The denial of service attack continues. By putting such a large number of candidates on the ballot the only conceivable result is less effective representation. Unless one dedicates one's life to reviewing candidates (and how does on review judges anyway?) there is no way to give effective overview to so many candidates. The only practical result I can see from this deluge of candidates is less people voting and for those who do vote, less attention being paid to each candidate.

• United States Representative - Congressional District No. 1 - Jay Inslee

• Governor - Christine Gregoire

• Lieutenant Governor - Marcia McCraw

• Secretary of State - Jason Osgood

• State Treasurer - Allan Martin

• State Auditor - Brian Sonntag

• Attorney General - Rob McKenna

• Commissioner of Public Lands - Peter J. Goldmark

• Superintendent of Public Instruction - Randy Dorn

• Insurance Commissioner - Mike Kreidler

• State Representative - Legislative Dist No. 45 - Position 1 - Roger Goodman

• State Representative - Legislative Dist No. 45 - Position 2 - Larry Springer

• State Supreme Court - Justices of the Supreme Court - Position 3 - Mary Fairhurst

• State Supreme Court - Justices of the Supreme Court - Position 4 - Charles W. Johnson

• State Supreme Court - Justices of the Supreme Court - Position 7 - Debra L. Stephens

• Court of Appeals, Division No. 1 - District No. 1 - Judge Position 5 - Lau, Linda

• Court of Appeals, Division No. 1 - District No. 1 - Judge Position 6 - Ann Schindler

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 1 - Tim Bradshaw

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 10 - Regina S. Cahan

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 22 - Julia Garratt

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 26 - Laura Gene Middaugh

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 37 - Jean Rietschel

• Superior Court - Judges of the Superior Court - Position 53 - Mariane Spearman

• King County Initiative 26 and Council Proposed Alternative - Question 1 & 2 - No/Council-Proposed Alternative

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In previous articles (here and here) I have talked about what software program managers do. And in another previous article I talked about Cosmos. In this article I bring the two topics together and talk about what Cosmos program managers actually do. (For those just joining us Cosmos is Microsoft's internal platform for reliably storing and processing petabytes of information such as all of Microsoft's log data from its various websites.) The issue of what PMs on the Cosmos team do is near and dear to my heart because I'm the lead program manager for Cosmos and we are hiring!

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Cosmos is Microsoft's internal data storage/query system for analyzing enormous amounts (as in petabytes) of data. As the lead Program Manager for Cosmos I can't say too much about it but what I can do is take a tour of the information that Microsoft has published about Cosmos. So read on if you are interested in the architecture Microsoft uses to store and query petabytes of data and what technical issues Microsoft's approach brings up.

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In my previous article about what a PM does I talked about contracts. While I didn't mean contracts in the literal sense of a legally binding document the best PM groups I've worked with do produce a specific set of documents which serve to record what has been agreed to, track status and help to identify and resolve problems. Below I walk through those documents and what their purpose is.

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Asking what a program manager (PM) does in the software industry is a bit of a trick question because so many different and only tangentially related positions are called PM. So I can't provide a universal answer but I can explain what the PM groups I have worked with over the years have done/do. The short answer is that we are the conduit between the core Development team (e.g. Development/Test/PM) and the rest of the known universe. Our job is to bring data from the outside world in, bring the core Development team's ideas out to the world, negotiate a "contract" between the two as to who is to do what/when and then be held personally responsible for making sure everyone honors the "contract".

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After looking at the various options available in 529 plans from stock mutual funds to bond mutual funds to age appropriate funds and so on the choice for us came down to TIPS mutual funds or CollegeSure CDs. We have decided to use CollegeSure CDs to save for our daughter's education. Yes, they have a horrible return and are quite possibly not FDIC insured (read the fine print) but of all the options this is the one that seems most reasonable.

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Asset location is not so much about what investment to buy as where to locate it. A typical asset location problem is - do I put money in a taxable account or a tax exempt account? In the case of saving for college there are at least four different ways to save money for college that have some kind of tax exemption. Below I explore the five options (taxable and various tax exempt ones) that I could find and explain why we settled on using a 529 savings plan (as opposed to a 529 prepaid tuition plan).

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TechCrunch claims that Yahoo!'s handing over data on a Chinese journalist to the Chinese government was, on balance, appropriate behavior. What I believe TechCrunch completely misses the point on is that Yahoo!, of its own free will, made the decision to become a 40% owner of a Chinese company that hosted sensitive personal information within the reach of the Chinese government. That is Yahoo!'s real ethical failure. The fact that the Chinese government used its powers to grab that data was the inevitable outcome of Yahoo!'s actions. I believe Yahoo! should have refused to have involved itself in any situation that would see its users sensitive data stored in a country with such an abysmal human rights record. I personally believe that Yahoo! deserves enormous criticism for its actions and some kind of movement to refuse to do business with Yahoo! until it gets sensitive data out of the hands of the Chinese government seems completely appropriate.

To the folks who read this blog, who are mostly in the on-line services business, this issue isn't just theoretical. Everyday we make decisions that affect the privacy and security of our users. Where do we host our data? What kind of interception facilities do we put in our networks? What kind of logs do we keep? We all have an obligation to act ethically, to use our knowledge to help people, not harm them. When we record more than we need, keep it longer than we need, make it too easy to recover/intercept and store it in the wrong place we fail in our ethical obligations and for that we all need to be held to account.

Thanks to the ACLU of Washington's blog I got a link to this outstanding video on the privacy commissioner of Canada's website. It absolutely nails what social networks are about from a business perspective and why users need to be concerned. This is just yet another argument for why we need open social networks that let users host and control their own data instead of being forced to live in other people's walled gardens. It's a pity that efforts like OpenSocial (which has absolutely nothing to do with freeing user's data) use the name "Open". Because we could really use a real OpenSocial. It wouldn't even be hard. Take a dollop of standardized data schemas, a side of REST and sprinkle some OpenID on top and you are basically there. For dessert we could even fix OAuth to enable true interoperability. [Ed. Note: I realize that my readership already understands what's in that video but maybe you can pass it on to your friends who haven't been quite clued in yet.]