Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr, continuing the great 2012 New York Times tradition of framing a criticism of the technology industry as a judgement against Apple:

The evolution of Apple into one of the industry’s patent warriors gained momentum, like many things within the company, with a terse order from its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs.

And a yarn is then spun in which a cabal of Cupertino inventors/samurai train themselves, behind closed doors, to wield the mighty patent and use it for the forces of evil.

Oh, and there’s this (compressed to expunge some backstory):

In March 2010, Apple sued HTC, a Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer that had partnered with Google. […]

It was one of seven major smartphone and patent-related lawsuits Apple has initiated since 2006. […]

Over the same period, Apple itself has been sued 135 times, mostly by patent trolls interested in its deep pockets.

You know, patent trolls. Forget about them, though, because Apple are the real patent assholes stifling innovation.

They have to be, otherwise the whole “iEconomy” moniker doesn’t make any sense. There has been a lot of great reporting this year under that title, but sometimes it feels as though The Times reportes put in extra elbow-grease to be critical of Apple first, critical of the industry second. How can trolls be brushed under the carpet in an article examining how shitty the patent system has become?

My pal Moisés Chiullan welcomed me onto the latest episode of his podcast, Screen Time, over on the 5by5 network.

The good stuff (i.e. me talking) starts around 14:55 when Moisés says we’re two peas in a pod. We talk about the new Roku bundled projector from 3M, Frankenweenie and Doctor Who, among other little tid-bits that should pique your interest. Check it out.

3M and Roku just announced a partnership, shipping a mini-projector with an integrated Roku Streaming Stick:

The projector is small enough to be carried around, bright enough to project a picture 120-inch picture, and powerful enough to pack over two and a half hours of battery life–“long enough to watch just about any movie,” according to Mark Colin, 3M general manager of mobile interactive solutions.

This thing sounds even dumber than the streaming stick itself, which will only work with televisions whose HDMI ports are Mobile High Definition Link (MHL) compatible. This allows the HDMI port to feed power to the $99 (!) stick.

I don’t get the thinking here. It’s more than likely that you won’t be able to plug the streaming stick into anything other than 3M’s projector, so there’s no real value-add. The Fast Company article by Jillian Goodman linked above also drops this bit:

As far as Roku goes, they’re aiming at nothing short of being the OS of TV. “I guess I would say Roku is sort of where I thought the world had been heading for a while,” says [CEO Anthony] Wood. “It’s just taken a while to get here.”

Why not partner with actual television makers? Better, why not start by building Roku as an OS on the 3M projector?

Anyway, I still love my Roku LT. They offer the most comprehensive web-TV offering out there and I want to see them succeed. This stick just sounds like a year or more of wasted effort.

If you want to order a 3M Streaming Projector Powered by Roku, please use this link so I’ll get a few bucks. You’ll be supporting this site and independent writing.

Kris Holt at The Daily Dot:

TweetDeck, which is owned by Twitter, gives you the option of seeing updates from your Facebook friends in the same timeline as tweets from people you follow. While that’s a useful tool for many people, it appears the measure is breaking rules on displaying tweets, which came into effect Friday.

I know, I can’t believe the hypocrisy at Twitter either.

James B. Stewart, [shooting from the hip in The New York Times][nyt]:

Apple’s use of its own mapping technology in the iPhone appears to be a textbook case of what’s known as a tying arrangement, sometimes referred to as “bundling.” In a tying arrangement, the purchase of one good or service (in this case the iPhone) is conditioned on the purchase or use of a second (Apple maps).

To the degree that tying arrangements extend the control of a dominant producer, they may violate antitrust laws.

Bullshit.

Apple is making it abundantly clear, almost embarrassingly so, that they offer many competing map platforms on iOS. Yet because Google¹ Maps isn’t available on iOS somehow Apple is breaking antitrust laws on the scale that Microsoft did with Internet Explorer?

Mail some of whatever they smoke in midtown down Austin way, wouldya?

GitHub:Training is a brand new site from the social coding network:

No matter where you are in the world, we have a mix of both live classes and recorded tutorials that you can access from the comfort of your own computer.

Very neat idea with a handful of free classes I may just audit.

Of course, “git - the simple guide” should spin you up pretty quickly, but knowing Git is only the beginning. Having just dipped my toes into hosting code at GitHub, there is definitely a learning curve to the way the site uses version control, with a slew of power tools waiting to be unleashed.

Lisa Fleisher for The Wall Street Journal:

“My world almost ended this morning when the local Starbucks told me they were out of Pumpkin Spice Latte,” tweeted Jason Sizemore, 38 years old, of Lexington, Ky.

