Fire and Knowledge

When I was young I read a lot of books, observed people around me, and came to the conclusion that most people’s lives are completely boring. So I made a rule for myself — find out what most people are doing, and do something else.

—Paul Lutus, Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor

This is disappointing. Just as net neutrality was making progress, McCain is trying to block it:

The FCC voted unanimously yesterday to move forward with the debate in an effort to formalize net neutrality guidelines. Senator John McCain followed up by introducing a bill that would prohibit the FCC from governing communications….

McCain’s bill, the Internet Freedom Act, seeks to do the opposite of what its name implies by ensuring that broadband and wireless providers can discriminate and throttle certain traffic while giving preferential treatment to other traffic. Basically, those in power or those who pay more will have better access. Apparently we have different definitions of ‘freedom’.

According to the text of the McCain bill, the FCC “shall not propose, promulgate, or issue any regulations regarding the Internet or IP-enabled services.” Isn’t that what the FCC does? Isn’t that sort of like introducing a bill to prohibit the Treasury from printing money, or a bill to prohibit the IRS from collecting taxes?

I find it ironic he named the bill “Internet Freedom Act” — doesn’t he realize how Orwellian that is? It’s not freedom for people or the internet… it’s freedom for carriers to restrict access and throttle bandwidth however they please.

That is, AT&T could turn off VOIP access. Verizon could throttle bittorrent traffic down to nothing. Time Warner could block access to competitors. They could all block access to Google unless Google paid them money.

You can’t allow phone carriers to block access to competitors numbers, and you can’t allow internet carriers to block access to competitors websites.

I’m really impressed with this demo, and I feel confident that something like this is going to be the future. I love how they solved the problem of arm/neck fatigue, and how they kept a physical keyboard. I can’t wait to use a real demo of this.

For more information, see 10/GUI.

There’s some good advice in this profile of Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist. Here’s a summary of his management philosophy:

• Listen to what users want. Try to make the site faster and better.
• Hire good people. “We work hard trying to get the right kind of folks.” It pays off: they hardly ever leave.
• No meetings, ever. “I find them stupefying and useless.”
• No management programmes and no MBAs. “I’ve always thought that sort of thing was baloney.”
• Forget the figures. “We are consistently in the black, so if we do better or worse in any given quarter it is absolutely irrelevant.”
• Occasionally, give people “a very gentle nudge”. This can be done over lunch or on the instant messaging boards.
• He doesn’t reply to any of his 100 daily messages, most of which beg Craigslist to do a deal. “I’m not real chatty on e-mail.”
• Put speed over perfection: “Get something out there. Do it, even if it isn’t perfect.”
• “Don’t screw it up by doing things that make people feel worse about their work.”

Charlie Brooker asks “Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?” His answer is hilarious — here’s an excerpt:

I admit it: I’m a bigot. A hopeless bigot at that: I know my particular prejudice is absurd, but I just can’t control it. It’s Apple. I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers. Awful people. Awful. Stop showing me your iPhone. Stop stroking your Macbook. Stop telling me to get one.

Seriously, stop it. I don’t care if Mac stuff is better. I don’t care if Mac stuff is cool. I don’t care if every Mac product comes equipped a magic button on the side that causes it to piddle gold coins and resurrect the dead and make holographic unicorns dance inside your head. I’m not buying one, so shut up and go home. Go back to your house. I know, you’ve got an iHouse. The walls are brushed aluminum. There’s a glowing Apple logo on the roof. And you love it there. You absolute MONSTER….

I know Windows is awful. Everyone knows Windows is awful… [But] it’s there, and there’s nothing you can do about it. OK, OK: I know other operating systems are available. But their advocates seem even creepier, snootier and more insistent than Mac owners. The harder they try to convince me, the more I’m repelled. To them, I’m a sheep. And they’re right. I’m a helpless, stupid, lazy sheep. I’m also a masochist. And that’s why I continue to use Windows – horrible Windows – even though I hate every second of it. It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life.

That’s why Windows works for me. But I’d never recommend it to anybody else, ever. This puts me in line with roughly everybody else in the world. No one has ever earnestly turned to a fellow human being and said, “Hey, have you considered Windows?” Not in the real world at any rate.