clarification

How can AT&T be smart enough to offer a revolutionary device like the iPhone, which is all about delightful user experience, and yet let their own customer communications be a chilling reminder how little phone companies care about their users?

…AT&T doesn’t offer the iPhone, in the sense of having any input into it’s design.

How can AT&T be smart enough to offer a revolutionary device like the iPhone, which is all about delightful user experience, and yet let their own customer communications be a chilling reminder how little phone companies care about their users? There, in a nutshell, is the case for the unlocked iPhone. [From Q: what’s The worst thing you can do with an iphone?]

AT&T doesn’t offer the iPhone, in the sense of having any input into it’s design. Apple did all that.

Remember, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

another world [updated]

The idea of eating fresh huckleberries more than 100 feet up in the crown of a redwood tree boggles the mind. But the canopies of those western giants are as rich in diversity as those in the tropical rain forests.

This book is well worth your time if you think the world still has some unexplored or undiscovered wonders.

The idea of eating fresh huckleberries more than 300 feet up in the crown of a redwood tree boggles the mind. But the canopies of those western giants are as rich in diversity as those in the tropical rain forests. And 97% of them are gone.

Almost halfway through it in one sitting. Some odd characters but it’s an unusual pursuit: it makes sense.

Just finished it. Amazing book. The idea of climbing into a tree that is taller than a football field is long and sleeping in it, let alone getting married or spending a wedding night in one, is too much for me.

It has seemed for some time that all the big records were set, all the mountains climbed, but here as some people discovering new things, new ecosystems, that we never imagined. Trees, gardens, small animals, all them being born and living their lives in the redwood canopy, with water, soil, and all their nutritional needs covered. And the adaptive cunning of the red vole, chief food source of the northern spotted owl, making its home in a redwood where owls wouldn’t look for it, but making trips across to Douglas firs for food.

When some people want to go into orbit, undiscovered worlds exist within 400 feet of the ground.

misunderstood message

The father of a 13-year-old cheerleader says school officials overstepped their bounds when they suspended his daughter for taking a cell-phone photo of another cheerleader getting out of the shower during a sleepover in his home. “This makes me realize how little control I have over my daughter when the school district can take action something that happened at my home on a Saturday,” says the dad.

Not sure he’s getting this.

The father of a 13-year-old cheerleader says school officials overstepped their bounds when they suspended his daughter for taking a cell-phone photo of another cheerleader getting out of the shower during a sleepover in his home. “This makes me realize how little control I have over my daughter when the school district can take action something that happened at my home on a Saturday,” says the dad. (Houston Chronicle)

[From School suspends girl for taking cell-phone photo at sleepover]

I can agree that they the suspension is out of line, but consider the truth of this: “This makes me realize how little control I have over my daughter.” And I suspect it’s not the taking of the photo that’s at issue but the sharing of it at school.

links for 2007-12-11

23 months?

Michael Vick, the National Football League star, is jailed over dogfighting: RICHMOND — Michael Vick, the disgraced American football star who has
pleaded guilty over his role in an illegal dogfighting enterprise, was
sentenced to 23 months in prison.”

23 months doesn’t seem nearly enough, but at the same time, what good does that punishment do? Why not require him to make amends in a more meaningful way? His astronomical salary could be re-allocated to Humane Society and animal shelter locations, and he could be required to spend some time either working at those institutions or doing something more meaningful that sitting in a prison cell.

This is the federal verdict: perhaps the state case will yield something more productive.

(Via Times Online – World News.)

conspiracy theorists, grab your tinfoil hats!

Interview with the Daily Grail’s Greg Taylor: “I think the real question about modern secret societies is their influence on politics. It still bewilders me that more was not made in the last U.S. presidential election about the fact that both Dubya Bush and John Kerry were members of the same secret society, Skull and Bones. A society with only (roughly) 800 living members, who refuse to reveal anything about the society and their relationship with it, manage to have ‘control’ of the two candidates to lead 300 million people and the world’s most powerful nation? That doesn’t sound like democratic choice to me. “

I don’t know what to make of this: is there anything to Skull and Bones? Is it more than just a glorified fraternity with a mystique? Do they really control anything beyond the perceptions of the credulous?

(Via Boing Boing.)