rants

http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/harpercollins-now-also-thumbing-nose-...

Book publishers have started establishing arbitrary delays in book releases to digital formats. Their hope is that maybe someone who doesn't want a hardcover of their stupid book and would prefer a 0 tree, 0 clutter version will run out and pay 60% more for a hardback so they can read Dan Brown's latest crap RIGHT THIS SECOND!

Let me explain how it actually works. You, the publisher pay a bunch of money to trot your author out on every talk show known to man. He ends up on the Daily Show with Jon Stuart, who I absolutely love. I see the book and have a passing interest. I go to amazon to get a kindle download. It's not there for 2 months.

2 months later I've forgotten you even exist, and I'm in the middle of this other great book I picked up when I went looking for yours.

As a reader, I've gone digital. Get used to it. Get over it. This means you don't have to spend money cutting down a tree, pulping it and gluing it together to deliver content to me. I don't want you to pulp those trees, and I don't want to store the pulped tree in my house. I'd like to save some money in exchange for you not having to pulp those trees. However, I'm still willing to pay a fair price for the content, which you are now allowed to infinitely distribute for nothing!

Things are shifting in the information economy. You can be fluid like the water or be worn away like the boulder.

How old are you and where were you when you got your driver's license?

I'm 31 years old and I grew up in a small town on the plains of Colorado. I got my drivers license after taking driver's ed in high school and passing a DMV test.

It was 1993. At the time, I only knew one or two people who had a cellphone. They hardly ever used them because minutes were very expensive. There was no such thing as texting. The town I lived in had no bike lanes, no roundabouts and GPS didn't exist. My first car with Anti-lock brakes was a 2001.

In the 16 years since I've had my license, I've never had another test. I've never had a refresh of the information I was taught in that one high school class. Most of my driver education since then has been handed to me as a carbon copy of a ticket from a cop.

Every year in America, 43,000 people die in automobile crashes. So on average, 118 people will die today. 1 or 2 will be a cyclist, and 11 of them will be pedestrians.

There are freak accidents, but I don't believe 43,000 people per year are dying in 'freak' accidents.

The cycling community is seeing a revolution in utility cycling. People are commuting more and more. Injuries and accidents are also on the rise. The motivation of the cycling community is to increase cyclist education and to encourage more people to ride. Every day my city planners are making more and more efforts to facilitate cycling. The problem is that the people they are educating don't have the ability to kill or injure others with their mistakes.

I have yet to hear a single proposal to continue the education of the people behind the wheel.

In this country you can go from 16 to 72, and take exactly one driving test. America had 48 states when your average 70 year old took his last driver's test.

Sparc International sent a cease and desist letter to my favorite hardware hackers SparkFun today.

This kind of stuff pisses me off. The boys and girls at sparkfun did a much better job of describing the lunacy of this proposal better than I can, so head over there to read the whole thing.

In this day and age, if you pull this kind of legal crap, and it clearly has no merit the whole internet just mocks you. Big corporations can't push mom and pops around silently anymore. I'm mostly blogging just to give Sparc International (a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems) bad press. They are clearly either assholes, idiots, or both.

What follows is a small back and forth triggered by an email forward from my family. (which means if you want the timeline read it from bottom to top.)
I reposted it here because I want my friends to fact/sanity check my assertions and provide feedback.

I attached the resolution for ya all if you want to see it. Not much there, just that he wants congress critters to forgo their benefits program and instead enroll in the public option. To me, as Michelle and Thomas said, it kind of misses the point of the public option.

Carol, I can't imagine a situation where your insurance would change because insurance was being covered for others. That's like saying medicare is causing your blue cross rates to rise. They're different entities with their own bank accounts. As I understand it, the worst thing that would happen is your taxes could go up subsidizing the public insurance for people who couldn't pay their own way. A more likely outcome if all goes well. (who knows?) Is that your rates will drop as your insurance company is forced to compete with that public option.

Here's the problem as I see it. Emergency rooms are packed with people that have sniffles. Even worse, emergency rooms are packed with people who have problems that would have been a sniffle if they had access to a doctor, but since they didn't they waited a month and rolled into the ER with full blown pneumonia. Sniffle: $100 visit. Pneumonia treatment: $10,000 Guess which one the doctor, patient, and insurance company would probably prefer to deal with?

