moral

Bill Gates was back in the news this week for his comments on personal and corporate tax. Here's the high order bit: "This is not a morality thing, this is about the law".

The backdrop for Gates' comments was Tim Cook's widely covered recent testimony before the Senate on Apple's tax strategy.

Gates is right. It can't be a morality thing. Corporations are not moral entities. What code could we possibly expect them to follow if not the law?

Now that we have got that straight, can someone tell me why amoral political expenditures by these unthinking corporate creatures are protected speech?

Nobody expects my dog to do anything but chase cars and dilligently lower his tax bill. My dog's speech is not protected even when translated. Why is corporate speech?

I'm not a rabid anti-capitalist hippie or a dog hater. A sole proprietor or partners in a partnership are certainly entitled to the same protections on their speech whether commercial or private. What I don't understand is a why a magical structure, the corporation, that exists solely to limit the liability of passive investors and thereby attract investment, should require such an expansive blanket of rights.

If I own a dental practice together with two other dentists in a general partnership and we use a radio spot to defame the unhygienic foreign oral surgeon down the road, we're jointly liable for any judgement against the practice without limit. I could lose everything. I could lose more than everything.

If Facebook defames the unhygienic foreign oral surgeon down the road, Mark Zuckerberg stands only to lose the value of his stake in Facebook. His losses are capped somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion. He probably gets to keep the house.

Let's agree that corporations are not moral creatures. Let's continue to limit shareholder liability. Let's also agree on a more appropriate grant of rights to corporations that recognizes their peculiar and amoral nature.

In the meantime, dog owners should probably get a corporation to own their dogs for them so that they can enjoy the same limits on liability they have for the shares in their retirement account.

working draft

Typewriters. Firearms. Binoculars. 3D Printers. Fax machines. What do these have in common? They have been or may soon be subject to confiscation or registration as dangerous instruments of sedition, terrorism, freedom, and intellectual inquiry.

Galileo is famous throughout the world for his work on and through the telescope. Contemporary authorities probably kicked themselves (or him) for failing to invent a telescope registration scheme in time. Holy See indeed. Their successors in civil administration have been hard at work since to prevent similar lapses.

Exactly three hundred years after Galileo's legal troubles over telescopes resolved neatly with his death in 1642, thousands of other Italians and Americans of Italian descent found themselves in trouble over optics. In 2000, Congress passed the Wartime Violation of Italian Americans Civil Liberties Act and acknowledged that binoculars, radios, and other items were improperly seized from thousands of Italian-Americans and from their households,  during the second world war. These are just excerpts from a spectrum of indignities.

Better late than never. It is heartening, at least, that an open acknowledgement was so obviously warranted that HR 2442 passed a Republican House by unanimous voice vote. It was promptly signed into law by a Democratic President.

Our true national position on freedom of speech, thought, and inquiry is not evident only in our lame apologies for past infringement of rights. We use issues like these to highlight tyranny and oppression world wide. It was widely reported that Ceausescu's Romania required police registration for typewriters in the early eighties. In the nineties, polite commentators used a Chinese ban on fax machines as a shorthand for the abuses of an inhumane and anti-democratic regime. Last week, brief Internet outages in Syria were blamed instantly on a hated tyrant. Even sources still waiting for all the facts on the purported use of chemical weapons have jumped on the condemnation bandwagon over such Twitter holidays. I bet Bashir al-Assad is responsible for my DSL troubles. It would be so very like him.

More recently, intrepid lawmakers, like California's Leland Yee and Washington, D.C.'s Tommy Wells, are leading a charge away from traditional American views on freedom. CBS13 in Sacramento has this quote from Yee speaking about 3d printers:

“Terrorists can make these guns and do some horrible things to an individual and then walk away scott-free, and that is something that is really dangerous,”

Yee is lucky that reaction has so far been loudest from quarters of the gun crowd who caricature themselves with bile over his ridiculous comments. Many are quick to say that plastic guns are junk, that printers are expensive, that cheap pistols are cheap, or that pressure cookers are cheaper. They are wrong to play down the issue based on present-day cost or quality.

Here's the thing: Ceausescu was right to fear the typewriter. The FBI was right, in 1942, that a good pair of binoculars and a radio could imperil thousands of lives and tons of vital war material. China would have done the world and the Internet a favor if it had been able to strangle fax.

