I could have just said it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. But two things happened - I got a Nexus One, and I saw people raving about LastPass. LastPass doesn’t do the bookmark syncing, but it does offer an Android app with the paid version. And bookmarks are so 90s. They’re rarely useful. And besides, Chrome, my current browser of choice, automatically syncs my bookmarks to my Google Docs account. I was really using Xmarks for the password syncing.

Now I’m not going to do the feature vs feature breakdown with charts and graphs that the title may have implied. I’m just going to describe the two experiences:

Xmarks - Create your account, install the software, surf the web. It imports the saved passwords in your browser and remembers new ones you use. It syncs automatically with their server. Browsers on other computers you use (or other browsers on the same machine) automatically stay in sync. After a couple of weeks of using Xmarks you forget about it, and it just becomes part of how surfing the web works. You can view your bookmarks by signing in to their website from any browser.

LastPass - Create your account, install the software, try to surf the web. It imports (and wipes out) the passwords in your browser. When you go to a site that requires a log in you get two weird options – AutoFill and AutoLogin. Try all the options listed under each and eventually sometimes one of them turns out the be your credentials for that site. You’re in! Unless of course none of those worked. In that case you get temporarily redirected to a form on a separate page that asks about dozen questions about that particular site / login. Most are optional. Instead of staying out of your way and working behind the scenes, LastPass is constantly in your face. About 25% of the time I end up having to log in without it. And lastly, if you lose your LastPass password you are SCREWED. There’s no recovery.

End result – LastPass uninstalled. I’m back to Xmarks. All is good with the world again.

I realize most of you believe that, and probably aren’t even picking up on my sarcasm. That’s fine. If you believe that  it’s settled –  global warming is real and man made, and we must do something to stop it – I can’t do anything to change your mind. You can’t reason someone out of a position that reason didn’t get them in to. Global Warming is your religion, Al Gore is your Savior.

All I ask is that you take 15 minute to read a speech Michael Crichton gave to the National Press Club on January 25, 2005.

Michael’s detailed explanation of why he criticizes global warming scenarios. Using published UN data, he reviews why claims for catastrophic warming arouse doubt; why reducing CO2 is vastly more difficult than we are being told; and why we are morally unjustified to spend vast sums on this speculative issue when around the world people are dying of starvation and disease.

There are scientists who believe in Global Warming – even ones who were alive during the 1970′s Global Cooling crisis-that-never-was. They are the ones the media gives the mic to. And despite what we are told every day, there are also scientists who do not. 31,486 American scientists, including 9,029 with PhDs signed a petition stating that there is no convincing scientific evidence of man-made global climate change. BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS!

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. -Michael Crichton

Now go read the whole speech, and let us never speak of this again.

There aren’t six reasons on that list, there’s one: Steve doesn’t want people using their proprietary solution, he wants them to use his proprietary solution. This is a pissing contest, and iPhone users are getting pissed on.

Jobs says Adobe Flash is proprietary and Apple is “open” because they’re using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. This is funny coming from one of the reigning kings of both closed source hardware and software. Somehow, faced with the exact same problem Google has worked out a solution. It turns out supporting HTML5 AND Flash are not mutually exclusive! Google loves “open,” but something had to give for the sake of user experience.

This is a power-play for the Apps market. Unbridled Flash support threatens to redirect money from Steve’s pocket. I don’t necessarily agree with Andy Rubin’s idea that people care about this whole “open” thing. I think it’s just the geek-set that cares, and in fact even just a subset of the geek-set. I tend to count myself among that group – until I really need to get something done with the tools I have right now. That’s why my Ubuntu laptop dual boots Windows XP, and why I keep a copy of Office 2003 installed, even though I mostly work in Open Office.

If the reliability, security, performance, and battery life problems Jobs points out are true, Flash is garbage. And I think they are true, and Flash is garbage. Either Adobe will fix them (they won’t) or Flash will die a natural death. But as he popints out, “75% of video on the web is in Flash.” What good is the 1 GHz Snapdragon in my Nexus One if I can’t use it to surf the web as it exists today? Are people buying iPhones to use them today, or to surf the web in some mystical, open web of the future?

iPhone users tend to call their phones, “iPhones” as opposed to just “phones” also. I remember this also being that case with the T-Mobile Sidekick. At first I thought this must have started because these devices are so much more than phones. It almost seems insulting call my Nexus One a phone. As phones go, the N1 one is great. It’s an excellent GSM device with a really nifty set of noise canceling microphones. (The fact that the iPhone is generally considered to be a terrible phone may have also contributed to people not referring to it as a phone.) But as with the iPhone and Sidekick, it’s so much more. Calling it a phone would be like calling my house a bed. I have an excellent bed, a Temperpedic, but that hardly sums up the value of my house.

