Forget waiting until November. You can decide the election right now. The Political Machine is a new PC game that lets you run for president. You take a stand on a total of 64 issues, run political ads, make speeches, and wheel and deal like a real politician in your bid for the virtual presidency. You can use historic candidates and see if Abe Lincoln could unseat FDR, or create your own candidate. The game runs on actual polling data and demographics to make it as real as possible.

You couldn’t time the release of a strategy game better than in such a hotly contested election year. Check out the official web site for more.

U2’s upcoming album, Vertigo How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, slated for a November release was stolen from a photo shoot in France last week. Worried the songs might end up online before the album’s release, front man Bono has a plan:

“If it is on the Internet this week, we will release it immediately as a legal download on iTunes, and get hard copies into the shops by the end of the month. … It would be a real pity. It would screw up years of work and months of planning, not to mention f*cking up our holidays. But once it’s out, it’s out.”

As a U2 fan, I find myself torn between hoping the album shows up online so it will be released early and I can legitimately hear it early, and hoping things go according to the band’s original plan.

Faster, better, smarter, stronger — and cheaper. The new iPod.

Yeah, I’m a little stoked about the newest iPod upgrade. I don’t know if I’ll scrape the cash together by ebaying more of my childhood treasures or not, but I’m definitely tempted once again. I’m sort of in a technological limbo where I’ve made half the digital leap — converting my music collection to iTunes — but it’s all stuck on my computer. I can’t take it with me. Yet.

The way we experience music is changing. It’s inevitable. I think it’s pretty cool, though I can definitely see some downsides. Getting free CDs in the mail for reviews has already drastically changed the way I listen to music. I rarely relish a CD and devour it like I used to. I take it for granted. A lot of stuff I just don’t listen to because there’s so much. It raises the bar. But such easy access to thousands of songs is also difficult and time consuming. Do I really need a soundtrack to my life? Do I really want to become a slave to my technology (how crushed would I be if I lost my iPod?)?

But how cool is it to play that song stuck in your head and move on?

Apple has turned to the cover of Newsweek for the announcement of the next iPod upgrade. The magazine covers the nearly life-changing status of the gadget as well as dishes the dirt on the new upgrade. The dirt includes a $100 price drop all the way around (though the low-end 15 GB priced at $299 is gone; but for the same price you can now get the 20 GB), a slightly smaller size, double the battery life, and an even simpler interface (as if it wasn’t easy enough, they dropped four buttons and went with the iPod Mini’s scoll wheel/buttons).

But more important than the latest offerings is the way the iPod and iTunes are almost single-handedly changing how people listen to music. The ability to carry your entire music collection in your pocket is having revolutionary reprecussions. The days of the compact disc are numbered and growing numbers of people now have a soundtrack to their lives.

Jordon Cooper linked to an interesting article, “Rush Hour on the Information Superhighway,” about our information overload:

The cyber age was supposed to jack us into the world’s collective unconscious, creating a Zen-like state of all-encompassing awareness. We were going to be freed from the time-consuming chores of a slow low-tech world, allowing us to become more efficient, work fewer hours, enjoy more free time. Instead, we feel as if we’re getting pecked to death by ducks.

A study by Xerox recently found that people spend 30 percent of their workday just hunting for documents