A 3d printer could certainly be used for evil. The answer is that we have to accept these risks to retain the benefits of a free, empowered, and creative citizenry. We thrive on a stream of dangerous machines and ideas that have contributed immeasurably to our quality of life and our pool of knowledge. Ever seen a combine harvester? Yikes.

As a personal matter, I benefit enormously from a controversial government decision to allow the previously classified cavity magnetron to pass into civilian hands without registration. Burritos microwaved in the US since 1945? Billions. Homemade terrorist radars used against the public? Zero.

Would you buy a microwave if you had to drag it down to police headquarters to get a license?

3d printers will become more precise and more prolific. Somebody will get stabbed by a horrible 3d-printed Klingon ceremonial battle-stapler -- and without any royalties paid to Paramount. The drug cartels will develop cocaine filaments and print everyday objects directly from drugs. All the more reason for us to be proud for tolerating these machines and for encouraging their further development.

These worst case scenarios are a sideshow. Affordable devices for personal, prototype manufacture are made to support freedom and they do. They will be used to devise new methods of making collagen scaffolds for replacement organs. They will jump start thousands of garage businesses. They will catalyze a revolution in patent and copyright law. They will, perhaps, embolden a new generation of backyard astronomers to look skyward with better homemade telescopes. Galileo found moons around Jupiter. Amateur astronomers have since mapped the Jovian moon Ganymede and witnessed asteroid collisions against the planet itself with instruments that might have been confiscated during the war.

Congress was lucky in 2000 that there were Italian-American victims left to apologize to. If we screw up a next industrial revolution, the manufacturing economy may not be left to hear our apology.

Here's my plea: would somebody please get a 3d printer to make a campaign contribution? If we can establish that their output is protected speech, then we should be fine.

fantasy violence (updated)

I spent a few moments this morning in the App Store cruising for a better iPad front-end to Blogger. Blogger's own app, now at version 2.1.7.1, caught my eye.

First, the app is rated at 2.5 stars. Things must have improved since I first got it. Second, the app is rated 12+. Google warns of mild/infrequent fantasty violence. I see the confusion. If an app is so poor that it makes you want to hurt small animals then it's merely a bad app. That's not fantasy violence.

The pathology of Blogger on iOS is clear from their description: "Download the latest release of the official Blogger app, and start blogging on the go. ...". 'On the go' used to mean something like 'in transit'. Somewhere after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 the meaning of 'on the go' split. It could mean either 'when I shouldn't be' -- as when also operating machinery or it could mean 'while subject to demeaning circumstances' -- as when dehydrated and shoeless at a TSA checkpoint.

These branches are converging again towards a simpler meaning -- 'poorly'.

I want to write on the stay and I want to do it in a comfortable chair with my tablet. The chair has been waiting for this application for more than a thousand years. The tablet is ready. The software is not.

Though I complain about blogger often, I generally enjoy the platform and I'm grateful for it. The web page is good enough for me to routinely bang out posts of a thousand words. I've used the page on the go (in both the 'poorly' and 'when I shouldn't be' senses) from my iPhone. It's just terrible on the iPad. I can't scroll long text in the editor. I can't upload a photo from my iPad. I can't make it stop tracking my own page views. I have a hundred other small problems with it.

I thought John Gruber was wrong earlier this month about native apps being better than web apps and I used a web page to say so. I'm using the updated native Blogger app to write this. It's certainly different. I can scroll. I can paste a picture. I can't add a hyperlink. The type is stunningly attractive on a Retina device.

This is basically my experience with most native apps and web apps on the iPad. The web apps are strangely broken for a device that has sold more than a hundred million copies worldwide (sorry, no hyperlink for you!). The native apps are from another planet, feature a completely different incomplete feature set, and appear to be written by a completely different team.

For Blogger, neither approach works for them on the iPad. As far as I can tell, neither app is hobbled by the technical or policy limitations of the platform. They just suck because they are software.

Go google 'othermill' and find the Kickstarter project (I left my hyperlinks in my other trousers). That looks like a nice piece of hardware. Kickstarter is full of thoughtful looking pieces of hardware. Here's a Kickstarter project that I predict will run and fund within the year:

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Wribbon:

We've been slaving away in our industrial loft for three years to develop a working prototype of the finest Artisinal typewriter ever. Trust us. Everything works. You can even use it in your kitchen. If successful, this Kickstarter campaign will allow us to put together a large order for the necessary cast iron bases and sheet metal stampings.

