Macworld 2012 has started two ongoing discussions, one interesting, the other one less so. The interesting discussion concerns the spike in the presence of booth babe eye candy at the conference, and how that affected both the show and the sensibilities of the attendees. Of course, every male I’ve seen in these discussions vociferously states that they are not interested in such frippery, and that their personal views of these companies decline; I’m no exception. But market research says otherwise: an empty booth repels potential customers, and attractive models at a booth generate enough foot traffic to break the glass wall and allow real customers to stop by.

I’m more interested in what my female colleagues are saying, and surprised to hear that many of them feel denigrated by the practice. I’d prefer to believe that we’re past the point where the presence of a model can somehow reduce the perceived value of a female journalist or technologist. But that’s been somewhat proven wrong by a controversy caused by Violet Blue’s coverage of the conference. A while back she blasted some geek attendees of Macworld for assuming that she herself was an airhead model (and “retaliated” by playing the part and blogging about it). This year she (or her editor) captioned a photo “The Saddest Booth Babe in Existence”, which turned out to be of an independent iOS app developer at her first Macworld.

Long story short, I’ve got nothing against cheap marketing tricks when they’re done well, and I think hiring attractive models for your booth falls into that category. But hanging with Tonya Engst and Kelly Guimont were two of my best times at Macworld this year, and so I’m going to listen carefully when they tell me that something sets them off.

The less interesting discussion is about whether Macworld “isn’t like it used to be.” That’s a common refrain among many of the old-timers at the show. Personally, this is my second “real” Macworld in San Francisco, although I attended several East Coast shows back in the day. I can infer what they’re talking about, though.

First, it used to be that being an Apple guy meant you were a member of a much smaller club. Now you can’t spit in Starbucks without splattering an iPad. I disagree with people who think that we all bought Macs back then because it made us members of an exclusive club; the more accurate analogy is to friends of mine who spend most summer weekends driving around with other owners of Alfa Romeos. We liked Macs because there was something about them that made them better for us; most people didn’t see the distinction; and when it came time for us to gather together in person or online, we naturally became a tribe of affinity.

If we really wanted to keep the door to our treehouse club closed, we wouldn’t be happy about how many folks clog the Apple Stores these days. Most of us are thrilled, especially those of us who make our livings working with Mac owners. And if we pat ourselves on the back once in a while for being on the Apple curve before the rest of you, well, we don’t really expect you to join in.

Second, the old show used to have more big displays, notably including Apple. Personally, I can’t say that I miss their presence; I’m not going to get any news out of them at the show any earlier than anyone else, and the stuff I’m there to see isn’t going to be from Apple anyway. It’s batshit crazy to expect Apple to release new products in January when the Christmas season has just passed. My guess is: the biggest loss to the show is that big companies come with better swag. Used to be that you’d get press bags and free software, now it’s T-shirts and thumb drives.

If you think big shows are necessarily better, then head to the Consumer Electronics Show some year to be proved wrong. I missed this year and I’m looking forward to going again, but it’s exhausting as hell and a relief when everything I need to see takes up only one football field, not twelve.

But the big change is probably cultural, and that’s due to the Internet. I became a Mac guy back when “online” meant a community bulletin board system, and back then, trade shows were where you went for genuine news. Now it’s all on the Internet, and in Apple’s case, it’s news on the Internet long before it’s an actual announcement. This morning’s Twitter feed included a debate over whether Apple would hold an announcement in February or not. How much more meta can you get?

In any case, I don’t much care whether Macworld used to be better — I think it’s great now, and it’s going to be an annual part of my schedule. I go because it’s the one time a year that my online fraternity of Mac journalists and geeks get together, and I’m going to see them again or meet new members; everything else is just the trappings. My guess is that most Mac and iOS users of a tribalist bent will get the same buzz from the show, and can build the same sense of community. So long as that’s going on, Macworld’s a worthwhile trip.

A long long time ago,
I can still remember how
An aircraft used to make me smile.
I didn’t know it wouldn’t last
‘Cause after PATRIOT was passed
The airport made us into juveniles.
In the X-rays they deliver,
You can see my fat cells quiver.
Bare feet: no one’s shoes kept.
Can’t even take one more step.
The guard says I must step aside,
I packed a pint of Liquid Tide,
And that they just cannot abide
Before they let me fly.

So screw you, first class rows one and two,
Pricey ticket, you can stick it up your X-rayed wazoo.
We all had to pass a governmental review
Passing TSA’s microscoped queue
And have our pics snapped in the nude.

Now, for ten years we’ve been on our own
And it looks like we’re still pretty boned
Obama’s not for privacy.
There’s a snowball’s chance of last resort
Coming down from Chief Roberts’ court
And no voice that comes from you and me.
Oh and while your rights are blown to hell
The nation’s hooked on the NFL.
No courtroom to adjourn:
Your verdict is returned.
While Lenin read a book of Marx
The FBI used it for darts
And found out they liked several parts
Before they let you fly.

They’re still singin’
There, there, people up in the air,
We don’t care if it’s unfair to look up your derriere.
Just grab and spread ’em ’til your sphincter is bare;
We hope you don’t mind if we stare.
We’ll keep the pics as long as we dare.

So there we were all in one place
Two hundred souls in a tiny space
And time has seemed to stop as well.
Though Jack be nimble and Jack be quick,
Jack has to stand to scratch his dick
‘Cause middle seats are a kind of hell.
But though I’m sorry for that guy
I have to smile, because I
Booked the exit row
with plenty room to stow.
Six thousand years of Jewish genes:
Low elevation for my knees.
I’m short, stretched out, and very pleased
Now that I can fly.

So screw you, first class rows 1 and 2,
Paid a pittance for remittance and I’ve more room than you.
Drink your whiskey and rye ’til you’re all nicely stewed
‘Cause if the shit hits the fan on approach,
Y’all are the airbag for coach.

Yeah, I was singin’
Fie, fie, from up here in the sky,
Damn the TSA’s lies, but it’s amazing to fly.
I hope their common sense is a future surprise,
But I think that’ll be the day that I die.

Via Gruber, an interesting post across the transom by MG Siegler about Google’s addition of Google+ results to all search results. Siegler in turn links to John Battelle’s thoughts on the matter:

Google hasn’t made peace with Facebook, and therefore is not crawling Facebook data…. Facebook, in turn, has not made most of what happens inside Facebook available to search engines. It’s a standoff, because neither company really knows how to value the other company’s partnership.

And it sucks for the web. The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture.

Personally, I have trouble seeing this as an antitrust issue so long as ease-of-posting to multiple social networks remains available. Most folks I know publish simultaneously to Facebook and Twitter, and will probably include Google+ once there’s enough critical mass there to make publishing to that site valuable. (Hasn’t much happened yet; aside from a few diehards, I’m still not getting a Google+ stream anywhere near as worth checking as what I get from the Big Two.) What makes the social networks viable is the personal content they publish, so as long as most people are cross-posting, then there’s no monopoly as everyone has access to data that they can republish with ads.

Call me in favor of Google’s move, because I’ve been waiting for Google+ to do something to make itself relevant. Right now it’s not; I’ll glance at Google+ every once in a while when the GoogleBar reminds me to, but it’s not yet a destination. Start making my content on Google+ appear in front of the people who’ve circled me, and suddenly I have a real incentive to be there–both for my own edification, and to stay on the radar of people in my network.

