How to tell Netflix is having money problems

Here's how to tell when Netflix is having money trouble.

Measure the scratch density on children's DVDs.

It costs money to replace scratched and old DVDs. Since scratched disks often work this is one of the first things Netflix will scrimp on.

We're seeing a lot of scratches ...

Update 2/24/09: And a lot of broken DVDs too - maybe 1 in 5. I wonder if Blockbuster is any better. It's time to look at alternatives.

Palm Pre has search, iPhone doesn't

Yeah, and the Pre has cut, copy paste as well ...

Palm Pre: The Definitive FAQ

... The entire contents of your phone are searchable. Whether it's contacts, old conversations, appointments, media file, etc., you can easily find what you need on your phone with all the results provided in a single screen...

Whoa! Smackdown Pre.

The Pre also has background multitasking and background notification.

Did we mention cut, copy, paste?

Eat that iPhone.

My Nano qualified for a $25 class action settlement

I think I got $50 back from a flaky battery in my original iPod in the form of an Apple Store coupon [1], now I'm getting (maybe, some day) $25 for Nano scratches.

Original iPod nano owners benefit from scratch settlement - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... Thanks to a now-settled class action lawsuit, nano owners who experienced the scratchies can apply for a refund of $15 (if the iPod shipped with a slip case, as later ones did) or $25 (for no-case shipments)."

It was a pain to enter the serial number at the settlement website, I found it easier to read on the internal 'about' screen than on the back of the phone. Between re-entering the serial number and re-entering the Captcha [2] it took me five tries.

You then get a printed form you have to mail in.

It's a lot of bother, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't feel that Apple has a nasty tendency to skimp on quality control. This seems to be the only way to keep them semi-honest.

[1] Much less useful than you'd imagine. It didn't work online. I think I squandered it on a 2nd generation iPod shuffle, which was (and is) a waste of money.
[2] Captchas are getting to the end of their useful lifespan; spammer neural network software is now better than humans at deciphering them. In fact, I'm soon going to have to start using that software to support my own (legitimate) Captcha entering.

Design gone bad: form over function

There's nothing so good it can't be ruined by excess.

Even the ideals of elegant design can be carried too far (emphases mine) ...

Palm Pre: Palm Chats with Facebookers, Explains Pre's Lack of MicroSD

... Crowley is currently holding an open chat on Facebook to answer any questions people might have, although it's heavily selective. Among the questions Crowley won't answer: how intrusive is the multi-platform personal information program Synergy going to be? What about the lack of desktop synchronization, or cloud storage? But he does take a crack at a question on MicroSD expandability.

‘Design' was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent...

My iPhone doesn't have a removable memory card, and I don't miss it. So I'm not griefing Palm for that call. I'm just taking the opportunity to call for balance, especially at Apple.

Design is a high goal, but function matters too. The MacBook Air should have had an ethernet cable, the MacBooks should have had a firewire port, the iPhone needs a Calendar API.

DateBk 6 is ugly, but the iPhone Calendar is lousy. There's more to good products than being pretty.

Managing the biggest global warming problem -- the American public

It's been noted before that an African Plains Ape is going to worry more about global cooling than global warming. That's particularly true for apes living in a temperate climate ...

Obama Urgent on Warming, Public Cool - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

The latest in an annual series of polls from the Pew Research Center on people’s top priorities for their elected leaders shows that America and President Obama are completely out of sync on human-caused global warming...

According to the survey of 1,503 adults, global warming, on its own, ranks last out of 20 surveyed issues. Here’s the list from top to bottom, with the economy listed as a top priority by 85 percent of those polled and global warming 30 percent: the economy, jobs, terrorism, Social Security, education, energy, Medicare, health care, deficit reduction, health insurance, helping the poor, crime, moral decline, military, tax cuts, environment, immigration, lobbyists, trade policy, global warming...

The only reason global warming outranks head lice is that the public wasn't asked to compare the two.