Support us at the $50 level and receive a signed typewriter ribbon used (by us) to hand type a copy of 'The Great Gatsby'. (sold out).

Support us at the $100 level and we'll type your manifesto (up to 1000 words) on a pre-production Wribbon. (6 of 20).

Support us at the $500 level and be the first in line to get a complete Wribbon kit. (22 of 100).

Support us at the $1200 level and get an assembled, tested, and hand enameled Wribbon together with a piece of furnace coke. (4 of 75).

Support us at the $8000 level and get an complete Wribbon with untraceable hammers and ten sheets of waterproof Adventure Paper generously sized to fit around the included clay brick. (sold out).

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I'll try to get in at the $500 level. $1200 is just too much for a typewriter.

Update: Wribbon is already taken by a photographer. I suggest Typst

gasket

Gasket awareness month continues here at reograph. Today we celebrate with a gasket giveaway! We have a genuine SVG file that, when cut, can be used as a three-bolt-flange exhaust gasket for FIAT X1/9 cars built between 1975-1980. Get it here.

My Graphtec machine does a fine job with these files. You can print a lifetime supply of these gaskets -- that should be about 2 -- for mere pennies.

In all honesty, the thrill of making gaskets is not really much greater than the thrill of punching holes to make loose leaf paper. I make it exciting by picturing a magnificent waterjet cutter plowing through a quarter inch of stainless steel in place of a swivel knife through gasket paper.

My current interest is more expansive and expensive. I would like to graduate from gaskets to the flanges themselves. The FIAT factory exhaust was a relatively high quality stainless unit. Mine features a two foot pipe that holds the place reserved for a catalytic converter in cars destined for California. Each end of the pipe has a flange with three bolts that engage the rest of the exhaust system.

I removed my pipe last week to drill a hole for a wideband oxygen sensor. The pipe itself is in fine shape after almost forty years. The flanges are heavily corroded. If waterjet cutting were cheap, I would simply have new flanges cut -- in stainless this time -- and assemble a new exhaust pipe designed for indefinite service.

I wrote last month about Matt Brannon's Midwest-Bayless. They sell a replacement pipe for a slightly later car. His pipe is made from a new length of 2 inch diameter pipe. His flanges are thirty year old flanges cut off dead catalytic converters. His pipe costs $79.

I wish him luck and happiness in the flange recycling business. Businesses like it are responsible for the survival of a thousand kinds of obsolete machines. I'm not interested. It's cargo cult capitalism. An army of American entrepreneurs jump through administrative hoops, pay taxes, operate web sites, and even hire employees as part of a frantic effort to lure wealth back to our shores. Many of these entrepreneurs, as ensigns of industry, have no more control over the means of production than they did before they enlisted.

The Senate passed their version of the Internet sales tax bill yesterday. Maybe this is the ritual that will bring the wealth back. It could be worse. We could be setting up giant fires in dummy smokestacks or just dumping barrels of goo into rivers to lure the wealth back.

Water jet cutting is not cheap yet but it is getting easier. Big Blue Saw, an Atlanta firm, accepts drawings online and generates quotes instantly. They even offer a dummy object you can use to get sample quotes without even drawing a widget. It's brilliant.

Their demo object is about a quarter of the area of my flanges. I can get one or two made in quarter inch stainless for $92.10 each. I could get five made for $21.16 each. Ten for $16.36. It's cheaper to get ten and throw away eight than it is to get two and keep two.

If I got ten flanges and made five pipes, I could probably sell them for less than Brannon's $79 pipe. That's an even dumber form of capitalism than the cargo cult kind. It's coffee club capitalism. It's barely different from a bunch of co-workers running an office coffee pot. These schemes do nothing but mask inefficiencies in the status quo.

Why am I holding my FIAT and poor Midwest hostage to an insane economic philosophy? Better still, why am I writing about it to strangers? I'm doing it because I can see the future where I control the means of production and I can't stand the waiting. In the meantime, I'll see if Shapeways can rent me the means for less. Their price for 3d printed stainless steel is $8 per cubic centimeter. My flange is about 7 cubic centimeters. With a per-model fee, my flanges are about $61 each. That's cheaper than two or ten but not five from Big Blue. Five is right out.

wrong

John Gruber is wrong. It doesn't happen much.

