Bazinga Journal

MSNBC:

"The CEO of the Nasdaq stock exchange says it is 'humbly embarrassed' by its bungling of Facebook's hugely anticipated debut as a public company on Friday."

Methinks they're going to be short a pile of money at some point, too.

Paul Thurrott details Microsoft's long-term Windows agenda:

"Today, Microsoft boasts of up to 1.3 billion active Windows users. Windows 8 is not for them, not for the most part: We get a few bones, like Storage Spaces and quicker boot times, but the desktop environment is pretty much just Windows 7++  (or Windows 7+1 for you non-programmers). But it is those very users who don’t want or need tablet functionality that are financing Microsoft’s push towards an OS—that is not really Windows—that will replace what they’re using. Maybe not in Windows 8. Maybe in Windows 9, or 10. But eventually."

Thurrott is no Microsoft antagonist. He's a well-known Windows technology writer, enthusiast and, perhaps, apologist, but he's not pleased with the direction Microsoft has taken with Windows 8.

Microsoft disclosed this week that it will discard the familiar Aero Glass desktop user interface in the upcoming Windows release:

We applied the principles of ‘clean and crisp’ when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look. The taskbar continues to blend into the desktop wallpaper, but appears less complicated overall. To complete the story, we updated the appearance of most common controls, such as buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon. We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

In short, Microsoft is firmly moving the Windows 8 desktop in the direction of their new tablet UI, called Metro, even before that product reaches the public.

This is a really big deal for them and their customers. Throwing out the familiar Windows desktop UI in favor of a more Metro-like space is nothing short of betting Microsoft's future on a competitor's ideas, ideas with which Microsoft has repeatedly failed to gain traction (see all past efforts at selling Windows tablets).

Can there be any greater evidence that Apple's iPad and the mobile computing revolution are the future of personal computing?

Thurrott isn't happy about it. In his lede, he states:

It’s about the Windows team abandoning the very market that drove Windows’s success for over 25 years in order to chase a coming and potentially illusory market for tablet devices.

This reveals Thurrott's conceptual myopia, the downfall of many prognosticators: failing to see that today's technology may only hint at tomorrow's.

If the iPad and  Metro-based Windows tablets are as far as tablet computing will ever go, then Thurrott might have a point. Tablets are not capable of fully replacing laptops and desktops today. What will tomorrow bring?

Microsoft apparently believes the answer looks more like a tablet than a desktop.

The New York Times' Bits blog:

"On Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, announced that he had married his long-term girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. The announcement was made, of course, on Facebook."

Not a bad week for Zuck.

The Big Picture has a terrific write-up on how IPO allocations work, in other words, who gets the goods at the offering price. Their example is Friday's Facebook IPO:

"In the end, the age-old Wall St. adage proved true yet again: Retail investors should be circumspect (to put it politely) of any offering they’re able to get their hands on. If you can get it, chances are you don’t want it.

How does the syndicate process generally work on the retail side? Herewith, a primer."

 

I wrote a small piece about John Gruber taking his podcast, “The Talk Show,” from its home at 5by5 to Mike Monteiro’s Mule Radio Syndicate yesterday. Since then there’s been a flood of Twitter traffic and a couple of web discussions dissecting it. If you’re an Apple geek, this is kind of a big deal.

Most of the talk revolves around a couple of possibilities.

I think the most likely reason Gruber exited 5by5 is his then-co-host Dan Benjamin’s announcement of new “The Talk Show” t-shirts for sale. Though a seemingly inconsequential topic, it appears to have blind-sided Gruber.

Give the last 2:42 of episode 90 a listen. Dan begins by saying that they have to mention “the t-shirts,” and Gruber replies “what t-shirts?” Dan goes on to say that Gruber approved a new t-shirt. He then takes a step back, saying Gruber approved last year’s t-shirt and the new one is no different, just as Gruber replies “did I? I don’t remember that.” Gruber says little after that, signing off awkwardly. Those were his last words on 5by5.

Gruber put his own “The Talk Show” branded [that should be “Daring Fireball” branded. My mistake.] t-shirt on sale at Daring Fireball shortly before the show appeared on MRS. Given the more elaborate design on his new shirt I’d say he had it in the works for a few weeks, and Dan’s announcement of a competing product set him off.

Another conjecture involves Dan’s sale of the 5by5 iOS app for $2.99. Maybe Gruber expected a cut of the price, given his share in the success of 5by5.

It’s hard to believe Gruber would object to selling the app, or expect a cut of the profit despite its inclusion of “The Talk Show“‘s live stream, when Dan had openly discussed pricing it at least twice with Marco Arment on Build And Analyze. Dan explained, as well, that the profits pay for the (expensive) streaming fees. Maybe Gruber doesn’t listen to the other shows at 5by5.

Gruber’s move is disappointing, because 5by5 has become a hangout for geeks, where Dan has actively encouraged a friendly atmosphere. Sure, 5by5 is a business, but it’s become more than that for many, the very people these podcasts address.

Gruber’s leaving 5by5 is like a popular TV character quitting a favorite show. It lets down the fans.

That he took the show name and re-started it elsewhere without at least a nod to its former home or a word of explanation to the fans assumed something about the audience. It assumed they would search him out, that he didn’t need to make any effort at explanation, that his success is assured regardless.

That’s the trouble with this move: it fully disregards the fans. And that’s a low-class act.

Neither Gruber nor Dan have had or will have anything to say publicly about this. I think Dan’s co-hosts will let it lie, though if anyone were to broach the subject it would be Merlin Mann. I’m a fan of his “Back To Work,” so maybe I’ll hear something there.

5by5 still has a bunch of great podcasts. My favorite is John Siracusa’s “Hypercritical.” John is a geek’s geek: well prepared, fully engaged and passionate about technology and what he has to say about it.

I like Marco Arment’s “Build And Analyze,” too, regardless of his topic-of-the-day. His keen interest in whatever is in front of him makes even a discussion about a new wall thermostat interesting. He’s got a good sense of humor, too, and doesn’t fall into the easy trap of thinking too highly of himself despite his success with Instapaper.

There are many more podcasts at 5by5, and Dan’s latest, “Big Week,” will appear soon. Worth checking out.

I wish Gruber good fortunes at MRS. I’ll listen for a while, at least. He showed a renewed energy and interest during his first MRS outing, so who knows, maybe there will be a silver lining to this cloud.

Jason Snell, editor of Macworld and a podcaster at 5by5, correctly put this brouhaha in perspective:

May 18, 1980: Mount St. Helens erupts violently, causing widespread destruction. May 18, 2012: A podcast changes servers and co-hosts.

It’s admittedly a small thing, but it’s the small things we do that people remember us by.

[updated here.]

This week’s “The Talk Show” appears as a first episode on Mike Monteiro’s Mule Radio Syndicate, after skipping last week’s episode on its then-home network, 5by5. Neither the show’s host, John Gruber, nor his ex-co-host, Dan Benjamin, who owns and operates 5by5, had any comment immediately after Gruber announced the new show on his web site.

This is a shame. I first found out about 5by5 on John’s weblog, Daring Fireball, when he and Dan re-started “The Talk Show” 90 episodes ago. The show has been fun, engaging and thought-provoking, and I’ve become a fan of Dan’s other shows, including Hypercritical with John Siracusa, and Build And Analyze with Marco Arment.

I don’t know that moving the show name to Mule Radio was the right thing to do. Sure, it’s John’s show (as Dan always managed to slip into the talk), and taking along the show name will bring listeners with it, but “The Talk Show” without Dan Benjamin isn’t “The Talk Show.”

I wonder if we’ll hear any of the reasons behind the move.

 

An interesting thing happened shortly after the somewhat delayed trading of Facebook stock began today. The share price crashed from the open, from nearly 10% over the initial offering price to break-even at $38. It has since recovered. It’s an interesting, if short story why.

The investment banks underwriting the offering priced Facebook’s shares at $38 after yesterday’s market close, setting the selling price to their prime customers. Those shares could be re-sold to the public today, perhaps netting sellers a nice profit. IPO shares usually trade up as small investors come into the market, buying at any price.

When the appointed hour arrived, though, there were no FB trades. First 11 AM passed, then 11:05, then 11:30. It wasn’t until shortly after 11:30 that the first trade crossed at $42.05.

