Get off your ass
It makes for funny headlines, like this one I came up with three years ago, but the science just keeps coming: sitting too much damages human health.
The troubling part is much of the onus for a solution is on businesses employing us all, who may not have much incentive to contribute to solving the problem if the consequences don’t affect workers until after retirement.
DHS wants to track license plates
DHS wants to track license plates
ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen, on the license plate tracking system recently proposed by the Department of Homeland Security:
It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government.
Because the government never compels commercial enterprises to give it data.
Ever.
CrossFit sends trademark takedown demand
CrossFit sends trademark takedown demand
The lesson here: the Digital Millennium COPYRIGHT Act contains no enforcement mechanism for TRADEMARK rights.
What is Intellectual Property Law?
What is Intellectual Property Law?
It’s not surprising that more scholarship self-identifying as IP-focused is about patents. After all, they drive much of commerce and innovation (and arguably the problems with the two) in the industrial and technology sectors.
It’s worth noting though that, unlike much of the protection afforded by a patent, many copyright protections are available even without registration, although it’s admittedly difficult to enforce them via litigation and to win statuory damages without timely registration.
Check out this PDF by the U.S. Copyright Office for more information.
Sens. Cruz and Lee Introduce State Marriage Defense Act
Sens. Cruz and Lee Introduce State Marriage Defense Act
At this point the anti-Constitutionalists are trolling themselves. A choice bit from this piece of garbage:
The bill will ensure the federal government gives the same deference to the 33 states that define marriage as the union between one man and one woman as it does to the 17 states that have chosen to recognize same-sex unions.
It doesn’t matter how a state wants to define marriage, whether it’s full of crazy conservatives or mushy liberals. It only matters what the Constitution requires, and that is equal protection under the laws.
All consenting adults with the capacity to validly enter a contract are allowed to marry. Legislating around that fundamental right violates the Constitution.
Facebook Opens Up LGBTQ-Friendly Gender Identity And Pronoun Options
Facebook Opens Up LGBTQ-Friendly Gender Identity And Pronoun Options
Following up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with shifting norms and modes of self-identificaiton. Good on ‘em.
Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg needs a good charity write-off for tax season, I would be happy to put him in touch with my student loan creditors.
Kansas anti-gay segregation bill is an abomination.
Kansas anti-gay segregation bill is an abomination.
Mr. Stern’s headline sums it up very well. If you don’t believe it can really be that bad, read the PDF.
It is that bad. Ignorance is one thing, but open hostility like this cannot stand and anyone who supports this bill commits the intellectual equivalent of burning the original Constitution to a pile of ashes.
Let me translate that from fiery liberal anger into constitutional principles:
A law allowing the detrimental differential treatment of a class of persons traditionally subject to invidious discrimination because they belong to that class violates the Equal Protection rights granted by the Constitution as to the federal government in the 5th Amendment and extended as to the States by the 14th Amendment.
Let us quote the Good Document itself:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Gotta love that 14th Amendment. There’s nothing ambiguous in the juxtaposition of the Kansas bill and the Constitution. You can’t deny someone equal protection of the laws. You can’t tell me I’m not allowed in your hotel because I’m a man. Maybe if it’s a country club. But not a hotel. Or a restaurant. Or a state.
The use of freedom of religion as a pathetic attempt to hide animosity and hatred is a supreme act of collective cowardice by the Kansan legislators who vote for this bill.
It is an un-American as it gets. But the good news is, as one ruling after another makes ever-more-clear, you can’t stop history.
$12M CEO vs. $1M baby
The wife of an AOL employee, commenting on the company’s chief executive using her child’s premature birth as an example of why the company was cutting benefits:
I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.
The view from the top is one of digits and dollar signs, not daughters and dignity.
What is the maximum constitutional duration of a traffic stop?
What is the maximum constitutional duration of a traffic stop?
The answer is, perhaps unsuprisingly, not clear. But while too few people know you don’t have to allow a vehicle search, the power differential during a traffic stop probably overrides abstract constitutional notions.
As the article says, be polite and minimize conversation. Police are used to the power differential and they are as comfortable with it as you are uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear about your constitutional law class or how you read an article in The Atlantic about traffic stops.
Workflow Tech, Part 2: Catalog
Introduction
I focused in the first of this three-post series on how I capture information for use at home, work, for study, and in creative pursuits. This article is part two in that series, where I’ll spend about 500 words talking about how I name, organize, and save files across several platforms and devices.
Catalog
I use TextExpander on OS X and iOS devices. TextExpander probably fits into all three categories, but I put it in Catalog because I use it overwhelmingly to name and tag files. It’s not free, but it’s worth every cent if you find yourself typing the same things over and over again.
