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The problem here isn't with "government," but with the failed ERP-style methodology of development that federal and local governments, along with very large corporations use to develop technology. Hewlett Packard, Hershey, along with a string of other large corporations have lost billions in value from these kinds of integrations. Hershey even missed Halloween one year because of a failed integration.

And while Silicon Valley and the startup community has largely moved away from this methodology, large bureaucracies, ever afraid of risk, seem drawn to them. But as far as I can tell, this idea that "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" is a function of marketing, not of a track record of success (IBM's latest for the feds: http://sam.gov. $171 Million).

What we can do to solve this problem isn't to scoff and laugh at government. While some want larger or smaller government, we all should want it to do what it is doing affordably.

The opportunity for smart technologists to take on the idea of working with government commercially is the next step in the Civic Hacking movement. I hope those invited to go to their next hackathon for the city or invited to give their free advice and labor to the city out of a sense of civic duty, begin to ask the question: why are you asking me for stuff for free with one hand, whilst handing out million dollar contracts with the other. How can you fix procurement in a way that allows me to compete for the serious work, so that I can save you from this mess?

Plus, One actually has much more control over my inbox than one does over Google+ Notifications.

I'm reluctant to buy something like this that'll become useless the moment I decide to change/upgrade phones.

It's easy to look at this as a critique of TED, and it is, but what's interesting here is that this is a TED Talk. He was invited by TedxSD to talk about the problems of Ted. And he delivered those problems in the language and culture of TED. And whether you agree with him or not, I think it's commendable that he was invited by the TED organizers to give this talk, and that he gave it.

This seems to me like it would distract me from writing, and distract me from reading -- both are things that seem pretty relevant to my information consumption and production habits.

I produce content that's read by people who you have to wear a tie to meet with. I hate wearing that damned tie, and the last thing I want to do is have to start wearing it for my blog.

It's easy to imagine the kind of data government has, imagine its ability to process that data, and easy to interpret that they will do it. But it's also important to recognize that this is conjecture.

From my experience in government: they nailed the user experience (check out http://dsbs.sba.gov for some awesome gov UI), but really overestimated government's capacity to build intelligent technology like this.

I know this will make me unpopular amongst this crowd, but The truth is, I'm far more afraid of data like this getting into the wrong hands because it's being stored improperly or insecurely, than I am of government being malicious with it. Heck, I'm more afraid of my insurance adjuster than I am a malicious cop.

It's too bad that the term political correctness is so generically incorrect. Doing things like swapping out the N word for "african american," dropping the word "retard" from your vocabulary, referring to adult women as "women," and referring to people of non-european descent as more than "oriental" and "mexican" is not "being politically correct," it's doing something that takes you no effort that makes you less of an asshole.

People who are 18 to 22 are not girls. They are adult women.

Step 1: stop referring to adult women as "girls"

This is all right, but a little vague. Here are some more specific problems: http://blog.dobt.co/post/63655420372/how-healthcare-gov-went...

I love my Tesla. That makes me more terrified to drive it.

I love my 1 year old Son. That makes me more terrified to drop him.

I drive a Tesla. It's a much bigger car and a much more expensive car than my old prius. As such, I am terrified to drive it. I'm neither superior nor inferior of a driver as a result of purchasing and driving a tesla, but I'm certainly more afraid of loss than I used to be -- both the loss of money, and the loss of time I get to spend driving my Tesla should I be in an accident.

At a valuation of a billion dollars greater than Blackberry's market cap.

Left out of this argument is that The New York Times bestseller list has a bias towards physical retailers and against Amazon. Methinks this is a smart strategy towards getting on the bestseller list (which means enhanced speaker fees), disguised as a strategy towards justice in retail.

I thought so too until I read the article. Buried at the bottom is the ability to stream my Playstation 4 content within my house to this box. That's awesome. I hope it works.

My wife does not want all that stuff dangling from my television, but what she really hates is a game console hanging from my television. If my game console can be in my basement, and I can duct tape this to the back of my TV upstairs, then we both get what we want.

Yeoman sets up boilerplates for many different kinds of applications, with many different kinds of requirements, and gives you all the tools you need to get started.