The share price began to slide after a flurry of 82 million shares changed hands in the first thirty seconds. Before an hour was up, FB was trading for its initial price of $38.

It was at that point that, according to CNBC’s David Faber, the underwriting banks stepped in and bought shares of FB, propping up the price. The share price recovered to the low $40s, where it stands now, a little after 2 PM.

So what happened? The delayed trading was ascribed to NASDAQ’s inability to create an orderly flow of transactions. Hours later, some investors had not received confirmation of their trades on the opening price.

Investors hearing this news backed away from trading, causing an imbalance where there were more sellers than buyers. The price crashed. It wasn’t until the underwriters removed the imbalance by holding the line at $38 that FB recovered.

So what’re Facebook shares really worth? About $40 right now, within the 5% - 10% target range set by the underwriters. As it stands now, Facebook's IPO is a success, netting the company maximal income while providing early investors with a reasonable profit.

While some investors may still be cautious after its rocky opening, can anyone doubt that Facebook shares will be trading higher by this time next year? Even if what we call Facebook today amounts to a fad, the momentum the company is carrying as it unveils new features and services is enough to keep users and investors interested.

That said, no, I don’t own any shares of the company. You’ve got to be nuts to buy on opening day.

Sam Byford, writing for The Verge:

“The director and screenwriter of sci-fi noir classic Blade Runner are in talks to collaborate on a sequel. Production company Alcon Entertainment has announced that Ridley Scott and Hampton Fancher are developing the idea, which is confirmed to be a new story set ‘some years after’ the original film’s conclusion.”

Blade Runner gets better every time I watch it, which will only heighten my apprehension about a sequel. Here's hoping for a "Godfather II," while dreading a "The Matrix: Reloaded."

Reuters:

"It can't be a straight ahead biography because it's very difficult to shake the cradle-to-grave structure of a biography"

I'm imagining Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, "Steve Jobs," itself a collection of anecdotes from the Apple founder's life, transformed by artistic license, a la "The Social Network." A very entertaining movie, especially if you're a geek, though only accurate in the gross details.

Eduardo Saverin, as reported by The Situation Room:

“My decision to expatriate was based solely on my interest in working and living in Singapore, where I have been since 2009. I am obligated to and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes to the United States government. I have paid and will continue to pay any taxes due on everything I earned while a U.S. citizen.”

(Via pandodaily.)

I call bullshit.

As Saverin says, his tax liability ends with his US citizenship, which he renounced last week to avoid capital gains taxes on any Facebook shares he sells after Friday’s initial public offering. Saverin’s share of the company will likely net him an additional $3 - $4 billion, making any past taxes paid a drop in the bucket compared to what he might owe had he remained a US citizen.

Saverin’s act is nothing but a tax dodge. Creating jobs, investing in US companies and changing his residence make no difference.

This is really neat: Kyle Taylor proposes marriage to his girlfriend via Pandora.

Lenovo digs into Intel's new Ivy Bridge processor offering to refresh their super Windows laptop line. Dana Wollman, writing for Engadget:

“All told, the upgrades span Lenovo’s ultraportable X series, mainstream ‘T’ lineup, budget ‘L’ models and the W-series workstation. In general, you’ll find Ivy Bridge processors (natch), Dolby audio and, in some cases, optional 4G radios. Additionally, the company tweaked its famed keyboard ever-so slightly and added a backlighting option to almost every system”

The Thinkpad line has long been the top choice if you're in the market for a Windows laptop of any size or weight. You'll pay more, along the lines of an Apple laptop, but you'll have a machine that lasts.

Joshua Gross:

”In 2007, NYC forced cab drivers to begin taking credit cards, which involved installing a touch screen system for payment.

During payment, the user is presented with three default buttons for tipping: 20%, 25%, and 30%. When cabs were cash only, the average tip was roughly 10%. After the introduction of this system, the tip percentage jumped to 22%.

Those three buttons resulted in $144,146,165 of additional tips. Per year. Those are some very valuable buttons.“

(Via DF.)

The Oatmeal publishes an awesome pean to Nikola Tesla, king of the geeks.

Saverin, the Facebook co-founder who was famously cheated out of his share of the company, only to regain a portion in a settlement with Mark Zuckerberg, has decided to renounce his US citizenship in order to avoid taxes on the immense gain he stands to realize after Facebook goes public this year.

Here’s Farhad Manjoo’s take on Saverin’s distasteful act.

The true story behind the ubiquitous poster.

I’ll offer one further reason it resonates today. It conveys a firm conviction with uniquely British character, or perhaps, as I like to imagine the British. The day the world truly goes to hell, someone in the UK will continue to keep a stiff upper lip.

ESPN, from the Associated Press:

“No sense fooling around with a talent like Robert Griffin III. Barely a week after the draft, the Washington Redskins are already proclaiming the Heisman Trophy winner their No. 1 quarterback. Saying that Griffin has the ability to do things no one else has done in the NFL, coach Mike Shanahan wrapped up a rookie minicamp Sunday by putting RGIII squarely atop the depth chart. ‘He’s the starter. Period,’ Shanahan said.”

That didn’t take long. Head coach Mike Shanahan ended this year’s “quarterback controversy” before it began: Rex Grossman is out as the starter, RG3 is in.

Redskins fans have been nuts about Heisman Trophy winner RG3 since the team traded up to select him in the NFL draft. Hey, maybe we’ll make .500 this season!

Ed Bott, writing for ZDNet:

“Microsoft’s decision to remove support for playing DVD movies in Windows 8 has caused some confusion. If the VLC media player can provide DVD support for free, why can’t Microsoft? For starters, Microsoft isn’t French.”

(Via pandodaily.)

I speculated that Microsoft was looking ahead to a DVD-less hardware future, but in fact they're just avoiding the headaches and fees attending that technology. If Windows 8 customers want DVD playback, they'll have to find someone else's software to make it happen.

Reminds me of Steve Jobs' claim that Apple would skip Blu-ray support until its licensing complexity was sorted out by the marketplace, because it was a "bag of hurt." Now that Netflix, Apple, Amazon and others are successfully streaming video content, make that 'never.' Good riddance.

Scott Camil, a US Marine, with a meditation on our ongoing war in Afghanistan:

“In Afghanistan, the United States supposedly invaded to arrest one man. Last year we were told he’d been executed in Pakistan. What is the mission now?”

A five-minute read from a guy who knows the terrain. A US Marine with four years of Vietnam under his belt opines on the ongoing conflict, its similarity to his war, and its relevance to you.

Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for MSNBC.com:

“the accused entered the 30-year-old victim’s home under the pretense of retrieving her belongings — an important part of any breakup — and proceeded to leave her mark. It seems the ex-boyfriend’s pool table was the focal point of her destruction, as she reportedly doused it in vegetable oil, snapped the pool cues and threw the billiard balls. Several doors were also broken. This she boasted about in Facebook posts the victim showed the deputies who responded to the man’s civil disturbance call.”

As a cop once said to me, “it’s a good thing criminals are dumb. It makes them easier to catch.”

The article goes on to describe other really dumb people documenting their law-breaking efforts. Somewhere, a prosecutor smiles.

Paul Krugman:

“But in the economy as a whole, your spending is my income and vice versa; my wage matters only in comparison to your wage; and so on. This changes everything, which is why we have paradoxes of thrift and flexibility.

Of course, that’s why we do economic modeling: precisely to scope out the areas where personal incredulity is a very bad guide to affairs.”

A five-minute piece on Krugman's weblog puts the lie to the 'I can't believe further spending could be good for the economy' meme.

Macroeconomics isn't a blindingly obvious pursuit. That's why economists spend careers studying and expounding on it, why economic models come and go as ideas prove false over the long haul.

Where we are today, though, is textbook liquidity trap territory, as expounded on by professor Krugman the past few years. In this situation, government austerity is exactly the opposite of what action should be taken, as can be seen by its effect on the recent UK economy.

US government spending is headed for automatic, deep cuts at the turn of next year. In effect we'll be going on our own austerity program. It would appear, from the evidence all around us, that austerity is not the right direction we should take. What to do?

As the man says, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge:

“You might have heard that Windows 8 won’t come with Media Center, but that’s not the only missing multimedia piece of the puzzle. This week, Microsoft revealed that the new operating system won’t have any kind of DVD playback, unless you specifically purchase Media Center or use third-party DVD software.”

