Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.

XKCD 606

Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.

But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.

If he's 50, he was born in 1964, so he might have gone to college before Apple II's became widespread. But when I was in high school from 1972-1974, we had time-sharing access to a PDP-11 at the nearby state university (with one teletype shared for the entire school), so by 8 years later it's likely he had something a lot fancier. My wife's high school didn't have that - they used punch cards, which got batch-processed weekly.

I first encountered PLATO in college, and it had Notesfiles (which contributed significantly to the evolution of Usenet, as well as Lotus Notes), and the coolest-ever Star Trek game.

In the US, the Pi was $25 for the A (now $20 for A+), and $35 for the B (which is what I actually bought, but this discussion is mainly about the A/A+.) The Beaglebone currently runs $52-55 online, and has 4GB memory instead of 2GB (it was getting hard for them to find 2GB parts), and the processor's been updated a bit since last fall when I looked at it (it's also a newer ARM core than the Pi uses.) The catch is that if you want to do 1920x1280 video, you only get 24Hz, vs. 60 for the Pi, which affects using it as a media platform. (But if you don't care about that, yeah, it's a great deal, especially now that it has more RAM.)

The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)

But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.

City council elections here in Mountain View California had a bunch of candidates running, including a guy named Neal, who has posters of himself wearing a cowboy hat. I didn't actually vote for him, but maybe my wife did. (It's a non-partisan "pick 3 of N" election, there were two we liked, one we disliked, and a few in the middle that we picked randomly.)

Oh, it's much messier than that, though that's usually how I vote. But consider an open-primary system where the Democrat incumbent is running for re-election and you have the option to choose which party's primary to vote in - you know the Democrat incumbent is going to win her party's primary (if there aren't any serious opponents), so the best strategy for the primary is to vote in the Republican primary instead, for the least electable candidate, whether that's a far-right Tea Party challenger or at least the second-tier candidate who doesn't have GOP machine money. That means that in the general election, your favorite candidate is running against a weaker opponent.

Gaming top-two is much trickier; there are more unstable ways to go wrong, but a lot of it has to do with the candidates' supporters spending money on various people from all parties in the primary.

I didn't know they'd done that, but I can't say I'm surprised. Another thing that's going to hit all the third parties is maintaining ballot access, since the main thing that's kept them on the ballot is vote count in the governor's or other state-wide races, and none of us are getting them this year. It's also possible to get party status by getting enough registered voters, but I don't know if any of California's third parties meet that threshold.

California recently imposed a hopelessly annoying new voting system - instead of per-party primaries, and a general election in the fall, all the candidates for a partisan seat get thrown into one ballot, and the top two candidates move on to the general election. This means that in a heavily Democrat district, you might end up with two Democrats in the general election (but the Republican voters get to pick the one they object to least instead of voting for a Republican who's guaranteed to lose.) That happened in a few Congressional and assembly districts this year, and I think there's one Republican-vs-Republican race in southern California.

For third parties, this is terrible - it means that third-party candidates are almost never going to get into the general election, which means they won't be able to get enough general-election votes to keep ballot status after a few years. You might have an exception like a Democrat and a Green in a liberal district (though that didn't happen this time), but most of us kept ballot status by getting a moderate percentage of votes for governor or minor offices like Secretary of State. And for the major parties, it's also possible to game the system, e.g. helping a couple of minor Democrats split their parties ballot to get your Republicans in, or Democrats voting for the craziest Tea Party candidate so the Democrat can easily beat them in the fall.

So while I'm a Libertarian, I had to split my ticket between mostly Democrats and one or two Republicans. On the other hand, in the primary, there were several offices for which we didn't have a Libertarian candidate, and I voted for one or two Greens and at least one Occupy person; Silicon Valley is strongly enough Democrat I saw no reason to give thm

It sounds like you're saying that the free software world suddenly decided to invent Firefox as a competition for IE. Firefox was Netscape freeing the source code for the Netscape browser so the open source community could improve it, and people continuing to improve it over the years. IE was Microsoft's attempt to kill Netscape and particularly to kill browser standardization, because the increasing move to HTML as a universal user interface for applications was threatening to make the operating system irrelevant. Imagine AOL shipping a CD with Linux, Netscape, and AOL, letting you use your slightly older PC, and letting you use AOL for your mail instead of some Microsoft product.

Twitter shows you comments in most-recent-first mode, which is sometimes confusing when news breaks. A few weeks back my twitter feed was filling up with things like
"[dog emoji] [knife emoji] [knide] [knife] !!!"
and it took a while to get down to the comments about "there's a new vulnerability called 'Poodle' out today."

Maybe Obama did something about this quietly, but I'd think one of the first things he should have done was worked to increase medical school capacities for training doctors and nurses, along with making it easier for immigrant doctors and nurses to get licensed here. Sure, it's a long-term activity that wouldn't significantly improve health care costs or availability during his two terms, and maybe the next batch of Republicans would take credit for it, but it's still critically important.

A lot of us baby boomers are going to be retiring, or even if we can't afford to retire we'll still be getting old and decrepit. And a lot of doctors are boomers, partly because everybody recognized that as a good job when we were growing up (both financial and social good), and it was before the tech booms turned everybody into software entrepreneurs, and also we had fewer kids than our parents' generation (the Millennials are catching up demographically, but with the economy and student loan problems, fewer of them can afford med school, and med school capacities are still limited.)