advocacy

Setting up an iPad in 2012

Setting up an iPad in 2012:

My mom says that all her friends who have iPads had to go to the Apple store to get them set up. I’m not surprised. I can’t imagine how it could be otherwise.

[Sadly, I think this is a question of market. My parents are constantly frustrated by not knowing how to do things on their iPad. But I wonder whether Apple cares. Well, no, I don’t wonder, I don’t think they care. I think they’ve written them off. But the real failure here (even if I’m right about Apple ignoring the grandparent demographic) is that it also applies to people who do not share the same experiences that leads to these things feeling easy. Apple shouldn’t need to help so many get going with their iPads. No?]

Source: Scripting News

The disneyfication of tech

The disneyfication of tech:

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.

[It’s such a mess right now, that I’m completely certain that the system will change for the better.]

Source: Scripting News

How Doctors Die

How Doctors Die:

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

[snip -Ed.]

Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

[It is unsurprising. And sad.]

The next SOPA

The next SOPA:

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

They use our support to buy these laws.

So maybe, instead of waiting for the MPAA’s next law and changing our Twitter avatars for a few days in protest, it would be more productive to significantly reduce or eliminate our support of the MPAA member companies starting today, and start supporting campaign finance reform.

[The one thing that is clear is that if this has died now, it won’t be dead for long. SOPA/PIPA were not the first attempt at this. It has been going on for 20 years. Marco’s suggestion is good for for more reasons than this… but this is enough of a reason.]

d: Where do books fit?

The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA:

In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.

[This is being bandied back and forth. Where else but through iBooks would an iBooks file be used so who cares, or maybe it was an overzealous lawyer at Apple, or as the above. What is the place of books in the future of education.

I was rarely interested in sitting and reading a textbook. Even history, with its arc and story was often reduced to a memorization of a bunch of facts about which I no longer had the slightest interest. But science lab, or a field trip to a historical place, or anything where you did something, worked with something, *touched* something worked for me.

So where do textbooks fit? Where does it make sense to have a primary learning experience consist of this? Most of us can look up facts whenever we need them. We can find well written accounts of virtually any topic, and it’ll include almost up to the minute news and recent changes in all but the most esoteric fields.

What I’d like to see for my kid is some sort of 1:1 iPad to student program. That should easily cover the 5 Rs. Art class, music class, etc. can all be bought this way as well, although I wouldn’t try and remove the chance for kids to play real instruments, apply paint to canvas, water color, go to museums, and mix stuff together in a science lab. Quite the opposite, I would encourage that more time and money be spent on those things. The social experience of going to school, the chance to bring Noah first hand (literally) experience with things that I cannot are why I want from his school. I admit, to my sorrow, that part of this is also “day care”. Both my wife and I work, so we need to make sure some one we trust is caring for Noah, but I want that time filled with great stuff now, while his mind is like a sponge. For the moment, Noah’s working on the basics (reading , writing, etc.) Soon those things will be just gateway skills to the real stuff. And I want him to have a modern education, not one that was designed 100 years ago.]

Source: venomous porridge

The other side of SOPA

Put Up or Shut The F… Up | The Cynical Musician:

Supposedly the tech crowd are some of the smartest people on this planet. I mean, they’ve come up with the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, a site where I can broadcast myself and a way for me to find what I’m looking for on the web, that’s not evil at all. Surely, figuring out a way how we can stop unprincipled, opportunistic arsewipes making money from creators’ work without paying them, while at the same time keeping the Internet secure and assuring that people’s free speech rights aren’t abridged, isn’t beyond the capabilities of those bright minds. I’m not asking for the impossible: I just want to see a situation where it is very hard to run a pirate site and the chances of getting caught and punished when doing so are considerable. I want to see piracy being a bad business to go into.

[I haven’t heard about this side of the argument from the tech people… it’s a problem and a half.]

What not to do: Learning leadership from Congress

Learning leadership from Congress:

When planning your career, avoid these pitfalls, behaviors evidenced by many elected officials:

  • In all things, look for money first. Listen to people with money, respond to people with money, justify your actions around money. Worth noting that 47% of those in Congress (House and Senate) are millionaires–an even greater percentage than those that are lawyers.
  • Embrace the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Aspire to run systems you don’t understand.
  • Compromise over the important issues, but dig in and fight forever over trivia.
  • Along those lines: focus obsessively on the short run. Even though you are virtually assured of re-election, define the long term as “before the next election.”
  • Take months off from your day job (with pay) to actively campaign for a better job.
  • Blame the system, the other side and your predecessors for the fact that you are not taking brave, independent action.
  • Avoid developing independent thought and analysis. Focus on parroting the work of lobbyists and the party line.
  • When given the choice between being on television or doing hard work, pick television.
  • When a difficult problem shows up, duck.
  • Try mightily to outlast passionate resistance by quietly ignoring it and waiting for it to go away.

[Good one, Seth!]

Source: Seth’s Blog

Justification? We can do better

Screw Entitlement:

So do I think SOPA/PIPA are good? No, don’t be stupid, they’re horrid bills. But do I think that it is solely the fault of RIAA/MPAA/et al? No. The people using the above excuses and justifications share just as much blame. If nothing else, they created reams of justification for lobbyists to use when pushing these bills in Congress.

The Internet’s relentless victim-blaming and support of piracy handed “the enemy” a fully-loaded gun, aimed at their own skulls, all the while screaming “I DARE YOU TO PULL THE TRIGGER”. Spare me the outrage until you’re willing to change your behavior.

[Not the first person to note this. but said with his usual vigor.]

Source: bynkii.com