Category: Uncategorized

Apple’s squabble over Google’s user interface

The Blade has a recent entry on the Google Voice application for the iPhone. The FCC inquired about the rejection to all three companies involved: Apple, Google, and AT&T (which has an exclusivity arrangement with Apple for the iPhone in the US market). The interesting part here is the reaction from each company.

AT&T denies any involvement in the rejection of the application.

Apple claims they have not actually rejected the application, and is “still pondering at this time.” What is surprising–or not, if you read this blog on a regular basis–is the following quote from the letter:

The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail.

I gather that that’s almost the entire point of the Google Voice application. What I take away from this: If Apple can do this to Google, they can damn sure do it to any other iPhone developer–and in fact, in a couple of cases, they pretty much already have.

Ron Schenone (author of The Blade) certainly signs off with a telling question
or three:

When I first read this I wondered why the FCC even cared? Why did the FCC even ask the companies to comment? Doesn’t Apple have the right to accept or reject any application that runs on their iPhone?

In an ideal world, Apple would let anyone write any application they wanted to run on the iPhone without having to play a high-stakes game of “Mother, May I.” It’s entirely backwards to take hundreds of dollars from a customer, and then still claim some kind of ownership on the item being sold to that customer. If Apple still considers the iPhone theirs after it leaves the factory, there needs to be a warning label to that effect on each box.

I’d like to think that would do some good. In the end those warning labels may be scarcely more effective than the ones on cigarette cartons. But that is a whole ‘nother rant for a different day.

Less than a penny’s worth

A recent UPI story details the case of Mark Guard, charged with stealing electricity in London. The taxpayers will have to pay over £5,000 (US$8,200) for the two separate hearings before the case was dropped.

Mark was filming a documentary about crime and the homeless. During the filming squatters entered a vacant building, setting off a motion sensor. Not surprisingly, the squatters didn’t want to stick around. Mark does the responsible thing and turns off the alarm to avoid disturbing the rest of the neighborhood. To do that, he had to turn on the power. When the London police arrived, he was arrested for theft of a ridiculously small amount of electricity (£0.00003 worth, which I’m not even going to bother converting into US$). Even though Mark offered to pay for it, the electric company felt it wasn’t worth the bother.

And yet, somehow, pursuing criminal charges was. Indeed, no good deed goes unpunished. I can see this happening here in the US as well. Every taxpayer in London should be outraged at such an irresponsible use of their money.

Maybe Mark can make a movie about his ordeal to show the citizens of London just how silly the whole thing really was.

Not-so-clever photo editing

Mashable reports on an unbelievable blooper from a company that really should know better.

Microsoft published at least two different versions of an ad, editing the photo in one. The change made was to replace the head of a black man–and only the head–with the head of a white man. While the change is not as noticeable if one only sees the Polish version of the image, it’s glaringly obvious if one sees both versions.

This was a PR disaster in the making from the beginning. To their credit, Microsoft did issue an apology in a prompt fashion. But really, you’d think Microsoft would know better. So should their ad agencies. It would make more sense to have extra models and shoot two pictures. It’s understandable to localize advertising, but it’s inexcusable to be this sloppy and this insensitive about it.

Internet addiction rehab

Ars Technica reports on a rather bizarre and dubious new development: the first US rehab for Internet addiction disorder (IAD). The Heavensfield Retreat Center’s reSTART program in Fall City, Washington, is offering a 45-day treatment program for US$14,500 and has already begun enrollment.

It’s a great deal, I suppose, if one believes IAD is a legitimate diagnosis to begin with. Previous Ars Technica articles show the American Medial Association (AMA) recommending to include IAD in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) V only to reverse its position later.

And I think the AMA was right to reverse its position. The opening of reSTART definitely arouses my skeptical side. My instinct and my personal experience tells me that what doctors are diagnosing as IAD is not the illness itself, but more likely just one symptom of something else; that “something else” of course will vary from patient to patient.

Maybe reSTART will help someone, and that’s great. But I have to at least put the question to its founders: if the AMA doesn’t think IAD is a legitimate mental illness in and of itself, how do you justify treating it as one?

Gender testing in sports: outdated?

A recent article on SocialistWorker.org mentions the rather interesting and bizarre story of Caster Semenya, who won the 800-meter race in the IAAF World Championships about a week ago now. The bizarre twist is that Caster was forced to run despite strong controversy about her gender, or specifically, that she “may not be entirely female” as an article in the newspaper The Age says it.

This quote from Caster’s coach, Michael Seme, while at first appearing to be rather defensive of her, really only serves to add to the humiliation:

We understand that people will ask questions because she looks like a man. It’s a natural reaction and it’s only human to be curious. People probably have the right to ask such questions if they are in doubt. But I can give you the telephone numbers of her roommates in Berlin. They have already seen her naked in the showers and she has nothing to hide.

I can only hope and pray that quote was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. Even if it was, it is still very close to the boundary line of tasteless territory, if not over it.

It’s not just track and field. All throughout women’s sports, it seems like the fashionable thing to do is characterize the best in sport as too “tomboyish” or “mannish” as a derogatory term. And it is derogatory, every bit out of bounds as calling inferior male athletes things like “girly” or even derogatory terms which imply homosexuality, that I will not repeat here.

I think the worst examples are the things I have heard about the WNBA, most notably that most would-be WNBA spectators feel uncomfortable sharing the stands with what they suspect to be homosexual women (when I had the conversations with various people who brought this up, invariably, some very derogatory and unflattering words were used).

Further down we get to the story of Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño, who was stripped of a first-place title when discovered to have XY chromosomes, instead of the expected female XX chromosomes. The effects on Maria were devestating.

While as a practical matter some hard lines do have to be drawn, I think it may be time we as a society reconsider and reframe how we consider gender, particularly that there are multiple aspects of gender identity, many of which may not neatly fit into the two boxes of “male” and “female” we’re used to.

Quoting the article again:

While we are never encouraged to conceive of bodies this way, male and female bodies are more similar than they are distinguishable from each other. When training and nutrition are equal, it is increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some of the best-trained male and female Olympic swimmers wearing state-of-the-art one-piece speed suits.

Indeed, dare I say it, this is what it should be about: training, conditioning, nutrition, practice, and effort, not gender.

Most of the men’s swimming records are still significantly faster than the corresponding women’s records (source: Wikipedia article “List of world records in swimming”) but I suspect over time this will change to the point that one day we’ll see a women’s record faster than the corresponding men’s record. A bold prediction? Yes. But not outside the realm of possibility.

But until it’s obvious having two record books is silly, let’s not reward the winners with an attack on their gender, which is in turn an attack on their identity and dignity. We owe our fellow members of the human race at least that small amount of decency.