What makes the Big Two the Big Two? Facebook finally realized the dream of sixdegrees.com by hitting the critical mass that made it the place to be, and then used that goodwill by creating the biggest walled garden since AOL. Twitter realized that everyday chit-chat with interesting people had no analogue on the web and created it. In the US at least, everyone else is an also-ran (I’m still trying to figure out what LinkedIn is good for).

But what makes Google+ exciting is precisely the cross-application connections between data that no one else can provide. I wouldn’t mind seeing intelligent agents that alert me–when privacy permissions allow–that several of my contacts are attending the same event, or that a particular web page is getting buzz (so to speak) in Reader among my circles.

We have plenty of examples proving that crowdsourcing is one of the best ways of creating solid information by magic, without any extra effort on the part of the participants. My microcrowds are filled with some very smart cookies; Google+ has an opportunity to stand out by starting to aggregate what they’re doing and keeping me informed of it.

Still true.

In the first and second parts of this diatribe against the idiocy that is Microsoft’s vision of the future, I highlighted a bunch of depicted technologies that are a) extremely likely to be impossible in 2021, b) completely at odds with how we use Internet technologies today, c) an affront to the intelligence of any human watching the video, or d) all of the above.

But the worst thing about this video is that it is so damned pedestrian. There is just so, so, so little here than shows me that Microsoft has any vision for the future, let alone how they intend to be a part of it. Fuck impossible holograms. Here’s the world I want to live in in 2021, and here’s how Microsoft fails to indicate that they have any interest in building it.

This is literally the opening second of the video, and what are we watching? An executive rolling her carry-on bag to the magical pickup that’s been arranged with Microsoft technologies. We know two things about this carry-on: it weighs 44 fricking pounds, and she’s schlepped it for the last 24 hours from Sydney to Johannesburg with at least one layover.

How’s this for a better idea? In the grand data-integrated future, my hotel and air carrier can actually talk to each other, and my luggage can show up in my damned hotel room without my having to touch it.

Here we see that in 2021, airport tarmac, which is driven upon by actual cars, is a Microsoft display surface. This is called out because it is So. Fucking. Stupid. I would have given this some credence if it were shown to be a projection from the ceiling, but no: it doesn’t appear projected on the limo when it arrives.

But even worse is the display behind Ayla. It’s a standard airport sign, and it’s needlessly animated. A printed sign works just fine for me when I’ve been in a dozen countries where I don’t speak the language; why in God’s name would you put a display surface here? Put up a goddamn sign that’s useful for anyone even if they don’t have thousands of dollars worth of portable technology. This is an airport in Africa. It’s ten years in the future. Get real.

A second example of So. Fucking. Stupid. 1) You just put a display surface where it’s invisible to the user and useless to anyone else. 2) You want us to believe that a pair of eyeglasses is both translating a spoken announcement and blocking out the ambient sound of the original announcement. Hey, Einsteins at Microsoft: eyeglasses cover your eyes. Your ears are what you hear with, while your ass is what you find with both hands on a good day. You couldn’t show us a rendition of the Bluetooth headset of 2021? Because that would actually make sense.

PS: eyeglasses = display surface, if you can stick one on a business card. That’s a hell of a lot simpler than the hoops you jump through for the rest of the video.

I have to bring back this picture because it’s just so many different kinds of stupid, as well as a missed Microsoft opportunity.

First: counting down the seconds is useful for any timer where precision to the second is actually feasible. I.e., a cab ride is not a useful place to display “15:24 remaining”. It’s useless and inaccurate information, and shows a sensibility that’s designed by engineers, not humans. Hint: the Apple display would say “about 15 minutes”.

Second: yes, I get it. You’ve got the Kinect, and that’s actually the only technology you do have that might give you a leg up on this future. I’d love to see your ideas on how you intend to Kinectify our future devices, because this is where you could really grab our mindsets by their collective balls and make us think you’ve got something important coming up.

Pointing in midair and drawing a heart ain’t it. In fact, it’s just the first of many depictions of a technology that’s more suited for 2221 than 2021, because it posits the existence of a Strong AI operating system that can anticipate the desires of the user and perform them instantaneously.

In this picture, is Ayla drawing a heart in midair? Or is she attempting to tap on her touchpad? Maybe she’s about to point for the driver? Scratch her knee? The magical device in her hand Just Knows and Responds Accordingly.

Bullshit. It tells me, instead, that no one at Microsoft is being serious about this video.

Note that the countdown timer is faintly visible in the window.

Note that my taxi just told anyone who’s watching where my meeting is tomorrow. As well as any other information that Microsoft decides to display on my car window.

Eyeglasses. Just. Use. The. Eyeglasses.

Could you possibly demonstrate any more thoroughly how completely you are missing the point?

It’s 2021. Why in the name of all that’s holy am I checking into my hotel manually from the taxicab? That is something that should be done for me when my GPS signal is detected at the airport gate before takeoff, and confirmed for me when it takes off on time. If vehicles are sending maintenance messages, then my airplane should damn well be calling my hotel to tell it when I’ve got a weather delay. And if there’s some problem and my hotel gets overbooked, find me another goddamned room.

If that happens, send me an alert and give me an interface. Otherwise, all you’ve done with the future is put a very pretty rotary dial on your iPhone.

This is where I start to question your marketing message. Our friend Ayla has the kind of job where she flies from Sydney to Johannesburg for a meeting, sure, but it’s not really clear how important she is until she gets here. After all, it’s 2021. Don’t you want to present a future where everyone has the dynamic kind of job where she’s constantly talking to colleagues on three continents?

So why does Ayla have an executive suite? I mean, never mind that the cheapest flight from Sydney to Jo’burg is $8,000. That hotel room is probably going to match that bill in three days. So your message is: if you’re as rich as Croesus, hoo boy, do we have the future for you!

That’s funny. I thought you were the guys with a motto of “a computer on every desk,” and that you made most of your money by sticking your OS on every piece of crappy commodity hardware you could find. Ayla is apparently the kind of person whose Microsoft Bing Navigator with Holographic Maps has a standing preference to avoid the “We Are the 99%” Protest Hooverville that should be visible from just about any fucking view of Johannesburg.

Which kind of brings me to this:

Really? Really? You set your future in Johannesburg, and your prominent black person is a Bellhop Assistant? Does this mean something different in 2021 than it does today? Are you aware that you could have put any number of white collar titles on this man’s display and avoided all of this?

I mean, shit, just make Anya’s surname “de Klerk” and be done with it.

Don’t think I didn’t notice that the time on Qin’s phone is the same as the time on Ayla’s phone. This is what I completely fail to understand about this video. You put so much effort into production values for everything but the products. It’s just goddamn sloppy. And that’s before I noticed that the mockup was apparently intended for an American audience before you stuck the actor in Hong Kong.

Now that I’m getting to see what your UI is actually like: Christ almighty, no thanks. That’s the most cluttered combination of totally extraneous elements I’ve ever seen, and you seem to be user-hostile about letting us focus on anything. That’s the device of the guy who wants to spend his entire day on Twitter and Facebook. Your vision of the future is awful. This is truly the best you can do?