Microsoft appears to be preparing for a future devoid of optical discs (DVDs, CDs, etc.). While they don't control the hardware that their operating systems run on, it's a good bet that the forthcoming Windows 8 tablets won't include an optical drive. Now we know their new operating system won't handle optical playback on its own, anyway.

Windows, OS X and Linux users are better off using the free, third-party VLC for their optical playback, anyway. No doubt the wizards at VideoLAN will have that tool up and running on Windows 8 shortly after it debuts.

Joe Weisenthal, writing for Silicon Alley Insider:

“This morning, this headline came via Bloomberg (via @Jackbeckman):

Amazon Tablet Share Fell to Just Over 4% 1Q Vs 16.8% in 4Q: IDC

That’s quite a big market share collapse!

I observed that it must mean that the Amazon Tablet (the Kindle Fire) is something people will buy as a gift over the holidays, but won’t buy themselves to actually use.”

I had a sneaking suspicion this would happen back when the Kindle Fire, well, caught fire last year. Its $200 price point is hard to ignore when you're 1. in the market for a tablet, and 2. don't know or see a difference between the Fire and an iPad.

After all, why buy a $500+ iPad when the Fire sells for $200? It's the same thing, right?

Similar consumer behavior occurred early last year when a slew of Android tablets hit the market. Big splash, followed by a sink to the bottom.

Apparently, the truth will out. Usability and a rich app market are key to satisfying tablet users, and neither the Android clones nor the Android-in-disguise Fire have either to the degree of Apple's iPad.

This is a difficult thing to explain to non-geeks who ask "what do you think of the Kindle Fire?" Their eyes tend to glaze over somewhere after the word usability, so I usually lead off with describing the huge and varied iOS App Store. A tablet without a rich app market is like a desktop computer without the Internet. Useful, but uninteresting.

Still, some folks don't get much beyond the price. And you always get what you pay for.

The Verge:

In a statement provided to The Verge, Target said that it is "phasing out Kindles and Amazon- and Kindle-branded products in the spring of 2012." Target said their decision was intended to find the right "product assortment" for its customers, but the truth may have more to do with its business partners than its customers.

(via Silicon Alley Insider.)
Here's a long-shot wager: Target is the kickoff mainstream retail outlet for Apple's forthcoming iReader tablet, and has signed an exclusivity agreement precluding their selling anyone else's tablet product after the unveiling at WWDC in June.

That's my one wild speculation for the upcoming Apple new product season.

Whitey Bluestein, writing for GigaOM:

“What’s next for Apple? Apple will provide wireless service directly to its iPad and iPhone customers. First, Apple will sell data packages bundled with iPads. Then it will sell data and international roaming plans to iPhone customers through the iTunes Store. And in time — sooner than many think — Apple will strike wholesale deals with several mobile operators so that Apple can provide wireless service directly to its customers, as Apple Mobile.”

Not many years ago, some people thought this was the way Google would handle the sale and use of their forthcoming "Google Phone." By controlling the hardware, software and wireless service delivery, Google would become a welcome alternative to the widely despised US telecom carriers. That never happened.

Maybe this rumor won't come to pass. Who could doubt the eagerness of Apple customers to bundle their wireless service payments with the rest of their Apple ID-based purchases, though? What a great selling feature for existing and new customers.

A terrific set of old images taken of New York City in the early 20th century. My dad was a very young man there when a handful of these were taken, but most predate him.

As he'd say, greatest city on Earth.

Megan Geuss, writing for Ars Technica:

“Netgear is poised to be the first networking company with a next-generation router on the market—one that has been shown to reach speeds of up to 1.3 Gbps in the 5 GHz band. The company’s new router is based on the as-yet-unratified 802.11ac standard, which is theoretically three times faster than the preceding 802.11n standard.”

Won't do you much good until your computing equipment supports the same standard, which hasn't yet been ratified. Still, this is a big deal for anyone who wants to stream full-motion, high-definition video between devices without pulling ethernet cable According to Netgear's literature (via 9To5Mac), 802.11ac will support simultaneous high-def streaming.

I'd still rather pull ethernet cable to carry unforgiving data such as video. Thing is, ethernet just plain works. Plug it in and, unless there's a break in the cable, you'll have zero problems. If that's not an option in your home, though, 802.11ac will likely fit the bill.

A characteristic feature of the project is that a volume that was originally intended for a second elevator and was never installed becomes a powder room with a glass floor that looks down all the 15 levels.

(via boingboing.)

Football Insider:

“Whatever suspense there was for Redskins fans (very little) is over, as Washington selected Robert Griffin III with the No. 2 overall pick. Jaon Reid says that the Griffin pick offers Daniel Snyder a shot at redemption. “

Snyder needs that redemption. In the thirteen years he's owned the 'skins they've failed to make the playoffs in all but two. Let's hope RG III is the guy.

Buster Heine, writing for Cult of Mac, points out how lucky Google was that Apple designed and sold the iPhone. Otherwise, all those Android phones would look something like this:

Nicholas Carlson, writing for Silicon Alley Insider:

“To get the technology on the road, Levandowski says the company is consider partnerships with automakers, aftermaket installations, or just giving the technology away.”

Google has already successfully lobbied the state of Nevada to allow self-driving cars onto public roads. No doubt they'll continue that effort in other states.

I'm not sure I'd be keen to use this technology on two-lane, slower-traveled roads, but out on the highway it would be great. Sort of an augmented cruise control, really.

The Big Picture posts a great infographic depicting the US Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka "the big bailout."

Interesting to note that of the $245 billion disbursed to purchase shares in banking institutions (thereby propping them up), all but $17 billion has been repaid through stock repurchase. The Treasury expects to gain about $25 billion from the sale of the remaining shares held.

About half the money disbursed to prop up GM and Chrysler has been repaid, and those companies appear healthier as a result.

The deadbeat: American International Group, the huge insurance company that sold billions in credit default swaps, in essence insuring those gambling financial firms against losses on their mortgage-backed security purchases. The MBSs became largely worthless when the real estate bubble burst, putting AIG on the hook for far more than they could pay. It'll be a long while before that portion of the TARP is repaid.

Planetary Resources, Inc.:

“Resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and grow to be valued at tens of billions of dollars annually. The effort will tap into the high concentration of precious metals found on asteroids and provide a sustainable supply to the ever-growing population on Earth.

A single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid contains the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history.”

(Via All Things D.)

Sounds like sic-fi, but it's not. The company is announcing its intentions at a press conference, today.

The engineering knowledge required to send a robotic craft to an asteroid, mine it and send back material is within our grasp. We already know how to get into space, mine small quantities on distant planets, and control processes from Earth.

It'll take significant production volume to make the economy of scale kick in. This effort requires space flight, after all. The only impediment to success is financial backing until that happens. Having a few billionaires on the team helps.

Michael Dobbs, writing for The Washington Post:

“Charles W. Colson, the Republican political operative who boasted he would ‘walk over my own grandmother’ to ensure the reelection of President Richard M. Nixon and went on to found a worldwide prison fellowship ministry after his conversion to evangelical Christianity, died April 21 Inova Fairfax Hospital. He was 80.”

(Via Darcy Spencer.)

Colson was one of president Richard Nixon’s “big three,” along with H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. He was a close political advisor to the president.

He’s the guy who allegedly possessed a framed picture in his White House office stating, “when you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” He was also the guy who tasked Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt with breaking into Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, looking for defamatory material. (Ellsberg had leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to the press, revealing the US military’s secret history of the Vietnam War.) He was intimately involved in the Watergate scandal, the granddaddy of modern political theater.

It was a different time when Colson was in the public eye. The crimes with which he was connected tarnished American’s view of their government, beginning a slide in public sentiment that gained momentum with Ronald Reagan’s often-misquoted “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” (Reagan was referring to the economic crisis extant at his first inauguration, not government at large.)

Colson went on to found Prison Fellowship, an organization simultaneously founded in multiple countries to serve the spiritual needs of imprisoned people. He was recognized many times over for his later-life contributions, but his notoriety came from Watergate.

Most of the Watergate players are deceased. Liddy is still kicking, though pre-deceased by his wife of 53 years, Frances. They were all true believers, convinced that the social activism of the 1960s was a threat to the American republic, and active against that movement, to the degree of actual crimes against that republic.

Patriotism wears many colors.