Yesterday's Daring Fireball took on a useful thought experiment proposed by Marc Andreessen. Here's the experiment -- extracted from a Michael Copeland piece in Wired by way of DF:

Let’s say we all grew up in tech world where we only used tablets and smartphones. Then one day, someone comes up to you with a 27-inch display hooked up to a notebook. You could have everything you have on your tablets and smartphones, and then some. Except you don’t have to download anything or update it. Everything is the latest and greatest, and just one click away. If you are a software developer, there are no gatekeepers telling you if your latest creation is approved, or when you can add the latest flourish.
“We would be like, wow, that’s great,” Andreessen says from his office at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s why in the long run the mobile web is going to dominate native apps, and for the same reason that on the desktop the web dominates apps. When the web works for something, it works way better in a whole lot of ways than a downloadable app.”

Gruber dismisses this argument with two of his own. First, that the desktop is over forever, baby. Imagining a user with a 27 inch screen is like imagining a unicorn. Second, that web apps suck.

Gruber is probably right on both counts but it doesn't matter. Andreessen's 27 inch display doesn't have to be a desktop. It could be a TV. It could be a car.

ASUS announced an 18 inch Android tablet that doubles as a PC display (or vice versa) last month. It might be great. It might be a piece of garbage. I don't know. Beyond a certain size, gadget verdicts and sentences start to diverge. It's a hassle to administer the death penalty. The ASUS mondo-slab might be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The overwhelming majority of Android and iOS devices sold to date share an essential property. They fit in a trash can. You can even chuck most of them into the skinny receptacles at Starbucks.

TVs don't fit or belong in the trash no matter how deserving the software. At some point, the

oft-caricatured smartphoning, ZipCaring generation will realize that it costs them $25 in rental fees just to go get the ZipCar to drag a dead gizmo to an appropriate e-waste drop off point.

The idea of a functioning gadget that stops working when its bores its manufacturer is less funny when it leaves a corpse in your living room or in your ride.

9to5mac reported earlier this week that Apple's advanced life support team were prepared to call it on the original iPhone on June 11. I have Macintoshes made before the iPhone was born that are still attractive and useful. I don't own a car newer than that iPhone. Until this moment, I thought of my second generation Prius as a pretty new car.

Large creatures live longer. This has to be the case for gadgets as well. If we are going to have connected gadgets larger than trash cans, then the web wins. I don't think there is any market for third party native apps tailored to these gadgets -- even if there should be. Things, by their nature, come in too many shapes and sizes to be worth targeting with native apps.

It doesn't matter that web apps suck. Essentially all software ever written sucks. That's why web apps suck. Native apps suck too. Web apps that advertise their native app counterpart might be a case deserving special scorn. Arguing about which sucks less accomplishes nothing. In fact, the only constituency for a pronouncement about which, on average, sucks less is middle managers who don't write and don't use the software they commission. These people might be half of the reason that software sucks in the first place. Independent developers and users have no problem arriving at their own conclusions without a debate.

Cisco sees a $14 trillion market in the 'Internet of Things'. If Cisco is right, then almost none of those things will be smartphone or tablet sized. If they were, they would be killed outright by smartphones and tablets or become them.  Anyone bringing a new smartphone-sized product to market in any segment had better make sure that it is edible, disposable, holds a smartphone, or is a smartphone in some combination. 

I have an ad supported flashlight app on my iPhone. The app puts the ad right below the 'power switch' for the skeumorphic torch. Here's a truth about the universe: Nobody who urgently needs an ad-hoc flashlight has ever wanted to click on an ad at that moment. Right now, the app tempts with a 'Free Game' ad for something. Seriously?

You can't do ad supported apps on Things. You can't easily monetize the user by mining photos and contacts on Things. You can't monopolize the user's eyeballs with Things. Combine those and you have nuked most of the technical rationale for native apps over web apps or web apps in Cordova wrappers on Things. 

That's the genius of Google Glass. Every refrigerator can become an ad-encrusted refrigerator. Every cordless drill can become an ad-encrusted cordless drill. Even if Glass were powerful enough to render the web app irrelevant -- the web still wins. Glass only works when you're looking at something. It's easier to be that something with the web.