Seems like things are as bad in Japan as they are here in the US.

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More news from the banking sector on the wire this morning.

Uncertainty has now hit the Japanese banking sector

In the last 7 days Origami Bank has folded.

Sumo Bank has gone belly up.

Bonsai Bank has announced plans to cut some of its branches.

Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song, while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived.

Samurai Bank is soldiering on following sharp cutbacks.

Ninja Bank is reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.

Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at the Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.

Despite your politics, you’ve got to admit that this election is resulting in some of the best fodder for Saturday Night Live.

Absolutely hilarious. Brought a smile to my face…which was desperately needed as I watched the market fall yet again over the weekend.

This is pretty funny. It is cool to see the overlords make a mistake once in a while.

The Wall Street Journal has a rather cool video on a new “grapefruit” camera that stitches together an 360 degree view in real time. It kind of makes Google street view seem quaint.

I’d embed the video but the WSJ, in true 2005 fashion, doesn’t support embedding yet. Come on guys…

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame published a survey of economists that he commissioned to see if any insight on the election might come out of it. Not surprisingly, economists split pretty evenly along party lines with Obama getting a bit of a lift due to the independents in the bunch.

It didn’t change my vote but some of the numbers are rather interesting.

I know like a gazillion people have seen this video but I really like it so here it is again.

This is so cool…

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.

I’ve been distracted in the past week trying to get a new start-up off the ground so I’ve not been posting much. This caught my eye today though.

Sun To Shed Up To 2,500 Jobs In Strategic Move

What I find interesting is that this layoff did not result from Sun needing to cut costs due to the economy (ok, maybe there was a bit of that) but primarily because their open source strategy is helping them reduce their cost of sales. If the software is free, more people use it and some of those people become paying customers. It tips the sales funnel on its end.

The enterprise software space is due for a change.