 I never imagined I’d be blogging on Apple issues, but here we go.
In anticipation of getting a new iPad2 I migrated my MobileMe over to iCloud. It’s hard to have a definitive idea of what a new service is going to do until you get your hands on it in earnest, but I had read about iCloud, asked some Apple types who knew more than I did about it, and felt like I had a fair idea that it was going to help me solve some problems I’ve been dealing with in the course of managing the logistics of my business.
I was wrong. Mostly, anyway. I knew I was in trouble when the guy at the Apple Store told me do not migrate, sweet gods, for the sake of all that’s sacred do not migrate!! Okay, that’s not exactly how he put it, and I won’t repeat the words he actually did use (which weren’t much much better), but suffice it to say that staff was finding iCloud to be “suboptimal.” Full story »
 The Tech Curmudgeon read last week that Samsung was challenging Apple’s iPad patents, demanding that Apple prove its patents were valid. About damn time. Whatever lawyer it was in the patent office who granted the first software patent needs to be run out of town on a rail. And the lawyer who granted the first “design appearance” patent needs to be tarred and feathered and then run out of town on a rail.
Software patents are one of the most egregious misuses of patent protection that exist. There was a time when the patent office would reject patents for 3rd Grade math or simple sorting algorithms, but no longer. For the last couple of decades, anyone could code an obvious calculation method for a spreadsheet program and then patent that code. With that patent in hand, you could not only sell a crappy spreadsheet program, but you could also sue all the other spreadsheet program developers who used your patented code for a simple, obvious calculation. Yay, more litigation! Full story »
by Hannah Frantz
Editor’s Note: The author is a junior at Gettysburg College. This semester she is studying abroad in Kigali, Rwanda and has agreed to share some of her experiences and insights (as well as her frustrations) with the Scholars & Rogues community.
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Recently I’ve found myself very frustrated in Rwanda. And mostly when I get frustrated it’s because of discussions I’ve had with Rwandans.
Mainly, I’ve been really irritated with perceptions of America that you encounter here. Perhaps it’s my American pessimism getting the best of me, but I find myself getting irrationally angry at the idealistic assumptions Rwandans make about America. And I get angriest when Rwandan men tell me that more than anything they want a white wife.
For starters, many Rwandans seem to believe there’s no poverty in America. Full story »
The extent of the skepticism with which the Iran assassination plot has been met from many different quarters may be unprecedented. It parallels the serious coverage by the mainstream media that the Occupy Wall Street movement is being accorded. (If only those who knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction were accorded the same respect.) Full story »
 Vermont’s vaunted maples have begun to flush crimson, but the oaks stubbornly cling to their sturdy green. By Robert Frost’s hillside grave, in Bennington’s Old First Churchyard, the birch trees have breathed in autumn and exhaled it as goldenrod.
These calico mountains, having abandoned most of the “Green” of their namesake, could not make a more picturesque Frostian site. He was the poet of rock fences, spring pools, and wood piles, of snowy evenings and roads not taken, of small-town New England life and simpler times. “I am an ordinary man, I guess,” he once told the New York Times Review of Books.
Frost has been on my mind since a Saturday trip last week to an apple orchard in North Chester, Maine. Al LeBrun balanced each Courtland, each McCoun, between his fingertips like a snowglobe, showing off its delicate beauty. Full story »
 by Emily West
If you want a more intelligent pet than a dog, try a pig. Pigs learn tricks quickly. They have even figured out video games. Scientists have compared pig intelligence to that of a 3-year-old child.
In factory farms, pigs have been observed going insane and committing cannibalism.
Factory farming should be illegal.
In factory farms, corporations raise thousands of animals in a confined area. Chickens spend their lives in about one square foot of space. Once they reach full size, they die in slaughterhouses that process thousands of animals each day. Factory farmers ignore animal health and welfare in favor of a cheap steak. Around 98 percent of America’s meat comes from factory farms.
Full story »
 I’ve long thought that Mark Cuban was a really bright guy. He’s not omniscient, by any means – every once in awhile he’ll wander down a blind alley of an idea and I’ll wonder if he’s finally run out of smart. But my experience is that he usually bounces right back with something that makes a lot of sense. In sports terminology, he never loses two in a row, and that’s a formula for success.
