It’s Global Ignite Week, with more than 50 Ignite events taking place all over the world. The second Ignite Raleigh was held tonight, and there were lots of entertaining and informative speakers. If you get a chance, you should definitely attend your own local Ignite event if you can.
I was one of the speakers at the previous Ignite Raleigh, last August, and wrote up the experience. If you’re going to be speaking at Ignite, it’s probably worth checking out:
Glenn Greenwald has an important blog post on the latest smear campaign by the terrorist-loving right:
As I noted yesterday, the group run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol released what is certainly one of the more repugnant political ads of the last decade, if not the most repugnant. It’s the type of McCarthyite act which would, if we had any minimal standards in our political culture, result in the shunning of Cheney and Kristol by all decent people (instead, it will likely land the Vice President’s daughter on multiple Sunday talk shows where she can pose as an expert on national security).
Some Republicans launched a smear campaign against the lawyers now employed by the Justice Department who once represented detainees at Guantanamo. This is the product of a deep cynicism that compels them to try to gain political power by capitalizing on people’s fear of terrorism.
What they’re really attacking is the Constitution, which guarantees everyone a fair trial. They’re not arguing a principle — they’re just trying to destroy people through insinuation. The bottom line is that this sort of garbage is always going to be persuasive to a certain type of idiot. Don’t be an idiot.
Oh, and the reason I say they love terrorists is that without the terrorists to use as a foil, they would have no path back to the positions of influence they so desperately crave. They want Americans to embrace unlimited Presidential power, expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if they’re really lucky, a new war with Iran. What they need for more people to agree with them is more, increasingly spectacular terrorist attacks. And don’t think that in their black hearts, they don’t wish for that at some level.
Other than a few sleazy actors like Intellectual Ventures there’s an understanding in the innovative side of the tech business that you don’t file aggressive patent lawsuits. You write a lot of patents, you file defensive lawsuits and countersuits, but in general you don’t use your patent portfolio as a big club to try to destroy competitors. Apple’s taking a big crap on that detente.
Nelson Minar on Apple’s patent lawsuit against Android handset maker HTC.
Update: ArsTechnica lists the patents in the suit. They’re all software patents. You disappoint me, Apple.
Jono from Mozilla makes a great point that most people (including me) have completely overlooked when it comes to the Web — most people don’t really understand URLs:
So what this mess teaches us is that there are lots of people out there who don’t know how to read a URL. The URL in the location bar, if they notice it at all, must appear to them as nothing but a bunch of computer gibberish.
Think about it from their point of view. They knew that Googling “facebook login” and then clicking the first link took them to their Facebook login. I wouldn’t call it the best way of getting to Facebook, but it was obviously working for these poor souls. Until one day, they saw something they didn’t expect. If you don’t know how URLs work, then all you know is that your expected Facebook login page has somehow been replaced with… something else.
The whole blog post is really thought provoking and worth reading for anyone who designs or develops software. For those of us who have completely internalized URLs, it’s hard to empathize with people who see getting to Web sites as a series of steps they follow. At this point it doesn’t matter whether people access all the Web sites they use through Google or some other search engine, other than to figure out how to make things better for people who use the Web that way.
I wonder whether browsers could display URLs in a way that makes things easier for users. The most important thing about a URL, especially in terms of preventing fraud, is the domain name — the real one, not the fake one that’s included to defraud people. Maybe it should be highlighted in some way with the owner of the domain displayed as well.
Via Simon Willison.
John Gruber on the name of Windows Phone 7 Series:
The bigger naming question: Why name it “Windows” anything? If Microsoft is going for a clean break, why not a new non-“Windows” name? I think it shows just how perverse Microsoft’s obsession with “Windows” is. There’s no good way to leverage their Windows PC OS monopoly to extend it to mobile, other than the name, so they’re sticking with it. It doesn’t even make literal sense. The whole point of the “Windows” name is that it was for a system whose UI revolved around the concept of on-screen windows. There are no windows in the Windows Phone 7 interface.
It’s funny because it’s true.
You already know what I think about Roger Ebert’s writing. Turns out he is inspiring great writing from other people as well. Don’t miss Will Leitch’s Roger Ebert story. It’s great, and twisty, and I won’t spoil it.
I’ve always been impressed with the stable of bloggers The Atlantic has amassed. There are some who I actively avoid, but it’s an impressive group overall. The latest redesign shows that whoever was in charge really doesn’t understand what’s good about a good blog. Take a look at this post from Ta-Nehisi Coates explaining to readers just what happened. Coates used to have a blog that had his posts listed in reverse chronological order, just like this one. Now he’s got what amounts to a category page on the Culture channel. I think that multi-author blogs are kind of iffy anyway, and diluting the pure voice of Coates (or any other blogger) in this way is very likely to kill their readership entirely.
The other bloggers at The Atlantic have weighed in as well, and they’re not too happy (with good reason). Here’s James Fallows and here’s Andrew Sullivan.
I’m sure that theory was that mixing up blog posts with all sorts of other content would give more exposure to the magazine content, but what it winds up doing is driving away the readers who wanted a quick fix from whichever blogger they were reading. This is especially true for the blogs that supported commenters. Any dedicated community of regulars is likely to just dissolve when subjected to changes like the ones The Atlantic has imposed. What they’re liable to wind up with is a group of commenters that are more like the ones you see on newspaper Web sites — committed cranks, total morons, and drive-by ranters who lower the value of the site every time they push the submit button.
Next we see how The Atlantic does damage control.
Patrick Mueller has some patent-related tips for software developers and people who make stuff in general. He was asked to testify in a patent infringement case because the defense attorneys found a paper he wrote published on the Web, and thought it would help their case.
His tips are simple enough:
- Document the crap out of the things that you make.
- Put your documentation on the web, and make sure search engines can find it 20 years from now.
Be sure to click through to read about his experience as a fact witness.
James Surowiecki ably describes the gulf between Democrats and Republicans on expanding access to health care. Democrats see the fact that 50 million Americans don’t have health insurance as a problem that the federal government should solve in the near term, and Republicans don’t. Democrats also see the fact that for certain groups of people, it’s impossible to get affordable health insurance at all as an individual as a problem, and the Republicans don’t. Or at least they don’t see either of those problems as being worth doing what it takes to solve them.
But there’s another side of the issue that he completely ignores — the fact that health care costs are rising rapidly and that both Medicare and employer-funded health insurance are headed for disaster. Most retiree health plans are already in deep trouble, and the second order effects are severe. One of the reasons General Motors has been uncompetitive is that a substantial portion of the revenue they earn from each car they make goes to pay for health insurance for retired autoworkers. Republicans do not seem to want to engage on this issue, even if America’s system were perfect today, the rising costs insure that it’s going to have big problems down the road.
And this, to me, is the bigger problem. Republicans and Democrats can debate until the end of the world whether the government should make sure everyone has health insurance. I am strongly in favor of universal health care, personally. But regardless of where people stand on that issue, our government is going to have to engage with the issue of rising health care costs and growing Medicare enrollment sometime soon. The fact that Republicans are unwilling to treat the problem as the impending crisis that it is disqualifies them from being taken seriously as far as I’m concerned.
Earlier this week Tim Bray explained why he’s given up on software patents and today we learn that Facebook has patented the activity stream, which was not their idea in the first place. Of course the patent examiners wouldn’t know that, further illustrating the fact that the patent office shouldn’t be in that business and that nearly all progress in software is iterative. We don’t need patents.
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