Not to be trolly, but…. if you substitute the sentence

Apple should design a phone the remains intact when you drop it 3 feet.
to
Microsoft should write an operating system that blocks spyware when you download porn.

would the reactions change from calls for “personal responsibility” to “down with the man!”? I like apple products and all, but try holding them to any quality standard and it seems you’ll get shouted down faster than somebody saying “retard” in a movie.

previously

Under these circumstances, the thinking goes, P.B.R. needs to stay neutral, ”always look and act the underdog” and not worry about those who look down on the beer, presumably because they’re snobs whose negative opinion only boosts its street cred. The Plan B analysis even says that P.B.R.’s embrace by punks, skaters and bike messengers make it a political, ”social protest” brand. These ”lifestyle as dissent” or ”consumption as protest” constituencies are about freedom and rejecting middle-class mores, and ”P.B.R. is seen as a symbol and fellow dissenter.” Eventually all of this sounds like satire, but the punch line is that it isn’t really that far off from P.B.R.’s strategy.

It’s been about 20 years since I’ve been to an Omaha City Council meeting, and in that time nothing has changed about the council chambers — the paneled décor, the dirty upholstered chairs, the institutional florescent lighting. The place even smells the same, a mixture of dust, mildewed paper, Brylcreem, toilet bowl deodorant and bureaucracy.

It also has to do with the fact that I find history so much more interesting now than I did as a child. Youth is wasted on the young I suppose.

It was intriguing to learn that the Upper East Side of Manhattan was replete with coal-belching locomotives in the late 20th Century, and fun to be reminded that the man who founded my alma mater was one of the original robber barons.

Most compelling, though, was the ramifications of a fatal mishap in 1902, that was likely inevitable given the congestion of heavy steel running into the old terminal. The deaths led to a public outcry over safety, which fanned the dissent over the pollution spit out by the coal engines. The New York legislature acted quickly to ban coal engines’ entry into New York City, and forced the majors to go electric or to die. They went electric, and the new beautiful Grand Central was born, and the train service was never disrupted in the process.

I was amazed to see how quickly the captains of industry were forced to modify their bread and butter in the name of the public welfare–such a stark contrast to the tepid environmental regulations that have slodged through Congress in more recent history. One of the show’s historians said that it was useless for them to resist the teeming public sentiment, the socialist and populism clamor was a force too large to be reckoned with, and the railroad was lucky to get out with what it got.

This made me feel a bit envious, I’ll admit. Not since that gilded age have the wealthy and elite been so far removed from the rest of society as they are in this part of the 21st century. But where is our public outrage, our populist movement, and where is our yellow journalism calling for reform? Have the Rupert Murdochs simply done better than their forebears by convincing 5 x more Americans to pay more attention to last night’s American Idol than to its Super Tuesday results? Why is it that slightly better than half the voters, far from outraged or disgusted, buy into the notion that the free market will sort it all out?

Beats me. All I know is that this righteous indignation has made me hungry. I’m off to lunch at Grand Central, with other yuppies who get paid well doing the Man’s dirty work.

…I continue to love Ernie Chambers:

(09-17) 16:15 PDT Lincoln, Neb. (AP) –

Fed up with the threats, tired of natural disasters, the state’s longest-serving state senator is using his legal muscle against who he says is the culprit — God. State Sen. Ernie Chambers of Omaha sued the Almighty in Douglas County District Court last week.

Chambers, who skips morning prayers during the legislative session and often criticizes Christians, said he filed the lawsuit to show that anybody can file a lawsuit against anybody.

That, he said, was recently illustrated by a federal lawsuit he said triggered his lawsuit against God.

Tory Bowen, 24, sued a state judge who barred the words “rape” and “victim,” among other terms, in the trial of Pamir Safi, who Bowen says sexually assaulted her. Bowen said Lancaster District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront violated her free speech rights.

Chambers said Bowen’s lawsuit is inappropriate because the Nebraska Supreme Court has already considered the case and federal courts follow the decisions of state supreme courts on state matters.

“This lawsuit having been filed and being of such questionable merit creates a circumstance where my lawsuit is appropriately filed,” Chambers said. “People might call it frivolous but if they read it they’ll see there are very serious issues I have raised.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf, in an order last week, expressed doubts about whether Bowen’s lawsuit “has any legal basis whatsoever” and said sanctions may be imposed against Tory Bowen, the accuser, and her attorneys if they fail to show cause for the lawsuit.

The Associated Press usually does not identify accusers in sex-assault cases, but Bowen has allowed her name to be used publicly because of the issue over the judge’s language restrictions.

Cheuvront declared a mistrial in Safi’s trial in July, saying pretrial publicity made it impossible to gather enough impartial jurors.

Chambers says in his lawsuit that God has made terroristic threats against the senator and his constituents, inspired fear and caused “widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth’s inhabitants.”

Chambers also says God has caused “fearsome floods … horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes.”

He’s seeking a permanent injunction against God.

We craft our identity through pointing all the time. Language is mostly about pointers (“signs”). The list of favorite TV shows, movies, and music on social network sites are a linguistic pointer to these cultural referents. Yet, in a multimedia world, instead of having to just reference them by name, I can reference them by image, video, and audio, pulling a much more rich set of content into the fold. In some senses, these practices are the same as they both involve constructing a semiotic pointer to a cultural object. Yet, because multimedia referents are “hosted”, multimedia pointers can be altered. Furthermore, there’s a perceived cost to pointing (namely, bandwidth). And, besides, we never think of uttering the linguistic referent as making a “copy.”

As remix is ridden with questions of legality, I can’t help but wonder what the legal ramifications of pointer remix might be. We live in a world obsessed with copyright and IP, but isn’t pointing to something fair use? Imagine how ridiculous the world would be if you could only consume, but never link (linguistically or through html)

There’s room for interesting debate about open culture, etc…. this preview [youtube] for a documentary grabs my attention, too… if for no other reason than hearing GWB “sing” Imagine and Walk on the Wild Side.

(more at the OpenSourceCinema page on youtube)

Congress set the deadline several years ago in an effort to free the nation’s airwaves for public safety and other services.

“The whole digital TV transition will enable public safety responders to have more spectrum for more operability and public safety uses,” said Todd Sedmak, a spokesman for the telecommunications administration.

To “fix” otherwise working tv’s that will be intentionally broken, the Department of Commerce¹ has set aside $990,000,000 (with an “emergency” $510,000,000 waiting in the wings — my bet is that that will get spent, too) to partially subsidize converters that tv owners can duct tape to their boxes.

¹ Glad to see we have the Department of Commerce tasked with paying for our safety. It only makes sense when Homeland Security is protecting our Commerce.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

“We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

 Related: me on Iraq: “Would have done it differently“