A great deal of this campaigning takes place in the traditional media forums: TV, radio, local newspapers, and voters occasionally get to meet the candidates in person.

But even more of this takes place on the Web. Practically every political ad that runs on a television screen anywhere in the country is also placed on YouTube and promoted on Twitter and Facebook. So are speeches and debates. This is good for voters who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can go back and evaluate what candidates says and make a judgement about them on their own time.

That is, if you can get to them. For most Americans, access to a solid broadband Internet connection is as readily available as an electrical connection, and only a phone call away. But for roughly a third of the country, it’s not so easy. That means that about a third of the nation’s population is less able to participate in the democratic process the way the rest of us do.

That, to me, is a troubling thought, when I consider the nation’s broadband-adoption problem. It basically comes down to this: Lower-populated rural areas and some inner-city areas don’t have the same access to the Internet that most Americans take almost for granted. Cable and phone companies often opt not to build the infrastructure needed in certain lightly populated areas, because they can’t justify the investment.

When he came into office in 2009, one cornerstone of President Obama’s technology policy concerned correcting this via grants included in the economic stimulus package. In 2010, Obama delivered the National Broadband Plan. And last year, the president talked to Congress about his hopes to bring broadband to 98 percent of the country, and using wireless technology to do it.

Little has worked. A new study, out today from TechNet, a tech-industry lobbying group, says that broadband adoption at the national level has plateaued at 68 percent of the population, only slight higher than the 65 percent it was when Obama became president.

What happened? Lots of people and organizations with great ideas emerged to try and tackle the problem, the report finds. But they all suffer from a severe lack of coordination, and wildly different visions of what the outcome should be. “Stakeholders are flying blind when it comes to understanding best practices to improve broadband adoption …” the report reads. It goes on to say, “To the extent that poor policy coordination hampers efforts to increase broadband adoption, we run the risk of having a less inclusive society, a smaller domestic market for tech goods and services, and a less innovative economy.”

One problem is simple demographics: A 2011 survey by the government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that only 43 percent of households earning $25,000 or less had broadband at home, and that only 46 percent of those with less than a high school diploma have it.

Then there’s the economy. A Pew survey found that 9 percent of people who at one time had broadband had cut their service off during the previous 12 months because of economic concerns. And that figure rose to more than 16 percent of people earning $30,000 a year or less.

There are apparently historical precedents for this sort of thing. During the Great Depression, telephone adoption dropped from 42 percent in 1929 to 31 percent in 1934. Electrical service leveled off at 67 percent during the Depression, and didn’t resume climbing until later.

A lot of people think that this same demographic just uses smartphones instead, but the data in the report shows that’s not the case generally, and if you added “smartphone-only” users to broadband users, you still end up with only a 73 percent adoption rate.

And this cost of “digital exclusion,” TechNet finds, is more than just participation in the election process. Employers increasingly require that applications for jobs be filed online. Healthcare is increasingly tracked online. Even just taking advantage of good deals on Groupon or LivingSocial more or less implies broadband access.

What to do? Get everyone on the same page, for one thing. The report suggests getting the numerous federal and state efforts pulling in one direction on such aspects of the problem as collecting reliable data, and setting an agreed-upon set of best practices.

There’s also the option of leaving well enough alone. Demographics have a way of shifting over time. Old people who don’t bother with broadband will die, and younger people who can’t imagine living without it will either demand it where they live or move to places where they can get it. As I learned in 2008 when I wrote this story for Businessweek, sometimes that can be as easy as moving to the other side of a street. Sometimes it’s just a matter of waiting for the cable company to offer service in your area.

My guess is that this is a problem that’s not going to easily solve itself with a market-based approach, but so far the government-based options aren’t looking so good, either.

Today it became clear that SOPA, at least in its current form, will never get that far. Word came from the White House today that the administration, while sympathetic to the cause of curbing online piracy, will support neither the SOPA bill nor its companion bill — known as PIPA — in the Senate.

Responding to a petition, the White House announced in a blog post today that Obama will not “support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

Basically, what it comes down to is this: Piracy is bad, but approaches like SOPA are bad solutions that would potentially hurt the free-flowing, vibrant Internet we’ve all come to rely on for so many things. As the statement reads: “Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small.”

