Peter Bright:

Microsoft thinks we can have the best of both worlds. I want to see that happen and Windows 8 is a transitional step towards that goal. The goal is realistic—but not with Surface, not with Windows 8 as it stands right now.

From the tablet perspective, Surface Pro is not acceptable. It gets too hot for a hand-held device, its battery life is woefully inadequate, and it’s too thick and heavy to be comfortable to hand hold for long sessions.

Maybe it’s just right for someone, but it sounds like the Surface Pro are compromises in all the wrong places. It’s a tablet, but because it has to be large and powerful enough to run Windows applications, it’s too heavy and awkward to really hold like a tablet; it’s a full PC, but it’s not nearly as useful as a laptop since it requires the kickstand to use.

Jamelle Bouie:

And then there’s the actual culture of the tech trade press, which has a fair number of often-unacknowledged blind spots. The most prominent voices of the Apple blogging community, for instance — John Gruber, Marco Arment, Jim Dalrymple, Jason Snell, Shawn Blanc, Stephen Hackett, John Siracusa, and so on — are all white men.

This doesn’t taint their opinions, but it does limit aspects of their perspective.

Fantastic piece that I think we should all read.

I don’t think “diversity”—the composition of a group’s racial, gender or other characteristics—is per se important. If it so happens that a group, company, conference panel, whatever, is mostly white, mostly black, mostly male, mostly female, that isn’t wrong in and of itself.

But as Bouie points out, what is important is whether that composition is due to some factor that locks out (or makes it more difficult) for non-white people or females to get access to it. If certain people are less able to break into technology writing (or software development or whatever else) because of their background, then that’s something that we should work to fix. It’s something we should work to fix both because everyone deserves to be able to enter the technology fold, and because it devalues our community and the work that we do.

The more homogeneous the community is,¹ the less able we are to understand the needs and desires of different people, and therefore of building things that people actually love using. Worse, it inhibits new ideas, because our backgrounds and interests are that much more limited. What problems aren’t we solving, and what opportunities are we blind to, because of it?

Most of us believe that technology is a democratic force—that is, it’s something that empowers people to be heard, to live better lives, and to do great work. It undoubtedly is, but if we believe that, we also should work to actively make it more open and accessible.

1. “The community” meaning technology generally, which includes writers, developers, designers, businesspeople, and so forth—everyone that is actively involved in the technology industry. [↩]

Megan McArdle points out an under appreciated cost of federal regulation:

But this may just be the broken window fallacy in action: we see the distortions of the local government, but the distortions of the federal government remain invisible precisely because they’re so effective at destroying innovation. The more national the rules, the harder it is to tell whether they’re bad.  

The economy would not be destroyed if we had federal laws against Uber and food trucks; we’d all just be a little worse off. The problem is, if the rules were national, none of us would even know that we were worse off. No one would ever have tried to start a food truck, so Matt and I wouldn’t even know that there was this great thing we were missing. We may be assuming that the Federal rules work pretty well precisely because they have entirely foreclosed a bunch of great possibilities that we’d really enjoy.

One huge benefit of allowing states significant autonomy is that we can test different policies without subjecting the entire nation to it, and we can compare results to states that followed a different policy path. That’s much less likely when more and more policy-making occurs on the federal level, and worse, we can be blinded to different policies that could be more effective or to the costs of current policy.

Jacob Sullum on the Obama administration’s claim that they can legally kill U.S. citizens they deem a threat:

The problem is that to accept this position, you have to put complete trust in the competence, wisdom, and ethics of the president, his underlings, and their successors. You have to believe they are properly defining and inerrantly identifying people who pose an imminent (or quasi-imminent) threat to national security and eliminating that threat through the only feasible means, which involves blowing people up from a distance. If mere mortals deserved that kind of faith, we would not need a Fifth Amendment, or the rest of the Constitution.

It really isn’t relevant whether the people the president orders blown up by unmanned drones in regions we’re not even at war in are a threat or not. Few would argue that Anwar al-Awlaki was actually a swell guy who didn’t deserve what happened to him. (His 16 year-old son? Not so much, despite Robert Gibbs disturbing attempt to blame Awlaki for his son’s death, rather than, you know, the U.S. government, which murdered him.) If the police fired Hellfire missiles on a car carrying a dangerous murderer, after all, we wouldn’t shrug our shoulders and say “Well, he deserved it”—we’d be horrified that the police murdered someone.

President Obama, who derided the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens and torture of suspected al Qaeda leaders, is leaving craters and burning wreckage where a U.S. citizen existed just milliseconds prior. What’s relevant is that he is carving out the power for himself (and future presidents) to be judge, jury and executioner for U.S. citizens, regardless of where they are. The Obama administration claims that the Fifth Amendment isn’t violated because the executive branch’s decision process constitutes due process.

As Sullum argues, this wholly undermines the bedrock idea that government’s power must be restrained to protect the rights of individuals. If the president can unilaterally decide that U.S. citizens should be killed, why shouldn’t the federal government be able to make speech they find threatening to U.S. security or otherwise harmful illegal? Certainly that’s much less egregious than blowing someone up, so if we are to rely on the president’s wisdom in the case of drone strikes, why not rely on the wisdom of Congress and the president for banning speech?

The ratchet of power continues.