Judy Battista, writing for The New York Times:

“The e-mail was finally sent to Roger Goodell at 12:33 a.m. Monday — “White smoke from the scheduling room.” That one line put an end to the N.F.L.’s yearly eye-blurring, mind-bending exercise in juggling the absurd and the inconvenient, in balancing prime-time television and 10 a.m. body clocks for West Coast teams, in sifting through 14,000 potential schedules to find the one that pleases the most and infuriates the least.”

A great read on the NFL's annual scheduling process.

Sounds like the scheduling office needs a re-write of their scheduling software. Winnowing down from 14,000 computer-generated possibilities by hand means their algorithm, as complex as it undoubtedly is, isn't doing enough.

My favorite: “indoor fireworks.”

TMZ.com:

“More slammertime for disgraced baseball star Lenny Dykstra … Nails has just been sentenced to 3 months in L.A. County Jail for allegedly holding a knife to a woman’s throat. Dykstra pleaded no contest to charges of assault with a deadly weapon and lewd conduct this morning … for incidents involving women he lured to his home by posting ads for a housekeeper on Craigslist.com. Officials tell us … when the women would arrive to his home, Dykstra would inform them the job required them to give him a massage … and then he would expose himself.”

Yes, that Len Dykstra.

… of a heart attack, a few years after suffering a massive stroke.

I suppose this means it'll be "Ryan Seacrest's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest" this year, finally.

The Verge reports confirmation of what you already knew: the best choices for mobile networking are AT&T and Verizon. Combine this knowledge with Verizon’s extensive (true) 4G and general voice coverage footprint, and the choice narrows.

Unless Verizon’s service is simply awful where you require use of your wireless phone, buy the Verizon model rather than something from AT&T.

Marco Arment, on Twitter’s recently announced Innovator’s Patent Agreement:

“A lot of people are heaping praise upon them for this, but it’s important to maintain perspective.”

Marco is the creator and developer of Instapaper, and host of the podcast “Build and Analyze” with Dan Benjamin. He was also a senior developer at Tumblr, so he’s well-qualified to discuss software development and the industry’s practice of defensive patent portfolios. Here he argues that while well-intentioned, the IPA reserves Twitter the moral (and legal) right to file patent infringement suits at will, and as such isn’t as big a deal as many commenters believe.

In an industry where companies routinely purchase multi-billion dollar patent portfolios solely as counter-suit ammunition, Twitter’s move is an incremental step away from that. It leaves some control of their employee’s patent use in the hands of the inventor, ostensibly giving the inventor a say in how a patent is used. It signals an intent, noted by Marco, to act as a gentleman entrepreneur, rather than a robber baron. Coming from a company so deeply entwined in both the Internet social networking infrastructure as well as Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, that’s remarkable.

What matters is how Twitter behaves under the IPA. They’re sitting on a patent that’s widely infringed upon, the pull-to-refresh technique used to manually trigger in-app updates. Anyone who has used the Gmail web site on his iPhone is familiar with it: swipe down on the inbox and release to manually check for new mail. Google has emerged as the latest boogeyman in software and Internet development. Let’s see how long Twitter goes without attempting to force them to license their very handy gesture-based technique.

Heather Armstrong:

“I need to take a break before I surrender to the exhaustion. I need to fill up my tank so that I can give more to my family and find more moments of peace.”

Heather has lived much of her personal life on the pages of her weblog for over ten years. It’s a bicycle she’s ridden to great acclaim and success. That’s how the world knows that her life has taken an unpleasant turn recently.

She gave a brief interview on the Today Show yesterday morning to promote her new book, and although she was composed, she was wound fairly tight. I can’t imagine going through what she’s in the midst of, let alone in such a public way.

It seems she’s reached a point where she needs to get off her bike for a while. I don’t know what surrendering to exhaustion entails, but that she’s taking a break from her only bread and butter to avoid it implies nothing good.

I’m curious to read her when she returns. Maybe she’ll be refreshed. It sounds, though, like she needs more than a week’s refreshing.

Adam Messinger, Twitter VP of Engineering, announcing the new Inventor's Patent Agreement for safe guarding the rights to employee inventions:

“The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.”

The US Congress has only made patenting and trademarking a deeper morass recently. If that body won't fix things, perhaps industry will.

Dan Provost:

“I see these as Apple’s three feasible options: keep the screen as is, bump to 16:9 but retain a 326dpi resolution, or increase the screen size while maintaing the 960x640 resolution. I hope they go with option 3, but chairman Gruber makes methinks option 2 is more likely. ”

(Via marco.org.)

Dan posts a lucid argument against the idea of a 16:9 next-gen iPhone display.

If it were my choice, I'd go with the pixel-added 16:9 version (option 2) and make the extra real estate open to notifications and other "special" programmable functions.

Video would be rendered in full 16:9 using the additional space. Older apps would continue to use the same 3:2 space as previous iPhones. Developers would have the option of making their new and updated apps use of the added space, or not, through new iOS API calls.

I don't believe Apple will backtrack on their vaunted Retina display by stretching the old pixel count to a larger LCD. That would be option 3, and it does nothing but join the bigger-is-better crowd that has sprung up in the Android hardware community. Apple design changes are always in the service of new or enhanced functionality, and a stretched display is neither.

CNN.com:

“The race of Florida teen Trayvon Martin had less to do with his death than the fact that the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him was carrying a gun, comedian Bill Cosby told CNN in an interview that aired Sunday.”

Exactly correct. Martin is dead not because he was the victim of a racially motivated crime, but because his shooter had two things: a gun, and a state law allowing him to use it when faced with less than deadly force.

James Hibberd, writing for EW.com:

“On the heels of reports that NBC is considering a creative restart on “The Office,” comes last night’s ratings: The comedy veteran fell to a series low while facing a repeat of CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” in the 9 p.m. hour.”

You had to imagine this would happen after Steve Carell left the show last season. The Office’s stories revolved around his character, and none other has replaced it.

The show has had a good run. Might be the right time to give it the axe and move on.

Techdirt:

“when people rent a movie that won’t arrive for a few days, they’re making a bet on what they want at some future point. And, people tend to have a more… optimistic viewpoint of their future selves. That is, they may be willing to rent, say, an “artsy” movie that won’t show up for a few days, feeling that they’ll be in the mood to watch it a few days (weeks?) in the future, knowing they’re not in the mood immediately. But when the choice is immediate, they deal with their present selves, and that choice can be quite different.”

In other words, future-you might like a Ken Burns documentary, but today-you wants an Adam Sandler flick. The winning algorithm helped make better picks for future-you who watches DVDs, not today-you who has streaming access to the Netflix library.

The article is a five-minute read and provides interesting details about how Netflix came to their decision not to implement the winning algorithm.

Richard Sale, writing for ISSSource:

“As ISSSource reported, Stuxnet was a comprehensive U.S.-Israeli program designed to disrupt Iran’s nuclear technology. This joint program first surfaced in 2009 and worked in concert with an earlier U.S. effort that consistently sabotaged Iran’s purchasing network abroad.”

(via The Verge.)

According to this report, an Israeli agent introduced the Stuxnet code to machines controlling Iranian centrifuges, destroying them and setting back the Iranian nuclear program by years.

There's a book somewhere in this story.

Steve Kovach, writing for Silicon Alley Insider:

“There have been a lot of rumors lately that Google plans to release it’s own tablet running a clean version of Android. The tablet will likely be sold by Google via a special online store.

The rumors also say the tablet will be a 7-inch device made by Asus and cost about $200, the same price as the Kindle Fire.”

If you’re envying the masses who have bought and loved Apple’s iPad, but have an inbred hatred of all things emerging from Cupertino, this is your chance to buy a tablet machine that’s 1. not Apple’s, and 2. not Amazon’s. Not that there’s much wrong with either.

In fact, this would be the definitive Android tablet from Android’s creator. Like the Nexus smartphones, you can’t get a more pure rendering of Google’s intent with their open-source OS.

If you’re hell-bent to avoid the Walled Garden of Jobs, or Amazon’s effort to make it easier to give them your money, this is your ticket to ride.

Or, buy an iPad, and be happy.

I’ve instituted a new design for Bazinga Journal, featuring a pair of new typefaces from the terrific Typekit.

My goal has always been to keep my weblog’s look clean and simple. With this redesign I get a little closer to achieving that.

