The closest USA has gotten to "Prime Minister's Question Time", a must watch exchange

The Atlantic magazine's James Fallows talks about a excellent exchange between President Obama and the GOP members of the House of Representatives. This exchange between Obama and House members is an exchange that should occur on a regular basis. Every American family should watch it and send their feedback to their legislators. Give this a watch and demand it happen regularly going forward.

The most wonderful and least appreciated feature of the new Apple iPad

It was a lots of fun to hear all of the pundits before, during and after the announcement of the Apple iPad today. Seeing them fib about their prerelease information, back peddle and Monday morning quarterback is fun and interesting.

But on to the important item, the iPad. I think it is going to be a real game changer for both the personal computer industry and the mobile phone industry.

And without further ado, the most wonderful thing about purchasing a iPad..... it means we can all go out and buy the simplest, cheapest and most reliable mobile phone that JUST DOES PHONE CALLS WELL!!!!! Hooray!!!!

iPad is NOT a phone. Yes, I know than in no time at all, innovated developers will figure out how to make Skype and other voice over data applications work on the iPad. It will be interesting to see how AT&T works to slow this and how the likes of Google work to speed it. Talk about an epic sea battle about to unfold.

That battle will be fun entertainment for all of us simpletons that just want a damn mobile phone to make and receive phone calls. Because the purchase of a iPad means we can all recycle our iPhones, Android phones, Palm phones, Window phones and every other lack of battery life and unreliable 'smart super phone' we own and go back to our drawer full of discarded technology and pull out, recharge and reenable the last mobile phone we owned that actually half way decently made phone calls AND NOTHING ELSE!

And went we want to use all of the cool data and information features of the iPad, well it looks like we will be able to do that and for only USD 30 per month.

I look forward to all of the up coming innovative accessories that will make the iPad easily to carry and quick to use. I think I would love to be a purse designer right now. And I look forward to version 2 of the devices shown below in an upcoming SkyMall catalog.

So rejoice, we can all go out and buy a Jitterbug mobile phone and quit wasting so much time trying make our phones do things they should not do. This might be such a great stress reducer, that the iPad might just live up the the hype that it is the holy grail for improving health care, not because it might be a good device for electronic medical records, but because it will reduce stress from technology medical problems.

I'm looking forward to much innovation and simplification based on the iPad. Congratulations Apple!

PBS Digital_nation : life on the virtual frontier 2-Feb-2010

This looks like it will be a good view into this very rapidly embracing new reality that we are living in:
Frontline Digital Nation Feb 2, 2010 on PBS:

Must have utility for all Kindle users, Instapaper.com

Instapaper is a web site and set of web API's that let you collect web pages that you are interesting in reading but would rather read at a later time then when you run across them. Developed by a smart guy, Marco Arment, the lead developer of useful blogging web app, tumblr.com .

The basic concept of this web app is not new, that being to grab the content of a web page and format it for easy reading at a later time. What makes Instapaper a real winner for Kindle owners, is its ability to let you collect a set of web pages and create a Kindle subscription that can either be wireless sent to your Kindle [note: Amazon will charge a small fee to the Kindle owner for this delivery] or the Instapaper web site has a function that will create the Kindle subscription and allow you to download it in an ebook format [mobi] that you can transfer to your kindle using the USB connection to your computer, saving you from the Amazon transfer charge.

Instapaper has a number of other features both for collecting web, RSS, Twitter and other sources of stuff you want to read and for reading the content. There is an iPhone reader application for example.

Circling back to Kindle users, I purchased my Kindle DX as much to read PDF and other content that I am overwhelmed with as for its ability to store books. And Instapaper is fantastic extension that allows me to use the excellent Kindle content display features for a broader range of things that I would like to read.

Instapaper is still a new project and is evolving rapidly. And I am sure the possible big Apple tablet announcement next week will shape the landscape for this type of application considerably. But so far in my initials tests of sending web pages to my Kindle, it has performed very solidly. There is not cost for the Instapaper service at this time. Other than the Amazon fees noted above, of which I do not believe Mr. Arment received any part.

