Cleaning out the flat files: Tim Biskup
This sucker is totally cool, totally old school Tim Biskup, and totally up on eBay. Could be yours!
Don’t Tase Me Bro
My friend Noah got Tased for an article on Wired. I’ve been hit with stun guns and with a very very very early version of a Taser which I’m sure is nothing compared to the X3 he got hit with. He got a 1 second shock and it took him out and made him scream. You can follow the link and watch the video, but this is the best part of his article and something I think should be asked more often:
By the company’s estimate, Taser-wielding police and troops have blasted more than 750,000 men, women and children. On average, they received a five-second shock. Which means I got off relatively easy: Mine was just a one-second blast, at 19 pulses per second…
What I keep wondering is: Who would inflict that kind of pain? And under what circumstances? We all know that our tools change our behavior. Give us cars, and we’ll go new places; give us iPhones, and we’ll check our e-mail way more often. So when we hear stories about grandmothers and kids and handcuffed prisoners and even runaway sheep getting tased, I asked Smith, what does that say about the stun gun’s impact?
The question wasn’t answered, but I think enough research has been done with things like the Stanford Prison Experiment to indicate what happens when one person has power over another. I know from my own experience being a bouncer that when you know you have the authority and can get away with anything because everyone else on staff will back up your story, the rules and what is “legal” get very gray and flexible. It’s not a pretty situation and I think tools like Tasers are not the deterrents they are touted to be, I think they give people who are already a little drunk on power the excuse to hurt other people and get away with it pointing to policy and “non-lethal” tools at their disposal. Billy clubs leave marks and break bones, guns have the potential to kill you. Tasers are seen as a much safer option than those to, but because of that they are used much more often. When people are forced to think about the long term results of their actions they are more cautious, when they aren’t… well, they aren’t.
It’s all pointing to the web
There have been several comments made in the last few days in reference to Apple’s decision to block some Google Apps from the iTunes App Store, and the following FCC interest in that whole situation (which is bad bad bad) – the most interesting of which I think is Chris Messina’s thoughts about Steve Jobs and the almost suicidal direction the App Store is being driven. It’s an interesting read for many reasons but the core of it echos what many of us have been saying for a while now. While there are many roads to take, some of which might be very lucrative, they are all heading to one place and that one place is the web.
The platform to end all platforms is the web, that’s bee proven again and again at this point and really we’re just waiting for everyone to squeeze everything they can out of all the other platforms before jumping on the ship. It’s a bit frustrating in the same way it is to watch people make the same mistakes you did but know you can’t warn them because they won’t listen. Or maybe you do warn them but carry on anyway. This is the same thing in that we all know where it’s heading and where it’s going to end.
That’s not to say that developing things for the iPhone is a bad business choice. Apple has a lot of resources behind it and it’s not going away anything soon. There is plenty of money to be made on that platform in the short term. But the key point to that is to remember it is a short term, and that the App Store isn’t going to be the end all be all platform that every person with a computer uses. That’s the web.