Ah, yes; the age of mob-rule is upon us.  Only it’s a kinder gentler mob-rule than those of old.  It’s a mob-rule that merely looks askance at you and scoffs and maybe snorts in contemptuous disbelief.  And yet it’s effective.

I wrote a while back about both Netflix plummet from grace and their eventual (inevitable?) reversal.

More recently I wrote in opposition to SOPA.

In response to this last article a fellow blogger wrote to me about an infographic they published.  I would like to share that with you.

I hope you have found this informative. Now go sharpen your knives.

There are, perhaps famously, two bills in the national legislature right now which are threatening to disrupt everything the Internet has accomplished over the last decade or more in terms of openness, discovery, and innovation.  These bills are SOPA and PIPA.  I believe they are both bad (very bad in fact) and I want you to understand them as best as is possible.

Here is a great discussion of the material history behind these two bills and a discussion of how they will likely impact you and I as well as a brief discussion of why they will not have any of their claimed intended effects on piracy.

The important part to understand is that removing sites from the name system will not make those sites inaccessible.  Those sites will still be accessible using their numeric IP addresses and using links created with those numeric addresses.

However, giving corporations the power to remove my site or your site or any site from the name system because they believe it is in their best interest (without due process and without court-worthy evidence)… well, that just puts the biggest bully in charge of the playground.

Please watch the above video; please educate yourself on matters of fare-use and sharing; please tell your elected representatives what we have discovered and how bills like these will be bad for all of us; and please watch the sky for signs of bills like this raining down in the future.

Useful Links:

CraigsList

Wikipedia

Did you ever used to read Marvel’s What If…? comics?  I did.  Fascinating alternate histories in the Marvel universe.  There is a lot of literature out there like that.  I once listened to a story about a time traveler who went back to help the South win the war using advanced weaponry.  I love Radio Reader.

Anyway, this whole steampunk thing is like an entire What if…? genre.  The thing is there were a lot of clever bastards roaming around the planet during the steam era.  One such non-dumby was Charles Babbage.

One of the crazy steam era ideas Babbage put forward was the difference engine.  More or less a pocket calculator for an enormous pocket.  It is run by a steam engine, after all.  He also worked on (though never completed) a more advanced calculating machine called the Analytical Engine.

Here’s where the steampunkers can get excited.

Recently Nathan Myhrvold commissioned and London’s Science Museum has put on display a working model of Babbage’s difference engine.  You can find out more about it here.

But that’s not enough apparently.  Now some British folks are looking to build a working model of the Analytical Engine from Babbage’s various notes and partial designs.  Here is a good starting point article.

With a likely price tag in the millions, why are they building this?  Surely the only answer is “because we can (we hope)”.

Good luck, fellow crazies.

For those of you who have already been working with HTML 5, the announcement that Adobe was throwing in the towel on mobile Flash development probably comes as no great shock.  It’s just a matter of time before HTML 5 relegates Flash (and it’s retarded step-cousin Silverlight) to the pages of history.

Let’s not be cruel; it had a good run.  I mean Flash in general.  There have always been issues with the mobile versions.  We’ll likely miss them less.

Sure all the browsers out there (Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, &c) are now supporting HTML 5, but there are still a lot of developers who haven’t dipped in (or at least not very deeply).

Running a search on Amazon for “HTML 5” returned more than 12,000 results.  Not that Amazon has much of a search engine, but nonetheless it’s here to stay based on those numbers.  (Searching for “Flash” only brought back about 18,000 and many of those were for The Flash.)

Anyway, the real buzz out there is about how Steve Jobs was totally right all along because he’s so smart and we love him to death but not really to death though he’s dead now and we are all really really sad (and so what if people are dying in Africa or China or whatever; you’re a jerk).

Well, you can read my article debunking the notion that Jobs was right about anything in his address and decide for yourself.  You can find that article here.

Oh, and here is a nice article on the current announcement.  (You should visit this article at least for the cool graphic they plucked from themz Interwebz for Flash.)

Have fun with that and don’t let anyone, not even an asshole like me, dissuade you from your best line of reasoning.

You may recall that I was particularly critical of the decision by Netflix to move their DVD by-mail service to Qwikster and utterly separate their streaming and by-mail services (see my article).  You may have also noticed that my opinion on the matter happened to fall in line with popular opinion on the matter.  I know: The Horror!

Well, it has come to pass that those executives in charge (in spite of the usual tendency of executives to live in an error-free fantasy land) have recognized the error of their way and have reversed the decision to make this division a reality.

