MG Siegler, commenting on the TechCrunch post by Chris Velazco, linked above:

In other words, the iPhone 5 was on sale for just nine days before the quarter ended. And it was supply-constrained the whole time.

Mr. Siegler and Mr. Velazco pointed out the nine-day sales window the iPhone 5 had before these quarterly numbers were announced, but neither came right out and said what I find to be the most impressive expression of it:

Verizon activated over 72,000 iPhone 5s per day during the nine days ending the quarter.

Larry Neumeister, for AP:

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its 2-to-1 ruling only weeks after hearing arguments on a lower court judge’s findings that the 1996 [“Defense of Marriage Act”] was unconstitutional.

This is good news. The holding was based on the intermediate scrutiny constitutional standard and declared DOMA violative of Equal Protection.

The dissent in the 2-1 decision came from Judge Chester Straub, who said “courts should not intervene where there is a robust political debate because doing so poisons the political well, imposing a destructive anti-majoritarian constitutional ruling on a vigorous debate.”

It is the duty of a court to intervene where legislation violates constitutional protections, and that is exactly what DOMA does with regard to same-sex marriage.

There is no valid argument to the contrary.

If the Supreme Court fails to strike this law down when it comes to them some time in the next year, and fails to confirm that our Constitution disallows discrimination with regard to who citizens love solely on the basis of a majoritarian religious belief, it will be the darkest legal day in my lifetime thus far.

This is certainly interesting. And at half the price of an entry-level Microsoft Surface, it even comes with a keyboard!

Patrick Gray, writing at The Register:

Jack also warned of a worst-case scenario in which a worm could infect multiple devices, spreading from patient to patient, re-flashing the devices with malicious code as it foes. This code could be programmed to deliver fatal shocks to patients implanted with vulnerable implants at a scheduled time.

So many lives depend upon the safe operation of a device like a pacemaker, including some of my dearest family. The good news here is that the researcher who discovered the vulnerability is ready and willing to work with manufacturers to design around the security weaknesses in these devices.

But perhaps more importantly, what about devices that have already been implanted in patients? I hope the corrections can be made via a software update so that even current patients can receive the fixes.

As an aside, this technology could also be used in the cyberwarfare arena for exceptionally clandestine assassinations.

Joseph Menn, quoting an anonymous source for Reuters:

We knew certain parts of government really wanted” evidence of active spying, said one of the people, who requested anonymity. “We would have found it if it were there.

I don’t know enough about this specific issue and the problem of cyberwarfare threats generally. My time in International Law this semester and previous courses like Cyberlaw and Cyberprivacy are coalescing in my mind into a strong area of interest, though, so I expect to follow this and similar issues closely and (hopefully) develop more substantive opinions about them over the next two months.

Michael Schechter, writing at his blog A Better Mess:

They want to take their backlog of DOC, DOCX and RTF files and convert them into either Markdown files or plain text files with Markdown formatting. At the moment, there’s no solution that’s viable for average computer users.

I write my articles for this site in Markdown syntax because it’s easier to read and write. I can work with scripts and other geeky implementations when I have enough time to research how they work, but I rarely have that time. I would love a tool like the one Schechter calls for in the linked post. I hope someone takes him on the suggestion.

Michael J. De La Merced and Neil Gough, in The New York Times:

In a statement on Monday, SoftBank, a big Japanese telecommunications company, said it would pay $8 billion to buy newly issued Sprint stock worth about $5.25 a share. It will then pay $12.1 billion to buy existing stock from other investors at $7.30 a share, a premium to current levels.

This could be a very big deal. Sprint just became a strong third place again to Verizon and AT&T.

And if you’re building a spaceship company like Virgin Galactic, you might as well build the sexiest beast ever built—the sexiest spaceship, the sexiest mother ship, the sexiest space port. Getting every little bit of the design right is so important.

Love this guy.

Michael Hinkelman, writing at the Philadelphia Daily News:

Campo’s claims in its civil complaint that its sandwich is “so superlative” and “gloriously gluttonous” that only it could be called “Philadelphia’s Cheesesteak.”

This fellow doesn’t have a chance in hell, but it’s a fun story. “Philadelphia’s Cheesesteak” is sufficiently similar to previous marks (mentioned in the article) and sufficiently generic cialis online with regard to geography (also mentioned in the article) that rejection of the mark is valid on its face. Federal court isn’t going to decide it differently.

In fact, pursuing the issue may alert the holders of the previously-granted similar marks and lead to infringement suits against Campos. I assume he and his attorney have discussed that possibility, but that would certainly be a frustrating turn of events for the steak-slinger.

Welp, absolutely no potential for unfortunate consequences there.

This is a good piece by Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land about the lack of coverage Microsoft’s privacy policy consolidation got this week compared to what Google got on a similar move earlier this year.

Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is thorough and worth a look, but I noticed a broader issue here for Microsoft:

Google matters and Microsoft doesn’t.

I’ll elaborate. Google got hammered by voluminous coverage because, in the minds of the tech press and many consumers, what they do with data matters. Microsoft, on the other hand, is not seen as an important player in the consumer data space. That perception may be inaccurate, particularly with the generally positive reaction to, if not widespread adoption of, SkyDrive and the new Outlook.

But it’s there: when it comes to privacy, Google is search and email and Android. Microsoft is, well, not much. Windows 8 and Surface may change that, but no one is holding their breath. In short, this looks like a case in which Microsoft got let less critical press coverage than they may have wanted: people complain about the things that are important to them. The unimportant things get ignored.

