Technology has advanced and gone further than any of us could have imagined over the last 20 years. Go back just 15 years and even the best forecasters would be shocked at the number of us who have cell phones, use email, have DVD players, spend as much time online as we do watching TV, have MP3 players, replaced our film cameras with digital cameras and more.
The next 15 years will have just as many new devices that we cant imagine today.
What if they all became illegal?
Mark Cuban has written an excellent post about how the law is strangling the innovation and the American economy.
Good move. Let’s just hope he doesn’t fail his physical.
John Maeda makes a good case that the original iPod’s controls are superior to those on the third and fourth generation iPods. The controls on the third generation are clearly the worst. However, I’m not sure that I agree that the original is better than the fourth. This is primarily due to the fact that I haven’t actually used a fourth generation iPod yet. Hint, hint.
The soundtrack for this week has been The Fiery Furnaces‘ EP. That title is quite a misnomer. The album consists of ten songs with a running time of 41:04. I guess, when compared to their previous album, Blueberry Boat, which is over 76 minutes long, the name fits. Usually, EPs are filled with stuff that either didn’t fit into the LPs or wasn’t good enough to make the cut. The music on EP certainly doesn’t fall into the latter category. With the exception of a couple songs, everything on this album is way above average. Even the weak spots are good. They’re just not as great as the rest.
Anyway, I can’t get enough of this band. Yeah, their music can be somewhat cheesy. It’s sure to make aficionados of Metallica think less of you. But in a lot of ways it fulfills my inner-child fantasies about what rock music should be. It’s noisy, beautiful, messy, complex, and childish. And it feels good.
From Yahoo (via Drudge Report):
Today, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers filed 24 separate copyright infringement actions against nightclubs, bars, and restaurants in 15 states and the District of Columbia. These establishments (listed below) have publicly performed the copyrighted musical works of ASCAP’s songwriter, composer and music publisher members without receiving their permission to do so, resulting in lost income.
And the music industry’s money-grab continues.
The Swiss Army Ambassador XL is a beautiful watch. I don’t think I could stomach paying $550 for it, though. There are so many more important things the money could be spent on. Still, it’s nice to look at.
This blog, and most of the others that run on my code, now insert rel="nofollow" into links in comments. (The rest will likely be updated this weekend.) Here’s a good explanation of why this is being done from the Google Blog:
If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.
This means that the criminals are wasting their time when they spam this site.
Scott Rosenberg (via Scripting News):
This speech wasn’t just soaring rhetoric. It was a lighter-than-air burst of helium verbiage — lofty language untethered from the perplexing world we occupy and from the messy events of the last four years, sentences floating off into an empyrean of millennial vagaries.
Peggy Noonan (via Drudge Report):
Ending tyranny in the world? Well that’s an ambition, and if you’re going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn’t expect we’re going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it’s earth.
So, how many new wars will it take to reach this goal in the next four years? I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s at least one.
