How Fast Are You?

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From the genius of xkcd.

It’s still early days, and some of this is abstraction based on reporting from a number of sources, but here’s what we know (or think we know) about the Palm Pre so far:

• The new OS, called WebOS, is based on Linux (bbg)
• UI and web browser are WebKit based (bbg)
• Comes with real GPS (bbg)
• Threaded SMS (bbg)
• Copy and paste is universally available (bbg)
• Universal search, kind of like Helio Ocean; just start typing, and it’ll search your contacts, calendar, files and the web (bbg)
• Optional tight Facebook integration, including contacts and avatars, IM, status updates (bbg)
• All applications, including the built-in ones, are created with web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) (ars)
• JSON-based access to device services, like contacts, calendar, location, accelerometer, GPS, etc. (bbg, ars)
• Sqlite database available to apps (one assumes through the JSON bus) (bbg)
• Palm seems to be OK with applications that send SMS, unlike Apple (ars)
• Palm hasn’t released the SDK or Mojo to the public yet, but a private group of developers has been working with it (ars)
• Applications can built using Palm’s Mojo development framework — which is “extremely nice, well thought out, and significantly improves the speed and efficiency of developing mobile applications on the prė” — or you can start from scratch (ars)
• Palm will provide a mechanism to download new apps over the air (bbg)

Everyone on teh weebs seems pretty impressed with the Pre. Pending further review, it’s sounding like my next phone might be a Palm, which is something I never thought I’d say again.

Break free for free!

That Bald Guy calls me a cult member, and he’s right: I have the Apple Kool-Aid running down my face after glugging down gallons of it. But I have taken a positive step.

After spending years paying $99 for a suite of services I never really used that much, I was glad to be getting push synching for my hard-earned dollars. But it wasn’t worth $99.

$12.99 a year, maybe, but not a Franklin. I mean, I can just sync at night.

Thankfully, a new web site has created a way to use Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative with push contacts & calendar on your iPod touch or iPhone, thanks to NuevaSync and Google. In order for this phase of your MobileMe recovery, you will need the iPhone 2.0 OS. To upgrade, connect your iPhone to your computer and click “Check for Updates” in iTunes.

NuevaSync links Google Calendar and Contacts with their Exchange server, which enables you to sync your Google info with devices that support Microsoft Exchange. You can sign up here.

Read more here. And welcome back to reality.

What’s In a Name?

The full and proper name of this website is “How Fast Are You? How Dense?” (sometimes abbreviated as HFAYHD) and reading the explanation of what the name means is kind of like having a joke explained to you: by the time you’ve heard the entire explanation, you get why it was supposed to be funny, but that time is now long past. Having said that, what follows attempts to explain why this website is called “How Fast Are You? How Dense?”, and by the time you finish reading it, you will probably understand why it has such a obtuse and grammatically inappropriate name, but you will almost certainly no longer care. Plunging onward:

Once upon a time, in a far off land called “The 80’s”, there was a magazine called Mondo 2000. It was the coolest thing ever. It covered a future full of wearable computers and smart-drugs and virtual reality and everything that was going to turn us all into gloriously posthuman cyborgs that lived and breathed information. And this future had just arrived, this very minute, and minds and bodies would never be the same. In a word, it talked about cyberpunk.

This herald of the “future now” (Mondo) had a tag line: “How fast are you? How dense?”¹ This, also, was the coolest thing ever. In the darkly dystopian future that was due any second now, we gloriously posthuman cyborgs would be using this as a recognition signal, a handshake protocol. We would greet everyone with a demand for bandwidth specification: How much information can you provide me with? How quickly can you accept the information that I have to impart? Because us cyborgs need information like a fish needs water, and I don’t have time for niceties.

This site attempts to provide you, the reader, with interesting information at as high a bitrate as our day jobs allow. Because you and us, we’re all are gloriously posthuman cyborgs, and we’re living in the cyberpunk future. For example:

Wearable computers? That cellphone in your pocket has more computing power than 3,600 desktop computers from The 80’s and is probably connected to the Internet, a massively interconnected system of billions of computers and providing a medium through which billions of people and companies work and play.

