OneMind

Famed activist and spiritual leader Van Jones inspires higher thinking and clearer action in this one-minute must-see video:

My favorite Presidential candidate, Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, placed second yesterday in a key California Democratic Party straw poll, barely losing the top spot to former Sen . John Edwards of North Carolina. Not bad for a “longshot darkhorse Quixotic” candidate, as the mainstream press likes to characterize him.

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama finished a close third, while New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the presumed and all but ordained front-runner for the nomination, finished a relatively distant fourth. All the other candidates were insignificant by comparison.

The caucus-like gathering was open to all Democrats and is viewed as a bellwether poll. Considering how many millions of dollars his opponents have spent in California, Dennis’ showing is more than remarkable.

If the front-runners continue their catty, slashing attacks on one another as they did during last night’s debate — particularly Obama and Clinton — Dems may become sufficiently disillusioned to look around for a fresh face that isn’t in that nasty battle. Kucinich fares well when you look at him in that context, to say nothing of his 100% pure Democratic platform.

Google is moving strongly into the social network space, but not by adding yet another social network to the dizzying array of such sites already vying for eyeballs. Instead, Google plans to offer a neutral JavaScript-based platform for creating apps that run inside social networks. This is a very smart position for Google to take. Its own social network, Orkut, has been a rare major bust for a company that often appears it can do no wrong. At the same time, Facebook has made great strides in gaining users of late, at least in part due to opening up its programming APIs to make it possible for third parties to develop apps that run in Facebook.

For security reasons, Facebook developed its own markup language called FBML and apps designed to work in Facebook must use that markup. This makes those apps unusable on other social networks (most notably perhaps MySpace).

Google chose JavaScript as the core language for developing the new cross-network apps. That’s a smart move. JavaScript is clearly the client-side lingua franca of the Web, much as PHP is the de facto server-side scripting language, But while PHP has lots of competition, JavaScript all but owns the client side. The emergence of a loose bundle of technologies called AJAX, which makes it possible to create standalone application look and feel in a Web app, has really all but frozen out other languages in this important space.

Google has already lined up social networks Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle as partners, along with such rising app development stars as Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide. This leaves some awfully big social network players — MySpace, Facebook, Microsoft, Bebo and Yahoo to name a few. But by choosing the gatekeeper role on the bridge between the social network and the end user, Google positions itself perfectly to ride above that fray. Eventually, assuming OpenSocial takes off as I suspect it will, those big guys will have to adopt Google’s bridge even if only as a secondary, “also supported” technology alongside their own. And of course MySpace now has no such bridge; it will come as no shock to me if they adopt OpenSocial in the next 30-45 days.

I’ve been saying it since the early 90′s at CNET: savvy Web developers need to master JavaScript. The case keeps getting stronger.

I installed the new Mac OS X Version 5 (dubbed “Leopard”) on Saturday and have been running it on my main machine (24-inch iMac w/4GB of RAM) ever since. I really like the slick finish. The interface feels so much more polished with this release, far moreso than Windows Vista (although I have only used Vista for a couple of hours and could be missing something).

My favorite new feature is Spaces, which is Apple’s implementation of the multiple-desktop tools that have been available on Linux for some years. I can set up as many as 10 virtual desktops and dedicate each to running a suite of apps related to a specific task set. I’ve thought this was a great idea for a long time. Back in the OS 9 days, I wrote a utility that would remember which apps and documents were associated with a given mini-app (written, if I recall correctly, in Frontier UserTalk). Anyway, Spaces is way cool.

I can see a lot of my friends really loving Time Machine, too. I’m using it just because it’s there but if I understand it correctly, it’s not as good as Super Duper which is my main backup program because with Time Machine, you have to restore the entire system back to the last known-good version, which has to be a lot less efficient and more disruptive.

I’ve noticed Firefox (2.0.0.8) crashes far more often than it did when I was running under Tiger, where it’s been absolutely rock solid. And strangely enough, most (but not all) of the Web sites I use where dropdown menus are part of the UI are partially crippled. The dropdown is selectable and (non-intuitively) you can select an entry from the menu with the arrow keys but the menu itself never appears.

There are quite a number of reports circulating that Adobe’s CS3 doesn’t work properly with Leopard, which, if true, is a real shame because it would indicate to me a serious breakdown in communication between Apple and one of its most important software vendors.

I’m keeping up with Leopard news and activity at MacOSX.com.

As a long-time sportswriter and columnist, I’ve spent more time than the average fan watching teams at all levels of the major sports perform. I think that qualifies me to judge the overall quality of a team but even if you disagree with my qualifications, it’s not too likely you’ll disagree with my diagnosis of the week.

The 49ers suck. Big time. They may not win a game the rest of this long, horrendous, mistake-filled season. Their 31-10 loss to the New Orleans Saints today was not just ugly, it was a demonstration of ineptitude that recalled the futility of the old New York Mets in their early days.

This team is offensively offensive. It’s not much better defensively. It says something when you look over the team and find that if the season ended today their MVP would be their punter, Andy Lee. Their punter, for Heaven’s sake!

And yet on this offensive roster you have Ashley Lelie, Frank Gore, Arnaz Battle and Vernon Davis among others of nearly equal note. So what’s the problem? There are two, really.

First and foremost, offensive coordinator Jim Hostler is just too green for the job. He needs to be demoted or fired. His game plans are unimaginative and his play-calling is abysmally conservative.

