I think I’m officially going to boycott Apple. This HTC lawsuit (as a proxy of course against Google’s Android OS) is clearly an attempt to clear the marketplace of any competition. Rather than innovating and competing they are stooping to bullying because when you get right down to it, as much as Jobs is a genius, he’s also and asshole and and asshole worth 5.4 billion and leading a company with 30billion in cash is an asshole with way too much power.

Yes the root cause of this is that the patent system is broken. Patents are given for anything and everything and the only winners are those with enough money to fight protracted legal battles. However, the system stays moderately functional because of the Mutual Assured Destruction of patent wars. Everyone holds tons of patents that their competition no doubt infringes upon so no one sues for the danger of counter-suit. Apple wants to break all that so that they can dominate their markets.

Who wins if Apple gets its way? Apple wins. No one else. Do developers in the mobile application space win with one platform stuck on one carrier? Do consumers win with no choice and no competition? Do internet sites win with a stagnant mobile internet market? Do other smartphone manufacturers win with the fear of patent wars constantly hanging over them? The short term winners now seem to be Windows Mobile and Symbian, but its pretty clear that they are next in Apple’s scopes. Honestly nobody wins, and even Apple might lose out by effectively chilling the marketplace and pushing manufacturers and developers in different directions.

Obviously Apple is a business in a competitive marketplace and they will do anything to stay ahead, as a good business should. However as we saw in the fall of 2008, a business aggressively pushing its own dominance of the marketplace can easily take down the marketplace (AIG, Lehman Bros, etc) and we are dangerously close to that happening here.

Simple Marriage is has become one of my all time favorite blogs on the internet for its simple, yet wise insights on relationships and life.  Though the name includes the word ‘marriage,’ it really is much more about just living and most marriage advice applies to relationships in general.

Today there is a wonderful post on adequacy, reminding us, that though the world, and the internet in particular, is caught up in a whirlwind of superlatives and potential growth, we do not have to.  Sometimes, success means getting to the point where you are just content, rather than constantly striving for more.

via Simple Marriage.

By now the Conservapedia project is relatively old news on the internet. Someone decided that Wikipedia was too ‘liberal’ (whatever that means) and decided an open encyclopedia based on conservative values should be created.  More recently the projects creators have set their eyes on a much older and more venerated source of knowledge: The Bible.  Apparently that is also too liberal (or at least English translations going back to King James are).  They aim to create a translation of the Bible that conforms to explicitly conservative values.  The aims of the project are listed on their webpage.

I will not even bother to waste my time rebutting such a project other than to point out the somewhat hilarious irony of a religious movement with a worldview supposedly based upon literal adherence to the Bible, re-interpreting the Bible to fit with said worldview. The rotations per minute of such circular reasoning are off the charts.

What is more interesting to me is the way that such fringe groups color the perspective of more mainstream groups.  One sees this in liberal as well as conservative groups that such fringe groups (Greenpeace, PETA, Conservapedia, Timothy McVeigh) are used by people to establish their ‘moderate’ credentials.  On the reverse side, members of the opposite group point to such extremes as indicative of the character of the group as a whole.  So while one side looks at such fringe groups as indicative of the validity of their non-extremist beliefs, the other looks on those same groups as representative.

Frankly, we should be less concerned with the ‘extremism’ of the beliefs (which is really just a measure of their deviation form the norm) and more on whether they make sense, stand up to logical scrutiny and real world experience.