Smart-drugs? In a survey of 1,427 scientists, 62% percent said they had taken drugs like Ritalin, and 44% reported using Provigil, to improve their mental performance. It is estimated that 7-20% of college students have taken drugs like Ritalin and Adderall for the same reason.

Virtual reality? Look no further than Second Life, World of Warcraft, or any of the other dozens of virtual locations where meet to play, socialize and create.

So, welcome to the future. Now, how fast are you? How dense?

Complaints? Requests? Corrections? Threats? Bribes? Anything else that won’t fit in a comment form?

Tower Records is dead. Chapter 11, the business dirt nap. Quite frankly, I’m wondering what took so long. The obvious answer is: The American public finally wised up. After years of paying 19 friggin’, hard-earned dollars for each shiny, plastic disc, they finally stopped. Now, Tower is paying the Jethro Tull piper for its sins of avarice and greed.

Yes, the recording industry is whining about illegal downloading, file sharing and piracy (by honest Buccaneer-Americans), but they also have only themselves to blame. Just like Congress, old white guys in suits tried to keep the gravy train rolling. The problem is, people weren’t coming to the station anymore. They found that bicycles were faster, and… well, let’s stop beating that metaphor into the ground.

The point is, many of us wised up and realized that when you buy something, you own it, and can share it at will. You can let a friend use your car, your computer, your phone… why not your digital music files?

Now, if we can just stop the RIAA from suing dead people’s families.

I don’t know with whom I’m more frustrated:

• The government, for preaching and peddling FUD
• The FAA and TSA, for hiring completely incompetent drones workers
• The general public, for putting up with all of it
• The media, for taking the gub’ment FUD and spreading it like syphilis

In a nutshell: because of a thwarted attempt to hijack airlines, we are no longer allowed to bring liquids, books or electronics on board. No water (wait ad nauseum for a steward to bring it), no toothpaste (ew.), no books (just SkyMall, please. Consume!), no DAPs (music kills) and no laptops (because watching Captain Ron for the umpteenth time is sooo much better).

It gets worse: mindless chimps people are actually agreeing with authorities, spewing the usual tripe about feeling safer with more regulations and the “small price to pay” for safety.

Try this one, from Bill Brown, Harbeson, Delaware: “I agree with the UK banning all electronic devices in the cabin. These items need to be checked in and stowed in the cargo area. We can do without these items until we reach our destinations.” And he’s not alone.

F-ing what?! Are you serious? You’d rather place your cellphone, $2,000 laptop and PDA into the cargo hold and let the baggage apes throw it around like a dead panther cub in the wild? The utter lack of intelligence and foresight appalls me, and though I am no longer surprised, I still find myself shocked.

It’s not that we’re not safe; it’s just a different perspective. We’re just like the rest of the world, which gets on with its life and understands that things happen and crazy people blow things up. But Americans are giving up their rights left and right, telling themselves it’s OK. You can sit at home and wring your hands over it, worrying that the terrorists will steal your personal data unless you let your DSL provider charge you more to send “secure and reliable” email. You can stay off planes altogether, or board them and arrive dehydrated in all your glorious bovinity, proud that you didn’t let the terrorists win. You can sit and cower and obey everything the nice, white politicians tell you. And after a while, you won’t have a choice to do anything except listen, because it will be law, and you’ll be wondering why no one stood up to say it was wrong. No one stood up, including you.

Besides, you weren’t using those civil rights anyway, were you?

The NTY reports that British government has foiled a plot to blow up 6-10 airplanes using liquid explosives with small electronic devices as detonators.

Here in the US, the TSA has “put in place new regulations barring passengers from carrying any liquids, gels or lotions onto planes, except for milk or juice for young children and medicines.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the restrictions reflected the belief of investigators that the plotters planned to bring liquids on board, “each one of which would be benign, but mixed together could be used to create a bomb.”

The liquids were to be disguised as beverages and the detonators as “electronic devices or other common devices.” Britain banned all cellphones and portable music players from flights.

Mr. Chertoff called the plot “a very sophisticated plan and operation” that was close to fruition. “They had accumulated the capability necessary and they were well on their way,” he said at a televised news conference in Washington.

