Month: February 2010

Truth and justice are on our side,” Mr. Silverman said. “We think it is a ridiculous argument to say these are ones and zeroes we like and these are ones and zeroes we do not like.

Coming off the train at 11 pm I run into the same guy who I saw earlier in the dog park. Our dogs our fraternal twins…we bought them from the same guy, from the same litter. Now that Max is shaved, she looks almost identical to her brother Zelda, and they know it. Those fuckers must have spent a good 45 minutes chasing each other around the same icy patch of dog park this evening. Anyway, same guy, couple hours later. And I’m thinking “I’m so cold, I don’t have a hat or gloves, I just want to run home and not make small talk right now.” And this dude looks at me and goes “I have an extra hat, do you want it?” So now I have a hat. And also a new found respect for why I don’t live in Manhattan.

It turns out that throughout this saga, folks have been getting excited over the same few Apple patent application drawings in slightly different forms again and again, because the claims are continually being rejected, modified, and resubmitted.

Byrne, Blumenauer, and Sadik-Khan all stressed that they just want to make it possible for people to choose how they get around, an objective that should be uncontroversial. Yet the urbane cyclists pushing for these changes may be their own worst marketing problem. Bike culture is just too cool and clubby for its own good.

In the quake’s immediate aftermath, all eyes turned to Romer, who had left his full-time post at Stanford the year before to proselytize his idea of “charter cities.” A charter city is an enclave created by fiat on an empty stretched of land, governed by the (laissez-faire) rules of its charter and administered by a third party nation. Anyone can emigrate there and can leave at any time. Romer’s favorite historical example was Hong Kong, which proved to be the lodestar for China’s capitalist reforms. Last summer, Romer modestly proposed transforming the American base at Guantánamo Bay into a charter city run by Canada, with the aim of creating Cuba’s own Hong Kong.

A federal judge in Manhattan on Tuesday ruled that the City of New York did not violate the constitutional rights of cyclists by requiring them to file for parade permits when they rode in groups of 50 or more. The ruling is a blow to organizers of the Critical Mass bike protests in Manhattan.

Google has shown little understanding of human needs outside of search algorithms, as its Nexus One debacle [14] exemplifies. A stripped-down, Internet-required netbook is Google’s vision — that’s taking “boring” and “compromised” to another level. The first indications of the iPad point to a device that’s anything but boring, and the compromises it no doubt has made will not be top of mind.