As most people know by now, Amazon was recently forced to remove copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles in the middle of the night, without notice or permission, replacing them with refunds. They did this because, it turned out, the individual who made the Kindle version available in the first place was not the rights holder.
This situation has troubling implications for cloud computing in general. The more we move our lives into the digital realm, particularly into the distributed, internet realm, the more vulnerable we become.
I love the cloud, and I'm working hard to move myself there as quickly as possible. But the Kindle case gives me pause.
The implications are... What's the word? The name of that British author who wrote about totalitarianism and the crushing of the individual? Something about pigs? Um... It'll come to me...
SpongeBob SquarePants knows its own power; deep inside the show there’s even a SpongeBob-size critique of marketing going on. Bikini Bottom is periodically swept by fads and crazes, its denizens rushing around in a volatile teenybopper horde, cheering or booing or raving on the beach to shudders of Dick Dale-ish guitar. This is the Beach Blanket Bingothread in the show’s aesthetic, its harking-back to the first deliria of the youth market. SpongeBob and Patrick themselves are feverishly suggestible—no gimmick or promotion targeted at them can possibly miss.
I'm very impressed by the spectrum of mobile devices. Less so by the desktop Adobe Air app. I don't think the Times as a whole is important enough to run a whole app for. I like the Times and read many of their articles, but I enter from Tweets or Blog posts or RSS feeds. The full package – The New York Times – doesn't interest me as a collection.
