If downloading was free everyone would be doing it

Part two in a series of two or more of top­ics rel­e­vant to the Net­work Neu­tral­i­ty debate

I’m shocked that I need to explain this, but prices are deter­mined by sup­ply, demand, and sell­ers’ deci­sions about the best ways to opti­mize sup­ply and demand. Over time they are deter­mined by noth­ing more than these.

Are there pro­duc­tion costs? Of course. But these are also gov­erned by the bal­ance of sup­ply, demand, and sell­ers’ deci­sions about the best ways to opti­mize sup­ply … Read the rest

«Unlimited» is fraud

Part one in a series of two or more of top­ics rel­e­vant to the Net­work Neu­tral­i­ty debate

Imag­ine a pizze­ria. Let’s call it Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za because that’s a ter­ri­ble name for a piz­za joint1 and with luck I won’t anger the pro­pri­etors of any actu­al piz­za places. Let’s say Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za makes pret­ty good piz­za. Maybe it isn’t the best in town, but you’ve been there before and you like their pizza.

As you walk past Mono­chro­mat­ic Piz­za one nice … Read the rest

Drupal, maybe we should just be friends

Recent­ly I fin­ished read­ing a book and went to put the book in my blog. I don’t have the book report writ­ten but want­ed to at least get a place­hold­er in the data­base with the vital sta­tis­tics: title, author, word count, my rat­ing, and so on. After enter­ing the infor­ma­tion, I hit sub­mit and was greet­ed with the less-than-use­ful mes­sage, The web­site encoun­tered an unex­pect­ed error. Please try again later.

Frankly, this sort of thing is the rea­son I don’t write. … Read the rest

Separating the presumably wiser adults from the relatively inexperienced younger individuals without specifying any gender identity for the purposes of this title

Pop quiz for self-described Repub­li­cans, Lib­er­tar­i­ans, Con­ser­v­a­tives, and Clas­sic Lib­er­als.1 What is your first thought when you see this head­line from an arti­cle in today’s Wall Street Jour­nal?

Pay­Pal Can­cels Plan for Facil­i­ty in North Car­oli­na, Cit­ing Trans­gen­der Law

Choose the one option which most close­ly cor­re­sponds to your belief:

  1. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness has gone too far.
  2. Cor­po­ra­tions have no right to tell peo­ple how to gov­ern themselves.
  3. God­less anti-het­ero­sex­u­al hea­thens are extort­ing the good peo­ple of North Car­oli­na to pre­vent
Read the rest

Apple sneakily thwarts own attempt to serve users

The head­line is mis­lead­ing, inas­much as it is dif­fi­cult to believe that this was either acci­den­tal or an attempt to serve users. «Sneak­i­ly» is sort of mis­lead­ing too. «Bril­liant­ly decep­tive» fits bet­ter. Makes for a real­ly awk­ward head­line, though.

One of the con­tentious aspects of Apple’s App Store (both the iOS and OS X fla­vors) is the lack of sup­port for appli­ca­tion upgrade paths. This has some short-term cus­tomer ben­e­fits; for exam­ple, app upgrades are usu­al­ly free. When a devel­op­er … Read the rest

Crowdfunding can be beautiful

I’ve seen some inter­est­ing kick­starter-style cam­paigns; it’s always nice to see what kinds of good­ies some­one will come up with to enroll peo­ple in their projects. These kinds of pre-fund­ing dri­ves are an oppor­tu­ni­ty to get peo­ple excit­ed about a project and put on dis­play one’s pas­sion. A dry invest­ment prospec­tus might get the big back­ing, but one real­ly has to have a com­pelling and acces­si­ble idea in order to get a lot of peo­ple to throw in $10Read the rest

Why I’m not upgrading to Omnifocus 2

I like Omni­fo­cus1 a lot. I can’t say that I’ve mas­tered it to the point where it has ful­ly become a trust­ed repos­i­to­ry for my tasks, but it is use­ful for keep­ing track of the things I have to do. The new ver­sion looks great. I got the demo ver­sion to test out before buy­ing the upgrade and it is a big improve­ment. The price tag is some­what high but in my opin­ion it’s a worth­while upgrade.

So why … Read the rest

Most traders ignore this vital truth about altcurrencies

I’ve been want­i­ng Ron­PaulCoin(RPC) for some time. I’m not bull­ish on the cur­ren­cy, in fact, I think it’s a bad idea. Nam­ing a cur­ren­cy after a per­son­al­i­ty, espe­cial­ly a liv­ing one (Tes­la­coin could be kind of cool) is a ter­ri­ble idea. But espe­cial­ly because Ron Paul is such an anti-fiat-cur­ren­cy gold­bug, I thought it would be fun­ny to have one RonPaulCoin.

Back when Ron­PaulCoin was trad­ing around $18 it was too much, even for the nov­el­ty. I … Read the rest

Bitcoin: worth the electrons it’s printed on?

I recall read­ing even before I had any inter­est in Bit­coin or Bit­coin min­ing that the cost of elec­tric­i­ty was prob­a­bly high­er than the yield one could get by min­ing. So I nev­er expect­ed to set up a min­ing oper­a­tion on my per­son­al com­put­er and get rich quick. I did what I rec­om­mend any­one do if they are inter­est­ed in get­ting to know how Bit­coin works: I set up a min­ing oper­a­tion to learn.

The online resources about Bit­coin are full … Read the rest