It was recently announced that President-Elect Obama will be doing weekly YouTube addresses to the nation rather than the more traditional weekly radio address U.S. Presidents have done in the past.  A simple yet highly worthwhile change that embraces today’s information on demand paradigm.  Here’s the first one:

Not a whole lot of new information if you’ve been following politics in the last couple months, but a decent first step towards improving government accessibility and transparency through technology.

Hmm, I just found out that the F-22 Raptor will cost about $200,000,000 a piece. Multiply that by the 300+ the Air Force wants to bring into service between 2005 and 2015 and that’s an obscene amount of money.

Yesterday I was talking with Mary at lunch about something I had read where Bill Bradley had indicated he wanted to eliminate the F-22 Raptor program as a cost saving measure if he was elected. Considering the F-15′s it will replace are about 26 years old and the technological advances we’ve made since they came out (stealth technologies, more powerful computers, thrust vectored engines, classified stuff, etc.), not to mention the money we’ve already invested in developing the F-22 that didn’t strike me as a good course of action. Our conversation moved on to other things that I did actually like about Bradley and I didn’t think anything more of it. Then last night I happened to flip to a program on the Discovery Channel about Air Force test pilots and it spent several minutes discussing and showing footage of the F-22. Nothing like a good coincidence I always say.

Continuing the recent parade of Presidential candidates and their wives through Spokane, Bill Bradley is going to be in town for a question and answer session tomorrow morning. I’m debating whether or not to go since it’s fairly early and I’m starting to lean towards McCain since he seems to be the most electable of the candidates I like these days. Guess I’ll see how I feel when I wake up.

Here’s a review of Freaks and Geeks that gives a good overview of what the show is all about. NBC seriously needs to GET A CLUE about this show!

John McCain came to campus this morning for a Town Meeting less than a block from my building. Unfortunately I had to work during the whole thing, but I did catch a couple minutes of the televised coverage. It was interesting to see the effects of three or four hundred more people than usual converging on the COG.

This is completely ridiculous. Linus Torvalds can’t get a green card because of INS beuracracy. But it gets even worse. According to a recent San Jose Mercury article: U.S. immigration law sets aside 140,000 employment-based green cards each fiscal year. But because of the green card backlog, about 40,000 cards were issued in fiscal year 1999. The approximately 100,000 unused spots don’t roll over to this fiscal year, so they’re lost.

It’s just not a good thing when you’re forcing valuable tech workers out of the country when more and more the economy is being driven by the very industry they work for.

Internet Week has a pretty informative article on migrating your existing Windows NT network to Win2k. This is an issue we’ve been exploring here at Gonzaga for a few months now. Thankfully, since my building is highly Mac-centric I only have a few PC workstations and a couple servers to deal with. I will say the Win2k Professional Beta 3 installation on my office PC went very smoothly and it has a fairly obscure network card.

This San Jose Mercury article has the lowdown on all the Super Bowl commercials. And that one with the stupid ad that I couldn’t remember was lifeminders.com.

I was certainly pleased to see this rumor on Apple Insider yesterday. I love my PowerBook and would definitely prefer being able to just upgrade it to buying a new one.

Looks like Mozilla Build 12 is finally available on the ftp servers (hasn’t been publicly acknowledged on the main page yet). I’ve heard good things, but I doubt it’s to the point where I can put away my current browsers. I can always hope though.

The repairs on the Hubble telescope begin tonight. Hopefully the procedure will go a lot more smoothly than the mission’s launch schedule did.

Looks like the Arizona Democratic Primary is going to be testing the Internet waters in March when it pioneers online voting. I think this is an important step in the right direction, as long as electronic voting is made secure with strong encryption. Whether that is true of the system they’ll be using remains to be seen.

Uh, oh. It looks like today could be a big dayfor Microsoft. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with this, especially since Microsoft is part of the Dow now too.

Hmm… I guess the big announcement isn’t going to happen until next week sometime.

Tonight Bill Bradley and Al Gore had the first of several planned town hall meetings. I forgot about it until just now, so I missed any chance of seeing live, although I don’t have cable anyway. Luckily for me CNN has it on Real Audio. Check it out here. I like Senator Bradley quite a bit, but one of his responses on how he would pay for his fairly expensive health care proposal struck me as a little bit funny. He talked about saving money on administrative costs through technology and moving things off of paper and onto the Internet. The Internet has a lot of potential in this area, but I don’t think bandying buzzwords pays the bills. It’ll be interesting to see if he has a more in depth explanation of how this would work.

In other Internet related comments during the meeting, Vice President Gore apologized for his well publicized gaff when asked to discuss his biggest political mistake (he indicated it was one of the first things that came to mind of the many he’s made). Thinking about his open source website still brings a smile to my face.