But then I realized that while that may have contributed, that’s probably not how this started. It started with the Blackberry. People have always said, “I saw your email on my Blackberry.” But it’s not because the Blackberry did so much more that make phone calls -  it’s because the Blackberry did not make phone calls at all. For many years – nearly a decade – Blackberry users also carried cell phones. You had to call your Blackberry a Blackberry, because there was nothing else to call it.

When we bought our 3 Nexus Ones (Nexuses One? Nexi Ones? Nexus Three?) there was no insurance available. We didn’t know that because the ordering process was so terrible. At some point a few weeks later T-mobile / Google / Asurion quietly made the Premium Handset Protection Bundle available for the N1. It’s $2.60 / month with a $130 deductible. With a two year commitment to these phones all three of us must have insurance.

But there’s a catch – you have to sign up for the Premium Handset Protection Bundle within 14 days of ordering the phone.  Well that was a problem for me, since 1) it wasn’t available within the first 14 days and 2) even if it was we wouldn’t have known to ask for it. As far I can tell they still don’t mention it on google.com/phone. So if you’re ordering an N1 you need to somehow know to call T-mobile and add the PHPB (with-in 14 days).

The insurance must be added within 14 days of opening your account, upgrading a handset, or completing an account change of responsibility. Wait – what was that last one?

Me: Is there any way I can add insurance to my phone now?
T-Mo Rep: Not at this point, it has to be done within 14 days…
Me: But if I transfer my whole account to my wife I can add insurance?
T-Mo Rep: That’s correct.
Me: I would like to initiate a change of responsibility for this account.
T-Mo Rep: No problem.

About an hour and a half of phone calls later the whole account has been transferred to my wife (still billing to the same credit card), and all three N1s have insurance.

Reason #2 – I haven’t come up with a second reason yet.

So do I think the iPad is perfect, necessary, or even non- evil? Not really.

Would it be better with a camera? Probably. So a future version will probably have a camera. Then we can all complain that it only has one camera.

I would like to see an open marketplace for apps, flash support, GPS, and multitasking. I would love to see a big Android tablet. We’ve been waiting a long time for the tablet computing thing to happen. Others have tried and for various reasons they all sucked. I hope this one is successful and ushers in the tablet computing era.

Fanboys will defend and haters will criticize. But there are two things you need to know about the iPad – 1) It is what it is, and 2) It isn’t what it isn’t.

One day soon there will be a better device that addresses all of our current concerns (but has a list of its own). But the iPad is right now.

So if you have $500 in the budget right now and you think it would be useful to constantly have access to the web, music, video, and books on a small, light, flat screen with 12 hours of battery life, buy one. If you don’t think that would be useful, don’t – but tell me how you found a blog.

I’m writing this on my Nexus One from the gym. I didn’t take a computer with me, but I have this, my Kindle, my iPod, a notepad (dead tree), and a Sharpie Pen. I really wouldn’t hate it if all of that was replaced with a tablet and a Zoolander flip phone.

You could, in theory, hash a string of any length. So there are an infinite number of inputs. Some of those strings will collide with the hash for your password. How many? Well, subset of that infinite number, but still an infinite number. A smaller infinite number, if you will.

What’s my point? Just that given an unlimited password field length you would have not one valid password, but an infinite number of valid passwords. I think.

But in a way this is also demonstrating a shortcoming in the technology behind these ads. Google displays ads relevant to the content you’re reading. It’s the first step on the road toward true customized ads for each individual, à la Minority Report. Shouldn’t Google know I already own an N1, and use that space more effectively?

All these ads got me thinking about Google’s advantage in the marketplace trying to promote a product like this. Motorola has spent piles and piles of money advertising the Droid on TV, the web, on billboards, and probably in print. How much has Google spent on all these N1 ads, considering they own the advertising delivery network?

It’s a good thing they aren’t evil!

A programmer writes a bit of software and offers it for sale for $5. When they reach 5,000 sales they release the source code under a GPL-like license and the product becomes free.

The programmer makes $25,000 for their effort, early adopters pay a small premium, everyone benefits from the new free software. The community decides as a group if they want to buy the source code.

Does anything like this already exist?