Dear Hillary,

You are a fine candidate. You have run a good campaign* and fought hard**, but the math is undeniable. Not only can't you win, you can't even catch up: you would have to win 84%-16% in every single remaining state to even approach catching up (thanks to Slate's excellent delegate calculator, a lovely little piece of engineering so good that every other commentator on the web is using it without modification).

After tonight's surprise result, this is even more true. Nearly all the polls had you 5 or more points ahead in Indiana, and Barack only 5 points ahead in North Carolina. Instead, North Carolina was a 14-point blowout and you won only by the skin of your teeth in Indiana, with a 1.7% margin.

It's time to concede defeat and drop out. Perhaps that's why you've cancelled all your public appearances tomorrow? We can only hope.

Sincerely,
L.

* Though a bit complacent to start with.

** Maybe a bit too hard. Did you have to be quite that vicious?

John C. Dvorak weighs in on the Yahoo-Microsoft deal:

Earth to Microsoft: Yahoo! is not worth $44 billion. You could buy General Motors lock, stock, and barrel for $14 billion, name all the cars "Google Sucks" and get more bang for the buck.

Heck, you'd have enough left over to buy Ford for around $16 billion, and you could name all those cars "Google Sucks More" and still have $14 billion left over for a big party.

So Microsoft has walked away from the Yahoo! deal, and I'm glad, but cautiously. The tech blogosphere has been busily going apeshit since the deal was announced, so I'm loath to repeat too much into the echo chamber, but I want to give a brief summary of the situation as I see it anyway.

Firstly, Ballmer made it clear that he walked away from the deal because Jerry Yang was going to make it too hard to do. This has two corollaries: first, some shareholders are going to feel like this was neglect of his fiduciary duties -- i.e., not in the best interests of the company -- and sue accordingly, especially if the stock nosedives on Monday (as is pretty widely expected). Secondly, it means that Ballmer would still like to do the deal, and a collapse of Yahoo!'s stock price would make it easier for Microsoft to come back later and try again.

In fact, many are speculating that this is just a hardball negotiating strategy on Ballmer's part. I'm not so sure. I think Ballmer may actually be done with Yahoo!, because he's worked out that he's not going to be able to get what he wants even if he does manage to buy the company. So what does Ballmer want? There's a few options:

• Technology: Yahoo still has a bunch of pretty nifty proprietary tech, but nothing that Microsoft couldn't reproduce given some time (and considerably less than $45 billion dollars).
• People: Bill Gates has publicly stated that engineering talent is what Microsoft wants out of the deal. If so, they would be sorely disappointed. If Microsoft can't hire them right now with the salaries they offer, then you have to assume that the talent it wants isn't working for Microsoft because it doesn't want to, and an acquisition would make that problem, if anything, worse.
• Advertising relationships (i.e. advertising market share): essentially, Microsoft would buy a bunch of customers. But again: Microsoft already has an online advertising arm. If people were willing to deal with Microsoft, they would already be doing so. Microsoft has no market share because businesses do not trust Microsoft as a partner, and again the acquisition wouldn't change anything.
• Customer relationships (i.e. search market share): Yahoo has between 20% and 30% market share and a brand that people recognize (unlike the colossal brand failure that is Live Search). Of all the possibilities, this is the one he'd be most likely to actually get, and $45 billion dollars (not counting various poison pills inserted by Jerry) is an awful lot of money to pay for market share.

Of course, if the stock tanks, then that market share could end up costing only $30 billion, at which point it begins to look more attractive. So if this walking away really is a negotiating tactic, look for the offer to come back within the next six months, possibly as quick as the next three. However, I don't think it's that likely -- I don't think coming back later would make this very troublesome acquisition any easier, and if they stock tanked it would shoot right back up when Microsoft came knocking again. So where does this leave the two companies?

Microsoft definitely comes off the worst. Ballmer looks impotent at best, incompetent at worst -- I mean, seriously? Your hard-dealing business-focused ass got faced down by nerdy, soft-spoken, all-around nice guy Jerry Yang? People are already claiming his career is in Jeopardy. And Microsoft as a company also takes a hit. Fake Steve jobs sums up nicely Microsoft's new position:

Nobody wants a big teetering giant stumbling through their market threatening to topple over and wipe out entire neighborhoods by accident. But that's what Microsoft has become -- the big stupid retarded giant lurching into the Valley, like King Kong with a lobotomy and a shotgun and a bottle of tequila, stomping around and beating its chest and then stumbling away, having wiped out most of the city.