This can be as convenient as typing in "yo bootstrap" to set up a generic bootstrap site, to "yo phonegap-backbone" to set up a workflow for a backbone and phonegap application. It not only sets up the directory structures for you, it also manages requirements inside of your project from external parties, test environments, and gives you a nice little live-preview setup with grunt automatically.

For me, it takes a lot of that project setup time out of the way, so I can get started coding rather quickly.

I have very limited experience around regexes, but would it be a good idea for the software to perhaps try and show multiple different regexes that would match? I'd imagine that's more difficult, if we're talking narrow scope and then broadening out... there's an interesting UI to be built around that.

Right. That's basically because employees (I used to work for the gov) want them, much to the CIO's dismay because the CIO is being better served by Blackberry sales folks than Apple's or Google's. By better served, I don't mean "taken out for golf," I mean "contracting vehicles have been set up by BlackBerry's experienced salesforce that makes this IT easy for a CIO to purchase." The SBA and many other agencies just renewed their blackberry contracts because, frankly, it was just easier for them to buy it. If you put an iPhone or an Android device into that existing framework for purchasing, it's game, set, match.

At 5 billion dollars of market cap, the company's worth less than what Microsoft paid for Skype. Frankly, Apple or Google should make this purchase just for their federal salesforce alone -- Blackberry knows how to do something those other companies don't do well and that's sell and entrench inside of Governments. That alone is worth billions. Give the iPhone to a Blackberry federal salesperson, and you've got billions.

I tried powerline for quite some time and thought it was useful. But once I became a homeowner, I decided it was time to wire my house for ethernet. To be honest -- it's one of the smarter things I've done when it comes to networking. Not only am I getting the full bandwidth out of my cable modem subscription, but I also walked away knowing more about how my house fits together.

Since I've done that, I've been able to diagnose other problems in the house that don't have anything to do with networking. It's not that hard, and if you're not-a-renter, it's a great little project that'll give you knowledge over your house should other things go wrong.

Don't get me wrong -- powerline's great. But cat6 is greater, cheaper, easier, not mutually-exclusive, and, unlike powerline, adds value onto the house.

From what I know of the project, CMS has a GitHub enterprise account that they used internally to "iteratively create on github," this Repo is the one that moved over after release.

It's a big step to have government releasing ANYTHING on Github. And yes, it's the next logical step for them to start projects on GitHub. But they're not there yet -- its worth noting that neither Sunlight nor Code for America start their projects out in the open 100% of the time either. It's new ground, and government will, I think, move more towards developing out in the open as we progress. But for now, I'm pretty excited that they embraced technology from this decade.

I should note I'm the former Director of Sunlight Labs, and am an advisor to Code for America.

The Department of Better Technology just raised 460k from the Knight Foundation to make technology for government not suck. We're looking for employees #1 and #2 -- a ruby person with good front-end skills, and a sales-person with government experience. hello@dobt.co

This is really awesome. But please -- save this as a note for some other time for your mother. As a dad, it'd be heartbreaking to get a "it's time to let go" note on Father's day. It would crush me. Even the most amicable divorce is tough.

Give your mom some flowers and, heck, draw something for her. Or use your talent to express your appreciation for her. But don't give her a goodbye letter on Mother's day.

I'm a huge Apple fan, but you are definitely in an echo chamber out in SV. Apple has huge tech/geek appeal. I know plenty of non-tech rich people from other places who would still much rather have Windows and Blackberries.

There is a huge difference between being anti-intellectual, and anti-institutional.

The 11th thing your commencement speaker won't tell you?

"You just spent four years of your life here, and are now six figures in debt as a result. You didn't have to do that. Hopefully in that 4 years and with that six figures, you learned how to educate yourself without this institution."

This site could make a whole bunch of money if it just put together a shopping cart on Amazon for me and took the referral money.

Right click and save-as might be annoying but it's also a critical piece of our tinkering economy. I don't want to use a client that prohibits me from downloading the web unless it's specified as "permissible" by the author. This is a step in that direction.

A lot of those billionares were born that way. I suspect that to understand what to do with that kind of money, you've got to have been without it at some point in your life.

I find it absolutely amazing that a guy who coined the term "mindless clicktivism" spent more than 14,000 words on an attack on Tim O'Reilly. Aren't there more important things to worry about?

Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly author.