Cynthia Smalls, a barista at a midtown Manhattan Starbucks, said steamed customers have grown emotional on days her location runs out of pumpkin sauce. “They go crazy. The day we first found out we had a shortage, forget it,” she said.

Her own surprised reaction: “You guys do know it’s just a drink, right?” she said.

Thanks a lot, Obama.

(via Daily Intel.)

I picked up 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America¹ a short while back on the recommendation of my pal, Rafi. I’ve always loved Albert Brooks and was curious what a novel by the comedian and auteur would be like. Plus it had the added bonus of being cheekily billed as a near-future tale of what would happen if America elected a Jewish President. Hilarious!

While it is a work of comedy, Brooks also makes a lot of astute observations about our nation and the geo-political climate we live in. In the run-up to the Presidential election, I highly recommend you give it a look.

When I wrote yesterday about Mitt Romney’s PBS comment, I refrained from commenting on his context: “I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.” 2030 deals largely with an America that becomes dependent on Chinese funds. While initially I thought of the book as a sort of conservative cautionary tale, Rafi turned me on to the idea that Brooks is offering instead a positive outlook on a globalist future. China’s ascent, in other words, doesn’t have to be America’s undoing.

There is a patina of old-world racism to Romney’s riffs against taking Chinese money. He could have set forth a plan to avoid taking foreign money altogether, but refusing British or German funds doesn’t light a fire under Americans’ asses. When he talks about China he’s invoking images of some kind of unsavory back room handling, loan sharking being peddled alongside opium pipes and gremlins. Now, there may well be reasons not to grow our debt, but racial myopia isn’t one of them.

2030 paints a starkly realistic, if exaggerated, picture of America’s trajectory, laying bare the classist, ageist and racist rhetoric that has come to define our politics. It does so with plenty of laughs and without taking a partisan stance. One of the main lessons I learned is that cooperation between China and the US should be far from our worst fear. I don’t want to wait 18 years as a nation to come to that simple realization.

I wrote this last year after Steve Jobs’s departure from Apple:

I got my first Mac in 2002, and no other tool has enhanced my ability to express myself better. Steve: thank you.

Still true.

Apple has a nice tribute up on their home page today, the one year anniversary of his passing.

{% blockquote -Mitt Romney http://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162258551/transcript-first-obama-romney-presidential-debate October 3, 2012 %} I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you too. But I’m not going to—I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it. {% endblockquote %}

Mitt Romney’s PBS rejoinder¹ has quickly become the most talked about soundbite from last night’s Presidential debate. It seems as though everyone has a Big Bird joke or critique to share today, quipping that the avian celebrity has been fired or some other nonsense.

But let’s be serious about this. The PBS volley is a stunning bit of political theater; a calculated and workshopped line designed to do exactly what it has done: spread like wildfire. While the wonks break down his many dubious claims, Mitt Romney has thrown the rest of us some gristle. He fit a pop culture reference into a direct threat against the event’s moderator, Jim Lehrer. LOL!

Beneath the fun,² however, there is something very cynical and dangerous brewing. There is nothing funny about cutting subsidies to Public Broadcasting Systems. The comment that spawned a few comedic Twitter accounts should be seen as a signifier of the stark differences between these two candidates.

I believe in the arts and the media. I believe, with every fiber of my being, that no nation can become or stay great without investing in its most creative citizens. After all, without culture, what are we? Who are we?

So I find it baffling that politicians are constantly willing to put arts and media funding on the chopping block, but I find it more disturbing that we tend to get strong-armed into believing that they’re right. America is hurting, Mitt Romney tells us, therefore we shouldn’t be pouring millions of dollars into a puppet show. And people believe him because, with everything going on in all of our lives right now, they can’t bring themselves to tell him he’s wrong.

I find it highly unlikely that a Mitt Romney administration will actually be able to de-fund PBS or other endeavors that generally live in fear like the National Endowment for the Arts.³ It’s more likely that this rehearsed “zinger” is a feint intended to keep us abuzz with talk of how slick and collected the Republican contender looked and hope we don’t notice some of his more gross misstatements from the evening. Still, it’s indicative of the kind of cynicism we can look forward to if Romney is elected.

It’s true that the economy is weak. Many of us are out of work or underpaid. Benefits that we once enjoyed have shriveled up. States are barely getting by. There’s growing unrest in the Middle East and we still can’t get out of Afghanistan, troubles we all have to foot the bill for. But I’ll be damned if I let that get it the way of my support for publicly financed television. We have already given up so much; must we give up on Big Bird too?