That aligns pretty closely with a statement that Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made in a recent speech in The Hague, in which she said that governments must fight the theft of intellectual property, “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

On top of that, some of the technical proposals in the bill — meant to remedy the piracy problem — go too far in tinkering, and might perhaps mess up the basic plumbing of the Internet itself. Doing so would probably create unforseen Internet security problems, the White House argues.

Any bill that does aim to clamp down on piracy should be “narrowly targeted,” and cover only “activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws.” That’s also a pretty clear statement that the Administration sees SOPA, as currently written, to be vastly over-broad in its legislative intent.

Additionally, there are also reports that Eric Cantor — the Virginia Republican who everyone knows is the real power broker in the House of Representatives — says the SOPA bill won’t come to the House floor for a vote anytime soon, unless there are some significant changes to it.

Somehow, I find it encouraging that opposing SOPA — or at least calling for changes to it — was the issue on which Obama and Cantor, who can’t seem to agree on anything, found they had some room for common ground. Could this signify a badly needed thaw in bipartisan relations in Washington?

Unless there’s a really big shift in sentiment among members of Congress on both sides of the ideological aisle, some version of the Stop Online Piracy Act is going to be passed by Congress sometime in 2012.

That means the legislation is going to wind up on President Barack Obama’s desk, requiring his signature, which would make it law; or his veto, which would effectively kill it. That makes it pretty much the first significant bit of technology policy he will face in the new year.

What’s not entirely clear is which way Obama is likely to decide. So far, the administration hasn’t sent any signals, one way or the other, on either SOPA or its companion bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

But there are some key clues.

SOPA and PIPA are proposed laws that would, among other things, give media companies significant new tools to police pirated online content that appears on Web sites hosted outside of U.S. borders. It would also require U.S. companies that link or do business with them in the normal course of operations — sites such as Google, Yahoo and eBay’s PayPal — to cease doing so.

For instance, Google might be forced by the courts or U.S. law enforcement agencies to stop providing search links to BitTorrent sites that host pirated copies of major motion pictures and television shows. It could go even further than that, by stopping U.S.-based Internet-service companies from allowing users to access any overseas site carrying pirated content.

Critics of the legislation charge that the two bills have gone overboard to protect content. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said it would “criminalize intermediaries.” Other companies, including Yahoo and Facebook, have claimed it could stifle innovation.

The problem the White House will face is that both bills appear to have a broad base of support in Congress. And proponents, such as the House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, are pushing the bill as a means of protecting American jobs by ensuring that profits from U.S.-produced intellectual property flows to the companies that created it.

But there are a few tea leaves indicating where the president might come down on this issue. For one thing, the administration has been pretty clear from the beginning that it supports an open Internet; not vetoing the bill now would be a major policy shift.

And, during 2011, the power of the Internet as a force for social change has been demonstrated throughout the Middle East: Dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are gone, and others are under threat by movements that have been largely organized and coordinated on Facebook and Twitter.

Just last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a conference on Internet freedom in The Hague, made an interesting comment that perhaps captures the nuance of the Obama administration’s position.

As the Hill noted, while sympathetic to the problem countries and companies face in combating the theft of intellectual property, Clinton said that governments can do so “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

The SOPA bill, in particular, would also criminalize contributing to or distributing technology that is meant to circumvent actions that block access to such content. That would put the government at odds with a project it has funded, the Onion Router (a.k.a. TOR), created by U.S. Naval Researchers and a nonprofit organization.

Under SOPA, the problem might be that people in more repressive countries, like China, can use TOR to anonymize traffic and thus bypass technical measures that prevent the free flow of information. The language in the bill is vague enough that TOR could be made illegal.

Then there’s also Obama’s promise to support a free and open Internet generally, which has been a major bedrock of his technology and Internet policy agenda. Early last month, Obama promised to veto a Congressional resolution that would overturn net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission put in place earlier this year, and which was to take effect on Nov. 20. (The Senate saved him the trouble by voting against the resolution.)

Therefore, Obama’s stance on the issue perhaps hints at an aversion to any significant changes in the status quo of the Internet, which suggests he would likely veto any version of SOPA or PIPA that reaches his desk.

If you’re a regular AllThingsD reader, you’ve already been introduced to the world’s most power supercomputer: It is the Fujitsu K Computer, which the Japanese computing concern disclosed earlier this month, and it runs in Japan’s quasi-public research institution RIKEN. That’s it in the picture above.

