Obama has been prez for 19 months and he passed his financial package within weeks of taking office and it was not even phased in like Reagan’s tax cuts were. This is the Obama economy.

Obama has no new policies to improve the unemployment rate. He only sells his current agenda (like Cap and [...]

Here is my speech.

This is some article about how Beijing is spending $740 on green energy.

This is a big headfake, or stupid on China’s fault. E=mc^2 says that energy is basically infinite. So why shouldn’t it cost almost nothing by now? We need cheap energy to have a manufacturing sector. We can’t be a country full [...]

Bedlam coffee open mic night: I’m bringing some dnb http://bit.ly/aCHkpA

Screwed up the text in the last version…

Useful discussion about dangers of hubris. Also points out connections between Obama and JFK.

Boehner was on the defensive for his nuking an ant statement.

He should have said something like this:

I’m sorry for mispeaking. My teleprompter was broken that day, and so I was speaking with my mind and heart as my guide. And I ended up using a metaphor that only half-conveyed the [...]

Now for something completely different, here is a progressive breaks mix I made.

I post much more frequently to Twitter or Facebook. I recommend we meet up there!

There are 12 Cuban programmers each translating a chunk of my book into Spanish. Here is my latest mail to them:

Hi;

An idea for an interesting project occurred to me, and you are the perfect candidate country to build it!

I have come to understand that rolling releases are what Linux should [...]

Here we are 5+ years in, and these basic problems still exist.

The problem is Mark doesn’t see the point of doing work in Debian, because if he did, then why should he have created Ubuntu? Mark thinks contributing to Debian makes as much sense as contributing to Red Hat: nice in some ideal [...]

I added music to the neurotic robot. Do you like it better?

I just wrote this to a friend in facebook and thought I’d post it here. He wanted to know what I didn’t like most about the healthcare bill:

It is so hard to say what I don’t like most because it is a big bill but also because I am upset about the process. [...]

Version 1.03

Dear Mark,

Thank you for your feedback on my book excerpt about Ubuntu / Debian, and I appreciate your time.

The main concern I have about the current situation is this: when an Ubuntu person does some coding work and posts the diff to a website, it is now a workitem [...]

There are people such as Jeremy LaCroix writing articles now about their frustrations with Mark Shuttleworth’s leadership of Ubuntu.

When I write about Debian and Ubuntu, I have focused on the inefficiency, the fact that Debian is no longer the center of the community, that Ubuntu is buggier because it is separate, that Debian [...]

Interesting picture from:

http://www.neatorama.com/2010/03/17/nano-trek/

There are a lot of people worried about “open data”, like Matt Asay and Tim O’Reilly.

Of course, they call free software “open source” and they think the lack of open data it is a big deal with companies like Google threatening to control what links we click on and companies like Facebook using [...]

Get your popcorn!

Microsoft is reviving itself right now. It has the money and the expertise. Windows 7 is a major improvement over Vista, even though it demonstrated the holes in Microsoft’s aging technology stack.

Windows 7′s additional 3 years of debugging, plus a new Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, Windows Azure, IE 9, Bing, [...]

This was originally posted to Linus and the rest of the Linux kernel mailing list, and then to Tom’s Hardware.

“The future is open source everything.” —Linus Torvalds

Dear LKML;

I have written a book that makes the case for Linux world domination. I find it interesting that the idea of Linux on the [...]

This video is funny.

I’ve tried for a while to figure out why computer vision is mostly still in research labs in spite of the fact that there are many thousands of people and different algorithms and codebases for doing computer vision. One analogy that occurs to me is image compression.

There are an infinite number of ways [...]

I have had this idea for a Virtual Darpa Grand Challenge for a couple of years now and I’m shopping around this slide deck to angel / VC people. I don’t know many, but I am looking and learning.

But I thought I’d also put this out there to the Linux community and see [...]

Mark announced he is stepping down as head of Canonical to work on design and quality, and this is what I wrote in his blog comments section:

You should focus on the buglist as one of your most important metrics, surely more important than boot time! You should use your Bully Pulpit and [...]

The last two releases of Ubuntu (9.04 and 9.10) seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The biggest problem is hardware because if your hardware doesn’t work, you can’t test out the software, and the hardware bugs are the hardest to find because nearly every computer on the planet is different!

I [...]

I just watched an incredibly inspiring, funny and interesting documentary about the history of women’s soccer. It is so good it should be shown in movie theaters!

If you are a woman, or like women, or have a daughter, you must check it out!

You can watch it on HBO: http://www.hbo.com/apps/schedule/ScheduleServlet?ACTION_DETAIL=DETAIL&FOCUS_ID=627001

Or you can [...]

I take a risk by crossing the street.

In order to know the risks attached to Mono, you’d have to know what people inside MS think. Of course, since you’ve not chatted with any MS employees, you have no way of knowing the actual risk. Mono is not the same thing as TomTom. It [...]

I believe we could have had robot-driven cars years ago. We need:

A video camera A computer Software

It should be obvious that we are missing only the software. What we need is 100s of people working together. There actually are enough computer vision people out there today, but they are not working together! [...]

This man needs my help to transfer 30 million dollars to a US bank account and I get 15%! I had no idea South Africa was such an unstable political environment that the banking system is not reliable, but their loss is my gain.

Note the passport looks a little suspicious to me [...]

This is the talk I will give gave: