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"Parallel Thinking in Product Design Will Only Increase"
“Parallel Thinking in Product Design Will Only Increase”
Rain Noe at core77:
When you have an uncomplicated design that’s boiled down to its pure essentials, you approach a kind of universal perfection, and that universality is the tricky part in a world filled with designers.
This is a great point.
Marriage rights tide turns decisively against US bigots
Marriage rights tide turns decisively against US bigots
I hope this is the beginning of an acceleration in the death of “traditional” marriage in the United States of America. Fear, ignorance, and religion are all equally insufficient and shameful excuses to deny universal marriage rights for one more moment.
IMAlive provides online counseling—but at what cost?
IMAlive provides online counseling—but at what cost?
Aja Romano of The Daily Dot:
IMAlive sounds perfect for introverts and those who are more comfortable writing than speaking. And anyone can volunteer to be a counselor, as long as they pass the background check. But there’s a hitch. Potential volunteers have to pay the organization $280 up front—before they even have their first IM session.
There is much in Romano’s article that I didn’t know. It’s worth reading if this issue is important to you, and worth paying strong heed to if you’re considering any association with the organizations it discusses.
Pandora suing ASCAP for lower licensing fees
Pandora suing ASCAP for lower licensing fees
Don Jeffrey of Bloomberg:
Pandora also claims that it’s entitled to lower rates because some large music publishers have announced they are withdrawing new media rights from Ascap and negotiating licensing fees directly with Web radio services.
The times, they are a-changin’.
A Map Of America’s 284 Drone Strikes Against Pakistan
A Map Of America’s 284 Drone Strikes Against Pakistan
Cliff Kuang of Co.Design:
Whatever your stance on drone killings, the fact remains that there’s been very little national dialogue on the topic. Indeed, some would say that’s a direct result of the main problem with the policy: Its complete lack of transparency.
Mr. Kuang points to the New York Times piece from this past June. It’s a good place to start, and taken along with this the infographic, starts to bring the severity of the issue into focus.
Perhaps reasonable people will come to different conclusions, but if you don’t at least have an opinion on this, get one.
Nearly all of Omni Magazine at the Internet Archive
Nearly all of Omni Magazine at the Internet Archive
Adi Robertson shared this at The Verge and it made me very happy. I loved this magazine.
Google integrating AMBER alerts
Google integrating AMBER alerts
Richard Dunlop-Walters’ The Brief is a must-read for those interested in news about how technology affects our lives every day.
Mr. Dunlop-Walters said of Google’s AMBER Alert integration:
whenever you perform a Google search related to an area where a child has been abducted and an alert was issued you’ll see an AMBER Alert on the results page.
This is a great example of how a company can make money and help society, and do both using its core technology (in this case, search targeting). The best part? Google is working on expanding the integration internationally in cooperation with foreign missing children’s advocates.
Professor David Post: Copyright is meant to benefit the public
Professor David Post: Copyright is meant to benefit the public
Professor Post, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy about the brief he helped write in the Aereo case:
copyright law does not exist for the benefit of authors; it uses the benefit granted to authors because that is a means to increase the creation and the availability of creative works to the public.
It’s important to note that this is not the Professor’s opinion, it is derived from the Constitution and the ways in which the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution (particularly Article I, § 8, clause 8).
The issue in this case is whether it is violative of copyright law for a company, Aereo, to essentially rent small digital television antennae to its customers that enable those customers to stream broadcast channels over the internet. Professor Post and his co-authors on the brief argue that it is not:
the court’s role in construing the statute is not to produce maximum authorial reward, but maximum public benefit. Where that means (as it often does) that it is the copyright owners who must persuade Congress to address the matter and adjust the balance so that it tips more in their favor, they are entitled and well-equipped to do that, as they have done so often in the past.
Read the amicus brief here.
Disney buys Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion
Disney buys Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion
Kathleen Kennedy, current Co-Chairman of Lucasfilm, will become President of Lucasfilm, reporting to Walt Disney Studios Chairman Alan Horn. Additionally she will serve as the brand manager for Star Wars, working directly with Disney’s global lines of business to build, further integrate, and maximize the value of this global franchise. Ms. Kennedy will serve as executive producer on new Star Wars feature films, with George Lucas serving as creative consultant. Star Wars Episode 7 is targeted for release in 2015, with more feature films expected to continue the Star Wars saga and grow the franchise well into the future.