The application uses intelligent web server logic to figure out what is the primary content that you want to read and removes the other content that is on most web pages. An interesting aspect of this applications are web ads. It does bring along some web ads to the Kindle. And I do not think that is a bad thing, content creators need to get paid for their work and the ad model is clearly one way that can happen. I've been reading magazines and newspapers with ads in them all my life, it is part of the deal. This aspect of Marco's application might be a real benefit for him to increase the functions of Instapaper and make some money doing it. As well to get content creators happy with Instapaper scraping together their articles.

I am certain there are going to be a number of interesting applications on the Kindle in the next months as Amazon opens up its architecture to make it competitive with the higher function tablet computers like the rumored Apple tablet. The Kindle is a wonderful targeted product and applications like Instapaper that extend its ability to do it core function are the really must have apps.

Give Instapaper.com a try, I think you will like it.

The multiple issues of privacy on the internet and the Google Toilet

I was sitting in on a talk about Personal Health Records (PHR) at the CES 2010 show two weekends ago. I know that might sound like a odd topic at the Consumer Electronics Show, but electronic in medical devices and medicine in general is a big market that have many of the electronics and software companies salivating.

One of the big perceived roadblocks to getting people to put their health records online is the concern that without good security, people's health info will be stolen by identity thieves. I do not want to minimize this concern, it is real. However, there is a second privacy issue around the internet and with fine grained information about our lives [whether we post it first hand on the internet or not] that I think is far less understood [which make it even worse, considering how little it appears most people understand about identity theft]. The issue is around corporate access to this information. I put government access somewhat in this same area, but I think that government access deserves it own analysis. I think that we have a number of good watchdogs of government, but do we have enough groups watching corporate ethics?

I do not think that we understand how much of our personal data and rights we are giving up to corporations and how they can use this 'against us'. Back to the electronic health records, I think the real concern we should have is about electronic access to our health information by insurance companies, hospitals, drug companies and others that might might be motivated to use this information for their betterment at the cost of the owner of the information.

I think what is needed is a requirement that every company or other entity that we grant access to our private information be required to show us at any time what other entities have been given this information via the specific company we are give our data to. And allow us to revoke this access to the information at any time. It would appear that getting  this control would require new additions to privacy laws. Additionally, it is a complex software and record keeping challenge. However both issues are solvable today, if we decide they are important.

A growing part of the internet, called 'the internet of things', will make it even more important that we have a better top down and easy to manage control of information about us and who gets it. My brother recently shared that the car pool payment sensor in his car now posts the speed at which the vehicle is traveling when it passes the billing sensors on the highways. If his insurance company were to make an agreement with the for profit company that builds these car pool lanes to get speed information about people that it insures, would he know this arrangement was in place when he agreed to put this sensor in his car? Could he revoke it at anytime and be apprised of the consequences? Insurance companies know your home address, the kind of car you drive, your age, driving record from the motor vehicle department. Knowing information about how fast your car is driven does seem like a bit data that the insurance company would want to having.

This funny but a little graphic video create by SuperNews at Current.com brings it 'home'.

Marko, the 9 yr old MCSE in Macedonia

I found Macedonia a wonderful place with very nice people when I visited there a couple years ago. At that time, I was impressed with the amount of effort they were putting toward educating their youth on technology and implementing leading edge technology projects. This story about Marko a young man who got his Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer at age 6 is grand!

I could have used his help in Skopje to get better bandwidth....

White House organic garden polluted with sludge

I'm not sure how I missed this article last year on finding that the new food victory garden at the White House is polluted. I guess we all should do soil studies.... you never know who lived here before you. There are so many jokes in is, how did I miss it.

The Clinton White House apparently used a sludge-based product to fertilize the lawn during the 1990s!