Second, and not far behind, it’s time the Niners admit they made a mistake drafting Alex Smith and paying him all that money. The guy just doesn’t have what it takes to be a top-tier NFL quarterback. And he’s too darned fragile besides. Every time a team spends a first-round pick on a QB, they roll the dice. In this case, the Niners came up crap, which is what Smith has so far proven himself to be. I was willing to give him 3 years to mature and become at least a promising starter. But he goes backward more than forward. It’s time for him to be evaluated for what he is: yet another busted first-round pick.

This ought to be Mike Nolan’s last year as head coach unless he fires or demotes Hostler, brings in someone who knows how to plan and call an NFL game, and salvages at least a few wins out of this forgettable season.

The Niners this year are among the 10 worst football teams I’ve ever seen. Just butt ugly.

ESPN.com’s Howard Bryant digs up the old and recurrent drumbeat that the National League should adopt the designated hitter rule in a cynical column today.

Bryant says it’s all about the money (he’s right), that the AL will never give up on the DH (right again) and that the NL is hurt by not adopting the rule (not so sure he’s right about that one).

He admits that, “If the conversation were about style and tradition, the AL should change and get rid of the DH. NL baseball is the better, faster, crisper game. With the exception of the Los Angeles Angels, few AL teams have multiple-position players on their bench because they do not need them. NL baseball is a skill game. The AL is built for plodding, bashing offense, the NL for versatility. Each player on a NL roster must be able to play.”

He concludes, however, that, “today’s conversation isn’t about tradition, but about money and jobs.”

He fails to persuade me. He may be right in his implicit view that although the AL game is less skill-based, and is slower, weaker and less crisp than the NL game, it appeals more to the casual fan.

But baseball as it is played from Pee Wee through Pony and Colt and Legion and into high school and college never uses the DH until you et to one part of the majors. There’s a reason for that. Fans appreciate the game more when there’s some semblance of strategy involved.

MLB should never have allowed the AL to move to a DH rule. There’s no moving back but advancing further down that slope only encourages over-emphasizing power offense at the expense of skill and strategy. Ultimately, that’s not good for baseball.

Check out this quiz and answers by Paul Slansky over at HuffingtonPost.com. Did you know W enjoyed blowing up frogs with firecrackers when he was a teen? Or that he glibly dismissed fraternity hazing that involved branding pledges with a hot coat hanger as harmless?

There’s some stuff I almost wish I hadn’t heard.

Adotas has a piece today on the reappearance of the symptoms that led to the infamous Dot Bomb of 2000-2001. They see all the same signs:

• Small companies
• Funny names
• No revenue
• Key idea is building audience
• Phenomenal overvaluation

I went through Dot Bomb I. Part of my assessment in retrospect was that the VC firms were among the biggest reasons for the billions of dollars in losses that took place as a result of that bubble bursting. I was in touch with numerous other VC-funded startups (and I had one of my own) whose investors were encouraging them — in some cases demanding — to spend money on advertising they didn’t need, extremely high-priced talent that was heavy on the wrong kind of experience and light on passion and dedication, office space (which was at a ridiculous premium in the Silicon Valley), and employee perks.

I won’t be surprised to find the same factors at work here.

Ever since former Vice-President Al Gore — the man who used to be the next President of the United States until the GOP flat-out stole the election — won the Nobel Peace Prize, the media has been clamoring for him to enter the presidential lottery once again.

Not one person of repute from Gore’s family or circle of friends and not one knowledgeable Democratic Party leader has seriously suggested Gore might make another run at the White House. Gore, for his part, has consistently denied any interest in running or holding the office. Yet every time you hear Gore’s name mentioned these days, the media focus is on the “Will he or won’t he?” question rather on the “Look what he’s done and is doing” aspect of this great man’s life.

Until and unless Gore announces his plans to run for the White House, it is dishonest and petty for the media to continue to downplay his power, popularity and vision on the environment so they can speculate about something about which their ignorance knows no bounds.

Former Vice-President of the United States. Elected President by the people, denied the office by the GOP and the Supreme Court. Nobel Peace Prize winner. Not to mention years and years of public service in the Congress. Isn’t that enough for one man’s life?

Yeesh.

I spent some time the other day with a friend and colleague (who asked to remain anonymous) who is in the Internet security business and who had recently returned from the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s conference in Pittsburgh.

What he revealed to me is appalling. It sheds great light on how badly our governments, at all levels, are missing the boat on the real terrorism going on in this country and the world: cyberterrorism.

There are approximately 17,500 police agencies in the United States, employing on the order of 185,000 sworn officers and another 50,000 or so support staff. These people are charged primarily with tracking down criminals who commit what I’ll call “conventional crime”: murder, kidnapping, robbery, burglary, arson, counterfeiting, fraud. The estimated annual cost to the economy of that entire category of crimes is about $50 billion, give or take.

Of that 235,000 people engaged in law enforcement, only approximately 200 are employed full-time to investigate cybercrime and to apprehend its perpetrators. This despite the fact that in the United States alone digitally mastered crime dings the economy to the tune of more than $200 billion per year.

Phishing is a particular problem. My source tells me that banks and financial institutions are dealing with “orders of magnitude” greater losses due to phishing than they are reporting. They generally pass these losses and associated costs on to their credit card operations, which, presumably, means higher interest and fee rates for cardholders.

It’s high time we awoke to the scope and depth of this threat and began protecting ourselves from such criminals and tracking down and prosecuting those who are getting rich from our lack of diligence.