Well, we knew this was going to be hard. The American public has been in the Twilight Zone for eight years, it's going to take years of education before there's public acceptance of a carbon tax, even a carbon tax that's offset by other tax cuts.

The history of tobacco education is both encouraging and discouraging. Encouraging because it worked, discouraging because the groundbreaking Surgeon General's report was published in 1964, but smoking in classrooms persisted into the 1970s. The real social transformations took place in the 1980s, and smoking bans in the 1990s.

So initial change took ten years, but real change took a generation. Of course the health impacts of smoking were not exactly deniable; even the hell-spawn tobacco marketers gave up on that line by the 70s. (Odd how Team Inferno also led GOP climate change denialism).

Since we're basically at ground zero in the US, this puts American acceptance of public sacrifice at least 10-15 years away. The 8 years of Bush-led paralysis may end up being the GOP's greatest crime -- which is saying something.

Well, it's probably too late for CO2 production control anyway.

Obama will have to move on things without public knowledge or support. That means a lot of money for public education (even if the results will take another 10 years), research on climate engineering and low CO2 emission energy, EPA limits on CO2 production to reduce coal driven CO2 emissions, a gasoline tax for "energy independence" that will be offset by a payroll tax, and backroom deals with China and India.

The single most important contributor to human survival, however, will be to keep an unreformed GOP out of power. That's why Obama is going to have to tread softly, and act covertly -- the electorate can't be frightened.

Obama's Jan 24 radio address

You can stream Obama's first weekly address from the whitehouse.gov blog. It's also available as an iTunes podcast, though that's through ABC TV rather than the gov site.

Excerpts below, with my emphases. I've asked the site to start providing full feeds rather than excerpts -- please add your voice to that cause ...

The White House - President Obama delivers Your Weekly Address

... Our economy could fall $1 trillion short of its full capacity, which translates into more than $12,000 in lost income for a family of four...

... I have proposed an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan to immediately jumpstart job creation as well as long-term economic growth...

.. It’s a plan that will save or create three to four million jobs over the next few years, and one that recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment - the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work even as, all around the country, there’s so much work to be done. That’s why this is not just a short-term program to boost employment..

... To accelerate the creation of a clean energy economy, we will double our capacity to generate alternative sources of energy like wind, solar, and biofuels over the next three years. We’ll begin to build a new electricity grid ... weatherizing 2.5 million homes.

To lower health care cost, cut medical errors, and improve care, we’ll computerize the nation’s health record in five years, saving billions of dollars in health care costs and countless lives. And we’ll protect health insurance for more than 8 million Americans who are in danger of losing their coverage during this economic downturn.

To ensure our children can compete and succeed in this new economy, we’ll renovate and modernize 10,000 schools ... We’ll invest more in Pell Grants to make college affordable for seven million more students, provide a $2,500 college tax credit to four million students...

Finally, we will rebuild and retrofit America to meet the demands of the 21st century. That means repairing and modernizing thousands of miles of America’s roadways and providing new mass transit options for millions of Americans. It means protecting America by securing 90 major ports and creating a better communications network for local law enforcement and public safety officials in the event of an emergency. And it means expanding broadband access to millions of Americans, so business can compete on a level-playing field, wherever they’re located.

... Instead of politicians doling out money behind a veil of secrecy, decisions about where we invest will be made public, and informed by independent experts whenever possible. We’ll launch an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov...

I'll subscribe to the iTunes podcast. Recovery.gov isn't up yet, there's just a notice that it will be online after passage of the recovery act.

Since I make my living working on clinical computing software, I will abstain from comment on the economic and clinical merits of investing in the EHR. The rest of it sounds good to me.

The broadband investment is critical. Cheap broadband combined with the the $150 Netbook will be revolutionary.

Google: The Quick, the Sick, and the Dead

In the spirit of the Dapocalypse, and inspired by a recent Google Sites bug, I'm going divide the Google products I pay attention to into three groups: The Quick, The Sick, and the Dead.

This would not be a good time to start relying on items in the Sick list.