Hint: the Apple video would show a clock and subway timetable on the home screen. If a new email arrived, it sure as hell wouldn’t pop up fullscreen without being asked.

(Which reminds me: in your future, Australian cell phones get holograms in Johannesburg, people have broadband in subway tunnels, but you can’t get online in a plane. Have you visited Earth recently? It’s kind of the opposite where we live.)

This single image says, “We have 1,000 marketers for every software engineer, and no one competent about computers or UI design was consulted in the making of this video.” It’s just that bad. This tells me that the future of Microsoft is being charted by the people who came up with the brown Zune.

I wrote software to determine exactly how long this image appears on screen, and it’s 0.7 seconds. Wendy is 32. Qin spoke to her 15 days ago. The software suggests he send her a gift. The very next scene: Qin puts down his phone and looks up and away with body language that pretty clearly says, “yeah, fuck that.”

What exactly are you trying to convey here? Because it’s not attractive.

This is bugfuck nuts. Seriously. The benefit concert is presumably playing in many stations, but the musician depicted immediately responds to the user’s action? You think that people will be more charitable when the musician is not physically standing on the platform performing? Has it ever occurred to you why a musician needs to put out a guitar case and throw in his own five bucks to start the day?

Then you show us that the musician is trying to raise US$6,600. Most street musicians consider $50 to be a damn good day. Again, this shows that not only are you ignorant about the technology you’re selling, you’re ignorant about the people you’re selling to.

Okay, just so we’re clear.

You’re demoing hardware—presumably not manufactured by Microsoft—that is capable of 3D input and holographic displays.

Microsoft Office 2021, in your vision, still works with 2D slides and documents.

Ayla works for a goddamn architectural firm. And her technology does not use the sort of 3D modeling and display work that is currently available in Google SketchUp.

You know, the idea that Microsoft will be this moribund in 10 years isn’t surprising at all. What is surprising is that you seem to agree.

Of course you had some Microsoft executive insist on including a QWERTY keyboard, because obviously you don’t want to scare away all of the gray-haired people who might watch this video. I even like the suggestion that Excel is still going to be vaguely useful in your future.

But what blows it is how you’ve lined up the keyboard perfectly with the hardware monitor. This isn’t a work desk, it’s a place where you’ve bolted down a keyboard and monitor for a demo. Make the keyboard askew. Show how all of the tabletop UI aligns itself with the keyboard to make it actually useful for a human user.

And for God’s sake, get rid of the drafting light. There’s not a single thing in this office that requires something this archaic. You might as well replace the keyboard with an Underwood typewriter.

We’ve just seen Ayla’s hotel workspace. Would you mind explaining the UI and/or AI that perfectly frames her upper torso for this video call, and then knows exactly which of several dozen interface elements spread out over three continents that this Kinect gesture applies to? You’re not demoing technology here. You’re demoing telepathy.

Two questions:

1) why is Qin arriving at 2 PM for his 11 AM meeting?

2) what exactly does he need to carry in that knapsack? All of the documents that were printed out on paper by Microsoft Office 2021?

In this segment Qin drags a graph off of his tablet and it “drops” along his line of sight to the display surface behind it. But everything is a display surface. What happens if it accidentally appears on the far wall? Can it fall out the window? And why did you neglect to include a bullshit holographic midair image with this motion, where the animation would actually be useful?

Also, why is there a hole in his tablet? Is that a cheeseboard?

If I’m reading the implication correctly, Microsoft Office 2021 will comprehend the actual language and mathematics used in documents, and will make suggestions as to how designs can be improved.

“It looks like you’re trying to create a design that requires a master’s degree in architecture, a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, and sentience. Would you like help with that?”

Again, this is appropriate for a video set in 2221, not ten years from now. Get serious. I could easily write another 1,000 words on all of the impossible things requiring Strong AI in the next 15 seconds of video.

I’m impressed how Sydney/Shannon has a completely clean physical workspace, and the most cluttered invisible spatial interface known to mankind in her tablet. Just one question: is her Ritalin dosage measured in milligrams or actual grams?

“It’s lo-og, it’s lo-og, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood! It’s lo-og, it’s lo-og, it’s better than bad, it’s good!” I’m especially impressed that Shannon/Sydney has both a diary and a log. Because that’s not using geek language that an 11-year-old would never use at all.

Another question: just what the hell is that “Ideas for bake sale” window doing there before Sydney/Shannon asks it to find 1,296 recipes? Did she get that far in setting up this project, then get distracted? Does she need a bigger dose of Ritalin?

Nothing says, “Mom, I love you,” like a handwritten note that gets immediately converted into a handwritten font. Or like a note that says, “Drop everything and pay attention to me immediately, goddammit.”

By the way, Shannon/Sydney? It’s 4 PM Monday. Your fucking bake sale is tomorrow. Could you possibly have found any better time to pick out a goddamn pie? Ask your Dad, he’s home and presumably unemployed. Hell, he even chips in to make dinner one goddamn night a week, while your Mom takes care of all that woman stuff with her fabulous Microsoft technology the rest of the week, no matter what continent she’s on.

In 2021, Microsoft will have the foresight to use a graphic design popularized by South Park in the 1990s for children being born today.

Nothing says “technology of the future” like woodgrain finish.

Nothing says “technology of the future” like transparent aluminum. Seriously, Microsoft, what the fuck?

Question: how is a chocolate tart “more like” an apple pie, and less like a chocolate brownie? What if I wanted more desserts with fucking apples? And how exactly does an Australian family with a Czech surname arrive at the idea of a South African melktert on the next page just because Mom happens to be there at the moment? I mean, that’s one hell of a coincidence. Or is Ayla really Afrikaner? (In which case, please cf. “only black guy in Microsoft’s South Africa is a bellhop.”)

Mom has just started a 70 minute recipe with her daughter. Meanwhile, her company has flown her 6,867 miles and put her in an executive suite for three days in order to attend a meeting in a strange town in a black building on the horizon that starts in 24 goddamn minutes.

I’m amazed that the magic transparent fridge can’t just make a melktert from scratch on its own.

Again, no way is that dude any less than 12 years older than his wife. Although considering how clean the kitchen is, I’m pretty sure he’s gay.

In the previous installment of this post, I discussed a number of raging errors in Microsoft’s demo of the future, possible only if the designers hold a deep contempt for both their audience and the details included in their HD broadcast. If we take the video at face value, nearly everyone depicted is living a largely joyless, obsessive-compulsive existence. To not take this video at face value, one wonders what kind of management by committee would be necessary to make these kinds of howling mistakes.

For example, a phone call originates at 7:30 AM on April 12th in Johannesburg, and is received on February 19th in Hong Kong. So not only will our future Microsoft Zune iPads have holographic technology, they’ll also be remanufactured out of discarded TARDISes.

In any case, we’re now back to more insane user interfaces, and having already written a few thousand words, I’m caught up to a whole forty seconds into the video.

The Devices, Continued

Without referring to the video, what do you suppose the above picture indicates? The text states “Stay Duration”, no check; “Room Type”, check; “Room”, no check; “Share My Personal Info”, check. The Share Info check is blank at first but then appears, presumably in response to a voice command. This immediately precedes Impeccably Tailored Bellhop Assistant looking at his impossible business card display.

