Enough anti-iPhone rants... just get another phone!
Channeling Jonathan Zittrain, Alex Curtis of Public Knowledge continues his incessantranting against Apple and the iPhone for supposedly not being open enough and, therefore, somehow harming consumers and 3rd party developers. In his essay today about the supposed evils of the iPhone App Store, he accuses Apple of an "1984 kind of total control."
Hmmm, let's see... Apple creates a great new product that is so insanely sexy and innovative that even Apple-haters like me are forced to admit that it is the most brilliant tech gadget of the decade. Millions of people have flocked to Apple stores, stood in lines so long that you'd think they were giving away free pot and floor bongs inside, and then voluntarily handed over seemingly all their disposable monthly income to get their hands on one of these things.
OK, so how is this like 1984 again? Is evil Steve Jobs forcing the masses to buy this product? Of course not. So it strikes me that we can easily dispense with analogies to a book about coercive, totalitarian government control like 1984.
And if all this anti-iPhone ranting is just about the degree of control that Steve Jobs and Apple exercise over product add-ons then hey, I've got an easy answer for you: go get a different phone!
Should it be illegal to text or talk while walking down the road?
When I was growing up in Illinois and Indiana, my friends and family used to make fun of me for always having my nose in a book. Everywhere I went I carried a book--first comics then novels--and was constantly reading while I walked about the neighborhood. [I still do so today, except it's more like nerdy law review articles and government filings these days.] My dad used to always say that if I didn't cut it out that one day I was going fall on my face or, worse yet, get hit by a car.
Luckily that never happened. But I thought of this again today when reading about this new law from my old birth state of Illinois that would ban texting and talking on mobile devices while walking through roadways. The penalty isn't all that steep (just a $25 misdemeanor) and the law certainly is well-intentioned (trying to deter pedestrian injuries / fatalities or traffic accidents), but one wonders if such a law is really needed or if it will accomplish the goal of improving public safety.
As a general matter, I think it's unwise for governments to pass laws protecting people from their own stupidity. But proponents might respond that the measure is equally as important in protecting others from your stupidity. That is, a distracted pedestrian could cause accidents. Therefore, it should be a crime for them to text or talk while crossing a roadway.
The problem with that logic is that it could apply to almost any of the countless other activities one does while walking down the road--including reading a book or article like I often do. Or what about listening to your MP3 player? And, quite frankly, the most distracted moments for me while I am walking involve arguments with my wife and kids! So, there are many distractions in this world and we can't ban them all.
But what if we just banned just this one distraction of texting or talking while walking? Wouldn't that help public safety at least a little bit? Well, we then have to ask about the effectiveness of such a ban. Do you really think you are going to stop the masses from blabbing on their cell phones all day long? Or texting incessantly? Well, good luck with that. It's going to take fines that are a lot stiffer than $25 bucks to have a serious deterrent effect. And you're going to need cops aggressively harassing people at every other corner if you really want to crack down on it.
Which brings up one final point: Is this really a sensible use of law enforcement time? Even minute a law enforcement officer spends policing such activities is a minute they could have spent policing something that represents a more serious threat to public safety.
Regulators to Save Us from Loud TV Ads and Product Placements
Couch potatoes of America, have no fear... Your friendly neighborhood super-regulators are about to swoop in and save you from the scourge of loud TV ads and "illegal" product placements! As we all learned in our high school Civics 101 classes, this is why the American Revolution was fought: We Americans have an unambiguous constitutional birthright to be free of the tyranny of "excessive loudness" during commercial breaks and pesky product promos during our favorite network dramas. (Seriously, it's right there in the footnotes to the Bill of Rights; you probably just missed it before.)
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) has the first problem covered. She and her House colleague Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) are proposing H.R. 6209, the "Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act." (Oh, isn't that so cute! The "C.A.L.M. Act"! How very, very witty.) The CALM Act would address "volume manipulation" in TV ads by making sure that TV ads are not "excessively noisy or strident." (Strident! We Americans hate "strident" ads.) The bill would empower regulators at the Federal Communications Commission to take steps to ensure that "such advertisements shall not be presented at modulation levels substantially higher than the program material that such advertisements accompany; and, the average maximum loudness of such advertisements shall not be substantially higher than the average maximum loudness of the program material that such advertisements accompany."
