Moving Walkway

Bush’s Surveillance Act | The Onion: “American citizens cannot be spied on, with the exception of all of them”

I’m all for protecting our country and those in it (citizens and visitors). My concern is the use of fear as the primary force driving policy. FISERV has important aspects, but it looks to go too far. We need checks and balances. The checks are not for the law enforcement who always “do the right thing” which are the majority. But there is a minority and they need checks. There are options for these checks, but having it outside of the organization is better than inside for something like privacy. The echo chamber is too powerful.

I don’t think I have anything to hide, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep “my business” and that of my family and friends to myself.

While the Onion is funny, there is often an undercurrent of truth which make the humor possible. This is one of those cases.

Danah Boyd has a nice piece on the mass sharing of the “social graph” at just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. One section:

The odd thing about forced exposure is that it creates a scenario where everyone is a potential celebrity, forced into approaching every public interaction with the imagined costs of all future interpretations of that ephemeral situation. This is not just a matter of illegal acts, but even minor embarrassing ones. Both have psychological costs. Celebrities become hermits to cope (and when they break… well, we’ve all seen Britney). Do we really want the entire society to become hermits to cope with exposure?

This is an important topic. How much privacy should we have? Should we be guaranteed any level of privacy? Just because information is available, should it all be trivial to access? At what cost? I expect the genie will leave the bottle and never return.

Freeing information and allowing it to evolve by connecting all of the dots has value, but Danah brings up the reality often ignored that everything has a cost and consequences. The job of a civil society is to make a balanced choice…deliver good to most while protecting the weak.

I updated my Apple TV to “Take Two.” The positive surprise was the “AirTunes” feature so I can push music to my TV…and you can even have it played in sync with the computer (multiple speakers). I may need to get AirFoil to stream random audio to my TV.

But the one thing I want isn’t there. When you have a music video in a playlist, it doesn’t play one after another. I want to be able to set a series of music videos (or podcasts for that matter) and have them play in order. Two uses:

• Better parties
• Custom “TV channels” based on podcast related playlists.>/li>

What bugs me is that it DOES work on on both iTunes AND the iPod Nano. At least I’m not the only one who wants this.

SiliconValley.com – First Edition Newsletter: “Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang signaled to Microsoft Wednesday that he is in no hurry to accept its $44.6 billion takeover offer. His message came as the company was sued by several shareholders criticizing Yang for not working harder to secure a better offer or to improve Yahoo’s performance.”

Anytime there is a significant transaction or “bad news” for a company, someone should start a pool on how long it will take for the first lawsuit to happen. So predictable. If you don’t think the company is run well, why do you own stock in it?

I watched the video talked about in this article…

HTC Magnum rumours rife following giant phone gag | Reg Hardware: “A group of self-confessed pranksters have admitted that their mock-up of a monster HTC tablet, dubbed the Magnum, doesn’t signal the manufacturer’s release of a super ‘pocket’ PC. However, the web’s now clogged with rumours to the contrary.”

And it became pretty obvious to me what I was looking at. I could be wrong, but the clue was that it came out right before the World Mobile Congress (formerly 3GSM) in Barcelona. If you were going to have a booth at a show and your product is very small, why not have a “blown up version” as a prop on display?

Unlike the massive iPhone’s in the window of Apple stores, it is neat that it is a fully functional version.

I keep thinking about the MacBook Air. It meets just about every one of my criteria. Just a little light on performance (memory capacity being the one that comes most to mind), but the tradeoffs made are very reasonable to me. My problem has been the cost of the solid state drive. It is just such a premium for something that will come down so fast in price over the next 12-18 months.

But now that I see how straight forward disassembly is at iFixit.com, I’m thinking I could get it now with the HD and upgrade the drive in a year when the prices of the SSD come down and people are offering replacements.

Hmmm, could be a good plan.