The colors are muted, both in background and typeface. Links are in green and red, yet not boldly so. There’s enough contrast to ease readability, yet not enough to sear anyone’s retinas.

The new fonts are Acta Display for the main title and headlines, and Museo Sans for article and block text. Both are available in the free tier offered by Typekit. I’ve wanted to dig into their service for a while and I finally took the plunge.

I really like the way the redesign turned out. I expect I’ll tweak this and that over the next week or so but, for the most part, it’s done. Hope you like it.

A recent Hypercritical with John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin included discussion about web ads and ad-blocking software. It got me thinking about my own browsing habits. It occurred to me that I haven’t seen ads on most web sites in years, because I’ve used the AdBlock add-on for Chrome. I used AdBlock on Firefox for years before that, too.

I began using AdBlock in response to the garish, largely irrelevant and often intrusive ads website authors insisted on presenting. After a few weeks I forgot what a mess ads make of some of my favorite web sites.

John raised a good point though, that if browser developers included ad blocking as a standard feature, as they have with pop-up blockers, online content creation and commerce would be a very different beast. There would likely be much less unpaid editorial content. We’d all be the losers, because paid content doesn’t get as wide distribution as unpaid.

Users employing ad-blocking add-ons are doing the same on a smaller scale. By refusing to load ads, they're denying web authors the revenue that keeps them afloat. Enlightened self-interest alone makes that a long-term losing proposition.

John’s solution is to block most sites’ ads, and white-list only the few web sites he truly likes. If by “likes” he means those that provide great content but not in-your-face advertising, his solution mirrors mine. Here’s how I started my white-list.

About a year and a half ago I noticed an article on Ars Technica making a plea to readers who use ad-blocking add-ons in their web browser. They explicitly asked readers to unblock ads from their site in exchanged for great, free content devoid of intrusive advertising. They vowed to put up only high-quality, non-intrusive ads for businesses that have relevance to their readers. Being a long-time Ars reader, I knew they’d made good on that promise in the past, so I white-listed their site in AdBlock.

I see ads whenever I go to the Ars Technica site, but I have yet to be annoyed by them. As Siracusa points out, it’s not seeing the ads that’s annoying, it’s the distraction from the content that jars. Ars makes another offer, for fully ad-free content: monthly subscriptions. The reader has a choice.

I’ve made the same private bargain with Daring Fireball, The Loop and 5by5. I white-list their sites, and in exchange they don’t bomb me with distracting crap. Their ads, following along the lines of their overall site design, are tasteful and unobtrusive, and I don’t mind seeing them. The ads are often relevant to my interests and I occasionally click through to a product. The bargain works for everyone.

This is a great model for the rest of the web. If you want readers to allow your ads in their browser, ask. And make sure you’ve made those ads tasteful, relevant and unobtrusive.

Treat your readers as valued customers, not hogs at the trough. If your product is tastefully supported by ads, readers won't mind seeing them.

Mark Maske, writing for The Washington Post's The Insider:

“The NFL has upheld the suspensions of New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton, General Manager Mickey Loomis and assistant head coach Joe Vitt for their roles in the team’s bounty scheme, the league announced Monday.”

The Saints are done for the 2012 season, even if they get Bill Parcells to step in as head coach for a year. The distraction of losing Sean Payton, the disruption of a new coach adapting, or adapting to a new offensive scheme, and the close scrutiny of the league, other teams and fans all wondering 'are they still doing it?' will prove enough to keep them at .500 or worse for the season.

Former Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams did not appeal his indefinite suspension. His case will be reviewed following the 2012 season.

Williams' suspension is "indefinite," so there's no reason to assume that such a review will return him to NFL coaching. Williams had left the Saints organization at the end of last season to take the St. Louis Rams defensive coordinator job under new head coach Jeff Fisher.

I'd guess Gregg Williams is done, too.

TV Series Finale:

“While Cops frequently wins its Saturday timeslot, FOX apparently isn’t satisfied with a 1.3 demo rating. Once a Saturday night staple, the reality show has been on only sporadically this season. Now, Vulture reports that FOX will be airing Cops even fewer times moving forward.

The network is scheduling sports programming — a mixture of baseball, college football, NASCAR, and UFC matches — for the next 28 of 32 Saturdays between now and early December. That will leave just three nights that Cops could air since an America’s Most Wanted special will take up one of them.”

A pizza, a six-pack of beer, Cops and America's Most Wanted: prime Saturday night entertainment for some. No mo'.

John Walsh's AMW got picked up by Lifetime Network, but the Bad Boys won't be seen much for the rest of 2012. They may have a future on cable, though!

Frederic Lardinois, writing for TechCrunch:

“quite a few small businesses and even large enterprises in the developed world still use XP today. Even in the U.S., for example about 22% of all PCs currently still run this legacy operating system.”

We've run Windows XP Pro on all three of our small business's machines since we opened in 2005. While no-one can blame us for skipping Windows Vista, my only defense for XP these days is "if it ain't broke …"

Seriously, it's provided us with seven years of largely headache-free operation. Our main POS machine is about due for replacement, though, so Windows 7 is in our immediate future.

A riff on one of my childhood favorites: Flopsy, Mother, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter enjoying an Easter brunch. Mr. McGregor was unsurprisingly uninvited.

(Via Boing Boing, photo by reway2007.)

The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture has a set of terrific images of RMS Titanic, both from 100 years ago and the recent past.

This stuff is amazing. I had the good fortune to see a display of Titanic artifacts during a business trip to Memphis several years ago. Seeing bits and pieces of the huge vessel against a context-correct background image brought home the immensity of the ship and the loss.

If you ever have an opportunity to visit an exhibition of recovered Titanic artifacts, go see it.

(The April, 2012 issue of National Geographic has a plethora of recent images, both individual and composite, from the wreck. Worth a purchase in the paper edition.)

(via The Loop. That’s Jim Dalrymple’s weblog, a low-volume, high-quality source of interesting stuff. He began a podcast today with Dan Benjamin at 5by5.tv. I haven’t listened to the new podcast yet, but if it measures up to the rest of Dan’s network, it’s worth a listen.)

Can't wait!

BBC.com:

“James Bond star Daniel Craig has said that he will continue to play the British spy for as long as he can.

The star - who is taking on the role for a third time in the latest film Skyfall - told the BBC he would “keep going until they tell me to stop”.”

(Via CBR.)

The original iPad made its debut about two years ago. Introduced in January, 2010 and delivered in April, it was a fresh start after a long, uninspiring line of tablet computers from a variety of manufacturers. But because Apple took the time to re-think the way a tablet might be used, indeed, took the time to tell the rest of the world how tablet computers would be used, it stuck this time.

My wife gifted me a first-generation iPad later that year. I was surprised not only because I’m usually the one who buys our electronics, but also because I’d had no plans to get one for myself. I hadn’t been able to make a use case to justify the expense. I was too glued to my laptop.

Over the year and a half I’ve owned it, though, my iPad has developed its own use case. I moved from reading paper books to ebooks, and my two-decade Wired subscription made the jump as well. And then came comics. I hadn’t much interest in them when I was younger, but I’d wanted to read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series after greatly enjoying his novel Neverwhere. The Comixology app for iPad made finding and owning them easy. Remote access to my collection of machines, lighter travel and less upkeep were nice bonuses, too.

Apple delivered the third-generation iPad last month.

People have asked me whether I’ll trade up from my original iPad, but two years and two models later I’m in the same place I was before Kelly handed me the box from Apple. I can’t think of a use case for a device that’s essentially the same as what I already own and enjoy.

I’ve read Gruber’s review, and The Verge’s and Ars Technica’s. I’ve listened to the usual suspects on 5by5 admire the new iPad’s features. Its retina display sure looks great, and a faster processor would be welcome. LTE networking is nice, although my iPad spends much of its life in my home, saturated in WiFi-N.

Stepping back I see that the new iPad doesn’t do anything my old (hah) iPad does, it simply does it all faster. And prettier. And lighter, too. But that only makes a good case for enjoying what I have, rather than lusting after the latest update. As terrific as the new iPad is, it’s only an update.

Though a new toy is always welcome, the new iPad won’t be appearing on my doorstep anytime soon.

I suspect I’ll keep enjoying my first-generation iPad until Apple no longer supports it with iOS updates. That day is coming, maybe as soon iOS 6 debuts later this year. Then I’ll have a choice to make … how much do I want whatever new features are in that new operating system vs. how well does my original iPad get the job done.