So.. If you can get that guy with the sniffle access to a doctor of any kind to take care of his sniffle, you save 9,900 in ER rubber gloves, hose, sheets, and all the other crap hospitals waste. ; ) (can you tell i just spent a week there recently?)

I ordered a Dell Mini 9 online on 3 March 2009. I won't bother linking to Dell; don't bother going there.

See, they don't have any.

This didn't stop them from putting a huge "back to school" banner on the Japan website (school starts in April here), complete with a "Hurry! Sale ends tomorrow!" tagline.

Having read a lot about how easy it is to install MacOS on them, I thought it would be nice to have a tiny, low-powered, cheap laptop to carry around campus and take to conferences. Like the MacBook Air, but not a million billion dollars and requiring a dongle for ethernet and a dongle for video out (what good is an ultraportable laptop that requires you to carry a bunch of junk in order to use it???). And, reading that back just now, yeah, that would be cool.

For this reason, I ponied up my $400 or so (fully loaded--the most RAM and the biggest SSD drive) and prepared the materials needed to effect its transformation. The full amount was promptly deducted from my credit card.

Then it turned out that I wouldn't be getting the computer until after moving to my new place here in Kanagawa, so I needed to give them that address for shipping. But no worries. School didn't start until 8 April, and if I hadn't quite gotten all the Hackintosh bugs worked out yet by then, I could just use my MacBook.

Then the ship date was updated to 20 April.

...Ummm... Okay. This is not what I had in mind, but shortly after that is Golden Week, so I will have time to fix it up then and I can really start using it day-to-day after that, when the school year finally gets reallty underway and you don't have a public holiday every week (this sounds nice, but it's awful to try to plan a class like that).

The 20th came and went with no laptop. I checked the website.

15 May was the new date.

This is part 2 of my response to Wired's shoddy coverage of Japan's "hatred" for the iPhone which was exposed by AppleInsider in this damning piece.

Okay, yes, Wired's Brian X. Chen is an asshat who really should be fired for that stunt. And yes, the iPhone is not doing as bad as he says (BTW, SoftBank is not "giving the iPhone away;" it simply follows the same cost structure as all their other models--I pay ¥3300 a month toward the purchase of my iPhone, although I actually don't because I've been with SoftBank long enough that I get a heavy discount on that; this cost structure, as far as I understand it, is mandated by law). But there are some serious barriers to heavy Japanese uptake of the iPhone. Some of these could be fixed; some could not.

You may have read this damning piece about Wired's coverage of Japan's "hatred" for the iPhone. If you haven't, go read it now. I'll wait.

(Playing Sol Free on the iPhone... Operating my iTunes library from the iPhone... Checking mail on the iPhone...)

You done?

Good.

Basically, here's the thing: In academia, when we write a claim--any claim--we have to either back that claim up with data we've collected and analyzed, or we have to cite some other available source written by someone who did. This is to ensure that we aren't just pulling things out of our butts and lying to people.

And that, my friend, is why academics are better than journalists.

"Yeah, but, who cares?"--I hear you thinking aloud, "it's just a stupid puff piece about a phone."

Wel, in this case, yeah, it's not the end of the world if it's wrong. It isn't going to get anyone killed, but it could have a negative impact on Apple's stock price, which could mean lost jobs, which could add to the unemployment problem in the US where the company is based, which could add to the overall economic downturn...

Everything is connected, and in the information age, putting out bad information from a position of authority, whether it be deliberate or negligent, is serious business. Wired is supposedly a respected and respectable technology magazine. In this case, a writer abused that reputation to try to get away with just throwing some crap on paper and cashing his paycheck.

And that's not right.

So every couple days or so I get a new comment on the blarg (most of them on this one article) that sounds like this:

You are really great
Submitted by Essay Help (not verified) on Tue, 02/17/2009 - 11:15pm.

You are really great dude.that's a really cool idea. i may use that in my own filing system.

Now, I'd like to be flattered that this person thinks I am "a really great dude".. but I just can't believe someone talks like that. More likely, they'd like to get a link displayed on my site to their site with the terms "Essay Help" on it in order to boost their site's pagerank.

