Should you be interested enough to try delving deeper into that place on the music map marked as “Prog rock: Here be demons”, you could do worse than this list from Slate,
August 19, 2012
ESR on the limits of “lawfare” for Apple
To put it mildly, ESR isn’t a fan of Apple’s lawfare approach to competition:
It’s beginning to look like Apple’s legal offensive against Android might backfire on it big-time. Comes the news that Judge Koh has declined to suppress evidence that Apple may have copied crucial elements of the iPad design from prototypes developed by Knight-Ridder and the University of Missouri in the mid-1990s.
Those of us aware enough of computing history to be aware of early work by XEROX PARC and others have always been aware that Apple’s claims of originality were highly dubious. Apple’s history is one of adroit marketing and a facility for stealing adapting ideas from others, wrapping them in admittedly excellent industrial design, and then pretending that all of it originated de novo from the Cupertino campus.
The pretense has always galled a little, especially when Apple’s marketing created a myth that, footling technical details aside, the whole package somehow sprang like Athena from Steve Jobs’s forehead. But it didn’t become intolerable until Apple began using lawfare to suppress its competition.
The trouble with this is that there’s actually a lot of prior art out there. I myself saw and handled a Sharp tablet anticipating important iPhone/iPad design tropes two years before the uPhone launch, back in 2005; the Danger hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick) anticipated the iPhone’s leveraging of what we’d now call “cloud services” in 2002-2003; and of course there’s the the Sony design study from 2006, described by one of Apple’s own designers as an important influence.
If only Apple were honest about what it owed others…but that cannot be, because the company’s strategy has come to depend on using junk patents in attempts to lock competitors out of its markets.
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UK girls did better than the boys in annual examinations
Tim Worstall explains how it was engineered and why it’s not the wonderful accomplishment that some have been exulting about:
As a general rule one of the things that we know about education is that girls do better under a system of continuous assessment and boys under a system of competitive examination. This is of course not necessarily true of any one individual: but it is on average across any particular age cohort of children. If you want the girls to do better than the boys then skew the testing system to course work. Want the boys to appear to do better then bugger the homework and see what they can regurgitate in two three hour periods in the summertime.
That we really do know that this is true comes from the way that a few years back the system of examinations in England and Wales was deliberately changed to reflect this very point. GCSEs, A Levels, are now more based upon coursework than they used to be. The actual exams themselves now have less importance in the system than they used to. The stated objective of this change was to lessen the skew in favour of boys that a purely examination based system entailed.
So it is possible to exult about the girls outdoing the boys these days if that’s what you want to do. For it would be an example of a government policy, a very rare one indeed, actually achieving the goal originally set out. The educationalists wished to reduce the achievement gap between boys and girls. They did so.
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Minnesota Vikings to play at Wembley?
Don’t panic, Vikings fans … the team isn’t moving. What is being considered is to allow the Vikings to play a couple of “home” games at Wembley Stadium in England while they await the end of construction on their new stadium:
The NFL and Vikings are both reportedly very keen to make this happen. It makes sense for the Vikings because, with the new stadium construction, they’ll have to play away from their real home for up to two years anyway. A couple home games at Wembley, which seats 86,000 for American football, means two fewer home games at temporary residence TCF Bank Stadium, which after upgrades will still be able to accommodate less than 60,000.
Of course the state-side fans might gripe about losing a couple of home games, but if there’s money to be made elsewhere, the Vikings won’t hesitate to follow it (sorry fans). It seems what we have here is a match made in heaven. The NFL wants to make more inroads in the European market, and the Vikings want to make back some of the revenue they’ll be losing by temporarily moving into a much smaller venue. So it seems inevitable that, for awhile at least, the Vikings will become England’s team.
A side-benefit to this would be that it ensures at least two games will be telecast outside the Vikings’ home region: a matter of great interest to this Toronto-area Viking fan.
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The end of the world is nigh
Sell all your posessions! Live for the now! Repent your sins! Or, as Matt Ridley suggests, keep calm and carry on:
This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. “super volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?” the site’s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on December 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but “the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.”
When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following — from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.
Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s [“and 1980s” was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”
Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”
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