You can attach frequently used snippets of text to shortcuts like “ddate,” which automatically expands to “January 20, 2014” the moment you type it. I like to prepend the date to new the blog posts I draft as text files, so I made a TextExpander snippet that expands “.dnb” to “140120.blog.” and then I can add a name after the second period. So the file I drafted this post in is called 140119.blog.Workflow.txt, but all I had to type was “.dnb Workflow.”
That file name is also a big and relatively new part of how I catalog stuff. Computers can change the date they attach to a file based on when it was modified, when it was downloaded, or for other reasons. So I append the creation date to every file I make, formatted as a 2-digit year, 2-digit month and 2-digit day. Then, a period (many people use a dash, it’s a matter of taste) and the type of file it is, like blog, work, fic for fiction. You get the idea. The third component is the title, with multiple words
I find a new use for TextExpander every day, so it’s vital not only to working productively today, but to working even more productively in the future.
Then, of course, there’s Dropbox, which I use primarily to store files I’m manipulating across different devices. Images I edit and store for work, documents I need to share with people who don’t use Google Drive, and the text files in my /Notes folder, where I draft everything I write, all get synchronized across my home, work and laptop computers. With Dropbox mobile apps and the widespread integration of the service by third-party apps and services, there’s never a problem accessing the most up-to-date version of what I’m working on, whether I’m online or off.
Evernote, which I mentioned in my Capture post and about which I’ll write a more in-depth post eventually, is also great for cataloging after you’ve captured stuff. I tend to use Evernote only when there is email or multimedia involved, sticking to plain text notes in Dropbox for regular old writing tasks. But when email or multimedia are involved, Evernote can’t be beat.
I have a notebook for music, where I tag notes lyrics or audio or both. I have another notebook for finance, where I store and tag all my emailed receipts and other financial bits. I even have a notebook for recipes, which I can share with my wife so we can collect stuff as we find it. Evernote “stacks” even let you make what is essentially a notebook of notebooks.
Much of the work over at the Evernote Blog focuses on how to catalog with the app, so check it out if you’re interested. But I usually start my cataloging workflow in my default notebook, which I’ve labelled Inbox, since I’m so used to processing incoming email from that label.
Since we want capture to be as friction-free as possible, I just save into my default notebook. Then, a few times a week, when I need some mindless busywork to do, I’ll dive into my Inbox notebook and start moving and tagging. Sometimes, I realize I don’t really need something and delete it altogether. I highly recommend the default-now, process-later approach so that using apps like Evernote in the field isn’t cumbersome or time consuming.
Conclusion
I could go on forever about this stuff, but the basic system I use for cataloging is a naming convention when it comes to plain text and a notebook + tags system when it comes to images, PDF, and audio in Evernote. I’m sure everyone’s different so feel free to contact me on Twitter and tell me about your workflow.
Mac turns 30
Steve Jobs, in 1985:
We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone.
The remarkable thing is that, at least for people my age, ~30, as old as the Mac itself, the computer is far more remarkable than the telephone ever was. We were raised with the telephone as a commonplace thing, the way our children and nephews and nieces are growing up with iPhones and iPads.
Our computers used the telephone as merely a means to an end, a mode of connectivity. Think about that for a moment: the previous household’s most advanced piece of technology (except perhaps for the television, which is an interesting argument) ended as just a feature in the next generation’s most advanced pieces of technology.
I don’t know whether that’s good or bad for society taken in the aggregate, but the ability of technology to truly and ineffably amaze is gloriously unrelenting. I see no difference, no separating line, between technology and art. Each is made to convey meaning, to delight, to terrify, to teach, to challenge perceptions, and to inspire those who come after us.
Technology and art, or technology as art, or art as technology, are always examples of the same thing:
Humans dreaming, and then building the dream.
What a neat idea.
Who cares if I think this link leads to a silly blog post at Forbes.com?
Who cares if I think this link leads to a silly blog post at Forbes.com?
No one. Least of all I.
I just wrote too many words about why I think the post I link to above isn’t worth the bandwidth it’s transmitted over, but I was being tired and petty and shitting on the good-natured opinion of someone more successful than I, so I deleted those words.
I’m embarrassed I wrote the first version of this note, but I give myself a few points for having published this far more self-aware and candid revision.
500 Words A Day
MG Siegler, general partner at Google Ventures, TechCrunch columnist, and tech writer:
This year, my plan is to write roughly 500 words a day in the form of a short post here on this site.
Good idea. Me too (although I’m a little late to punch so far).
The part that goes alone
This post stems from my recent conversations with a few people I know and care about who are having a very hard time of things these days.
Each of us have our own mountains to climb, our own monsters under the bed. Mostly, it’s a different battle for all of us. But there’s a common thread. I notice it while I’m trying to give advice to one person, while trying like hell just to get in touch with another, and while trying to stay as quiet as I can while the heart of a third breaks a little more every day:
However close we are to someone, there’s always a part of them we can’t help.
