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.

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.

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.

[One] can as little compare the biblical creation story and a scientific theory like that of evolution as one can compare, shall we say, an organ and a vacuum-cleaner – that there can be as little question of harmony between them as of contradiction?… The creation story deals only with the becoming of all things, and therefore with the revelation of God, which is inaccessible to science as such. The theory of evolution deals with what has become, as it appears to human observation and research and as it invites human interpretation”

The brilliance of this quote is the way that it captures the subtlety of the distinction between science and theology.  A vacuum cleaner and an organ operate according to the same physical principles of pressure and suction.  Yet their role and significance in human life is rather different from one another.  So, it is not the case (as it is often argued) that science and religion are totally distinct epistemological categories.  Rather, starting from the same world, they diverge to accomplish different epistemological goals.  In Kantian language, we could say that, starting with the same noumena, theology and science apply different manifolds of perception to reality, thereby arriving at different perceptions of the phenomena while remaining both ‘true.’

Theology derives its significance as more-than-myth by virtue of being based on fact.  The creation story as theology would bear no significance were it not based on the fact that the world did in fact come into being.  We need not look at the Bible as a science textbook, but we need not relegate its truth to the realm of merely aesthetics.  As Barth says, “…[One] should distinguish what is to be distinguished and not shut [oneself] off completely from either side.”