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In attempt to justify to myself not only the cost of the iPhone but also the hassle of obtaining one on Friday if possible, I have put together a list of reasons why I am the perfect iPhone customer: My primary use for my mobile phone is making and receiving calls, but I don’t make that many calls. I’m not a heavy cell phone user. I don’t see the lack of voice dialing and the lack of useful speed dial bothering me. They’re not really features I depend on (or in the case of voice dialing, even use). I am already a ATT Wireless (formerly Cingular) customer. So even though their network sucks, it’s not like I’ll feel like I’m missing out on something. The voice mail on the iPhone is purported to be light years better than regular voice mail. That is a killer feature for me. I hate most existing voice mail interfaces so badly that I can barely stand to use them. I am very much looking forward to voice mail with a decent user interface. (I use Callwave for voice mail now, so my voice mail just goes to my email inbox.) The number one feature I’d like on a new mobile phone is the ability to read email. I use Gmail for everything these days, so the iPhone is probably the perfect device to provide access to it. The number two feature I’d like is a real web browser. Every review says the iPhone’s web browser is excellent. My current phone’s web browser is non-existent. That’s a win. The iPhone offers Wifi support. I am usually at home or in my office, both of which have Wifi that I have access to. So I’d probably be using the iPhone on those networks most of the time. On the other hand, those are also environments where I have access to a computer, so I’m not sure how much I’d need the iPhone in those situations. Perhaps the big liability of the phone is that it has the virtual keyboard, but I’ve never had a phone with a real keyboard, so again, the iPhone won’t suffer by comparison. I have certainly never come to enjoy entering text with the phone keypad on the phones that I’ve had. Laura Lemay says she’s not buying an iPhone. She already has a smart phone she paid a lot for, she’s very much used to its keyboard, and she’s wary of first generation Apple products. Makes sense to me. ...

Walter Dellinger deflates the “strict constructionist” judicial philosophy in one elegant paragraph: Senators especially like it when a nominee says a judge’s role is just to be an “umpire.” But broad constitutional phrases are different from sports rules, so a judge would be like an umpire only if the game—instead of having a strike zone and a set number of balls, strikes, and outs—provided instead that “each batter shall have a fair chance to hit the ball” and “each team shall have a reasonably equal opportunity to score runs.” Key language of the Constitution is that broad, meaning that men and women appointed to the bench must necessarily exercise judgment. Which is, of course, why they are called judges, and not umpires. ...

The early verdict on the iPhone seems to be: believe the hype. It got a blessing from Walt Mossberg, which is the most coveted positive review in the world of computers and gadgets. Update: Valleywag attempts to add up a consensus.

What happens when a satirical press release gets picked up in the media as real news?

So the traditional measures of database scalability have to do with query speed. Does your database run queries quickly enough? Do you have contention issues when one thread is trying to insert data and another is trying to run some kind of crazy five table join. One problem I’ve run into with large MySQL databases is what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, maintenance scalability. Let’s say I need to index a column in a table with three million rows. The create index statement can take 20 or 30 minutes to run. Same thing if I need to add a new column to a large table. So how do people get around these maintenance scalability issues without downtime? In the MySQL world, is there an answer to this question? ...

After yesterday’s gloomy post about how we have failed to defend ourselves from nefarious elected officials, I read this story praising the bureaucracy for imposing some accountability on the government. Christopher Hayes writes: But a funny thing has happened over the past six years. At a time when the press failed to check a reactionary Administration, when the opposition party all too often chose timidity, it was the lowly and anonymous bureaucrats, clad in rumpled suits, ID badges dangling from their necks, who, in their own quiet, behind-the-scenes way, took to the ramparts to defend the integrity of the American system of government. ...

Jason Levine offers a counterpoint to John Gruber’s iPhone post from the other day, explaining the enterprise features offered for the BlackBerry that the iPhone won’t match. They’re both right, of course. The iPhone isn’t going to try to compete in the space where BlackBerry excels. At the same time, there are going to be lots of people who buy or want to buy iPhones and will try to cope with the corporate IT environment to the degree possible. Whether the iPhone is good enough to compel IT departments to accommodate the iPhone and to compel Apple to provide more enterprise-friendly features remains to be seen. ...

The Audobon Society reports a precipitous decline in many bird species in the United States. Why are the birds disappearing? The proximate cause is habitat loss, but of course the root cause is indifference: The Audubon Society portrait of common bird species in decline is really a report on who humans are. Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life. It’s not that we believe that other species don’t matter. It’s that, historically speaking, it hasn’t been worth believing one way or another. I don’t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a whippoorwill if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has dropped by 1.6 million. ...

Timothy Noah is kicking of a new series for Slate on what Presidential candidates are promising in terms of health care reform with a look at Barack Obama’s health care plan. Here’s what he says about the state of health care in America: Health care has lately ranked second, third, or fourth in polls asking what the federal government’s greatest priority should be, and I predict it will soon settle in for a long run as No. 2. (For the foreseeable future, the Iraq war will remain No. 1.) As I’ve noted before, the American health-care system is in an advanced state of collapse owing to the failure of an 80-year experiment in market economics. Politically, the problem has grown more urgent because rising health-care premiums and diminishing coverage are starting to cause serious problems for the middle class. Health insurance costs more and more and covers less and less. Per capita health-care costs are about twice what they were when Hillary Clinton tried unsuccessfully to reform the system in 1994, and the ranks of the uninsured have increased by 13 percent. Universal health insurance, which has eluded the political system at least as far back as 1912, when former president Teddy Roosevelt endorsed it in his failed Bull Moose bid, is starting to look inevitable. Even insurance companies think so, according to a May 30 article by Jackie Calmes in the Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal, the insurers have given up blocking universal health care, “Harry and Louise”-style, and are now redirecting their energies toward co-opting it. ...

Go read John Gruber’s blog post on the bizarre Wall Street Journal article today letting the world know that the iPhone won’t connect to proprietary mail services. I would assume that anybody who’s seriously considering buying an iPhone already knows that.