It’s capable of performance as high as 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The same machine had been rated in the top spot on the list before, but was less powerful then, because it was still being assembled, and then capable of only 8.16 petaflops.

The machine is based on SPARC chips — the chips for which Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle, gained such renown. Fujitsu has been building SPARC chips under license and using them in its own servers and supercomputers for years. In this case, there are 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores in action. And if my memory is correct, the chips in question each have four cores on board, meaning there are 176,256 individual processing chips in the machine.

It’s the first machine on the Top 500 list to venture past the 10-petaflop milestone; however, work is underway in the U.S. on a machine known as Titan, which will supposedly break the 20-petaflop mark sometime next year.

In the meantime, the second most powerful machine in the world is in China. The Tianhe-1A system took the top spot on the list a year ago — and in the process, caused President Obama such consternation about the state of American leadership in innovation that he mentioned it in his State of the Union address to Congress. Its performance reaches 2.57 petaflops and it’s powered by a combination of Intel-made Xeon processors and Nvidia graphical processing units.

In fact, the supercomputers in the top 10 spots on the list are otherwise unchanged from the list released in June.

At No. 3 is Jaguar, the system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is being rebuilt into the machine called Titan, which I mentioned before. It’s a system built by Cray primarily around Nvidia GPUs and Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Its current performance is just shy of 1.8 petaflops.

The No. 4 system is in China. It’s called Nebulae and is at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen. Its performance is just short of the 1.3-petaflop mark. No. 5 is called Tsubame 2.0, and is at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

Chip companies in particular like to crow about the use of their products in the systems that wind up on the list. That makes this a banner day for Intel. Of the 500 systems on the list, 384 of them — 77 percent — use Intel chips. Chips from AMD, Intel’s main rival, are in 63 systems.

It’s a banner day for Nvidia, too. Its GPU chips can be found in 35 systems, more than double the number from the previous list. GPUs were invented to make the graphics in computer games more stunning and realistic; as such, it meant they were, from the beginning, pretty good at performing a certain type of math problem known as a floating point operation. It turns out that the people who run supercomputers do a lot of floating point operations — or FLOPs — too. So as GPUs have gotten more powerful, they’re finding their way into an ever-larger number of the world’s top supercomputers. Two supercomputers on the list use GPU chips from AMD’s graphics chip unit, ATI. Two more use IBM’s PowerCell architecture, which is a sibling of the Cell processor chip found in the Sony PlayStation 3.

President Obama shouldn’t feel so bad about the U.S. not being in the top spot. For one thing, practically all of the systems on the list are built on American-made technology. And among the systems that can reach 1 petaflop in performance or more, the U.S. has five, more than any other country. China and Japan have two each, and France has one. And the U.S. has more supercomputers on the list than any other country: 263. European countries have a combined 127; China has 75 and Japan has 30.

Intel may furnish more chips to the Top 500 list than anyone, but the king of the systems vendors on the list is unquestionably IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard. IBM built 223, or more than 44 percent, of the machines on the list; HP built 140 of them. IBM also led the performance pack: Its machines are responsible for more than 27 percent of the total. Fujitsu, which made the list-topping K Computer, was in second place, with 14.7 percent. Cray and HP were in a statistical dead heat, with about 14 percent each.

Here’s a link to the full list, and a bunch of other things related to supercomputing.

Oak Ridge National Lab's "Jaguar" computer

Despite the fact that the Chinese system was built largely with American-made or American-designed components, the news came as a bit of a blow to American pride, and even caught the attention of President Obama, who kvetched about it in January’s State of the Union address.

By June (the list is updated twice a year) the Chinese machine had fallen to second place, its crown seized by a supercomputer in Japan, relegating the top supercomputer in the U.S. to third place.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, will announce plans to build a system that has a good shot at reclaiming the top spot. The machine will be named “Titan,” and its primary computing engine will be the Tesla chip from Nvidia, the company best known for turning out chips that enhance the graphics of games on personal computers.

Nvidia has been making inroads in high-performance computing for some time. Earlier this year I wrote about how the Tesla chips were helping Lucasfilm make movies faster.

I talked with Steve Scott, the CTO of Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, who told me that the Titan machine will be 10 times more powerful than the current Jaguar machine, and that 85 percent of its computing power will come from Nvidia chips, while the remaining portion will come from conventional CPU chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

Why GPUs and not CPUs? It turns out that graphics chips are really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD found inside a PC or server.