The NY Times did this full article.  What I like to see in the article is the wonderful spin put forward by company representatives which clearly signal to us that they fully intend to return to Nonerrorland immediately.  Nonetheless, for now, Netflix customers may continue their streaming and by-mail enjoyment mostly unmolested.

The price hikes are still in place and could certainly still use some reasonable refinement.  It was a two dollar augmentation to get the second (by-mail) service added to your account.  Now it’s about double.  This may work out according to the accountants (lost customer satisfaction replaced by increased revenue per customer), but this assumes there is no dollar value attachable to said satisfaction.  This is not true; customer satisfaction is paid advertising dollars and there is no better advertising than the words of satisfied customers.

Just so’s you know.

As part of my (apparently) on-going series on plastics (see this and this post) I have found another TED video discussing those wonderfully manipulable materials.  This one is about a guy who managed to develop a recycling plant and process by which all plastics can be effectively and efficiently converted back into the raw materials from which plastic objects are created (those tiny pellets).

Hope this helps the future as much as he seems to think it will. I’m all for helping the future.

So you’ve probably all heard about Netflix and their strange (and post hoc) announcement concerning their DVD mailing service.  Let’s take a look at what they are actually saying.

First of all they are discussing the separation of mailing and streaming into two separate business entities, at least as concerns the public.  If they are in fact creating two business entities in the legal sense, perhaps that is preparatory to selling off the mailing side of things?  Oh, I shouldn’t speculate.

Now in dividing these two sides they have created a need to give each its own name.  Of course since Netflix was originally a mailing service the mailing service will keep the Netflix name and… what?  Oh, they did?

Ok, so because Netflix has such strong brand recognition and they recognize that “DVD by mail may not last forever” they want to use that strong brand recognition to continue the success of the side on which they are betting: streaming.

Since the mailing side is what made them what they are they would of course want to create a name for that service which is immediately recognizable, sensible, and pretty fucking cool.  Qwikster, of course, is none of these.

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery.

I can only assume it’s a clever combination of the English word quick and the ever popular delivery site Napster but employing kewl spellin stuph.  Except Napster is more like streaming.  Am I getting this right?  Sending things through the US postal service is considered quick when compared to streaming?  Knot kewl.

While the by-mail service may not in fact last forever, it’s pretty clear it is dead to Netflix.  C’mon, they named it in part after a dead music sharing service.  If they were really trying to be cool they could have named it zombiesbymail or something.

Perhaps I’m being too critical.  Perhaps I’m harshing their mellow.  After all this is not likely to have a large impact on their customer base, right?

A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places.

Really?  That’s necessary?  Because I have an Amazon.com account and I can use that to sign into Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr or Amazon.whothefuckknows and I can buy shit and I can rate things and those ratings carry over to the other sites.

Our view is with this split of the businesses, we will be better at streaming, and we will be better at DVD by mail.

I have to wonder what could have evoked this alleged view.  I know, you’re wishing Amazon had done that instead of using all those tabs on their sites.  Can we still buy books there?  Yes, actually the book store is still their flagship.

Meh.  We can let history decide, but my prediction is that this maneuver will land them face down in the mud.  And by them I mean poor Andy Rendich who got stuck heading the zombie fork in the Netflix road.

One Laptop Per Child may have seemed overly ambitious, but the fact is they have been making an increasing impact as they have progressed through their mission.  (Learn more about their mission here and here.)  The one possible criticism against the program might be its price point: $100 for a laptop is cheap but can you give anyone a $100 computer?

That program is doing great and I would not want to discount their successes.  However, there is a new player in this interesting corner of the computing world.  Raspberry Pi is about to introduce a $25 computer ($35 with twice the RAM and a NIC).  It’s still under development (somewhere between alpha and beta phases) but it’s looking very strong for its November release schedule.

Here is a talk about their goals (which consist essentially of eliminating the price problem in getting computers into the hands of future developers):

Here they run a demonstration of Quake (the computer game) on this tiny machine:

And here you get to see their two hardware prototypes (the large one in beta and the small one I believe is a production prototype):

What I find particularly interesting is that they have managed to pack all of this computer into something as small as a USB stick (their final version intends to be about as big as a credit card with all the necessary connections—audio, video, NIC, USB, power).

Bravo, fellas.  Keep going.

I came across this article discussing the current use (and incredible buying prices) of defensive patents. I like the angle the author takes in arguing against defensive patents as a their own raison d’être.

Good Defensive Patents Are Bad Patents

I felt like this was a perspective worth spreading.  I hope you enjoy the article too. I look forward to your comments and questions.