Day: 24 September 2011

The Macalope Weekly ⇥

The entire column is great, but this section takes the cake:

Oh, sure, the slideshows might have seemed cute when you started. They’re easy to write and generate 10 times as many ad impressions, but now they’ve reached the stage where they’re more a call for help than anything else. Like the latest from Don Reisinger.

Apple iPad 3 Might Face Trouble at Launch: 10 Reasons Why

Here we go. There are 10 points and we’re gonna do them all!

White House Petition to End Software Patents Is a Hit ⇥

There are lots of good reasons to end the practice of patenting software, including the fact that software patents are primarily a vehicle for transferring wealth from the innovators who create it to patent trolls whose sole “product” is litigation. (Software patents are also sometimes used by big companies to take their rivals down a peg or two, in what seems like an effort to pile up so many cross-licensing fees that they all cancel each other out.)

I think this is the crux of the current patent war(s) between companies. The current patent system is broken. That isn’t to say that everything shouldn’t be patentable, but there are thousands of patents covering arguably obvious ideas and vague, generic software features.

The Fraying of a Nation’s Decency ⇥

Anand Girdharadas, writing for the New York Times:

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.