Sophisticated plans? This smacks of the kind of brilliant analysis the comes from watching the Die Hard movies, but I digress.

Liquids for children are allowed on board, as are liquid prescription medicines with the traveler’s name on the bottle and non-prescription medicines like insulin. Parents were being asked to take a sip of the juice or milk to prove it is what they say it is.

Officials were requiring passengers to check everything except personal items like keys, wallets, and passports, which they had to carry in plastic bags. Drinks and other liquid items were banned.

Travelers were required to remove eyeglasses from their cases, including sunglasses, and those traveling with infants were required to taste any baby milk in front of security officials.

I understand why their government, and ours, is taking these measures: the very thought of not taking them, and having a plane blow up as a result, fills the decision makers with fear. Fear is what the terrorists want, therefore the terrorists win. But taking these measures means telling the public something about why they are being inconvenienced and hassled at the airport, which fills the public with fear. The terrorists win, but nobody dies, so the decision is a no-brainer.

However, all of the wacky security measures that the TSA has put in place in the last several years have not netted a single terrorist. Sure, they’ve caught senators, grandmothers and nuns, but no terrorists. The 21 people that the British arrested regarding this particular plot were not nabbed at the airport, they weren’t caught by an NSA wiretap. The police got a tip from the Muslim community.

Interestingly, just last week the Cato Institute published a paper (PDF Link) that, well, here:

Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

Cory Doctorow, in his excellent post on the paper titled “Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists” said:

The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.

Well said, that man.

The current administration has spent a great deal of time and effort to instill in the American public a pervading fear of terrorists, which to my thinking makes the administration complicit in the terrorism. Buncha dicks, all of ‘em.

Via Consumerist and Boing Boing.

Technical Note: The link below is brought to you reddit’s New York Times Link Generator, a nifty little tool for bloggers that will convert the URL of a NYT article to a link with a longer life than the URL.

UPDATE: More from Mr. Doctorow on today’s story: British aviation bans all hand-luggage

UPDATE: Zefrank adds his two valuable cents: link

Levi’s. Apple. Brand icons the world over. But iPod jeans? It insults my geek sensibility enough to… to… well, to get my crank on over the whole thing. This is the denim version of tape on your thick, black glasses. This is like carrying a Hong Kong Fuey lunchbox in 8th grade.

Think of the tech hazard here. Parents, check those pockets before putting your kids’ iPod jeans in the wash. I don’t know how much Goldschlagger their designers had to down in order to come up with this, but it was obviously too much or not enough. These jeans have a built-in docking cradle, a joystick, and retractable headphones. If you’re Inspector gadget on holiday, these might do the trick. Otherwise, who would wear these things? As an avid jean wearer and Apple aficionado, even I’m embarrassed by these. And, um… $200. I sh*t thee not. Oh, the horror. The horror.

I don’t know what’s going on. I hit a certain age, and now I’m lusting after old tech like Bill O’Reilly at a loofah showroom. Don’t get me wrong: I’m up to speed on the new stuff. The latest G5, 39-megapixel digital camera backs, wi-fi out the wazoo… I love it all. But last weekend, I bought a manual Smith-Corona typewriter for $5, and now I’m looking for an old Mamiya C330 twin-lens reflex camera to go with my 50-year-old Speed Graphic 4×5 camera. (Thankfully, I don’t look like Weegee… yet.)

What’s next? A Bakelite phone with a modular jack? What’s become of me? I just wanted to go to Tosche Station to pick up some power converters.

That message alert on your phone is not the late-night call you were waiting for, but it might be just as good (riiiight). Cellfire has launched its nationwide phone service for Cingular customers, and more carriers are on the way. Only a few businesses In Cali have bought in, but the concept is great. Sign up, download the mobile app, get coupons on your phone and redeem them by either showing it to the cashier or have them scan the bar code on your mobile screen.

It just makes sense that people can make more use of one device in even more practical ways than carrying envelopes full of dead-tree discount delivery devices. Maybe you can even beam your number to that cute checker. (“Is this the checkout line? Well, I’m checking you out. Giggity-giggity. Aw-right.”)