That part always, always goes alone into whatever minor annoyance, mundane problem or massive tragedy we face. It’s the part no one can follow, carry or comfort. Those outside your mind can’t know that part of you, and you can’t know it in them. But we all have it.
And we have to treat it differently from the other parts, the bits of someone we can reach, the bits that need encouragement or a listener or someone sitting next to them in mutually acceptable and comfortable silence.
The part that goes alone can only be recognized and respected, and that’s really, really difficult to accept when all you want to do is help someone.
Happiness and sadness are equal parts chemicals and circumstances, but understanding someone and making them feel understood, even when that means accepting you can’t completely relieve them of their burdens, is an art worth pursuing.
Developing the Law of Cyber Warfare
Developing the Law of Cyber Warfare
Good article by lawyer, legal journalist and fellow Temple Law alum Amaris Elliott-Engel. The law, or lack of it, as it relates to cyber warfare is near the top of my list of legal interests.
Facebook scans messages for ad targeting
Facebook scans messages for ad targeting
I know this is an unpopular stance, but if you operate on any assumption other than that this happens all the time on myriad services you use, you’re a crazy unrealistic person lacking in the minimum amount of cynicism (read: realism) required to use the modern internet in a fully-informed manner.
While I don’t have time these days to do the digging someone should do on this, it strikes me as very likely we all gave Facebook permission to skim all of our content for ad-related and any other purposes when we signed up.
Digital privacy almost always comes with an asterisk these days, and that’s not going to change any time soon.
Apple and "market realities"
Apple, it turns out, is not happy about the legal consequences of its ebook price-fixing scheme. I would be unhappy as well if the attorney assigned by a federal judge to make sure I reformed my anti-competitive practices was sending me $1,100-per-hour bills.
The monitor, Michael Bromwich, submitted to the court on Dec. 30 a detailed explanation of Apple’s treatment of him and his team since their assignment in mid-September. He quotes Kyle Andeer, Apple’s director of competition law, as complaining he is “disappointed by [Bromwich’s] position on rates and other fees. They do not reflect market realities.”
As a former trial attorney at the Federal Trade Commission, Andeer should know a thing or two about “market realities.”
But then again, it’s a distaste for those realities that got Apple a monitor in the first place.
Teehan+Lax on redesigning Prismatic
Teehan+Lax on redesigning Prismatic
It’s a great post by great designers about the work and value that goes into and comes out of great design. It also happens to explain very clearly the concept behind my own website here at Constant & Endless.
Geoff Teehan of Teehan+Lax writes:
In the end, a successful project is never done. It is never perfect. If you aren’t learning from it, then you’ve given up. It’s a constant process of assessing the landscape, making hard choices and accepting trade-offs.
Like Saleem Sinai says in Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, “the process of revision should be constant and endless.”
Prismatic is a content discovery engine powered by your own wide array of interests, aiming to avoid being limited by your filter bubble of common sharing tendencies. Check it out on iOS or the web.
Judges are, and aren't, competent to rule on intelligence issues
Judges are, and aren’t, competent to rule on intelligence issues
Lots to parse on this one, although it looks like a new chapter in the “Surveillance Wars” Edward Snowden started with his leaks.
Two choice quotes really stood out to me in this article, though, especially because they are in sequence:
Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of both NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, said […] judges “are not really in a good position to judge the merits of intelligence collection programs.”
That’s funny, because the very next paragraph cites consistent judicial approval of the program as a defense to its continued use:
An Obama administration official said that on 35 occasions in the past, 15 separate judges assigned to the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court had declared bulk communications of telephone metadata lawful.
Which one is it? Well, as usual with the law, it’s probably both. Judges are human too, despite what some litigators may say, and their job is to decide.
Whether that decision is sufficiently informed in every case is up for debate, but if the former head of the NSA and the CIA doesn’t think judges are well-equipped to render decisions on intelligence collection programs, it’s curious the Obama administration would rely on that judgment in defending the collection programs.
Perhaps the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) should be amended to mandate an intelligence background for all judges appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance panel.
As it stands now, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can quite literally appoint whomever he wants to the FISA court, whether they have any experience in intelligence or not.
How intelligent is that?
CrunchBase and People+ settle
A TechCrunch reporter had this to say about his employer’s sister product:
Put another way: The CrunchBase team ended up looking like it didn’t really understand how Creative Commons worked, or at least that’s what the vast majority of online commentary suggested.
Mutually agreeable settlement is always the best outcome. Although judging by the comment from CrunchBase President Matt Kaufman near the bottom of the TechCrunch post I linked to, Aol still doesn’t understand Creative Commons at all.