With all the breathless mainstream coverage of Barak Obama choosing Joe Biden as his running mate this week I found it interesting that little of the writing actually focused on his voting record. One of the better pieces with regard to how Joe Biden feels about free speech and new technology in general was published by CNET a few days back.

The best part may be that his desire to limit the level of encryption that you and I can employ in our daily lives lead to the creation of PGP. The rest of his voting record is pretty scary. I guess we should all be warned.

A tip of the hat to CrunchGear for alerting me to the post.

As a huge fan of open source in all its various forms, I get a kick when a company so focused on secrecy shoots themselves in the competitive foot via the limits they place on their customers.

Apples Secrecy Obsession About to Backfire on the iPhone

The future of software is in wrapping value added services around an open platform. Granted, Apple isn’t know for open platforms and you can argue that is part of their success but I strongly believe in the end open wins over closed. Android is going to be interesting to watch.

Wired has a great article demonstrating how broken the US government is right now. $17 billion is subsidies for big oil and they managed to scrape together $30 million to help support the development of viable plug in hybrids.

It is absolutely ridiculous. The government needs to view the goal to move off expensive, disappearing oil as a new “moon race” and for once dump some serious money into it. Of course most of it will be wasted, but the 10% that is not will likely result in some amazing technological breakthroughs that might make a difference. Our options are electric cars and hydrogen and we should be pumping billions into both programs on an annual basis.

Oh yeah, how about a proper program to invest in public transit. Now that would be something I’d vote for.

I often wonder what will happen as robots become more common in our daily lives and they start to interact with our kids and pets. I can only imagine the battles that will ensue.

Perhaps something like this.

Current TV has an interview up with Stephen Hawking that was done as part of a Discovery News segment.

I love that he says that he hopes there is intelligent life in space as he’s never found any here on Earth. The man is brilliant.

I logged into my Google Analytics account this morning and was presented with the following notice:

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System Message: Analytics Processing Delay from April 30th to May 5th

Google Analytics experienced a data processing error from April 30th to May 5th. Almost all of the data has been recovered and is currently being reprocessed. The recovered data will be reflected in your reports within a few days. Please note that a small percentage of data, particularly in the area of e-commerce reporting, was not recoverable from those dates.

We sincerely apologize for this processing issue and are taking every precaution to prevent such disruptions from occurring again in the future. For more information, please read through our common questions.

The Google Analytics Team

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The Gods of Internet not only had an outage in which they lost data, but some of that data was not recoverable! I guess running a 24×7 system is hard even for the masters and their thousands (millions?) of servers. Mind you it wast just Analytics but still…

The moral of this story…everyone has outages and they are really hard to plan for. The thing that bugs me is that even after a decade of investment in Internet technologies, it is still nearly impossible to build a self healing system without massive expense (and even then). Maybe we need to take a break from all the “cool” things that are being developed by all the startups in the space and invest in hardening our infrastructure as it is pretty creaky (as Comcast recently found out).

With all the chatter these days about the high price of oil and gas, the impact of global warming on pretty much everyone and the general destruction of this planet we call home, I thought it might be valuable to point out the most obvious way to make a major positive impact as I just don’t see it talked about enough.

It is pretty simple and will have an effect way beyond solar panels, wind power, more insulation in the attic, energy efficient appliances and the continuously talked about and never available electric car. It is even cooler than Google’s biofuel buses.

Are you ready for it? Simply stay home. Commuting to work has got to be one of the most ridiculous concepts in today’s broadband, highly connected, 24×7 online environment. As someone who hasn’t had a real office job in seven years and has built two companies in that time yet never paid a dime in office rent, I can assure you that it is completely possible to stay connected with a global team of people, accomplish great things and never wear pants. All this wonderful technology we talk about and blog about allows you to do it with ease (and actually rather cheaply). And the environmental numbers speak for themselves.

Plus, you get to see your kids grow up. I highly recommend it.

You always read about Moore’s Law and how it can only be maintained as long as the transistors on chips get smaller and smaller, something that is getting increasingly more difficult over time due to good old physics (electrons don’t like to behave the smaller you get).

I wonder how Moore’s Law applies to soccer?

I tip o’ the hat to Engadget for pointing out the video.

Wow…I remember when Priceline first went public in the beginning of the dot com craziness and it was the company many of my clients were watching - mostly because of their name your price auction format but also because they seemed to be able to do no wrong. Now they are a decade old and pretty much mainstream.

I must be getting old…

A fun site to waste time on: passive aggressive notes.com. One of my favorites: