In what is a great move at least symbolically, Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama has announced that he's taking his acceptance speech out of the convention arena and into an outdoor stadium that seats 75,000. That's a gutsy move given that there's no guarantee there won't be a lot of empty seats in that place that will make him look bad.

But you gotta know that a ton of people will want to be there for the event if they can get there.

The symbolism is brilliant. Every Presidential nominee in the past has accepted the nomination in front of the convention that offered it, where only party insiders and activists can go. In a sense, the acceptance speech was a way of paying homage to the party leaders. This makes a clear statement that he owes this nomination not to the partiati but to the people of America.

I don't like some of his shifts to the center of late but I have to say, this guy is a master of political theater, better than any Democrat in at least 45 years.

There was a big scary story in the San Jose Mercury News this morning headlined, in something larger than 72-point type, "Virtual voyeurism." It provided a Big Scare Tactic warning readers that, as the lead paragraph said, "Big Brother and his buddies are watching what you do online."

Most of it was rehash. Warnings about cookies (almost none of which is practical or real), a pointer to an anonymous browser masking tool. But one of the warnings caught my eye. Here's the operative paragraph:

"When accessing Web sites, browsers typically reveal users' Internet addresses, which can be tied to particular geographic locations or workplaces. They also often divulge other information about users, sometimes including their name and email address." I thought to myself, "Really? I wonder how that could happen?"

The article pointed to a Danish site that can help you determine your browser's vulnerabilities. So I went there on my OS X system with both Safari and Firefox 2.x. I was amused to find that a significant number of potentially worrisome-sounding characteristics it could test for your browser applied only to Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows. Color me unsurprised. Unfortunately, their ability to check mail safety has been temporarily disabled for some reason, so I couldn't see if my browser was violating any privacy principle. Somehow, I doubt it.

Cookienoia (a word I think I just coined) is really pretty silly for the most part. Cookies are deliberately small, deliberately tied only to the site from which they were issued, and in 90% of cases are really designed for your convenience. Without cookies, e.g,. you'd have to log in every time to your favorite sites, re-enter your membership information, re-visit message threads, be unable to find out what is new on a site since your last visit...a whole host of things that make the browser experience seamless. Can cookies be exploited by nefarious developers? Probably. But an intensive search on the Net reveals very little chatter on the topic and almost none since 2006. I think this is a leftover from people who hear one time that something is frightening and then go through the rest of their lives believing it.

My friend Ted Lane called my attention to this story reporting that the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has been outsourcing the key security component in the new electronically protected U.S. passports to a Dutch company which does part of its manufacturing in Thailand.

The outsourcing raised security concerns among some experts who point out that Thailand has a history of political instability and "Muslim discontent." Apart from the fact that that last is code for the less politically acceptable Islamofascist term and that it represents an ugly attempt at using fear, this outsourcing does seem to me to be problematic on at least three fronts, with what scant information is now available.

First, there is a legitimate security concern here. It seems the Dutch are putting the chips into the passports and then sending them to Thailand for assembly. This means blank but secured U.S. passports are traversing numerous international borders and ending up in a country with lax law enforcement and the constant potential for a regime unfriendly to the U.S. taking power. How many thousands of passports could be confiscated in the process and what would the consequences be?

Second, the GPO says the Dutch firm Smartrac Technology Ltd., "was the only company in the world that produced a chip to store passport information that met the State Department’s standards." Having been around the block a few times, I can tell you what that means. It means that some lobbyist convinced the GPO and/or the State Department to issue a specification that only Smartrac could meet. Bureaucrats love those kinds of situations because it saves them the hassles associated with a competitive bid. I can't tell you how many times I saw that happen in my years in Silicon Valley.

Finally, it means that a technology that really should be developed by an American technology company will now probably not be. There wouldn't be a market for it. And you can bet your last tax dollar that somewhere in the U.S., more than one company was working on this problem because its solution was mandated by Congress in a piece of 2002 legislation.

The Bush Administration has been particularly inept at keeping American technology competitive as it has sought to run the government like a business. That is a favorite refrain of conservatives: run the government as if it were a business and things will be less expensive. Sure, and the only real beneficiaries will be those who run the businesses who get the juicy contracts -- many of them no-bid deals -- with the Feds.

Just another reason we have to rid D.C. of this corruption.

As a member of the the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), I get some very thought-provoking and insightful videos, newsletters, CDs and other such great content. Today, they sent me a link to a one-minute "Shift" video featuring one of my favorite funny men, Swami Beyondananda. Here's the video. It's cute, informative and only takes about a minute to watch:

My good friend Sandy Golden sent me this link to a send-up video at YouTube done by another good frend, Danny Goodman. Danny's been spending a good bit of time of late in the spam wars world and this video is a cool viral way of promoting himself there. It's also pretty darned funny.

Thanks, Sandy. I needed that!

Using a flavor of MRI and some sophisticated software, scientists have been able to read the minds of subjects, determining in advance their intentions. Subjects were asked to decide before being shown two numbers whether they would choose to add or subtract them. Using complex brain-mapping techniques and evolving algorithms, researchers achieved 70% accuracy, well outside the bounds of random chance.

For people like myself who are convinced of the reality of the Zero Point Field, this is not news, simply confirmation. Lynn McTaggart is in the process of preparing to conduct a massive online series of experiments in intentionality, a topic she discusses at length in her latest book, The Intention Experiment.

I am aware that this whole concept is debunked by scientific skeptics. I'm also aware that most of the major scientific revolutions that have taken place in the hundreds of years that science has been a field of human interest have initially experienced the same sort of skepticism. Being a student of spiritual energy and one who spends a lot of time thinking and reading about energy related topics, this one feels like a natural extension to me.

Common Cause is on a crusade to convince the FCC (good luck) that media consolidation has already gone too far and needs to be stopped. They wanted to buy ad space on MySpace.com for the ad shown here, but MySpace, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (which also owns Fox) refused to run the ad. Perfectly within their business right to do so, but that's precisely the point.

The FBI has been quietly using a program called ATS (Automated Targeting System) for two years in an effort to spot criminals and terrorists based on what the government sees as key indicators of potential bad guys. The system looks at things like how you pay for your ticketes, your motor vehicle record (huh?), seat preference and meal choice (right, crooks and terrorists are probably vegans, eh?).

This is another of those "if you're not a bad guy, what are you worried about?" things the government does and naive people rationalize. But this one has a kicker: the data can be shared with a broad array of people including private industry, but not with the person being rated.

"The government notice says ATS data may be shared with state, local and foreign governments for use in hiring decisions and in granting licenses, security clearances, contracts or other benefits. In some cases, the data may be shared with courts, Congress and even private contractors."

Your government doesn't trust you. Should you trust your government?

According to the Rocky Mountain Times, two men who were thrown out of a publicly funded event at which President Bush appeared in 2005 won a court order to force those who removed them to reveal who ordered them to do so.

The Bush Regime has made an absolute mockery of the concept of freedom of assembly throughout its horrendous reign of fear and terror. It routinely requires any protests to take place at a great distance from where the President is speaking on the flimsy and never-before-used grounds of "national security." This is one of literally hundreds of cases like this all over the country.

The problem is the courts move too slowly. By the time all of these civil rights tramplings come to justice -- assuming they ever do in a nation whose benches are populated increasingly by right-wing puppets -- their outcome will be moot.