Until then, though, I’ll stick with what I’ve got. I like my gadget just fine. And I think that’s what Apple was shooting for, anyway.

Coming this August, the remake of Total Recall.

Catch the neat homage to The Matrix as Farrell takes out a squad of armored cops? Looks great!

(via CBR.)

Hillary Busis, writing for EW.com (via CNN.com):

“In an upcoming ad campaign, the blond Bond is going to forgo his trademark cocktail for a swig of Dutch beer. Let’s hope it doesn’t arrive shaken.”

Do not like. The last two Bond films have each been a catalog of product placement, though not distastefully so. Ditching the spy's signature libation, however, might be going a step too far.

On the other hand, I'm so ready for another Daniel Craig Bond flick. Perhaps I'll knock back two Vespers as I watch, to make up for Bond-san's lack. On PPV, of course.

At least the brew will be a Heineken, and thereby qualify as "good beer."

Mac McClelland, writing for Mother Jones:

“”We want you to go work for Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.,” they said. I’d have to give my real name and job history when I applied, and I couldn’t lie if asked for any specifics. (I wasn’t.) But I’d smudge identifying details of people and the company itself. Anyway, to do otherwise might give people the impression that these conditions apply only to one warehouse or one company. Which they don’t.”

Fascinating long read about working conditions in a shipping warehouse, where workers pick and ship products in double-time for well-known online retailers.

These employees, thankful to have jobs, are unable to gain better employment for lack of training, education, or effort when it would have made a difference. Yet they’re unable to simply walk away for lack of income. They epitomize the phrase “wage slave.”

Employment like this is only going to increase given the expanding online share of worldwide retail sales.

Here's a terrific visual presentation of the current wind flow over the US. It's zoomable!

Give it a few seconds to load, it's fairly popular right about now.

(via @Ihnatko.)

"Boehner takes slight dig at #Romney "while POTUS is overseas I think it's appropriate that people not be critical of him or our country.""

(via @LukeRussert.)

David Frum makes a good case for a US national identification card. Worth a read, especially if you disagree with the proposition.

(via The Daily Beast.)

Dave Nanian:

"After six and a half months exclusively using @windowsphone, I went back to my iPhone 4S for two days.
And actually missed Windows Phone."

Uh oh.

Jeff Blagdon, writing for The Verge:

“The NIF’s goal with these experiments is called inertial confinement fusion (ICF) — a type of fusion reaction created by heating and compressing a small piece of solid fuel, in this case a frozen pellet of a hydrogen isotope (a different kind of experiment than those the SLAC lasers are being used for). If done successfully, the fuel will “ignite,” causing a fusion chain reaction that produces more energy than is added by the laser.”

Fusion-based nuclear energy stands a good chance of supplanting fossil fuels for domestic energy production, if scientists can figure out how to ignite hydrogen fuel. With this successful experiment, we're one step closer.

Glenn Garvin, writing for The Miami Herald:

““Castro knew,” the intelligence officer would tell a CIA debriefer years later, after defecting to the United States. “They knew Kennedy would be killed.””

(Via Chuck Todd.)

Fascinating article about Cuban Intelligence operations over the past several decades as detailed in a new book, to appear next month. In it, a Cuban signals intelligence operative recounts how he was told to channel his listening efforts toward news coming out of Texas on November 22, 1963. President Kennedy was assassinated later that day.

I finally got around to investigating Apple’s iTunes U service, an aggregator that offers free online courses from colleges and universities around the world. I’ve wanted to do this for what seems like years, but took the plunge only after Apple updated the service a couple of months ago.

They’ve created a universal iPhone/iPad app for lectures, notes and assignment delivery that lays out the curricula in a concise, session-by-session list. Each class session opens to video, slide and PDF content.

I’ve wanted to learn iOS programming for iPhone and iPad devices, so I clicked through to the engineering offerings. Right at the top of the list was iPad and iPhone Application Development from Stanford University, CS193P. What better source could there be?

This course is a set of recorded lectures from the Fall 2011 quarter, including approximately ten weeks of instruction as well as six programming assignments. It includes nineteen video lectures recorded during actual classroom sessions, a set of slides from each for later review, and an assignment about every two weeks.

The assignments will, after the first, melt your brain. There are a few things conspiring to make this so.

First, CS193P is a high 100-level course intended not for the casual student, but rather one matriculated into a computer science program. By the second assignment you will be expected to incorporate recursion into multiple class methods in order to create a functional RPN calculator. If any of that didn’t make sense, this isn’t the course for you.

(I hadn’t worked with recursion since I programmed Karel the Robot in Pascal to find a cookie in a maze twenty-seven years ago. It took a while for my synapses to find and replay that exercise.)

Second, and probably more to the point, this course is offered by Stanford University. It moves RIGHT ALONG. The professor, Paul Hegarty, covers the main points of each class’s topic and gives a live, hands-on code demo.

You’ll spend copious amounts of time later digging through Xcode documentation for the finer details. You’re keeping up with students who were accepted into a Stanford engineering major, so … buckle up.

(Prof. Hegarty is knowledgable and a good teacher, having been hired by Steve Jobs for NeXT right out of Stanford years ago. You could say he was present at the birth of the modern Mac architecture.)

Third, Objective-C, the native high-level language for programming iOS devices, isn’t exactly the easiest to learn. I’ve had some experience with OO languages, taking a command line-oriented C++ programming course in the early nineties and, a half-dozen years later, self-learning Java. I have a stock tracking application that I wrote in Java and used to watch my accounts rise and fall through the Internet bubble of 1999-2000 floating around somewhere.

Objective-C, however, possesses a significantly different syntax for accessing class and instance methods and properties, which takes a little getting used to.

This is the first time I’ve been exposed to both this, umm, different OO language and the model-view-controller paradigm. MVC is an approach to programming for point-and-click, graphic UI devices that separates the business parts of the code from the viewing parts by mediating between them with a controller. Complex applications use multiple MVC classes to interact with the user. Tying them together adds to the difficulty of learning the language.

The first assignment from this course was fairly easy, walking through a code example and adding functionality to a basic RPN calculator.

The second assignment quickly ramped up the difficulty, requiring the addition of programmability, test variables and conversion of RPN-format formulae for infix-notation display. That took me about a week to accomplish.

The third assignment, just finished, extended the previous assignment’s requirements to include graphing the results of a user-entered formula over a visible range of values, as well as turning what had been an iPhone app into a universal iPhone/iPad version. Working through the differences between those two displays took another week.

(iPhone possesses a small display, so you just segue from the calculator to the graph view. iPad is larger, so you have both the calculator and graph visible in a split view until the user rotates the display. Then you have just the graph, and a button to display the calculator in a popover. Both device’s graph displays must handle zooming, panning and triple-clicking to move the graph origin around the screen. All of this is accomplished in custom code.)

Keep in mind that Stanford students are taking this course along with at least another CS course, plus another science and perhaps a distribution course.

The upside to taking this iTunes U course is that I have all the time I need. I’m not a member of a class, I'm just auditing. The class only meets as often as I play another lecture. Having completed the third assignment I’m halfway through the programming part, though there are about a dozen more lectures to be viewed.

If this all sounds like a chore, well, it is. But if you want to learn iOS programming this is the course you want. The advanced topics start around lecture three or four, and by the time you’re done you’ll have a rich understanding of how to create iOS apps. You’ll be miles ahead of anyone working through a basic, self-taught course. But you’ll work for it.

Ryan Faas, writing for Cult of Mac:

“The ban on electronic devices has come under fire recently as the F.A.A. has been certifying the use of iPads in the cockpit during all phases of flight (including takeoff and landing) by various commercial airlines as a replacement for hefty “flight bags” of paper manuals and charts.”

If it's ok on the flight deck, it's ok in the cabin.

If airlines want your device shut off during taxi-out so they have your attention for the safety briefing, they should say so. Otherwise there's no good reason to ban devices during any phase of flight. Certainly not electromagnetic interference, which would be a concern on the flight deck where iPads are already in common use.

Could you take your eyes off the road?

(via kottke.org.)

Jim Dalrymple, writing for The Loop:

“Rian van der Merwe:

My loyalty comes from the fact that I’m unable to separate Instapaper from its creator, Marco Arment.

