Apple was graced this week by the euphemism of the year: “Curated Computing.” This is the idea that new technology, specifically applications for iPhones/iPods/iPads have been curated by intelligent, quality-aware judges that decide what we are able to see and use.

Curation is a positive term. It implies that there is an incredible amount of Rough in this world, and we trust certain experts to find and show us the Diamonds.

One of my favorite things in life is going to art museums. To me, they are an absolute thrill. Art Museums are some of the most curated places on Earth: many pieces are submitted, but only the best are displayed. As I posted earlier, I’m absolutely fine with curation, as long as I am not locked in the museum.

And that’s the key failing here. Check out or no, you can never leave. And there are many, many things in this world that are worth seeing, even if they weren’t accepted by the curators.

Steve: Your apps are incredible, and the app store is great (Yes, iTunes needs a major overhaul, but that’s like the museum in my metaphor being in bad need of renovation.. the art itself is second to none). But what if I want to leave the museum, hop on the internet, and look at that virtually unknown artist’s new collage projects? What if I want to view the art of that outsider who’s work is too subversive or shocking to be displayed in the museum? In this system, it’s impossible. Steve, you have built a great system here, and it should stand strong, based on marketing and business strategy alone, without you needing to lock your clientèle in the museum until death does them part.

If they go out and find apps that slow down their system, or cause it to crash, or drain the battery more quickly than you would like, so be it. Those outsider Apps aren’t Apple Quality Checked, and the user knows going in what could happen.

I would like to finish here by saying: “A user being able to install whatever they want on the hardware that they own is the way of the future.” But it isn’t.. It’s been that way for many, many years. Innovation is everywhere, but innovation is not oppression, shackling your devices with (golden) chains. The more you do it, the more strength you give to open platforms, like Android, which as of this quarter is more prevalent than your system. Worse than that, you’re gradually, one by one, losing the respect of people like myself that used to swear by your products but have now been driven away.

If Jesus spent most (or even half) of his time talking about politics, his message would have been lost in history with all the other pundits of his day. There were all manner of political leanings, parties, etc in in the politically turbulent Roman Empire, but how much time did he spend talking about them? Despite rampant politics, he rarely talked about it, except to say Caesar’s money has his image on it, so give it to him if he asks for it.

So from that stand point, money and politics mean almost nothing. All that matters is love and communion.

GOP marketing efforts, supported by Evangelical leaders, made it a Christian requirement to vote GOP. And social networking creates a group of people who have Status A: Jesus loves you all; Status B: Obama ruining the country; Status A: Hope is only in Jesus, Status B: We’re going socialist… this back and forth drives people away in droves.. because it creates a system where you must be right wing, republican, libertarian, tea party, or w/e as a Prerequisite to being a Christian.

A great example of this is a Facebook status I saw on election Day, 2009: “Just voted for McCain/Palin. I’m going to go home, turn on Fox News, and pray that God’s will be done.”

Radical politics and religion don’t mix. That’s why Jesus didn’t mix them. The majority of prolific social networkers should choose which line they want to take: religion or politics. The more that radical politics are discussed, the weaker the spiritual message becomes, and vice versa.

As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Ghandi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological. –From Wired

Michael: Is this your position:absolute ?
3 minutes ago ·

Me: Yes, this position IS absolute. It is not a position: relative. And it will NOT float: left or float: right.

Michael: Your points are clear:both of them.

After much research, I found that a certain Mr. Lawrence Brownington of Henley-on-Thames, which is in South Oxfordshire, England, poached 2 eggs and served them with buttered toast and coffee in my original universe on July 12, 1996.

In this universe, he poached 2 eggs but served them with unbuttered toast and coffee on that morning. Whenever I switched, I hadn’t noticed any significant differences between the two worlds. But now that it has been around a decade, those differences may be more apparent. I wouldn’t know: I haven’t been back.

By taking a major web technology, and completely deleting it from their device, Apple has made the iPad worthless.

It shouldn’t have an Mp3 player Operating System hacked/ported to what should be a computing platform.

It should not sync with iTunes. It should run iTunes. You should sync your iPhone or iPod to your iPad, not iPad to your computer. What if you want it to be your computer?