Clearly, this is valuable use of our regulators' time. I look forward to the day when I can visit the FCC and see my tax dollars at work as teams of bureaucrats closely monitor each episode of "Desperate Housewives" and "Swingtown" in search of such malicious volume manipulation during the commercial breaks. (Incidentally, where is the form I need to fill out to get that job? Heck, I'll take minimum wage pay to do this all day long.)
James Joyner notes the relative dearth of political blogs among the top sites in the blogosphere. Many technology blogs, on the other hand, and perhaps not surprisingly, are near the top.
According to Technorati, HuffingtonPost still reigns at No. 1. But at least 7 of the top 10 are more or less tech blogs.
I was just cleaning out some old e-mails and found this old Radio Shack ad that a friend had sent me a couple of years ago. Sadly, I remember lusting after this machine back in 1989. A 20 MHz processor, 2 megs of RAM, and "mouse support included" made this Tandy 5000 professional "the most powerful computer ever." But with a price tag of $8499, it was practically as out of reach as a new Ferrari. (And note the fact that the ad makes clear that "monitor and mouse not included." Can't even imagine what that brought the final total to). And I love the fact that it's running the old Aldus PageMaker program, which I used to think was the greatest thing since sliced bread. God, I can't even imagine using that clunky program now. It's just amazing to think how far we have come in the last 20 years.
Randall Stross, a Silicon Valley-based technology author, has penned an excellent essay for the New York Times making an argument that many of us here have made in the past: "The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits." That is, tech giants can rise very quickly and attain something approaching market dominance thanks to the power of bandwagon effects and the "winner-takes-all" economics that characterize digital markets in the short-term. But that dominance, Stross rightly argues, is difficult to maintain over the long haul because technology and markets evolve rapidly and new players displace old ones. Mr. Stross notes that IBM is a classic example, but Microsoft is experiencing a similar fate:
two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that he won’t succeed. Not because of personal failings, but because Mother Nature simply won’t permit it.
A new study from number-crunching firm Flowing Data did some eye-opening work recently, dividing 23,160 Facebook applications into 22 categories. A whopping 9,601 of them fall into Facebook's "just for fun" category, followed by "gaming" and "sports" with over 2,000 each. In other words, the majority of Facebook applications are goofy time-wasters.
She calls this "an unsettling piece of news that I don't think any of us saw coming" and says "The world of social networking may never be the same."
What I found intriguing about the list is that (a) protecting free speech doesn't make their radar screen, which seems both sad and puzzling since it will continue to be under attack regardless of who is in charge next year; and, (b) perhaps less surprisingly, much of what they are calling for the next administration to do would involve more regulation of the Internet, broadband networks and media markets. Here's their list and how I would score each item [Note: I am using CAPS below not to scream, but just to differentiate my scoring versus their proposal]:
Video games, pro wrestling, and the politics of hypocrisy
For those of you who aren't avid WWE wrestling watchers, the 3 leading presidential candidates all offered up videos for the professional wrestling crowd recently. McCain's freakish one is right below and Hillary and Obama's are down below the fold. They all cracked a bunch of jokes and used what were obviously scripted remarks that integrate in the requisite number of wresting analogies. And they all talked all sort of stupid smack, just like pro wrestlers do. [It reminded me of former candidate Mike Huckabee’s bizarre cultural politics].
Justine Bateman, Net Neutrality & Celebrity Witnesses
So there's another Net neutrality hearing today. I'm beginning to think we'll have to endure one every week for the rest of time. Anyway, today's took place in the Senate Commerce Committee and it featured the testimony of 1980s TV star Justine Bateman, who was in the sitcom "Family Ties."
Before I get to the "substance" of her arguments, I have to say that celebrity testimony has long been a fascination of mine. Whenever a celebrity or pop star shows up in the hollowed halls of Congress, the collective knees of lawmakers simply melt like butter as they fawn over them and all rush to get snapshots and autographs for their office walls.
It would be tough for me to single out my favorite celebrity testimony moment. Kim Basinger on banning animal research? Meryl Streep on banning Alar? Kevin Richardson of the Backstreet Boys on coal and water regulation? While those were all certainly great moments in the history of our republic, my favorite celebrity testimony of all-time had to be from 1993, when Sheri Lewis and her sock puppet "Lamb Chop" testified in favor of the Children's Television Act, a law regulating educational TV programming. What made is so special was not that Ms. Lewis testified alone. Lamb Chop testified too! I wish I had the video of that to post here. I mean, there was a woman with a hand in a sock making it talk to elected members of Congress... and they were listening. Awesome.
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