As for Yahoo!, we come out battered but generally unscathed. Microsoft's failure to acquire us for $31 billion dollars because we wanted $40+ billion should permanently set the company's value somewhere between those two values, although in the absence of anybody else who could feasibly buy us the stock might plunge. I personally think that would be unjustified: a modest fall in stock price would put us back at the same 40 P/E ratio as Google, which is the only company reasonably comparable to what we do.

Who wins? In a word, Google. This highly public drama has been a huge distraction for its two biggest competitors and will continue to be for some time. Oh, and I, personally, am much happier.

Dear god London, I leave you alone for 5 minutes and this is what you go and do! Don't make me come over there. (Seriously, don't. I'm having fun over here.)

On the plus side, it will reduce the number of cracks about Arnold Schwarzenegger I get. At least he used to run a successful business.

I wrote a while back about Obama being the candidate who understands the Internet and I've been meaning since then to go into more detail about the actual policies that he has that I like. It was my intention to compare these policies with Hillary's, but her site doesn't address the issue of technology at all. The closest she gets is talking about science policy, which mentions broadband once.

Understand that this is not just some silly "gotcha" that her website doesn't address these issues. Her website is very comprehensive, and an absence of a policy issue belies a lack of focus on that issue. And technology is not just my pet issue. Technology, specifically information technology, has shifted in the last decade from being an industry of its own to being part of the structure of every industry. Policy made affecting information technology, and specifically the government's use of IT, will have profound and widespread effects on the economy and society. A lack of recognition of that fact is a serious problem for a candidate who in all likelihood will be president through 2016.

So here are the bits of Obama's technology policies that I think are especially important. See the full page if you want even more details (it's huge!):

Network neutrality

The question of whether Internet service providers should be able to regulate the flow of traffic through their systems is a controversial one that I could talk about for a while. On the one hand, a certain amount of inspection of traffic allows optimization and prioritization that improves the experience for everyone. But on the other hand, as the recent debacle of Comcast blocking bittorrent traffic has shown, there is a difference between optimization and censorship. As the Obama campaign points out, most areas are served by only one or two ISPs, and this monopoly or near-monopoly situation means that consumers have to have their interests protected. There will be a lot of back-and-forth about how far network neutrality has to go, but as a general principle, it is best to err towards the side of greater openness.

Privacy laws

The increasing use of databases by the government opens up massive possibilities for the theft or misuse of that data, either through maliciousness or merely incompetence, such as the Oklahoma department of corrections, which recently accidentally exposed sensitive personal data about sex offenders and department employees. Obama supports controlling access to this data, and more importantly mandating safeguards that track how this data has actually been used (something the UK government could take a lesson from). He also wants to address the protection of e-health and location data that don't easily fall into a single industry's laws.

Open government

The extent to which Obama wants to take open government is really breathtaking. Some headliners, but by no means the full picture:

• Universally accessible formats and standards for government data
• Recording, archiving and broadcasting live on the Internet the proceedings of all Executive Branch departments and rulemaking agencies. This sounds like a gimmick, but my experience of exposing this kind of volume of data is that the effects could be tranformational. Every poor decision, every uninformed comment, in every meeting of government would be available for obsessive bloggers and policy wonks to pore over. And if there is one thing that the Internet has taught us, it is that there is nothing so boring that somebody won't be interested in it.
• A government-maintained search engine for all federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contracts

A national CTO

The government is the largest corporation, and yet the government lacks a CTO, a position every other major corporation has had for over a decade. Unsurprisingly, government IT is notorious for being inefficient, out of date, over-budget, and generally bungled. The CTO's job will be to make sure that government is using the best IT available, using it properly, and using it in a co-ordinated way so that departments can effectively cooperate.

Technology as an economic driver

Obama really gets this. Here's a quote direct from his policy page:

In the 21st century, our economic success will depend not only on economic analysis but also on technological sophistication and direct experience in this powerful engine of our economy. In an Obama administration, the government’s economic policy-making organizations and councils will include individuals with backgrounds in our technology industry.

So to reiterate: Obama should be every geek's candidate of choice, but not just geeks. Anyone who recognizes the primacy that technology has already taken in our economy and culture should realise that it is time it entered our politics as well, and Obama is the candidate to do that.

The state of Florida has introduced a $60 fine for attaching TruckNutz (or other replica bull testicles) to your vehicle.

It's hard to say which is more depressing: that this practice is popular in the first place, that somebody was offended by it, that Florida lawmakers thought it was worth their time to ban it, or that Florida lawmakers believe that it's okay to ban things just because you find them offensive. None of them say anything good about the state.