The Quick

• Search and Scholar
• Android
• Google Reader
• Gmail
  
• Google Contacts (added 2/9/2009)
• Google Video Chat
• Google Mobile Sync (added 2/9/2009)
  
• Blogger
• Chrome
• Picasa and Picasa Web Albums
• Calendar
  
• Maps
• Earth
  
• News
• Browser toolbars
• Translate
  

The Sick

• Google Sites
• Google Apps
• GrandCentral
• Gmail Tasks
• Custom search engines
• YouTube
• Shopping
• Google Groups
• Google Checkout
• Google Base
  
• Orkut
• Talk
• Desktop
• iGoogle
• Knol
• Mobile
• Documents (Presentation is near death, Docs is sick, Spreadsheet is quick)
  
• Google Health (added 6/09)

The Dead

• Google Notebook*
• Google Page Creator*
• Google Browser Sync
• Google Video
  

* Zombie, or walking dead

I'll revise the list over time, but I think most migration will be downwards.

How will we know the economy has recovered?

We will know the economy has truly recovered when it is possible to buy a good toaster.

What is the secret of a happy life?

What is the secret of the happy life?

Editing.

All the Bush conspiracy theories - up for re-examination

A terrific summary of Bush era "conspiracy theories" from Tom Tomorrow, one of our most cogent political analysts (emphases mine) ...

This Modern World - (Tom Tomorrow) “Of course…”

Olbermann’s guest, the NSA whistleblower, got me to thinking: what other things that we already pretty much understand to be true will be confirmed as fact in the weeks and months ahead? This is the list that I’ve come up with so far. (Spoiler alert: this feels like something that will probably turn into a cartoon in the next week or two, so if you prefer to be surprised there, you might want to skip this one.)

1. The aforementioned spying on journalists. Of course they were spying on journalists. And there was that oddly specific moment where Andrea Mitchell, in the course of interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen about his reporting on the NSA and government wiretapping, asked if he knew anything about the administration spying on Christiane Amanpour — a question the network promptly scrubbed from the transcription.

2. Of course Cheney was running everything, at least for the first term.

3. Of course they made backroom deals with their pals at Halliburton, Enron, etc.

4. Of course they were lying about Iraq from the start.

5. Of course torture was sanctioned at the highest levels.

6. Of course Valerie Plame was deliberately outed in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s op-ed debunking the yellowcake uranium story.

7. Of course male prostitute turned fake journalist Jeff Gannon was having an affair with someone in the White House.

8. Of course we came close to war with Iran.

9. Of course someone was feeding Bush answers during that presidential debate where you could clearly see a square shape under the back of his jacket — a camera angle that the administration had specifically demanded the network not use. And there’s the point where he interrupts his own answer to chastise someone no one else can see — of course he was wearing a wire.

10. I’m not sure if this one counts as an “of course,” but I’ve long suspected that Bush has some sort of neurological disorder which worsened over the course of the past eight years. If you go back and look at clips from his days as governor, it’s almost shocking how articulate and quick he seems. I mean, yes, we can all chuckle, ha ha those wacky malapropisms, in the way that you might have had a good natured chuckle about Ronald Reagan’s absent mindedness, until years later when you realize with dawning horror that the man with his finger on the button probably had early stage Alzheimers. Bush was inarticulate eight years ago but these days he can barely string a sentence together.

11. And maybe an overall generic entry: of course the truth will turn out to be much, much worse than we ever suspected...

… of course I go out and run a few errands, and am swamped with reader suggestions when I get back. Most of these came in repeatedly, including many suggestions that my “neurological disorder” theory might more easily be formulated as “of course George Bush was drinking again.”

– Of course Alberto Gonzales fired those attorneys for political reasons.

– Of course the White House emails were deliberately deleted.

– Of course more than two hundred thousand Iraqis were killed and more than a million displaced.

– Of course there were plans to suspend elections in the event of another terrorist attack.

– Of course Bush decided to invade Iraq in October, 2002.

