The guy who filed a patent application for a storyline thinks he's some sort of beacon of light for Objectivism, judging by the text of his filing. This is unsurprising, given that he has a technical background. Ayn Rand's writings tend to attract tech people, perhaps because many of them have an overdeveloped sense of their contributions to society. Yes, technology drives everything now, but you still can't make a modern society function without bankers, designers, truck drivers, construction workers, and dentists. Nobody here is Howard Roark, OK?

What I find particularly galling is that many of the people who buy into the Randian notion that unmitigated egoism will make the world a better place. Then they use the very collective mechanisms (in the case of Storyline Boy, the USPTO) they claim to abhor, in pursuit of their own supposedly pure goals.

Maybe that's the danger inherent in ideology. Once you buy into it completely, you never again have to think about what you're doing. You just point back to your religious/philosophical canon and call yourself a believer. Whether you actually come close to following that creed is beside the point.

I'm getting *so* tired of hearing the freakin' Windows startup sound "bwing, bwing, bwah bwaa.." here in the library and at the beginning of every class. What is it about people that they can't remember to TURN OFF THE GODDAMNED SOUND on their laptops BEFORE turning them off, so that when they do turn them on, that absurd noise won't annoy the rest of us.

As MSG Dunn would have said, "Attention to detail!" Argh!!!

It looks like Apple is going to do the right thing and take care of people whose iPod nanos got scratched too easily. Smart move, Apple. This confirms what I've been saying for some time now - this is a different Apple than the one of even just a few years ago. They learned from the iPod battery issue. Apple may have been a bit slow in responding to this one, but at least they offered the right response.

It's a bizarrely-written article, but this little gem from The Register tells me that Big Music and Big Telecom companies are still fumbling around in the dark, looking for a clue. Apple proved that online music can be legal and profitable, so now Warner Bros. seems to think letting go of Apple wouldn't be a bad idea. If Warner controlled tunes are off of the iTMS, it certainly loses much of its appeal.

Hey, do what you want. After all, the music industry doesn't owe Apple anything. Business is business. But why screw with a plan that seems to be working? Apple is moving in on a billion songs sold, and now the geniuses who did... umm... nothing for years while digital music made inroads into their antiquated profit model, are confident that they know what the future of online music is going to be. It seems Big Music and Big Telecom figure they're not really in that dire of straights after all, despite all the protestations we've heard to the contrary over the past few years. It seems now ringtones and music distribution via mobile phone (at $3/song, natch) is the answer.

When are these people going to climb out of the plastic bubble?

Dell is massive. They're the computer company everyone is supposed to be like. So why can't they design like Apple? I think the success of the iPod line has finally shown everyone why Apple customers are so loyal. Design really does matter, as this hilarious account on Daring Fireball shows.

This outfit called Tribal Fusion specializes in making pop-up ads that evade pop-up blockers. Sure, they're just being shrewd businesspeople. They're making a product that their customers want. By the looks of their website, they're snagging clients left and right with their approach.

Ultimately I think these blocker-evading ads are self-defeating, but only when evaluated individually. If Company X advertises using these ads, I can elect not to spend any money on Company X products, to show my displeasure with their advertising techniques. At a certain point, Company X will catch a clue and realize that their in your face marketing technique is a detriment to sales, and they'll stop using such ads.

However, what if all of the companies in their market are using the same technique? O-level managers behave like sheep, no matter what you've read. It's a rare executive who has the cojones to buck an industry trend, which is why everyone generally loves a maverick. There are so few of them that it's refreshing to see one. But I digress.

Company X, Company Y, and Company Z now all use the same ad-blocking technique, forcing dilligent hackers to come up with new blocking software. The offense/defense war continues. Ultimately you wind up with a situation where all but the most dilligent web users find themselves bombarded with pop-up ads that can't be easily defeated.

I'm reminded here of the insufferably stupid little ad gizmos (I refuse to learn the proper term) that TV networks put at the bottom of the screen now. The worst part is, they're advertising for shows on their own network! People, if you just let me watch the damned show I'm currently watching, and stop hammering me with animated little ads for the next mini-series you'll be airing, I might actually be interested in staying loyal to your network. As it is, because all the networks are doing this sort of thing now, they're all annoying me to the same degree.