And, of course, multi-tasking. Give me a break: You can make an OS that runs circles around Windows for decades and you can’t bother your programmers to add 1 more item to their task lisk? Maybe they can’t multi-task either.

Apple, you say that you make products the way they should be made, not the way the mob wants them. And I’ve always liked that about you. So I’m gonna use the same philosophy: I don’t care how many hipsters, fanboys, coffee shoppers and scene geeks go out and buy this thing: Your new product missed the mark.

And so does your censorship of web technology. It is a slap in the face of all the designers, developers and creatives that have evangelized your products since your darkest days. You can’t just take a major component of the Internet, whether it’s HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, XML, etc, etc, or Flash, and completely remove it from your device.

Go back to your cubicles, create an iPad Pro (or whatever you want to call it, something better than “Pad”), price it $100 higher, put OSX or OSX-lite on it, the Real Safari with the Real Internet, and act like this upgraded version was going to be your flagship the whole time.

“Some do, the ones that aren’t sick of everything being locked into proprietary systems that can’t be altered, uncustomizable machines, frequent Photoshop crashes, MP3 players that only work with one piece of software, auto-assigned file formats on audio/video files that need special software to crack, inflated prices, common logic board meltdowns, charging customers to recover data from failed hard drives, suing everyone who has an Apple in their logo (I guess Apple OWNS Apples), a history of building the worst mouses the world has ever known (one button?), iTunes SUCKS.. and there’s no way around it, iTunes locks up my computer every time I plug an iPhone or iPod into it, stupidly expensive peripherals…

Let’s talk about the amount of RAM on a luxury computer: A luxury computer should not have 2 gigs of RAM. My PC from 2006 has 2 gigs of RAM. 4 should be the standard for an economy Apple. The $1500 to $2000 Apples should have 8.

Along with phones that have no desktop or desktop widgets, no multitasking, no copying pasting for 2 years, censored apps without clear censorship rules, CENSORED APPS, no clear reasoning given to App makers whose programs were removed, or action steps to get them re-approved, no official ‘underground’ unapproved app store, proprietary USB connectors (that are, of course, stupidly expensive), screwing artists and record companies by keeping most of the money from online sales of music, iPods and iPhones that can transfer music up from a computer but not down to a computer, no Flash on iPhones (No Flash on iPhones? Have you guys heard of the Internet?)

A general inability to understand that when I buy a little piece of hardware, i OWN it. They can’t reach out through the internet or cell networks and try to destroy it. I can do whatever I want with my property.

And I’m also running Vista right now. It’s not that bad. It crashes a lot less than Mac, especially running Photoshop.. which has a tendency to just “disappear” on Macs.

I’m hoping Google will stop worrying about turning their browser (Chrome) into an OS and take an OS that is evolving well (Android) and do something good with that.

Jesse Not used to being up so late huh? Welcome back amongst us. The creatures of the night.
6 minutes ago

Dominic yeah no joke.. i’ve run out of things to do, now im organizing files.
5 minutes ago

Jesse At least it’s something productive. When you spend the amount of life we do immersed in digital frameworks, keeping a clean file structure is just as important as a clean home.
3 minutes ago

Dominic lol true.
3 minutes ago

The best gem I’ve found so far is Johann Hari’s You Are Being Lied to About Pirates:

Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

“We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.” William Scott would understand.

Read the full article.

Johann, here’s where you and the pirates that you defend are wrong: they are not attacking Toxic Waste ships and demanding the world look at the problem. They are attacking vessels passing through, including Captain Phillips’ ship recently, which was delivering food aid to Africans, and demanding MONEY.

What pirate has boarded a toxic waste ship and declared “We will stop attacking these boats when they stop dumping waste in our waters!” None.

The arguments you use are similar to the ones that have been used to defend extreme Islamist insurgents. But here is what you guys always miss: Pirates, instead of seeking to change the problem they describe, attack innocent people in the interest of money, while ignoring those that are doing them wrong. Their message of being a victim is lost to their greed and their willingness to create more victims. Insurgents are the same, they start out claiming to be victims of foreign invaders, but then lose their message by killing innocent men, women and children, including their own people. When someone sites a problem to justify greed or lustful killing, the problem they site shows itself for what it truly is: a way to rationalize committing atrocities.