The problem here is that it’s mixing multiple modes with the same UI. Presumably, the first three items are Ayla’s room preferences. The checks must mean hotel confirmation that she’s received her preference prior to checkin. Or it’s some kind of bizarre personal checklist to confirm that the hotel has kissed her ass appropriately. Or, most likely, it means absolutely nothing at all, because it’s hard to understand how she has her room type confirmed without a room number.

Meanwhile, the last entry is a user control that she can toggle, and it appears with an identical interface in a list of items of a completely different type. This is meant to show us how useful and intuitive Microsoft interfaces will be in 2021.

(You may interrupt at this point to say that I’m being too nitpicky. I’ll remind you that this kind of demonstration is the whole fricking point of the video.)

Cut to our buddy Qin, who had to sacrifice his Sunday afternoon, but at least he didn’t have to stay up all night like that poor bastard Jeff Zheng. Or is that Zeng? Qin’s phone can’t quite decide which it is.

We arrive at this screen as follows: first we see the home screen for this Hong Kong resident standing in a Hong Kong subway station. The top headline of the day: the Senate has passed a new environmental regulation. Either Bing News is having a bad day, or the Chinese government will go through some changes in the next 10 years.

Qin taps on a picture captioned “Social,” which scrolls him to a lower page (not the second page, as the home page is shown to extend in all directions) instead of doing anything social or resembling a button press. Here we find that he has a portal called “five minute focus,” presumably with the things he needs to do in the next five minutes. Again, Microsoft believes this should be on a subpage, not in the primary display.

In the next five minutes, Qin is instructed how to get coffee, presented with an email message with attachments and an IM history, and has an incoming voicemail. Meanwhile, it’s 10:34 AM and his meeting is at 11 AM, so let’s hope that the subway is quick. Of course, nothing about this futuristic interface says anything about travel time or subway arrivals. I guess in the future, everyone in Hong Kong is Jewish and no one cares if you’re late.

The email from Jeff Z(h)eng pops up onscreen without a user request; unlike similar interactions in Ayla’s cab, it’s hard to believe that this is supposed to be a voice command because a) he’s on a crowded subway platform, and b) there’s a goddamn benefit concert going on over his left shoulder. So Microsoft devices apparently decide for you which email you need to read right now. And tell you about someone’s birthday—again in a pop-up with no user input.

This is still labeled “five-minute focus.” Considering how many fucking things we’re expected to get done in five minutes in Microsoft’s future, it really sucks that we’re working 160 hours a week.

Fortunately, Qin is also waiting on some lab results, so with any luck he’s picked up a drug-resistant Asian flu and will get to be bedridden for a long while.

We then get what could be the most bugfuck insane prediction of the video. A voicemail message is transcribed, “Can you approve the order?” A message appears saying “Creating reply interface…,” and Microsoft Bugfuck for Windows Phone with No Windows displays a numeric scroller which Qin uses to change “35” to “40.”

That’s the only interface for a transcribed voice message. Qin can hit an “Approve” or “Place Order” button. He can’t, for example, reply to the message. Or call Ben back. Or take a look at some document indicating whether he’s purchasing 40 liters of potassium nitrate or plutonium. Or cancel the order. About the only thing this advanced user interface allows him to do is to order 80 or 90 liters by mistake when some commuter jostles his arm.

The Environment

Microsoft depicts a future where pretty much any flat object is a display and control surface, and they all instantaneously integrate with the gadgets you’re carrying. In Ayla’s taxi, the window provides a heads-up display showing remarkably worthless information about her trip; in her hotel room, a wallscreen and a tablet apparently included with the hotel room immediately context-switches to whatever she’s doing.

Here she’s picked up the tablet while her back is to the wall; the wall switches from a “good morning Johannesburg” hotel info display to provide her instead with something relating to the work that’s on the tablet.

Of course, the first question is why she needs the tablet at all. The entire fricking table it’s on has the same controls, and presumably they’re all brimming with holograms. The purpose of the tablet appears to be so she can sit on the edge of the bed and use a touch interface, instead of the holograms in the much better wall display, or the much larger table by the window. This places her focus in her lap, which means that anything supplementary that appears on the wall (and presumably her iPod touch) is either intended as a distraction, or is important information that isn’t in her peripheral vision.

Later, a phone call arrives from her daughter, miraculously during the 18.8 seconds of downtime she has available this morning. Ayla, of course, takes the time to pick out a recipe for her, while the wallscreen merrily follows along with supplementary information. At this point, I was expecting her to pull a piece of pie out of the hologram so she could see how the recipes tasted.

Back home in Sydney, a large whiteboard receives the messages Ayla sent to her daughter, as opposed to having them go to Sydney’s dedicated tablet. (The daughter and the city are both named Sydney. Or her name is Shannon. It changes. No, really.) Unnamed Ayla husband is reminded by the AI in his car to schedule a tune-up, which he drags with a smile to his busy schedule. Offscreen, an unnamed mechanic receives a message telling him to reconfigure his entire schedule for His Eminence, because there’s no indication that this scheduling had anything to do with the mechanic’s workload.

Credit where credit is due: the idea that all sorts of display surfaces will configure themselves to your liking is a premise that’s both possible and useful. I’m less sanguine about whether a hotel in 2021 would provide a flatscreen and tablet computer that automatically hosts these services instead of, say, advertising $99 for one day’s Internet connection and a reminder of all of the movies I haven’t seen on pay-per-view. Indeed, the dystopian insanity of having my entire world reconfigured to show me advertisements is the main reason why I think I’d prefer to drop dead before existing in Microsoft’s world.

For example, here is the clean, uncluttered view out of a cab window in 2021, according to Microsoft:

And here is the clean, uncluttered view of a Bing search in 2011, according to Microsoft. The highlight indicates the search result.

In other words: in the future, the killer app will be a Flash blocker for real life.

Coming next: how a competent designer or futurist would have presented a completely different view of technologies that are not bugfuck insane.

There’s a meme going around to critique the latest concept video out of Microsoft telling us all how we’re going to live in the future. Gruber points out that, like the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator video, this is a corporate exercise in vaporware that says nothing about what the company is developing or any real products. Other critiques mention that the haptic interfaces of the future are clearly fictional, and on top of that, your wife is probably sleeping around.

I’ll point out one other major difference between the Apple Navigator demo and the Microsoft 2011 version: Apple showed me a future that I wanted to live in. (With many flaws, which I’ll come back to in another post.) I was so confused by what this video was depicting that I downloaded the HD version to try to figure out what kind of world Microsoft wants us to live in. We’re supposed to believe that this is a cool vision of the future where computers make our lives easier. It’s not. It’s a dystopian hellscape of despair.

The Culture: Work Schedule

Let’s start with the work culture we’ll be experiencing in the Brave New World of 2021. Ayla, our hero, has just arrived in Johannesburg from Sydney on a Sunday afternoon. She’s arriving at night and we learn later that she only had a 9-hour incoming flight; check Kayak and, hey, turns out she sacrificed her entire weekend for this trip. It’s at least a 24-hour flight, and she had to leave as early as Saturday morning or Friday night. (The only alternative: Qantas flies airplanes that are 44% faster in ten years, and completely changes its arrivals schedule.)