It’s also an issue of power. For years, as chips and the transistors on them have shrunk, the amount of power required to send pulsing through them has dropped as well. Scott says that is no longer the case. “We’ve reached the point where processors have become power constrained. If you pack all the transistors that you can onto a chip and run it as fast as you can, the chip will melt. We’ve entered a time where performance is constrained by power, and its only going to get worse, so you need processors that are power efficient,” he says. “It’s a fundamental sea change in the underlying technology of high performance computing.”

GPUs, originally designed for gaming and professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists, are inherently designed to perform several repetitive tasks at once. In explaining this, I always think back to the old saying “many hands make light work,” though here it’s applied to computing. Two people who divide up the task of folding a pile of laundry get it done faster than one. And four people will get it done faster than two.

Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel of a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster. Essentially, lots of small computational jobs are carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and, fundamentally, CPUs chips aren’t as good at it as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one. Generally speaking, Scott says, GPUs are about eight times faster at floating point operations than CPUs.

For Nvidia it will be a return trip to the top spot. China’s supercomputing champ, the Tianhe-1A at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, which is now ranked No. 2 in the world, uses Nvidia GPUs. This certainly got the world’s attention concerning the potential for GPUs in high performance computing.

The plan at Oak Ridge calls for Titan to have 18,000 nodes, each with an AMD CPU chip coupled with an Nvidia Tesla GPU. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by the GPUs, Scott says. Its total computing capacity will top out at 20 petaflops. FLOPS are floating point operations per second. “Peta” refers to how many the system can do every second: In this case, the answer is 20 quadrillion. Just because I can — and because it’s one of the rare cases where I get to use a number that’s larger than the national debt — I’m going to write that number out: 20,000,000,000,000,000.

And what will it be used for? While many of the Department of Energy’s computers are used to simulate nuclear explosions that are no longer allowed thanks to the Test Ban Treaty, this one won’t be. The mission at Oak Ridge, Scott says, is to advance the boundaries of science. Scientists will use it to model climate change, and to predict the results of different methods of mitigating it. They’ll also use it to design engines, study biology and genetics, and explore the possibilities of using nuclear fusion for energy. If you have interesting scientific work to do that requires this kind of computing oomph, you can even write a proposal explaining how you’d use it.

In the first phase of Titan’s deployment, which is already under way, Oak Ridge will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 new Tesla chips. In a second phase, expected to start next year, Oak Ridge plans to deploy the 18,000-node Tesla-based system.

Down the road, the hope within supercomputing circles is that performance improves to the point where we’re no longer talking petaflops, but exaflops, or quintillions of floating point operations every second. The government is already working on that, and earlier this year President Obama asked Congress for $126 million in the federal budget to begin research to work on ways to get there by 2018. The biggest problem: How to supply enough electrical power while delivering the computing muscle. Today’s announcement by Oak Ridge is a big step in that direction, but there are still 981 more petaflops to conquer.

Well, Mr. and Ms. Entrepreneur, your friends at IBM are thinking of you today. Big Blue will today announce the availability of $1 billion in new financing options specifically aimed at small and medium businesses to pay for purchases of new tech hardware, software and services.

Now before you roll your eyes, harrumph, and restrain yourself from saying “Who cares about small and medium businesses anyway?” allow me to answer: You do. In the U.S., small businesses account for a huge swath of the economy, accounting for about two-thirds of new jobs created over the last 15 years, and they hired 40 percent of high-tech workers. They also employ roughly 90 percent of the workforce of the entire world.

And get this: According to IBM, the total amount spent on technology each year by small and medium businesses — IBM defines them as having fewer than 1,000 employees — amounts to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Compared to that, well, a billion is a little slice. But when credit is hard to get from ever-more-cautious banks in a tough economy, CIOs will see it as a welcome move. Half of small businesses crash and burn within five years because they can’t get access to capital.

Not only is IBM making the cash available but it is making it easy to get. Most of IBM’s small and medium business customers interact with Big Blue not directly, but through business partners — third parties like CDW and Ingram Micro — who sell IBM gear and do the heavy lifting associated with getting different bits of hardware and software working right. They also tend not to have huge IT departments as larger companies do, says Andy Monshaw, the general manager of IBM Midmarket Business. “It’s a really fragmented market with literally thousands of local players,” he says. “It’s a market based on long-term local relationships.”