I wasn’t a fan of Episodes I, II, or III, and this deal doesn’t increase my hope for some sort of redemption in future Star Wars films. I predict this will lead to a slow, painful death of the franchise in the eyes of geeks and comic store-guys who may have still held out that same hope.
I hope I’m wrong.
Marco Arment goes to a Microsoft store
Marco Arment goes to a Microsoft store
The link above and what it describes are far more damning than any of Microsoft’s shitty advertising and messaging.
Samsung shipped a stunning 57M smartphones in Q3 — twice as many as Apple
Samsung shipped a stunning 57M smartphones in Q3 — twice as many as Apple
How many Samsung devices are on the latest version of their respective operating systems?
Many consumers don’t know or care that they’re buying an outdated version of Android, but that ignorance will not last forever. Samsung needs to solve the fragmentation problem if they expect this kind of success to be long-term.
More interactive Tweets, in more than 2000 ways
More interactive Tweets, in more than 2000 ways
What ever happened to seeing a link and clicking on it? I don’t want garish, heavy embedded crap all over Twitter. But alas, it’s not my company or design to screw up, so I’ll stop whining (but not sulking).
Supreme Court Will Address Antitrust State Action Exemption
Supreme Court Will Address Antitrust State Action Exemption
Steve Semeraro at the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog:
Government actors are charged with a duty to act in the public interest and thus can generally be trusted to restrain trade only when the public will benefit. Private actors, by contrast, are driven by the desire to maximize profit and will thus restrain trade when it is privately beneficial but harms the public interest. On 26 November, the Supreme Court will reenter the fray, hearing oral argument in FTC v. Phoebe Putney Health System.
This is an interesting part of antitrust law: the exemption from antitrust liability for state actors and, in very limited circumstances, private actors acting under the supervision of the state. These issues are more relevant than you may think if you’re not a law student/lawyer/professor/large-scale businessperson.
Consider my recent Amazon prediction, or the reach of international competition law.
Find more information about FTC v. Phoebe Putney Health System at SCOTUSblog, or read the 11th Circuit’s opinion at Google Scholar.
Invention as Art
This is a great article on patent drawings and models, as selected for Co.Design by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan.
iPad mini - Every inch an iPad.
iPad mini - Every inch an iPad.
Everyone is shitting their pants over this thing, but I’m more excited by the new MacBook Pro.
FTC Publishes Facial Recognition Guidelines
FTC Publishes Facial Recognition Guidelines
Carl Franzen, of TPM Idea Lab:
There are two cases where the FTC believes that companies need to get a consumer’s “affirmative express consent,” that is, an “opt-in,” before using information captured via facial recognition: When identifying anonymous individuals to third parties that wouldn’t otherwise know who they were, and when using any data or imagery captured via facial recognition for purposes outside of what was initially stated by the company.
This is good news because it signals awareness on the part of the FTC that this is an issue. Mr. Franzen provides some good context in his article, so if this stuff interests or worries you, click through to read his analysis. You can also find the FTC’s press release on the issue here, the report itself, in PDF format, here, and the dissenting statement of Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, also in PDF format, here.
Amazon outage takes out Reddit, Foursquare, Heroku
Amazon outage takes out Reddit, Foursquare, Heroku
Lee Hutchinson, writing at Ars Technica:
These kinds of outages are a jarring reminder of the true nature of “the cloud”—it’s still just servers in data centers.
Amazon’s market power in ebooks leads to some questionable behavior, as well as some anti-competitive business practices.
Now it is becoming increasingly clear that reliance on Amazon by some of the internet’s most popular services could be a liability. Their cloud hosting services, which, to be fair, are well known for affordability and reliability, look like an attractive single point of failure for the things we use on the internet every day.
Introducing the New Entertainment Experience from Xbox
Introducing the New Entertainment Experience from Xbox
Yusuf Mehdi, Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Division:
[…] we will rapidly accelerate the reach of Xbox entertainment from more than 67 million consoles to literally hundreds of millions of devices worldwide. Also this week, we will take our biggest step ever to increase our global reach, extending Xbox entertainment experiences to 222 countries from 35.
Looks good. The only question now is whether it will work as well for me as it did for this well-coiffed engineer. Even if the only thing I get out of this update is the ability to use a phone or tablet keyboard to enter text on my Xbox, it will be the greatest thing that ever happened to the Microsoft console.