(For those that aren't familiar Google has a rather ingenious setup where they assume that if someone takes the time to link to you, they like you and you're important. If thousands of sites link to you, you're very important. Additionally, the term they use in the link text ends up being terribly accurate as keyword metadata.)

Out of the box, drupal comments allow for posters to leave their 'homepage' as one of the terms in the comment. This is a pretty cool way to kind of.. spread good will between sites. At the same time, the nasty side of it is that my site ends up contributing to the endorsement of all kinds of stupid crap on the net... without me actually thinking those people are important.

So, I hacked into drupal's guts and turned that off. Am I just being a cranky grinch? or am I doing my part to enforce search engine accuracy?

I guess I leave the question to this thread's comments, should you feel inspired. I'm afraid you can't link to your site though. ; )

So for the past two months, Celeste and I have incurred massive phone bills with At&t. After the first big one, I accepted that oops, yup, we talk more than our rate plan will allow. I called At&t up, and the nice man there happily sold me a larger rate plan for more money. I asked him, "So, when does this go into effect? this month? (it was january 19th) Like, we'll have more minutes now?" He said "Yes sir."

So, it's February 6th, and I've got another bill from At&t for $360 bucks. I called them up hoping this was a billing mistake, but of course... Corporations never make billing mistakes. When the computer's all you've got, what the computer says is the word of god.

I tried to explain my conversation with At&t call center Monkey1 to At&t Monkey2 and then Monkey2's supervisor. Both of them checked with 'the word of god', and there was no record of Monkey1's words.
(in their defense, they were willing to halve the overage charges.)

Here's the thing.. (sorry it took me so long to get here) Throughout this entire conversation, I felt completely powerless. At&t holds all the cards. I signed their contract, so I can't take my business elsewhere, if they wrong me, I've got more or less no recourse. This power imbalance translated all the way down to Monkey2, who acted like I should feel lucky that she was willing to work with me as much as they have, and that she CAN transfer me to her manager, but then the huge favor she's doing for me could be taken away because I'm making waves.

Yes, it's my own damned fault. I sold my soul to Apple and by extension to At&t. I sold what little power I would have had over their actions for a cheaper iPhone. Really though, how much power are we talking about here? Enough to change the motivations of Monkey2? Probably not.

(batty will hate this but:)

I've been following the story of Rebecca Allen's death in Fort Collins last Tuesday, and I went to her funeral Friday, (cyclists city wide showed up to show support).

I've been reading the local press about it, and this is as good an example as any:
http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080730/UPDATES01/...

In every article I've seen, this, or some variation of this concept has been uttered:

Allen was taken to the hospital where she died from her injuries. Garvey suffered serious injuries, but was released from the hospital the same day. Both were wearing bike helmets.

A helmet? She was hit by a CAR! In the equation of bike v. car, a helmet is little more than a luck bonus. Yeah, there are lots of tales of people getting their heads run over and the helmet miraculously takes the hit and squirts their noggins out onto the street. But seriously, day to day, what do you think that inch of foam is going to do for you?

So, why do they bring it up? Because people assume a cyclist without a foam hat is an irresponsible idiot who somehow deserves to die. Because people don't want to talk about how CARS KILL PEOPLE. Being on the bike didn't kill Rebecca. A car killed Rebecca. (yes, the dumbass kid behind the wheel killed Rebecca, but tell me, would that have happened if he were out riding a bike drunk instead?)

Consider this:

4,749 pedestrians were reported to have been killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2003. These deaths accounted for 11 percent of the 42,643 motor vehicle deaths nationwide that year. An estimated 70,000 pedestrians were injured or killed in motor vehicle collisions, which represents 2 percent of the 2.9 million total persons injured in traffic crashes
_{(http://www.walkinginfo.org/pedsafe/crashstats.cfm: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Traffic Safety Facts 2003, Washington, DC, 2004)}

We're worried about deaths in Iraq? We lost more people in one year just walking down the street than the entire war so far!

We've built our entire society around the automobile; around the idea that accelerating 2 tons of steel to human killing speeds through the places we live and work is acceptable. It's quite literally killing us.

For a better article about Allen (yup, mentions helmets..) read this one:
http://media.www.collegian.com/media/storage/paper864/news/2008/07/30/Ne...

Get out on your bike this week. Take the lane. Let a car or two know you're there.