No, he didn’t

Scripting News: He called the President ‘boy’.:

Just tuned into a little of the Sunday morning news discussion on various networks. The big issue seems to be whether or not VP Biden was disrespectful of Congressman Ryan in the Wednesday debate.

Yes he was. But I haven’t forgotten what Mitt Romney said to President Obama. He said the President is like a boy who doesn’t tell the truth.

“Look, I’ve got five boys. I’m used to people saying something that’s not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it.”

He called the President ‘boy’ — to his face.

[What a load. Dave, this is outrageous. I know how you react when people put words in your mouth, and he didn’t come close to saying what you’re claiming he said. I also disagree with your interpretation. And obviously, so do the people who would be most sensitive to your interpretation. Move along. There’s nothing here. Plenty of real stuff to be concerned about.]

Lance Armstrong’s Endgame: Doping in Pro Cycling

Lance Armstrong’s Endgame: Doping in Pro Cycling:

His ultimate legacy most likely is out of our hands. Fans who may not yet be alive will decide who he was. To us, today, Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist who ever lived, not a fraud who tested positive for a stimulant while leading the 1969 Giro d’Italia and had his 1973 Giro di Lombardia win stripped for the same. Joop Zoetemelk is the hardman who started and finished 16 Tours—a record—and won one. He’s not a reprobate who was caught doping at the 1979 Tour, received a paltry penalty of a 10-minute time addition, and maintained his second-place podium spot. Jacques Anquetil is the five-time Tour winner who in 1961 took the yellow jersey on Stage 1 and wore it all the way to Paris, not a boastful cheater who said, during a French television interview, “Leave me in peace—everybody takes dope.” And Fausto Coppi is il campionissimo, the champion of champions, not an admitted doper who said on Italian television that he only took drugs when necessary—”which is nearly always.”

We live in a different age, one that may not allow the forgiveness of Lance Armstrong, that may hold him to be the creator rather than the product of the era he reigned over. We might even judge this champion’s cheating and lying too vile to permit the remembrance of the part of him that, even now, convinced that he doped to win the Tour, I can’t stop being a fan of: the plain fact that he was, as even his bitter enemy Floyd Landis told me when we spoke last year, “a badass on a bike.”

[And this sat well with me. It’s a sport. People cheat. It’ll be forevermore be the case. And the folks that win are all badasses. You don’t win if you’re not regardless of what you may or may not take.]

Injustice for All: USADA & Lance Armstrong | Bicycling Magazine:

What would happen to the jerseys would be an absurdity.

Probably the most notable outcome is that Jan Ullrich becomes a unique champion, a four-time winner of the Tour, more decorated than Greg LeMond. Ullrich is, of course, an admitted and convicted doper. The farce on top of this farce would be the continued possession of a yellow jersey by Bjarne Riis. After the 1996 Tour winner admitted in 2007 that he’d used EPO to achieve his victory, the race organizers told him not to attend that year’s edition, and in the official listing of winners in the online archive and elsewhere, a blank space appeared where his name once was. The next year, he was back at the Tour as a directeur sportif, and his name was back on the list.

If Armstrong is found by USADA to have doped but, like Riis, somehow is granted possession of his bounty, thanks to his celebrity a Hadron Collider-worthy impact will occur between our society’s ideal of morality and the real-life ethical relativism of cycling (and just about every other pursuit in life involving money and fame). It’s a black hole—one that already swallowed Floyd Landis and Alberto Contador, who doped and, unlike Riis, lost their jerseys.

[And that’s the critical point. The record books are already a mess beyond fixing. Forget them. They are nothing.]

Outline your Twitter conversations.

Thread: Outline your Twitter conversations.:

I just released a tool called Microliner that lets you outline your conversations on Twitter.

I don’t think anyone has ever had a tool like this, so I’d better explain how it works.

1. Open up the Microliner Workspace window. Enter an idea. 140 characters or less, please. :-)

2. Click the Tweet button. It goes out to all your followers on Twitter.

3. Wait a minute or so. Click the Replies button. Microliner calls Twitter and gets the replies, and arranges them under the messages they are in response to.

4. You can then reply to the replies, and so on. Once you get going, you can participate in a dozen conversations at once, and not lose track of where you are or who you’re conversing with. It really works.

The tool is available now: http://microliner.opml.org/.

I thought I was done developing on Twitter as a platform, and then I get an idea like this, and I have to do it, whether or not its advisable. :-)

[Nice idea. Twitter has really made a mess of stuff like this.]

Source: Scripting News

★ Kindle Paperwhite

★ Kindle Paperwhite:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

[Still waiting for them to get this together. When they do I’m in…]

Source: Daring Fireball

Marveling at the existence of the greatest phone ever made.

Marveling at the existence of the greatest phone ever made:

If I tell you the greatest thing about the iPhone 5 is how it “feels,” you’ll accuse me of being a superficial aesthete who cares more for form than function. You don’t care how a phone was built or how it looks; you just want it to work. But I think that argument misses something important about what it means for a phone to “work well”: When you’re holding a device all the time, how it feels affects its functionality. Or, as Steve Jobs might say, how it feels is how it works.

[I know this to be true from objects I craft myself. If people are going to touch it, how it feels is a huge part of how it works. I recently built some objects that were “so nice” that the folks they were built for refused to use them as they were designed. In short, they put a cover on them. An utter failure.]

Pandora and Artist Payments

Pandora and Artist Payments:

Pandora founder Tim Westergren:

For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000
dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my
favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more
than 800 we’ll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the
average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele,
Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying
over $1 million each. Drake and Lil Wayne are fast approaching a
$3 million annual rate each.

It’s hard to look at these numbers and not see that internet radio
presents an incredible opportunity to build a better future for
artists. Not only is it bringing tens of millions of listeners
back to music, across hundreds of genres, but it is also enabling
musicians to earn a living. Since Pandora accounts for just 6.53%
of all radio listening in the U.S., it seems fundamentally unfair
that other forms of radio that represent much larger shares of
U.S. radio listening pay substantially less to artists.

Hard to argue with that.

★

[I point to all the anti “new model” articles. Seemed like this ought to get some play as well.]

Source: Daring Fireball

Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button

Disruptions: With a 3-D Printer, Building a Gun With the Push of a Button:

But monitoring whether people make their own guns on a 3-D printer is going to be impossible, barring sticking an A.T.F. agent in every home. It’s also hopeless to try to build a technology into these printers that prevents people from printing a gun. One project mentioned in Mr. Wilson’s video, called the RepRap printer, will be capable of replicating itself by printing other 3-D printers.

After committing a crime with a printed weapon, a person could simply melt down the plastic and reprint it as something as mundane as a statue of Buddha. And guns made of plastic might not be spotted by metal detectors in airports, courthouses or other government facilities.

“This becomes scary when you consider the fact that it could be yet another opportunity for people to evade background checks and get a gun,” said Daniel Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

[First of all, this is nothing new (people building their own firearms at home.) Certainly the “IED” commonly discussed in the last couple of wars shows that guns could well be overrated by Hollywood and the Press as the best means of causing harm. But anyway, while the above scenario is bound to happen, there’s a lot more good to come of 3D printing than bad. In the meantime this only proves how poor “banning” anything works as a system. The more try and do it, the worse we get at it.]