The-Asterisk

While I am getting used to using my new 3G iPad, I am thinking ahead to what might be next... actually, what I want to be next. I was struck by three events that happened this week. HP purchased Palm for a cool $1.2 Billion, Microsoft dropped its Courier (two screen foldable) tablet project and HP has also dropped its plans for a slate device based on Windows 7. Things are definitely happening in the mobile computing space, and happening quickly. As I have tweeted and talked about before and Dave Sobel has actually demonstrated , the iPad can be used as a kind of portable thin client. I don't yet know how well it works, but any kind of application like this is a good thing for business computing. We keep hearing over and over about cloud this and cloud that. We also hear about how Apple is the devil incarnate to application developers who are stymied by Apple's restrictions on what can be developed for the iPad and iPhone. And do not forget Steve Jobs' obsession with keep...

The way I am wired can be a bit annoying at times. I am always trying to figure out solutions to any problem that I see. I just can't help it. Some things are easy, like fixing potholes: JUST DO IT!!! Or fixing really bad roads: Sue the contractors for the repair... like having a ten year warranty on their work. Or getting stuck in a line at McDonald's behind someone that is ordering for 10 people back at the office: Adopt a single line like Burger King. So, while watching the Sunday news shows today my affliction kicked in again when the subject of financial regulation inevitably came up. I have wasted more than a few brain cells on this issue over many years, but nothing like the past 20 months. I have blogged in the past about who I think was the real culprit in initializing our most recent crisis, as well as how the law of unintended consequences is the only law in Washington that will work as promised. And then it hit me. We need a gaming commissioner. Seriously. It has b...

I just saw this video posted on Breitbart. It has a man at a town hall meeting with Congressman LoBiondo (R-NJ) asking the Congressman various 'trick' questions about the Constitution of the United States. At first, you may feel a little sorry for the Rep, since no one wants to be put on the spot or have to memorize law books, but this one is different. The way I see it, fortunes can be won or lost on whether a particular law has the word "and" or the word "or" in a certain position and lawyers will beat a semantic phrase to death to get their point across. Also, political fortunes can we won or lost based on what the meaning of "is" is. So, it is with that backdrop that I think that it is infinitely more important that all of our representatives, who swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, should know what they are upholding and defending. The basic Constitution is really not that long or that difficult to read. Some of t...

I was at the dentist yesterday, sitting in the waiting room, when this lady comes in and goes to the reception window. She explains how she tried to call but must have been calling the wrong number. So she had to come in to reschedule an appointment for her significant other. After the receptionist rescheduled the appointment, she asked "Do you want to go ahead and schedule your cleaning and checkup?" The lady replied, "I am not a patient here and besides, I don't have dental insurance." With that said, she left. I sat there for a moment taking that statement in. Was she saying that since she doesn't have insurance she wouldn't do anything for her dental health unless she had an emergency? Or was she saying that since she would have to pay for it, she didn't consider a cleaning and checkup to be a worthwhile thing to do? Conventional wisdom in the US now is that everyone considers health care to be a basic human right. Well, what good is health care...