– Of course the administration leaked important details of ongoing investigations by federal agencies before the completion of the investigation for purely politically expedient reasons, thus compromising the security of the cases, alerting accessories, and endangering Americans.

– Of course Whittington’s shooting involved a criminal coverup.

One of Cheney/Bush's more remarkable achievements was to revise the tinfoil hat standards. What was once absurd and silly became, for eight years, well worth consideration.

It will be quite interesting, 10 years from now, to review this list. I suspect about 80% it will be found to be correct, and none will be considered absurd. Given the surprising accuracy of the loony gas station tabloids over the past few years, I have wondered about their persistent claims that Bush was drinking again.

I've also wondered about the neurologic disorder.

As bad as we now think the Bush regime was, it's possible it was even worse.

What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6

DateBk6 is ugly, eccentric, and complex.

I miss it terribly. The iPhone’s Calendar is pretty and swooshy, but, as a tool, it’s pretty pathetic. It’s one of the reasons I don’t sing the praises of the iPhone. (My lack of praise is probably fully responsible for weakening iPhone sales.)

Give me an ugly jackhammer like the PalmOS DateBk6 any day …

Pimlico Software - DateBk6

When was the last time that you missed buying a birthday present because there was no ADVANCE warning of an event? Or missed a task because your tasks were not integrated with your calendar? Or spent more than two taps inserting a commonly used event for which DateBk6 has a built-in template? Or needed to look at a week-at-a-glance with the TEXT listed of your appointments? Or wanted to use color on your Palm handheld to emphasize important events? Or wanted to keep your spouse's or co-worker's calendar on your palm - but visibly separate from your own? Or have DateBk6 time-zone aware so that alarms and events are properly keyed to the correct timezone? Or wanted to recover an event that you accidentally just deleted? Or link an event or ToDo to an address book entry and automatically log to it? Or put an alarm on a ToDo? Or handle events that span midnight? Or.....? DateBk6 handles all of these tasks and more. No wonder it is one of the most popular Palm programs ever written…

…Best of all, the proceeds from this product go towards wildlife conservation and the Dewar's Gorilla Haven project in the North Georgia Mountains

Of course nobody would seriously consider porting DateBk6 to the iPhone.

What a developer might do is to make a deal with Pimlico. Work with the engineer (singular I think) to reverse engineer DateBk6. Understand what it does and why it does it. Then build a true iPhone app with a similar set of ideas, but have it sync to Google Calendar and Contacts (maybe sync notes/tasks to Evernote).

Yeah, in theory Apple could produce a good solution and take this niche away but, really, there’s no sign they’ll ever do this. Waiting for Apple to open up their Calendar APIs is waiting for Godot.

So screw Apple.

I’d pay $100 if it worked.

Update 12/23/2010: It's not on the iPhone, but Pimlical for Android has been released.

We now have Krugman’s human sacrifices

Actually, it was Paul’s wife who called for a “human” sacrifice of bankers, and my wife who seconded the motion.

In any case, we now have the winning candidates …

TPMMuckraker | Talking Points Memo |

The Financial Times reports … today that in early December, Merrill, which months earlier had agreed to be bought -- rescued, really -- by Bank of America, decided to pay out $3-4 billions in bonuses.

The bonuses were handed out on an accelerated schedule -- at least a month earlier than in previous years. And they ere agreed to just days before Bank of America, realizing how much in toxic assets Merrill had on its books, went to the federal government asking for more taxpayer money to help it digest Merrill -- money that was eventually forthcoming…

Let the ceremony begin …

Colin Powell – the path to reform?

Powell squandered his honor serving Bush and Cheney. He may have been betrayed.

We knew he’d become an Obama supporter, but reading his quotes it’s clear he’s not just a voter, he’s a fan (emphasis mine) …

Colin Powell: The America We Remember Is Back Again - Political Hotsheet

.. "I am surprised," Powell said. "I am deeply pleased it happened in my lifetime…

.. As an African-American who was once touted as a presidential candidate, Powell offered his perspective on the Mr. Obama's historic election.

