Splitting the apple

Rumors are swirling this week that Apple may be planning on releasing a new iPhone with a different screen. This is the normal fantastical speculation about future tech products that effect most popular products. The same kind of speculation comes up around the time of new game consoles. The media tends to spend a bit more time with the Apple rumors but that is neither here nor there. The great thing about speculation has less to do with its factual basis, of which there is usually very little, but what it say about consumer desires and expectations. The anatomy of the current rumors has deep implications for the iOS platform.

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Institutional inequality

It is very difficult for some people to wrap their head around the notion that America is still for many Americans unjust. They would like to believe that inequality is a thing of the past. When someone tries to say make things easier for a community that had been traditionally disenfranchised, they cry bloody murder and call such tactics as unearned advantage. The best example of this is affirmative action, but most of the "welfare" state falls under this assault.  I think the problem is people haven't really given much thought to the concept of institutional inequality and what it really means for a country.



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The American Homeowners Sophie’s choice

It doesn't get talked about much anymore but we are still in the middle of a housing crisis. Since Congress has decided to focus their laser like attention on jobs, jobs, jobs, which some how results in days of discussion about whether or not employers should be allowed to have some say in when women have children, it can be easy to forget. The truth is though we're still stuck in an economy sucking housing crisis. Homeowners are stuck and while occasionally someone will mention foreclosure rates no one is addressing the real problem facing homeowners underwater mortgages. 

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Tech Alert! (Warning Geekiness inside) Google Chrome brings us one step closer to the cloud computing revolution with latest update.

Google has started rolling out tab syncing officially for the Chrome browser. For the uninitiated tab syncing allows you to recover whatever tabs you have open on one computer on another computer. To use it you first have to have the latest version of chrome installed on the computers you use. Then you have to sign in to your Google account in the browser and enable syncing. I've been using this feature on my tablet since the beta came out and it is a true game changer.

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Scientist: They Do it for the Lulz

I got to work later than I wanted to this morning. I was a half an hour behind my schedule because I got sucked into the rabbit hole that is YouTube. No, I wasn't catching up on cat videos, but it is still remarkable how it all started. I'm reading a comic book called Echo, by someone named Terry Moore. It's a surprisingly dorky comic. At first it seems like a standard superhero comic, but at the point I'm at it suddenly starts delving into some higher level physics. While it's all very fantastical it got me wondering about this Terry Moore person, which of course sent me to the googles last night. There I found a TED talk on YouTube by one Terry Moore, not the same Terry Moore, but I didn't know that till later. The TED Talk itself wasn't even that interesting, (It was about how we're tying our shoes wrong if you really want to know), but it was short and I watched it. At the end as with all YouTube clips they showed images of "related content." This is the true black hole of YouTube. If you have anything to do in your day and someone sends you a link to something on YouTube you can watch the clip just fine but I implore you stop it a second before the very end because that related content at the end of the clip will eat up the rest of your day. Anyway from the TED talk I started watching a clip from the stand up master George Carlin, which led me to Lewis Black, which led me to the reason I was late to work this morning, Neil deGrasse Tyson..

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Conservatives it’s an election year do you know where your party stands?

I am a liberal, this should be clear to anyone who has read any two posts I’ve put up here, but still it’s good to be honest. When I started this blog I didn’t know what I would end up talking about. It was an effort to get back into writing, but less fictional and more a deconstruction of my own thoughts and how I came to them. Over time it has developed into a collection of articles mostly framing my ideological stance, and the defense of said stance. Overall I’m satisfied with this kind of output, but at times I get bound by it, which leads to fewer posts. This post is more of a throwback, I hope, to the earlier premise. The question of the day, are conservatives even aware of the kind of people they are voting for?


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A Radical Solution to the Price of Gas: Raise Gas Taxes

I know, I know, taxes are the liberal plot to enslave the masses into socialism but if you dare to read past the purposefully provocative title we may get somewhere in this country on energy policy. Under a normal economy increasing the tax on something would naturally result in higher prices for said item. This tax would be a servicing fee attached to the cost of doing business that would need to be passed on to the consumer. Yet I still contended that this would largely result in less pain at the pump, or at least it would have a greater chance of decreasing the cost of oil then say drill baby, drill.


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The accountability trap

Accountability is the great buzz word of the new millennium. The powers that be would have you believe that the biggest problem in government is a lack of accountability. They would have you believe that as soon as we have better methods of holding people accountable we will strip government of its bloat. There is an overall problem with this. By claiming to strive for more accountability it begins with two important and negative assumptions. The first being that most people are doing their jobs poorly, the second and more importantly it assumes people are doing it on purpose.

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The increasingly less surprising apple announcements

Apple has garnered the lion share of the press today for obvious reasons. The brand new iPad is an impressive device and many of the new features are great improvements. Yet much like the iPhone 4s it is a predictable incremental upgrade. This is not to say it won't sell boat loads of units. Apple has a process of slowly rolling out new features over time. Honestly if you're disappointed with apples announcement today you really haven't been paying attention. The original iPhone lacked 3g at a time when many devices had it. The reason was battery life. They wanted the device to last and they didn't feel they could do it if they included 3g. I predicted the new iPad coming with LTE back when the rumor mill was churning over the 4s. The reason is simple the sales of iPads with cellular data is tiny in comparison to the iPhone. Selling the LTE iPad gives them a large sample base to test features for the next iPhone. Similarly putting the "retina display" on the iPhone has allowed apple to perfect the process of producing high capacity screens. The new iPad will push the IOS platform further and I'm glad because it means fierce completion in the mobile market is what makes paying attention to tech great.

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The Biggest Threat to Android: The Carriers

The Biggest Threat to Android: The Carriers
This is more of a follow up to my post about Android fragmentation. As many people like to point out there are a lot of different android experiences out there which leaves many people to believe android has a problem with fragmentation. I still believe that these are more growing pains than anything else, and the reason no real concerted effort to kill the fragmentation issue totally dead is that so far people are still purchasing andoid phones in mass numbers. Once the numbers start to change companies adjust. The clearest example of this is HTC who stated they lost focus last year and released far too many different phones and would be scaling back, In addition they are attempting to declutter sense (their software differentiator) to provide a better more consistent experience. While this is great to see there is still one albatros on the back of all smartphones save the iphone - The Carriers.


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