Heroic insurgents, like the American Revolutionaries, attacked and defeated the occupying army of a much stronger nation. They didn’t win the war by gunning down and blowing up other Americans. How stupid would that have been? Then, in 1812, when the British were harassing them at sea, the Americans did not respond by pirating random merchants and aid ships. They went straight for and defeated the aggressors without seeking to create more victims by attacking people completely unrelated to the situation. Sitting Bull fought against the aggression of the Americans, and he didn’t do it by planting bombs to blow up his own people or invading Canada. You see the difference?

The rhetoric and logic you use to defend these criminals would mean nothing if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and ended up in front of one of their AK-47s. You would face the same fate as all the other victims; all because someone else is occupying Israel or dumping toxic waste.

This pirate/insurgent attitude of “You victimize us so we will victimize them” is foolishness at its best, trumped only by the foolishness of well-educated men who think reason and logic should be used to reinforce the backwards, radical and barbaric philosophies of kidnappers and murderers.

Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

After reading this, a Cisco employee replied:

Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.

In a blog posted today, @theconnor ponders what has happened, making this point:

the point is that people with many Twitter followers can’t afford to be real people on Twitter. Tim Levad would probably never use Twitter to make a flippantly negative remark about his career, because he understands that @timmylevad is more of a mass-media channel than a human being.

It’s important to think about these things as you go about your daily life. How am I using Twitter, really? Do I have the service set up in the right way to support that? Am @I more of a mass-media channel than a human being?

My 2 cents on this issue:

You can be yourself on Twitter..and there is no difference between you and your twitter name. Whether the real you shouts at the top of your lungs “I hate this job” loud enough for the world to hear, or publishes it in text for all the world to read, there is no difference.

Just because Twitter gives you a technological way of ’shouting really loud’, doesn’t mean that it is a “fake” you or anything else. You just need to make sure that you’re only shouting the things you want people to hear. If you insist on being genuine at all times, then shout and Twitter away, just recognize there is no difference.

If you are pondering over “What is it to be genuine?”, then you should’ve said to the hiring manager, “Look, I would love the fatty pay check, but I would really hate to work here.” Obviously, you didn’t do that, which is why he offered you the job.

Posting a public comment on the internet is not a way of communicating with your 45 friends.. It is mass publishing with instantaneous distribution. Be yourself, be real, and be genuine at all times… and in the process, if you tell someone something negative in person, or shout it loudly, or mass-publish it electronically, don’t be surprised at the consequences. More than that, please don’t ponder needlessly on what is and isn’t your true self.

That being said, I don’t think people should be insulting you, but that is typical reactionary behavior.

The whole thing reminds me of a local music-related web forum I was a member of several years ago. After a few years of seeing flames supercede any positive benefit anyone could’ve gotten from the site, and the admin’s reluctance to prune the Trolls, who had completely taken over, I decided to leave. 

What was interesting though was that this forum was different than most forums we, as internet users, participate in… because this one was local, and everyone knew each other in real life. We often saw each other at the events, concerts and parties that the site promoted. Despite this, people would post some of the most crass and derogitory statements about others, things they would never say to the person in real life. You could get a smile and a hug from someone at a show, followed by a long “How have you been?” talk, and then a few days later read a post they had written that cut you, your show or your friends to the bone.

If you confronted them in person or over the phone about what they had published about you, the situation was approached with alarm, taboo and complete shock. The response could be summed up by saying “What are you talking about? That was an internet post!” There was a complete wall of seperation between the real them, the flesh and blood version, and the other them that “posted stuff” on the internet. It seems that what @theconnor describes above has been adopted as canonical doctrine by the Internet Generation. It is the fundamental notion that there is a duality consisting of a real person and a digital person. For most, this doctrine is taken for granted.

When someone breaks the doctrine, by confronting flesh and blood over what their digital self published, the shock almost always leads the flesh and blood person to quickly downplay and move past the situation. That leaves room for the digital person to come back in full force, publishing about the taboo meeting on the internet, where it can be reviewed, analyzed, criticized and lampooned in published form. 

I’m hoping that as the internet evolves, people will realize what should be completely obvious: that there is no difference between what one speaks in real life or mass-publishes on the internet. One immediate result of such a realization is that people won’t be getting fired over their Twitter or Facebook posts… If they speak their honest opinion at all times, and not just on the internet, they won’t ever get those jobs in the first place.