Despite this hellacious trip, Ayla immediately gets down to work in the cab. She’s got “new” messages that arrived in the last few hours, so despite the holographic speeds her Australian data plan achieves while roaming in Africa, her plane didn’t have an Internet connection. Meanwhile, her daughter was awake at 5 AM in Sydney to wish her a safe flight.

It’s 10:34 PM in Jo’burg and Ayla has already reviewed five tasks in the cab. Her colleagues in Hong Kong also work weekends. One sent her an email while she was in the air this afternoon, the other emailed her at 3:30 AM his time. Ayla lets the first guy know that she’ll get to his work first thing, and sets a reminder… which will take place 3 hours after the meeting he needs it for. Apparently futuristic Microsoft devices have trouble with time zones. This might also be why the email was dated Sunday 4/21/2021, which can’t happen.

Something odd happens in the cab; she’s only 15 minutes away from the hotel when her meeting is pointed out, but 15 minutes later the cab says she’s at the hotel when clearly she’s not much further down the same road. The bellhop’s watch says it’s noon in Australia, making it around 4 AM before she gets to her room.

We get to see how technology organizes the work of the bellhop assistant. According to his schedule, he has 15 minutes to stand around looking impeccably tailored, after which eight people (one of whom is handicapped) will need his services in the space of six minutes. That’s some fine AI agenting he’s got there.

Unfortunately, Ayla has set a 7:30 alarm in order to blow that Hong Kong deadline by only three hours, so it’s a good thing she’s a high-powered executive who can fly for 24 hours and then get only 2 hours of sleep. Indeed, by 7:36 AM she’s fully dressed and the bed has not been slept in. Her meeting is scheduled in 84 minutes and is apparently either a 15-minute or a 6-hour drive across town. Oddly, none of her information appliances mention travel time or say anything about it on her schedule. So she has plenty of time to jump into a meeting with colleagues in Hong Kong and the US (local time: 9 PM – 12 AM Sunday night) and to pick out a bake sale goodie for her daughter.

So in the grand Microsoft future, all of us work 24/7 and pretty much conduct our social lives through our devices. Good thing Ayla is able to mother her child over the live video link. It’s less clear how Microsoft expects us to handle the constant sleep deprivation.

The Culture: Health and Well-Being

When Ayla arrives at the airport curbside, there’s almost no one else there, which pretty much never happens at an international airport. Her flights are on Qantas, so we know that she doesn’t have a private jet. Ergo, we must assume that her flight was nearly empty, maybe a result of the still-ongoing global depression. Or perhaps we can take the hint that her daughter wrote her at 5 AM to wish her a safe flight on what is currently one of the safest airlines on Earth. Is terrorism that much of a concern in the Microsoft future, to keep a child awake all night? Perhaps this also explains why there was no Internet connection on the plane; lingering radioactive fallout may play havoc with the signal, or perhaps even a major airline can’t afford the amenity when the plane is flying nearly empty.

Ayla is clearly a top executive, as indicated by her executive suite. But at the other end of the economic scale, we see that plenty of jobs have been made available at the entry level, where the only black man who is featured in the video has the grand title of Bellhop Assistant. The only black man in a video set in Johannesburg. Shine on, you crazy Microsoft diamond.

But Ayla has concerns: at the end of the day, there’s a large “1600” displayed on the health meter on her phone, next to her yoga log. Was that her caloric intake today? Her caloric target? Either starvation is common enough that wealthy women don’t get that much more to eat, or this already thin woman with a very active schedule is on a diet.

On the bright side, the husband of this important executive appears to be 10-15 years older than she is, and is at home raiding the fridge on a Monday afternoon while a tablet parents his kid, so it’s nice to know that the future will continue to benefit me with a gender gap in my favor.

The Devices

The whole point of this video is supposed to be its depiction of the future. Meaning that these devices should have a basis in a reality that somewhat intersects our own. Instead, what we’re shown is frequently so batshit crazy that it ranges from the merely poorly-designed to the physically impossible.

All of the flatscreens have what appear to be a window view on a 2-dimensional infinite plane that scrolls in any direction. Scrolling is somewhat constrained on the handheld professional devices, but have 360-degree zooming and scrolling on the tablets, as depicted by the above workspace that is deemed appropriate for a 11-year-old child.

These flatscreens have holographic output that extend past the boundaries of the display in what appears to be at least a hemispherical radius of several inches. Holographic input is also accepted at any angle to the device and at an equal radius. Devices are able to track eyelines of people glancing in the direction of the device in order to dynamically change information displays (the bellhop’s card) or determine when one surface is subjectively “behind” another (moving items from the tablet to the large desktop display). Despite three-dimensional input and output, navigation is always two-dimensional, as is data input.

So in other words: we’re discussing devices that constantly track all humans in the area and monitor all movement, sounds, and gestures in order to determine when these actions may be a command. These devices instantly network to each other and to any new devices in the area when they are detected. This is somehow deemed to be a good thing, in a world where we were forced to invent a word for butt-dialing.

Consider what needs to happen for this clip where the bellhop assistant takes a card out of his pocket, uses the dual touchscreen, then uses the dual transparent display. The card needs eye tracking to determine when it is being used, and when it’s merely being removed from his pocket. The card is transparent but there is not even a shadow of the reverse image when the card is flipped over, which means that it is redrawing when it detects it is exactly parallel to his eyes.

If that’s not impossible enough for you, consider the close-up of the handheld display. That grid could be a background element on screen, but I doubt it’s coincidental that it mimics a close-up of an iPod retina display. On an iPod, each of those squares is a pixel, and that square is 0.00307 inches on a side. The text in the upper-left and the image to the left appear to mimic sub-pixel rendering on a current display, but for the rest of that text, clearly the designers just said “fuck it.” You want a curve like that “O” on a Retina display? I’m guessing that’s at least 10 more pixels within each 0.00307 of an inch, or 100 pixels per square, for a total of 1.06 billion pixels per square inch implied on this screen.

There is still more mock-up bullshit to come, to be continued in the next post.

A post from Zach Holman by way of John Gruber, on the topic of dividing our friends into separate groups and applying these to social networking:

The problem is that, anecdotally, no one seems to use Lists. Twitter is filled with users who have carefully made a few lists, and then promptly forgot about them after they realized their clients don’t make it as easy to read List tweets as it is to read tweets from people you follow.

This is why I was never fascinated by Google+ and its concept of Circles.

Holman goes on to say that Facebook has the better idea, in that it can automatically intuit which groups are preferred by the user by using it’s existing networking data.

I call bullshit on this. Take the examples given in Holman’s screen shot: “close friends” (presumably a list), the city he lives in, the university he went to. I don’t know about you, but I have plenty of friends and followers in my city of residence whom aren’t exactly close friends, and I’m hard-pressed to think of hyperlocal content that I’d be interested in posting that would use a city limit as an interesting boundary.

On the other hand, Google+ does one thing that crucially escapes the shit work designation: you don’t organize your friends into circles, you are forced to add them to circles from the get-go. Create a new Google+ acquaintance and you can’t just add them to the master list; you’re forced at the point of sale to make a purchasing decision and categorize them into a circle. This mediates the work of organizing through UI design.

The downside is that this is still a pain in the ass and not particularly useful. Everyone who is in my college fraternity circle has to also get added to a friends or acquaintance circle; everyone who is in my scientific advocacy organization is subject to a brain fart that’s been going on since college where I might accidentally put them into my fraternity.

