When it's an Apple event and everything must be just-so (especially where those odious creatures known as journalists are present), even a trip to the dvd-jon becomes a doubletwisted experience in infantilism. Apple Insider tells the whole sorry tale. These geek writers covering Apple must feel like they've stepped into a parallel reality with every new display of Apple paranoia:

Paranoia on the part of Apple reached a new high this week when the company refused to allow journalists covering its annual developers conference to use the restroom facilities on site without a personal escort..."I started off for the wash room, but was told by Apple officials that I couldn't go alone," he wrote, claiming that the seemingly absurd measure was the result of both Apple chief executive Steve Jobs and a just-announced iPhone 3G being somewhere within a 50 yard radius."

I have a post up at Geekology today, in which (in the context of a frustrating rollback from Leopard to Tiger) I follow the footsteps of Ron Reagan and ask Steve Jobs to tear down his wall:

Don't fight open source, because it's a battle you are sure to lose. Again, Redmond sets the example here: they have fought FOSS and come out bloodied. Apple can observe the lesson and set to work after the same fashion as Google: making open source fit into its business model. Get to work on Linux versions of Safari, iTunes and Quicktime, and watch the open source community respond with their wallets and their downloads. Apple has long led the way in marketing and entrepreneurial innovation as well as techno-innovation: supporting and celebrating open source software is the next natural step on this path.

Paul Krugman, the political and economic op-ed columnist for the New York Times, offers up a mini-review of Amazon's Kindle today, with a focus on the future of digital reading and digital entertainment at large:

Bit by bit, everything that can be digitized will be digitized, making intellectual property ever easier to copy and ever harder to sell for more than a nominal price. And we'll have to find business and economic models that take this reality into account.

Scott Bloch, head of the Office of Special Counsel, is under investigation for wiping official data from computer files in 2006, and according to this report by the Center for American Progress, used...um...alternative means of covering his data tracks:

In 2006, Bloch also "erased all the files on his office personal computer," potentially as part of a cover-up. To do so, he bypassed the Office of Special Counsel's technicians and phoned Geeks on Call, the mobile PC-help service.

Despite Apple's great advances in design and technology these past four years, there are still areas in which they are persistently retro. One of the more notable of these is the company's rigid insistence on charging $99 a year for services that are widely free elsewhere (see Google, Inc.).

Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley obviously agrees. I would only add that Apple puts its customers into a double-bind with this bad habit: they sell software that takes advantage of a networking service that itself must be paid for. If Apple really wishes to ramp up its market share on the software side, they will have to cease with this dual-charging.

Yes, LOL-Cat fans, I Can Has Cheezburger? won a pair (if you count People's Voice winners). Huffington Post and FactCheck cleaned up the political arena; the NY Times beat out the BBC for News sites; Apple (naturally) conquered for best video site; National Geographic won best magazine site; and the Simpsons Movie got the great donut for best film site. The total list is present here, in both Flash and non-Flash format.

It's still a week till April Fool's Day, so I'll assume this story from Alley Insider is for real:

A pair of hoax ads on Craigslist cost an Oregon man much of what he owned. The ads popped up Saturday afternoon, saying the owner of a Jacksonville home was forced to leave the area suddenly and his belongings, including a horse, were free for the taking, said Jackson County sheriff's Detective Sgt. Colin Fagan. But Robert Salisbury had no plans to leave. The independent contractor was at Emigrant Lake when he got a call from a woman who had stopped by his house to claim his horse. On his way home he stopped a truck loaded down with his work ladders, lawn mower and weed eater.

A fond farewell to Arthur C. Clarke:

Clarke's vision of the future is more than mere sci-fi, in the same way that J.K. Rowling's vision of magic is more than mere fantasy. What Clarke discovered was a wholly new world of metaphor, a weightless, boundless space in which poetry could breathe and move; a place where our evolutionary roots and our unknown future could touch the same doorway between dimensions -- a place where giant spaceships can dance.

A doctor I knew once told me, "bacteria aren't evil -- they're just cells, doing their jobs." An article in the LA Times today tends to confirm that impression:

Atmospheric scientists have long known that under most conditions moisture needs something to cling to in order to condense into snow and rain. A study published Friday in the journal Science shows a large share of those so-called nucleators turn out to be bacteria that can affect plants. "Bacteria are by far the most active ice nuclei in nature," said Brent C. Christner, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University.

I've often complained that the New York Times has missed the point of blogs, even as they keep adding more to their stable. You have to deliver some forceful opinion, supported by evidence, in a blog: this faux-objectivity crap doesn't cut it in the blogosphere.

Well, Timothy Egan today shows what a good blog post is all about, in his excellent demolition of Steve Jobs' dismissal of the e-book. Definitely worth a read.

Next year, business may be down, and several publishers may merge, and certainly more of the poor, beloved independent bookstores will cling to life support. Steve Jobs will stroll into a room filled with breathless acolytes and pull a must-have trick from his bag. We'll oohh and ahhhh about it, then go back to lives where a good book still holds more power than anything with a screen. Power to transport the reader to another world. Power to get inside somebody's else mind, to live their story, to be moved.

Spiegel has a very thorough report with photo galleries of findings from the CEAMARC Antarctic expedition, which uncovered hitherto unknown aquatic species and a strange abundance of life on the floor of the Antarctic Ocean.

"We had some of the world's experts on Antarctic fish, and they were completely, completely flabbergasted," said Martin Riddle, the lead researcher of the Australian ship, Aurora Australis. "Many of the fish had very large eyes...[and] fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths." The fish experts on board, Riddle said, "were unable to name them."

I've got an early review of dvd Jon's latest assault on Apple DRM hegemony, here, along with screenshots and a few suggestions for the DT developers (prompt the user for a restart after the .Net framework installation, and consider spinning off a Debian Linux version).

WaPo has an item reporting on a new-and-improved black being developed by scientists at RPI:

...they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.

Naturally, this leads to talk of Harry Potter-esque invisibility products and advanced stealth tech.

Silicon Alley has the news of the MTA's updated website, which now incorporates an actual trip planner. This is all right with those of us who live in New York and have long complained of the MTA's helplessness on the Intertubes.

In short: The transit authority has built its own trip planning service with some nifty features, like links to weekend/construction-related route changes. (Unfortunately, it's not smart enough to actually use that information to help you plan your route. Next version?) There's also a nice subway-and-street map, which uses Microsoft's interactive mapping system, a button to email yourself (or your BlackBerry) the directions it spits out, and a mobile edition. Not perfect, but the progress is encouraging.

According to the Register, MS is busy attempting to patent an employee-monitoring automation system that the Reg dubs "Hal-9000":

Microsoft hopes to build some sort of "activity monitoring system" that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various "physiological or environmental sensors." These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response...Redmond sees this system as a way for companies and, um, governments to monitor "group activities."