I certainly appreciate that in an era of pathological greed, here’s a gazillionaire with clearly articulated progressive tendencies. He’s a guy whose employees seem to love him. He’s generous, apparently, and willing to spend whatever it takes to succeed. When it comes to competing, he’s always struck me as a man who adheres to the “self-interest, rightly understood” principle that de Tocqueville talks about in Democracy in America. I have no idea whether he’s even heard of de Tocqueville, of course, but he seems to get the underlying values, regardless. Full story »
by Pat Hosken
Last week, Texas prison officials decided, after executing 475 people since 1976, its death row prisoners no longer deserve a last meal. You’re already taking away their lives, Texas. Don’t take away their dignity, too.
State Senator John Whitmire said the decision has nothing to do with cost, despite a tight Texas budget. The soon-to-be executed don’t deserve a last meal because they didn’t give their victims a chance for one, either, Whitmire said.
Yes, these inmates have killed or at least have been convicted of killing. But don’t dehumanize them; don’t say they don’t deserve their final nutrition intake.
Full story »
 by Chip Ainsworth
When things go bad, people will use the word dysfunction without knowing its meaning. They know it’s not good and that’s about it. Dysfunctional is something that functions, but functions in pain.
This year’s Red Sox team is a good example of dysfunction. So was the year after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2005. That’s when the Red Sox had become, in the words of a Red Sox executive quoted by author Seth Mnookin, “The biggest bunch of prima donnas ever assembled.”
It was the season that Curt Schilling had nine saves and a 5.69 ERA as the team’s closer, pitcher Matt Clement was hit in the head by a line drive, and pictures of pretty coeds sitting in the laps of Derek Lowe and Bronson Arroyo were making the rounds on the Internet.
Full story »
 Every once in awhile a new term/catchphrase/buzzword/meme catches fire here in the US. Sometimes it’s a function of the fact that our incredibly plastic language, with its myriad dynamic influences (everything from media to subcultural to ethnic to technological) sort of inherently generates new words. Other times the term is a result of political or PR craftiness, as was the case with “Japan-bashing” (and subsequently, any more generalized iteration of “______-bashing”). The lobbyist who made the phrase up later famously said ”Those people who use (the term) have the distinction of being my intellectual dupes.” Full story »
On Sunday at midnight, October2011′s Stop the Machine permit for occupying Freedom Plaza expired. While some, like our group from the Tulane School of Social Work, had to return to our respective cities, many held strong on the Plaza. Instead of leaving the grounds at midnight, remaining demonstrators threw a dance party. They announced that 99 percent of the U.S. population were invited to join. In return, park police proposed extending Stop the Machine’s permit for four additional months. The dance party won us the Plaza.
Dr. Margaret Flowers, Stop the Machine Organizer, speaks in low lighting at Sunday’s dance party on the Freedom Plaza permit extension and Smithsonian Air and Space Museum protest
Full story »
 When I first moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1993 there were three big local bands: Big Head Todd & the Monsters, The Samples and The Reejers. BHTM were and still are an outstanding blues/rock band. The Samples were an alt act that reminded me at times of The Police and at other times of Johnny Clegg & Savuka (although both comparisons are misleading – Sean Kelly’s voice had a sort of Stingish quality about it and the Savuka reference is mainly about Jeep MacNichol’s drumming). The Reejers were a hard, noisy industrial-edged grunge act, I guess you’d say. All three of these were, in my view, outstanding bands, and they represented a broad diversity of sound. I was in heaven.
But then Boulder went 100% hippie on us and has since been defined by bands like Leftover Salmon, The String Cheese Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band. Full story »
 Some months back I submitted a long “poem” to a new publication called Uncanny Valley. (I quote-mark the word “poem” for reasons that are quickly evident to the reader. It’s part poem, but it’s also comprised of elements that are’t poetry at all – snips of drama script, blog entries, actual e-mail exchanges, photographs, newspaper clippings, playbills, and so on.) I was stunned when it was accepted – honestly, I never figured something that long and experimental had a chance anywhere.
But UV is different. Very different. They set themselves a mission to provide a forum for the unconventional. As the editors explain, “Other magazines make the words they publish fit their format. We make our format fit the words.”
Now, a few months later, Issue 0001 has dropped. My copy arrived in the mail today, and I can’t tell you how honored I am to be included in something this damned cool. Full story »
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