Category: observations

Instead, I think[,] like most people, the[y]se developers are cursed with an agenda of selfishness. So long as they have an unrestricted ability to play in their little sandbox, they’re content. Start throwing up barriers, and they’ll elect or adopt any philosophy convenient to their case.

That it’s often libertarianism seems more a coincidence of convenience than anything else.

They also have the weird habit of saying “we” when they mean “me.”
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Not like we haven’t see this before . . .

Man blows up apartment spraying for bugs?
| Oddly Enough
| Reuters

.

NEW YORK, July 21 – A New Jersey man trying to exterminate insects in his apartment blew it up instead, the New York Daily News reported on Monday.

Isias Vidal Maceda was unhurt in the incident, but 80 percent of his apartment was destroyed, Eatontown, New Jersey police told the newspaper.

The accident occurred as Maceda was spraying for pests in his kitchen. Somehow the bug spray ignited a blast that blew out the apartment’s front windows and triggered a fire that quickly spread, the newspaper said.

Police told the newspaper that the Saturday blaze also caused smoke damage to the apartment above.

Can you say, aerosol propellant and stove pilot light?

Saving rain: How much is too much?.

Harvesting rain water is illegal? I think I am missing something here. If I collect water and use it to water my crops (which then flows into the ground or evaporates off), where is the harm? It’s not like a dam, if you really want to bring up a resource diversion with serious impacts.

Crazy.

The story could have been better written: the central issue is that the law is archaic and doesn’t reflect today’s reality (who in 1917 could have predicted how we live now?). I have 5 water barrels at my place and am re-doing how they are filled and drained: I don’t expect to be arrested for that. In fact, I suspect if more people did harvest water in some kind of containment system, we would have less street flooding in winter. It all flows downstream eventually . . .

via email:

It’s kind of like how I remember when the only place you could get
organic cellphones was at the neckbeard freetard web site, and the
phones kind of sucked. But there were people who bought them anyway,
because they believed that things could be better. [RJL20/elsewhere.org]

OpenMoko Train Wreck on Vimeo on Vimeo

OpenMoko Train Wreck on Vimeo.

Not all that great. I’m sort of not surprised but I really expect better.

To White River campground – Google Maps

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[updated Fri Jul 18 12:36:24 PDT 2008]: As the comments illustrate, I can’t argue against a position I don’t understand. Don’t like the iPhone, iPod, whatever? Don’t buy one.

Some helpful hints:

• Tell people what the trade-offs are when they “buy” these new devices/services (buy is in “quotes” since increasingly, we are buying access or a license to use something, rather than an actual thing).
• Explain what happens (not what might happen or what it means in moral terms) when these fail or the hidden pitfalls of the relationship are exposed.
• If possible, show people where they lose money, as opposed to freedom or other philosophical principles: the man in the street understands one better than the other and being unwilling or unable to frame your argument in terms that are mutually understood means you’re wasting your time.

As skeptical as I am of the free market and consumerism, it makes me itchy to find myself defending it against an agenda I don’t understand. I don’t think the free market is an unalloyed good, as I don’t believe it is truly free. It’s a rigged game. The Invisible Hand is in my wallet.

As best I can tell, the LPF/FSF/GNU folks admit to no such weaknesses or trade-offs. The response will be that I need to read all their back-catalog of position papers and manifestos. <sigh>

Gruber points to this from the FSF:

Wait, locked up? Prison? It’s a phone. Aren’t we being a little extreme?

[From 5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G – Free Software Foundation]

The FSF is something I would like to support but the claims they make are so extreme, I just can’t. There’s an underlying elitism there, that only people who can program computers should have them (can anyone argue that without shrinkwrapped software, we would see fewer computers and likely a lot of industries might never have been born (is there a freeware DTP application that rivals PageMaker or it’s successors? For that matter, I’m still looking for an office suite that works as well as the Leading Brand . . . ) Would the internet be as ubiquitous as it is without the millions of commodity (read: Windows) PCs out there? Hmm, maybe it would be better if it wasn’t . . .

I think the bottom fell out when I saw the bit about Steve Jobs hating competition. He introduced a new phone platform in a mature market against a whole array of entrenched players — Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM, Palm — and seems to be doing quite well. There were digital music players before the iPod: where are they now? I think he craves competition, or he might have been content to run Pixar and count his money. And there is something a little disingenuous about a MacArthur grant winner arguing about business models. $240,000 over 5 years isn’t a bad wage. For someone obsessed with fairness, how fair is it for a grant recipient to offer products and services that compete against organizations that are not grant-subsidized?

Seriously, I think there is a need for the work the FSF is doing but I wish they could make their case without the exaggerated claims.

Continue reading “zealotry”

4 people counted 4 different images of mine as favorites.

1, 2, 3 ,4

Thanks, friends.

The serious lefties over at the Washington Monthly think this cover will read like scripture to most people.

[From The Washington Monthly]

And they’re moderating comments, so I have enclosed mine below.

Dear Moderators,

ya know, it really bollixes things up when you remove comments that other people have responded to. You’re under no obligation to moderate comments, so why invite people to speak their piece and then toss it in the Memory Hole?

That said, this is entertaining, to see the humorless and uptight “serious left” get their tightie whities in a bunch about a satirical magazine cover. For those of who say the art in question is not satire, it might help to refamiliarize yourself with the word and its meanings:
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.

And confidential to Albert Champion, the New Yorker does indeed have a masthead and many ways to contact them. Look harder. Also, Condé Nast left us in 1942, so I doubt any boycott of his magazines will matter much to him.

So Apple releases the 2nd generation iPhone, sells a million in the opening weekend, 10 million applications (granted none of this was known while the graphed trades were being made). But look at the drunkard’s walk, from the night before the release. Yes, it’s only a few dollars but the direction seems puzzling, though consistent with how the market reacts to Apple’s performance.