On the other hand, consider some heuristics that could automate this process. For example, how would you easily define “close friends” in a way that an algorithm could recognize?

1. How many emails have I sent this person? Over how long of a period of time? What was their length? How often is this person the sole recipient?
2. Did this person have an association with me in the past (i.e., college or fraternity), and have we kept reliably in touch since then?
3. What was the size of that associative group? My university had a population of 30,000 students. My fraternity had a population of 20-30. Ergo, if you were in my fraternity, you’re much more likely to be a closer friend than if we wear red and blue colors on the same anniversaries.

Who has all of this data? Google. Who could use data-mining to come up with these suggestions automatically? Google. Who has access, additionally, to my phone records and calendars? You get the point. There’s some additional work to be done here where everyone needs to be incentivized to provide a more thorough curriculum vitae listing all of their associative groups to provide the seed data, but I expect that ice has already been broken by Facebook.

This references an old issue that arose as far back as the 80s, which few people get concerned about: different relationships leave different data trails. You probably consider information about whom you sleep with to be intensely personal, but it’s revealed in your data trail. People who sleep together have different data patterns than people who meet casually for dinner every so often.

This would be a stunning invasion of privacy, but depending upon the implementation, could also be a stunningly useful stunning invasion of privacy. To date, the only heuristic that’s been released into the wild, as best as I can tell, is Gmail’s guess at which email messages are deemed important. It seems to me that it’s only a matter of time before these heuristics become a standard feature of social networking, limited only by the data you’ve shared by the company, and by the social conventions that would lead users to riot in the streets if they’re released indelicately.

In the category of “horribly ironic,” I was watching the iPhone 4S event last night, comparing new CEO Tim Cook to Steve. Cook reminds me of a beloved professor I had back at Penn—even when he talked about things I found absolutely fascinating, his presentation made me feel like I was watching an Iowa farm report.

Simply put, I missed the Reality Distortion Field, and I gave some idle thought to what Jobs would do in retirement.

Reality came along and smacked me in the head a half-hour later.

Suffice to say that I’m not particularly concerned about Apple from a business or technology design perspective. Jobs was one hell of a leader, his protégé class has plenty of his skills, and all of them were working with a talented crew that remains in place. I fully expect an idiotic business/tech/analyst community to come up with a new meme to replace “beleaguered Apple” within three to six months, saying how badly Apple has lost its way since Steve died. Really, it’s just a matter of time, one of those stories that writes itself regardless of whether it’s true.

As for my feelings… anyone remember when Charles Schultz died the same day the last Peanuts cartoon was published? Yeah. That.

This was from Tuesday’s presentation, the first without Steve at the helm, and a day before he died. I don’t know if the reserved seat was for him, but a day later, the black drape with the “Reserved” moniker seems… appropriate. This seems to me to perfectly encapsulate where Apple stands.

A room full of people applauding Apple’s latest release.

Rows of Apple employees basking in the moment.

An empty chair for the man who won’t get to see next year’s model.

So. Cigarettes are bad for you. Who knew?

That appears to be thinking behind new cigarette packaging due out later this year, on which the federal government will attempt to gross me out with yucky pictures. Apparently, the boffins at Health and Human Services believe the following:

1. I really don’t know that smoking is bad for me.
2. Showing me pictures of cigarettes fucking up my insides will convince me.
3. Hence, I’ll quit smoking and stop forking over approximately $5 a day in optional state and federal taxes.

Genius!

Let me clarify for HHS:

1. I know that smoking is bad for me, probably with greater detail than most of the administrators at HHS who approved this campaign.
2. In my family, the more you smoke, the longer you live. (N=3, p ≤ 1.0)
3. I think it’s highly likely that I started smoking because it’s bad for you, and at the ripe old age of twenty, I disliked being such a goody two-shoes.
4. Now that I’ve been smoking for twenty years, I am addicted. That means that the cells in my body really couldn’t give a flying fuck what you have to say about it.

I don’t think that my experience with smoking is that anomalous; smokers have known for centuries that it’s bad for us, and we do it anyway. Like most smokers, I’d prefer not to be addicted whether or not I choose to stop; like most smokers, I intend to quit someday before it’s forced on me by reasons of health or early death, just not right now.

Chances that sterner warnings or yucky pictures will affect this: zero. Chances of cigarette-holding flip case sales going up: high. Or I’ll just switch back to an Altoids box.

You want to improve the health outcomes of smokers? Try doing research to make genetically-modified safe cigarettes—or at the very least, let’s see some actual government regulation that reduces the amount of crap in an American cigarette. Because that would be useful. This? It’s a load of bullshit designed not to piss off the tobacco companies too much. As if we can’t tell.

And here’s what I was given at CFP, to assuage those who believe I’ve become a media whore:

From CFP, a nifty shoulder bag that I’ve drafted as a laptop carryall, a few 2 gig USB sticks, and an extra-large T-shirt that oddly enough placed the conference logo at right hip level. Also a few yummy catered box lunches.

From AT&T, a notebook in which I can write all of the reasons why I’m glad I’m a Virgin Mobile customer.

The Center for Democracy and Technology and Public Citizen both sponsored evening happy hours, with free vittles and libations. I vittled heavily and libated lightly.

For those of you who are not members of the human race, a few reasons why Anthony Weiner might initiate cybersex conversations with attractive women over Twitter:

1) He’s a middle-aged guy with attractive young women willing to throw themselves at him from afar.

2) He’s cut. Above the waist, anyway. Probably below, if he’s Jewish.

3) He’s a middle-aged guy with attractive young women willing to throw themselves at him.

This doesn’t change, of course, that such behavior is risky, stupid, and apparently threatening to both his career and marriage. This is self-evident. But it’s also self-evident why a popular public figure might have a prurient interest in some of the people who are attracted to his public image. Can we please stop with the “why would anyone step outside the narrow bonds of monogamy” brow-beating?

[I got a little silly this afternoon. Preserving it here for posterity.]

7:05 PM: #RapturePR Yes, of course it’s today. Except in Australia, Asia, and parts of Eastern Europe.

7:12 PM: #RapturePR Don’t bother looking for those Disney executives. We needed their help dealing with the long lines.

7:20 PM: #RapturePR Attn idiots murdering children: please reread the fine print on your ticket. Really. We mean it.

7:25 PM: #RapturePR We’re getting word that today’s volcano and earthquakes were not quite earth-shattering. The people responsible have been sacked.

7:28 PM: #RapturePR Attention Copts: we cannot be responsible for your safety if you invade Libyan airspace on your way up.

7:32 PM: #RapturePR Yes, the flying nuns *did* get a head start over the rest of you. Stop grumbling. They’re *nuns*.

7:34 PM: #RapturePR Oh, by the way… Mayans? Suck it.

7:36 PM: #RapturePR We’ll be processing you in alphabetical order, no complaints please. Abdul abn Aaziz! Step on down. You’re our first contestant.

7:38 PM: #RapturePR Those of you with a long wait ahead of you, please visit our gift shop/snack bar. We borrowed that idea from our Jewish friends.

7:40 PM: #RapturePR If it is 5/22 where you are, don’t panic. We stopped being literal about the word “day” a week before Genesis.