And it works really well.“

Yep, that’s a quote of a quote, the sight of which is usually an indication that a weblog writer is about make a lazy post. It got me thinking about Instapaper, though, so here we go.

I’ve been using that application for a couple of years now. I’ve been listening to Instapaper author Marco Arment’s weekly podcast musings for as long as he’s produced one, too. As van der Merwe writes, it’s hard to separate the app from the author.

That’s because Marco is not only a successful developer, but a thoughtful and pragmatic entrepreneur as well. Though occasionally not what you’d expect from an software author (he advises settling a wrong-headed software patent suit out of court rather than bankrupt yourself fighting it), his ideas and opinions on making independent software development a life choice are borne out by the evidence of Instapaper. He’s the poster boy for good software design and difficult choices carried through to a functional software tool, and the ease of making a living though the iOS App Store.

In short, becoming familiar with the author made me want to use his product all the more.

Jonathan S. Geller, writing for Boy Genius Report, says Apple is about to reach a market capitalization more impressive than Exxon-Mobile’s: the entire US retail sector.

Click through for an astonishing graph. Note the near-vertical climb in Apple’s market cap over the past year.

Jordan Kahn, writing for 9 to 5 Mac, reports on a usually reliable financial analyst's note today:

“A new report from Misek (via BusinessInsider) claimed small quantities of TV components are starting to move through Apple’s supply chain. He also said production of up to 5 million units could kick off as early as May, and he still expects the product to launch by Q4 of this year”

Misek accurately predicted the new iPad's slightly lower resolution Retina display last year.

Still unknown is how Apple will work with content providers (cable companies? TV production companies?) to fill their new television product with programming people actually watch.

Matt Lynley, writing for Silicon Alley Insider:

“Pinterest does not believe it infringes on copyright law and is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

We’ve reached out to Pinterest to find out what their official policy regarding images that potentially infringe on copyrights. Now we have our response from Pinterest:

Pinterest provides a service platform through which people share images, videos, commentary and links with friends or with others. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides safe harbors for exactly this type of platform. If a copyright holder objects to any of the postings – and so far very few have objected – Pinterest will follow the safe harbor procedures set forth in the DMCA.

So, as long as Pinterest removes content if it gets a legitimate copyright complaint, it is in the clear.”

Clearly the Pinterest founders have thought this through, and sought legal opinion on the matter before investing their time and money booting the company. The test will come when someone big, like a media company, files a tort claim rather than a DMCA takedown request.

Courtney Garcia, writing for MSNBC.com, quoting Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker in the first Star Wars prequel film:

“According to The Sun,  he destroyed his “Star Wars” memorabilia, and now only makes appearances at sci-fi and comic book festivals, refusing to even watch the films because they are too “creepy.””

Then he’s in agreement with about 99.9999% of Star Wars fans who had much the same to say about his role, and the prequels in general.

Anakin Skywalker: the Wesley Crusher for a new generation.

ESPN.com:

“The Indianapolis Colts will release franchise quarterback Peyton Manning.”

HOLY CRAP.

Manning signed a very lucrative long-term contract with the Colts one year ago, after a 4700-yard passing season. Then came the surgeries, the lost season, and now this.

While I really liked watching Manning march his offense down the field for last-minute touchdowns, my hope is that he doesn't wind up with the Washington Redskins next season. We've had plenty of aging Pro Bowlers sign big contracts only to flame out one or two seasons later. Our next quarterback must come from the upcoming draft.

Rob Beschizza, writing for Boing Boing:

“According to a lawsuit filed in Georgia, butterwitch Paula Deen used a racial slur beginning with “n” to describe the perfect wedding.”

Sounds like Paula Deen just became too heavy for the Food Network to carry any further. Brother Bubba doesn’t sound like a lightweight, either.

CNN.com:

“Former New York Mets great Lenny Dykstra was sentenced Monday to three years in prison after pleading no contest to grand theft auto.”

Dykstra was a local hero when he played for the 1986 Mets, the last Mets team to win the World Series. We called him "Nails."

That was the last full year I lived in my parent's house, leaving the following year to pursue my career. What great playoff and Series games they were, first against the Houston Astros and Mike Scott's near-unhittable split-finger fastball, then against the Boston Red Sox.

The following year I was living in New Hampshire among Sox fans, but I never let them forget that Bill Buckner's error against the Mets cost them the World Series. Again. This was long before the Sox' two World Series wins this century.

And now he's going to jail, not only a thief, but a financial scammer. Dumb.

They paid him for his baseball, not his brains.

Andy Ihnatko, writing for The Chicago Sun-Times:

“I’ve been using the developer preview edition of Windows 8 on a multitouch tablet for a few months, and now I’ve been using the new consumer preview for a little less than a day. My overall opinion is so high that it has to be stated right here in the first paragraph: Microsoft has really cracked something here. With the Metro user interface, they’ve created a simple and beautiful design language that’s relevant to a broad range of devices and to the ways that people use computers in the second decade of the 21st century.”

Microsoft's new Metro UI (user interface) has garnered nothing but praise since its first demo last year. Andy claims not only to be interested, but "tempted."

How exciting this is … MS will produce something later this year that is not only well-crafted, but original as well. Long criticized for solely producing derivative work (Excel after Lotus 1-2-3, Word after Wordperfect, Windows after OS/2, DOS after DR-DOS), the company is poised to unveil something truly new into the world: a novel touch UI.

As Andy goes on to say, though, MS shoehorns the Windows 7 desktop UI into the product, sans Start button. The old desktop metaphor is useful for legacy software (MS Office, the company's other cash cow), but it apparently doesn't sit well next to the new touch UI.

So it's up in the air as to whether Windows 8 on desktop and laptop machines, where both the old desktop and new Metro UI are available, will be a hit. But on ARM-based tablets devices, where the Metro UI is the only interface provided, Windows 8 appears to be a winner.

Byron Tau, writing for Politico:

“According to the latest national Fox News Latino survey, none of the Republican contenders for the presidential nomination poll above 14 percent in a head-to-head matchup against Obama. That’s a 17 point drop in support from John McCain’s 2008 share of the Hispanic vote, garnering 31 percent of the that group four years ago.”

(Via Luke Russert.)

Analyses of the last two US census results have indicated a surging US Hispanic population. As one commenter wrote, “the future is brown.”

If this trend and polling data are accurate, the GOP will have a long-growing crisis on its hands in the next decade. It could have been avoided.

President George W. Bush’s administration helped author legislation to reform US immigration law during his second term, a rare even-handed proposal welcomed by Democrats and independents. It was roundly condemned by Republicans, and failed to reach a vote in the Senate.

The failure of immigration reform was a key issue among Latinos in the last presidential election. It appears to have long coattails. Act in haste, repent ... and repent.

Ars Technica reports that the US Department of Energy has signed agreements to assist in development of small nuclear reactor technology designed to power small areas. The technology includes sealed reactors, trucked into place and returned to the manufacturer when their fuel wanes.

These agreements join renewable energy projects and efficiency improvements in a portfolio of public effort to realign US energy production away from fossil fuels.

The US DOE announcement is here.

This is the kind of thinking and planning we get for appointing a Nobel laureate in physics to head the DOE.

Clive Crook has a terrific look at American populism, Rick Santorum and the US political Left in BusinessWeek.

It says something about the fattening of American liberalism that a right-winger like Santorum can more effectively garner support from blue-collar voters than can liberals in a time of economic uncertainty and high unemployment. The Left has gotten fat off America's excess, and protecting that fat has weakened its response to voters' struggles.

Santorum is a right-wing nut, but he's an honest nut. He believes every damn word that comes out of his mouth. Can anyone say that about Romney or Gingrich?

(Via Luke Russert.)

Headline should be: Limbaugh Makes Argument That Women Should Not Vote For Republicans.

Halimah Abdullah, writing for MSNBC.com:

“The ongoing debate over birth control took a particularly nasty turn recently when conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute” for speaking out about the issue.”

Limbaugh went on to say that “we” should get something in exchange for the requirement that insurance companies provide women free contraceptives: movies of the sex had using the contraceptives.

Limbaugh, voyeur. Dope.

And the hammer falls.

"Cheat."

ESPN.com:

“Crew chief Chad Knaus and car chief Ron Malec of Jimmy Johnson’s No. 48 team have been suspended from the next six Sprint Cup Series races, a result of rules infractions found on Feb. 17 during opening day inspection for the Daytona 500.”

