Linked List: August 8, 2011

Monday, 8 August 2011

Once a Met, Always a Met 

Mike Monteiro:

They still sell beer during the 6th.

How Bad Is News Corp.? 

Michael Wolff on the state of the Murdoch empire and its Mob-like structure.

Please Stop Calling Gadgets Sexy 

Mat Honan:

Dear technology journalists of the world: You know how you called that gadget you just reviewed sexy? Tell me, do you intend to fuck it, or do you simply plan to shove it up your ass?

Mark Cuban on Patent Reform 

Mark Cuban:

  1.  End all software patents. Don’t make them shorter, eliminate them.

  2. End all process patents. They serve absolutely no purpose.

That’d be a good start.

DigiTimes: Non-Apple Tablet PC Shipments Expected to Grow 134 Percent in 2012 

So that’s what it has come to: “non-Apple tablets” as a separate category.

Danny Sullivan on Google and Copying 

Good piece by Danny Sullivan defending Google. But:

Gruber tells us that the Android UI was copied from Apple. Hall says that the idea of a touchscreen smartphone was copied by the iPhone.

Newsflash. As a Windows Mobile user from 2004, I had a touchscreen smartphone that ran apps long before that idea ever punched itself out of Apple. My phone did things that Apple later copied, too, such as the innovative copy-and-paste feature. It was magical.

As a reminder, here’s what Android phones looked like before and after the introduction of the iPhone. Yes, it really did evolve to resemble Windows Mobile circa 2004.

There’s an argument to be made that copying good ideas is not wrong, that copying is how progress is made. That everything is a remix. But you can’t seriously argue that Google doesn’t copy. And I’d say they copy more ideas from others than others copy original ideas from Google. You don’t see many clones of Google Wave.

My recent complaints about Google haven’t really been about copying, in and of itself, though. It’s about Google’s whining and hypocrisy when competitors fight back.

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? 

Everyone is talking about this op-ed by Drew Westen in yesterday’s NYT. So good:

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Obama’s problem is that citizens on the right have never agreed with his policies, and but now, citizens on the left have grown disillusioned with his leadership.