7:44 PM: #RapturePR Rapturees from Washington DC, please be patient. Our air traffic controller fell asleep.

7:48 PM: #RapturePR Please refrain from taunting Jews on your way up. We don’t want you to piss off our accountants. Atheists are fair game.

7:54 PM: #RapturePR Liberty University fraternity brothers: please stop whizzing on Virginia. It’s unseemly.

8:00 PM: #RapturePR FAQ: no, we do not have AT&T 3G coverage. Wow, and we thought *we* were optimists.

8:00 PM: #RapturePR FAQ: just leave the iPad at home. Your solar charger will not work off of Holy Radiance.

8:03 PM: #RapturePR FAQ: yes, you can drink here. Immortal, remember? The open bar is just past the Crystal Meth Pavilion.

8:06 PM: #RapturePR FAQ: No, you will not receive 72 virgins upon arrival. How did you get this number?

8:06 PM: #RapturePR We have no disease or pregnancy. Most virgins will give it up before they clear the stratocumulus layer.

8:13 PM: #RapturePR FAQ: Mac/PC idiots: neither. We’ve been Open Source since 33 AD. Can’t help it that y’all forked the codebase so often since.

8:15 PM: #RapturePR No, Tim LaHaye is NOT invited. When we told you about camels and eyes of needles, did you think we were bullshitting?

8:15 PM: #RapturePR Kirk Cameron? Please. You can keep that putz.

8:19 PM: #RapturePR Our 5,000,000th customer just went sub-orbital! Suck it, Branson.

8:29 PM: #RapturePR @ACLU Sure, feel free to revoke our tax-exempt status. We can turn water into wine, it’s not like we need more money.

8:31 PM: #RapturePR Attention rapturees: suborbital windsurfing off of the International Space Station begins in 15 minutes. Wear sunscreen.

8:33 PM: #RapturePR We hear that Californians are assembling in open fields so they don’t hit their heads at 6 PM PST. That’s so adorable.

8:34 PM: #RapturePR Sorry, big guy. We’ve got the Hallelujah chorus. @DepressedDarth: Jesus should walk down from clouds to the Imperial Death March.

8:35 PM: #RapturePR Iceland? ICELAND? Fuck. “@slashdot: Volcano Erupts In Iceland bit.ly/m1f61k”

8:37 PM: #RapturePR Damn, we appear to have taken DSK by mistake. Sorry about that whole “home confinement” thing. Working on it.

8:40 PM: #RapturePR Yes, we invited the 25,000 Big Mac guy. He said he’d prefer to go for 30.

8:43 PM: #RapturePR Attention shoppers: doors closing on West Coast in 18 minutes. Please bring your last minute repentance to the counter.

8:45 PM: #RapturePR For Our sake, Camping. STOP CALLING. We didn’t pick up the damn phone earlier and we’re not going to now. Enjoy the gravity.

8:50 PM: #RapturePR You guys with the helium-filled blow-up dolls? I haven’t seen Jesus laugh like that since Magdalene brought cake to the Seder.

8:53 PM: #RapturePR Hey, Facebook. Foursquare is eating your lunch with their Heaven-enabled checkins. Get on it, will you?

8:54 PM: #RapturePR We’re the top story on Google News! On behalf of PR Staff, we’re taking vacation in Valhalla as soon as we can get out of here.

8:56 PM: #RapturePR Please note: entire Republican 2012 field can expect to be there Monday. Not that we’re judging, or anything.

8:58 PM: #RapturePR If you intended to see On Stranger Tides before coming, We recommend a drive-thru. It’s not like we have it here.

8:59 PM: #RapturePR Camping, the Big Guy just went to get the thunderbolts. You *really* want to put down that fucking phone.

It’s become a common refrain in my ongoing debates with Brian Greenberg: he says something completely cockamamie (IMHO) about George Bush or the financial industry, and I reply, “you and I live on different planets.” It’s been my theory for a while that despite our both being raised as Northeastern middle-class Jews, he and I just have completely different frameworks for looking at the world, and how we filter information about it.

Then, twice today, Eli Pariser jumped in with some reasons why this might be true, first from the following TED video, then in an hour-long interview on the Diane Rehm show.

Shorter version of Pariser: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and most other gatekeepers on the web are personalizing the results they give you for your searches. As a result, you don’t know what’s being excluded from these results, so you increasingly live in a filtered bubble of information that’s been selected for you, based on not only your login cookies, but other data such as what wifi hotspots you’re nearby, and what computer you’re using. As a result, when Brian looks up information about Goldman Sachs, he’s going to get results from the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg; I’m more likely to see Matt Taibbi and Mother Jones.

I’m still chewing over this idea, but my initial impression is to reject it. The people who are most going to be affected by this kind of personalization are also the people who are unlikely to go seeking alternate news sources in the first place. If I want to read a WSJ article, I’m not going to be dissuaded by not seeing it in the first four links on Google. But that presupposes that I know about the Journal, and I know when I want to look for their information (and when I want to avoid it as a self-contained and self-satisfied echo chamber).

The idea that we all benefit from having a randomized percentage of our news feed is also nothing new: David Brin suggested it in 1990’s Earth, which talked about a personalized news filter that we still don’t have 20 years later. The difference between Brin’s solution (which predated the common use of the Internet), and what Google is doing, is precisely what Pariser is calling for: transparency in what’s being filtered out. There’s no way to tell Google, “I place a high value on seeing topics that are outside some of my boundaries—but really, I don’t ever need to know about sports. Oh, and please show me a cogent Republican argument if they ever happen to come up with one.”

But this brings me back to something I wrote about years ago, and which surprisingly (and amusingly) I can’t find in Google. Head over to Google News, and what do you see? My page, considering only the headlines, is currently being built from the following sources: ABC, ABC (Australia), ArsTechnica, the BBC, Bloomberg, the Boston Herald, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, CNN International, Computerworld, the CBC (Canada), CTV (Canada), the Daily Mail (UK), Fox News, the Guardian (UK), the Hindu (India), Hollywood.com, InformationWeek, iVillage, the Kansas City Star, the Los Angeles Times, MediaPost, the Nation (Pakistan), the New York Times, NPR, PCWorld, the Register (UK), Reuters, Reuters Africa, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Telegraph (UK), TMZ, USA Today, WHDH (NBC Boston), and ZDNet UK.

That list would be twice as long if I checked the sidebars, or if I did my usual thing and opened Google News in tabs. Compare that list to the access to media I had twenty years ago: the Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR, CNN, and perhaps an early version of ClariNet. (Granted, 20 years ago September I started grad school at the Annenberg School for Communication, so at that point my media buffet broadened quite a bit more.)

It’s my theory that even with constricted filter bubbles, the greater constriction is imposed by most people’s apathy, the same dynamic that leads to more interest in Donald Trump than a discussion of actual spending policy. Regardless of what might be filtered out of the Internet tidal wave of information, there’s still a much better chance of accidentally lodging an interesting headline in the brain of someone who doesn’t give a damn, which might just lead to a painless and cost-free click to find out more.

What Pariser is concerned about, in my opinion, is that the Internet has near-infinite potential to make all of us much more informed of the world around us, and that content filtering might reduce from this theoretical maximum. I agree with him, and stand behind the idea of making these filters more transparent. But what’s keeping us from realizing this potential is simple human nature, which isn’t going to be fixed by any algorithm.