Matt Homan has an early review of today’s Windows 8 Consumer Preview. He loves it.

There are several touches in the new Metro UI garnered from Apple’s OS X Lion and iOS. Full screen apps, multi-touch gestures and and icon-driven launch screen are just a few. Microsoft has implemented them in their own way, though, and that invokes a tension between the new Windows OS on the one hand, and OS X and iOS on the other.

Consumers will have a tough choice of flavor in their gesture- and icon-based OS.  Meanwhile, we’re back to the good ol’ days of Microsoft vs. Apple, only in a good way this time because they’re both strong, consumer-focused companies.

The new mobile computing era is shaping up quite nicely.

Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica, spills the beans on how to grab a copy of the most technically interesting and, for Microsoft, bet-the-company important Windows release since Windows 95. Remember when people lined up at midnight for something other than an iPhone?

Microsoft might actually create a strong competitor to Apple's OS X here. It's a genuinely exciting time to be a technology geek.

Matt Burns, writing for TechCrunch, shows us why we shouldn’t get our tech news from CNBC (or any other mainstream news organization). They’re usually wrong right up until the news is old.

Electronista:

“Lenovo has climbed to the top of Rescuecom’s computer reliability ratings for the beginning of 2012, achieving a significantly higher score than its competitors. Apple has fallen to fourth in the lineup, despite maintaining a stronger rating in past years and achieving a surge in overall market share, with a score that is just over half of Lenovo’s rating.”

This report emerged the day after my previously reliable Lenovo Thinkpad’s hard drive failed. ‘Twas a fine machine while it lived, but it needs a new main storage drive and cooling fan now.

Our Apple products continue to chug along just fine, though.

This brings up thoughts of replacement cycles. Well-managed (and well-funded) IT departments put their machines on a life cycle clock. Three years is a common lifespan; when a machine is approaching its fourth year there is a replacement order made, client software installed, local data transferred and the old asset retired.

Major manufacturers often buy used equipment by the pound, crediting owners for retired products against the purchase of new. In that way the manufacturer locks in customers.

It’s less likely an individual will adhere to a computer life cycle. Who wants to plan for another computer purchase when they’re still paying off their current machine?

Think of it as insurance. That new machine is going to fail at some point, sooner the more it’s used. Laptops will fail sooner than desktops from reduced cooling capacity and wear from physical movement. A hardware failure, particularly a main storage drive failure, is usually more disruptive than a software fault because it renders the machine useless.

How to deal with this eventuality? Begin by implementing a smart backup strategy. Ensure that you can recover from a failure in a day or less. That entails daily (or nightly) backups to an external drive and some means of booting from CD or USB drive.

There are many good software solutions available for this, and both Windows and OS X ship with built-in backup software. There’s no excuse for not enabling and using it.

The better products are set-and-forget. Plug in an external drive, answer a few questions and you’re all set. Be sure to test your backup periodically to make sure it’ll be useable when you need it.

Consider putting away a few dollars each month after buying a new machine. It need not be much. Five or ten dollars a month is enough to replace an internal hard drive after a couple of years. A drive that makes it through the first month of use is not likely to die in the next couple of years.

At some point replacing a failed drive won’t satisfy the urge for a new machine, even if the replacement drive is a speedy SSD. Sock away more money if you want your next machine paid for when the current machine’s life is up. Divide the purchase price of your most recent machine by twelve, then again by three or four. That’s your monthly saving target against a three or four year life cycle.

Doing this is not any more interesting than paying your monthly car insurance premium, but you’ll find purchasing your next machine so much more palatable when you already have the money in hand to do so.

What to do with a retired machine? Services like Gazelle will buy your old equipment. The payout varies by the age and condition of the old equipment, so a three-year replacement cycle will net you more for your old machine than will a four-year cycle. Taking care to reduce physical wear of a mobile device such as a laptop will bump up what you’ll be paid when you’re through with it. Just be sure to securely wipe the contents of the storage drive before sending it off.

By putting your new machine on a life cycle replacement schedule and adopting a systematic backup scheme you’ll make hardware failure or the urge to buy a new machine much less painful.

Eric Schmoldt, writing for ESPN Sports Radio Interviews:

“I think Peyton Manning ends up playing somewhere else.

...

The New York Jets. … I love Mark Sanchez and there are 25 other quarterbacks in this league that I would take Peyton Manning over. There's a turf war in New York. The Giants just won the Super Bowl. The Jets are fighting for every inch of space they can get in the newspaper. How do you get that inch? How do you get the headlines? You sign Peyton Manning.”

Hmm. The Jets have done better with Sanchez at QB than other teams have done with their quarterbacks. I think that makes other teams hungrier for a free agent Manning.

I wouldn't put making a play for Manning past the Washington Redskins' owner Dan Snyder. He has a long history of grabbing aging Pro Bowlers on the downhill side of their career, paying them too much and getting too little in return. Donovan McNabb and Deion Sanders, to name a couple.

And what's up with ESPN cutting Jaws from the MNF broadcast booth, yet leaving Jon Gruden on the air? Gruden is the reason that broadcast is nearly unwatchable!

Christian Zibreg, writing for 9 to 5 Mac:

“According to a Hong Kong court ruling from last July, Apple founded a United Kingdom-based company to snap up rights to the iPad trademark in various markets without revealing Apple was the purchaser.

However, a mainland China court ruled in December that Proview was not bound by that sale, opening doors for Proview to threaten a country-wide ban on iPad imports and exports in China.”

A Hong Kong court has upheld Apple's purchase of the iPad trademark, but the mainland China court has not. That begs the question, how many Chinas are there?

The mainland Chinese government has been quick to claim 'one China' in matters related to Taiwan since that province became a haven for Nationalist partisans.

Britain relinquished sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1999, creating a second Taiwan-like region where Chinese hegemony is in doubt. One would think that, as with Taiwan, the mainland Chinese government would be quick to enforce the Hong Kong court's decision across all of their 'one China.'

Here's a way to a quick solution: should a US State Department official openly wonder at how in the court's view there are apparently two Chinas, mainland and Hong Kong, the mainland government would quickly intervene and end this ridiculous two-court, two-China dispute.

Or maybe there are multiple Chinas.

Kevin Drum, writing for Mother Jones, discusses Dylan Matthews' Washington Post piece about Modern Monetary Theory. That theory, like that of John Maynard Keynes, prescribes government deficit spending during recessionary periods as a means to stimulate economic activity.

While Keynes' theory eschews continued deficits after a recession has passed, MMT claims that deficits don't hardly matter at all. It's an interesting claim, born out by recent US economic history.

Paul Krugman begs to differ, though, in a short piece on his blog last year.

Fifteen minutes of accessible economic discussion, with links to more. Turn off the tube and learn something.

Barry Ritholtz, writing for The Washington Post:

“What I learned from Facebook’s filing was that they have 161 million active users who actually go to Facebook.com each month. That’s not shabby — but it’s a far cry from the MAU claims of 850 million. That definition of active users is probably overstated by a factor of 500 percent. I suspect that the $100 billion valuation may be overstated by nearly as much.”

(via The Big Picture.)

Barry found these detailed numbers by examining the company’s S1 filing, the document announcing to the Securities and Exchange Commission Facebook’s IPO intentions.

Ritholtz is guilty of mis-reading the S1. The 161 million number is Facebook’s reported monthly active users (MAU) figure for the US alone in December, 2011. (Go here and scroll down to “Trends in Our User Metrics” for a discussion of what constitutes an MAU.) He appears to quote it as MAU ex-third party application access, in other words, actual facebook.com web site access by human users. That’s not the case.

The point remains, though, that Facebook reports a very large number of monthly users (~850 million), but is only logging a fraction of that as actual marketable eyeballs.

How can Facebook claim an active user number higher than a count of actual active users? By counting every click of a Like button, anywhere on the Internet, as an active use. A user need never go to Facebook’s web site to be counted as an active user.

Such users don’t expose themselves to Facebook’s advertising and other monetization methods, but they do increase the cost of maintaining Facebook’s infrastructure. They’re a reason Facebook makes less revenue per user than other popular services.

Investors expecting to buy into an 800,000,000-user service are really buying into a much less-used product, a fact worth considering before investing.