Mark Jaquith is …

Links

• Mark Pilgrim elucidates what is so upsetting about the Apple iPad to people like us who grew up tinkering on their computers, in Tinkerer’s Sunset. Our children are going to grow up in pristine computing jails that both legally and technically thwart attempts at tinkering.

• The Phylomon Project merges my main area of interest (web publishing, generally; WordPress, specifically) with that of my wife (zoology). It’s an open-source real-life-animals Pokémon-esque card project, using user-submitted art. I love it.

• The Washington Post: FBI broke law for years in phone record searches

  The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist [...]

  And this is what they’re admitting. They would declare that a request was an emergency, and then they’d make up the emergency after the fact.

  Eventually, FBI officials shifted to a second strategy of crafting a “blanket” national security letter to authorize all past searches that had not been covered by open cases.

  The officials who implemented these policies should spend a long time in jail. The law provides a sentence of up to 10,000 years in jail for these crimes. I’d settle for a decade.

• Google is rethinking their decision to operate a filtered search engine within China:

  We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

  via Official Google Blog: A new approach to China.

  This makes me feel so much better about open web advocate Chris Messina recently joining Google. Maybe things are going to turn around, and Google will rediscover their roots and re-embrace their corporate motto.

• Tina Daunt: The Secret History of Kubrick, the Blog Theme That Changed the Internet

  The combination of the elegant and versatile WordPress and the ground breaking Kubrick made that possible, turning the democratization of publishing from an idealized concept into a concrete reality.

  This well-written piece makes me almost sad to be putting Kubrick out to pasture in WordPress 3.0.

• Always a enjoyable read, Timothy Sandefur absolutely nails the problem with “hope” as a slogan: Learned helplessness in the age of Obama.

  hope is what you do when you are out of all other options, and can do nothing other than wait for someone else to come along and solve your problems for you

• Bruce Schneier on what is probably the most important lesson of the last decade that we failed to learn:

  Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

• 70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

  If you’re a Star Wars fan and  hate George Lucas for ruining the “prequel” movies, you owe it to yourself to watch this brutal and hysterically funny takedown.

• Om Malik on AOL’s new look and logo:

  AOL should ask for its money back!

  These are the same idiots responsible for the 2012 Olympics logo (some have noted it looks like Lisa Simpson performing… er, just look), and the horrible muddled NYC Taxi logo. And this monstrosity is their website. People pay them for this? Seriously?

• 12 tips for avoiding an untimely death:

  12. Don’t play the lottery…you might win. Any unearned wealth, or wealth that is disproportionate to the objective value you provide will destroy you. Lottery winners and Sports/Movie stars share a common bond of disproportionate rates of depression, addiction, and suicide.

  The best tip, statistically, is to buy the biggest, heaviest, newest, most airbag-laden vehicle you can afford, and always buckle-up.

• Timothy Sandefur:

  These men did not fall for the facile “realism” that proclaims itself too sophisticated and clever for moral issues; they knew that nothing is more realistic than to call things by their right names—to celebrate and cherish and proclaim the goodness of freedom, and to attack the tyrant and the slavemaster with whatever tools one has.

  via Freespace: Obama: too busy to remember communism’s crimes.

• Put This On is now on my list of daily must-reads. It’s a blog and a video series about how to dress like a grownup (presumably for men, I haven’t seen any tips for women). The aforelinked post about Levi’s 514 jeans being a great bargain gets my nod of approval. Dressing like a grownup has been one of my projects this year. I’ve just now returned from the tailor to get a pile of button-down shirts brought in for a more flattering fit.

• This 2008 post I made about opting out of the “mandatory” and incredibly invasive American Community Survey has turned into a 200 comments and growing forum for people to share their experiences with census worker harassment. There are even Census Bureau workers responding. I’m taking a hands-off approach—it’s fascinating! For the record, I’ve no received no further contact from the Census Bureau after I sent the survey back marked “2 adults” with no other information.