"We have a man who happens to be an African-American, but beyond that, he is a qualified, capable, transformational figure – that's why we elected him," Powell said. "The fact he is African-American says so much about who we are as a people, as a country. It has energized the country and energized the world. Parades the night of the election, not only in Chicago and New York, but in Rio, in Berlin, in Obama, Japan -- there is such a place. They're building a statue in it for him already. The world wondered, can America really do this? Aren't they too divided? Can they really pull something like this off? And we said to the world, yes, we can, and we did."

Regarding the ongoing wars that President Obama will inherit, Powell offered his view on how to proceed, "...in terms of Iraq, we can continue the draw-down a pretty steady pace, and the Iraqis get our help, but Afghanistan, a still more difficult task. Still a tribal society, still a very poor country. The government is not functioning as well as we want it to, and you have the drug problem, which I think can destroy any country if it is not brought under control. So additional troops will help, but we need more than just additional troops. We need to do something about the Pakistan side and the government needs to start functioning. It is a political and economic challenge."

It's not unlikely that President Obama will call upon Colin Powell for service in the new era of responsibility.

Powell may yet undo some of the harm he contributed to. If he’s really willing to help, I’d forgive.

Obama – leading us out of the darkness and the torture chamber

I lived 8 years under the rule of Cheney and Bush Jr. The darkness began to lift when the Dems took the Senate, but now I’m blinking into a rising sun.

I’m mostly stunned (emphases mine) …

Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' | World news | The Guardian

Barack Obama embarked on the wholesale deconstruction of George Bush's war on terror, shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition, and calling for a new set of rules for detainees. The repudiation of Bush's thinking on national security yesterday also saw the appointment of a high-powered envoy to the Middle East.

Obama's decision to permanently shut down the CIA's clandestine interrogation centres went far beyond the widely anticipated move to wind down the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year.

He cast his scrapping of the legal apparatus set up by Bush as a way for America to reclaim the moral high ground in the fight against al-Qaida.

"We are not, as I said during the inauguration, going to continue with the false choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama said at the signing ceremony. "We intend to win this fight. We are going to win it on our own terms."

In a sign of the sweeping rejection of the legal standards set by Bush, officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday said the new administration would not be guided by any of the opinions on torture and detainees issued by the justice department after 11 September 2001.

Instead, Obama, in three executive orders, renewed the US commitment to the Geneva convention on the treatment of detainees. All detainees will be registered by the International Committee for the Red Cross, in another departure of past practice under the Bush administration.

… Another order directs the CIA to follow the US army field manual on interrogations, which bars such techniques as waterboarding…

… Obama followed up the burst of activity on detention policy by announcing that his administration would put resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the top of his agenda, "actively and aggressively" seeking a comprehensive peace deal. As a sign of that intent, he confirmed that former senator George Mitchell, a veteran US mediator, would be his Middle East envoy…

In contrast to this great post from The Guardian, Minnesota Public Radio spent most of today butchering a confused story about the restoration of US funding for international family planning. Maybe they’re even more stunned than I am.

This is a good day. All of our traditional investments have been devastated, but our investments in Obama’s election have already paid off.

Now that Obama has done his part, our task is to support the creation of an American Truth Commission and international efforts to prosecute Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Bush.

PS. In honor of President Obama, after more than five years of posting, I’ve added the tag called “government” – now that we have one worthy of the name.

The new Whitehouse.gov -- now with a blog

As of this moment Google Reader was unable to parse the feed [1], but via Daring Fireball we now know of the White House blog …

EOP - Blog Post - Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov

Welcome to the new WhiteHouse.gov.

I'm Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.

… Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities:

Communication -- Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated…

Transparency – .. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Participation – …we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

We'd also like to hear from you -- what sort of things would you find valuable from WhiteHouse.gov? If you have an idea, use this form to let us know…

[1] The blog feed is -  http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/blog.aspx. I think they’re using their own platform. It doesn’t format as expected in WLW, so I think there are more problems than non-compliant feed announcement.