People complaining about outages at Twitter often say (as Scoble does today) that people will switch to some other service. Scoble says Friendfeed, others say Pownce.

This confuses the hell out of me. Those services do not have an SMS interface. The SMS interface is what makes Twitter interesting and useful. I don't understand how Pownce can even claim to be competing when they haven't solved the core problem that Twitter solves, which is being a no-brainer SMS broadcast/aggregation service.

• The financial crisis
• The collapse of housing values in the US and around the world
• Health care
• Energy
• Immigration
• Education
• Trade
• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Iran
• China
• Torture
• Global warming
• The world food crisis
• The declining value of the US Dollar

Things that were:

• Whether Obama thinks people in small towns are "bitter"
• Whether Obama should have walked out of his preacher's church
• Whether Obama supports Weather Underground, a terrorist group who were last operational over 30 years ago
• Whether Obama isn't patriotic because he doesn't wear a flag-pin in his lapel
• How Obama intends to modify affirmative action so rich black kids don't get special treatment
• Whether the candidates support gun control
• How the candidates plan to get out of Iraq
• Whether the candidates will raise taxes, and how exactly

In all, nearly substance-free and pretty nakedly pro-Hillary. ABC's debates are terrible even by the very low standard of American political debates.

Returning to the UK was strangely reassuring. All my favourite places in London are still there, and largely unchanged. My favourite people are also nearly all still there, too, and it was lovely to see them and discover that gaps of 15 months or more between seeing them had not diminished our compatability or affection. It was also fun to see their lives in a sort of fast-forward: the last time I saw them they all had different jobs, different houses, often different relationships. In nearly all cases their current situation was an improvement on 15 months ago, so from my perspective they were all suddenly happier, healthier, richer and more respected in their careers, which is always a nice thing to see in your friends.

Plus there is my lovely little niece, who despite being a mere 6 weeks old, essentially immobile and incapable of rational human interaction, manages to somehow be adorable and also look remarkably similar to the rest of my family. I realise the latter shouldn't come as a surprise, but I've never had a younger sibling or even close cousin, so seeing a real-life baby version of my family features is very novel to me. It also means I am, finally, at 26, no longer the baby of the family. Hurray!

Of course, it's always the weird little things about continental transition that get you. A bunch of things that used to be familiar no longer were, for instance:

My hair

My hair is notorious for being stupidly unmanageable, but in California's bone-dry air it will at least lay reasonably flat, especially if it's warm. In Britain cold, damp climate it curls up and frizzes out. Grump.

Money

Neither side has this right. Identically-sized and coloured bills are obviously stupid, but so is having your singles be irritatingly large, heavy coins. Sort it out, Western world. I want all-paper, size and color-coded money.

The tube

One of the biggest things I miss about London is the ability to get to any part of it, unaided, via the ever-present tube. But I also forgot what a pain it is to ride the tube at rush-hour, squeezed into the sweaty armpit of a stranger. I have a new appreciation for the air-conditioned, wi-fi enabled shuttle I ride in as a type this. Which brings me to...

Commuting

One of the biggest drawbacks of my Californian situation is my daily commute, an hour each way. However, being able to feasibly access the net either on my laptop or iPhone while travelling significantly reduces that problem. I'd also forgotten that in London, in addition to the weekday commute, nearly any kind of social activity on the weekend also involves a commute into Central: in San Francisco, most of my weekend hangouts are within walking distance of my house.

Bathing

Another unexpected one. Bathing in California is just better: water pressure is better, temperature less haphazardly managed, and soap is available that doesn't involve some kind of slimy moisturizing element that makes you feel like you're never properly clean.

Broadband

Britain's got this one. Broadband is both faster and significantly cheaper in the UK, especially mobile broadband (in which I intend to invest sometime this year).

Tipping

An obvious one, but it's nice to be able to tip 12.5% without feeling like a cheapskate (although a lot more London restaurants seem to have started including service charges in the bill, what's up with that?)

The light

The sun is brighter in California. It seems inconsequential, but to somebody who grew up close to the equator, I miss the hot bright sunshine of my childhood. The bay area is just further south enough that the light is more satisfying. Which brings me to the final thing...

The weather

Oh, the freaking weather. It's April, London! You should not be having snow followed by hail followed by torrential rain and lightning. Deal with your issues! California has been 20 degrees and sunny for over a month now. Again, my tropical upbringing makes me craze sunlight a lot more than your standard British transplant, and California's wonderful weather is a daily perk that I never stop appreciating.