Sulcer’s winning purchase was, ironically, Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way,” which Sulcer downloaded for a mix of Cash songs he was making for his son.

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How awesome is it that the 10 billionth iTunes download is a 50 year old Johnny Cash song and not some forgettable, soulless autotune from Ke$ha or The Black Eyed Peas?

Also, Rolling Stone, I think you said “ironically” when you meant to say “coincidentally”.

There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it’s the web. Apple doesn’t build lowest common denominator platforms. Before, when Windows was the LCD, Apple was in a hard place because they were locked out of that platform: their platform was at odds with it. Now, with the web as the LCD, Apple has it both ways: their platforms gracefully coexist with it. Apple isn’t a web company, but the web might be the best thing that ever happened to them.

From Apple’s perspective, when it comes to software platforms, theirs is best (Cocoa/Cocoa Touch), because they have complete control. Everyone’s is good (the web), because Apple has control over their own implementation and can influence the future direction of the standards. What Apple doesn’t want is someone else’s proprietary platform, where they have no control at all. That’s what Flash is.

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This is an incredibly astute point from John Gruber about the saga of Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Implicit in John’s post is that Adobe wants Flash, not that uncontrollable phenomenon known as “the web”, to emerge as the next generation lowest common denominator platform.

You’ll probably remember that a while back, something called “Rich Internet Applications” emerged as the next great platform battle, with the major players being Adobe with Flash/Flex/AIR, Microsoft with Silverlight and Google with web apps based on HTML, CSS, javascript (with GWT) and offline access via Gears. The RIA promise was to marry the access-anywhere nature of the the web with the experience of using a native application, which may sound suspiciously like yet another twist on the idea of write once, run anywhere with the addition of cloud storage, itself a variation of thin client computing. It seems like the idea of new, non-web based RIA platforms is shaping up about as well as those other grand ideas, which is to say, not well at all.

Missing from all of the hype and bluster about RIA was what Apple might do – they didn’t come out and announce additions to Objective C or some new platform to rival Flash or Silverlight. What they did do was continue building WebKit, the best web rendering engine for mobile and desktop browsers, and advancing and promoting standards like HTML 5. That strategy seems to be bearing out pretty well – Google, both a partner and competitor, continues to promote the strategy of using open standards and has adopted the specific implementation of WebKit for their own projects. They even deprecated their own Gears project in favor of HTML 5’s offline support. Microsoft and Adobe, meanwhile, continue to believe that they can supersede “the web” with their own proprietary platforms. John is spot on here, that Apple cares first and foremost about its native platforms while still providing a first class experience for the new lowest common denominator without needing to become the lowest common denominator.

As someone who spent years as a Flash developer and who still manages a team of bright and capable developers with a lot of Flash expertise, I have to say that the only platform I’m really excited about these days is “the web” specifically the future that HTML 5, CSS 3 and javascript libraries like jQuery portend. Flash was interesting for so long because it let us do things we couldn’t do otherwise – vector animation, audio and video playback, motion graphics. Over the past few years, though, the number of problems that Flash uniquely solves versus the number of problems that Flash creates has all but leveled out.

NPR is streaming the new Frightened Rabbit album

Streaming until the album is released on March 9

Hey, pal, happy birthday. I hope you’re less hungover tomorrow than you were in this picture.

I’m a happier person because I get to call you a friend. Thanks.

The Sunlight Foundation is live streaming the healthcare summit alongside individual campaign donations

This is really clever – when someone takes the mic, a list of campaign contributions shows up inline. [via mathowie]

They tried to trace her via her Pomeranian lapdog but found it registered to a disused warehouse.

—Possibly my favorite detail in the story of Angie Sanselmente Valencia, a former lingerie model who is wanted for running one of the world’s largest cocaine cartels.

The basic problem with NBC’s coverage is that they haven’t improved the fundamentals of the coverage in spite of massive changes in the way people take in content. The prime-time coverage is largely as it’s always been: a few events (including figure skating) are heavily showcased, a few other events (most skiing and speed skating fall into this category) are usually shown in an abbreviated format regular viewers instantly recognize as “USA-Plus” (meaning you see the Americans, plus a few other people who are relevant because they either do very well or wipe out spectacularly), and two events – hockey and curling – are shown as complete events, but they’re shoved off to cable.

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Linda Holms on why NBC’s Olympics coverage pisses off just about everyone.

Dick Ebersol shoulders a lot of the criticism for the coverage, unfairly or not, as the head of NBC Sports & Olympics, inspiring plenty of ire across the internet. You’ll remember Ebersol as the executive who called Conan an “astounding failure”.

Ted Rall is Kickstarting a reporting trip to Afghanistan

He’s trying to raise $25,000 to get there, report and get home to write a book about it. No media outlet will cover his expenses so he’s bootstrapping the operation himself.

Rall is nothing if not controversial and certainly willing to launch metaphorical bombs at both sides of the political divide. He knows his shit when it comes to central Asia, though, he’ll do good work there.

We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government.

—Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty telling fellow conservatives that they should be more like Elin Nordegren. You see what the governor did there, trying to be all “topical”? You know, just yesterday some maniac flew a plane into a federal building, a much less metaphorical attack on “big government”, why not try to work that one into your speech, governor?

The National Enquirer might win a Pulitzer for its coverage of John Edwards

The Enquirer’s reporting was largely ignored, even as Edwards continued his presidential campaign.