Linked List: March 3, 2010

Wednesday, 3 March 2010

Republican Representative Introduces a Bill to Put Reagan on $50 Bill ★

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC):

“Every generation needs its own heroes. One decade into the 21st century, it’s time to honor the last great president of the 20th and give President Reagan a place beside Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy.”

Bill Clinton, of course, left office with higher approval ratings (particularly the average for his second term) and a balanced budget.

Cloud-Based Video Storage From Apple? ★

Greg Sandoval, reporting for CNet:

The company’s representatives have recently spoken with some of the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their content on the company’s servers, two people familiar with the discussions told CNET. That’s in addition to streaming television shows and music. […] Apple’s vision is to build proverbial digital shelves where iTunes users store their media, one of the sources said. “Basically, they want to eliminate the hard drive,” the source said.

There are two ways to interpret this. One would be that Apple will provide online storage for your iTunes purchases as backup, so that if your hard drive fails or your computer is lost or if you simply buy more movies than you have space to store yourself, you still have access to everything you’ve bought. Think of this model as like IMAP for iTunes content — it would also allow multiple devices (computer, iPhone, iPad) to remain in sync over the air, rather than the current model where devices need to be tethered via USB to your computer in order to sync. I think this would be fantastic. As it stands now, iTunes customers are responsible for the data integrity of their purchases. Update: Think of it this way: if Apple doesn’t do something like this, then what’s the model for owning an iPad as your primary computing device?

The other way to interpret it — the dystopic take — is that Apple wants to remove local storage entirely, except perhaps as a cache that we can’t control. In this model, if you disconnect from Apple’s servers, you lose access to your library. (Given that we’re lucky to complete phone calls on weekday afternoons in certain U.S. metro areas, we’re a ways off from this being feasible, even if it is what Apple has in mind.)

‘Already Dead’, Eh? ★

Worth a re-link, just to point out this remark from “genius” patent troll Nathan Myhrvold regarding Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997:

“Apple is already dead.”

(Myhrvold at the time was Microsoft’s CTO.)

Not a Good Move, Perception-Wise ★

Dan Frommer makes a good point:

But in terms of perception, it’s really the latest sign from Apple that it is terrified of Google, whose Android operating system is becoming a formidable rival in the smartphone industry.

Whether it’s true or not doesn’t matter. This is how it looks.

The U.S. Patent System vs. Innovation ★

Eric Von Hippel, professor of technological innovation at MIT, in an interview with The New York Times:

“It’s a bad scene right now. The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation — that’s what society gets out of it. The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out.”

Yes, the patent system is supposed to reward the innovators themselves, but it is also supposed to benefit the public interest.

London Sperm Bank’s New Brand ★

There’s nothing Futura can’t do. (Thanks to DF reader Tom Davis.)

Nilay Patel’s Apple vs. HTC Patent Breakdown ★

Patent-by-patent overview of all 20 patents upon which Apple claims HTC is infringing.