Entrepreneurs are running up against expectations of the so-called “consumerization of IT.” They have easy-to-use technology at home, but the stuff at the office is older and not cutting it. One big thing these companies are looking at is cloud computing. An IBM survey found that 60 percent of them are shopping around for cloud services. That got the attention of IBM’s Global Financing unit, which helps customers pay for new gear and services in much the same way that car dealers help people buy cars — by providing attractive financing packages.

On top of that, IBM has come up with a long list of products and services that are priced in ways that make sense to smaller companies — stuff that gets charged on a per-user or consumption basis. IBM has hacked together a list of products and services to fit with the effort, including cloud services, analytics and security, as well as products from recent acquisitions like Netezza, Cognos and Cast Iron.

Certainly there’s a lot of hand-wringing going on, especially in the U.S., about what it will take to get the economy creating jobs again. In fact, the president of the United States is going to talk about that very subject in an address to Congress and the nation tonight. And a survey done by Pepperdine University and Dun & Bradstreet found that 35 percent of small business owners say their biggest impediment to hiring more workers is access to capital.

Details are beginning to emerge of the painstaking detective work that led to the raid, and one fact that has caught my attention is this:
The property where he was hiding, while valued at $1 million, had no phone service, nor any Internet connection. This turned out to be a key red flag that helped bring an increase in scrutiny that in time led to the attack on the compound that President Obama ordered yesterday. A report in The National Journal mentions that it was the National Security Agency, which gathers America’s electronic intelligence, which determined, in some secret manner that didn’t tip off the government of Pakistan, that the compound had no phone or Internet.

I find it ironic that among the clues that led to this important victory was a lack of technology infrastructure. Consider for a moment the untold billions of dollars in electronic intelligence-gathering that has gone into the effort to finding even the vaguest clue as to bin Laden’s whereabouts since 2001, with no result.

Add to that the years of legal and moral hand-wringing that U.S. citizens have endured after learning that their own government was illegally monitoring their phone and email communications. This collection, disclosed by the New York Times in 2005, was part of a broader effort, the argument went at the time, to collect any information that may reveal a threat to the United States. Perhaps some terrorist operative inside the U.S. would call, or send an email or text message to a handler. And it wasn’t just eavesdropping. As USA Today reported in 2006, the NSA also built a massive database of American’s telephone calling patterns using data provided by the phone companies.

It would have seemed reasonable were it not for the fact that the government didn’t follow the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that sets out the conditions under which the government may eavesdrop on the communications of U.S. citizens. The revelation that it was eavesdropping without authorization by the secret FISA court naturally led to lawsuits. In 2010 a federal judge ruled that the government had overreached its authority.

Ultimately the eavesdropping efforts contributed little. In practically all cases, the information gathered under the program led to dead ends, and the sheer volume of information forwarded by the NSA so overwhelmed FBI investigators that they complained.

Meanwhile, bin Laden himself has been described numerous times as eschewing electronic communications. The story has been repeated many times that bin Laden had been an active user of satellite phones until sometime in 1998. In fact, the Inmarsat phone’s number was published in a fascinating book entitled “Body of Secrets” by the intelligence expert James Bamford. Following a 1998 missile attack on camps in Afghanistan thought to be frequented by bin Laden–and which he narrowly escaped–he severely curtailed his satellite phone use in order not to make himself an easy target for another missile strike. Some reports have said that since then he relied instead on an elaborate system of human couriers and opted not to use electronic communications at all.

Over the years there were numerous video and audio tape message. Intelligence analysts sought to pick out what clues they could from these. At one point in 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies turned to geologists to try and glean clues about his whereabouts. It wasn’t by accident that later video messages showed him speaking in front of a cloth background and that later messages were only audio tapes.

One has to wonder if bin Laden had chosen instead to be less careful, whether he might have been discovered at all. Presumably he had been able to purchase this property though intermediaries without raising attention, and had lived there for some time. Had he or someone living with him engaged in routine communications with the outside world, making the occasional local and international phone calls, he might have been safer, ironically more camouflaged amid the background noise of modern life in urban Pakistan.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the events leading up to the attack that ultimately killed bin Laden. But looking ahead I have to wonder if his choice to forgo all the modern communications technologies that so permeate 21st century life may in the end turn out to have been his biggest strategic mistake.