Just got this email regarding an article I published in December about America losing ground in supercomputing. In the print edition the article appeared under the headline, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Hi. Your article in Dec. 5, 2011, is disturbing to me. “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” Why do you feel the need to breed unrest, fear and uncertainty in our country? I fear God, and nothing else. China, technology, communism, etc, etc… are all out of our hands. I believe that Americas biggest problem may just be journalists like yourself spreading the fear phenomenon, when there is truly NOTHING to be afraid of.

Filed under “Oooooookay.”

The name is Cocomo, he tells the Boston Globe. Something to do with collaboration and mobile. My guess is that three years from now a beta ships, and six years from now Ray will still be trying to explain what the stuff actually does.

Marc Andreessen tells the Wall Street Journal he has “taken a step back” from investing in tech startups because some deals are “definitely on the expensive side.” Turns out Andreessen hasn’t made any big investments since July. Which is weird because last July someone using the same name as Marc Andreessen told the New York Times that there was no bubble and that in fact tech stocks were dead cheap. And shortly before that the same person appeared at the AllThingsD conference and explained that there was no tech bubble because everybody was saying there was a bubble and if everyone was saying that there’s a tech bubble then by definition there wasn’t any bubble because there can only be a bubble if nobody is saying there’s a bubble.

No doubt the crap performance of companies like Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn and Pandora in the public market is making VCs gun shy. The worst example is Zynga, whose late-stage investors Kleiner, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price got burned when Zynga had to price its IPO below the price that those late-stage guys had paid in a private round last February.

No doubt we’ll see other deals where the public markets refuse to pay as much as loony private investors did. But how did we get here? How did valuations get so out of line? Could it be because a few devil-may-care VCs spent the past few years throwing money around like drunken sailors in a whorehouse and assuring everyone that this was all perfectly sane and reasonable behavior and there was no tech bubble? Nah, couldn’t be that.

[Update: A reader points out that LinkedIn doesn't belong on the list of "crap performers" since it was initially priced at $45 and is still trading above $60. Whether that's a disappointment depends somewhat on your point of view, since LinkedIn hit $90 on its first day of trading.]

Amazing.

Whatever the reason, she’s out.

How soon until someone does something with this video from North Korea?

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas on March 31, 2011, explaining why he was upgrading Tesla stock to “overweight” status and projecting sales of $9.5 billion by 2020, and declaring Tesla to be “America’s Fourth Auto-maker”:

The confluence of structural industry change, disruptive technology, changing consumer tastes and heightened national security creates an opportunity for significant new entrants in the global auto industry. California dreaming? We don’t think so. In our view, the conditions are ripe for a shake-up of a complacent, century-old industry heavily invested in the status quo of internal combustion. The risks are high. So is the opportunity. Enter Tesla.

That was then. Today the same Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley slashed its estimate on Tesla and downgraded the stock to “underweight” status, saying electric vehicles are “not ready for prime time.”

The stock is in a swoon.

Yes, Morgan Stanley was an underwriter of the IPO.

Just a reminder that we’ll be doing a Newsweek Daily Beast Hangout on Google+ today at 4:30 Eastern time. Our guest will be Matias Duarte, the head of design for the Android project at Google. Matias is a really great guy with an interesting background — he studied fine arts in college, and aspired to become a painter — and if you’re an Android fan you’ll have a chance to talk to him directly. So please tune in.

I’m not talking about the abortion stuff, which was ridiculous. But I’m starting to see grumbling about the simple fact that Siri just doesn’t work all that well. In the latest pieces the writers aren’t willing to say, as Jordan Crook of TechCrunch did recently, that while Siri is disappointing, “in the end it’s my fault.”

Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch lashes out at Siri in his piece explaining why he likes the Galaxy Nexus better than the iPhone 4S. He calls Siri “completely underwhelming” and refuses to accept the fanboy rationalization that “Siri is just a beta product.”

Also: Beta, schmeta. Apple fans have repeatedly pointed out that Siri is being billed as a Beta by Apple, and so it shouldn’t be held to such high standards. In my mind Apple lost the ‘Beta’ fallback the moment it started running commercials promoting the feature — some people are buying an iPhone 4S exclusively because of Siri because it’s been so highly touted.

Then comes blistering write-up by Mat Honan on Gizmodo where he refers to Siri as “Apple’s broken promise” and calls it “a half-baked product,” writing:

Apple is the company that sells perfection. It’s a company that usually keeps its promises, and in its Siri ads, it promises far more than what it actually delivers. That’s not what any of us signed up for.

Honan also refuses to accept the line about Siri being a beta product, saying that you can’t call something beta but then advertise the hell out of it.

I’ve had a 4S for a few days and haven’t used it much. And a bunch of times I’ve tried to use it and it was not available.

I’m wondering what others are finding out. Has Apple over-promised and under-delivered?

My colleagues at Newsweek Daily Beast are trying to arrange some Google+ Hangouts with interesting tech industry folks. First one we’ve scheduled is this Wednesday, Dec. 7, at 4:30 p.m. East Coast time with Matias Duarte, a renowned computer interface designer who runs the user experience team for Android. I spoke with him recently during a visit to Google and hope to publish a Q&A from the talk very soon. He’s a fascinating guy who studied fine arts as an undergraduate and hoped to become a painter. Before joining Google he worked at Palm, Helio and Danger.

I’m really excited about the chance to meet via Google+ and have others join the conversation, so I hope you will take a minute to drop in on our chat. We’ll be talking about Ice Cream Sandwich, of course, and about the new Galaxy Nexus phone. But I am hoping to get Matias talking about his approach to design and where human computer interfaces might evolve in the future.

We have another exciting guest lined up for next week. Will tell you more about that later.