A Justice Department memo providing the legal justification for drone strikes on American citizens has leaked. The key determinant is whether they provide an imminent threat to the U.S. “Imminent,” though, doesn’t mean “imminent”:

But the confidential Justice Department “white paper” introduces a more expansive definition of self-defense or imminent attack than described  by Brennan or Holder in their public speeches.  It refers, for example, to what it calls a “broader concept of imminence” than actual intelligence about any ongoing plot against the U.S. homeland.    

“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.

Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American  has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is  no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.” 

Let’s restate that to be a little more taut: American citizens are killed when the president decides they need killed, and we call that “due process.”

Jawbone made two big acquisitions:

You can tell the influence of uber designer (and chief creative officer) Yves Behar on the San Francisco-based wearable computing products company Jawbone. The company is buying two startups – Visere and MassiveHealth (behind the Eatery app) for an undisclosed amount of money in order to create a better experience around the UP, its personal health focused wearable computing device.

Exciting news. It’s early days for devices like Jawbone’s Up wristband, and I can’t wait to see where the people involved take the category.

Big thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.

Did you know that 49% of employees in 100-999 person companies are using consumer cloud services to store and synchronize their business data?

It’s because the consumer cloud is easy and fast. But it’s not always secure enough for your business’ intellectual property. It certainly doesn’t meet Corporate’s policies for auditing and data retention. It’s simply not the cloud you’re looking for.

Igloo is built in the enterprise cloud. We’re made for business, but still fast and easy to use. In fact, we have a full suite of social tools, like blogs, built around secure document management, collaboration and version control. (We have all the security acronyms you need. Really.)

It’s time you try Igloo (and check out our fancy new form, too.)

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Patrick Rhone:

The original iPhone was released June of 2007 and changed the very idea of what a mobile phone was. It was a “blockbuster”.

The original iPad was released April of 2010, nearly three years later, and changed the very idea of what a mobile computer was. It was a “blockbuster”.

Now Apple has to — as in, MUST — come up with something equally revolutionary in less time in order to stay “relevant”? I’m sorry, I think I’d choose selling more stuff and making way more money and staying irrelevant by that definition.

Bloomberg says Apple is negotiating with Time Warner to put HBO Go on the Apple TV by mid-2013.

Excellent news if the negotiations are successful.

iTunes, Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO Go… Once you’ve got enough content sources, you could build a wonderful UI around the sources that abstracts them away. Just look for the movie or show you want to watch, rather than a source then what you’re looking for.

Time Warner Cable signed an agreement with Roku to allow subscribers to watch up to 300 cable channels through a Roku set-top box.

Interesting. This signals that cable makers may be becoming a little more open minded to how subscribers watch their channels. This is a significant step toward a major shift in television.

Along with the news that the giant squid has been captured on film for the first time (alive, anyway), this story about a New Zealand giant squid researcher/Ahab popped back up:

The currents were pulling us toward the rocks, and I could hear the massive waves crashing into them. I was holding a flashlight, and I shone it in front of us: there was a twenty-foot wall of water. I turned around, and discovered that another enormous wall was pressing down on us from behind.

“You won’t find this in New York, will you, mate?” O’Shea said.

For a moment, I wondered if O’Shea was fully in command of his faculties. But we made it through the gap in the rocks, and he skillfully steered the boat into a protected inlet. It was indeed the perfect spot.

Lovely story to file away in your read-later service of choice and read when you’ve got a moment. It’s the kind of story I loved reading as a child: a person obsessed with discovering a mystery, driven to extreme lengths despite constant failure, and the blending of myth, science and reality.

Eugene Wei argues that Amazon’s low-margin approach is a strategic advantage:

Attacking the market with a low margin strategy has other benefits, though, ones often overlooked or undervalued. For one thing, it strongly deters others from entering your market. Study disruption in most businesses and it almost always comes from the low end. Some competitor grabs a foothold on the bottom rung of the ladder and pulls itself upstream. But if you’re already sitting on that lowest rung as the incumbent, it’s tough for a disruptor to cling to anything to gain traction.

True. That’s what makes Amazon a threat to Apple: they are in the position of creating cheap, pretty good mobile devices that have access to a pretty good media store. They can undermine Apple’s strong margins, which have driven their success.

But what if “the market”—the nature of it—is constantly being redefined? What if you end up clinging to the bottom rung of a ladder to a market that no longer exists?

Wei believes that Apple should compete at the bottom end with lower-margin devices to defend against low-end threats from Amazon and Google. I don’t think he’s wrong, but I think the most important defense Apple has is offense. They have to continue redefining what mobile devices are and do so competitors are constantly chasing them.

Matt Stone:

“Disruption is overrated,” he said. “If you tell good stories, the platforms are sort of beside the point. We made the most analog thing you can think of, a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater, and it worked out as well as anything we have ever done.”

Romo is a $150 iPhone-powered rover robot that can be controlled from other iOS devices. I must have one.

It’s a cute toy right now, but what excites me about this is programming for it. There’s so much to experiment with—navigation, object recognition and people recognition, “emotions,” you name it.

Today’s best news:

The ex-guitarist of the band Ween and lifelong Jersey Shore fisherman is prepping to shoot a pilot for a quirky TV series about saltwater angling. He’s going to embark on nautical adventures with fellow musician and fisherman Les Claypool of Primus.

And to make it better, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are producing it. Awesome.