldiers were wounded late Sunday morning after their vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in eastern Baghdad, a U.S. military statement released on Monday by Multi-National Corps-Iraq said.”

I have a nephew there. If he gets killed in all this nonsense, I’ll never forgive this administration. Historically, the US has been basically isolationist, and gotten involved in foreign countries only when ours was in jeopardy. What happened that made us project ourselves out into the rest of the world?

From [CNN.com](http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/10/22/obama.presidency/index.html?eref=rss_topstories:)

Sen. Barack Obama said Sunday that he may run for president in 2008, despite previous assertions that he would complete his current six-year senatorial term, which ends in 2011.

‘I would say I am still at the point where I have not made a decision to pursue higher office, but it is true that I have thought about it over the last several months,’ the 45-year-old Democratic senator from Illinois told NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’

Yes, PLEASE! I’ve been wanting the chance to vote for this guy for a couple of years now.

The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama,” David Brooks, a conservative op-ed columnist for The New York Times, wrote in his Thursday column, entitled, “Run, Barack, Run.

See? Even the conservatives are sick of lame candidates coming out of the Democratic party nomination process.

Barak ’08. Sounds good to me.

Take a look at [this graph](http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh26-4/images/register5.gif.) The risk of mortality on 2 drinks per day is about the same as for zero per day for all causes, but is quite a bit lower for heart attacks.

From Xark! "OK, now I’m only going to explain this once: You start with Tim Berners Lee and the W3C and you wind up with PornTube, LaLa, ytmnd and that "Numa Numa" guy. And it’s all done with computers, coffee, business plans and Douglas Coupland novels. Don’t understand it? Well why do you think they call it "code," dumbass? "

Got that? No? Take a look at the picture for a full description. The important thing to remember is that porn is at the center of it all.

From [CNN.com](http://www.cnn.com/?eref=rss_topstories:) “Half of all Americans believe most members of Congress are corrupt — a figure that has risen 12 points since the start of the year — and more than a third think their own representative is crooked, according to a new poll released Thursday by CNN.”

And the other half just thinks they are incompetent, but whose counting.