Congratulations, AT&T iPhone users. Your long national nightmare is nearly over. But a few quick notes for people who are considering being in the first wave of switchers to AT&T:

1. Sure, the early reviews are out from many reputable sources, and Verizon phone service is knocking AT&T into a cocked hat. But the proof won’t be in the pudding until the droves switch; if enough people zoom off of AT&T and onto Verizon all at once, then you may see the network problems migrate along with you.

Especially worth noting: nationwide sales numbers won’t mean diddly. You’ll want to know how many people are switching on the same towers you’re using, which means municipal sales numbers. Which you’re not likely to get for a while.

So you might not want to be in the first wave of switchers—or you might want to take Verizon up on the 14-day switching window that’s mandated by law. It’ll take a few months to see how this shakes out, and whether Verizon service is better than AT&T’s after everyone moves over.

2. Both carriers are getting personal hotspot services. Verizon will offer an unlimited data plan, but only for internal data to the phone; hotspot data is capped at 2 gigs. Meanwhile, AT&T is now offering an additional 2 gigs for hotspot subscribers, which is intertwingled with the data you’re getting in the 2 gigs you’re paying for the data package.

Which is better? Depends. Me, I hate any kind of data caps, which is why I’m on Clear 4G. The only way to know which works better for you is to have some idea of how much data you’re using in-phone, and how much you’re using over the phone tether. Good luck finding that out if you’re not an übergeek.

3. Major downside of Verizon: phone calls kill data connections. Workaround: port your number to Google Voice, and you’ll be able to control when calls go to your phone, so you can’t be knocked offline by a phone call.

Yes, I said knocked offline by a phone call. Man, it’s 1987 all over again. Mom, can I have a dedicated phone line for my modem?

Catching up on the latest nontroversy on the web, to which I can summarize Planned Parenthood’s apparent response as follows:

We work aggressively with law enforcement and we’ve done nothing wrong. But y’all were crying for blood, so a head rolled anyway.

You’ll pardon me for asking this, but what the fuck? First ACORN, then Shirley Sherrod, now Planned Parenthood. All three the victims of fraudulent “investigations” by idiots with a camera and an axe to grind. All three paying the price for it.

Tell me: exactly what is the disincentive for lying motherfuckers to go after their opponents? Seems to me like it’s a win-win scenario all around. Either you get them on tape saying bad things, or you can edit the tape making it look like they did. The attacked organizations put their tails between their legs and act like they shat on the rug. The attackers get tons of free media.

Hell, you don’t even need Final Cut Pro. iMovie will do.

Let me make a modest proposal for what PPFA should have said in their press release:

Yes, while none of us like to admit it, there are plenty of unholy bastards out there willing to pay for underage tail, which is the real cause of child sex-trafficking. We are in the business of protecting people’s health. So when we hear that a minor is being trafficked, we immediately work with the authorities, AND we give out information which will protect them.

Perhaps you people out there believe that a child already being trafficked for sex is somehow corrupted and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if she dies of AIDS or complications of a pregnancy at age twelve. Or you think that we should do what you do: put our heads in the sand and pretend that this isn’t happening. Or that she’ll be magically protected by fairy Jesus. But we know that hopes and wishes do not a public health strategy make.

That’s what you should have said. And that means not firing the woman who tried to protect the child. If she did say something which genuinely was a firing offense, and you have evidence above and beyond an edited video by the people who are trying to shut you down, then release that information. Let us know what you do, what you won’t do, and the principles you stand by. Even if that means giving out sex protection information to children who need it. Even if that means that Fox News will start baying at the moon.

Fuck them. You have principles. Defend them, goddammit. Make the other side explain why they’re in favor of children having their lives permanently ruined or ended by sex trafficking. By acting like you’ve done something shameful, you’re just playing into their hands, and that’s exactly the message you send when you fire your employee without sufficient explanation.

Just finished watching Obama’s speech in Tucson, which mostly sucked.

Too soon to say that?

Of course, the stories of those who acted heroically were moving, but that was because heroes themselves are moving. Obama, perhaps deliberately, went with historical precedent in the tone of his speech: They have consecrated this ground, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who died here have thus far so nobly advanced. And as a result, he gave a speech which, unlike Lincoln’s, was mostly not notable and which will be easily forgotten.

I was also mostly left unmoved by the Eulogist-in-Chief. Yes, I know, it is kind to say that those who died represented the best of America, and it would be nice to believe that. But they were united only in the violence of their passing; it seems odd that all you need to do to become the best of America is to die in a tragic and telegenic disaster.

More moving, and more true, to say: these were everyday Americans who died, and everyday Americans who became heroes, so let us celebrate the living and the dead for who they were, not for what we wish to believe of them.

Obama did move me with his words, briefly and unintentionally, with a catch in his throat when he analogized Christina Green to “our own daughters,” and I was suddenly reminded that his children are the same age. It humanized him and touched me, more so because it did not seem planned.

But too much of the speech fell into the trap of the Kumbayah Democrat. “Please, can’t we all get along?” I’m sure his enemies have already forgotten the speech except when their interviewers remind them to make nice, and their interviewers will forget to do so shortly. If Obama wanted to make a difference, to really mark a line in the sand pre-1/8 and post-1/8, he blew it.

What would have been better? I thought I’d have to turn elsewhere for an example of rhetoric, but Obama briefly spoke from a place of powerful oratory, in the last few minutes of his speech:

I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it. I want America to be as good as Christina imagined it. All of us, we should do everything we can do to make sure this country lives up to our childrens’ expectations.

That’s the man who has repeatedly moved me to tears with his words. That’s the man with a strong moral compass and an argument to make in its favor. That, essentially, is who I thought I was voting for, and the man who has too often been missing from office. Obama could have given a respectful, mournful, and powerful speech with this level of oratory, but if that speech was ever written, it was set aside for Kumbayah.

Too bad. If these deaths are to make a real difference in the American character, it is up to us, and Obama could have been the beginning of that. 9/11 just made us angry and fearful. Oklahoma City did nothing for our character. And we absorb mass shootings weekly without a tremor. It appears that this will be going on for a while longer.

Last night outside the Flamingo: an apparently homeless man being handcuffed by two cops, filmed by a TV cameraman about two feet away with another guy holding a boom mike over the arrest, while three guys walked by singing the theme song to Cops. Pop quiz: who should be most ashamed of themselves?

I wish I could say this is the strangest thing I’ve seen this week. The exposed belly is real, but the underarm hair is part of the costume.

Spotted near MGM Grand: fat Batman. A block later: fat Spider-Man. Guys, I’ve got no problem if you want to play dress-up, but perhaps the form-fitting suits aren’t quite the costumes you should be wearing.

Also near MGM: dwarf Elvis. Next block: the saddest 5’9″ Yoda I’ve ever seen, carrying that well-known Jedi accoutrement, the crystal scepter. Perhaps you two should switch jobs?

Apparently, Disney copyright lawyers never come to Vegas, and there’s no law against importing costume knockoffs from China.

Chewie is working with the Imperials? Which side is Elvis on? (It’s hard to tell from the pic, but that’s a black TIE fighter pilot from the original Star Wars on the right.)

Saddest. Costume. Ever.