This only makes me want to avoid TV altogether. I use Tivo to watch only the shows I'm truly interested in, and I have absolutely no network loyalty. They're all trying to screw with my user experience, poisoning their own wells. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

I'm not alone in taking a pass on TV. More and more Americans are changing their TV habits, getting more entertainment and news from other sources. But what happens when the good tribe of happy marketeers at Tribal Fusion succeeds in poisoning the web? Where to we go to escape the infernal flashing annoyances of commerce? And how do the people who work at Tribal Fusion feel about creating a product that is designed explicitly to sabotage users' individual preferences?

I'm burning through highlighters in law school. Before classes started, I went down to Staples and picked up four different kinds of highlighters, in different colors and sizes. I wanted to be sure that I found the optimum highlighter for my needs.

Drumroll....

The winner is the Bic Z4 brite liner liquid highlighter. The colors are vibrant, but not overpowering. The tip holds its shape well and doesn't feel clunky. It's like highlighting with a scalpel. The ink comes out smoothly and works particularly well in law school textbooks. I use the yellow, orange, pink, blue, and green pens for highlighting different aspects of a case, and I've been very happy with the results thus far.

For a while I was favoring a click-open highlighter, but the ink wasn't as good, and the constant clicking drove me and probably everyone else in the library crazy. The Bic, in contrast, uses an old-school removable cap design, coupled with a clear barrel. The nice thing about the clear barrel is that you can see how much ink remains in your highlighter.

The Bic also has a comforting rubber grip that isn't too intrusive. I also like the rounded clip, which makes attaching and unattaching the highlighter easier when putting them in my backpack pocket.

Stay away from the Staples in-house brand. The ink sucks, the tip gets mangled when you put the cap on, and after a while the pen starts to feel awkward in your hand.

Am I a complete dork? Yes. Hey, cut me some slack. It's a Saturday afternoon and I'm in the library reading about torts.

1) "Repeat after me." (followed by a binary statement about how human affairs always work in a certain fashion)

2) Analysts do express concern, however, that Apple's luck may soon run out, given that..." (followed by a statement about how Microsoft has been talking up their new product, or how Apple failed to license their OS twenty years ago, or how everyone else is doing something different)

3) I snag music through P2P systems out of protest, man! (because protecting fair use requires a library of 10,000 songs)

4) Leaf blowers

5) "The media sucks!" (umm... TV is not the only medium... you've heard of newspapers and magazines, right?)

6) "Intelligent Design" (because science hasn't given us anything worthwhile)

7) Lists that arbitrarily use nice round numbers like ten.

This is interesting. By way of WWDN, I found out that Wizards of the Coast is selling D&D library kits, ostensibly so librarians can lure kids into the library with the promise of a nice quiet space for roleplaying. I'm not sure if librarians will be excited about the idea of bringing potential mayhem into the libary, but I hope a few librarians try it out and publicize it.

Back in my formative geek years friends and I played Top Secret in the high school library. We were freshmen, and it was as good a place as any to avoid the dispiriting realties of high school lunchtimes. The librarian, an otherwise fairly crusty guy, looked the other way and now that I think about it, sort of tacitly encouraged us. Somehow there was always a study room available for us every day.

I'm sure there are more than a few misguided people who will assume that D&D is tantamount to Devil worship, and will act accordingly. With any luck, though, a few more kids will be introduced to the wonders of good old pencil-and-paper gaming, and a few libraries will find a new way to serve their communities.

Telecoms, even though they're now almost completely unregulated and compete vigorously with each other, they still tend to think and act like highly-regulated, follow-the-leader utilities.

The iTunes cell phone story is a classic case in point. Apple teamed up with Motorola a year ago to deliver iTunes through a Motorola cell phone. Aside from hangups on Motorola's end, there have always been problems with both music companies and telecom companies. Cell phone providers come up with logic like this (from the Financial Times):

Music downloads are seen by most wireless operators as a lucrative new revenue source and one of the keys to driving up data revenues and exploiting the capabilities of their new 3G networks.

However, some fear that enabling subscribers to download full-length music tracks to mobile phones over their networks from a third-party service such as iTunes could undermine their booming ringtones business.

