Maryland has a new touch-screen voting system, their answer to the nightmares of Florida 2000. Unfortunately, it’s not the elegant, incredibly intuitive interactive system that one might have hoped for, if this rather homely-looking online demo is any indication.

My copy of Mac OS X 10.2 — colloquially known as Jaguar — arrived on Monday. Last night I installed it on my PowerBook and it’s smooth. I’m inching closer to using Mac OS X as my production environment… but still not quite yet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics have joined forces to produce Chilling Effects, a Web site devoted to educating the public on their rights within the First Amendment and copyright laws.  “[It] offers background material and explanations of the law for people whose websites deal with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation.” Have a look at the database of cease and desist letters sent by megacorporations to perceived violators of their copyrights to get an idea why the site has that name.

Cloudmark has the best idea I’ve seen yet for eliminating spam. Their SpamNet product is basically a kind of distributed computing application. It plugs into Outlook XP and helps users identify incoming spam using a set of rules — the system communicates back to a central server about which messages have been marked as junk. As more users contribute, the rules get refined, the system gets smarter and a kind of global understanding of what is and isn’t spam develops. Brilliant. Hope it works.

Found this little stencil graffiti of Elvis next to CBGB’s. Which reminded me of this interesting book from Thames & Hudson.

More Lessig:“Right now we have a culture where the most creative and important builders of freedom in the 21st century have zero political savvy and (so far) zero political effect.” This is from his recent blog posting, one communiqué from a very interesting online squabble between Lessig and well-known Userland impresario and knee-jerk blogging evangelist Dave Winer. The debate’s heating up, and this is a good thing.

Stephen Dorff makes another brilliant career move in what looks to be the stupidest movie of the year, “Feardotcom.” This is just more proof that Hollywood doesn’t have the faintest understanding of the digital world.

Those looking to find out a little bit more about “24 Hour Party People” subjects Joy Division and Happy Mondays are in luck — the Trouser Press Record Guideis recently back online after a long hiatus. If you had a superior attitude about the music you listened to in the 70s, 80s, or 90s, then the Trouser Press probably has it cataloged here. I’m just kidding! About the ‘superior’ bit, not the catalog bit.

Oh yeah, so two days ago I saw “24 Hour Party People,” Michael Winterbottom’s chronicle of Manchester impressario Tony Wilson and his Factory Records empire.The trailer was half wildly promising and half very worrisome, but I’m happy to say that the former part won out, thankfully. “24 Hour Party People” is consistently hilarious and restlessly inventive, engagingly manic and deeply comic. I had a great time watching it. And if director Michael Winterbottom fawns a little too much over the Ian Curtis character, the movie is still loaded with far fewer pretensions than the average pop history movie.

This Is a Magazineis a curiosity; an old media concept in a new media context. It’s a Web magazine, but not like Salon.com or even Newsweek, as it’s very literally a magazine that just happens to be on the Web. Your mouse-clicks ‘turn’ itspages, and it lacks true interactivity in a way that suggests a committed principle (though its designers can’t resist the occasional, spartan suggestion of acknowledging its online milieu). It’s a strange idea, but the abundance of evident visual talent behind the whole thing is ultimately winning. Worth a look.

For so long I’ve been plodding along with just 256MB of RAM in my Titanium PowerBook G4, but last night I popped in a new 512MB chip, for a grand total of 768MB. Aaaaaahhhhhh. The picture above shows all the apps I’m running at once, and there’s still 483MB available.Memory’s not as cheap as it was a year ago, but I got a fair deal for it at Crucial.com.

The new Mac platform seems more viable than ever — and I’m enjoying using it more and more and playing around with all the new software toys, too. It’s such a charming experience that I pre-ordered a copy of the next revision of the OS (technically 10.2, but colloquially known as ‘Jaguar’) from MacConnection, which has it for US$25 below list. It’s pretty remarkable how elegantly constructed most of the software is for Mac OS X, from 800 pound gorillas like Office v.X, which is running beautifully on my machine, to intrepid shareware/freeware endeavours like Fire, which makes one of the best instant messaging clients out there, and certainly the most elegant cross-IM platform application I’ve ever seen. Even the Java-based ports like LimeWire are way more elegant than their Mac OS Classic or Windows counterparts.

Noted cyber-age legal authority Lawrence Lessig has a wake-up call for anyone frustrated with the way media companies are trying to dominate copyright controls. He laid it down in his powerful presentation at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention: it’s in the old guard’s interest to try and control creativity and innovation; they have the power to do so and they are excercising it, and it’s our responsibility to fight it.

All-around sharp tack and Behavior-compatriot Christopher Fahey has been interviewed over at Rhizome.org, for whom he is currently toiling away under a grant on a super-cool art project. Also, check out his drop science and his art smarts.

A few years ago I played around with bookmarklets — essentially bookmarks loaded with JavaScript that allow users to perform nifty browser-based tasks —but I’d totally forgot about them until I read Brad Grimes’s column in the latest issue of PC World Magazine. They’re still neat.

From TidBITS: “The centerpiece of the annual MacHack conference is the MacHax Group’s Best Hack Contest, in which the world’s best programmers compete (preferably during the preceding 48 hours) to come up with software that displays the ultimate in programming creativity, knowledge, or arcana, ideally presented with tongue firmly planted in cheek.”For hardcore Mac geeks who couldn’t attend this past spring’s MacHack, the The MacHax Best Hack Contest CD is now for sale.

Miscellaneous links: Get your fill of Kid 606 and plenty other beeps’n’blips artists at Tigerbeat6 Records, whose site is an oddly charming mix of DIY and Web design savvy. Marcus Ericsson has a notably elegant portfolio at Subdisc.com, which is a rare case of an overbearing visual metaphor that doesn’t veer into the obnoxious. The much-anticipated, massively multiplayer video game “Star Wars Galaxies” looks amazing and beautifully rendered, judging from this hand-shot demo footage. It could be the video game that makes me buy a video game.

A last minute emergency yesterday forced us at Behavior to run out and purchase two laptops for immediate use. I’ve been kind of sour on Wintel laptops for a while, and I was reminded of why. The really well-designed ones, like Sony’s VAIO line, are miserably overpriced under-performers. The ones with great specs and that can actually hold their own in a production environment, like the Toshiba Satellite 5105s that we bought yesterday, are hideous disasters of industrial design. Design loses again.

My cable modem was out from Saturday morning through Monday morning. After spending a few hours on the phone with the very polite tech support folks at Time Warner Cable New York’s Road Runner division, I am more convinced than ever that it’s impossible for people at huge organizations to know anything beyond the slim parameters of their own specific job descriptions. It’s depressing.