Narrative Fallacy writes "If you've ever written about Apple products with even a hint of negativity, you'll appreciate Salon's excerpt from Farhad Manjoo's True Enough, about why the Apple tribe is so rabid. 'There are many tribes in the tech world: TiVo lovers, Blackberry addicts, Palm Treo fanatics, and people who exhibit unhealthy affection for their Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners,' writes Manjoo. 'But there is no bigger tribe, and none more zealous, than fans of Apple, who are infamous for their sensitivity to slams, real or imagined, against the beloved company.' Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg has even coined a name for the phenomenon — the 'Doctrine of Insufficient Adulation.' 'If I see the world as all black and you see the world as all white and some person comes along and says it's partially black and partially white, we both are going to be unhappy,' says psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University. 'You think there are more facts and better facts on your side than on the other side. The very act of giving them equal weight seems like bias. Like inappropriate evenhandedness.'"

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Gabriel Delahaye (whose work we've featured on Boing Boing tv not once, but twice!) says, "Um? This video? AMAZING." And holy plus-sized polyester dress slacks, do I ever concur.

Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you "buy" "content" for Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the "surprisingly readable" legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.

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CNN is reporting on the widening brouhaha that began when Barack Obama's passport file was accessed illegally on three occasions beginning in January. Now it seems that John McCain's file was also snooped; and that last year Hillary Clinton's file suffered the same fate. Ars Technica nails the real importance of these breaches, saying that the Presidential hopefuls are "...currently providing the country with a very public lesson in why the 'privacy advocates' who oppose initiatives like Real ID and the executive branch's domestic surveillance programs should really be called 'democracy advocates.' In short..., the entire incident shows exactly why citizens' privacy is critical in a country where citizens compete with one another for control of the government."

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In this Newsweek article from 1995, Clifford Stoll suggested it would be unlikely we’d buy books over the web or read newspapers online.

But he didn’t stop there. He didn’t think internet shopping would work because the internet was missing salespeople:

We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Anyway, 1995 was definitely the early days. Plenty of predictions were wrong. Who knew what was going to happen. We can’t fault him for having an opinion.

But reading his opinion today does highlight just how far we’ve come in such a short time. Just about everything in his piece — from news to shopping to government — has been fundamentally changed by the web. What he thought wouldn’t work has actually worked so well that we can’t imagine our lives without it.

Further, his article shines a light on the burden of assumptions. Stoll assumed one of the reasons online shopping would fail was because it lacked salespeople. That was an assumption tied to his present day experience; a person had to sell you something.

How much of what you say can’t change is tied to your present day assumptions? “We can’t do that in our business” or “That would never work here” or “We have to have that” or “We need this in order to do that” or “That’s just how its done.”

Vision is about demolishing today’s assumptions and recognizing that new things are possible. It takes real guts to fight for the side of the non-obvious.

It also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Daniel Burnham. I usually just excerpt the first part of this quote, but in this case the end is what’s relevant:

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

As far as the internet goes, we didn’t have to wait for our sons and grandsons to surprise us. We surprised ourselves.

On the bright side, it seems Clifford has come around. He sells Klein Bottles over the web. Curiously, doesn’t it look like his site was designed in 1995?

Chroniton writes with news of a Silicon Valley company, Luxim, that has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours. There's no mention of mercury or other heavy metals, which pose a problem for compact fluorescents.

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Anonymous people writing with supposed authority about living people. Too easily (and often) gamed.

Wired has an article on the national fusion centers in the US, which were created to aid intelligence-sharing in the fight against terrorism but are increasingly being used to look at other sorts of crimes. The keynote of these centers is "all hazards, all threats" — the LA police chief is quoted: "Information that might seem innocuous may have some connection to terrorism." The ACLU has up an interactive US map to help you become acquainted with your local fusion center.

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trogador writes "Researchers from Imperial College London are improving the Da Vinci surgical robot by installing an eye-tracker, which allows surgeons to control the robot's knife simply by looking at the patient's tissues on a screen. Tracking the eyes can generate a 3D map, which in turn can make moving organs — like a beating heart — appear to stand still for easier operation. Other features include 'see-through' tissues on the surgeon's screen (so tumors can be seen underneath tissues) and 'no-cut' zones, places where the robot won't allow the surgeon to cut by mistake. Says ICL Professor Guang Zhong Yang, 'We want to empower the robot and make it more autonomous.'"

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harsha_c sends in a local Indian perspective on the vote against Microsoft's OOXML ahead of the March 29 deadline. Of 19 companies participating, only 5 voted in favor of OOXML. "It was the ultimate battle for control over global IT standard for documents — between Microsoft-promoted OOXML and Sun and IBM-backed Open Document Format. It was played out between Indian IT giants, namely Infosys, Wipro, TCS supported by Nasscom on one side and the global IT biggies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat backed by te IITs, IIMs and IISc on the other, on their respective positions on Microsoft's OOXML standard. Microsoft understandably expressed its disspointment. 'While we are disappointed with the decision of the BIS committee, we are encouraged by the support from NASSCOM.'

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Michael Markman sent a pointer to another Wright sermon video, which I watched. The one that ends with God Damn America.

I was born here, I love this country, it gave sanctuary to my parents and grandparents. I am a product of Jewish Europe, transplanted in, welcomed by, the United States of America. I owe my existence to this country, and never forget it.

So God Damn America, to me, is bad. What a thing for a man of religion to say. A man who believes in god, to whom damnation is real.

On the other hand...

The rest of the sermon, the part leading up to that conclusion, is reasonable, and makes the ending understandable, even if I don't support it.

Then I wondered, what if I had been born in Germany instead of the U.S. The country that treated my ancestors the same way Wright's ancestors were treated by the U.S.

How would I have made the adjustment?

What if my country's flag had a swastika on it?

What if my country hadn't fully expressed its shame over burning my ancestors in ovens. Treating them like animals. Implementing a "final solution" on my race that somehow left me living. What if they expected me to love that country the same way the ancestors of the people who destroyed my ancestors do?

In the privacy of a cultural gathering of Jews living in a German city under a Nazi government in the 21st Century, might we say God Damn Germany for what it did to my people?

I don't know. Probably. It's something to think about.

hairyfeet writes "Do you use iTunes on Windows? If so you may be getting the gift of Safari from Apple whether you want it or not, and Mozilla CEO Joe Wilcox is not happy about it. After his daughter was offered Safari as a "bonus update" with a recent update to her iTunes software, Mr. Wilcox is quoted on his blog as saying "What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that's bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web." He also pointed out the check box is already clicked when you go to update meaning you have to opt out, not in and that it lists Safari as getting an update even if you don't have it installed."

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theodp writes "A newly-issued Google patent for Rendering Advertisements With Documents Having One or More Topics Using User Topic Interest describes how to detect the presence of children by 'using evidence of sophistication determined using user actions' and tracking their behavior using the Google Toolbar and other methods to deliver targeted ads. Which is interesting, since the Google Terms of Service supposedly prohibit the use of Services by anyone 'not of legal age.' The inventor is Google Principal Scientist Krishna Bharat, who is a co-inventor of another pending Google patent for inferring searchers' ethnicity, reading level, age, sex and income (and storing it all)." Ok I'll be the first to admit that this is greek to me. Someone smart figure this out and post a comment translating patentese into english.

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