Yes, because ringtones are always going to be popular. They're not just a fad, they're a new way of life. Songs are passe, annoying five-second riffs are what people really want. The telecom boys are confusing a temporary trend, which is dictated by the limitations of current cell phones, with a real long-term choice. Actual songs are what people want, but until now they've used their cellphones to snag ringtones because that was all they could get.

What really cracks me up about this is that telcoms have been struggling to figure out a way to come up with the right kind of content to fill the bigger, faster pipes they've built. Then when an obvious answer comes along, they look it in the mouth.

I'm a Verizon subscriber, primarily because they provide the best coverage in my area. However, I certainly wish Cingular all the luck in the world with their iTunes experiment, not because I'm really interested in downloading iTunes through my cellphone, but because at least they're willing to try something new, rather than making all their calculations solely on the basis of how much (theoretical) profit from (theoretical) services they can hoard.

The Economist ran an article in the August 20th edition revealing that when looking for a corporate employer, undergrad students are "heavily influenced by their perception of that employer's products and services."

Apparently this accounts at least in part for Apple moving up the totem pole from 41st to 13th most popular employer. The iPod Phenomenon seems to be creating an even bigger "halo effect" than the pundits are now proclaiming (after the fact, per usual).

Side note: The FBI moved from 138th to 10th on the same list, perhaps because years of X-Files reruns have finally taken effect. Or maybe for some other reason, related to geopolitics. I'm not sure.

One of many problems with "Intelligent Design" is that you could teach any number of "theories" about the intelligence that designed our universe. I find it fascinating that we don't hear more uproar about the fact that the ID people are all Christians, and ID is obviously not just about God, but about a Chrisian God.

This outrageous site opens up that can of worms, with hilarious consequences.

Attractive people can now rent their foreheads for advertising! Heh heh. This is like a built-in test for beautiful people. Someone comes up to you and offers you $1,000 to advertise for Mort's Bail Bonds. Do you take the money and prove that you'll do *anything* for cold, hard cash, or do you reject the money and maintain your dignity?

I doubt the guy who came up with this will get anywhere, but the fact that he came up with it in the first place is pretty revealing. If you ever needed proof that commerce is the one religion that unites Americans, this is it.

What do you do when you put pornography, domain names, and the Bush Administration in a pot and stir the ingredients vigorously? This tar stew.

Note to politicians: Porn on the Web won't go away if you turn your eyes and pretend it's not there. The irony is that just like any other vice, the government would ultimately have much more influence over online porn if they set aside a legit area for it. Bought any moonshine lately? No, you pay through the nose for it and the government takes a nice chunk of tax out of your hide in the process. Alexander Hamilton figured this out a long time ago, and it's been a staple of government taxation schemes ever since.

But why be realistic about it. Everyone's opposed to online porn, and if we hold our heads in the sand about it long enough, it'll just go away. I love living in a post-rational society. It makes every day Opposite Day.

So goldspider makes the perfectly valid point that people who sign contracts then blow them off are not very deserving of sympathy from the rest of us. What do I do? I gratuitously introduce information about how contracts are broken all the time because businesses and by extension musicians, athletes, etc. figure it's in their best interests. Since it's not a criminal matter, in the eyes of the law there is no guilt being assigned. That's all well and good, but goldspider's point still stands: we shouldn't feel sorry for losers who break contracts and whine about how the contracts were unfair.

So why did I introduce this side nonsense? Because I'm just starting law school, and I'm already turning into more of a babbling jackass than I already was. I've heard it said (by lawyers) that everyone becomes insufferable to one degree or another as they progress through law school. Doubtless I'll be posting far less often while I'm in school. I already feel behind, and we're still in orientation. That should give those who find my comments annoying some reason for celebration.

When I do show up and relate everything back to the law, don't say I didn't warn you!

Side note: It appears Apple is making a comeback at law schools. I bumped into several PowerBook-wielding students over the past few days, and Apple had a booth at the information fair today that was much spiffier than the Dell booth (better goodies and two people at the booth rather than one) and seemed to be getting more attention. This despite the fact that our school uses a fugging annoying Windows-only exam app which can't be used on a Mac (it's an honor code violation to use it in VirtualPC, because the intent of the software is to shut out all access to resources other than the exam app itself).