Philadelphia Councilman James Kenney made the following comment at the Restaurant Industry Summit, quoted by Randy Lobasso at Philadelphia Weekly's PhillyNow blog:

After 9/11, everyone became a ‘terrorist’—including that Mexican guy on a bike going from his lawn care job to his restaurant job. He is no threat to me, whatsoever. He is no threat to this country, whatsoever.

Kenney doesn’t like the immigration policy pushed by some “lunatics in Harrisburg” and wishes they would “exempt the city of Philadelphia” when they pass harsh immigration measures. Further, he stated that if he were mayor he wouldn’t cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (presumably beyond what the law requires).

I think there are more eloquent and nuanced ways to make the argument against strong immigration restrictions and criminalizing undocumented immigrants, but I respect the hell out of Kenney’s verve for the issue, which he said reminds him of problems his Irish ancestors faced in the earlier days of our nation.

Drew Olanoff, at TechCrunch:

By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things or worrying about how to share them.

Maybe this will work, maybe not. But I like Tumblr’s people because of stuff like this.

The Digital Advertising Alliance, announcing they’ll ignore “do not track” browser headers:

A ‘default on’ do-not-track mechanism offers consumers and businesses inconsistencies and confusion instead of comfort and security.

Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Joe Barton (R-Texas), replying to the DAA statement:

If consumers want to be tracked online, they should have to opt-in to be tracked, instead of the other way around.

Advertisers should concede the default “on” status of tracking prevention. The appearance of disrespect for consumer privacy will encourage new legislation on this front, probably from Barton and Markey. It will be an easy target for viral online support campaigns, and, eventually, advertisers may face federal regulations far harsher than defaulting to no tracking.

Gregory Ferenstein, writing at TechCrunch about Vivek Wadhwa’s latest research:

Nearly a quarter (24.3 percent) of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign-born founder; in Silicon Valley, it’s nearly half (43.9 percent). Nationwide, they’ve helped employ more than half a million workers (560,000) who contributed $63 billion in sales just in 2012.

Those numbers demand superlatives: they’re staggering. The common assumption is that immigrants do jobs US citizens don’t want to do. This research would seem to turn those assumptions upside-down: immigrants often do jobs for which US policy, educational institutions, and deeply-ingrained social strictures simply leave our young people unprepared.

My Citizenship and Immigration class meets twice weekly, on Monday and Wednesday evenings. It really is a fascinating class, and offers a broadened perspective on a hot political issue this election season.

One thing I’ve learned from Professor Peter Spiro (of Opinio Juris and much scholarship), and from research like Mr. Wadhwa’s, is that immigration policy is not as amenable to applause-worthy one-liners as political candidates would prefer it to be.

The angle on Mr. Wadhwa’s recent research, and Mr. Ferenstein’s TechCrunch post, is that immigrant participation in US entrepreneurialism may have peaked already. I wonder, not cynically or rhetorically, but genuinely wonder, whether the US will be able to replace them with adequately-inspired and prepared citizens of its own, and whether the nation wouldn’t benefit from incentivizing continued and increased opportunities for citizens and immigrants alike.

I don’t know what that policy direction should look like, but I think it’s worth thinking, and most importantly, talking about.

I just completely overhauled my Twitter lists, a few days after impulsively unfollowing everyone who didn’t follow me back. I deleted many lists and added many users to the ones I kept. I used Twitter List Copy to import all the users on other people’s lists into pre-existing lists of my own.

It uses oAuth so it’s password-free, and despite the disclaimer on the site, it seems to merge imported users with your pre-existing lists just fine. Thanks to Noah Liebman, who built this awesome tool. Follow him on Twitter or check out his website.

Mat Honan, writing at Wired:

Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the world works, you are free to change it. Which is exactly what he did.

Honan’s was my favorite “one year since Steve Jobs died” post. It is, in many ways, the most insightful. It’s also, most importantly, the most respectful.

Meg Whitman, as quoted by Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica:

We aren’t as effective internally as we should be because of poor systems. We are not as competitive as we need to be in how we go to market because of our IT systems. We haven’t been using a compelling customer management or CRM system for years.

She has received some harsh criticism from industry watchers like John Gruber and MG Siegler for pushing back HP’s expected mobile phone launch to 2014 at the earliest.

That criticism is justified, especially given HP’s epic Palm/webOS fail.

But this is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen from HP in years: honest self-aware, long-term leadership commitment.

I say well done, Ms. Whitman. Now, call the caterer and lock some engineers in a room for the next year.

This Steve Jobs talk from 1983 (I was less than a month old…) is a series of astoundingly accurate predictions about the future of computing. The audio was sourced from a cassette tape, cleaned up a bit, and posted to Soundcloud by Marcel Brown. Read his post about it on his blog, Life, Liberty, and Technology.

Allan Grinshtein of LayerVault, design software, designed for designers:

It would be crazy to call these designers lazy — there’s an awesome amount of work and detailed involved in recreating beautiful “rich corinthian leather.” Still, it is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.

As a user who wishes more designers would refocus their talent away from skeumorphisms and toward the elegance Grinshtein describes above, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Related

I want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this problem.

I, like them, needed to get rid of months of Instapaper cruft. This bookmarklet did the trick. Instapaper’s Kindle integration is wonderful, but I wish Amazon would let us auto-delete recurring content.

John Biggs, writing at TechCrunch:

In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere.

That’s absolutely true in my experience. Reviews by 20-/30-/40-somethings blogging from their basement or posting on their favorite forum are almost always more useful to me than the popular reviews. I still read the latter, but I rely far more on the former.

Whether you like them or not, Google still leads the way on data portability.

This looks, on its face, like a good thing. I wonder (sincerely, not sarcastically) how patent attorneys feel about it.